Just picture me with my eyes shut, hands over my ears, going "La la la la la la".
Not exactly heroic, I know. But KOTIS has achieved what it needed from me, found what they think is a workable plan, and my role now is to just keep my head down until they open the way to the last of the marbles.
The rest of Fourth was back from leave today, and I could see that Kaoren’s open exhaustion was a serious shock to them. Sen, oddly, isn’t having nightmares, but I think her Sight has told her something because she’s gone very quiet and wants to be carried about and held far more than usual. I’m not allowed anywhere without a guard, and a full squad within quick response time. Not even medical. Mori and Glade were with me today, and it was a relief to talk almost normally about the ads for the upcoming season of The Hidden War. They’re hyping the hell out of the first episode as a major, history-making event, and showing the last few seconds of the last episode and then blackness and then a fragment of the actual audio from my log, ending in a huge splash and underwatery sounds.
I think if any of us have to wait any longer someone’s head’s going to explode from sheer stress.
Monday, November 3
Out from Underneath
It’s over.
It’s over and I’m not dead. Or trapped in a half-life or any of the things I halfway expected to happen to me. I’ve been quietly convinced for so long that I would end up dead that I can hardly believe it. Nor can anyone else, I think.
There’s a good deal of cautious celebration going on.
Of course, I had to get through a lot of drama to reach this point. It started while I was still being a pin cushion in medical, when news came in from Muina that Second Squad had been lost.
Not lost as in dead: lost as in vanished. They’d been in-transit through Kalasa, hauling a fresh batch of sacrificial drones (now produced in Pandora). They stepped on the platform to the town nearest to Oriath – along with a greensuit and two greysuits who had been with them – and didn’t arrive at the expected destination. As totally gone as I’d been when I vanished to Kalasa. All the scanners stationed by the platform could tell us was that there’d been a higher than usual power reading. The greysuits were guessing that the platform’s destination had been diverted. That Second Squad had been caught by the trap meant for me.
There’s a serious problem with using technology that your enemy understands far better than you.
They’d been missing about an hour by the time we heard the news, and we had to sit through way too much debate over whether to try and use me to visualise the missing. I desperately wanted to, not only because I’ve grown close to Second, but I just hated to think of Zee and Ketzaren, who would both be going out of their minds. But I was also scared spitless that I would visualise them and they’d be dead.
Before KOTIS was willing to risk a visualisation – particularly one which would require me going into the Ena – they sent every available squad out to scout multiple locations in near-space for any sign of Cruzatch, and then finally took me through a gate they don’t normally use, with an escort of six squads.
The visualisation at least wasn’t difficult to do and I felt a good deal of relief not to be seeing dead bodies. Nils was looking very captainly, quite unlike his usual self, talking to Jeh while unpacking one of the drones from a pallet of them. Jeh was trying to wake everyone else, all lying about on the floor of a rather familiar-looking doughnut-shaped room. The inside of one of the Pillars.
"The walls–" Halla began, and Kaoren said sharply: "Cut the projection!" and grabbed at me, but it was too late, and his hands went straight through me.
It’s a little hard to describe what happened, even after watching several different logs of it. I guess it was the reverse of what I did when visualisating Inisar. I was sitting on the testing chair we’d brought with us, looking at all the symbols burnt into the whitestone walls of the Pillar, which had shifted from glowing mildly to vivid white, and from my point of view just sort of overwhelmed everything I could see and swept me away like a tidal force. I really thought I was in the undertow of a massive wave. The squads guarding me saw me just fade away, as if I was one of my own projections allowed to lapse. And to Nils and Jeh, off in the Pillar, the symbols began glowing and I suddenly blazed into existence, being pulled backward toward the central column of the Pillar.
Nils has Speed and excellent reflexes, and threw himself between me and the central column, which was a handy way to give us both a lot of bruises. I split his lip. The tidal wave kept trying to sweep me on, and he let out this low gasp of pain as he was crushed against the central column, but he managed to keep hold of me.
I felt like a super magnet was pulling me, and Nils was just a bit of squishiness temporarily between me and where I was going. The pressure made it very hard to breathe and Nils was even worse off, with me crushing into his chest, and his enhanced Telekinesis useless because it won’t work on me. Even with Jeh’s help they couldn’t budge me at all, and my arms and legs kept getting sucked backwards around him and going straight through the substance of the central column into the aether stream. All three of us barely had the strength to haul them back, and it was obvious that if Nils didn’t let me keep going both of us would suffocate.
"Get one – two – of the small drones," Nils gasped, then opened a channel for all three of us because he was barely able to talk. "Caszandra, open your suit and seal the drones inside it."
This wasn’t difficult to do, though it did make me look ridiculously like I was pregnant with very argumentative twins, and spider drones aren’t exactly something that are fun to put inside your clothes. Fortunately the legs folded away in non-dangerous ways or I probably would have ended up a drone-kebab.
Nils activated the drones, adding: "Sound your alert – it gives more people more ability to access your interface and suit controls," and gave me a little squeeze after I did, then with Jeh’s help struggled out from between me and the symbol-covered central column. I promptly smacked into it and vanished, falling into a river of light.
I’ve watched the mission log from back on Tare, where I and my projection had both vanished at the same time. Kaoren stays frozen before my empty chair for all of two seconds, eyes wide and horrified, and then goes totally captain, ordering everyone back inside at double-pace and asking Halla for her Sight impressions during the brief trip back inside. His voice was maybe a little more curt than usual, and his eyes nearly totally closed, but otherwise he didn’t show any sign of his feelings. He says he couldn’t let himself pause until he’d made sure everything he could think of doing was being done.
Once back in real-space he was very absolute in his discussions with the bluesuits – though at that time he thought that I was trapped at the Pillar with Second, and didn’t know I’d spent barely any time there at all. But knowing Second was at a Pillar, and with drones, meant they had a shot at finding them, since all the Pillar locations found so far open out into deep-space. Kaoren had a scanning ship which was stationed at the rift island sent into deep-space immediately to try and contact the drones, and then arranged for a second ship to take a mix of scanning technicians and some of the best Kalrani path-finders on a trip through to Muina. And the kids, because Lira has shown a marked tendency to speak to them, and the search would be coordinated from Muina.