noticed me, and Rikolfr nudged Cobb. “Spin?” the admiral asked, stepping up.
“I need to go, sir,” I said, still staring at the battle map.
“I don’t know if we can risk you,” he said. “None of our other ships can protect your brain from cytonic attacks. Besides, we don’t know if we can get any of these hyperspace slugs you mention . . . so, well, you might be needed soon.”
“I’m needed right now,” I said. I looked down at him. “Something terrible is about to happen. I don’t think I can explain it to you. I don’t have the time. But I have to stop it.”
“Go,” he told me. “We might be able to defeat the fighters, but those battleships? Now that they’ve finally decided to throw everything at us, our time is running out. So if you can do something . . . well, go. Saints watch over you.”
I was off and running toward the hall before he even finished.
39
As I ran, I felt the shadow grow stronger inside me.
By approaching the nowhere to listen, I’d let more of it in. The thoughts of the delvers. They touched the part of me that I couldn’t explain.
This part of me hated everyone. The buzzing noises people made. The clicks and the disruption of the pure calm void that was space.
The human inside me fought back. It saw lives behind the blips on the screen. It had flown with the enemy and had found friends in them.
I didn’t understand myself. How could I be both of these things at once? How could I want to stop the fighting, but at the same time hope they’d all just destroy themselves?
I exploded from the bay of Platform Prime, flying my Superiority ship, as it was the only ship not in use at the moment. Cobb really was worried. He’d mobilized every fighter we had.
Following a provided course through the shells around Detritus, I accelerated constantly, my back pressing into the seat. Eventually I emerged into space beyond the shells—and confronted the chaos of hundreds of ships fighting at once. Destructor blasts tore streaks through the blackness, and ships exploded with flashes of light that were quickly extinguished. In the distance, the Weights and Measures watched stoically alongside the two battleships.
I thought I understood Winzik’s plan, and it had a kind of twisted brilliance to it. He needed to exterminate the humans of Detritus. By escaping, we were coming too close to proving him weak, or even a fraud. But he didn’t yet have the space force he needed to do the job himself.
At the same time, he needed a delver in our realm that he could control and use as a threat. He couldn’t be seen summoning it himself, however. So what did he do? He sent his forces to Detritus to “bravely fight” the humans. Then he secretly had Brade draw a delver into our realm and let it destroy Detritus. He could blame the summoning on us. After all, everyone knew the humans had tried to do this once before.
After consuming the humans, the delver would move on, searching for other prey. But Winzik could use his newly trained space force to control it—send it someplace safe, bounce it between unpopulated worlds.
In so doing, he’d become a hero—and the most important being in the galaxy. Because with a roving delver threatening all the civilized worlds, only his force would provide any protection. His pilots would be on call to defend planets who asked for them—but if someone opposed him, well, the delver might just find its way to their region with no defense force to send it away.
Brutal. Effective.
Terrifying.
I boosted toward the fight, where starfighters spun and dodged, blasted and fought. Where was Brade? I could hear her shouting into the nowhere, but I couldn’t sense where. Would she be on the Weights and Measures?
No. They wouldn’t want the thing to come into our realm near one of their ships. She’ll be out here somewhere.
But where? This battle was several times larger than any I’d been in before—probably larger, I realized, than anyone in this fight had ever seen. The battlefield was quickly devolving into chaos as flights tried to stick together and admirals frantically tried to keep a coherent strategy.
A familiar sense of excitement built inside me, the anticipation of the fight, the opportunity to push myself. But . . . today it was accompanied by a hesitance I might once have called cowardice. I silently thanked Cobb for beating