All her life, Spensa has dreamed of becoming a pilot. Of proving she's a hero like her father. She made it to the sky, but the truths she learned about her father were crushing. The rumours of his cowardice are true - he deserted his flight during battle against the Krell. Worse, though, he turned against his team and attacked them.
For Eric James Stone,
who has tried to show me how to be brief
(a lesson I’ve mostly failed to learn)
but has been an amazing friend and role model nonetheless.
Contents
Dedication
Title page
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Part Two
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Part Three
Interlude
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Part Four
Interlude
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Part Five
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Interlude
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About the Author
By Brandon Sanderson
Copyright
PART ONE
1
I slammed on my overburn and boosted my starship through the middle of a chaotic mess of destructor blasts and explosions. Above me extended the awesome vastness of space. Compared to that infinite blackness, both planets and starships alike seemed insignificant. Meaningless.
Except, of course, for the fact that those insignificant starships were doing their best to kill me.
I dodged, spinning my ship and cutting my boosters midturn. Once I’d flipped around, I immediately slammed on the boosters again, burning in the other direction in an attempt to lose the three ships tailing me.
Fighting in space is way different from fighting in atmosphere. For one thing, your wings are useless. No air means no airflow, no lift, no drag. In space, you don’t really fly. You just don’t fall.
I executed another spin and boost, heading back toward the main firefight. Unfortunately, maneuvers that had been impressive down in the atmosphere were commonplace up here. Fighting in a vacuum these last six months had provided a whole new set of skills to master.
“Spensa,” a lively masculine voice said from my console, “you remember how you told me to warn you if you were being extra irrational?”
“No,” I said with a grunt, dodging to the right. The destructor blasts from behind swept over the dome of my cockpit. “I don’t believe I did anything of the sort.”
“You said, ‘Can we talk about this later?’ ”
I dodged again. Scud. Were those drones getting better at dogfighting, or was I losing my touch?
“Technically, it was ‘later’ right after you spoke,” continued the talkative voice—my ship’s AI, M-Bot. “But human beings don’t actually use that word to mean ‘anytime chronologically after this moment.’ They use it to mean ‘sometime after now that is more convenient to me.’ ”
The Krell drones swarmed around us, trying to cut off my escape back toward the main body of the battlefield.
“And you think
“Why wouldn’t it be?”
“Because we’re in combat!”
“Well, I would think that a life-and-death situation is
I could remember, with some measure of fondness, the days when my starships
“Spensa,” M-Bot said. “You’re supposed to be leading these drones toward the others, remember?”
It had been six months since we’d beaten back the Krell attempt to bomb us into oblivion. Alongside our victory, we’d learned some important facts. The enemy we called “the Krell” were a group of aliens tasked with keeping my people contained on our planet, Detritus, which was kind of a cross between a prison and a nature preserve for human civilization. The Krell reported to a larger galactic government called the Superiority.
They employed remote drones to fight us—piloted by aliens who lived far away, controlling their drones via faster-than-light communications. The drones were never driven by AIs, as it was against galactic law to let a ship pilot itself. Even M-Bot was severely limited in what he could do on his own. Beyond that, there was something that the Superiority feared deeply: people who had the ability to see into the space where FTL communication happened. People called cytonics.
People like me.
They knew what I was, and they hated me. The drones tended to target me specifically—and we could use that. We
It was a sound plan. And I’d make good on it . . . eventually.
Now, though, I wanted to test something.
