How were the lifebuster bomber escort ships controlled?

[Ziggo]

Theories? In the final battle when spensa was engaging the bomber in her shieldless Poco she notes that she cannot hear the commands being issued to these fighters, that look different than the standard krell.

Simpliest answer is that they were being locally piloted right. Perhaps by a different Alien species that is more warlike than the one that spensa saw? Maybe by brainwashed cytonics culled from the humans that surrendered? Is there an ovbious answer that I missed?

[+robardin]

Yeah, my assumption is that they were not unmanned drones being given commands remotely via cytonic transmissions that Spensa and her dad (and presumably, were she not blind, her grandmother) could tap into. And probably other descendants of the Defiant engineering crews who genetically have "the defect".

What they were instead, then, is something to discover in the next few books. The "jailkeeper" pilots that Spensa encountered when she flew out of the debris layer seemed quite terrified of a physical encounter, yet they only said that "[being face to face with a human pilot] is a job for an unmanned drone", instead of something like "OMG get one of those Kerplotchians* in one of their black fighter ships out here, now!"

(*Of course I made that up.)

It would be interesting if it turned out the "Kerplotchians" were humans, brainwashed or not. We don't know what the official decree was from the "victorious coalition of aliens" with regards with what to do with defeated humankind, other than they were not genocidal, yet exclusionary: "too brutal, too uncivilized, and too aggressive to be allowed to be part of the intergalactic community. They demanded that all human fleets... surrender to their authority."

The independent fleet of the Defiant had fled rather than surrender to this collective judgment, but were "cornered" - upon which the engineering crew, led by Spensa's great-grandmother, defied orders and crashed on Detritus instead of wherever or whatever else the official orders had been.

So there could well be humans still out there, and in the years that have passed since then, who have been "rehabilitated" into working with the Intergalactic Community.

I don't think they'd need to be cytonic humans, or aliens, to be fighter pilots any more than anybody else in the DDF, as the aliens clearly have non-biological cytonic transmission technology to control the drones. The "hateful eyes" that Spensa senses when opening herself up to "hyperspace" (that term isn't actually used in the book, is it?) seem both sentient and hostile and are likely a component or a driver of the alien coalition arrayed against humankind, though.

[Calyx]

My assumption was that they were just locally controlled by the bomber - still remote, but without the need for FTL communication that Spensa can intercept.

[John Flamesinger]

They don't call is Hyperspace, they call it the "nowhere"