I can only be relieved that he did that – and that the weather was good so that they could fly quickly and weren’t still in deep-space when it happened. Fourth and Eleventh travelled to the rift island via the Ena – a route which has been included in the regular rotations ever since I got myself trapped the first time – and they joined up with the scanning ship as it came back from its initial survey.
There had already been a project underway to try and locate the Pillars from deep-space. They hadn’t succeeded as yet, but then they hadn’t had drones and squad sitting handily at any Pillar locations. Deep-space isn’t a great environment for drones – the physics there aren’t exactly helpful – but drones and ship instruments have a far greater range than the Setari. The scanning ship hadn’t detected anything when it went in to hover around the rift entrance, but after returning to collect Fourth and Eleventh, they headed on the usual course to Muina, scanning madly all the way, and finally detected a signal just before the Muina rift. Whereupon Nils told them that I was no longer with them.
Since they were inside the Pillar and relatively protected from Ionoth, Second Squad (bruises and aether-drunkenness aside) weren’t in immediate danger, so the ship continued on to Muina to let them know I’d been taken, only to find out that this was old news.
From the squads on Muina’s point of view, they’d been continuing their search for Second Squad when I suddenly popped into interface range, deeply unconscious with my alert blaring away. Nils had dropped both our logs to the drones before letting me go, so they knew what had happened to me before I’d passed out. And they knew exactly where I was, too – right near the bottom of the Oriath installation.
As soon as the Oriath team detected me, they’d accessed the drones, and withdrawn my nanosuit so that they could make a visual scan. The visual had shown that I was lying alone on a (symbol-etched) platform being busily unconscious. The technician driving the drones detected movement nearby and very sensibly didn’t leave them sitting on top of me, but scuttled them down one side of the platform and tucked them as far out of sight as she could manage. She even powered them down to a ready state, and I gather that she’s likely to get some kind of commendation for this, since the Cruzatch invariably destroy any drones they spot, and it was a group of Cruzatch which came and took me away – up to a room directly below the room holding Lira.
After a suitable pause, KOTIS repowered the drones and did some cautious exploration of the lower reaches of the Oriath installation. The Cruzatch had taken me up, and one drone tried to follow and was promptly crushed on a ramp. The other searched down and found a particularly grand and magnificent series of sarcophagus rooms, ending in another malachite marble. Once it reached here, the drone was tucked into a corner and KOTIS Command had a fun argument over whether to have Palanty from Fifth teleport down straight away, or to wait. They didn’t want to precipitate a countermeasure by the Cruzatch, and if they lost the drone’s visual feed, it would be much more difficult and dangerous for Palanty to teleport down.
And they didn’t particularly want to blow the place up while I was still in it. Unless they had to.
The eventual decision was to hold off doing anything until they’d broken through to the malachite marble in the last of the other installations. Isten Notra had stressed that leaving everyone one marble functional might create catastrophic stress on the spaces, so KOTIS has been shielding each marble against Cruzatch retaliation and planting bombs ready and waiting.
And they were still waiting when Fourth brought news of Second’s location. Fourth stayed on Muina, headed for Oriath, while Eleventh went back to trace a path to the Pillar where Second were stuck. KOTIS was already well into full battle mode, most of the Setari squads massing at Oriath, and two groups of technicians frantically trying to overcome the ramp of doom and work through the last of the shielding at a final installation up near the northern icecap.
All that time they were trying to wake me up, but I was suffering from an extreme overload of aether and was totally non-responsive. Other than them finally breaking into the other installation and planting the second-last of the bombs, there really wasn’t any progress until I did wake up – by which time Fourth was about two-thirds of the way to Oriath and Second had been recovered and had just emerged from the rift.
Waking up was the worst thing.
I was lying down and I couldn’t move and I couldn’t see. There were voices. The whispers.
The whispers were still whispers, but somehow they were so loud, so dominant, that the large mass of people trying to talk to me over the interface were just noise. But then that noise dropped away and became Kaoren, just Kaoren, talking to me steadily, and very sensibly sending the words to me in text as well.
Reading his words helped me hear him, repeating my name. And then, in some of the bare few words of English I’d managed to teach him: "Please. Need. Hear."
That did start to shift me out of my groggy state, and I tried to turn my head and failed, discovering that the stuff covering me would only expand and contract a few millimetres, like strong elastic.
The whispers started to build up, trying to drown out Kaoren, and that made me angry, giving me impetus to respond.
"There’s ten Cruzatch near me, and more somewhere down. I’m tied up and can’t move my arms or legs. I think they’ve used the same stuff that net was made of," I said, struggling with the annoying rubberiness of it. "There’s something over me making it too dark to see. I can hear the stones whispering. They’re a little further away, but otherwise it’s very like my dream."
Although I held it together starting out, I sound openly terrified by the time I reached the end. And the log has helpfully captured my gasping breaths when Tsur Selkie told me they needed me to wait, to lie there and tell them if the Cruzatch went away.
I opened a private channel to Kaoren and asked him to keep talking, and especially to keep sending it in text to reinforce the words, to tell me what had been happening. I needed that to keep back the whispers, which kept sucking at my attention, this steady stream of old Muinan, building a hierarchy of gods.
It might have seemed like forever, but apparently it wasn’t more than five minutes after I woke up enough to respond that until the Cruzatch in the room gathered together, then moved away.
"They are going down," I said. "None left near me."
"Tell us immediately when you can no longer detect them," Kaoren said, his voice shifting to measured captain-mode. "As soon as that happens, the drone will be activated so a team can teleport into the room of the power stone. We can’t teleport to where you are, both because we cannot see the room, and because you’re in the heavy zone. Once you’re free, you need to move either down toward the power stone or up to the surface – whichever way is easiest. Once the teleportation group are in, I’m going to take you through a visualisation to help free you."
"I can only feel a couple now," I said. "I – no, they’re gone as well."
"Good. We’ll start the visualisation now."
Kaoren began to describe a drone, a very solid, squat drone furnished with a vast array of cutting tools. It was his usual clear, concise description, and by that time I’d shrugged off more of the aether effect, but–