Cytonic (Skyward #3)(58)

I felt a momentary pang for what could have been, then grabbed the controls. “Can you get the hangar doors open?”

“Give me a second…yes. This ship’s system has the transmitter locked behind three layers of security. They were really worried about attracting delvers when they built it.”



As the door opened, I kept my weapons trained on the two fighters. At last I caught blue light coming from beneath Shiver’s ship.

“Don’t make me unload on you two,” I said, hitting the comm.

I was given no reply, though the mechanism said my words had gone through. As soon as the hangar was open, I turned the ship toward the opening.

“Spensa,” M-Bot said. “Would it be all right if…if I flew?”

I hesitated. M-Bot’s programming had always prevented him from flying. When he’d wanted to come rescue me on Detritus, he’d needed to convince Cobb to fly him. This was the first time in his life that he had a chance to truly pilot a starship.

I’d been yearning for this moment, tasting it, dreaming of it. But he’d been waiting for centuries.

“Go for it,” I said, lifting my hands—with effort—from the controls.

“Oh, thank you!” he said. The ship continued turning of its own volition, then inched toward the exit—using maneuvering thrusters, not the main boosters, to avoid vaporizing the people behind us.

Oh, scud, I thought. M-Bot is a highly advanced AI. He can think faster than any human, respond in a split second. Why would anyone ever need a human pilot? In this moment, I saw the end of my time flying a starfighter.

Then M-Bot clipped the side of the hangar doorway as he was steering us out.

“Oops!” he said, and started turning the ship, as if to inspect what he’d done.

“No!” I said. “You’ll slam the tail into the wall. Keep going forward!”

“Right, right,” he said, wobbling the ship as it moved slowly out of the hangar. Directly toward…

“M-Bot!” I said. “Trees!”



“Ah yes. Trees. Hmm…”

We jerked to a halt, then floated upward, then jerked forward again as he moved us over them.

“You know,” he said, “this isn’t going as well as I thought it would.”

“Ya think?” I said, trying to look back at the hangar. “You might want to move faster…”

I couldn’t make out much, but I was pretty sure the blue glow was increasing in the hangar behind us. I could only imagine that Dllllizzzz and Shiver, seeing the awkward flying, had decided I might not be difficult prey.

The ship wobbled as he got us up over the trees.

“M-Bot!” I said.

“Hey,” he snapped, “I think I’m doing pretty well. Didn’t you crash into the mess hall on your first day?”

“A holographic mess hall,” I said.

“Well, I haven’t crashed into any mess halls. Look, I’m a computer program—do you know how hard it is for someone like me to do something that isn’t explicitly in my programming?”

“No.”

“It’s impossible,” M-Bot said. “That’s how hard it is. And I’m doing it anyway.”

“You flew the drone just fine.”

“I borrowed the drone’s hard-coded flight instructions from its rudimentary firmware. I don’t have that anymore!”

A starfighter darted out of the hangar, and another one followed. Two blips appeared on our proximity sensors.

“Oh,” M-Bot said. “They’re going to try to kill us, aren’t they?”

“Yup.”

“You wanna…”

I seized the control sphere and the throttle, then slammed on the overburn, kicking us into some real speed. We blasted away from the fragment with a roar that vibrated the cockpit. It took me by surprise. I’d been fighting in the vacuum of space too much recently; I hoped my atmospheric flight instincts weren’t rusty. Starships were built to minimize the difference, but in a firefight you lived or died based on tiny mistakes.



The thing was, I didn’t want to get into a firefight. Shiver and Dllllizzzz seemed like good people. I was willing to steal one of their ships, but I wasn’t about to shoot them dead. Not unless they forced my hand.

First we’d see if they could keep up.

I swooped across the neighboring fragment—which was flowing with waterfalls that ran over the sides and vanished into infinity. My tails followed and immediately opened fire. Scud. I’d hoped maybe they’d be hesitant to kill me. I fell into evasive zigzags by rote, then dove over the side of the fragment, parallel to the falling water. My stomach tried to crawl out through my esophagus, and a moment later the ship’s GravCaps were overwhelmed and I was slammed by g-forces, and nearly hit a red-out.

I pulled up, gritting my teeth. “These GravCaps are terrible.”

“No surprise there,” M-Bot replied. “Not only is it a civilian craft, it’s so old it’s practically an antique.”

“Your original ship was two hundred years old.”

“And three hundred years ahead of its time,” he said. “This thing was outdated when they made it. It was a fast production-line model made cheaply.”