“Fun time!” Doomslug said from where she’d climbed up onto the armrest of my seat.
I slipped into the cockpit. “You really did that?” I asked.
“Complaining about organics? Yes, it’s very easy. Did you know just how many dead cells you shed daily? All of those little pieces of you litter my cockpit.”
“M-Bot, focus. You hacked her computer?”
“Oh! Yes. As I said, it’s not very advanced. I got the entire database about her planet, people, culture, history. What do you want to know? Their planet was allied to the human forces in the last war—though many of their politicians now call the human presence there an authoritarian occupation—and several of their cultures were significantly influenced by human ones. Her language isn’t too different from your own, for example.”
“What is her name?” I asked softly, glancing over at her ship. The buzz of medical technicians around the cockpit gave me hope that she would survive her wound.
“Alanik of the UrDail,” he said, pronouncing her name as “ah-la-NEEK.” “Her flight logs say she was on her way to visit the Superiority’s largest deep-space commerce station. She never arrived though. She seems to have somehow found out where we were, and so came here instead. Oh! Spensa, she’s cytonic, like you! She is the only one of her people who can use the powers.”
I settled back in my seat, feeling numb.
M-Bot didn’t notice how much all this was disturbing me, as he just kept right on talking. “Yup, her log is encrypted, but I cracked that. She hoped to find answers about her powers among the Superiority, though her people don’t think highly of them. Something about the way they rule.”
I can feel where she was planning to go…, I thought again. The coordinates were burned into my brain, but they were fading like a dying engine. Sputtering and losing power. I could jump. I could go there. But only if I acted quickly.
I sat frozen in a moment of indecision. Then I stood up in my cockpit and called to Jorgen, who had climbed from his ship to observe the medical staff.
“Jorgen!” I shouted. “I need you to come here right now and talk me out of doing something incredibly stupid.”
He turned toward me, then—with a look of sudden panic—ran over and hauled himself onto M-Bot’s wing. I didn’t know if I should be thankful he responded so quickly, or be embarrassed by how seriously he seemed to take the threat of me doing something stupid.
“What is it, Spin?” he asked, stepping up to my cockpit.
“That alien put coordinates in my brain,” I said, explaining in a rush. “She was going to go try out for the Superiority’s space force, since they’re recruiting, and she wanted to see if they knew anything about cytonics, but I just realized this is the perfect chance to put Rodge’s plan into action. If I went and imitated her, it wouldn’t seem nearly as odd as if we tried to imitate a Krell. M-Bot got her entire log and planetary database, and I can take her place. You need to stop me because, so help me, I’m just about ready to do it because the coordinates are evaporating from my brain.”
He blinked at the flood of words coming from my mouth.
“How long do we have?” he asked.
“I can’t be sure,” I said, anxious as I felt the impression fading. “Not long. Five minutes? Maybe? Yes, and my gut is telling me to go right now. Which is why I need you to talk me out of it!”
“All right, let’s consider.”
“We don’t have time to consider!”
“You said we have five minutes. Five minutes’ consideration is better than none.” Then—like the insufferable rock of protocol he was—he carefully set his helmet on the wing. “Rodge’s plan was for you to imitate a Krell pilot and sneak aboard their station here near Detritus.”
“Yes, but Cobb doesn’t think we could ever imitate one of the Krell.”
“Then what makes you think you could imitate this alien?”
“She is from a backwater world,” M-Bot piped up. “Which is not an official part of the Superiority. Nobody in the Superiority will have met any members of her species, so anything Spensa does will not feel out of character.”
“She might still seem human to them,” Jorgen said.
“Which will be fine,” I said. “Because Alanik—that’s her name—came from a world that was allies with the humans not long ago.”
“Indeed,” M-Bot said, “they had a great deal of cultural exchange.”
“You don’t speak the Superiority languages,” Jorgen said.
I hesitated, then fished in my pocket for the translator pin I’d taken from the alien. The medics had her hooked up to a breathing device and were extracting her—carefully—from her ship. I felt a spike of concern, even though I’d only just met her.
I could still feel her touch in my mind. And her plea. A fading arrow in my brain, pointing into the stars.
I held up the pin for Jorgen to see. “I can use this pin to translate for me, I think.”
“Confirmed,” M-Bot said. “I can set it to output in English so you’ll understand what they’re saying.”
“All right, that’s a start,” Jorgen said. “Now, can you imitate that pilot’s ship with your holograms?”
“I’d need to do a scan of it.”
“Well, I guess we don’t have time—”
“Done,” M-Bot said. Then he shifted to an imitation of the alien’s downed ship. It was a far better fit than the Krell ship had been; M-Bot and Alanik’s ship were much closer in shape and size.
Jorgen nodded.
“You’re thinking I should go,” I said to him. “Scud, you actually think I should go through with this!”
“I think we should consider all of our options before making a decision. How much time left?”
“Not much! A minute or two! It’s not like I have a clock in my brain. The sensation is just fading. Quickly.”
“M-Bot, can you successfully make her look like that alien?”
“If she has the bracelet on,” he said.
I scrambled to pull it off his dash and slap it on.
“Handily,” M-Bot said, “our medics just finished a scan of her for vitals. And…There.”
My hands changed color to light purple as he overlaid my face and skin with a hologram of Alanik. M-Bot even changed my flight suit to match hers, and the imitation was perfect.
I stared at my hands, then looked at Jorgen.
“Scud,” he whispered. “That’s uncanny. All right. So what is the plan?”
“There’s no time for a plan!”
“There’s time for a quick outline. You go to the recruitment station in this alien’s place, then claim to be her. You try out for the enemy’s military…Wait, why are they recruiting new pilots? They’re probably increasing their troop numbers to come fight us, right?”
“Yeah,” I said. That would make sense.
“That might be useful. If you did this, you could gather valuable intel on their operations. From there, you would try to steal a hyperdrive—or get some pictures of one for the engineers—then you teleport back here. Do you think you can get back on your own?”
I grimaced. “I don’t know. My powers…aren’t very consistent. But Alanik’s records said she was going to the Superiority because she hoped to learn about her own abilities from them.”
“So either you’ll have to figure that out, or you’ll have to steal a hyperdrive somehow, then get yourself and M-Bot back to us with the stolen technology.”
“Yeah.” It sounded impossible when he outlined it like that. Yet I looked up toward the stars, and I felt a fire burning within me. “It sounds crazy,” I told him. “But Jorgen, I think I have to go. I have to try this.”
I looked down, meeting his eyes as he stood on the wing beside my cockpit. Then, remarkably, he nodded. “I agree.”
“You do?”<
br />
“Spin, you can be reckless—even foolhardy—but I’ve flown with you nearly a year now. I trust your instincts.”
“My instincts get me into trouble.”
He reached over, putting his hand on the side of my face. “You’ve gotten us out of far more trouble than you’ve ever gotten yourself into, Spensa. Scud, I don’t know if this mission is the right thing to do. But I do know our people are in serious danger. We talk optimistically, but the command staff knows the truth. We’re dead here unless we find a way to use hyperdrives ourselves.”
I put my hand on his. The information in my brain was dimming. Only seconds remained.
“Can you do this?” he asked me. “Does your gut say you can?”
“Yes,” I whispered. Then, more firmly—with the strength of a warrior—I repeated it. “Yes. I can do this, Jorgen. I’ll get us a hyperdrive and bring it back. I promise.”
“Then go. I trust you.”
I realized that was what I needed. Not his permission, or even his approval. I needed his trust.
In a moment of impulse I sprang from the cockpit, then grabbed him by his flight suit and pulled him down so I could kiss him. We probably weren’t ready for that, and it probably wasn’t the time, but I did it anyway. Because…well, scud. He’d just encouraged me to trust my instincts.
It was wonderful. I felt a strength to him as he kissed me back, an almost electricity coursing through him into me—then back again stronger because of the fire that burned in my chest. I lingered in the kiss as long as I dared, then pulled away.
“I should go with you,” he said.
“Unfortunately,” M-Bot said, “we have only one mobile receptor. You’d be identified as a human immediately.”
Jorgen grunted. “I suppose someone has to explain this to Cobb anyway.”
“He’s going to be mad…,” I said.
“He’ll understand. We made the best decision we could with the limited time and information we had. Saints help us, I think we have to try this. Go.”
I held his eyes for a moment, then broke the gaze and jumped back down into the cockpit.
Jorgen touched his lips with his hand, then shook himself, picked up his helmet, and leaped off M-Bot’s wing. He pulled back to where everyone else was focused on the alien’s ship, oblivious to the powerful moments that had transpired.
“I’m confused at what just happened between the two of you,” M-Bot said. “I thought you insisted to me several times that you had no romantic inclinations toward Jorgen.”
“I lied,” I said, seizing on the compelling sensation the alien had embedded in my brain. It was nearly gone, but it still felt like an arrow into the sky. Just as it threatened to disappear completely, I somehow yanked on it.
“Cytonic hyperdrive online,” M-Bot said. “It actually—”
We vanished.
I was only in the nowhere for a moment, but in that place, time seemed to have no meaning. I floated alone, with no ship. Infinite blackness surrounded me, punctuated by lights that seemed so much like stars—only malevolent. They could see me hanging there, exposed. I felt like a rat suddenly dropped on a string into the middle of a cage full of starving wolves.
The eyes focused on me, and their anger built. I was trespassing in their domain. I was an insignificant worm…but my presence still brought them pain. My world and theirs did not belong together. Their lights surged toward me. They’d rip my very soul to shreds and leave only scraps of—
I appeared back in M-Bot’s cockpit.
“—worked!” M-Bot finished.
“Ah!” I yelled, jolting. I grabbed the sides of my cockpit seat. “Did you see any of that?”
“See what?” M-Bot said. “My chronometer indicates no time has passed. You engaged the cytonic hyperdrive…or, well, I think you are the cytonic hyperdrive.”
I put my hand to my chest, pressing it against the thick material of my flight suit, which seemed very strange now that it was the wrong color. My heart raced and my mind reeled. That place…the nowhere. It had been like swimming through a deep-cavern lake without any lights. All the while knowing things lay beneath, watching me, reaching for me…
That was them, I thought. The things that destroyed the people of Detritus. The things we saw in the recording. The delvers were real. They and the eyes were the same thing.
I breathed in and out deeply, calming myself with effort. At least the hyperjump had worked. I had used my powers again, with the help of the coordinates that Alanik had placed in my mind.
Right. Time to be a hero. I could do this.
“Spensa!” M-Bot said. “We’re being contacted!”
“By who?” I asked.
“By whom!” Doomslug said from beside me.
“You’ve brought us in near a Superiority space station of some size,” M-Bot said. “Look at your five. The radio chatter here is quiet, but distinct.”
I rested my hand comfortingly on Doomslug, who was fluting in annoyance, perhaps sensing my discomfort. I searched in the direction M-Bot had indicated, and saw something I’d missed in my first brief scan of the starfield. It was a distant station of some sort—lights in the darkness that were clustered around a central flat plane.
“Starsight,” I said. “That’s what the alien, Alanik, called it.” I scrambled to pull on my helmet and buckle in. “They’re contacting us? What are they saying?”
“Someone on the station is asking us for identification,” M-Bot said. “They’re speaking in Dione, a Superiority standard language.”
“Can you spoof Alanik’s transponder signal?”
“Doing so.”
“Great. Then stall them for a little bit while I think through this.”
M-Bot clearly still looked like the alien ship, and—judging by my soft violet hands—my hologram was still working as well. If this mission failed, it wouldn’t be due to the limitations of the technology—it would be because of the limitations of the spy.
“First things first,” I said. “We need to check our retreat and see if we can get home, if things go poorly. Give me just another minute or so.”
I breathed in and out, calming myself, doing the exercises Gran-Gran had taught me. Exercises she’d learned from her mother, who had been the one who’d hyperjumped our old space fleet before we’d crashed on Detritus.
I’d jumped here to perform this mission, but I wanted to know: Could I jump back if I needed to? Everything would get a whole lot easier if this expansion of my powers, as granted by Alanik touching my brain, could work again.
I imagined myself floating in space…stars zipping around…Yes, having just hyperjumped, I felt a familiarity to the action. The nowhere was close. I’d just been there. I could return.
Those things would see me again.
Don’t think about that, I told myself sternly. I concentrated on the exercise. I was flying, shooting through the stars, zipping away…
Where? That was the problem. For anything other than a very short jump, I’d need to know exactly where I was going. I couldn’t simply reverse the directions Alanik had given me, because they hadn’t included my starting point of Detritus, only my destination of this space station.
“M-Bot,” I said, coming out of my trance. “Can you calculate our location?”
“Currently calculating, using astronomical data. But I warn you, Spensa, my stalling is not working. They’re sending ships out to investigate.”
“What have you been doing?”
“Sending them binary code.”
“What?” I said. “That’s how you decided to stall?”
“I don’t know! I figured, ‘Organics like dumb things, and this is pretty dumb.’ In hindsight, maybe it wasn’t dumb enough? Anyway, they’ll have visual on us within the minute.”
The moment of truth. I took a deep brea
th. I was a warrior. Trained by my grandmother from childhood to face my heroic destiny with courage. You can do this, I told myself. It’s just a battle of a different kind. Like Hua Mulan or Epipole of Carystus, going to battle wearing another person’s identity.
I’d heard those stories a dozen times over from Gran-Gran. The thing was, the subterfuge of both women had eventually been discovered. And it hadn’t exactly gone well for either one.
I’d just have to be sure not to end up like them. I turned M-Bot as two ships approached from the distant station. Boxy and painted white, they were like the Krell shuttlecraft I’d seen at the space station near Detritus.
The two ships leveled off with mine, rotating to the same axis so we could see each other through the glassy fronts of their crafts. The pilots were a pair of aliens with crimson skin. They didn’t wear helmets, and I could see that they were hairless and had prominent eye ridges and cheekbones. They looked basically humanoid—two arms, one head—but were alien enough that I couldn’t distinguish their gender.
M-Bot patched through their communication, and alien chatter filled my cockpit. I dug out Alanik’s translating device and clicked it on, and the chatter was translated into her language, which didn’t do me a whole lot of good.
“M-Bot,” I hissed. “You said you’d fix that.”
“Whoops,” he said. “Hacking into the pin’s language interface…Ha! I activated the English setting.”
“Unidentified ship,” an alien said. “Do you require assistance? Please classify yourself.”
I launched right into it. No choice now. “My name is Alanik of the UrDail. I’m a pilot and messenger from the planet…”
“ReDawn,” M-Bot whispered.
“From the planet ReDawn. I have come to be a pilot for you guys. Um, in your space force. Like you asked?” I winced. That wasn’t terribly convincing. “Sorry about the odd communication earlier. My computer can be a real pain sometimes.”
“Ha ha,” M-Bot said to me. “That was sarcasm. I can tell because it wasn’t actually funny.”
The two patrol ships were silent for some time, probably having switched over to a private comm line. I was left to wait, hanging there in space, worrying. I examined their boxy white ships—and oddly, I couldn’t find any weapon ports on them.
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