I turned us away from the lightburst, then slammed the overburn, as if we were fleeing back the way we’d come. At the same time, Hesho detached M-Bot’s former drone from the outside of the hull. Then, using his controls, Hesho flew that at full speed straight toward the lightburst.
“Fly well, little me!” M-Bot said. “You were my first taste of freedom. And now you will likely be my first taste of death!”
“Death?” I asked.
“I left a small monitoring and communication program on the drone,” M-Bot said. “So I can see what it feels like if they destroy it. Isn’t that neat?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Neat.”
“Hey,” he said. “Pieces of you die all the time—literally every moment—so it’s not novel for you. But it is for me!”
I dodged another flurry of shots. The delvers weren’t expert at aiming—that was what you got from flying sideways—but they were good at filling the air with stuff, which was more dangerous. That slowed down, fortunately, as we flew away.
I dared a glance at the proximity sensor. The bulk of the delver ships hung in the air. Confused. Oh, scud. The drone plan was working!
“Decisions are hard for them,” Chet said softly. “They see the drone and know you’re not on it. They can sense you here… They can probably sense all of us…except maybe the gerbil.”
“Hey!” Hesho said, focusing on his controls. “I do not know what a gerbil is, but the word the translator uses is not flattering. If you do not refrain, I shall call you a sanshonode.”
“Which is?” Chet asked.
“Like a monkey,” he said, “but stinkier.”
“That’s fair,” Chet said.
The bulk of the delver ships turned to chase the drone. Maybe…eighty of them?
“Scrud,” Chet said. “M-Bot is right. They’ve been changed by the small differences they’ve developed while being out here. So instead of all of them, we only got most of them.”
“Farther and farther apart they grow,” Hesho whispered, “like two vines from the same root.”
Well, it was something. I banked us in a wide turn, my ship’s shadow stretching long like a tunnel.
Something washed across our ship. A sensation. Things breaking down, ripping apart, shattering. Becoming dust. Voices being smashed and stomped and quieted.
“They’re angry,” I said. “The hundred in particular—they recognize they’ve changed already.”
Hesho executed his part expertly, flying by instruments—which he thought he had a lot of practice doing in the somewhere—as he wove and dodged, trying to keep the attention of the eighty ships following him.
I doubled back on the twenty-odd delvers who had chosen to follow me. I buzzed them, dodging their blasts, but hadn’t anticipated what proximity to them would do to me. Because the delvers hated me, and I could feel it. Like a terrible heat, a wrongness that warped the air. There was nuance to it though. A slight…variation.
Doomslug sensed it too, judging by the frightened impressions from her in my pocket.
“They hate us both,” I whispered. “And they also hate another one of us…”
“I warned you they would want to destroy me,” Chet said.
“No,” I said. “It’s not you. They want you back. They want to help you, Chet. In their own terrible way.”
It was M-Bot. They hated me, yes, but him almost as much. Abomination. The impression came to me a hundred times over. Destroy…abomination.
“They’ve only just realized what M-Bot is,” I said.
“Ah…” Chet said. “We were far enough away that they couldn’t see what he was. I’m surprised they didn’t pick up on it a few hours ago.”
My pocket fluted.
“I think Doomslug helped hide you, M-Bot,” I said. “These last few hours, at least.”
She fluted again.
“She apologizes,” I said. “We’re so close now, she can’t do it any longer.”
“The slug?” M-Bot said. “Protected me?”
More fluting. I steered the ship around another snarl of ships before I could find the breath to respond.
“She likes you,” I said. “I think…she considers you a nice nest.”
“I suppose that’s a compliment, right? I mean, she wouldn’t use just anyone for a nest. But I’m in a different body now.”
“She sees with her cytonic senses,” I said. “So to her, you feel the same.”
“Remarkable,” M-Bot said.
It was, but I didn’t have time to think about it for the moment. I had gotten us out in front of the twenty ships that had chosen to stick on me. That gave me a chance to push straight for the lightburst.
Hesho’s face scrunched up with concentration as he watched his screen. Unfortunately, more of the delvers were breaking off from chasing his drone and turning toward our ship. They weren’t buying it. Not entirely. They—
A flash exploded in the near distance. Hesho muttered the most polite curse I’d ever heard, then his hands slipped from the controls.
“They have ended my drone,” he said. “My apologies.”
“Goodbye, little me,” M-Bot said. “That felt…more peaceful than I’d imagined. Like a power outage.”
I kept flying, but scud, the proximity sensors said I would have to go at least three more minutes on a straightaway to hit the lightburst. And I didn’t dare fly straight. A swarm of ships followed me—and even more had turned from Hesho’s drone long before it had been shot down. Those flew between me and the lightburst, forming a barrier of steel and destructor fire.
Scud.
I was forced to the side. The plan had worked better than I’d hoped, but it hadn’t been enough.
I needed to do something. I needed to get through.
I swooped down along the ground, casting up jets of dust and earth, and pushed.
Again they rebuffed me.
Soft…something in me thought. There are times for a knife. This isn’t one of them. Listen. Like Gran-Gran taught…
I let my instincts take over my flying. I was too tense, too stressed. Instead I went back to fundamentals. Yes, I’d learned a lot in here, but my grandmother had trained me for years before this. She’d taught me originally to listen, to let myself expand, to hear…
The delvers sent me hatred. Instead of rebuffing that, I welcomed it, accepted it in like I was an ocean and they were pelting me with hail. Hard, yes, but what did that matter to the ocean?
There.
Something clicked in my mind, and I suddenly knew exactly what they were each going to do. I could feel their plans, their motions, their reactions. I could track them all individually, in a way that I thought a normal human brain shouldn’t be able to.
But my brain interfaced with the pure nowhere. A place where all time was one, all place was one. In there, it didn’t matter if I faced one enemy ship or a million. So long as I could hear their minds, I could track them, understand them.
And anticipate them.
My hands moved by instinct, responding to this new information. Information I processed at the speed of the nowhere, not at the speed of a human mind. I’d done this before, in the past—when facing the Krell, who had been using communication devices that relied on the nowhere.
This time I did it to the delvers. I could feel them panic as my motions changed, and I gracefully began to dodge their each and every shot. In a fury, they tried to attack me, get inside my brain as the Krell had attacked my father. But no. I was a star as vast as an ocean, and I’d learned to not rebuff them, not be taken by them…