Page 113 of Blightfall

More alarming than the thousands—maybe hundreds of thousands—of pods, were the varvax racing around them. The gate we’d passed through was unguarded. Rather than defend it, the varvax ran here and there, lights flashing and sirens wailing, alerting them to do…whatever it was they were doing. There were dozens of them, some with clipboards, others wheeling carts piled with fluid-filled IV bags. These wore no robes, and their exosuits were fully intact, rather than missing their heads. Most of them didn’t look like soldiers. More like…vat workers.

Ivy’s voice came over the loudspeaker, though the words were in another language. I turned on my pin so it would translate. “Intruders at the gate,” Ivy said. “Don’t let them disrupt the preparations!”

Several varvax ran toward us between the pods, sidearms pointed in our direction. “Stop,” they said. “Drop your weapons!”

If we dropped our weapons, they were probably going to kill us. Instead, Nedd and I dove for shelter behind the nearest pod and fired our pistols. The varvax returned fire, hitting the pod in front of us. A viscous liquid began to pour out of it, turning immediately to steam as it depressurized. A wave of cold wafted over me like a blast from a refrigerator, and through the broken part of the pod, I could see the arm and hand of a human inside.

They weren’t farming people. They were freezing them. “It’s some kind of stasis pod,” I said. “They’re preserving all of these humans.”

“That answers the question of where the gladiators are going,” Nedd said, firing again at the varvax over the top of the pod. We were leaning against some kind of vitals panel, I realized. The pod was monitoring and reporting blood oxygen levels, temperature, and heart rate. I wasn’t a medical expert, but all of those rates looked far below human normal. The person inside wasn’t literally frozen, but their vitals had been reduced to a minimum while the pod kept the person medically alive.

I thought about Liba’s assertion that there were other planets training humans with other skills—pilots, ground troops, navies. Had they all been sent here? Ivy probably didn’t need a hundred thousand highly specialized melee fighters like the gladiators. If this really was a well-rounded army of trained humans ready to fight aliens, they could be exactly the resource we needed to fight Ivy and get home, especially if there were ships and sidearms stored in this facility. Could we wake them up and get them to be on our side?

But it also raised an important question: Why had Ivy collected this army? What did she intend to do with them?

“Are you people incompetent?” Ivy said. “Do I have to do everything myself?”

“Oh, scud,” Nedd said as a host of small drones, no bigger than a taynix, flew over the top of the pods. One looked identical to the camera drones from the arena, but the others had small weapons, each glowing with an eerie orange light.

“Come on,” Nedd said, ducking and running along the back of the bank of pods. I followed with my pistol pointed behind me, pausing only to take aim at one of the drones and shoot it out of the air. It landed on the far side of a pod with a heavy clank.

The other drones were too fast, though. They descended on us. Nedd and I shot wildly, but we only succeeded in taking down one more drone before one pressed the glowing barrel of its weapon against the skin at the back of my neck. I reached around to seize it and toss it away, but I was too late. A current of electricity ran through my body, sending all my muscles into spasms. My pack hit the ground, and I heard Hoid squeak inside. My whole body screamed in pain, and I thought I screamed along with it, though I wasn’t sure if that was aloud or only in my mind.

“Bring the humans to me,” Ivy said over the loudspeaker. “If you all can’t deal with them, I will.” The current stopped, but my muscles still cramped, and I lay helpless on the floor, unable to resist as varvax grabbed us by the arms, hauling us away.

Thirty-Nine

Arturo

“Oh, stars,” I said, staring up at the approaching ships. Bob kept broadcasting my words, not knowing they were no longer meant for the crowd. “They’re going to attack. The scudding varvax are going to attack the arena.”

Those ships would be here in moments. “We need to get to our ships,” I said to Alanik. Bob got the message on that one, and my words cut out halfway through. Stars, though, I’d just told a whole arena of people they were under attack. Many of them would have seen the ship that hit the city wall, and all of them would have heard about it. I could already hear the voices in the arena beginning to rise, the panic beginning to set in.

There wasn’t time. I had to leave control of these people to Dayan and hope they could keep them from rioting. If a crowd this big tried to flee in a rush, people could be trampled.

“Bob, stay with Dayan,” I said as Alanik put a hand on my shoulder. “Stars, we have to wait for a hyperjump,” I said. The ships might destroy the arena by then.

“We can go now,” Alanik said. “I requested one when Ivy announced Dayan was a traitor. I thought we were having an immediate need.”

I hadn’t commanded her to do that, but I wasn’t unhappy she had. Alanik put a hand on Gilaf as well.

“We’ll do our best to keep them off you,” I said to Dayan, and in a blink, we’d left the arena behind. All those humans, about to be fired on by destructors. No shields. No ships. Not even a roof between them and raw firepower from enemy starfighters. Only Dayan and Bob remained to try to stave off the panic.

We appeared near our ships. “Alanik, ride with me,” I said, running for the Dulo. She was injured, and we only had two ships for three pilots. From the copilot’s seat she could help me manage the taynix and keep an eye on the enemy. I let Suki out so she could climb into the Dulo’s dash seat. Alanik and I emptied our bags of taynix, and I passed Squeeze and Wham to Gilaf as he boarded the remaining starfighter. We kept Nope with us.

But Naga was missing. “Naga!” I shouted, expecting to find her waiting on my dash, or already in her sling beside my seat, but she wasn’t here. The last time I’d seen her, she’d appeared in the coliseum. “Suki, did you see where she went?”

“She hyperjumped while we were still in the arena,” Suki said.

“Scud.” She was a hyperslug, so she couldn’t be left behind unless she wanted to be.

“There’s no time to find her,” Alanik said. “She’ll have to catch up.”

Stars, I hoped she was okay, but Alanik was right. We needed to be over the arena now.

Suki buckled herself into the dash seat. I forgot about the preflight checklist. Even rule-following Jorgen wouldn’t mess with one under these circumstances. Instead, I lifted my ship off the ground, hovering just below the tree canopy. “Ghost, you ready?” I asked.

“Ready,” Gilaf said.