The Touchstone Trilogy (88 page)

KOTIS sent a ship to Nuri after Inisar first showed up, and were basically "escorted off the premises" by a couple of very uncommunicative Nurans.  I can just picture tiny flying samurai staring down the
Diodel
or even the
Litara
.  I bet Inisar could pull that off.

Whatever the Nurans want with me, they plainly don't intend to start cooperating with Tare, which no-one thinks is a good sign.  Kaoren's really bothered by today's (non-)appearance.

Tuesday, July 22

Crack

A day which started mildly, with nothing but training with Fourth scheduled.  Martial arts in the morning – everyone pairing off and trying to hit each other.  I was paired with Sonn, and Kaoren left me to her while critically watching everyone else.  Toren and Dae were paired to start with, and Kaoren didn't seem to pay any particular attention to them, just swapped them out after a while to fight Glade and Mori. 

I still can't tell how good people are at fighting – certainly not when they're practicing rather than quickly taking their opponents down.  Toren and Dae didn't seem to me to be obviously better or worse than Glade or Mori, but the way their expressions changed – Dae acting intense and determined and Toren going all grimly quiet – I guess there must have been some kind of difference.  Kaoren spoke to them briefly – five terse words – during a rest break and both of them looked like they wished they were anywhere else.

Most of Fourth Squad are twenty (I refuse to think of Kaoren as sixty), while Toren and Dae are a couple of years younger.  You can't actively serve as a Setari until you've hit fifty – nearly seventeen – which is the 'qualifying age' on Tare for trying to pass the adulthood exams.  Most Kalrani aren't promoted until they're closer to eighteen.  Toren and Dae no doubt knew Kaoren's reputation, and Fourth's generally as a squad which focuses on close combat, but I think they were expecting less of a gap.

Still, with me around they never had to worry about being the worst in the room.  I was genuinely trying, and I am a little better than before, but I always seem to make absolutely the wrong choice in response to an attack, and I think Sonn was having to spend a lot of effort to not wipe the floor with me.

The best part of martial arts training for me is seeing everyone in the martial arts training outfits.  They apparently wear these because the nanosuits give too much cushioning, and can sprout weapons.  They do training using the nanoliquid blades as well, of course, but work on the basic combat moves separately.  Mori seems to be the best fighter in the squad beside Kaoren – or at least he sparred with her seriously toward the end of the session.

After that we changed and jogged over the stairs.  I dropped far behind, unsurprisingly, but Kaoren stayed with me while the rest of the squad went ahead, and fortunately he didn't turn into a drill-sergeant, letting me rest halfway up the longer flights of stairs.  I told him it would be a great workout for him if he carried me, but he just asked me deadpan if I thought he wasn't getting enough exercise.

"Am I going to be babysat for long?" I asked.  "Haven't failed to notice that Halla keeping close to me even when getting changed."

"That will depend on the Nuran," Kaoren said, not bothering to pretend I'm not under full-time guard.  It was pretty obvious I'd been switched to training with Fourth because it has two Place Sight talents.

"Would Nuran really have any chance of wandering about undetected inside?  Doors wouldn't open, elevators wouldn't work."

"And scanners are harder to guise against.  But shielded rooms won't necessarily keep a teleporter out, though it increases the risk." He tucked a straying strand of hair behind my ear, adding: "Very likely we will be relocated to Muina ahead of schedule, since even Nurans would find the Ddura an insurmountable obstacle.  And, yes, that won't change the fact that you are going to be constantly guarded for the foreseeable future."

"I don't like that it was a different Nuran than Inisar," I said, sighing at the thought of constant guarding – for all that a large part of that constant guarding is going to involve just me and Kaoren and probably not a lot of clothing.  "Do you think they found out he gave me that book?"

"It's a possibility."  He asked whether my legs hurt, and we had a brief, serious discussion about the conflicts between supervising me and sleeping with me.  Kaoren prefers my training to be with First, but that I be assigned to Fourth whenever I go anywhere risky.  I'm fine with either, just so long as no-one decides to station us on different planets again.

The afternoon was mixed combat training with Fourth and First, with Nils from Second along to make illusions for everyone to attack.  He was being oddly quiet again, and didn't even tease me about Kaoren, though I could tell he knew by the way he watched when Kaoren was talking to me.  Surprisingly, I don't think the gossip has spread very far.  Other than Kaoren and I having lunch together one day, we haven't been seen out publicly, and I guess those who know haven't been telling.

Even Toren and Dae aren't in that loop.  Fourth Squad have been politely welcoming toward their two new members, but weren't being relaxed and 'themselves' during break times with them.  They were well aware that Toren and Dae didn't like that they'd been assigned to Fourth, and naturally they weren't pleased with that.  Or it could be they were still being quiet and non-chatty on account of me sleeping with Kaoren, but I don't think it's quite the case.  Sonn seemed a little more like I was an accepted part of the team than she usually is, and I even had a bit of a conversation with Halla about Nurans and what they thought they were achieving by not joining forces with the other ex-Muinan civilisations.

And then, halfway through the two squad training session, the swoops Nils had been projecting abruptly disappeared.  The look on his face, when we turned to find out why, was such straightforward shock that First and Fourth reacted by gathering as if to fight off an attack, but then Ketzaren said: "Unara."

I was a beat behind everyone else checking the news feeds, and the first channel I went to only seemed to be showing me a waterfall.  A waterfall and a chair.  That was from a scanner, but the feed switched almost right away to someone's personal vision.  They were in a triple-tiered atrium full of plants and there was water pouring down from a gash, a long, wide crack, in the whitestone ceiling.  And there was a woman hanging down, tangled in, I don't know, some kind of cable, with the water pouring past her.

It had only just happened, too recent even for the bluesuits to have worked out any orders, but First and Nils ran anyway, so they'd be ready at the nearest lock.  Kaoren said: "Take lead," to Mori and she, Par, Glade and our two Kalrani went, while Kaoren, Halla and Sonn stayed to protect me from Invisible Nurans.  I had a couple of moments' angst about that, then realised that they probably wouldn't have been sent anyway.  Sight talents and Lightning wouldn't be very useful when what you were fighting was Tare's weather.

It's only now, hours later, that any sort of clear exterior view of the damage has been available.  It doesn't even look like that much, just a tiny crack in the endless blocky meringue of Unara.  Other than some falling injuries, it's likely that it wouldn't have been anything like so bad, except this is Tare, and the daily mega-storm was dumping half an ocean on Unara's roof.

I called the crack tiny, but it exposed over two thousand Unaran apartments to one of Tare's full-scale storms.  Bad enough, but add to that the countless gallons of water draining over the vast expanse of the roof, some diverted into water collection channels, but most following whatever was the easiest course down to the ocean.

In the first few minutes after the crack opened, a lot of people evacuated, thankfully.  But others moved to inner rooms, or were stopped by exit corridors split in two or elevators not functioning.  The Unaran authorities, finding corridors and atriums suddenly awash, had little choice but to seal the area as best they could.  And the person who was transmitting on the news channel I'd linked to – it was a teenaged kid named Konstan Trabel – drowned.

Tarens can't swim.  There's no lakes on Tare, no rivers or beaches, and the only swimming pool is in the Setari facilities.  When you live in permanent air-conditioning there's no particular drive to get wet as a form of recreation, and Taren cities don't really have the space to spare for lots of water-sports.  I'm not sure many people could have successfully swum out of a room filling with furniture and pot plants even if they'd been raised in the water.

Back when the 2004 tsunami hit I remember staying glued to the TV, watching over and over sequences filmed from balconies, of walls of mud and village sliding past.  Knowing that people had to be in that churning mass, glad not to see any, unable not to look.  On Tare, the interface lets those people transmit direct to their families, or social network, or news channel, and unless they block you, you can watch and hear and shudder until the images fill with grey or wriggling sparkles of light, and stop.

I switched to a channel which wasn't live-streaming death.

It didn't take very long for the Setari squads to reach Unara.  The biggest delay was getting from their entry space to the particular 'suburb' being flooded.  The Telekinetics and Teleporters and the Levitation talents joined various drones and emergency rescue workers and a handful of middle-strong civilian talents working to get people out.  Every Ice talent KOTIS could send went to the roof and, with the strongest of the Telekinetics bracing them against the gale, formed dams and channels and barriers to route the water away.  That was immensely frustrating to watch, knowing how much quicker they could do it if I was there.

Still, they got it done, and the ice held more or less despite the driving rain.  There's four squads still stationed at Unara, helping with the job of putting up a temporary seal before the next storm hits.

Far fewer people died than during the Dohl Array attack.  But Tare is – I don't know how to put this –
wounded
in a way which it wasn't when the problem was a massive which the Setari could fight and kill.  Because the crack was caused by a gate.  Not even a huge gate.  A gate the size of a car tyre.

Even though the Tarens have refined their whitestone nanomaterial so that it can take a lot of weight, Unara is still a huge, heavy place.  I got a bit lost among Taren terms more complex than 'load-bearing' and 'distributed force', but the diagrams made clear enough that far bigger parts of Unara could split or collapse if only a relatively small part of its core structure was damaged.  The news channel I was watching had a fine old time showing projections of what would happen if gates opened at dramatically critical points.  And then there was the question of air routes, the possibility of one of the tanz clipping a gate, and countless graphs plotting the increase in gate openings, and estimates for what Tare would be dealing with in ten, five, even one Taren year.  Open statements on every channel that within four Taren years life here will have changed substantially, and that's not even factoring in the continual increase in Ionoth numbers.

It's like Tare has abruptly woken up to a nightmare which has been happening all along.

Kaoren is a wreck – Sight Sight had shown him way too much, and he's been off talking with Mori, who had a person die just as she was teleporting him.  We've been discussing our own anti-nightmare strategy, just to get to tomorrow, and after I've finished writing this up we're going to watch the next preview episode of
The Hidden War
together, and after that hopefully we'll both be too exhausted to stay awake.  Then we'll step through a Sights exercise together, and I'll try not to drown us both in my inevitable reaction projection.

Wednesday, July 23

Keep on keeping on

They've moved up our departure for Muina to the day after tomorrow, whether because of the Nuran or because yesterday pushed them into being not so reluctant to use me.  I think everyone's looking forward to heading back, overwhelmingly keen to do something, anything, which might result in a solution.  It'll just be exploration at first, and I'll probably actively work with First and Fourth.

What I need to focus on is no more meltdowns, no more injuries.  I can't do anything about being irreplaceable, but at the least I have to stop putting myself in medical.

Despite all that went on yesterday, First and Fourth went ahead with their scheduled dual eight-strength squad rotation today.  Kaoren warned me ahead of time that they'd likely be out for a long stretch – one of the huge advantages dual squads give exploration teams is the extra Ena manipulation to ensure gates are locked, so they can go further without tiredness making it too dangerous.  If they'd been able to get permission they would have taken me with them, since I represent the ability to cast very deeply into the Ena, and Kaoren's hoping that some time in the future they'll be able to work with me again, attempting to locate Pillars.  But no go.

They were out most of the day, too – nearly six hours, which is an immense amount of time for Setari.  I was 'adopted' by Third again for the day, since Tol Sefen has Place Sight.  Taarel kept us busy, and the conversation away from Unara, but there was a level of stress sitting under everything.  It's not like anything's really more urgent than it was two days ago, but it sure feels like we can't waste any more time training.

Third were a good group to distract me, though.  Third's two new members, Shin Morel and a girl called Elory Tedar, plainly can't believe their luck in being made part of the squad and are quite ready to worship at Taarel's feet, which of course means the regular squad members consider them people of taste and discernment.  Eeli continued on with being totally fascinated by the idea of me and Kaoren, and though she did try not to pry too openly, she really really wanted to know what drew us together.  I don't know what Taarel said to her, but she seems to have completely accepted that Kaoren isn't someone Taarel wanted a romance with.