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 aske
d, 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 s
ign 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?
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