Page 128 of Blightfall

Copy, I said.

Jorgen didn’t tell me how to get out of this. He just trusted me to do it, even knowing I’d lost half the team.

If I wanted to get through those ships and rescue Sadie and Nedd, I needed to summon that kind of confidence in myself.

Forty-Five

Sadie

When Arturo called the next time, I leaned to the side and pressed the button to reply. “Nedder?” Arturo called. “Sentry? This is Amphi. Do you copy?”

“That’s our flightleader,” I said to Ivy. “The one that crashed through the wall. Can I answer him? He hasn’t heard yet about how you protected us. I think he should know.”

“Do you think it will change anything?” Ivy said. “It’s so hard for you humans to comprehend my benevolence.”

“Arturo is all about benevolence,” Nedd said. “It’s like his favorite thing.”

Arturo was quiet, so I hoped he could hear us and had wisely decided to listen in.

“Talk to him while you can,” Ivy said cheerfully. “It’s the last you’ll speak to anyone for a long while.”

Stars, that was terrifying. “Amphi,” I said, “we’re here with Ivy, the AI who’s been building a human army and cryogenically freezing them. She’d like to tell you all about it, but she’s worried you won’t be suitably impressed.”

There was a beat of silence, and I worried I hadn’t gotten my radio turned on after all, but then Arturo responded. “You’ve also got an impressive flight of pilots out here.” The sound of destructor fire blasted over the radio. Oh, stars. He was in combat. “Any chance you could call them off?”

Ivy laughed. It was an unnatural sound, more like someone pretending to laugh than actual laughter. “I have more than just one flight of pilots,” she said.

I supposed this was our chance to learn exactly what she’d amassed out there. “You have…two flights?” I asked.

“Seven thousand pilots,” Ivy said. “Five armies. Two navies. A few battalions of marksmen, four hundred elite strike forces, and another hundred ballistics experts. You need fewer of them, since they don’t carry the bombs in person. Less messy that way. One hundred four cytonics of various specialties. And forty-five tacticians. Better not to have too many of them awake at one time, as they get in each other’s way, but it’s important to have a few redundancies.”

That sounded like a nightmare. The Superiority had suppressed violence, which was good on the surface, but it left us unprepared to defend against an enemy like this as a united galactic front. Scud, I wasn’t even sure we were a united galactic front yet, even if we did have the firepower.

“You hearing this, Amphi?” I asked. “Are you impressed yet?”

More shooting came over the radio. “Very impressed!” Arturo said. “Let me know where you are so I can come tell Ivy how impressed I am in person.”

For all her supposed brilliance, Ivy hadn’t noticed that I’d turned off the flow of gas into the unit. I stole a glance down at Nedd’s panel. He had it angled just right and was easing the grate against the side of his boot, sliding it up against the wire connections.

“We’re back in the facility where you took out the wall!” I said. “You kind of abandoned us here, sir.”

“Yeah, sorry,” Arturo said. “We’ve had a little bit of excitement up here.”

“It’s always fascinating what you humans find exciting,” Ivy said. “And by fascinating I mean incredibly dull.”

Nedd eased the grate panel back and forth, back and forth. I could see the wires shifting, though the power to the unit remained on.

More destructor fire sounded over the radio. “This planet we’re on,” Amphi said. “It’s Earth.”

It took a moment for that to sink in. “What?” I said.

“This place. It’s Earth, Sentry. You’re on Earth right now.”

That didn’t seem right. If I were on Earth, I would know it, wouldn’t I? Though I’d never been on Earth, and neither had my parents, or my grandparents. No one had seen it for a hundred years. How would I know it from anyplace else?

“We’re in the nowhere,” I said, trying to still my body’s shaking, to concentrate on the words, meditate on the words, be the words. Oh, stars. No wonder no one had been able to find it, not for centuries. “Earth is in the nowhere?”

“Yes,” Arturo said. “And it looks like it took some damage coming in. Several continents have been destroyed.”