Evershore(Skyward #3.1)(46)

It all had something to do with that portal, but I didn’t understand what. “Good,” I said. “They’ll have better cover there. But we still need to protect the city. Stardragon and Ivy Flights, intercept the enemy ships before they reach the city. Your goal is to make sure Victory sees no action.”

“Copy, Jerkface,” Robin said.

“Skyward Flight will take point. All flights stay at least five klicks from the platform to avoid the autofire. Our objective is to convince them we aren’t worth it and pull their ships back. If you have a hyperdrive and need to be pulled out of the heat, let me know. Otherwise, Amphi will give you specific formation instructions.”

“Okay,” Arturo said. He probably wasn’t prepared to do that for multiple flights, but he started doing it anyway.

Which left me free to focus on the new carrier ships in the sky. I wasn’t going to sit here and wait for them to pour out their fighters to bombard the city.

I was going to take them out first.

“Jerkface,” Alanik said, “your sidekick wants to join you again. I think he’s given up on me.”

“Send him over with Snide,” I said.

Snide and Juno appeared a moment later, both riding on Juno’s platform. A moment later Alanik called Snide back, and the slug disappeared again.

“I did not give up on her,” Juno said. “I simply said she appeared to have less aptitude for mindblades than you do. It wasn’t a qualitative judgment.”

“To Alanik it probably felt like one,” I said.

“Is there some particular meditation you would like to try?” Juno asked. “I don’t have all my books, but I could—”

“Not right now,” I said. I called to Snuggles, who appeared in my arms with Boomslug. I tucked Snuggles into the taynix box where Gill had been. “Maybe later. Right now I need to concentrate.”

“The purpose of meditation is to help your concentration—”

I tuned him out, loading Boomslug into the platform’s hyperweapon. Then I focused on the airspace near the carrier ship and sent Snuggles the instruction to go.

We slid beneath the eyes and then Wandering Leaf reappeared beneath the carrier ship. Our inhibitor field encompassed the enemy ship, preventing it from hyperjumping while the autoturrets fired, weakening the shield, piercing through it in a few places to punch holes in the hull. The hangar doors opened and ships poured out, trying to escape. The big guns couldn’t possibly hit all those targets. The sensors showed that my people were still flying low—I didn’t need to worry about clipping them yet.

Go, I said to Boomslug, focusing on the area right outside the hangar.

I felt the edge of the nowhere ripping apart as the hyperweapon fired, mindblades flying out at the escaping ships, bypassing the shields, cleaving their hulls in two. Debris rained down out of the sky. The pilots didn’t even get a chance to eject.

I couldn’t afford to feel sorry for them. I leaned toward the window, spotting the next carrier ship halfway behind a nearby tower of clouds.

Go, I said to Snuggles, and suddenly we were in front of it, the platform shaking with autoturret fire.

“We’re ready,” Alanik’s brother, Gilaf, said over the radio. “But we’d rather not jump out right here, if it’s all the same to you.”

“Sorry for the short notice,” I said. “We didn’t get much more ourselves. I’ll jump you down closer to the planet.”

“Hell of a way to wake up,” Gilaf said.

I contacted the taynix in Gilaf’s ship and sent him and the other UrDail pilots down to the place where we’d first brought the platform in.

This carrier ship seemed mostly empty, but I still told Boomslug to fire, aiming the hyperweapon at the hull of the ship. It diced into chunks, bits of it blowing out into the sky and then falling.

“Did you do that?” Juno asked, watching through the window.

“I did,” I said. Stars, this thing was powerful. This tactic could be less effective against a battleship, which might be equipped with an inhibitor, but we were putting a serious amount of metal into the ocean from these carrier ships. Bits were going to wash up on the beach for years.

What could we do if we were able to move more of the other platforms from their orbit around Detritus?

The third carrier ship belched forth more fighters. I could feel the distinct vibration of a cytonic among them, and I reached out, listening for any cytonic communications, to see what we could learn about their plans.

Instead I felt something else. A thrumming against the nowhere, a rhythmic knocking like someone tapping their nails against the boundary between that world and ours.

The enemy cytonic sliced across the battlefield, headed directly for Alanik. The thrumming followed them, and as I focused I could feel small projectiles swarming around them, like pointed shards of glass made out of bits of the nowhere.

Oh, scud.

“Angel, get out of there,” I said. “That incoming ship has—”

The shards of nowhere flew out around the enemy pilot’s ship in a swirling melee, clipping wings and piercing hulls. Two ships went down—one from Ivy Flight and one from Stardragon—as the ship neared Alanik.

Alanik’s ship blinked out of existence and reappeared farther down toward the city, where Victory Flight was chasing off the fighters that had pierced through our other forces. The enemy ship sailed right past the place where she’d been, toward Kimmalyn and Nedd, who darted away. The ship pursued Kimmalyn. Before I could say anything, Arturo was yelling at her over the radio to go into a dive, get out of there.