Advance
Looking over Berro Jo’s fish factory, I was confused by what we could have missed the first time. Only two of us had actually gone inside the first time, but it wasn’t that complex a structure.
A small stack of office rooms at one end of a long factory floor. The walls were just corrugated metal, and there was no broadcasting equipment to speak of.
No… I reminded myself. There was no visible broadcasting equipment to speak of. If the drones transmitting to the factory had been disguised, it stood to reason the receiving end of the setup might be concealed too.
Tolar’s computer was being dissected by Coalition engineers as we spoke, but I doubted we would learn anything quickly from it.
So the immediate concern was finding out why someone wanted Caleb Hane to be brought to the factory.
Serral climbed into the truck, dragging my eyes off the factory.
“Just a few minutes now. How’s your arm?” he asked.
I’d been having a grand time in the back of a Coalition equivalent of a surveillance van.
“Just fine,” I said. “Dyn got the bolt out just fine, and I patched the wound. I’m ready to go.”
Serral gave a heavy breath, keeping a lid on his reaction.
“…And you don’t want me going,” I realized.
“You aren’t going,” he said.
“Don’t I have to?” I asked. “Our fake message from Tolar was pretty clear. If it’s not me and a Casti who can pass for Tolar, aren’t we blown?”
Serral looked at me aghast.
“You know…Nai told me the best way she’s found to handle you is to just let you talk long enough for you to realize the problems with your own ideas.”
“…We’re blown anyway?” I guessed.
“This is a raid, Caleb. We’re not knocking politely on the door. We’re breaking down any locks between us and the personnel inside. Someone is party to eliciting a kidnapping from a Coalition base. Laranta has been flexible with you, but she’s not going to stay quiet when someone tries to steal people from our own house,” he said.
“Even if we could find out more if we played along?” I said.
“Caleb, you’ve been an exemplary First Contact up until now. Even when Nai assaulted you, you took it with grace. Even after Nora woke up, you’ve been nothing but cooperative with us. But in the last day, you’ve gone to a meeting with a violent criminal and dangled yourself as bait for a spy, and keeping me uninvolved in the decision making.”
“You said you understood,” I said, “so you know why.”
“I also said I didn’t like it. So tell me, what’s changed?”
“Come on, it’s obvious,” I said. “The Coalition wanted to lock up the only other human out here, and the only thing that stopped it was Nai throwing her weight around.”
“That explains why you’re frustrated with the Coalition, and Laranta, even me,” Serral said. “But it doesn’t explain why you decided to start taking these risks.”
“It’s because I’m getting impatient,” I said. “We finally start learning things, about these drones, about how we were abducted, and the first thing the Coalition decides to do is look at Nora. I can put up with it coming from Laranta, because at least she doesn’t try to pretend the investigation is hitting the brakes for Nora’s and my own safety.”
“Is that what you think I was doing?” Serral asked.
“What? No,” I said. “I get why you were involved. It’s your job. But we aren’t talking about you, I mean the rest of the Coalition at large.”
“Ah…” he said, tension leaving him. “I understand our failure then.”
He looked me dead in the eye, willing me to absorb his every word.
“Caleb, the Coalition is not responsible for your safety. I am. The Coalition has its responsibilities, and your safety is one of them, but insofar as that responsibility must be fulfilled, the task is wholly mine. I dismantled the Coalition’s position at Demon’s Pit because I believed that upholding your safety was more important than controlling the power for a hemisphere. Ever since I’ve returned to Lakandt, I have had one responsibility, one role: you.”
“It’s your only job now,” I followed. “…Then what’s our misunderstanding?”
“You need to tell me about these things instead of leaping to take risks on a whim.”
“…Then I’m not sure what to do,” I admitted. “Because I didn’t do any of this on a whim. I made sure to take a moment to weigh— seriously weigh the risks against the gains. And looking at how it turned out, I’m having a hard time seeing where I went wrong.”
Serral was fighting to keep the anger off his face.
“No,” I corrected, “that’s not quite right. I can see what was wrong with the decision, but I can’t see what better options there were.”
“The better option was trusting us with what you found,” Serral said, “trusting me.”
“If I’d told you, you would have had to tell Laranta. This is the secure wing of a military hospital, not some apartment building on base. And I don’t know exactly what formal response the Coalition has for its maximum security hospital getting bugged, but I’m pretty confident it would have taken a day or two right?”
“It would have,” Serral agreed, “and I could have stopped that from happening.”
“How?” I asked. “Unless you can just not share threats to Coalition security with your commanding officer…”
“The same way you kept Nai in the loop,” he said.
“Nai is suspended from active duty,” I hedged. “She doesn’t have to—”
“That’s a weak technicality and you know it,” Serral said. “You told Nai because you trusted her not to tell me or Laranta.”
“…Not immediately,” I conceded. “It’s not like I waited that long. You weren’t even an hour behind me.”
“Time isn’t the problem, Caleb. It’s trust. Laranta and the Ase s’ motives for suspecting Nora were deeply flawed, but their reasoning was sound: we are more able to help you if we can trust you!”
“Trust goes both ways though,” I said. “And you lose a lot of it when you can’t stop your coworkers from trying to lock up one of us for nothing but a little peace of mind.”
“…You are correct in that regard,” Serral conceded. “Both I and Laranta failed to communicate reasonably with you and Nora both about that.”
“I’m not sure if I’m ready to admit my failure was the same magnitude as yours,” I said. “…But I’ll keep thinking about it. So in the meantime, I’m sorry too.”
“Well don’t wait too long,” Serral snorted. “Because trust is usually best repaired with feet on the ground, not on a starship.”
“…Are we planning on going somewhere soon?” I asked.
“Look at where you are,” Serral nodded toward the factory. “Whatever we do find will probably point us somewhere new, and we’ll learn some more along the way. How long do you think that can repeat before our new leads are going to be sitting on another planet?”
“I have been thinking it’s unlikely for my abductor to be entirely based on Lakandt,” I admitted. “Especially if we’re right about drones watching Nora’s abductees too.”
“We’ve been thinking about what we need to do when we actually find them,” Serral said. “If the Red Sails are that convinced psionics are what shut down the beacons, they could get more aggressive as everyone learns more. If they even think we might move you, it’s not impossible that they attack this moon.”
“Which makes it all the more important that the Coalition have a way to get us humans off this moon,” I agreed. “Okay yeah, having you guys looking out for my safety is pretty good. Just…”
“We should be smart about it?” Serral suggested.
“Yeah. That.”
“…Okay,” he said, tilting his head. “They’re ready for us.”
“What?”
“Raid’s done, factory’s clear,” the Ase said, climbing out of the truck.
I followed.
“Wait, wait, you went in?” I said. “When? I didn’t hear anything…”
“Not me personally,” Serral said. “I’m an Ase. I don’t go kicking down doors much. My job was to sit on you and coordinate psionically.”
“I would have noticed if…” I mumbled, checking my psionics. “…If you were using a default channel.”
“Nai and Nora set up a non-default one,” Serral said while we walked closer to the factory.
“Yeah, I found it in two seconds,” I said. “I just didn’t know to look for it. You could have said something.”
I winced as soon as the words left my mouth.
Serral shot me a sickening grin.
“[Sucks] doesn’t it?” he said.
“Okay, okay, I get it. Come on.”
A dozen familiar faces were awaiting me and Serral at the factory entrance. Several of the Adepts from our workshop had been rolled out in addition to a number Casti I didn’t recognize sporting psionics.
I’d known the Coalition’s psionics usage was going to expand soon, but it was still unnerving to see it happening without any connection to me. But I trusted the Adepts in our workshop enough that I could live with it.
I would have to.
“About time,” Nora mocked, already inside standing with Nai.
“Where did they have you?” I frowned.
“The other truck,” she shrugged. “They wanted me to monitor the psionic band.”
“I really didn’t hear a thing. I don’t just mean psionically,” I said.
“As far as raids go, this was an uneventful one,” Nai admitted. “No resistance, no shots fired. In fact, I’m a little worried we’re in the wrong spot. We haven’t found anything yet.”
“All the evidence pointing to here might be circumstantial, but it’s still a mountain of it. If there really is nothing, we’re going to make sure,” Serral said. “That’s the only reason you and Nora are here.”
“I don’t follow,” I said.
“Cascading,” Nai said. “Psionically linking cascades is quite a trick.”
She held up her fist for me to bump.
It was possible for the superconnector to do its work without physical contact, but we’d found the easier we made its work on the front end, the more stable the result tended to be. A physical connecting point for the cascades to mix from took a lot of the guesswork out of the equation.
The moment my knuckles bumped hers, our cascades washed together beneath our feet and began spreading out through the factory.
The other few Adepts that had supported the raid were visibly confused when our combined cascade tore through their own. Watching their faces was satisfying in a petty little way.
All the factory personnel had been cleared from the building, currently being held outside, while the Coalition tried to figure out what to do with them. I was going to feel really badly if this whole factory turned up nothing.
Even if we did find something, odds were these were just workers who didn’t know anything about Berro Jo’s smuggling or Tolar’s connection to the factory.
Berro Jo themselves were irate and confused, shouting to one of the Asu to contact Tolar.
“What is the meaning of this! I’m ruined!” they shouted.
It was bluster. But believable. They clearly hadn’t heard about what had happened to Tolar.
So Berro Jo wasn’t the one Tolar had been communicating with.
“Just what are we looking for then?” I frowned.
Nai’s worries about finding nothing weren’t sounding so unlikely now.
We scoured every inch of the factory. The offices, the paper files, the two computers on the premises, every wire going to every machine on the factory floor.
It was a fish factory, and the fish in question was just cloned muscle tissues fed by soaking in vats of nutrients. Nothing inside those but varieties of Kraknor eel and what I could only hope was shark tissues.
Every inch of the concrete floor, every nook of the tin walls. We went over it twice and then three times.
There had to be something. Somewhere! But even when we refined our search, looking for the same ultra-fine filaments the drones had been found using on base, our search was turning up empty.
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Until someone made a mistake.
Normally, the ideal way to search a wide area with a cascade was by thinning it. Limiting the cascade’s spread to an object’s surface would let you reach further, since Cascades spread according to how much mass they had to propagate through.
So the more two-dimensionally you thinned your cascade, the further it could reach.
A common mistake of beginners was to waste some of their cascade’s reach feeling downward, inside of the ground. Unless you were specifically wanting to sense the internal layout or composition of something, it was generally more optimal to sense just an object or material’s surface.
One of the workshop Adepts made that mistake, and it saved our bacon.
“Whoa!” he cried out. “Down! There’s something under the floor!”
Nai and I were on opposite sides of the building, examining the machines by hand when we heard the call.
The building rested on a concrete foundation. Concrete was concrete. One inch deep was the same as six.
Checking deeper revealed a cavity though.
“[Holy crap,]” I muttered as we felt what was down there.
“Nora, Caleb, stand back,” Nai said.
I kept our combined cascade going, but stepped far out of the way with Nora.
“Cover me,” Nai ordered the returning Casti troops. They stood at the ready while she summoned up gouts of vorpal flame.
Teal flames sank into the grey floor, melting it into slag in seconds. The heat lingered even after just a few seconds of flame.
Nai jumped down the hole and the soldiers aimed down the hole after her.
Still connected to her cascade, I had a bit better view.
The hidden basement seemed to be similar dimensions as the factory: long and thin. Except it didn’t run parallel to the factory itself. The length of the basement seemed to be perpendicular to the factory floor.
<…Not much at all,> he said.
I hedged.
She focused the cascade one a tower-like structure framed in metal. I hopped down after her into the dark substructure. It was almost pitch black save for the blinking lights on the tower holding Nai’s focus.
“It certainly looks like a server rack,” I said. “Almost a year out here and this is the first piece of computer technology that actually resembles something from Earth.”
“Can I jump down too?” Nora asked.
“
“Here,” Nai said. With barely a blink she created a crude blocky ladder out of her crystal. Our Casti compatriots climbed down into the dark hole and readied their weapons for anything that might be lurking in the dark. Nora followed them close behind.
“Anyone see a light switch?” I asked.
“Lamps?” one of the soldiers replied.
Yeah okay, that was on me.
Nai and I materialized some glow sticks so we could at least see our footing, and Nora followed suit quickly after.
“
“
“
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“
“
“[Doesn’t matter,]” Nora shook her head. “[The point is you find something hidden, like a food smuggling operation, so you don’t look further. A smaller secret can be used to hide the bigger one.]”
“What’s she saying?” one of the soldiers asked.
“Small secrets designed to be found distracted us from discovering the big secret,” Nai answered. “Keep moving, I want to see what’s at the other end of this.”
With our combined cascade scouting the way ahead of us, we picked our way through the dark basement until we came to a heavy door locked with a keypad.
“How far is this?” Nai asked. “What would you say, two-hundred feet from the hole in the ceiling?”
“Not even,” I said. “Maybe half that.”
“No traps that I can find,” Nai said, inspecting the door. “
“Any circuits connected to the door other than the keypad? Any wires going from the—”
Nora’s questions cut off when Nai grabbed the handle and pulled the door open. No keypad necessary.
“—and it isn’t locked. Of course. [Well, good thing we checked…]”
Beyond the door, there was a light switch. Clicking it on revealed another smaller room containing a much more functional computer setup. Just one server rack and a short series of monitors.
A small fridge sat opposite the desk along with a basic cot, and a ladder led up to a steel panel in the ceiling. Cascading it revealed that the panel was carpeted over on the next floor above.
“This looks like it could be a work station,” I said. “Think this desk is Tolar’s?”
“Maybe,” Nai said.
“The computer’s on,” Nora found, holding her hand against it. <…Nai, Caleb, find any drones?>
Now that was an excellent question.
“Think they’re watching us right now? I mean, no point keeping it secret right?” I asked the room.
“Same reason you have security cameras?” Nora said. “They want to see who’s doing what in their secret hideout. Besides, Caleb is right, look.”
She materialized one of our detector antennas and handed it to Nai. I materialized my own and found what Nora had.
“There’s a live transmission happening, right now,” she said, waving the antenna around. “But this is odd. The signal is faint…”
The three of us probably looked like idiots, waving around little lengths of wire like they were magic wands or something, but hey, that’s Adeptry for you.
Trying to get a sense of the signal was difficult though.
“It’s weak like it’s far away, but I’m not getting any closer or further from it moving around the room,” I frowned.
“Up,” Nai said. “
“
<…Nothing. Just solar panels and a chimney.>
“
<…That’s because it’s not a chimney,> Serral said.
“
·····
Hours later, the Coalition was still aswarm over the hidden basement under Berro Jo’s factory. The factory’s automated processes had been modified in ways that not even Berro Jo seemed to know about. Packages had been added to just prior to shipping, and been taken from immediately after receiving. Extra compartments in boxes, carrying a few pounds of metal.
Shinshay was busy peeling apart the machinery in the basement that seemed able to process the raw materials into functioning drones.
Asu Tolar still wasn’t talking, so we were content to focus on where the transmissions were being routed.
“It’s a tiny orbital platform,” Serral said. “The thing is less than two-hundred feet long and its orbit is just stupid.”
“Is two-hundred feet really that small?” I asked.
“For a satellite? No. But this is a proper platform, pressurized for people to be on board.”
“And we’re sure the stuff at the factory was transmitting here?” Nora asked.
“Tightbeam transmissions are virtually impossible to detect unless you manage to stumble into the beam’s path or get near one of the transmitters. The flipside to the that secrecy is that once they’re found, it’s very easy to tell what they’re aiming their signal at.”
“What makes the orbit stupid?”
“The same thing that makes the platform detectable at all. Look up at the sky, what do you see?” Serral asked us.
“Uh…Paris? Plus a bunch of void,” I said.
“And notably, not any other moons yes?”
“Oh…” Nai realized. “It’s not orbiting one of the moons.”
“Of course it’s not!” Serral spat. “It’s orbiting Paris itself, at a disgustingly low altitude too. With that trajectory, if those boosters give out, it won’t take twenty hours for its orbit to degrade.”
“Really?” Nai said. “How do you figure that out?”
“Because the boosters gave out,” Serral grimaced. "Right now, it’s technically in freefall over Paris. In fourteen hours it’s going to drop into the planet never to be seen again.”
Nora and I both went still.
“Can we get to it within fourteen hours?” I asked.
“…Yes,” Serral said. “The question is if we want to.”
“[Oh come on…]” I sighed. “You’re worried about this being a trap? Don’t be! It obviously is. We can be ready for it.”
“I don’t know Caleb, a doomed satellite holding everything we might want to know does kinda scream ‘baited hook’ to me,” Nora admitted.
“[I’ll fold right now if you can honestly tell me you think we shouldn’t go,]” I told her.
“[I…fuck. Yeah. We have to,]” she said, shrinking back. The way she said it made it sound like she was consigning us to death.
“Caleb, do I even need to say it?” Serral asked.
“Do I?” I replied. “I appreciate that there are no guarantees of safety, but I would be shocked if we went through all this trouble just for a satellite to blow up. We can be careful, scout it out, all due diligence. But you cannot shut us out now. We can visit who checks out the platform itself later, but we are at least on the rocket.”
Serral looked like he wanted to contradict me, but I knew what I was suggesting was reasonable.
“You’re going to bring Shinshay,” I accused. “Bring Nora and I in the same capacity.”
“…Done,” Serral conceded. “Looks like you’re getting on a starship even faster than we thought.”
He turned to Nai. “Go to your building. You know what they eat; put together some trip bags for Caleb and Nora. Then grab Dyn so we have medical clearance. Then we can commandeer one of the standby shuttles. We can be in the air in two hours if we’re quick about this.”
“What should Nora and I do?” I asked.
“Talk her through rocket launch procedures,” he said.
Oh yeah, it was going to be Nora’s first time being conscious during a rocket launch.
And that was that. Serral left to sort out the personnel we needed, Nai was off to grab supplies, and in a few hours we would be jetting off to inevitable peril.
Nora looked like she might wilt and die on the spot.
“[What’s wrong?]”
“[I’m—I’m nervous,]” she said. “[I’ve been thinking a lot about…well, this exact moment, and—fuck!]”
“[Worried about we’ll find?]”
“[Or what we won’t. Or that we’re about to die. Or that we’re going to learn something awful about everything.]”
“[…Like what?]”
“[Like a good reason,]” she sighed. “[You said if there was a good reason, you’d walk away from the Coalition. Tolar’s one of them, and he’s tied up in this drone shit. Now maybe whoever’s behind the drones isn’t actually our abductor, but come on. Do you believe for a second that—]”
“[No,]” I admitted. “[Not even for a second.]”
She nodded in agreement. “[In the last few days, we keep finding ourselves a few hours away from actually finding some answers about who abducted us, and every time that deadline gets pushed back, I have to take a little sigh of relief. Because I’m downright terrified of what we might learn, and what choices we might have to make.]”
“[…You’re worried about your campers,]” I followed. “[Because the Coalition might find the price of helping them is too high, even for Laranta.]”
“[I feel like I should stay behind,]” she admitted. “[If I let myself sit still for even a minute, I start wondering if they’re going to be okay. All the while I’m stuck out here, desperately hoping that the next thing we learn isn’t bad news.]”
“[That sucks, I’m sorry,]” I said. “[But don’t think for a second that you staying behind on this trip is going to help that feeling at all.]”
“[It’s dangerous, and I’m not exactly contributing much. I’m only just now getting the language down. I—I don’t know what I can say to help you understand what I’m worried about, really.]”
“[…Well you’re not useless,]” I said. “[You’re the closest thing we humans have to a leader out here.]”
“[Oh face it, Caleb, I’m the head counselor at an empty summer camp. The one student attending this season knows more than me, has more experience than me, and is literally the one teaching me all the rules of the wilderness.]”
I grinned.
“[I’ll admit, attendance at your hypothetical summer camp is a bit screwy. But that’s the job isn’t it? You’re their leader. Whether you wanted to be at first or not, that’s where you wound up. It’s the role you’ve been denied any opportunity to fulfil for months now. Maybe that’s on both of us, maybe neither. But I think that problem vanishes when we find your campers.]”
“[New ones will appear,]” she said. “[They could be worse.]”
“[And when they do, you’ll have your campers with you to help out. From everything you’ve said, I think they might be better at being supportive than me.]” I said. “[They’re waiting for you; let’s go.]”
The look on her face was pure anguish, and I understood bone deep where it came from. I’d had Daniel inside my own head. I’d learned how he felt from his own undiluted individual experience
How could I not understand?
“[Okay,]” she said, voice stony and resolute. “[What do I need to know about rocket launches?]”