Blindspot
Nora trudged through the station’s dim corridors wearing a guilty expression. I only got glimpses of it while I floated helplessly behind her.
I was going through too many emotions all at once.
Confusion, anger, anguish, shock, finally leading back to confusion.
My whole body was locked up, not quite limp, not quite frozen. But even my mouth couldn’t move to speak.
Nora noticed my psionic scream, half-glancing over her shoulder.
“[I’m sorry,]” she said again, too calmly. She was stressed and anxious, but not panicking.
You planned this, I realized with a cold shiver. This possibility—or one like it—had gone through her head already.
However Nora was doing this, whatever this was, it wasn’t all improv.
My mind latched onto that.
If this was a trick, psionic or Adept, I could beat it.
Somehow Nora had frozen my body. Nai’s too. A psionic weapon then? One that somehow affected our brains’ control of our body?
The possibility of making something like that was remote…I’d been so careful, predisposing all my constructs against psychic weaponization. I was fine with it if psionics were used to attack other psionics, but I’d worked too damn hard to keep anyone from repeating what had happened between me and Daniel.
But when I turned my psionic senses toward Nora, I found nothing. It was like she didn’t exist to my psionics. Nai too, now that I thought about it.
Even our nearby rocket, with Serral, Dyn, and Shinshay onboard…they were more than a mile away, but I should have at least been able to sense them faintly. Especially with how few other minds were out here.
You isolated me, I decided. But how? She hadn’t added anything to my consciousness, I could tell. Nora was good at psionics, but not as good as me. The intro-module’s firewall was yet to be defeated by anyone but its creator.
I forced my mind to ignore the frustrated panic that came with confronting an impossibility—no, a seeming impossibility.
She was somehow psionically paralyzing my body. But everything I’d come to understand about psionics made that practically impossible. Psionics didn’t interact with the physical nervous system unless there were specific structures built-in to enable that. I’d found ways to trick my own perception in small ways, but my body had still been experiencing the sights and sounds I’d been tuning out.
This wasn’t just preventing me from feeling my body move though. I was downright paralyzed.
How had she gotten a psionic influence to affect a physical structure? Except that was exactly the breakthrough Nora had already made.
I turned my tactile cascade inward, tugging it backward through my own flesh, and oh thank God I’d learned that trick.
If Nerin hadn’t almost killed me trying to talk me through Adept medicine, I never would have found it. It was faint, almost nothing at all. But running through my body, neatly speckled foreign material lit up under my cascade.
Like little…ticks…only smaller, longer. Each one was a thin wisp of… nerves.
Tiny Adept nerves, spliced into mine, overriding my body. Nora’s specialty, put to new use on a much finer scale than I’d known she was capable of.
She’d been the one to crack psionic-sensitive matter. That’s how she’d paralyzed us.
The realization she hadn’t actually weaponized psionics calmed me the slightest bit. This was just an oblique Adept attack enabled by transmitting with psionics.
These invading-nerves were concentrated in my limbs. They must have been countermanding any impulses on arrival that my brain tried to send.
That had to be a complex task. Unless it was somehow automatic…No. Forget the process, I needed to block the result. No matter how complicated, she would still be in psionic communication with the invader-nerves. If I could find which band she was using and override them, she wouldn’t be able to negate the impulses from my brain.
I’d used radio frequencies as a metaphor when designing the original transceiver and its subsequent versions. It was a familiar concept, one that was easily converted into simpler forms of information—like binary code—if necessary.
But it was only ever a metaphor.
Colors, series of shapes, even flow rates of conceptual fluid were all less intuitive alternatives to encode whatever information you wanted to pack into a signal. As long as the transceiver on the other end was built to decode that same form of signal, you were golden.
Nora wasn’t using a ‘radio’ metaphor.
It was pure conjecture, for which I had no proof other than my own perception of those psionic radio frequencies. But psionics were mine, and instinct told me the only way Nora would have felt safe hiding this was if her encoding metaphor was unpredictable enough that I wouldn’t guess anywhere close.
Was it worth trying to then? I probably didn’t have time. If ENVY’s remote control of this station was still good, we could be less than a minute away from being jettisoned back toward Vorak space.
…No.
No, whyever she was doing this, she wouldn’t be stupid about it. I wasn’t going to find her signal-metaphor without more to go on.
So if I couldn’t block the signal, I needed to wreck the receivers. This hurt so much last time…
I reimagined the same material Nerin and I had tried to use to inoculate Nora. I tailored the lifespan to be shorter this time though. I couldn’t afford to pass out like I had last time, so I’d need to keep it from being too aggressive.
Nora rounded a corner, giving me a glimpse of where she was dragging me. The door at the other end of the corridor was a dead end with some faded Starspeak lettering reading ‘in case of emergency only’.
My modifications to the anti-invader material weren’t going to be done quick enough.
Have to buy time first…
Paralysis made it hard to draw upon Adeptry. It was easier to create things with a motion, or a flourish, but it was still possible to wield without moving a muscle.
And there was one creation in particular I was familiar with using motionlessly; a trick with which I was truly Adept.
Nora heard the station air crackle a foot behind her, and she turned to look on impulse.
My kinetic bomb blasted us apart, slamming me against the side of the corridor wall and launching her down the corridor toward the jettison-section. My impact was worse than hers. Floating like I was, I couldn’t brace myself for the impact at all. My face was the first thing to meet the bulkhead, and I tasted blood.
“[Godammit, Caleb!]” Nora shouted.
The fleshy tether tying us together was blown apart, but I was still paralyzed.
It bought me precious few seconds to tweak my creation, and I deployed it.
Every nerve below my neck instantly went up in flames like molten metal beneath my skin.
I saw Nora stare at me aghast from her creation’s feedback.
“[Fucking Christ, Caleb…inside your own body?]”
“You’re…one to talk…” I choked out. “Materializing…inside a living organism…practically impossible.”
“[Yeah,]” she said soberly, ‘[practically…not actually.]”
How had she pulled this off? Practice? How? She couldn’t have practiced this on herself…it was the only exception to biological interference. Could someone from our Adept workshop have volunteered?
But…no…
“Our spar…those stupid [starfish],” I panted. “Those were your test run…”
She had a knack for creating Adept organisms. She must have practiced the invader-nerves on her own creations. It was how she controlled them.
Nora righted herself and pushed through the corridor toward me. This time she closed the difference carefully.
I was burning out her Adept nerves, but not quickly enough. She’d released my face, but I still couldn’t move any limbs.
“Don’t do this.”
“[It’s done,]” Nora said, shaking her head.
“Why? Why now? [You fucking planned this? How?]”
“[I didn’t plan it!]” she said. “[I had…a plan—the start of one. But…I didn’t plan this .]”
“What is this?” I hissed. “You have a trick to hijack my body?! What about Nai!”
“[She’ll be fine,]” Nora said. “[As soon as you and I are clear, I can dematerialize the cells, and she goes back to the rocket.]”
“Except for the nerve damage you can't possible know won’t happen,” I said. “Why are you doing this?”
“[Because I believe ENVY,]” Nora said. “[And what’s more, you do too. There’s more humans out there. Thousands! And they’re going to die unless we put ourselves in a position to talk to people ready to do something about it.]”
“You learned that minutes ago,” I said. “You can’t possibly have thought this through.”
“[The new abductees are just the last straw,]” Nora said. “[My campers have been stuck for months and with what I know now? I can help them today. How can I stay here knowing I could go back and help them?]”
“You mean with what we taught you?”
“[Yeah, I do,]” she said. “[Or should I just sit back and see if the Coalition is going to try locking me up—no…no, that’s not fair. I’d be doing this even if they had been nicer about all this.]”
She unfurled a net of tendrils wrapped around her arm, ensnaring me again. From the inky tendril flesh, I felt Nora’s cascade push into my body. Tiv had taught her the trick to bypass range limitations by cascading through her own creations and adding to them.
Her cascade reached the flagging invader-nerves and bolstered them. She was replenishing what I was trying to choke out.
She winced at the contact. Her invader-nerves were plugged into my nervous system, so she’d feel the pain I was inflicting on myself trying to fight them off. Through that connection, for just a moment, I got a glimpse past whatever psionic screen Nora was keeping me isolated with. I saw into her mind’s constructs.
My heart skipped a beat, and I flashed back to the moment Daniel had first warned me about the superconnector. It had seemed like a phantom back then, a malevolent force beyond ordinary comprehension lurking in the depths of my own mind.
Something like that looked back at me now.
My blood ran cold. Nora had made her own superconstruct, inscrutable and terrifying. It flexed and responded like a living thing, but lived in thoughts and minds rather than flesh. And like all things horrifying, it emanated unknowability. Anyone who perceived it couldn’t be blamed for thinking it was a genuine monster: a phantom.
Panic crept into the edges of my mind, and I closed my fist around it.
I’d been in worse situations than this, and I’d squeeze the panic right out of my mind if I had too.
Of course she’d made one. What else could handle the complexity of tapping into a separate nervous system and hijacking it externally?
“You kept all this secret,” I said, buying time. “You knew I’d fight back.”
“[The Vorak tried to kill you,]” Nora agreed, dragging me toward the airlock. “[I don’t blame you for thinking this is a terrible idea, but they’re not going to kill you if we go back.]”
“You are crazy!”
“[You don’t even realize you’re not speaking English right now; you really want to talk mental states?]”
“[I’m in the habit of Starspeak,]” I denied.
“[Your judgement is still not objective,]” she said. “[Caleb, you’re brilliant in some ways, especially for sixteen. But holy hell are you still just a kid. Responsible authorities don’t put teenagers in positions like this.]”
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“Responsible authorities also don’t try to murder teenagers just to mitigate risks,” I said. “The Coalition isn’t perfect, but they were there for me when no one else was!”
“[…I know. I don’t have a perfect answer to our problems,]” Nora said, her voice wavering. “[But with everything else being equal? This is the best option I can see.]”
The note of finality in her voice made my heart crack. She’d known exactly how I’d react to this, and done it anyway.
“…You’d rather have all us humans together than respect my wishes,” I accused.
“Yeah. Yeah, I would.”
A storm of emotions rolled over me as I wrestled with that. I was angry, like never before in my life. But I couldn’t ignore the obvious either.
“We’re going to die,” I warned. Maybe I could still convince her. “A flight to Archo would take days. We’d starve.”
“[A, we’ve got rations and water,]” she said, patting the backpack Nai had put together. “[B, we’re not going to Archo. We’re not just going to turn up on the doorstep. If we go to Sorc and the Deep Coils instead, we can trade information in exchange for their help approaching the Red Sails.]”
“…Nai packed these bags,” I said. “You didn’t have a plan for food and water…this is just all falling into place for you.”
“[Not wrong…]” she said. “[But I doubt a chance like this is going to come twice. And my abductees can’t wait, to say nothing of all the rest.]”
“…You really think this is the best outcome,” I said. “But you’re wrong.”
Nora wasn’t the only one with a psionic superconstruct.
I put every ounce of attention into my superconnector I could, reaching out for Nai’s mind. Nora could block psionic signals, jam psionic senses, but there was no way she could block everything.
The superconnector ran into an obstacle, and I came to understood what Nora had done. She’d thought to try stopping the superconnector along with my other psionics using hardware jamming.
She hadn’t needed to get around my firewall. I was broadcasting just fine. The signals just couldn’t reach anywhere. They were being scattered by the gas Nora had added to the local atmosphere. Her tricks, I grasped, were rooted in bridging psionics and physical matter.
When my superconnector went to build a bridge, Nora’s countermeasure scattered it on contact. But I wasn’t deterred. I could make a new metaphor too.
Instead of a bridge, I twisted the superconnector into a new configuration, something denser, less ethereal. Instead of building a bridge, I could bore a tunnel instead.
I materialized a pair of opposing charges in my foot and the nearest bulkhead. Nora’s tendril left enough slack in the zero gravity for the magnetism to pull my boot into contact with the wall. The second I touched the metal, I ran my cascade into the material. Pushing the superconnector through my tactile cascade, I snaked it through the station’s bulkheads in Nai’s general direction.
There was no gas inside the walls…
Sure enough, Nai had reverted to her strengths. Her cascade was pushing through the station like slime mold, searching for any information she could use.
My cascade found hers, and the link completed like a circuit closing, finding the path of least resistance.
We traded information in a flurry. Part of my mind was back onstage with Nai, another part watched her brother and father in the wooded clearing. More parts connected in new ways.
I stayed conscious this time, and the connection was wide open. Even as I clamped down on the flow of information—limiting it to stay manageable—Nai and I took stock of each other’s situations.
No words were necessary, aloud or psionically. The thought went from one mind, through the superconnector, and into the other seamlessly.
Nai hadn’t tried to burn out her set of invader-nerves, and that gave us two different data points.
The invader-nerves were clamped down on any signals our brains tried to send to our limbs’ muscles, overriding them with their own impulses. Nora was jamming our ability to psionically signal Serral with a psionic-interactive gas of some kind.
The two problems could solve each other.
Nora’s gas didn’t block whatever form of signal she was controlling the invader-nerves with…But ours could.
In unison, Nai and I added a similar gas to the interior of our voidsuits, trying to imagine its characteristics as to cut off the invader-nerves from whatever variant of psionic signal Nora had cooked up.
The feeling of numbness instantly cut in half.
Relief in both our heads traded back and forth wordlessly, but we weren’t out of the woods yet. We could move our limbs again, but not with full range of motion or swiftness. The numbness lingered, only lessened, so some of Nora’s signals must have been getting through.
But it would be enough to work with. If Nora didn’t launch the jettison-section first.
After she dragged me past the airlock, I found that the jettison section wasn’t quite what I expected. It was too big to be called an escape pod; Serral had mentioned some of these jettison modules were like small ships. This was definitely one of them.
Past the airlock a computer unit awaited inside the jettison module itself. The controls. Had to be.
Nora anchored the tendril she was dragging me with to a wall and stooped over the computer, pecking away at it.
Nai had gotten a glimpse of the elaborate instructions ENVY had flashed for her.
It was literally an operations manual with notes…that occupied Nora’s attention.
“[ENVY, can you connect to this display?”]” Nora asked. “[…Thank you…walk me through this.]”
Looking over Nai’s memory of the instructions…we had seconds to act.
I struggled against the web of tendrils Nora had tied me down, reassured by the knowledge that Nai was mobile enough to be moving towards us.
Inside her voidsuit, Nora might not have been able to hear what I was doing, but her cascade habits were good.
The second I made any progress she turned to see me conjure a half-dozen flashbangs within the tangle of tendrils.
The heat scorched away the thinner cords, blinding Nora in the process.
“[Godammit, Caleb!]” she fumed, blindly launching a tendril to try and catch me again.
I magnetized myself to the nearest surface, giving myself something to push off. Nora felt me leave contact with her cascade and she dove back toward the computer console to finish sealing the airlock.
Nai rounded the corner and she and I created in unison, each of us materializing one half of an intense opposing charge. With Nai anchored in place, and me floating freely, the magnetism pulled me out not even a heartbeat before the airlock squeezed shut.
“[God… dammit!]” Nora mouthed from behind the airlock. I could barely hear her behind the airlock double doors and our helmets. But through the window I saw tears running down her face.
“<[Game over,]>” I said. “
<[I can’t stay!]> she cried. <[I can’t! If I do nothing, people die! For all I know, my own campers could be dead already.]>
<[I have to go help whoever I can,]> she said. <[Even…even if that means leaving you behind.]>
I slammed my fist against the glass, trying to meet her gaze. “
She couldn’t bring herself to look me in the eye.
“
<[…No,]> she said, turning back to the controls. <[I won’t let them.]>
She hit a last series of buttons and mechanisms lurched to life.
I was still superconnected to Nai’s mind and our last option struck both of us at once. We bolted away from the airlock doors, going back to the room with ENVY’s display.
“[Stop her launch!]” I called out. “[Don’t let her go, ENVY!]”
Can’t, was the only response.
A moment later the sound of rocket boosters lurched the station, and we felt Nora begin accelerating away from the station.
She’d left me to die.
I smashed my fist into the nearest flat surface. Wall. Floor. Ceiling. I didn’t care. I let out a scream that left my voice ragged.
<[Nora!]> I screamed. It would still be a minute before we lost psionic contact.
I could sense her listening on the psionic channel, but she didn’t say anything.
<[…When you get to Sorc,]> I said, forcing myself to speak evenly, <[demand to talk to one Tashi Umtane Fromil. He owes me. He…he can help you.]>
<[Thank you. I will. I’m sorry,]> she said. <[To Nai and Nerin especially. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry…]>
A few seconds later we lost contact.
Nai and I were left there in the empty station. ENVY didn’t seem to be interested in saying more. And I was doing my level best to keep my body from shaking with anger.
“Are you okay?” I asked. My voice was shaking.
“…I’m not sure what I feel right now,” Nai admitted. “But we need to move. Launching a module like that probably ate all the time we have left.”
“[Oh God,]” I said. “What do we tell Serral?”
“One problem at a time,” she replied, and the two of us picked out way out of ENVY’s station.
I robotically followed her, numb.
I wanted to disconnect from the channel. Every word stung for reasons I couldn’t explain. All I wanted to do was fall against a wall and try to make sense of what just transpired.
This wasn’t the time for it, but the feeling almost overwhelmed me anyway. I’d been in dangerous situations before. I was no stranger to keeping a lid on things when the situation called for it. But I didn’t have the same expertise as Nai.
If I hadn’t been utilizing the superconnector, I would have. But with access to Nai’s mind, she seemed to offer…tips. Pointers. It wasn’t advice. Nothing was put into words, but as long as we were linked, I felt like I could borrow some of that expertise.
So instead of breaking down, I put it off for a few minutes and drowned out anything that wasn’t exactly what Nai told me to do.
We made it to the exterior airlock and stepped back out into space. The cable Nai had fused to the station’s hull was being stretched as the station’s dead weight pulled against the rocket above us. Tension had built up in the cable, which struck me as unsafe. But Nai materialized extra coils onto it in two places before melting a point between the attachments.
The slack from the extra line furled out in a second, with Nai and I fastening ourselves to it. The moment Nai melted the portion of cable attached to the station, it fell out from beneath our feet.
No extra force had been added to it. It plummeted toward the planet below, and I got a chilling reminder just what we were in the middle of.
Had I been thinking the rocket was firing to try and hold the station up? That was idiotic. It was a million pounds of steel and new bad memories. No, the rocket had just been firing to stay hot and ready to accelerate once we were on board.
It wasn’t quite accurate to say we’d been in ‘zero G’ the whole time on the station.
It was freefall.
Every second saw us plunging deeper into the planet’s outermost atmosphere.
But we were hanging on thousands of feet of cable below the very rocket we needed to ride to safety. It couldn’t really fire its thrusters downward without barbecuing us.
She materialized heavy weights attached to the cable, roughly Nora’s weight I recognized.
<…Yes?>
Fenno said.
We didn’t feel anything immediately, but I felt a vibration travel down the cable to us. When it reached our weight, it yanked us upward toward the rocket.
Nai hadn’t just made a tether for the ship, it was a pulley. She’d prepared a counterweight ahead of time to pull us back up from the station when we were done. She really was an experienced Adept. It was a perfect little display of engineering she put on. The cable hauled us upward, using the structure of the rocket itself as the wheel.
With how far away the rocket was, it felt like we might have hit a hundred miles an hour hurtling up toward the rocket. But Nai was prepared for that too. In the last seconds, she called on her Adeptry again, adding to the weight on our end of the pulley.
We slowed enough for Nai and I to magnetize ourselves to the rocket’s hull. The second we made contact, Serral and Weith fired maneuvering thrusters to angle us away from the planet. We slipped inside the airlock where Fenno and Erggen awaited to seal the hatch behind us. Thankfully, there was no time to feel awkward about the glaring lack of Nora brought back with us.
We hadn’t pulled many Gs leaving Lakandt, but now my skin pulled on my bones. Metal creaked in the rocket as we climbed back into a stable orbit.
The pain was distracting, giving me something clear to be upset with. But it didn’t last.
Soon enough we were no longer in danger of being crushed in the planet’s atmosphere, and it was time to debrief exactly what had happened in the last hour.