Interlude-Pest
(Starspeak)
Nora, Dustin, and Jacob returned to Shirao with a new grasp of their bearings. It would have been nice to return to Archo first, but its planet would have to do. At least they didn’t have to stay long.
Their shuttle change was a layover through the biggest spaceport on the planet, here to pick up a cadre of aliens to consult about their abduction problem and its latest deductions and reveals.
Moy had been a wellspring of information—truly, there was no substitute for expertise. Technology and manufacturing was a deep rabbit hole even without involving Adept methods, but they’d learned from their visit to F4.
In a way, the advice they’d been given boiled down to an old adage. ‘Follow the money’.
There were tangible material costs their abductions’ conspiracy would have been obligated to make. Resources gathered, created, or…‘diverted’. It was a topic Caleb and the Flotilla had been poking at for more than a year. but Nora was in a better position to make headway.
She had more developed relationships with alien businesses and governments. Depth, rather than breadth. There were countless alien organizations that dabbled in all different sectors of the interstellar economy. Corporations, non-profits, charitable foundations, state agencies.
Tens of billions of aliens were milling about their business out there, and one of them knew something about the abductions.
…Even if they didn’t know they knew.
“Four, three, two… go.”
Their new shuttle lifted off with an eerie silence that Nora did not like from spaceships. Gravity assisted launch rigs meant they only needed a fraction of the thrust to escape the planet. It made her skin crawl, but everyone else seemed eager to chat each other up.
Nora was sucked into the idle banter on either side of her, but all the while she kept mulling over ideas in the back of her mind.
Nora’s bet was on a manufacturer. Some Casti who might’ve machined a particularly odd series of parts on commission, something that wouldn’t fit the conventional design of a ship for their own species, or the Vorak or Farnata.
Dustin had buried his nose in everything he could read about spaceships for weeks, and the results had ultimately led here: a gathering of some of the finest aerospace minds in the system and the adjacent ones.
Half a dozen human abductees to drink in every word uttered, twice that number from the upper crust of Yawhere’s industrial strata, as well as some choice members of the Vorak occupation. This wasn’t even everyone, just the ones they were picking up from Yawhere’s surface.
The other half of experts were already waiting on Archo, many of them already at the Mission.
Nora couldn’t wait to get back home. She hadn’t gotten to talk to Michelle, Savannah, young Elaine, Nick, or…
Well, the list went on. All people she hadn’t gotten to hug and smile with. Near death experiences really forced your priorities into clarity, didn’t they? She didn’t dare think of Caroline’s name—dang it. Well that lasted real long.
It would be nice to see her. In the privacy of her own mind, she let herself admit that she’d missed flirting with her.
She only spared herself a few moments to indulge those hopes—it wouldn’t do to inflate them unnecessarily.
It was easy to distract herself with a person she missed even more.
Halax.
She missed him so much, it was easy to resent him. At least a little bit. Stupid furfish asshole, going to help stubborn fucking Caleb. Made no fucking sense. Nora herself had already sent Tox. What did Halax need to go too for?
Someone in the Red Sails might know exactly, and she turned to the impressive looking Vorak seated near the end of the row.
But before Nora could ask anything, the radio signals cut out.
What?
The Vorak checked their radio—it had to be spitting out static given the look on their face.
Nora pulled out her own handbook and found that it didn’t have any signal either.
Wait, no. It was still picking up psionic bands just fine. But EM signals had dropped off to just a fraction of a few seconds ago.
We’re still above the island, Nora frowned. Even without actually bothering to unravel the signals, hardware should have still at least detected them.
From her seat in the cabin, Nora had a narrow view out the ship’s window. Their shuttle had climbed high enough in the sky for the planet’s surface begin spinning away from them, so she could actually see the—
Almost every square inch of Glatten Island was obscured by a sinister motionless black sphere.
Blackout curtain. A massive one. Had to be two miles across. Only the tiniest, most remote spits of land poked out from under the curtain’s black orb.
She needed to call to the Vorak. Their cabin was at the opposite end of the deck.
An explosion rocked the shuttle, and the idle chatter warped into screams.
If you were going to suffer through a spaceship crash, you probably wanted to do it in seats like these. The shuttle they’d transferred to was obscenely high-end. Bigger than an A-ship by at least twenty percent, but with none of the living accommodations. It was a temporary transport, good for a few hours of flight at best, with the good adjustable-density foam inside the upholstery, so they conformed well to all alien body types.
Shame too. It was probably going to leave a giant crater when they crashed into the ground.
The rak at the end of the cabin swore, immediately calling out,
There was no immediate response, but a passive signal from somewhere above them in the ship—the pilot, likely—stirred.
the rak at the helm growled.
Nora resisted the urge to ask another question. She gave Ken and the other humans a psionic once over, glad to see they’d reached the same conclusion as her, almost as quickly. They weren’t pilots, and even for something like this, there were emergency procedures to follow. Besides, she couldn’t do much from the passenger cabin.
Then again, the pilot might not either.
Of course, not everyone on board was keeping the same level head as her. Next to Nora, every one of her fellow passengers squawked in their native language.
“Tavitavitavitavitavitavi—”
Nora had seen plenty of violence. She even liked to think she was decent in a pinch. But there was no denying she wasn’t exactly the most battle-hardened abductee.
Her campers were commandos compared to these trust-fund kids.
‘Kids’. What a weird thought. Every single alien here was older than her.
“What is happening?”
“Somebody stop this at once!”
“Aaauugghh!”
Nora ignored them.
The question seemed almost flippant, given the scenario, but there was something to be said for an unusual progression of events. If they were crashing to their deaths, it was slower than expected.
This ship wasn’t equipped with psionic-compatible computers and instruments, so Nora couldn’t peek at any hard readings. But looking out the window, it didn’t seem like the ship was ascending or plummeting anywhere quickly.
Then again, eyeballs were not instruments to be trusted in a situation like this.
<…We’re not actually dead in the air,> the pilot called.
Nora glanced around. The Casti in the steward’s uniform was slumped in their harness, orange blood dripping down the side of their head. The Casti was moving though—probably hit their head in the blast. The other rak in Red Sails uniform tended to them.
Her fellow humans were doing the same.
Nora gave the Casti in her cabin a visual exam, trying to find any blood, but they seemed merely hysterical, not harmed.
Nora said.
It didn’t need saying that they would be rocked around much worse when they hit the ground. Or…water.
That was bad. Hopefully their shuttle was spewing smoke as it went down. Otherwise, when the blackout curtain went down, there might be no indication that anything had gone wrong with their shuttle.
It might be days before anyone found their crash site.
Survive the crash first, then worry about that.
The Vorak did so, cascading underfoot.
Their pilot was from the Red Sails and not, in fact, a fool.
Nora followed suit, but strapped into her seat, she couldn’t extend her cascade quite far enough to check the shuttle’s cargo hold, much less the engines.
Nora told Ken.
They cut themselves off right as Nora popped her harness’ release.
Nora ignored the confused cries from the other passengers as she picked her way toward the deck’s other window. The ship really was listing. She felt like a mountain goat, the floor pitched up beneath her at such a steep angle.
It was obvious what the pilot had seen. A mile above them, flying on a parallel course was a dark shape streaking through the sky. A tiny orange glow lit up on the figure before peeling toward their falling shuttle. Another one followed it, this time hot pink. A third, lime green.
Not mechanical failure.
They’d been shot down.
Nora squinted for only a moment at the colored rockets burning toward them.
True to her prediction, each one exploded in thunder that rattled Nora’s teeth, sending fresh screams through the passengers.
But the ship did not disintegrate in a ball of fire.
They were being taunted. SPARK could have killed them once again and wanted to rub their noses in it.
Nora said.
Nora didn’t even bother asking the Red Sails rak if they were ready. Instead…
They nodded, unstrapping themselves and disappearing down the hatch toward the airlock.
Nora’s mind raced. If SPARK shot them down after the chutes deployed, they were dead. No helping it. But they’d be dead if SPARK just shot them down right now instead of firing warning shots.
No, the priority had to be land safely. Addressing anything else first was wishful thinking.
The ship was high-end, comfortable. But not necessarily emergency rated. Everyone wore a harness for takeoff, but the seats didn’t have heavy-duty robust head cradles. They were too sleek to function outside of ideal circumstances.
Less than thirty passengers total…so that meant…ten seconds per passenger, at most. She could do this.
“Everyone— everyone listen!” Nora said, keeping her voice as steady and calming as possible. “We’re going to hit the ground, but the shuttle is equipped with chutes. I am materializing extra head protection too, it is critical that no one gets out of their seats. Keep breathing, and don’t move…”
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Some of the wails trailed off to focus on her words, and Nora went one by one, materializing fleshy helmets around the aliens’ heads.
“What is this?” a Casti asked about the improvised helmets.
“Why aren’t you staying in your seat?”
Nora ignored the questions, grateful that Ken followed her example, slipping out of his harness and materializing more helmets. Between the two of them, they made the three minute deadline, but only just.
The ship’s chutes deployed with an explosive blast of their own, lurching everyone in their seats. Looking at the way the aliens’ heads jostled each other, the helmets were a good call. With everyone was battened down, there wasn’t anything else to do but wait.
The drone stopped firing, Nora noticed.
To keep shrapnel from tearing up the chutes? The blasts didn’t seem powerful enough to rupture the hull, but the parachutes would be more delicate.
The time spent falling wasn’t wasted though. The pilot didn’t stop chattering with their fellow Red Sails via psionics or repeating the same mayday over conventional radio.
As they drifted down, their course had taken them far enough laterally that they came into sight of land.
“We’re going to hit solid ground,” the pilot announced, resorting to the shuttle intercom. “Stay strapped in even after impact. The shuttle is unlikely to stay upright, so even if it seems like we’ve stopped moving, DO NOT unstrap. Brace on my mark.”
The minutes of falling was a blessing in disguise.
“Five, four…three, t—“
Their timing was not perfect and the intercom cut off. The chutes’ lurch was nothing compared to this. Every one of them slammed downward into their seats. Somewhere underneath the cries everyone let out, Nora heard the snap of bones.
It took agonizing seconds to suck down new breath into her lungs; he’d been pressed so forcefully into the harness. Her hands flew toward the release on reflex, but the weight of her arm felt wrong.
It was in the wrong direction.
Nothing instilled dread like what you knew was coming.
The ship tilted ever so slowly but steadily, inches at a time hurtling them all head over heels. More screams. Metal scraped stone, and the ground hammered into the shuttle from all sides four more times in a rhythm.
…
Finally, they came to a stop.
Ken and the five other humans on board gave her green flags.
they reported.
<…Can’t say. I don’t want to take a shot and miss.>
Nora swore under her breath. Then what good were they?
She recognized her body tapping into her augmentations as she tried to pry open her harness’ catch.
It gave, and the ceiling suddenly fell into her face.
No. No, she’d fallen up— down into the ceiling. The shuttle was steeply upside down.
“Who’s conscious?” Nora asked.
Only one of the aliens in her cabin answered even remotely cogently. They were the first one Nora helped out of their harness.
She saw Ken doing the same.
What else needed doing? The pilot had said…well, the pilot had said not to unstrap themselves, but Nora knew everyone was going to need help—the pilot!
“I’ll be right back,” she said to the Casti, leaving them to try unfastening the others.
Adrenaline pumping, Nora slid her way ‘up’ the walls, hoisting herself through the hatch leading toward the cockpit. It was tightly sealed, but Nora pressed a hand to the metal and started materializing the densest flesh she knew how.
Like tree roots cracking through concrete, exotic liquid muscle squeezed into the hatch’s gaps and began growing. In just a few seconds, the metal crumpled away from the gaskets.
Nora swung inside to find the pilot—shit, their head was at a bad, bad angle.
They weren’t wearing the same fleshy helmets as everyone else. Nora hadn’t gotten to the pilot.
Nora was no stranger to that, at least. A single finger on the back of the pilot’s palm was all it took for her.
Her superconstruct squelched in her head, recognizing the biological information her cascade was picking up. Meat. Sinew. Neurons.
Oh, thank Christ, Nora breathed. The pilot’s heart was still beating, and they were breathing. They’d suffered several bad fractures in their collarbone though. If Nora wasn’t misreading things, there was a thin crack running over almost half their skull too.
For anyone else, it would have been prohibitively risky to even think about moving the pilot’s body. Of course, not moving meant the pilot was going to keep dangling from the chair until something lurched and another bone snapped.
But Nora was not anyone else.
The first thing she did was completely hijack the pilot’s nervous system for two benefits. One? It let her override every nerve signal going anywhere that wasn’t their lungs or heart. One wrong twitch and they might puncture their own organs with a rib. Second was the superior feedback her construct offered.
Nora’s artificial neurons spliced into the pilot’s imperceptibly. Even if the pilot was unconscious, Nora would feel every signal running through their body.
Including pain.
She hissed as she felt the collarbone grind against itself just from breathing. Focus. The pain was her best feedback that she wasn’t making anything worse.
Next, she materialized flesh. Heaps of it.
She had to build it up in layers, growing it on her skin, pushing the old growth outward and merging its nerves into hers. This was a practiced trick by now, and it took only seconds to build up a writing mass of inky muscle.
Under her psionic direction, it contorted toward the ceiling, gingerly conforming its shape to that of the pilot’s body and chair. Instead of trying to lever the harness’ release, Nora opted to simply separate the whole chair from the floor-turned-ceiling.
Gingerly as she could, keeping the pilot’s body as supported as possible, Nora eased them to the floor.
“…Wh…ere are we?” the pilot started to mumble, but Nora suppressed those neurons.
Nora’s mind raced trying to think of what Roxanne had taught her about medicine and bio-Adeptry. Immobilize broken bones. Staunch bleeding and maintain blood pressure. What else?
Shit.
Slowing only to lay the pilot on the ceiling, Nora doubled back toward the cabins.
Another rocket exploded somewhere close. Maybe a hundred feet away.
Fuck. This was the second life-or-death crisis in one month. This was supposed to be Caleb’s purview, not hers. Crying about it now wouldn’t help though. Plenty of time for that once they survived.
Nora did just that, but she began materializing some of her starfish-mimics—with some choice mutations.
Each one had a couple eyeballs where the limbs met. Alone, they still couldn’t see shit. But with all of them feeding the rough visual information back to Nora, she got to form a decent picture of the ship’s exterior from the aggregate.
They scuttled out through the ship’s damage while Nora and Ken went around inspecting people for injuries. So many people suffered broken bones and bleeding in the crash, Nora was shocked no one had outright died.
Maybe the shuttle’s safety systems were better than she’d given them credit for.
The ship itself had landed within sight of the ocean, maybe five miles inland. But the terrain was awful. The coast wasn’t a beach, but rather rocky cliffs that towered above the ocean and stretched for miles in both directions.
It was actually very evocative of coastal northern California. Fewer trees though. More rolling grassland hills divided by gulches.
That was trouble. There was almost nothing to cover them from the drone’s fire.
Her increasing number of starfish took in the surroundings and found the drone streaking across the sky in a wide arc.
She saw no sign of Bestir, but she wouldn’t. They wouldn’t be within a hundred miles.
At least there didn’t seem to be any traps waiting for them where they’d landed. SPARK was conniving, but even he couldn’t control where their shuttle had been shot down. So what exactly was his game this time?
Her starfish continued to spread out, surveying the land when Bestir gave another warning.
Said rocket exploded, wiping out a cluster of Nora’s starfish. Everyone jumped at the blast, louder than the one before it.
Nora frowned. Something had been different about the first one then.
Aiming her starfish to look for another impact crater…there, by the robot.
She froze. The first rocket hadn’t been a rocket. It had been a drop.
SPARK’s drone was just as graffitied as the ones back at Moy’s mining colony. Neon pink and green paint was messily sprayed onto the otherwise eggshell paneling. This one even had silly oversized buttons glued into place for ‘eyes’.
Maybe it had been a mistake to send Dustin and Jacob back to Archo. They were better fighters than her. She could handle one robot, but she really doubted this was the only one.
The bot was visibly damaged though. Half of its paneling was cracked from impact with the ground, and one of the leg joints were clearly damaged.
It started limping toward the ship, and Nora didn’t hesitate to sic her starfish on it. This variant with the eyes traded off on muscle density, but three starfish were still enough to pin all the robots limbs and start prying them apart at the joints.
“[Stop. Or—]”
Nora did not stop. Her starfish ripped apart the bot, and found three more pulling themselves out of the metal apparatus the drone had delivered them. She frowned as she set her starfish on them too.
What was SPARK’s goal here? He could have easily destroyed the shuttle. What was the point of sending individual bots in like this? Ken or Nora alone would have been more than a match.
“[Not. Acceptable,]” the drones chattered. “[Do. Not. Resist. Or. You. Will. All. Be. Killed.]”
Not if Bestir had anything to say about it. Besides, Nora knew SPARK knew her Adeptry. SPARK should know that her starfish were basically little more than drones themselves.
Ah, she’d made a mistake. Because SPARK wasn’t actually here. At best, he was on some inconspicuous ship or satellite somewhere above the planet. He’d be getting all the results of this little soiree second hand, from the drone feeds.
So there wasn’t any negotiating to be done. These bots had been sent in with certain parameters to follow, and there was nothing Nora or her actions could do to change those parameters.
The bots outside exploded, vaporizing her starfish, and Nora was left more confused. They were suicide bots? So SPARK was trying to kill someone?
But why not just shoot down the shuttle? …Because however awful SPARK was, neither he nor any other of the AI siblings had shown any eagerness to kill humans in the past. Their abductors had put in tons of work to keep the abductees alive. That priority showed in the AIs.
But as SPARK was clearly demonstrating now, there were limits.
<…Yes,> Bestir said, and a small glint in the sky suddenly drew a straight line to the ground.
A millisecond later, the rocket exploded midair, well short of the shuttle.
Nora hadn’t been expecting high tier Adept help when she’d asked for security. Hearing about SPARK’s antics attacking Moy’s colony must have spooked the one-armed rak.
Bestir Khorsi’s railgun was apparently capable of shooting down a missile in flight. They weren’t shooting from the sky though. No, ‘making themselves scarce’ meant avoiding detection entirely.
Nora didn’t care how good the drone’s radar was. There was no chance it was detecting one rak-sized target floating in the middle of the sky.
Ken and the others were privy to the psionic conversation, and the other passengers did not question why even the injured needed to get out of the shuttle.
Nora split off toward the cockpit, wrapping black tendrils around the pilot’s torso and neck to immobilize their broken bones.
Nora could hear more shots from the railgun echoing above, so Bestir was already firing.
Nora said.
Using her black tendrils as limbs, Nora lifted both herself and the pilot up through the ship, following everyone out of a hole that Ken melted through the hull. With the few eyes she still had outside, Nora saw each torpedo get shot down as it flew.
There were three more capsules of robots too—Nora could see the difference now too. They were thicker and slower. She’d also misunderstood Bestir’s meaning. The bot capsules were aimed directly at the shuttle too.
There wasn’t time for everyone to escape!
Nora flung out tendrils, stretching them across the cabin in a vain attempt to create some kind of curtain—anything to catch even one piece of shrapnel when—
Half the shuttle was torn apart by the impact and Nora lost all bearings. The capsule was more like a bullet than a bomb. It just plowed right through shuttle, splitting metal, and burying itself deep in the earth below.
It didn’t hit anyone directly, but no one was unscathed. Worse, the shuttle had already been in a precarious position, and now it had been all but cleaved in two. Half the passengers had already made it safely out onto the hillside, but everyone else could do nothing but try to find something to hold onto as the shuttle’s own weight pulled it the rest of the way apart.
The two halves began sliding down the hill in parallel, the half Nora was still inside staying upright, the other half bumping, and tumbling end over end.
Nora couldn’t believe she was still standing when they finally came to a stop at the bottom of the hill. Up where they’d started, Ken and half the passengers seemed to be okay, but…
The other half of the ship, the lower half, was more tubular. It had begun to spin on the way down the hill. Anyone still inside would have been...
Nora’s eyes fell onto the figure of one of the other Red Sails rak, flung dozens of feet from the other half’s wreckage. ‘Pulped’ was the only word for it. It was a small mercy the rak had come to rest face down, because Nora was on the verge of vomiting just imagining what the alien’s face had been reduced to.
Was there any more?
High over their heads, the drone was occupied with Railgun, and it seemed to have launched everything else it had.
Nora almost didn’t dare to ask. But she had to.
Five abductees came back green, and Nora let out a shaky sight of relief. Maybe that was callous. Aliens had died.
But Nora couldn’t help breathing easier knowing none of her campers had died.
“I’m—"
<…Good,> Nora breathed.
Day wasn’t over yet.