Just not with my ears.
Remote drones worked fine for the Krell in most situations. They were an expendable way to suppress the humans of Detritus. However, the enormous distances involved in space battle forced the Krell to rely on instantaneous faster-than-light communication to control their drones. I suspected their pilots were far away—but even if they were on the Krell station that hung out in space near Detritus, the lag of radio communications from there would make the drones too slow to react in battle. So, FTL was necessary.
That exposed one major flaw. I could hear their orders.
For some reason I didn’t understand, I could listen into the place where FTL communication happened. I called it the nowhere, another dimension where our rules of physics didn’t apply. I could hear into the place, occasionally see into it—and see the creatures that lived there watching me.
A single time, in the climactic battle six months ago, I’d managed to enter that place and teleport my ship a long distance in the blink of an eye. I still didn’t know much about my powers. I hadn’t been able to teleport again, but I’d been learning that whatever existed inside me, I could harness it and use it to fight.
I let my instincts take over, and sent my ship into a complex sequence of dodges. My battle-trained reflexes, melded with my innate ability to hear the drone orders, maneuvered my ship without specific conscious instructions on my part.
My cytonic ability had been passed down my family line. My ancestors had used it to move ancient starfleets around the galaxy. My father had had the ability, and the enemy had exploited it to get him killed. Now I used it to stay alive.
I reacted before the Krell did, responding to their orders—somehow, I processed them even faster than the drones could. By the time they attacked, I was already weaving through their destructor blasts. I darted among them, then fired my IMP, bringing down the shields of everyone nearby.
In my state of focused concentration, I didn’t care that the IMP took down my shield too. It didn’t matter.
I launched my light-lance, and the rope of energy speared one of the enemy ships, connecting it to my own. I then used the difference in our momentum to spin us both around, which put me into position behind the pack of defenseless ships.
Blossoms of light and sparks broke the void as I destroyed two of the drones. The remaining Krell scattered like villagers before a wolf in one of Gran-Gran’s stories. The ambush turned chaotic as I picked a pair of ships and gunned for them with destructors—blasting one away as a part of my mind tracked the orders being given to the others.
“I never fail to be amazed when you do that,” M-Bot said quietly. “You’re interpreting data faster than my projections. You seem almost . . . inhuman.”
I gritted my teeth, bracing, and spun my ship, boosting it after a straggling Krell drone.
“I mean that as a compliment, by the way,” M-Bot said. “Not that there’s anything wrong with humans. I find their frail, emotionally unstable, irrational natures quite endearing.”
I destroyed that drone and bathed my hull in the light of its fiery demise. Then I dodged right between the shots of two others. Though the Krell drones didn’t have pilots on board, a part of me felt sorry for them as they tried to fight back against me—an unstoppable, unknowable force that did not play by the same rules that bound everything else they knew.
“Likely,” M-Bot continued, “I regard humans as I do only because I’m programmed to do so. But hey, that’s no different from instinct programming a mother bird to love the twisted, featherless abominations she spawns, right?”
Inhuman.
I wove and dodged, fired and destroyed. I wasn’t perfect; I occasionally overcompensated and many of my shots missed. But I had a distinct edge.
The Superiority—and its minions the Krell—obviously knew to watch for people like me and my father. Their ships were always on the hunt for humans who flew too well or who responded too quickly. They’d tried controlling my mind by exploiting a weakness in my talent—the same thing they’d done to my father. Fortunately, I had M-Bot. His advanced shielding was capable of filtering out their mental attacks while still allowing me to hear the enemy orders.
All of this raised a singular daunting question.
What was I?
“I would feel a lot more comfortable,” M-Bot said, “if you’d find a chance to reignite our shield.”
“No time,” I said. We’d need a good thirty seconds without flight controls to do that.
I had another chance to break toward the main battle, to follow through with the plan I’d outlined. Instead I spun, then hit the overburn and blasted back toward the enemy ships. My gravitational capacitors absorbed a large percentage of the g-forces and kept me from suffering too much whiplash, but I still felt pressure flattening me against my seat, making my skin pull back and my body feel heavy. Under extreme g-forces, I felt like I’d aged a hundred years in a second.
I pushed through it and fired at the remaining Krell drones. I strained my strange skills to their limits. A Krell destructor shot grazed the dome of my canopy, so bright it left an afterimage in my eyes.
“Spensa,” M-Bot said. “Both Jorgen and Cobb have called to complain. I know you said to keep them distracted, but—”
“Keep them distracted.”
“Resigned sigh.”
I looped us after an enemy ship. “Did you just say the words resigned sigh?”
“I find human nonlinguistic communications to be too easily misinterpreted,” he said. “So I’m experimenting with ways to make them more explicit.”
“Doesn’t that defeat the purpose?”
“Obviously not. Dismissive eye-roll.”
Destructors flared around me, but I blasted two more drones. As I did, I saw something appear, reflected in the canopy of my cockpit. A handful of piercing white lights, like eyes, watching me. When I used my abilities too much, something looked out of the nowhere and saw me.
I didn’t know what they were. I just called them the eyes. But I could feel a burning hatred from them. An anger. Somehow, this was all connected. My ability to see and hear into the nowhere, the eyes that watched me from that place, and the teleportation power I’d only managed to use once.
I could still distinctly remember how I’d felt when I’d used it. I’d been on the brink of death, being enveloped by a cataclysmic explosion. In that moment, somehow I’d activated something called a cytonic hyperdrive.
If I could master that ability to teleport, I could help free my people from Detritus. With that power, we could escape the Krell forever. And so I pushed myself.
Last time I’d jumped I’d been fighting for my life. If I could only re-create those same emotions . . .
I dove, my right hand on my control sphere, my left holding the throttle. Three drones swept in behind me, but I registered their shots and turned my ship at an angle so they all missed. I hit the throttle and my mind brushed the nowhere.
The eyes continued to appear, reflected in the canopy, as if it were revealing something that watched from behind my seat. White lights, like stars, but somehow more . . . aware. Dozens of malevolent glowing dots. In entering their realm, even slightly, I became visible to them.
Those eyes unnerved me. How could I be both fascinated by these powers and terrified of them at the same time? It was like the call of the void you felt when standing at the edge of a large cliff in the caverns, knowing you could just throw yourself off into that darkness. One step farther . . .