ReDawn (Skyward, #2.2)

“This is not a good thing!” Jorgen said. “Coming here when Cobb gave us sort-of orders to do so was one thing, but this is entirely out of the chain of command, and you didn’t think it through or consult me before you did it. You could have had Alanik contact me. We could have had a conversation about it—”

FM closed her eyes and drew a deep breath. “You’re right, okay? It was rash. But we’re not sending them back. Not while your mother is considering taking them to the Superiority. That doesn’t even make good tactical sense, Jorgen, and you know it.”

“But you don’t make the tactical decisions,” Jorgen said. “You don’t know what the bigger plan is.”

“The bigger plan may be to give the taynix to the Superiority!” FM said. “I’m not going to let them do that. And if you are, then you are not my flightleader.”

Rig and Arturo both stared wide-eyed at FM, like she’d said something horrific. FM looked down at the floor, her hands shaking. “I didn’t mean that,” she said quietly.

Jorgen stared at FM, his mouth set in an angry line. Rig and Arturo exchanged a concerned look, and outside the control room the rest of the flight had fallen silent.

“Fine,” Jorgen said, setting his jaw. “We’ll keep them here for now. Though I imagine there are going to be a lot of pilots who are not thrilled with us for stealing their taynix.”

    “We’ll return them when the situation is safe,” FM said through gritted teeth.

Right. Of course they would. They had no intention of sharing with us.

I couldn’t let the humans leave here with all the slugs. Even one could change everything for ReDawn. But they weren’t making noise about leaving now, so this wasn’t the moment to worry about it. Not when I still had hope they might help me.

“Okay,” Rig said. “If the taynix are staying, maybe we should figure out how they interface with this platform.”

FM looked like she wanted to flee the room, and Jorgen looked like he wanted to punch someone, but they both nodded.

“Good idea,” Arturo said.

“All right then,” Rig said. He squeezed FM’s shoulder and then moved over to one of the boxes on the wall. “The boxes themselves weren’t stripped. Makes sense, if the people here don’t know the secrets to hyperdrives.”

“We found something weird on that map,” Arturo said. “There was a control room and the autoturret systems, of course. But no engines and no navigation systems. Alanik said this platform used to move, but there doesn’t seem to be any way to move it, at least not on the schematics we found.”

“Interesting,” Rig said. “Maybe it requires a hyperdrive to move? Get me something to stand on so I can get a look above the boxes and see how they’re interfaced with the platform.”

    Everything useful in this room that wasn’t screwed down appeared to have been looted, but T-Stall and Catnip hauled in a chunk of metal that was tall enough for Rig to boost himself up. While they did, Kimmalyn slipped into the room with us and linked her arm through FM’s. She and Jorgen were both still silent. Jorgen leaned against the wall opposite FM with his arms crossed, and FM actively avoided looking at him. It was an improvement over the yelling. The more they fought, the more I worried they’d decide ReDawn wasn’t worth the trouble. Though if that happened, perhaps I could convince FM to stay and keep the taynix with her. Jorgen was their cytonic, so he could influence the slugs to go with him.

But as we’d discovered, he wasn’t the only one.

Rig stared at the debris as Catnip and T-Stall deposited it on the floor. “Is that a piece of a starfighter wing?”

“Yep,” one of them said.

“Is it a piece of one of our starfighter wings?” Rig asked.

“I had a little trouble with the landing,” I said, and the other one snickered.

Rig looked at me like he wondered how I was still alive. “We’ll tell you all about it later,” Jorgen said. “Right now we need to know what the taynix can do if we interface them with the platform.”

Rig boosted himself up on the wing, first knocking on the wall and then swinging open a panel to reveal a circuit board.

“This all looks like it’s intact,” Rig said. “Either it’s not valuable, or the salvagers didn’t know it was here. The holoprojectors would have been much more recognizable.” Rig climbed down again. “These boxes are labeled underneath, but not in English. Alanik?”

    I had to lean over the control panel and crane my neck upward to see the labels. They were in neither English nor my own language, but Mandarin. “This box says it’s for the weapons system,” I said. “But that doesn’t make sense, does it? The weapons systems aren’t cytonic.”

Rig and Jorgen exchanged a look.

“The autoturrets aren’t,” Arturo said. “But the map had those facilities in another location. Are there…cytonic weapons systems?”

“Maybe,” I said. “I’ve never heard of that.”

Still, while the writing on the boxes was a bit antiquated, the meaning was clear. The next few boxes were for the comms system. On the opposite wall I found one with a different label. “This one is for the navigation system.”

“So it does have a hyperdrive,” FM said.

Rig nodded. “There’s only one spot for a navigation slug, and several for the hypercomm. Probably so you could have commlinks open with many people at once. It only takes one slug to move the platform.”

I examined the boxes along the third wall. “These are for the defense systems.”

“Could be a shield like the one back home,” Rig said. “That would be useful. Though I don’t know how that would work, because on Detritus the platforms combine to become the shield, and the shield mechanism doesn’t require a taynix.” He turned to me. “Do you know how this platform was used in the past? Was it part of a larger system?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “The Superiority doesn’t like us teaching the details of our military history. Rinakin taught me some things, but most of our education is limited to being told we were wrong to fight.”

    “You don’t believe that though,” FM said. “Why not, if that’s what you were taught?”

“Do you believe everything you’re told?” I asked.