“And how long do you think she’d sit out there popping off Krell before they swarmed her? Remember, if they decide any one pilot is too dangerous, they focus on that person.”
“Maybe we could use that. You said that anytime you can anticipate an enemy, that’s an advantage, right?”
He grunted. “Leave the tactics to the admirals, Spin.” He turned off the line as Nedd successfully tagged the debris.
“Good night, sweet prince,” M-Bot whispered as the junk crashed to the ground. “Or princess. Or, most likely, genderless piece of inanimate space junk.”
I looked up above, watching for more debris. Hurl would be on the next run, and I’d be her wing. Some junk was definitely moving up there. Several pieces of it . . . swarming down . . .
Not junk. Krell.
I bolted upright, hand going tense on my control sphere. Multiple flights of the enemy emerged from the rubble belt, and the full pilots moved to engage them.
“Fly down to twenty thousand feet, cadets,” Cobb said. “You’ll be here as reserves, but those pilots should be able to handle this. Looks like . . . only about thirty enemy ships.”
I settled back, but couldn’t relax as explosions began to light the sky. Soon, the debris falling around us wasn’t solely from the rubble belt. Cobb called for Hurl to do her run. Apparently we were going to continue despite the fighting, which was probably good training, as I thought about it.
Hurl performed an excellent maneuver, with a precise set of shots at the end. “Nice,” I told her as we fell into line. I didn’t get a reply, of course.
“Alas, poor space junk,” M-Bot said. “I would have pretended to know you, if I were capable of lying.”
“Can’t you do anything useful?”
“。 . . This isn’t useful?”
“What about those Krell up there?” I asked him. “Can’t you . . . I don’t know, tell me about their ships or something?”
“At this range, I have access only to general scanners,” he said. “They’re merely little blips to me, no specifics.”
“You can’t watch in more detail?” I asked. “Cobb and the admirals have some kind of hologram that replicates the battlefield, so they’re using scanners or something to construct what’s going on.”
“That’s ridiculous,” M-Bot said. “I’d have noticed a video feed, unless it was a localized short-range beacon created by echolocation devices in the various ships that . . . Oooooooooooh!”
A flaming starship—one of ours—came down in a death spiral, and though Arturo tried to get in close and spear it with his lightlance to help, the ship was too far out.
The pilot didn’t eject. They tried until the last moment to pull up, rescue their ship. I steeled myself, looking back up at the battlefield.
“Oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooh,” M-Bot said.
“Well?” I asked.
“I found the video feed,” he said. “You’re all so slow. You really fly like that? How can you stand it?”
“Moving faster would either break our ships or crush those of us inside with g-forces.”
“Ah yes. Human squishiness quotient. Is that why you’re so mad at that space junk? Jealousy is not pretty, Spensa.”
“Weren’t you going to do something useful?”
“Computing enemy attack patterns,” M-Bot said. “It will take me a few minutes to finish running simulations and analyzing predictive data.” He paused. “Huh. I didn’t know I could do those things.”
“Is it my turn?” Arturo asked over the general line, and I jumped. I kept expecting them to hear M-Bot talking to me, though the AI said he was sending his own feed directly into my helmet, then intercepting my outward feed to edit away any sign of his voice or my responses to him. Somehow, he did all of this in the blink of an eye, before my signals reached the rest of my flight.
“Hold a moment,” Cobb said. “Something is odd about this attack. Can’t put my finger on it.”
A large shadow shifted overhead. Enormous. It was so big, my mind reeled to comprehend it. It was like the sky itself was falling. A sudden shower of hundreds of pieces of debris rained down, a blazing hail. And behind it, that something. That enormous, inconceivable something.
“Pull back,” Cobb said. “Flightleader, scramble your ships and get them back to—”
In a sudden burst of motion, the battle above us became the battle around us as ships from both sides dodged downward. Krell ships and human ships scattered in front of the enormous thing that was falling from above—a dark metallic cube the size of a mountain.
A ship? What ship could be that size? It was vaster than a city. Had even the flagship of our fleet been that big? I had always imagined it as a slightly larger troop transport.
The fighters kept shooting at one another as they lowered their altitude. Our little flight was suddenly in the center of a firestorm of destructor blasts and falling chunks of burning metal.
“Out!” Jorgen said. “Accelerate to Mag-5 and follow my lead. Local heading 132, away from those dogfighters behind us.”
I engaged my booster, zipping forward, Hurl on my wing.
“That’s a ship.” Arturo said. “Look how slowly it’s falling. Those are functioning acclivity rings across the bottom. Hundreds of them.”
A shadow blanketed the land. I leaned into my throttle, speeding up to Mag-5, well above normal dogfighting speeds. Any faster, and we wouldn’t be able to respond to our surroundings. Indeed, as a fighter-size chunk of debris fell near us, we barely had time to react. Half of our flight dodged left, the other half right.
I went left with Kimmalyn and Nedd, slowing for more maneuverability. Destructor blasts sprayed in front of me as two of our starfighters barreled past, followed by six Krell ships. I cursed and dodged around them, followed by a whimpering Kimmalyn, who took my wing position.
“Analysis complete!” M-Bot said. “Oh! Wow. You’re busy.”
I dove, but we had picked up a tail. The Krell ship sprayed blasts around me. I cursed, then pulled back. “Go ahead of me, Quirk!”
She sped past and I broke right, getting the Krell ship to focus on me—the closer target.
“You really should have waited for my computations before beginning,” M-Bot noted. “Impatience is a serious character flaw.”
I gritted my teeth, spinning through a sequence of dodges.
“Spin, Quirk, Nedder,” Jorgen said on the line. “Where are you? Why didn’t you follow my—”
“I’m taking fire. Jerkface,” I snapped.
“I’m on you, Spin,” Nedd said in my ear. “If you can level out, I’ll try and shoot him down.”
“You won’t get through the shield. Quirk, you still there?”
“At your three,” she said, voice trembling.
“Be ready to pick this guy off.”
“Oh! Um, okay. Okay . . .”
The enormous falling vessel loomed overhead. Arturo had been right; its descent was slow, steady. But it was old and broken, with gaping holes in it. The battlefield continued in a wide, shadowed section of open air underneath it, filled with dogfighting ships and lines of destructor fire.