Page 108 of Defiant

No.

“Why not?” she asked. “We can give you freedom.”

I’m needed.

“What? Why? I don’t understand.”

I’m needed.

“But—”

Go. I stay. Needed.

Scud, the poor thing was wrung out. She could feel its despair, its fatigue, the sickness it felt from being locked in a tiny box for weeks on end. Yet it wouldn’t leave, for reasons Kimmalyn couldn’t understand. The slugs didn’t think like humans, and the images it sent her as explanation were a confusing mess.

It did seem to be willing to give Kimmalyn’s ship an exception to the inhibition field though. “Happy,” she said. “Go.”

“Oooo?”

“We’ll find another way to help them,” she promised.

She checked to make sure theSwims Upstreamwould be all right—fortunately, the worm had turned back and the kitsen ship was only a short distance from friendly forces now. So Kimmalyn urged Happy again, and in a blip, they hyperjumped away.

The slug knew it would be punished for letting them go. In apainful, perhaps fatal way, once the battle was over. The slug had helped regardless—but it also had refused her aid. Why?

Kimmalyn’s ship appeared right inside of Detritus’s defensive shell. She immediately called Jorgen.

“We have a problem, Jerkface,” she said as soon as he came on the line.

“What?” he asked. “You jumped. Do you have the slug from that inhibitor station?”

“No,” she said. “It refused to come with me.”

“Why?”

“I have no idea,” she said. “It said it was needed. It understood that I wanted to rescue it, but it just wouldn’t go with me.”

Jorgen fell silent.

“What do we do?” she asked him. “I could maybe have forced it to come with me, by having Happy grab it right as we jumped, but I decided against that.”

“You chose correctly, Quirk,” he said. “If you’d violated its trust, I suspect none of the others would ever listen to us. Maybe we can get them to lower their inhibitor fields and allow Detritus to jump forward?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “This one indicated that it would be punished for letting me through. Beyond that, we had to contact it individually. How many slugs would we have to convince to make a hole big enough for Detritus?”

Dozens, maybe hundreds. More than they could manage in the middle of a battle, she was certain.

“I’ll work on a solution,” he said, sounding beleaguered. “For now, call FM and tell her about this. She’ll gather all such experiences, and keep the other flightleaders in the loop. They need to know that this battle somehow just got even harder.”

38

“Curious,” one of the tenasi generals said as he stood with Brade, facing away from me, watching the battle. “That is thefourthopportunity they have had to destroy an inhibitor station—and again the humans did not take it. Do they growkorochas? Perhaps our assumptions about their aggressive natures were incorrect.”

“If they were incorrect, General,” Brade said, “would they have attacked us here? With a smaller force, in our center of power?”

“No, I suppose not.” The general narrowed his reptilian eyes. “Still, it is curious.”

My hands were free, but I hadn’t moved yet. I needed to pick the right moment. How did I get to that pouch at Brade’s waist? If I was wrong about it containing an antidote, it would be a disaster. Yet I was increasingly certain I was right. The way she kept space between her and everyone else, even her generals and bodyguards. The way she rested her hand there on the pouch, for reassurance.

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