The Estarian didn’t like where this conversation was heading.
* * *
Twenty minutes later, Joel stormed out of the building with Maya in tow.
“Slow down, Joel…” she said, trotting after him – her shorter legs having to work twice as hard to keep up.
“It just makes me sooo mad!” he grated through his teeth, as they hit the street and awaited the pods.
Maya shook her head. “So what? You found they were hiding the profits, and paying them out as bonuses?”
Joel was scowling as he turned to look at her. “Exactly. I mean, it’s not technically illegal… But if you want to know why people are paying eight times what the cost of their care is, and going bankrupt in the process, this is why!” He pointed back at the building. “Andskotans grjónapungur!” he growled.
Maya tried to soothe him. “It’s okay. We’re putting a stop to it. You’re onto them; they won’t be able to do that, now that you’ve been in there. And if anything like that happens again, there’ll be hell to pay.”
Joel nodded with his hands on his hips, calming himself down. “You wouldn’t believe the bullshit I had to go through just to see a set of fucking accounts.”
Maya nodded solemnly. “Well, you can understand why they wouldn’t want you to see.” She paused, about to say something else when the pods arrived. They each jumped into their respective pod, and set their next meeting coordinates.
The conversation continued over the intercom. “I guess you could always sack the ones that are a risk?” she suggested.
Joel nodded. “Yep. That’s stage two… they understand that now. We’ve rewritten the company mandate, and I’ve made it very clear. Any deviation for their own self-interest is gross misconduct.”
Maya nodded, a smile on her face as she belatedly strapped herself into her harness. “Good. We’ll have this whole sector cleaned up in no time.”
Joel scoffed. “Yeah. If only. We still have a looong way to go.”
Chapter 12
Gaitune-67, Wilderness
“Okay,” Arlene explained. “So this time, you’re going to imagine that your awareness is a radio dial; and what you’re doing is tuning into different stations, when you imagine individual people that you know.”
“Uh. Okay.” Molly paused, looking confused. “But how?”
Arlene shifted on her mat as she explained. “Just like you were doing with your intentions, to tune into those different places that were presented to you. You’re just replacing the places, or the idea of those places, with the idea of a particular person.”
Molly nodded. Her eyes were swollen from crying the night before – and all night. Arlene was being sympathetic, but not letting Molly’s mood take them off-course.
“Okay,” Arlene instructed her mentee. “Off you go,” she said, gesturing to the rocky landscape where Molly had been trudging off to meditate for several hours on end already.
Molly felt numb. She picked up her sleeping mat and her water bottle, and seemed to be just walking herself through the motions; her emotional body not really present in her physical one.
Arlene watched Molly go, hoping that she hadn’t shut herself down so much that the exercise was going to be a bust.
She started puttering around the camp, and the next time she looked up to check on her, Molly had seated herself down on the ground again, and taken up the lotus position.
* * *
Molly brought her awareness to her body, and then to her breathing, effortlessly inhaling and exhaling deeper than she had been.
The previous night without Oz had been the hardest she could remember for a long time. She wouldn’t admit it to Arlene, but there were several instances in the night when she went so numb and still that her body didn’t seem to see the point in taking her next breath.
Molly felt somewhat comforted by the darkness behind her eyes now, as she started to tune in to each of her team members in turn.
First, there was Joel. He was easy to sense. She’d spent so much time with him, and they’d been so close - well, as close as Molly could be with another organic entity - that the sense of him was familiar. Comfortable. And easy to recognize.
She explored a little, tuning into different aspects as Arlene had suggested. What was he doing? She imagined he was actually quite cross right now. Someone had pissed him off; though she couldn’t see who. She checked to see if it was Sean – but she couldn’t sense anything that felt like Sean in his space.
So maybe not Sean. But something.
Then she looked for Oz. She waited. There was nothing.
Figures, she thought to herself.
What about Paige?
She searched, and was easily able to feel Paige. She worked through the exercise until she’d tuned into each of the folks at the base.
Then she stretched herself, as Arlene had told her to do. She took her mind to other places like she was wandering around in the darkness of her imagination.
For a long while, there was nothing. And then there were extraneous thoughts. And then she started imagining she could hear snatches of conversations. Voices, chattering away; voices she didn’t recognize. Languages she didn’t know. But there was a sense that maybe she had known them once. Like she heard the unfamiliar words, but somehow understood the meaning, if only her mind could concentrate a bit harder.
Then, out of the nothingness, she saw a blue face with the bony frill, just like the people she had seen on the planet the other day. Except this wasn’t someone she had met. She felt anxious; there was something familiar about it.
That’s just your temporal lobe overreacting, she told herself. It secretes a hormone that pegs memory, so you think that there is a memory associated with this image; but it’s just a protein floating around randomly.
Molly brought her attention back to her breathing, recognizing that her monkey mind was… well, monkeying around with her. She willed her mind to go blank, and in a second, she was back to trying to tune into whatever mysteries the darkness held.
Some time later, she felt something that she recognized. She wracked her brain trying to allow her mind to make the connection.
Where have I felt this before?
Her mind flashed to when she was writing her letter to Bethany Anne, and then to when she had been researching her on the dark web as a kid. It was the feeling she had when she thought of Bethany Anne.
Strange, she thought. She wasn’t intending to tune into her, but since she had, she may as well practice.
No control, though, Mollz… she told herself. Therefore, not really useful as an experiment, if you’re trying to convince yourself this shit is real.
Molly twitched as she tried to shake the scientific-her from her head. This was playtime. She was going to do whatever the fuck she liked now. She was Oz-less, sitting in the middle of a forsaken fucking rock. If she wanted to explore the thoughts around Bethany Anne, she was damn well going to do it.
And just as quickly as the initial feeling had emerged, it evaporated.
Molly sat patiently, willing it to return. She waited, tuning in and out of the darkness, waiting for another whiff of the signal.
After a while, feeling frustrated and bored, she brought her awareness back to her body. Her butt ached despite having used her sleeping mat to try and pad the ground. Her back ached from holding herself upright and still. Her joints were sore, and she had pins and needles in her right leg.
Okay. Fuck this for a game of soldiers, she thought, her spiritual-ness exhausted. She slowly pulled herself to her feet, and hobbled back to camp.
Arlene had been sitting, doing her own practice, having rearranged the camp and tidied up. When she heard Molly approaching, she opened her eyes slowly and smiled.
“How did it go?” she asked.
Molly shrugged, still hurting from having to switch Oz off. In fact, she realized, as she stood there, having to have another conversation with th
e woman, she was angry. She tried to put it aside; being angry isn’t going to solve anything, she told herself.
Molly explained her visions and the voices, and the different things she had noticed.
After letting Arlene absorb it for a moment, Molly asked her, “Was it really Bethany Anne I was tuning into? Or am I just being delusional?”
Arlene raised her eyebrows. “I’m not sure, dear. With practice, you will learn to calibrate – so you know what is construction and what is real, as far as we can know what reality is.”
She inhaled, her chest and shoulders rising with a tension that was unusual for Arlene. “However, if it was Bethany Anne, you can probably assume that you’ve managed to tune into the Etheric.”
Molly cocked her head. “The Etheric?” she asked. “What’s that?”
Arlene rolled her lips between her teeth trying to think of the best way to describe it. “Imagine there is a place from where those with the nanocyte enhancements can draw energy; like a different realm, but it has different qualities than the other realms you’ve been exploring.”
Molly was thankful for her years studying vector spaces and group theory. It helped her imagine the abstract dimensions that Arlene was alluding to. “So, you mean, I found her in the Etheric?”
Arlene nodded gently, clearly not sure of herself. “I suspect so,” she answered, chewing on her bottom lip now. “The thing is, there are probably only three people who have ever been able to access it in that way; but those who have learned to bring energy back from the Etheric – to heal, or to light explosions –have learned to travel through it physically.”
Arlene's eyes flickered with brief concern as she explained the last piece. She quickly covered her true feelings with her smile.
“But not to worry, dear. With everything you’re learning, if you find yourself accessing that realm, you’ll be able to back away from it, so you don’t accidentally pop into it.”
Molly had been thinking how she could practice getting into it, but Arlene’s words suddenly filled her with fear. “Why would I want to avoid it?” she asked.
“Because,” Arlene explained, now looking serious, “I don’t know how to teach you how to get out again. If you get lost in there, you may be trapped.”
Molly could barely process what she was hearing. They were discussing something she could hardly believe was real, and the layers of convoluted uncertainty were just getting to be a little too much.
Arlene jumped to her feet, and started busying herself.
“I think we need to go for a little drive and find more water. Then we can come back and do some more practice.”
Molly nodded absently as she shuffled her gear around, and put her sleeping mat back in her tent. This shit is getting weirder and weirder.
And all she wanted to do was talk to Oz.
Gaitune-67, Hangar deck, On board The Empress
There was an almighty thud, and then a groan along the length of the ship. Crash reacted immediately by checking his instruments in the prescribed sequence.
Something was off, but he couldn’t figure out what.
He fired again, and again; the blasters sent out projectiles as he expected, but a second later, the ship shuddered.
Something was definitely wrong.
There wasn’t time to figure it out, though. He had deployed the projectiles with less than 20 kilometers to spare ahead of the blast zone. He needed to pull up, and pull up fast. He yanked at the stick, and pulled the nose up – but again the whole ship shuddered.
“Emma. Report,” he ordered.
Emma’s voice came over the intercom. “Systems are desynchronized. Warp is at 40% resistance, and the weapons system has been taken offline.”
Crash searched his mind, trying to recall the protocol, while simultaneously trying to use his engineering knowledge to figure out what mechanism was screwed.
Emma’s voice came over the intercom again. “Alert. Hull has been breached. Losing pressure. Decompression of cabin in fifteen, fourteen…”
Fuckity fuck fuck! Crash thought to himself.
“Help me out, Emma. What the helvíti is going on?” Crash demanded.
“You’re screwed, Crash,” Emma announced calmly. “In ten seconds, your crew will all be dead. Five seconds later, you will be, too.”
The panic was rising in Crash’s voice. “What? Wait, no! There has to be something I can do! Emma, help me.”
He’d never been in this situation before: confused, and without a clue. He took risks, but he’d always managed to pull out.
Emma’s situation analysis came back, matter-of-factly. “It’s game over, baby.”
“No. Not possible.” Crash began flicking switches and trying to maneuver the ship less steeply to take the strain off the hull.
Emma reported back again. “No, you’re dead, Crash. You’re all dead.”
The alarms were at full volume, creating a din. The ship shuddered again and again, as an almighty explosion rippled through the cabin, and then through to the cockpit. Crash looked out of the main screen, watching the explosion he had created disappear from view as the unseen explosion ripped through The Empress.
And then everything went dead. The screens. The simulated explosions. The sirens.
Even Emma’s audio.
Crash sat there in silence, his sweaty palms still gripping the joystick, and his eyes still scanning the bank of now-blank instruments.
Several seconds passed as he realized he’d been sweating, and a bead dribbled down from his hairline. He took his stiff hands off the stick, and remembered to breathe.
Emma’s audio clicked on. “And that is what happens when you use the proton blasters after dropping out of warp, without first syncing with the forcefield.”
Crash hung his head in disappointment and exhaustion.
When he sat up, the fatigue was evident around his eyes. He tipped his head back into the headrest, cussing to himself under his breath.
“You couldn’t have just told me that?” he asked.
Emma’s video powered back up again. She shook her head. “Ah ah. We want you to be an incredible pilot; you’ll never make that mistake again.”
Crash knew she was right. He nodded, and prepared to take on the simulated mission again.
“No way,” she told him, shutting down the instruments. “You’re all done for a few hours. You need to rest.”
Crash started trying to override her control on the console. “’No way,’ yourself. I’ve got to get this right. I’m flying the return mission to the Zhyn Empire, and I’ve got to be ready.”
“And if you want to be able to retain anything you’re learning, you’re going to need to take a break. I’ll see you back here in no less than two hours.”
She powered down her video and audio, effectively dismissing him.
Crash sat there in the dark for a few minutes. He could try and argue, but the EI ran the ship. Besides, he knew she was right. He was exhausted – and he had just fucked up. He knew the protocol, and still he missed it.
He hauled his ass out of the pilot’s chair and stiffly stretched before taking himself out to the main cabin. He could potentially just rest here for a little while; but it would be better to go and connect with whomever else was around in the common areas.
He sighed as he headed out to the invisible steps, pinching his eyes between the thumb and forefinger of one hand. He stepped out, thinking about taking a nice hot shower, too.
Suddenly, he felt his right foot slip as he stepped out of the ship.
He wasn’t aware of what was happening. All he felt was the adrenalin shooting through his body, and then a thud as he hit the ground, and a dull, distant pain in his head as he slipped into nothingness.
Gaitune-67, Wilderness
Molly and Arlene arrived back at their camp, having found a well at the edge of a small property a few miles away. The exercise had done Molly good, and brought her
back into her body. She felt less resentful and less shut-down than she had that morning.
Arlene tossed two of their water carriers into the back of the truck, and Molly brought the third one over to the tents. Arlene followed her.
“You think you’re ready for another session?” she ventured.
Molly put her hands on her hips and smiled. “Yeah. May as well; not like there are any computer games to play out here.”
Arlene chuckled. “This is true,” she agreed.
Molly grabbed her mat and made her way back out to her meditation spot.
* * *
Not twenty minutes later, Arlene looked up, and saw Molly rushing back towards the camp.
“What happened?” she asked, seeing the anxiety on Molly’s face.
Molly was panting from the jog and the anxiety. “I need to get back to the base. Something is wrong.”
“Why, what is it?” Arlene pressed, watching Molly rush to pack her gear up.
Molly had started collapsing her sleeping mat. “I saw one of my team members on the hangar deck floor – and there was blood. I have a horrible feeling something has happened.”
Molly started dismantling the tents before Arlene really understood what was happening. Seconds later, Arlene had caught up, and the pair were packing up the truck.
With everything loaded up, they got in, and Arlene started the engine, and then they pulled away.
Molly shuffled in her seat.
“There was something else that was odd,” Molly said, locating her harness as they made their way across the bumpy terrain.
Arlene glanced at her. “What?” she queried.
Molly’s demeanor had relaxed somewhat, now that they were en route. She leaned her arm on the side of the passenger door. “I saw another vision; apart from Crash…”
Arlene glanced furtively at Molly before locking her eyes on the ground ahead of them.
Molly continued. “I saw the blue face again – the one that I recognized, but didn’t know. And there was a clear voice that sounded in my head, that my ears didn’t hear.”
The Ascension Myth Box Set Page 100