“But—”
He took me by the arm, then moved some papers and gently steered me to sit in his chair. He didn’t banish me immediately to that debriefing. Perhaps he wanted me around to answer questions.
I sagged in the seat, watching as he stepped forward to take command. He was far better at that than one might assume. He didn’t try to do it all himself. He let the other admirals—ones he’d handpicked for their combat sense—lead the individual segments of the battle. He only intruded when he felt he needed to. Mostly he limped around the room, sipping his coffee and offering pointers here and there.
I watched the swarm of ships approach one another. I tried to sink farther down into my seat as I watched. Red and blue blips on a screen—but some of those blips were people I loved dearly. People on both sides. Was Morriumur out there, terrified but determined? Hesho and the kitsen? Would Kimmalyn shoot them down?
This wasn’t right. This couldn’t happen. And…it was also wrong. Not just wrong morally, wrong tactically. I stared up at the battle maps, and the Superiority side looked impressive. Two hundred drones, fifty manned ships. Our own force of scrambled fighters would only number around a hundred and fifty.
But we were the DDF, battle forged and growing in skill each day, while the Superiority fielded drone pilots trained to be nonaggressive and a group of new recruits with only a couple weeks in the cockpit. Winzik had to know his forces were actually at a disadvantage.
He also knows we’re growing stronger each day, and now—after finding the remnants of my destructor pistol—fears we’ve been able to get to Starsight. He knows we have cytonics. He knows we were spying on his operations…
I suddenly saw a different cast to this battle. I saw a terrified Winzik realizing that his prisoners were out of control, that the threat he’d often used to scare the rest of the Superiority was actually real. So what was his plan here? It had to be more than just letting his fledgling space force die to our destructors.
As the two groups of fighters began to engage, I strained to put together what the Krell leader might be planning. Unfortunately, I’d never been the one to worry about large-scale tactics. My job was to get in the cockpit and start shooting. Sure, I could think on my feet and win a battle, but today I needed to be more. I understood the enemy better than anyone else. I’d lived among them. I’d talked to their general, listened to his orders.
What was he doing here, today? I watched the battle, and slowly I stood up from the seat—the admiral’s chair, where I loomed over the entire room. I stared at the blips on the screen and saw the people beyond them. I felt the world fading slightly around me. I saw…and heard…stars.
…reporting live from the Detritus refuge…
…brave fighters, hoping to hold back the human scourge…
Winzik was broadcasting these events. This attack was theatrics. I imagined millions of people back on Starsight, watching the broadcast in fear. Winzik could destroy his reputation by failing here. And he would, wouldn’t he? He couldn’t defeat us.
…reports that the humans are doing something strange…
…this refuge, which is surrounded by ancient mechanisms, remnants from the Second Human War…
…the movement of those platforms. Something seems to be happening…
Beyond it all, I heard something else. Like…like a building scream. Or a challenge? Was that Brade? Screaming into the nowhere? She couldn’t do that—it would draw the eyes. It would—
It snapped into focus. The things I was hearing, Cuna’s warnings, Brade’s explanations from earlier. Winzik’s plan.
They were going to intentionally bring a delver into our realm.
A few of the people in the room noticed me, and Rikolfr nudged Cobb. “Spin?” the admiral asked, stepping up.
“I need to go, sir,” I said, still staring at the battle map.
“I don’t know if we can risk you,” he said. “None of our other ships can protect your brain from cytonic attacks. Besides, we don’t know if we can get any of these hyperspace slugs you mention…so, well, you might be needed soon.”
“I’m needed right now,” I said. I looked down at him. “Something terrible is about to happen. I don’t think I can explain it to you. I don’t have the time. But I have to stop it.”
“Go,” he told me. “We might be able to defeat the fighters, but those battleships? Now that they’ve finally decided to throw everything at us, our time is running out. So if you can do something…well, go. Saints watch over you.”
I was off and running toward the hall before he even finished.
As I ran, I felt the shadow grow stronger inside me.
By approaching the nowhere to listen, I’d let more of it in. The thoughts of the delvers. They touched the part of me that I couldn’t explain.
This part of me hated everyone. The buzzing noises people made. The clicks and the disruption of the pure calm void that was space.
The human inside me fought back. It saw lives behind the blips on the screen. It had flown with the enemy and had found friends in them.
I didn’t understand myself. How could I be both of these things at once? How could I want to stop the fighting, but at the same time hope they’d all just destroy themselves?
I exploded from the bay of Platform Prime, flying my Superiority ship, as it was the only ship not in use at the moment. Cobb really was worried. He’d mobilized every fighter we had.
Following a provided course through the shells around Detritus, I accelerated constantly, my back pressing into the seat. Eventually I emerged into space beyond the shells—and confronted the chaos of hundreds of ships fighting at once. Destructor blasts tore streaks through the blackness, and ships exploded with flashes of light that were quickly extinguished. In the distance, the Weights and Measures watched stoically alongside the two battleships.
I thought I understood Winzik’s plan, and it had a kind of twisted brilliance to it. He needed to exterminate the humans of Detritus. By escaping, we were coming too close to proving him weak, or even a fraud. But he didn’t yet have the space force he needed to do the job himself.
At the same time, he needed a delver in our realm that he could control and use as a threat. He couldn’t be seen summoning it himself, however. So what did he do? He sent his forces to Detritus to “bravely fight” the humans. Then he secretly had Brade draw a delver into our realm and let it destroy Detritus. He could blame the summoning on us. After all, everyone knew the humans had tried to do this once before.
After consuming the humans, the delver would move on, searching for other prey. But Winzik could use his newly trained space force to control it—send it someplace safe, bounce it between unpopulated worlds.
In so doing, he’d become a hero—and the most important being in the galaxy. Because with a roving delver threatening all the civilized worlds, only his force would provide any protection. His pilots would be on call to defend planets who asked for them—but if someone opposed him, well, the delver might just find its way to their region with no defense force to send it away.
Brutal. Effective.
Terrifying.
I boosted toward the fight, where starfighters spun and dodged, blasted and fought. Where was Brade? I could hear her shouting into the nowhere, but I couldn’t sense where. Would she be on the Weights and Measures?
No. They wouldn’t want the thing to come into our realm near one of their ships. She’ll be out here somewhere.
But where? This battle was several times larger than any I’d been in before—probably larger, I realized, than anyone in this fight had ever seen. The battlefield was quickly devolving into chaos as flights tried to stick together and admirals frantically tried to keep a coherent strategy.
A familiar sense of excitement built inside me, the anticipation of the fight, the opportunity to push myself. But…tod
ay it was accompanied by a hesitance I might once have called cowardice. I silently thanked Cobb for beating that out of me during training.
I wasn’t here to fight. So instead of firing on the first Superiority drone that passed by, I studied my proximity monitor—and realized that it was still attuned to Superiority signals. They’d blocked me from their general communications chatter, so I couldn’t hear what they were saying to one another, but I could still highlight individual ships and designations on my monitor.
I picked out a specific starfighter flying mostly by itself, near the far right side of the battlefield. The Swims Against the Current in a Stream Reflecting the Sun. Hesho’s ship. My old flight. They might know where Brade was.
But Hesho and I were enemies now. He knew me for what I really was, the thing that he hated.
I steered my ship that direction anyway. I zipped down through the battlefield to avoid the shots of several drones—then the shots of several DDF fighters, who obviously hadn’t believed my signal code that identified me as an ally.
The drones and the DDF fighters ended up engaging one another, which left me to swing around toward Hesho. The kitsen turned their ship toward mine, and I stopped a good distance away, slowing down until I was motionless in space. Now what?
I tried opening a private channel to the kitsen ship. “Hesho,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
No response. Indeed, the ship powered up its destructors and started toward me. I could practically hear the orders on board as Hesho commanded the kitsen to prepare for battle. My fingers twitched on my controls. They thought they could take me? Did they really want to push me to see? They were insignificant, meaningless noises upon a vast…
No. I took my hand off my control sphere and checked the seals on my helmet.
Then I popped my canopy open.
The air in my canopy was sucked out into the void in a rush of wind. Water in the air immediately vaporized, then froze, causing frost to condense across the inside of the glass. Crystals of it sparkled in the air, reflecting the light of the distant sun.
I undid the latches on my seat, all except the one cord that would pull tight to lock my feet into place if I ejected. That one had some slack right now, and tethered me to the cockpit.
I floated out, closing my eyes. I imagined I was soaring. Free. Me, the void, and the stars. Those sang distant songs, but there was a louder noise growing nearby. At the back of the battlefield. It was building. The delver was coming.
“What are you doing?” Hesho’s voice said in my ear. “Get back into your ship so we can engage in combat.”
“No,” I whispered.
“This is foolishness, Alanik—or whatever your real name is. I am warning you. We will not delay our fire simply because you are indisposed.”
“I promised you, Hesho,” I said. “Remember? First shot at a human is yours.”
I opened my eyes to the surreal scene of emptiness all around. I’d always known it was there—I’d flown through it—but for some reason, being out of my ship, with only the suit to keep me from the vacuum, made it all more real to me.
Once, I’d looked up at the sky and been awed by it. Now it engulfed me, consumed me. There didn’t seem to be a line between me and it. We were one.
It was pierced in the nowhere by whatever Brade was doing. A shout, projected into the nowhere. A dangerous scream…
Hesho’s ship hovered up in front of me, mere meters away, destructor turrets trained on me. I stared back at them.
“You speak of promises,” Hesho said. “When all you ever gave me were lies.”
“I was always the same person, Hesho,” I said. “You never knew Alanik. You only knew me.”
“A human.”
“An ally,” I said. “Back when we were pilots together, you spoke to me about a shared desire to resist the Superiority and find our own way to use hyperdrives. I have the secret, Hesho. I found it. You can take it back to your people.”
“Why should I believe you?”
“Why should you believe them?” I asked. “You know I’m not the monster they say I am. You flew with me. Our people were allies once, long ago. You know the Superiority doesn’t care about your kind. Come with me. Help me.”
No response. I reached out to the ship.
“Hesho,” I whispered, “Winzik is planning something terrible. I think he’s going to use Brade to summon a delver. If that’s true, I need your help. The entire galaxy needs your help. We don’t need just a ship’s captain right now. We need a hero.”
Beyond us, the battle raged. Two forces of frightened people, each with no choice but to kill the other. It was either that or die.
“I don’t know what to do,” Hesho said.
“Maybe,” Kauri’s voice said from the background, “you could ask us?”
The comm went dead. I hung there, floating in space just above my ship. Then finally, Hesho spoke again.
“Apparently,” Hesho said, “my crew does not want to shoot you. I have been…overruled. What a curious experience. Very well, Alanik. We will ally for a short time—long enough for us to learn whether you are telling us the truth or not.”
“Thank you,” I said, feeling a sense of relief. Then I tugged with my foot, yanking myself back toward my cockpit. “Where are the others? Morriumur?” I braced myself to hear that they’d been shot down. After all, why else would the kitsen be out here by themselves?
“Morriumur did not come,” Hesho said. “They decided at the last minute that their time as a pilot was done, and so returned to their family. Vapor is out here somewhere; I lost her in the fighting. Brade…”
“You’re right about this, Alanik,” Kauri said from the bridge. “Brade is doing something strange. We’re supposed to distract the human fighters and keep them away from her. She’s secretly flying closer to your planet.”
“I can feel her,” I said, locking myself back into place and repressurizing my cockpit. “But I can’t locate her. This is bad. Very, very bad. We need to stop her.”
“By joining you,” Hesho said, “we will be committing treason against the Superiority.”
“Hesho,” I said, “part of the reason everyone hates my kind is because several hundred years ago, humans tried to turn the delvers into weapons. Are you really going to sit there and ignore the fact that the Superiority is about to try to do the very same thing?”
The humans of Detritus had failed in their attempt to control a delver. I’d watched them die. Winzik was confident he wouldn’t suffer the same fate, but I didn’t believe that for a moment. I’d felt the delvers. Their ideas kept trying to worm their way into my brain even now. He could not control them. If his plan succeeded, the delver would escape his control. Just like we humans were threatening to do.
I exploded across the battlefield, and the Swims Upstream followed. “Surely they wouldn’t be so foolhardy as to play with this danger,” Hesho said to me. “Surely there’s another explanation for what Brade is doing.”
“They’re terrified of humans, Hesho,” I said. “And Winzik needs a decisive victory here to prove to the Superiority how powerful he is. Think about it. Why train a force to fight delvers, when it’s been decades since anyone saw one? The ‘weapon’ Winzik developed is really just a way to point the delvers where he wants them. This isn’t about just Detritus. It’s about him finding a way to control the entire galaxy.”
“If this is true,” Hesho said, “then the Superiority will become even more dominant than they are now. You said you know the secret of their hyperdrives. Will you give it to us, as proof of your good faith?”
I debated only a moment. Yes, this secret was important—but people controlling it, and keeping it from others, was part of the problem. “Look up a species of slug called a taynix. The Superiority claims they’re dangerous, and should be reported immediately if spotted—but
this is because they’re cytonic and the Superiority doesn’t want people to know. Using them somehow, the Superiority can teleport their ships without drawing the attention of delvers.”
“By the ancient songs…,” Hesho whispered. “There was a small colony of them on our planet. The Superiority sent a force to helpfully exterminate them, supposedly before the outbreak could destroy us. Those rats! Here, I have the battle plans from the Weights and Measures. We should be able to use this to deduce where Brade is. They needed to get her close to your planet.”
“So the delver would attack Detritus first,” I said. “Instead of going after the Superiority ships.”
“I have it!” one of the kitsen said from the bridge. I thought it was Hana. “From the layout of the battle, I suspect Brade’s ship should be at the coordinates I’m relaying to your monitor, Alanik.”
We turned in that direction, though it required cutting through the middle of the increasingly frantic battlefield. We dodged around a set of DDF fighters with Nightstorm Flight markings, then through some ship debris that made my shield flash. We were picking up speed when a handful of Krell drones fell in behind us.
“The Weights and Measures has finally spotted us, Captain!” a kitsen called over the line. “They’re demanding to know what we’re doing.”
“Stall!” Hesho said.
I didn’t know if that would do any good. They’d noticed me, judging by the way the drones were starting to fly in after us. I hit my overburn, but this ship just wasn’t built like M-Bot. She was serviceable, but she wasn’t exceptional—and the kitsen ship was even slower.
As we fell into defensive maneuvers, I was made specifically thankful that I’d forced the kitsen and the others to do dogfighting exercises. We were likely only surviving because the battlefield was so frantic. Drone pilots had difficulty tracking us, and even more difficulty breaking away without immediately getting shot down.
Somehow we made it—and I picked out a solitary black fighter flying with expert precision. Brade. But she wasn’t quite in the place that the battle plan indicated. Instead, she was fighting against a drone for some reason. As we watched, Brade scored a series of hits on the drone, overwhelming its shield and destroying it.
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