Starsight

“Excellent,” Vapor said. “Are they ready for combat then?”

“Scud, no!” I said. “We need to be at this for another few weeks at least. They’re good pilots, so it’s not like starting with raw recruits, but that doesn’t mean I want them shooting at anything yet.”

Vapor seemed to take that in stride, and didn’t complain—or even ask for more details. She simply said, “Interesting.” How was I to interpret that?

“Let’s give them another break,” she eventually said to me. “Then we’ll try some higher-speed formations. We have three hours until we return to Starsight for the day. Flight Command has been asking if any of us will be heading into the maze. I’ll tell them that we don’t anticipate it.”

“All right,” I said, slowing my ship and pulling out my canteen.

“Unless, of course,” she added, “you want to give it a try while the others are on break. You and I could head in there together.”

I hesitated, canteen halfway to my lips.

“It would be useful, after all, to know what it is we’re preparing for,” Vapor said. “I’ve heard of delver mazes, but I’ve never been in one.” Her ship hovered up beside me, and it was disconcerting to see the cockpit empty, as if it were piloted by a ghost.

What was Vapor’s game? In putting me in charge of running the exercises, she’d been able to go back to observing. Participating, but remaining mostly mysterious. Now she wanted me to go into the maze with her. It seemed a test of some sort. A challenge?

I looked out toward the maze. Each flight had been assigned a different face of the dodecahedron, and the pilots had been practicing approaching and then flying into it.

“I’m up for it,” I decided, putting away my canteen. “Tell Flight Command to call off those drones though. We can train on fighting them later.”

“Done,” Vapor said. “Let’s go.”

23

Flight Command reluctantly did as requested, and pulled back the drones this once so that Vapor and I could fly in uncontested.

I got a better sense for the size of the thing as we flew into its shadow. It was roughly as wide as one of the platforms around Detritus—but that was just its diameter. In total mass, it must have been a dozen times as large.

Not planetary scale, and therefore smaller than the full delvers I’d seen in the videos, but still dauntingly enormous. Each face of the dodecahedron had dozens of holes in it, punctures roughly twenty meters across. Vapor and I picked one at random and drew in close enough that I could see that the rest of the face was of polished metal.

I found myself growing excited. I was increasingly fascinated by the delvers, an emotion that walked hand in hand with my growing worry about them. Maybe even fear of them. I couldn’t shake that image I’d seen back on Detritus: me, standing where the delver should have been. Whatever it meant to be a cytonic—whatever I

was—it had to do with these things and the place where they lived.

This isn’t a real one, I reminded myself. This is just an imitation for training. Like a practice dummy to use in sword fighting.

We paused right outside our chosen tunnel, looking as if into the throat of the beast. I kept expecting M-Bot to chime in with an analysis, and found the silence of my canopy daunting. “So . . . ,” I said, calling Vapor. “We just go into one of these tunnels?”

“Yes,” she replied. “Reports from pilots who survived entering a real maze indicate all the tunnels looked the same. If there is a reason to pick one over another, we don’t yet know what it is.”

“Follow my lead then, I guess?” I asked, inching my ship forward at one-tenth of a Mag, the starship equivalent of a crawl. The inside was pitch-black. Though I could fly by instruments alone—I often had to, out in space—I hit my floodlights. I wanted visuals on this place.

The inside of the tunnel narrowed to about fifteen meters across, cramped confines on starfighter scales. I let myself move at barely a creep as I flew forward.

Behind me, several drones broke off the wall near the entrance and started moving in our direction. “Flight Command,” I said, “I thought you were told to let us do this run without pursuit.”

“Um . . . ,” the person on the channel said. “When you actually fight a delver, they’ll chase you . . .”

“We’ll never get to the part about fighting a delver if we die during these practice runs,” I said. “Call off the drones and let Vapor and me get our feet underneath us. Trust me, I’ve done a lot more training than you.”

“Okay, okay,” the dione said. “No need to be so aggressive . . .”

These people. I rolled my eyes, but they called off the drones as requested.

Vapor’s seemingly empty ship moved up beside mine. M-Bot had said she flew not by moving the control sphere or pushing buttons, but by interrupting and overriding the electrical signals sent by the controls to the rest of the ship. So . . . did that mean she was the ship, after a manner? Like she was a spirit that could possess electronics?