Enemy
The goal this time was to focus on staying ‘we’ instead of ‘I’.
That had been feasible in low-intensity testing, and it had made the downsides of Coalescence less drastic. Less disorientation, less disassociation, and while seemingly maintaining just as much shared cognitive and Adept ability.
This would be our first high-intensity test since cracking the technique on Draylend.
We wasted no time getting our Nai-half moving toward the pirates.
This body’s joints weren’t augmented to withstand the full potential of the maneuvering thrusters we’d abused so much against the Red Sails, but we could still use a simplified version to jet ourselves dozens of feet into the air. We leapt over stacks of shipping containers two at a time, sending psionic messages to Serral, Fenno, and Deg coordinating with the Port Authority forces.
We dropped markers on a shared psionic map we’d constructed of the dock yards, indicating the positions everyone else should take up, simultaneously drawing our own path toward the enemy.
Deg and Fenno’s confusion came across the psionic channel clearly, even without being expressed into words. Neither of them nor Serral had gotten to see our last Coalescence victory firsthand. Everything they knew about it was secondhand, and the experience wasn’t the easiest thing to put into words.
But reading the complex exchange of information even ordinary psionic telepathy afforded, we could see Serral looking toward Tasser more than either of us.
Because Tasser had seen it firsthand, and the prospect of us diving into the midst of twenty, twenty-five, thirty armed pirates and counting…that prospect had Tasser sitting unconcernedly in a crudely Adepted lawn chair.
His job was protecting my/Caleb/our human body but the fact was it was unnecessary. Only the Farnata half of our equation was in the line of fire.
He wasn’t even watching the soon-to-be site of combat, instead scanning the spaceport for any other threats that might crop up.
Tasser’s utter lack of worry was readable enough across our telepathy that Serral was convinced.
As we drew closer to the flickering torch marking the pirate’s position, new minds stopped showing up on radar. The final count was…
We landed heavily on low ground, climbing over the stacks of containers to survey exactly who we were fighting.
Peeking over the edge showed every single pirate dressed in dark blue jumpsuits, bordering on pitch black. The padded combat getups were completed with Casti-shaped balaclavas. Mirrored lenses even covered their eyes, so we couldn’t even tell their genders.
Like Loen had said, their dark uniforms were patched with an upside-down hammer cracked in two. It was one of the most prominent symbols of a dozen different anti-Adept movements.
Most surprising was the other containers the Casti were breaking into. We’d been on the money; the pirates were unloading weapons and armor from two other crates that hadn’t needed to be cut open.
They really were shipping their own weapons to their heists.
Except something had gone wrong with the third container, requiring the lock to be melted through instead.
Unlucky them.
Not that it would have made much difference.
We took our final preparations, materializing invisible armor around ourselves and pushing our cascade into the containers and dock yard surface.
To ordinary ears, every last one of them was dead silent. The only audible clue as to their presence was the soft thump of footsteps on the tarmac, the occasional clink of rifles and carabiners, and the hiss of the heat torch cutting into the third container.
But dipping into psionic layers of perception, there were telltale signs of communication—though not on the default five-hundred twelve telepathy channels. These pirates were experienced enough to have set up their own custom bands, as well as developing rudimentary methods of cloaking their own psionics’ presence.
Our Caleb-half took no small amount of satisfaction at the whispers of psionic chatter rippling between the Casti pirates. That guess had been right on the mark.
They were doing something to encrypt their telepathy though. That was new.
Both of us felt the impulse to try dividing ourselves between the battle and solving their psionic puzzle, but it would have been a bit too risky. Coalescence was powerful, but there were a lot of opponents all wielding extremely potent weaponry.
But Serral and the Port Authority were in position, so it was about time we got to work.
Our opening move was a massive wall of grey crystal almost a hundred yards long, cutting the groups in two. Half of them were north of the wall, and we could force them toward Fenno. The other half would be forced west, towards Deg’s group.
The pirates’ reaction to the sudden division made the hair on the back of one of our necks stand up.
They didn’t say a word.
Every last one of them reacted, instantly looking upward and around for us, but not a single one of them said anything aloud. This group had trained with psionics. Maybe even more than we had.
That chill collapsed our/my differentiation and with the adrenaline coursing in my body, my thinking slipped into ‘I’ instead of ‘we’. Drat.
Whatever. I could work on that more later. It wasn’t really a pressing issue, just something I’d been interested in trying to circumvent.
Unsettling as their initial reaction was, they still weren’t prepared for what we brought to the table.
Two or three of them caught sight of me and fired, but I jetted overhead with maneuvering thrust too quickly for their aim to track.
Even if my/Nai’s body couldn’t handle the stress of rapidly changing directions with the jets, I/she could still handle rocketing in straight lines.
Measuring the space with my cascade and radar, I erected another wall to trap some pirates between it and the first. Twelve of them were caught.
It wasn’t impossible for them to escape with time, but that was something I wasn’t giving them.
I dove for my own wall, taking a moment to cascade my own clothing and equipment carefully to make sure they fell within the field my/Nai’s augmentations gave off.
Diving right through the wall, I closed my hand on a pirate’s rifle on the other side. The weapon crumbled to my touch—adding the right compromising agent to its metal, even for an instant, was enough for the weapon to crumble like rotting wood under my grip.
The Casti leaned away in alarm, but not quick enough to avoid my fist crashing into their nose.
Once again, the pirates proved their training and ruthlessness when they didn’t hesitate to fire at me with their ally sprawled not five feet from me.
Maybe these chumps thought they were ruthless, but they didn’t know who they were messing with.
And I could be far colder than them…
Moreover, right now I was powerful enough to not even need to be.
Invisible slabs of metal materialized at the speed of thought, protecting me and their ally from the explosive rounds. Cracks spiderwebbed out from the impact points, letting them see something blocking their shots.
That made them hesitate to launch a second burst of fire.
Half-a-dozen pressure bombs threw the remaining pirates off their feet, into the ground or nearest wall. With my cascade running through everything solid within reach, I could feel the metal of every gun the moment they touched the ground.
Materializing more pseudo-gallium throughout each of the guns made every one of them crumble.
Dear God, it was unfair how fast Coalescence let me think…
From materializing the first wall to destroying a quarter of their rifles…it hadn’t taken ten seconds. You could just do more in the same amount of time, because you could think faster than anyone could on their own.
Even marveling at that realization didn’t slow me down in the slightest.
Another twist of imagination and those twelve pirates found themselves glued to the tarmac by the same metal glue that had almost trapped me/Caleb on Draylend.
Shamelessly copying tricks I’d only seen once put a smile on my face too. Coalescence just kept on giving.
A few of them still had hands free enough to draw sidearms, but those three earned more kinetic bombs. With the glue more than strong enough to hold them in place, the blasts crushed bones and ruptured blood vessels instead of throwing them around.
Twelve Casti immobile and/or bleeding from their eyes meant a quarter of the pirates were already captured. That alone would be enough to accomplish our objectives.
But even only having gotten to know Detective Loen briefly, I felt the impulse to overdeliver.
Huh. Was I/Caleb right? Did I/Nai have a crush on him?
Problems for later.
As soon as I decided to do it, a plan spun together in my mind: I absolutely could capture every single pirate here, alive.
If showing off wasn’t enough motivation, the thought of humiliating supremacists did put a smile on my face.
Fenno’s Port Authority group was exchanging fire with the pirates. I’d just cleared half of Deg’s group’s opponents though, so that half of the battle was significantly quieter.
Diving back through my first wall, I prepared to address the bigger threat.
This group was smart. They knew the wall was Adept made, so two of them were watching it intently despite the gunfight happening at their backs.
Unfortunately, even if I hadn’t cracked their telepathy’s encryption, I’d still made some observations. So when I improvised a pair of targeted psionic missiles, they blew apart the lookouts’ psionics before they could warn the others.
Like I’d predicted, they couldn’t identify individuals in their network. Every one of them would sense two of their number seemingly being blown away, but they wouldn't be able to recognize that it was the specific two charged with watching the wall behind them.
Even when the two lookouts, now cut off from their support, opened fire on me, the fog of war was thick enough that the other pirates on this side of the wall didn’t even realize they were shooting at a different target than the rest of them.
More invisible slabs caught the bullets before two pairs of rocket knives stabbed into their trigger hands. They didn’t even cry out in pain. Was that a psionic feature?
I thought I’d fragged any constructs they had. My attack had been aimed specifically at their telepathy transceivers so maybe something separated enough had survived.
That psionic combat training came back to bite them though. All these two Casti would have needed to do was let out an audible cry and the rest of their attention would have turned.
Instead, they tried to swing their rifles at me and switch to firing with their other hand respectively.
The first one earned a blow to their chest—breaking a few ribs—and a healthy spot of metal glue where they fell. The second one earned a shattered rifle, a headbutt, and being thrown right on top of their immobilized comrade.
For a second, I was standing behind more than twenty unaware pirates, all facing the wrong way to see me. Fenno’s group had somewhat inferior positions, and didn’t have many lines of fire available. So the pirates were more or less free to keep her group at bay.
But the same problem prevented the pirates from pushing towards her position and out of the corner my first wall had backed them into. Stacks of containers to each side, and a massive grey crystal slab behind them…the pirates were trapped.
But their attention was all on the Port Authority forces with Fenno to the North. So I was free to take my time and carefully set up all the pieces of my attack.
I restricted my cascade, carefully concentrating it under the feet of all twenty-three hostiles before me. The pirates were so organized, it was disturbing. They were peeking out from behind containers in pairs with tight timing. Each one wouldn’t expose themselves for more than one or two shots’ worth of time before ducking back down.
That kind of covering fire burned through ammo quickly for non-Adept forces. Not quickly enough that it wasn’t worth intervening though.
The flypaper treatment was so nice, I was using it thrice.
With no warning, all twenty-three Casti pirates found everything below their waists cemented to the ground by long strands of sticky metallic fluid. Exactly one second later, rocket knives went into twenty-three different shoulders or wrists. And finally, another moment later, More than a dozen kinetic bombs materialized in positions that would blow every last one of them off their feet with the sticky metal glue still attached.
Every last one of them suffered broken bones and painful bleeds, but they’d all live.
I stayed with the pirates, flitting my eyes between each one while my allies approached. It would be careless to let one of them wrench themselves back into a firing position. A few of them tried, but further metal glue and rocket knives on a case-by-case basis secured the lot of them while the Port Authority moved in.
On the other side of the wall, I sensed panic in the positions of the remaining eight pirates.
“
I dove back through my wall, putting more rocket knives into the legs of some of the first group trapped between my two walls, before slipping through that second wall.
I emerged just in time to see one of the pirates shoot their own ally.
“-e need to surren—” was all I got to hear.
The explosive rounds they used turned half the Casti’s skull into a spray of orange. The other six still able-bodied pirates froze for a moment, unsure what to do.
A blast of vorpal fire slagged the rifle before the offending pirate could fire again.
A kinetic bomb an inch from their chest blew them into the nearest container. That one might die…I definitely hadn’t been gentle with the kinetic blasts earlier, but I’d at least kept them somewhere near ‘survivable’, especially for Casti.
But seeing friendly fire—even against scum like this—made me angry enough to let loose.
The remaining Casti chose wrong by listening to their training and firing on me.
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More invisible slabs to protect me.
More rocket knives for their arms.
More metal glue for their legs.
I beckoned in Deg’s group a few moments later.
Twelve caught between the walls. Twenty-three dispatched on the far side. Eight casualties here. Forty-three in total.
Only after confirming that number did I dissolve the massive walls I’d erected.
The Port Authority teams all wore an expression adjacent to awe.
“By herself…”
“Was that even a minute?”
“Unbelievable…”
The whispers all went something like that.
I didn’t ask why those signals hadn’t reached the pirates. Half of me was still back on the rooftop with Tasser, jamming any psionics that weren’t on our dedicated channels.
Pirates were being zip-tied and blindfolded, and there were two I made sure to quietly divert away from the rest. Their psionics had already been obliterated and I didn’t want the remaining pirates realizing.
No, they would notice their absence in the network and conclude they were killed. Which was just perfect.
·····
Coming down from Coalescence was almost as much of a trip as the experience itself.
Untangling my mind from Nai’s left me questioning some of the fundamental definitions of identity. The superconnector was more than capable of sharing memories between us, moreover, it did share them while we were Coalesced. Every little impression one of us had that evoked even a hint of our pasts would be completely known and understood by both of us.
The trouble came in letting go of those memories after the fact. We had to. If not, it would be like we never really untangled. Even if the superconnector stopped exchanging information between our minds, that information would still be there after the fact unless we did something with it.
And if we just kept trading pieces of ourselves back and forth, we’d eventually just become the same person. A muddied, blended pair of aliens each a perfect average of the both of our original identities.
It was a feature of Coalescence—not a bug—that we lose track of our identities.
Even cooler was that Coalescence provided the solution to its own problem too. Both Nai and I were invested in staying ourselves. Even if we learned from the experience of being connected to the other and seeing each other’s perspectives, neither of us wanted to be the other. And so it was possible to cooperate and reestablish our respective identities.
The trick was to not cling to the other person’s identity too much. I could remember recalling Nai’s memories. I could even remember recalling details of those memories. But I couldn’t recall the memories themselves. They felt like someone else’s; not mine.
It meant that Coalescence was a powerful tool with nearly endless applications, but it would be extremely difficult to use it to learn or copy skills between people more permanently.
My gut said it was theoretically possible, but my hunch was that it would require completely compromising your own individuality in the process. You wouldn’t so much ‘learn a new skill’ so much as you would let someone else’s consciousness parasitize—or even completely subsume—your own mind.
Maybe that’s what had happened with Daniel. Except his consciousness wouldn’t have been willing to subsume mine.
There was no way to know for sure. Not right now.
Even then, doing that much would still require far better understanding of the connections between psionics, consciousness, and the brain than any of us currently had.
And as usual, there were a pair of righteous headaches to accompany the questions of identity and selfhood.
But I don’t think our Casti prisoners were focused on the icepack in my hand.
Their attention was probably fixed on the gun in my other.
I wrested the pirate’s blindfold back into place. The few sights they had would be shared amongst the rest.
“Come on, I only really need the one hand free to shoot you,” I said, keeping my ice-pack on my forehead. “What do you think, Captain? Are we going to get anything out of this one?”
“Not that I can tell,” Serral said. “But we have plenty of prisoners. Someone will talk.”
“Not at this rate,” I complained. “These guys are ruthless. The only way they’re going to tell us anything is if they’re more afraid of us than each other, or whoever helped them.”
“You’re suggesting we torture prisoners?” Serral asked, aghast.
“I’m suggesting these guys were willing to kill their own. I’m sure they’ve done worse to humans like me. So if the price of getting information is a few of them dying? I’ll sleep just fine, thanks.”
“It hasn’t come to that yet.”
·
“No, you can’t torture prisoners,” Loen said a few hours earlier.
“Yeah, I know,” I said. “We’re not desperate enough to be tempted. What I’m wondering is exactly how much we can lie to them. On earth, law enforcement has to make sure you have a lawyer for questioning.”
“Sidar’s got something similar,” Loen nodded. “But we should still be able to interrogate them for critical information: other immediate threats, timely information and the like. But you all aren’t military or actual law enforcement.”
“I’m an alien they won’t have any context for,” I said. “Information is power in tradecraft isn’t it? Trust me, you’re going to want me there.”
Nai and I had formulated a plan when we’d decided to take them all alive. And with Serral and Loen’s support, it wouldn’t be hard to pull off.
·
We’d turned one of the hangars into a makeshift jail, with cargo containers being used for cells. The Sidar Port Authority had a jail, but forty prisoners would take time to prepare for, and we were using that delay to its fullest.
I materialized a gun and a gag. I shoved the gag into the Casti’s mouth in an exaggerated attempt to keep him quiet. He played along because he thought he was getting one over on me.
“Last chance!” I said loudly. “No? Fine.”
I pretended to fire the gun, materializing a kinetic bomb to approximate the sound of the gunshot. The echo bounced ominously through the hangar.
But my gun wasn’t even loaded.
Even with each Casti in their own little isolated cell, we were all in the same hangar. They wouldn’t be able to hear each other speak with the gags and walls, but shouting and gunshots would be impossible to ignore.
Psionic senses still told me that the gunshot had elicited some reaction from them. Their body language betrayed nothing though.
I was an ‘it’ to them? Was that because I was Adept or human? Hard to say, either way it was depersonalizing. And rude.
Yeah, their psionic channels hadn’t been hard to figure out.
That sent another shift through the pirates’ emotional states. At a guess, they were feeling relieved, but it still didn’t show in their body language. Even blindfolded and isolated, each one was staying resolute.
We repeated that sequence with the next fourteen pirates only for similar reassurances to be given psionically.
Each one, I let myself sound more impatient and frustrated when I exited the ‘cells’.
“It’s not working…” I whispered through gritted teeth.
“We’re not even halfway through them,” Serral said. “Be patient.”
We were talking just out of earshot of the pirates, technically. But I was counting on their skullduggery. Any one of them might catch a snippet or two. With the forty of them sharing information psionically though, I figured they could all piece together what Serral and I were saying.
What we were letting them hear.
I was counting on the fact they had to work and puzzle a bit to figure out our words. Earning the opportunity to hear our lies would make it a bit easier to believe them.
·
“You’re going to want them thinking their psionic network is secure,” Loen followed. “But if you just pretend to kill them, and they all know you’re not, then they’re still not going to tell you anything.”
“True,” I conceded. “But what they don’t know is that I can blow away their psionics without killing them. They’re going to rely on that reassurance, that psionics can be used to confirm who’s really still alive.”
“Ah…I see what you’re thinking,” Loen said. Part of him looked impressed, but his expression was also a bit perturbed.
That was fair.
I was thinking about pretending to murder several dozen people convincingly enough to scare the pirates into believing they were next.
·
When it came time to ‘execute’ pirate number twenty-something, I decided it was time to ‘notice’ exactly how unfazed these Casti really were.
I cocked the hammer on my revolver as I prepared to miss, and pretended to notice something in the body language of my would-be-victim. That they were too relaxed in the face of having supposedly heard twenty of their comrades executed.
“…[Son of a…] he knows!” I shouted, kicking the pirate over. It wasn’t gentle, but the purpose was to shift the Casti’s hood just enough for them to peek out at us for a second.
Just long enough for them to glimpse me raising the gun again, and Serral reaching out to grab my arm.
The pirate shared what little they saw across the network.
“Let me go!” I hissed. “Your way isn’t getting us anything: they figured it out somehow!”
“Shut up!” Serral hissed back at me. “There’s procedure to this—"
I took the chance to cut off both Serral and the pirate by shooting my pistol again, this time adding a psionic salvo that obliterated the pirate’s mental constructs mid-sentence.
Simultaneously, Dyn was ready to plunge a needle into the pirate’s neck, rendering them unconscious in just a second or two. Keeping them blindfolded and shackled had kept each one from realizing Dyn entered each cell with me, ready to medicate our guests.
Even with a captive audience, theater, you see, is about stakes.
Or at least…the perception of stakes.
Making people work and struggle to hear something, and they’ll be less sensitive to the possibility it could be a lie. Give people a success, let them get one over on you, they’ll be more desperate to reclaim that victory if you snatch it away from them.
Psionics had let the pirates feel ahead of the curve in this interrogation. They knew our prisoner’s gambit was a bluff.
So when that same advantage failed them…when their allies’ psionic words were cut off coinciding with a gunshot from somebody increasingly impatient with proceedings…
It painted a convincing picture.
“What did you do!?” Serral shouted. And we made a convincing racket as I was wrestled out of the cell.
·
“That won’t help you, though,” Loen pointed out. “You’re just starting back at the beginning then and pretending to kill them one by one. The pirates know they’ve been captured by the Port Authority. They know the rules we have to follow.”
“Which is why it’s me that needs to be there,” I said. “Even if they didn’t get psionics directly from humans, they’re connected to someone who’s had contact with the abductees—they have to be. They’ll at least know what I am, which is why they’ll believe that I’m not following the Port Authority’s rules.”
·
“Get your hands off me!” I yelled. “They know about the abductees!”
“Captain, the Human’s got a point,” Nai played along. “This bunch is hardened. One of them shot their own ally’s face off for entertaining surrender. They won’t respond to the usual encouragements…”
“There are lines not worth crossing, Warlock,” Serral said. Nai’s epithet drew another shift in the emotions of the pirates, though different from the one before. Was it anger instead of just fear? They were supposed to be anti-Adept supremacists…it figured Nai’s name would be one to rile them up.
“There’s [God] knows how many thousand abductees out there, in the hands of animals like these, and you want me to believe this isn’t a line worth crossing?” I hissed.
We came up with a pretty good script on short notice, I thought.
“Well?” I shouted, demanding an answer.
“…Detective,” Serral said slowly. “Isn’t there something you should grab from the investigation office?”
“…Yes Ase,” Loen agreed, “I think there is.”
That more than anything before sent a shift through the pirates’ emotions.
As soon as the detective ‘left’ the hangar, I walked into the next pirate’s cell.
I put the muzzle of the gun under their chin.
Looking at their psionics, the pirates were keeping an open broadcast. Anything this Casti heard would be transmitted across the network for them all to hear.
“Talk,” I said simply.
“You can’t—” they started before I blew their psionics to smithereens, and sounded another false gunshot. Just as quickly, Dyn sedated them so they couldn’t try making any noise.
We entered the next pirate’s cell and repeated the process.
“Talk,” I demanded.
They were shaking, trying to listen to the psionic reassurance of their allies. But when they’d still said nothing after a couple seconds, we snuffed them out too.
We went down the lines, each pirate only allowed to hear the deafening gunshot followed by psionic silence.
“You can’t do this!” one of them finally shouted out loud.
I fired another gunshot and obliterated his psionics at the same time.
“I can’t what?” I asked his now sedated body, loudly enough for the rest to hear.
“You Adepts are—” the one in the next cell began as soon as we entered. But Dyn was on top of it more than I was. He jabbed their neck with the sedative and erased that pirate’s psionics too.
The body language of the remaining pirates was promising. They were shifting where they knelt, craning their heads to try and hear something beyond the confines of the cubicles.
The trick was what order we went in.
Rather than going in sequence, we were targeting our next subject on a case-by-case basis. Different pirates were younger, or showing different stress moment to moment, and we were trying to maximize stress in the pirates who actually knew the information we wanted to hear.
That meant the ones in charge, or near to it.
Keeping it seemingly random helped keep them in the dark about who we would talk to next.
“Talk,” I told another one.
They bit back a whimper feeling my gun press against their chin.
“…They’ll kill me,” she—judging by her voice—whispered.
Interesting. That little tidbit had gone unshared across the psionic network.
She got no sympathy from me though.
“Maybe,” I admitted. “So all you have to do is ask yourself…is there something worse that I can do to you?”
We were being very careful with their psionic perception. We didn’t want them able to perceive each other’s psionics too well, and we didn’t want them perceiving each other’s presences at all.
The trick was keeping them from realizing that we’d done anything to limit their perceptions at all.
Then again, they were only working with the perception tools that came standard in the intro-module, so it wasn’t hard to keep them in the dark.
But for this pirate, I dangled a new construct in front of her mind: something that gave the impression it might lean towards her…a shivering little construct that might burrow into her mind and do damage untold and horrific.
She didn’t understand that as soon as something entered her mind, she would be the one with dominion over it.
But Daniel hadn’t understood the superconnector. Even if these pirates had psionics, they didn’t truly understand them.
And one of the many things sapient aliens all had in common?
We fear what we don’t understand.
She was the first pirate terrified enough to spill her guts.
She wasn’t the last.