I quickly ran through the preflight checklist. “Ready to go, M-Bot?” I asked.

I was met by silence.

“M-Bot?” I asked, tapping the console, feeling a spike of concern. “You all right?”

“I’m not responding,” he said. “Because you don’t want to talk to me. Remember?”

Oh…right. He was still angry because I’d muted him earlier. I winced, unhooking his mobile receptor, and clicked it back into the dash. “Sorry about that. You were going to get me into trouble.”

“Spensa, it’s impossible for me to get you into trouble. I can merely point out preexisting trouble.”

“I said I was sorry.”

“Well, obviously you don’t want me around. I can logically conclude, using very little processing power, that you feel you are better off without me.”

“Were all AIs as sulky as you are?” I asked.

“We were made as reflections of humankind, meant to imitate their actions and emotions.”

“Ouch. I asked for that one, didn’t I?” I glanced toward the green light that appeared on the wall, indicating that Cobb and Rodge were out and the bay was ready to depressurize. I engaged the maneuvering thrusters, then the door opened, and I steered my ship out into the vacuum.

A few minutes later, Kimmalyn’s ship hovered out of her own docking bay. “Hey,” she said over the line. “What exactly are we doing again?”

“We’ve spotted an unidentified alien ship approaching the planet. It’s coming in through the defensive layers right now.” I boosted forward alongside the thin edge of the platform.

Kimmalyn fell in behind me. “A single ship? Huh.”

“I know.” I left off the part where I thought I’d felt it approaching. I didn’t know what that meant yet—or even if it was real. “Let’s go.”

“Let’s go,” a voice said from behind me in the cockpit, and I jumped. I spun my head to see a yellow-and-blue slug nestled into the spot between my toolkit and the cockpit’s emergency water supply.

“Doomslug?” I said.

The little animal mimicked the sound, as she was inclined to do. Great. I should’ve been annoyed at Dobsi and the rest of the ground crew for not keeping an eye on the slug, but…well, they weren’t pet sitters, they were mechanics. Plus, Doomslug had a habit of getting into places she wasn’t supposed to.

Hopefully I wouldn’t have to do any dangerous maneuvers; I wasn’t sure how many Gs Doomslug could pull. For now, I boosted toward the strange ship. True to his word, M-Bot didn’t say anything to me—but he did lay out a direction on the monitor, pointing the way we should head to intercept the ship. He then wrote a message for me on the screen.

I’m tracking the ship’s progress via our surveillance beacons, and it is NOT taking a wise pathway. Multiple platforms are firing upon it.

“Huh,” I said to him. “Maybe the technicians were right. They think it’s a scout drone sent to test something about the platforms.”

There is a logic to that, he replied onscreen. If that ship had intended to actually reach Detritus, it would have picked a course that wove between the platforms, staying out of range. The Krell know how to do such things.

I turned my ship and boosted in the direction M-Bot indicated, enjoying the sensation of g-forces pressing me back. I always felt more in control of my life when I was in a cockpit. I sighed, trying to push away the uneasiness I felt at having watched the video of that…thing.

“Interception in a minute and a half,” M-Bot said.

“What happened to the silent treatment?” I asked.

“You were looking too comfortable,” he said. “I decided that being silent is the wrong approach. Instead, I need to remind you what you’re missing while not talking to me—by showing you how wonderful my interaction is.”

“Whoopee.”

“Whoopee!” Doomslug repeated.

“I’m glad you two are pleased.”

I boosted a little faster.

“Wait,” M-Bot said. “Was that sarcasm?”

“From me? Never.”

“Good. I…Wait. It was sarcasm!”

Ahead, a twinkling bit of light broke through the bottom layer of the defensive shells. A ship…trailing smoke.

“The ship made it through,” I said. “But it’s been hit.”

“I can’t believe that you—”

“M-Bot, archive that conversation,” I said. “The enemy ship. How bad is the damage?”

“Moderately bad,” he answered. “I’m surprised it’s still in one piece. At this angle, my projections say it will crash into the planet and vaporize itself on impact.”

“Permission to give chase,” I said, calling Flight Command. “That ship is heading for the surface on a collision course.”

“Granted,” Cobb’s voice answered. “But keep your distance.”

Kimmalyn and I pulled in behind the ship, following it down toward the atmosphere of the planet. I could see the alien ship trying to pull up—it was a motion I instinctively recognized. I’d been there, in a damaged ship threatening to spiral into a crash. I’d fought unresponsive controls in a panic, the smell of smoke overwhelming, my world spinning.

The ship managed to recover enough to course correct and hit the atmosphere at a better angle. Whoever was flying that drone didn’t want it to…

Wait. I couldn’t hear anything—no commands being directed through the nowhere to the ship. Which meant that was no drone. There was a live pilot inside.

Air friction from reentry made my shield begin to glow, and my ship trembled as the atmosphere grew thick enough to be noticeable.

That ship is going to tear itself apart if it stays at that angle, I thought.

“Command, it’s coming in hard,” Kimmalyn said. “Orders?”

“I’m going to try to snare that ship before it crashes,” I said.

“That could be dangerous,” Cobb said.

“It jumped in using a hyperdrive. Do you want to let it pulverize itself, or do you want to try to grab the technology? Maybe if we save it, we won’t need to try Rodge’s plan after all.”

“Go ahead and chase the ship,” he said. “But I’m scrambling the rest of Skyward Flight in case you need backup.”

“Confirmed,” I said. “Quirk, cover me. I’m going in for the ship.”

“Sure,” she answered, “but what if this is some kind of trap?”

“Then try not to laugh too hard while you haul me out of it.”

“Spensa! What do you think I am? I would never gloat at you when you could see me.”

I grinned, then slammed my throttle forward, hitting overburn and darting after the ship. Its barely controlled descent had thrown off M-Bot’s intercept calculations, which he quickly redid.

Scud, it was going to be close. At these speeds, the ship would almost certainly destroy itself when it hit. The pilot seemed to know it; the ship jerked upward—trying to level out—but then dove right back down. The acclivity controls were obviously malfunctioning.

That got worse as the atmosphere thickened and the increasing rush of wind caused the alien ship to start spinning in a deadly rotation. Fortunately, my atmospheric scoops redirected airflow, giving me more control. My cockpit barely trembled, despite the speed of my acceleration straight toward the ship.

The incredible g-forces pushed through M-Bot’s advanced GravCaps, and the familiar sensation of weight pressed me backward. It pulled my lips away from my teeth as I gritted them. It pulled my arms back, making them feel like they were tied with weights.

Behind me, Doomslug made an annoyed fluting sound. I glanced at her, but she’d hunkered down against the wall and gone rigid. She seemed to be able to handle this. I turned my attention back to the spiraling ship and focused on keeping it in the center of my vision. Its movements were growing increasingly erratic, and suddenly I was hit with a wave of emotion from inside that cockpit—an anxiety that somehow I connected to. A frantic, desperate panic.

I recognized something about the “tone” of those emotions—it felt as if they were being intentionally broadcast. Whoever was in there…they were the one who had spoken to me earlier, the one who had said they heard me.

This wasn’t just an alien pilot. This was another cytonic.

I’m coming, I thought, hoping they could hear. Hang on!

“Spin?” Cobb’s voice, over the intercom. “Spin, you need to catch that ship. Our analysts think it might be manned.”

“Trying,” I said through gritted teeth.

M-Bot’s readout on my canopy told me we were under fifteen seconds from impact. We blasted down through the atmosphere, pointed straight toward the dusty surface below. The front of my ship was aglow, and I knew I was trailing my own burning line of smoke. Not from damage, but from the raw energy of cutting through the atmosphere like this.

Now! I thought, drawing just close enough to the alien ship. I launched my light-lance and speared it right between its twin boosters.

“Use cockpit rotation!” I screamed, pulling up—switching on my acclivity ring to counter the planet’s gravity—and bracing myself as I frantically leveled off my dive.

Blackness crept across my vision as all the blood rushed to my feet, the g-forces now pointing down. M-Bot rotated my seat in an attempt to compensate—the human body is far better at taking forces straight back than it is at taking them downward.

The cockpit trembled as I slowed our descent. Scud…I hoped the g-forces didn’t scramble the pilot. They nearly scrambled me. My vision blacked out completely for a few seconds, and my pressure suit constricted around my waist and legs, trying to force the blood back up into my brain.

As my vision returned I found myself trembling, my face sweaty and cold, a rushing sound in my ears. The ship slowed—mercifully—to a steady Mag-1. My cockpit seat rotated back as I pulled out of the dive completely.

I glanced over my shoulder to Doomslug, who was fluting in an annoyed tone from where she’d been pressed against the wall. Did not having bones make this harder or easier for her? Either way, we both seemed to have weathered the moment.

I glanced out to see the ground speeding along below. We were maybe four or five hundred feet up. I still had the other ship though—my own ship towed it along behind with the glowing red-orange rope of the light-lance.

“That was a little close, Spin,” Kimmalyn said in my ear. “Even for you. But…I guess it wasn’t a trap?”

I nodded, not trusting my voice as I breathed in and out. Still, my hands were steady as I slowed us to a stop, hovering on my acclivity ring. I carefully lowered the alien ship to the ground, then disengaged the light-lance and landed.

I waited—my cockpit open, feeling the breeze on my sweaty face—as Kimmalyn landed nearby. Cobb said he was sending a force of ground troops to handle the Krell captive, but didn’t order me to stay back. So I climbed out and dropped down off the wing, my feet thumping on the dusty blue-grey landscape of Detritus. From down here, the defensive platforms and rubble belt of the lowest shell were just vague, distant patterns in the sky.

The alien ship was roughly the same size as M-Bot, so larger than our standard fighters. That meant it might be a long-range vessel, with more storage and room than a short-range fighter. It had a large cockpit set into the center of a circular fuselage, with wide arced wings and a destructor emplacement under each one. The ship also had a light-lance turret under its fuselage, in roughly the same place as M-Bot’s. I hadn’t seen those on any Krell fighters.

It was a combat fighter, obviously. The left wing bore a large blackened gap and scorch marks where the ship had been shot, and it had been ripped almost completely free in the descent.

Unfamiliar alien writing marked one side of the fuselage. Whatever I thought I’d sensed from the cockpit was gone now, and I felt a rising fear. The alien must be dead.

Unwilling to wait for Kimmalyn, I hauled myself up onto the alien ship’s right wing—it was still warm from the descent, but cool enough to touch—and the ship tipped beneath my weight, reminding me it wasn’t sitting on landing struts. I held on and climbed over to the canopy.

There, through the glass, I got my first up-close look at an alien. I had been expecting to find something similar to the crablike creatures I’d seen in the cockpits of Krell ships.

Shock moved through me, and my breath caught as I was confronted by something entirely different. What I saw instead was a humanoid woman.