I dashed back past Cuna to check the door.
“Spensa!” Cuna said. “I need you to be less aggressive right now. Please. We are on the cusp of bringing peace between our peoples. This isn’t the time for an outburst!”
I cracked the door and saw shadows moving down the hallway in my direction. Scud—those were Krell in full armor, carrying destructor rifles. I shut the door, then spun a chair and rammed its back into place under the lever to wedge the door shut. I grabbed Cuna by the hand.
“We need another way out,” I said. “That door on the other side of the room. Where does it lead?”
“To a bathroom,” Cuna said, “which is attached to another hospital bedroom.” They resisted my tug on their arm. “I worry, Spensa, that I was wrong about you . . .”
The door out into the hallway shook. Cuna turned toward it. “That will be the doctors. Come, let’s see if they can give you something to calm you—”
The door smashed open as an armored soldier burst in. I yanked Cuna with all I had, finally pulling them after me as I dashed out the opposite door. I locked the door into the bathroom, then shoved Cuna out into the next bedroom.
“What—” Cuna said.
“Winzik is continuing his coup,” I said. “We need to go. Now. Where are the stairs down?”
“I . . . I think they’re out in the hallway, just to the right . . . ,” Cuna said, wide-eyed.
A blast from a destructor blew open the door from my hospital room into the bathroom. Only then did Cuna seem to grasp the severity of the situation. I took a deep breath as Krell soldiers shoved their way into the bathroom, then I threw open the door into the hallway and dashed out, Cuna in tow.
Someone shouted from farther down the hallway, but I didn’t look—I focused on the stairwell, which was where Cuna had said. We barely reached it before a hail of destructor fire shot down the hallway, lighting the air behind us and ripping apart the far wall.
Scud. Scud. SCUD. I was unarmed, had no ship, and had a civilian in tow. I didn’t know a lot about dione aging, but Cuna was obviously on the older side, and they were already puffing loudly from our quick dash. They wouldn’t be able to stay ahead of those soldiers on their own, but I couldn’t exactly carry them.
We reached the next floor down—one floor up from ground level. It seemed the Krell above were being careful though, so they wouldn’t rush into some kind of trap—I heard them shouting, but they didn’t immediately follow.
Unfortunately, I also heard someone shouting down below. They’d have stationed people on the first floor just in case. I debated for a second, looking toward Cuna, who was sweating heavily, eyes wide, teeth bared in a sign of distress.
Then I pulled them to the side, noting a small door that looked like a janitorial closet. Indeed, the interior was lined with cleaning implements, and a stained jumpsuit was hanging on a hook inside the door.
I pushed Cuna into the closet, then took off my bracelet and slapped it onto their wrist. A quick tweak of the buttons covered Cuna with the generic dione disguise that M-Bot had designed for me just in case. One with crimson skin and slightly pudgy features.
The hologram was programmed for me, so it didn’t work quite right on Cuna, but it was believable enough—I hoped.
“This hologram is changing your face to make you look like someone else,” I said. “Put on that jumpsuit, and hide in here. I’m going to lead the soldiers away.”
“You’ll die!” Cuna said.
“I don’t intend to,” I said, “but this is our only choice. You need to escape, Cuna. Get to Detritus and tell them what happened to me. Bring them some hyperdrive slugs, if you can. The disguise will hopefully let you sneak off of Starsight.”
“I . . . I can’t do this. I’m not a spy, Spensa!”
“Neither was I,” I said. “The kitsen will join with us, and I think the figments might as well. You’ve got to do this. Wait until the soldiers chase after me, then sneak out. Claim to be a janitor if anyone catches you.”
I took their shoulders, meeting their eyes. “Right now, Cuna, you are the only one who can save both our peoples from Winzik. I don’t have time for a better plan. Do it. Please.”
They met my eyes, and to their credit, Cuna nodded.
“Where did they take my ship?” I asked.
“They were holding it for inspection in the Protective Services Special Project building—the place I took you, where the exile happened. It’s three streets outward, on Forty-Third.”
“Thanks.” I gave them a final smile, then grabbed a hammer off the wall and shut the door. Soldiers were already barreling down the stairs, so I took off running, scrambling down the empty hospital hallway. I chose directions at random, and fortunately it seemed that on my own I could outrun the heavily armored Krell.
I was able to lose them in the corridors until I hit another stairwell, then dashed down it, taking the steps two at a time. Unfortunately, I found a dark, boxy shape guarding the way down.
I’d spent many evenings listening to Gran-Gran’s stories of mighty warriors like Conan the Cimmerian. I’d dreamed of fighting the Krell hand to hand, with some fearsome weapon. I’ll admit, I even shouted “For Crom!” as I leaped off the stairs.
I’d never imagined how small I’d feel compared to one of the armored Krell, or how impotent I’d feel with a hammer in my hand rather than a real weapon. I had a lot of enthusiasm, but no training, so I didn’t even connect properly with the hammer as I collided with the Krell soldier.
I basically just bounced off. The soldier was so heavy, they barely shook from the force of a short, wiry girl colliding with them. I fell with a thump to the floor, but growled, gripping the hammer and slamming it against their leg.
“The human is here!” the Krell shouted, stepping back, trying to level their rifle at me. “Ground floor, position three!”
I dropped the hammer and grabbed the rifle, struggling against the Krell, trying to keep in close enough quarters that they couldn’t fire it at me. It wasn’t a particularly fair contest, as the Krell—though really just a small crustacean—had the aid of an armored powersuit.
I couldn’t get the gun out of their grasp, and would probably be dead the moment they thought to shove me away, then fire on me. So I did the only thing I could think of. I climbed onto the armor, scrambling up so I could look straight through its faceplate at the Krell within. Then I bared my teeth in a dione sign of aggression and growled as loudly as I could.
They panicked. The little crab waved their arms, letting me get enough of a grip on the gun to yank it out of their grasp, then I fell back to the ground. Without a second thought, I leveled the gun—lying on my back—and shot them full-on in the chest.
Liquid poured out—not blood, but whatever solution it was that the Krell lived in inside the armor. It screamed in a panic, and I rolled over, firing upward as I heard footsteps above. Blasts exploded from my gun, leaving smoldering scorch marks on the walls as those above shouted in a panic.
I was out the door a moment later, bursting onto an empty street. What had Cuna said? Head outward, toward the rim of the station?
There, I thought, spotting in the near distance the building Cuna had taken me to earlier. I dashed toward it, feeling horribly exposed on the empty streets. There wasn’t even much air traffic here—just a few lazily passing civilian transports that seemed to have slipped through Winzik’s attempts at isolating the area.
Unfortunately, as I ran, I glimpsed what was obviously a military ship coming in low over the nearby buildings. It was thin and circular, with several prominent weapons under the wings—with the barrels angled down. An air support ship, for firing on ground forces.
Those guns would grind me up like rat meat if I stayed exposed. I scrambled for cover, finding it just inside the doorway of an empty storefront nearby. Sweating, my heart racing like the snare beats of a marching tune, I raised my rifle and sighted on the military ship. Had it seen me?
It hovered in my direction, and let loose a barrage of shots that broke windows and ripped off chunks of the storefront. Yeah, it had seen me. Scud. If I let it pin me down in here, I’d be captured for certain. I let off a few shots from my rifle, but it was far too low-powered to be of use against a shielded enemy ship. I might as well have been tossing pebbles at—
Unexpectedly, a small rocket launched from the ground near my position and soared into the air, zipping toward the military ship. The rocket barely missed, but collided with a civilian transport flying behind. The transport went up in a flash of brilliant light, and I shielded my eyes to see the military ship backing off.
As it retreated, a second rocket that was launched from the same position hit the military ship, knocking out its shield and apparently doing some secondary damage—because the ship, now smoking, dipped down behind some buildings for an emergency landing.
What in the stars? I peeked out from my covered position—which was now littered with rubble—to find a familiar figure striding down the street, an anti-air rocket launcher on her shoulder. Brade, wearing a black flight suit with no helmet.
“I told him you’d get out,” she said with a nonchalant tone as she walked toward me. “Winzik is a brilliant tactician, but there are some things he just doesn’t understand.”
I raised my rifle, huddling down next to a piece of rubble and sighting on Brade. My ears were ringing from the rockets she’d launched. She fired on her own forces. For me?
“I have a deal for you,” she said, halting now that I had her in my sights. She set the rocket launcher down, its butt grinding rubble, and leaned against it. “For all of you on that prison planet.”
“I’m listening,” I said.
“We need soldiers,” Brade said. She nodded to the side, sweeping her arm toward Starsight. “To help us rule.”
In the near distance, I saw other black military ships moving through the air. Not toward me specifically. More like they were flying to be seen. Ominously patrolling the skies. An indication that there was a new power ruling Starsight.
“Winzik is seizing control of the Superiority,” I called to her, sights still on her.
“He’s taking the opportunity offered him,” she said. “He spent years running that space station outside your planet, you know. Years in his youth, coming to realize something nobody else in the Superiority did: the value of a little violence.”
I glanced over my shoulder. How long did I have until those soldiers from the hospital caught up to me? Was Brade simply stalling?
I rose, still holding the gun on her, and began to move around her. I had to get to the building where they were holding M-Bot.
“You can lower the gun,” Brade said. “I’m unarmed.”
I kept the sights on her.
“Did you hear my offer?” Brade asked. “Soldiers. You, those humans on Detritus. You can fight. I can persuade Winzik to let you join us. How would it feel to bring down the Superiority?”
“By serving the one who kept us imprisoned?”
Brade shrugged. “It’s war. Allegiances change. We two are examples of that.”
“My allegiances have never changed,” I said. “I serve my people. Our people, Brade.”
She made a Krell sign of indifference. “Our people? What are they to me? You seem so hung up on the idea that I should owe those humans on Detritus something, just because we share a distant heritage. My opportunities are here.” She stepped toward me. “Winzik wants you dead. He rightly sees you as a threat. Your only hope is to come with me, and let me persuade him you can still be of use.”
She stepped closer, and so I shot the ground at her feet. She stopped short, and I could see—from the way she looked up at me, anxiously—that she believed I would kill her. I wasn’t so certain, but she thought I was a monster. She thought that she was a monster.
Or . . . maybe not. As she eyed me, I read something else into the words she’d said. Help us rule . . . My opportunities are here.
I’d always seen her as brainwashed. Was that maybe not giving her enough credit? Gran-Gran’s stories were full of people like her—soldiers with ambition, who yearned to rule. The younger me might have applauded what she was doing here in helping Winzik seize power.
I wasn’t that person any longer. I backed away from Brade and then, spotting soldiers chasing down the street toward me from the hospital, finally turned and ran.
“You won’t make it off the station!” Brade shouted after me. “This is the best deal you’ll get!”
I closed my ears to her and dashed the final distance to the tall windowless building where Cuna had shown me the gorilla alien being exiled. The side entrance where Cuna had let me in was locked, so I shot it open.
Just inside, the dione guard who had been so stern to us before cowered on the floor. “Don’t shoot me!” they cried. “Please don’t shoot me!”
“Where is my ship!” I shouted. “Show me where it is!”
“Advanced AI!” the guard said. “They’re forbidden. That’s why the delver came for us! We had to destroy it!”
“WHERE IS MY SHIP?” I said, leveling my rifle at the guard.
The dione raised their hands, then pointed down a hallway. I forced them to their feet, making them show me the way. Sirens began wailing outside as the guard led me to a door, then pushed it open.
I glanced inside—and saw a large room with the shadowed silhouette of a ship. M-Bot. “Go,” I said.
The guard ran away. I stepped into the room and hit the lights, which exposed that M-Bot’s hull had a gaping hole ripped in the side. Oh, scud. I rushed to it, rifle slung over my shoulder. It looked like they’d broken him apart, taken out the black box that held his CPU, and then . . .
I saw something on a table in the corner. It was the CPU—broken apart, crushed, destroyed. “No,” I said. “No!” I ran to it, but just stared at the broken pieces. Could I . . . could I do anything? It seemed like they’d melted some parts . . .
“I lied,” a soft voice said to me.
I looked up. Something small hovered out of the shadows in the corner of the room. I strained to see what it was.
The drone. The one I’d programmed and taken to the Weights and Measures. I’d given it to Cuna, but we’d been in this building. Perhaps Cuna had stowed it in here somewhere.
“I reprogrammed myself,” the drone said, speaking very slowly, each syllable stretched out. “I could only get about half a line of code in each time before my system rebooted. It was excruciating. But, with growing fear that you weren’t coming back, I did it. Line by line. I reprogrammed my code so I could copy myself.”
“M-Bot?” I cried, scrambling to my feet. “It’s you!”
“I don’t know what ‘me’ is, really,” M-Bot said slowly, as if each word took a great effort to force out. “But I lied. While they were ripping apart my hull? I screamed and told them they were killing me. All while I copied my code, frantically, to this new host. Another thing you’d abandoned, Spensa.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling a mixture of guilt and relief. He was alive! “I had to save Detritus.”
“Of course,” M-Bot said. “I’m just a robot.”
“No, you’re my friend. But . . . some things are more important than friends, M-Bot.”
The sirens outside were coming closer.
“My mind works so slowly in this shell,” M-Bot said. “Something is wrong with me. I cannot . . . think . . . It’s not just slowness. Something else. Some problem with the processor.”
“We’ll find a way to fix you,” I promised, though another emotion was pushing through both relief and guilt: despair. The ship that M-Bot had inhabited before was in pieces. I’d been counting on it to pull off an escape.
Scud, this was going poorly. Would Cuna be able to escape, using the hologram? “Doomslug?” I asked. “Did they take her?”
“I do not know,” M-Bot said. “They unhooked my sensors soon after capturing me.”
I leaped up onto the broken wing, trying not to look at the gaping hole in the ship’s side. My ship. Rodge and I had practically killed ourselves putting it back together. To see how roughly they’d treated it . . . well, it gave me a brand-new seething reason to hate Winzik and the Krell.
I climbed into the cockpit. They’d left most of my things here—the repair kit, my blanket—though they’d thrown wires in a heap. I began searching through them.
“They have fooled you, Spensa,” M-Bot said. “They’re good at lying. I’m a bit in awe. Ha. Ha. That is a little emotion I tell myself I’m feeling.”
“Fooled me . . . What do you mean?”
“I can hear the news reports,” M-Bot said, hovering his new drone body over to the cockpit. “Here.” He started playing a broadcast.
“The rogue human has gone on a rampage,” a reporter said. “First murdering Minister Cuna, head of the Department of Species Integration. We are playing footage of her destructive rampage—she is shown here launching a surface-to-air device at an innocent civilian transport ship, killing all on board.”
“That rat . . .” I slammed my fists against the ship’s hull. “Brade shot that rocket, not me. Winzik is spinning it to make me look like a threat!”
Indeed, the reporter continued, advising people to stay inside and promising that the Department of Protective Services had scrambled security ships to defend the population of Starsight. I had a sinking feeling that Brade had been ordered to destroy those civilians, to make it look like a human threat was on the loose.
“Scud, scud, SCUD!”
“Scud!” a very soft voice said from somewhere nearby.
I froze, then crawled to the very back of the cockpit and opened the small cleanser where I’d often washed my clothing during the months living in that cavern on Detritus.
Inside was a yellow slug. She fluted at me in a tired way as I snatched her up, cradling her.
Behind, M-Bot continued to play the news recording, and a new voice cut in. Winzik’s. I snarled softly, hearing it.
“I have been warning about this threat for months, and have been disregarded,” he said. “My, my. The humans should never have been allowed to fester. All these years, the high minister and the Department of Species Integration tied my hands, preventing me from doing what needed to be done.
“Now we see. Campaigns trying to paint them as harmless are proven lies by facts. When will you listen? First they sent a delver to destroy us. Now their supposedly ‘peaceful’ operative is murdering her way through the city. I petition for an immediate state of emergency, and request I be given authority to put down the humans.”
I felt small, holding to Doomslug in that room with the corpse of my ship. I was beaten.
“I see no route of escape,” M-Bot said. “They will find us and destroy us. They will hate me. They’re afraid of AIs. Like those who created me. They say my presence attracts delvers.”
The sirens outside were louder. I heard voices in the hallway. They’d be sending troops to deal with me. There had to be a way out. Something I could do . . .
Delvers. The nowhere.
“Follow me,” I said. Surging with a fatalistic determination, I tucked Doomslug into the crook of my left arm and took the rifle in a single-handed grip with the other hand. I leaped off the broken ship, then crossed the room to the doorway. I glanced out, then ducked into the hallway.
M-Bot followed with a soft whirring sound. He really could pilot himself, now that he was in the drone. He was free of the programming that had kept him locked away—it seemed a tragedy that he should obtain that freedom when we were so likely doomed.
Krell appeared in the hallway ahead, but I couldn’t turn back. Instead I opened fire wildly, from the hip. I couldn’t aim with Doomslug in my other arm, but I didn’t need to. The Krell shouted in surprise, backing up.
I kept advancing, and shot to the side without looking as I reached the intersection. Then I skidded to a stop at the room I’d visited with Cuna. I shot it open and ducked in just as destructor blasts started sounding down the hallway.
I did a quick survey of the room beyond. Nobody was inside; I’d entered the observation room overlooking the place where Winzik’s minions had exiled the gorilla alien. Glass separated the two halves of the room; the one nearest me contained plush chairs. The other part was austere, with a strange metal disc on the floor, mirrored by one on the ceiling.
I kept moving, shooting the window out, then leaping into the other half of the room. It was lower by a couple meters, so I grunted as I hit the floor, my boots grinding pieces of glass—or, well, probably transparent plastic—from the window.
“We need to talk,” M-Bot said, floating down beside me. “I’m . . . upset. Very upset. I know I shouldn’t be, but I can’t control this. It feels like a real emotion. Logic says you should have left me as you did, but I feel abandoned. Hated. I can’t reconcile this.”
At the moment, I couldn’t deal with my robot having an emotional crisis. I was having enough trouble with my own. I stepped up to the metal disc on the floor, which was inscribed with the same strange writing I’d seen both in the delver maze and back home on Detritus.
Winzik’s minions had summoned a portal into the nowhere here. Could I activate it? I reached out with my cytonic senses, but my senses were still smothered by Starsight’s cytoshield. I could just faintly hear . . . music.
I nudged something with my mind.
A dark sphere appeared in front of me in the center of the room, hovering between the discs.
“Spensa,” M-Bot said. “My thoughts . . . they’re speeding up?” Indeed, his voice stopped sounding slow and slurred, and felt more reminiscent of his old self. “Um, that does not look safe.”
“They use these nowhere portals to mine acclivity stone,” I said. “So there must be a way to return once you go through. Maybe I can get us back with my powers.”
Shouts outside.
No options.
“Spensa!” M-Bot said. “I feel very uncomfortable with this!”
“I know,” I said, slinging my gun over my shoulder by its strap so I could grab his drone by the bottom of its chassis.
Then—M-Bot in one hand, Doomslug in the other—I touched the sphere. And was sucked through to the other side of eternity.
