She fluted uncertainly. At the noise, I felt something respond in the light. The delvers had heard that. I needed to do this next part quickly.
So I stepped into the light.
Chapter 43
I’d been here before.
Every time I’d hyperjumped, I’d entered this non-place. The place where I had no body. We’d entered their realm fully.
The delvers were surprised. Yes, they really had thought they’d killed me. They could see the future, but time confused them. They didn’t understand things like causality, and the “future” wasn’t any different from the present.
I could sense them all around me. I could also sense Doomslug, and Saints was she tired. Exhausted, barely able to stay awake. Keeping up that illusion had taxed her.
I felt her try to take us home. She failed—used up—and slipped into unconsciousness. Frantic, I put a barrier around Hesho. Something to keep him from being destroyed or driven mad. Then, panicked, I tried to take us home—but the delvers had seen me. They seized us, held me in place, prevented me from leaving.
Eyes opened up around me. Thousands upon thousands of angry, vengeful eyes.
You took the Us.
You took the Us and corrupted the Us.
You took the Us and corrupted the Us and tried to kill the Us!
You know.
You know.
You know!
Furious minds assaulted me. Forces unimaginable pushed against my soul, as if to shred it. And scud, I was tired too. Tired from so long without memories. Tired from fighting myself, torn between duty and desire. Tired from the emotional wringer I’d been through today.
I wanted to let them have me. But we’d come all this way. We’d fought so hard. Now they tried to stop me? I felt a sudden burst of anger and pushed back. All my rage barely made them retreat. They soon resumed crushing me, trying to snuff the star I had become, like a candle’s flame.
I was time. I brought time in here when I came. Things happened in a sequence to me, and while I was here they had to experience me in a linear way. They hated that. They hated that I created noise. Most of all, they hated that I knew what they were.
So. Much. Hatred.
It was exhausting. Numbing…
They poked me like hunters with spears. They slashed me, attacked me, ripped at me…
But one hesitated.
One of them was different.
It was very slight, but the sensation was familiar. It was my own emotion reflected at me. Courage. The courage to walk a difficult path and not take the offered escape. Courage to press forward, even when I didn’t want to.
I’d given this to the delver. No amount of rewriting had been able to erase it. Chet was still in there.
Now!
I seized that sensation, that delver, and it unlocked again. The being that had been Chet hit my soul, and—with the strange cytonic softness I’d learned from the Path—I welcomed it in. Our essences vibrated as one.
As we began to intertwine, I grew to understand better how he saw the delvers. How he saw himself. I knew, intrinsically, that if I could isolate the others I could destroy them. The same way they’d been trying to destroy me. Chet knew how, and my soul understood.
I also sensed his hurt from long ago, the crippling pain of having lost a loved one. Chet had learned that he could bear that, but knowing didn’t remove the agony. As we intertwined further, I found I could offer something important. I knew how to live with that grief. I knew how to live with that pain. I’d done it for a decade.
The delver that had been Chet was everything I was not. And I was everything it needed. I let its pain stand, but I used my experience to temper it further. I grieved my father, and Hurl, and Bim, and everyone else I’d lost. But I had learned to bear it. That part of me was the balm the delver needed.
Together we became one.
In that moment a weapon was born.
I’d made a promise, hadn’t I? To come back for M-Bot? They’d killed him.
No, Chet-me thought. See it again.
M-Bot’s housing exploding. And a shimmering light was obscured by the explosion. A light the other delvers didn’t see—but one had been watching.
He saw what I did, Chet-me thought. When I left the ship earlier. The others shot down his housing, but in here AIs don’t need such a thing. They didn’t think he’d learned enough, but he saw the vision, and he saw me. He grew and changed.
He lives?
He lives?
I had a promise to keep, then. Emotions surged through me. Relief. Anger. Understanding. Love.
If I fell here, then that was it for Doomslug and Hesho too. Not to mention my friends, whose faces I couldn’t completely remember, but whose love I felt as strongly as ever.
The delvers raged, driving forward to smother me. And…I simply opened up to them.
Go ahead, I thought. Touch me.
They slammed their essences into mine, but touching me hurt them. I offered change. I offered a better way to deal with their pain, but that terrified them.
They were static, and that was their weakness. My strength was the opposite; my strength was that I could change.
I could be afraid, then become courageous.
I could be small-minded, then come to understand.
I could be selfish. Then move beyond it.
I could start as human, then allow myself to become something more. I was everything they feared. Because they refused to ever let themselves change, but I embraced change. It was the essence and nature of my strength.
Touching me seared them. Screams shook the void. They split away from me as I grew in awareness. I became a blackness upon their pure white essences. A hole into…
There.
Something clicked in my mind, and I stepped out of the light into a familiar cavern tunnel, holding Hesho and Doomslug. The angry fear of the delvers faded behind me.
I was home.
Epilogue
And all was quiet.
Quiet save for my breath echoing in the black tunnel. Quiet save for a distant dripping of water. Quiet save for the scuttling of a rat somewhere. Beautiful quiet, the quiet of my childhood.
I wanted to linger, because this place granted me memories. Each scent and sound restored something deep inside me that I’d lost. But I had to move. I’d returned to a place where time mattered.
So I hyperjumped. Straight into the DDF’s Platform Prime in orbit around the planet. I’d absently chosen a random hallway, so I was probably lucky that I hadn’t appeared on top of some poor aide running errands.
Something felt odd about this place. I could come here by familiarity, but it wasn’t…in the same location as before? Was that correct? Well, it looked the same as ever. Clean metal walls, a simple rug on the floor, industrial lighting. Two pilots I vaguely knew stepped out of a nearby room and saw me. Then one shrieked.
Odd. That wasn’t the reception I’d expected. Hesho and Doomslug were both still unconscious, one cradled in each of my arms, but I tucked away my worry.
“Admiral Cobb?” I asked the two frightened pilots.
The one who hadn’t shouted pointed toward operations.
I walked that direction, proud that I’d remembered Cobb’s name. Would all my memories be restored? I held two sets of those now. Spensa’s memories and Chet’s. Why did everything feel so odd? And why did people stumble away as they saw me? They edged away white-faced, backs to the walls, stammering.