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.