The Touchstone Trilogy (22 page)

"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 looked 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.

I only saw it properly when it was dead, and stopped being so difficult to look at.  A lizard, like a gecko except with some uncomfortably humanoid lines to its scaly white body.  And too much claw.  Chameleons with attitude.

Even before it was still, Maze added: "Two coming fast from mark two," and they shifted about me to cover an opening on the opposite side.

It went on like that for way too long.  The maze space is huge, and we weren't just walking through it to a certain point, we were systematically searching out all of the chameleons and killing them.

The bright spot of the space was in the centre, the heart of the maze.  It was an open, circular garden, with lots of grass between us and the walls, and beds of purple and red flowers which looked like cosmos.  We'd been going about two hours by that time, and had cleared most of the chameleons.  Maze ordered a break, though still to stick to using only our interfaces, and we sat down in the very centre, resting but on guard, Zee and Maze watching in opposite directions.  Everyone was looking worn, and ate silently, so I decided not to bug them with questions and chewed on my entirely unappetising molasses bar.  And then there was this cat.

Half-grown kitten, really, long-legged but not properly grown up.  It was one of the slinky, big-eared type I'd seen on Muina, smoky grey with unexpectedly dark moss-green eyes.  It was just there, sitting in front of me, drifting into visibility in an eye-blink.  And, yeah, I was stupid, but my automatic reaction to cats, even ones which pop up out of nothing, is to hold out a hand, fingers unthreateningly down, and see if it runs away.

It acted just like a cat should, delicately sniffing, touching a cold nose to one knuckle, then rubbing its face against my hand.  I had scratched it behind one ear and under its chin and felt the slightest buzz of a purr before it even occurred to me that maybe I shouldn't, and carefully took my hand back.

"Can I pick it up?" I asked over the interface.

First Squad's reaction would probably have been comical if, well, if the Ena hadn't been a life or death thing for them for so many years.  Ketzaren was closest to me, sitting at a right-angle, and turned her head only to leap up as if scalded.  And then they were all on their feet, the nanoliquid blades appearing, along with Mara's Light-whip, and the cat very sensibly leaped away and vanished, leaving me sitting there staring up at them.

I remembered, at least, to keep talking over the interface.  "Kittens are evil?"

None of them answered immediately, but Mara touched her hand to my shoulder and stared about, searching.  "Nothing," she said.

"Checking the log," Maze said.  When we're on mission, as well as second level monitoring I'm on mission log, which he can access as team captain, so he meant he was looking at my recording of the cat.  And then he looked at me a moment before scanning the area again.  "Gone now, at any rate.  Or completely undetectable."  He looked back at me, and though his voice wasn't angry his mouth was a flat line as he said: "If anything approaches us, no matter what it looks like, warn us immediately.  We can't judge by appearances here."

I felt a prize twit, of course, and could only nod and try really hard not to screw up any more on the mission.  Which took another hour of tense maze-trekking and by the time we finally got back to KOTIS everyone looked like they had stress headaches.

"Another increase in population," Mara said, after the scan had cleared us of stickies.  "I'm starting to reconsider the proposals to double-team."

"Dealing with swoops on top of that?"  Lohn pulled a face.  "I'll pass."

"The trade-off is too great," Maze agreed, sounding terribly tired.  He gave me a worn smile.  "You made a big difference to that space's difficulty.  If it wasn't for the population increase, we would have easily set a record completion pace."

"And you claim to disapprove of the pace records," Lohn said, heading to the showers.

"Lunch with me?"  Zee said as we followed him, and I knew I was in for a talk well before we were sitting in a quiet corner of the canteen.

"Are kittens evil?" I asked, as soon as I'd swallowed enough of some yellowy mashed stuff (which tasted a lot better than it looked) to no longer feel painfully hungry.

"I've not read any reports featuring them," she said.  "But there are Ionoth which can disguise their shape, and Ionoth with appearances entirely innocuous and intentions which are not.  The problem with that one was that we did not detect it.  There's very few things that can get anywhere near as close as that to someone with Combat Sight without notice, threat or not."  She reached over and rapped the back of my knuckles with her spoon.  "And petting the thing was entirely idiotic."  But she smiled at me, and shook her head to take the sting out of the words.  "He was angry at himself, not you.  Just be sure to be more sensible in future."

I nodded, still cringing internally.  There was no way I was going to upset everyone like that again if I could help it.  I watched her eat, not missing the shadows under her eyes, and finally managed to ask: "What happen third senior Setari squad?"

"A kadara."  She said the word so softly I could barely hear her.  "One which broke into real-space three years ago.  We lost nine, most from the senior squads.  They renumbered us all afterwards.  The original First Squad captain, Helese, was Maze's wife.  He's been very hard on himself ever since."

"Very sad guy," I said, and could only promise myself to not be entirely idiotic in future.

Wednesday, February 20

Third Squad

Third was a difficult squad to test with.  Not because of any attitude, but because they had such a range of talents, which required three test environments to get through.  I'd been a little nervous about working with their squad captain, Taarel – the spectacular one with the unlikely hair – just because I'd taken the impression she was really intense about Maze.  But she was totally professional, so either it was my imagination or she's not a petty sort.