Page 26 of Blightfall

Alanik already had her light-net connected to Orator before I asked. Gilaf hit Alanik’s left wing with his light-lance, and Sadie came barreling in from my right, connecting to the lower part of my fuselage. My ship quivered from being pulled so many directions.

“Cut your boosters!” I shouted. If we didn’t and Naga teleported us into a tight space, we’d crash immediately. “Go, Naga!”

“Go!” Naga replied.

Then the planet below us disappeared, and my ship suddenly plunged into darkness.

Eight

Arturo

It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the dim light. Trees crowded around us, the canopy sheltering us from the sun, which shone through the branches at a low angle and tossed a pattern of light and shadow across the forest floor. Wide, five-pointed leaves waved wildly overhead, the light above exposing their large networks of veins. Our light-lances illuminated the purple-brown bark of their trunks, the color of a bad bruise.

Naga had hyperjumped us deftly between the trees into a gully, so our ships would be hidden from view. My proximity monitors had a hard time getting a reading with my ship at lower elevation than the land around it. I wasn’t sure how far we’d gone, or how long it might take the ships to follow if they managed to track us.

“Nedder,” I said over the radio, “do we have incoming?”

If the Superiority force had a full cytonic, they’d be able to pinpoint our location and hyperjump after us. If they were only using taynix to give directions to their drone ships, they might have lost us.

Nedd was quiet for a moment. “I’m not seeing anything,” he said. “Though it might take them time to reach us. Should we keep moving?”

Could we keep moving? The woods had enough space that we could use the hangar controls on our boosters to painstakingly maneuver our way through, but it would be slow going, even slower than walking.

“I think we have to stay put,” I said. “But Bob needs to be ready to put in for another hyperjump if things go south.”

“Enemy drones might arrive from any direction,” Alanik said. “Oh, my translator indicates you mean if things go wrong. Why does your language have a bias toward north?”

I…didn’t know the answer to that, so I ignored the question. I checked my ship’s atmospheric readings. According to my sensors, the air was safe to breathe. “Scan the area, Nedder.”

“Will do,” Nedd said. His Dulo-class ship lacked the sophisticated scanning capabilities of the scout ships, but it could gather some limited data about our proximity to the city and the river that ran near it.

“Suki,” I said, “are you and the slugs all right in there?”

“We’re alive!” Suki said.

I supposed at the moment that was all we could ask for.

“I’m coming to get you,” I said. “Everyone else sit tight.”

“Um, Amphi?” Sadie said. “Shouldn’t one of us back you up?”

“Yes,” Alanik said. “These trees are disturbing.”

“Really?” Sadie said. “You grew up in a tree!”

“We live on trees,” Alanik said. “The trees do not grow over the top of us. Even the grafted orchards are not so large as these. It feels…wrong.”

“I don’t know,” Sadie said. “Feels kind of like being in a cavern. Just like home.”

Except the walls of the cavern didn’t sway in the breeze. Sadie did have a point about backup. I didn’t have good visibility in the shadows of the trees, and I couldn’t be sure what I’d encounter. I reached behind my seat to the storage box and pulled out a handheld light-line and a destructor pistol, making sure they were operational. “Angel, stay by your ship and provide cover while I extract Suki and the slugs.”

“Copy, Amphi,” Alanik said, and to my left, the canopy of her ship popped open.

I lifted my own and was unprepared for the oppressive blanket of heat that fell over me. This part of the planet was humid, the air heavy. I took off my flight mask and was struck by the stench of decay, with an undertone of something like cinnamon.

“I’ve got you covered,” Alanik said. She hadn’t descended from her cockpit, but she had her destructor pistol pointed in my direction.

I climbed out of my ship, my boots digging into the soft soil at the bottom of the gully. Rotting bark flaked apart as I trod toward the wreckage of Orator. The soil was composed mostly of purple-brown wood remnants, loose and fluffy, as if the trees had been molting. A creaking sound echoed through the forest as the wind bent the branches of the trees. They moaned as if they were in pain, and more remnants of bark filtered through the air and caught in the crooks of the branches or came to rest on the forest floor.