Chapter Two Arturo
Two
Arturo
My mother didn’t send a pilot after us, and she didn’t jump into a ship herself to chase us down. We returned the ships safe and sound to the ground crew, and I waited for my mother to call me on my handheld radio to tell me what a disappointment I was. I waited and waited.
But when the call finally came, it wasn’t from my mother. It was from Rikolfr, the secretary to Admiral Jorgen Weight. “Amphi,” Rikolfr said, “the admiral would like to see you in his office in thirty minutes.”
“I’ll be there,” I told him, because when the admiral of the Defiant Defense Force asks for your presence, the answer is always yes.
Still, I wondered what my mother must have said to Jorgen to inspire him to summon me. He wouldn’t care about me stealing the family ships, so I worried he was about to promote me.
I wound my way through the labyrinthine hallways of Platform Prime to the admiral’s office.
While the assembly argued about how to make Detritus’s surface more habitable, our military was headquartered in an old station in the debris belt, high above the planet’s surface.
Jorgen’s office was small and windowless, with a wide desk and a conference table.
It was completely undecorated, which was either a reflection of how busy he’d been or mandated by some obscure DDF regulation only Jorgen had read.
Jorgen sat behind his desk, scrolling on a datapad.
His white admiral’s uniform was crisp and well fitted, and it contrasted with his dark skin and curly black hair.
Two taynix sat on the corner of his desk—one purple with orange spines and one red with black spines.
The purple one was a commslug, which powered hypercommunications across galactic space, and the other could explode in a torrent of mindblades, ripping people to shreds, so Jorgen had aptly named it Boomslug.
It still took me aback sometimes that creatures who looked so cuddly could be so powerful.
The Superiority had forced the taynix into what was essentially slavery for centuries, using them to manage their communications and hyperjump their ships across space.
By comparison, we’d only discovered them recently—and it was in large part because of them that we’d been able to win the war.
Unlike the Superiority, we tried to treat them as partners rather than tools.
Boomslug opened his mouth and sampled some papers on Jorgen’s desk. Jorgen didn’t seem to notice. I stepped up and saluted, as befitted the reception of my senior officer.
“At ease,” Jorgen said. He hesitated. “In the future, you can dispense with the formalities when we’re alone.”
Thank the North Star for that. Jorgen was young for an admiral, but he knew the DDF regulations inside and out and was only recently willing to consider that maybe the handbook didn’t contain every rule and guideline we’d ever need.
All it took to grant him that perspective was developing inexplicable cosmic powers and the complete upending of our entire civilization.
“If this is about something my mother said,” I began, but Jorgen waved a hand, indicating for me to take a seat in the chair across the desk from him.
“It’s not about that,” Jorgen said. “Though if you want a position in Command, I would of course promote you.”
My mother would salivate over this. “I hope you didn’t tell her that.”
Jorgen smiled. “I did not. I take it you’re not eager to leave the flight?”
“Not at all.”
“Good,” Jorgen said, “because I have a job I need your help with.”
“Need your help with!” Boomslug agreed, his baritone trill lower than other taynix’s.
I shouldn’t be excited to be needed—if Jorgen had a job for Skyward Flight, it meant he thought someone should be shot at.
Over the month since the end of the war, we’d mostly been sent on escort missions, accompanying alliance diplomats to various alien planets.
Our presence on those trips was preventative and symbolic—and mostly boring, to be honest, but none of those assignments had been handed down by the admiral himself.
“We’re starting to reach out to the other human preserves,” Jorgen said. “But we’ve run into an obstacle.” He waved a hand at the holoprojector on his desk, and an image splayed across the space between us—a spherical accumulation of rock, like the natural version of the platforms around Detritus.
“That’s a planet with other humans?” I asked.
We’d met very few humans from outside Detritus—the Superiority’s use of “preserves” had kept us separated while letting them congratulate themselves on only mostly destroying our species.
We still didn’t know where all of them were, though we had the locations for a few—but those were so isolated, the humans there might not even know we were free.
“Yes,” Jorgen said. “It’s called Blightfall. It’s a small planet in a tidally locked orbit around a red dwarf star.”
We’d learned about tidal locking in school: When a planet was close enough to a star, its rotation could sync with its orbit so the same side of the planet always faced the star.
There would be no sunrise or sunset, with the sun remaining in a static position in the sky based on your location on the planet.
“We think there’s a large human city here,” Jorgen said. “But a cytonic disturbance is preventing us from hyperjumping through the rubble belt or using a hypercomm to make contact.”
“An inhibitor?” I asked. Our own planet was protected by inhibitors produced by the blue-and-green taynix. They blocked all cytonic powers, like hyperjumping or hypercommunication.
“We don’t think it’s a normal inhibitor,” Jorgen said. “The rubble around the planet looks a lot like the physical matter that leaks from our realm into the nowhere.”
“Oh, scud,” I said. The nowhere was a dimension parallel to ours, which cytonics passed through when they hyperjumped.
Despite what the name implied, it was far from empty.
If one of the portals between our dimension and the nowhere had opened, sending a rubble belt’s worth of matter through to our side…
“Are the humans on this planet still alive?”
“We think so,” Jorgen said. He pressed a button on the holoprojector, bringing up a report beside another three-dimensional representation of a planet.
The side facing us had a large landmass surrounded by ocean.
Detritus had no large bodies of water, only a wasteland of dust and debris, so it always surprised me how common surface water was on other inhabited planets.
“The information we stole from the Superiority during the war mentions the rubble belt and the inhibitor field around it. It’s not caused by taynix, but rather some kind of natural cytonic disturbance.
It can’t be turned off, though it affects only the area around the planet, not the planet itself. ”
That was odd. I hadn’t heard of a “natural cytonic disturbance” before. And one that affected the area around the planet, but not the surface? It almost sounded like a cosmic bubble, the planet trapped within it.
“Shouldn’t we be able to jump directly to the surface, then,” I asked, “even if the airspace above it is blocked?”
“We should,” Jorgen confirmed. “But we can’t, and we don’t know why.
That may be one reason the Superiority considered the humans on this planet a very low escape risk.
In addition to being trapped inside some kind of naturally occurring inhibitor, they are also not spacefaring, don’t have acclivity stone to power ships, and seem to be peaceful. ”
“So they’re still trapped there,” I said. “Even though the Superiority is gone and can no longer actively hold them captive.”
“That’s what we believe,” Jorgen said. “We’re sending scouts to fly through the disturbance, along with a team of diplomats…”
I saw where this was going. Another bodyguard mission, this time to a people who were known to be peaceful and didn’t even have ships capable of firing on us.
“Our job is to keep the diplomats safe,” I said.
“In part. The information we stole indicates that there was a small Superiority security force watching the planet. But even if that force is still there, hiding inside the nowhere disturbance, they won’t have seen combat in a century.
You should be able to quickly deal with any resistance and then land near the city.
Leave it to the scouts to survey the planet and the diplomats to make contact with the city.
I want your team to investigate the nowhere disturbance to see what you can learn about what caused it.
You’ll want to take Alanik. As a cytonic, she may be able to sense things about the disturbance that others can’t. ”
I was never opposed to taking Alanik with me, and not just because she was an amazing pilot. I would spend all my time with her if I could. “Should I not take the entire flight?”
“I don’t think you’ll need that many ships,” Jorgen said. “We aren’t sending our diplomats in without precautions, but we also don’t want a full strike force on a diplomatic mission to a population that doesn’t have starfighters. I want to send you, Alanik, and two other pilots.”
“I’d like to bring Nedd,” I said.
Jorgen raised an eyebrow. I didn’t know if Nedd had told Jorgen yet that he intended to stay with the flight. I didn’t want to turn Nedd’s job offer down for him, but I also didn’t want to leave him behind.
“As a copilot,” I clarified. “He’s been riding with Gilaf, so I’ll bring him too.” As long as Nedd was my second-in-command, we couldn’t fly in the same ship. He had to be ready to give orders if I went down.
“I want you to take four ships,” Jorgen said, “so you can break into wingmate pairs as necessary. If Nedd is riding with Gilaf, I recommend taking Sadie as your fourth pilot.”
I resisted the urge to groan. Sadie Chay was the youngest pilot on my team, and the least experienced. “Due respect,” I said, “but if we’re supposed to silently guard the diplomats and let them do the talking, I’d rather bring someone…”