Chapter Twenty-Nine Sadie
Twenty-Nine
Sadie
Oh stars. Oh stars. The other ships still swarmed around us, firing relentlessly, but Nedd and Gilaf disappeared beneath the overhang of the cylindrical station, through a set of open hangar doors.
If they closed those doors, we wouldn’t be able to get to Nedd and Gilaf.
“Nedder!” Arturo shouted over the radio. “Nedd!”
“I’m going,” Alanik said. She didn’t ask permission, didn’t wait for Arturo to acknowledge. She just ducked through the rain of destructor fire and flew through the hangar doors and out of sight.
“Amphi?” I called.
“Go with her,” Arturo said. “I’ll cover you, then follow.”
I didn’t like leaving him behind, but I didn’t hesitate. I dove after Alanik over the landing platform. My ship began to handle differently as I passed through the surrounding air bubble, the sudden drag of atmosphere making my ship feel sluggish.
The enemy drone that had towed Nedd and Gilaf into the landing bay turned itself around and immediately began to fire at Alanik and me.
I took a second hit to my shields as I focused on Gilaf’s Dulo, which had collided with the hangar floor and now lay, inert, beneath the opposing ship.
Dim yellow light lit the hangar from overhead.
I slammed forward in my harness as I fired my boosters backward, rapidly slowing to keep from slamming into the wall on the far side.
Stars, how bad were the g-forces from that spin? Had their blood vessels burst? Had it killed them?
My shield took a final hit and blinked out, leaving me unprotected.
I screamed and focused my destructors on the ship in front of me.
Alanik joined me, and our combined fire tore it apart.
I brought my ship to a stop just behind the wreckage, using it for cover.
I set my shield to reignite and scanned for oxygen levels.
My monitors indicated the air was safe to breathe. The ground crew seemed to have evacuated, but the large double doors that led into the facility were cracked open, and the barrel of a large gun protruded through the gap.
“Gilaf!” Alanik shouted over the radio, not bothering with his callsign. “Respond!”
More destructor fire rained onto the landing pad behind us as Arturo circled, keeping the bulk of the ships off us but unable to make a safe landing without leading them right to us.
The gun peeking out from the station proper probably wasn’t heavy enough to damage our ships, but it would prevent us from climbing out to reach Nedd and Gilaf.
“Cover me!” I said to Alanik, aiming my ship at the doorway just as the machine gun began to shoot. I returned fire.
The gun was no match for ship destructors. My shots took out the gun, both doors, and a sizable part of the doorframe with it. I couldn’t see anyone on the other side. I’d probably blown the shooter clear across the room and into multiple pieces.
Stars. If we walked in there, were we going to see the body?
Most of the ships we shot down were drones, and even those that had pilots were distant, just wreckage falling out of the air.
I knew that the creature tried to kill me first, but I still didn’t like the idea of looking it in the eyes afterward—if there were any eyes left.
I grabbed my pack with my radio, light-line, and pistol.
I dumped in Hoid—still stripeless—and Twist, then hopped out of my ship.
Alanik had already disembarked, running from the shelter of her ship to the shadow of the Dulo and then forcing open the canopy.
She grabbed Gilaf by the shoulders as I joined her.
Gilaf groaned, holding his head. The bone protrusions on Gilaf’s face were ringed with dark purple blotches, and the whites of his eyes were stained dark. He was conscious, though. He was alive. He said something, but his translator pin must have fallen off because I couldn’t understand him.
Nedd looked equally disoriented, but he blinked at me as I hoisted myself up on the ship. His prosthetic had shaken loose, hanging awkwardly in his sleeve. I winced as he pulled off his face mask. His face was covered in red blotches, his eyes red-ringed with broken blood vessels.
He looked like hell and probably had a raging headache, but at least he was conscious. That probably meant he hadn’t done permanent damage to his brain.
Alanik tucked Squeeze, Wham, and Nope into her own pack with Bob and began to haul Gilaf out of the ship.
“You okay?” I asked Nedd.
“I think so,” Nedd said. “Where are we?”
“In the hangar,” I said. I located his pistol along the side of the seat and shoved it into his hand. Normally I wouldn’t want a disoriented person wandering around with a sidearm, but in this case, leaving him without one was the greater risk.
More destructor fire disintegrated the remains of the ship I’d gunned down. We couldn’t stay here, or we were going to be killed.
Arturo’s ship soared through the hangar doors. Once he landed, we wouldn’t have anyone else in the air to keep those ships off us.
“We’ve got to go,” I said. “Come on!” I hauled Nedd out of the ship and pulled him toward the door into the facility.
Our ships were parked almost all the way against the wall, so the drones wouldn’t be able to fire on them without destroying parts of the space station, but they might consider that an acceptable loss if they could prevent our escape, so I searched the wall until I found a control panel.
I prayed I wasn’t about to evacuate our oxygen—surely that would be more difficult than the simple press of a button?
—and pulled switches until the hangar doors closed, preventing the enemy drones from following, for the moment at least.
Alanik hauled Gilaf in through the hole in the facility wall. Nedd and I followed as Arturo landed. He popped his canopy and jumped out, sprinting toward us. Dayan climbed out behind him, light-whip in one hand and Naga in the other, looking shaken but happy to be out of the ship.
Nedd seemed a bit unsteady on his feet, but he had his destructor pistol pointed in the right direction as we moved into the hallway.
The broken body of the varvax I’d shot lay against the far wall, its exoskeleton in pieces, leaking a brownish fluid.
Dayan stared at it as if unsure of what they were seeing.
I averted my eyes from the body. Maybe the varvax had survived. Except if it did, was I just leaving it alive to try to kill us another day? I didn’t know what to hope for.
Arturo took Naga from Dayan and followed us in, Suki floating behind him on her disk.
We were pretty small for a ground force, but the varvax had always caved in the face of human aggression before, so hopefully they’d do so now.
We all moved to the end of the hall, pistols aimed in front of us, ready to fire on anything that resisted.
At the end of the hall, we hugged the walls, pistols out, as we entered some kind of control center with a high ceiling and large computer screens lining the walls above rows of workstations. The left part of the room was sectioned off into cubicles with partial walls only a meter and a half tall.
The center appeared abandoned, though several of the screens were still on. A lot of the text was in what I assumed was the varvax language, though one of the screens near the ceiling had the names of gladiators from Blightfall—it appeared to be some kind of leaderboard.
Nedd had managed to get his prosthetic reattached and operational. He and Gilaf seemed to be more coherent, which was good, because we all needed to be on our toes if we expected to get through this.
Alanik approached one of the computer screens with her translator pin, holding it up so the pin could read the text. Before it could speak, a voice sounded over a loudspeaker, booming and mechanical. Alanik’s pin translated the words: “Facility compromised.”
All the computer screens went dark.
“Scud,” Arturo said. “I guess we’re not getting information that way.”
I scanned the room for exits. There were two doorways on either end of the far wall, roughly the size of normal human doors, leading deeper into the facility.
“You will not win here,” Ivy’s voice said over the loudspeaker. “You’ve neglected this facility for too long, and now it’s far too late.”
“The Superiority neglected Blightfall,” I repeated. “So Ivy turned it into her own splinter group?”
No one had the chance to debate this with me, because at that moment, everything in the room, including us, began to float.
My stomach leaped into my throat as my whole body lifted into the air, weightless.
Hoid nearly drifted out of my open pack, and I tucked him in again.
He and Twist curled around each other, looking pale and frightened.
“Scud,” Arturo said. “They turned off the artificial gravity.”
“This,” I said, “is incredible.” I reached out and grabbed onto Gilaf’s arm, pulling myself toward him as we both hovered in midair. Only Suki could move comfortably—she had strapped herself to her disk, which was powered by acclivity stone and therefore moved similarly even without gravity.
At that moment, one of the doors on the far wall swung open, and the barrel of a cannon rolled into view.
Oh scud. That was less incredible.
“Take cover!” Arturo shouted.
Easier said than done. I pushed off Gilaf’s shoulder, flinging myself at the floor. I floated toward it much more slowly than I wanted to, but twisted around to watch in horror as Gilaf went the other way, drifting toward the ceiling, completely exposed.
“Oh, scud, I’m sorry!” I said, but Gilaf shoved the corner of one of the monitors, sending himself hurtling toward the floor much faster than I had.
Suki navigated her disk down next to me.
Naga floated away from Arturo’s shoulders, and Dayan lassoed her with their light-whip, swinging her back into Arturo’s reach.
I twisted to check on Nedd—not sure if his reflexes had totally recovered—and found that he and Alanik had also flattened themselves to the floor, holding on to bolted-down table legs and shoving on the underside of desktops to stay down.
I braced for the blast from the cannon, but it caused no damage to the furniture, the monitors, or the wall behind us.
No material matter shot over our heads, but I felt the energy vibrating in my ears, humming with a frequency that turned my thoughts to jelly.
I was far enough out of the blast radius not to lose consciousness, but I recognized the sick, disoriented feeling, even at the edges of it.
“Concussion blast,” Alanik said. Stars, they had a concussion slug trapped inside that cannon.
I still didn’t know what these varvax were doing here, but they clearly weren’t going to fold as quickly as we’d hoped.