Take
A few days later, there was a meeting to determine if I and my psionics were worth compensating.
Frustratingly enough, I wasn’t allowed to talk, though in truth they didn’t have to let me listen to the discussion at all.
Speaking in my favor were Tiv, Serralinitus, and Nai. I only recognized one of the officers arguing against my proposal: Yakne, one of Serral’s right-hand Casti.
It was upsetting to hear them effectively argue against helping me more than they strictly had to, but at the same time I got the impression that the opposition might have been a token effort. What I was offering was too good to pass up, even with the risks associated with it.
In the end, it was a very boring, very dry discussion about just how badly the Coalition wanted what I had.
When it was all done though, I had a formalized document certified by Laranta and three other Coalition admirals from other star systems.
The Admiral asked me to hang back afterwards.
Maybe finally holding the document in my hands should have been a more momentous occasion, but as I absently ran my cascade through the paper and seal, all I could think about how much of a problem Adept counterfeiting was.
“You’re satisfied?” Laranta asked me.
“I think Asu Yakne and Ase Morril are badly underestimating just how valuable psionics are,” I said. “But they were outvoted in the end, so I’ll make my peace with it.”
Laranta nodded pensively. “Serralinitus’s results in the Cirinsko operation speak very highly of what you’re offering us.”
“I thought you might say this was a bad idea,” I admitted. “The Vorak aren’t going to like the fact that I’m giving you…well, I don’t know if I’d call this ‘technology’, but you know.”
“I’m not wild about it,” Laranta said. “But at the same time you aren’t the only civilian we contract work with. And as vicious as the Vorak can be, they’re not going to be attacking the engineering crews who built our facilities.”
“Really?” I said. “Isn’t that a cornerstone of warfare? Undermine your opponents' supporters?”
“Not untrue,” Laranta conceded, “But the truth is, the Vorak are occupying this star system, and they know it. Besides, even if they could reliably identify anyone who does work for us, the fact is the Vorak might want them to work for them too.”
“Somehow I don’t think I’ll be worrying about that,” I said.
“…You should,” Laranta said. “Like I said before, you need to be prepared to negotiate with them. That includes in case they manage to capture you again.”
“You’d be [cool] with me trading psionics to them to help myself?”
“Of course not,” Laranta scoffed. “I don’t want to give them the chance to learn anything about it. But you are not —”
“I’m not the Coalition, I know. I just think you’re oddly evenhanded when it comes to the Vorak. You don’t seem to think of your enemies as ‘bad’.”
“They aren’t,” Laranta sighed. “Not really. Your Casti philosophy reading is correct at least in that sense. As a whole, the Red Sails and the Assembly are pursuing their own interests. So is the Coalition. That makes it harder to assign good and bad. Instead, it’s just…us and them.”
“Well, thank you anyway,” I said. “I have a plan, and this represents the first big obstacle.”
Laranta had been clear that it would be difficult to compel the Vorak to do anything related to the other humans they had without evidence.
And since I couldn’t just go poking at all the places those humans might be, it occurred to me the surer course of action would be to find where they weren’t.
Namely, Earth.
If I could use Coalition resources to investigate the abductions themselves, I could find evidence of Nora’s group from before the Vorak got a hold of them. If the Red Sails really weren’t behind the abductions, it meant they didn’t know how vulnerable they might be to that kind of evidence.
“I’m going to have to curb my school attendance,” I realized. Not only was I going to be investigating, I was going to pay for it by teaching psionics.
My schedule was about to look a lot like Nai’s.
“Oh you’ll still be in school,” Tiv said, swinging into the conversation. “Just not as a student.”
It wasn’t Tiv though. My psionic senses told me it was one of his clones.
“Thanks for your vote of confidence,” I said. “I don’t suppose you could lend me a clone to help when I actually have to teach psionics?”
“Century,” Laranta said. “Can I entrust Caleb to you for now?”
I frowned. “You don’t have to entrust me to anyone. I’ve already got my shadows.” I nodded toward today’s chaperones, Erggin and Weith. “Speaking of, since you’re going to have to be with me for the lessons anyway, either of you two want to try out psionics?”
“Before you answer that, recall that you might be ordered to later if they prove useful enough,” Laranta said, walking off.
“I’d be interested,” Weith said.
“Adept trickery anyone can use? I’m in too,” Erggin chirped.
“We’ll see about passing it around,” I said. “I’m still putting together a beginner’s kit.”
“Don’t feel the need to rush. It’ll be a week or so before the command staff can shift around duty rosters so you actually have some students to teach. We’ll hold up our end of the bargain first, snoop a bit harder for some of your fellow Humans,” Tiv said. “Which is actually why I came back. Real me is busy with a tactical…something…it’s classified, sorry. But you and I are going to grab the Warlock and take over a workspace for this little investigative probe.”
“We’re starting today?” I asked, surprised.
“Why not?” Tiv-clone grinned. “I hear you even have some investigative experience. I didn’t know about that bioweapon mess at the Green Complex.”
“It was a mess,” I said. “And Nai did most of the heavy lifting. I just sat in on things and did medical tests most of the time.”
“You found the data and exposed the culprit,” Tiv said. “It’s impressive. I mean, I would have had the whole thing solved in the first day, but you had a lot of distractions, so it’s understandable.”
I stared at the towering Farnata, trying to tell if he was serious.
He walked the line perfectly, and I couldn’t tell.
“Where’s Nai then?” I asked.
Tiv returned me his own skeptical look.
Really?
I rolled my eyes.
“You already contacted her,” I accused the clone. Someone else getting one over on me psionically?
Oh, I was not a fan of that.
“Of course,” Tiv grinned.
“
“
“
“It means you’re broadcasting on all the metaphorical frequencies at once,” I said. “Look at the transceiver, right…
I sent him a simple series of signals that ran through each channel. If he was broadcasting on all of them at once, he was probably receiving them too.
That made me feel a bit better about Tiv’s psionic strides. He reminded me of a child overeager to play with his new favorite toy. His clones seemed to have that trait distilled and concentrated too, only they knew they wouldn’t see any of the consequences.
Nai, with another of Tiv’s clones in tow, caught up with us while we grazed for a room to use. They had already found us an unused empty room attached to a plain brick building that, according to Nai, was very definitely not a classified R&D laboratory. Which of course meant there definitely weren’t any classified powerful computer modules in the building’s basement.
Two Tiv clones, Nai, myself, and today’s bodyguards were a bit stuck though.
Serral was technically going to be the one at the helm of things, and that meant we were dragging our feet until he arrived.
“We should have made sure to grab him before the proposal concluded,” Tiv’s first clone complained.
“Not everyone can be a dozen places at once,” Nai chastised. “You can’t possibly be complaining about having a few spare moments.”
“Oh, but I am, dear Warlock,” Tiv’s clone grinned. “Because I can be a dozen places at once. My schedule is downright leisurely.”
Nai materialized a rubber band and flung it at the clone.
The other clone turned his attention to me.
“I didn’t realize Serral had psionics,” he said.
“He was one of the first volunteers,” I said. “Indirectly, he’s a big reason why I’m feeling confident about how valuable psionics are.”
“Ase Serralinitus already has experience with them. Aren’t you curious how so many people made it through the skirmish on Archo?” Nai asked the clone.
“I’ve seen the summary,” Tiv said. “Roughly ninety troops landed outside Cirinsko, and you all went on a Casti-classic split-and-run strategy to reach ships. Aside from the fact that you two actually made it through, it was a disaster. More than half of Serral’s troops didn’t make it off.”
“True, but only fourteen Casti were captured,” I said with a grin.
The Century perked up at that. “Seriously? Fourteen? Not everyone got captured?”
“Nai and I are friends with one of the Casti who got stuck behind,” I explained. “He’s been dodging Red Sails occupation troops on Archo for weeks. We’ve been trading transmissions whenever they can sneak into a broadcasting window. The next one is tomorrow if you want to ask any questions.”
“I will,” Tiv said. “I’m trading psionic signals with my original body right now, and it’s a bit bizarre. Usually I’m not in this much contact with my clones once they’re made. Relaying information the clones gather has been problematic in the past, but psionics are making it trivially easy.”
“Glad you’re as excited as I am,” I told him.
“You’re not concerned about the Vorak retaliating for helping us?” Tiv asked.
“What are they going to do?” I asked. “Try to kill me more? They don’t really have much more room to escalate. In fact, if psionics are really that helpful, they might even stop trying to kill me so they can capture me and get psionics for themselves.”
“That begs the question how’d they would find out about them in the first place,” Weith said.
“Quasi-constructs,” I explained. “The Vorak—and maybe some Farnata too, I don’t know yet—have some Adept senses that resemble rudimentary psionics. They might not even be consciously aware of them.”
“But there are enough Vorak Adepts that one of them will figure something out,” Nai said. “The Coalition’s advantage is going to be in having specifically Caleb’s expertise. He’s going to keep us ahead of the curve. If you could see what he made? It’s mind-boggling.”
“What exactly has he given you?” Tiv asked.
Nai gave me a glance, seeing if it was okay to share.
“Sure,” I said.
“The complete list of things we’ve made is really long. But the highlights? The telepathy transceiver is the most casually useful, but he built this absolutely insane three-dimensional radar to complement Adept senses. It’s like cascading air, but instead of feeling materials, it indicates the positions of minds. It can even tell the difference between you two and the real Tiv.”
“Really?” the clones asked before turning to me, “Can you tell the difference?”
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
“The radar in Nai’s head is sorta one of a kind, but yes. If I’m close enough to you, I can look at your minds.”
“Can you tell what we’re thinking?”
“No,” I laughed. “Unless I have real context clues to help me out, I can just tell if a change has occurred, not what exactly that change is.”
“What kind of context clues?” Weith asked.
“The normal ones you’d use to interpret someone’s mental state,” I said. “Tone of voice, body language, that kind of thing.”
“And the Warlock can do that too?” Erggin asked.
Nai nodded. “Caleb is far better at modifying psionics than I am. I can make them and use them, but I think my intricacy limit makes it difficult for me to pull them apart and put them back together again.”
“This radar,” Tiv said. “What’s its scope?”
“Depends on how clear a picture you want,” I said. “I built some settings and options into it over the months on Yawhere. The more you limit its area, the clearer it reads.”
“But just how far can it reach?”
“If you’re willing to just get very vague fuzzy impressions, it can reach a few hundred meters,” Nai said. “But I think it was a bit more efficient in Caleb’s head than it is in mine. Transferring it was very spur-of-the-moment, and I think the construct took some damage when I put it back together.”
“Bah,” I said. “The radar is boring. It’s too big and complicated to share easily. I’m going to focus on the lightweight stuff for now–things I don’t have to disassemble to share. The document system, the camera, the mirror, that kind of thing.”
“Mirror?” one clone asked, while the second simultaneously asked, “Document system?”
“The mirror is a self-perception tool,” I said. “It helps clarify the connections your own mind has to its own psionics.”
“It also carries some risks if you don’t have the tools to manipulate it,” Nai said. “It gave me insomnia for months.”
“Not really a concern for us,” the Tivs said in unison.
“[So cavalier…]” I muttered. “I’ll show you the mirror later. The document processor is the one I want to share around today. It shall be invaluable in our probe into the abductions.”
“Nai mentioned psionic records,” one clone said. “You said ‘document processor’, but what exactly does that mean?”
“Is everyone here authorized to read the data from Korbanok?” I asked.
Nods all around.
With a very dramatic flourish, I materialized a heavy stack of documents copied from the Vorak computer drives and spilled them across the table.
The Tivs snatched a few pages out of the air and blanched.
“This text is all unique,” one gasped.
“You just reproduced the entire documents? From memory?” Weith asked, aghast.
“Not really ‘from memory’,” I said. “I looked at the original, recorded a psionic copy, and then just used the copy as a template to materialize a new physical copy. I could tell you what’s on all those pages, but I’m not sure that’s the same as remembering it. I don’t know exactly what they say unless I actually look at them.”
“But it’s all in your head!” Erggin said. “How is that not remembering?”
“If we write something down normally, you might not actually remember it until you look at it again,” Nai explained. “Caleb’s psionics just write things down in a very different way.”
“Teach me,” both Tiv’s asked. “The real me, at least. If we can devise a way for my clones to share documents between each other?”
“Pictures too,” I said. “The camera works on the same principle. It’s a lot less reliable, but it can still capture details that you take the time to process into an image.”
“You know,” Weith said, “if the Vorak do redouble their efforts to nab you, you could sell psionics as a civilian. If people want what you have, you could take a lot of the pressure off yourself by becoming a commodity.”
“Take pressure off?” I asked. “You think making more aliens want a piece of me would see my life get easier?”
“Fair point,” Weith conceded. “What’s taking Serralinitus so long anyway?”
“” Nai said, voice dripping with sarcasm. “
“There’s a few dignitaries from Nakrumum here this week,” Tiv-1 leaned over to explain. “Anyone with efiffir is getting paraded in front of them.”
“Is that what the real Tiv is up to?” I asked. “Entertaining dignitaries?”
Tiv-2 snorted. “Dira no. It’s definitely a clone on them.”
A few minutes later Ase Serralinitus walked in with six familiar faces: Nikrim, Thugnin, Fenno, Leen, plus the last two heads in my bodyguard rotation, Deg and Phorius.
“My [backup dancers]?” I asked. “That’s who you got for the grunt work?”
“Aren’t they a bit overqualified to just assist in an investigation?” Tiv asked. “I mean, Warlock’s got rapport with Caleb.”
“You’re the same rank as me,” Serral responded. “How are you not overqualified to be here?”
“I’m not here,” both Tivs smirked.
“Point being…” Serral snapped, “we want to be extremely careful with our information. Caleb’s guard unit are the obvious choice. They’ve had a whole month to get used to him, they are qualified to investigate with us, and most importantly, there’s not too many of you all.”
“Too many?” I asked. “Is manpower not something you want in an investigation?”
“Many hands make light work,” Nai said, “but they make for heavy void-craft.”
“We’ll gather all the data we can here and make a plan,” Serral agreed. “But sooner or later, we’re going to have to find information on other rocks.”
“Unless everything we might need to learn the whole truth just happens to be sitting somewhere on Lakandt,” Nai said.
Oh. Duh.
“So that first part is today right? Make a plan?” I asked.
Serral nodded. “We’re going to get everyone to the same trailhead, then decide what our options are to learn more. Caleb, I might be the commanding officer, but this is all technically at your behest. This is at least partially your show. What are your goals for this?”
“…There are three,” I said. “First, rescue any Humans we can. Nora proves I’m not the only one stuck out here, and I’m not going to leave them to fend for themselves, especially not with what little I do know from Nora. Second, I want to find out everything I can about who abducted us, especially why. And third is to find a way back to Earth.”
Nai did her best to materialize a piece of paper, but was left with a thick card stock, almost like a scroll instead. But I appreciated the gesture. Its text was simple.
Rescue Humans.
Scrutinize Abductions.
Reach Home.
Priorities, nice and simple.
“Thanks,” I smiled.
“You mentioned the other human, Nora, told you some concerning things?” Serral said. “Catch us all up, I want all eleven of us to know the same information.”
“Hey…” the Tivs said, offended.
“You’re not really here,” Serral said, utterly sincere. “You don’t count toward our headcount.”
“I only talked with Nora for a minute or two before she was injured,” I said. “But it was long enough to learn that whichever Vorak were holding her didn’t teach her group much Starspeak, if any at all.”
Nai’s face flashed with surprise. “That bodes poorly,” she said.
“And very well,” Tiv-2 pointed out. “It means the rest of the Humans are likely being kept in very controlled conditions. That means they’re probably all in one place.”
“It also means the Red Sails are strictly controlling the information they might have access to,” Nai said.
“Do we know that for sure?” Serral asked, “that they’re held by the Red Sails?”
“…I’m not completely sure,” I admitted. “The Vorak Nora was moving with wasn’t wearing Sails insignia, but I also didn’t get to see beneath their voidsuit. At any rate, I don’t think he had that much combat training, so he might be an industrial production or support Adept.”
“Then we can’t assume the Humans are formally in Red Sails custody,” Serral said. “But I’d be shocked if they truly weren’t.”
“Nora said she and Halax were trying to reach Marshal’s Adjutant Tox,” I said. “Since Tox and his Marshal aren’t getting along, it seems likely that Marshal Tispas might be the one keeping the humans holed up and out of sight.”
“Caleb, materialize us some pages and pens,” the Tivs suggested. “Let’s write everything down and Caleb can record the notes until we properly distribute psionics.”
I did so, opting for ballpoint pens rather than the complicated Casti laser-scribs.
“What are some places or ways we might bee able to find information valuable to our goals?” Serral proposed.
“I still think it’s worth prying into Vorak connections, even if not the Red Sails specifically,” Nai said. “It’s common knowledge the Sails funnel resources to criminal groups on Paris moons. The Deep Coils were really upset about it before the Korbanok raid.”
“The Sails aren’t going to share information about Humans with criminals,” Serral disagreed.
“Probably not,” I said. “But we could still use them. Smuggling groups might have Vorak interplanetary flight records. That could be worth having since we want to find the abductees or where we came from.”
“The ships,” Nikrim suggested. “You’ve mentioned they were automated. That’s unheard of, but surely there has to be someone around this star who might know more about how that could be done?”
“Shinshay,” I recalled. They’d talked about false stagnation in Casti computer science.
“The stalker?” Deg, the lone Farnata in my detail, asked.
I nodded. “They wanted to talk to me about learning from Earth technology.”
“Could their interest in you be cover?” Tiv asked. “Could they be involved in the abductions?”
I shook my head. “No, but they’re almost certainly worth talking to about the ships we were on.”
“Ships rated to go through Beacons aren’t exactly common either,” Nikrim said. “If Caleb can reproduce enough details, we might learn where they were made.”
This was good stuff. Pens moved quickly as everyone scribbled down the ideas. In my head, a new psionic document was beginning to resemble a flowchart.
“The Organic Authority,” Weith suggested. “They have records on Caleb from his time at the Green Complex. The Red Sails are holding onto seventy humans. There’s no way they haven’t looked at the Organic Authority’s records on Caleb, even just to double-check their own work.”
“See what Vorak have tried to access Caleb’s medical data…” Nai wrote down. “Smart.”
“The food too,” I said. “Vorak aren’t going to eat a lot of Farnata food molecules, but if they’ve been feeding seventy humans, they have to be getting the materials from somewhere.”
“Dira, tracking organic molecule supplies, this is going to be the Green Complex all over again. You want to call up Umtane while we’re at it? He’s probably over on Sorc right now,” Nai joked.
“It seems like the third of the goals isn’t going to be accomplishable without first progressing on the second,” Tiv-1 said.
“And solving the first will likely give us information about the second. Surely the Vorak held onto the ships they found you in, Caleb,” Tiv-2 said.
“So finding Nora’s group is priority number one,” I said. “That would be a [hell] of a lot easier if she was awake.”
Tiv-2 got a dastardly look on his face. “You said that psionic mirror induced insomnia in Nai, right? Could that wake her up?”
“No,” Nai and I both said firmly.
“Nora isn’t asleep,” I elaborated. “Humans don’t hibernate or sleep for months on end. She’s comatose. I’m not a medical expert, but bodies don’t go into comas without a very physical reason, I don’t think. We’re not going to solve that jamming new things into her consciousness.”
“Then forget the coma Human for now,” Tiv-1 suggested.
“Or we do the opposite,” Fenno said. “She was trying to launch off Archo taking advantage of the same chaos we were.”
“She said they were trying to get to Yawhere’s surface,” I recalled.
Serral nodded along. “That makes sense. I know for a fact Tox was on Yawhere at least through Caleb and Nai’s trip to the Green Complex.”
“But the Human had to get to Cirinsko somehow,” Fenno pointed out. “Unless the Vorak were already keeping the Humans somewhere near there.”
“How hard is it to get information from Archo colonies?” I asked.
“Depends on the governance and if they like us,” Nai grimaced. “Cirinsko? Coalition folk aren’t going to be popular there for a while.”
“Neither will the Vorak though,” Serral replied.
“True.”
“Surely there must be someway to access Archo records from here,” I said. “If we have to wait for a ship, fly all the way to Archo, just to run into a dead end, I’m going to lose it.”
“We’re not going to fly anywhere for a while,” Serral said. “Securing a ship is not that simple. For the present, we should focus on leads that are pursuable here above Paris. Preferably on Lakandt, but some of us could get to Draylend if we absolutely had to."
“That’s going to mean transmissions from Archo, Yawhere, or Korbanok, to here,” Nai said. “Our first suggestions seem to be best for that: the Organic Authority and Red Sails-supported criminal groups.”
“We might only turn up a slew of digitized records that don’t mention humans at all. I was on Korbanok nine days before you all’s raid yanked the drives,” I said. “Why didn’t more data about me show up?”
“They likely compartmentalized it,” Serral said. “If it was valuable enough, it might not have been stored on the station’s composite drives. They could have had an isolated system for everything related to you.”
“Then getting that data is pointless,” I said. “Because it’s probably stored the same place the Sails are keeping the abductees.”
In this case, having all the eggs in one basket was optimal strategy. It was easier to hide just one basket.
“…But we know of a Vorak who spent months around Nora and her abductees,” Nai said. “The one trying to get her off Archo, Halax.”
“If we can figure out where he wound up after Cirinsko…” Serral agreed, “we can find out where they kept the other Humans.”
“They’ve been moved, no doubt about it,” Tiv said, “but this rak could help point us toward the right places.”
“Nora said he was trying to get her in touch with Marshal’s Adjutant Tox,” I said. “And Serral, you negotiated with Tox for our passage through Cirinsko. Tox had to be watching that whole battle. Go figure, maybe he was watching closely enough that Halax got where he was trying to go?”
“Then I need to talk to Tox,” Serral said.
“Tox is going to be hard to get in touch with after what Tispas pulled,” I said. “We need to talk to Tasser.”