I remembered, at least, to keep talking over the interface. "Kittens are evil?"
None of them answered immediately, but Mara touched her hand to my shoulder and stared about, searching. "Nothing," she said.
"Checking the log," Maze said. When we’re on mission, as well as second level monitoring I’m on mission log, which he can access as team captain, so he meant he was looking at my recording of the cat. And then he looked at me a moment before scanning the area again. "Gone now, at any rate. Or completely undetectable." He looked back at me, and though his voice wasn’t angry his mouth was a flat line as he said: "If anything approaches us, no matter what it looks like, warn us immediately. We can’t judge by appearances here."
I felt a prize twit, of course, and could only nod and try really hard not to screw up any more on the mission. Which took another hour of tense maze-trekking and by the time we finally got back to KOTIS everyone looked like they had stress headaches.
"Another increase in population," Mara said, after the scan had cleared us of stickies. "I’m starting to reconsider the proposals to double-team."
"Dealing with swoops on top of that?" Lohn pulled a face. "I’ll pass."
"The trade-off is too great," Maze agreed, sounding terribly tired. He gave me a worn smile. "You made a big difference to that space’s difficulty. If it wasn’t for the population increase, we would have easily set a record completion pace."
"And you claim to disapprove of the pace records," Lohn said, heading to the showers.
"Lunch with me?" Zee said as we followed him, and I knew I was in for a talk well before we were sitting in a quiet corner of the canteen.
"Are kittens evil?" I asked, as soon as I’d swallowed enough of some yellowy mashed stuff (which tasted a lot better than it looked) to no longer feel painfully hungry.
"I’ve not read any reports featuring them," she said. "But there are Ionoth which can disguise their shape, and Ionoth with appearances entirely innocuous and intentions which are not. The problem with that one was that we did not detect it. There’s very few things that can get anywhere near as close as that to someone with Combat Sight without notice, threat or not." She reached over and rapped the back of my knuckles with her spoon. "And petting the thing was entirely idiotic." But she smiled at me, and shook her head to take the sting out of the words. "He was angry at himself, not you. Just be sure to be more sensible in future."
I nodded, still cringing internally. There was no way I was going to upset everyone like that again if I could help it. I watched her eat, not missing the shadows under her eyes, and finally managed to ask: "What happen third senior Setari squad?"
"A kadara." She said the word so softly I could barely hear her. "One which broke into real-space three years ago. We lost nine, most from the senior squads. They renumbered us all afterwards. The original First Squad captain, Helese, was Maze’s wife. He’s been very hard on himself ever since."
"Very sad guy," I said, and could only promise myself to not be entirely idiotic in future.
Wednesday, February 20
Third Squad
Third was a difficult squad to test with. Not because of any attitude, but because they had such a range of talents, which required three test environments to get through. I’d been a little nervous about working with their squad captain, Taarel – the spectacular one with the unlikely hair – just because I’d taken the impression she was really intense about Maze. But she was totally professional, so either it was my imagination or she’s not a petty sort.
But before Taarel there was Eeli. After breakfast I’d gone up to the roof because I’d figured it was around time for dawn, and on Tare dawn lasts a really long time and is well worth watching. I was sitting through a lesson on Taren geography, keeping an eye on the horizon, when a girl a year or maybe even two years younger than me arrived. Eeli Bata, according to the interface, looking like a string bean in her Setari uniform.
"Sorry to interrupt you," she started out, her voice high and enthusiastic. "I thought I’d introduce myself since we’re working with you today. I’m Eeli. I’m the path finder in Third Squad. I’ve really been looking forward to this. We all want to see how far you can take us."
This was definitely a different sort of Setari. "Hello."
"I can show you the way to the test room, when you’re ready," she continued. "Why are you up here on the roof? Are you not used to being inside buildings? Is this much like your world?"
Eeli is what Nenna would be if Nenna had uber psychic powers. She’d sometimes stop asking questions in the hopes I would remember them all to answer them, but then new questions would bubble up and she’d be off again. I wanted see if she would act like that once the training session started, and was pleased that, though she shut right up and did exactly what she should, she kept looking really excited the entire time.
We started in Test Room One to go through the combat talents. In terms of sheer fire power Third Squad is nothing compared to Eighth, but they’re not shabby either. We moved on to testing sights next. There’s six sorts of sights: Combat, Path, Gate, Symbol, Place and Sight Sight, which is two different words, but both mean sight. Third Squad has all but Sight Sight, which is really rare and is apparently something to do with divining the nature of things. According to Eeli, the bluesuit who came down in person to look at me, Selkie, has Sight Sight and so does Ruuel. Eeli is a great source of information. I don’t even have to ask her questions.
I could tell Taarel’s squad really adores their captain, the way First Squad respects Maze, but with an extra level of worship. She’s definitely one of those people like HM, a tiny sun, though she leaves HM in the shade. She has the strongest Ena manipulation talent, and when we went into the Ena to test my enhancement on her talents, she was able to partially close one of the gates. She has a calm reserve, but I can really picture her giving a Battle of Agincourt type of speech, inspiring everyone around her to follow and admire and commit great acts of nobility.
Reading back that last paragraph, it sounds like I have the hots for Taarel. Funny. I guess she impressed me. This whole entry is really confused and out of order and I think that’s because of Eeli’s gossip and because Taarel really reminds me of Ruuel. I haven’t had any reason to write about him, but I’ve developed a tendency to look closely at any squad I happen to see, hoping it might be Fourth. I think about him a lot more than I’ve written about.
And it occurred to me, while I was watching Taarel and being impressed and seeing Ruuel in the shape of her eyes, that I might be on second level monitoring for the rest of my life. No wonder none of the Setari want to have informal conversations with me.
Thursday, February 21
Let’s try that again – Third Squad
Yesterday’s entry reads as amazingly garbled. The shorter and less confused version is that Eeli collected me and we went to Test Room One. We tested combat skills and Combat Sight and then went to a smaller room where we tested Symbol and Place Sight. Then we went into the Ena and tested Path Sight, Gate Sight, and Ena manipulation. The fact that, enhanced, Taarel was able to partially close a small gate was a fairly major thing apparently. There’s a few gates in very inconvenient spots and, though it sounds like it would take a lot of sessions to do it, I had a strong impression that I’ll be assigned to Third Squad at some point in the future to go and close one or two that they really don’t want open.