The Wild Ba’Neesh Chapter Thirty-Eight ©2019 Fay Thompson All Rights Reserved

Mick sat straight up and yelled out, “It’s telepathy.”

Of course, he wakened everyone, with the general consensus being to shut him up physically. He shrugged off the sharp words and grabby hands and repeated what he’d said. “It’s telepathy.”

Elias groaned. “What in the flames of hell are you talking about when I was sleeping really well?”

“Sleep share.” Mick rubbed at his face, the cave was still light enough to see the sea of grumpy faces surrounding him. “Don’t you see, if we can share info while asleep, it means we can share info brain-to-brain, that’s telepathy.”

“Then, why don’t we hear each other?” Elias was considering thumping the kid. “We don’t hear each other, Mick. Nothing. Nada. Zippo. Zero. Just your bastard mouth yammering when we should be sleeping.”

“We must.” Mick shook his head. “The only thing different is we are asleep when we listen.” He argued, mostly to himself. He glared around at the sniffing Ba’Neesh. He was learning they had certain sounds that meant certain attitudes. This kind of sniffing was annoyance, no doubt with him. He fixed on Aenor whose expression was nearly hostile.

“Aenor, I know you messed in my head today. I know you did, remember?” He squirmed a bit. “Think something at me, not pull on my brains.”

He felt nothing. His frustration grew. “Think a color. Think red, or…”

His mind flooded with icy blue. He grinned. “Icy blue.” He chortled. “You thought icy blue, right?”

She blinked and then shared a look with the other Ba’Neesh.

Mick’s mind flooded with red. “Red.” He yelled out, and he wasn’t alone. All of the Ba’Neesh and Elias spoke too.

“Shit.” Elias said.

“Color, so we know we can receive color.” Mick said. “I bet we can do more but when we are awake, we stand guard on our brains, defenders. A color isn’t language exactly. It’s like an itch.”

He almost instantly regretted that suggestion when the word came back as not a word, but a physical sensation. “Okay. Yes, I got it.” He writhed, trying to make the itch subside.

Aenor was focusing on him fully now. “Why itch and color?” She asked.

“A guess?” Mick said. “Probably warning things are exempt from the defender inside. Colors we associate with defense. Like red for danger, yellow for beware, green for safe. Sensations may bypass that part of the brain too like…” He focused on heat.

“Hot?” Aenor asked.

“Yeah. Hot, cold, warm.” Mick nodded. “We use these in healing when we evaluate by touch. Again, not verbal language at all. I didn’t try to send to you a WORD that could speak in your head. I did try to send you a feeling.”

“Voice.” Elias muttered. “When I was in school and trying to learn my first word using true Speech, the word we were told to work on was ‘yawn’. If we could get the Master to yawn, we would pass the class.”

“Yawn.” Aenor used Speech and everyone yawned, including her.

“Exactly.” Elias said. “Shit. That was telepathy hiding behind Vrill influence on words?” He tried to catch up with what Mick was suggesting.

“Those molcoms.” Mick said. “It’s that whole purple cow thing. You know, do purple cows exist?” He asked to blank stares. “We don’t know because we are taught they can’t exist so if they can’t, then when we see what seems like a purple cow, it must be something else, right? The moment we stop agreeing with it’s non-existence, it becomes possible to exist, but we are then outside of the world where a purple cow cannot exist. Soek. I am Soek. I hear words in my sleep and that means I’m a broken telepath of some kind. I am not human, who are unable to hear words in their sleep, I think, or they believe they cannot therefore they cannot. I resist because I want to belong and sharing my brain is scary and I don’t want my brain to hurt or be taken without my consent. I am afraid. I am a coward. I am a broken Soek.”

“Fuck Mick.” Aenor rose to her feet. “I am not a coward, fuck Mick.”

Mick grinned. “Are too, Aenor. All of us are too afraid to be what we can be with each other. We are ego, as my psychiatrist would say. Our ego is a weak-assed little kid terrified of nearly everything.”

“No.” She threw the thought at him hard.

It landed in the brains of everyone, not just Mick.

“I received a thought word.” Elias said aloud. “No.”

Turns out, everyone heard her. She smiled in triumph. “I can think word at you, fuck Mick.”

Mick shook his head. “No. You thought no and everyone received it, not just me. No finesse. I felt a struggle in my head, after the word arrived. I knew it wasn’t my word or my thought.”

Others nodded in agreement.

“Broadcast.” He said. “I bet it is like casting and that thing we did with Mael and the sigil and the water.”

Aenor sat back down, her forehead furrowed.

“I didn’t really focus on Mael.” He confessed. “I focused on his helmet. It is like this super odd thing and it radiates.”

“Vrill.” Elias said, “Mael says it is behaving like a Ba’Neesh horn or antler.”

“When everyone chained up we pushed into that helmet.” Mick said.

“It’s a powerful defensive sigil.” Elias said, awakening dawning inside of him.

“He grabbed the shell.” Mick recalled. “He said it hurt.”

“It goes icy when it defends itself.” Elias said. “So, you really focused on seeing the shell?” He asked.

“Specifically, yeah. And then everyone pushed cause I’m just learning about my Vrill like a weak-ass kid.”

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Silence grew as everyone considered his words. He stiffened, his mind moving back and forth over his excitement, his use of Vrill. “Gods, I really am as stupid as Iiyiko said.” Mick said sourly. “Fuck me. We have to not use Vrill in here. We have to not use that equipment of yours either, Elias. Here I wake up all excited and stupidly trigger us to use Vrill. In a game, my opponent would be trying to trigger me to get me to give him trace. By the Gods I hope these asshats haven’t figured out a way to understand my triggers enough to get me to stimulate others into Vrill use.”

“Fuck.” Aenor stared around as if demons might crawl out of the walls.

“I don’t think they know you.” Elias said, his own feelings made grim by Mick’s astute assessment. They were all fools. It was daylight and they were indeed using Vrill, at the time when Tule Soc would be trying to find them using Vrill tracers.

“Next one to use Vrill I punish and hurt them hard.” Aenor glared around at Ba’Neesh and Soek alike. “Ba’Neesh not be made fools like stupid Soek. Learn battle rules. Now. I not warn.”

Rules. Mick nodded, his feeling intense and sober. “I am learning these battle rules too, Aenor. I am chasing my damn tail. I’m sorry for making us less safe.”

She glared at him. “Never apologize for unlearning. You chase Ba’Neesh to be less stupid in future.”

Elias snorted. “Got you there. What the hell are we teaching these Ba’Neesh, Mick. Profanity and an enduring view of Soek?”

“Yeah.” Mick smiled uneasily. “What are they teaching us too, Elias? How to leap instead of walk, fly instead of run, pulling and pushing at our brains. Our sisters. I am less sure we are doing any more than sharpening their edges by rubbing their way against us.”

No one slept well after that. Everyone was individually thinking about how things could possibly work. What were the limits? It was scary.

Arjan paced the small room that had been hastily converted into the main security office. The situation was a nightmare. So far the national defense was riding down the middle of a territorial impasse. He knew there were certain people in high positions who were aligned with Tule Soc’s truth, eager to prevent the good name of the public Tule Soc from being destroyed. The corporation was one of the largest industries in the world. Still, Damian Thorne, newly arrived from Citadel, was a persuasive man. It was Thorne’s misfortune that the world was still raw from the understanding that massive illegal weaponry was in the hands of a corporation few knew much about.

In the midst of this, Arjan was chasing shadows. The Tule Soc story behind closed doors was that yes, they were sheltering a substantial number of severely retarded humans who could not manage themselves. As a health corporation they had been seeking treatments for years for the bizarre physical deformities these children manifested until eventually the deformities killed them. That was the line. Humanitarian kindness. Except, there were Ba’Neesh in the Reserves of Fels, loose. If a single one came into public view it negated all of the public story.

He knew the Directorate had hundreds of Ba’Neesh adults just outside the facility, standing guard outside of a dozen aircraft. Tule Soc claimed these individuals were wearing the well-known avatar gear designed by the Directorate to mask the identity of the individual. Play acting. So far, the Directorate had not brought in the teams necessary to take the Ba’Neesh housed at the lab by force. He knew that likely they feared injuring the monsters. It was political hell.

“We have nine confirmed dead in that wildfire.” His new second, Dieter Vogel, interrupted him to say. “Reserves Teams are expressing concern that they found two cleanly severed arms, unusual in a fire, not the work of animals.”

“Clean? A laser cannon?” Arjan said. “How is that possible? Those cannons are huge and require vast amounts of energy to fire.”

“Unknown, Sir. We have to speculate DireSec developed a mobile device and are testing it in the field against us.” Dieter concluded. He was struggling to come to terms with what they were hunting. His secrecy rating had gone through the roof three days earlier when Arjan advanced him. That advancement cost him far more than he had imagined.

They were chasing monsters, real life monsters who seemed to have a mobile laser at their disposal. He had watched the restricted footage of the blue hand weapon and wondered if the two weapons were related. Most of what he was encountering was not logical, it offended him in a way he was careful to screen from his new boss.

He had been told these monsters had escaped and were so dangerous that the operatives were to kill on sight. He couldn’t quite mesh this with the situation at the facility and the mentally defective mutating children everyone was fighting over. Did the mentally defective have the training to use a laser?

“Send in more teams.” Arjan ordered. “I know it makes us thin near the facility but that situation is going nowhere fast and we have to eliminate the threat of these loose monsters.”

Dieter nodded, turning away to return to his own office to order yet more teams in to a ground search that in the aftermath of the fire deaths, had produced no credible evidence of Vrill trace strong enough to follow. If these creatures did use this Vrill, how were they hiding? More caves? There were thousands of caves in the pock-marked Hohle escarpment area. If the Reserves Warden discovered Tule Soc was violating its agreement to stay out of the Reserves, what would that mean?

Arjan came back to Dieter’s doorway. “Concentrate where the operatives were killed. They are on foot, that means their range is limited. They have to be in the area whether we see them or not. And, show me the Reserve Team rescue footage again, there’s something wrong with it.”

They watched the footage together. The Reserves Team had overflown the wildfire area looking for both a source of fire origin and any intruders that might have been in the area. In general, fires were started by weather events or by humans. There had been no lightening in the area for weeks, just rain. That suggested intruders.

When they saw a thin trail of smoke they followed it to a still smoldering campfire and bodies. It was clear to the Team that these intruders were the cause of the fire and died soon after it was lit. What wasn’t as clear was the intruder’s identities as they were carrying no identification and their bodies were charred enough to make reconstruction necessary. But, it was the two cleanly severed arms that stood out. Those amputations shifted this from a careless fire to murder.

Arjan had Dieter freeze the footage so he could study the pattern of the bodies and parts. Clearly, one-on-one brutality. Why hadn’t the men used their weapons? Then he leaned in. “Do you see any weapons, Dieter?”

Dieter also stared hard at the holo. How had he missed something so obvious? “No. In fact, I don’t see their gear either, Sir.”

Arjan nodded. Then he pointed at one boxy pack. They focused in on the object. It had been a Vrill trace pack. It was melted by extreme heat. “They killed the pack. Odd. Took the weapons and gear, why?”

“To use, Sir?” Dieter answered.

“Right. They needed the gear or were they just removing it? They must have needed it. Food? Arms, certainly.”

“You think they are hungry?” Dieter asked. “But, we found evidence of substantial small animal kills in that cave we blew. If they can hunt like that then why were they going for food? I would think they wanted the weapons. Could the amputations have been to remove the weapons?”

“Before or after the ground fight?” Arjan followed the logic. “It had to have been before. They lasered first, then engaged in hand-to-hand. Why? Clearly the laser is the superior weapon. Why not kill them all at a distance with the laser? Why fight them?”

“You said they are violent creatures.” Dieter said, “What if they wanted to kill them up close?”

Both men shared a glance. There was a kind of primordial terror in the idea of facing an enemy who preferred to be in your face to watch you die. A creature able to vanish into the woods, like the monsters in ancient folklore. That’s what it was, Dieter realized, this all reminded him of the fairy tales he’d read to his daughter when she was small. Dark tales of creatures in the woods, in eld Germany’s famed black woods. A lab full of twisted creatures. Arjan had shown him secret footage. They were human-like but clearly not human. A few in the woods. He suddenly knew he was not being told the whole truth. This ambush smacked of revenge, of thoughtful, brutal revenge.

These monsters had wanted the operatives to see them, know them as they died. He shivered. A blue hand that could toss aircraft and monsters in the woods with laser cannons large enough to kill two shiploads of men. He had a sudden desire to quit his job, and his wife was still unpacking in the small town house he’d been given as part of his incentive package. His daughter, now twelve, in harms way if these creatures could go where humans could not. He tried to imagine what he could say to her, the stories might be real after all Neva. The stories might be real after all.

(When I was young I lived in a fairly small town with one library. I read my way through every children’s book in that library including shelves and shelves of folklore and fairy tales from all over the globe. Clearly, they didn’t influence me at all. J)