“Sure did!” he said. “I had to dump a lot of it, but I kept many text files, which are small. I now know when jazz music developed. You know, in case it’s important—”
“Chet said he’s around two hundred years old,” I said. “Would he have been alive during the Second Human War?”
“Most certainly, if his guess of his age is accurate,” M-Bot said. “The Second Human War began two hundred and fifty years ago, but lasted decades. It was characterized by the first attempts to weaponize the delvers, who had appeared near the end of the First Human War.
“The first war started when humans escaped Earth and found an entire galaxy full of people who enforced nonaggression by imprisoning, exiling, or executing those who showed aggressive tendencies. Let’s just say they were not ready for your people. Boy, howdy.”
“…‘Boy, howdy’?”
“Cool, huh? I just made that up.” He buzzed around me. “No, I didn’t! That was a lie! Ha! I can say them so easily now. Anyway, if Chet there was born two hundred years ago, he’d have lived during the time known as ‘the stilling,’ when the galaxy was actively trying to stop using wireless communication. These were the times punctuated by the worst and most terrible delver attacks, and when the war was starting to end.”
“When was the original colony on Detritus destroyed?” I asked.
“That’s uncertain,” M-Bot said, “as Detritus was a secret project, and the Superiority didn’t have records of it. We can guess it was between three hundred and two hundred years ago.”
“So Chet wouldn’t have been alive when it was made?”
“A reasonable assumption,” M-Bot said.
We reached the hills. Chet had disappeared into a cave there, but I could see his footsteps leading in.
“For further reference,” M-Bot said, buzzing up beside me, “I crashed on Detritus a hundred and seventy-two years ago.”
“Huh,” I said. “Chet said he came in here right around a hundred and seventy years ago. He mentioned remembering some caves in the place he was before he came in here. And ruins…”
I trailed off. We looked at each other. Or, well, I looked at the box that contained M-Bot’s circuits, and he focused his lenses on me.
Then we both took off toward the cave.
Chapter 8
The cavern was small, barely as large as one of the bunk rooms on Detritus. A soft tinkling sound accompanied some water dribbling in through the wall and gathering in a shallow pool at the rear.
Chet knelt there, washing his hands. He looked up as I skidded to a stop, kicking up sand, my fatigue momentarily forgotten. “Chet,” I said. “You said you remembered some things about the day before you entered.”
“Just bits and pieces.”
“Did you know someone named Commander Spears?” I demanded, naming the man who had been M-Bot’s pilot all those years ago, when he’d crashed on Detritus.
Chet frowned. He shook his hands off, then stood up and ran them through his silvering hair. Slowly, he reached to the chest pocket of his flight jacket and took something out. A patch, as if from a uniform.
It said SPEARS on it.
“Oh, scud,” I said.
“I…think I crashed somewhere?” he said. “A place with caverns, and…metal platforms in the sky? It’s so fuzzy, though I have a distinct impression of a wall full of strange lines. I now recognize that as a nowhere portal. I must have fallen through.”
Scud. Scud, scud, scud.
M-Bot hovered at my side, and I could sense his concern. Like, actually sense it. I could feel his emotions. He was worried. Apprehensive. Shocked.
“I found your ship,” I said. “It had an AI on it. You are M-Bot’s old pilot.”
“I…hardly think I could fit in a drone…” Chet said.
“He used to be in a ship,” I explained. “An extremely advanced one. All he could remember about his pilot was the name, and some orders. That was you, Chet.”
“Nonsense,” he said. “Why, I find it difficult to say this without giving offense, but I would never have fraternized with an AI. They draw the attention of the delvers!”
“You have the patch,” I said, pointing. “You remember Detritus, my homeworld. You are Commander Spears.”
Yet another part of me rebelled against the idea. This seems impossible, I thought. What were the chances that we’d enter the nowhere and find M-Bot’s original pilot within minutes? Something very suspicious was going on.
“We were friends, Chet,” M-Bot said, flying closer. “I mean…I don’t remember that, but I felt it. We must have been. I…I tried to follow your final orders, all those years. Kept trying until I ran out of power and shut down… Waiting…”
Chet sighed. “I don’t know much, but I’ve heard that computers have severely limited processing speeds unless you let their circuitry dip into the nowhere for calculations. It’s a trade-off. Either deal with a nearly useless computer, or…” He nodded toward M-Bot.
“They come to life?” I guessed.
“Everyone talks about it in here,” Chet said. “The pirates who used to be Superiority? They whisper about it. You can’t let a true AI continue to function. They’ll eventually draw the delvers to you. To keep an abomination like that is…well, it’s certain death. I’m sorry.”
“Why?” I asked. “Why would AIs bring the delvers?”
“I can’t remember,” he admitted.
I didn’t know what to make of that. Or any of this. It did seem that Chet was Spears though. We’d wondered what had happened to him after crashing on Detritus and leaving M-Bot’s ship in that cave.
It stood to reason that Detritus would have had a way into the nowhere, as we’d found abundant acclivity stone on the planet. The people who had built Detritus must have had mining operations, like the Superiority now had. Maybe they’d traveled here using that spot in the caverns that had carvings like the ones on the portals.
“I’ve tried to get back,” Chet said, wistful. “Find the place where I entered, then go through? Seemed like quite an adventure! But I’ve forgotten the way to that portal—and every one I’ve found since has been locked. The people who made those portals, whoever they were, grew exceedingly frightened of what was in here.”
He turned away from me and M-Bot. “Anyway, we should bed down! Camp for the night, such as it is. Tomorrow is a big day! With a solid hike, we can make it to the first portal in the Path of Elders.”
He took off his jacket and began rolling it up, evidently to use it as a pillow.
It was too convenient. Too improbable. Perhaps…perhaps I’d been drawn to this location, when hyperjumping into the nowhere? Because of him? Could that explain the coincidence?
Unfortunately, I was starting to feel genuinely exhausted. I wasn’t in much of a state to process this information. I pulled off my own jacket to use as a pillow, then hesitated as I noticed M-Bot was gone.
I cursed myself softly. Of course he’d left, after hearing what Spears had said. I forced myself to hike back out of the cave and found him focused on a small cactus.
“M-Bot—” I said.
“You know,” he whispered, “I anticipated this. We even talked about it, remember? I knew they were afraid of me. Why else would my own programming forbid me from things like piloting my ship? So yes, ha ha! I was right. My pilot was afraid of me…” He trailed off. “It would have been okay for me to be wrong.”