Starsight

Cobb grunted. “Well, at least now we have an idea what happened to the people of this planet.” He gestured with his mug out the window, and I stepped up to look down at Detritus. It looked desolate, a surface that had been turned to slag. The debris in lower orbit—the damaged platforms, the junk—had probably been caused by terrified people on the planet firing on the entity as it surrounded them.

“Whatever that thing was in the recording,” Cobb said, “it came here and . . . destroyed all the people on this planet and these platforms. They called it a delver.”

“Have you ever heard of anything like that?” I asked. “You knew about . . . about the eyes I sometimes see.”

“Not the word delver,” Cobb said. “But we have traditions that stretch back from before our grandparents were alive. They speak of beings that watch us from the void, the deep darkness, and they warn us to avoid communicating wirelessly. That’s why we only use radio for important military channels. That man on the video said that the delver came because it heard their communications, so maybe that’s related.” Cobb eyed me. “We’re warned not to create machines that can think too quickly and . . .”

“And we’re supposed to fear people who can see into the nowhere,” I whispered. “Because they draw the attention of the eyes.”

Cobb didn’t contradict me. He went for another sip of coffee, but found his mug empty and grunted softly.

“Do you think that the thing we saw in that video is related to the eyes you see?” Cobb asked.

I swallowed. “Yes,” I said. “They’re the same, Cobb. The entities that watch when I use my powers are the same as that thing with the spines that emerged on the video. The man said something about their cytoshield. That sounds a lot like cytonics.”

“A shield to keep the enemy from hearing or finding the cytonics on the planet, maybe,” Cobb said. “And it failed.” He sighed, shaking his head. “You see those battleships arrive earlier?”

“Yeah. But the platforms will protect us from bombardment, right?”

“Maybe,” Cobb said. “Some of these systems still work, but others aren’t as reliable. Our engineers think some of those more distant platforms have anti-bombardment countermeasures, but we can’t know for certain. I’m not sure we have the luxury of worrying about delvers, or the eyes, or any of that. We have a more immediate problem. The Krell—or whatever they’re really called—won’t listen to our pleas to stop their attacks. They’ve stopped caring whether they preserve any humans. They’re determined to exterminate us.”

“They’re afraid of us,” I said. When M-Bot and I had stolen information off their station six months ago, that was the biggest and most surprising revelation I’d discovered about the Krell. They kept us contained not out of spite, but because they were genuinely terrified of humankind.

“Afraid of us or not,” Cobb said, “they want us dead. And unless we can find a way to travel the stars like they do, we’re doomed. No fortress—no matter how powerful—can stand forever, particularly not against an enemy as strong as the Superiority.”

I nodded. It was a core tenet of battlefield tactics: you needed to have a plan of retreat. As long as we were trapped on Detritus, we were in danger. If we could get offworld, all kinds of options opened to us. Fleeing and hiding somewhere else. Searching for other human enclaves—if they existed—and recruiting help. Striking back against the enemy, putting them on the defensive.

None of this was possible until I learned to use my powers. Or, barring that, until we found a way to steal the enemy’s hyperdrive technology. Cobb was right. The eyes, the delvers, they might be important to me—but in the grand scheme of my people’s survival, that was all a secondary problem.

We needed to find a way off this planet.

Cobb looked at me carefully. He had always felt old. I knew that he was only a few years older than my parents, yet right now he looked like a rock that had been left out too long and survived too many meteor falls.

“Ironsides used to complain about how hard this job was,” he grumbled. “You know the worst part about being in charge, Spin?”

“No, sir.”

“Perspective. When you’re young, you can assume that everyone older than you has life figured out. Once you get command yourself, you realize we’re all just the same kids wearing older bodies.”

I swallowed, but didn’t say anything. Standing next to Cobb, I stared out the window at the desolate planet and the thousands of platforms surrounding it. An incredible network of defenses that—in the end—had been powerless to stop whatever this delver was.

“Spensa,” Cobb said, “I need you to be more careful out there. Half my staff think you’re the biggest liability we’ve ever put into a ship. The other half think you’re some kind of Saint incarnate. I’d like you to stop supplying both sides with good arguments.”