Cytonic (Skyward #3)(91)

I grinned and launched into the middle of the chaos. It was so liberating to not have to worry about the safety of my companions. Cobb would have yelled at me for not bringing a wingmate, but here I could fly as I’d always secretly wanted to. Reckless. Free.

I lit up a ship in front of me, neatly blasting away its shield. That sent it into a series of panicked evasive maneuvers. Trusting my gut, I chased for a moment, then backed off and gave them space to screw up. They did just that, trying so hard to get away from me that they took a shot from Peg.

My grin widened as I dove to the side and shot down one, then two, then three enemy ships. Scud, this was awesome! I dove among the crazy mess, blue destructor blasts lighting the sky in all directions. M-Bot highlighted some enemies on the monitor: my reckless attacks had earned me two tails.

“So, let me see…” M-Bot said. “This emotion…is frustration at the crazed attack, mixed with the teensiest amount of fondness. And a desire to bonk her on the head with something that isn’t too heavy, but just heavy enough.”

“Vexation,” Chet said.

“Wow!” M-Bot said. “That’s perfect. Spensa is, like, vexation incarnate!”

“I thought you two said you’d be quiet,” I said.

“You’d rather not be able to hear us talk about you?” M-Bot asked.

Actually, no. I gritted my teeth in a half grin, half grimace and accelerated, diving to dodge the fire from our tails. At the risk of being called foolhardy, I pushed us low, weaving between parts of the landscape of one crumbling fragment.



Chet’s face on the corner of my screen looked a little pale. “How you doing back there, Chet?” I asked.

“Trying my best to enjoy the expert course in being vexed, Miss Nightshade!” he called. “I recognize this kind of fragment. It is from a twilight planet—those that grow in a dark solar system, feeding off a star that doesn’t glow brightly in the visible spectrum but still provides radiation.

“Those places tend to have plants and animals with much bioluminescence—and even a kind of mineral-luminescence. Judging from what I’ve seen, these rocks will likely explode in great showers of light if hit by destructor fire. Perhaps you can use that?”

Excellent. I spotted a hole in the breaking fragment ahead—and so I pushed for that. I wove up in a loop, then straight through the hole. My tails followed, but as I expertly wove between falling pieces of rock, their destructor shots hit on all sides of me. As Chet had suggested, the explosions lit up like flares. Indeed, the falling debris acted like flak ejection, intercepting the disruptor fire.

So long as I didn’t hit any big chunks, I’d actually be safer in here. Even as I was thinking that, I did hit one moderately sized chunk. Only one, and my shield deflected it.

“A sense of disbelief,” M-Bot said, “mixed with an absolute expectation that something like this would happen. Because of course she’d dive through a radioactive, explosive natural minefield.”

“Resignation,” Chet said with a chuckle.

“Quiet, you two,” I muttered as I pulled up and darted along underneath the ripping fragment, weaving between chunks of dropping earth. My two tails, blinded by the explosions, evidently lost track of me, as they broke off pursuit.

“That was well done, Spensa,” Chet said.

“We’re alive,” M-Bot said. “And oddly, I feel—”

“Yeah, I know,” I said. “Complain about my recklessness again.”

“Actually,” he said. “I’m feeling something different. A tremble of excitement…building to relief, and a…a desire to do the same thing again?”



“Ha!” I said. “You thought it was fun!”

“It was,” M-Bot said. “Scud! Why did that feel fun? It was stupidly risky.”

“A little risk is what makes it enjoyable, AI!” Chet said. “That is the part that is daring! The part that is exciting! Assuming one can fight down the nausea.”

I looped around toward the main firefight, where I found Peg’s slower ship being tailed by someone fairly skilled. I drilled them with three precise shots in a row, making them break off.

“Enjoying danger sounds like an evolutionary problem,” M-Bot said. “Shouldn’t you find things fun when they’re safe?”

“Who knows?” I said. “I don’t think evolution was trying to create me. I just kind of happened.”

“Evolution doesn’t ‘try’ to do anything,” M-Bot said. “But like it or not, you are the pinnacle of its work. All evolutionary pressures throughout all the ages among your species have resulted in you.”

“Bet it feels embarrassed,” I said, finally shooting the ship that had been chasing Peg. It locked up and slowed, soaring idly through the battlefield. “Like that time all the parents got together to watch their kids march when I was in school, and my mother was forced to admit to the other moms that I was the one who’d glued her homemade suit of wooden ‘power armor’ to her uniform.”

“I wish I’d known you back then,” M-Bot said. “You sound like such a capricious child.”

“Uh, yeah. Child.”

I’d been sixteen.

“Where is Hesho?” I asked, looking over the battlefield. “Any signs of him yet on the scanners?”