Interlude-Lunar
Tasser didn’t like lunar gravity.
He’d stood on half a dozen moons in his life, and they all had roughly the same gravity. At least it felt that way. No two orbital bodies were identical, but when you were weighing how your body moved in .15G compared to .18G, there wasn’t much of a tangible difference.
If the Vorak hadn’t been so good at engineering and material sciences, then maybe colonization efforts wouldn’t have embraced artificial gravity systems so widely.
The floaty feeling was bad enough, but ducking into a building customized with more intense gravity just meant you needed to readjust every time you walked outside.
No, Tasser much preferred the steadier sensation of having a planet under his feet. Even thrust gravity in a starship was preferrable to wasting away on a moon.
Worst of all, moon gravity made shooting more complicated.
The odd invisible field could be jutting out from a building near his line of fire, and there was no way to predict when your bullets suddenly changed weight mid-flight.
Tasser replied.
Tasser retorted. <…Are they supposed to talk this much?> Corphica asked. They were both right. Nemuleki had a point about staying disciplined. Even with an advantage impossible for the Vorak to even become aware of, their success wasn’t guaranteed. But Tasser had a better handle on psionics than she did. He understood that, when handled gently, almost loosely, they didn’t occupy any attention at all. It was possible to focus, entirely, on two different things. Provided one of them was psionic, at least. Tasser’s non-psionic attention was absorbed in watching the post office. Some might have called it a shipping hub—it certainly moved enough small cargo for the name—but this was also the building that the Red Sails routed a significant portion of their mail through. It wasn’t technically their office, rather, it was a colony municipal office that was prepared to divert mail toward the Red Sails garrison. Wurshken was probably not wrong though. There would be at least a few Red Sails personnel working inside, even if only as oversight or adjunct personnel. But even with a Red Sails presence in the building, it wasn’t a fortified position. Security was not flawless. Tasser sent, peering through his scope. Even months after receiving the rank, Tasser still had to bite his tongue to keep a stupid grin from creeping across his face. He’d been told upon enlistment he would never qualify to be an officer. Now, depending on how you nitpicked the hierarchy, he was among the ranking officers for the entire moon. Tasser instructed, Wurshken said, strolling easily into the building. The two rak instead wore civil service badges with the colony’s insignia. On the one hand, that meant they were much less likely to tangle with anyone in a Coalition uniform. That would be left to the Red Sails soldiers. But on the other hand, Wurshken wasn’t in a Coalition uniform right now. Unlike on Yawhere, the Coalition didn’t control any major territory. So most of the Archo chapter had to act covertly. Ironically, the civilian guards were much more likely to interrupt Wurshken than any trained Red Sails personnel. From an adjacent rooftop, Tasser watched Wurshken’s path through the post office lobby toward one of the counters. He paused at the counter, painstakingly holding a scrib and writing on the heavy paper envelope he carried. Wurshken looked as boringly diligent as possible, blending into the background while awaiting the next opportunity. <…Move on four,> Tasser sent. On the fourth beat Wurshken moved, setting down the scrib, his envelope still half-labeled. Perfectly naturally, he walked toward a locked door, and entered the combination into the keypad. Each motion was easy and natural, like he’d done it a thousand times every time he came into work. Wurshken belonged here. At least, that’s what he would say if anyone tried to stop or catch him now that he was in a restricted area. But while Tasser’s perch didn’t give a great view of the lobby and its guards, it gave a fantastic view of the windowed hallways on the building’s south side. Over the last month, they’d used this trick dozens of times. It was astonishingly easy to avoid Vorak patrols when you could communicate psionically. In lieu of visibly carrying radios, they appeared to be uncoordinated activists. Which made it all the more devastating when they employed a spotter like Tasser was here. One Casti could blend in with civilians near the Vorak and silently, invisibly relay information to any psionically equipped Coalition troops nearby. Tasser hadn’t needed to fire his weapon since Cirinsko. Hopefully he wouldn’t today either. Tasser watched as the two Casti drew toward the spot where Wurshken would be visible from…but the pair stopped before reaching the end of the hall, stepping into a side room instead. Wurshken followed the order, moving steadily and silently through each hallway until they got to the riskiest portion of the building. The back section Wurshken was sneaking through was more or less a straight shot, and Tasser had a wide enough view of the hall that he could warn of anyone who might see Wurshken before he was actually detected. But the civilian offices were not what Tasser needed to relay the message he’d been given. For that, Wurshken needed to sneak into the sorting room. It was a massive tangle of machines and conveyor belts, shuffling packages from one end of the facility to the other, and it had not a single window. Tasser scooped up his rifle and set into motion. The one saving grace of lunar gravity and the popular artificial fields to counteract it was customizability. No one ever extended a given gravity field to include the rooftops. Why would you? That was just more upkeep, not to mention structural stress. It made it easy to leap from one rooftop to another, provided you didn’t need to climb. Tasser made his way east, parallel to Wurshken’s path through the post office interior. If Nemuleki and Corphica were all set, there would be a very large distraction and the four of them would slip away and stay unseen until some rak had to scrub through whatever security footage this facility could afford. Tasser stopped for a moment, held up a numbered piece of paper toward the building, and then moved on after just a few seconds. There were a few tense heartbeats when Wurshken didn’t respond immediately. Tasser swore under his breath. Not because of Wurshken’s success, but because The counter-Adept intently chose to stop dead in his tracks rather than hurry further. A pair of Vorak in Red Sails uniforms were on the streets below, hauling a heavy pallet toward the mail facility. Tasser had caught a glimpse of them as he leapt from one rooftop to the next. But had they noticed him? <…One of them is,> Nemuleki said. This is what made psionics so incredible. Telecommunications were already powerful enough, but psionics didn’t require equipment, or any buttons to press. Communication happened as easily as you could think to ask. Tasser moved the very moment Nemuleki saw the Vorak on the ground look away. Tasser hopped to the next building without a sound, and the rak turned their attention back to the same roof, without having seen Tasser continue. It was another three hops before he was relocated enough to have a view of the post office’s exterior east wall. he sent Wurshken. Wurshken counted down, and Nemuleki was at the ready. <—three, two, one.> Wurshken pushed open the door and… …no exterior alarms sounded. On ‘two’, Nemuleki, having covertly stashed a small incendiary device in the nearest transformer, had pressed a button. The device lit, and fire cooked the processor strands in the transformer’s regulator. For only two seconds, power went out across the whole block. The redundancies built into the system kicked in immediately. But the post office wasn’t a military or medical building. They’d found it wasn’t quite up to code. Wurshken made sure to push the door shut behind him quickly enough that the alarm circuit would be closed before the backups restored power. But even if quiet, it wasn’t exactly subtle. Adjoining the post office was a transit hub. Trains and surface shuttles delivered most of the packages the mail facility distributed. There wasn’t a formal Red Sails presence for the post office, but the transit station was buzzing with soldiers. Every last one of them noticed the power outage. But that was fine. It was all according to plan. A few dozen Vorak would come to investigate, but there wouldn’t be anyone to find except scores of Casti with no Coalition equipment, radios, or even weapons. Only Tasser and Wurshken were armed, and they could easily abandon their weapons if they feared discovery. From his vantage point, Tasser could actually see where Corphica was seated at a bench pretending to wait for a shuttle-bus. Her eyes weren’t watching for Wurshken’s exit though. She was focused on a gargantuan beast marching toward the post office along with half a dozen rak in full regalia. Corphica wasn’t alone. Every civilian turned their heads toward the monster. “ Tasser’s instincts flared up at the name, instantly scanning the crowd below. He didn’t find the Vorak, but he found the monster Corphica saw. He trained the rifle on his best guess anyway. His finger twitched on the trigger. But he refrained, but only because he’d heard of Shaper before. The Vorak fleets tended to be much subtler handling their headline Adepts. Farnata Adepts were more public than their Vorak competition. The names 'Warlock' and 'Century' would be recognized even outside Shirao. But 'Shaper' and 'Discharge' would likely only be known by Coalition soldiers, and even then not all of them. Tasser himself, an experienced counter-Adept, only knew of those two Vorak headliners at all, and even then only because Nai had personally fought them and lived to tell about it. Shaper had exactly one trick: making monsters. They were devastatingly good at it, despite the endless complexity of forming Adept life. According to the Red Sails, everything Shaper made was compliant with Organic Authority restrictions on organic Adeptry. Nothing self-replicating. Nothing self-sustaining. No ecohazards. That still left a lot of wiggle room for Shaper to dream up nightmares for battle. Today’s monster in question was disturbingly evocative of Casti, if they were three meters tall, wore scales like armor, and walked on all fours with their knuckles. The creature cast its huge orb eyes over the crowd, but did not give any visible reaction. This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon. Tasser’s instincts screamed at him to take the shot. He was more than half sure he’d managed to pick out Shaper themselves from the retinue of Vorak. Nai had said Shaper needed to stay close to their creations… If Tasser could scratch a Vorak headliner right now? That was not an insignificant effect on the occupation as a whole… Except that wasn’t what he was here for. It took every shred of his restraint to not open fire immediately. But if he did, they were all doomed. Not just their mission today, but the entire colony. Shaper’s creatures were tied off. Even if they died, the creature would persist until its preallotment had run out. And without Shaper to keep it in line, it would almost certainly go wild. Shaper subtly and anonymously held hostages every time they deployed one of their monsters. Even if Tasser had correctly identified which Vorak near the creature was Shaper, he still couldn’t kill the Adept. <…Ignore it,> Tasser ordered. Wurshken started moving before Tasser had even begun explaining. That trust pushed him over the perimeter fence in the nick of time before any Vorak saw him. A few Casti civilians would say something, just because they’d seen it. But it wouldn’t be enough, and it would be too late. Tasser and company rejoined Mu-Rahi Wol on the next train out of the colony without incident. Their mission was done, papers quietly slipped into the post going toward the Vorak base. The mail would be scanned for explosives, and irradiated for bioweapons or toxins. But those didn’t matter. Clandestine as it had been, it had ultimately been diplomatic. The next morning, more than a hundred Red Sails officers and infantry found the same document in their weekly mail. Having so many Vorak involved, there would be no way to hide the event from the eyes the document’s message needed to reach. A simple series of lines, a language only one-and-a-half Vorak in the whole star system spoke. Huge blocky English letters dominated a single page, reading: WE NEED TO TALK ····· Michelle needed to talk with someone. Anyone. But she absolutely abhorred the idea. That was a really shitty thing to realize. She needed to do something she couldn’t. Her kids had caught on. To part of it, at least. Ever since Nora had disappeared and they’d been moved to this new location, her cabin had been on their best behavior. When Nora had first asked for them all to split into groups of eight—‘cabins’—Michelle had quickly been voted to lead her cabin. She hadn’t wanted to, but she couldn’t shirk the responsibility. Everyone was depending on her. On each other. Lately there had been a lot more of the latter. Even some of the younger kids in her cabin were recognizing that the older abductees were also not okay. Michelle specifically hadn’t been sleeping. Even when her campers diligently tucked themselves into their beds and stayed quiet, she couldn’t… rest. Her skin crawled almost every hour she was awake. She was a self-described nervous germaphobe, and the soap the Vorak gave them made her paranoia do somersaults. ‘A nervous wreck’. Describing herself that way was simultaneously encouraging and self-deprecating. She might be a nervous wreck, but she wasn’t a hopeless ruin. She didn’t want to talk to anyone though, because they were all in the same boat, and no one else was panicking about the germs. The Vorak weren’t. Shakri had arranged as much medical testing as she could, and apparently there wasn’t any risk. Back on Earth Michelle had forced herself to accept that she couldn’t scrub her hands raw. But being around aliens felt like a reasonable occasion to do so. So now she wasn’t forcing herself to have a reasonable response, but an unreasonable one. She’d brought it up with Nora exactly once and felt like a ten-year-old complaining about the brand of candy they’d gotten for Halloween. Damn that girl for disappearing. But Michelle didn’t get to indulge that idea. She needed to be a role model for the abductees who were actually ten years old. Or close to it. Michelle was amongst the oldest five of their seventy abductees. She was even older than Nora, but that didn’t mean she had her shit together before all this. And being abducted by aliens was not an event that helped get your shit together. Unless you were Nora, of course. Seriously, damn that girl for up and vanishing… She’d disappeared with Halax, leaving just Shakri to translate. “Diraksi—[fucking perfect…]” Michelle muttered to herself. Learning the Vorak’s language was not coming along swiftly. The Vorak were stingy with learning materials, and too much of it was on Shakri to oversee, and she was only one otter. When arranging who would receive the lessons, Jacob had decided to confront the trouble of teaching too many students soon rather than later. Almost a third of the abductees were receiving at least some instruction. It made sense. Michelle had even voted for it. But fuck if it wasn’t problematic in its own ways. It didn’t help that the Vorak were steadfastly refusing to allow anyone other than Shakri to take up translating duties. Even Shakri herself was so angrily perplexed at the decision, she’d given away the name of her superior officer: Sendin Trakin. Otter names were weird. The otters themselves were weird. Just another of the many things that made Michelle want to curl up and die while she ignored the feeling of her skin twisting. The way their muscly bodies flexed and rippled, their tri-part pupils, it was all disturbing. Worse, thinking that way made her feel like a racist. Everyone had distrusted Shakri, especially after Halax disappeared with Nora. But the Vorak was just too tired to be disingenuous. She was just as frustrated as they were and doing her best to keep outcomes as good as possible. She was sympathetic. So it made Michelle’s gut lump up with guilt when she flinched near the Vorak. Sympathy ran both ways though. Without saying a word, Shakri had begun distancing herself from Michelle. Not personally, just physically. She’d stay an arm’s length away, speak quietly but clearly. Those little things added up and helped Michelle keep herself calm. It was a cooperative effort. Nora had realized that earlier than anyone else. If chaos broke out, it would be the youngest kids who caught the worst of it. It was in everyone’s interest to keep things civil, and Shakri accommodating Michelle was a blessed gesture. And Jacob, being a sharp bastard, wasn’t above exploiting that. Dustin was fulfilling the age-old adolescent tradition of sneaking out, and Michelle was playing his lookout. Because given the option, Shakri would keep her distance from her. With Jacob’s input and approval, Dustin and Nick had snuck out to try and learn more. One of the things Nora and Jacob had agreed not to tell the Vorak, was that they’d figured out how to charge phones using Enumius powers. Dustin was a freshman physics major at Berkeley and he’d decided they could use smartphones to wiretap the Vorak. Underneath Michelle’s ‘cabin’, Dustin and Nick cut their way through the floor using Dustin’s Enumius powers and managed to Shawshank their way into connecting with an adjoining corridor. They’d poked their way through a few times and found a potential office. If they were translating the lettering right, the office door was labeled ‘Sendin Trakin’. Dustin and Nick would stash a phone somewhere near the office enough to catch some audio, retrieve it later, and translate what they heard over the course of lessons with Shakri. That would all come later though. Right now, they were still on the ‘stash’ step. So Michelle lay on her bunk, driving Shakri away from floor panel they’d pried up and slipped down through. She just wanted to curl up and die. There was so much pressure. But maddeningly, every time there had been an important decision, or small crisis to solve, Michelle had persevered against her own expectations. She’d choked out a coherent answer, or managed to keep up a calm face to reassure one of the youngsters. She felt like a nervous, paranoid, racistly-germaphobic wreck. And somehow her name was near the top of their order of succession in case something happened to Jacob. She just wanted to feel a little less… spent. Why couldn’t Dustin hurry up and get back already? Why couldn’t she just feel as calm as she struggled to act? Whywhywhy? The questions in her mind accelerated, intensifying. This wasn’t normal. Did she scream? She should have. But she didn’t. She stayed where she was needed, to make sure Dustin got back safely. The sensation in her skin shifted back and forth, like different patches of her arms were being tugged from the inside. Michelle curled up, a piece of her fear actually swallowing up her panic. This wasn’t all in her mind. The realization made her feel the tiniest bit better. She was right to be so afraid. And then the universe broke apart around her, staying completely whole all the while. Pinpricks ran across her skin like acupuncture, only every one of them was hot, cold, deep, shallow, a million different varieties of pain. She felt the air around her change. Something… added to it. The floor of the Vorak hangar under her knees…it changed too. It was too much. She couldn’t wait for Dustin— “[Help me!]” she screamed to no one in particular. Her eyes were wide open, but she couldn’t focus on anything she saw. Everything happening to her…it was too much. She was overwhelmed by—not only the pain—but by the ideas she couldn’t fight off now. The awareness…that all she had to do was…create… Droplets of something impossible condensed in the air around her. She was adding more to her surroundings. She didn’t mean to. Her chest heaved as she tried to wrestle herself under control. She didn’t know what was happening. She didn’t know how to stop it! “[Michelle!]” Dustin was back, crawling up through the floor with Nick in tow. “[Get Jake,]” Dustin said to Nick, swiping a hand through the droplets in the air. “[She’s empowered]. Enumius.” Nick wasn’t out the door for three seconds before Jacob burst in, taking in the scene in a second. “Shakri!” Jacob yelled. No hesitation. “[Caroline, pound on the gate! Yell until Shakri gets here!]” Jacob knew what to do. It didn’t make Michelle feel any better. Michelle was vaguely aware of Caroline having been in the doorway behind them. The other girl wasted no time in bolting. She was unexpectedly level-headed for her age. But Michelle’s attention was dragged back to the changes she was undergoing. The pinpricks faded from most of her skin, concentrating on her skull… inside her head. She did not have the nerve endings to truly feel the phantom sensations, yet she screamed anyway when she understood. Her brain was…changing. “[Help me!]” Michelle sobbed. Dustin was ready. “Michelle, you’ve got the stuff,” he said. “[The creative powers. You need to focus on breathing. Try to ignore whatever you’re feeling.]” “[I can’t!]” she shrieked. “[It’s in my brain!]” “[Breathe anyway!]” Dustin said firmly. “[Deep breaths! Repeat after me: ‘I do not want to hurt myself.’]” “[What? Why?!]” Michelle sobbed. “[Just breathe, and say it,]” Dustin insisted, voice icy calm, “[and you need to believe it too.]” “[I…I don’t want to hurt myself!]” Michelle said, curling into a tighter ball. “[Good,]” Dustin said. “[Breathe steady and deep. Steady and deep…keep trying to breathe like that. We’re trying to get your heart rate down. Keep saying it with me, ‘I don’t want to hurt myself’…there you go.]” “[I don’t want to hurt myself,]” she said again, choking down shuddering breaths between words. “[I…don’t…want to hurt myself.]” “[Keep it up,]” Dustin said. He held up his hand before her face, and a twinkling gold cube appeared pinched in his fingers. “[Try to focus on what you’re feeling and… aim those words at what you’re feeling. Really believe them.]” “[I don’t want to hurt myself,]” she repeated, terrified to pay any attention to what she felt crawling under her scalp. The tingling was not subsiding, nor were the bubbles of starry liquid hanging in the air. “[…Why am I saying this?]” she managed to ask. “[Because these powers, this Enumius stuff knows how you think,]” Dustin says. “[It’s the only way something could possibly work off your mind. So you make sure your mind is nice and attentive, prioritizing things like…]” “[Like not wanting to hurt myself,]” Michelle followed. “[Remember when this happened to me?]” Dustin asked. “[I burnt my hand with that stupid fireball. I didn’t know what I was doing.]” “[R-reckless,]” Michelle stuttered. “[Good,]” Dustin said. “[Keep breathing like that. And you’re right: it was reckless. So learn from my mistakes, and keep repeating.]” “[I do not want to hurt myself,]” Michelle insisted, squeezing her eyes shut. “What’s-[What’s happening?]” Shakri burst in, brought by Caroline. “[Michelle is empowered,]” Dustin said. “[Try to stay quiet. Yelling is just going to stress people out.]” Michelle nodded, unable to drag her eyes off the starry droplets hovering in midair. Quiet was good. “[What did she makes?]” Shakri asked. Dustin ignored the grammatical error, but Michelle’s brain grasped onto it. Any detail she could preoccupy herself with felt like a float that might keep her from drowning. “[Not sure,]” Dustin said. “[Doesn’t seem dangerous though.]” “[That means nothing,]” Shakri said. “[Michelle, are you okay?]” Reserving her voice to reassert she didn’t want to hurt herself, Michelle shook her head. She was not okay. “That was a stupid question, of course not,” Shakri muttered, grabbing her radio. “Tashi, we can’t show the document right now. One of the eldest just activated. We need to keep them calm.” Michelle stared at Shakri. Her grasp of the language was too young to know what the otter had said. But her brain was going a million miles per hour processing what words she had recognized. Show. Now. Can’t. Need. Keep. Calm. “[You’re hiding something,]” she said, eyes still locked on whatever she’d created. “[There’s…no reason not to teach more of you how to communicate with us! Why then?]” She was screaming loud enough that kids from other cabins were starting to make noise. She’d woken them up. Dustin hesitated for only a second before he gave Michelle a hug. “[Save it for later,]” he said. “[You focus on keeping healthy. Leave all that to us for now.]” He squeezed Michelle tighter then, quieter than Shakri would hear, whispered “[I know what they’re hiding. I saw it. It’s a message in English.]” Michelle’s mind, grasping for anything to focus on, locked onto that. She nodded, finally managing to pull her eyes off the liquid bubbles she’d put midair. “[Keep talking,]” she asked both Dustin and Shakri. “[I don’t know what to do!]” “[You were unlucky,]” Shakri said. “[The other activates were not this bad seeming.]” “[Keep breathing,]” Dustin reminded. “[Do whatever you need to feel calm. There’ll be plenty of time to talk later.]” Michelle met Dustin’s gaze, nodding slowly. Even with her own mind falling to pieces, there were still other pressing matters. New questions to ask, and new facts to adjust to. Like the fact Dustin had learned something. Like the fact that Michelle was Enumius. And that this brought the cumulative total of empowered human abductees to twenty-two.