ship, and—judging by my soft violet hands—my hologram was still working as well. If this mission failed, it wouldn’t be due to the limitations of the technology—it would be because of the limitations of the spy.
“First things first,” I said. “We need to check our retreat and see if we can get home, if things go poorly. Give me just another minute or so.”
I breathed in and out, calming myself, doing the exercises Gran-Gran had taught me. Exercises she’d learned from her mother, who had been the one who’d hyperjumped our old space fleet before we’d crashed on Detritus.
I’d jumped here to perform this mission, but I wanted to know: Could I jump back if I needed to? Everything would get a whole lot easier if this expansion of my powers, as granted by Alanik touching my brain, could work again.
I imagined myself floating in space . . . stars zipping around . . . Yes, having just hyperjumped, I felt a familiarity to the action. The nowhere was close. I’d just been there. I could return.
Those things would see me again.
Don’t think about that, I told myself sternly. I concentrated on the exercise. I was flying, shooting through the stars, zipping away . . .
Where? That was the problem. For anything other than a very short jump, I’d need to know exactly where I was going. I couldn’t simply reverse the directions Alanik had given me, because they hadn’t included my starting point of Detritus, only my destination of this space station.
“M-Bot,” I said, coming out of my trance. “Can you calculate our location?”
“Currently calculating, using astronomical data. But I warn you, Spensa, my stalling is not working. They’re sending ships out to investigate.”
“What have you been doing?”
“Sending them binary code.”
“What?” I said. “That’s how you decided to stall?”
“I don’t know! I figured, ‘Organics like dumb things, and this is pretty dumb.’ In hindsight, maybe it wasn’t dumb enough? Anyway, they’ll have visual on us within the minute.”
The moment of truth. I took a deep breath. I was a warrior. Trained by my grandmother from childhood to face my heroic destiny with courage. You can do this, I told myself. It’s just a battle of a different kind. Like Hua Mulan or Epipole of Carystus, going to battle wearing another person’s identity.
I’d heard those stories a dozen times over from Gran-Gran. The thing was, the subterfuge of both women had eventually been discovered. And it hadn’t exactly gone well for either one.
I’d just have to be sure not to end up like them. I turned M-Bot as two ships approached from the distant station. Boxy and painted white, they were like the Krell shuttlecraft I’d seen at the space station near Detritus.
The two ships leveled off with mine, rotating to the same axis so we could see each other through the glassy fronts of their crafts. The pilots were a pair of aliens with crimson skin. They didn’t wear helmets, and I could see that they were hairless and had prominent eye ridges and cheekbones. They looked basically humanoid—two arms, one head—but were alien enough that I couldn’t distinguish their gender.
M-Bot patched through their communication, and alien chatter filled my cockpit. I dug out Alanik’s translating device and clicked it on, and the chatter was translated into her language, which didn’t do me a whole lot of good.
“M-Bot,” I hissed. “You said you’d fix that.”
“Whoops,” he said. “Hacking into the pin’s language interface . . . Ha! I activated the English setting.”
“Unidentified ship,” an alien said. “Do you require assistance? Please classify yourself.”
I launched right into it. No choice now. “My name is Alanik of the UrDail. I’m a pilot and messenger from the planet . . .”
“ReDawn,” M-Bot whispered.
“From the planet ReDawn. I have come to be a pilot for you guys. Um, in your space force. Like you asked?” I winced. That wasn’t terribly convincing. “Sorry about the odd communication earlier. My computer can be a real pain sometimes.”
“Ha ha,” M-Bot said to me. “That was sarcasm. I can tell because it wasn’t actually funny.”
The two patrol ships were silent for some time, probably having switched over to a private comm line. I was left to wait, hanging there in space, worrying. I examined their boxy white ships—and oddly, I couldn’t find any weapon ports on them.
“Emissary Alanik,” one of the aliens said, coming back on, “Platform Docking Authority sends you welcome. It seems they have been expecting you, though they note that you’re later than you