ReDawn (Skyward #2.2)(50)

“Why haven’t they done that to us already?” FM asked.

“I imagine they’re planning to,” I said. “But it wouldn’t let them get inside the shield, and it’s not easy to do. They’d have to surround the platform and maintain more or less the same positions while they do it. It’s not very applicable in an actual battle, where the enemy ships can chase you out of formation.”

“So we’d need ships in the air,” Jorgen said, “making sure they can’t get into formation to inhibit us or use the concussion field. We could tempt the other cytonics away from Rinakin, which would make it easier for you to rescue him.”

    “Right,” I said. Even if they had Rinakin inside a taynix-powered inhibitor, I’d still have a better chance of rescuing him without the other cytonics to contend with.

“What exactly are we going to do to get their attention though?” FM asked. “It’ll take more than just firing the hyperweapon into the miasma.”

“Is there some Unity base we could fire on?” Jorgen said. “We don’t want to hit civilian targets, but if we could hit a military one—”

The idea of actually firing a mindblade weapon, even at a Unity target, was horrifying to me. “I don’t want to kill anyone unless we have to,” I said.

“Sure,” Jorgen said. “We could wait for them to fire first.”

“But there will be a lot of Unity people on their base who aren’t firing at us,” I said. “And I don’t want to shoot at them.”

The humans stared at me for a moment, like they could accept this but didn’t quite understand it.

They’d been at war their whole lives and were willing to make sacrifices I wasn’t ready for. I acted like I was hardened to the consequences, but I’d never killed anyone. I’d mostly shot people with tagging lasers—most of my time in starships had been spent playing games.

“What if we moved the platform into the miasma outside the Unity headquarters on Tower?” I asked. “It’s a tree with a huge population, so I don’t want to fire on it. But just being there would feel like a threat to Unity, more than any other tree but the Council tree. We can’t threaten that one, because we need to draw the cytonics farther away so I can go and get Rinakin if they leave him behind. But you don’t have to shoot at the tree. Just hyperjump there, maybe fire a warning shot with the hyperweapon into the miasma.”

    “That’s a better idea,” Jorgen said. “You’re right. We don’t want to hurt anyone we don’t have to.”

“Good,” I said. “Meanwhile I could go in and get Rinakin, since he’d be relatively unguarded.”

“Unless they bring him with them,” FM said.

“They might,” I said. “But if they bring him to us, we can pivot the plan and I can come back to rescue him from their ships.”

“You shouldn’t go alone,” Jorgen said. “There are too many things that could go wrong with that plan, and you’d need backup.”

“I’ll be stealthier alone,” I said.

“But we work as a team,” Jorgen insisted, sparing a glance at FM. “You need someone there if things go wrong. At the very least that person could engage their taynix to come back here and tell us what’s happened to you, so we can organize a rescue effort.”

It was a good sign that they would consider rescuing me if something went wrong.

“I’ll have to stay here to communicate with the slugs in the platform,” Jorgen continued, “and Rig will need to stay too, but—”

“I’ll go,” Arturo said from the doorway.

I looked at him. Yesterday it had seemed like he was starting to trust me, but here he was volunteering to come along and babysit me. To make sure that I wasn’t going to have his people make a spectacle out of themselves and then grab Rinakin and run.

    I could do that, I realized. Arturo’s presence wouldn’t stop me. But the whole point of going to Detritus in the first place was to find allies. Even if the rest of their people were making a different choice, these humans were still willing to work with me. So far, anyway.

Jorgen nodded. “That makes the most sense. Maybe you should take Nedd as well.”

“Alanik is right,” Arturo said. “The more people we bring, the less stealthy we are. But if we’re going into combat with a ship with a cytonic inhibitor, we’ll want at least two of us. If we find that it’s being guarded by a whole fleet, we can hyperjump back and regroup, but at least we’ll know more than we know now.”

“All right,” Jorgen said. “We’re going to need to get everyone together and talk this through. Alanik, would you go talk to the Independence pilots? See if they’ll join us? We could meet in the hangar. It’s the only space we’ve found so far that’s big enough to fit all of us together comfortably.”

I nodded.

I didn’t like putting any of them in danger, but if we succeeded it would be worth it.





Eighteen


An hour later, Rig, Jorgen, and I gathered in the control room again to use the hyperdrive. The other pilots—both human and UrDail—were all ready in their ships to be transported out to defend the platform. Rig had pulled the radio out of the wreckage of my ship and installed it in the control room, so he’d be able to talk to us once we were in the air.