Chapter Forty-Two Arturo
Forty-Two
Arturo
We emerged from the nowhere portal in what looked like a massive warehouse filled with strange apparatuses. We sped across the room at breakneck speed, rapidly approaching the far wall. “Scud!” I shouted. “Scud, scud, scud!”
“Scud!” a chorus of taynix echoed around me.
I pulled up and fired with my destructors, blowing a hole in the wall. Dust and stone rained around us, but my fighter sailed cleanly through the hole, flying out into the sky.
The horizon was a dusky blue color, clouded with a haze that made it difficult to see too far in any particular direction.
Enormous chunks of rock hung in the sky, similar to the debris field surrounding Blightfall, though these rocks were closer together and much lower to the ground.
They were suspended in midair, as if gravity held no sway over them here.
I’d heard the nowhere described as a series of islands floating in space, but the ground here was solid, as if we’d transported to another planet.
Around my ship, a complex of square buildings rose up, all similar in size and shape, arranged in a grid pattern.
It was so…mundane-looking, not unlike the squat, utilitarian military buildings we constructed on Detritus.
Even the chunks of rock floating in the sky reminded me of home.
“Nedder? Sentry?” I said over the radio. “Are you there? Do you copy?”
There was no response. Stars, we’d probably left them behind in that warehouse. I hoped they were hiding. Other alternatives were too terrible to think about.
“When I imagined the negative realm,” Alanik said, “this is not what I expected it to look like.”
“Me neither,” I said.
“I never imagined I’d see it at all,” Suki said.
She hadn’t wanted to, but I’d dragged her along anyway. “I’m sorry, Suki,” I said. “I’ll do my best to get us out of here.”
That started by figuring out where the hell we were. “What do you think these buildings are?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Alanik said. “But Amphi, look.”
“Look!” Naga said.
Alanik pointed to the monitors, at objects beginning to move toward us.
Maybe I should have turned to run, but instead I pivoted my ship in their direction. We’d come here to grab Nedd and Sadie and find out what the varvax were doing in the nowhere. We needed to see everything we could if we wanted to find answers.
It didn’t take long to identify them. Several enemy ships soared toward us.
These weren’t Krell ships but crewed fighters of a design similar to our own.
“Those are piloted ships,” I said. “Why didn’t Ivy send them after us before?
” Every ship we’d seen since we arrived on Blightfall was an unpiloted drone.
“Maybe because she would’ve needed to fly them through an arena to get them out,” Alanik said. “Not everyone is that kind of crazy.”
“Crazy,” several slugs repeated.
“Fair point,” I said. That would have startled the humans of Epiphany, that was for sure.
Stars, there were a lot of ships. Where had they found twenty pilots?
“We can’t fight that many alone,” Alanik said. “We need to run.”
She was right. If we led the ships away, lost them in the debris field, then picked some off as we swung back around, we might have time to find some answers and rescue Nedd and Sadie before being completely overwhelmed.
For now, I shot between the nearest buildings and into the sky, toward the big pieces of floating debris that hovered overhead. Nearing them, I used my light-lance to circle around one of the pieces of rock, changing my trajectory and heading away from the warehouse, still climbing in altitude.
The ships were gaining on me now, flying faster than I was. I accelerated, hoping to stay ahead of them, dodging through the debris to obscure my flight path on the enemy proximity monitors.
“I’ve never seen that model of starfighter before,” I said.
“Are they a varvax design?” Alanik asked.
“I believe they are based on a historical human ship design,” Suki said. “Your people no longer use them, but perhaps other human settlements do. Look out!” Suki ducked down in her seat as destructor fire bombarded us from behind.
“May be an old model,” I said, “but it still has the same guns.”
“Blowing things up isn’t an advanced technology,” Suki said. “You’d be surprised how little advancement is required before humans begin to bomb each other.”
“Not just humans,” Alanik said.
I wove through the debris, hitting piece after piece with my light-lance, weaving between them, putting more and more obstacles between me and the enemy. I seemed to have lost them, for the moment, at least.
I slowed to a stop above a particularly large piece of debris.
I’d never seen rocks floating so close to the surface of a planet—if that was what this landmass was.
Theoretically, gravity should have pulled them down, crashed them into the buildings below.
And yet they stayed aloft, almost like they were frozen in time.
I hovered close to the rock beneath me, keeping it between me and the surface below.
This near, the sensors of the enemy ships shouldn’t be able to differentiate between me and the debris.
They’d have to search the sky rock by rock.
And to do that, they’d have to separate, which meant I could pick off any that came close.
The various taynix still hanging out in my ship seemed to have mostly settled in.
One boomslug curled around Alanik’s ankles while another rested on her knees.
Three taynix were fluting softly behind my seat, where they had found a bag of Naga’s rations and tucked into it.
At least that would keep them from wandering around the ship and disturbing the instrumentation.
“Look at that,” Suki said, indicating the rock. Like some of the debris around Blightfall, this chunk of jagged stone contained a square, inorganic shape. This one appeared to be made out of concrete.
“Looks like the foundation of a building,” I said. “And there”—I pointed up higher on the rock—“there’s one of the walls.” It was mostly destroyed, its exposed steel all that held the remaining pieces together.
This debris looked exactly like the chunks of rock that hung around Blightfall, as if some of them had leaked from one side to the other.
“Material leaks from the somewhere into the nowhere, right?” I asked. “It slides through the portal and ends up here. That’s how we think the caverns on Detritus were formed. Rock slowly leaking through over years, leaving a space behind where it used to be.”
“But where did the land below us come from?” Alanik said. “Can it all have leaked through?”
“Can we get a look at the surface from here?” Suki asked, craning her neck and peering past the nose of the ship.
I eased my ship slowly toward the edge of the rock.
As long as I stayed close, the enemy ships should have difficulty finding me.
So I tipped the ship to get a better look at the land below.
Our view was hazy due to the rock and dust in the atmosphere, but we could make out the general shape of the land below.
It was sloped and spherical. Stars, had an entire world been sucked through into the nowhere, all in one piece?
Blightfall’s portal wasn’t big enough for that, though space clearly worked differently in this dimension, since every point of it seemed to be tied equally to every point of the somewhere.
To devour a whole planet, though. The implications boggled my mind.
There were oceans below, though the geography looked different from the islands of Evershore or the forests of Blightfall. And there were unmistakably continents, the curves of their coastlines irregular and jagged. My eyes paused on a particular hooked formation on one of the continents.
It looked familiar.
“No,” I said.
“What?” Alanik asked.
I couldn’t bring myself to say it, not unless I was sure.
I didn’t want to expose us to danger, but I needed to get a better view.
I checked for enemy ships, but the closest ones were all moving erratically, still searching for me.
I eased out from behind the rock, banking left, traveling from piece of debris to piece of debris to avoid detection, watching below me and analyzing the shape of the land.
It was simply a coastline, just curves and lines. It didn’t have to mean anything.
But the curve of the top of the continent looked familiar too, and there was the hooked, boot-like shape of a peninsula just above it.
“All stars above,” I said. “Suki, are you seeing this?”
“I’m seeing it,” Suki said. From the hush in her voice, I could tell she was coming to the same conclusion.
“What is it?” Alanik asked.
“It’s Italy,” Suki said, her voice quiet with awe.
“It’s what?”
“Earth,” I said, unable to rip my eyes away. “It’s the coastline of what used to be Europe. This planet is Earth.”
Alanik swore in her own language, which was warranted. Earth had vanished a hundred years ago. No one had seen any trace of it since. “Are you sure?”
“Very sure,” Suki said. “That block-shaped peninsula there, that used to be the Old Earth country of Spain.”
“The continent next to it was Africa,” I said. Suddenly, those school lessons didn’t seem so pointless after all. “Is Africa? Stars, I don’t know. Are there people still living here?”
“Look at that,” Alanik said. She pointed at the horizon, an area particularly crowded with broken fragments. “Watch for enemies,” I said to Alanik, unable to tear my eyes from the surface of the planet as I flew to investigate.
As we approached, it became more and more clear that the surface of the planet had exploded. Debris hung motionless in a spray pattern, as if it had erupted from the surface and then frozen, suspended on its outward path by invisible wires.
Ridges around the ragged edges of the torn earth below kept the oceans from rushing into the concave hole created by the explosion.
If the land below had still been subject to the laws of ordinary physics, gravity should have pulled those pieces of rock back in, making them part of the orbiting whole again, or else expelled them, throwing the planet off balance.
It had done neither. The pieces hung in permanent stasis, a monument to whatever horror had caused this.
“Which part exploded?” I asked. “North America?”
“I think so,” Suki said. “And South America, it seems.”
This must be where the debris around Blightfall came from.
Half of Earth’s surface had erupted, sending large chunks of matter into stasis around the planet on this side, and into orbit around Blightfall on the other.
I wondered if this event was what caused the strange inhibitor field as well—some leftover effect of a mass this large making the transition from one side to the other.
“We found Earth,” I said. “Stars, we have to get back to tell the others.” Humanity needed something to unite us, and if there was ever anything that would bring us all together in purpose, this was it.