by A. K. DuBoff
“So, I guess the neural link is sort of how you cheat at omniscience,” Alisha said.
Wes smiled. “Yeah, it kinda is, huh? Getting a feed from what the other pilots in the squad are seeing, so you can take action together, not simply based on what makes the most sense from your vantage alone.”
Jason swallowed the lump in his throat. “Yes, exactly.”
Shite. There had been a little crack there—enough that the most perceptive students in the group caught it.
“Let’s go over one more,” he quickly added, trying to sound more confident.
The conversation was less lively than those about the previous examples, but at least the content was valuable. When the discussion started to wind down, Jason dismissed the class.
Not surprisingly, Alisha hung back.
I can’t deal with her right now. Jason took a steadying breath, willing himself to hold it together long enough to get back to his quarters.
“Sir, are you okay?”
No! he shouted in his mind. “We have jobs to do,” he said instead. “How we feel doesn’t matter.”
“Except it does, sir. You told us yourself that our emotions color our perception, even when we don’t want them to. But a good officer knows how to acknowledge that and compensate.”
Fok, I did say that, didn’t I? He evaluated the statement and decided that it was still good advice, as much as he hated it right now. “It’s been a difficult few days. One of my best friends was on Alkeer.”
“Shite!” Alisha’s eyes went wide. “I’m so sorry. Why didn’t you say anything?”
“Because talking about it won’t bring her back,” he snapped.
Alisha took half a step back. “At the risk of sounding patronizing, sir, you also told us that keeping things bottled up isn’t productive in the long-term.”
“Thank you, Alisha, I’ll take it under advisement.” Jason walked away before he said something he’d regret.
In any other military-type organization, she’d have never been able to speak to a superior officer like that. But, as much as it pained him to admit, she was being as TSS as they came. Honorifics were rarely used between fellow Agents, and even between students and instructors they were mentioned sparingly. The TSS drilled into their trainees how important it was to have each other’s backs as people, beyond their responsibilities dictated by the chain of command. Alisha was observant and not afraid to speak up when she sensed something was amiss. She’d make a good officer one day.
Regardless of her well-meaning intentions, talking about Tiff with a student acquaintance wasn’t any way to go about healing. He’d need to dig a lot deeper to come to terms.
Being alone wasn’t going to help, though. Not with everything going on. He needed to recover quickly; he didn’t have the luxury of mourning on his own time frame.
He had people he could turn to. Tiff may have been his best friend, but she wasn’t his only friend.
Jason pulled out his handheld and typed out a message to Gil: >>Game night tonight? I feel like killing some bad guys.<<
— — —
There was too much work to do, but Wil had to step away and call it an early night. He couldn’t dismiss the magnitude of the events on his psyche, and he knew he needed to take the proper time to process the loss.
The people on Alkeer had been under his command. He had been in a position to order an evacuation or any other course of action that may have saved their lives. It didn’t matter that they hadn’t known the danger at the time; he still bore responsibility for their deaths, as much as anyone but the perpetrator. If anyone was to be blamed, it would be him.
No one would—at least not within the TSS. There was no reason for him to have given any other orders.
Saera sat with him on the couch in their quarters, offering what comfort she could. She understood better than most the parallels to what Wil had been through in the war and how those decisions had eaten him alive. This wasn’t as bad, but the similarity dredged up the past to make it worse.
“I keep wondering if I should have taken action sooner. Tried to talk to them,” he murmured.
Saera squeezed his hand. “I’ve watched the replay over a dozen times, Wil, and I wouldn’t have done a thing differently. There was nothing to talk to.”
“Still.” He hung his head.
“Hey.” She rubbed his back with her other hand. “Engaging sooner may have gotten the Conquest destroyed, too. I suspect they were going to take out the station regardless of what else happened. Dwelling on what ‘could have been’ doesn’t alter the present.”
“I know. It doesn’t change the feeling like we’ve been here before.”
“And, as we learned from that, sometimes inaction is the best action to win the bigger war.”
“It hurts all the same.”
She nodded and hugged him, bringing his head to her chest. “It does. But those feelings are what assure me we can trust ourselves as leaders. Though we may push back our emotions in the heat of battle, we feel every decision when the heat is off. It’s how I know, in the moments that count, we’ll make decisions we can live with.”
Wil took a deep, steadying breath. “Some decisions are easier to live with than others, despite best intentions.”
“No matter what, we’re in this together. Just like before.”
“I couldn’t do it with anyone else.”
“Me either.”
In these moments of doubt, uniting as a team was what kept Wil going. He never would have made it through the Bakzen War without Saera and his friends, and he needed to remember he wasn’t alone now, either.
Like in the war, they were at a disadvantage in firepower. Tactics and intellect were what got them to a place where they could make the final push. He needed to start thinking like a strategist again.
Dwelling on losses won’t save anyone else. With renewed determination, Wil sat up and started thinking through next steps.
“We have to get eyes on the enemy.” And they were the ‘Enemy’ now, not just vague ‘beings’ or ‘entities’. They’d attacked and killed his people. The fight was on. “We were trying to replicate the novel circumstances on the Andvari, but we should have taken the parameters and seen what other ways we could get the same result using more reliable means.”
Saera nodded. “I understand why you started with the Andvari’s research before, but now we know it’s not scalable. With what we learned from the scan data captured at Alkeer, we have more options.”
Wil threw out the previous assumptions they’d made about creating a transdimensional image capture of the enemy. “All right, though we know very little about these guys, it’s clear at least part of their essence exists in another dimension. We also know that they hate the use of Gatekeeper tech, which draws energy from another dimension. What do you want to wager that the two are connected?”
“Odds are good enough that I’m not betting against you on it.”
Wil’s face lit up. “I’m pretty sure we did a full analysis of the Gate sphere that opens the portals before we handed it back to the Gatekeepers.”
Saera raised an eyebrow. “Don’t look so excited.”
“Sorry, but we might be able to approach this as an engineering problem. That’s not only something that I can manage, but I actually enjoy.”
“It’s worth exploring,” she agreed.
“I don’t know what else to suggest. If this tech is what makes these aliens so angry, then maybe it’s the solution to interacting with them.”
Wil sent a quick message to the Engineering team so they could get working on a fresh analysis. After the instructions were sent, he sat back on the couch, deep in thought. “It does make sense, in a way.”
“What does?”
“The interrelationship between dimensions—how something seemingly innocuous here like the Gate tech could be wreaking havoc elsewhere.”
“Oh, this is going to turn into one of those conversations.” She settled in.
>
“Hey, we can either sit around here wallowing in misery or we can try to understand the enemy.”
“Since Option C of lounging on an Alushian beach is out of the question, continue.”
He smiled. “All right, bear with me. Obviously, we know there are many different dimensions, and what we perceive as ‘reality’ are the three physical dimensions plus the fourth dimension of time—collectively what we call ‘spacetime’. Though we don’t tend to think about it, we actually step outside spacetime whenever we do a subspace jump.”
Saera nodded. “That’s true.”
“However, we always remain closely tethered,” Wil continued. “The nav beacons serve as markers to confirm coordinates within spacetime. Even with the independent jump drive, the principle of using fixed reference points remains the same.”
“Right. The boat in the flowing river, as you so adorably explained it when we first met.” She smiled at him while sharing a reflection of the memory in his mind.
How far we’ve come since those awkward teenage years. Meeting Saera had been a turning point for him. She’d been a muse, in many ways—helped him work through a multitude of issues over the years, patiently listening to him ramble while he talked out problems, just like she was doing now.
“So, what if there wasn’t that tether? What if a being didn’t have those restrictions of spacetime?” he continued. “Those are the terms we need to think in with these higher-dimensional entities. They don’t have the same relationship with our reality that we do. To them, spacetime would only be a representation, in the way we might regard a two-dimensional drawing.”
Saera shifted on the couch. “It’s frustrating that, no matter what, we’re bound by the limits of our perception as natives to our perceived reality.”
“Such is the nature of our existence… There are immutable laws to spacetime. Even when we enter a subspace state, we’re just punching out of our spacetime into an encompassing super- manifold to bypass the restrictions of constants like the speed of light. But we still have that tether to our native reality, and limits. We can bend the rules a little when we’re in subspace. Nearly-space.”
Saera pursed her lips. “On that note, I always thought ‘hyperspace’ would have been a more accurate term.”
“Oh, don’t get me started!” Wil groaned. “That naming mess happened well before our time. Do you have any idea how hard it is to change something like that, once the public gets the idea stuck in their heads?”
“It’s all about the branding.”
“Isn’t it?” He sighed. “This is why I hate corporate shite. But anyway, my point is that for everything we take for granted in spacetime, there’s a representation of it in the lower dimensions, so the same would go for anything on the higher dimensions looking down on us. Consequently, under the right conditions, we can catch a three-dimensional glimpse of what happens on higher dimensions, such as that image taken when the Andvari was attacked.
“Sadly, that limited representation is all that we’re ever going to know about these higher-dimensional entities. While they can dip down into our perceived reality because it’s within the scope of their being, we can’t ascend to their dimension to experience them in their true form. Yet, despite being able to touch our reality—almost like a shadow of themselves—they can’t really appreciate what life is like for us in spacetime. Our perceptions are too different.”
Saera’s brows knitted. “That doesn’t bode well for building a relationship with these beings. Without being able to observe their full essence, we’ll never really know them.”
“Which is what makes trying to interface with them such a daunting task.”
“We have to try,” she said. “Our respective dimensions are intertwined, so we must find a way to coexist or they could simply stomp us out. The way we would crush unwanted ants.”
“Worse. More like erasing a stick-figure drawing. Or burning the piece of paper.” Wil waved his hand. “We don’t think about the individual molecules interacting in everything around us. Why would our lives be any more meaningful than that to a being of their power?”
“It’s wild to think about.”
“It is,” Wil agreed. “And it’s given me a whole new perspective on our own abilities.”
She cocked her head. “How so?”
“Well, we generally teach that telekinesis, telepathy, and the general skillset we call our Gifts are basically electromagnetic sensitivity. That’s a greatly oversimplified explanation, but the essence is that certain people have the innate ability to sense and manipulate energy fields at the foundational level.
“Now, I don’t know if it’s the same aesen energy that these aliens wield, but we Agents and others like us do have some form of connection to a higher dimension than spacetime. It’s the only explanation for us being able to do what we do. The enormous amounts of energy we wield has to come from somewhere. I’ve thought about it a lot, especially after seeing the tear left in the Rift after the war. It makes perfect sense. It’s why we always felt more powerful in the Rift rather than normal spacetime—it was blurred with a higher dimension, closer to that energy source we draw on.”
“All right, I can see that,” Saera said. “And I suppose that makes us transdimensional in our own way—three-dimensional beings riding the 4D time-wave.”
“Yes, though it’s more than that. We have a genetic predisposition to tap into the higher dimensions, and perhaps to the aesen itself. I believe our thoughts—or telepathy, at least—might even surf in the fifth dimension. It would explain why the exchanges are so fast.”
“That’s an interesting thought,” she said telepathically.
“Isn’t it?” He smiled at her and continued out loud, “So, it reasons that these beings exist in more than one dimension, as well. However, we have no notion at this point what they might call their ‘native’ dimension… though it must be much higher than ours, to wield aesen in the way they do.”
Her brows drew together. “All right, so if our Gifts are a manifestation of this higher-dimensional connection, then why are some people’s abilities more powerful than others?”
“No clue.” He shrugged. “There’s a genetic predisposition, obviously, but how does that biology interact with a connection to a higher dimension? I wish I knew. Could be that some genetic structures are simply more conducive to tapping into that extended aspect of our being. I don’t have enough verified information to offer anything more than speculation.”
“We do tend to take these abilities for granted. Most people would perceive them as magic.”
“Not understanding how something works doesn’t make it less real, but I know what you mean. I never thought we’d find ourselves face-to-face with something so reality-shaking,” Wil admitted. “The funny thing is, there are other little instances in our everyday lives that evidences our connection to an energy network on higher dimensions.”
“Such as?”
“Our bond is the most obvious example. We can feel each other even when we’re not in physical proximity. I think what people call ‘gut feelings’ or ‘intuition’ might be a manifestation of the same thing. We can sense when there’s a shift in the universal energy pattern on a subconscious level. Though the full range of Gifted abilities aren’t widespread anymore, Tarans and their subspecies always maintained that aspect of their higher-dimension connection.”
“The same could be said for everything in Nature, I suppose.”
He nodded. “I think so. It’s why you feel drawn to certain people or places or things. Their resonance with you just… fits.”
Saera wrapped her arms around her right leg and rested her chin on her knee. “That makes me wonder… You’ve spoken about your vision in the nexus, of seeing a vast energy web stretching through the universe. Is that the aesen, in some kind of structured form?”
He thought for several moments. “I look at it this way: the aesen itself is neutral. It is the definition of potential. The very existe
nce of the universe has a natural order to it, keeping everything in balance. That ‘energy web’ is a representation of the aesen comprising and connecting everything.”
“I’ve always liked that idea. The connections we feel to others, to our home. In the most tangible sense, our bond.”
“Exactly. But there’s also the flip side. When actions take the distribution of aesen out of alignment the universe finds ways to self-correct.”
“Like the way you dealt with the Bakzen.”
He couldn’t help wincing slightly at the mention of their name. “In a way, but that still came down to the actions of individual people. I choose to believe in freewill, that I made a conscious choice to fulfill my role, because I understood the consequences if I didn’t. But that’s not to say that our actions aren’t, in some way, influenced by forces beyond our understanding. Perhaps each choice that seems like freewill is the product of some greater cosmic scheme, where our decisions are swayed based on what’s needed in any given moment to maintain the alignment of aesen.”
“For everything good, there’s bad. For everything created, something is destroyed.”
“Maintaining neutrality. Balance.”
“And these beings that can control the aesen themselves? Then what are they?” she asked.
“Maybe the cosmic overseers—the last line of defense if the normal checks and balances don’t succeed.”
“What does that say about us if they have determined we should be eliminated?”
“One of two things: either we must become better, because we have failed; or they are acting purely in their own self-interest. Just because someone has authority, it doesn’t mean they will wield it in the right way. You know the adage about absolute power.”
“What if coming after us actually makes things worse?”
He shrugged. “That is the question, isn’t it? In either case, we need to do everything we can to survive.”
CHAPTER 15