Starsight

That sound suddenly seemed to ring through the entire structure. My fighter thumped under my fingers.

I stared at the membrane, shocked. We’d only been in the delver maze for . . . what, half an hour? Maybe a little longer? I’d expected it to take hours upon hours to find the heart.

“That’s it,” I said. “The membrane. The thing we’re looking for. The . . . the heart of the delver.”

“What?” Hesho said. “I don’t see anything.”

Oh. I took a deep breath, calming myself. An illusion. Which meant—

I saw the entire universe.

In a blink everything vanished around me, and somehow my mind expanded. I saw planets, I saw star systems, I saw galaxies. I saw the scrambling, useless, tiny little insects that covered them like chittering hives. I felt revulsion. Hatred for these pests that infested the worlds. Hordes of ants swarming on a dropped piece of food. Buzzing and mindless, disgusting. Painful, as they’d swarm me, occasionally biting—for though they were too small to ever truly destroy me, they hurt. Their noise. Their painful scraping. They infested my home, after swarming all of the rocks that broke the endless nothing that was this universe. They would not ever leave me alone, and I wanted so badly just to smash them. To smother them beneath my foot so they’d stop piling, and crawling, and clicking, and snapping, and biting, and corrupting, and—

I snapped back into my cockpit, slamming against my seat as if I’d been thrown there.

“Another illusion then,” Hesho said, sounding bored. “You want to move forward first? I’ll cover you, in case further embers guard this chamber.”

I trembled, the horrible vision resting on me like the darkness in a cavern far, far underground. I breathed in gasps, trying to recapture my breath. The room looked normal to me now, but . . .

“Captain Alanik?” Hesho asked.

What had that been? Why . . . why did it linger in my mind, making me revile Hesho’s words, as if they were coming from something slimy and horrible?

“I . . . ,” I said. “Sorry, I need a moment.”

He gave it to me. I recovered slowly. Scud. SCUD. That had felt like . . . like Vapor had said the delvers regarded all of us.

“Flight Command,” I said, calling in. “Did you just show me something strange?”

“Pilot?” Flight Command called back. “You need to learn to fly the maze without contacting us. When you enter one for real, you won’t—”

“What did you just show me?” I demanded.

“The log indicates that your ship’s illusion for that room is of darkness hiding an exit. That is all.”

So . . . they hadn’t shown me that sensation of the universe?

Of course they hadn’t. That was far beyond the powers of a holographic projector. I’d seen something else. Something . . . something that my own mind had projected?

Scud. What was I?

At Hesho’s urging we continued, and spent another fifteen minutes moving through rooms, familiarizing ourselves with the way the maze worked. I didn’t experience anything else approaching the feeling of that strange moment when I’d seen the universe.

Eventually, we hit our predetermined exploration time limit, and so we turned around and flew back. Outside, we found the others gathering—including a furious Brade who, as Vapor had guessed, had gotten stuck in one of the early rooms, unable to tell what was real and what wasn’t.

None of them had seen any membranes or had any idea what I was trying to explain when I tried—and failed—to talk about what I’d seen. I couldn’t put it into words, but it remained with me. Like a shadow over my shoulder, lingering as we reported back to the Weights and Measures.

26

We entered the nowhere.

As always, it started with a scream.

Absolute darkness, broken by the eyes. White hot, they stared in the wrong direction. The more often I did this, the more I could sense the . . . shadow of what they were. Enormous, mind-bending things whose shapes didn’t conform to my understanding of how physical forms should work.

I seemed to hang there for an eternity. Aside from Brade, who wouldn’t talk about it, the others of my flight said they didn’t sense any time at all passing in the nowhere. To them, the hyperjump happened instantaneously. They never saw the darkness or the eyes.

Finally, I felt the end coming on. A subtle fading sensation that—

One of the eyes turned and stared right at me.

The Weights and Measures popped back into regular space outside of Starsight. I gasped, my pulse going crazy, battle senses coming alert.

It had seen me. One of them had looked right at me.

We were traveling back to Starsight after another day of training—my tenth so far in the military here. I was extra tired today from putting the others through their exercises. Was that why it had seen me?

What had I done? What was wrong?

“Captain Alanik?” Hesho said. “Though I am not familiar with your species, you do seem to be exhibiting some traditional signs of distress.”