ReDawn (Skyward, #2.2)

We welcome your cooperation, Quilan said.

I had to get out of here, but if they were going to hurt Rinakin, I was bringing him with me whether he liked it or not.

I couldn’t let them take him, not to hand over to the Superiority. I could hyperjump to him—one touch and I could take him with me as I escaped. I reached toward the ship, past Quilan, who stared at me with a hard look on his face. Into the back, where I could see the bone ridges of the top of Rinakin’s head, where he sat sandwiched between the two guards.

My mind hit a pocket of dead space.

No. They had a cytonic inhibitor on board, creating a space behind Quilan that I couldn’t reach with my powers, even though Quilan could obviously use his.

    Cytonic inhibitors required cooperation from multiple cytonics, but if Quilan had brought everyone he would have surrounded the ship to keep me from escaping as well. Beyond Rinakin and the guards, I spotted two diones with bright blue skin. This was Superiority technology, run by those diones because the Superiority would never entrust something that powerful to a “lesser species.”

Unity was already working with the enemy, trading away ReDawn’s autonomy for the ability to destroy the Independence.

Alanik, Quilan said. Step out of the ship, if you would. He sounded so reasonable, which only made me angrier.

I wasn’t coming with him. I reached into the negative realm toward his mind, ready to tell him so, when I caught a bit of cytonic communication coming into his ship.

—have them yet? someone asked.

Not yet, Quilan responded. —picking them up—

—getting impatient…wants humans, but we don’t have them…they will have to do. We need to make the offer before—

I paused, my hands on the altitude control. Quilan’s ship hovered over my wing, but if I engaged my boosters, I could shoot out from under his wing and then ascend. I’d flown with Quilan in the junior leagues. I knew I was a better pilot.

But what was that? The Council was getting impatient. They didn’t have any harbored humans to turn over, so instead they were going to make an offer.

What were they offering?

Rinakin and me?

    I wasn’t going to be their next bargaining piece. But Rinakin—they were going to give up the leader of the anti-Superiority movement as an offering to appease them.

You’re going to give us to them? I asked Quilan.

Your cooperation is appreciated, Quilan said.

This wasn’t happening.

I couldn’t hyperjump in there. I couldn’t save Rinakin.

The only thing I could do was run.

I twisted the dial that fired the boosters.

The ship roared to life, but it only jerked forward a few inches. I twisted around to look and found that Quilan had used a light hook to hold my ship in place. He climbed out of his ship, walking with a brisk step. He might want to convince me that he came in peace, but he also didn’t want to give me time to escape.

As long as I didn’t let him get me in the back of that ship, he couldn’t keep me here.

“Alanik,” Quilan called. He was no longer speaking to me cytonically, possibly trying to distract me from anything else I might hear. “Come with us, and we can get this all worked out.” He slowed as he approached the door to the ship.

I was going to have to leave this ship behind, but I might be able to get a new one at Hollow. I reached through the negative realm, forming the coordinates for the base on Hollow in my mind. If that base was the last holdout, I could take shelter there while I made contact with the humans. I’d also be better positioned to get my people out if things went wrong.

    “I’m sorry, Alanik,” Quilan said. “I thought you might still see reason.” He sent a concussion bolt flying into the ship. I felt it coming and ducked just in time, missing most of it, though my ears rang and my vision swam.

I ripped into the negative realm, hanging there for a gut-dropping moment, staring out at thousands of white eyes that all focused on me. I felt lost here as I always did, slack and untethered like a streamer torn free of its post, floating for a moment before fluttering inevitably downward into the dark. The eyes regarded me as a trespasser—

And then I returned to myself. I stood in a vestibule in the Independence base on Hollow, a tree even larger than Industry, though far less populated. This tree was dead, and was now used mostly for lumber harvesting.

Through the enormous window comprising one wall of the vestibule, I could see Wandering Leaf—an abandoned military platform similar to the ones that had shot me down when I first visited the human planet—drifting in the miasma. The platform was slowly migrating closer to Hollow, though if it had to threaten any of our trees with its autoturrets, at least it was a sparsely populated one.

The base around me was silent, the hallways empty. That was odd—there were usually a hundred people in residence here helping with the lumber transportation, keeping an eye on Wandering Leaf, and monitoring the tree itself for signs that it was becoming unstable.

“Secure the area,” a voice said at the end of the hall, and I pivoted to see several people approaching. They were wearing Unity pilot uniforms, yellow leaves emblazoned on their shoulders.

    They’d already taken the base. So where were the Independence pilots? I ducked back into the corner, hiding in a recess until the Unity pilots had passed me by.