“But we work as a team,” Jorgen insisted, sparing a glance at FM. “You need someone there if things go wrong. At the very least that person could engage their taynix to come back here and tell us what’s happened to you, so we can organize a rescue effort.”
It was a good sign that they would consider rescuing me if something went wrong.
“I’ll have to stay here to communicate with the slugs in the platform,” Jorgen continued, “and Rig will need to stay too, but—”
“I’ll go,” Arturo said from the doorway.
I looked at him. Yesterday it had seemed like he was starting to trust me, but here he was volunteering to come along and babysit me. To make sure that I wasn’t going to have his people make a spectacle out of themselves and then grab Rinakin and run.
I could do that, I realized. Arturo’s presence wouldn’t stop me. But the whole point of going to Detritus in the first place was to find allies. Even if the rest of their people were making a different choice, these humans were still willing to work with me. So far, anyway.
Jorgen nodded. “That makes the most sense. Maybe you should take Nedd as well.”
“Alanik is right,” Arturo said. “The more people we bring, the less stealthy we are. But if we’re going into combat with a ship with a cytonic inhibitor, we’ll want at least two of us. If we find that it’s being guarded by a whole fleet, we can hyperjump back and regroup, but at least we’ll know more than we know now.”
“All right,” Jorgen said. “We’re going to need to get everyone together and talk this through. Alanik, would you go talk to the Independence pilots? See if they’ll join us? We could meet in the hangar. It’s the only space we’ve found so far that’s big enough to fit all of us together comfortably.”
I nodded.
I didn’t like putting any of them in danger, but if we succeeded it would be worth it.
Eighteen
An hour later, Rig, Jorgen, and I gathered in the control room again to use the hyperdrive. The other pilots—both human and UrDail—were all ready in their ships to be transported out to defend the platform. Rig had pulled the radio out of the wreckage of my ship and installed it in the control room, so he’d be able to talk to us once we were in the air.
“Here we go,” Jorgen said as Rig deposited Drape in the navigation system taynix box. “At least we’ve used hyperdrives before. Do we think this works the same way as the ones in our ships? I just send it a location and the whole platform will move?”
“The Superiority moves massive ships with hyperdrives,” I said. “So this platform shouldn’t be a problem.”
“I only know how to send the slugs to places we both know,” Jorgen said. “I don’t know where we’re going.”
“I can give it coordinates,” I said. “If we’re going to Tower, I want to be sure we’re out of range of the tree so the autoturrets don’t fire on it.” I wasn’t going to be responsible for that many civilian casualties, and not just because it would be impossible to convince my people we meant well after something like that.
“Could you move the platform yourself?” Rig asked me. “It seems like you could do it without the help of the taynix.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But I’d rather not risk it.”
“Plus, we should test it with the hyperdrive,” Jorgen said. “That way we know if it works, in case I need to pull us out after Alanik is gone.” He turned to me. “Do you know what kind of range the guns have?”
“I’m going to overestimate it,” I said, “just to be safe. We want the guns shooting at the people who come after us, not at Tower. We can always move the platform a second time if we need to.”
I searched out across the planet, reaching past Industry and Spindle—where I lived—to Tower. It was far from other trees at the moment, leaving many branches of space out in the miasma to move the platform to. I needed it close enough to Tower that Unity saw it as a threat, but not so close that anyone got hurt, even aircraft that were passing through the busy airspace around the tree.
Better to be too far out than too close. I chose a place farther away and impressed the coordinates into my mind. And then, reaching out for Drape, I fed them to him.
Nothing happened.
“Why isn’t it working?” I asked.
“He’s not listening to you,” Jorgen said. “Probably because he doesn’t know you.”