“If he keeps broadcasting, it will be easy enough to triangulate his location,” I said. “But some of the Unity cytonics have the ability to inhibit, so they won’t leave Rinakin unguarded. The Superiority also granted Unity some cytonic inhibitors. More than the one in this ship.” I gestured toward the wreckage.
“Is the inhibitor still on board?” FM asked.
It was a good question. The ship’s inhibitor had stayed active, even after the cockpit was obliterated. It wasn’t working now, but the technology should still be on board. I stepped into the empty hull, examining what was left of the ship.
Rows of passenger seats were mostly still intact, and at the end of the aisle was a panel with instrumentation—and a box set into the side of the ship. I moved up the aisle with FM right behind me.
“That’s a taynix box,” FM said, and she squeezed past me and knelt down next to it. The other humans crowded around the hole in the hull, watching.
“There isn’t a slug in it,” Jorgen said. “We’d be able to feel it if there were.”
He was right—the box felt empty to me. But when FM unlatched it and pulled it open, a pale blue taynix with bright green spines stared up at us out of the box.
“Hey, baby,” FM said, reaching in gently and pulling the slug out. She looked at Jorgen over her shoulder. “No slug in the box, huh?”
“I can’t sense it in the negative realm,” I said. I couldn’t even touch the area where it rested in FM’s arms, though the area had been too small for me to notice before. “It’s…inhibited itself.”
“It’s adorable,” Sadie said.
FM ran a hand down its spines, and it hummed quietly, as if nervous.
“I guess that answers the question about how they do it,” Jorgen said. “And now we have one. Maybe we could figure out how to use it to inhibit the platform.”
“Can’t you just ask it nicely?” I asked.
“We can try,” FM said. “But it might need a little more instruction. Working with the others took time.”
“Time,” the slug trilled softly.
“Still,” Jorgen said. “If we can harness the platform’s capabilities, we could buy ourselves some. That would also give us some time to determine Rinakin’s location.”
FM continued to hold the new slug, and she didn’t seem eager to let it go. Technically this slug should belong to my people, because it was recovered on our turf, but I didn’t know what to do with it, so for now it was probably better off in her hands. “I expect they’ll be keeping Rinakin on or near the Council tree. That’s where the Unity cytonics live.”
“More trees,” Nedd said. “Do you really live on those? Not down on the surface of the planet?”
“ReDawn is a gas giant,” I said. “There is no surface, except the core. And the atmosphere down there isn’t breathable. We only go down there for mining.”
“This is your home planet?” Sadie asked. “Like, your people lived in trees even before you had starfighters?”
“Yes,” I said. “We’ve always made the trees of ReDawn our home.”
Sadie made a little squealing noise. “That is so cool.”
“And kind of terrifying,” FM said. “What if you fall?”
“Do you often fall off your platforms?” I asked.
“No,” FM said. “But we don’t really live on those. It’s a military base. The civilians on Detritus all live underground. There are no children on Platform Prime.”
“We learn young how to be careful,” I said. “We don’t walk on the edges of the branches without safety equipment. We have walls and railings and nets. A few people fall every year, but those deaths are mostly due to equipment failures, like having a cord break when rubber-jumping.”
They all stared at me like I’d lost my mind.
“All right,” Jorgen said. “Let’s do some poking around and see what we can find on this platform.”
I nodded. I wasn’t sure what there would be to work with, but at least the humans weren’t talking about fleeing anymore.
“Alanik,” Jorgen said. “Why don’t you try the radio while we look around? See if you can find any more broadcasts that might give us a clue what the people who took Rinakin are planning.”
The humans probably wanted to conference without me, but I couldn’t stop them from talking to each other. Trying would make me look desperate. “Okay,” I said.