“That will be our housing for the ‘night,’？” Chet explained. “I’ll jog on ahead to secure it and be certain the cave there is safe. Join me at your own speed! You’re looking a little run-down, but certainly with good reason!”
I nodded, grateful as he jogged off. Once, I might have been angry at the implication I was too weak—but he had a lot of experience in this place, and I had practically none. I was woman enough to admit that pushing myself now was a bad idea.
So I followed at a slower pace, M-Bot at my side. “M-Bot,” I said, something occurring to me, “you got a historical database from Superiority records, right?”
“Sure did!” he said. “I had to dump a lot of it, but I kept many text files, which are small. I now know when jazz music developed. You know, in case it’s important—”
“Chet said he’s around two hundred years old,” I said. “Would he have been alive during the Second Human War?”
“Most certainly, if his guess of his age is accurate,” M-Bot said. “The Second Human War began two hundred and fifty years ago, but lasted decades. It was characterized by the first attempts to weaponize the delvers, who had appeared near the end of the First Human War.
“The first war started when humans escaped Earth and found an entire galaxy full of people who enforced nonaggression by imprisoning, exiling, or executing those who showed aggressive tendencies. Let’s just say they were not ready for your people. Boy, howdy.”
“…‘Boy, howdy’？”
“Cool, huh? I just made that up.” He buzzed around me. “No, I didn’t! That was a lie! Ha! I can say them so easily now. Anyway, if Chet there was born two hundred years ago, he’d have lived during the time known as ‘the stilling,’ when the galaxy was actively trying to stop using wireless communication. These were the times punctuated by the worst and most terrible delver attacks, and when the war was starting to end.”
“When was the original colony on Detritus destroyed?” I asked.
“That’s uncertain,” M-Bot said, “as Detritus was a secret project, and the Superiority didn’t have records of it. We can guess it was between three hundred and two hundred years ago.”
“So Chet wouldn’t have been alive when it was made?”
“A reasonable assumption,” M-Bot said.
We reached the hills. Chet had disappeared into a cave there, but I could see his footsteps leading in.
“For further reference,” M-Bot said, buzzing up beside me, “I crashed on Detritus a hundred and seventy-two years ago.”
“Huh,” I said. “Chet said he came in here right around a hundred and seventy years ago. He mentioned remembering some caves in the place he was before he came in here. And ruins…”
I trailed off. We looked at each other. Or, well, I looked at the box that contained M-Bot’s circuits, and he focused his lenses on me.
Then we both took off toward the cave.
The cavern was small, barely as large as one of the bunk rooms on Detritus. A soft tinkling sound accompanied some water dribbling in through the wall and gathering in a shallow pool at the rear.
Chet knelt there, washing his hands. He looked up as I skidded to a stop, kicking up sand, my fatigue momentarily forgotten. “Chet,” I said. “You said you remembered some things about the day before you entered.”
“Just bits and pieces.”
“Did you know someone named Commander Spears?” I demanded, naming the man who had been M-Bot’s pilot all those years ago, when he’d crashed on Detritus.
Chet frowned. He shook his hands off, then stood up and ran them through his silvering hair. Slowly, he reached to the chest pocket of his flight jacket and took something out. A patch, as if from a uniform.
It said SPEARS on it.
“Oh, scud,” I said.
“I…think I crashed somewhere?” he said. “A place with caverns, and…metal platforms in the sky? It’s so fuzzy, though I have a distinct impression of a wall full of strange lines. I now recognize that as a nowhere portal. I must have fallen through.”
Scud. Scud, scud, scud.
M-Bot hovered at my side, and I could sense his concern. Like, actually sense it. I could feel his emotions. He was worried. Apprehensive. Shocked.
“I found your ship,” I said. “It had an AI on it. You are M-Bot’s old pilot.”
“I…hardly think I could fit in a drone…” Chet said.
“He used to be in a ship,” I explained. “An extremely advanced one. All he could remember about his pilot was the name, and some orders. That was you, Chet.”