an hour and a half? Fly in for forty-five minutes, start accustoming yourself to the strange ways of the place, then fly back out.”
“Very well. Good luck.” Vapor and Morriumur moved off, while Hesho commanded his helmsman to guide the kitsen ship up beside mine.
“Does it strike you as odd,” I asked him, “that we complain about Morriumur being aggressive right after Brade flew off on her own? Morriumur is a fair bit less aggressive than I am. Even less than you are, I’d say.”
“Morriumur is not a member of a ‘lesser species,’ ” Hesho said. “Others expect more of them because of the vaunted ‘primary intelligence’ their species has.”
“I’ve never understood that,” I said as the two of us flew inward, picking a different section to attack from Vapor and Morriumur. The delver maze was so big, that wasn’t a problem. “What does ‘primary intelligence’ even mean?”
“It is just a term, not an actual measure of their relative intelligence,” Hesho said. “From what I’ve been able to gather, it means their species has created a peaceful society, where crime is reduced to near nonexistence.”
I sniffed. Peaceful society? I didn’t buy that for a moment—and if I had ever been inclined to, Alanik’s last words would have disabused me. Don’t trust their peace.
Hesho and I approached the delver maze, and I smothered the feelings of concern that rose inside me. Last time I’d gone in here, it had been a very strange experience. But I could handle that. A hero didn’t pick her trials.
“You and your crew ready?” I asked Hesho as the first of the embers neared us.
“The Swims Upstream is ready for action, Captain,” Hesho said. “This moment . . . it awaits us like the tongue awaits the wine.”
We fought our way through the embers. Then—side by side—the two of us swooped in through one of the many holes in our section of the delver maze. I hugged the kitsen’s larger, more heavily shielded ship as we entered a long steel tunnel ribbed with pillarlike folds at periodic intervals. There were no internal lights, so we turned on our floods.
“Sensor department,” Hesho said to his team, “get a close-up shot of those symbols on the wall.”
“Roger,” another kitsen said.
I drifted to the side, shining my lights on another field of strange writing etched into the wall here.
“We can’t translate them, Your Normalness,” said Kauri. “But the symbols are similar to ones found near nowhere portals on some planets and stations.”
“Nowhere portals?” I asked, frowning.
“Many people have tried to study the delvers in their own realm, Captain,” Hesho said. “Kauri, explain if you please.”
“Nowhere portals are stable openings,” Kauri said, “like wormholes leading into the nowhere. They are often marked by similar symbols. These portals are how acclivity stone is mined and transported to our realm—but I don’t know why the symbols would be here. I see no sign of a portal.”
Huh. I pulled my ship right up to the symbols, shining my floodlights on them. “I saw some of these symbols back on my homeworld,” I said. “Inside a tunnel near my home.”
“Then I should like to visit and see that,” Kauri said. “It’s possible your home has access to an unknown nowhere portal. That could bring riches—the Superiority keeps very careful control over their nowhere portals, as there is no other source of acclivity stone.”
Huh. I didn’t say more because I didn’t want to give away the truth—that these writings had been in the caverns on Detritus, not Alanik’s homeworld.
The old inhabitants of Detritus had fallen to the delvers. And I was increasingly certain that what Cuna had told me was right—the people of Detritus had courted that destruction by trying to control the delvers. They’d set up shielding, had tried to be quiet, but none of their precautions had worked. When the delver had come for the people of Detritus, it had easily bypassed their protections.
The tunnel around me suddenly looked like it had turned into flesh. It was as if I were in the veins of some enormous beast. I gritted my teeth. “Hesho, what do you see?”
“The tunnel has changed,” he said. “To feeling like it is submerged. Do you see this? It is a strange experience.”
“I feel like I’m in an enormous vein,” I said. “It’s a hologram—an illusion. Remember?”
“Yes,” Hesho said. “We are shown different things. Thankfully, we have two ships.”
I wondered how Brade was doing in here by herself.
“The illusion is curious,” Hesho said. “I feel like a stone plucked