Page 92 of Blightfall

“We’ve got to go,” I said. “Come on!” I hauled Nedd out of the ship and pulled him toward the door into the facility. Our ships were parked almost all the way against the wall, so the drones wouldn’t be able to fire on them without destroying parts of the space station, but they might consider that an acceptable loss if they could prevent our escape, so I searched the wall until I found a control panel. I prayed I wasn’t about to evacuate our oxygen—surely that would be more difficult than the simple press of a button?—and pulled switches until the hangar doors closed, preventing the enemy drones from following, for the moment at least.

Alanik hauled Gilaf in through the hole in the facility wall. Nedd and I followed as Arturo landed. He popped his canopy and jumped out, sprinting toward us. Dayan climbed out behind him, light-whip in one hand and Naga in the other, looking shaken but happy to be out of the ship.

Nedd seemed a bit unsteady on his feet, but he had his destructor pistol pointed in the right direction as we moved into the hallway. The broken body of the varvax I’d shot lay against the far wall, its exoskeleton in pieces, leaking a brownish fluid. Dayan stared at it as if unsure of what they were seeing.

I averted my eyes from the body. Maybe the varvax had survived. Except if it did, was I just leaving it alive to try to kill us another day? I didn’t know what to hope for.

Arturo took Naga from Dayan and followed us in, Suki floating behind him on her disk. We were pretty small for a ground force, but the varvax had always caved in the face of human aggression before, so hopefully they’d do so now. We all moved to the end of the hall, pistols aimed in front of us, ready to fire on anything that resisted.

At the end of the hall, we hugged the walls, pistols out, as we entered some kind of control center with a high ceiling and large computer screens lining the walls above rows of workstations. The left part of the room was sectioned off into cubicles with partial walls only a meter and a half tall.

The center appeared abandoned, though several of the screens were still on. A lot of the text was in what I assumed was the varvax language, though one of the screens near the ceiling had the names of gladiators from Blightfall—it appeared to be some kind of leaderboard.

Nedd had managed to get his prosthetic reattached and operational. He and Gilaf seemed to be more coherent, which was good, because we all needed to be on our toes if we expected to get through this.

Alanik approached one of the computer screens with her translator pin, holding it up so the pin could read the text. Before it could speak, a voice sounded over a loudspeaker, booming and mechanical. Alanik’s pin translated the words: “Facility compromised.”

All the computer screens went dark.

“Scud,” Arturo said. “I guess we’re not getting information that way.”

I scanned the room for exits. There were two doorways on either end of the far wall, roughly the size of normal human doors, leading deeper into the facility.

“You will not win here,” Ivy’s voice said over the loudspeaker. “You’ve neglected this facility for too long, and now it’s far too late.”

“The Superiority neglected Blightfall,” I repeated. “So Ivy turned it into her own splinter group?”

No one had the chance to debate this with me, because at that moment, everything in the room, including us, began to float. My stomach leaped into my throat as my whole body lifted into the air, weightless. Hoid nearly drifted out of my open pack, and I tucked him in again. He and Twist curled around each other, looking pale and frightened.

“Scud,” Arturo said. “They turned off the artificial gravity.”

“This,” I said, “is incredible.” I reached out and grabbed onto Gilaf’s arm, pulling myself toward him as we both hovered in midair. Only Suki could move comfortably—she had strapped herself to her disk, which was powered by acclivity stone and therefore moved similarly even without gravity.

At that moment, one of the doors on the far wall swung open, and the barrel of a cannon rolled into view.

Oh scud. That was less incredible.

“Take cover!” Arturo shouted.

Easier said than done. I pushed off Gilaf’s shoulder, flinging myself at the floor. I floated toward it much more slowly than I wanted to, but twisted around to watch in horror as Gilaf went the other way, drifting toward the ceiling, completely exposed.

“Oh, scud, I’m sorry!” I said, but Gilaf shoved the corner of one of the monitors, sending himself hurtling toward the floor much faster than I had. Suki navigated her disk down next to me. Naga floated away from Arturo’s shoulders, and Dayan lassoed her with their light-whip, swinging her back into Arturo’s reach.

I twisted to check on Nedd—not sure if his reflexes had totally recovered—and found that he and Alanik had also flattened themselves to the floor, holding on to bolted-down table legs and shoving on the underside of desktops to stay down.

I braced for the blast from the cannon, but it caused no damage to the furniture, the monitors, or the wall behind us. No material matter shot over our heads, but I felt the energy vibrating in my ears, humming with a frequency that turned my thoughts to jelly. I was far enough out of the blast radius not to lose consciousness, but I recognized the sick, disoriented feeling, even at the edges of it.

“Concussion blast,” Alanik said. Stars, they had a concussion slug trapped inside that cannon.

I still didn’t know what these varvax were doing here, but they clearly weren’t going to fold as quickly as we’d hoped.

Thirty

Arturo

I’d never thought about how much I relied upon gravity until it was gone. The cannon advanced on us from the far end of the room, anchored to the floor by what I guessed were magnets, while we clung to the furniture, trying desperately to stay out of its path. Naga curled around the back of my neck, tucking her hind end into the collar of my flightsuit to hang on so she wouldn’t drift away again as I shifted.

We’d all managed to get low enough to avoid the brunt of the mind-bending concussion blast that had sought to render us unconscious. The Superiority didn’t usually put taynix in small weapons, reserving cytonics for capital ships and other large weaponry so their slugs couldn’t be easily lost or stolen.