Page 9 of Blightfall

Despite its more organic shape, it wasn’t alive, and its pilot was somewhere far away, steering and shooting remotely. “I will roast your power matrix over an open flame!” That didn’t have quite the right ring to it. “And then I will feed the remains to…a horde of hungry puppies!”

No, that definitely didn’t have the right ring to it. My former wingmate Spensa had taught me to fling insults and violent promises at my enemies, but no matter how many creative things I threatened to do with my enemy’s innards, I couldn’t catch up to her oratory skill, not by a kilometer. Most of the time I didn’t even get the insults right.

“What’s a puppy?” Alanik asked.

“I saw a picture of one once,” Gilaf said. “It’s like a fat monkey with sharper teeth.”

I held my shot steady, ready to fire, when the enemy ship cut beneath Gilaf’s hull and performed a roll, circling back with a barrage of destructor fire. I steadied my hand on the control sphere. I took a deep breath and pressed the trigger.

And missed. My destructor blast went wide, speeding off into oblivion. The ship hit its boosters, rocketing toward me and leaving Gilaf behind. Alanik covered me from the other incoming ships while this one showered me with destructor fire, and I switched to evasive maneuvers. Not fast enough; the ship took out my shields and fired one final shot.

My ship exploded.

I died.

I deflated in my seat while Alanik reset the simulation. “Stars, I thought I had that one.” I should have. Yes, the ship was moving. Yes, my shot had to be incredibly precise. But since so many of our flight members had left, we had an opening for a crack-shot pilot who could be counted on never to miss. “I’m never going to be our sniper if I shoot like that.”

“Shoot like that,” Nope agreed from the bottom of my mockpit. I bent down, petting the blue taynix down her long green spines. Nope was our flight’s inhibitor slug.

“Everyone misses sometimes,” Gilaf said, climbing out of his mockpit and sticking his face through my holographic canopy. He and Alanik were siblings, UrDail from the planet ReDawn. The image of the cockpit fizzled around his face, bits of my shield casting an electric blue glow over his bright white hair and the white bone protrusions that emerged from the purple skin on his cheekbones. In the holographic light, his hair looked almost as blue as mine, which was also a bright, electric color, a gift from my Yeongian heritage.

Gilaf scrutinized me. “You seem like you could use cheering up. Should I tell you a joke?” He spoke in the lilting UrDail language, but a pin on his jumpsuit translated his words into English.

“No,” Alanik said from her mockpit.

Gilaf looked confused. “Humans like jokes, yes?”

“We do,” I said. “Do UrDail not like jokes?”

“Not like jokes!” Nope trilled.

“Not Gilaf’s jokes,” Alanik said.

“Well, I want to hear it,” I said.

“Did you hear about the monkey that fell out of the tree?” Gilaf asked.

I shook my head.

“It plummeted.” Gilaf grinned at me, as if expecting me to laugh. The trees on ReDawn were kilometers tall, suspended in the atmosphere of their gas giant planet. A monkey falling out of one of those trees would plummet a long, long way, and I didn’t find the image of its terror particularly amusing.

Alanik sighed. “The UrDail word for ‘plummeted’ is a homophone for the color green. The same shade of green as a common species of monkey.”

I was trying to piece that together, but found myself distracted by the image of a green monkey. I’d never seen a monkey in real life, but—“Your monkeys are green?”

“Of course,” Gilaf said. “What color are yours?”

“Brown, I think? Black, maybe?”

Gilaf shook his head. “Ah, I see why the joke was not funny to you.”

“That joke is not funny to me either,” Alanik said.

“Yes,” Gilaf said, “because you don’t have a sense of humor.”

“It’s okay!” I said. “Your joke worked. I’m all cheered up now.”

Gilaf didn’t look convinced, which was fair. I didn’t sound cheered up and I wasn’t, particularly.