Page 121 of Blightfall

We emerged from the nowhere portal in what looked like a massive warehouse filled with strange apparatuses. We sped across the room at breakneck speed, rapidly approaching the far wall. “Scud!” I shouted. “Scud, scud, scud!”

“Scud!” a chorus of taynix echoed around me.

I pulled up and fired with my destructors, blowing a hole in the wall. Dust and stone rained around us, but my fighter sailed cleanly through the hole, flying out into the sky.

The horizon was a dusky blue color, clouded with a haze that made it difficult to see too far in any particular direction. Enormous chunks of rock hung in the sky, similar to the debris field surrounding Blightfall, though these rocks were closer together and much lower to the ground. They were suspended in midair, as if gravity held no sway over them here.

I’d heard the nowhere described as a series of islands floating in space, but the ground here was solid, as if we’d transported to another planet. Around my ship, a complex of square buildings rose up, all similar in size and shape, arranged in a grid pattern. It was so…mundane-looking, not unlike the squat, utilitarian military buildings we constructed on Detritus. Even the chunks of rock floating in the sky reminded me of home.

“Nedder? Sentry?” I said over the radio. “Are you there? Do you copy?”

There was no response. Stars, we’d probably left them behind in that warehouse. I hoped they were hiding. Other alternatives were too terrible to think about.

“When I imagined the negative realm,” Alanik said, “this is not what I expected it to look like.”

“Me neither,” I said.

“I never imagined I’d see it at all,” Suki said.

She hadn’t wanted to, but I’d dragged her along anyway. “I’m sorry, Suki,” I said. “I’ll do my best to get us out of here.”

That started by figuring out where the hell we were. “What do you think these buildings are?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Alanik said. “But Amphi, look.”

“Look!” Naga said.

Alanik pointed to the monitors, at objects beginning to move toward us.

Maybe I should have turned to run, but instead I pivoted my ship in their direction. We’d come here to grab Nedd and Sadie and find out what the varvax were doing in the nowhere. We needed to see everything we could if we wanted to find answers.

It didn’t take long to identify them. Several enemy ships soared toward us. These weren’t Krell ships but crewed fighters of a design similar to our own. “Those are piloted ships,” I said. “Why didn’t Ivy send them after us before?” Every ship we’d seen since we arrived on Blightfall was an unpiloted drone.

“Maybe because she would’ve needed to fly them through an arena to get them out,” Alanik said. “Not everyone is that kind of crazy.”

“Crazy,” several slugs repeated.

“Fair point,” I said. That would have startled the humans of Epiphany, that was for sure.

Stars, there were a lot of ships. Where had they found twenty pilots?

“We can’t fight that many alone,” Alanik said. “We need to run.”

She was right. If we led the ships away, lost them in the debris field, then picked some off as we swung back around, we might have time to find some answers and rescue Nedd and Sadie before being completely overwhelmed.

For now, I shot between the nearest buildings and into the sky, toward the big pieces of floating debris that hovered overhead. Nearing them, I used my light-lance to circle around one of the pieces of rock, changing my trajectory and heading away from the warehouse, still climbing in altitude.

The ships were gaining on me now, flying faster than I was. I accelerated, hoping to stay ahead of them, dodging through the debris to obscure my flight path on the enemy proximity monitors.

“I’ve never seen that model of starfighter before,” I said.

“Are they a varvax design?” Alanik asked.

“I believe they are based on a historical human ship design,” Suki said. “Your people no longer use them, but perhaps other human settlements do. Look out!” Suki ducked down in her seat as destructor fire bombarded us from behind.

“May be an old model,” I said, “but it still has the same guns.”

“Blowing things up isn’t an advanced technology,” Suki said. “You’d be surprised how little advancement is required before humans begin to bomb each other.”