Page 1 of Blightfall

Part One

Prologue

Arturo

I fell.

The foreign planet loomed beneath me, hundreds of thousands of acres of deadly forest stretching in all directions, as I plummeted toward it without the protection of anything but my flightsuit. The land below grew larger, as if rushing up to meet me. It might have been beautiful, were it not about to be the instrument of my demise.

Wind buffeted my skin, the atmosphere growing thicker, providing more resistance as my body cut through it. My stomach lodged in my throat, adrenaline coursing through me. I held tight to Naga, my hyperslug, who trembled violently in my arms. The inhibitor field around the planet prevented her from hyperjumping until we were near the ground—and then Naga could ask for and receive permission to teleport us to safety. If permission didn’t come, that would be that.

My team couldn’t catch us. They had already been chased toward the forest by countless enemy ships. If I died, they’d be left here, fighting for their lives.

Stars, we’d fallen so far, so fast. I couldn’t open my mouth, couldn’t speak, couldn’t even scream except in my mind, a silent wail of terror as I dropped down, down, down, gripping Naga because if the wind pulled her from my grasp, there was no hope of anything but a swift death. I began to make out the texture of the trees. We had mere seconds before we would crash through the branches and become a fine paste of blood and decaying bark.

Alanik’s face flashed across my mind, and I regretted failing her the most. My head swam, and I wondered if I would faint from panic and fail to experience the last moments of my life.

Though she couldn’t hear me, I silently pleaded to Naga. Give me another chance to find a way out of this.

Don’t let me die here and abandon my team.

One

Arturo

Three Days Earlier

We were entering a new era, my mother said. An era of freedom. No longer trapped on a forgotten rock, no longer imprisoned by an oppressive galactic empire, no longer living in a preserve like endangered but fearsome predators. An era of possibility, where we would become what humankind was always meant to be.

A new era in which there was money to be made, because if we didn’t capitalize on the Defiant Defense Force’s new need for interstellar trade infrastructure, someone else surely would. So it only made sense that my family’s starfighters were moved up to a docking platform in the rubble belt around Detritus, the planet we called home, to support our quest to secure intergalactic trade agreements, profiting off humankind’s new galactic freedom.

“Your mom is going to kill you,” Nedd said, peering around me through the doorway of the private hangar. We’d snuck past the ground crew huddled around a screen in the break room, watching clips from last night’s digball championship.

“Kill you!” added the yellow-and-blue slug peeking out of my backpack. She was the length of my forearm and twice as thick, with long rows of flexible spines that waved along her back.

“Thanks for your concern, Naga,” I said, scritching behind her first plume of spines.

“Hey, I was also concerned,” Nedd said. He curled the fingers of his prosthetic arm. On his shoulder perched another slug, this one entirely black with an iridescent blue shimmer. The slugs, also known as taynix, had powerful cytonic abilities. This one could send out a concussion blast that stunned anyone nearby, which had earned him the name Wham.

Wham watched the movement of the prosthetic with interest as Nedd bent the fingers one at a time. Nedd was shot down during the war for our freedom just weeks ago, and the crash left him with a limb ending just above his elbow. The prosthetic’s joints could bend, and its fingers could clench and relax. He manipulated the motion with electrodes tied to the remaining nerves in his upper arm, and he had been practicing in a flight simulator every day, trying to improve his control. The prosthetic was steady as he moved, his finger motions smooth.

But our holographic mockpits weren’t the same as flying actual starfighters. Nedd’s biological hand was shaking.

“You’re only concerned about me?” I asked.

“Of course,” Nedd said, though we both knew he was bluffing. His pale skin was even paler than usual. “Your mom won’t stay mad at me. I’m a delight.”

I was her son, but that only meant she’d be twice as angry at me for taking this risk with our family assets. I was supposed to be better than that.

Yet when I found out Nedd and I both had the afternoon off, I commissioned Naga to hyperjump us into my family’s hangar without a second thought. Under the new Defiant Defense Force hyperjumping regulations, I had to put in a request for a jump and wait for approval, but even my mother’s status as an assembly leader didn’t grant her access to the hyperjump logs, so she was none the wiser.

“These ships don’t see enough flight time,” I said. “In a way, we’re doing my mother a favor by taking them for a spin.”

“Totally,” Nedd said. “I’m sure your mother will see it that way.”

“Your mother will see it that way!” Wham added.

Ah, taynix. Ever the optimists.