Page 27 of Defiant

I immediately felt guilty for that snideness. Yes, FM liked to be fashionable, but she’d never given me reason to think she was vain. I’d just always felt intimidated by how…well, perfect she was at basically everything. Even, it turned out, taking care of slugs.

She set her three down with their own bowls of caviar—we had to ship the stuff in from Evershore in bulk—and started talking, animated. “Coordinated raid on all five mining installations,” she explained. “Tomorrow morning at oh six hundred hours. Orders should be coming to Arturo any minute.”

“They’re here,” he said, scrolling on his datapad. “Five strike forces, all at once.”

“Why five?” I asked. “We know one of those is already locked down on the other side by the Broadsiders.”

“Can you say for certain your friends are still in control?” FM asked. “And that they wouldn’t open up the portal again if properly bribed? Would they sell acclivity stone to the Superiority if the value of the stuff increased a hundredfold?”

Would they? Maybe, maybe not. Life was tough in the nowhere. I wouldn’t blame Peg for making some calculated bargains if theSuperiority tried to trade with her. I’d trust her and the others not to do it if I asked, but I could understand Jorgen wanting to remove that option by destroying the Superiority facility.

“It would be pointless to go through all of this and still leave them with a functioning mining station,” FM said. “So we’re striking all five. Tomorrow.”

“That’s good,” Catnip said. “It’s the only shot we have at winning. Stop them making any more starfighters.”

“Still sounds like we’re in for a slog of a war,” Sadie said. “Sure, we can maybe take out their production capacity—but we still have to fight through everything they’ve already built.”

“Do we have any choice?” Kimmalyn asked. “At least this way we have a chance.”

“I suppose,” T-Stall said. He shared a look with Catnip, his wingmate.

Arturo finally spoke. “Anyone else have a problem with the level of destruction we caused on the last raid?”

They didn’t look at me. That was nice of them. Perhaps they knew that nothing was more painful than having my friends be afraid of me. But of course, I was just a weapon now. So that couldn’t bother me the way it once had.

Though they were doing their best not to stare at me, I looked around the group, huddled forward surrounding our long table.FM scratching the head of one of the slugs. Sadie sitting back, as if she’d lost her appetite. Arturo pretending to scroll through the data, though his eyes were distant. Alanik hovering at the edge of the group, aloof as always. Catnip and T-Stall, side by side, staring at their unfinished meals. Kimmalyn still eating her brownie with a small fork, because she never wasted a dessert. “As the Saint said,” she had once noted, “ ‘Throw away something delicious, and you throw awaybeauty itself.’ ”

“I’ll say it,” Kimmalyn said. “What we did was wrong. At the very least, we should have found a way to save that first slug.Ishould have found a way. But beyond that…”

“I didn’t expect the information nexus to be so much like…a city,” I told them.

“Yeah,” FM agreed. “I mean, it makes sense that they’d need noncombatants to work it. Researchers, engineers. People like Arturo would be, if he hadn’t fallen in with the wrong crowd.”

“Hey,” Arturo said. “Wait. Was that a dig at me, or at all of you?”

“It was a deliberate ricochet,” FM said. “How many of you felt the last raid was wrong?”

Slowly, everyone raised a hand. Even Alanik, who took a moment to realize that meant agreement.

“We should say something to Jorgen,” Kimmalyn said. “We’re here to fight the Krell. Not become them.”

“He’s aware,” I said. “He’s planning how to ensure that we’ll know in the future if there are civilians in the way or not.”

“And if thereare,will he stop us from going in?” FM asked.

He…hadn’t said that, had he? He’d told me he wouldn’t send me in unaware again. But the mission likely would have to continue.

“I do not like the idea of doing that sort of thing again,” Kimmalyn said. “Not at all. I saw…stars, I saw dozens of civilian ships fall in the destruction.”

My stomach turned.

“Do we have a choice though?” Sadie whispered. “We’re warriors, right? We break things. People. That’s the point, right?” She looked to me for support.

I forced myself to nod.

“That’s easy for you to say, Spensa,” FM said, though I hadn’t actually said anything. “You’re…well, you.”

Yeah. I sure was. Me. Mostly.

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