Spinward Fringe Broadcast 11

by Randolph Lalonde

  Minh-Chu nodded knowingly then turned to Jake. "Welcome home, surprise!" he said with a chuckle, his voice low enough so he wouldn't startle Laura.

  Jake laughed and nodded. "Best homecoming I can remember." In a moment's reflection, he realized that he'd never had two that were exactly alike. Every time there were changes. Whether his returns came with more good or bad news, it didn't matter, there was always catching up and adjusting to be done, but he was always happy to be back.

  Sixty-Nine

  Of New Minds

  * * *

  The meeting was stated in Alice's command and control unit. It wasn't marked as mandatory or optional, it was marked as fact. At oh-six-hundred she would be in Observation Room Six Three One Four. Theodore met her on the way. He knew his report would piss her off, it was written on his face.

  Alice's stride didn't even stutter; he had to fall in step with her. "They have me on two weeks minimum leave. I won't be allowed to go on duty unless that invasion actually happens. That means the Clever Dream is down, my team goes into standby with Gabe taking over as leader, and if nothing comes up, they're in training starting at the end of week one. After two weeks, I'm on standby for a month with no assignments outside of the Haven System."

  "I am looking out for your overall health. You've taken a lot in stride, there have been so many changes, but you've taken almost no time to adjust," Theodore replied apologetically.

  "You barely know me; how can you tell what I can and can't handle?" Alice retorted, guilt nagging at her over the snap.

  "I see the signs of too much stress for too long. You're quicker to anger, letting emotions factor into command decisions and combat acts, and then there's the suffering you endure at night, when you're trying to sleep. These are signs that you're trying to cope, and I can see that being under so much pressure is getting in the way. All this while your personality is still highly malleable. The worst thing about that are these telepathic encounters you've had. According to the Lorander psychological information I have, engaging in these violent contests of the mind could leave your core personality scarred and your potential for personal development severely limited."

  The most annoying thing about Theodore's justifications for concern was that he was almost certainly right. Alice couldn't know for certain, but he could. "You should have talked to me first," was the only counter she could offer other than screaming and wailing and kicking her feet, which she wanted to do anyway, but there was no way she'd do it in the command section of the War Forge or in front of Theodore. Well, maybe in front of Theodore, just to freak him out.

  "If you saw me pulling memory from my chest and damaging expansion ports, would you take me aside for a chat, or turn me off?" he asked with surprising conviction.

  Alice stopped and turned towards him. They were a few steps away from her destination. "You're getting too good at arguing," she said, sighing. Alice deactivated her armour, parts of it fell off, too damaged to fold into a jacket.

  Theodore picked the pieces up. "Thank you?"

  "In a week or something I'll probably thank you for getting me to take a breather if we aren't under attack. I’m not there yet though, okay?"

  "Okay," he said. "Do you want me to take the rest of your armour to recycling, what's left isn't effective."

  Alice gave him the jacket and boots section, glad that her vacsuit was able to make soles and draw an edge around her feet to make it look like she was wearing shoes. "Someday you'll get tired of taking care of people."

  "Only if I'm not needed."

  "I'll see you when all these meetings and briefings are done, okay?" Alice said. Her frustration at being put on leave was still fresh, but her irritation with Theodore had almost completely melted away. He was only doing his job. If anyone was to blame, it was her for putting him in that position.

  "Oh, good, I thought I'd have to put in a request for quarters."

  "Never going to happen, Theo," Alice said. "Unless you want a break from my drama."

  "Your drama is amazing," he replied. "I'll see you later."

  They parted ways, and Alice turned to watch him finish walking down the dark hallway before she sighed and pressed the button beside the double doors leading into the Observation room. They parted, allowed her through and closed the moment she was clear. Terry Ozark McPatrick stood in front of a completely transparent wall.

  Sections of heavy hull plating were being held away from a thick frame as the War Forge's fabrication arms and worker droids worked on robust looking thruster and beam systems. They were actually looking at live construction, this wasn't a digitally created vista made to convince whoever was in the room that they were adjacent to a manufacturing line aboard the War Forge.

  Oz turned and smiled at her, his uniform jacket marked him as a Commodore. "Thank you for coming, Alice," he said. Unlike the last time she saw him, he seemed approachable, well.

  When she started towards him, her intention was to shake his hand, but it flowed naturally into an embrace, like an uncle greeting his niece. "How are you?" she asked.

  "I was demoted two steps," he said. "My legal representative told me I should expect Rear-Admiral temporarily while I waited for the panel to convene, but they busted me down to Commodore because I told them to skip the panel."

  "You plead no contest to the charges?" Alice asked as they parted.

  "Aye," he replied, his manner still pleasant. "Considering one of the charges involved murder, I'm not surprised. If Anderson was part of the decision, I probably wouldn't have been dropped so far, but I'm still in a place where I can do some good. I've asked to take over SOCU. I'd like to rebuild the Special Operations Combat Unit. They'll let me have it, Sawyer will be reassigned to a carrier. It's a better assignment for her."

  The thought of working under Oz never occurred to Alice. Imagining him as the new leader of the Special Operations Combat Unit was exciting. "You're going to have to do without me for a while, boss," she said. "But I can't wait."

  "Good," Oz turned towards the view. "It's going to be an interesting crew, but you'll have a lot of time to get used to it while you take some time off. We're both on leave for two weeks. Your medic, Theodore, writes one hell of a report."

  "I can't wait to read it," Alice growled. "I'm not allowed to do any heavy lifting for six weeks, mission-wise."

  "Considering what you were trying to do out there with that Geist, I can't disagree with him. Neither of us are ready for the kind of telepathic work we were doing. Haus Geist did his best to train me while we were together on the Triton, but what you were doing takes years to learn to do properly. The kind of fight you were doing can scar both you and your opponent."

  "Theo told me all about it," Alice said, turning towards the transparent wall. "It's all old science to Lorander."

  "Lorander doesn't understand Geists," Oz said. "When you were fighting this one today, I was able to look right into your mind. There were no defences against me, you didn't know I was there at all. The Geist did. As soon as you let him go, he fled because he knew he could survive you since you were fighting out of fear, but it didn't know what to expect from both of us. When I told them there were three Lorander telepaths on the way, that was all it needed to know."

  "I was not fighting out of fear," Alice said, at the same time trying to clearly recollect what that battle was like, whether or not it was true.

  "All your willpower came from primal instincts, fear being the most powerful. I wasn't the only one listening in. Lorander telepaths who were on their way but too far from you to help could feel it. You were powerful, but you weren't controlled. You were fighting with a sharp knife, but it was all double-edged blade, no handle. Even when you were winning you were hurting yourself."

  Alice's head still hurt, even though the medication made the pain seem distant. "I'll learn."

  "You could," Oz said. "You should, actually. Find a Lorander trainer to help you defend yourself if a normal telepath tries to get into your head. Fighting G
eists, that's a discipline that will either require a Geist like Haus, or a decade or two with Lorander trainers. That's if you don't want to burn your memories out, eventually turn into a vegetable."

  Alice watched as a thick arm lowered one of the ship's main starboard hull plates into place. "What about you?"

  "I'm not much different. Haus Geist found some telepathic potential in me, so I'm training, but where Geists are concerned we're the same. I'll be able to block one out like you could after some training, there's no way they'd get in, but fighting is dangerous. The wrong Geist or too many of them at once could burn me out in seconds. We'll always be a major problem for Citadel, though. I can tell you where a Geist is hiding within a million kilometres of here if one came into the system. They have a telepathic shadow that triggers our fight or flight instincts more than anything else. That is a huge problem for them, especially since they can't sense us unless we push back when we feel them nearby, when we feel them try to read us."

  "So, if I sense a Geist and it's trying to get into my mind, it doesn't know I'm there unless I counter?"

  "Exactly. We are invisible to it. The reason why we feel them at all is because they're reading the surface thoughts of everyone around us. It's their first strategic advantage. That's why the fleet is working hard to develop passive suppressors. The ones we have right now don't get along with cloaking devices."

  "As in, they give everyone a way to find them when they're turned on," Alice said.

  "Right. So, what do you think? Are you going to join a group of Lorander telepaths and work on your abilities full time, or are you going to stick with SOCU?"

  "Is it really one or the other?" Alice asked.

  "I won't let you stay in my unit if you plan on fighting Geists. Pointing them out, keeping them out, sure, but I couldn't live with myself if you had your mind wiped or destroyed. Not after everything you've gone through just to be here, just to be alive."

  When Alice thought of her experiences with Geists, the first memories that came were of the pain they could cause. The thought of it made her cringe, what he said made sense. The knowledge that she'd never be an actual telepath was always there, and she'd already decided that being able to block people out was enough, how was making the decision where Geists concerned much different? "What if I counter-attacked a human? Am I facing the same risks?"

  "Ask an expert," Oz said. "But according to what I know, no; humanoid telepaths who aren't engineered are different. Still, I can't tell you for sure. I don’t know enough."

  "Looks like I'll be hanging out with some creepy Lorander people," Alice said. "So I can learn more about blocking, and stay with SOCU."

  "I actually thought you'd be joining the monks for a second there," Oz said.

  "Gotcha," Alice chuckled. "Guess I'll have to enjoy teasing you while it lasts."

  "Oh, the telepathy? I won't be able to master that for a long time, a decade, probably more. You'll have a lot of time to pull my leg. Just don’t do it in front of anyone else in my command."

  "Deal," Alice said. "So, which ship is this?"

  "The Merciless," Oz replied. "Your father's ship. No one's seen anything like it. It took a lot of failures, and some research, but Ayan finally got everyone working together and now we'll have ships that use technology from every end of the galaxy. Everyone in command is holding their breath, praying that what we've seen in testing bears out." He shook his head. "But there's no need to watch them bolt it together when you have a family waiting for you."

  "Meeting's over?" Alice asked.

  "Adjourned," he agreed.

  She turned towards the door and started walking. "Are you coming?" she asked as it opened.

  "You go ahead," Oz said. "I have some thinking to do."

  Seventy

  Carnie's Tale: Reprise

  * * *

  It wasn't like any place Noah Lucas had seen before. The directions on his command and control unit marked it as the Launch Room, a play on words he didn’t expect in such a well-armed or generally serious military star base. It was new, open for one day, and as opposed to the rest of the halls and rooms he'd seen, every surface was softened with a special walking surface under foot, matte wall covering that had a velvet feel, and yellow lighting from above.

  The wall across from the door and to the left were completely transparent so people on all three tiers of the place could watch as ships emerged from the front of the War Forge. The overall mood was high, everyone seemed pretty happy to be there. He wondered what it would look like when the news of the impending invasion got around.

  There was a bar running through the middle of it with plenty of gaps for people to walk between the sides of the space, food dispensers along the walls and plenty of tables to sit at. It was where Theodore's message said to meet him, and he was looking for the only person in the place without a uniform, expecting it to be him.

  He half expected his friend to still look like his mechanical self, and that was quashed the moment he saw a gentleman smiling at him, walking from the end of the bar. "Theo?" Carnie asked, excited, surprised. He was wearing a jacket marked with a red stripe going down the shoulders and arms, the letters S.O.C.U. on his chest under a red skull.

  "Yes, how are you, Noah? Perhaps you'd rather be called Carnie?"

  "No, man, that's all right," Noah said, hugging him enthusiastically. "I'm sorry I left you behind, I thought it would be a quick trip then I could use my pull to get you in with a fleet technician. You did all right, though, wow, I really didn't know it was you."

  "They did an excellent job repairing me, and please don't worry about leaving me behind. I know you didn't have the means. I found us a table." He said, gesturing towards the side of the lounge.

  "Man, I thought about you all the time while I was out there. I can't tell you how many times I thought; 'I wish Theo was here to see this,' and you've gotta meet Minh, he's, well, he's Minh."

  "Meaning that he's unique, one of a kind," Theodore said with a smile. "I found myself thinking the same thing about you. I've seen a lot since I was reactivated and repaired. I'm a citizen now." A card emerged from his chest, the vacsuit parting just enough to let it come through.

  Noah accepted it, realizing that he was holding a real Haven Nation Citizenship Identification Card. "You have seen a few things," he said, handing it back. "Congratulations, man. I don't know what to say."

  They sat down, Theodore taking a moment to look at the ship having its plating bumped and checked. It was a severe looking warship unlike anything Noah had seen before. "I like watching the War Forge work. They say that her artificial intelligence is emotionless, but when I watch it put something together sometimes I see an artist's flair in how it goes about printing and building." He looked to Noah and smiled a little. "I'm sorry, I'm trying to share more of my random musings, it's something humans and other social races are encouraged to do when they're developing socially."

  "No need to explain," Noah said. "I can't get over this place, or you, so if I go quiet it's because I'm stunned. So, what happened to you? Who picked you up and dusted you off?"

  "Oh, that's a good story," Theodore said, a little excited. "I was activated by Alice Valent and Iruuk Murlen. They cured me of the virus that made me attack you. I'm sorry about that, by the way."

  "No worries," he said, reeling from the name he just heard. "Alice Valent, Captain Valent's daughter?"

  "Yes, and I have to wonder what he'll think when he finds out she's a captain as well, but we're getting ahead of ourselves."

  "An admiral and two captains. That has got to be an interesting dinner table," Noah said.

  "We'll probably find out."

  "What?" Noah asked with a chuckle. "Okay, okay, start at the beginning. Alice got you switched on and cleaned up. What happened next?" Over three Salojin Ales and a full meal of broccoli, string beans and chicken, Theodore told him all the unclassified details of his time with Alice Valent so far. In the company of the best friend he ever had, th
e dark days he knew were coming seemed a little lighter.

  Thank You and Contact Information

  Thank you for purchasing and reading Broadcast 11: Revenge. Watch for Spinward Fringe Broadcast 12: Invasion coming later in 2018. Here are a few ways you can reach me and other readers:

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