Starsight

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 from land and dropped, to sink endlessly into an eternal deep.” He paused. “My crew sees the same thing that I do, Captain Alanik.”

“That makes sense,” I said. “Our ships are programmed to replicate the illusions of the delver maze. For us right now, it’s just programming. If this were real, you’d probably all see something different.”

At least, that was what I’d been told to expect. Only it seemed that much of what the Superiority “knew” was really guesswork. If I entered a real delver maze, would the same rules actually hold there?

Hopefully, you’ll never have to find out, I thought. Hesho and I took the right-hand exit and flew through a corridor that appeared to me to be crystalline, but Hesho saw flames. Both of us, however, saw a large boulder at one side of the room—so we flew over and inspected it. A tug on it with a light-lance proved it was real, and it tumbled out into the room.

“How odd,” Hesho said. “Did someone come and install that boulder specifically to hinder our path?”

“Supposedly,” I said, “this maze is built to replicate the kind of oddities and mysteries we’ll find inside the real delver maze.”

“Our scanners are useless,” Hesho said. “I have reports from my instruments teams—and they can’t tell what’s fake and what isn’t. It seems that the Superiority has programmed our ship to be fooled by this place, something I find disconcerting. I don’t like the idea of seeing what the Superiority shows me, even if it is for an important training simulation.”

As we flew deeper, I was glad to have the kitsen with me. Bringing a wingmate made all kinds of practical sense, not just for identifying what was real. On a more basic level, it was comforting to have someone to talk to in this place.

We passed through several other strange rooms with a variety of odd visuals—from the walls melting, to the shadows of enormous beasts passing just out of sight. We were attacked by embers in one, which I fired upon—before realizing Hesho couldn’t see them. My shots hit the wall, blasting off pieces of metal, and the entire structure rumbled in a way that I could swear was threatening.

“How can we hear that?” Hesho asked. “Instruments report a vacuum outside the ships. There is no medium for sound to pass through.”

“I . . .” I shivered. “Let’s try that tunnel over there.”

“I don’t like this,” Hesho confided as we moved down the tunnel. “It feels like it’s training us to rely upon one another’s eyes.”

“That’s a good thing though, right?”

“Not necessarily,” Hesho said. “While all experience is subjective, and all reality in some ways an illusion, this offers a practical danger. If we come to rely upon consensus to determine what is real, the maze could simply exploit this assumption and trick us.”

In the next chamber, we were attacked by embers that were real this time—and I almost ignored them, a mistake that could have been deadly. I responded to Hesho’s warning at the last moment, dodging as a barrage from the heavily armed fighter vaporized them.

We were left in a room with junk bouncing around and hitting the walls before starting to pool toward the bottom. Sweating, my heart thumping, I led us through the next passage. Scud, was I ever going to get used to this place?

We reached the end of the tunnel, and my floods shone on a strange membrane covering the opening. It ran from the floor to the ceiling, and pulsed softly with a rhythm I could hear.