by StarAndrea
“You’re really going to do that,” Jenna said, when the “matched” icon lit up over the injector and he popped it free of the handheld unit. “Just because we dared you to?”
“That would be consistent with typical Ranger personality traits,” Kel remarked.
“I’m not doing it because you dared me to,” Saryn said, even though that was only partly true. “I’m doing it because Lyris asked me to.”
He pressed the injector against the inside of his wrist and looked for an initiation mechanism. It vibrated before he could find one, and he realized that it was automatic and warning him at the same moment it pricked his skin. He was careful not to flinch, holding the injector where it was until it stopped vibrating and the light went out.
He didn’t feel anything except a slight warm where the system had been pressed against his wrist. He lifted it away carefully, just in case it wasn’t done, but the injector had apparently turned itself off. With the slightest hesitation, he replaced it inside the larger unit and looked at his wrist more closely.
“Yeah,” Kel said. “Everyone does that.”
“Are you okay?” Jenna asked. She sounded cautious, and he couldn’t blame her. Who knew what the process for enhancer delivery entailed? He’d never seen it publicized. “How do you feel?”
“Normal,” Saryn said. “Or at least, no different than before.”
“Funny,” Jenna said.
He was starting to smile when it hit him: the room lit up like everything in it had been burnt by the sun. He could hear Jenna breathing, and the shockingly loud buzz of Kel’s silent processors. Even the flickers of holographic light in the center display made noise, and gravity was suddenly harsh and dizzying. He could taste metal in the air, the smell of dust and life and the flight suits that had been in the room hours before.
The sudden roar in his mind was violent and unstoppable and he clapped his hands over his ears. Jenna’s fear was a tangible thing, reaching into his bones and paralyzing him where he stood. He was uncertain, terrified, filled with remorse for the careless words that had led them here. He was watching a good person fall, and how did that help anyone?
“Saryn,” Lyris said. “Saryn, hold still. Don’t move; it gets better.”
“Lyris,” he said. He tried to say it; he wasn’t sure it came out. It was hard to breathe and impossible to tell where he was. He could feel heat in his right arm and ice against his hip, the cold spreading when he tried to reach out.
“You’re okay,” Lyris’ voice said, and why he could make out those words he had no idea. Lyris couldn’t be the only one talking to him. Lyris shouldn’t be anywhere near him. “Keep breathing. Just breathe. Don’t try to think.”
He was breathing. He was still standing. He could see the whole room in shades of blue, cool overtones that muted the light and made the shadows bright enough to ignore. He wasn’t falling after all.
Jenna was saying his name, and he could understand her, but she sounded different somehow. “Saryn, are you all right? What do those things do!”
“They enhance you,” Kel’s voice said. The bot sounded exactly the same, and Saryn realized they were both bracing him: Jenna was holding his arm, while Kel kept him from lurching the other way. His balance must be stabilizing if he could tell which side they were on now. “What part of that isn’t obvious from the name?”
“What does it mean?” Jenna demanded. “What’s happening to him?”
“This is the thing you don’t know?” Kel retorted. “You were fine bullying him into it when you had no idea, weren’t you. Now you’re worried and you think that makes it someone else’s responsibility?”
Saryn felt his fists clench, but he could pull in a deep breath and he could see. He was hearing them, that had to be real. He could still… if he tried, he could taste the air, which was strange so he tried not to think about it.
“Keep breathing,” Lyris said. “It gets better.”
“Where’s Lyris,” Saryn tried to say, and this time he knew it came out as a gasp. But the words made sense, and Jenna reacted, so she must be able to understand him.
“Still in space,” she said. “Are you okay? Should we—do we need to get him, or something? Should he have been here?”
“What good would that do?” Kel wanted to know. “He’s just overreacting; it happens to everyone. It’ll pass.”
“It’s just—” Saryn drew another breath, tried to straighten, and he felt Jenna lean harder against his side as he wavered. “It’s fine. I’m fine.”
“Well, you have a funny way of showing it,” Jenna said, but she was relieved, she was reassured, and he felt calmer just knowing she wasn’t about to panic anymore.
From somewhere far away, he heard Lyris swear, and the room turned bright and white again as he struggled to catch his breath. But it didn’t—it didn’t explode, it didn’t blind or deafen him and that was the problem, wasn’t it. The enhancers.
“Enhancers make things work better,” the bot was saying. “Perception, cognition, metabolism. They make you better. Hence the name. I’m told it can be a little overwhelming at first, but I wouldn’t know.”
“Why do I hear Lyris,” Saryn said.
“I have no idea,” Kel told him. “Hallucination?”
“You hear him?” Jenna said. “What, like here? In the room with us?”
“Yes,” Saryn said. “No. At first it was like he was here. Now he sounds far away.”
There was a long moment of not-silence, where the shift of Jenna’s clothing and the flow of air in the room was loud beyond all reason. He could smell power from the charge pads lining the room—charge pads he didn’t know were there until he smelled them. He could feel exactly how far it was to the surface from where they stood, and that didn’t make any sense: that wasn’t vision or proprioception or any biological ability he should possess, enhanced or not.
“Why do I know how far underground we are?” he blurted out.
“The attenuation of light,” Kel said. “The length of the lift ride. The fact that the display over there tells you; take your pick.”
“Are you okay to stand?” Jenna asked.
He lifted his arm out of hers carefully, shifting forward before he took a single step. The floor was solid under his feet, though it had a slight echo he hadn’t noticed before: this wasn’t the bottom of the facility. Something stretched long and cavernous through the level below, and they must be adjacent to the hangar.
“Yes,” he said, taking another step. There was a RAV down there, and he could fly it. He wasn’t a pilot anymore than she was, but he could already envision the cockpit around him. “So it would seem. Thank you.”
Lyris, he thought. Thank you.
There was no answer, but he hadn’t really expected one. Kel was right, after all: a hallucination was the most likely explanation. He wasn’t psychic, and as far as he knew, even empaths didn’t put words in other people’s minds.
Unless these enhancers created a previously non-existent mental link, kept unusually secret by the people who used them and everyone who knew them, he had probably imagined the entire conversation.
“I’m not allowed to tell you how to access the RAVs,” Kel was saying. “Consider it a test of enhancement integration.”
“You think he’s going up there now?” Jenna sounded incredulous. “He can barely walk!”
Kel made the motion that was like shrugging, and Saryn wasn’t even looking at him. He could tell by the sound and the movement of air. “If he can find and use them,” the bot said, “then he can find and use them.”
Saryn thought that was a reasonable restriction. He wasn’t sure it was enough of one, given how straightforward the task now seemed, but he certainly didn’t object on the basis that it was too challenging. “Are you coming?” he asked Jenna.
She stared at him like he’d lost his mind. “What?” she said.
“You said we need firepower,” he reminded her. “Do you feel differently now?”
/> “About stealing enhancers and sneaking into space in a superpowered Ranger vehicle?” she countered. “No, I feel pretty much the same way I did before.”
“I was giving these enhancers by a standing Ranger,” Saryn reminded her. “I hardly think using them constitutes stealing.”
“You were,” Jenna agreed. “I wasn’t.”
Saryn looked down at the injection system he’d managed to hold onto, then back up at Kel. “Is this single use?” he asked.
“No,” Kel said, in an exceptionally neutral voice.
Saryn handed it to Jenna. “Now you have been,” he told her.
She took it automatically, the same way he had when Lyris offered it to him. He wondered if that meant anything: conditioned or instinctive, was it a reaction born of politeness? Or of recognition?
“I’m going to make sure they know you’re responsible for this,” Jenna told him, pressing her thumb against the top of the injection system.
He had to smile. “Somehow I doubt that,” he said.
She responded to the enhancers better than he had: he saw her stiffen and squeeze her eyes shut, and her breathing went ragged almost immediately. He remembered what Lyris had said and how loud everything had sounded at the same time, so he whispered, “Breathe.”
Saryn saw her swallow, but her breathing steadied. She put her hands out and he took a step closer, but she didn’t seem to lose her balance. He saw Kel watching too, silent and not, processing and recording and ready to assist if it seemed necessary.
It didn’t. Jenna opened her eyes, took another breath, and stared at nothing at all for a long moment. When she moved, it was only to press her the heel of her hand against the inside of her other wrist. She was still holding the injector, and he wondered irreverently if there was something about the enhancers that kept them from dropping things.
When her eyes met his, she managed a half-smile. “Okay,” she said, and it sounded almost normal. She still took another breath before she added, “More sympathetic, now.”
His own smile came back, and he told her, “I see you’ve managed to outdo me again. Lyris clearly approached the wrong person.”
“Yeah, well.” She took another breath and he knew she changed what she was about to say. He’d always been able to read people’s intent in their faces, their voices, the way they held themselves. It was a learned skill, not an inborn ability.
“I guess we’ll see,” she was saying. “If Kel’s not going to stop us, bring on trial number two.”
“Excuse me,” Kel said. “I’m glad to see you’re displaying all the typical qualities of recklessness and unfounded enthusiasm, but I do worry for your safety. A little. Only in a practical sense. Whatever the reason, there are spare flight suits and you should at least take a helmet in the event of decompression.”
If Saryn hadn’t been distracted by the sudden knowledge of which locker was which he might have been more alarmed by the warning. Logically, he and Jenna had no business doing what they were doing. It was unsafe and potentially impossible—except that apparently three other people had done it before them.
They were carrying helmets and flight suits when they ran into the hangar bay, and Saryn honestly couldn’t remember when they’d started running. He remembered when they stopped, though, because they both did it at the same time: the RAVs made a profound first impression.
“We’re going to fly those?” Saryn heard himself ask. He was licensed for independent orbital flight maneuvers, in-system transit with Level 1 AI support, and interstellar travel with Level 3. He had no commercial rating, let alone a military classification.
He was, in short, exceptionally unqualified to control a spacebound armored assault vehicle.
“No,” Jenna said, and when he looked over at her she was grinning. “The appropriate reaction is, we’re going to fly those!”
“Do you even know where we’re going?” he asked.
“Sure,” she said. “Up.”
He must have looked very skeptical, because she added, “Saryn, you’re a Ranger. In a RAV. You have right of way everywhere. I don’t know how we launch these and honestly I don’t think it matters: Space Control will clear a path as soon as they see us.”
“Yes,” he said. “It's them seeing us that I'm worried about.”
“You like cameras, Lyris said,” she reminded him. “You want people to see you. And right now, the more they help us the better.”
She was pulling on the flight suit she'd grabbed, and he only belatedly realized he should go the same. Over their clothes, then. It was all they had time for, and he took for granted that he knew that until he didn't.
Luckily he didn't stop to wonder again until it was too late. Jenna charged onto a RAV that opened for her as she approached, helmet in hand, and he went for the one beside it without thinking. If it hadn't opened as hers had, he might have run straight into the hull.
The second door didn't open until the first one closed. He could count on one hand the number of times he'd been inside an airlock in his life, but he knew it as soon as he saw it. He took the ladder on the other side and found himself beneath a transparent canopy at the top of the vehicle.
“Dynamic pressurization engaged,” a voice informed him. Calm and even, the voice implied an active AI inside a previously dormant vehicle. “Engine cold start sequence initiated. Discontinue?”
“No,” he said, when he understood the question. “Continue. How do we find the others?”
A heads-up display came online in front of what had to be the pilot’s chair. He sat down to get a better view and barely noticed the harness that slid into place over his shoulders. “RAVs 4 and 5 local,” the voice told him, and he saw markers on the display flash. “RAVs 1 through 3 in-system.”
“We need to get to the Rangers,” Saryn said. Less because he thought he would be a tremendous help and more because he knew that was where Jenna would go.
“Please deploy secondary pressurization seal,” the voice told him. “Broadcasting launch bay authorization now.”
He looked down as a panel in front of him lit up, wondering if the comm board always did that or if the AI was trying to visually prompt him through the process. The harness got his attention as it tightened over his chest, and he drew in a deep breath. It moved with him, but there was no ignoring it.
“Please deploy secondary pressurization seal,” the voice repeated.
“The what?” He should know that. He knew what every one of these panels did just by looking at them; why didn't he know what it was telling him to do?
“Put your helmet on,” the AI said.
He was still holding his helmet. Apparently the enhancers didn't improve his common sense. He would have to suggest Kel add that warning to the bot’s standard explanation. He was sure it would find some satisfaction in doing so.
As soon as the helmet seal connected, he heard Jenna’s voice in his ear and felt a steady thrum through the deck and all the way up into the back of his chair. “Saryn,” she was saying, and if it sounded a little breathless he couldn't fault her. “Are you there? My console says you're online but I can't hear you.”
“I'm here,” he replied. The display in front of him changed abruptly, RAV locations scrolling up as they were replaced by a view of the open flight lane.
The open flight lane—underground? He knew what it was, instinctively, but his rational mind couldn't reconcile it with what he knew to be in front of him. He wasn't in the air. He wasn't even above the surface of the planet. How could he be looking at a viable flight path?
“Okay, good,” Jenna’s voice was saying. “The bay doors are open and we're clear to launch, but I'm not sure what happens if we both go at once. Do you want the lead?”
“If you know where we're going,” he said, “I'll follow you.”
“So far knowing what I'm doing hasn't been a big part of being a Ranger,” Jenna said. “Can't say I'm surprised.”
“Saryn,” Lyris’ voice said. This time h
e felt moderately confident it came from his helmet comm and not from his imagination. “I'm not supposed to talk to you until you get off the planet, but we can hear you over the helmets. Just a heads up.”
He opened his mouth to reply, to ask who or why or what that was supposed to mean, but his brain caught up before he spoke. Maybe he had the enhancers to thank for that revelation: anything he asked Lyris would reveal that Lyris was talking to him, which he'd just said he wasn't supposed to do.
He tapped the collar of his helmet to disengage the seals and pulled it off as soon as it released. He didn't wonder why he knew how to work the seals and not the comm. “How do I address only one of the Rangers?” he asked.
“A private audio channel is established by prefacing your communication with a recipient designation,” the AI replied. “In the absence of instruction, default address is used.”
“What's the default address for the helmet comm?” Saryn asked.
“Ranger only,” the AI replied.
“What about the RAV comm?” Saryn asked. He knew there was one; it had just contacted Space Control.
“Ranger only,” the AI repeated. Then it added, “RAV 5 has launched. Please replace your helmet and prepare for launch.”
“Thank you,” Saryn said, remembering Lyris’ advice about Kel.
“You're welcome,” the voice replied. “Please replace your helmet.”
“How do I talk to you while I'm wearing the helmet?” Saryn wanted to know.
“My designation is RAV 4,” the voice told him. “Prefacing your statements with that call sign will ensure that only I hear them.”
That wasn't exactly what he'd asked, but it was what he'd meant. He put his helmet back on before it could ask him again, then said, “RAV 4, I appreciate your assistance.”
This time it replied, “It’s my pleasure, Saryn.”
That was an interesting statement, but he didn't have time to consider it before he was shaken by a vibration he couldn't really feel. “Launch,” the voice in his ear said.
“Saryn,” Jenna’s voice added. “Everything okay?”
“RAV 5,” he said. “Apparently the default helmet communication goes to all Rangers unless you preface it with the RAV you’re talking to. This was conveyed to me with the intention that the person passing the message not be identified.”