myself from his grip. “I’m fine,” I said. “Just got a little caught up in the video.”
“Great. We’re still going to talk later,” Jorgen said.
Cobb waved for me to follow him out of the room, and I made my way to the door, though just before we left he paused and looked back in. “Lieutenant McCaffrey?” he asked.
“Sir?” Rodge said, perking up from beside the wall.
“You still working on that project of yours?”
“Yes, sir!” Rodge said.
“Good. Go see if your theories work. I’ll talk to you later.” He continued on, leading me out of the room.
“What was that about, sir?” I asked him as the door shut behind us.
“That’s not important now,” he said, leading me into the observatory across the hall. A wide, shallow room, the observatory was named for its dramatic view of the planet below. I stepped inside, and through the wall-to-wall window Detritus confronted me.
Cobb stood at the window and took a sip of coffee. I approached, trying to keep the trepidation from showing in my steps. I couldn’t help but glance over my shoulder toward the room where we had watched the video.
“What did you see in that video?” Cobb asked.
“Myself,” I said. I could speak honestly to Cobb. He’d long since proven he deserved my trust, and more. “I know it sounds impossible, Cobb, but the darkness in the video took shape, and it was me.”
“I once watched my best friend and wingmate try to kill me, Spensa,” he said softly. “We now know something had overwritten what he saw—or the way his brain interpreted what he saw—so he mistook me for the enemy.”
“You think . . . this is similar?”
“I have no other explanation as to why you’d see yourself in a video archive hundreds of years old.” He took a long drink of his coffee, tipping the cup back to get the last drops. Then he lowered it. “We’re blind here. We don’t know what the enemy is capable of—or really even who the enemy are. You see anything else in that darkness?”
“I thought I heard something tell me . . . that it ‘heard’ me. But that felt different somehow. From a different place, and not nearly as angry. I don’t know how to explain it.”
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,