Starsight

“—worked!” M-Bot finished.

“Ah!” I yelled, jolting. I grabbed the sides of my cockpit seat. “Did you see any of that?”

“See what?” M-Bot said. “My chronometer indicates no time has passed. You engaged the cytonic hyperdrive . . . or, well, I think you are the cytonic hyperdrive.”

I put my hand to my chest, pressing it against the thick material of my flight suit, which seemed very strange now that it was the wrong color. My heart raced and my mind reeled. That place . . . the nowhere. It had been like swimming through a deep-cavern lake without any lights. All the while knowing things lay beneath, watching me, reaching for me . . .

That was them, I thought. The things that destroyed the people of Detritus. The things we saw in the recording. The delvers were real. They and the eyes were the same thing.

I breathed in and out deeply, calming myself with effort. At least the hyperjump had worked. I had used my powers again, with the help of the coordinates that Alanik had placed in my mind.

Right. Time to be a hero. I could do this.

“Spensa!” M-Bot said. “We’re being contacted!”

“By who?” I asked.

“By whom!” Doomslug said from beside me.

“You’ve brought us in near a Superiority space station of some size,” M-Bot said. “Look at your five. The radio chatter here is quiet, but distinct.”

I rested my hand comfortingly on Doomslug, who was fluting in annoyance, perhaps sensing my discomfort. I searched in the direction M-Bot had indicated, and saw something I’d missed in my first brief scan of the starfield. It was a distant station of some sort—lights in the darkness that were clustered around a central flat plane.

“Starsight,” I said. “That’s what the alien, Alanik, called it.” I scrambled to pull on my helmet and buckle in. “They’re contacting us? What are they saying?”

“Someone on the station is asking us for identification,” M-Bot said. “They’re speaking in Dione, a Superiority standard language.”

“Can you spoof Alanik’s transponder signal?”

“Doing so.”

“Great. Then stall them for a little bit while I think through this.”

M-Bot clearly still looked like the alien ship, and—judging by my soft violet hands—my hologram was still working as well. If this mission failed, it wouldn’t be due to the limitations of the technology—it would be because of the limitations of the spy.

“First things first,” I said. “We need to check our retreat and see if we can get home, if things go poorly. Give me just another minute or so.”

I breathed in and out, calming myself, doing the exercises Gran-Gran had taught me. Exercises she’d learned from her mother, who had been the one who’d hyperjumped our old space fleet before we’d crashed on Detritus.

I’d jumped here to perform this mission, but I wanted to know: Could I jump back if I needed to? Everything would get a whole lot easier if this expansion of my powers, as granted by Alanik touching my brain, could work again.

I imagined myself floating in space . . . stars zipping around . . . Yes, having just hyperjumped, I felt a familiarity to the action. The nowhere was close. I’d just been there. I could return.

Those things would see me again.

Don’t think about that, I told myself sternly. I concentrated on the exercise. I was flying, shooting through the stars, zipping away . . .

Where? That was the problem. For anything other than a very short jump, I’d need to know exactly where I was going. I couldn’t simply reverse the directions Alanik had given me, because they hadn’t included my starting point of Detritus, only my destination of this space station.

“M-Bot,” I said, coming out of my trance. “Can you calculate our location?”

“Currently calculating, using astronomical data. But I warn you, Spensa, my stalling is not working. They’re sending ships out to investigate.”

“What have you been doing?”

“Sending them binary code.”

“What?” I said. “That’s how you decided to stall?”

“I don’t know! I figured, ‘Organics like dumb things, and this is pretty dumb.’ In hindsight, maybe it wasn’t dumb enough? Anyway, they’ll have visual on us within the minute.”

The moment of truth. I took a deep breath. I was a warrior. Trained by my grandmother from childhood to face my heroic destiny with courage. You can do this, I told myself. It’s just a battle of a different kind. Like Hua Mulan or Epipole of Carystus, going to battle wearing another person’s identity.

I’d heard those stories a dozen times over from Gran-Gran. The thing was, the subterfuge of both women had eventually been discovered. And it hadn’t exactly gone well for either one.