Orientation
(English)
“…I’m going to turn around very slowly,” Knox said. “Is that alright?”
“Only if you sit down first,” I said. “No weight on your feet.”
He gave an anxious twitch. Yeah, he knew why I wanted that. Few positions were as vulnerable as sitting down. Even lying completely on your back, you at least didn’t present much of a profile and could roll quickly.
Sitting crisscross made it almost impossible to move anywhere quick.
But ‘Knox’ did comply.
“Who are you, ‘Ted’?” he asked tensely.
“I suppose that is the next question,” I said. “…Because I already know who you are.”
He must have been a master of concealing his expression, because that had to make his blood run cold—but his expression didn’t waver for even a second. He sold his confusion so well, I almost doubted my own senses.
But psionics were my game, and mine told me that the mind before me wasn’t human. And that left only one possibility: an alien who convincingly looked human.
“I really do know who you are,” I said. “So what’s going to happen is you’re going to tell me the story of how you got here, and then I decide if we’re going to be friends or if I sell you out to Kemon for my own ends.”
“You’re crazy…” ‘Knox’ said, still in perfect English.
“Oh, I don’t think I am… Mirsus,” I said.
That finally shocked him.
His eyes widened, and his body tensed like he might bolt in panic. I tilted the pistol in my hand, reminding him exactly what would happen if he did though.
Whatever fear he felt, he mastered it quickly. But he didn’t move. Rather, he stared at me for almost a minute while the gears turned in his head.
Mirsus Bandee was the first Vorak name I’d ever learned. More than a year ago, Nai had raised every concern about me imaginable, including the possibility that I was a Vorak shapeshifting Adept, one whom Serral possessed some rare personal details about.
Unravelling the accusation had been some of the first Starspeak I’d ever translated.
Finally, he only had one question.
“…How?”
“Because I’m Caleb Hane,” I said.
He recognized my name, but it wasn’t the clarifying detail I thought it would have been. He just frowned.
“The one Kemon keeps talking up?”
“Oh, is he?” I asked.
“He’s been talking about Hane’s—your fight with the Red Sails,” Knox said. “He’s been talking about finding you and joining forces for as long as I’ve been here.”
“How long is that?”
Mirsus didn’t want to answer at first.
“Come on, you might as well tell me. Worst comes to worst, I shoot you and someone else tells me. It can’t exactly be a secret,” I said.
“…I got here about three weeks after the psionics wave.”
“Tell me the story,” I said.
“No,” he said firmly.
“Come again?” I asked. “I have a gun on you. And if you were a skilled enough Adept to fight back, you would have already. But you’re not combat-specialized are you? At least, your Adeptry isn’t. How are you limited?”
“Oh, haven’t you heard? I’m a rare L3 in every category,” he snarked.
“Cute,” I said.
Sarcasm wasn’t a good sign. I might have caught him off guard with his name, but even with just a minute to collect himself, he was prepared to withstand questioning.
“Which fleet are you here for?” I asked. “Glittering Abyss? Or are you on loan to the Majesty?”
“…Neither,” he said. “I haven’t been attached to the Abyss for more than a year now…that’s how you knew my name. Fleet personnel data got leaked.”
“Who then?” I asked. “Wings? Iron? Legs? No, wait…"
“Those are terrible translations,” Mirsus marveled. “Come on, ‘Legs’? Trailblazers is staring you right in the face, and you go ‘Legs’?”
“So you’ve clearly been around humans long enough to pick up conversational English,” I observed, ignoring him. “But is four months really enough time for that? Win speaks stiffly…and he seems to have a better grasp of psionics than you, quite frankly.”
“Win is an idiot,” Mirsus scoffs. “What makes you think he’s better?”
“Because he at least knew to bolster the default firewall?” I said. “Very interesting stuff you have written down in that skull of yours…”
Once again, he almost panicked, but got it under control fast.
“Nice try,” he said.
I had indeed accessed his psionics. Calling it a remote ‘connection’ was generous, since I couldn’t actually interact or affect them. I’d just aligned the focus on my perception tool to see through his firewall and check out what he’d recorded on his journal pages.
But sensitive as that information might be, it was all I could access.
Psionics couldn’t read minds, just other psionics.
“You really encrypted the notes in your own head?” I asked. “I take it back, this is high quality work, relatively speaking, I mean.”
“…Tell me how I did it,” ‘Knox’ said. “I’m not giving any information away for free. Prove you’re not just fishing for me to betray my own secrets.”
“You used abstract invisible ink,” I said. “In your head, your notebook pages look blank until you expose them to a different construct you’re holding. Probably…that one.”
I sent a simple signal pointing out the small innocuous thing attached to Mirsus’s own perception tool.
“How do you know so much about psionics?” he asked.
“I invented them,” I said, “months before ‘the wave’, as you said.”
“…Ah, you’re the first one,” he said. “The one from Shirao.”
“That’s right,” I said. “You knew about me then, but not my name? You just stopped getting new information…like you dropped off the face of the Earth…you went undercover then. But you might have had a different assignment. If you’d come up since then, you definitely would have been briefed on my name, at least…so you went undercover as a human before my fight with the Red Sails!
I leaned closer, excited. This was good news.
“You knew about humans before the psionic wave! You started learning English before my dictionary was distributed.”
“You’re making more than a few leaps there,” Mirsus said. He didn’t correct me though.
“I’m allowed; I’ve got the gun,” I said. “But…I think there’s a way we’re allies in this.”
He wasn’t convinced. “Is that right? You’re sure you don’t want to just shoot me?”
“Kemon is exploiting the abductees, and you’re lying to Kemon,” I said frankly. “It’s a working theory, but I think he’s trying to convince everyone the Vorak abducted us. Still working on the ‘why’, but if you tell me how you got here, there’s a chance we can help each other out and ruin Kemon’s year.”
“…Why should I?” he asked.
“You’ve already lost,” I said, brandishing the gun. “Telling me your story gives you a chance to get back in the game. Tell you what, gesture of good faith…”
I dissolved the gun and sat down too, lounging against the rock with my hands behind my head.
“Talk.”
“I’m reticent. You’ll think I’m lying.”
“Everyone thinks I’m lying when I say I didn’t kill Sendin Marfek,” I said. “I know how you feel.”
“Don’t know who that is, but okay…” Mirsus said slowly. “I’m undercover on behalf of a group of abductees my fleet stumbled across nine months ago.”
Nine?
Even accounting for messy timekeeping, that was at least one month before I left Yawhere. Two at the most.
“What fleet?” I asked.
“That is very classified,” he said.
“Come on,” I said, switching to Starspeak so I could get the fleet names right. “If you were in Margatha, you’re with the Deep Coils or Red Sails. I ran into both of them in Shirao and you still haven’t heard of me. I’m going to assume you’re not with the Prowlers because you don’t seem like a complete asshole, so not Paz. Minshia has the Ironwill, Helco has the Horror Wings, and those ‘Trailblazers’ fly out of Babuar.”
He gaped at me for a second. Score one for me! That’s why you complete the assigned reading…
“I’m well informed,” I said. “So where are these humans?”
“…Sinnesana,” he said.
I sucked in a breath. Hadn’t been expecting that one.
“V2?” I confirmed.
He nodded.
“No wonder you haven’t heard of me,” I said. “They’re probably only just now getting the news.”
Sinnesana was the first and only system colonized by generational ship rather than Beacon-wormhole travel. Almost two-hundred years ago, some Vorak had fled their homeworld to make a new cradle for the civilization on a planet suffering from a bit less nuclear winter.
To this day, they remained a special entity even if they were ostensibly part of the Assembly. Despite the whole system being well developed by now and boasting not one, but two terraformed planets, they liked to stay uninvolved with other star systems. Or so I was told.
But it wasn’t surprising news reached them slowly. Most systems had at least six Beacons connecting them to others, but Sinnesana had just two, neither of which connected to any system I’d been in.
“So you’re under the system’s…what would you call it? A ‘national’ fleet? It’s not really a nation…”
“Guard of the Republic,” Mirsus supplied.
“Smart phrasing,” I said. “If you used ‘Republican Guard’, it would have some implications you probably wouldn’t want.”
“Nine months ago, some stargazers measured a tiny gravitational anomaly. Normally it wouldn’t have provoked any kind of response—instrument error. But it got reported to the Guard and it coincided with the timing of a drill. Guard ships investigate and find four mysterious craft hooked into…I don’t know the words in English. A gravitationally bound configuration,” he said, clarifying.
“They weren’t under thrust?” I asked.
Mirsus shook his head. “No, they were just arranged symmetrically around a focal point. Physical armature built into the ships was keeping them from collapsing toward the focus.”
“I wouldn’t say I’m an expert on ships,” I said, “but have you ever heard of anything like that before?”
Again, he shook his head. “No. The only reason I can think of to equip ships with artificial gravity like that is if you expect them to be sitting idle for long enough to cause health problems from time in zero-g.”
Disturbing implications aside, it fit with what I knew about ENVY.
“Go on,” I said. “Get to the part where the abductees are the ones who put you up to this.”
“They did,” Mirsus defended. “They helped me iron out the details in my face and musculature.”
“So quit dancing around it and tell me,” I said. “We’ve only got so long before someone happens to find us missing from bed.”
“We went through First Contact procedures,” he said. “We even found a second quartet of craft, listing just like the first. So we had almost two-hundred humans in one place, and we were muddling through teaching them Starspeak. But when we got the Organic Authority involved, there was a rumor that one of them was going to turn humans over to another party.”
A second quartet? So far we’d only found one per system. But that wasn’t the most distressing detail.
“What kind of rumor…” I said slowly. This was beginning to sound familiar.
“We don’t know where it started,” he said. “It was a rumor, after all, so the details weren’t consistent. But someone thought the Organic Authority was going to turn over the abductees to another system’s military for research.”
“…And this was nine months ago, about?” I asked.
“Maybe closer to eight? In Earth time, at least. You wouldn’t believe how much it bothers me not to use standardized reference time.”
“Standardized reference—?” I began, only for it to click. “Right, SRT. Yeah, that’s my fault. I didn’t include that in the intro-module’s notes. Actually, the other thing might be my fault too.”
“…The rumor?”
“Right about that time, or just before, I was getting checked out at an Organic Authority office on Shirao. One of the doctors there tried to turn me over to the Prowlers to defuse a hostage situation. It didn’t go well,” I said. “Your rumors sound a bit too similar to be a coincidence.”
“Maybe. Long story short, our abductees lose a lot of trust in the Org and scale back cooperation. That was my life for the next few months until there’s an encrypted broadcast saying that there’s a pirate hunter in Askior rescuing Humans but then not letting them go. The abductees I met came to me and asked me to investigate—hired me, even, to go undercover and see who needed rescuing.”
“So this antenna is your lifeline,” I guessed.
“Yes.”
“Can we call for help?”
“Sort of? Its broadcasts are coded to get relayed into the tertiary Beacon comm lines,” he explained.
I pretended to know exactly what that meant, but he recognized my blank look.
“It means it’s transmission-only,” he said. “I don’t get to hear a response.”
“Alright,” I said. “One last question for now: are you lying? Hiding anything? Not telling me something crucial?”
“Yes,” he snorted. “I’ll take some secrets to my funeral.”
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
“To the grave,” I corrected.
“Whatever…”
He did have that mannerism down.
“Fine then,” I said, plugging the antenna back in. “Then I’ll gamble. Let’s work together. You’ve been here longer than me; what’s your take on Kemon?”
“He’s a snake,” Knox said.
“Because he’s inciting the campers against the Vorak?” I asked.
He nodded. “You haven’t been here a day, and you can already tell?”
“I spent the last four months in Mummar asking everyone I could if they’d heard about human abductees. We found out Kemon ghosted us, so I didn’t have high hopes going in. But on the trip here, Win was a bit too heavy-handed with his inferences.”
“Well it’s been going on for as long as I’ve been here,” Knox said. “That Adept training group you saw this afternoon? Win started that. One day, he asks for volunteers amongst the oldest abductees ‘just in case an enemy comes…oh, and that enemy will almost certainly, 99% definitely will be Vorak’. It was along those lines.”
“Your Adept skills aren’t that impressive; you didn’t even make a weapon to defend yourself,” I frowned. “What are you doing in that group?”
“My Adeptry is incredibly impressive. It’s just not for combat so I’m usually not in that group,” Knox said. “But I swing by regularly to keep my eye on them.”
“If we’re going to team up,” I said, “tell me what you can do. Can you shapeshift into one of Kemon’s crew? Poke around?”
“What? No,” he said. “I thought…you didn’t read much of dossier, did you?”
“It had your name and that you could shapeshift,” I said honestly.
“Well, it takes me weeks to change form,” he said. “Do you know how bones mend themselves? Two kinds of cells work in tandem, one carves away at the bone, especially where its damaged. Then the other kind of cell comes in and fills the gap. So, over time, the shape of the bone changes, eventually back to normal.”
“…But you do the same thing with exotic versions of those cells,” I grasped. “You can shapeshift, but only as quickly as your body can replace cells.”
“My Adeptry works on more than just bones,” he said. “I can engineer my own musculature, nerves, even these eyes are custom work.”
“You’re almost like a Casti, then,” I said. “As long as an injury doesn’t kill you, the Adept cells in your body should eventually be able to manufacture non-exotic replacements for any damaged tissues. You can heal any injury.”
“Takes months, but yeah,” he said. “As far as abilities go, I’m great in a fight. Even with this unfamiliar body, I could take anyone in camp without Adeptry. Honestly, most of the weaker Adepts I could take too. But Johnny scares me, and I think Madeline is too sharp for me.”
“I’m not fighting my own people,” I said.
“Well, I can beat any of Kemon’s crew except Win and Vaz,” he said. “Vaz is—”
“The other Farnata, I got it,” I said.
“Well, like I said, my Adeptry isn’t combat oriented. My mass limit is low. So I could make a knife. Maybe a gun. But my real skill is hand to hand. What about you?”
“Nai Cal-Yan-Ti taught me,” was all I needed to say.
“Oh.”
Mirsus suddenly looked very glad he hadn’t tried to fight me.
Hah.
“If we’re not going to kill each other, we should get a way to talk,” I said. “How’s your confidence in psionics?”
“Low to moderate,” he said.
“Cool, take these then,” I said, offering my hand.
He clasped it hesitantly, and I dumped a very non-standard package of psionic tools into his mind.
“Upgraded transceiver, spatial processor, sensory log,” I said. “You’ll have to tinker with that third one to get it adapted to your senses, but when you figure out the compatibility, it should be able to record the inputs to one or two of your senses. Sight. Hearing. That kind of thing. Should be useful.”
I highlighted each construct to orient him.
“How upgraded is the transceiver?” he asked.
“Very,” I said. “This version has customized peripherals that both hide and encrypt the signal. Even if someone manages to detect the signal—which I doubt many people here could—then they’d still have no idea what was actually being said.”
“You said you invented them?”
“The Beacons made the building blocks,” I said. “But I’m the one who put them together.”
“Okay…okay…let’s work together.”
“Then we can talk more details tomorrow,” I said. “For now, grab your real transmitter and send a message to whoever your handler is: tell them to contact the Jackie Robinson. It’s a diplomatic ship…and whatever else you wanted to send, I guess.”
“What about the girl who came with you?” Knox asked.
“Jordan knows who I am,” I said. “She’s an ally. Part of the reason we’re hunting Kemon was to find her sister and the other abductees that were with her…but…”
“But you found Drew within a few minutes of getting here?”
“Yeah. Wasn’t expecting that.”
“Alright…allies…for now,” he said.
“You got it, ‘Knox’,” I chuckled.
“Shut up, ‘Ted’.”
·····
The first few days were exactly like summer camp right down to the obnoxious wake up.
“Run to the rock and back!”
Someone different yelled the wakeup call every morning. Every time.
Every single stupid morning, we all got up to go through an exercise regimen that would stave off muscle and bone loss. Hopefully.
I didn’t have any trouble running the distance, but Jordan had been cooped up in a cell recently and it showed.
Even though she wasn’t using her voice to speak, there was still some huff to her words that matched her breathing.
I said.
I’d told her the truth about Knox, but the opportunity had yet to present itself for a lengthy face-to-face.
The Vorak spy had proved it was worth keeping him around quickly; he had an elaborate understanding of Kemon’s crew and the relationships in it.
Jao, Dansi, Goma-ah, and the rest of the Casti in camp were all part of the non-combatant elements of Kemon’s crew. But Vaz and Win were part of the Fafin’s paramilitary contingent.
That wasn’t even scratching the surface of Kemon’s operation. Knox had done his homework, and his information clarified a lot of the facts my own crew had found. For starters, the Fafin was a much bigger ship than I realized. It alone outweighed all six A-ships here on the ground, which was precisely why it hadn’t descended to the planet.
Kemon and a select number of his staff had been commuting back and forth between the camp on Scozha’s surface and the Fafin in orbit for weeks now. But Kemon was due to return soon, and he would certainly want to meet the new arrivals in person.
<…I agree,> I said.
I said.
The activity groups were an interesting idea. Jordan and I had seen enough alien society outside of it to know their primary purpose was to occupy time. Dividing the abductees into groups, having them do various hikes, Adept puzzles, and rudimentary schooling…it was all to create clear expectations and have the abductees act in manageable and predictable ways.
I couldn’t even blame Kemon for setting things up that way, much as I might like to. Because there were more than a hundred kids in camp. That many kids in one place meant fights were inevitable.
An argument on the move was slowing down the whole crowd of kids jogging.
“Quit it!” the first boy yelled.
I didn’t get to hear what the second said in response, because one of them started kicking.
In two seconds flat, they’d bumped into five other people, tripping them in a chain reaction.
“Hey!” I started, but another older teenager beat me to the punch.
She blew a whistle that materialized already between her lips, and both kids froze long enough for her to grab one by the shirt. She dragged him away from the middle of the dirt road and out of the way of the other joggers.
“Grab him,” she said, and I was quick to follow her example.
“H-hey! Put me down!” the kid squealed.
“You’re tripping people,” I said. I dumped him next to the first kid. They immediately went for each other again, but I materialized my stave and held it between their faces.
That made them hesitate.
“Nice,” the girl said. I recognized her from the Adepts on the first day: Madeline.
“Is this a stupid fight?” I asked the two of them.
“He said my mom is happy I got—”
“Hush,” I said. “Is. This. A. Stupid. Fight?”
“Totally, he just punched me!” the other kid said.
“…Just now?” I asked. I’d seen it. There’d only been kicks.
“Yeah! Or…no, earlier.”
“Good grief,” Madeline sighed. “Who started the violence?”
Both of them glared at each other.
The words ‘he did’ were on the tip of both of their tongues.
“Whoever started the fight, if you admit it, then I’ll make sure the other person gets punished if they provoked you. If you both just say the other did it, then neither one of you gets punished.”
Madeline frowned at that, but my ultimatum had the desired effect.
“…I kicked him. He was talking shit about me to my parents,” the first boy said.
“Don’t swear,” Madeline tried.
“Yeah. Language,” I said, mostly out of habit. “But just because someone insults you doesn’t make it okay to hit them. Understand? Hey, understand?”
I forced myself into the kid’s eye line, and he had no choice but to acknowledge the lesson.
“I understand.”
“Alright, then you go with Madeline—Maddie?” She nodded. “You go with Maddie and she’ll decide a punishment.”
“You said—!”
“I said I would punish the instigator,” I said. “I never said you wouldn’t get a punishment too.”
I turned to the second one. “Did you insult him?”
“Yeah…”
“What did you say?”
“Stuff about his mom…”
“Not good enough. You said it to his face, so you can say it to mine. Aren’t you proud of what you said?”
He looked properly guilty now, on the verge of tears. “I said…his mom didn’t miss him…”
“Not proud of what you said?”
He shook his head.
“Okay. Now apologize.”
“Sorry.”
“Good.”
Then I flicked the kid on the forehead as hard as I could.
“Ow!”
I did it twice more.
“What the he—eck is your problem!?”
“Don’t ever say anything like that again,” I warned.
“Okay, okay!”
“Now run.”
He got going, leaving me and Madeline with the third kid.
“You’re going to wait thirty seconds before you start running again,” Maddie said. “And tonight you’re going to hand write an apology to him for hitting him. What he said might have been a dick move, but starting a fight is also a dick move.”
“…Language?” I said, unsure if she was doing it on purpose. I didn’t know all the rules here yet.
“Shit— I mean …right…” she said. “You’re going to have to apologize to the people your fight tripped too. Someone could have gotten hurt.”
“Okay…” he grumbled, before Madeline let him start running again.
“…I have no idea what either of their names were,” I said.
“Cody,” she said. “And Edgar.”
Her tone was slightly embarrassed though. Like…
“But which one is which?”
“I don’t remember either,” she admitted. “Nice job though. Ted, right?”
“It’s my middle name, but yeah,” I said.
“Maddie,” she said. “Cool staff.”
“I heard that swords are more of a liability for the holder unless you know what you’re doing,” I said. “I don’t know swords, so I figured a stick was more reliable.”
“Hey, even if you think your Adeptry isn’t crazy enough for the kind of stuff Win wants, there’s another group that’s geared for non-Adepts. A few kids know martial arts and are sharing. They’re focusing more on self-defense skills,” she said. “Either way, you’re welcome to sign up.”
“I’ll check it out,” I said. “
Hah, progress!