“Humans have many holes in them. Would you like me to provide you with a list?”

“Please don’t.”

“Ha ha. That was humor.”

“I have a hole in my brain,” I said. “It can see into the nowhere, but they can use it against me. I think… I think my father was shown some kind of mind hologram. When he flew back down to Detritus, he saw what the enemy wanted him to.”

I remembered what he’d said. I will kill you. I will kill you all… He’d been so mournful, so soft. He thought the humans had lost—that his friends were already dead. What he’d seen hadn’t been reality.

“When he blew up his friends,” I whispered, “he thought he was shooting down the Krell.”

A small number of the boxy ships approached M-Bot in the blackness. They struck me as couriers or maybe towing devices. Through the wide glass fronts, I saw creatures that looked vaguely like the drawings we had of Krell. Dark forms in armor, with red eyes.

Only here, they were bright colors—a perky red and blue, not dark at all. They reminded me a little of the pictures of crabs I’d seen from Old Earth, during my ancient biology courses. And the “armor” they wore seemed more like some kind of living apparatus, with open plates on the “head” portion for the creatures to see out of.

The sides of the little ships were stenciled with what looked to be words in a strange language.

“Ketos redgor Earthen listro listrins,” M-Bot said, reading the words. “Roughly, in English, that means ‘Penitentiary maintenance and containment of Earthlings.’ ”

Scud. That… sounded ominous. “Can you tell me what they’re saying?”

“There’s some radio chatter nearer the station,” he said, “but I suspect these ships are communicating using faster-than-light cytonic devices.”

“Relax whatever you’re doing to shield us,” I said, “but don’t put it down entirely. If I scream again, or go crazy, put it back up.”

“Okay…,” M-Bot said. “You already seem crazy to me, but I guess that’s nothing new.”

Awareness returned to me, the voices in the darkness of space. I could hear their words, the ones they were sending through the nowhere. I knew them, even without needing a translation, because in that place all languages were one.

“It’s looking at me!” one of the creatures was saying. “I think it wants to eat me. I don’t like this at all!”

“It should be incapacitated now,” a communication returned from the space station. “And if it’s looking at you, it doesn’t see you. We are overwriting its vision. Tow the ship in for study. That’s not a standard DDF model. We’re curious how they built it.”

“I don’t want to get anywhere near it,” said another one of the creatures. “Don’t you know how dangerous these things are?”

Curious, I looked out of my canopy at a ship drawing closer, then I made a kind of growling face—baring my teeth. The creature screamed and immediately turned its ship around and fled. The other two tugboat-style ships backed away.