can get anyone’s attention on the military channels. We need the city to go silent. The delver can hear their radio signals. I don’t know how we’re going to drive the thing away, but I suspect it will be a lot easier if this city isn’t screaming at it.”
“Understood,” Kauri said. “We’ll do what we can. Good luck.”
“Luck is for those who cannot smell their path forward,” Vapor said. “But . . . perhaps today that is us. So good luck to you too.”
The Swims Upstream broke off from us and started back. Vapor and I continued along just outside the atmosphere bubble. Beneath us, ships were swarming and trying to escape.
“M-Bot?” I asked, trying the secret line the two of us had been using, connected via my bracelet.
There was no response, and using my onboard sensors I was able to get a zoomed-in picture of my embassy building as we passed. The rooftop was empty. So maybe he’d gotten away somehow? Scud, I wished I knew.
Together, Vapor and I approached the delver itself. It evoked an awful sense of scale—and was far more daunting than a mere planetoid would be. Embers emerged from the dust, then smashed repeatedly into the city’s shield, exploding soundlessly in the void—but some of the blasts were the size of entire battleships.
“I can’t help churning upon myself a little,” Vapor said as we approached, “and thinking our training was horribly incomplete.”
“Yeah,” I said. No training in a simulation could approximate the strange sensations the delver sent at me, a kind of crushing feeling upon my mind. It somehow heightened my fear, my anger, and my sense of horror. It was getting worse the closer we got.
A small blip flashed on my proximity sensor.
“What’s that?” Vapor asked.
“It’s her,” I said, noting the ship flying ahead of us. I quickly opened a line. “Brade. You can’t take this thing on by yourself.”
“I’m not going to let it destroy my home,” she said back. “This wasn’t supposed to happen. It was supposed to go after you.”
“Ignore that,” I snapped. “Work with me for once.”
“Alanik . . . you realize what I’m going to do if I reach the center? The only thing I can do?”
Use the diversion weapon, I thought. Send it back toward Detritus again. “We have to send it somewhere else, Brade. We have to try.”
She cut the line.
“That one has always been a foul wind, Alanik,” Vapor said. “She’s . . . Oh. Um.”
She’s human.
“Cover me as we get close,” I said, hitting my boosters.
We flew out from over Starsight, nearing the delver’s dust cloud. The only hope I had for a plan was to try to send the delver somewhere unpopulated. I’d established three hyperjump locations in my mind: Starsight, Detritus, and the deep-space location of the delver maze.
So I only had one real option. I’d have to send it to the maze. But . . . surely it would just find nothing to destroy there, then immediately return to Starsight. What else could I do though? Maybe it would see the maze and be distracted by it? That seemed a frail hope, but it was the only one I had.
Vapor flew out ahead of me and started shooting down the embers that approached. I slowed, and tried to reach out with my mind to the delver.
It was . . . vast. The sensations coming off it smothered me. I could feel how it regarded us. The anger at all the buzzing noises we made. Those same emotions threatened to overwhelm me, alienate me, make me feel the same way it did.
I fought against that, feeding it the location of the maze, trying—as I’d somehow done before—to distract its attention. Unfortunately, before it hadn’t just been me. It had been a mixture of my emotion, the silence on Detritus, and the sound out in the void. The singing stars.
The delver had come here because it knew the noises were greatest here. My current efforts to distract it were swallowed up by the emotion it radiated. I felt like I was screaming into a tempest, and try as I might, I couldn’t pierce the noise.
I cursed, cutting off my attempts and boosting after Vapor, blasting an ember that almost hit her.
“We need to get inside,” I said. “We need to find its heart.”
Vapor fell in next to me, and together we hurtled into the dust. Visibility dropped to nearly nothing, and I had to fly by instruments. We’d been warned we would need to