I forced myself to calm down and nodded to Jorgen, prying myself from his grip. “I’m fine,” I said. “Just got a little caught up in the video.”
“Great. We’re still going to talk later,” Jorgen said.
Cobb waved for me to follow him out of the room, and I made my way to the door, though just before we left he paused and looked back in. “Lieutenant McCaffrey?” he asked.
“Sir?” Rodge said, perking up from beside the wall.
“You still working on that project of yours?”
“Yes, sir!” Rodge said.
“Good. Go see if your theories work. I’ll talk to you later.” He continued on, leading me out of the room.
“What was that about, sir?” I asked him as the door shut behind us.
“That’s not important now,” he said, leading me into the observatory across the hall. A wide, shallow room, the observatory was named for its dramatic view of the planet below. I stepped inside, and through the wall-to-wall window Detritus confronted me.
Cobb stood at the window and took a sip of coffee. I approached, trying to keep the trepidation from showing in my steps. I couldn’t help but glance over my shoulder toward the room where we had watched the video.
“What did you see in that video?” Cobb asked.
“Myself,” I said. I could speak honestly to Cobb. He’d long since proven he deserved my trust, and more. “I know it sounds impossible, Cobb, but the darkness in the video took shape, and it was me.”
“I once watched my best friend and wingmate try to kill me, Spensa,” he said softly. “We now know something had overwritten what he saw—or the way his brain interpreted what he saw—so he mistook me for the enemy.”
“You think…this is similar?”
“I have no other explanation as to why you’d see yourself in a video archive hundreds of years old.” He took a long drink of his coffee, tipping the cup back to get the last drops. Then he lowered it. “We’re blind here. We don’t know what the enemy is capable of—or really even who the enemy are. You see anything else in that darkness?”
“I thought I heard something tell me…that it ‘heard’ me. But that felt different somehow. From a different place, and not nearly as angry. I don’t know how to explain it.”
Cobb grunted. “Well, at least now we have an idea what happened to the people of this planet.” He gestured with his mug out the window, and I stepped up to look down at Detritus. It looked desolate, a surface that had been turned to slag. The debris in lower orbit—the damaged platforms, the junk—had probably been caused by terrified people on the planet firing on the entity as it surrounded them.
“Whatever that thing was in the recording,” Cobb said, “it came here and…destroyed all the people on this planet and these platforms. They called it a delver.”
“Have you ever heard of anything like that?” I asked. “You knew about…about the eyes I sometimes see.”
“Not the word delver,” Cobb said. “But we have traditions that stretch back from before our grandparents were alive. They speak of beings that watch us from the void, the deep darkness, and they warn us to avoid communicating wirelessly. That’s why we only use radio for important military channels. That man on the video said that the delver came because it heard their communications, so maybe that’s related.” Cobb eyed me. “We’re warned not to create machines that can think too quickly and…”
“And we’re supposed to fear people who can see into the nowhere,” I whispered. “Because they draw the attention of the eyes.”
Cobb didn’t contradict me. He went for another sip of coffee, but found his mug empty and grunted softly.
“Do you think that the thing we saw in that video is related to the eyes you see?” Cobb asked.
I swallowed. “Yes,” I said. “They’re the same, Cobb. The entities that watch when I use my powers are the same as that thing with the spines that emerged on the video. The man said something about their cytoshield. That sounds a lot like cytonics.”
“A shield to keep the enemy from hearing or finding the cytonics on the planet, maybe,” Cobb said. “And it failed.” He sighed, shaking his head. “You see those battleships arrive earlier?”
“Yeah. But the platforms will protect us from bombardment, right?”
“Maybe,” Cobb said. “Some of these systems still work, but others aren’t as reliable. Our engineers think some of those more distant platforms have anti-bombardment countermeasures, but we can’t know for certain. I’m not sure we have the luxury of worrying about delvers, or the eyes, or any of that. We have a more immediate problem. The Krell—or whatever they’re really called—won’t listen to our pleas to stop their attacks. They’ve stopped caring whether they preserve any humans. They’re determined to exterminate us.”
“They’re afraid of us,” I said. When M-Bot and I had stolen information off their station six months ago, that was the biggest and most surprising revelation I’d discovered about the Krell. They kept us contained not out of spite, but because they were genuinely terrified of humankind.
“Afraid of us or not,” Cobb said, “they want us dead. And unless we can find a way to travel the stars like they do, we’re doomed. No fortress—no matter how powerful—can stand forever, particularly not against an enemy as strong as the Superiority.”
I nodded. It was a core tenet of battlefield tactics: you needed to have a plan of retreat. As long as we were trapped on Detritus, we were in danger. If we could get offworld, all kinds of options opened to us. Fleeing and hiding somewhere else. Searching for other human enclaves—if they existed—and recruiting help. Striking back against the enemy, putting them on the defensive.
None of this was possible until I learned to use my powers. Or, barring that, until we found a way to steal the enemy’s hyperdrive technology. Cobb was right. The eyes, the delvers, they might be important to me—but in the grand scheme of my people’s survival, that was all a secondary problem.
We needed to find a way off this planet.
Cobb looked at me carefully. He had always felt old. I knew that he was only a few years older than my parents, yet right now he looked like a rock that had been left out too long and survived too many meteor falls.
“Ironsides used to complain about how hard this job was,” he grumbled. “You know the worst part about being in charge, Spin?”
“No, sir.”
“Perspective. When you’re young, you can assume that everyone older than you has life figured out. Once you get command yourself, you realize we’re all just the same kids wearing older bodies.”
I swallowed, but didn’t say anything. Standing next to Cobb, I stared out the window at the desolate planet and the thousands of platforms surrounding it. An incredible network of defenses that—in the end—had been powerless to stop whatever this delver was.
“Spensa,” Cobb said, “I need you to be more careful out there. Half my staff think you’re the biggest liability we’ve ever put into a ship. The other half think you’re some kind of Saint incarnate. I’d like you to stop supplying both sides with good arguments.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “I…to be honest, I was trying to push myself, put myself in danger. I thought if I did that, it might make my brain work and my powers engage.”
“While I appreciate the sentiment, that’s a stupid way to try to solve our problems, Lieutenant.”
“But we do have to figure out how to travel the stars. You yourself said it.”
“I’d rather find a way that isn’t so reckless,” Cobb said. “We know the Superiority ships travel the stars. They have hyperdrive technology, and the eyes—the delvers—haven’t destroyed them. So it’s possible.”
Cobb adopted a contemplative look, staring back out the window at the planet below. He was quiet for such a long time, I found myself growing nervous.
“Sir?” I asked.
“Come with me,” he said. “I might have a way for us to get off this planet that doesn’t rely upon your powers.”
I followed Cobb through the too-clean corridors of Platform Prime. Why were we walking back to the fighter bays?
He counted off the doors until stopping next to the dock where I kept M-Bot. Increasingly confused, I followed him through the small door. I’d expected to find the ground crew beyond, doing M-Bot’s normal post-battle services. Instead, the room was empty save for the ship and one person. Rodge.
“Rig?” I asked, using his old callsign from when he’d been in Skyward Flight. That had only lasted a few days, but he was one of us all the same.
Rodge—who had been inspecting something on M-Bot’s wing—jumped as I said his name. He spun to find us there, and blushed immediately. For a moment he was the old Rodge: earnest, gangly, and not a little awkward. He almost dropped his datapad as he quickly saluted Cobb.
“Sir!” Rodge said. “I didn’t expect you so soon.”
“At ease, Lieutenant,” Cobb said. “How goes the project?”
The project? Cobb had said something about a project earlier—it involved M-Bot?
“See for yourself, sir,” Rodge said, then tapped something on his datapad.
M-Bot’s shape changed, and I actually yelped in surprise. In an instant, he looked like one of the black ships that were piloted by Krell aces.
His holograms, I realized. M-Bot was a long-range stealth ship, designed—best we could tell—for spy missions. He had what he called active camouflage, a fancy way of saying he could use holograms to change what he looked like.
“It’s not perfect, sir,” Rodge said. “M-Bot can’t turn himself invisible, not with any real level of believability. Instead, he has to overlay his hull with some kind of image. Since he’s not exactly the same shape as one of those Krell ships, we had to fudge in places. You can see here that I made the hologram’s wings bigger to cover up the tips of his hull.”
“It’s incredible,” I said, walking around the ship. “M-Bot, I had no idea you could do this.”
Rodge looked at his datapad. “Um…he sent me a text here, Spin. He says he’s not talking to you because you muted him earlier.”
I rolled my eyes, inspecting Rodge’s work. “So…what’s the point of this?”
Cobb folded his arms where he stood near the door. “I asked my command staff, scientists, and engineers to tackle the hyperdrive problem. How do we find a way off this planet? All the ideas I got back were wildly implausible, except one. It’s only mildly implausible.”
I stepped up beside Rodge, who was grinning.
“What?” I asked him.
“You know all those nights,” he said, “when you’d come wake me up and force me to go on some insane adventure?”
“Yeah?”
“Well, I thought maybe I should get some revenge.” He turned and swept his hand toward M-Bot, and the new, confident Rodge was back. He grinned widely, his eyes alight. This was a man in his element. “M-Bot has extremely advanced espionage capabilities. He can create detailed holograms. He can eavesdrop on conversations hundreds of meters away. He can hack enemy signals and computer systems with ease.
“We’ve been using him as a frontline combat ship, but that’s not his true purpose. And as long as we use him just to fight, we’re not utilizing his full potential. When the admiral asked for ideas on how to get ahold of the enemy hyperdrive technology, it occurred to me that the answer was staring us in the face. And occasionally pointing out how odd our human features look.”
“You want to use him to infiltrate the Superiority,” I said, the realization hitting me. “You want to pretend to be a Krell ship, then somehow steal their hyperdrive technology!”
“They launch drones from their space station nearby,” Rodge said. “And we’ve observed new ships arriving there using hyperdrive technology. The very thing we need sits on our proverbial doorstep. M-Bot can use holograms on us too. He could make a small team of us, equipped with mobile receptors like the one you wear, look like Krell.
“If we could somehow—in the confusion of a battle—make M-Bot imitate an enemy ship, we might be able to land him on their station. A small team of spies could unload, then pretend to be Krell just long enough to steal one of their real ships and escape with it. With that in hand, we could replicate their technology and escape the planet.”
I felt my jaw dropping at the audacity of it. “Rodge, that’s insane.”
“I know!”
“I love it!”
“I know!”
The two of us stood there, grinning like we had after stealing the claymore off the wall of the historical preservation chamber. It had taken both of us to lift it, but hey, we’d gotten to hold a real sword.
Together, we looked to Cobb.
“Krell ships likely have transponders,” he said, “for authentication.”
“M-Bot should be able to spoof one,” Rodge said.
“And you think you could do this, Spin?” Cobb asked me. “Imitate one of our enemies? Believably? Sneak onto an enemy station and steal one of their ships?”
“I…” I swallowed, and tried to be objective. “No. Sir, I’m a pilot, not a spy. I don’t have any training along these lines. I…well, I’d probably make a fool of myself.”
It hurt to admit that, as the plan was fabulous. But I had to be realistic.
“Jorgen said the same thing,” Cobb said.
“He knows about this plan?” I asked.
“We briefed him and the other senior flightleaders on the idea during our last command meeting. We all agreed that nobody in the DDF has this kind of expertise. We’ve spent eighty years drilling for direct battle, not espionage. We don’t have spies. But…Jorgen suggested that we start up a training program. Spin, if we do that, would you be willing to participate?”
“Of course,” I said, though the idea of more school—and less flying—gave me a pang of regret.
“Good, because that ship of yours still won’t let anyone else pilot it.” Cobb shook his head. “I think this is the only viable plan we have, though I just don’t like it. I can’t imagine one of us, no matter how well trained, believably imitating a Krell. We’re too different. Plus they’re bound to find it strange when our ship lands on their station without following their protocol. We’d have to find some sort of excuse for why our ship is behaving oddly. Damaged systems maybe?
“In any case, Lieutenant McCaffrey, I’m giving you leave to continue developing this idea. Maybe start training all of Skyward Flight for espionage activities. Give me detailed plans. I wish we weren’t pushed so far back against the wall. We might not have time to give this plan the proper preparation it would need. But with those battleships in place now…”
I opened my mouth to agree, but then stopped. I sensed something in the back of my mind. A strange sound, like a humming. I cocked my head, focusing on it. The sensation was new to me.
There, I thought as the sound came to a climax, then vanished. I tried to stretch out my cytonic senses to determine what it meant. Did…did something just arrive?
A call came on the comm. Cobb walked to the wall, answering it. “Yes?”
“Sir,” Rikolfr’s voice said. “One of the outer scouts spotted an alien ship appearing just outside the defense platforms. It’s a small vessel, fighter size. It seems to have hyperjumped directly here.”
“One ship?” Cobb asked.
“Just one, sir. Not of any Superiority design we know. We’re scrambling a response team from planetside, but this is odd behavior. Why would they send a single ship? Surely we’re past the days when they’d try to sneak up a bomber on Alta.”
“How far away is it?” I asked, knowing the answer. It was close. I could feel it.
“Approaching th
e outermost shell now, at the orbital equator,” Rikolfr said. “Analysis thinks it must be a new kind of drone sent to test platform gun emplacement response time.”
“I’ll go check it out, sir,” I told Cobb. “A ship from up here will arrive before a planetside team.”
Cobb eyed me.
“Please, sir,” I said. “I won’t do anything stupid.”
“I’ll order Quirk to go with you,” he said. “Don’t try to lose her, and don’t engage this ship unless I give you orders. Understand?”
I nodded, and read the implication in those words. He was testing me. To see if I could still follow orders. I probably should have been embarrassed that such a test was necessary.
I scrambled to climb into my ship as Rodge and Cobb walked to the door. I had a lot to think about, with Rodge’s plan—not to mention the lingering sense of disquiet I still felt at having seen the delver wearing my face.
For the moment though, I was too eager to get back in the cockpit. And to find out why the Superiority would send a single ship to test our defenses.
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.
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