Inquiry
Dustin, Dyn, Nai, and I all huddled around Michelle in the Jack’s medical ward.
If we were crowding her, she didn’t say anything. And saying something is the only way we would know. I hadn’t noticed it so much earlier, but the more time I spent around her, the more I saw how she didn’t seem to perceive her surroundings.
Her eyes didn’t quite glaze over, but she got those thousand-yard stares. Weirder still, she stayed expressive, not freezing in place, but still functioning normally.
It was like every minute or so, something drew her attention entirely into herself, to the point where she stopped noticing her surroundings until something dragged her attention back.
“[And this has been going on for months?]” I asked.
“[Ever sin-nce my Adeptry activated,]” she said. It wasn’t cold aboard the Jack, but her teeth clattered anyway.
Something in her mind sucked her attention back in. It was an involuntary process, I could tell. She wanted to pay attention to what we were doing, but something that defied her ability to describe was preventing her.
Compulsive behaviors—even one as simple as spacing out—and speech impediments…
Those had Dyn sharply concerned. Neurological symptoms were not the first sign of accumulation sickness, but if she’d come down with a case...The odds were good though. Dustin and Caroline hadn’t noticed any of the other symptoms, leapfrogging her case over the initial symptoms straight to nerve damage. That was unlikely.
Plus, Michelle put her mass limit somewhere around Jordan’s: fifty or sixty kilograms.
“I think it’s unlikely to be accumulation related then,” Nai said. “Even if the damage will never heal completely, there should have been at least some rebound. Accumulation and accretion don’t stay this steady. They should get a little better, or get a lot worse.”
“Plus, her mass limit’s really low to encounter problematic levels of accretion,” I pointed out. The more mass you create, the more would go where it isn’t supposed to be. Low magnitude Adepts had to really push themselves to see even minor accumulation symptoms.
“If her mass limit refreshes slowly, she could still be vulnerable to it,” Dyn insisted.
“Sl-low down,” Michelle said, snapping back to us again. She’d swapped to Starspeak. “E-explain th-that more.”
“[Adepts can hurt themselves trying to create too much mass,]” I said. She’d switched to Starspeak, but the details mattered here. English explanations would be clearer. “[Usually it’s not a problem for Adepts who don’t make much mass overall. But there’s an exception to that: if it takes a long time for your mass limit to refresh itself.]”
“[…That’s not in the journal,]” Dustin said. “[The accumulation problem is in there, but not about mass limits refreshing…]”
“[What’s your total mass limit?]” I asked him.
“[I don’t know, two-hundred pounds?]” Then he blinked. “[Wait, I never told you I was Adept,]” he realized.
“[Could you materialize all two-hundred pounds of your limit at once?]” I asked, ignoring him.
“[Yeah—well…maybe, I don’t know,]” he said.
“[You probably can’t,]” I said. “[But go ahead, try it. Make as much mass as you can.]”
He focused for a moment, and a jagged hunk of black metal grew from an open spot on the floor.
“You better have kept that above the surface…” Dyn complained.
The stalagmite was almost as tall as I was, but thinned the taller it got. It definitely wasn’t all two-hundred pounds.
“[Dematerialize it and immediately try to make as much as you can again,]” I instructed. “[But don’t try to push yourself.]”
He did, and immediately frowned. He’d noticed instantly. The hunk grew again, but this time to less than half the original size.
“[I don’t get it,]” he said.
“[Suppose you have a limit of a hundred kg, even,]” I said. “[Then say you make something that’s ninety kg, then dematerialize it. Immediately afterward, how much mass do you have at your disposal?]”
“[…Not the whole hundred,]” Dustin said, observing the results of that very experiment before him.
“[Just the ten-n,]” Michelle noted. “[It takes tim-me for what m-mass you exp-pend to com-me b-back, doesn-n’t it?]”
“[Ding-ding-ding! Some Adept’s limits come back especially slowly,]” I said. “[Generally, the more mass you expend, the longer it’ll take to come back.]”
“[So someone like her can only do big creations so frequently?]” Dustin asked, jutting his head at Nai.
“[She’s got the luck of the draw,]” I said. “[Even despite her huge mass limit, it refreshes itself pretty quickly. Give her a few minutes and she can recoup thousands of kilograms. Don’t ask for an exact figure, I don’t know it. She might not either, actually.]”
“[Then you think Michelle might have the opposite problem?]’ Dustin said. “[Instead of a huge mass limit and a quick refresh rate, she’s got a low limit and a slow refresh rate. So if she tried to materialize something too quickly while her mass limit is expended…]”
“It’s possible,” Nai said. “Caleb’s mass limit and refresh rate are very typical of each other. His mass limit is so low, as soon as he dematerializes something, he recoups it almost immediately. Most of the time refresh rates trend inversely to mass limits, but exceptions exist.”
“[…I don’t suppose you could repeat that for my benefit?]” Dustin said.
“[You’re Starsp-peak sucks,]” Michelle stuttered.
“[This is serious,]” I chastised. “[If Michelle does have a refresh rate low enough to be problem, what other symptoms would we expect to see?]”
Nai shrugged.
“I don’t know the symptoms in humans. Just Farnata.”
“[How much overlap could there be, Doctor Dyn?]” I asked.
“…I don’t speak that language,” he said dryly.
“Are we, in any way, able to predict what human symptoms for accumulation might be? Predict what overlap there might be between human and Farnata cases?” I explained.
“Not even remotely,” Dyn said. “Accumulation can present with virtually any neurological symptoms. The only pattern is that it tends to show in the extremities first, small nerves.”
“…So something that strictly affects her brain would be unusual?”
“…Yes,” he conceded.
“So if it’s not accumulation…” I trailed off.
There was a reason she’d sought me out.
“[So what are the psionic explanations for this?]” Dustin asked.
“[…That’s a complicated question,]” I said. “[Because I was recently given reason to think we all have psionic sensitive particles in our neurons…but that isn’t necessarily related.]”
Several pairs of eyes fell on me.
“[It’s not a big deal. I think. I talked to the Beacon about it, but they weren’t sure if they were responsible or not.]”
“[That sounds like a big deal,]” Dustin said.
“[It’s not,]” I reassured him. “[We’re talking about a few million atoms in your brain. There’s more Uranium in you than the stuff I found. Now stop pestering, and let me work.]”
“[Alright, alright,]” he said, raising his hands.
Michelle lay patiently on the table, and I started by cascading her skull.
Just like for Tasser, Nerin, and Nai, the superconnector gave off faint resonance in response to her mind. I could Coalesce with her if I really tried.
But the thought raised my hackles.
Coalescing with a stranger was risky. I couldn’t speak to how I knew, but I did. As sure as I knew I had five fingers on each hand.
The superconnector would be my last resort.
But turning to my other tools told me little. My psionic suite was better than what Dustin and Caroline were outfitted with.
But Michelle’s own psionics were much closer to mine than theirs. I didn’t get a complete picture, but from what constructs I spied peeking above the surface of her mind…she had the most developed custom tools I’d seen so far.
Mine still took the cake, ultimately, but there were at least two constructs in her mind that I couldn’t even guess their function. But they sure looked advanced.
Nothing stood out though. Hardly surprising.
Michelle didn’t even understand her problem; we weren’t totally confident it was even a psionic one. I was searching a blind alley walking into it backwards here.
I needed new tools.
The psionics we’d been teaching for months was built around the three basic tools in the intro-module. I had a hunch that our teaching prospects had suffered from not having words for a number of topics and ideas that needed describing. Part of me was tempted to come up with new psionic-specific vocabulary for the different kinds of tools, but I wasn’t sure I understood the field well enough to take a stab at that.
And if I didn’t understand enough…
Making shiny new labels for things wouldn’t help anyone.
But that didn’t necessarily mean the impulse was wrong. Labels helped categorize things. They made ideas quicker to recognize and understand.
So what categories was I working with here? Which ideas needed to be recognized and understood quickly?
The intro-module included some extras, but was wholly based around three basic constructs. One for organizing your own psionics, one for manipulating your own psionics, and one for…perception.
Of course.
Perception tools to start, then. The last time we’d had a problem like this, the solution had been giving Nai the tools to make the fix herself. But we had even less idea what was wrong here. So it was me needing the upgrade this time.
Easier said than done, I thought to myself. How was I supposed to spontaneously make a tool better?
I wasn’t sure.
“...Where do improvements come from?” I asked the room, just to get ideas flowing.
“Innovation leads to exploration leads to optimization leads to specialization leads to stagnation leads back to innovation again,” Nai said.
It sounded like she was quoting something.
“I’m trying to figure out how I can improve my tools,” I said. “I need a better picture of what’s going on.”
“…Try specializing,” she suggested. “Right now the perception tool is general-purpose. Make it better at just one thing, even if it makes it crappy at other things.”
It was the same mindset she must have had discovering candle constructs. Marginal costs…
Nai’s candle constructs intentionally included drawbacks and limitations in order to allow for improvements in other areas. I didn’t yet understand the precise mechanics of those tradeoffs, but I understood the principle as it pertained to more generalized psionics.
But exactly how far could it be taken?
I created something useless on its own. It needed to be physical, and that would introduce another point of failure. This would just be a proof-of-concept creation. A simple sphere would do.
Making something so unknown raised my hackles. I did not totally understand my creation here, and that carried risks. Physically, the material was inert, but psionically, it teemed.
There were four things I was testing with it, and the first one was checked by dropping the orb right on the floor.
“…Caleb?” Dustin asked.
“You sense anything from this thing? Psionically, I mean.” I didn’t take my eyes off my pitch black orb. I even pushed my cascade through the floor with my feet.
“…No,” he said. “Am I supposed to?”
“Nai? You too, Michelle. Picking up anything from this orb?”
Both of them shook their heads.
“Good. Me neither. How about now?”
I aimed a precisely tuned signal at the orb. Faint psionic feedback hummed off the orb, but almost imperceptibly.
“No,” Dustin said.
“…I thought so, but I think I was imagining it,” Nai said.
“…Barely anything,” Michelle said.
“But something?” I confirmed.
She nodded.
“How about now?” I threw the superconnector at the orb to little effect. My creation was meant for minds, and this orb was pointedly not one. But the barest thread of bridging was more contact than a mere psionic signal, and I felt more of the orb teem past the confines of my mind.
“Now I do,” Nai said.
“Buzzing,” Dustin agreed. “It’s quiet, but it’s there.”
“What exactly are you doing?” Michelle asked.
“Confirming a hypothesis,” I said. “We know psionics can be embedded in physical objects, Adept-made or not. We know that Adept-made objects purpose-built to be embedded with psionics hold them better than ordinary matter.”
“So what’s this ball prove?” Dustin asked.
“That embedded psionics seize up without a real mind connected to them. The orb has a bunch of psionic cycles set up in it. Like, psionic dominos just going in a circle. But the orb was totally inert after I dropped it. A little psionic contact like a signal made it wake up a tiny bit. Connecting to it a bit more woke the cycling back up a bit more. And now…”
I picked up the orb, physical contact allowing my mind firm purchase.
“I see it now,” Nai nodded.
“I think Nai’s half right,” I said to no one in particular. “Right now my current perception tool is too self-oriented, too vague in what it’s supposed to clarify, but simultaneously not circumspect enough.”
“I don’t follow that last one,” Nai said.
“All our psionic perception so far has been focused on the psionic side of things: the strictly abstract constructs. But we know there’s a real link between the abstract psionics and the tangible brain. That link must be both partially tangible and partially abstract, right?”
“I follow you,” Nai lied. She was humoring me to usher the idea, but it was actually helpful to bounce off someone else. Even if only symbolically.
“We’ve only been looking at the strictly abstract part,” I said. “I don’t think our perception tools were made to perceive the half-abstract, half-tangible connection that must exist. I have no idea exactly how consciousness depends on the brain and neurochemistry, but it does anyway. Perceiving the link—even if not the brain itself—must be a leap in the right direction, right?”
“So how do you perceive something that’s half-abstract, half-tangible?” Dyn asked, interjecting.
I gripped my orb, scattering the psionics previously embedded and putting in pieces of a new construct.
This was going to take a while…
·····
A day-and-a-half later, the Vorak crewing the Ares were getting tetchy. Truth was, I was shocked to learn that long had gone by. I’d gotten a few hours of sleep and a bite to eat in the middle, but I’d been working nonstop, engrossed in the puzzle.
This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.
But I’d cracked at least one psionic breakthrough, probably a second, and maybe even a third.
“[What is that?]” Michelle asked, back on the Jack’s medical table.
In my hand, I held the same exotic sphere I’d made before, but this time it carried some very different constructs.
I wanted to call the psionic constructs software. But at the same time, the term just didn’t quite fit in my gut. Still, after this, I had little doubt it would catch on no matter what I did.
“[This is a psionic network probe,]” I said. “[It finds psionics with these ‘pings’ and then it tries to figure out what’s connected to the psionics it just found. Rinse and repeat.]”
Jordan was here this time. Nerin too, but she and Nai were mostly talking off in the corner.
“[This goin-ng to work?]” she asked quietly.
“[No clue,]” I said honestly. “[But it’ll do something. I know that much.]”
She’d barely been conscious the past day-and-a-half, and not just because of sleep. She’d been a patient trooper, and a good example to the kids whenever they’d huddled outside the door every few hours.
“[Hold still, and try to keep your psionics quiet,]” I instructed.
She nodded and I sent a pulse into my sphere.
It whirred to life, and I held it next to Michelle’s head.
The network probe was ultimately a baby version of the superconnector. What was a network if not a bunch of connected things?
The superconnector was amazing at figuring out connections, but ultimately it was designed to make them, not analyze them. And today, I needed to examine a bridge instead of build one.
Nai’s candle-constructs were brilliant, and I’d copied the principle for my network probe. It wouldn’t burn itself to nothing, but I couldn’t use it nonstop. It had to analyze things in bursts, no more than five minutes, with long rests between each use. Furthermore, it depended on a physical reference. This was a tool that didn’t— couldn’t just exist in my head. It relied on psionic constructs in both my head and the sphere I was holding, working in tandem. It wouldn’t be able to find anything that wasn’t wholly abstract otherwise.
The result was a tool that gave incredible clarity for just a few minutes at a time.
I had a far more complete picture of the psionics in her head. Constructs weren’t obscured by the mind itself because I wasn’t trying to figure the mind out. I wasn’t trying to read someone’s thoughts, or figure out their consciousness, or search their true feelings…. I was strictly limiting myself to the psionics and the brain, like how an x-ray ignored softer tissues and picked out only the denser bone.
I hadn’t realized just how much extraneous illegible feedback previous tools had given me.
And looking at Michelle’s, my network probe returned some fast results. There was a ton of junk psionics in her mind that sported physical connections. Maybe a quarter of the constructs in my brain had connections to my brain that strong. Everything was tied to the brain at least a little bit, but half the stuff in her brain lit up like it was running heavy gauge wire.
The obvious implication being, there was something physical in her brain on the other end of all those connections.
So what gives? Were we back at square one?
“I don’t get it,” I confessed. “There’s a bunch of psionics with stronger-than-average connections to something physical in her brain, so there must be exotic matter in her brain. But we already crossed off accumulation. What else builds up exotic matter in your body and/or brain?”
“…Augmentations,” Dyn said tiredly. He said it like it was a specious answer.
But…
“[Holy crap, you’re right,]” I said. “[I mean—] you’re right, Dyn.”
I put another hand on Michelle’s forehead and went looking again. The network probe would need longer to recharge, but I could still use the information I’d already gathered with it.
When I’d tried Coalescing with Tasser and Nerin, the superconnector had just barely found the intraneural particles I’d needed to see to make it work. I hadn’t perceived any individual particle, but rather just the barest hint of their presence.
This was not the barest hint.
Michelle’s mind lit up with exotic matter when I cascaded it. I hadn’t been looking for it before, and so nothing stood out. But even amidst the storm of neurochemistry that was a living, conscious mind, whispery filaments ran through her brain.
“[Holy shit.] Nai, come check this out,” I said, spinning up the superconnector enough to show her my cascade.
“…Sweet fucking Christ,” she swore. “You weren’t kidding. Augmentations.”
“[…Is this good n-news?]” Michelle asked.
I probed at one of the strands, and my patient’s eyes widened.
“[Was that painful?]” I asked.
She nodded. “[Like a p-pounding headache, but on-ne of the p-pounds dragged for a second-nd-nd lon-nger than-n ordin-nary.]”
“[Well, good news,]” I said. “[I figured out what’s wrong.]”
In fact…
“[I think I know how to fix it too,]” I said.
“[I’m-m n-not going to b-beg,]” she said.
“[Hah!]” I chuckled. “[Sorry, I didn’t mean to string you along. Your body is trying to make augmentations to your brain and nervous system. It’s trying to shove new structures into your cranium to complement your brain’s ordinary abilities, but the added mass is hiking the pressure in your skull.]”
“That’s not good,” Dyn said. “Intracranial pressure is typically relieved by removing a portion of that skull and letting the pressure escape. I wouldn’t dare something like that on a human unless we were desperate.”
I glanced over at Dyn. He’d followed my English. Odd. Had Jordan translated for him?
“It’s fine,” I said. “I think we can solve it ourselves with no surgery required. Nai, remember that guy back on Lakandt? In the workshops?”
“Oh…oh…Mag? Mej? What was his name…the extra-arms guy, right?”
“Yeah, him. Think that would work here?”
“Elective augs? Sure. Actually, yeah! That would be perfect wouldn’t it?”
“[Exp-plain,]” Michlle said on the table.
“[Your body wants to make augmentations,]” I said. “[It’s going to keep trying, so we’re going to let it succeed on your terms. Here, this is probably going to make your migraine worse in the short term, but if you can tough through it, you should experience at least some relief immediately.]”
“[What do I n-need to do?]”
“[Just don’t fight this connection,]” I said.
I shifted the superconnector, instead of sharing my cascade with Nai, I looped in Michelle instead, showing her her own mind.
She let out an agonized hiss, but didn’t fight the connection.
<[See the filaments?]” I said.
<[Yes.]>
<[Think you could create them somewhere else, not inside your skull?]> I asked.
<[…Yes,]> she said.
Just in front of her temples, a pair of short triangular spikes curled out, almost like tiny little horns. Under my cascade, they were the exact same material and composition as the filaments in her skull, but they had to be dozens of times the mass.
The filaments in her brain thinned the second the horns started growing, and Michelle let out a breathy sigh as a few grams of mass disappeared from inside her skull. Sweet relief.
The horns were tiny, each one barely more than an inch, but between them there must have been a dozen grams or so. Her body hadn’t been able to manifest enough mass inside her skull to complete the structure.
Subconsciousnesses could be kinda dumb, couldn’t they? That was, of course, assuming augmentations were formed by the subconscious. But that was a whole other can of worms.
“[Better?]” I asked.
“[I thinnnkkk…so… whoa,]” she said.
I frowned. I’d seen her new horns psionically light up. For a second they’d taken up a huge amount of ‘mental energy’. It reminded me of the superconnector. Was this another type of superconstruct in the making?
“[What happened?]”
“[Felt like things slowed down,]” she said. Then she clapped a hand over her mouth. “[I didn’t stutter! Betty Botter bought a bit of b-better butter!]”
Oh, hey, I knew that one!
She winced when she still stuttered one of the ‘b’s, but it was just one this time instead of five.
“[Son of a bitch,]” she swore, frustrated. But then she noticed she hadn’t stuttered that ‘b’ either.
“[…Son of a bitch?]” she hazarded again. “[…Son of a bitch. Son of a bitch. Son of a b-bitch.]”
Her brow furrowed when she stuttered again, but not deeply.
“[I can live with three out of four. That’s a massive improvement,]” she said. “[But more my head! Holy cow, feels like I’m finally back above fifty percent!]”
“[Tell you what, embed some copies of your psionics for me to study after you’re gone, and we’ll be more than even,]” I said.
“[You got it!]” she said, smiling. It seemed like she might not have done that in a while.
A glance at Dustin supported that idea.
“[So, uh, are we just not going to talk about the horns growing out of her head now?]” Dustin asked.
“[Psionic prosthesis,]” I said. “[Can’t say why they look like that, though.]”
“[I’m-m there’ll be plenty of jokes when I get back,]” Michelle said, reaching up and snapping one off. She turned it over in her fingers a few times before it dematerialized and the snapped off horn regrew. “[Huh.]”
We spent the next twenty minutes trying to stress test Michelle’s horns to little effect. But that was actually a good thing. For now, we didn’t actually need to know what they did, just that they weren’t going to do anything harmful.
Michelle could figure them out herself.
“[Alright, I should probably get going then,]” I said. “[Captain wanted to know the second we were done.]”
“[Yeah, your guy and Tox have been wanting to get us all in a room to talk,]” Dustin said.
“[You know what? Bring Jordan too. She should hear it too if she’s going with you guys.]”
“[Sure,]” I said. “[Best not leave that furball hanging,]”
·····
“Oh, there he is,” Serral said as I entered the room. Tox, Caroline, and Dustin were already here.
“Can we make this quick?” I asked. “I’ve slept four hours in the last two days.”
“That’s shocking,” Tox said. “…I never imagined you could count to four.”
“Well feel free to keep underestimating me,” I smiled. “Ask your old Marshal how that turns out.”
Tox’s reaction was like sucking on a lemon. I’d scored with that one, apparently.
“Shame you can’t ask Reaver,” I pressed. “What about Railgun and Lawbreaker? Did either of them survive? If neither of them is around and the Marshal’s too shaken up about it, you can always ask Shaper.”
Caroline glared between us. “Are you two done [flirting]?”
Tox looked like he was doing his best to keep his chin up, only to falter as he latched on to what I’d said.
“…Shaper died too,” he said slowly.
I paused.
“No…they didn’t?”
I very nearly said ‘we couldn’t quite kill him’, but managed to spit out the right pronoun. I did not want to blab about Coalescence.
“She arrived after they’d built up a critical mass,” I said. “Nai stopped them from digging up the power conduit, but Shaper still managed to escape.”
A dark look crossed Tox’s face. He wasn’t in a joking mood anymore.
“…That’s concerning. All we found of them were burnt scraps of his uniform and blood: the Warlock’s calling card.”
“They’re renegade?” Serral said, surprised.
“Presumed dead until about ten seconds ago” Tox sighed. “This is going to be a nightmare when we get back.”
“The Jackie Robinson is scheduled to depart in twelve hours,” Serral said. “We’re burning for Askior, so if there’s anything we need to tell each other in person, this is the moment.”
“I think I’ve said all we know about the other abductees and Kemon,” I said. “We’ll keep you posted, but we won’t get more information in this system.”
“We know,” Caroline said. “This is more about what we need to tell you guys in person.”
I raised an eyebrow.
“[Well, pitter-patter,]” Jordan said, waving her hand for them to get on with the sharing.
“ENVY’s gone,” Tox said. He let the sentence hang in the air, sinking in.
“…Well don’t go and explain any more than that,” I suggested.
“Before you escaped Shirao, Nora made a psionic device ENVY could communicate directly with. It had a lifespan of about ninety-days, and when it went, Nora replaced it just fine. We’ve been trading messages with ENVY for weeks,” Caroline said.
“But another ninety-days later, we brought another device to ENVY’s station, and the whole thing was abandoned. Every hatch on the station vented to vacuum and nothing inside. Nora said it looked cannibalized like the first station you and she found orbiting Paris,” Dustin said.
So he did know Starspeak…
“So ENVY is [ghosting] you?” I asked.
“We can’t even confirm its body is still in the system,” Tox said. “Technically we can’t even confirm it ever had a body.”
“If it stripped computer resources from the station you were in contact with, it furthers the hypothesis that its constrained to a specific piece of hardware,” Serral says. “If it was only a piece of software, it likely wouldn’t have bothered with moving hardware off the station.”
“How’d ENVY even pull that off?” I asked. “You guys didn’t notice anything coming or going from the station?”
“It’s a tiny station,” Caroline said. “But the point is…have you guys heard anything? Has ENVY reached out at all?”
“Not that I’ve seen on our comms,” Serral said. “We wouldn’t be hard to find either.”
“…Maybe we were easy to find,” I said. “Captain, that report the port authority tried to arrest us on at Sidar, think ENVY could have been the one to feed them that report?”
“We do know ENVY was spying on you at High Harbor…but we have no reason to think you weren’t being surveilled earlier than that,” Serral admitted.
“ENVY could have been watching me ever since my presence at Demon’s Pit was publicized,” I said.
“Laranta hasn’t gotten much out of Tolar, but it’s clear enough that ENVY doesn’t do things in person. They would be working through an intermediary agent,” Serral said.
“If an Asu in the Coalition was on the hook, I think it would be child’s play for ENVY to have someone in the Sidar authorities,” I said.
“True enough,” Serral conceded. “I don’t suppose the former Adjutant is willing to share if any of ENVY’s agents in the Red Sails were identified?”
“…We’ve— they’ve found two, so far,” he said. “But that probe was low priority as long as ENVY was at least somewhat cooperating with Nora.”
“Was it?” I asked. “Cooperating, I mean?”
“They were pretty clear about having restrictions that would force their hand, but they seemed to be doing as much as they could to help us,” Caroline said. “Jury’s still out on whether or not ENVY is hostile or just screwed.”
“And you didn’t send anything about this in transmissions because you know for a fact ENVY has at least some access to the Beacons’ inter-system broadcasting equipment…” I realized. “You don’t want ENVY knowing you told me.”
“I think ENVY will put it together anyway,” Caroline said. “But we’re also worried about the siblings they mentioned. Still don’t have any more information on them.”
“We’ll keep our ears to the ground,” I nodded.
“What about the abductees your enclave has contacted from Vorak systems?” Serral asked.
“Nora and Jacob brought back a full pod of A-ships from Helco,” Dustin said. “And the Trifiold Hearts brought another bunch in, but they’d had a rough time.”
“Trifolds?” Jordan asked.
“A Vorak void fleet,” Serral answered. “They’re not in the war though. They fly out of V2, don’t they? The exile worlds.”
I knew the earliest Vorak colonies hadn’t been originally settled by Beacon travel, but rather the old fashioned way with colonist ships. Beacons and spatial-abridgement had restored contact, but the colonies were the model of independence from a homeworld. They’d declared themselves neutral in the Coalition’s war to secede, but V2 was technically still under the Assembly.
It was also one of the most convoluted stars to access from Shirao, requiring four separate skips. That put a small damper on the idea that all the abductees had traveled through Shirao.
“How many people have you guys managed to take in?” I asked.
“More than two hundred,” Dustin said. “We’re beginning to put together statistics on exactly how many of us are Adept, where we’re all from, and other [junk] that might make good data.”
“Data is good,” I said. “We need to start digging as much as we can into ENVY and whoever created them. Data on the abductees could help us identify patterns among the abductees. If we can figure out why we were abducted, it would go a long way in figuring out who’s responsible.”
“Well…” Caroline said. “Our sample size isn’t the biggest, but we’re pretty sure we know why we were abducted in particular, at least partially. We’ve been plotting whose Adeptry activated when, and a trend is emerging pretty clearly. The rate is slowing down with time, but our data is showing an asymptote around sixty percent.”
It was Serral’s turn to be stunned.
“Sixty percent of Human abductees are Adept?”
Caroline nodded.
“Two possibilities,” Tox outlined. “Either Terrans are just simply inexplicably special, and a grossly unprecedented proportion of your population is Adept…”
“…Or ENVY and their creator have some way to detect Adepts,” I finished.
“Except none of us had activated when we were abducted. It means they have a way to pick out latent Adepts,” Dustin said.
“Well, it’s ENVY, so assuming we were abducted by some kind of drone…either the drone would have to be able to check someone covertly from a distance, or be connected to satellite checking people from orbit…Unless there’s another option I can’t think of right now.”
“None of the possibilities are reassuring,” Serral said grimly. He locked eyes with Tox. “We have to exchange information carefully. Even if you’re no longer a member of the Red Sails, much of our information is still classified by the Coalition. But we need to learn more about ENVY’s creator, all of us.”
“Marshal Tispas was hoping to bring more of the issue to the Assembly’s attention. He’d be a lot more successful if everyone thought Admiral Laranta would do the same in Coalition circles,” Tox said.
“I can’t make any promises,” Serral said. “But something needs to change. Because we keep learning there’s more and more happening out of sight, and those happenings are going to hurt everyone sooner or later.”