Starsight

Sound suddenly erupted from the screen. People shouting, a dozen voices overlapping. “—make this report,” the man at the screen said, speaking in heavily accented English. “We have initial evidence that the planet’s cytoshields are, despite long-standing assumptions, insufficient. The delver has heard our communications, and followed them to us. Repeat, the delver has returned to our station and . . .”

He trailed off, looking over his shoulder. The room was mass chaos, some people breaking down and collapsing to the floor in hysterics, others screaming at one another.

The man on our screen typed on his keyboard. “We have video from one of the perimeter platforms,” he said. “Number 1132. Turning to that view now.”

I leaned forward as the recording switched to show a starfield—the view from a camera on the outer shell, looking out into space. I could see the curvature of the platform on the bottom of the screen.

The people in the recording quieted. Were they seeing something in that star-speckled blackness that I wasn’t? Was it—

More stars were appearing.

They winked into existence, like pinpricks in reality. Hundreds . . . thousands of them, too bright to actually be stars. In fact, they moved in the sky, gathering and collecting. Even through the monitor—even from a vast distance away, in both time and space—I could feel their malevolence.

These weren’t stars. These were the eyes.

My lungs seized up. My heart started to pound in my chest. More and more of the lights appeared, watching me through the screen. They knew me. They could see me.

I started to panic. But beside me, Cobb continued to quietly sip his coffee. Somehow, the calm way he stood there helped fend off my anxiety.

This happened a long time ago, I reminded myself. There’s no danger to me now.

The lights on the screen started to grow blurry . . . Dust, I realized. A cloud of it appeared, as if leaking through punctures in reality. The dust glowed with white light and expanded at an incredible speed. Then something followed, a large circular shape that emerged as if from nothing in the center of the dust cloud.

It was hard to make out more than the shadow of the thing. At first, my mind refused to accept the awesome scale it presented. The thing that had appeared—that blackness inside the glowing dust—dwarfed the enormous platform. Scuuud. Whatever it was, it was the size of a planet.

“I have . . . I have visual confirmation of a delver,” said the man recording the video. “Mother of Saints . . . It’s here. The cytoshielding project is a failure. The delver turned back and . . . and it’s come for us.”

The black mass shifted toward the planet. Were those arms I picked out in the shadows? No, could they be spines? The shape seemed intentionally designed to frustrate the mind, as I tried—against reason—to make sense of what I was seeing. Soon, the blackness simply became absolute. The camera died.

I thought the video was over, but the view switched back to the library room, where the man sat at his desk. Most of the other monitors had been abandoned, leaving only the man and one woman. I heard screams from elsewhere in the platform as this one man, trembling, stood up—knocking into the monitor he’d been using, twisting the camera angle.

“Life signs vanishing from the outer defensive rings!” shouted the woman. She stood up at her desk. “Platforms falling dormant. The High Command has ordered us to engage autonomous mode!”

Shaking visibly, the man sat back down. We watched through an off-kilter monitor as he typed furiously. The woman in the room pushed back from her desk, then looked up at the ceiling as a low sound rumbled through the platform.

“Autonomous defenses engaged . . . ,” the man muttered, still typing. “Escape ships are falling dead. Saints . . .”

The room shook again, and the lights flickered.

“The planet is firing on us!” the woman screamed. “Our own people are firing on us!”

“They’re not firing at us,” the man continued, typing as if in a daze. “They’re firing on the delver as it envelops the planet. We’re just in the way. We need to make sure the nowalk is closed . . . Can’t access it from here, but maybe . . .”

He continued to mutter, but my attention was drawn by something else. Lights gathering at the back of the room on the screen. They were breaking reality, making the far wall seem to stretch, become an infinite starfield penetrated by intense, hateful pinpricks.

The eyes had arrived. The woman in the room screamed, then . . . vanished. She seemed to twist in on herself, then shrink, crushed by some invisible force. The remaining man, the one who had been speaking, continued furiously typing at his station, his eyes wide. A madman working as if on his last will and testament. Though his face dominated the screen, I could see the blackness gathering behind him.

Lit by stars that were not stars.

Infinity coalescing.

A shape stepped from the darkness.

And it looked just like me.