Author's Note: The vast majority of the chapters I post are literal first drafts, but for the first time in a long time I managed to actually get a draft to beta readers, and incorporate their feedback! It was extremely useful, and I thank Quibbloboy, ketura, gazztromple, knickersinaknit, DaystarEld, Lawrence, Catricia, and callmesalticidae for helping this one not suck.

Next update is planned for the weekend of the 18th, though I reserve the right to delay it a few extra days if that lets me post it in one chunk versus posting it in two halves.

As always: your feedback literally feeds me! Please leave comments/reviews here, or join the theorizing and discussion over at r/rational.

Chapter 49: Marco

I try not to be stupid.

I try, but it happens anyway.

Another explosion—or laser beam, or physical impact, I don't actually even know what the Howlers were hitting us with, and I don't know if anybody else knew, either, or if we were even sure it was the Howlers—

Another explosion rocked the ship. Not my ship, but the holo gear Tobias had sent over still made my stomach lurch, my visual field jerking in a realistic simulation while my actual body held still. A split second later, the reverse happened—the world around my eyes holding eerily steady while the floor heaved under me.

Meanwhile, inside, the pressure was building.

You know when like a fighter jet or whatever breaks the sound barrier? Like, at first, it's going slower than the speed of sound, so all the sound waves are still rippling out forward in front of it, but then the jet is catching up faster and faster and all the sound waves are sort of piling up in front of it until boom—it pushes through them?

I felt something like that. Something like dread, building and building—not the familiar, you're about to die kind of dread, hot and charged and sugar-high sick.

This was cold, like ice spreading outward from the center of my chest, turning my blood vessels brittle.

Something was wrong.

Something was wrong, and it was about to be wronger.

I picked myself up off the floor again—looked around at the other holographic figures doing the same—braced myself for the next volley, the next lurch—

Nothing.

More nothing.

Still nothing.

And for some reason that didn't help, made the feeling worse instead of better, the dread rising—thickening—curdling into outright panic.

Wrong something is wrong not good very not good—

Somewhere, on some level, some part of me had made some connection, picked up on some pattern, but the rest of me didn't see it yet, I could feel myself starting to unravel and I didn't know why—

I turned my head, and out there, on the Pemalite ship, the holographic copy of me followed suit, looking over at the hologram of Visser Three—

"Yes," the man said softly, answering my unspoken question. "The Howlers are—distracted."

"By—"

"It seems the Chee are—making headway on the problem. Quite rapidly, in fact."

The rest of the circle seemed to relax, as if that was it, as if that meant the crisis was over, the threat neutralized, and it was like there was some magical conservation-of-tension between us, all the fear and apprehension and stress draining out of them and concentrating in my own shoulders, my own throat—

What is it, what is it, what IS it—

"How rapidly?" Jake asked—idly, curiously, like there was plenty of time to slow down and think now—

God dammit, this isn't HELPING—

"A few hundred Howlers have already been killed."—

"A few hundred?" I blurted—like an idiot, like a moron, and meanwhile my sense of doom was still rising—

"Well. Coming up on a thousand, now."

Of COURSE they've killed a thousand Howlers in about twenty seconds—what, were you expecting this to be a FAIR fight?

There was a glimmer of something there, a flash of insight, and I tried to snatch at it, but it melted in my mental fingertips—

"Where are the other ships going?" Jake asked. "The ones that were shooting at us?"

The Visser gave a twisted, humorless smile. "Where do you think?" he drawled. "Where the fun is, of course."

Fun.

A stadium full of captured humans—streets with blood running black in the moonlight—a tiny transponder falling from my beak—

I don't know why I got it then, and not sooner. Or later—don't know what it was about that exact moment, that string of thoughts, that made it click. But suddenly, I understood.

It wasn't the Chee.

My dread, I mean. It wasn't about the Chee directly.

One minute. I was one goddamn minute too late, one minute too slow, had realized what had happened just one measly minute after my last chance to do anything about it—

Fucking time pressure.

They'd been using it against us since the beginning, keeping us off balance, forcing us to take shots in the dark, and we'd been getting better at not letting it drive us—a little—but the thing about that was, you had to notice it was happening in order to boot up and dig in your heels, and this time it had all come together just a little too fast, a little too neatly, so neatly that we hadn't picked up on the fact that we were being rushed, hadn't consciously realized that we were being—

—funneled—

—until the decision was already made, the critical moment already in the past.

Or—was it? Was that the critical moment, or is this?

I had no idea. I had no idea what was about to happen, no idea what any of it meant, I just knew that whatever it was—whatever was downstream of Tobias unlocking the Chee—it had been tricked out of us, they had twitched and tugged and manipulated us into place, and that meant that whatever we'd just done was almost certainly not something we would have chosen for ourselves, if we'd had the chance to think it through properly—

And as one part of my brain immediately set about trying to think it through properly, another part reached all the way back to the beginning, and finally made the connection—

That very first night—the night Elfangor had landed—the night that Visser Three had murdered him—when we'd sat cowering behind a couple of cinderblocks, five dumb kids who should've taken the long way home—

I had wondered how they hadn't seen us.

The Yeerks, I mean. Had wondered what force had sheltered us from their sensors, hidden us from Sauron's eye. I'd thought—could remember thinking—that there had to be a reason, an explanation, some story that would make it all make sense. It had bugged me all the way up until we'd met the little blue avatar thing, and then I'd sort of shrugged and thought okay, I guess that explains it?

But even then, it hadn't really felt like an explanation. Hadn't really made sense all the way down in my bones, like ahhhh, okay, THAT'S why.

But now—

I understood, now.

It had nothing to do with the Ellimist, or Crayak. Didn't require divine intervention, to make sense exactly as it had happened.

Sometimes, people are just stupid.

Sometimes, things just go wrong.

Sometimes, you have all the pieces, everything you need to put it together, it's all there on the table staring you in the face, and you just—fail.

Probably some idiot Hork-Bajir Controller had done a scan right at the start, and just not thought to do another one, once Elfangor's ship wasn't there to jam the sensors anymore. Had just gone about his routine, the same old habits and reflexes—like that general what's-his-face, in World War I, who sent like a hundred thousand soldiers to their deaths charging the same entrenched machine guns over and over again for months.

There's always an explanation, sure. But sometimes, the explanation is just you had every opportunity to get this one right, and you fucked it up instead.

It was like the world had shifted, like everything had snapped from black-and-white into color—like I'd broken through the sound barrier, and was out in front of the shock wave, going too fast to do anything but hang on and hope, the double epiphany leaving me pale and shaking.

What now?

Now that they'd gotten what they wanted out of us—the Chee, unlocked, I assumed, since that's what we'd been puppet-mastered into doing, and the pressure had let up almost as soon as we did—what now?

Was it over? Had that really been the critical moment? Or was this—

"Marco?"

Too fast, it was still happening too fast, even though there wasn't anything obviously rushing us—a thousand Howlers dead in under a minute—I didn't know which way to turn, didn't know how to respond, had no idea what I was responding to and there was still time pressure—

"Marco."

It was then that I realized that they were staring at me—that all of them were looking at me—right, because I'm the only one who isn't acting like we just solved the problem—

What do I do, what do I say, if I say it wrong they'll just look at me like I'm crazy and then we'll waste ten minutes on a stupid back-and-forth and by the time we finish it'll be—

I clamped down on the thought, held back the last two words through sheer force of will—I might know what they were, but I could stop myself from saying them—

I cleared my throat.

The Chee? Could it be the Chee themselves?

Could WHAT be the Chee?

"Helium," I croaked, my mind racing barely a tenth of a second ahead of my mouth, the words appearing without me having any idea, in advance, what they would be. "You—when they were shooting at us—we didn't jump out because, because, because maybe there was a trap, right?"

‹It is conceivable that they have laid a trap somehow.›

Conceivable.

An entire species that had been at nonstop war for millennia—

"Can you—I dunno—do a scan, or—or launch a probe—can you minesweep, or something? Clear a path—confirm that there is a safe path?"

‹To—›

"Out of here."

"Hey, wait a second," Cassie objected. "We're not just—"

"I'm not saying go I'm just saying can we please get started on whatever it is we've got to do so that if we need to—"

I choked off, my brain feeling like it was overheating. I sent Jake a pleading look—

"Helium," Jake said levelly. "Do it."

There was a slight delay, so slight I might have missed it—just the tiniest tinge of resentment in the hive-mind's mental voice—

‹Yes, Prince Jake.›

He's been juggling like forty ships nonstop for three days—

"Marco. Talk."

I shook my head, trying to clear it.

"I don't know," I said—

The Chee just want—they just want there to be dogs, happy dogs, they just want the dogs to be okay, that's probably fine, right?

"—I just know that—"

If it turns out that it ISN'T fine, how shocked will you be? Like on a scale from 'duh' to 'no shit, Sherlock.'

"—that it seems like we just got—got leaned on, or something—"

A thousand Howlers in less than a minute.

I took a deep breath, forced myself to slow down.

"I suddenly have a really bad feeling about what just happened," I said. "About—about the way we got rushed into it. And how as soon as Tobias hit send—"

I trailed off. Jake's eyes narrowed.

"What do you think—"

"I don't know," I cut in. "I just—"

"We should leave."

I blinked. It was Conse-whatever, the woman from Terra, a worried look on her face—

"Marco makes sense. Something here is—not right."

"Leaving could be another trick," my dad pointed out—forcing me to remember that he was there, that I had mostly managed to not-think about him. "Something else that we're being manipulated int—"

"We've already established this one," I growled. "Don't try to think your way out of the box, just do what makes sense."

What, like setting the indestructible robots loose?

I could feel him turning to look at me, as I stared at an empty spot over Jake's shoulder—caught the movement out of the corner of my eye as he turned his head—

Or as the fucking slug IN his head turned it—

Irrelevant, it could not be more irrelevant, and I kept my eyes fixed on nothing, ignoring the fact that they were burning, ignoring the trembling in my limbs, I didn't, I couldn't, I simply did not have the space to deal with my dad right now—with his sudden reappearance, with the awful sneaking suspicion that maybe Jake had known he was coming, with the fact that he'd apparently made up with Cousteau down in Brazil—

With Cousteau, who just died—

I shut it down, shut it all down, crushed it down until it turned to diamond, shoved it into a dark corner of the back of my mind and slammed the door as hard as I could, because I did not have time—

Oh, fuck.

Two more revelations had just smashed into me, each vying for my attention—they were coming in waves, now—more and more places where we'd been stupid, where we just hadn't thought things through—

I waited to see if there would be a third hammer blow, struggled to weigh the two against each other—which one is more urgent—ignored the voice in the back of my head that shouted uselessly that maybe urgency isn't the right way to rank stuff right now—

"Tobias," I said, my mouth making the decision for me. "Did you—the humans on board your ship, have you—have you been in the same room with them? Shared air?"

Tobias opened his own mouth, then froze, his face going white. "No," he breathed. "No, I—everything's been sealed off, social distanced all the way. You think—the Howlers—"

"They did it to the Pemalites, right?"

I turned back to the Visser. "Did they?"

The Visser shook his head. "I see no evidence that they seeded the atmosphere with bioweapons."

"Yeah, but you didn't exactly see them pointing guns at us, and they managed to do that," Magellan snapped.

The Visser shrugged. "My attention was on the Earthbound Howlers," he said simply.

Which makes it more likely that he'd have caught something like that—

If he wasn't just lying. About any number of things.

"A virus takes time to penetrate through the atmosphere," the Terran woman said, her voice soft and reassuring. "The Howlers were never in our airspace, and Tobias evacuated us long before nightfall—"

"Tobias's ship came from Howler airspace," Cassie pointed out.

"Through the atmosphere, though," Jake said. "At high speeds, right? And it was cloaked and shielded?"

"Does a shield do anything to knock off viruses?" Magellan asked. "I mean, is it any better than just, like, the metal hull of a ship—"

I felt a strange, teetering, sucking sensation, like the conversation was a whirlpool, and it was going to pull us all in—

No. It already had pulled us all in.

‹Yes,› said Helium, answering Magellan. His hologram gave every appearance of being fully occupied elsewhere, but occasionally he twitched a stalk eye to sweep around the circle. ‹The odds of infection are quite low.›

"But are they low enough?" Jake asked.

"Does it matter?" Cassie countered. "Does it change anything?"

"It changes whether Terra and Telor go in the same direction as the other coalescions," my dad put in.

Funneled, we were being funneled again, or at least that's what it felt like, but I didn't know where else to go—

Tobias raised a hand. "Garrett says, Howlers don't like using the same trick twice. Boring. Not a challenge. He says the only times they've used a virus since the Pemalites was when they had to."

Several heads turned toward the Visser, who nodded in confirmation—

God dammit, we need to MOVE.

"Okay, fine," I said. "Terra and Telor want to go, Tobias wants to go, they can sort out the virus stuff later. Any reason not to—"

I broke off mid-sentence, because I had been stupid again.

"Tobias. Can you control-Z the thing with the Chee?"

"I'm not—"

"I didn't say will you, I said can you."

Of course he can't, whispered one of the thousand clamoring voices in my head. Of course he can't, there's no way they'd push us that hard just to let us undo it—

"No," he said quietly, with just the slightest hint of fear making it through his iron control. "The—the line isn't there anymore."

"What?" Jake asked sharply.

Tobias's face was still white, his hand stretched out flat on the surface of the console. "The Chee—they've—unplugged, or something, I don't know, the ship doesn't know. They—it's like there's nothing on the other end. The ship can't see them, can't talk to them."

"What about the ones still on board with you?"

"Don't wake them up!" Magellan cried.

Tobias shook his head—shakily, somehow, like he wasn't just shaking it on purpose—

He feels it, too.

"I—I don't know," he stammered. "Not without—I don't think I should risk—"

"Approximately two hundred thousand Howlers have been killed," the Visser put in.

"Out of how—Tobias, you said Garrett said—"

"Half a million—"

"How much longer does that—"

The conversation was unraveling, voices layering over top of each other, tires spinning. I looked around the circle—at Helium, still conducting who-knows-what sorts of tests and maneuvers with the rest of the fleet that we'd left in his hands—at Jake, his eyes darting back and forth—at Cassie, at Magellan, at the Visser—the woman from Terra—my father—

It doesn't even matter, now.

The second revelation, the less-urgent epiphany.

It doesn't matter, but I still have to know.

"Tobias," I cut in, drawing the other boy's attention. "That—that key thing. Do you know where the Chee got it?"

"It's the key to the ship—"

"Do you know where they got it, though? Like—like how?"

"I don't—"

He trailed off, a look of dawning horror sliding across his face.

"Why now?" I asked. "Right? I mean—why now? Why you? Haven't the Chee been here for, like—"

"Thirty-seven thousand years," he murmured, his eyes unfocusing as he sent his mind into the ship's computer.

Yeah, no.

No way—there was no way that the Chee spent thirty-seven thousand years just—just not-realizing that they could grab some random human and get them to unlock their restrictions. I mean, they'd made a pretty big production of it—it had taken two or three dozen of them to get the words out, routing around whatever filter kept them from just saying it normally. But still.

I mean, maybe you could argue that they didn't care until the Howlers showed up—

But they'd given Tobias the key before that. And besides, once you were trying to explain away something that didn't make sense, you were already fucked—

Dominos. It was all dominos, everything was dominos, in every direction—every piece of it connected to everything else—I had a sudden mental vision of a world, a galaxy, a universe of dominos, all set up to fall at the slightest touch, but which way—

Whoever set us up to unlock the Chee, they were setting the Chee up, too.

Did that mean that the Chee weren't the threat? Or did it just mean that the Chee had a guardian angel, just like we did?

The Chee wouldn't have known about the meteor if Cassie hadn't given herself up at the pool.

And Cassie had come back from the dead, stopping us from using the quantum virus, which had led right straight to this moment—

The dread was back in full force, the looming sense that something was coming, but it still didn't have any goddamn hints about what—

"What now?" Cassie was saying. "The Chee—if the Howlers are—are—taken care of, what's next? For us, for Earth?"

"I'm still leaving," Tobias said. His eyes were still distant, but his voice was firm, with no hint of doubt. "We are, I mean. We're out."

"Should—should they just go, then?" Magellan wondered. "Right now?"

"Helium," Jake said. "What about the remaining coalescions?"

‹Four of the remaining pool ships have departed,› Helium replied. ‹We—elected not to interfere, once we had confirmed that the exit vector was safe.›

His stalk eyes—both of his stalk eyes swept the circle, as if daring someone to voice an objection.

‹The other six survivors are—confused,› he continued. ‹Awaiting further information from us.›

"I'll note that the Chee are moving quickly," the Visser cut in. They will be through with the Howlers in mere minutes, and will be in possession of many, many Howler ships. If you were still intending to visit Mars, for instance."

I felt my eyes narrow. Felt them narrow, rather than narrowing them myself, my conscious mind once again playing catch-up as my instincts raced ahead—

But Jake was faster. "You're trying to keep us here, Visser," he observed quietly, his voice like a knife sliding out of a sheath. "Why?"

"It just seemed a little—obvious, no?" the man said evasively. "You're already outside the system. Free and clear, as it were. If there's any kind of ticking clock left—"

"Helium, can you still see across the bridge?"

‹Yes, Prince Jake.›

"Have the Chee made any kind of moves toward Mars?"

‹No, Prince Jake. No ships have left Earth orbit, though a large fraction have been damaged or destroyed.›

Time pressure.

A current sweeping us along, a drowning swimmer counting the seconds left before he starts sucking in water—

Only—

There wasn't any time pressure. Was there?

It's not like the Chee have launched ships.

But the dread was still rising, the alarm bells in my head still going off. Somewhere, something was happening, something we hadn't quite noticed—

"What are the Chee actually doing?" I asked.

"Murdering Howlers," the Visser said dryly.

Murdering Howlers—

Murdering Howlers—

"How?" I asked, feeling like a kid half-lost in a math lecture.

"With force fields, mostly. Some with brute strength. A few have stolen beam weapons or ships. It's all mundane—just very, very fast."

I could feel my fingers scraping the bottom of the barrel. "Are—are any of the Howlers winning?"

Wrong question, it was the wrong question—

"No."

"The other coalescions need hosts, right?" Cassie cut in, clearly sensing that I was going nowhere with anything. "And—and the humans on Mars need rescuing, one way or another—"

Side quests.

Side quests and plot threads—

I felt another insight hovering just outside my reach, opened my mouth to say more useless words—

The air—screamed—screamed and cracked like metal cutting through glass—seemed to shatter, somehow, in the space at the center of the circle, and falling through—bursting through, as if it had been pressing up against a barrier that had suddenly given way—

It was the avatar. The wizened blue creature, standing in the middle of the chamber, a look of rage and fury melting into one of confusion, and then sudden horror—

"What—" it began, and then choked off, whirling. It threw up its hand, like a wizard casting a spell, seemed to strangle a curse when nothing seemed to happen—

We all sat frozen, stunned—

The creature strode toward the console—Tobias leapt up, yanking Garrett out of nothingness and into view, dragging him away—yelled "Ship!" just as the avatar reached the panel—

Everything went black.

"What the—"

My voice rang loud in my ears. The air was heavy, close. I waved my hands through the darkness, found the connections for the holo projector and pulled them loose—

The room around me snapped back into view, four featureless metal walls lit with harsh blue light. I glanced back down at the tiny Pemalite machine—

It looked dead.

What. The. Fuck.

I ran. Through the corridors of the near-empty pool ship—saw Magellan ahead of me, prodding the Visser's host toward the bridge with a handheld Dracon beam—

"What?" I called out.

"Yours too?" Magellan shouted back.

The pair of them turned through the doors to the bridge, with me right behind them—

Jake was there, and Helium, two more lifeless holo projectors lying nearby on the metal deck.

"Tobias's ship just went back across the bridge," Jake said. "Back in-system."

"What? Why?"

Jake nodded grimly toward the viewscreen—

I swear my heart skipped a beat.

It was a view of the space around Earth—the same feed that our three stationary scout ships had been sending us the whole time, as they monitored the situation on and around the planet. The blue globe still hung in the center, surrounded by a swarm of tiny specs of light—

But all around it, vast, enormous objects were flickering into view, one after another after another—

Too big to be a space station.

Continents of metal. Worlds of metal—gigantic shapes, cubes and cones and mazelike tangles, a mismatched collection of a thousand different designs, black and silver and gunmetal gray. Some were sprinkled with lights, like cities—others looking open and unfinished and exposed, like the Borg cube or the second Death Star. There were sleek superstructures with gigantic, glowing engines—slowly rotating centrifuges—bulky piles of geometric shapes held together by strings of gossamer—

It was mind-boggling. Incomprehensible. Every scrap of metal the human race had ever mined would have been too little to form even one of the impossible constructs, and more were appearing by the second. Already there were enough that it seemed like they should be tearing the planet apart with gravity alone—they had filled the space halfway to the moon—

"What," I said.

It wasn't a question, and I wasn't expecting an answer.

But the Visser gave one anyway.

"Behold," he said. "The Ellimist."

His voice was low, breathy—enraptured, his eyes wide, wild, staring at the viewscreen with a look of pure hunger, ignoring the Dracon beam that Magellan had between his shoulder blades like it wasn't even there.

Jake's eyes were laser-sharp. "You know what this is?"

"I assume," the Visser said distractedly, "that these are the physical representations of the hypercomputer. Or its output devices, anyway. At least, they seem to match—"

He broke off. There were flashes of light, now—arcing between the vast machines, sometimes sparking down toward the surface—

‹There is activity,› Helium said. ‹The Chee—›

"The Chee are being dealt with," the Visser exulted.

"By—"

I trailed off.

It was obvious by what. By what wasn't the question I wanted answered. Who, what, why, how—

The physical representations of the hypercomputer—

The memory clicked, distilled from the half-remembered fever dream of Leeran hypersight—the computer that ran the morphing tech, the computer the Visser had been trying to hack into—

The computer that lived in Z-space.

‹Confirmed,› Helium said, and I thought I could detect a crack in the hive-mind's impenetrable poise. ‹The Chee are being—deactivated.›

"It's quite a sight," the Visser breathed. "Do you dare draw close enough to see it?"

"Jake, what—"

"Helium, can you make contact with Tobias?"

‹One moment.›

Suddenly, I felt my vision go double—dropped to my knees as the world swayed—

What—

Oh.

It was the room again—the chamber aboard the Chee ship, the same room that I had been standing in via hologram, only now it was viewed from the side—a view that kept shifting slightly, like a handheld camera—

Tobias's view. Somehow, Helium was patching us directly in to whatever Tobias was seeing—

‹Tobias, it's Jake. Can you hear me?›

I squeezed my own eyes shut, blocking out the nauseating overlap.

‹I don't know what's—it's just—›

‹It's taking out the Chee,› Jake explained. ‹Are you all right?›

From the mental view, Tobias was curled up against the wall, as far from the console as he could get, his arm wrapped around Garrett, his eyes locked on the blue creature. Its fingers were a blur on the console—

‹It's ignoring us. For—for now.›

‹Helium here. Do you have any access to your ship's functions? Any access at all?›

‹No.›

‹We're—›

Jake broke off, turned to look at me—seemed to register something in my face, nodded as if we'd come to some kind of agreement—

‹We're coming in,› he said. ‹Hang on—›

"Jake, what—"

What are you thinking, I might have been about to say. Or, what do you think we can do. Or maybe just what the everloving fuck. I didn't know, and I would never find out, because at that moment—

It happened almost too quickly to see.

The creature stopped, and pulled its hand away from the console.

Tobias stiffened, his arm tightening around his brother.

The creature straightened, then screamed, ropes of shadow appearing out of thin air, wrapping around it like some dark spell—

And then it ripped apart. Ripped apart, ripped to shreds, and then the shreds themselves shriveled and vanished, dissolving into nothingness, all in barely more than the blink of an eye.

‹WHAT—›

And then another scream penetrated my consciousness, this one loud and frighteningly close. My eyes snapped open, and I fought to reorient as my vision swam—

The Visser's host—the man named Han Pritcher—he was convulsing on the deck, clutching his skull, rolling from side to side as Magellan tracked him with the Dracon beam, his expression one of pure panic—

"What's—"

"It's the Visser—"

The man's scream collapsed into a gurgle, and he rolled over onto his back—unconscious, nerveless, still twitching. Jake and I stood frozen, shocked—

"The Visser," Magellan repeated, his voice a shaky whisper. "He—he's gone."

"What?"

"Gone. Gone out of Vasco's head. It—it's just Edriss in there, now—"

"Are you sure?"

"No. But—"

‹A quantum virus?› Helium asked darkly.

"What? How—who—"

"Helium," Jake said, his own voice trembling—

Not every day you see a god RIPPED APART RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOUR EYES—

"—could the Chee—"

‹No,› Helium answered flatly. ‹Not so quickly.›

The Andalites?

No. Not at the same time as—as—as whatever the fuck that had been—

‹Tobias, Jake. Are you still there?›

‹S—still here.›

‹Can you—are you in control of the ship now? Again, I mean?›

A part of me marveled at Jake's ability to hold together as another part of me laughed at the pretense—that anything mattered, that there was anything worth doing at this point, anything at all—

The double-vision view crawled slowly—reluctantly?—over to the console. A hand stretched out—

‹Yes. I can—yes.›

‹Is everything—›

‹The Chee are gone.›

‹What?›

‹The Chee that were on board. The ones that were deactivated. They—they're gone, physically gone.›

‹Like, gone gone?›

‹Gone. The—the mass, the materials.›

‹What about—›

‹Everyone else is here. I can see them. They—they don't know what's—›

‹Helium here. Tobias, can you bring the ship back out through the bridge?›

‹Hang on.›

There was a silence that stretched out for miles.

‹Yeah. Yeah, I think I can.›

‹Wait,› Jake cut in.

On the bridge, his eyes turned to lock with mine again.

Whatever the hell just happened—

Whatever the hell had just happened, it was so far beyond anything we'd expected, anything we were prepared for—

I broke away, looked out at the view of Earth, at the vast thicket of metal wrapped around it—dwarfing it.

It took an active effort to make my shoulders shrug—seemed so wrong for the moment, a gesture infinitely inappropriate.

But I didn't know.

‹Okay,› Jake said. ‹Come—come on out.›

The psychic link broke, my vision collapsing back into normalcy, and it occurred to me for the first time to ask—

‹Yes,› Helium said. ‹The other pool ships are still with us.›

I turned to look at Jake again, opened my mouth to say—

What?

Something.

Anything.

But before I could, the door hissed open.

Cassie stepped through, her face sweaty and grim, her eyes hooded and diamond-bright. And behind her—

My jaw would have dropped, if it hadn't already been open.

She was standing—standing—standing upright and steady, not shaking or trembling or leaning. Her eyes, too, were bright—sharp and lucid and undeniably aware.

She looked at me for a long moment—a handful of heartbeats—an impossible eternity—gave the tiniest nod and the smallest fraction of a smile. Then she turned—not to Jake, but to Helium.

"Are we still in touch with Tobias?" Rachel asked.

‹Yes,› the alien said, visibly leaving aside any number of other possible responses.

"Ask him if he still has the Visser's Leeran with him," she said. "I think we're going to need it."