you need?” he calls out.
“Yeah. I have them.” I ramble off the sequence ALCOR Prime gave me back in that… place and Luck enters them in one by one. Then he puts on a pair of goggles and throws a pair at me. I catch them and slide them over my eyes. “Ready or not, here we go,” Luck yells.
And no sooner are my eyes protected than a sun appears in the center of the room.
And then it disappears. And in its place is the spin node, an undulating, crackling blue blob of possibilities.
I’m suddenly afraid. Of finding her. Of not finding her. Of winning and losing. I’m suddenly scared of everything. Of all the possible futures and pasts that wait for me inside that node. I look back at Luck. “What do I do?”
“Walk through, dumbass.”
“What’s gonna happen to me?”
He shakes his head. “I don’t know, Crux. I have no idea.”
“What if I can’t find her?”
“What if you can?”
“What if I get lost?”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake. Stop being a pussy and get your ass inside that fucking node!”
I just… freeze. And stare at my brother for a minute. One last look. “I love you, ya know.”
He swallows hard and nods. “I know.”
“I’m not going to kill them, Luck. Even if it means we have to start over from nothing and lose again a million more times. I’m not gonna do it.”
But to my surprise, Luck shakes his head. “That’s not how this ends and we both know it. Because if we don’t explode them, Crux, we lose bigger. Then… they’ll have them. And that’s not the kind of loss I can live with. We can’t just hand them over. You have no idea what they did to her when she was a girl. You have no idea what the silver princess Nyleena has endured. But I do. And I won’t give her back, Crux. I won’t do it.”
His fear is so clear, I wonder how I missed it earlier.
He killed me because he wanted it to be that simple. He wanted me to be the worst-case scenario.
But me exploding the woman he loves isn’t the worst-case scenario.
Nyleena in the hands of the Akeelian and Cygnian overlords is.
I nod at him. “I’ll find a way.”
“I know you will,” he says. “And… And I’m…”
“You don’t need to say it,” I tell him. “I already know.”
Alarms start blaring outside the museum.
“What the fuck is that?” Luck asks.
I ponder the sound and pitch of the sirens. Decide it’s a level one disaster. I look at Luck and shrug. “Just another fucking day on Harem Station.”
Then I turn away and walk into the node.
CHAPTER TWENTY - FLICKA
Thirty minutes earlier, while Valor was trying to explain their superpowers, Flicka was deep down inside the lowest levels of Harem Station surrounded by a sound that could only be described as a hum. It wasn’t the soft hum people make when they are content and distracted and talking in small groups. It wasn’t the almost invisible hum of white noise in the background, either.
It was something completely unique, yet recognizable.
It was creepy, but alluring.
It was a little bit like the groaning of a ship’s hull before it comes apart. But not like that at all.
If one were familiar with planets, they might be able to describe it as insects. But not any insect they’d ever come across before.
Because the sound deep down in the lowest levels of Harem Station was a dragonbee bot swarm and there had not been a proper swarm of dragonbee bots loose in the universe for thousands of years.
A few hundred here and there, sure. The beebots were an army. They were no strangers to war.
But this was not a few hundred beebots.
This was a few hundred thousand.
Flicka’s commitment and duty to Delphi was still her defining objective, but Crux had come through for her. Pulled Delphi out of that spin node and kept her safe. She was his responsibility now. And Crux had always been the one Harem brother who could be trusted to do the right thing.
So now she felt like her duty to Delphi was over and she could get on with her real job.
And her real job was to kill the AI ALCOR.
Not these copies. The actual AI ALCOR who had escaped just prior to Delphi meeting up with Jimmy and brining Flicka back to Harem Station.
That ALCOR was a particularly sneaky AI.
But he was no dragonbee bot.
Flicka looked at her comrades as she sent them inaudible messages using