“Vapor?”
Static.
I dodged away from another ember, but my fingers had started to tremble from the force of the thoughts pressing upon my mind.
Buzzing…buzzing insects…Destroy them…
Oppressive thoughts, weighing me down. Nightmare visions started to appear in the dust. Monsters from Gran-Gran’s stories, appearing and vanishing. My father’s face. Myself, but with burning white eyes…
This wasn’t anything like the carefully designed illusions of the training maze. It was a horrific cacophony. No secrets to uncover, just noise slamming against me. Being a cytonic here was a huge disadvantage, because the delver got inside my brain.
I was barely controlling my ship. Reality and illusion melded as one, and I took my hands off the controls and pressed them against my eyes. My head had begun to throb in agony. I tried another weak effort to whisper back—to divert the thing toward deep space.
That seemed to open me further, and the noise invaded my mind. I screamed, and something smashed into my ship, ramming it to the side, nearly bringing down my shield. Warning alarms from my dash were just another noise. I…I couldn’t fly in this. I…
A shadow emerged from the dust. My heart leaped at the shape of a ship. Vapor? M-Bot?
No, a shuttle, with no weapons except an industrial light-lance for moving equipment. It speared my ship and pulled me after it, away from the churning shapes. An ember—I thought it was real—roared past, narrowly missing my ship.
“Alanik?” a voice said on my comm.
I…I knew that voice. “Morriumur?” I whispered.
“I’ve got your ship tethered,” they said. “You were just sitting there. Are you all right?”
“The heart…,” I whispered. “You have to get me to the heart. But…but Morriumur…you can’t…The illusions…”
“I can see through them!” Morriumur said.
What?
Morriumur towed me through the dust, approaching one of the spines of the delver—a large spike leading down to its surface. We flew along it, Morriumur dodging some of the nightmares, but completely ignoring others. They smashed into us and puffed away. Just…illusions.
“It shows different things to everyone,” Morriumur said, expertly towing me into a hole in the surface.
“Two people…,” I whispered, holding my head. “You need—”
“That’s the thing, Alanik,” Morriumur said. “I am two people.”
I whimpered, squeezing my eyes shut at the assault, which only grew worse as we flew inside. Fortunately, Morriumur’s voice continued, somehow comforting and real in the middle of all the emotion and noise.
“It’s projecting two different things at me,” Morriumur said. “One to each of the brains of my parents. I…don’t think it knows how to deal with me. We’ve never flown a draft into a delver before, so far as I know. Honestly, I don’t think any diones at all ever tried flying into one of these. Our pilots have always been varvax or tenasi.
“The illusions are nothing to me, Alanik,” Morriumur said. “We didn’t realize, during training. We treated me like anyone else—but I can see through them as two overlapping, shadowy images. I can do this. I can reach the heart.”
I undid my buckles with trembling hands, barely aware of what I was doing. I ripped off my helmet, then curled up, holding my head, trying to escape the visions. I bounced against the inside of my ship as Morriumur pulled me one direction, then the next.
“A lot of these tunnels are fake,” Morriumur said. “I think the maze would have led us around in circles…It’s really just a big openness in here, Alanik.”
I trembled beneath an infinite weight. I don’t know how long it took, but I felt us getting closer. I was a child alone in a black room, and the darkness was pressing against me. Growing deeper, and deeper, and deeper…
“There’s something ahead.”
Deeper and deeper and deeper…
I dropped inside my cockpit, pressing against the seat.
“This is it!” The small voice came from my dash. An insect to crush. “Alanik, we’ve entered a pocket of air and gravity. What do I do now? Alanik? I never got to the heart during our training!”
“Open. My. Canopy.” I whispered the words, my voice hoarse.
A short time later, I heard a thumping as Morriumur forced open my canopy with the manual override.
“Alanik?” Morriumur asked. “I see…a hole over there. The membrane is an illusion. It’s just a blackness, like a hole into nothing. What do I do?”
“Help. Me.”
Eyes squeezed closed, I let Morriumur assist me out of the ship and onto the wing. I stumbled, clinging to them, and opened my eyes.
Nightmares surrounded me. Visions of dying pilots. Hurl screaming as she burned. Bim. My father. Hesho. Everyone I’d known. But I could see it too, the hole. Our ships had settled down on something solid. It looked like one of the caverns from back home. The hole was right next to my ship, a deep void in the ground.
I let go of Morriumur, pushed off them. They cried out as I dropped from the wing. And plunged into the void.
I entered a completely white room.
The pressure on my mind vanished immediately. I stumbled to a stop and looked around at the pure whiteness, somehow familiar.
I let out a long sigh, turning around until I saw myself standing beside the far wall. Not a mirror image. Me. Standing there. That was it, the delver. It looked like me the same way the one in the recording had. I wasn’t sure why it chose that shape—or even if it did. Perhaps my mind simply interpreted it this way.
I walked to the delver, surprised at how confident and strong I felt. After what I’d just been through, I should have been weak, exhausted. But in here, in this white room, I had recovered.
The delver was staring at the wall. I leaned forward and saw that there were tiny pinpricks in it. Holes? I could hear a buzzing noise from them. The more I focused on it, the more awful it sounded. It was an annoyance that marred the otherwise perfectly serene room.
I looked back at the delver. It wore my face, which should have been strange. But…for some reason it wasn’t? I prodded at it with my mind, curious.
Curiosity came back. I cocked my head, then closed my eyes. I felt…pain, agony, fear from the spots on the wall. The delver sensed those emotions, and reflected them back out the way they’d come.
“You don’t understand emotions, do you?” I asked it. “We’re misinterpreting you, like I misinterpreted Cuna. You don’t hate us. You just reflect back what we feel. That’s why you look like me. You’re only sending back at me what I’m showing you.”
It looked at me, its face impassive. And…I could tell that what I’d said wasn’t exactly true. It did hate the buzzing sounds, the annoyances. But much of what we showed it—much of our experience of the universe—was completely foreign to it. It reflected those back at us, part of a fundamental inability to understand.
“You have to go somewhere else,” I said to it, and tried to project the location of the delver maze.
It looked away from me, staring back at the wall.
“Please,” I said. “Please.”
No response. And so, I reached out my hand and touched it. The white room shattered, and suddenly I was expanding, as if…as if I were as large as a planet. A galaxy. I was expansive, eternal. I’d lived forever in peace, in a place where time had no meaning. Except when people intruded.
I saw them now, the buzzing annoyances of Starsight. The shield fell before my barrage, and I started forward, sweeping across a few of the nearby ships. Those sounds went out, and each quieted insect was a relief. It wasn’t just occasional trips through the nowhere that bothered me, but each and every one of these obnoxious buzzes.
I could finally reach them. Quiet them. It was glorious!
> I pulled back, and was in the room, my hand pressed to my chest. I felt a lingering hatred of everything living. The delver would destroy all of Starsight in pursuit of its peace. I understood that, because part of me was from that place where it lived. The part that could touch the nowhere.
“Don’t,” I pleaded. “Please don’t!”
Some of the specks on the wall vanished.
What could I do? I couldn’t fight it. I was nothing more than one of those specks myself. No amount of training in a maze, fighting with destructors and light-lances, could have helped with this moment. I could not have trained to defeat this thing.
The people of Starsight deserved a diplomat, or a scientist, who could understand this problem. Not me.
More specks vanished, and—tears pouring down my face—I grabbed the front of the delver’s flight suit with both hands. I felt that overpowering expansion happening again, the alignment with its perspective, which was so vast as to make individuals meaningless.
But they weren’t.
“See them,” I whispered. “Please, just see them.”
I had seen what the delver experienced. In that frantic moment with a catastrophe starting before me, I tried to show it what I’d experienced. With all my strength I towed on its consciousness.
It worked. Instead of growing to the size of a galaxy, I pulled us down so we shrank to the size of a child. Infinity went both directions. You could expand forever outward, but at the same time, the closer you looked at something, the more detail you saw.
For a moment, we were a child who played with floating globes of water. We were Mrs. Chamwit, delivering dinner to a neighbor. We were Cuna. We were the Krell on the street who had apologized for bumping me. I touched the mind of the delver and showed it those annoyances from the perspective of each individual person. I showed it that the buzzing was sometimes laughter.
This is what I see, I said to the delver. Though I had to learn how to look.
The delver stopped advancing. Its mind touched mine, and I felt emotions, images, and alien things that were neither. Things I didn’t have the senses to otherwise experience or explain. In the midst of it was an idea…a question.
They are like us?
Not words. Ideas. The term us was projected into my mind as a set of meaningful concepts I could roughly interpret.
They…, it repeated. They are alive?
Yes, I whispered. Every one of them.
The thing trembled with an emotion I understood without needing interpretation. Horror.
The delver pulled in, somehow reversing upon itself. I was ejected from that place where I’d been, as the entire thing—the enormous planetlike mass and the strange being at the center—vanished.
Dumping me into space.
I’d done decompression exercises, and somehow managed to exhale before my lungs burst. Water boiled on my eyes, and pain shot through me, and I started to black out almost immediately. Yet I was just aware enough to feel a pair of hands grab me.
The sound grew louder the deeper Jorgen went.
It wasn’t a buzzing, not like when he’d first met Spensa. He wasn’t even certain it was a sound. Nedd and Arturo couldn’t hear it, after all. Maybe he was imagining it.
But Jorgen could hear it. A soft music, growing louder with each tunnel they had explored in the five days they’d been searching. They’d hit many dead ends and had to turn back a dozen times. But they were close now. So close he felt it was just beyond the wall here. He had to find a way to lead them left…
He stumbled down a short incline, then waded through water that came up to his knees. He held his industrial-strength lantern up before him, the kind used by the teams who traveled the distant tunnels and caverns of the planet to service remote equipment like pipes that carried up water from underground reservoirs.
“More water?” Arturo asked from behind, his own lantern making Jorgen cast a long shadow. “Jorgen, we really should get back. I could swear that sound we heard was an echo of the alarms. We might be under attack.”
All the more reason to keep going. He waded forward as the water grew deeper. He had to know what he was hearing. Had to know if he was imagining things, or if…maybe…he could hear Detritus.
That seemed stupid when he thought about it like that. He hadn’t told the others yet, except to explain he was on orders from Cobb. Which he kind of was. After a fashion.
And everyone believes I can’t disobey orders, he thought. They don’t think I can be brash? Foolhardy? Ha!
Running off into the deep caverns without proper supplies, and only a couple friends to accompany him? Following a hunch and something he maybe thought he could hear, only nobody else could?
“Jorgen?” Nedd asked, standing with Arturo at the edge of the water. “Come on. We’ve been at this forever. Arturo is right. We really need to be getting back.”
“It’s right here, guys,” Jorgen said, hip deep in water, a hand pressed against the stone wall. “Songs. Right here. We have to get through this wall.”
“Okaaay,” Arturo said. “So we head back, see if anyone has mapped this section of the tunnels, and maybe determine if there’s a good way to…”
Jorgen felt across the wall, noting that the water seemed to be flowing oddly. “There’s an opening here, just beneath the surface. It might be wide enough for me to wiggle through.”
“No,” Arturo said. “Jorgen, do not try to squeeze through it. You’ll get stuck and drown.”
Jorgen dropped his pack, letting his waterproof lantern float on the top of the pool. He reached down into the water, feeling at the break in the wall. It was wide enough. “Spensa would try it,” he said.
“Uh,” Nedd said, “is Spin really the best example to follow? In acting stupid?”
“Well, she does it all the time,” Jorgen said. “So she must have a lot of practice.”
Arturo rushed into the water, reaching for him. So, before he could get talked—or pulled—out of going farther, Jorgen took a deep breath and ducked under the surface, then kicked into the hole.
He couldn’t see in the water; his motions had stirred up silt, and so the lantern wouldn’t have helped either. He had to feel his way forward, grabbing the sides of the rock tunnel, and pull himself through the dark water.
Fortunately, it turned out that the tunnel wasn’t long—it wasn’t even really a tunnel. Just a passage through the stone, maybe a meter and a half in length.
He burst up into a dark cavern, and immediately felt stupid. What did he expect to find or see in the darkness? He should have drowned.
Then he heard the sounds. Music all around him. Flutes calling to him. The sound of the planet itself speaking?
His eyes adjusted, and he realized he could see. The stone here outside the small pool where he stood was overgrown with a blue-green luminescent kind of fungus. Indeed, much larger mushrooms were growing all across the floor of the cavern, perhaps feeding off nutrient-rich water dripping from an ancient pipe running along the wall.
Hiding amid the mushrooms, fluting in a way he could now hear with both his mind and his ears, were a group of yellow creatures. Slugs, like Spensa’s pet.
Hundreds of them.
* * *
—
I awoke to a soft breeze on my face.
I blinked, disoriented, seeing white. I was back in that room with the delver. No, I couldn’t be! I…
The room came into focus. I was in a bed with white sheets, but the walls weren’t stark white. Just a cream color. A window nearby looked out on the streets of Starsight, a soft breeze blowing in and ruffling the drapes.
I was hooked up to tubes and monitors and…and I was in a hospital. I sat up, trying to piece together how I’d gotten here.
“Ah!” a familiar voice said. “Spensa?”
I turned to find
Cuna, wearing their official robes, peeking in through the door. My translator pin, fortunately, was clipped to my hospital robe.
“The doctors said you’d be waking,” Cuna said. “How do you feel? Explosive decompression nearly killed you. I’d recommend against going into space without a helmet in the future! It’s been three days since the delver incident.”
“I…” I touched my face, then felt at my throat. “How did I survive?”
Cuna smiled. And actually, they were getting better at that. They settled down on a stool beside my bed, then got out their tablet and projected a holoimage for me. It showed a shuttle flying down and landing on the docks inside Starsight.
“The city’s shield went down,” Cuna said, “but emergency ES gravitation kept the atmosphere from escaping. Morriumur says you appeared in space once the delver vanished, and they were quick-witted enough to grab you and pull you into their cockpit.”
I watched a projected Morriumur dock at Starsight, pop their canopy, then stand up, holding me, unconscious. They were met with cheers. I really was getting better at reading dione expressions, because I immediately recognized the befuddlement on Morriumur’s face.
“Morriumur thought everyone was going to be angry, didn’t they?” I said. “They assumed they’d get in trouble for flying into battle.”
“Yes, but for no reason,” Cuna said. They swiped the holoimage to another: this one showed two dione parents holding a small purple baby. I could see Morriumur’s features in the parents—at least, half of them on each face. “It turns out, relatives who were advocating for a redraft changed their minds quickly once the draft became a celebrity. My culture has its first war hero in centuries! It will be a few years before Morriumur develops enough to enjoy their notoriety though.”
I smiled and settled back into my pillow, feeling worn-out—but not in pain. Whatever they’d done to heal me had been effective; Superiority medical technology was obviously beyond our own.
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