One
Arturo
Three Days Earlier
We were entering a new era, my mother said. An era of freedom. No longer trapped on a forgotten rock, no longer imprisoned by an oppressive galactic empire, no longer living in a preserve like endangered but fearsome predators. An era of possibility, where we would become what humankind was always meant to be.
A new era in which there was money to be made, because if we didn’t capitalize on the Defiant Defense Force’s new need for interstellar trade infrastructure, someone else surely would. So it only made sense that my family’s starfighters were moved up to a docking platform in the rubble belt around Detritus, the planet we called home, to support our quest to secure intergalactic trade agreements, profiting off humankind’s new galactic freedom.
“Your mom is going to kill you,” Nedd said, peering around me through the doorway of the private hangar. We’d snuck past the ground crew huddled around a screen in the break room, watching clips from last night’s digball championship.
“Kill you!” added the yellow-and-blue slug peeking out of my backpack. She was the length of my forearm and twice as thick, with long rows of flexible spines that waved along her back.
“Thanks for your concern, Naga,” I said, scritching behind her first plume of spines.
“Hey, I was also concerned,” Nedd said. He curled the fingers of his prosthetic arm. On his shoulder perched another slug, this one entirely black with an iridescent blue shimmer. The slugs, also known as taynix, had powerful cytonic abilities. This one could send out a concussion blast that stunned anyone nearby, which had earned him the name Wham.
Wham watched the movement of the prosthetic with interest as Nedd bent the fingers one at a time. Nedd was shot down during the war for our freedom just weeks ago, and the crash left him with a limb ending just above his elbow. The prosthetic’s joints could bend, and its fingers could clench and relax. He manipulated the motion with electrodes tied to the remaining nerves in his upper arm, and he had been practicing in a flight simulator every day, trying to improve his control. The prosthetic was steady as he moved, his finger motions smooth.
But our holographic mockpits weren’t the same as flying actual starfighters. Nedd’s biological hand was shaking.
“You’re only concerned about me?” I asked.
“Of course,” Nedd said, though we both knew he was bluffing. His pale skin was even paler than usual. “Your mom won’t stay mad at me. I’m a delight.”
I was her son, but that only meant she’d be twice as angry at me for taking this risk with our family assets. I was supposed to be better than that.
Yet when I found out Nedd and I both had the afternoon off, I commissioned Naga to hyperjump us into my family’s hangar without a second thought. Under the new Defiant Defense Force hyperjumping regulations, I had to put in a request for a jump and wait for approval, but even my mother’s status as an assembly leader didn’t grant her access to the hyperjump logs, so she was none the wiser.
“These ships don’t see enough flight time,” I said. “In a way, we’re doing my mother a favor by taking them for a spin.”
“Totally,” Nedd said. “I’m sure your mother will see it that way.”
“Your mother will see it that way!” Wham added.
Ah, taynix. Ever the optimists.
“Looks clear,” I said. “Let’s go.”
Nedd and I ran for the two ships farthest from the door. These were Fresa-class starships—single-pilot fighters known for their speed and sleek design. We each climbed into a ship and ran system checks. My family’s ground team kept the ships well maintained and ready to fly at a moment’s notice, so we only had to do a few routine scans before takeoff.
I engaged the airlock, and the door between the maintenance rooms closed, cutting the crew off from the hangar. Above us, the ceiling rolled back to reveal the layers of platforms in the belt that filled the sky over Detritus, huge chunks of metal blocking out the stars.
“Ready when you are,” Nedd said over the radio.
“We are a go,” I told him, and we both engaged our acclivity rings, allowing our ships to lift vertically off the landing pad and float toward the open airlock door.
“Hey!” a voice shouted over my radio. “What the scud do you think you’re doing?”
“Doing!” Naga sang cheerfully, sliding out of my pack to rest along the side of my seat.
“Oh hi!” I replied over the radio. “Sorry, didn’t want to bother you. You all seemed busy! Arturo Mendez, taking the family ships for a routine flight. I’ll have them back inside of an hour.”
“Copy, Amphisbaena,” the voice said, using my callsign, as was customary over the radio. “But you’re not scheduled to take the ships today. Your parents’ orders are clear: If you want to take the ships, you’ll have to—”
“No need to bother my parents!” I said. “We’ll be back before you reach them anyway.” I hoped that was true. To avoid further argument, I changed my radio channel.
The hangar door finished rolling open, then started in the opposite direction as the ground crew overrode my commands. Nedd and I squeezed our ships through before the door closed, and we hovered side by side above the hangar platform, our acclivity rings keeping us aloft.
“Engage boosters,” I said. I shot off parallel to the hangar, flying through the wide space between the layers of the debris belt that orbited Detritus, like vat-grown meat between two slices of algae bread. Nedd followed at my wing, slow but steady.
“This is going well,” I said.
“Yes,” Nedd said, though his voice was strained. “I can take off in a straight line. Throw me a party.”
Flying took a surprisingly light touch, so using the prosthetic couldn’t be easy. As both Nedd’s friend and his flightleader, I had to encourage him, to push him. Nedd and I had flown together since the day we entered flight school. Since then, so many pilots had left us—for the diplomatic corps, for the new DDF space exploration forces. Jorgen Weight, our last flightleader, was our scudding admiral now—despite being only eighteen, like the rest of us—and many of our fellow cadets had died during the war. Nedd and I were the only remaining pilots from the original Skyward Flight, and I wasn’t leaving my buddy behind. Not if I could help it.
To make a case for a full return, we’d have to prove he could fly in combat. Dodging through the debris belt was a good first step—the metal platforms that orbited Detritus moved slowly and predictably, providing steady obstacles to navigate without the danger of being shot out of the sky.
“Ready for some maneuvering?” I asked.
“Not really,” Nedd said. It hurt to hear him so defeated. I’d been hounding engineering for weeks to design a ship specifically to fly one-handed, but so far it hadn’t been a priority. I was just the leader of one flight, even if we had recently been reclassified as “special forces.”
Not special enough to get accommodations, apparently.
“Here we go,” I said. “Try to tag me.” I switched my ship’s destructors to their laser function, which we used for target practice. This way, we’d be able to “hit” each other without doing damage. Nedd didn’t say anything, but a second later my ship’s monitor flashed green, meaning I’d taken a hit to my shields. When the light turned blue, my theoretical shields would be gone, and when it turned red, I was dead.
“Cheap shot,” I said.
“I think I paid what you’re worth.”
“Fine.” I spun into a barrel roll away from Nedd and then shot up at a sharp angle between two platforms in the next layer.
I tracked Nedd on my proximity monitors. He lagged behind, the nose of his ship bobbing erratically as he tried to ascend. We were high enough in the debris belt that there wasn’t enough atmosphere to experience drag, but he was still struggling with control. I didn’t want him to accuse me of going easy on him. I wouldn’t be doing him any favors— if he couldn’t fully control a ship with the prosthetic, he didn’t belong in combat. If I helped him cheat, I’d only get him killed.
I flipped an Ahlstrom loop, pointing the nose of my ship up and cutting over my own flight path in a vertical dive. I took the loop a bit fast and my GravCaps engaged, soaking up the g-forces to lessen the impact on my body. If they engaged for too long, the GravCaps could overload and I’d feel the full effects of the g-forces—which could result in temporary blindness, blackouts, or even death.
In this case, I only felt the press of my own momentum briefly before pulling out of the loop and heading back toward Nedd. It wasn’t hard to get him in my sights, and I wasn’t the best shot on the team. Nedd cut his boosters and spun with his nose pointed toward me, the rear of his ship skidding behind him. If he shot at me, he missed.
I got Nedd in my sights and slammed on my destructors. My dash light flashed yellow. Hit.
Nedd fired his boosters, soaring over me and away. His reaction time was sluggish, his flight path jagged. It was honestly impressive he could maneuver this well, new to the prosthetic as he was, but if he went into combat like this, he’d be dead.
He needed more practice. That was all. I followed him between two large metal facilities, each big enough to house a small city within it. And maybe they did house cities once. Centuries before our people crash-landed here, a lot of this space junk had been inhabited by humans bent on conquering the galaxy.
I didn’t try to tag Nedd again. I shot forward, sailing past him to forge a path through the highest layers of debris until empty space came into view, speckled with millions of stars. The sun was behind us, golden light shining across the rows of rotating platforms.
So much blackness, so much nothing. Before we were confined to this planet, our ancestors roamed the ocean of space, flying ever onward without a shore to return to. I used to wonder if they did so by choice, or if they simply had nowhere else to go. We’d lost Earth in the Third Human War—not to invasion, it had simply disappeared—the same war that destroyed much of our species. After our defeat, most surviving humans had been confined to “preserve” planets by the victors, an alien alliance known as the Superiority.
Still, we’d survived to fight back. I knew that other groups of humans had found other worlds to live on too. When I was a child, the idea of traveling the stars terrified me.
Now it wasn’t the wide universe that scared me. It was the thought of being left behind.
An alert flashed on my monitor. We’d risen through the debris close to one of Detritus’s weapons platforms— autonomous guns that shot down unidentified objects, protecting the planet from bombardment. I leveled out, staying below its firing range.
Nedd’s ship shot past mine, continuing to climb.
“Nedder, pitch down!” I said.
“Pitch down!” Naga agreed.
Copyright © 2026 by Brandon Sanderson. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
