Starsight

Following a provided course through the shells around Detritus, I accelerated constantly, my back pressing into the seat. Eventually I emerged into space beyond the shells—and confronted the chaos of hundreds of ships fighting at once. Destructor blasts tore streaks through the blackness, and ships exploded with flashes of light that were quickly extinguished. In the distance, the Weights and Measures watched stoically alongside the two battleships.

I thought I understood Winzik’s plan, and it had a kind of twisted brilliance to it. He needed to exterminate the humans of Detritus. By escaping, we were coming too close to proving him weak, or even a fraud. But he didn’t yet have the space force he needed to do the job himself.

At the same time, he needed a delver in our realm that he could control and use as a threat. He couldn’t be seen summoning it himself, however. So what did he do? He sent his forces to Detritus to “bravely fight” the humans. Then he secretly had Brade draw a delver into our realm and let it destroy Detritus. He could blame the summoning on us. After all, everyone knew the humans had tried to do this once before.

After consuming the humans, the delver would move on, searching for other prey. But Winzik could use his newly trained space force to control it—send it someplace safe, bounce it between unpopulated worlds.

In so doing, he’d become a hero—and the most important being in the galaxy. Because with a roving delver threatening all the civilized worlds, only his force would provide any protection. His pilots would be on call to defend planets who asked for them—but if someone opposed him, well, the delver might just find its way to their region with no defense force to send it away.

Brutal. Effective.

Terrifying.

I boosted toward the fight, where starfighters spun and dodged, blasted and fought. Where was Brade? I could hear her shouting into the nowhere, but I couldn’t sense where. Would she be on the Weights and Measures

?

No. They wouldn’t want the thing to come into our realm near one of their ships. She’ll be out here somewhere.

But where? This battle was several times larger than any I’d been in before—probably larger, I realized, than anyone in this fight had ever seen. The battlefield was quickly devolving into chaos as flights tried to stick together and admirals frantically tried to keep a coherent strategy.

A familiar sense of excitement built inside me, the anticipation of the fight, the opportunity to push myself. But . . . today it was accompanied by a hesitance I might once have called cowardice. I silently thanked Cobb for beating that out of me during training.

I wasn’t here to fight. So instead of firing on the first Superiority drone that passed by, I studied my proximity monitor—and realized that it was still attuned to Superiority signals. They’d blocked me from their general communications chatter, so I couldn’t hear what they were saying to one another, but I could still highlight individual ships and designations on my monitor.

I picked out a specific starfighter flying mostly by itself, near the far right side of the battlefield. The Swims Against the Current in a Stream Reflecting the Sun. Hesho’s ship. My old flight. They might know where Brade was.

But Hesho and I were enemies now. He knew me for what I really was, the thing that he hated.

I steered my ship that direction anyway. I zipped down through the battlefield to avoid the shots of several drones—then the shots of several DDF fighters, who obviously hadn’t believed my signal code that identified me as an ally.

The drones and the DDF fighters ended up engaging one another, which left me to swing around toward Hesho. The kitsen turned their ship toward mine, and I stopped a good distance away, slowing down until I was motionless in space. Now what?

I tried opening a private channel to the kitsen ship. “Hesho,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

No response. Indeed, the ship powered up its destructors and started toward me. I could practically hear the orders on board as Hesho commanded the kitsen to prepare for battle. My fingers twitched on my controls. They thought they could take me? Did they really want to push me to see? They were insignificant, meaningless noises upon a vast . . .

No. I took my hand off my control sphere and checked the seals on my helmet.

Then I popped my canopy open.

The air in my canopy was sucked out into the void in a rush of wind. Water in the air immediately vaporized, then froze, causing frost to condense across the inside of the glass. Crystals of it sparkled in the air, reflecting the light of the distant sun.

I undid the latches on my seat, all except the one cord that would pull tight to lock my feet into place if I ejected. That one had some slack right now, and tethered me to the cockpit.