Groundwork
After more than a week on the ground, Sturgin was still the only Coalition officer we’d actually talked to. In fact, for Jordan and I, who were relegated to the Jack, Sturgin was the only local we’d seen at all.
The Admiral was taking no chances with any stray contact with us. Just how much had they planned this? It had struck me as odd that someone so far up the food chain had been our point of contact. But Serral said Hakho was worried about the trustworthiness of his own troops.
Serral was being stingy with whatever Sturgin had shared with him, but that was the point of privacy, I suppose.
Still, sucked to be out of the loop by design.
But the fact that Sturgin was ready to outline all the ‘do’s and ‘don’t’s of being delivered on Kemon’s doorstep was a bit of a giveaway. The advice was not spur of the moment, but rather a heavy, well-edited packet of more than forty pages all dedicated to summarizing years for dummies.
Yeah…she and Admiral Hakho had known we were coming for a while.
So it was all the more bothersome they hadn’t shared information sooner.
“Don’t mention the Warlock. Don’t mention anyone that could give away that you’re actually Caleb Hane,” Sturgin said.
“Fake name, fake history, I know,” I said.
“Don’t lie unless you have to,” Sturgin said. “Lies are hard to keep track of. So when in doubt, just be vague instead. Saying ‘some Coalition troops helped’ you while you were stuck in Vorak space should be fine. It’s not even a lie. You just need to be careful about showing anything glaringly recognizable.”
“I did read the booklet,” I tried. “I know the basics.”
“A booklet is not a substitute for experience,” Serral said. “The Jack might be a diplomatic ship, but it came from Shirao—another warfront system—and you and Nai were both seen there. So if Caleb Hane goes announcing himself to someone with their finger on the pulse of the Coalition’s heartbeat…”
“Kemon will think Nai is somewhere close,” I finished. “And the only reason to bring Nai to a party is a fight. And fighting is the opposite of what we want anywhere near the abductees. I do get it. I just still don’t like any of it. He’s basically holding the Humans hostage.”
Not with any kind of violence though. He was holding his crew’s labor and supplies over the abductees’ heads. No one else could take care of them.
But if Serral’s plan worked out, we could kill two birds with one stone.
“Be vague instead of outright lying, keep a low profile, and just amass information,” Sturgin said. “You don’t need to fight them, you don’t need to do anything. The only reason we’re doing this is to keep things peaceful when time comes to settle Kemon’s affairs. Humans with rapport with both Kemon’s abductees and the Coalition will build bridges. So—look at me when I say this—you don’t need to do anything…”
“Don’t do anything, don’t say anything. Got it,” I lied.
I must not have been that good a liar, because Serral just glared at me. The more I heard about Sturgin and Hakho, the less I liked. At best, Kemon had something on the Coalition, and I was a neat trump card Hakho could play to even the odds.
At worst, they were working with Kemon and this undercover mission was the quickest way to get me out of the way for however long they needed.
Serral looked like he was a second away from swatting my nose though. It was like he could read my mind.
“
Oh that was smooth.
Sturgin didn’t react to Serral’s message, and the hidden psionic channel we were using gave feedback on how many people were currently looped into it within range. Nobody else was listening in.
But Serral had still said the message aloud, gauging Sturgin’s expression and signaling to me he wanted to split the conversation.
<…I don’t think she can hear this channel,> I said.
Serral and I silently planned while Sturgin covered more ‘do’s and ‘don’t’s tradecraft. As much as I hated how needlessly complicated this was getting, I would do whatever it took for my fellow humans to come out of this ahead.
·····
Jordan was staying busy too.
While Serral had been going over the big picture with me, Nai had been getting Jordan up to scratch with handy Adeptry.
The entire cargo bay was encrusted in a layer of translucent crystal—ostensibly to keep any bullets from damaging the Jack.
Jordan stood a dozen paces from Nai on opposite ends of the room, and they faced each other down.
I hadn’t quite figured out how to make a speaker with Adeptry, but I could still psionically broadcast a crummy imitation of the ‘high noon duel’ sound effect.
Neither Jordan nor Nai was distracted by it though. Nai had training and Jordan’s time as a prisoner had hardened her. Good. She’d need that.
Nai moved first, materializing a revolver and firing from the hip.
But Jordan was even faster. A green slab appeared in an instant, absorbing the three bullets Nai put into it.
Then, with no warning, Nai whirled and pointed the gun at me.
I’d done this drill before, and muscle memory put my hand up, blocking the bullet with a transparent piece of orange glass.
“Rude,” I said.
“Just checking to see if you’ve been keeping the reflex,” Nai said.
“I was thinking about improvising a psionic recognizer, something to double check all the sights my eyes take in and flag any guns I see, just in case I somehow miss them.”
“Would certainly be handy,” Nai said. “What do you think of Jordan, though?”
“She still has her shield up, so I think you must have been very harsh with her to ingrain the habit so quickly,” I said.
“I mean this in the most constructive way possible, Jordan—but she knows fear too well to learn slowly.”
“You can relax,” I told Jordan, but true to Nai’s training, she didn’t drop her defenses.
“Drill clear!” Nai called, and only then did the lumpy green barrier disappear.
“She’s good,” I said. “Not just in discipline. Speed. Shielding on reflex is invaluable.”
“I’m beginning to get what you meant about the Adept arms race,” Jordan said. “It’s too easy to make good armor. Better bullets to match takes more technical knowledge.”
It wasn’t that you couldn’t make better bullets. It was just they were expensive if you wanted to manufacture them, and fewer Adepts were capable of it in the first place. Adept-made armor was just simpler to make than crazy Adept ammo.
“It’s chemistry,” I said. “Defense doesn’t have the same energy requirements as offense.”
“Is that because of atomic bonds? Forming bonds releases energy, breaking them takes it. So making something durable just…”
“Doesn’t take that much chemistry,” I said. “You should learn how to handle yourself in close quarters too. If someone can’t shoot through your shield, they’ll probably try getting inside it next.”
“One thing at a time,” Nai said. “Shields aren’t the only thing I’ve had her doing.”
“Bored out of your mind yet?” I asked.
“No,” Jordan said honestly. “This is important.”
The tone of her voice was insistent, acknowledging the importance instead of thinking how much of a pain in the ass it all was.
She was, I decided, making an effort to withstand everything we threw at her without complaint. The first part of that was great. The ‘without complaint’? Not so much.
“…You aren’t too tightly wound are you?” I asked. “The heat might be on, but it’s more important than ever that we stay cool.”
“What do you mean?”
“You seem like you have something to complain about,” I said. “Vent.”
“…It does seem…like I keep going through really dangerous and risky training. I understand that I need to pull my weight, and high stakes training makes me learn quick, but I like being informed when I’m going to risk my life. I mean, Nai’s shot more bullets at me than the pirates did.”
“You’re brilliant,” I grinned. “I didn’t complain about that for months.”
“She’s far enough along, I think we can probably tell her,” Nai said.
“Fair enough,” I replied. “Jordan, when it comes to the kind of training you’ve been put through, what’s more important, high stakes? Or the perception of high stakes?”
“…Explain,” she said.
“Well think about the spacewalk test,” I said. “It seemed dangerous when I vented the airlock, but?”
“You had a bunch of safety redundancies in place,” Jordan said. “But the flash of fear makes one [hell] of an impression and predisposes me to think about the ship’s safety features at all times.”
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
“So when Nai is shooting at you, there might be a little pageantry involved even though you’re in no danger, like, say, putting a layer of bulletproofing across the whole cargo bay to really nail home that these are real bullets Nai’s shooting at you?”
“I can feel the impact when they hit my shield,” Jordan frowned. “They are real.”
“Stop me if this sounds familiar. when you started, Nai just had you build, dissolve, and rebuild your shield over and over?”
“Yes…?”
“And when you did so, Nai would probably inspect it by hand, make sure it was tough enough?”
“Yes…”
“Nai also happens to be very good at—oh, actually, yeah you wouldn’t know that about her yet—Nai’s really good at selective solids,” I said.
“Selective sol—[You’re going to explain what that is, because you damn well know I don’t,]” Jordan said, getting perhaps a bit mad.
“I was cascading your shield to get a sense of the material’s characteristics,” Nai said. “Had to make sure I could make my bullets treat it tangibly and everything else intangibly. That’s part of why I’ve been a stickler about picking a solid medium to be able to work with broadly. If you change the material, my bullets will just pass right through.”
Nai wrenched open the breach of her revolver—breaking it in the process—and motioned for Jordan to hold her hand out. Dumping one of the cartridges out of the gun saw it tumble straight through Jordan’s hand like a ghost and dink against the crystal covering the floor.
“…Every single time I was too slow,” Jordan fumed, “you said you were grazing me by an inch! But the bullet doesn’t interact with me at all?”
“It doesn’t interact with anything except the special material I make the gun from and gravity. Not even air interacts with the solid.” Nai said. “Even then, I didn’t put any of the bullets through you. But it’s convincing, isn’t it?”
“She’s been shooting from the hip for the last three days,” Jordan complained. “I was wracking my brain trying to figure out how she’s so good a shot that she didn’t hit me once.”
“Honestly, at this point, it’s better to show and explain our mindset training you. Keeping you unaware of the safety precautions just isn’t worth it past this point,” Nai said.
“Because everything else I need to learn is lower stakes than spaceship safety and bullet protection?” Jordan asked.
“Actually, yeah, pretty much,” I said.
“Lower stakes maybe, but definitely still not truly ‘safe’,” Nai reminded her. “I’m not wild about this undercover idea.”
“When was the last time you were wild about anything we did?” I asked. “Not that I’m enthusiastic about it either—I’m just saying we have to choose the best of bad options a lot.”
“Touché,” she said.
“Well, this option seems really bad,” Jordan agreed. “So what are the even worse ones we supposedly avoiding with this?”
“
“The other options all involve confronting Kemon directly,” I said. “Which would be hard enough without knowing where he is, but if we’re right and he has ulterior motives, a direct confrontation would turn into a fight.”
“I realize there’s a gaping hole in my logic when I say this,” Jordan said, “but isn’t that exactly what happened when you rescued us on Cammo-Caddo?”
“Yes, but we made a mistake in our approach, and our hand got forced,” I said. “If we’d been less lucky—not even actually unlucky, but just slightly less lucky—some of you would have died. No one wants a repeat of that, so we’re taking it slow, and taking the opportunity to gather information more carefully than last time.”
“The other side is that, on Cammo-Caddo we had virtually no backup from allies. It was just our crew,” Nai said. “By cooperating, we’re not alienating Admiral Hakho and his fleet.”
“Even though they might be working with Kemon?” Jordan said.
“Serral thinks Kemon knows something about a military development and is leveraging,” Nai said. “But it’s impossible to know for sure.”
“Is there anything we can do to resolve that?” Jordan asked.
“The trouble is, if we make preparations under the assumption that Hakho’s setting us up, and it turns out he isn’t, then we’re scorning a powerful ally. But it’ll be even worse if we prepare as if Hakho is trustworthy only to get betrayed,” Nai said.
“…So…why don’t we just do both?” I said.
“Is it that easy?” Jordan asked.
“Sure,” I said. “We just need to find some leverage on Hakho in case we need it, and a way to contact people outside of whoever Kemon will let us. You and Serral will have to handle the first part, Nai.”
“Think you can solve the communication problem before you leave?” Nai asked. “You only have a few days.”
“I doubt it,” I said. “The way I see this going has us out of contact for however many days or weeks that it takes.”
“You can’t even make an estimate, can you?” Nai said.
“Nope,” I said. “Innovation is unpredictable. We’ll have to experiment, but we can figure out if psionics can function across interplanetary distances.”
“…Is there a reason they wouldn’t?” Jordan asked.
“Not that we know of,” I said. “But we never did figure out exactly how the range of psionic transmitters works. Sturgin’s going to want to go over our cover with you next, so while you’re doing that I’ll try figuring out the—”
“What are you talking about?” Jordan asked, confused.
“I’m going to take another crack at figuring out what limits the range of psionic signals…” I said.
“You don’t…already know?”
“No,” I said. “…Why, do you?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Signals stay coherent over longer distances based on the volume of the transmitter.”
The words for how much space an object took up and the level of sound it made were not homophones in Starspeak, so I was extra confused when she used the Starspeak word for spatial volume, and not sonic.
“…Okay, it’s your turn to explain,” I said. “The size of the transmitter determines how far the signal travels?”
“Not travel,” she said. “Coherency. When Logan and I first got in contact, I could hear him psionically, but he couldn’t hear me. Took some trial and error, but when I scaled up how much space the transmitter took up in my mind, it let him start hearing me. We could still hear the signals before that, they were just incomprehensible garbage.”
“…That explains a lot,” I said. “Even though it wasn’t super necessary, I was keeping the transceivers small and compact to leave room for future creations.”
“You also first visualized them as being analogous to short-range hand radios,” Nai recalled. “We might have baked the range limits in on the front end.”
“Do you know how far psionics can reach overall?” I asked Jordan. “Does doubling the size double the range? What’s the exact relationship—scratch that. We can just do our own experiments.”
“I never figured out any maximum range,” Jordan said. “I didn’t need to. Once I got in contact with everyone at the dam, I didn’t need to broadcast any further.”
“Then I hate to steal your student, Nai, but Sturgin gets back here in less than two hours, and we need to solve this right away.”
·····
The last few days flew by, with most of the pressure coming down on Jordan.
She had too many different responsibilities. Learning more Adeptry and self-defense from Nai, being coached by Sturgin, and experimenting with psionics with me, there was an enormous weight on her shoulders.
Psionic range experiments were troubling too.
Within just a few hours of fiddling, we developed a rough curve for how range correlated to the transceiver’s abstract volume. But we could only experiment at low ranges and hope that data could be extrapolated.
We couldn’t test interplanetary distances until, well, we were at interplanetary distances.
Worse still, we’d run into a limit. We could only magnify the transceivers to be so large in our mind. Whatever form of abstract esoteric ‘space’ we were dealing with, it wasn’t unlimited. And even at maximum size, our curve predicted we’d fall well short of the millions of kilometers we’d need to stay in contact from another planet.
As things were, the numbers said we could get in contact with a moon, but not much further.
But we weren’t out of ideas to test.
“Worst comes to it, you and Jordan will have to figure it out after you’ve left,” Tasser said. “We’ll keep our receivers ready.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Wish you could come with us.”
“Probably a good thing I can’t,” he said. “I’d be sorely tempted to shoot Kemon on sight. Everyone else is treading carefully just in case there’s more to this than meets the eye, but even if there is more, my instincts say he’s an enemy.”
“I’m going to be counting on Jordan to hold me back,” I agreed.
It was the middle of the night on Mihan, and only now were Jordan and I allowed to disembark the Jack. Tasser escorted me to the cargo bay airlock where the rest of the crew were waiting for us.
“Shinshay, you’re taking care of my stuff while I’m gone, alright?” I said.
“I’ll take good care of it,” they promised.
“If you’re feeling overwhelmed all on your own again, make sure to breathe slowly to stay calm,” Fenno advised.
“I won’t be on my own,” I grinned. “Jordan’s got my back.”
Jordan gave a thumbs up.
“Dyn and I compiled a rudimentary medical manual just in case some of Kemon’s Humans need it,” Nerin said, passing the two of us another psionic packet. “It’s not a substitute for real medical care, but it might come in handy.”
“Be nice to your sister,” I said.
“She’s the one who needs to be nice to me!” Nerin protested.
“Who do you think I was talking to?”
Everyone laughed at that, but Deg was especially entertained, offering me a fist bump. It was something I’d only shared with Nai and Tasser. When had the rest of the crew picked up the gesture?
It felt a shade too intimate for how well Deg and I knew each other, but that thought only made me feel guilty. He’d saved my life just a little while ago.
The prospect of leaving the crew like this made me realize just how little I knew everyone. I was close to Nai and Tasser, but everyone else has spent months helping me track down my fellow humans.
I resolved to get to know my crewmmates better when I got back. Pursuant to that…I made another resolution to finish this mission as quickly as possible.
Our Captain was the only one who escorted Jordan and me past the airlock. We’d stay with Sturgin for two days before pretending to have been picked up by a small Coalition ship returning to base.
And then Kemon would get the call to pick up some wayward humans.
Sturgin was waiting for us at the bottom of the lift, but before we were in earshot, Serral gave us our last pep talk.
“Watch yourselves,” Serral warned. “The other abductees have apparently been cared for, so this shouldn’t be a dangerous assignment. But don’t let your guard down, and don’t do anything rash without a very good reason.”
“I won’t,” I promised him.
Serral nodded.
“Good.”
“Well, Hakho’s going to be watching,” I said. “Make this look good?”
“Kemon will probably hear about the Jack’s departure too,” Serral mused.
“Then make it look extra good,” I said.
“You think I haven’t learned anything from you?” Serral asked. “Of course we’ll make it look good.”
“Thanks.”
“
Everyone back on the Jack let out a cacophony of farewells, except for Tasser. Instead, he quietly slipped one last message.
<[Break a leg.]>