“Whatever that thing was in the recording,” Cobb said, “it came here and . . . destroyed all the people on this planet and these platforms. They called it a delver.”
“Have you ever heard of anything like that?” I asked. “You knew about . . . about the eyes I sometimes see.”
“Not the word delver,” Cobb said. “But we have traditions that stretch back from before our grandparents were alive. They speak of beings that watch us from the void, the deep darkness, and they warn us to avoid communicating wirelessly. That’s why we only use radio for important military channels. That man on the video said that the delver came because it heard their communications, so maybe that’s related.” Cobb eyed me. “We’re warned not to create machines that can think too quickly and . . .”
“And we’re supposed to fear people who can see into the nowhere,” I whispered. “Because they draw the attention of the eyes.”
Cobb didn’t contradict me. He went for another sip of coffee, but found his mug empty and grunted softly.
“Do you think that the thing we saw in that video is related to the eyes you see?” Cobb asked.
I swallowed. “Yes,” I said. “They’re the same, Cobb. The entities that watch when I use my powers are the same as that thing with the spines that emerged on the video. The man said something about their cytoshield. That sounds a lot like cytonics.”
“A shield to keep the enemy from hearing or finding the cytonics on the planet, maybe,” Cobb said. “And it failed.” He sighed, shaking his head. “You see those battleships arrive earlier?”
“Yeah. But the platforms will protect us from bombardment, right?”
“Maybe,” Cobb said. “Some of these systems still work, but others aren’t as reliable. Our engineers think some of those more distant platforms have anti-bombardment countermeasures, but we can’t know for certain. I’m not sure we have the luxury of worrying about delvers, or the eyes, or any of that. We have a more immediate problem. The Krell—or whatever they’re really called—won’t listen to our pleas to stop their attacks. They’ve stopped caring whether they preserve any humans. They’re determined to exterminate us.”
“They’re afraid of us,” I said. When M-Bot and I had stolen information off their station six months ago, that was the biggest and most surprising revelation I’d discovered about the Krell. They kept us contained not out of spite, but because they were genuinely terrified of humankind.
“Afraid of us or not,” Cobb said, “they want us dead. And unless we can find a way to travel the stars like they do, we’re doomed. No fortress—no matter how powerful—can stand forever, particularly not against an enemy as strong as the Superiority.”
I nodded. It was a core tenet of battlefield tactics: you needed to have a plan of retreat. As long as we were trapped on Detritus, we were in danger. If we could get offworld, all kinds of options opened to us. Fleeing and hiding somewhere else. Searching for other human enclaves—if they existed—and recruiting help. Striking back against the enemy, putting them on the defensive.
None of this was possible until I learned to use my powers. Or, barring that, until we found a way to steal the enemy’s hyperdrive technology. Cobb was right. The eyes, the delvers, they might be important to me—but in the grand scheme of my people’s survival, that was all a secondary problem.
We needed to find a way off this planet.
Cobb looked at me carefully. He had always felt old. I knew that he was only a few years older than my parents, yet right now he looked like a rock that had been left out too long and survived too many meteor falls.
“Ironsides used to complain about how hard this job was,” he grumbled. “You know the worst part about being in charge, Spin?”
“No, sir.”
“Perspective. When you’re young, you can assume that everyone older than you has life figured out. Once you get command yourself, you realize we’re all just the same kids wearing older bodies.”
I swallowed, but didn’t say anything. Standing next to Cobb, I stared out the window at the desolate planet and the thousands of platforms surrounding it. An incredible network of defenses that—in the end—had been powerless to stop whatever this delver was.
“Spensa,” Cobb said, “I need you to be more careful out there. Half my staff think you’re the biggest liability we’ve ever put into a ship. The other half think you’re some kind of Saint incarnate. I’d like you to stop supplying both sides with good arguments.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “I . . . to be honest, I was trying to push myself, put myself in danger. I thought if I did that, it might make my brain work and my powers engage.”
“While I appreciate the sentiment, that’s a stupid way to try to solve our problems, Lieutenant.”
“But we do have to figure out how to travel the stars. You yourself said it.”
“I’d rather find a way that isn’t so reckless,” Cobb said. “We know the Superiority ships travel the stars. They have hyperdrive technology, and the eyes—the delvers—haven’t destroyed them. So it’s possible.”
Cobb adopted a contemplative look, staring back out the window at the planet below. He was quiet for such a long time, I found myself growing nervous.
“Sir?” I asked.
“Come with me,” he said. “I might have a way for us to get off this planet that doesn’t rely upon your powers.”
6
I followed Cobb through the too-clean corridors of Platform Prime. Why were we walking back to the fighter bays?
He counted off the doors until stopping next to the dock where I kept M-Bot. Increasingly confused, I followed him through the small door. I’d expected to find the ground crew beyond, doing M-Bot’s normal post-battle services. Instead, the room was empty save for the ship and one person. Rodge.
“Rig?” I asked, using his old callsign from when he’d been in Skyward Flight. That had only lasted a few days, but he was one of us all the same.
Rodge—who had been inspecting something on M-Bot’s wing—jumped as I said his name. He spun to find us there, and blushed immediately. For a moment he was the old Rodge: earnest, gangly, and not a little awkward. He almost dropped his datapad as he quickly saluted Cobb.
“Sir!” Rodge said. “I didn’t expect you so soon.”
“At ease, Lieutenant,” Cobb said. “How goes the project?”
The project? Cobb had said something about a project earlier—it involved M-Bot?
“See for yourself, sir,” Rodge said, then tapped something on his datapad.
M-Bot’s shape changed, and I actually yelped in surprise. In an instant, he looked like one of the black ships that were piloted by Krell aces.
His holograms, I realized. M-Bot was a long-range stealth ship, designed—best we could tell—for spy missions. He had what he called active camouflage, a fancy way of saying he could use holograms to change what he looked like.
“It’s not perfect, sir,” Rodge said. “M-Bot can’t turn himself invisible, not with any real level of believability. Instead, he has to overlay his hull with some kind of image. Since he’s not exactly the same shape as one of those Krell ships, we had to fudge in places. You can see here that I made the hologram’s wings bigger to cover up the tips of his hull.”
“It’s incredible,” I said, walking around the ship. “M-Bot, I had no idea you could do this.”
Rodge looked at his datapad. “Um . . . he sent me a text here, Spin. He says he’s not talking to you because you muted him earlier.”