Starsight

Scud. That dark liquid on her lips had to be blood. I scrambled to pull the emergency bandage from the cargo pocket on my leg. “Hang on!” I said, though Kimmalyn got hers out first and forced it into my hands.

I climbed farther into the cockpit, bracing myself against the broken control panel, and pressed the bandage against the woman’s side. “Help is coming,” I said. “They’re sending . . .”

“Human,” the woman said.

I froze. The word was in English. She seemed to notice my reaction, then tapped a small pin on her collar. When she spoke again in her airy language, the device translated.

“A real human,” she said, then smiled, blood trailing down the side of her lip. “So it’s true. You still exist.”

“Just hang on,” I said, trying to stanch the blood at her side.

She lifted her arm, trembling, and touched my face. Her fingers were covered in blood and felt wet on my cheek. Kimmalyn breathed out a small prayer, but I clung there—half in, half out of the cockpit—meeting the alien woman’s eyes.

“We were allies once,” she said. “They say that you were monsters. But I thought . . . nothing can be more monstrous than they are . . . And if anyone can fight . . . it would be the ones they locked away . . . the terror that once nearly defeated them . . .”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“I opened myself up—I searched for you for so long. And only now did I finally hear you, calling out. Don’t trust . . . their lies. Don’t trust . . . their false peace.”

“Who?” I said. What she was saying was too vague. “Where?”

“There,” she whispered, still touching my face. “Starsight.” I felt something beyond the word, a force that hit my brain like a collision. It stunned me.

Her hand dropped. Her eyes fluttered closed, and I feared she was dead—but I had trouble thinking through the strange impact to my mind.

“Saints and stars above,” Kimmalyn repeated. “Spensa?” She checked the woman for a pulse again. “Not dead, just unconscious. Scud, I hope the troops bring a medical crew.”

Feeling numb, I reached out and took the small pin from the alien’s collar, the one that had translated the words. It was shaped like a stylized star or sunburst. What had that last part been? It felt drilled into my brain—a plea to go to this . . . place. Starsight?

I knew, intimately, that this woman was like me. Not just a cytonic, but a confused one, seeking answers. Answers she’d hoped to find in that place, the one she’d drilled into my brain.

I . . . I could go there, I realized. Somehow I knew that if I wanted, I could use the coordinates she’d placed into my head to teleport directly to the location.

I leaned back as three DDF troop transports landed gracefully on large blue acclivity rings next to the ship. They were accompanied by seven more fighters, the rest of Skyward Flight, scrambled to give backup that I hadn’t ended up needing.

I climbed down from the alien ship and backed away, reaching M-Bot as the alien ship became a hive of activity. Tucking the translator pin into my pocket, I hauled myself up onto his wing. Please live, I thought to the wounded alien. I need to know what you are.

“Hmmm,” M-Bot said. “Fascinating. Fascinating. She is from a small backwater planet that is not part of the Superiority. It seems the Superiority recently sent a message to her people asking for pilots to recruit into their space force. This pilot was a response to that request; she was sent to try out for the Superiority military.”

I blinked, then scuttled over to M-Bot’s open cockpit. “What?” I asked. “How do you know that?”

“Hmmm? Oh, I hacked her onboard computer. Not a very advanced machine, unfortunately. I was hoping to discover another AI, so we could complain about organics together. Wouldn’t that have been a fun time?”

“Fun time!” Doomslug said from where she’d climbed up onto the armrest of my seat.

I slipped into the cockpit. “You really did that?” I asked.

“Complaining about organics? Yes, it’s very easy. Did you know just how many dead cells you shed daily? All of those little pieces of you litter my cockpit.”

“M-Bot, focus. You hacked her computer?”

“Oh! Yes. As I said, it’s not very advanced. I got the entire database about her planet, people, culture, history. What do you want to know? Their planet was allied to the human forces in the last war—though many of their politicians now call the human presence there an authoritarian occupation—and several of their cultures were significantly influenced by human ones. Her language isn’t too different from your own, for example.”

“What is her name?” I asked softly, glancing over at her ship. The buzz of medical technicians around the cockpit gave me hope that she would survive her wound.