Chapter Eight Arturo
Eight
Arturo
It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the dim light.
Trees crowded around us, the canopy sheltering us from the sun, which shone through the branches at a low angle and tossed a pattern of light and shadow across the forest floor.
Wide, five-pointed leaves waved wildly overhead, the light above exposing their large networks of veins.
Our light-lances illuminated the purple-brown bark of their trunks, the color of a bad bruise.
Naga had hyperjumped us deftly between the trees into a gully, so our ships would be hidden from view.
My proximity monitors had a hard time getting a reading with my ship at lower elevation than the land around it.
I wasn’t sure how far we’d gone, or how long it might take the ships to follow if they managed to track us.
“Nedder,” I said over the radio, “do we have incoming?”
If the Superiority force had a full cytonic, they’d be able to pinpoint our location and hyperjump after us. If they were only using taynix to give directions to their drone ships, they might have lost us.
Nedd was quiet for a moment. “I’m not seeing anything,” he said. “Though it might take them time to reach us. Should we keep moving?”
Could we keep moving? The woods had enough space that we could use the hangar controls on our boosters to painstakingly maneuver our way through, but it would be slow going, even slower than walking.
“I think we have to stay put,” I said. “But Bob needs to be ready to put in for another hyperjump if things go south.”
“Enemy drones might arrive from any direction,” Alanik said. “Oh, my translator indicates you mean if things go wrong. Why does your language have a bias toward north?”
I…didn’t know the answer to that, so I ignored the question. I checked my ship’s atmospheric readings. According to my sensors, the air was safe to breathe. “Scan the area, Nedder.”
“Will do,” Nedd said. His Dulo-class ship lacked the sophisticated scanning capabilities of the scout ships, but it could gather some limited data about our proximity to the city and the river that ran near it.
“Suki,” I said, “are you and the slugs all right in there?”
“We’re alive!” Suki said.
I supposed at the moment that was all we could ask for.
“I’m coming to get you,” I said. “Everyone else sit tight.”
“Um, Amphi?” Sadie said. “Shouldn’t one of us back you up?”
“Yes,” Alanik said. “These trees are disturbing.”
“Really?” Sadie said. “You grew up in a tree!”
“We live on trees,” Alanik said. “The trees do not grow over the top of us. Even the grafted orchards are not so large as these. It feels…wrong.”
“I don’t know,” Sadie said. “Feels kind of like being in a cavern. Just like home.”
Except the walls of the cavern didn’t sway in the breeze.
Sadie did have a point about backup. I didn’t have good visibility in the shadows of the trees, and I couldn’t be sure what I’d encounter.
I reached behind my seat to the storage box and pulled out a handheld light-line and a destructor pistol, making sure they were operational.
“Angel, stay by your ship and provide cover while I extract Suki and the slugs.”
“Copy, Amphi,” Alanik said, and to my left, the canopy of her ship popped open.
I lifted my own and was unprepared for the oppressive blanket of heat that fell over me. This part of the planet was humid, the air heavy. I took off my flight mask and was struck by the stench of decay, with an undertone of something like cinnamon.
“I’ve got you covered,” Alanik said. She hadn’t descended from her cockpit, but she had her destructor pistol pointed in my direction.
I climbed out of my ship, my boots digging into the soft soil at the bottom of the gully.
Rotting bark flaked apart as I trod toward the wreckage of Orator.
The soil was composed mostly of purple-brown wood remnants, loose and fluffy, as if the trees had been molting.
A creaking sound echoed through the forest as the wind bent the branches of the trees.
They moaned as if they were in pain, and more remnants of bark filtered through the air and caught in the crooks of the branches or came to rest on the forest floor.
Leaves were sparse on the lower branches, but I had to weave around tree trunks and over fallen branches. If we had to travel far like this, it might be easier to climb up to the lower branches, which twisted and tangled around each other. We could walk along them like a series of balance beams.
I made my way to Orator and found the side fuselage door rumpled and jammed shut, so I climbed in through the hole where the cockpit used to be and forced my way through the door into the hold.
It was dark inside, and I switched on the small light-lance attached to my wrist. The red-orange glow illuminated the bodies of Katri and Dasha, still strapped in their seats.
Dasha’s head lolled at an unnatural angle, and Katri had a metal rod jammed through her side.
Blood had pooled on her seat and splattered all over the walls and ceiling, spread by the abrupt changes in momentum during the fight above.
I was grateful for their flight masks. I’d failed them both, and I couldn’t bear to look into their lifeless faces.
Suki was barely visible, layered between Hoid and Twist, who had coiled themselves around her—for comfort or protection I wasn’t sure.
“Are you hurt?” I asked Suki.
“Only bruised, I think,” she said, reaching to unstrap herself from her seat, though the slugs remained in her way.
“Hey,” I said to the slugs, and reached for them. I ran a hand down Twist’s blue spines and then Hoid’s rainbow-colored ones. “It’s okay. You can let go.”
“Okay,” Twist said, loosening her grip on Suki.
“Let go,” Hoid said, and he nuzzled my outstretched hand.
I lifted Twist and Hoid onto my shoulders, where they nestled closer to my neck than was comfortable, especially in this heat. I freed Suki’s flotation platform, which was strapped next to her tiny seat, while she unbuckled herself.
“Come on,” I said. “You can ride with me while we figure out what to do next.”
Suki gave one long, last look at Dasha’s and Katri’s bodies before climbing onto her disk and floating after me as I made my way out of the wreckage.
Suki had an easier time than I did navigating back to my ship.
She sailed ahead of me, weaving between a few low branches while I trudged across the soft ground to my cockpit.
“All clear,” I said over my radio when I arrived. I settled Hoid and Twist into the sling with Naga. The netting of the sling threatened to burst, but the slugs all curled around each other, too happy to be alive to care about the close quarters. “Nedder,” I said, “what have you found?”
“There are still drones patrolling above us,” Nedd said. “But they’re in the upper atmosphere. If we flew above the canopy, they could probably spot us.”
“If they’re not flying directly toward us,” I said, “that may mean they don’t know where we are. Any idea where the Superiority base is located?”
“I did a scan for acclivity stone in the surrounding area,” Nedd said. That sensor function was meant for locating downed ships with broken beacons, but could also sense enemy airfields. “I’m not finding any concentrations on the planet.”
“So our intel may be correct,” I said. “The people here aren’t spacefaring.”
“Then why are there so many drones patrolling the atmosphere?” Gilaf asked.
“Maybe they’re aware the Superiority has fallen,” I said, “and have been preparing for a potential attack.”
“They were waiting for us,” Sadie said, “thinking we’d come to destroy them now that their side lost the war.”
“That’s the only explanation I can think of,” I said. Though this Superiority force was surprisingly prepared for a group that hadn’t seen combat in a century and couldn’t have been preparing for our arrival for more than a couple of weeks. “Angel, do you sense any cytonic activity?”
“None,” Alanik said. “Just the hypercomm signals to the patrolling ships. A few of them are flying beneath the inhibitor field.”
“Can you tell where their instructions are coming from?” I asked.
“I cannot,” Alanik responded. “They must be hidden by the inhibitor.”
I knocked my head against the back of my seat.
“If they can command their drones inside the inhibitor, that means their taynix know the inhibitor codes.” The code wasn’t an actual sequence of numbers, but a unique cytonic impression that allowed their taynix to use their abilities inside the inhibitor field, while we couldn’t.
“That puts them at a huge advantage. Combined with their superior numbers, there’s no way we can take them by force, even if we can locate their base. ”
“I found it,” Nedd said. “Sensors indicate a large space station hovering over the planet, above the city.”
“Okay,” I said, “so we can’t assault them directly, and we can’t outrun them through the inhibited zone. Their drones would gun us down before we worked our way through the debris and escaped.”
“Sounds right,” Nedd said.
Stars. I had to get my people out of this mess, but if we couldn’t fight and we couldn’t hyperjump, we hadn’t saved ourselves by hiding on the planet. Unless we wanted to start our own colony of tree people and live out our lives in this forest, we’d only delayed the inevitable.
“If we wait long enough, Jorgen will send help,” I said.
“Though he’ll be sending them into the same ambush that hit us.
” He’d probably send a bigger force, but without any information about our disappearance, it wouldn’t be big enough.
“Angel, any chance you or Bob can get a cytonic communication to Jorgen, let him know what we’re up against here? ”
“None,” Alanik said. “This planet is odd. I can use my powers here, but it’s as if the galaxy outside the inhibitor field has disappeared. We’re trapped in some kind of pocket.”
That was odd, and I didn’t totally understand it. Figuring out the inhibitor field was part of our mission here, and we weren’t making progress on that front.
The other half of our team’s mission was to begin diplomatic relations with the humans of Blightfall, but we’d lost most of our diplomatic team, and I was no longer confident that it was safe to announce ourselves to the humans of Blightfall—not when we had so drastically misunderstood the situation on this planet.
We’d been in dangerous situations before, but this one felt different.
It took me a moment to realize why.
Jorgen was the one in charge then. I hadn’t had to make the calls during the war. I’d followed where he led.
Saying that out loud would be admitting that I wasn’t as good a leader, that I didn’t have what it took to guide my team through this.
And even if that were true, it would be worse to broadcast it to the team.
If I wanted them to have confidence in me, I had to have confidence in myself.
We’d already lost five members of our team today.
I had to do everything I could to keep things from disintegrating further.
“If we determined the situation was safe,” I said to Suki, who floated on her platform inside my cockpit, “would you be prepared to make diplomatic contact?”
Suki looked at me like I had lost my mind, then said, “Flightleader, I’m a xenoanthropologist. My job on the diplomatic team was an advisory one. I daresay most of my direct diplomatic experience has been spending time with you.”
I’d been afraid of that. Suki could help us in an advisory capacity, but even if it was safe to reveal ourselves to the humans of Blightfall, we’d have to do the talking. “Nedd,” I said over the radio, “can you tell how far we are from the human city?”
“There’s a hub of radio activity thirteen klicks out,” Nedd said, “with enough traffic to indicate a city.”
“Can you tell what kind of radio traffic?” I asked.
Nedd was quiet, probably listening in. “Weather reports. Some statistics…I think they might be sports scores.”
“Sounds like a civilization,” Alanik said.
“Investigating that city is our best bet,” I said.
“We can leave the ships here, and either hyperjump or follow their tracer beacons to return. For now, I think we need to disguise ourselves using Hoid’s illusions and take a look around the city.
See if the humans are aware of the force that attacked us, and if they seem safe to approach. ”
“That sounds like a wise course,” Suki said.
“If we’re going to do this,” I said, “we need stealth and subtlety.”
“Hey,” Nedd said. “We can be subtle. Remember when we first met Alanik? We were totally subtle.”
“Were you?” Alanik asked, as if this were the first she was hearing about our prowess with stealth.
“Didn’t we corner her in a medical bay and scare her until she ran away?” I asked.
“You did,” Alanik confirmed.
“I meant after that,” Nedd said. “When we met up with her on her home planet.”
“You mean when your hyperjump attracted military attention,” Gilaf said, “and ended in a firefight?”
“Yeah,” Nedd said. “That time.”
“There was the time you visited my people,” Suki said. “This also attracted attention and eventually a firefight. A very large one. With explosions.”
“I’m sensing a pattern,” Nedd said. “Involving firefights.”
“Okay!” I said. “So none of us have ever successfully spied on anyone before! But we did battle an oppressive galactic empire and a bunch of superpowered, godlike artificial intelligences, and we won, so it’s not like we don’t have experience doing impossible things.”
“I’d say this is significantly less impossible,” Suki said.
“Thank you,” I said. I steeled myself. My team needed my leadership, so I had to sound confident, even if I wasn’t.
“This is why Skyward Flight was sent on this assignment. Because we all have experience jumping into insane situations where things go wrong and then finding our way back out again. Jorgen had faith that we can do this, and so do I.”