Evershore(Skyward #3.1)(61)

The hum of all the slugs around us was overwhelming, and it was difficult for me to pick them out one from another. I tried to focus on the hyperdrive slugs, but I couldn’t because there were so many. I didn’t want to give a blanket instruction to all of them, since we didn’t know what many of them could do.

“Where’s Fine?” I asked.

“Hypercomm box, I hope,” Rig said. He moved down the row of boxes. “Over here.”

I found Fine before he did—one of the few signatures I knew in this cacophony. Fine, I said. Can you tell them to take these platforms to Evershore? I showed him an image of the slugs he knew—Naga, Happy, Chubs, Whiskers—all flying around the planet, and then some of the platforms appearing in a ring beneath the clouds, where they could fire on enemy ships.

Go? Fine said to me.

Go, I responded.

He hesitated for a moment—conversing, I thought, with the other slugs. And then I felt us slip into the nowhere, the surface of it rippling around us like rings on a pond. We passed beneath the eyes—scud, this was working. We’d be able to support the flights, and at least reduce the damage the ships were able to do to the islands of Evershore.

As we reemerged, I looked out the control room window, expecting to see the stars above.

Instead I saw the planet itself, an enormous ball of water, punctuated by sand-colored islands. Scud. The platform was way too high up, and we were facing the opposite of the direction I’d expected. I could see the backside of several of the Superiority carrier ships. They might be in range of our hyperweapons, but—

One of the engineers swore. “Flightleader Weight,” she said, “you’re going to want to see this.”

She indicated the proximity monitors, which showed the planet of Detritus and all the platforms moving around us—the entire belt of them.

They were still there.

Scud. The control room had worked, but it hadn’t only moved some platforms. It had moved the whole damn planet.

Go, I heard Fine say through the nowhere.

And all around me, the nowhere began to ripple, tear, and explode.





Twenty


Bits of the nowhere ripped apart, exploding outward toward nearby Superiority carrier ships. Scud, there were more of them. It was kind of gratifying, seeing how much force Winzik felt he had to bring in order to take us down.

But he hadn’t done it yet. Hyperweapons I didn’t know we had erupted from the surfaces of the platforms, ripping up enemy ships. Ships swarmed below us, mostly centered over the island of Dreamspring. They weren’t much more than dots, but through the nowhere I could feel the minds of the pilots—UrDail, kitsen, and human alike—all fighting together.

We were pretty high up, maybe even out of the atmosphere, so many of the enemy ships were out of range. I didn’t feel like we should move the whole planet on a whim, though scud, did we need to move it farther away? What were two planets this large going to do to each other?

Jorgen, Alanik said. What did you—

We brought company, I told her. All of it.

Apparently, she answered.

My view of the planet below began to shift, and I realized the platform was drifting away from Detritus.

“Rig,” I said, “are we moving?”

“Oh, scud,” Rig said. “Is that what that navigation system does?”

Rig called to the other engineers, and several of them joined him at the panel. “Here,” he said. “These are navigation controls like the ones on Platform Prime, but because there are no engine systems I could never figure out what they’re for. But now—I think these inputs here are for coordinates, and then the system tells the hyperslugs where to go.”

“Jerkface!” Kauri said over the radio. “I don’t know what’s going on up there, but our tidal authority would like you to know that your planet is going to pull on our oceans, gathering all the water on that side, causing an even worse wave to engulf our islands. Wait—oh, they say it will do that if one of our planets doesn’t rip the other one apart first.”

“They’re right,” Rig said. “But it should have happened already.” He scanned the monitors, looking for something. “I don’t know why it hasn’t, but my best guess is that the planet itself has some kind of gravitational capacitor—almost as if it was intended to be a traveling space station, so it has systems to counteract the gravitational forces for the surrounding bodies—”

“The planet,” I said, “has GravCaps?”

“Yeah,” Rig said, shaking his head. “Apparently it does.”

“Negative, Kauri,” I said over the radio. “Detritus has systems to prevent damage to Evershore.”

“If so, they aren’t working perfectly,” Kauri said. “The tidal authority is seeing a rise in the water, though not nearly as bad as they’d expect.”

“We’re too close,” Rig said. “GravCaps have limits, and running them at this strength has to be depleting their power source quickly. We need to move the planet farther off.”

“Let’s do it,” I said. “Before that though, can you send the platforms out to the kitsen islands to defend them?”

“I need to find the coordinates,” Rig said, tapping at his console, using the platform sensors to pinpoint the coordinates of the various islands.