Crumbles
No one was keen to stay in the gymnasium. A number of eggs had been put in that basket under Nai’s protection, and with her now taking the offensive, there was a slim chance some enterprising Prowler might try to sneak their way to a win and ambush us.
Tasser and I found ourselves relegated to the security room Niza had taken back from the Prowlers.
The Chief of Security was attempting to direct his troops throughout the facility, both to protect the myriad of personnel sheltering in place or hiding and trying to cut off Vather’s escape.
Because it wasn’t much of a fight.
Camera coverage was sporadic, but comparing what I could see to my psionic floorplan gave me a strong grasp of the fight’s momentum.
And it was Nai’s fight from start to finish.
Not a single spark of vorpal fire made an appearance, something that visibly flustered Vather.
For someone who boasted skills tailor made to counter Nai’s best weapons, I thought it was odd why he lost so much ground so quickly.
That tracked. If Vather had been waiting to catch Nai in a mistake like trying to summon her fire when he could suppress it, then he would have been assuming Nai wouldn’t notice the suppressive field unless she tried to burn something. Nai hadn’t even bothered trying to summon her fire, so Vather’s game plan was ruined from the first minute.
The fight burst out from one of the balconies, and Vather fell to the bottom of the atrium. He created some kind of transparent bubble to cushion his landing.
Nai walked down the wall, seemingly casual if you didn’t know her. This was pure caution.
Just like Vather outstripped me on all fronts, she held a similar lead over him, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t get lucky.
The Warlock was playing to win, not giving up a single opportunity for the Vorak to exploit.
Vather fired a pair of beams at her, still clinging to the wall by her boots, but a heavy shard of crystal flickered into existence, deflecting the beam.
Every time he tried to shoot her, she would create a barrier, often preemptively. Each one came quicker and quicker, and Nai began moving more aggressively as things dragged on.
Vather tried to dance around the floor of the atrium, leaping off trees growing out of planters and continuously firing to keep Nai at bay.
And if that had been the only thing for Nai to contend with, the fight would have been over in seconds. Nai could do ground spikes like Itun had, but hers were more like massive swords popping into existence rather than stabbing stalagmites coming under foot.
Even the modest spikes were as tall as I was, and they emerged too fast for Vather to avoid without help.
His help came in the form of fire support.
Vather had brought the fight down to the floor of the atrium to put distance between Nai and his dozen or so Rak that were shooting at her from above.
Only a few of them could shoot at a time, because their own positions were being pressured by Niza’s security forces.
Nai was augmented, and she’d donned a crude set of armor made out of the same dark glass she was making her ground spikes from. Bullets were unlikely to stop her, but they could still slow her down, and her armor didn’t cover everything.
She was being careful to avoid anywhere they could land a shot by sheer numbers, but that was giving Vather more room to maneuver.
He was trying to find an opening to attack, but Nai was too disciplined to give him anything appealing. He couldn’t attack, and with his allies covering him, she couldn’t chase as easily.
I saw Vather give up. His steps changed, he stopped orienting his movement around Nai, and his focus changed to one of the hallways leading out of the atrium deeper into the facility.
My first instinct was to send Nai a psionic message that he was about to flee. But Tasser’s were the only psionics I could sense right now. She was still inside Vather’s field.
Vather scattered a dozen beams, crisscrossing them into a momentary lattice. The beams only lasted a second or two, but that was enough time for the Vorak to dive into one of the corridors attached to the atrium and disappear.
Nai instantly gave chase, but green beams lanced out of the door way, deterring her for a moment. She could outrun him in a plain race, no question. But as long as he could flee down hallways, she would have to bar her own progress if she wanted to create cover for herself.
The long narrow space favored him. It was presumably why she’d followed him when he fled into the relatively open atrium.
Once the two of them ducked into the hall though, they were gone.
I was pushing my radar as far as I could to track them, but to hike the range this much, the resolution was totally shot. Even restricting the area it covered to only Nai and Vather’s direction didn’t afford me any more detail than vague clouds like a three-dimensional heatmap.
It caught me off guard, because once the fight had moved out of sight I realized I had no idea what to do.
·····
Nemuleki radioed us from somewhere to tell Tasser and I to stay put, which duh. She sounded like she was swatting away medics trying to treat her wounds.
It left him and I relegated to the side of the security office watching Niza scramble across a dozen different radio channels.
I kept calling it ‘the’ radar, but I was learning that it wasn’t really one machine that Daniel and I had made. Different parts of it were suited for different tasks, sensing different things.
When it was configured to truly be a ‘radar’, there was an element of space to it that other configurations lacked. It was about mapping out positions of minds, relative to me and each other.
But when I turned a few hundred metaphorical dials in my head, and trained my psionic senses on Tasser’s mind, I didn’t need to know where it was. In fact, it was because I already did know where to look that I could look with more detail like this.
Nai’s mind was the one I’d seen in the most detail, and even then I could tell I’d just barely scratched the surface.
But that was good enough it seemed.
The psionics Nai had created and put in Tasser’s mind seemed to float on the surface like icebergs. Or maybe like coral reefs, plainly visible in the shallowest portions of the ocean.
Precise metaphors failed me, but I could see Nai’s work even if how Tasser’s mind connected to it remained invisible.
That was a complicated question. Just like when I’d looked at Nai’s mind, I could intuitively feel an insurmountable gap between Tasser and I. No matter what I did, I wouldn’t be able to manipulate any psionics or the mind that supported them.
But…again, just like Nai, I felt confident I could push some new pieces in myself. Maybe even something that could modify another piece if I could pre-instill what I wanted…
I might have been able to get a clearer picture of his psionics in action if I did cascade his head, but given the circumstances, it could wait.
Right now, he seemed to have to formulate individual words too carefully. The process was still too tailored to the…’format’ Nai thought in. He had to spend a moment crafting each word on its own rather than just putting the whole of what he wanted to say into his signal.
She cut herself off suddenly and for several moments there was only silence.
Tasser and I traded concerned looks.
A strong sense of frustration come over her signal, it was clear enough to be unambiguous even despite psionics occasional failure to convey tone or emotions.
<…Yes. Has to be that way.>
“Vather’s gone,” I told Niza. “He got away, but Nai is making sure he can’t come back soon enough to matter.”
The Farnata frowned at me, but Umtane whispered to him, reassuring him that I was not simply making up messages from Nai.
“We need hands on the entrances,” Director Hom-Heg said. “Plus we need to detain whoever Vather was forced to leave behind.”
Niza nodded. “I already mobilized everyone I have. No one is off duty right now. Rikonnam has already detained seven Prowlers casualties and counting. Human, if you’re in contact with the Warlock, can you have her bring the rest of the Coalition forces you came with?”
“I’ve got no objection,” Umtane added. “The more guns we can put on the exits, the better.”
·····
With the shooting at an end, we began to breathe easier, if only just.
An allergy test was the only thing remaining according to Dr. Mo.
He was caught off guard by our demand to finish testing the same day, but since he wasn’t part of the medical teams, and his normal appointments were obviously scrapped for the day, there were surprisingly few reasons not too.
Just hours ago I’d helped trash Dr. Mo’s Ecology and Biospheres department, or at least the entrance to it. To be completely honest though, it looked pretty decent. Given how many lasers Vather had been tossing around, I would have imagined more scorch marks on the walls.
Dr. Mo led Tasser and I to one of the untouched rooms that housed the more complex equipment.
I’d told him about scratch tests for allergies back on Earth, but his version was a bit more intensive.
A machine the size of a minivan scanned a section of my arm while Dr. Mo operated it in total silence. It poked at my bicep and a tingling laser trained itself on the same spot. Part of me thought about getting a more detailed explanation of what exactly the machine was doing.
There was a Chief of Research sized elephant in the room. And, while I was still mad about it, I was curious who would be the first alien to bring it up.
“…How big a deal is it that I’m not quarantined?” I eventually asked him.
“It’s either no trouble at all or catastrophic,” Dr. Mo said honestly. “The odds are extremely skewed towards the former, but there’s no dismissing the possibility however remote.”
A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
He didn’t seem to know that I was asking in reference to what Dr. Maburic had done.
Was he just trying to play it off?
Or…had the news of Dr. Maburic trying to hand me over to the Prowlers not spread yet?
I was being paranoid. And not entirely without reason. That felt like a slippery slope.
What a long day this had been.
It wasn’t quite over yet though.
After Dr. Mo had what we needed, we were walking back through the foyer strewn with paper and debris.
“Wait a second,” I said, stopping in my tracks. We’d left someone here when fleeing from Vather, but now they were gone. I would have guessed Vather just got him to safety, but…
I expanded my psionic senses outward, struggling to inflate it back to a larger area. Sure enough, relegated off to the side of the foyer, stuffed into a very small alcove behind a planter box, lay Itun.
He was practically wedged between the planter and the wall, trying to keep out of sight. And he was totally immobile. His eyes barely recognized that he’d been found.
“Vather left you behind,” I said, unsure of how happy to feel. At least there wouldn’t be nothing to show for Letrin’s death.
“…Like this I’m dead weight,” Itun mumbled. “It was the right call…”
“Call security,” Tasser directed Dr. Mo.
There was one more defeated Prowler for them to detain.
·····
Nai wanted us to leave the next morning, but Nemuleki and several of the Casti we’d left outside weren’t medically clear to move yet, so we were convinced to remain an additional day.
“You’re not going to take up my offer,” Director Hom-Heg guessed.
The Director had gingerly entered the room Umtane had been running his investigation from.
“No,” I told him plainly. “I’m leaving tomorrow morning.”
“I figured not, given what’s happened.”
“Norgi or Maburic?” I asked.
“Both,” he grimaced. “I’ll likely lose my position for this. Deservedly too. Not one, but two colossal breaches of medical ethics happened under my watch by senior staff I personally approved.”
“I might be the wrong one to talk to about that,” I told him, trying to be lighthearted.
“No, I suppose not. It would be stranger if you did sympathize,” he said.
“I only meant I’m not even remotely qualified to talk about medical ethics. I think it would be narrow-sighted to only blame you for being the one in charge during all this.”
“What an odd phrase, ‘narrow-sighted’,” Hom-Heg mused. “Casti are known to have both very wide and very clear vision.”
“It’s a metaphor,” I said. “You might not have handled this perfectly, but it wouldn’t be right to blame you for their actions.”
“…I am sure the Prowler leadership will say the same thing about Senior Vather.”
He spoke the word ‘senior’ with all the respect a snake had for a rat.
That was a disturbing possibility though.
“Regardless,” he said. “I am still Director of this facility for however much longer, so it is on behalf of the Organic Authority and all its personnel that I gravely apologize for what has transpired to you here.”
“I accept the apology,” I said, giving Tasser a glance to make sure I’d gotten the form right.
He gave me a small nod. It was apparently an important Casti custom to say ‘accept the apology’ rather than ‘accept your apology’, since Hom-Heg wasn’t primarily speaking personally, but rather as a representative of his organization.
My time at Demon’s Pit had given me some skewed ideas of Casti formality and what I’d thought to be lack thereof.
“I’m happy to say, Dr. Mo completed your testing last night. He was too exhausted to deliver you this personally, but he figured this would be gift enough.”
Director Hom-Heg handed me a large clamshell case, and a bracelet with an engraved metal plate.
“The case contains extensive medical documentation and several vials of things that could save your life in a medical emergency. Compatible blood clotting agents, a number of testing solutions, and nutritional supplements with instructions how to synthesize more.”
“So most of this case is more for the benefit of the nearest doctor?” I asked. “Not that that’s a bad thing.”
“The case is mostly technical,” Hom-Heg admitted. “But this should be of more interest to you.”
He indicated the bracelet. I recognized the engraving on the plate. The last time it had only been a third complete, but now the steel square was completely covered in a complex set of grooves and divots. It was reminiscent of an alien QR code.
“Your completed Individual Nutritional Index,” Hom-Heg said. “Every living thing ever encountered is listed under Organic Authority databases, and samples of something can be compared to the code of your index to see if it’s safe for your consumption.”
“I can eat food?” I asked, excitedly. “Real food?”
“Well, given your particular index, a large portion of Casti staples will be either toxic or deficient for your biology, but yes. This will tell you what you can eat—which, looking at it, is going to be Farnata food mostly.”
“Is it a problem that I have no clue how to read the code?”
“Not for now,” Tasser said. “We’ll get Dyn to teach you how to check foods eventually, but for now just run anything by someone who already knows how to check.”
“So I’m all [squared away]?” I asked. “If I leave the planet, no one from the Organic Authority is going to try to shoot us down?”
“There are still some cultures whose results are pending, but they’ll be finished in a day or two,” Hom-Heg said. “I understand the Warlock isn’t keen to keep you around, and nothing further requires your presence. Once those final risk assessments show safe results, and they almost certainly will, our database will be updated, and you’ll be marked safe for travel into any biosphere.”
“Except Uriken ones,” Tasser pointed out.
“Yes…obviously,” Hom-Heg said.
The door to the office slid open and Umtane trudged inside carrying a small thermos.
“Finished interrogating Norgi?” Tasser asked.
“We found the bioweapon,” Umtane nodded, gingerly setting the canister down on the table.
“Where was it?” Nai asked.
“Exactly where Norgi said it would be: in the refrigerator in the Auditing office,” Umtane glowered. “It was hidden inside a bag of laghra. ”
“He actually told you where he stashed the thing?” I asked in surprise.
“I threatened to scuttle the whole facility with him inside.”
“The reactor needs three confirmation keys to scuttle,” the Director frowned. “Senior Norgi would know you were lying.”
“If you’re upset and Adept you don’t have to be lying,” Umtane pointed out.
“…Were you serious?” I asked.
“He believed me,” Umtane said ambiguously.
“So everything is resolved?” Tasser said. “What happens with the weapon?”
“Well, technically my orders were just to investigate. No one really thought I’d find anything, but on the off chance I did, I was to seize all materials connected to the weapon’s creation and bring them back for Deep Coils technicians to analyze. But…”
“…But?” Nai asked.
“But the weapon almost certainly isn’t for targeting Vorak like we originally thought. I don’t think it would be wise for me to take custody of a bioweapon if my people aren’t the ones at risk. But there’s an easy solution too,” Umtane said.
He held the canister out to Nai.
“You can burn its contents from the inside right?”
“I can,” she said.
She made a little stand for the canister to sit on before making a transparent bubble wrap around the whole container and stand before she finally created any fire.
It was only a spark of vorpal fire on the inside of the canister, but in seconds the metal was glowing orange.
When she was done, the canister was a bit deformed about to melt. But it stayed sealed even as the metal cooled. And with the duration of the heat she’d used, not even the smallest bacterium could have survived.
“Technically, that’s not proper disposal procedure,” Hom-Heg said.
“I was going to say the same thing,” I told her. “Are you sure that was safe?”
“The fluid body was tweaked,” Nai defended. “It’s not just sterile by heat, but radiation too. There isn’t a biocarbon chain still in one piece in there.”
“Fluid body?” I asked.
“Never mind, yes, just trust me. It’s safe.”
Umtane materialized a glove and deposited the deformed canister in an airtight bag before putting that bag inside a sealable case. Even with Nai having incinerated its contents, there was still every reason to be cautious.
“Everything’s done for you then,” I said. “But you don’t seem…” I trailed off. I knew exactly why he was still in a dark mood. He was leaving with half the people he came with. Nemuleki had been similar when we’d checked on her this morning. Letrin hadn’t been our only casualty.
“I’m feeling about that well,” Umtane said and nodded toward a purple stain on the door of one of the cabinets. It was Vorak blood. Umtane had said the Prowlers shot two of his staff.
“I would be willing to talk to Deep Coils leadership about what happened if you need it,” Nai said. “I can’t say for sure when we’ll be off this planet, but we should be going to Paris roughly the same time you make it back to your fleet.”
“That’s generous of you,” Umtane said. “I won’t forget what I owe you, Caleb Hane. You saved my life, and you didn’t have to.”
“You’d best believe I’ll call in that favor,” I reminded him.
Umtane nodded.
“If it’s all the same to you, since you’re leaving tomorrow morning, I want to go over the evidence with you one more time. See what we missed,” the Vorak said.
“I’d like to help,” the Director said. “This is mostly Niza’s show for the next few days, so I don’t have much more to do. Plus, I’d like to know exactly what we can turn over to the colony judiciary.”
We spent the evening retreading old ground, compiling all the evidence that implicated the Chief Auditor.
At least, Nai and Umtane did. They spelled out what they’d found piece by piece, what the most damning evidence was, and what facts had nearly exonerated him.
“Aral… ” Umtane swore under his breath. “Obvious in hindsight.”
“What is it?” Nai asked.
Umtane showed the communications logs to her. “Norgi made a traceable broadcast to Moc Province a little more than two days ago. How long would you say it takes to get from Moc to Cordani?”
“A day, maybe a day and a half?” Nai said. “If you and Caleb are correct, that’s where the Prowlers were staying. Norgi contacted them.”
“Yes, but what happened a day and a half before they arrived? Why did he get desperate then?”
“…Auditing,” Nai breathed. “We made the appointment to look at their audits of the different departments’ stocks and supplies.”
“He even knew when the Prowlers would arrive,” Umtane guessed. “We should have double checked why they couldn’t see us immediately.”
It was harsh to listen to.
Umtane kept going even as Nai’s engagement faded. Even when the Director seemed, not content, but at least placated by the new understanding of events, Umtane kept going.
Watching someone else go through the same motions was new, but nonetheless it was a familiar scene. It was how I’d spent the first few days without Daniel to keep me company.
“Stop,” I told him. “Just pack all the evidence up and turn it over to someone else.”
“You don’t have to stay,” Umtane said, not taking his eyes off the page of logs.
“Neither do you,” I told him.
“I want to figure out where I went wrong,” he said. “Or else Fr—or else they died for nothing.”
“…They didn’t die for anything you care about,” I said. “They didn’t sacrifice themselves and there was nothing noble about it. They were murdered.”
Umtane glared at me harshly but didn’t say anything.
“What were their names?” I asked.
“…Fraget Nachi and Wari Yukrem,” he said.
“Don’t make them into…[martyrs]. I don’t know the word in Starspeak, but don’t try to find a way to give their death’s a meaning. Don’t try to make their deaths right. I’ve been there. There’s nothing good thinking that way.”
“…Why not?”
“Because their deaths weren’t right. There’s nothing even remotely good about what happened to them. I don’t mean you shouldn’t try to learn from any of this, but not like this. Not right now.”
“Dusk was three hours ago,” Nai pointed out. “We should all get some sleep.”
“…Fine,” Umtane said. “I suppose I’ll see you folks leave tomorrow morning.”
I made sure Umtane left first so he couldn’t linger after we departed.
I admitted.
She was trying to joke, but it was hard to go along with it. I wasn’t sure having Daniel in my head hadn’t warped some of my personality.
Nai said.
she said.