During my schooling, I’d taken mandatory heritage classes each year—where we’d seen pictures of Old Earth, and had been taken to see animals of many varieties in special caverns where they were bred. So I knew about life there, and about things like skyscrapers, even if I’d always found Gran-Gran’s stories of the ancient times more interesting than the heritage classes.
Those skyscrapers indicated that these platforms around Detritus had been inhabited once, like the planet had been, but something had destroyed them centuries ago.
The sight of all the platforms—curving into what seemed like infinity—never failed to leave me breathless. Our fifty starfighters were specks of dust by comparison. How long had it taken to build all of this? There were maybe a hundred thousand people living in the cave networks that made up our nation, the Defiant Caverns. But that entire population could vanish into just one of these platforms.
The command came to decelerate. I spun M-Bot with the others and pointed my boosters toward the planet. A quiet, easy burn slowed my ship.
Facing backward toward the shells, it all looked faintly like the gears of some eldritch clock going about an unknowable purpose. Each platform rotating in its turn, guns ready to vaporize anyone—human or alien—who tried to interfere. These shells were the reason we were still alive though, so I wasn’t complaining.
Our ships soon passed the nearest shell to the planet, which was distinctive for several reasons. The most obvious was that it held thousands of massive lights that shone like spotlights, illuminating sections of the planet below. These skylights created an artificial day/night cycle.
This inner shell was also in a far worse state of repair than the outer ones. Enormous fields of debris tumbled through space here just outside the atmosphere. This junk was the remnants of—we assumed—platforms that had been destroyed. Some sections had fallen inward, crashing into the planet after losing power.
A voice crackled in my helmet speaker. “Skyward Flight,” a man’s voice said, “and Xiwang Flight. Admiral Cobb has ordered you to dock on Platform Prime. The rest of you, head down to the surface for off-shift rotation.”
I recognized the speaker as Rikolfr, a member of the admiral’s staff. I complied, turning my ship in the right direction. That brought Detritus into my view: a blue-grey sphere with a bright, inviting atmosphere. Thirty ships from our fleet flew off down toward the planet.
The rest of us skimmed along outside the atmosphere, passing several platforms whose lights blinked a friendly blue, instead of the angry red of the other platforms. Thanks to M-Bot’s stealth capabilities, we’d been able to land on one and hack its systems. Fortunately, the platforms’ internal security protocols made some small exceptions for humans, which had given the engineers a brief respite—long enough to finish their work.
That done, Rodge and the other engineers had figured out how to power down a few of the platforms nearby, letting us reclaim those too. Our work had captured only ten out of thousands so far, but it was a promising start.
Platform Prime was the largest of these—an enormous platform with docking bays for starfighters. We’d turned it into an orbital headquarters, though the engineering teams were still working on some of its systems—most notably the ancient data banks.
I flew into my assigned dock, a small individual hangar. The lights flickered on as the bay door closed, and the room pressurized. I drew in a deep breath and sighed, then opened the canopy. It felt so dull to return after a battle and go back to ordinary life. Unrealistic though it was, I wished that I could continue patrolling and flying. The answers to who I was—to what I was—were out there somewhere, not in these sterile metallic hallways.
“Hey!” M-Bot said as I climbed out of the cockpit. “Take me with you. I don’t want to miss the fun.”
“I’m just going to get a lecture.”
“Like I said . . . ,” he replied.
Fine. I reached back under the front control panel and unhooked his new mobile receptor: a bracelet device that contained some sensory equipment, a holographic projector, a receiver to boost M-Bot’s communication capabilities, and a small clock display. He claimed to have had a mobile receptor like it in the past, but it was missing—his old pilot had probably taken it hundreds of years ago when he’d gone out to explore Detritus.
When M-Bot had given the engineers plans to create a new one, they’d gone crazy over the microhologram technology it contained. Fortunately,