I HAD A hard time following my own advice, and so I spent a good portion of the sleep cycle lying awake, listening. Sometime while the humans were all asleep, I caught a communication traveling through the negative realm.
—everything in hand— Quilan was saying. —give us time—retrieve Alanik—
—give us the rogue cytonic and her allies—if that proves difficult for you—set up a government who can.
I drew a deep breath. Quilan was still trying to pacify the Superiority, but he had a storm in a bottle, and any moment the glass might break. He was holding them off for now, but if they grew tired of waiting we were going to pay the price.
We had to make our move tomorrow, with whatever resources we had to work with.
I woke in the morning unsure of how much sleep I’d actually gotten, though I was still glad we’d taken the time to rest. Tired pilots were sloppy pilots, and sloppy pilots lost matches. Or in this case got themselves killed.
While the humans were eating, I used the radio in Jorgen’s ship to check the frequency Nanalis had used to broadcast the message from Rinakin. It was a Unity channel, one they often used to send messages to their people, despite Superiority admonitions that we keep wireless communication to a minimum. I wondered how long that would last once they gave the Superiority more influence over ReDawn. I wondered if they would regret it.
There was no broadcast now, but there was a repeating message about an upcoming special conversation between Rinakin and one of the most popular Unity orators later in the morning.
That was good. If Rinakin was broadcasting, I could use that signal to find his location. They would unintentionally lead me right to him.
When everyone finished eating, I followed the humans to the control room with the taynix boxes. Rig, Jorgen, FM, and I gathered in the room while the others waited outside.
“None of your people died in the night,” I said to Jorgen. “So I suppose the udal nuts weren’t toxic to you.”
“You only say that because you didn’t have to share a room with Nedd last night,” Jorgen said.
“All right,” Rig said. “I’ve finished reassembling Alanik’s ship, and I found the shield systems. They’re similar to the ones on Platform Prime, so I was able to get them working. I don’t think it’s as effective as the planetary shield, because we don’t have hundreds of other platforms to form a barrier. But look.”
He gestured out the window at a blueish tint now coloring the miasma.
“That’s something,” Jorgen said. “Good work.”
I wondered how much sleep Rig had gotten, but he didn’t complain. “We expect we know how the comms and navigation systems work,” he said. “They should be similar to the hypercomms and hyperdrives we already use. But we want to check out this unknown cytonic weapons system, and then make a plan for how to use the platform to fight back.”
“Rig and I were thinking that Boomslug might be the right type to put in a weapons system,” FM said. “Given what we’ve seen him do.”
Jorgen knelt to gently pick up Boomslug, who was lying in the doorway to the control room. “You ready, buddy?”
“Buddy,” Boomslug said in his deep voice.
“Okay,” Rig said. “It would be really nice to have a weapons system we can control.”
FM took Boomslug from Jorgen and put him into the box. “I am going to give you so much caviar if this works,” she said.
“If we have to experiment on him,” Jorgen said, “I’m glad he’s inside a metal box where he hopefully can’t hurt us.”
I was pretty sure mindblades could pass through most substances and do damage as they went, but I didn’t tell Jorgen that. If the former inhabitants of this platform had put a taynix in this box and then used it to power weapons, presumably they hadn’t cut themselves to ribbons in the process.
“All right,” Rig said when the box was locked. “Let’s see what he can do.”
“What am I going to ask it?” Jorgen said. “Please attack… nothing?”
“Go boom,” FM said. “You remember what that felt like, right?”
Jorgen winced. “Too well.”
“Can you aim the gun?” I asked. “We’re a long way from Hollow, but we don’t know exactly how far this weapon can reach.”
“She’s right,” Rig said. “The Superiority had planetary weapons. This could be one of those. I didn’t see anything on this platform as big as that was, but I didn’t exactly perform an exhaustive search, and—”
“I’ll try to focus away from the tree,” Jorgen said. “Out in the miasma. The same way I do when I direct them to hyperjump. Anyone else have any concerns?”
We were all quiet.
“Okay,” Jorgen said. “Here goes.”
I focused on the mind of the slug, trying not to make enough contact that I would distract it from Jorgen’s message, but just enough that I could feel the change.
I didn’t need to though. The whole platform quivered with the reverberation, like a weapon had fired with incredible force. Out the window, the miasma in front of us shifted, swirling in eddies around invisible projectiles.
“Scud!” Nedd shouted from outside. “What was that?”
“Mindblades,” I said. “Did they aim where you wanted them to go?”
“They did,” Jorgen said. “We still have no idea how powerful that weapon is. It moved the gas clouds around, but that doesn’t mean—”
“A well-placed mindblade can cut right through a ship’s hull,” I said.
“That seems like something we can use to defend ourselves,” Rig said. “Though I worry we’ll have already drawn attention by using it.”
A plan began to form in my mind. “Drawing attention might be a good thing though,” I said. “If we were to move the platform and activate the weapons, Unity would want to stop us.”
“That’s true,” Jorgen said. “They’d send forces after us.”
“But they wouldn’t be able to get past the autoturrets quickly,” I said. “That kind of operation requires a lot of drones and a lot of patience, and that’s if they could get through the shield. They’d want to send Unity’s cytonics to stop you.”
“What good are cytonics if we have an inhibitor up?” FM asked.
“They’d still be able to affect us,” I said. “The inhibitor prevents cytonics without the key from using their powers from within the field. The other cytonics could still surround us and put up an inhibitor field of their own, preventing us from using the cytonic weapons or hyperjumping out, essentially trapping us.”
“We’d still have the autoturrets and the shield to defend us,” Jorgen said.
“Yes,” I said. “But they can also magnify each other’s abilities. Quilan can use his cytonic powers to knock people out with a concussion bolt. It’s what he did to me before I crashed your ship. The other cytonics can help him amplify it, creating a concussion field, similar to the way they join their minds together in an inhibitor. They’ve done it before during political protests.” They said they were quelling riots, trying to keep things peaceful. But knocking people out en masse always seemed violent to me.
“Why haven’t they done that to us already?” FM asked.
“I imagine they’re planning to,” I said. “But it wouldn’t let them get inside the shield, and it’s not easy to do. They’d have to surround the platform and maintain more or less the same positions while they do it. It’s not very applicable in an actual battle, where the enemy ships can chase you out of formation.”
“So we’d need ships in the air,” Jorgen said, “making sure they can’t get into formation to inhibit us or use the concussion field. We could tempt the other cytonics away from Rinakin, which would make it easier for you to rescue him.”
“Right,” I said. Even if they had Rinakin inside a taynix-powered inhibitor, I’d still have a better chance of rescuing him without the other cytonics to contend with.
“What exactly are we going to do to get their attention though?” FM asked. “It’ll take more than just firing the hyperweapon into the miasma.”
“Is there some Unity base we could fire on?” Jorgen said. “We don’t want to hit civilian targets, but if we could hit a military one—”
The idea of actually firing a mindblade weapon, even at a Unity target, was horrifying to me. “I don’t want to kill anyone unless we have to,” I said.
“Sure,” Jorgen said. “We could wait for them to fire first.”
“But there will be a lot of Unity people on their base who aren’t firing at us,” I said. “And I don’t want to shoot at them.”
The humans stared at me for a moment, like they could accept this but didn’t quite understand it.
They’d been at war their whole lives and were willing to make sacrifices I wasn’t ready for. I acted like I was hardened to the consequences, but I’d never killed anyone. I’d mostly shot people with tagging lasers—most of my time in starships had been spent playing games.
“What if we moved the platform into the miasma outside the Unity headquarters on Tower?” I asked. “It’s a tree with a huge population, so I don’t want to fire on it. But just being there would feel like a threat to Unity, more than any other tree but the Council tree. We can’t threaten that one, because we need to draw the cytonics farther away so I can go and get Rinakin if they leave him behind. But you don’t have to shoot at the tree. Just hyperjump there, maybe fire a warning shot with the hyperweapon into the miasma.”
“That’s a better idea,” Jorgen said. “You’re right. We don’t want to hurt anyone we don’t have to.”
“Good,” I said. “Meanwhile I could go in and get Rinakin, since he’d be relatively unguarded.”
“Unless they bring him with them,” FM said.
“They might,” I said. “But if they bring him to us, we can pivot the plan and I can come back to rescue him from their ships.”
“You shouldn’t go alone,” Jorgen said. “There are too many things that could go wrong with that plan, and you’d need backup.”
“I’ll be stealthier alone,” I said.
“But we work as a team,” Jorgen insisted, sparing a glance at FM. “You need someone there if things go wrong. At the very least that person could engage their taynix to come back here and tell us what’s happened to you, so we can organize a rescue effort.”
It was a good sign that they would consider rescuing me if something went wrong.
“I’ll have to stay here to communicate with the slugs in the platform,” Jorgen continued, “and Rig will need to stay too, but—”
“I’ll go,” Arturo said from the doorway.
I looked at him. Yesterday it had seemed like he was starting to trust me, but here he was volunteering to come along and babysit me. To make sure that I wasn’t going to have his people make a spectacle out of themselves and then grab Rinakin and run.
I could do that, I realized. Arturo’s presence wouldn’t stop me. But the whole point of going to Detritus in the first place was to find allies. Even if the rest of their people were making a different choice, these humans were still willing to work with me. So far, anyway.
Jorgen nodded. “That makes the most sense. Maybe you should take Nedd as well.”
“Alanik is right,” Arturo said. “The more people we bring, the less stealthy we are. But if we’re going into combat with a ship with a cytonic inhibitor, we’ll want at least two of us. If we find that it’s being guarded by a whole fleet, we can hyperjump back and regroup, but at least we’ll know more than we know now.”
“All right,” Jorgen said. “We’re going to need to get everyone together and talk this through. Alanik, would you go talk to the Independence pilots? See if they’ll join us? We could meet in the hangar. It’s the only space we’ve found so far that’s big enough to fit all of us together comfortably.”
I nodded.
I didn’t like putting any of them in danger, but if we succeeded it would be worth it.
