Page 123 of Defiant

Like I saw you,I agreed. I showed that to the taynix, and waited. Hopeful.

Finally, I got back a set of thoughts.Those…poor slugs.

That warmth from before returned, the love and support. Turned not to me this time, but to the delvers. Toward horrors that had destroyed planets—toward people who didn’t know how to control what they were, who had tried to hide their pain.

The love of the oppressed found the souls of the broken, and the result was light. Cracks withdrawing. Pain being eased. It started with the one I’d picked and radiated outward.

How?M-Bot asked, hovering up beside me.How is it happening?

“What they’ve always needed,” I said to him, “was to know that they weren’t alone.”

What will that mean?he asked.

Change,Chet replied, hovering up on our other side.At last.

51

BRADE

Brade cursed softly, standing in her ripped-apart command room. Near her, the hologram map showed the thirteen planet-size delvers—dwarfing even the largest carrier—suddenly motionless in space, no longer advancing on the rebellious forces. What was wrong?

She looked at Spensa. The woman’s mind was fully in the nowhere, though her body remained behind. She wasn’t hyperjumping; she was communing with the creatures in the other dimension. But could one person stand up to the entire might of the delvers? That seemed impossible, even for Spensa.

Scrud. And yet, Brade didn’tdaretry to touch her. Not with the power Spensa had radiated. That delver combined with her…it coulddestroyBrade.

“Sir,” an aide said, rushing over with a datapad. “It’s the inhibitors and the communicators. Their disobedience is growing and growing. They’re expending a cytonic effort into the nowhere! The moment they started, those delvers you called stopped.”

Scrud again. Theslugswere involved in this somehow? Brade took another shot at Spensa with her sidearm, just to be certain. Itstill didn’t work—the blast was hyperjumped away before hitting her. Helpless though she seemed, Spensa was untouchable.

Fortunately, the slugs were not.

“Execute them,” she said.

“Which ones?” the aide asked.

Brade surveyed the battlefield. Her last fighters, which had no carrier support. The few capital ships she’d been able to convince to come as emergency reinforcements. This was a disaster, but not an unrecoverable one. She would need to spread propaganda of Winzik’s death and the fall of theDefiantcarefully to maintain power.

“Can we maintain the Superiority without the slugs here?” she asked.

“Yes,” an aide said, “but barely. I’ve been running the numbers, as you asked. We’ll need to set up a new communications hub.”

“No,” Brade said. “No more hubs. We organize in a way that ensures we can’t be hit like this ever again.” Scrud. If the slugs here were disobeying en masse, then she’d already lost these ones. They had spread the idea among themselves that theycoulddisobey. She needed to get her ships out of here, the ones that—hopefully—had hyperslugs who hadn’t been corrupted by rebellion. But she couldn’t leave such a wealth of resources behind.

Time to cut her losses. “Kill them,” she said.

“Allof them?” the aide asked.

“Yes. Every slug on this station, every slug in their inhibitor pods, and every single slug on Evensong.” She looked to her generals, who seemed shocked, but then several nodded at her grimly.If the delvers wouldn’t fight for them, it was time to pull out—and they couldn’t leave their hyperdrives and other tools in the hands of their enemies.

Just as you burned your supplies when you left a fortress, they needed to burn the slugs to keep them from falling into enemy hands.

“Kill them,” she said.“Now.”

52

The warmth and light spread through the delvers as, understanding what the slugs had done, they turned to help their fellows. Like a virus in a system—no, like an update patch being propagated—light forced back lines of darkness, spreading outward.

The magnitude of it daunted me. But most of all, I was awed by the willingness of the slugs to help. After years of abuse, they had come to the aid of even the delvers. Soothing their pain as they’d learned to do for one another.

---