Page 20 of Blightfall

Oh stars, I hoped these birds weren’t trying to adopt us. Sadie would probably want to take the whole flock home.

“Any advice for dealing with them, Suki?” I asked.

“If the ship could steer close enough, I could get a better look at that plumage…”

“Oh hell no,” Ferret said.

“I appreciate your thirst for knowledge, Suki,” I said, “but our priority is your safety.”

“They are following you, Ghost!” Sadie said. “You’ve got your very own flock!”

He did. Though he was quickly leaving them behind, the birds gathered in formations in our wake.

“I wonder if they enjoy the disturbance in the air,” Suki said, “or the heat from the boosters. I’m making note of this.”

“Are we sure they don’t think we’re predators and aren’t congregating to scare us off?” I asked.

“We’re not sure of anything, flightleader,” Suki said. “That is the joy of original research.”

I preferred to do my learning from a book. I wove around the clusters of birds, trying to track the haphazard flight paths of my team as they, too, evaded the creatures.

“Amphi,” Blaze said, “I’ve got something on my monitors.”

“More birds?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “Bigger.”

“A really big bird?” Sadie asked.

“Not a bird,” Underscore confirmed. “Stars, that’s a—”

Destructor fire bloomed against a chunk of debris near the edge of the field, sending it spiraling upward, right into Sadie’s flight path. She dodged the slow-moving rock, but more fire sprayed at us as enemy ships took shape on my monitors. Stars, they hadn’t shown up on our scanners. Had they been hiding among the debris?

And if the humans here weren’t spacefaring, who the hell was attacking us?

Six

Arturo

“My shields took a hit,” Underscore said. “Stars, there are a lot of them.”

Our shields could take three hits before needing to be reignited, but it wasn’t a good sign that Underscore got shot so quickly.

“You have visual on the ships?” I asked.

Blaze cut in. “Amphi, we’ve got multiple Krell drone ships, dead ahead and closing. They must have sheltered behind the debris, or we would have seen them coming.”

“What was that about not being shot at?” Nedd asked.

“I knew I should have practiced my insults to their entrails!” Sadie said.

Krell drone ships? Those were the ships we’d fought for years on Detritus. They used hypercomms to operate—their pilots stayed in a mockpit in the safety of some Superiority facility, sending instructions to their pilotless ships via cytonic communication. But the Superiority had been beaten. Its fighting force had either surrendered or been isolated to their own planets. The taynix had escaped from them en masse, no longer offering hyperjumps or hypercomm services to our enemy.

These ships shouldn’t have access to cytonic abilities inside a naturally occurring inhibitor—and even if they could somehow bypass the inhibitor, they should have lost access to the taynix who powered their communication until the end of the war. Their ships shouldn’t function. Besides which, why would an outpost that hadn’t seen combat in over a century be prepared to shoot us on sight?

“Amphi?” Blaze said.

Right. All that was irrelevant if we got shot out of the sky. “Ranger Flight,” I said, “evasive maneuvers. Skyward Flight, shoot down those drones. Nedder, positional recommendation?”