Page 117 of Blightfall

“Fleeing,” Alanik said. “The better question is why.”

I didn’t know why, which was worrisome. “The inhibitor is down,” Alanik said. “It…ran away.”

I didn’t know what that was about, but I had a guess. “Ghost, tell Squeeze to fire away.”

“Over all these people?” Gilaf asked.

“I’ll catch the wreckage,” I told him. “Do it now.”

“I still don’t have a hypercomm,” Dayan said. “But everyone can see you’re trying to help us. That’s good, right?”

It was, but if people kept dying, it wasn’t good enough.

“Boom!” Gilaf said.

There was no fire, no explosion, no blast. The ship flying in front of Gilaf slid elegantly apart, as if it had been run through an invisible egg slicer, the pieces fragmenting out in all directions. I swooped in, catching the majority of the ship with my light-lance before it could fall into the crowd and tossing it over the edge into the city.

There were still six ships circling the arena. They had given up on aiming for the gate and were now shooting indiscriminately at the crowd, whether to punish them or to convince us to give up, I couldn’t tell. Gilaf dove his ship under a barrage of fire, catching the full force of it with his shield but preventing it from hitting the arena below. His shields went down, and he flew away from the arena, off to reignite.

We needed to take these ships out fast, before they killed more civilians.

“Where’s that other ship?” I asked. “The one that might have the hypercomm?”

“It’s still flying,” Alanik said. “Here.” She indicated a spot on the monitors near three o’clock. I banked to go after it. I didn’t like leaving the arena undefended, but if we could take out that hypercomm, we could take down all the ships.

I startled as a pile of slugs materialized between my seat and Alanik’s, heaped all the way up to Suki’s seat. Suki yelped as Naga slid off the pile, squishing her against the dash. Bob was among them, and also three commslugs I’d never seen before, two boomslugs, one concussion slug, one inhibitor slug, and two hyperslugs. They piled on top of one another, all wriggling in panic except Bob, who lay on top of the pile, looking smug.

“Friends!” Naga said.

Friends, indeed.

“Naga!” I said. “Take Bob to Dayan!”

“Dayan!” Naga said, and then she and Bob disappeared again, leaving us with a pile of unfamiliar slugs.

“Could you…put those somewhere?” I asked Alanik.

Alanik threw her hand in the air. “Any suggestions?”

There wasn’t time. I jerked my ship to the side as an enemy drone came up behind me. I shot upward, trying to simultaneously shake the ship and direct it away from the civilians. The ship didn’t take the bait, instead moving in a straight line angled down toward the arena.

Scud, all of the ships flew straight, as if…as if they’d suddenly lost navigational commands, and were just following the last trajectory they’d been given.

Oh, stars. Naga had taken their commslug.

“Way to go, Naga!” I said.

“Way to go, Naga!” several of the new slugs replied.

“The enemy has lost control over the ships!” I shouted into the radio. “Naga rescued their commslug.” We needed to catch the drones to make sure they didn’t crash over the city.

Or over the arena. The ship that had been following me was going to clear the coliseum and crash somewhere in the woods beyond the city, but one of the other ships up ahead was on a collision course with the outside of the coliseum wall. How many would it kill if it took out the stone wall?

I didn’t want to find out. I went into a dive, sweeping above the ship and tagging it with my light-lance. I pulled up sharply, hauling it over the top of the arena and into the forest beyond. A few plumes of smoke rose from the forest—I hoped those ships hadn’t crashed into anything important, though the casualties would be much lower out in the forest than they would be if they crashed into the arena.

I sailed low over the forest outside the city wall, watching for a place that was dense with foliage and uninhabited, and then I dropped the wreckage and turned my ship around to fly back. Alanik wrangled slugs, trying to find places for them to rest in the slings, under the dash, and behind our seats.

“Dayan,” I said, “how’s the arena? You shouldn’t take any more fire.”