Six ships collided together behind me. The light spat them out again up ahead. Yeah, this was far, far worse than the asteroids from delver mazes. These ships flew better, but somehow more erratically at the same time.
Worse, I caught sight of a few enemy cockpits, and saw that each ship was being piloted by Chet. A dull-faced, emotionless doppelganger of Chet that always turned to look at me no matter which direction the given starfighter was flying. Their faces weren’t melting. Perhaps because they were completely under control.
Mix all this together in a void of white light—our ships casting strange too-long and too-sharp shadows—and the effect was disorienting. Nauseating. I kept accidentally getting too close to the ground, my sensors going crazy.
My only hope was my powers. I tried to stoke my soul, like I was a star. But I was again rebuffed. It was too difficult to divide my focus between flying and concentrating on that. Yet if I handed the controls over to Chet or M-Bot, we’d be cut to bits in seconds.
“I don’t think I’m going to last long like this,” I said as a stray destructor blast crackled across our shield. “I’m not managing to get through with my powers. Hesho, let’s give our other plan a try.”
“I would pray to the emperor for success,” he said in response, leaning forward in his spot on the dash, hands on some buttons and controls. “That was my first instinct. However, I’m getting this strange sense that I’m him, so that might be redundant. Engaging drone.”
M-Bot had, with some hasty reprogramming, set off a section of dials and levers on the control panel for Hesho to use. I couldn’t access the starfighter’s life support mechanisms now, but M-Bot could control those. Hesho even had a tiny control sphere—which worked like my larger one to fly the starfighter—in the form of the repurposed thumbstick normally used for fine control of the cameras on the sides of the ship.
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.