Page 10 of Blightfall

“I thought humans smiled when they felt cheer,” Gilaf said.

I forced a smile onto my face and pointed to my mouth with one finger. “See? Smiling now!” When Gilaf still looked skeptical, I added, “Isn’t it impressive the way I missed three out of four shots? That’s got to be some kind of record! Maybe if I keep at it I’ll be able to miss even more!”

“Better,” Gilaf said. His face retreated out of the hologram.

I was pretty sure Gilaf understood my sarcasm and was answering with his own, but it was sometimes hard to tell if we understood each other. Still, my fake enthusiasm did make me feel a bit better.

“Are we going to go again?” Alanik asked. She started the simulation over, and I stared at the enemy ship in the distance, back to taunt me.

“No,” I said. “I think I’m done for today.” I’d begged Alanik and Gilaf to practice with me to keep our skills sharp, since we hadn’t seen much battle lately. Theoretically, if the diplomats did their jobs, we might not see any more battle, which would be great. I didn’t enjoy being shot at.

But they hadn’t disbanded our air force, which meant the DDF still anticipated a use for us. It was my job to be ready, so I had to find some way to distinguish myself. Arturo was our flightleader. Nedd was his second-in-command. Alanik was cytonic. T-Stall and Catnip were the big brothers of the flight. Gilaf was the best at evasives. Apparently he and Alanik had both learned to fly playing an UrDail sport that involved lots of dodging. Gilaf had promised to take me to a match on ReDawn someday, and I was going to make sure he made good on his promise.

Try as I might, even after months with Skyward Flight, I was still the new girl. The inexperienced one. The innocent one. The young one—youngest on the team at barely seventeen and a half. The labels had stuck so hard I worried we’d take on new recruits and I still wouldn’t be able to shake them. I needed to find something I was good at, some way to prove myself.

Which meant I’d better keep practicing, even if I sucked at it. “Same time tomorrow?” I asked.

Alanik shut down our mockpits, and my canopy dissolved in little glimmering sparks. “Not tomorrow,” she said. “We’ll be on assignment.”

I perked up in my seat. “We have an assignment?” Lately we’d just been escorting various diplomats to our allied planets, but even that was a welcome distraction.

“Did you not hear?” Gilaf asked. He and Alanik exchanged a look.

Was I not being called up with the others? I wasn’t on official leave or anything. “What’s the assignment?” I asked.

“We’re going to one of your human planets,” Gilaf said. “Apparently there’s some weird space phenomenon that Alanik needs to poke at with her mind.”

“It’s an inhibitor field,” Alanik said. “And how else would I investigate it besides with my mind?”

My stomach sank, the crisp algae strips I’d had for lunch suddenly feeling very heavy. “You guys are going to a human planet?” Stars, another colony of humans. I wondered if their planet was a barren wasteland surrounded by space junk, like Detritus, or if they lived on a planet with clouds and sky and green plants, like Old Earth before it disappeared. “Without me?”

“Maybe your briefing message was lost somehow,” Gilaf said.

“I hope so,” I said, “because if I don’t get to go on the adventure to contact other humans, I will die.”

“Die!” Nope said, wrapping herself around my ankle.

“Someone should tell Arturo about the oversight,” Gilaf said. “He won’t want to be responsible for her death.”

“She is not going to die,” Alanik said. “It’s a hyperbole.”

“Is it?” I asked. “Are you sure?”

Alanik stared at me, and I wilted. She was intimidating at the best of times.

“Okay, it is a hyperbole,” I said. “But I’ll be sad.”

“He won’t want to be responsible for her sadness,” Gilaf said.

I wasn’t so sure. Arturo’s job was to follow orders and do what was best for the flight. It gutted me to think that what was best for the flight might be to leave me behind, but maybe it was.

I stewed on that as I left the simulator and dropped Nope off at the slug lounge for lunch. My hyperslug copilot, Cheeky, was currently absent on shore leave in the caverns below the surface of Detritus, where most of our population had settled to avoid being destroyed by the Superiority. I missed her, but as our diplomacy division worked out the details of our treaty with the taynix, they’d agreed that slugs should have ample repatriation time and therefore couldn’t be assigned to any of us permanently. I didn’t know what a slug did on shore leave, but I imagined Cheeky gathered with hundreds of other slugs, all fluting little melodies and eating mushrooms and falling asleep fat and happy, even if that wasn’t exactly how the biologists described it.

It made sense that the slugs wanted time at home, given that they still had one. We, on the other hand, were preparing to move our people off planet and return to our former nomadic life. Or maybe we were working on a way to terraform Detritus, emerge from the caverns, and live in the open. It was hard to tell. Sometimes I thought we needed a team of biologists to tell us what our natural habitat should be now that we weren’t stuck in caverns and had literally the whole galaxy to explore.

I was headed to the gym to change out of my jumpsuit and into regulation exercise shorts when Arturo approached, wearing a serious expression. He’d recently cut his dark, curly hair, and it made him look even less approachable. “Sadie,” he said. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”

I perked up, hoping he was here to tell me my lack of notification about the mission was all a big mix-up. “Sure,” I said. “I heard the flight was called up, but I didn’t get the briefing.”