It bugs me that I’m basically swapping planets with Fourth Squad. Not just because of Ruuel. I’m still dreaming about Ruuel every night, but I’m hoping that a long patch of not seeing him will cure me. The problem is Fourth is the squad I’ve connected with the most outside of First. Particularly Mori, who I think I was becoming a sort of friend. But between shifts, and assignments on different planets, and assignments to different squads, I’m not sure I’m going to be able to overcome the barrier that second level monitoring already raises.
Thinking about that, and wishing I could send Alyssa a letter asking how she’s going, prompted me to write to Nenna again, even though she didn’t answer me last time. We’re about to arrive at Pandora, so she won’t get it till tomorrow at the earliest, but I hope she writes back. The Lents were so nice to me, and it’ll never stop bothering me that I ended up hurting them.
Time to go be poked at mysterious alien installations. Hopefully they won’t expect me to stand about getting headaches for too long.
May
Saturday, May 3
Two Steps Forward, Ten Steps Back
New resolutions:
1. Always carry full Setari equipment.
2. Find a lighter.
3. Be careful what I wish for.
Monday, May 5
Extended dodging and swimming practice
It was just on dawn at Pandora when I arrived with Third Squad. My labrattery session wasn’t for a couple of hours, so Taarel handed me over to two greensuits who were to be my primary babysitters: Esem and Hetz. They were a younger and older guy, polite, but super po-faced, making me sorry that Third Squad left almost immediately with the Litara. I would have loved to listen to Eeli’s reaction to Pandora’s changes. It’s grown so big, I could hardly believe it: still plenty of tents, but dozens of buildings in varying stages of growth and fit-out. My greensuits showed me to a room in the main building, just a bed and a shelf, but with a window looking over the lake. I left my things, ate a little lunch/breakfast, and asked if I could go for a walk along the lake since I wanted to visit my otters, to make sure their stream was undisturbed. Esem nixed that idea – I’d have to schedule any departure from Pandora – but was quite amenable to taking me to look at my old tower while we were waiting for my first appointment.
It gave me a very eerie feeling to explore the old village, to check out how far the cleaning-up project has advanced. They’ve been concentrating on the buildings around the central amphitheatre section, removing encroaching plants and encrusting dirt, cataloguing the objects but leaving all but the most fragile in place. I kept peering through the windows expecting to see people who belong here, instead of greysuits and greensuits. They’re even planning to restore the gardens, because the whole town is going to be a museum site. So is my tower, but as Fort Cass, part of the history of the stray who unlocked the world. That spun me out, and I’m still not sure whether to be upset or amused that they’re turning a piece of me into a tourist site. My blanket, mats and pots look incredibly pathetic.
Far too soon, Esem and Hetz herded me to the amphitheatre, where I was introduced to the small group of technicians who were going to give me headaches. They were all eager to start work: it seems they’ve been waiting for some considerable time to get their hands on me. The cats have all moved out, off to a part of the town which isn’t being worked on yet. But I’d noticed two or three in Pandora: kittens kidnapped and adopted, and one or two slightly less feral adults on the look-out for food.
The technicians explained that they were investigating how the platform operated and where the aether went when it flowed down to it. Since I could hear the Ddura, they were hoping that they’d be able to get clearer or different reading of the platform’s operation when I was in contact with it.
"Simply try to communicate with the Ddura as you have previously," said Jelan Scal, the geeky guy in charge. "I know that the volume of the Ddura is painful for you, so we’ll keep the sessions as short as possible. What we want is quality, not quantity. We’ve found that we take much clearer readings from subjects standing on the platform, so we’ll monitor the platform’s reactions with you there until the Ddura arrives, and then we’ll keep you for only a brief exchange. Ready?"
I nodded, and walked up the stair onto the platform, betting that the brief exchange would end up much longer and hoping that the Ddura was by now so used to there being Muinans again that it would listen to me when I told it to shut up. I turned to Jelan Scal, who looked pleased and started to say something, and then he disappeared.
For a moment I really thought that Scal – and everyone else in the room and all the machinery – had just vanished. But of course it was the other way around, as glowing walls and the big hole in the back of the room made obvious. It was a different platform room, broken and split, with a chunk of floor and back wall missing so I could see I was perched beside a drop to a big flooded chamber. I walked to the edge of the platform, peering down, and could see what looked like some kind of cistern system, the water quite clear, with low outlet tunnels.
Not inviting. I shook my head and tried to work out how to leave. Just wanting to go didn’t work. I walked back into the centre of the platform and wanted very hard, and that didn’t work either. And then I looked up, feeling uncomfortable, and there was a Cruzatch crawling along the ceiling toward me.
Wanting really, really a lot to leave didn’t help either.
The Cruzatch was moving quickly, completely upside-down: Spiderman with a burning Cheshire Cat grin. I didn’t have a whole lot of choices. I sure as hell wasn’t going to fight it. I didn’t seem able to conveniently teleport back to Pandora. So I turned and dived into the water.
It was a long drop, and the water shockingly cold, but I entered clean, angling toward one of rectangular outlets. They were a fair distance and I knew I wouldn’t be able to reach them, let alone swim through one, without surfacing for air. I paused, floating underwater as I peered upward, and couldn’t see anything behind or above me. The ceiling and the wall above the outlet was empty of grinning black shapes and so I swam hastily upward, surfaced just long enough to take a huge breath, then dove again.
I felt a jolt on my heel, then a grip on my ankle, and I was hauled backward out of the water, straight upward. The Cruzatch didn’t need to cling to the ceiling or wall, flying easily, and its hold was both painfully tight and so hot it felt like even my very resistant nanoliquid suit was having trouble. Coughing because water had gone up my nose, I kicked upward with my free foot, connecting twice but not seeming to bother it much until I made a nanoliquid spike extend out the bottom of my boot to spear into its arm. It let go, white light spurting.
It was a longish drop back to the water, but that was good because it gave me a chance to twist into a diving position, to orient myself and take a breath, and the velocity to shoot into the nearest outlet and swim as hard and quickly as I could, and fortunately it wasn’t too far and I surfaced in a tall round chamber, only about three metres across, with a clutch of underwater outlets but no other openings I could see.