by Jean Johnson
Project Code-Talker had been moved up in importance; the Terrans were now mass-distributing communications satellites to every system via any ship that could carry the satellites and a handful of V’Dan-speaking Terran techs to get them in place and set them up without any of them exploding. More and more of the Salik seemed to be partially aware of what they were, in the sense of thinking they were nothing more than torpedoes, space mines; they steered their ships carefully clear, readjusting their angles of attack whenever approaching a space station, domeworld, or breathable planet.
Like this one . . . except the Salik hadn’t attacked this one much. Au’aurrran was a joint colonyworld, predominantly hosting the Solaricans who had founded it three centuries before, a large V’Dan population . . . and a nearly equally large Salik and Choya population. This world was an oddity in the war; within a day of word spreading on this world of the attacks by their brethren elsewhere, the Salik colonists had broadcast their independence from their motherworld government and pledged to reside in peace.
Anyone with any understanding of the planet’s geology could guess as to why: Au’aurrran had a series of underground seas and rivers that were thermally heated, ideal conditions for the Choya and the Salik, who preferred warm, wet worlds. Au’aurrran also had a treasure trove of useful minerals, plus precious metals and useful gemstones: malleable gold and silver, platinum and copper, brilliantly colored garnets, beryls, diamonds, topazes. Many caverns kept being uncovered as the inhabitants continued to explore, bringing back thousands of images of underground chambers filled with awe-inspiring crystals the size of skyscrapers.
This world was a haven for gem cutters and goldsmiths, tourists and more . . . underneath the surface. It also occupied the sixth orbit around its sun, making the surface bitterly cold in winter and barely tolerable for the Salik in summer, though the Solaricans found it merely chilly. Neither the Choya nor the Salik wanted to fight on Au’aurrran, and the Solaricans ensured it. The g’at-like race that had founded the world had made it quite clear to their first few Salik visitors many years ago that they could and would be shoved onto the surface and left to die of exposure if they did not get along.
The Salik had long memories. They did not forget that threat, and their settlers on this colonyworld had behaved. Li’eth did not expect them to forget the threat. He did not expect them to forgive it, either. No matter how many times the local Salik insisted they would not attack, he could not bring himself to believe them, and that meant he could not relax enough on this world to join the learning Gestalt behind him.
Lieutenant Commander Buraq came out of the side corridor leading to the refreshing-room facilities. Solarican and V’Dan biowaste facilities were designed along very similar lines, making it easy for them to simply share refreshing rooms; Tlassian tails required special seating alterations, and Li’eth had never wanted to know anything about the other races. Not after finding out in his history lessons as a premarked youth that the Chinsoiy “grew” their waste in a sort of crystalline aggregate. Originally, those had been considered quite lovely by the other races, until finding out why the Chinsoiy were so reluctant to sell the fragile lattices as artwork. A rather ignominious day for the Alliance when that became widely known.
“Still can’t relax?” Buraq asked, moving up beside him to enjoy the windows overlooking the snow-swept city. The V’Dan soldiers who had accompanied them down to the surface from the V’Goro J’sta as an escort force looked over at her but otherwise went back to lounging around, watching entertainment programs spooling off the local matrices. A few remained somewhat alert, including Lieutenant Paea, who stood with his rifle cradled across his chest, the muzzle aimed low. But only a few of the dozen in the hall. There simply wasn’t anything for them to do but lounge around and wait.
Li’eth shook his head, looking over at the Terran security officer. “There are over half a million Salik on this world. Nearly a hundred thousand live within a day’s travel of this city.”
“We were reassured they rarely come up to any of the surface zones,” she pointed out. “And this building has a shuttle bay on the roof. We can easily . . . get . . .”
She broke off, dark brows pinching together on her tanned face. Peering past him, she moved closer to the windows, trying to see something off to the side. Curious, Li’eth shifted as well, peering through the rising steam clouds and falling snowflakes.
“What are you looking at?” he asked her.
“Is that . . . smoke?” Jasmine murmured, squinting through the pane. “I thought I saw something explode, farther up the valley . . . I think your paranoia has me seeing things. It was probably just light flashing through yet more steam from the geysers,” she dismissed. “This city is so damp, I’m surprised the Solaricans don’t suffer from arthritis.”
Li’eth looked out across the rest of the ribbonlike city. “I’m told it’s a common complaint for anyone dwelling on . . . what . . . ?”
The tiny flash he had spotted down below and across the way turned into a gout of white and orange, far too thick to be steam, far too bright to be a normal source of light. It flared again, this time curling black with smoke around the edges.
“Saints!” he exclaimed, backing up a startled step.
Buraq didn’t hesitate; she turned and snapped orders to the dozen men and women either standing watch with their eyes on the entrances, or lounging on the benches of the narthex. “On your feet! Be alert! Someone get on the news matrices and find out what is going on out there, because we could be under attack!”
To their credit, they immediately scrambled to attention; three kept their display tablets active, and the others grabbed for their weapons. One of them started toward the center of the sanctuary. Li’eth quickly broke away from the window, stretching his strides to catch up to the woman. “Stand down, Corporal!” he ordered. “No one disrupts their session.”
“Pardon your Tier, Grand Captain, but if we’re under attack, we have to get the two of you out of here,” the corporal superior countered tartly.
“I will contact them,” he told her, and flicked his hand to dismiss her back toward the others. “Form a safety perimeter and let nothing through.”
“You’d better hurry, Captain,” Buraq called out to him, moving away from the window while Paea moved closer. “The faster we can evacuate, the happier I will be.”
“I was told these things must be done carefully, to keep from damaging all their minds,” he countered. “Now . . . let me work in peace. You find out what is going on out there.”
Moving to the edge of the cushion-strewn circle, underneath the great chandelier of tiny pinpoints of light, Li’eth eyed the curly-haired woman at the center of the quietly meditating group. There was no way to get to her without touching one of the others, for they all sat close enough to comfortably clasp hands, some furred, some smooth. Giving up, he found a spare cushion, dropped onto it, crossed his calves, and closed his eyes.
Calming his mind, he slowly, slowly opened his innermost shields to Jackie’s presence on the inner plane of existence, not the physical one. Let his awareness seep through her shields. Clearing his mind was not easy; he focused on thinking of himself as steam, supersaturated gas seeping into her awareness and condensing into view. He didn’t know how long it took for her to notice.
Eventually, she did. Slowing the whirl of information being exchanged, she reached out to him, wrapped him in a bubble that held him away from the others, and asked, (Li’eth? Why are you in here?)
(Danger,) he sent back, with underflavorings of explosion and fire and attack.
(Beloved, I know you’re feeling nerv— What was that?) she exclaimed, feeling her body rocking. Their bodies, hers, his, and the others’ as well.
Li’eth backed out of the mental plane far enough to hear shouting, which meant so did she. The words “. . . hangar bay exploded!” reached his ears, provoking another spike
of Danger! from him straight into her psyche.
Her reaction satisfied him. (Oh. Gentlebeings? We are going to end this here and now. Please visualize stepping backwards, until you step safely into your bodies—we will finish the language transfer later, meioa-e. We have a situation outside our heads, and we need to go protect our bodies. Visualize releasing each other’s hands and stepping back into your own bodies. Be calm when releasing physical hands, too . . .)
Li’eth stepped back with his mind and opened his eyes to the real world. The vast building vibrated slightly but rhythmically, as if something in the distance kept striking it with a giant hammer. Buraq stood near the columns delineating the border between sanctuary and narthex, snapping words into her communicator in that strange language, Man-dah-rin, that the Terrans used for private communications. Beyond her, Lieutenant Paea stood at the windows, hands cupped to the glass to cut down on the reflections from the lighting in the grand chamber. Here on the twenty-third floor, the biggest obstacles to seeing what happened anywhere else in the city were those reflections, wind-whipped clouds of steam, and the now-thickly-falling snow.
Seeing the various holy ones starting to blink and stretch and move, the corporal superior rose from the padded bench she had borrowed during her wait. “Is everyone awake?” she asked the group, her tone brisk and tight with anxiety. “Yes? Good! The city is under attack. We have to get out of here and find a safe place.”
“I heard something about the hangar bay?” Li’eth asked.
She shook her head, her short, purple-streaked pigtails sliding across her red uniform coat. “I’m sorry, Grand Captain, but someone’s been launching missiles at all the hangar bays. Our shuttles are half-damaged and blocked by the debris. We’re going to have to find another way out of here.”
“How long was I trancing?” Li’eth asked, alarmed.
The corporal looked down at her chrono and shrugged. “About . . . sixteen mi-nah? It’s probably a good thing we didn’t leave since we might have still been boarding, or just taking off, and been a tempting target. The V’Goro J’sta—”
The glazed windows two dozen mitas away exploded inward. Lieutenant Paea tumbled and crumpled, flung off his feet by the sheer force of the blow. Li’eth flung up his hand, ears ringing from the concussion, but Jackie was faster, flinging up her mind in a wall of force that stopped the pebbled shards in their tracks. Bits of window glazing pelted off the cringing back and side of Lieutenant Commander Buraq, just a body length beyond that wall.
She turned to look at the bloodied streaks of Paea’s path across the floor—and whirled, lunging behind the nearest column for cover as a metallic bulk roared into the great gap made in the formerly beautiful windows. Seers and priests shrieked and scattered, and the Imperial soldiers on either side of the opening yelled and opened fire, adding searing laserfire to the confusion of sights and sounds. Lieutenant Johnston drew his sidearm and hurried forward, only to quickly duck behind a pillar as well when the invader returned fire.
One of the few Seers who did not flee for cover snarled in a mix of V’Dan, Terranglo, and her native tongue, something about the bastard being enclosed in a mechsuit, keeping the damned amphibian warm instead of freezing to death.
Freezing to death . . .
One of Master Sonam’s lessons came back to Li’eth now. “. . . The laws of thermodynamics are not broken with pyrokinesis; we expend some of our own energy to ripple lightwaves and agitate molecules elsewhere. We don’t know what kind of energy, precisely, other than kinetic inergy, of course, nor how we can reach across a distance and seemingly manipulate things indirectly . . . but because we are not hampered by matter when we do so, a pyrokinetic can also be a cryokinetic, someone who removes heat by moving it elsewhere. So you will learn to light this birthday candle over here, by shifting the energy from that piping-hot cup of water I just boiled in the microwave, there.”
(You have an idea?) his partner asked, wincing from the flash of light and sizzling sound shooting out of the little turret-guns on the shoulders of the mechsuited alien. Like the soldiers, her aura was considerably stronger, calmer than the panicked splashes and streaks of the fleeing psis. Scared, but determined. (If you do, do it! I don’t know how close he needs to be to stun us all!)
The V’Dan nearest the Salik warrior were indeed dropping unconscious, considerably more vulnerable to stunnerfire than their attacker was to laserfire, lacking protective armor of their own. Johnston, caught in a moment of sheer bad timing, crumpled to the floor unconscious, his gun tumbling free from his slack fingers. Buraq whipped around the corner of her own pillar and shot at the machine-clad alien, three fast, well-aimed shots . . . that ricocheted off everything, though it did crack that faceplate. The armored marauder tried shooting back at her, but she ducked behind the broad, heavily carved column again before he could turn the nearest gun turret and fire.
Li’eth needed to concentrate, not gape. Squinting, he focused his inner vision, trying to twist his aura-reading abilities into something that could sense thermal energies instead of emotional and psyche-based ones. Trying to look through the matter, to the energy states that charged each particle.
The Salik swirled with shades of vicious red, triumphant turquoise, frantic gold. But beneath that . . . it was difficult to find the right viewpoint under pressure. Li’eth had not practiced this twist on his aura-vision recently, though he had tried it several times under Sonam’s supervision. It was more of an awareness than a literally visual thing like his aura-reading, so he bent his thoughts to his awareness of where heat would be located, to help him focus. The narthex beyond Jackie’s telekinetic wall had lost much of its heat out the shattered window, forming a sharp temperature differential. Buraq and the unconscious soldiers made brighter spots, including the barrel of her pistol and the scorch marks from the laser rifles. The Salik, however . . .
Inside the winter-chilled skin, the fully enclosed environment of the combat suit “felt” toasty-warm to Li’eth’s inner senses. Breathing deep, in and out, he pictured his mind becoming one with the thermodynamic energies. Saturating it with his strength much as he had saturated Jackie’s innermost shields. Becoming one with the heat.
Something exploded in bright-hot golden heat from the alien’s armor; it exploded a second time in sharp red kinetic impacts immediately afterward. His eyes were closed, so he didn’t see the actual attack, but his ears heard Buraq scream. Li’eth gritted his teeth, wrapped his senses throughout the whole suit of armor, and signaled a subthought to Jackie that he was about to pull. She reached out to him, joining some of her strength to his—and suddenly, he felt like he was at the head of a tugging rope, with himself, her, and the Seer who had remained with them in the heart of the sanctuary. (. . . Three . . . two . . . one . . . PULL!)
Heat seared the air in a billowing line between them. Li’eth quickly bundled it up inside his shields, not wanting the others to be scorched. Unsquinching his eyes, he held himself still, not daring to move in case he lost control of the thermal energies. The Salik warrior . . . did not move. Could not move. Even as Li’eth stared, the dark alloys of all that carefully jointed armor turned lighter and lighter . . . literally frosting over from the moisture in the air hitting the superchilled statue he had just made.
A moment later, he watched in dawning horror as the alien’s aura finished stuttering and snuffed out. A strange emptiness filled the space where the Salik technically stood, a cold that had nothing to do with cryokinesis, thermodynamics, or any normal, rational science. His first kill via his holy skills . . . He had killed someone with . . .
(Snap out of it!) Jackie ordered. (I’ve done it, too, and it’s not pleasant, but there are more coming, and Buraq’s down, possibly dead! I don’t even know about Paea . . . The rest of you get back in here!) she added in a wider telepathic sending. (We have injured people in here!)
(I . . . I think I can convert this to kinetic inergy,)
he muttered, moving forward carefully, step by step closer to the lieutenant commander. The damned bastard had blown up the column, sending her bloodied and sprawling with chunks of stone and metal all over. Stone, and metal, and blood. (But it’s all I can do to hold on to all this thermal energy. I can’t heal her without fearing I’d just scorch her.)
(Don’t bother; we have enough biokinetics coming back out of their hiding holes. I’m moving the kinetic shield up to the opening. Go get near the window and see if you can see what’s going on out there,) she ordered. (If it looks hostile, fry it.)
(I can definitely do that,) he agreed. Already, sweat beaded on his skin, the air directly around his body quite warm. He compressed more of the energies, pushing on all sides until it formed an oddly glowing ball, faint dull red, like tungsten heating up. (Maybe I’ll get lucky, and— V’shova!)
He lashed out with the heat-ball just as a new mechanized, tentacle-limbed enemy roared up through the opening with thrusters blasting full bore. The thermal packet scorched the mechsuit with a bang that rattled the remaining windows in their panes. This time, much more sure of his attack, Li’eth sunk his mental hands into the teetering alien, and yanked hard and fast. Frost hissed across the armor. That snuffed off the suit’s energies, toppling it out the window and dropping it far out of range before he could sense the swift death of its occupant.
Lights danced around him, golden instead of bluish in hue. Flames, he realized. Flames on his hands, his arms, even his hair from the feel of the fine strands starting to flutter. It did not burn him—it was under his conscious control—but the others, the Solaricans and V’Dan who were returning from taking shelter in the two side halls off the sanctuary, slowed and gaped at him. Moving forward, he left Jasmine and Simon to Jackie to check. His place lay at the gaping hole in the outer wall . . . which he blocked with a telekinetic wall since he had more than enough energy to spare, now.