Page 68 of Blightfall

“Do as they say,” he said, and I released my bag.

Dayan stepped closer, taking care to avoid Nedd’s loose leg, and hauled my bag away with one hand, still holding the light-whip tight with the other. The bag appeared deflated, as if it had already been emptied. Dayan peered inside, not immediately screaming at finding a blue-and-green frilly slug. They fished out the pistol and dropped the bag against the door of the house, then did the same with Nedd’s, which had also been partially emptied.

Twist must have hyperjumped the slugs to safety. She was allowed to do that without permission, so long as she only moved taynix with her. I hoped they were all okay and not too bumped and bruised.

Dayan turned off their light-whip, releasing Nedd and me into a tangle of limbs. Nedd climbed to his feet and offered me his bio hand. His prosthetic arm was still strapped to his body, the hand covered by his glove, but useless in his sleeve.

“All right,” Dayan said, light-whip ready to lasso us both again if we made the slightest wrong move. “Tell me who the hell you two really are.”

I turned to Nedd. He was the commander of our little side mission and was probably right that I shouldn’t have given Dayan the information I had. I’d have to apologize for that later.

Nedd shrugged. “I guess we’re doing this,” he said. “Go ahead.”

Stars, he still wanted me to do the talking?

“We’re Sadie and Nedd, like we told you,” I said. “But we’re from a planet called Detritus. Our people were imprisoned there by the same aliens who are watching you.”

“So you’re also prisoners?” they asked. They seemed less sure that we’d abducted their friends now, so that was progress.

“We were until recently,” I said. “Our people crashed on Detritus at the end of the last Human War.”

“What do you mean, the end?”

“We don’t know where your gladiators are going,” Nedd said, “but they aren’t fighting in Elysium—because the war is over.”

Dayan’s finger hovered over the light-whip’s trigger. “If the war is over, then why are those aliens still keeping us prisoner?”

Dayan wouldn’t like this part, but I didn’t know how to explain without telling them the full story. “The humans lost the war almost a century ago,” I said. “And the Superiority—the aliens we were fighting—decided we were too dangerous, so they kept us isolated on our planet and shot us down whenever we got close to escaping.”

“How could you escape?” they asked. “You have ships? You flew here?”

It was better to admit that than spill everything we knew about cytonic hyperdrives. “Yes,” I said. “We have ships nearby.” I stole a glance at Nedd, who nodded for me to keep going. “The aliens on the star haven’t been shooting at you, have they? Do you have functional starships?”

“No,” Dayan said. “Every time we tried to repair our old ships, something went wrong. Just like when our telescope manufacturing gets too advanced, or our mining too productive.”

Huh. It seemed strange that the Superiority would shoot at us from a distance but sabotage the people of Blightfall up close. The Superiority had been terrified of humans—they preferred to fire at us with drone ships rather than put their feet on the same ground we walked on. Why had they treated this group so differently?

“If we’re still detained,” Dayan said, “then the war is not over. They may have declared victory, but we have not conceded.”

This conversation was getting away from me. “The war is over, though. Yes, we lost for a time, but recently we rallied and made alliances with several alien races. We defeated the Superiority, and now we’re forming a new galactic order. The people who kept you prisoner have been neutralized, and the humans are free now.”

“This is what freedom looks like?” they said in a flat voice.

Okay, maybe I overstated my case. Stars, we could use some diplomats about now.

“We’re here to free you,” I tried again. “And invite you to join our alliance and work toward galactic peace.”

Dayan squinted at me. “If you’ve come to liberate us, why are you sneaking around pretending to be rice farmers? And why would you ally with the creatures who kept you captive?”

“Our allies weren’t our captors,” Nedd said. “This may be hard to believe, but there are a lot of other sapient species in the galaxy, and many aliens were also prisoners of the Superiority. Our allies want to coexist, to learn to live in peace.”

“The aliens holding you captive are a remnant of the Superiority’s larger forces,” I said. “Your planet is in some kind of dimensional pocket that made it incredibly difficult for us to reach you, which helps the Superiority troops keep you prisoner even though the rest of us are free. We flew through to make contact, but now we’re trapped here, and we can’t get back or call for reinforcements.”

“So you’re here to rescue us,” Dayan said, “but you have no more power than we do.”

We still had ships. And hyperdrives, even if we couldn’t use them to get off world. “We have some resources,” I said. “What we lack is information. Can you tell us more about the people holding you here?”

“I don’t know much,” they said. “A few months ago some older gladiators told me about the star. They said they had reasons to believe we were being watched, and they were suspicious of Elysium—the way no one ever comes back to visit or tell us what it’s like. Some of us think we’re being trained and taken for some other purpose, but we don’t know what it is. We talk about trying to get a message back after we cross over, but no one has managed it.”