Page 30 of Blightfall

“Good,” Arturo said. “See if you can climb high enough to get a look at what lies between us and the city. The rest of us will cover you.”

“Copy!” I said, strapping my light-line to my wrist and my pistol and radio to my belt. I probably should have felt sacrificial—Arturo was obviously sending the least important and lowest-ranked member of the team to do the investigating. But it meant I got to explore the forest before anyone else did, and it sounded like a good way to distract myself from the fact that we were in mortal peril with no way to get home.

I popped my canopy and climbed out of my ship, surveying the trees around me. The ground was littered with fallen twigs and branches, and carpeted with a bed of soft leaves. Hopefully if I fell, I’d land on the latter and not the former.

I pointed my light-line at a thick branch only three meters above the gully floor and tapped it, attaching a thick line of red-orange light to the branch. I waited for a moment and pulled hard on the line to see if the branch would react to the touch, but it seemed stable.

Good enough. I shimmied up the light—now physical and stronger than any rope—and hoisted myself onto the branch. My flightmates had climbed out of their ships below and watched me with destructor pistols in hand.

I stood on the branch and walked toe to heel until it passed near another large branch angled upward. I slowly transferred my weight to the new branch. The bark was oddly soft—my feet sank a little and left indentations behind. Bits of bark peeled off and fluttered down as I moved.

“All clear up there?” Arturo called.

I paused, looking around the forest now that I was high enough to see over the gully. The woods were dim from the setting sun, but all was still. Eerily so.

“I don’t see anything but more trees,” I said into my radio, so as not to shout. Just because I couldn’t see a settlement of humans didn’t mean there wasn’t one just out of sight. “Climbing higher now.” I shot my light-line forward to connect with one of the thicker branches in the canopy above, stabilizing myself as the branch beneath my feet grew thinner, eventually no wider than the soles of my boots.

Walking from branch to branch, I continued up and up, until the limb beneath me swayed with my weight. I kept my light-line securely attached above me so that if the branch snapped, I’d be able to swing to safety instead of tumbling to my death. I was probably twenty meters in the air now, and the leaves were growing thick, brushing my hair and tickling my face.

“Sadie?” Arturo said over my radio. “You okay?”

“Yep!” I replied.

A strong breeze battered the leaves around me and blew back my hair. I wished I’d brought one of my kerchiefs to tie it back. I approached a wildly flailing clump of leaves near the top of the tree cover and pushed them aside with one hand, still gripping the light-line with the other.

My face broke through the canopy, and I could see everything.

The sun appeared to be setting behind me, turning the sky a pale shade of violet. It hung there unmoving, as if in stasis—though I guessed it was the planet being held to it, like a mother grabbing her kid by the face and forcing them to look in her eyes—which only furthered my opinion that this planet’s sun was incredibly creepy.

The thick forest continued to the edge of a wide river, along which was some kind of farmland—evidence of the humans who lived here. Though I couldn’t tell what they were growing, they definitely weren’t growing it in a vat.

The elevation sloped upward on the other side of the river, the leafy canopy rising with it like a quilt draped over a grandmother’s knees. Far to my right and at the top of a large hill, an enormous white stone wall extended above the tree line, encircling what must be the human city, set against a backdrop of mountains. Their dark shapes blended into the twilight and were punctuated by caps of snow. Even from this distance I could tell the city was massive. Tiny flags rippled atop the wall in a variety of colors.

This was it. A bastion of humanity. The home of fellow survivors. And I was the first one to see it.

I grinned. “I have visual on the city,” I said to Amphi. “It’s on the other side of a river lined with farmland. I don’t see any large settlements between us and our destination, but the river is partially hidden by trees, so I can’t see everything.”

“Copy, Sentry,” Arturo said. “Good work. Can you see any defenses? Any enemy ships?”

“Just the city wall,” I said. I looked up at the lavender-blue sky. The debris field was barely visible from here, just a vague haze in the atmosphere. Over the mountains, in the darkest part of the horizon, a smattering of stars shone across the indigo twilight. Stars weren’t visible from the surface of Detritus, much less from the caverns beneath it. But wishing on stars was an ancient human practice, and as a child I used to wish on the idea of stars—the many bright lights I knew were there even if I couldn’t see them, tiny hopes in the vast darkness.

Today I wished on one of them for our fallen comrades—I hadn’t known them well, but they died because we failed to protect them. Even though we’d clearly been acting on bad information, we’d still fallen short.

Directly overhead a single bright star shone against the purple sky, though no other stars were visible around it. The space station, watching the city from above.

“I can see the Superiority base,” I said over the radio. “But no ships. If they’re flying beneath the debris belt, they’re too high up to be visible.”

“Good work,” Arturo said. “You can come down now. We’ll pack up supplies and start walking.”

I attached my light-line to a sturdy branch and then rappelled down until I hit the forest floor. My eyes took a moment to adjust to the dim light again. The others were already gathering rations and sidearms, packing them into backpacks where the slugs would ride as we walked. I climbed back into my ship to collect Nope and my own pack, when a female voice spoke through my ship’s radio.

“Are you there?” it asked.

We all froze. The voice was speaking English, though it sounded somewhat mechanical, like it was speaking through a translator.

“That came over the hypercomm,” Alanik said. “Bob broadcast it to our ships.”

“Are you there?” the voice said again. “Pardon me, I don’t mean to interrupt, but I am trying to reach the intruders who arrived earlier this cycle.”