“So that’s settled, then,” FM said. “I can wait here with you while Jorgen sets up a meeting, if you want.”
“Please,” I said, and Jorgen returned Gill to FM before leaving to talk to his leaders.
I hoped my meeting with them went better this time, because otherwise I had come a very long way for nothing.
Five
It didn’t take long for Jorgen’s admiral to agree to a meeting. FM and her strange slug kept me company in the infirmary while we waited for Jorgen to send word that they were ready for us.
“What are you doing with the taynix anyway?” I asked her.
“Bonding,” FM said. “I shouldn’t say too much, but it’s a new program the pilots are trying out.”
The pilots were bonding with creatures that could hyperjump. After one of their own had infiltrated the Superiority in my place, trying to find the secret to hyperdrives.
The humans, as it turned out, had found it.
“You can use them to hyperjump,” I guessed. “Even if you aren’t cytonic?”
FM winced. “I really don’t have the clearance to tell you that.”
“You didn’t tell me,” I said. “Your slugs revealed it.”
“Yeah, we really do need to figure out how to get them to only do that on command. It gets really confusing when they want to buddy up every time we mention their names.”
I stared at the taynix, which was tucked back in FM’s sling, nuzzling the crook of her elbow. If those things were the key to Superiority hyperdrives, I would need to take at least one with me if I had to flee.
A radio attached to FM’s belt made a beeping noise, and then Jorgen’s voice spoke. “We’re ready,” he said. “FM, can you bring Alanik to the command room?”
“We’re on our way,” FM said, and she smiled at me in a way that was probably meant to be reassuring.
FM led me through the stark metal hallways. My body felt lighter, my steps bouncier than expected—the gravitational pull of Detritus had to be slightly less than ReDawn.
Everything on this platform was so flat, the ceilings so low, not like the buildings at home—which would wind up the branches of the trees, filled with ramps and stairs on the inside and the outside. On some of the wide lower branches, where flat horizontal ground was easier to come by, a building might have a wide first story, but then it would soar upward, making use of the space above it, or spiral around the branches with lower floors built on the bottom side of the branches.
Who wanted to live in a building that was so…squashed? I felt like the ceiling was pressing down on me, closing me in.
Before we reached their command room, we passed beneath a large skylight through which I could see the other platforms that traveled above. They looked a lot like Wandering Leaf, though there were so many more of them.
“Was this an outpost during the last human war?” I asked. “Is that how you became trapped here?”
“No,” FM said. “The technology here is a lot older. Our people were travelers with a small fleet of ships. We crashed here and were imprisoned by the Superiority after the war ended.”
I wondered if there were more humans hiding in pockets across the universe. The people here had been resourceful enough to survive.
As we walked, I caught glimpses of an electric blue barrier stretching across the sky between the platforms above. “What is that?” I asked.
“Our planetary shield,” FM said. “It protects us from the Superiority gunships. Jorgen told me we apparently have a cytonic inhibitor? I guess that must have activated around the same time we put the shield up. We still don’t really understand how all these systems work.”
If I had more information about that, I could have used it as currency, but most of this technology was foreign to me as well. Jorgen had the key to the inhibitor in his mind, but he hadn’t known it existed. I wondered if being born here attuned him to it somehow. That would also explain why the slugs could use their abilities as well.
FM led me to a room with a slightly higher domed ceiling. Several humans with a variety of skin tones, all in shades of beige and brown, sat around a large table. I wondered if those tones revealed their places of origin like with us, or if they were indicative of something else.
The woman I’d fled from—Jeshua Weight, FM had called her—glared at me. The meanings of facial expressions varied from species to species, and Finis had made me memorize many of them before I left for Starsight. But I was pretty sure that glare meant the same thing in every humanoid culture.