Page 32 of Blightfall

“Bold move asking for their unconditional surrender,” Gilaf said. “Especially since they already killed half our team and shot us out of the sky.”

“It was worth a try,” Arturo grumbled. “I wanted to tell her the Superiority had already lost the war and they’d better surrender because it’s only a matter of time before our admiral sends more ships here to search for us, but I don’t think it’s a good idea to alert her that they might be coming. She’s got so many drone ships that it would only increase the odds of our reinforcements getting killed.”

“How long do you think it will be before they come?” Alanik asked.

Arturo sighed, perching at the edge of his cockpit and staring out at the jungle. “Jorgen will allow time for us to scout the planet and then make contact. It could be a week before he starts to think something’s wrong, maybe longer before he sends a strike force to find us. And even then, he won’t send an armada and potentially damage a tenuous political situation. He’ll send a small force to investigate, and they’ll suffer the same fate we did.”

“We don’t have enough rations to last that long,” Alanik said.

“There’s farmland by the river,” I said. “We could steal food, if it came to that.”

“The UrDail and I can eat many human foodstuffs,” Suki said. “It’s a good fallback plan.”

“A better plan would be to get home before Jorgen starts to worry, if we can,” Arturo said, glancing at the sky peeking through the leaves, “so he doesn’t unknowingly send more people to their deaths.”

“What if we tried to meet with Ivy?” I asked. “We have Hoid’s illusions. We could disguise one of us as a varvax or a dione and pretend to perform this inspection she’s talking about. Then we could tell her we approve of what she’s doing and get permission to fly out of here.” We wouldn’t liberate these humans that way, but we could get back to Detritus to report, and then the admiral could send a bigger army to deal with Ivy and her team.

“None of us speak those alien languages,” Arturo said. “And Ivy sounded pretty hostile toward us, even believing we came from the Superiority. We can’t be sure she won’t shoot us on sight.”

“Why would she do that, though?” Nedd asked. “To her own people?”

“I don’t know,” Arturo said, rubbing his forehead. “Her attack when we arrived doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

“I think we’re a couple branches short of a full tree,” Gilaf said.

“I agree,” Alanik said. “We are missing something.”

Arturo nodded. “Exactly. And I don’t want to put all of your lives at risk until we have more information.”

That made sense, I supposed, but one way or another we had to go through Ivy to get out of here. “It just seems like if Ivy is the one standing between us and home, we should at least try to reason with her.”

“I understand your point,” Arturo said. “Alanik, could you contact Ivy again, even if her position is inhibited?”

“Yes,” Alanik said. “As long as Bob is outside an inhibitor, he can send messages to Ivy through her hypercomm. Now that she’s contacted him once, he’ll know exactly where to send the message.”

“And can you continue to monitor hypercomm communications from Ivy?”

“Of course,” Alanik said.

“Good,” Arturo said. “Tell Bob not to put any more signals through to our comms, but let me know if Ivy sends anything new. We may need to make contact at some point, but I want to see what’s going on in the city first, and then we can think about how we want to respond. The human colony might be allies against Ivy’s forces here. Ivy compared our loss of living pilots to their loss of drone ships, so we can’t trust that our lives have any value to them. Until we have more information, some allies, or something we could use to bargain with them, we’re outgunned and outnumbered by an enemy that we have to assume wants us dead.”

I nodded. That sounded like a reasonable plan, and it was Arturo’s call, not mine. Stars, I’d probably already done too much talking out of turn.

“So we stick to our plan?” Nedd asked. “Investigate the city and see if we can find allies against her, or at least more information about what we’re up against?”

“Yes,” Arturo said. “Everyone pack some rations, translation equipment, and sidearms. We’re going to take a long walk.”

Ten

Sadie

We loaded the slugs up in our backpacks, with Suki nestled in the hiding place she’d chosen for herself: a pouch made of black mesh on Arturo’s pack, which allowed her to see out but not be visible within. He stored her floating disk as well, in case she needed it. Arturo handed us all translator pins and earpieces, so we’d be able to hear the English translation quietly in our ears, instead of loudly broadcast to everyone.

“We don’t know when we might encounter people,” Arturo said, “so we should put up some illusions to blend in. Alanik, can you instruct Hoid to disguise us? You and Gilaf need illusions over your faces and hands to look human, and cover Nedd’s arm as well. We don’t know what prosthetic technology is like here and we don’t want anyone asking questions. If he can cover our earpieces too, we can avoid questions about those.”

“What about my hair?” I asked. Owing to centuries of genetic engineering, blue was my natural color, but Yeongian wasn’t among the languages spoken on this planet, so I doubted there were many people here with my heritage.

“Sadie’s hair too, if possible,” Arturo said.