ReDawn (Skyward, #2.2)(49)

When everyone finished eating, I followed the humans to the control room with the taynix boxes. Rig, Jorgen, FM, and I gathered in the room while the others waited outside.

“None of your people died in the night,” I said to Jorgen. “So I suppose the udal nuts weren’t toxic to you.”

“You only say that because you didn’t have to share a room with Nedd last night,” Jorgen said.

“All right,” Rig said. “I’ve finished reassembling Alanik’s ship, and I found the shield systems. They’re similar to the ones on Platform Prime, so I was able to get them working. I don’t think it’s as effective as the planetary shield, because we don’t have hundreds of other platforms to form a barrier. But look.”

He gestured out the window at a blueish tint now coloring the miasma.

“That’s something,” Jorgen said. “Good work.”

I wondered how much sleep Rig had gotten, but he didn’t complain. “We expect we know how the comms and navigation systems work,” he said. “They should be similar to the hypercomms and hyperdrives we already use. But we want to check out this unknown cytonic weapons system, and then make a plan for how to use the platform to fight back.”

    “Rig and I were thinking that Boomslug might be the right type to put in a weapons system,” FM said. “Given what we’ve seen him do.”

Jorgen knelt to gently pick up Boomslug, who was lying in the doorway to the control room. “You ready, buddy?”

“Buddy,” Boomslug said in his deep voice.

“Okay,” Rig said. “It would be really nice to have a weapons system we can control.”

FM took Boomslug from Jorgen and put him into the box. “I am going to give you so much caviar if this works,” she said.

“If we have to experiment on him,” Jorgen said, “I’m glad he’s inside a metal box where he hopefully can’t hurt us.”

I was pretty sure mindblades could pass through most substances and do damage as they went, but I didn’t tell Jorgen that. If the former inhabitants of this platform had put a taynix in this box and then used it to power weapons, presumably they hadn’t cut themselves to ribbons in the process.

“All right,” Rig said when the box was locked. “Let’s see what he can do.”

“What am I going to ask it?” Jorgen said. “Please attack…nothing?”

“Go boom,” FM said. “You remember what that felt like, right?”

Jorgen winced. “Too well.”

“Can you aim the gun?” I asked. “We’re a long way from Hollow, but we don’t know exactly how far this weapon can reach.”

“She’s right,” Rig said. “The Superiority had planetary weapons. This could be one of those. I didn’t see anything on this platform as big as that was, but I didn’t exactly perform an exhaustive search, and—”

    “I’ll try to focus away from the tree,” Jorgen said. “Out in the miasma. The same way I do when I direct them to hyperjump. Anyone else have any concerns?”

We were all quiet.

“Okay,” Jorgen said. “Here goes.”

I focused on the mind of the slug, trying not to make enough contact that I would distract it from Jorgen’s message, but just enough that I could feel the change.

I didn’t need to though. The whole platform quivered with the reverberation, like a weapon had fired with incredible force. Out the window, the miasma in front of us shifted, swirling in eddies around invisible projectiles.

“Scud!” Nedd shouted from outside. “What was that?”

“Mindblades,” I said. “Did they aim where you wanted them to go?”

“They did,” Jorgen said. “We still have no idea how powerful that weapon is. It moved the gas clouds around, but that doesn’t mean—”

“A well-placed mindblade can cut right through a ship’s hull,” I said.

“That seems like something we can use to defend ourselves,” Rig said. “Though I worry we’ll have already drawn attention by using it.”

A plan began to form in my mind. “Drawing attention might be a good thing though,” I said. “If we were to move the platform and activate the weapons, Unity would want to stop us.”

“That’s true,” Jorgen said. “They’d send forces after us.”

“But they wouldn’t be able to get past the autoturrets quickly,” I said. “That kind of operation requires a lot of drones and a lot of patience, and that’s if they could get through the shield. They’d want to send Unity’s cytonics to stop you.”

    “What good are cytonics if we have an inhibitor up?” FM asked.

“They’d still be able to affect us,” I said. “The inhibitor prevents cytonics without the key from using their powers from within the field. The other cytonics could still surround us and put up an inhibitor field of their own, preventing us from using the cytonic weapons or hyperjumping out, essentially trapping us.”

“We’d still have the autoturrets and the shield to defend us,” Jorgen said.

“Yes,” I said. “But they can also magnify each other’s abilities. Quilan can use his cytonic powers to knock people out with a concussion bolt. It’s what he did to me before I crashed your ship. The other cytonics can help him amplify it, creating a concussion field, similar to the way they join their minds together in an inhibitor. They’ve done it before during political protests.” They said they were quelling riots, trying to keep things peaceful. But knocking people out en masse always seemed violent to me.