I yanked open my backpack, letting a dione soldier inspect the contents.
The inside didn’t look suspicious at all. Just the large, clear plastic food container that I normally brought my lunches in. It looked perfectly innocent. For all the fact that it was a drone in disguise.
The guard shined a small flashlight in at the contents. Would they see how worried I was? Was I sweating too much? Would one of the nearby security drones sense my racing pulse?
No. No, I could do this. I was a warrior, and sometimes that required craftiness and stealth. I stood there an excruciatingly long moment. Then, bless the stars, the guard waved me forward.
I zipped up the pack and shouldered it, hurrying across the shuttle bay of the Weights and Measures. I tried to exude both confidence and lack of concern.
“Alanik?” Morriumur asked, stepping up beside me as we entered the hallway. “Are you well? Your skin tone looks uncommonly flush.”
“I…um, didn’t sleep well,” I said.
We neared the first intersection. M-Bot suspected that this segment of hallway had a secondary scanner installed to detect illicit materials—but he was confident that the scrambler we’d given the drone would obscure it. Indeed, no alarms went off as we went through the intersection, though a passing dione crew member did nearly collide with Hesho’s small hoverplatform. Kauri cried out, barely steering the platform around the dione’s head.
The crew member apologized and quickly moved on. Kauri flew the platform back, and Hesho’s tail twitched in annoyance as he looked over his shoulder at the offending dione. “Even when we fly, we are underfoot. Serene until marred, a centimeter deep but reflecting eternity, I am a sea to many, but a puddle to one.”
“You’d think that the Superiority would be accustomed to dealing with people of all sizes,” I said.
“There aren’t many of us,” Hesho said. “I know of only one other species our size, unless you count the varvax inside their exoskeletons. Perhaps we will need to build huge suits ourselves. It is difficult for ordinary people in a universe of giants.” His tail twitched again. “But this is the price we must pay to have allies against the humans. They are near to breaking free, you know. Did you see the news reports?”
He eyed Brade, who as usual strode on ahead of us and barely paid any attention to our conversation.
“The humans are contained, Hesho,” Morriumur said. “This little blip is nothing to be worried about. I’m sure it will be dealt with soon.”
“My duty, and my burden, is to worry about the worst possibilities.”
As we reached the now-familiar intersection with the usual guard and the pathway to Engineering, I split off from the others, waving them onward. “Gotta hit the head,” I told them, then stepped up to the guard.
The Krell twitched her fingers in a sign of annoyance, but called for a guide drone to accompany me to the restroom. I thought through my plan once again—I’d spent all night practicing it with M-Bot. I wasn’t worried about being tired from lack of sleep. My nervous energy probably could have powered half of Starsight.
The guide drone led me to the restroom, then again waited as I entered one of the stalls. I immediately sat and put the backpack on my lap, then quietly slid open the zipper. My hands—having performed this exact sequence a hundred times in a row last night—pulled out my drone, then took out the security module. I screwed it on with a quiet click that I hoped wasn’t too audible.
A flip of a switch left the drone hanging in the air as I quickly did my business in the stall, so as to not sound suspicious. Then I squeezed around the side of the stall, leaving the drone hovering there. I held up one finger, then two, then three.
The drone vanished, activating its camouflage. Then I tapped my bracelet, checking to make sure the drone and I could communicate. It responded by sending me a message in DDF flight code that my bracelet tapped out on my skin.
All systems functioning.
The mission was a go. The Weights and Measures’s shielding prevented me from contacting M-Bot on the outside, but—as we had hoped—I could still communicate with someone inside, such as the drone.
I shouldered my pack and stepped out—then had an immediate regret. The destructor pistol! Scud, I’d meant to detach it and put it in my backpack in case I needed it.
Too late now. It was safely, and uselessly, strapped to the back of the drone.
Good luck, little guy, I thought, washing my hands. A part of me kept expecting the security drone to suddenly raise an alarm, but it remained silent. I followed my guide from the restroom, leaving my secret spy behind, ready to slip out and sneak to the engine room.
I reached the jump room and settled down with the others. Then I waited. And waited some more. Was it taking an unusually long amount of time for us to disengage from the docks and take off? Had I already been discovered?
Finally, the Weights and Measures undocked and began to move out into space.
“Pilots,” Winzik’s voice said over the comm, making me jump practically to the ceiling. “I wanted to let you know that today’s training is particularly important. My, my! We bear a number of important officials from the Superiority government, who have come to watch your progress. As a favor to me, I’d like you to fly your best and impress them.”
Today? Of all days, today was the day that extra observers came on the ship to watch? I almost contacted my drone and told it to abort. But no. I was committed.
I waited in silence as we got a safe distance from Starsight, and then a scream sounded in my mind and we entered the nowhere.
I didn’t have much opportunity to worry about the drone and its mission during training that day.
I shot through space, pursued by a swarm of self-propelled imitation boulders. Brade flew close at my wing, and together we tried to dart toward the delver maze—but the embers were ready for that. Another group of them broke off the outside of the maze and streamed toward us.
“Veer pattern,” I said. “Cutting right.” I spun my starfighter, boosting. That shot me to the side, though my momentum still carried me forward as well.
My proximity sensor showed that Brade—instead of following my orders—barreled toward the new set of embers. I growled, hitting the private line. “Brade, follow orders!”
“I can take these embers,” she said.
“No doubt that you can. But can you follow orders?”
She continued toward the embers. Then, just before engaging them, she veered off and broke away, boosting toward me. I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding.
“All right,” I said. “Veer pattern, cutting right.”
I turned us around in a wide sweep, away from the embers. Brade followed, and together we wove around as I had ordered. “All right,” I said, coming in at a better angle. “Let loose.”
“Really?” she asked.
“I’ll follow your lead.”
I sensed an eagerness to her as she boosted ahead of me. The embers were predictable in how they would try to smash into us, so the way we had cut around had bunched them all up in front of us. Brade had little trouble blasting a group of them away.
I, in turn, shot the one that drew too close to her. We both took some debris on our shields, but emerged mostly unscathed as we dove between the two advancing packs of embers.
These, in their eagerness to hit us, began crashing into one another. We emerged as a good dozen of the enemy crashed together in a sequence of fiery deaths behind us.
“That,” Brade said as we boosted on toward the maze, “was extremely satisfying.”
“Once in a while, I know what I’m talking about.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t listen to you because of that.”
“Why, then?”
“You don’t talk to me like the others,” she said. “You didn’t even ask me about that planet of wild humans. I’m sure you saw the news reports. Everyone’s scared of them right now. Everyone looks at me, even more than they used to. They tell me they know I’m not like those dangerous ones. But still, they look at me.”
Scud. There’s an entire planet where we won’t treat you like that, Brade. I almost told her right then, but forced myself to hold back. It didn’t feel like the right time.
“To me,” I said, “you’re just a member of my flight.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I like that.”
I’d suspected she would. The two of us veered down near the maze. Today’s training was to fight through the embers, then do maze runs, like we’d need to do if fighting a real delver. We drew close to our section of the maze, the sheer metallic surface punctured by tunnel entrances. In the near distance, three other fighters came in close: Vapor, Hesho, and Morriumur.
“Let’s take that one,” I said, tapping my display, which would highlight the indicated point on Brade’s own display.
“Roger,” she said.
I made the move, then was shocked as my proximity alarm went crazy. I veered out of the way, boosting to the side as a pair of embers suddenly accelerated from the surface at explosive speeds, nearly colliding with my ship. They’d never moved that fast before. I cursed, reorienting myself as the ones chasing me picked up speed too. I had to boost to Mag-4—an insane speed for dogfighting—to stay ahead of them.
“What is this?” Brade said over the comm. “Flight Command, what are you doing?”
I narrowly avoided another pair of embers. I had to speed up again, but another group approaching turned and began smashing against one another. What in the stars?
They’re trying to get me to smash into their debris, I realized. And their high speed made me boost faster. It was nearly impossible to dogfight at such speeds; there just wasn’t enough time to react—but embers didn’t need to care about that. They were disposable, while we were not.
What followed was some of the most frantic piloting I’d done in weeks. “Wave sequence,” I said to Brade—and she fell right on my wing as we ducked and wove among the embers. Scud! There suddenly seemed to be hundreds of them, all focusing on us, ignoring other pilots.
I jerked to the side as two embers collided right near me, then braced myself as debris flashed across my shield, wearing it down. Another ember nearly hit me, and I dodged belatedly—if it had been on target, I’d have been smashed. I felt like a solitary sparrow among an entire flock of hungry hawks.
I swooped and wove, spun and dodged, trying to make sense of the chaos. “My…my shield is down,” Brade said with a grunt.
Scud. Scudscudscudscud. She’d veered off from me, so I spun around, then boosted after her. “See that large ember coming at you from just below your 270? Spear it with your light-lance.”
“But—”
“Just do it, Brade,” I said. I barely got out of the way as the ember flew past us at a horrific speed. Fortunately, as I’d suggested, Brade shot her light-lance at it and hit the thing in the center with her glowing rope.
The momentum of the large stone yanked her after it—and right out of the path of several other embers, which smashed together. I swung around and chased her, accelerating so hard my GravCaps got overwhelmed and I slammed back in my seat. I barely managed to keep pace, as I had to shoot down an ember that tried to collide with Brade, then swoop in beside her to shield her from the debris.
My shield crackled and my ship shook. Ahead, the large ember we’d been trailing cleared us a path before finally slowing, as if its pilot had realized what we were doing.
“Up and over!” I shouted, dodging upward. Brade let go just as another large ember smashed into the one we’d been following. She barely dodged a large chunk ejected from the collision, but together the two of us boosted free of the mess. Our incredible speed carried us far beyond the melee in seconds.
“That…,” Brade said. “That was close.” She actually seemed shaken for once.
“Flight Command,” I said, hitting the comm button, “what in the stars was that?”
“I am sorry, Alanik of the UrDail.” Winzik replied personally, which was uncommon. “Occasionally, the embers have been observed engaging in extremely aggressive behavior like this. We are trying new boosters on our drones to match it.”
“You could have warned us!” I snapped.
“Very sorry!” Winzik said. “Please do not be offended. Brade, thank you. You have made a very impressive showing for the officials here.”
So Winzik was showing off his pet human, was he? He could have gotten her, and me, killed!
Brade didn’t seem to care. With this new batch of embers disposed of, she spun back around toward the maze itself. I boosted after her. A second later we darted through one of the openings, entering the tunnel.
It seemed quieter inside.
That was silly, of course. Space was always silent. Sure, I could set my ship to simulate explosions and vibrations to give me nonvisual cues, but no atmosphere means no compression waves, and no compression waves means no sound.
That normally felt right to me. Soaring through the void was supposed to be silent. The darkness was so empty, so awesome, so vast that it should smother all sound.
These tunnels inside the maze felt more intimate. I felt like I should hear clanks, drips of water, or at least distant screeching as gears ground together. Here, the silence was creepy.
My floods illuminated Brade’s ship, flying just ahead of me. She slowed to an uncharacteristically careful speed, inching along the corridor.
“Do you see that opening ahead?” she asked.
“Yes,” I replied. Both of us seeing it confirmed it was real—though openings like the one ahead almost always were. It was the things the holograms covered up that could get confusing.
We crept into the room beyond, which was one of the spaces that felt like it was submerged. There were even holographic fish swarming around in schools, and some dark thing in the corner that bore multiple tentacles.
I’d been in this “room” several times before. They were starting to repeat. The illusions on our canopies were Superiority tech, bounded by the limitations of their programming. The true delver maze would be more erratic. Pilots who had entered and escaped reported a different setting to each room, with surprises around every corner.
I asked Brade what she was seeing, as that was part of the training. But I knew this room too well, so even while she was describing what she saw, I was ready when the octopus thing sprang from the corner. I knew it wasn’t real—but that it would distract from an ember coming in behind us.
I spun and blasted the ember away before it could reach me.
“Nice shot,” Brade said.
Wow. A compliment? I was getting through to her.
She led the way down to the bottom of the chamber, where to my eyes the exit was covered in some kind of seaweedlike substance.
“You see something here?” she asked.
“Some kind of sea growth.”
“I see rocks.” She grunted. “Like last time.”
She lowered her ship down through the hologram, and I followed, entering another metallic tunnel.
“I half expect Winzik to try to get us killed again,” I noted as I tailed her.
“Winzik is brilliant,” Brade said immediately. “He knows exactly what he’s doing. Obviously, he understood our limits better than we did.”
“He got lucky,” I said. “His stunt out there would have looked really stupid if we’d gotten killed.”
“He is brilliant,” Brade repeated. “It’s not surprising you didn’t understand his purposes.”
I bristled at that, but bit off a retort. Brade was making small talk. This was progress.
“You grew up with Winzik?” I said. “Like, he was your father?”
“More like my keeper,” she said.
“And your parents? Your biological ones?”
“I was taken from them at age seven. Humans have to be carefully monitored. We can feed off one another’s aggression, and that can quickly turn to sedition.”
“That must have been hard though. Leaving your parents when you were so young?”
Brade didn’t respond, instead leading the way down through the corridor, then into another one beneath it. I followed, frowning as the tunnel walls slowly shifted and transformed into rock ones.
This looks familiar, I thought.
Stalactites, stalagmites. Natural stone, looking almost melted in places from the constant dripping of water. And there, the side of an enormous metal pipe peeking through the stone?
It looked like…like the caverns I’d explored as a youth. The endless tunnels of Detritus, where I’d hunted rats, imagining that I was fighting the Krell.
I paused my ship near the wall, where my floods illuminated ancient etchings. Patterns, words in an untranslatable language. I knew this place. Though the scale was larger, it looked exactly like a tunnel I’d traveled a hundred times, a place where I would trail my fingers on the cool wet stone. A hidden maintenance locker nearby would hold my speargun, my map book, and the pin my father had given me…
Almost unconsciously, I reached out toward the wall, though my fingers hit the glass of my canopy. I was in a ship, an alien starfighter, traveling through a deep-space maze. How? How had it reached into my mind and reproduced this place?
My eyes focused on the glass of my canopy. Reflected in it, as if sitting right behind me in the cockpit, were a pair of burning white spots as large as my fists. Holes puncturing reality itself, sucking in everything and crushing it into a pair of impossibly white tunnels. They looked like eyes.
The hair on my neck rose. I opened my mouth to shout, but the eyes vanished—and along with them the changes to the tunnel. In an instant, I was back in just another metallic corridor, one of a thousand in this maze.
“Hey,” Brade said in my ear. “You coming or not?”
I twisted and looked over my shoulder, but saw only the back part of my cockpit—a cushioned wall affixed with an emergency blanket, flashlight, and medical kit.
“Alanik?” Brade asked. “There’s something over here. Come tell me what you see.”
“Coming,” I said, hands trembling as I put them back on the controls. Scud. Scudscudscudscudscud. I felt alone. Small. I had nobody to talk to about this. Cobb and my friends were trillions of kilometers away, and even M-Bot was cut off from me until I returned to Starsight.
Dared I mention my vision to Brade? That had been no simple delver maze hologram. That had been from my own memories. Would she think I was crazy? Worse, would she think I was one of them? Was I seeing these things because some part of a delver had attached itself to my soul?
My controls went crazy as I reached the end of the tunnel. They said I had hit a patch of artificial gravity, and—even more strangely—had entered atmosphere. This ship barely had any wings, but it still deployed ailerons for steering, and the atmospheric scoop powered on to help me make high-speed turns.
Just ahead, Brade had stopped her ship. “What do your sensors read?” she asked.
“Atmosphere,” I said. “Nitrogen-oxygen.”
Brade boosted forward a little, entering a large chamber that looked like it had a mossy floor.
“You see that moss?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said, then let loose with her destructors. An explosion flared yellow-orange on the side of the chamber, blasting off flaming bits of metal. I felt the shock wave from it, my ship trembling.
“What?” I asked. “Why did you shoot?”
“Those blasts made fire that burned, instead of being smothered in the vacuum,” Brade said. “And I heard it. We’ve passed through an invisible shield and entered a pocket of atmosphere.”
Alarmingly, she popped the canopy on her ship.
“Brade!” I yelled.
“Relax,” she replied. “Pilots reported rooms like this near the heart.” She lowered her ship down, landing on the mossy surface. Then she climbed out and dropped to the ground.
I eased my ship into the chamber. After all the tricks we’d been through in this place, she was willing to just climb out? True, she had her helmet on, and her flight suit would double as a pressure suit, but still.
“The membrane should be here somewhere,” she said. “Come help me look.”
Nervous, I settled my ship down next to hers. I checked my console and was relieved to find that the pressure differential was minimal, so I popped my canopy. I unstrapped, trailing Brade’s form with my eyes as she poked along the ground. Finally I climbed out onto the ground, my feet scraping on the moss. It was real, no hologram.
I carefully picked my way over to Brade, who pulled off her helmet and looked around the dark chamber, lit by the floods from our fighters.
“Brade,” I said, hitting the microphone that would project my voice out of my helmet. “What if it’s a trap?”
“It’s not,” she said. “We’ve found the heart. This is the whole point of the maze.”
“We got here so quickly though. Only like what, three rooms?”
“It moves around,” Brade said, examining the cavern. “They must have simulated that when fabricating this maze.”
“I…” I stepped closer to her. “I’m not convinced this maze was fabricated.”
“The humans—”
“I know where the Superiority says they got it,” I said, cutting her off. “And most of me believes their story. But I don’t think the humans fabricated this. It’s too…” What? Eerie? Too hauntingly surreal?
It shows me real hallucinations. It’s not a fabrication. Not completely.
“I think it must be a corpse,” I said. “A delver’s corpse, repurposed to train on.”
Brade frowned at that. “I don’t know if they can even die, Alanik. You’re making assumptions.”
Maybe she was right. Still, I kept my helmet on as we scouted through the cavern, sticking close together. The moss on those rocks was alive, as best as I could tell from picking at it. What if it released, like, dangerous spores or something? I would have felt a lot more comfortable if Brade would put her helmet back on.
As we reached the far side of the room, I spotted something on the floor. A web of deep green, hidden behind a pile of rocks. I waved Brade forward and approached the patch. It looked like a spiderweb of green fibers, and was about a meter in diameter, circular.
“You see this?” I asked.
“A membrane,” she said. “Made of green fibers.”
So it wasn’t a hallucination. I knelt, poking at the fibers, then looked at Brade. She didn’t seem eager to push through it, and I found that neither was I.
“I was furious,” Brade finally said, speaking in a soft voice.
“You asked earlier,” she said. “What it felt like to be taken from my parents when young. It made me angry.”
She knelt, yanking at the spiderweb of fibers, pulling it back and revealing a hole in the ground. It looked to be about two meters deep, and the light on my helmet showed a metal floor at the bottom.
“It seethed inside me for years,” Brade continued. “A molten pit, burning like destructor fire.” She looked back at me. “That’s when I realized the Superiority was right. I was dangerous. Very, very dangerous.”
She met my eyes for a moment, then pulled on her helmet again and activated the channel to call in to Flight Command. “We’ve found the heart,” she said. “Entering now.”
She lowered herself down through the opening. I hesitated only a moment, then climbed down after her. My heart began beating faster, but our headlights showed only a small, empty chamber with a very low ceiling.
“Well done,” Winzik’s voice said in our ears. “Alanik of the UrDail and Brade Shimabukuro, you are the seventh pair to reach this room in the training.”
“What happens now?” I asked. “I mean, if we were in a real delver maze? What would we find?”
“We don’t know what it will look like,” Winzik said. “Nobody has ever returned after entering the membrane. But in the event of a true delver emergency, you must detonate the weapon. The lives of millions may depend on it.”
The weapon. We’d been told several times that one existed, though we had been given no details on it. We were assured that if a real delver emergency happened, we’d each be given ships equipped with one of the weapons, which was apparently like some kind of bomb that we were supposed to detonate near the membrane room.
“Great,” Brade said to Flight Command. “Now that we’ve gotten here, I think we’re ready. Brade out.” She leaped up and pulled herself up from the room through the hole, entering the chamber with the moss.
I followed, turning off the line to Flight Command. “Ready?” I asked her. “Brade, we’ve only made it to the heart once. We need to run this mission many more times.”
“To what end?” she asked. “The rooms are starting to repeat; we’ve seen everything this test maze can show us. We’re as prepared as we’re going to be.”
I caught up to her. “I doubt that. There’s always room for more training.”
“And if this fake maze makes us grow complacent? The real thing will be unexpected. Insane, or at least beyond our kind of sanity. If we just run through these same rooms, we’ll get too comfortable with them. So the more we train, the worse off we could be.”
Once we reached our ships, I hesitated, thinking of what she’d said earlier about being angry. Then, after a moment of indecision, I pulled off my helmet. I didn’t want to risk my microphone picking up what I was going to say, just in case.
Brade had been about to haul herself onto her ship’s wing, but stopped when she saw me. She cocked her head, then pulled off her helmet too. I put mine aside, then gestured for her to do the same.
“What?” she asked.
Again, I nearly told her. I nearly turned off my bracelet, revealed my true face. In this place of lies and shadows, I nearly exposed to her the truth. I wanted so badly to have someone to talk to, someone who might understand.
“What if there were a way to change things?” I said instead. “A way we could make it so humans didn’t need to be treated like you are? To show the Superiority they’re wrong about you?”
She cocked her head and drew her lips together in a dione sort of expression. “That’s the thing,” she said. “They aren’t wrong.”
“What was done to you was unnatural, Brade. You were right to feel angry about it.”
She grabbed her helmet and put it on, then climbed up into her cockpit. I sighed, but did the same. So my helmet was back on when I caught what she said next.
“Flight Command,” Brade said. “We’ve reached the center, so I’m going to test the weapon now.”
“Affirmative,” Winzik said.
Wait. What?
“Brade!” I said, looking across at her cockpit. “I’m not even strapped into my—”
She pushed a button on her console, and a flash burst from the center of her ship. It hit me like an invisible wave, connecting not with my body, but with my mind.
In that moment, I immediately knew the way home.