Starsight by Sanderson Brandon

Author:Sanderson, Brandon
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
ISBN: 9781473217928
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2019-11-25T16:00:00+00:00

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.

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