I drew my knees up to my chin. "Cloning legal Tare?" I asked carefully, and felt the depth of their silence.
"Cloning will not reproduce a talent set," Mara said eventually. "Kolar tried it not long ago, and although there’s some pattern similarity, it seems that there’s more to talents than simple genetics. Since they haven’t found a way to make clones with an adequate lifespan, there’s a ban on human cloning here."
But there’d obviously been a lot of debate about quite a few things.
"Be really good way make me want be anywhere but here," I said softly. "That good thing to add today’s report." And then, because I hated making First Squad feel bad, I added: "Six billion people my planet. Bet Cass not only one enhance skill. Hope they look harder for natural gate, get chance show First Squad my home."
Mara put a hand on my shoulder. "We’ll do that. Besides, the real solution’s the Pillars, not increasing our ability to kill Ionoth. You can be sure we’ll be throwing all our resources into taking advantage of the stroke of luck your visit home brought."
It isn’t necessarily an endless war. It’s good to remember that.
Monday, February 18
Eighth Squad
It’s a weird feeling to have a group of strangers all eager for me to show up. Or really eager to try out what their powers are like enhanced, anyway.
Eighth Squad is one of the Setari teams stacked with high impact talents instead of being more all-round. They’re not usually used for spaces that require close fighting: there’s apparently some spaces where you don’t want to go in and make things explode because parts of the spaces explode right back. Memories of oil refineries, perhaps. And there’s some Ionoth that you have to kill by hitting them because it’s a bad idea using psionics on them.
Eighth’s captain is Ro Kanato. He tracked me down about half an hour before I was due to meet them, to introduce himself, show me the way to a new test room, and double-check my preferences for people grabbing hold of me. He kept making references to the rules which had been set up regarding my handling. I’d love to be able to read these rules, and the reports and things filed about me, but though I’ve access to the public parts of the interface, there’s an awfully large amount of the KOTIS network which I can’t look at. I’d like to be able to look up more information about the rotations I’m assigned to before going into them. Although maybe that would be a bad idea and give me nightmares. Hard to tell.
Kanato is about my height, with long black hair which he catches up in a ponytail, and he comes across as unfussed with a mild-mannered efficiency that turns mountains into molehills. I kept wondering where I’d heard his voice until I recognised it as the person who’d first spoken to Ruuel from Fourth when we returned from my excursion, just sounding considerably less surprised. He’s not quite as correct as Zan, but all sensible and by-the-book, which kept me feeling less embarrassed than I might otherwise have been.
Test Room 2 is built for testing the high impact talents, divided into two by a massive amount of shielding, with the larger side full of angled walls of metal – targets – and the rest of Eighth Squad waiting on the safe side of the shielding. Two girls and another three guys, all polite and professional, with an edge of underlying excitement. Kanato introduced them in the order they were standing: "Henaz, Kade, Trouban, Bryze, Hasen. We’ll do a complete run of each skill set per person, starting with Hasen. Remember your instructions regarding contact. Anyone who fails to keep to the restrictions will spend the rest of the day on a training run."
Hasen was a tiny, bird-like girl with soft black hair cut really close to her skull, gorgeous dark brown eyes and darker skin than most Tarens. She stood before a hatchway which was the only opening to the other part of the test chamber and did the whole current strength base level test first. Her primary talent is Electricity, and she shot a fat bolt of it at a target a third of the way down the long length of the test chamber. It wasn’t like Lohn’s Light bolts, which are short bullets, but a literal lightning bolt, stretching all the way to the target. It left her breathing deeply, and there was a sharp ozone scent in the air and if it wasn’t for my uniform I think the hair on my arms would have been standing on end. The target made a thooming noise, and I watched through the thick, distorting viewport as some residual lightning played around the metal wall. There was an afterimage of it across my eyes.
"Now enhanced," Kanato said, after it had died down, and Hasen brushed the back of my wrist with her fingers. First Squad had decided it’s better for the Setari to handle the contact involved in the enhancement because there’s less communication lag, and they have far better reaction times than me. I was relieved that Eighth Squad had realised that they didn’t need more than a slight touch to be enhanced.
I think she was aiming for the same target. It was a little hard to tell since instead of a bolt shooting from her hand this huge round ball of white appeared about a quarter of the way into the room, arcing and spitting and drifting slowly away from us. The noise and smell of it was incredible, and I turned away and covered my ears, but could still feel the vibration of each strike. It didn’t last too long, fortunately, and died away to this stunned silence.
Kanato wasn’t quite managing to hide that he was having exactly the same "Whoa" reaction which Jules would have to something particularly cool and unexpected, which all of them were having, I guess. But after blinking a couple of times, he said: "We’ll target to the far end of the room in future, I think. Either of you experiencing any side-effects?"
I shrugged, and Hasen slowly shook her head. She looked so small and slight to have done so much.
"Re-test that at the far end of the room, then, so we can see if the result is the same."
It was. I did my usual weird things to Eighth Squad’s talents, but again the distortion remained consistent whenever it showed up. Fortunately most only had three or four talents each, but I was still feeling hungry and tired by the time Kanato called it a day and sent me off to the medical exam they make me go to after test sessions. The medics couldn’t decide whether I was feeling the impact of the enhancements or was just normally hungry and tired. Eighth Squad all looked exhausted after blasting all-out like that, so comparatively it’s still a negligible impact on me. I did snooze for a lot of the afternoon though, and slept through when I was supposed to go jogging (too bad, so sad).
Even though Eighth is closer to my age, I’d rather stay with First Squad, given the choice. I know that Eighth Squad was being all business and distracted by excitement and whatever, but Kanato was the only one who said a word to me the entire time. They weren’t being deliberately rude or anything: I think maybe they’re not sure how I fit into this very structured world they’ve been raised to accept. Like they haven’t been given permission to be social.
I didn’t mind them, though. It was funny watching them being so excited and trying not to show it.
Tuesday, February 19
Maze Rotation
Tsennel Rotation actually, but tsennel means labyrinth/maze. I’ve found a proper dictionary, to supplement my vague injected one, and have taken to looking up words and trying to fix the real definition and making annotations to connect to English.