Less than a minute left…
The lightburst began to boil again.
I should have known. I should have expected. But in that moment, all I could feel was a terrible frustration. As we were only seconds from freedom, ten thousand new ships emerged from the lightburst. Then they crunched together like the fragments of land, creating an interlocking wall of steel.
I almost slammed into it. I thought maybe that would be enough to punch us through. But I could feel with my senses that the lightburst was undulating further, another rank of ships emerging to push away the wall in front.
Punching through wouldn’t work. I imagined, in my mind’s eye, what would happen. Our ship a fireball. All of us dead before we touched the lightburst.
I wrenched us to the side, breaking away just before we hit.
“Scud!” I said, flying us parallel to the wall of ships. “We need a new plan. Suggestions?”
Silence. Neither Hesho nor M-Bot responded.
Then a soft fluting came from my pocket.
Land.
“What?” I asked.
She fluted again. Hesitant.
Close to the lightburst, Doomslug sent. Land.
Wouldn’t that be suicide? Yet I had asked for options, and I wasn’t coming up with anything. With so many firing on me again—and more beginning to shoot from within the wall—we’d be dead in moments. So—frustrated to be stopped less than a hundred meters from freedom—I took us down.
“Hang on, everyone,” I said. “This is going to be bumpy.”
Counting on the last of the shields to keep us in one piece, I hit the ground at as shallow an angle as I could manage. Chalky white dust exploded around us—an enormous rush of white haze and strange shadows—as we half crashed in a long skid.
As this happened, I felt a strange sensation pulsing around us. Cytonic, but unlike the hatred—or even the connection—that I’d felt previously. It felt…like…
A rock?
I blinked, scanning the cockpit. Hesho sat up, shaking himself. The canopy was mostly covered in chalky dust, but the lights were on, the ship in one piece. The shield had fallen, but M-Bot was reigniting it already. Proximity sensors showed ships flying around above us, yet they seemed confused. As if…
“She’s hiding us,” I whispered.
“What is what?” M-Bot said.
“Doomslug!” I said, pointing up through a portion of the canopy not covered in dust. The confused ships were flying one way, then the other, in waves. “In here she has camouflage. That’s why ships with slugs can hyperjump without drawing delver attention. She’s hiding the entire ship…like she’d do during a hyperjump.”
In awe, I watched the confused delvers. She’d needed us to land because we needed to appear as something in the landscape. In this case a rock?
Whatever she’d done, the delvers didn’t seem to be able to tell that a new rock had appeared. They swarmed about, agitated. Her camouflage was excellent. She’d blended us into the ground, covered up our tracks, and maybe even blurred our location for a little while when coming down.
“Spensa,” M-Bot said. “Do they really hate me? Like Chet?”
“Yes,” I admitted.
“They shouldn’t,” M-Bot said. “I know we’ve talked about it, but it’s illogical. If they are AIs, then why hate all AIs? It’s like a human from a group hating everyone else in that group.”
I didn’t mention to him that unfortunately, that very thing wasn’t unheard of among humans. “Perhaps it’s because you’re too close to them, like how a human face with distorted features is more terrifying to us than an alien face.”
I reached into my pocket as I felt something wiggling there. I pulled out the pin, but it was enlarging, transforming into a bright yellow slug with blue markings. She reached her full size—about as big as a loaf of bread—but was all curled up and tense. I could feel the effort coming off her. She was working so hard on hiding the ship that she couldn’t hold her false shape any longer.
“She’s in pain,” M-Bot said softly. Indeed, she began letting out a long, high-pitched fluting noise.
“This is hard for her,” I guessed. “When doing hyperspace jumps, slugs only have to hide their ships for a short time. Keeping this up long-term for something this much larger than her is difficult. That’s why she was hesitant.”
Overhead, the delver ships began shooting destructors toward the ground. They had plainly guessed part of what had happened. They were trying to find us, and they soon seemed to coordinate a pattern search with each ship shooting at a different location, systematically hunting us.