Descend- Seeing Stars

by Sean Oswald

  When he walked into what had likely been intended as some sort of storage area, he found Cluster 2 gathered around his six fuses as a heated discussion was ongoing. He activated the Veil ability that he had gained from Daphne which helped him to stay hidden from the others.

  “You can’t just hold us here,” yelled a tall, slender Chinese woman.

  Trina calmly responded, “We can keep you here for as long as it takes to decide that you aren’t our enemy. Your leader and that one attacked us and tried to kill one of our team.”

  “Li Wei paid for his mistakes with his life. I was there. I saw your precious leader murder my husband. I am just grateful that my children were too young to see it happen,” the woman countered.

  In that single instant, Jay’s entire plan changed. This was an enemy. No matter how much he might want to protect all of humanity, his first commitment was to Team Jay. Worse, this was a woman aggrieved and her children or any other children that Li Wei had fathered might grow up someday to believe it was their responsibility to get revenge for their father. History was filled with examples of the same.

  Still, he didn’t say anything. He did telepathically let all his fuses know he was there. Then he scanned the area more thoroughly. His PSI sight caught tendrils of energy flowing off of one of the women in the back. She was Malaysian if he had to guess, very petite and wiry in her build. Whatever energy he sensed coming off of her kept twisting and turning to his senses as though it was trying to escape detection.

  As he had before he combined Hyper Accuracy and PSI Sight to sense more accurately. Then he realized what was going on. This woman was putting off a dampening field of some kind. It seemed to affect sensory skills only but for all that Jay knew it could be used to dampen or even prevent the use of other types of skills. It became clear why he had not immediately detected that his fuses were here. His senses were being dampened.

  He scanned around the room more. Now that he was able to pierce the veil, he could tell that at least half the adults in the room had various skills held in readiness. He could sense the PSI and Stamina that they were holding even if he couldn’t tell what they intended.

  Jay tried to pay attention to the conversation as best he could. Cluster 2’s representative was arguing that someone named Gung Han didn’t have enough of a mind left to be held culpable for his actions in the attack. He glanced over at the man they were talking about. Sure, enough it was the mountain of muscle that had helped Li Wei in the attack before.

  A scan revealed extraordinarily little thought in the man’s head. Which corresponded with this woman’s claims that Li Wei had obliterated most of the man’s mind. He also wasn’t holding any type of PSI skill at the ready. Jay was still conscious of the man’s strength, but his fuses could undoubtedly handle themselves.

  Then another thought crossed his mind. He combo’d Hyper Accuracy with Precognition and Temporal Manipulation. Suddenly potential futures started to unfold before him. In three-quarters of the futures if he didn’t make himself known soon, a fight would break out. It was hard to tell the outcomes because the further ahead that he saw the more tangled the threads of time became and he didn’t know what to expect.

  What he did know though was that if a fight broke out, many of the members of Cluster 2 were going to die, including some of the children caught in a crossfire. Some of the flickers of images that he caught also showed the potential that some of his fuses would be hurt. They were powerful but only a fool would disregard the possibility that some of these women had skills that could damage his other parts.

  As his intention to intervene firmed up in his mind, new possibilities spun out. Still a full third of the time, the women all attacked his group. He needed to defuse this situation and if he couldn’t then he would have to act decisively to end the threat.

  Jay first telepathically said, “They are holding onto powers and preparing to attack. Let me try to talk first but I need you to all be ready to fight. Focus on defending each other. If it comes to killing, I will handle that.”

  Then he allowed himself to be seen and verbally said, “Everyone needs to calm down.”

  The spokeswoman turned to see him appear as though from nowhere. She turned and glanced at the woman holding the field that was weakening PSI powers, but the woman simply shrugged. “I’m Jay, for better or worse, I am currently the leader of the remnants of humanity. We shouldn’t be fighting each other. So, who are you?”

  “I’m Li Ming, and I speak for Cluster 2 now that Li Wei is dead,” she replied with a deadpan stare.

  “That isn’t what we agreed to. I will be the leader now. Gung Han is too brainless to lead, and I was Li Wei’s second anyway,” said a man from the back of the cluster.

  “Look, we should probably just lay our cards on the table,” Jay said even as he erected a PSI construct to protect him and the rest of his team. “I know that you are trying to dampen our ability to detect anything. I know that many of you are holding attacks ready and waiting for some signal. I’ve also seen the future play out before my eyes.

  “It isn’t an exact science and there are many possibilities but in all of them your cluster loses many lives and ends up defeated. This is a certainty. So, we can either fight and you will die first, or we can talk. I have a proposition that I want to run by you.”

  It was clear then that telepathic communication was going on between them, but Jay found that he wasn’t able to press into the stream of thought. At least not without pushing extremely hard. He didn’t want them to realize that he was invading their minds, so he contented himself with watching their faces and body language.

  Whatever argument they were having came to an end and the man stepped forward. “You can call me Shu. We would like to hear your proposition.”

  Jay paused for a moment and then sighed. “I will just lay it out for you. We can’t trust you or your cluster and it is going to take time to build trust. We need to because there are far too few humans left for us to not get along. But, right now, I am on a mission to save my son who was taken by one of the A’snkarnt. I won’t let anything stand in the way of that.”

  Shu nodded and said, “Family is important, but what does this have to do with us.”

  “Simply put, there can’t be people moving around on this ship that I don’t trust. So that leaves me with three options. We could find a way to put you off somewhere, but I don’t really have time to find a planet that you all could survive on,” Jay said.

  At that point some of the women from Cluster 2 started shouting things like, “You can’t do that to us,” or “We have every bit as much right to be here as you do,” even, “Think about the children.”

  Jay waited for Shu to regain control of the group although once again he identified the woman who had been speaking first as someone who wasn’t really under Shu’s control. She was definitely going to bear watching.

  Then Jay continued, “I know that isn’t a desirable option, but you also need to know that I won’t let anything stand in the way of me saving my son. Although, honestly, I would also fight for any of your children. Thus, the second obvious option is off the table. I won’t kill any more humans unless they absolutely force me to.”

  The woman stepped forward again, all but pushing Shu out of the way. “Are you threatening us?”

  Jay shook his head and snorted, “No, I don’t have time for threats. So, stop posturing. If I had decided to kill you it would already be over with. I prefer door number three. That is the option where we find a way to contain you all that keeps you safe but out of our way. I believe I have a way to do exactly that without causing you any real inconvenience.”

  The woman started to speak again, but Shu seemed to have had enough because he turned on her. “Ming, just shut up. We get that you are angry but that isn’t going to protect our people. You saw what this guy can do. So, why don’t you open your ears and close your mouth for once. We all know what Wei saw in you.”

  Li Ming’s face seemed t
o lose all color and her body trembled, but she got control of it and snapped her mouth shut, walking off to the side. Shu then turned towards Jay and said, “Okay, so how would this work? Ming may be a hot head, but I have to agree, I don’t really like the idea of being made a prisoner.”

  Jay paused and looked Shu in the eyes before answering. “Truthfully, I could have just done it and you wouldn’t even know it. But I am trying to deal openly and honestly. So here is what I’m proposing. You will all stay here in these quarters for the next hour but if the field I create works properly seven weeks will have passed for everyone else.

  “That will give us enough time to reach our destination and to get settled in. If something changes or there is an emergency, I will end the field sooner. Either way for you who are here only an hour will have passed.”

  Jay gauged that Shu seemed resistant to the idea so he added, “This is really the best deal that I can offer you.” Then he stopped talking and just stood there waiting.

  At least that was how it appeared to the outside world. Instead, he was busy creating a PSI circuit with the fuses there. He began with Amelia and moved on from there, binding their channels together. The process was becoming easier each time he did it.

  The base amount of PSI that Jay held was a staggering amount compared to anything that he had imagined before. It would have only been possible with a circuit like this. The circuit worked so that as he ran his PSI through his fused girls it would resonate within them and then come back to him in an enhanced form.

  Not only would the quantity double with each fuse added to the circuit but the PSI would for lack of a better term become condensed and more potent. His enhanced senses saw the difference in quality despite never having noticed it at first. He was also glad that Cluster 2 was obviously engaged in a heated telepathic argument because none of them seemed to notice the girls’ reactions to being added to the circuit.

  It has a positively orgasmic impact on them. In a way, that made sense. He was pouring out from his very core into them. Invading their bodies and forcing his channels to merge with theirs. Each girl he added to the circuit expanded its complexity as he was forced to weave more and more channels together into one, forming a true unity.

  Looking at how their connection worked, this was more than the standard partial fusion but not as extreme as the complete fusion he had performed with Trina and Meikiyo to defeat the undead swarms. Still the effect was amazing. His PSI levels reached over twenty-one million after completing a circuit with six of his fuses.

  He had thought the power that he had before was godlike, but each time something like this happened he realized that his scope of understanding before had been so small. He forced himself to realize that now was likely no different. This was only a step forward.

  It was one thing facing Forlorn monsters or an individual A’snkarnt, but by all information they had, humanity would soon be facing at a minimum an entire fleet of spaceships. Each would be armed with weapons that presumably were far more powerful than anything they had faced so far.

  If what Ava had learned from the A’snkarnt ship was accurate, and he tended to never doubt his hyperactive little wife, then they had weapons that could destroy entire planets. Suddenly twenty-one million PSI didn’t sound like quite so much. Still, it would more than suffice for what he wanted to do now.

  In the minute it took to form the complete circuit, Shu apparently wrangled the girls of Cluster 2 under control. “Okay, American. We will trust you for now. You give us very little choice. Just remember that how you treat us here will reflect in how we respond to you later.”

  Jay simply nodded and then teleported himself and the six fuses out into the hallway where Abby and Kayla were standing guard. He was glad that the increased power his fuses now possessed was enough to keep them from passing out as part of the circuit. Even being stronger all of them except for Amelia and Trina were acting like they were drunk. That probably wasn’t too odd with the amount of energy running through them.

  Now though, Jay thought, it was time for the rubber to meet the road so to speak. He believed he could do this, and he certainly had the power necessary to do so. It was just something that he had never attempted before. He formed his power to create the tempus fugit field then began to force the flows of time in the opposite direction. The science of what he did was beyond his understanding and truthfully, he didn’t care about that, at least not at the moment. For now, this was an ability that he possessed, and he wanted to get better at using it, to make it more natural.

  For good measure he also reinforced it with a PSI construct wall to both add a second prison wall and provide protection to those within the time sphere. Ultimately, he only needed a portion of the PSI that he now held and likely would need less when he attempted the same in the future. It always seemed that the more skilled he got with any of his abilities the less draining they were.

  Then the field stabilized, and he disconnected from it. He examined it and was content that he had accomplished what he wanted to. The ratio was only 1176:1 but time was definitely flowing more slowly within the field than outside of it. This should buy them the time that they needed.

  Amelia asked, “Did it work?” Her voice warbled a bit, and he could feel that she was being affected by all the power channeled through her. Each time the power pulsed through all of them she would be the first to feel it come from him and the last to feel the expanded burst go back to Jay. She was the linchpin of the circuit so to speak and from what he could feel of her emotions she was starting to really like it, almost to the point of addiction.

  “Yes, perfectly, and with far less PSI than we created,” Jay replied as he carefully broke the circuit allowing the excess PSI to bleed off into the surrounding atmosphere while simultaneously using some of it to make minor enhancements to each of the girls.

  It was difficult to juggle six balls at once, but somehow his mind seemed to be expanding to handle tasks like this. It was less about increased intelligence, as Amelia would no doubt point out to him, and more about an increased awareness. Perhaps his ability to handle multiple things at once was even a subconscious extension of his temporal manipulation. It would be worth thinking about later.

  For now, though he was just content to see six incredibly happy girls smiling at him, each on the cusp of bliss brought on by the circuit followed by the modifications he had made to strengthen their bodies further. It had been the work of a second but with all that PSI he had probably added half a dozen points of Durability to each of them.

  The look in Amelia’s eyes said that just like the girls in the science lab she wanted some alone time with him. Apparently controlling the fabric of the universe and manipulating time was a turn on even without the aphrodisiac. The same expression was mirrored in five other sets of eyes.

  Jay grinned and then sighed. It was such a burden, but he would just have to be man enough to live up to it. Over the next minute he spent hours with his various fuses and then from there once everyone was content, he moved on to the other clusters and made the same offer that he had given Cluster 2. Well actually to the other floor clusters that had not been introduced to Team Jay prior to the final attack.

  Ultimately each accepted the offer, usually with far less animosity than Cluster 2. The reality was that they would be safe, only an hour would pass for them and it would prevent a confrontation now. The next question he had to deal with was what to do with the two clusters that D’varn had dumped on him shortly before their escape. They had been offered the opportunity to sort out how they wanted to fit in with Team Jay and Team Miguel and Jay wasn’t sure he should go back on that now.

  Oh well, all leadership couldn’t be the fun parts.

  Chapter 4- Expanding the Team

  In theory now that all the clusters he didn’t know were put into time distortion fields the next meeting should be easier. Should being the operative term. Team Jay and even Team Miguel had his full trust, the issue was that there wer
e sixty women that he didn’t know who had officially been made a part of his cluster before the escape.

  He had met with their leaders Cecelia and Trudi. They had both seemed like nice, if overly eager young women. It had to say a great deal about them that they had been able to hold their clusters together after all the guys had died. For a second, he wondered if that made him sound sexist, but then he decided that it was appropriate to say of anyone who had managed to hold a cluster together.

  The question now was whether he should even care about the cluster system or anything like that. So what that the A’snkarnt had sent those sixty women to him. After D’varn’s actions, not to say anything of what S’vanth had done, Jay didn’t really give a rat’s ass what any A’snkarnt thought.

  Then again, they had told those sixty women that they would have a chance to join Team Jay or Team Miguel. Admittedly no specifics had been laid out but dealing with them fairly was more about him being true to his word rather than honoring any sort of A’snkarnt system. Thinking of that system though, he pulled up the leaderboard. He still had access to it until the implants were removed, heck maybe even the new implants would be able to access the systems.