But to absorb everything they sent me. The untrained cytonic mind was a weakness. But I was no longer untrained.
Destructor fire was a tempest. Entire ships tried to collide with me. White bursts of soil and stone—casting too-crisp shadows that seemed to last for miles—sprayed and tumbled around me. But for the moment, none of it could touch me.
I wove between their shots like I was tracing a static maze, always a fraction ahead. I didn’t blink; I barely moved or thought. I just flew.
“She’s done it,” Chet said softly. “She’s got them.”
“You fly like a sunset, Spensa,” Hesho whispered. “Like a living glimmer of light escaping the horizon at twilight’s last moment.”
I barely registered the words. I concentrated on our goal. Because in the midst of my transcendent ability, I was able to make a good break for the lightburst. I shot through the guarding ships, dodging with supernatural alacrity.
We drew closer.
And closer.
Tailed by fifty ships and a firestorm of shots. I was in control. I could see them all. I could…
There wasn’t a way out.
A shot hit our ship, weakening the shield. I blinked, realizing that hadn’t been my fault. There simply hadn’t been a viable dodge. Even when I could anticipate all of their actions, see every shot, it didn’t mean I’d be safe forever. Because—like a game where the goal was to leave your opponent with no valid moves—the delvers could fill the air with enough shots that there was no place to dodge.
We took another hit and the low-shields warning started chirping on the dash.
“She can’t avoid them all,” Chet said. “Even with cytonics. It is time for me to do something.”
“Wait,” M-Bot said. “Do what? We already tried both parts of the plan.”
“I thought of another,” Chet said. “I have the memories they fear. So there is a chance—if a small one—that I might be able to infect them. When they…they try to force me to turn into one of them, that might open them up to me.”
Something about him started to change.
Chet, I sent him, too busy dodging to use my lips. Our ship wove back and forth, barely avoiding more hits. I can feel your fear. Don’t!
“I apologize,” he said. “I realize this is abrupt. I had…hoped to not be pushed to this. I fear it has a very small chance of working. But it is something I can do.”
Chet…please…
“I am so glad you came when I called,” Chet said, his voice becoming more like the way he’d been when he first rode in on that dinosaur. Firm. Chipper. “I am happy! Happy you carry the knowledge you need! Happy to have been able to help, and to have changed, and to have finally accepted my loss. It was an honor to explore with you, Miss Nightshade.”
I saw his pain and fear. Fear of being taken by the delvers, and pain…the pain of having lost someone he loved. Yes, that was still raw. The man he’d loved as an AI was only a month dead. I remembered what it had been like to lose my father, and a month later I’d been far from okay.
Pain and fear. But in the center of all that was courage. The courage I had given him.
The light inside him expanded, consuming his body. A shimmering light emerged from our ship.
“Ah…” M-Bot said. “So that’s how they do it… How they exist without circuits or body…”
Fully half of the ships chasing me went after the shimmering light instead. They changed to shimmering light as well and rammed into him. In those moments I could feel what was happening. Their rage. His courage.
He tried to show them. And they consumed him. They rejected the memories as they swirled around him, ripping at him. Locking him away again.
“It’s working, by Lovelace!” M-Bot said. “It… Oh. Oh no.”
I suspected he’d just heard Chet’s cytonic screaming. It was excruciating. I felt the moment they forced him to lock everything individual about him behind an infinite loop in his programming.
In moments they had all re-formed—with one more ship flying among them, identical to the others, determined to destroy me. Fortunately, the reprieve he’d bought me—with fewer ships shooting—had let me get closer. So close… The lightburst filled my vision.
Less than a minute left…
The lightburst began to boil again.
I should have known. I should have expected. But in that moment, all I could feel was a terrible frustration. As we were only seconds from freedom, ten thousand new ships emerged from the lightburst. Then they crunched together like the fragments of land, creating an interlocking wall of steel.
I almost slammed into it. I thought maybe that would be enough to punch us through. But I could feel with my senses that the lightburst was undulating further, another rank of ships emerging to push away the wall in front.
Punching through wouldn’t work. I imagined, in my mind’s eye, what would happen. Our ship a fireball. All of us dead before we touched the lightburst.
I wrenched us to the side, breaking away just before we hit.
“Scud!” I said, flying us parallel to the wall of ships. “We need a new plan. Suggestions?”
Silence. Neither Hesho nor M-Bot responded.
Then a soft fluting came from my pocket.
Land.
“What?” I asked.
She fluted again. Hesitant.
Close to the lightburst, Doomslug sent. Land.
Wouldn’t that be suicide? Yet I had asked for options, and I wasn’t coming up with anything. With so many firing on me again—and more beginning to shoot from within the wall—we’d be dead in moments. So—frustrated to be stopped less than a hundred meters from freedom—I took us down.
“Hang on, everyone,” I said. “This is going to be bumpy.”
Counting on the last of the shields to keep us in one piece, I hit the ground at as shallow an angle as I could manage. Chalky white dust exploded around us—an enormous rush of white haze and strange shadows—as we half crashed in a long skid.
As this happened, I felt a strange sensation pulsing around us. Cytonic, but unlike the hatred—or even the connection—that I’d felt previously. It felt…like…
A rock?
I blinked, scanning the cockpit. Hesho sat up, shaking himself. The canopy was mostly covered in chalky dust, but the lights were on, the ship in one piece. The shield had fallen, but M-Bot was reigniting it already. Proximity sensors showed ships flying around above us, yet they seemed confused. As if…
“She’s hiding us,” I whispered.
“What is what?” M-Bot said.
“Doomslug!” I said, pointing up through a portion of the canopy not covered in dust. The confused ships were flying one way, then the other, in waves. “In here she has camouflage. That’s why ships with slugs can hyperjump without drawing delver attention. She’s hiding the entire ship…like she’d do during a hyperjump.”
In awe, I watched the confused delvers. She’d needed us to land because we needed to appear as something in the landscape. In this case a rock?
Whatever she’d done, the delvers didn’t seem to be able to tell that a new rock had appeared. They swarmed about, agitated. Her camouflage was excellent. She’d blended us into the ground, covered up our tracks, and maybe even blurred our location for a little while when coming down.
“Spensa,” M-Bot said. “Do they really hate me? Like Chet?”
“Yes,” I admitted.
“They shouldn’t,” M-Bot said. “I know we’ve talked about it, but it’s illogical. If they are AIs, then why hate all AIs? It’s like a human from a group hating everyone else in that group.”