Starsight

25

A week later, I swooped through a complex dodging maneuver, boosting my ship between multiple enemies, the embers—the burning asteroids that the delver maze would eject to intercept fighters. Although the illusion was disturbed by the fact that these ones were just Superiority drones wearing a disguise, the combat was exhilarating. I had some ten tailing me now, increasing speed, accelerating even faster than I could in my quick interceptor.

I swept up alongside one face of the delver maze. From this close, it was like I was flying across a large polished metal surface. The structure was so huge it had noticeable gravity, and I had to monitor my acclivity ring to keep from being pulled off course.

Embers chased after me, burning from within with a molten light. More came in from the side, trying to press me in against the maze—removing my options for escape. It was like a game of cat and mouse, except there were fifty mice trying to herd one cat.

In my case, one very dangerous cat.

A group of embers rushed in to try ramming me from the front, and I opened fire. I blasted them into dust—swerving left to avoid the debris—then rotated my ship and fired back at the ones that came in too close. I had to immediately spin back around and veer upward to avoid another group approaching from that direction.

As much as I missed M-Bot’s voice, a part of me was glad for the chance to prove myself in these contests. I ignored my cytonic senses—they’d be useless against the real embers—and I didn’t have an advanced AI to project and calculate for me.

It was just me, the embers, and a wingmate. Today, that position was filled by a second force of carnage in the form of Brade. As I blasted ember after ember, the two of us finished our maneuver, swooping back together. We flew side by side for a moment, me firing forward while she rotated to fire backward, each of us covering a 180-degree arc.

On my mark, we darted to the sides, then used our light-lances to pull ourselves in mirrored maneuvers, swinging off embers even as they tried to collide with us. This move sent us hurtling back toward one another. We then crossed within centimeters as we opened fire, each blasting away the embers chasing after the other.

When we swooped back around again, we were both free of tails. Heart pounding, a dangerous grin on my face, I fell in beside Brade. Together we flew away from the delver maze, almost like we were two ships being controlled by one mind.

Brade was good. As good as I was. More, I clicked with her. We flew like we’d been wingmates for decades, rarely needing to even confirm with the other what to do. Perhaps it was because we were both cytonic, or maybe it was because our individual piloting styles were in sync. Over the last week, I’d spent time training with each member of the flight—but I never seemed to fly as well as I did when Brade was on my wing.

At least until we spoke to one another.

“Great work,” I said over the communication channel.

“Don’t compliment me on being so aggressive,” she said. “I need to control it. Not revel in it.”

“You’re doing what the Superiority needs right now,” I said. “You’re learning how to protect them.”

“It’s still no excuse,” she said. “Please. You don’t know how it feels to be human.”

I gritted my teeth. I could help you, I thought. Offer you freedom from this—freedom to actually be yourself.

I didn’t say it. Instead I switched off the comm. I felt that I was slowly getting through to her, but if I was going to make further progress, it probably wouldn’t involve directly arguing against Superiority ideals. I needed to be subtle.

I could be subtle. Right?

Together we rejoined the other ships, and received a round of congratulations from Hesho and Morriumur.

“You continue to fight well, Alanik,” Vapor said to me. “You bear the scent of long rains.” I wasn’t certain what that meant—her language had some odd idioms that the pin could only translate literally. “But remember, our task is not to chase and hunt these embers. Learning to dogfight is only a first step. We will soon have to practice flying that maze.”

Morriumur and Hesho took off to do a practice run—using another training exercise that I’d developed. I wasn’t worried about training them to be expert dogfighters, but we did need to be working in pairs.

“Vapor?” I asked. “Do you have any idea what this weapon is that we’ll supposedly use to kill delvers?”

“I do not,” she said in her soft way. It was odd, but I felt more comfortable speaking to her over the comm than I did in person. “I am intrigued by the possibility though,” she added. “It would mean a great deal to society if delvers could be killed.”

I nodded to myself.

“I fear them,” Vapor continued. “During the second war, when the humans sought to control the delvers and use them in battle, I caught a . . . glimpse of how the delvers see us. As specks or insects to be wiped away. They laid waste to worlds, vaporizing entire populations in moments. We didn’t drive them off then. They just ended up leaving. We exist because they let us.”

I shivered. “If that’s true, then all life in our galaxy lives with a gun to its head. All the more important that we should know if this weapon works or not, right?”

“Agreed,” Vapor said. “I find its possible existence to be most interesting.”

“Is . . . that why you’re here?” I asked.

Vapor was silent for a moment. “Why do you ask?”

“I mean, it’s nothing. Just . . . you know, the others tell me that your kind usually . . . has very specialized missions . . .”

“We are not assassins,” she answered. “Those rumors are false, and the flight should not spread them. We are servants of the Superiority.”

“Sure, sure,” I said, surprised at the forcefulness in her voice. “Maybe the team has been chattering too much. I’ll run them through a few more exercises today, shut them up the old military way—make them too tired to gossip.”

“No,” Vapor said, her voice softening. “No need to bear the scent of smoke, Alanik. Just . . . ask them not to theorize on my mission. I am not here to kill anyone. I promise that.”

“Understood, sir,” I said.

That only made her sigh—a sound like a soft breeze riffling papers. “I will take Brade out for a practice run. Please rest.”

“Confirmed,” I said, and she took off, ordering Brade to join her. I opened my backpack, which I kept stowed in its tied-on position behind my seat, and got out a snack. I believed that Vapor wasn’t here to kill anyone. But what was she here to do? I could swear I’d smelled her scents watching over my shoulder at times, and her race . . . did they see like others? I doubted it. But could she smell what I really was?

Scud. I was already doing what she’d asked me not to do. If she knew what I was, she hadn’t turned me in yet, so there was no use in worrying.

I pointed my ship away from where the others were dogfighting, looking instead out at the stars. The field of lights stared back at me, endless, inviting. I couldn’t hear much from them. There was a small stream of cytonic communication leaving the Weights and Measures, likely heading back toward Starsight, but it was a lot “quieter” out here than it was back near the enormous platform.

All those stars, I thought, wondering if Detritus’s sun was visible to the naked eye from this distance. Many of the planets around them inhabited. Billions and billions of people . . .

I closed my eyes, letting myself drift. Just out here among the stars. Floating.

Almost without thinking, I undid my straps, hit the control lock on my console, and released myself to the zero G of my cockpit. It was small confines, but with my eyes closed, I could truly just float. I pulled off my helmet and let it drift away to thump softly against the canopy.

Me and the stars. Always before, I’d done Gran-Gran’s exercise when on the ground—in places where I needed to imagine that I was soaring among the stars. Seeking their voices.

For the first time, I truly felt that I was among them. Almost as if I were a star myself, a point of warmth and fire amid the endless night. I lightly pushed off the side of my canopy, keeping myself floating in the center. Feeling . . .

There, I thought. Starsight is over there. I knew, instinctively, the direction toward the platform. During our jumps between the delver maze and the city, my mind had been injected somehow with that knowledge. Each time the imprint seemed to last longer, to the point where it was firm in my mind now—and no longer fading.

If I had to, I knew I could hyperjump back to Starsight on my own. In fact, I was increasingly certain I could now find my way back to Starsight from anywhere. That didn’t do me any good at the moment though. I already had transportation to Starsight.

My concentration receded as my problems seized my brain. Steal the Superiority’s hyperdrive technology. Rescue Brade. Figure out what was up with Vapor—not to mention the weapon the Superiority was developing. And that didn’t even get into the subtleties of whatever political situation was going on among Cuna, Winzik, and the Krell. It was all just so overwhelming.

Spensa . . . A voice seemed to speak from out there, among the stars. Spensa. Soul of a warrior . . .

I snapped my eyes open, gasping. “Gran-Gran?” I said. I pushed my feet down against my seat, pressing myself against the window of my canopy, looking frantically out among the stars.

Saints and stars. That had been her voice.

“Gran-Gran!” I shouted.

Fight . . .

“I will fight, Gran-Gran!” I said. “But what? How? I . . . I’m not right for this mission. It isn’t what I trained for. I don’t know what to do!”

A hero . . . does not choose . . . her trials, Spensa . . .

“Gran-Gran?” I asked, trying to pinpoint the location of the words.

She steps . . . into the darkness, the voice said, fading. Then she faces what comes next . . .

I searched desperately for my home among the thousands of stars. But it was hopeless, and whatever it was I thought I’d heard did not return.

Just that lingering phantom echo in my mind.

A hero does not choose her trials.

I drifted for a long moment, hair floating in a mess around my face. Finally, I pushed myself down and buckled back into my seat. I tucked up my hair, then pulled on my helmet and strapped it in place.

When further cytonic reaching didn’t do anything, I sighed and focused on my flight. I should probably be evaluating their performances anyway; Vapor might ask.

Brade and Vapor were both doing well, as could be expected. They were the two best pilots of the group, excluding me. But Hesho and his kitsen were also performing admirably. During this week of training, they’d really learned how to cover a wingmate and how to blend their role as a gunship with the need to sometimes just be a fighter, dogfighting like any other ship.

Morriumur, though . . . Poor Morriumur. It wasn’t their fault that they were the weakest pilot in our group. They were only a few months old, after all—and even if they’d inherited some skill from one of their parents, that smidgen of combat experience only made their mistakes more obvious. As I watched, they pulled too far ahead of Hesho and left the kitsen to be swarmed by enemies. Then, when trying to compensate and come back, Morriumur’s shots missed the enemy—and nearly brought down the kitsen ship’s shields.

I winced and opened a comm channel to chew out Morriumur. I immediately heard a string of curses that my translator helpfully interpreted for me. And scud, even Gran-Gran hadn’t been able to swear that eloquently.

“Which parent did you get that from?” I asked over the channel.

Morriumur immediately cut off. I could practically hear the blush in their voice as they replied, “Sorry, Alanik. I didn’t know you were listening.”

“You’re trying too hard,” I advised them. “Overcompensating for your lack of skill. Relax.”

“It’s easy to say that,” they replied, “when you have an entire life to live. I’ve only got a few months to prove myself.”

“You’ll prove nothing if you shoot down a wingmate,” I told them. “Relax. You can’t force yourself to become a better pilot through sheer determination. Trust me, I’ve tried.”

They acknowledged, and I think they did better during the next run, so hopefully my advice was working. Soon the practice runs ended, the embers pulling back to the delver maze. My four flightmates joined me in a line.

In the distance, I could see other flights practicing. To my amusement, it seemed that several others had pulled back from doing runs through the maze, and were now practicing their dogfighting as well. I suspected we’d had a good influence on them.

Don’t pat yourself on the back too much, Spensa, I told myself. These are Krell ships. Even if they’re training to fight delvers now, you know they’ll inevitably end up on the other side of a fight from the humans.

That knowledge subdued my enthusiasm. “That was a nice run,” I told the rest of my flight. “Yes, even yours, Morriumur. Vapor, I think this lot is starting to actually look like pilots.”

“Perhaps,” Vapor replied. “As they are excelling at your training, maybe we could let them have a chance at the maze. We should have time for one extended run today before training is finished.”

“About time!” Hesho said. “I am a patient kitsen, but a knife can only be sharpened so far before all you are doing is wearing it away.”

I smiled, remembering my own enthusiasm when Cobb had first started letting us train with weapons. “Let’s pair off,” I said to Vapor. “And do a run. Three of us will have to go as a trio though, as we have five—”

“I don’t need a wingmate,” Brade said, then turned and boosted toward the maze.

I sat in stunned silence. She’d been getting better throughout the week; I’d thought she was beyond this now. Scud, that was the sort of stunt that would have made Cobb scream at us until he was red in the face.

“Brade!” I shouted into the comm. “So help me, if you don’t return, I’ll—”

“Let her go,” Vapor cut in.

“But we’re always supposed to take a wingmate into the maze!” I said. “Otherwise the illusions will fool you!”

“Then let her learn this lesson,” Vapor said. “She will see for herself when the rest of us perform better than she does.”

I grumbled, but held myself back—barely—from continuing to rant at Brade. Vapor was our commander, even if I was the XO.

“I will take Morriumur,” Vapor told me. “I believe that I can help teach them a little patience. They need to learn to handle their aggression.”

“That puts me with Hesho,” I said. “We’ll meet back here in an hour and a half? Fly in for forty-five minutes, start accustoming yourself to the strange ways of the place, then fly back out.”

“Very well. Good luck.” Vapor and Morriumur moved off, while Hesho commanded his helmsman to guide the kitsen ship up beside mine.

“Does it strike you as odd,” I asked him, “that we complain about Morriumur being aggressive right after Brade flew off on her own? Morriumur is a fair bit less aggressive than I am. Even less than you are, I’d say.”

“Morriumur is not a member of a ‘lesser species,’ ” Hesho said. “Others expect more of them because of the vaunted ‘primary intelligence’ their species has.”

“I’ve never understood that,” I said as the two of us flew inward, picking a different section to attack from Vapor and Morriumur. The delver maze was so big, that wasn’t a problem. “What does ‘primary intelligence’ even mean?”

“It is just a term, not an actual measure of their relative intelligence,” Hesho said. “From what I’ve been able to gather, it means their species has created a peaceful society, where crime is reduced to near nonexistence.”

I sniffed. Peaceful society? I didn’t buy that for a moment—and if I had ever been inclined to, Alanik’s last words would have disabused me. Don’t trust their peace.

Hesho and I approached the delver maze, and I smothered the feelings of concern that rose inside me. Last time I’d gone in here, it had been a very strange experience. But I could handle that. A hero didn’t pick her trials.

“You and your crew ready?” I asked Hesho as the first of the embers neared us.

“The Swims Upstream is ready for action, Captain,” Hesho said. “This moment . . . it awaits us like the tongue awaits the wine.”

We fought our way through the embers. Then—side by side—the two of us swooped in through one of the many holes in our section of the delver maze. I hugged the kitsen’s larger, more heavily shielded ship as we entered a long steel tunnel ribbed with pillarlike folds at periodic intervals. There were no internal lights, so we turned on our floods.

“Sensor department,” Hesho said to his team, “get a close-up shot of those symbols on the wall.”

“Roger,” another kitsen said.

I drifted to the side, shining my lights on another field of strange writing etched into the wall here.

“We can’t translate them, Your Normalness,” said Kauri. “But the symbols are similar to ones found near nowhere portals on some planets and stations.”

“Nowhere portals?” I asked, frowning.

“Many people have tried to study the delvers in their own realm, Captain,” Hesho said. “Kauri, explain if you please.”

“Nowhere portals are stable openings,” Kauri said, “like wormholes leading into the nowhere. They are often marked by similar symbols. These portals are how acclivity stone is mined and transported to our realm—but I don’t know why the symbols would be here. I see no sign of a portal.”

Huh. I pulled my ship right up to the symbols, shining my floodlights on them. “I saw some of these symbols back on my homeworld,” I said. “Inside a tunnel near my home.”

“Then I should like to visit and see that,” Kauri said. “It’s possible your home has access to an unknown nowhere portal. That could bring riches—the Superiority keeps very careful control over their nowhere portals, as there is no other source of acclivity stone.”

Huh. I didn’t say more because I didn’t want to give away the truth—that these writings had been in the caverns on Detritus, not Alanik’s homeworld.

The old inhabitants of Detritus had fallen to the delvers. And I was increasingly certain that what Cuna had told me was right—the people of Detritus had courted that destruction by trying to control the delvers. They’d set up shielding, had tried to be quiet, but none of their precautions had worked. When the delver had come for the people of Detritus, it had easily bypassed their protections.

The tunnel around me suddenly looked like it had turned into flesh. It was as if I were in the veins of some enormous beast. I gritted my teeth. “Hesho, what do you see?”

“The tunnel has changed,” he said. “To feeling like it is submerged. Do you see this? It is a strange experience.”

“I feel like I’m in an enormous vein,” I said. “It’s a hologram—an illusion. Remember?”

“Yes,” Hesho said. “We are shown different things. Thankfully, we have two ships.”

I wondered how Brade was doing in here by herself.

“The illusion is curious,” Hesho said. “I feel like a stone plucked from land and dropped, to sink endlessly into an eternal deep.” He paused. “My crew sees the same thing that I do, Captain Alanik.”

“That makes sense,” I said. “Our ships are programmed to replicate the illusions of the delver maze. For us right now, it’s just programming. If this were real, you’d probably all see something different.”

At least, that was what I’d been told to expect. Only it seemed that much of what the Superiority “knew” was really guesswork. If I entered a real delver maze, would the same rules actually hold there?

Hopefully, you’ll never have to find out, I thought. Hesho and I took the right-hand exit and flew through a corridor that appeared to me to be crystalline, but Hesho saw flames. Both of us, however, saw a large boulder at one side of the room—so we flew over and inspected it. A tug on it with a light-lance proved it was real, and it tumbled out into the room.

“How odd,” Hesho said. “Did someone come and install that boulder specifically to hinder our path?”

“Supposedly,” I said, “this maze is built to replicate the kind of oddities and mysteries we’ll find inside the real delver maze.”

“Our scanners are useless,” Hesho said. “I have reports from my instruments teams—and they can’t tell what’s fake and what isn’t. It seems that the Superiority has programmed our ship to be fooled by this place, something I find disconcerting. I don’t like the idea of seeing what the Superiority shows me, even if it is for an important training simulation.”

As we flew deeper, I was glad to have the kitsen with me. Bringing a wingmate made all kinds of practical sense, not just for identifying what was real. On a more basic level, it was comforting to have someone to talk to in this place.

We passed through several other strange rooms with a variety of odd visuals—from the walls melting, to the shadows of enormous beasts passing just out of sight. We were attacked by embers in one, which I fired upon—before realizing Hesho couldn’t see them. My shots hit the wall, blasting off pieces of metal, and the entire structure rumbled in a way that I could swear was threatening.

“How can we hear that?” Hesho asked. “Instruments report a vacuum outside the ships. There is no medium for sound to pass through.”

“I . . .” I shivered. “Let’s try that tunnel over there.”

“I don’t like this,” Hesho confided as we moved down the tunnel. “It feels like it’s training us to rely upon one another’s eyes.”

“That’s a good thing though, right?”

“Not necessarily,” Hesho said. “While all experience is subjective, and all reality in some ways an illusion, this offers a practical danger. If we come to rely upon consensus to determine what is real, the maze could simply exploit this assumption and trick us.”

In the next chamber, we were attacked by embers that were real this time—and I almost ignored them, a mistake that could have been deadly. I responded to Hesho’s warning at the last moment, dodging as a barrage from the heavily armed fighter vaporized them.

We were left in a room with junk bouncing around and hitting the walls before starting to pool toward the bottom. Sweating, my heart thumping, I led us through the next passage. Scud, was I ever going to get used to this place?

We reached the end of the tunnel, and my floods shone on a strange membrane covering the opening. It ran from the floor to the ceiling, and pulsed softly with a rhythm I could hear.

That sound suddenly seemed to ring through the entire structure. My fighter thumped under my fingers.

I stared at the membrane, shocked. We’d only been in the delver maze for . . . what, half an hour? Maybe a little longer? I’d expected it to take hours upon hours to find the heart.

“That’s it,” I said. “The membrane. The thing we’re looking for. The . . . the heart of the delver.”

“What?” Hesho said. “I don’t see anything.”

Oh. I took a deep breath, calming myself. An illusion. Which meant—

I saw the entire universe.

In a blink everything vanished around me, and somehow my mind expanded. I saw planets, I saw star systems, I saw galaxies. I saw the scrambling, useless, tiny little insects that covered them like chittering hives. I felt revulsion. Hatred for these pests that infested the worlds. Hordes of ants swarming on a dropped piece of food. Buzzing and mindless, disgusting. Painful, as they’d swarm me, occasionally biting—for though they were too small to ever truly destroy me, they hurt. Their noise. Their painful scraping. They infested my home, after swarming all of the rocks that broke the endless nothing that was this universe. They would not ever leave me alone, and I wanted so badly just to smash them. To smother them beneath my foot so they’d stop piling, and crawling, and clicking, and snapping, and biting, and corrupting, and—

I snapped back into my cockpit, slamming against my seat as if I’d been thrown there.

“Another illusion then,” Hesho said, sounding bored. “You want to move forward first? I’ll cover you, in case further embers guard this chamber.”

I trembled, the horrible vision resting on me like the darkness in a cavern far, far underground. I breathed in gasps, trying to recapture my breath. The room looked normal to me now, but . . .

“Captain Alanik?” Hesho asked.

What had that been? Why . . . why did it linger in my mind, making me revile Hesho’s words, as if they were coming from something slimy and horrible?

“I . . . ,” I said. “Sorry, I need a moment.”

He gave it to me. I recovered slowly. Scud. SCUD. That had felt like . . . like Vapor had said the delvers regarded all of us.

“Flight Command,” I said, calling in. “Did you just show me something strange?”

“Pilot?” Flight Command called back. “You need to learn to fly the maze without contacting us. When you enter one for real, you won’t—”

“What did you just show me?” I demanded.

“The log indicates that your ship’s illusion for that room is of darkness hiding an exit. That is all.”

So . . . they hadn’t shown me that sensation of the universe?

Of course they hadn’t. That was far beyond the powers of a holographic projector. I’d seen something else. Something . . . something that my own mind had projected?

Scud. What was I?

At Hesho’s urging we continued, and spent another fifteen minutes moving through rooms, familiarizing ourselves with the way the maze worked. I didn’t experience anything else approaching the feeling of that strange moment when I’d seen the universe.

Eventually, we hit our predetermined exploration time limit, and so we turned around and flew back. Outside, we found the others gathering—including a furious Brade who, as Vapor had guessed, had gotten stuck in one of the early rooms, unable to tell what was real and what wasn’t.

None of them had seen any membranes or had any idea what I was trying to explain when I tried—and failed—to talk about what I’d seen. I couldn’t put it into words, but it remained with me. Like a shadow over my shoulder, lingering as we reported back to the Weights and Measures.