The last space was like a ghost town in a Western: old, falling apart, little more than the shells of buildings on a dusty plain. In the middle of the town were square wooden frames, and tied to the squares with barbed wire were the shapes of people. Black shadows with no features at all, like a person had had all their skin had burned away and then been covered in dusty ink. They looked like they were in pain, being tortured like the shadows on the pyramids. First Squad approached incredibly cautiously, scanning every building as we approached the frames, making sure nothing was lurking, and stopped at the edge of the central square with the frames.
"These are seen in a number of spaces," Alay said. "Most notably on the Columns Rotation. They are one of the most dangerous of the Ionoth, and frequently reach near-space and sometimes real-space."
One of the shadows reacted to the sound of her voice, eyes opening to slits. And then a mouth appeared on the darkness of the face, out of nothing like the Cheshire Cat's does in Alice of Wonderland, but stretching up into the nastiest grin you could imagine. It was all light inside, the shadows burning white within. And what I'd thought was pain was a kind of exultation.
Then Maze set the entire thing burning, all the frames and the shadows on them. He was still enhanced, and called down a pillar of flame in an absolute Wrath of God moment, shocking me. First Squad, except for Mara who continued scanning the area for anything coming, all stood and watched in silence. It was pretty clear they hated these things.
"Most monsters my world are people," I said, feeling inadequate. "These memories of people?"
"Not anything I'd class as a person," Alay said, very firm and sharp for someone usually so quiet. "Time to head back?"
Maze nodded, and we went back through the same set of spaces, with Ketzaren pausing at every gate and enhancing herself before locking them as much as possible. Even though we'd just been through them all, First Squad stayed alert and ready for attack right up until we stepped back into real-space.
This time, an alert flashed in our mission display when we were being scanned. "You've got a stickie, Zee," Maze said, and she groaned and walked away from us to a corner of the box.
"Stickie is?" I asked.
"A very weak variety of Ionoth, but with an ability to conceal itself even from Sight talents. They're parasites, feeding off human hosts. When they're stronger, they can copy themselves to new hosts through physical contact, and–"
"Are a plaguish nuisance," Zee put in, arms crossed.
"If they're left too long, they begin to corrupt their hosts," Lohn added, grinning.
"They're removed using sonics," Maze continued, as if they hadn't interrupted, then gave Zee a sympathetic smile. "Also known as an Instant Headache Treatment. Hopefully the rest of us won't finish the day so uncomfortably."
We split up then. After missions, showers and rest are very high on First Squad's list of things to do, and I guess Maze gets to file a mission report. The rotations seem designed to last only a couple of hours, and there's never training or anything like that afterwards because it takes so much out of them. I showered, ever-amused by my nanoliquid uniform, and then grabbed some 'portable food' from the canteen and went up to the roof.
It's still night, but it was very clear and not too windy and it was nice to sit and watch the stars. I wasn't really surprised when Lohn and Mara showed up. They take babysitting as seriously as they do killing Ionoth.
"What's the attraction?" Lohn asked, sprawling down next to me. "Black, black, black and some stars?"
"The wind," I said, after thinking about it. "And there insects here – they sound crickets – insects from home. And temperature changes. And different smells."
"Not many would consider these things positive," Lohn said. "Besides, we had all that in Lights Rotation, didn't we? Except perhaps this chirping."
"Too busy being nervous enjoy."
"You hide it well," Mara said. "Maze wanted us to check how you're holding up to all this."
I like Mara for being very open about Stray mental health checks. She's a really straightforward person.
"Is awful," I said. "Killing things. Spaces very interesting, Ionoth horrible. Obvious." I shrugged. "But not overwhelm. First Squad not scared. Save panic for when First Squad is."
This made Lohn laugh. "Worse philosophies, I suppose."
"One night Muina, most scared ever," I said. "Been walk eleven days, sick eat bad fruit. Sleep on hill under mat made leaves. Something big walk up to me. Foot came down mat, right next head. Sniff me. Lay there listen to it. Then it go away. Lots panic. Watch very deadly Setari toast bugs easier."
They both shut up at that one, then Lohn slung an arm around my shoulders and squeezed tight. "You've a way of putting things in perspective. But you'll let us know if there's anything troubling you?"
"Sure." Since I'd succeeded in putting second level monitoring into perspective for myself as well, I thought about other things I could ask them, then said: "What Eighth Squad like?"
"Ah, you're due to do enhancement testing with them tomorrow, right? Well, Kanato's solid, very level-headed. Eighth is one of the 'big punch' squads, so we can expect some exciting damage to the test areas, I'd bet."
"Have decided long-term what do with me?"
"Too early. There's a lot of debate, and some competing interests. They won't have you actively working with the younger squads for quite a while, since having a talent set so increased and then reverting it might have a negative impact on them. In theory we're too old and wise to have our heads turned as badly." He laughed. "I gather Seventh Squad is not very happy with Eighth for being selected to test with you."
I drew my knees up to my chin. "Cloning legal Tare?" I asked carefully, and felt the depth of their silence.
"Cloning will not reproduce a talent set," Mara said eventually. "Kolar tried it not long ago, and although there's some pattern similarity, it seems that there's more to talents than simple genetics. Since they haven't found a way to make clones with an adequate lifespan, there's a ban on human cloning here."
But there'd obviously been 'a lot of debate' about quite a few things.
"Be really good way make me want be anywhere but here," I said softly. "That good thing to add today's report." And then, because I hated making First Squad feel bad, I added: "Six billion people my planet. Bet Cass not only one enhance skill. Hope they look harder for natural gate, get chance show First Squad my home."
Mara put a hand on my shoulder. "We'll do that. Besides, the real solution's the Pillars, not increasing our ability to kill Ionoth. You can be sure we'll be throwing all our resources into taking advantage of the stroke of luck your visit home brought."
It isn't necessarily an endless war. It's good to remember that.
Monday, February 18
Eighth Squad
It's a weird feeling to have a group of strangers all eager for me to show up. Or really eager to try out what their powers are like enhanced, anyway.
Eighth Squad is one of the Setari teams 'stacked' with high impact talents instead of being more all-round. They're not usually used for spaces that require close fighting: there's apparently some spaces where you don't want to go in and make things explode because parts of the spaces explode right back. Memories of oil refineries, perhaps. And there's some Ionoth that you have to kill by hitting them because it's a bad idea using psionics on them.
Eighth's captain is Ro Kanato. He tracked me down about half an hour before I was due to meet them, to introduce himself, show me the way to a new test room, and double-check my preferences for people grabbing hold of me. He kept making references to the rules which had been set up regarding my 'handling'. I'd love to be able to read these rules, and the reports and things filed about me, but though I've access to the public parts of the interface, there's an awfully large amount of the KOTIS network which I can't look at. I'd like to be able to look up more information about the rotations I'm assigned to before going into them. Although maybe that would be a
bad idea and give me nightmares. Hard to tell.
Kanato is about my height, with long black hair which he catches up in a ponytail, and he comes across as unfussed with a mild-mannered efficiency that turns mountains into molehills. I kept wondering where I'd heard his voice until I recognised it as the person who'd first spoken to Ruuel from Fourth when we returned from my 'excursion', just sounding considerably less surprised. He's not quite as correct as Zan, but all sensible and by-the-book, which kept me feeling less embarrassed than I might otherwise have been.
Test Room 2 is built for testing the high impact talents, divided into two by a massive amount of shielding, with the larger side full of angled walls of metal – targets – and the rest of Eighth Squad waiting on the 'safe' side of the shielding. Two girls and another three guys, all polite and professional, with an edge of underlying excitement. Kanato introduced them in the order they were standing: "Henaz, Kade, Trouban, Bryze, Hasen. We'll do a complete run of each skill set per person, starting with Hasen. Remember your instructions regarding contact. Anyone who fails to keep to the restrictions will spend the rest of the day on a training run."
Hasen was a tiny, bird-like girl with soft black hair cut really close to her skull, gorgeous dark brown eyes and darker skin than most Tarens. She stood before a hatchway which was the only opening to the other part of the test chamber and did the whole 'current strength' base level test first. Her primary talent is Electricity, and she shot a fat bolt of it at a target a third of the way down the long length of the test chamber. It wasn't like Lohn's Light bolts, which are short bullets, but a literal lightning bolt, stretching all the way to the target. It left her breathing deeply, and there was a sharp ozone scent in the air and if it wasn't for my uniform I think the hair on my arms would have been standing on end. The target made a thooming noise, and I watched through the thick, distorting viewport as some residual lightning played around the metal wall. There was an afterimage of it across my eyes.
"Now enhanced," Kanato said, after it had died down, and Hasen brushed the back of my wrist with her fingers. First Squad had decided it's better for the Setari to handle the contact involved in the enhancement because there's less communication lag, and they have far better reaction times than me. I was relieved that Eighth Squad had realised that they didn't need more than a slight touch to be enhanced.
I think she was aiming for the same target. It was a little hard to tell since instead of a bolt shooting from her hand this huge round ball of white appeared about a quarter of the way into the room, arcing and spitting and drifting slowly away from us. The noise and smell of it was incredible, and I turned away and covered my ears, but could still feel the vibration of each strike. It didn't last too long, fortunately, and died away to this stunned silence.
Kanato wasn't quite managing to hide that he was having exactly the same "Whoa" reaction which Jules would have to something particularly cool and unexpected, which all of them were having, I guess. But after blinking a couple of times, he said: "We'll target to the far end of the room in future, I think. Either of you experiencing any side-effects?"
I shrugged, and Hasen slowly shook her head. She looked so small and slight to have done so much.
"Re-test that at the far end of the room, then, so we can see if the result is the same."
It was. I did my usual weird things to Eighth Squad's talents, but again the distortion remained consistent whenever it showed up. Fortunately most only had three or four talents each, but I was still feeling hungry and tired by the time Kanato called it a day and sent me off to the medical exam they make me go to after test sessions. The medics couldn't decide whether I was feeling the impact of the enhancements or was just normally hungry and tired. Eighth Squad all looked exhausted after blasting all-out like that, so comparatively it's still a negligible impact on me. I did snooze for a lot of the afternoon though, and slept through when I was supposed to go jogging (too bad, so sad).
Even though Eighth is closer to my age, I'd rather stay with First Squad, given the choice. I know that Eighth Squad was being all business and distracted by excitement and whatever, but Kanato was the only one who said a word to me the entire time. They weren't being deliberately rude or anything: I think maybe they're not sure how I fit into this very structured world they've been raised to accept. Like they haven't been given permission to be social.
I didn't mind them, though. It was funny watching them being so excited and trying not to show it.
Tuesday, February 19
Maze Rotation
'Tsennel Rotation' actually, but tsennel means labyrinth/maze. I've found a proper dictionary, to supplement my vague injected one, and have taken to looking up words and trying to fix the real definition and making annotations to connect to English.
Breakfast was with Maze, Zee, Mara and Lohn, to talk about the day's assignment. Lohn, of course, thought it very funny when I said that in English 'maze' could be labyrinth or 'corn' if you just go by the way it's pronounced, though it was a bit hard to describe what corn was beyond it being a yellow vegetable. Or grain? The Taren alphabet is really strange with its 's', so I'm not entirely sure whether Maze or Mase is correct. They have an 's', but use it mostly at the beginning of words, and then they use this 'ts' letter a lot of the time, and there's an awful lot of 'z' when I would expect 's', like how they pronounce my name 'Caszandra'.
Anyway, Maze Rotation is what they consider a fairly tough assignment, partly because of its size and the need for close combat, and also because they've encountered new types of Ionoth there from time to time. Lohn was saying that the spaces we've worked in this week have been reasonably straightforward, and that now they were going to try me out in the 'weird and confusing' territories. The way he talked about it made me wonder if the spaces weren't so much the memories as the nightmares of planets.
"What toughest rotation?" I asked, as we walked to our assigned gate-lock.
"Unstables," Zee said. "Spaces which have moved up against Tare's near-space, but which we haven't encountered before. For everything else, even Columns, we know what we're going up against, and they choose which teams to assign based on that. If we sent Eighth into Maze Rotation, for instance, they'd kill themselves in the first few minutes. While Ninth couldn't handle Lights Rotation because you need strong ranged abilities for that mountainside. We can manage either, but at the same time neither is as easy as it would for a team with exactly the right talent set. It's been a big step forward, having specialist teams."
"How long, younger teams active?"
"About seven years, for Three to Six. Eleven and Twelve, coming up on one year. Thirteen and Fourteen will be made active in the next year. The aim is to have sufficient squads to keep the near-space clear, and increase exploration and searches for the Pillars."
It took me a minute to remember that a 'year' here was only four months. "How many Pillars are there?"
Zee lifted her hands, then let them drop. "We only confirmed three years ago that they truly exist. And, presuming that rotational space does realign, we're only just coming up to our first chance to properly examine one. The knowledge of how the things were constructed, and what exactly they're doing, has long been lost."
"Exciting days ahead," Lohn put in cheerfully, and then we reached our gate-lock and it was time for the mission to be officially logged and to call each other by surname and be all serious.
There were only two spaces involved in the Maze Rotation. The first seemed to be the inside of a house, all cramped walls and sketches of furniture and a shadow by a corner which might have once been an old lady. And then there was the maze.
It was exactly that: a huge maze of white stone covered in a climbing plant with small almond-shaped leaves. The walls looked to me to be really similar to the stone which the Taren and Muinan buildings are made of, so I guess it was a memory of one of those worlds, or another where the Muinans had gone. The walls were really high – twenty feet at least – and right above it the sky looke
d scratched and rubbed out. But there were clover flowers in the grassy paths below and it had an austere English garden feeling which made me like it despite it being dangerous.
"The walls have a resistance to talents," Maze said through the interface, once we were all through the gate. "Reflecting or dampening them unpredictably. We will be close-fighting almost exclusively in here, and keeping very near to each other. Avoid touching the walls; we've found that seems to draw increased attention from any Ionoth in the space. Follow Spel's lead, staying on her left, and communicate only through the interface."
I nodded, and he started off, getting even more focused. First Squad is always serious while in the spaces, but I could tell by how tightly concentrated they all were that they'd meant it about it being tough. Everyone except Mara made long blades out of their suits, the first time I'd seen anyone except Ruuel use that. I still hadn't figured out how to make any bits of the suit be more than tough rubber.
Staying on Ketzaren's left put me in the centre of the six of them, and I noticed that Lohn, on my left, had his blade on his left arm instead of his right. I was only just within arms-length of any of them, so that they could reach to keep up their enhancements without risking accidentally bumping me.
"Coming up, mark seven, twenty in," came Maze's voice over the interface. "Three rush."
Three rush apparently meant Maze, Mara and Zee would suddenly leap forward, while Lohn, Alay and Ketzaren closed about me and followed at a slower pace. We reached the corner just as something I couldn't properly see leapt off one of the walls at Maze. Maze, Mara and Zee all have the Speed talent, and unenhanced they move amazingly. With enhancement, they come close to blurring instantaneously from one place to another. Plus both Maze and Mara have Combat Sight, which so far as I can tell is an ability to detect attacks almost before they happen. The thing didn't really have a chance, in other words.
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