“I’m confused as to what you mean,” M-Bot said. “Though the Krell are using some normal sublight communications in addition to the superluminal ones. The ordinary ones, I can crack and listen in. Working to translate.”
I slowed M-Bot, passing ships that turned toward mine. These didn’t appear to be fighters; they were boxy, with large open windows at the front.
In that moment, something hit me, like a physical force. It crawled inside my brain, made my vision fuzz. I screamed, sagging in my straps.
“Spensa!” M-Bot said. “What’s wrong? What is happening?”
I could only whimper. The pain. And . . . impressions. They were sending images. They were . . . they were trying to overwrite . . . what I was seeing . . .
“Engaging stealth and jamming!” M-Bot said. “Spensa, I’m reading unusual signals. Spensa?”
The voices vanished. The pain evaporated. I let out a long, relieved sigh.
“Don’t die, okay?” M-Bot said. “If you do, I’ll probably have to make Rodge my pilot. It would be the most logical move, and we’d both hate it so much.”
“I’m not going to die,” I said, leaning back, tapping my helmet against the seat’s headrest. “I do have a defect. A hole inside me.”
“Humans have many holes in them. Would you like me to provide you with a list?”
“Please don’t.”
“Ha ha. That was humor.”
“I have a hole in my brain,” I said. “It can see into the nowhere, but they can use it against me. I think . . . I think my father was shown some kind of mind hologram. When he flew back down to Detritus, he saw what the enemy wanted him to.”
I remembered what he’d said. I will kill you. I will kill you all . . . He’d been so mournful, so soft. He thought the humans had lost—that his friends were already dead. What he’d seen hadn’t been reality.
“When he blew up his friends,” I whispered, “he thought he was shooting down the Krell.”
A small number of the boxy ships approached M-Bot in the blackness. They struck me as couriers or maybe towing devices. Through the wide glass fronts, I saw creatures that looked vaguely like the drawings we had of Krell. Dark forms in armor, with red eyes.
Only here, they were bright colors—a perky red and blue, not dark at all. They reminded me a little of the pictures of crabs I’d seen from Old Earth, during my ancient biology courses. And the “armor” they wore seemed more like some kind of living apparatus, with open plates on the “head” portion for the creatures to see out of.
The sides of the little ships were stenciled with what looked to be words in a strange language.
“Ketos redgor Earthen listro listrins,” M-Bot said, reading the words. “Roughly, in English, that means ‘Penitentiary maintenance and containment of Earthlings.’ ”
Scud. That . . . sounded ominous. “Can you tell me what they’re saying?”
“There’s some radio chatter nearer the station,” he said, “but I suspect these ships are communicating using faster-than-light cytonic devices.”
“Relax whatever you’re doing to shield us,” I said, “but don’t put it down entirely. If I scream again, or go crazy, put it back up.”
“Okay . . .,” M-Bot said. “You already seem crazy to me, but I guess that’s nothing new.”
Awareness returned to me, the voices in the darkness of space. I could hear their words, the ones they were sending through the nowhere. I knew them, even without needing a translation, because in that place all languages were one.
“It’s looking at me!” one of the creatures was saying. “I think it wants to eat me. I don’t like this at all!”
“It should be incapacitated now,” a communication returned from the space station. “And if it’s looking at you, it doesn’t see you. We are overwriting its vision. Tow the ship in for study. That’s not a standard DDF model. We’re curious how they built it.”
“I don’t want to get anywhere near it,” said another one of the creatures. “Don’t you know how dangerous these things are?”
Curious, I looked out of my canopy at a ship drawing closer, then I made a kind of growling face—baring my teeth. The creature screamed and immediately turned its ship around and fled. The other two tugboat-style ships backed away.
“This is a job for fighter drones,” one said. “Not manned ships.”
They sounded so scared. Not like the terrible monsters I’d always imagined.
I relaxed in my seat.
“Would you like me to try to hack their systems?” M-Bot said.
“Can you do that?”
“It’s not as easy as it might sound,” he said. “I have to piggyback on an incoming signal, and then decrypt their passwords and create a dummy login, then transfer files while spoofing an authorized request—breaching local data defense lines—all without tripping any of their alarms.”
“So, can you do it?”
“I just did,” he said. “That was a very long explanation. Beginning data transfer . . . And, they caught me. I’ve been booted, and security protocol is preventing my reentry.”
Lights flashed on the station, and a moment later a squadron of small ships ejected from one of the bays on its side. I knew those flight patterns. Krell interceptors.
“Time to go,” I said, grabbing the controls and sweeping us around. “Do you think you can navigate us through the debris layers without triggering any of the defense platforms?”
“Supposedly, the Krell do that each time they attack the planet,” he said, “so it should be possible.”
I hit the overburn, launching us back toward the outer layer of debris. M-Bot put some directions on my canopy, and I followed, tense for the first bit. We skimmed close to some of the platforms as we weaved toward the planet, but none of them fired at us.
I felt . . . strangely alert. The sense of fascination I’d experienced earlier—the draw to seek out what was causing the stars to sing—had faded. It was replaced by stark realism.
Coming out here really had been crazy. Even for me. But as we wove past another layer of debris, the Krell interceptors fell back. It seemed, increasingly, that I’d be able to return to the planet safely.
“Did you get anything?” I asked. “From their computers?”
“I started with the station’s core orders and worked outward,” he said. “I didn’t get much, but . . . Oooh . . . You’re going to like this.”
“What?” I asked as I hit the overburn, flying back down toward Detritus. “What did you find?”
“Answers.”
EPILOGUE
Two hours later, I sat in the DDF command center, holding a blanket around me, with my legs up on my seat. They’d given me Admiral Ironsides’s chair.
Ever since that moment in the nowhere, I’d felt cold. A chill I couldn’t shake, and which the blanket could barely help. My head still pounded, despite the metric ton of painkillers I’d swallowed.
A group of important people surrounded my chair, crowding me in. National Assembly Leaders, junior admirals, flightleaders. I was growing confident that they believed I wouldn’t turn against them, though at first—after I’d reentered the atmosphere—they’d been very cautious.