Go, I said to Boomslug, focusing on the area right outside the hangar.
I felt the edge of the nowhere ripping apart as the hyperweapon fired, mindblades flying out at the escaping ships, bypassing the shields, cleaving their hulls in two. Debris rained down out of the sky. The pilots didn’t even get a chance to eject.
I couldn’t afford to feel sorry for them. I leaned toward the window, spotting the next carrier ship halfway behind a nearby tower of clouds.
Go, I said to Snuggles, and suddenly we were in front of it, the platform shaking with autoturret fire.
“We’re ready,” Alanik’s brother, Gilaf, said over the radio. “But we’d rather not jump out right here, if it’s all the same to you.”
“Sorry for the short notice,” I said. “We didn’t get much more ourselves. I’ll jump you down closer to the planet.”
“Hell of a way to wake up,” Gilaf said.
I contacted the taynix in Gilaf’s ship and sent him and the other UrDail pilots down to the place where we’d first brought the platform in.
This carrier ship seemed mostly empty, but I still told Boomslug to fire, aiming the hyperweapon at the hull of the ship. It diced into chunks, bits of it blowing out into the sky and then falling.
“Did you do that?” Juno asked, watching through the window.
“I did,” I said. Stars, this thing was powerful. This tactic could be less effective against a battleship, which might be equipped with an inhibitor, but we were putting a serious amount of metal into the ocean from these carrier ships. Bits were going to wash up on the beach for years.
What could we do if we were able to move more of the other platforms from their orbit around Detritus?
The third carrier ship belched forth more fighters. I could feel the distinct vibration of a cytonic among them, and I reached out, listening for any cytonic communications, to see what we could learn about their plans.
Instead I felt something else. A thrumming against the nowhere, a rhythmic knocking like someone tapping their nails against the boundary between that world and ours.
The enemy cytonic sliced across the battlefield, headed directly for Alanik. The thrumming followed them, and as I focused I could feel small projectiles swarming around them, like pointed shards of glass made out of bits of the nowhere.
Oh, scud.
“Angel, get out of there,” I said. “That incoming ship has—”
The shards of nowhere flew out around the enemy pilot’s ship in a swirling melee, clipping wings and piercing hulls. Two ships went down—one from Ivy Flight and one from Stardragon—as the ship neared Alanik.
Alanik’s ship blinked out of existence and reappeared farther down toward the city, where Victory Flight was chasing off the fighters that had pierced through our other forces. The enemy ship sailed right past the place where she’d been, toward Kimmalyn and Nedd, who darted away. The ship pursued Kimmalyn. Before I could say anything, Arturo was yelling at her over the radio to go into a dive, get out of there.
She dove, but the enemy ship followed her, slicing her ship into three even pieces. The wreckage fell to the ground. She didn’t eject, but she wouldn’t have needed to. I searched for her taynix in the falling wreckage, but I couldn’t find him. I hoped he’d hyperjumped her out.
“All flights,” I said, “that pilot has mindblades. Take them down.”
“We can’t get close enough to use the IMP,” Amphi said. “Quirk’s our best shot and she’s down.”
“Nedder,” FM said. “Did Quirk make it out?”
“I don’t know,” Nedd said. He sounded shaken. The cytonic with the mindblades dove again, this time taking off after Catnip.
I found Catnip’s slug, Whiskers, and instructed it to jump down closer to the city, below Victory Flight. Catnip disappeared. Our ships flew loosely around the enemy cytonic, all trying to peg the ship with destructor fire without getting close enough to be torn apart by the mindblades, but the enemy ship rolled and dodged, evading their fire.
I couldn’t let this continue. I could get in my own ship and try to go after the cytonic, but I imagined they had a lot more practice with those mindblades than I had, and possibly a lot more reach.
“All flights,” I said, “pull up.”
All across the battlefield, ships shot up into the clouds, clashing with the Superiority ships that had made it out of their carriers. Not all the kitsen flights obeyed, but those that didn’t were far enough away from the cytonic that they should be safe from the autofire above and below.