Starsight

“And for the record, I don’t accept the excuses that the administration gives for why the humans were allowed access to technology in the first place. This talk of keeping them focused by providing space battles to engage them? Nonsense. The administration is making excuses to cover up an uncontrolled explosion of human aggression that began some ten years ago. High Minister Ved should have listened to the advice of experts such as myself, and dealt with the humans more harshly.”

I sank down into the seat as the report returned to playing the recorded dogfights. I’d lived my entire life knowing that the Krell were trying to exterminate us, but to hear someone speak of us this way . . . so dispassionately . . . At my request, M-Bot changed the station to another, which had a panel of experts talking. Another channel showed the same footage.

The more I watched, the more small I felt. The way these newspeople spoke . . . stole something precious from me. It reduced my entire people—our heroism, our deaths, our struggles—to an outbreak of pests. I walked to the window again.

No chaos in the streets. People streaming in and out of their shops, going about their lives. Oddly, even as I found it difficult to summon my hatred for them, I did feel a growing hatred for the government that ruled them. The government hadn’t just killed my father; now they made him out to be some insect to be swatted.

Tiny, a part of me thought, looking out at the people flowing on those streets. All so tiny.

The Superiority thought they were so grand? They too were just insects. Biting bugs. An itching noise that needed to be silenced. Why were these pests snapping at me? It would take barely a thought to smother them all, and . . .

And what was I thinking? I lurched back from the window, feeling sick. I felt the eyes watching me all around, and somehow understood them. Those thoughts about insects were their thoughts.

I . . . Something was happening to me. Something related to the delvers, the nowhere, and my abilities. M-Bot worried he was the shadow. But he had no idea.

I looked at the desk where I’d been working. There sat the casing, perhaps as large as a human head, where I’d attached the three components I’d taken out of M-Bot. I seized it and stomped out of my room, leaving Doomslug to trill questioningly after me.

I climbed onto the roof, then crawled under the tarp that hid M-Bot. The drone lay where I’d left it, sitting on my seat in his cockpit, attached to the console by wires.

“How much longer?” I asked him. “Until you’re done programming it?”

“I’m finished,” M-Bot said. “I was done not long after you left the house with Morriumur. I would like a day to run it through diagnostic tests.”

“No time,” I said. “Show me how to hook this piece I built onto the bottom.”

He popped a set of instructions up on his monitor, and I worked quietly, affixing wires and screwing my makeshift sensor bundle onto the bottom of the reprogrammed drone.

“I am monitoring eighty different Superiority channels,” M-Bot noted. “Many of them are talking about Detritus.”

I kept working.

“Most of the people talking on these shows are angry, Spensa,” he said. “They’re making an outcry for stronger measures to be used against your people.”

“What stronger measures could they make than parking a fleet of battleships on our doorstep?” I asked.

“I’m running simulations, and none of the outcomes are good.” M-Bot paused. “Your people need hyperdrives. The only way to escape such an overwhelming force is to run.”

I held up the drone, then activated it. The two small acclivity rings began to glow with a deep blue color underneath the wings, holding the thing in the air somewhat precariously, with the large sensor module attached to the bottom.

“Drone?” I asked. “Are you awake?”

“Integrated AI install successful,” the drone said in a monotone voice.

“How are you feeling?”

“I do not understand how to answer that question,” it said.

“It’s not alive,” M-Bot said. “Or . . . well, it’s not whatever . . . I am.”

“Drone,” I said. “Engage active camouflage.”

It vanished—projecting a hologram onto its exterior that made it look like I was seeing through it. That, plus the sensor scrambler, should hide it from all but the most dedicated scan.

“Active camouflage has weaknesses,” M-Bot noted. “It’s impossible to properly make something invisible from all angles using this kind of technology. Look at it from the side, then have it move.”

I twisted around, and he was right. From the side, the invisibility wasn’t nearly as convincing—there was a ripple in the air marking where the drone was. When it moved, the ripple was more noticeable.