Hasta Luego
There was a lot of prep work involved with flying. Dustin and Caroline were getting Elaine and the other youngsters situated on the Ares. Our rendezvous was wrapping up, and launch time was drawing near.
While they familiarized themselves with the Vorak crewing their ship, I’d been going over the essentials with Jordan.
“What is this?” Jordan asked, pointedly using Starspeak.
The two of us were cramped into a tiny crawlspace behind the well-hidden hatch on the flight deck. The space was so cramped, it sent cold sweat down my back—a chilling reminder of the hours we’d all spent in boxes after first being abducted.
I’d feel better outside. I pulled the six levers that would seal us in.
“This,” I grunted, tugging each lever just to make sure, “is the tertiary airlock for emergency exterior access.”
“I thought the tertiary airlock was the one down on the water processing deck,” Jordan frowned.
“All the airlocks past the secondary one are ‘tertiary’,” I explained. “But this one is specifically for emergency access because its closer to crew quarters.”
“I can’t help but notice this isn’t an emergency,” she said.
“You sure?”
I reached past her and yanked on the releasee lever for the exterior of the airlock.
“[Caleb, what the shit?!]” she screeched, lunging for the handle. But it was too late. The seal was already broken, and she was keenly aware we weren’t wearing spacesuits.
Only the air didn’t rush out of the airlock, and we didn’t suffocate.
“You get five points,” I said, pushing the hatch the rest of the way open.
“[What is wrong with you?]” she hissed. “[Why aren’t we dead?]”
“Because the ship has multiple air barriers that deploy around us. When we’re in motion, we trim them to be flush with the hull, or close to it. But landed like this, we can expand them a bit,]”
Jordan followed me out of the airlock where we floated a few dozen feet above the surface of the cylindrical Beacon.
It was a surreal experience that visibly overwhelmed her. We were floating on the outside of a spaceship, outside a space station, with no suits on and seemingly nothing between us and a cold endless void.
She kept the presence of mind enough to loop an arm through a handhold I materialized on the Jack’s hull, but it took her several minutes to calm herself. Truthfully, I was grateful for the opportunity to do the same.
I was told how all the safety redundancies worked, but that wasn’t quite the same thing as understanding them myself.
This was only my second time doing a dramatic spacewalk like this. All the other times had been with suits. Floating weightlessly in space with no suit freaked me out too.
But, while Jordan absolutely freaked out, she did not panic. Fear and alarm peaked on her face in the first minute, but steadily loosened over the next several.
“…Radiation,” Jordan finally said, voice shaking. “We should be cooked alive.”
She’d calmed enough to switch back to Starspeak.
“Both the Beacon and the Jack are equipped with blackout curtains to absorb radiation,” I said. No such barriers were visible. In fact, we could see in every direction. “They block all the ionizing radiation, and a good deal of nonionizing. Stars pump out radio waves as well as heavy UV. Ionizing wavelengths will give you cancer fast, but radio waves will just heat you up. Now that can kill too if you’re close enough to the star, but I’m pretty sure we’re far enough.”
“That is not reassuring wording,” she said.
“Shinshay and Weith know better than me,” I shrugged. “I trust their expertise.”
“The curtains absorb light—heat, then,” Jordan said. “But it can’t just keep absorbing heat. How come the station doesn’t cook?”
“You can thank the Vorak on that one,” I said. “They didn’t invent the curtains, but they did figure out how to use them as solar panels. Instead of just absorbing the radiation, they can convert some of it to power and reflect most of the rest. It’s easier of you don’t think of them as field membranes or barriers or anything like that. They’re just intangible solar panels that you can be modulated to absorb, scatter, or reflect light and thereby manage the station temperature. The Jack has similar curtains.”
“So…the radiation curtains double as solar panels, which help power the station…but if those failed? Wouldn’t we die out here in seconds?”
“Stations, colonies, you name it. If it’s got people, they’re running at least two curtains on separate grids with at least one battery backup. Plus the Jack has her own pair of curtains,” I said. “I know this seems super risky, but there really are about eight different things that all have to fail before we’re in danger.”
“Still a dumb prank,” she said.
“It’s not totally a prank. It’s one of many ways to provoke you into paying attention to the all the different ways things can go wrong on the ship. You need to know how the airlocks and other safety features of the ship work, in detail,” I said.
“Like what needs to happen in the event of a hull breach? Wait, you already mentioned: air barriers. That’s how we’re breathing now too. It’s not just the curtains that are expanded. There’s just an invisible bubble of air around us?”
“Only the Jack’s barrier is holding oxygen, but yes,” I said. “The station exterior’s just enveloped to pressure with something inert. Nitrogen, probably.”
“…But those are just for air and radiation, right? They’re not actually solid. If I let go and floated away…”
“You’d probably get twenty feet before I dragged you back,” I said.
“If not, I’d go ballistic,” Nai said, walking into view, magnetizing her feet to the Jack’s hull.
She was trying not to smile. The airlock prank was a morbid one, but she and Tasser had plenty of fun with me the first time they’d pulled it. And we hadn’t had the Beacon’s curtains and barriers for safety then.
“What was the point of springing all this on me?” Jordan asked.
“Putting you under pressure,” Nai said honestly. “This is the kind of background knowledge you need to have, living on a ship, and scaring you makes you remember it. Just wait, it gets worse. We’ve got dozens of emergency drills that you need to memorize and practice until you know them in your sleep.”
“And you did all this too?” Jordan asked, eyeing me.
“Took me a whole week to get up to scratch,” I said. “But it’ll take you longer.”
“Why?”
“Because I was motivated.”
“You think I’m not motivated to find my sister?”
“I think you aren’t being hunted by Vorak commandos ready to kill you on sight,” I said.
Jordan didn’t respond to that. She’d seen the memories of my fight on Draylend.
“Like she said, pressure,” I said.
One day I was going to ask more about Jordan’s time in pirate custody, because I saw a stony look go across Jordan’s face.
“Let’s keep going then.”
If I hadn’t Coalesced with Nerin and Tasser, I wouldn’t have recognized that expression as one of my own. Coalescing with Nai hadn’t given me any greater perception of myself. Was that because she and I had only Coalesced as a pair? Or was it something about Nai and I’s interaction that prevented that kind of self-discovery?
“Some of the critical ones we can only really do while the Jack is under thrust,” Nai said. “But Caleb wanted some time in zero-G, and it’s not often you can float in space without a suit like this. Take ten minutes to drink it in. Then we go back inside and go through hull breach drills.”
“…What are you guys doing for the next ten minutes, then?” Jordan asked.
“I wanted to try practicing the maneuvering thrusters,” I said, letting go of the Jack’s hull. “When I was Coalesced with Tasser and Nai’s sister, I didn’t gain any mass to work with, and I can’t really be sure if I got any more intricate or precise, but I definitely had more attention to dedicate…”
I created some puffs of gas behind me, carefully turning me around.
“You think you can replicate the thrusters’ performance without being Coalesced?” Nai asked.
“At the very least I think I can improve it,” I said. “Before, I’ve been pushing myself with discrete jets, just a bunch of them to distribute the force on my body.”
“Sixteen different jets,” Nai nodded. “I remember. We arranged them so no one part of your body would take too much of the stress.”
“Well when I was Coalesced with Nerin and Tasser, I didn’t have the mass for that many jets, but a single one underfoot could still get me some decent thrust. I’m trying to figure out how much I could regulate the thrust with a psionic construct,” I said. “I’ve got a prototype, but I want to test it in zero-G.”
“You recoup your spent mass absurdly quickly,” Nai said. “You might be letting the plasma linger too long. After it pushes off your body, you don’t gain any more motion from it. So the quicker you can dematerialize the plasma, the more pressure the thruster should achieve.”
“I had the same thought,” I said. “I can’t be the first person to come up with something like this. You know anyone I could ask about it? I don’t need an answer any time soon.”
“I know an Adept from training who did something…almost similar. I can reach out,” Nai said. “What about you, Jordan?”
“What about me?”
“Adeptry,” Nai said. “How much do you intend to develop your abilities?”
“I’m not sure,” Jordan admitted. “I don’t think I can make that much mass, I don’t think I’m precise like Caleb either though. I suppose I don’t know how to answer that question because I don’t know what I’m going to contribute outside Adeptry either.”
I wanted to tell her ‘no pressure’, but truth was she did need to contribute.
As for not knowing exactly how…I was fresh out of ideas too.
“What exactly can you do Adeptry wise?” Nai asked.
Jordan shook her head. “I can’t really fight well. I can make more mass than Caleb, but not that much more, and it’s a lot slower to renew. And I’m way less precise. Caleb made guns back on Cammo-Caddo, and I can’t make anything that intricate.”
She pointed in front of her and materialized a vaguely handgun-shaped lump of fused metal.
“How carefully can you follow a psionic stencil?” I asked, sending her the one I used for my revolver.
She tried again, forming a much more passable facsimile of the weapon. But when I floated over to it, I found the cylinder didn’t turn.
“No, hang on,” she said. “I can get this.”
She spent a full minute concentrating on the blueprint in her head, carefully filling in its nooks and crannies. Nai sent me a subtle glance. She had her own problems with precision, but she’d learned how to take her time to still manage some useful contraptions.
But even Nai didn’t need an entire minute just to materialize something as simple as a revolver. That wasn’t even with psionic stenciling.
Jordan’s final product was a functional revolver though. Dry firing it confirmed all the mechanisms worked properly.
“You’ll get better with practice,” I told her. “You’ve got the right mindset to make it through fights.
“How do you know?”
“You went for my throat when we first met,” I said. “Almost got me too.”
“[Oh yeah…hey], why didn’t your hand bleed then?”
“Check your dictionary, entry: ‘augmentations’,” I answered.
“What about Adept chemistry?” Nai asked. “Caleb is an interesting case of accomplishments stemming from ignorance. You haven’t killed yourself with your powers yet, so you could have stumbled onto something useful.”
“Okay…what should I try to do?”
“Try to make something burn beyond the boundary of the air barrier,” Nai said, “in hard vacuum.”
Jordan frowned. “It won’t burn without oxygen.”
“And?” Nai prodded.
Technically, it wouldn’t burn with oxygen either. Adept molecules could vanish into thin air, but if they were chemically bonded to real atoms when they did…then depending on the chemical bond, potential energy would be added back to that real atom.
Thermochemistry got complicated really quickly when you mixed Adept-made molecules with naturally occurring ones. If you wanted to exploit Adept materials in chemistry, it was always simpler to make catalytic materials that weren’t consumed in a reaction.
Or just have all the chemistry happening be limited to Adept molecules. Daniel and I’s first experiments trying to increase the yield of our flashbang had seen us accidentally stumble onto that answer.
We’d added Adept-made oxygen, and so didn’t need real oxygen to fuel the reaction.
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Would Jordan figure out she could do that too?
She did.
Jordan pointed out at the void of space and a bright red burst flickered into view several dozen meters away from the Jack. That was pretty far, actually.
I frowned, checking what I was seeing with psionics. Range finding was really hard with just one reference point.
“Do that again?” I asked.
Jordan did, and the trajectory engine we’d made while Coalesced with Tasser explained what I was seeing. She’d pointed with her finger and her product had been created at her desired point on her finger’s line. It hadn’t just been ‘near’ the line though.
Exactly on the line. Twice.
“What is it?” Nai asked.
“Not sure,” I said honestly. “It’s just she didn’t get any less precise over distance.”
“Really?”
“She didn’t create those flares based on her line of sight,” I elaborated. “Both of them corresponded to where she pointed with her hand. That’s odd, right?”
Adepts, like everyone else, almost always relied on sight to aim their creations’ emergence. Most Adepts had to be looking at the spot they wanted to create something.
Jordan had been looking in that direction…
“One more time,” I asked, this time focusing on her eyes. Applying the trajectory reader to her line-of-sight and the vector her finger created was tricky, but…
“The flare appeared at exactly the point her line-of-sight crosses the line extending from her finger,” I confirmed. “It’s within a centimeter.”
“…I don’t get it,” Jordan admitted.
“Talking about the Adept aptitude, the terms ‘precision’ and ‘intricacy’ are used interchangeably. But even though they both refer to the same broad aptitude, they’re measured very differently,” Nai said. “Intricacy is how complex a creation is. How many different materials are substantiated at once, the margin for error in the creation’s function, how small or fine a given part needs to be materialized. But precision is the ability to put Adept matter where you intend to, no matter how small or large you’re making it.
“Seems like you need to take your time if you want to be even a little intricate,” I said.
“But you’re unusually precise,” Nai noted. “Especially at distances.”
“This is a pretty ideal testing environment,” I said, pointing out at the void. “Force of emergence requirements in a vacuum are zero.”
“
“Go,” Nai told Jordan. “Caleb, track what she makes.”
“[Uhhh...oh crud, you’ve got me thinking about what I’m doing with my arms now,]” Jordan complained.
“Just do what comes naturally,” I said. “Point and create.”
“Talking about me pointing made it feel not natural,” she grumbled. But when she went through the motions again and I checked the trajectory, it was even more accurate.
“Triangulating puts that flare at ninety meters,” I said. “Any further and I’m not going to be able to triangulate the distance on my own.”
“…I can go further than that,” Jordan said.
“Link to me,” Nai said. “Two pairs of eyes will make better reference points.”
There was no need for full Coalescence. Linking my sight to Nai’s wasn’t that fundamentally different from linking our awareness of each other’s cascades.
Jordan manifested another flare, and it was far enough away I had trouble picking out from the stars for a moment.
Triangulating from both Nai’s perspective and mine, the trajectory engine put it…
“A hundred and thirty-eight meters away,” I said. “You’re still inside a centimeter of the two lines’ intersection.”
“That’s unbelievable,” Nai said.
“You guys can’t do this?” Jordan asked.
“No,” we both said.
“Adepts are classically limited by two distances, effective range and absolute range. It’s a fancy way of saying people’s aim gets crappier the farther away you go. Yours is too, but it’s only off by like…a tenth of a centimeter, and at this distance, that could be imprecision in our psionics or eyes,” I said.
“You’re creating stuff accurately well outside of my maximum range,” Nai said. “That’s rare. I’m a fairly high range Adept already, but you’re pushing the boundary.”
“Could she be L3 for range?” I asked. Those were rare. L3s did not appear equally. More than sixty-five percent of L3s achieved the rating in magnitude. Another thirty percent of L3s did so in intricacy. L3s in range comprised just five percent. And that was on top of the tiny proportion of Adepts that reached L3 in any aptitude.
“How far can you create things?” Jordan asked, frowning.
“I max out about ninety meters,” Nai said. “On good days I can scrape a hundred, but not by much.”
“So you can’t create anything a mile away…” Jordan said.
Nai choked at the sheer absurdity of the figure.
“N-no, no I cannot,” she said. “That would be—”
Jordan pointed out toward the void again, and a red-hot flash sparked out in the distance.
It was larger than the previous flares, offset by how much further away it was this time. Jif Jordan had been making golf-ball sized lumps of combustive material before, she must have made more like a basketball’s worth this time.
“…Fourteen hundred meters,” I marveled. “It’s too far away to be more precise. I have no clue what the margin of error is, but it sure seems like you were still hitting the mark you pointed at.”
“Not quite a mile then,” Jordan said. She didn’t look proud though. Nervous actually.
Nai, on the other hand, was speechless. She just gaped out at the spot that had glowed.
“Definitely L3?” I asked.
She nodded.
“What’s the benchmark for L3 range?” I asked.
“…About two-hundred meters for Farnata,” she said. “Its shorter for Vorak.”
“So she’s on the high end of L3 in range,” I observed.
“The L3 brackets don’t have upper bounds,” Nai said. “But yes, looking at the average L3 for range, she clocks in above that…by a lot.”
Impressing Nai seemed to unnerve Jordan more than the prospect of being thrown out an airlock.
“[This is fun and all, but you guys are throwing a lot at me here,]” she said. “[Can we go back inside if we’re going to talk more? I was focusing on not freaking out before, and it’s getting harder to do that.]”
“Well when you put it that way, how could we refuse?” I said.
Jordan still had enough mettle to materialize her own handholds on the Jack’s hull while we picked our way toward the cargo bay secondary airlock. Once we pulled the hatch behind us, Nai signaled to Weith that he could begin trimming the curtains and air to be flush with our hull again.
As soon as we were inside, Jordan’s composure broke. She slid down the wall to the floor, hands clutched at the surface behind her.
She wasn’t just scared though. Anger flickered across her face too, but not directed at me or Nai.
“[I want to ask that you not spring crap like that on me,]” she said. “[But I also know I need to be able to cope.]”
“[It might not make you feel any better, but I keep wanting to tell you ‘no pressure’,]” I said.
“[…Even though that’s patently false,]” Jordan nodded. “[I think I appreciate the sentiment regardless. But… fuck that was one of the most terrifying things I’ve ever done.]”
“You hid it well,” Nai said. “I couldn’t tell you were stressed when we were testing.”
“Psionics,” Jordan mumbled. “Distracted myself, so I wasn’t thinking about…all the empty.”
“Allergies aren’t the only thing that can develop spontaneously,” I said. “I wasn’t claustrophobic before we got abducted but going through airlocks still makes me flashback to being stuck in the coffins.”
“[Thalassophobia,]” Jordan nodded.
Nai and I both frowned.
“[I don’t know that one,]” I admitted.
“Which explains why I don’t either,” Nai said.
“Fear of oceans and deep water,” Jordan said. “But it’s not really about the water or swimming. It’s the creeping feeling of depth and nothingness underneath you when you’re swimming out in open water like that.”
“Yep, spacewalks would do that,” I said.
On the other end of the cargo bay, the airlock connected to the Beacon station’s elevator hissed open and Dustin walked in dragging a cooler on wheels with the rest of the humans following him.
“[What’s this about spacewalks?]” he asked.
“[Caleb didn’t tell me you could do one without a spacesuit,]” Jordan said. “[I’m still…coping.]”
“[Wait, they got to do a spacewalk?]” Logan asked excitedly. “[Can we do a spacewalk?]”
The other kids were looking excited too.
“[No,]” I, Dustin, Jordan, and Caroline all said in unison.
“[Aww, no fun,]” Logan pouted.
“[You guys about ready to launch?]” I asked Dustin.
“[Yep. Wanted to make sure everyone got to say their goodbyes. It might be a while before we see each other again,]” he said.
“[Bye miss Nai, bye mister Caleb,]” Jessie said, giving me a big hug. “[Thanks for rescuing us.]”
The youngsters all went one by one, giving us hugs and thanking everyone involved. Elaine noticed when Tasser came down the ladder and gave him a big hug too.
“[Thanks mister Tasser. Sorry I was scared of you at first,]” she said.
“[Any time,]” he said simply.
All the youngsters made sure to say goodbye to Jordan too. She still hadn’t quite managed to pick herself up from the floor, but the kids threw hugs around her anyways.
“[Thanks for helping us with psionics.]”
“[I’ll never forget the singing.]”
“[You gave us hope. You were right.]”
Everyone had nice things to say. It was impossible not to smile at it all.
<[…What about you?]> Caroline asked me quietly. <[Should I tell Nora anything in particular?]>
<[…No,]> I decided. <[Say whatever you’d like. I’ll pick that bone another time.]>
“Think the horns will hold up, Michelle?” I asked.
“Yeah. I’m still figuring out how all they can be configured, but they’re help-ping a ton. [I kinda like how they look too],” she smiled.
She tapped them and they changed from a pale ivory color to a metallic green and back.
“[People could probably make earrings or necklaces with Adeptry,]” I wondered. “[You could go crazy with Adept jewelry.]”
“[Bras,]” Michelle said. “[Every Adept girl can make a perfect— always clean— custom fitted bra. It’s awesome.]”
“[Gross!]” Andre said. Alan nodding along with him. “[Cooties!]”
‘What are you—twelve?’ is what I almost said. Trouble was, they were about that old.
“[You’re going to have to put up with those,]” I warned them. “[But I thought bras were actually uncomfortable.]”
“[A lot are,]” Jordan said. “[But she’s right about custom work. I was Adepting fresh socks and underwear for months. For all of us.]”
I blinked.
<[…You used their psionics as a reference point to aim so you could materialize the clothes everyone needed at the dam. It would have been just inside your range, wouldn’t it?]>
<[It wasn’t at first,]> Jordan said. <[I had to work up to it. But Logan was the only other person besides me to catch the psionics you and the Beacon flung. I coordinated with him at first, and created copies of the intro module directly into the others’ minds.]>
<[That’s insanely awesome,]> I said. <[But also intriguing. It’s said your first Adept creations can be significant, or formative to what your overall abilities are suited to. It’s unusual presentation, but you might have developed range like this because you needed to.]>
<[I was Adept for several months before then. Does Adeptry usually evolve and grow like that?]>
<[It’s not exactly common, but it’s not rare either. Nai was originally L2 in magnitude, and she could only make a bonfire’s worth of Vorpal flame. Now she could probably engulf half this Beacon.]>
Michelle dragged my attention back to the audible conversation.
“[Caleb, just to reassure myself, you can use the constructs I gave you right?]” she asked.
“[Definitely,]” I told her. “[I’m going to go wild experimenting with more external prostheses; you don’t owe me a thing.]”
“[Then I think I’m all that’s left,]” Dustin said, wheeling the cooler he’d brought with him. “[Goodies for the road.]”
He popped the lid, showing a number of foil tins and soft bottles.
“[Just for the sake of variety, some foodstuffs from Archo,]” he said. “[We included recipes for the synthesized stuff, but a lot of this is Casti food we’ve confirmed is safe to eat. Some of it’s pretty awful, but there’s a few good ones.]”
The label on the topmost foil package made me smile.
‘Not Peanut Noodles, but Kind of Close’.
“[Thanks Dustin,]” I said, shaking his hand.
“[Hey, when you’re off on your adventures, don’t forget to bring back some souvenirs,]” he said, before leaning closer and whispering. “[And don’t forget about ENVY.]”
“[You got it,]” I said. “[But don’t act like this is goodbye forever. You’re going to stay in touch. We’re going to be sending messages more frequently. Every three days at the very least.]”
“[Can’t wait,]” he grinned. “[Now go kick some ass and bring back our people.]”
Everyone traded more hugs, delaying the actual departure, but soon enough we all filed back to our respective ships.
Jordan and I watched the Ares lift off from the Beacon platform, then propel itself in a wide loop away from the Beacon at first, and then back towards the station. They were so small at this distance, I almost missed the white flash that marked space folding around its hull.
And they were gone.
An hour later the Jack lifted off, and Weith announced to us all: