I doubled back on the twenty-odd delvers who had chosen to follow me. I buzzed them, dodging their blasts, but hadn’t anticipated what proximity to them would do to me. Because the delvers hated me, and I could feel it. Like a terrible heat, a wrongness that warped the air. There was nuance to it though. A slight…variation.
Doomslug sensed it too, judging by the frightened impressions from her in my pocket.
“They hate us both,” I whispered. “And they also hate another one of us…”
“I warned you they would want to destroy me,” Chet said.
“No,” I said. “It’s not you. They want you back. They want to help you, Chet. In their own terrible way.”
It was M-Bot. They hated me, yes, but him almost as much. Abomination. The impression came to me a hundred times over. Destroy…abomination.
“They’ve only just realized what M-Bot is,” I said.
“Ah…” Chet said. “We were far enough away that they couldn’t see what he was. I’m surprised they didn’t pick up on it a few hours ago.”
My pocket fluted.
“I think Doomslug helped hide you, M-Bot,” I said. “These last few hours, at least.”
She fluted again.
“She apologizes,” I said. “We’re so close now, she can’t do it any longer.”
“The slug?” M-Bot said. “Protected me?”
More fluting. I steered the ship around another snarl of ships before I could find the breath to respond.
“She likes you,” I said. “I think…she considers you a nice nest.”
“I suppose that’s a compliment, right? I mean, she wouldn’t use just anyone for a nest. But I’m in a different body now.”
“She sees with her cytonic senses,” I said. “So to her, you feel the same.”
“Remarkable,” M-Bot said.
It was, but I didn’t have time to think about it for the moment. I had gotten us out in front of the twenty ships that had chosen to stick on me. That gave me a chance to push straight for the lightburst.
Hesho’s face scrunched up with concentration as he watched his screen. Unfortunately, more of the delvers were breaking off from chasing his drone and turning toward our ship. They weren’t buying it. Not entirely. They—
A flash exploded in the near distance. Hesho muttered the most polite curse I’d ever heard, then his hands slipped from the controls.
“They have ended my drone,” he said. “My apologies.”
“Goodbye, little me,” M-Bot said. “That felt…more peaceful than I’d imagined. Like a power outage.”
I kept flying, but scud, the proximity sensors said I would have to go at least three more minutes on a straightaway to hit the lightburst. And I didn’t dare fly straight. A swarm of ships followed me—and even more had turned from Hesho’s drone long before it had been shot down. Those flew between me and the lightburst, forming a barrier of steel and destructor fire.
Scud.
I was forced to the side. The plan had worked better than I’d hoped, but it hadn’t been enough.
I needed to do something. I needed to get through.
I swooped down along the ground, casting up jets of dust and earth, and pushed.
Again they rebuffed me.
Soft…something in me thought. There are times for a knife. This isn’t one of them. Listen. Like Gran-Gran taught…
I let my instincts take over my flying. I was too tense, too stressed. Instead I went back to fundamentals. Yes, I’d learned a lot in here, but my grandmother had trained me for years before this. She’d taught me originally to listen, to let myself expand, to hear…
The delvers sent me hatred. Instead of rebuffing that, I welcomed it, accepted it in like I was an ocean and they were pelting me with hail. Hard, yes, but what did that matter to the ocean?
There.
Something clicked in my mind, and I suddenly knew exactly what they were each going to do. I could feel their plans, their motions, their reactions. I could track them all individually, in a way that I thought a normal human brain shouldn’t be able to.
But my brain interfaced with the pure nowhere. A place where all time was one, all place was one. In there, it didn’t matter if I faced one enemy ship or a million. So long as I could hear their minds, I could track them, understand them.
And anticipate them.
My hands moved by instinct, responding to this new information. Information I processed at the speed of the nowhere, not at the speed of a human mind. I’d done this before, in the past—when facing the Krell, who had been using communication devices that relied on the nowhere.