Starsight полностью

“Our best chance of having it remain unseen is for it to hover up high where nobody will accidentally run into it,” M-Bot said. “Then we have it move slowly, with orders to freeze if anyone looks directly at it. If only one person is glancing at it, the drone can adapt to their perspective and remain hidden. The more people looking at it from different angles, the worse it will stand out.”

“Can it obey those orders?” I asked.

“Yes. It has basic intelligence, and I copied over a large chunk of my stealth infiltration protocols. It should be able to explore, take pictures of the area we want it to, then return to its hiding place for pickup.” M-Bot paused again. “It can fly by itself, something I cannot do. Perhaps I shouldn’t have said it wasn’t alive, for in some ways it is more alive than I am.”

I thought about that, then opened the compartment on the side of the cockpit and took out the small emergency destructor pistol I kept there.

“Drone,” I said, “deactivate hologram.”

It appeared just above me, hovering near the open canopy and the tarp draped around M-Bot outside. I made sure the destructor pistol’s safety was activated, then secured it with electrical tape to the back of the drone, so I could smuggle it in as well.

“If you get into too much trouble,” M-Bot said, “remember that you have a second face programmed into your bracelet. You can become someone else, if ‘Alanik’ gets compromised and you need to hide.”

“All right,” I said. “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. But in any case, Detritus is running out of time. We’re going to have to try this plan tomorrow.”

PART FOUR

INTERLUDE

Jorgen spent his day learning how to make bread.

Spensa’s grandmother was very good at bread, despite the fact that she was blind. Together they sat in her cramped, single-room home in Igneous. Spensa’s mother had accepted new quarters, but her grandmother had insisted she remain here. She claimed she liked the “feel” of it.

Red light flooded in through the window, and the air smelled of heat from the apparatus. You could smell heat, Jorgen had realized. Or at least hot metal. It was a burned sort of smell, but not a burning smell. The smell of things that had gone so far beyond being on fire that now their ashes were stewing.

Gran-Gran made him work like her, by touch and smell alone. He closed his eyes, reaching out and feeling at an iron pot to test the powder inside. He brought a pinch to his nose and sniffed it.

“This is the flour,” he said, breathing in the wholesome—yet somehow still dirty—scent of ground grain. “I need about five hundred grams.” He took a measuring cup in hand and dipped it in, weighing it by feel—not by sight. He hefted it, then felt for the bowl in his lap and dumped the flour in.

“Good,” Gran-Gran said.

He mixed it with his hand for a count of a hundred. “Now oil,” he said, raising the proper container to his nose. He sniffed it, then nodded and tipped it so oil dribbled over his finger into the bowl. She wanted him to measure like that, by touch of all things. Water followed.

“Very good,” Gran-Gran said. She had a patient voice. A voice like a rock would have, he imagined. Immobile, ancient, and thoughtful.

“I would rather check to see that I got the amount right,” Jorgen said. “I didn’t really measure anything.”

“Of course you did,” she said.

“Not accurately.”

“Mix it. Feel the dough. Does it feel right?”

He mixed, his eyes still closed. She refused to let him use an electric mixer. Instead he mixed by hand, squishing the stretchy dough between his fingers as the ingredients melded.

“It . . . ,” he said. “It’s too dry.”

“Ah.” She reached out and felt into his bowl. “So it is, so it is. Knead in some water then.”

He did so, still keeping his eyes closed.

“You’ve never peeked,” Gran-Gran noted. “When I taught Spensa to do this, she kept looking through one eye. I had to challenge her to do it without looking, make it a game, before she’d do as I asked.”

Jorgen continued kneading. He had given up on trying to figure out how Gran-Gran would know if he’d peeked or not. She was obviously blind—the gnarled old woman had only milky whites for eyes. But there was a power to her. Near her he felt that same buzzing, fainter than with Spensa or the alien woman.

“You never complain either,” Gran-Gran noted. “Five days learning to bake bread by touch, and you’ve never once asked why I’m making you do this.”

“I was instructed by my superior officer to come receive your training. I assume it will make sense eventually.”

Gran-Gran sniffed at that. As if . . . as if she wanted him to balk at the strange style of instruction. Well, Jorgen had talked to dozens of soldiers about their first days in training, and the monotonous tasks they’d been given. It happened more in the ground crew than in flight school, but he understood nonetheless.