The Touchstone Trilogy

by Andrea K Höst

  I think if any of us have to wait any longer someone's head's going to explode from sheer stress.

  Monday, November 3

  Out from Underneath

  It's over.

  It's over and I'm not dead. Or trapped in a half-life or any of the things I halfway expected to happen to me. I've been quietly convinced for so long that I would end up dead that I can hardly believe it. Nor can anyone else, I think.

  There's a good deal of cautious celebration going on.

  Of course, I had to get through a lot of drama to reach this point. It started while I was still being a pin cushion in medical, when news came in from Muina that Second Squad had been lost.

  Not lost as in dead: lost as in vanished. They'd been in-transit through Kalasa, hauling a fresh batch of sacrificial drones (now produced in Pandora). They stepped on the platform to the town nearest to Oriath – along with a greensuit and two greysuits who had been with them – and didn't arrive at the expected destination. As totally gone as I'd been when I vanished to Kalasa. All the scanners stationed by the platform could tell us was that there'd been a higher than usual power reading. The greysuits were guessing that the platform's destination had been diverted. That Second Squad had been caught by the trap meant for me.

  There's a serious problem with using technology that your enemy understands far better than you.

  They'd been missing about an hour by the time we heard the news, and we had to sit through way too much debate over whether to try and use me to visualise the missing. I desperately wanted to, not only because I've grown close to Second, but I just hated to think of Zee and Ketzaren, who would both be going out of their minds. But I was also scared spitless that I would visualise them and they'd be dead.

  Before KOTIS was willing to risk a visualisation – particularly one which would require me going into the Ena – they sent every available squad out to scout multiple locations in near-space for any sign of Cruzatch, and then finally took me through a gate they don't normally use, with an escort of six squads.

  The visualisation at least wasn't difficult to do and I felt a good deal of relief not to be seeing dead bodies. Nils was looking very captainly, quite unlike his usual self, talking to Jeh while unpacking one of the drones from a pallet of them. Jeh was trying to wake everyone else, all lying about on the floor of a rather familiar-looking doughnut-shaped room. The inside of one of the Pillars.

  "The walls–" Halla began, and Kaoren said sharply: "Cut the projection!" and grabbed at me, but it was too late, and his hands went straight through me.

  It's a little hard to describe what happened, even after watching several different logs of it. I guess it was the reverse of what I did when visualisating Inisar. I was sitting on the testing chair we'd brought with us, looking at all the symbols burnt into the whitestone walls of the Pillar, which had shifted from glowing mildly to vivid white, and from my point of view just sort of overwhelmed everything I could see and swept me away like a tidal force. I really thought I was in the undertow of a massive wave. The squads guarding me saw me just fade away, as if I was one of my own projections allowed to lapse. And to Nils and Jeh, off in the Pillar, the symbols began glowing and I suddenly blazed into existence, being pulled backward toward the central column of the Pillar.

  Nils has Speed and excellent reflexes, and threw himself between me and the central column, which was a handy way to give us both a lot of bruises. I split his lip. The tidal wave kept trying to sweep me on, and he let out this low gasp of pain as he was crushed against the central column, but he managed to keep hold of me.

  I felt like a super magnet was pulling me, and Nils was just a bit of squishiness temporarily between me and where I was going. The pressure made it very hard to breathe and Nils was even worse off, with me crushing into his chest, and his enhanced Telekinesis useless because it won't work on me. Even with Jeh's help they couldn't budge me at all, and my arms and legs kept getting sucked backwards around him and going straight through the substance of the central column into the aether stream. All three of us barely had the strength to haul them back, and it was obvious that if Nils didn't let me keep going both of us would suffocate.

  "Get one – two – of the small drones," Nils gasped, then opened a channel for all three of us because he was barely able to talk. "Caszandra, open your suit and seal the drones inside it."

  This wasn't difficult to do, though it did make me look ridiculously like I was pregnant with very argumentative twins, and spider drones aren't exactly something that are fun to put inside your clothes. Fortunately the legs folded away in non-dangerous ways or I probably would have ended up a drone-kebab.

  Nils activated the drones, adding: "Sound your alert – it gives more people more ability to access your interface and suit controls," and gave me a little squeeze after I did, then with Jeh's help struggled out from between me and the symbol-covered central column. I promptly smacked into it and vanished, falling into a river of light.

  I've watched the mission log from back on Tare, where I and my projection had both vanished at the same time. Kaoren stays frozen before my empty chair for all of two seconds, eyes wide and horrified, and then goes totally captain, ordering everyone back inside at double-pace and asking Halla for her Sight impressions during the brief trip back inside. His voice was maybe a little more curt than usual, and his eyes nearly totally closed, but otherwise he didn't show any sign of his feelings. He says he couldn't let himself pause until he'd made sure everything he could think of doing was being done.

  Once back in real-space he was very absolute in his discussions with the bluesuits – though at that time he thought that I was trapped at the Pillar with Second, and didn't know I'd spent barely any time there at all. But knowing Second was at a Pillar, and with drones, meant they had a shot at finding them, since all the Pillar locations found so far open out into deep-space. Kaoren had a scanning ship which was stationed at the rift island sent into deep-space immediately to try and contact the drones, and then arranged for a second ship to take a mix of scanning technicians and some of the best Kalrani path-finders on a trip through to Muina. And the kids, because Lira has shown a marked tendency to speak to them, and the search would be coordinated from Muina.

  I can only be relieved that he did that – and that the weather was good so that they could fly quickly and weren't still in deep-space when it happened. Fourth and Eleventh travelled to the rift island via the Ena – a route which has been included in the regular rotations ever since I got myself trapped the first time – and they joined up with the scanning ship as it came back from its initial survey.

  There had already been a project underway to try and locate the Pillars from deep-space. They hadn't succeeded as yet, but then they hadn't had drones and squad sitting handily at any Pillar locations. Deep-space isn't a great environment for drones – the physics there aren't exactly helpful – but drones and ship instruments have a far greater range than the Setari. The scanning ship hadn't detected anything when it went in to hover around the rift entrance, but after returning to collect Fourth and Eleventh, they headed on the usual course to Muina, scanning madly all the way, and finally detected a signal just before the Muina rift. Whereupon Nils told them that I was no longer with them.

  Since they were inside the Pillar and relatively protected from Ionoth, Second Squad (bruises and aether-drunkenness aside) weren't in immediate danger, so the ship continued on to Muina to let them know I'd been taken, only to find out that this was old news.

  From the squads on Muina's point of view, they'd been continuing their search for Second Squad when I suddenly popped into interface range, deeply unconscious with my alert blaring away. Nils had dropped both our logs to the drones before letting me go, so they knew what had happened to me before I'd passed out. And they knew exactly where I was, too – right near the bottom of the Oriath installation.

  As soon as the Oriath team detected me, they'd accessed the drones, and withdrawn my nanosuit so th
at they could make a visual scan. The visual had shown that I was lying alone on a (symbol-etched) platform being busily unconscious. The technician driving the drones detected movement nearby and very sensibly didn't leave them sitting on top of me, but scuttled them down one side of the platform and tucked them as far out of sight as she could manage. She even powered them down to a ready state, and I gather that she's likely to get some kind of commendation for this, since the Cruzatch invariably destroy any drones they spot, and it was a group of Cruzatch which came and took me away – up to a room directly below the room holding Lira.

  After a suitable pause, KOTIS repowered the drones and did some cautious exploration of the lower reaches of the Oriath installation. The Cruzatch had taken me up, and one drone tried to follow and was promptly crushed on a ramp. The other searched down and found a particularly grand and magnificent series of sarcophagus rooms, ending in another malachite marble. Once it reached here, the drone was tucked into a corner and KOTIS Command had a fun argument over whether to have Palanty from Fifth teleport down straight away, or to wait. They didn't want to precipitate a countermeasure by the Cruzatch, and if they lost the drone's visual feed, it would be much more difficult and dangerous for Palanty to teleport down.

  And they didn't particularly want to blow the place up while I was still in it. Unless they had to.

  The eventual decision was to hold off doing anything until they'd broken through to the malachite marble in the last of the other installations. Isten Notra had stressed that leaving everyone one marble functional might create catastrophic stress on the spaces, so KOTIS has been shielding each marble against Cruzatch retaliation and planting bombs ready and waiting.

  And they were still waiting when Fourth brought news of Second's location. Fourth stayed on Muina, headed for Oriath, while Eleventh went back to trace a path to the Pillar where Second were stuck. KOTIS was already well into full battle mode, most of the Setari squads massing at Oriath, and two groups of technicians frantically trying to overcome the ramp of doom and work through the last of the shielding at a final installation up near the northern icecap.

  All that time they were trying to wake me up, but I was suffering from an extreme overload of aether and was totally non-responsive. Other than them finally breaking into the other installation and planting the second-last of the bombs, there really wasn't any progress until I did wake up – by which time Fourth was about two-thirds of the way to Oriath and Second had been recovered and had just emerged from the rift.

  Waking up was the worst thing.

  I was lying down and I couldn't move and I couldn't see. There were voices. The whispers.

  The whispers were still whispers, but somehow they were so loud, so dominant, that the large mass of people trying to talk to me over the interface were just noise. But then that noise dropped away and became Kaoren, just Kaoren, talking to me steadily, and very sensibly sending the words to me in text as well.

  Reading his words helped me hear him, repeating my name. And then, in some of the bare few words of English I'd managed to teach him: "Please. Need. Hear."

  That did start to shift me out of my groggy state, and I tried to turn my head and failed, discovering that the stuff covering me would only expand and contract a few millimetres, like strong elastic.

  The whispers started to build up, trying to drown out Kaoren, and that made me angry, giving me impetus to respond.

  "There's ten Cruzatch near me, and more somewhere down. I'm tied up and can't move my arms or legs. I think they've used the same stuff that net was made of," I said, struggling with the annoying rubberiness of it. "There's something over me making it too dark to see. I can hear the stones whispering. They're a little further away, but otherwise it's very like my dream."

  Although I held it together starting out, I sound openly terrified by the time I reached the end. And the log has helpfully captured my gasping breaths when Tsur Selkie told me they needed me to wait, to lie there and tell them if the Cruzatch went away.

  I opened a private channel to Kaoren and asked him to keep talking, and especially to keep sending it in text to reinforce the words, to tell me what had been happening. I needed that to keep back the whispers, which kept sucking at my attention, this steady stream of old Muinan, building a hierarchy of gods.

  It might have seemed like forever, but apparently it wasn't more than five minutes after I woke up enough to respond that until the Cruzatch in the room gathered together, then moved away.

  "They are going down," I said. "None left near me."

  "Tell us immediately when you can no longer detect them," Kaoren said, his voice shifting to measured captain-mode. "As soon as that happens, the drone will be activated so a team can teleport into the room of the power stone. We can't teleport to where you are, both because we cannot see the room, and because you're in the heavy zone. Once you're free, you need to move either down toward the power stone or up to the surface – whichever way is easiest. Once the teleportation group are in, I'm going to take you through a visualisation to help free you."

  "I can only feel a couple now," I said. "I – no, they're gone as well."

  "Good. We'll start the visualisation now."

  Kaoren began to describe a drone, a very solid, squat drone furnished with a vast array of cutting tools. It was his usual clear, concise description, and by that time I'd shrugged off more of the aether effect, but–

  "The whispering's getting louder." My voice was high.

  "Then concentrate, Cassandra." Kaoren's words were clipped, stern, the tone he only uses with me in emergencies.

  He continued with the visualisation, and I think I did succeed in making the drone, or at least there was suddenly a loud crunching sound right next to me, as if a solid, squat drone with a vast array of cutting tools was being compacted for recycling.

  Then Zee's voice, loud and abrupt. "Use her suit. Caszandra, we're going to cut you out."

  Nanosuits can be cloth, they can change colours, and they can make an edge sharper than steel. Lots of them, all over. Caszandra Scissorsuit.

  It worked too. While Palanty and Kajal teleported down to the malachite marble room with the last of the bombs and a round dozen drones to send skittering off exploring, my uniform grew dozens of blades, effortlessly slicing through the stuff holding me down. My hands came loose first as a technician cleverly manipulated the suit to slice as well as pierce.

  But the whispers had me.

  As I stopped hearing anything else, my vitals began climbing through the roof, and waves of distortion started rippling out: slow billows of heat which increased with every repetition. Not confined to the room either – they felt them at Pandora. For all I know, they felt them on Tare.

  Tsur Selkie ordered Palanty and Kajal out immediately, and recommended that the bombs be triggered as soon as they were clear. All they could do was hope that the malachite marble would be destroyed without much damage to my floor. Palanty and Kajal teleported, but then the next wave of heat and distortion rolled out and that one–

  Quite a few people have tried to describe to me what happened next. Maze says he felt 'thin', Zee that she was made of glass. Everyone on Muina had some variation of this: flattened, washed away, erased, frozen, unable to move, to think, to do. To trigger explosions. Kaoren says he felt painted. And all of them could see another place, a Muina where enormous statues stood above the cities to proclaim the reign of golden gods.

  I didn't feel thin, or made of glass. I felt like I was being cooked alive while my brain was pierced by a half dozen needles. My scissorsuit hadn't cleared away the covering over my face, but even through it I could see there was a bright, burning light directly above me.

  There was just enough of me left outside the brain piercing to be aware that they were going to blow the malachite marbles. I didn't realise the entire world had fallen into a pit of distortion with no way to dig itself out, and so I was pretty much lying there waiting to die. Which was pathetic of me, but it had
just felt so inevitable for so long. I was the Supa Speshul Magick Gurl who had appeared from nowhere and made it possible to win, but who had to die at the end so that the people she cared about could live on.

  Which would SUCK.

  Especially when I was the one doing the dying, and particularly when it involved being slowly roasted. If I was going to be blown up, I decided, I at least wanted to get away from the mega-sunlamp first.

  I wanted to not break my promise to Kaoren. I wanted to not have been wrong to let three children care.

  My body didn't feel quite my own, but I managed to lift a hand and flail clumsily at my face, swiping away the rubbery shroud. But the whispers were getting louder, louder, and I'm not sure if I would have managed any more if not for Lira.

  I don't know how long she'd been there, trying to push me off the altar. She was quite a sight to see, looking like a proper ghost instead of a little girl, with great streamers of light warping off her, being pulled toward this glowing starburst above where I was lying. Every time she reached out, her arms would thin out to light and be caught by the starburst, making it impossible for her to reach me.

  But she kept trying, and mouthed words I could barely hear: "You have to move!"

  The sight of her galvanised all the parts of me which weren't caught by whispers. Not to any rational, measured plan of action. No, my response could best be summed up as BAD LIGHT EATING LIRA! The amount of thought space I had left was definitely at Lolcat level. Which is probably why I decided that the important thing was to save the little girl who'd been dead for centuries.

  But it got me to move, to roll off the altar, trying to push her backward, looking for the quickest route away from the light. There was no door. That betrayal of expectation actually cleared my head a little, enough to realise that the burning sensation in my chest was at least in part because the air was really, really hot. Still focused on saving Lira, I grabbed her to me, and staggered drunkenly toward the corner of the room, trying to shield her from the light.