Page 126 of Defiant

Good,she thought.Let’s bond.

No. No, that will change me too much.

Brade sighed.All right, then go to the station I just left.

And do what?

Stop the abomination we call Spensa,she sent.Or at least prevent her from following me. Do this, and maybe we can change your friends back.

They are not my friends. They are me.But it seemed inclined to do as she said. And as long as it was willing to help, that was all that mattered for now.

54

KIMMALYN

Kimmalyn flew, with the others, on overburn away from the delvers. The call had come. Evacuate the system. Regroup.

If the Superiority could control the delvers, then this war was over. It was hard to accept. From what Kimmalyn understood, people had been trying to control these things since they’d first appeared centuries ago. And now someone had done it.

Saints and stars. That wasbad.

She overburned toward Detritus, dodging chunks of destroyed capital ships. Both theDefiantand the Superiority ones. Fortunately the enemy fighters had mostly scattered away at the delvers’ appearance, but still. She had to concentrate.

Her comm light came on. Sadie, trying to talk to her.

“This isn’t a good time, Sentry,” she said.

“Yeah, uh, okay,” Sadie replied. “But, Quirk. What are they doing?”

She glanced at her proximity monitor, which showed the delvers ejecting thousands upon thousands of small ships. “Chasing us down and trying to eat us, I believe. Assuming they eat. Perhaps they just kill. It’s probably not polite of me to make assumptions about their bodily functions.”

“Right, right,” Sadie replied. “But…does that look like a pursuit pattern to you?”

She paused. Those ships the delvers had ejected were fanning out. To her horror, smoke began to appear all through the system, andmoredelvers were emerging. Smaller this time, only the size of destroyers—but there werethousandsof them.

Oh, Saints and stars. Thousands of delvers? Before today, the galaxy, so far as she knew, had never seen more than one in a single location. Likely they’d chosen to make themselves smaller to not crowd the region.

“Look at the things they’re sending out,” Sadie said.

Despite herself, Kimmalyn zoomed in on them. The proximity monitor had scans from long-range sensors, giving her visuals on the nearest of those little ships. They didn’t look like the balls of stone and destruction the delvers usually summoned. In fact, they looked…well…

…like little flying drones with claw arms. Sadie was right. They weren’t chasing Kimmalyn or the other fighter groups, though it had seemed that way at first. They were actually moving to the inhibitor stations.

“What under the heavens?”

55

JORGEN

“This is extremely odd behavior,” Rinakin the UrDail said, stepping up beside Jorgen.

Jorgen nodded in agreement, watching the hologram, trying to figure out what the delvers were doing.

“I have studied each and every recording of a delver event,” Rinakin continued. “They’ve never done anything like this. Dare I hope something is different? Less deadly?”

“I wish I could be as optimistic as you,” Jorgen said, pointing. “What do they want with the inhibitors? Why are they going to them, thenvanishing? Are those inhibitor fields falling?”

“They are!” an aide piped up. She rushed over with a datapad for him. “Each inhibitor station visited by a delver is dropping its field, suggesting the inhibitor slug inside has been destroyed.”

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