Starsight (The Skyward Series Book 2)

I stumbled back from the screen, colliding with the press of officers. I was suddenly fully alert like I felt before a battle, and I found my hands forming fists. If they wouldn’t let me out, I would punch my way to—

“Spensa?” Kimmalyn said, taking me by the arm. “Spensa!”

I blinked, then looked around, sweating, wide-eyed. “How?” I demanded. “How did it . . .” I looked back at the screen, which had paused on the image of the dead man and his room filled with stars. The line at the bottom indicated the video had reached its end.

The freeze-frame had a complete shot of me standing behind him. I was there. I WAS THERE. Wearing my modern DDF flight suit. Same shoulder-length brown hair and narrow face. I was frozen in place, reaching toward the man.

My expression though . . . I looked terrified. Then that expression changed, impossibly mimicking how I now felt.

“Turn it off!” I shouted. I reached for the screen, pulling out of Kimmalyn’s grip, though a stronger grip seized me.

I wrestled against those hands, struggling to get to the screen. Both with my body, and . . . and with something else. Some sense inside me. Some primal, panicked, horrified piece of me. It was like a silent scream that emerged from within and expanded outward.

Then, from someplace distant, I felt as if something responded to my scream.

I . . . hear . . . you . . .

“Spensa!” Jorgen said.

I looked up at him. He was holding me back, his eyes locked on mine.

“Spensa, what do you see?” he said.

I glanced at the screen and my image there. Wrong, so wrong. My face. My emotions. And . . .

“You don’t see it?” I asked, looking around at the others and their confused expressions.

“The darkness?” Jorgen asked. “There’s a man on the screen, the one who was making the log. Then there’s a blackness behind him, broken by white lights.”

“Like . . . eyes . . . ,” one of the techs said.

“And the person?” I asked. “Don’t you see someone in the darkness?”

My question was met by more confused stares.

“It’s just blackness,” Rodge said from the side of the group. “Spin? There’s nothing else there. I don’t even see any stars.”

“I see stars,” Jorgen said, narrowing his eyes. “And something that might be a shape. Maybe. Mostly just a shadow.”

“Turn it off,” Cobb said. “See what other logs or files you can dig out.” He looked at me. “I’ll speak with Lieutenant Nightshade in private.”

I looked from him to the room’s startled faces, feeling a sudden shame. I’d worked through my worries about being viewed as a coward, but it was still embarrassing to have made such a scene. What did they think, seeing me break like that?

I forced myself to calm down and nodded to Jorgen, prying myself from his grip. “I’m fine,” I said. “Just got a little caught up in the video.”

“Great. We’re still going to talk later,” Jorgen said.

Cobb waved for me to follow him out of the room, and I made my way to the door, though just before we left he paused and looked back in. “Lieutenant McCaffrey?” he asked.

“Sir?” Rodge said, perking up from beside the wall.

“You still working on that project of yours?”

“Yes, sir!” Rodge said.

“Good. Go see if your theories work. I’ll talk to you later.” He continued on, leading me out of the room.

“What was that about, sir?” I asked him as the door shut behind us.

“That’s not important now,” he said, leading me into the observatory across the hall. A wide, shallow room, the observatory was named for its dramatic view of the planet below. I stepped inside, and through the wall-to-wall window Detritus confronted me.

Cobb stood at the window and took a sip of coffee. I approached, trying to keep the trepidation from showing in my steps. I couldn’t help but glance over my shoulder toward the room where we had watched the video.

“What did you see in that video?” Cobb asked.

“Myself,” I said. I could speak honestly to Cobb. He’d long since proven he deserved my trust, and more. “I know it sounds impossible, Cobb, but the darkness in the video took shape, and it was me.”

“I once watched my best friend and wingmate try to kill me, Spensa,” he said softly. “We now know something had overwritten what he saw—or the way his brain interpreted what he saw—so he mistook me for the enemy.”

“You think . . . this is similar?”

“I have no other explanation as to why you’d see yourself in a video archive hundreds of years old.” He took a long drink of his coffee, tipping the cup back to get the last drops. Then he lowered it. “We’re blind here. We don’t know what the enemy is capable of—or really even who the enemy are. You see anything else in that darkness?”

“I thought I heard something tell me . . . that it ‘heard’ me. But that felt different somehow. From a different place, and not nearly as angry. I don’t know how to explain it.”

Cobb grunted. “Well, at least now we have an idea what happened to the people of this planet.” He gestured with his mug out the window, and I stepped up to look down at Detritus. It looked desolate, a surface that had been turned to slag. The debris in lower orbit—the damaged platforms, the junk—had probably been caused by terrified people on the planet firing on the entity as it surrounded them.

“Whatever that thing was in the recording,” Cobb said, “it came here and . . . destroyed all the people on this planet and these platforms. They called it a delver.”

“Have you ever heard of anything like that?” I asked. “You knew about . . . about the eyes I sometimes see.”

“Not the word delver,” Cobb said. “But we have traditions that stretch back from before our grandparents were alive. They speak of beings that watch us from the void, the deep darkness, and they warn us to avoid communicating wirelessly. That’s why we only use radio for important military channels. That man on the video said that the delver came because it heard their communications, so maybe that’s related.” Cobb eyed me. “We’re warned not to create machines that can think too quickly and . . .”

“And we’re supposed to fear people who can see into the nowhere,” I whispered. “Because they draw the attention of the eyes.”

Cobb didn’t contradict me. He went for another sip of coffee, but found his mug empty and grunted softly.

“Do you think that the thing we saw in that video is related to the eyes you see?” Cobb asked.

I swallowed. “Yes,” I said. “They’re the same, Cobb. The entities that watch when I use my powers are the same as that thing with the spines that emerged on the video. The man said something about their cytoshield. That sounds a lot like cytonics.”

“A shield to keep the enemy from hearing or finding the cytonics on the planet, maybe,” Cobb said. “And it failed.” He sighed, shaking his head. “You see those battleships arrive earlier?”

“Yeah. But the platforms will protect us from bombardment, right?”

“Maybe,” Cobb said. “Some of these systems still work, but others aren’t as reliable. Our engineers think some of those more distant platforms have anti-bombardment countermeasures, but we can’t know for certain. I’m not sure we have the luxury of worrying about delvers, or the eyes, or any of that. We have a more immediate problem. The Krell—or whatever they’re really called—won’t listen to our pleas to stop their attacks. They’ve stopped caring whether they preserve any humans. They’re determined to exterminate us.”

“They’re afraid of us,” I said. When M-Bot and I had stolen information off their station six months ago, that was the biggest and most surprising revelation I’d discovered about the Krell. They kept us contained not out of spite, but because they were genuinely terrified of humankind.

“Afraid of us or not,” Cobb said, “they want us dead. And unless we can find a way to travel the stars like they do, we’re doomed. No fortress—no matter how powerful—can stand forever, particularly not against an enemy as strong as the Superiority.”

I nodded. It was a core tenet of battlefield tactics: you needed to have a plan of retreat. As long as we were trapped on Detritus, we were in danger. If we could get offworld, all kinds of options opened to us. Fleeing and hiding somewhere else. Searching for other human enclaves—if they existed—and recruiting help. Striking back against the enemy, putting them on the defensive.

None of this was possible until I learned to use my powers. Or, barring that, until we found a way to steal the enemy’s hyperdrive technology. Cobb was right. The eyes, the delvers, they might be important to me—but in the grand scheme of my people’s survival, that was all a secondary problem.

We needed to find a way off this planet.

Cobb looked at me carefully. He had always felt old. I knew that he was only a few years older than my parents, yet right now he looked like a rock that had been left out too long and survived too many meteor falls.

“Ironsides used to complain about how hard this job was,” he grumbled. “You know the worst part about being in charge, Spin?”

“No, sir.”

“Perspective. When you’re young, you can assume that everyone older than you has life figured out. Once you get command yourself, you realize we’re all just the same kids wearing older bodies.”

I swallowed, but didn’t say anything. Standing next to Cobb, I stared out the window at the desolate planet and the thousands of platforms surrounding it. An incredible network of defenses that—in the end—had been powerless to stop whatever this delver was.

“Spensa,” Cobb said, “I need you to be more careful out there. Half my staff think you’re the biggest liability we’ve ever put into a ship. The other half think you’re some kind of Saint incarnate. I’d like you to stop supplying both sides with good arguments.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “I . . . to be honest, I was trying to push myself, put myself in danger. I thought if I did that, it might make my brain work and my powers engage.”

“While I appreciate the sentiment, that’s a stupid way to try to solve our problems, Lieutenant.”

“But we do have to figure out how to travel the stars. You yourself said it.”

“I’d rather find a way that isn’t so reckless,” Cobb said. “We know the Superiority ships travel the stars. They have hyperdrive technology, and the eyes—the delvers—haven’t destroyed them. So it’s possible.”

Cobb adopted a contemplative look, staring back out the window at the planet below. He was quiet for such a long time, I found myself growing nervous.

“Sir?” I asked.

“Come with me,” he said. “I might have a way for us to get off this planet that doesn’t rely upon your powers.”