First Squad took care of whatever was at mark two with a minimum of fuss, and it wasn’t until we were at the mark thirteen that Fourth Squad found anything of interest, pausing.
"Underground," Ruuel said. "Hold here, off surface. Sonn, with me. Stay unenhanced."
That was an odd one. Auron and Ferus levitated those staying behind while Ruuel and Sonn walked to a patch of leaves which seemed totally unthreatening until these huge greyish tentacles whipped up out of holes and tried to grab them. Ruuel cut one in two, dancing back out of the spurt of blackish blood, and then lifted himself and Sonn into the air so she could blast the tentacles with bolts of lightning. Trap-door octopus. Other than that, there was only an encounter with a handful of toothy monkey things, nothing that made Fourth Squad even break a sweat.
It was a big park and too overgrown to walk through quickly, so it was over half an hour later when we met back up at the central circle. Then the stronger Telekinesis talents – Maze, Zee and Ferus (whose first name is Glade, which I thought very ironic) – had a logistics discussion before enhancing and pulling trees from the area I thought had been fields, stacking them to form walls dividing the park into a half with trees and a half without.
You don’t just pick up a tree; they’re too firmly rooted. Instead they quiver, and rattle from an invisible wind, raining leaves and bugs, then burst upwards in showers of dirt. We kept a respectful distance after the first one, and Lohn and Sonn followed along behind looking alert as scores of critters ran in every direction. Ruuel took everyone else on a little hunting trip after something which had strayed within his detection range, and I trailed along at Maze’s elbow, trying not to fall in the holes, and thinking over how much Jules would love to be in my place.
"What are you trying not to laugh at?" Lohn asked me, when we were about a third through the field half of the park.
"Setari have great future landscape gardeners. Get Maze add nice water feature."
Maze heard that, and shot me an amused look over his shoulder, but kept concentrating on uprooting trees.
"Not our usual style of mission, true," Lohn said, surveying the destruction all around, but then giving the telekinetics a narrower glance. "More difficult, in some ways. We’re not really designed for sustained output."
That also got a look from Maze, but then he nodded and said over the interface: "This is sufficient clearance. Meet back at the centre point."
We turned and walked back, Maze, Zee and Ferus occasionally filling in the larger holes left behind, or tossing boulders over at the stacked rows of trees. They looked extremely tired, and I was starting to feel that way myself. Enhancing people never feels like effort, until I abruptly fall asleep afterwards. We sat down on the rim of the central circle and waited for the Diodel to show up and kick up a lot of dirt and fallen leaves in our faces and make us really want the shower we were all looking forward to anyway. There’s six to share between the Setari and the greysuits, and I wasn’t at all inclined to object when Zee took me along for first shot at them, and then to eat and straight to bed. Even though it wasn’t yet sunset, it had still been a long day for everyone, and I felt sorry for whichever of the Setari had to sit up during the sleep shift, since someone with Combat Sight has to be on watch at all times.
It’s still night out. I woke ridiculously early, well before everyone except the people who were on duty, but that’s given me a chance to catch up writing this. I think it will be dawn soon. I’m sitting in the common room area, which has a window giving me a lovely view of darkness. It was a little eerie walking past everyone’s pods, the covers all closed and opaque. They have good sound-proofing and I couldn’t hear breathing, though there was a hint of someone snoring.
Setari Summer Camp, day one.
Very expensive guards
It was starting to grow brighter outside when I finished writing about yesterday, so I turned out the lights in the common room (faintly chuffed that I could do something like turn the lights out – I still haven’t fully recovered from my early days in medical purgatory when I didn’t have access rights to do anything). The window wasn’t facing fully in the direction of the rising sun, but I still had a great view down a slight slope to a flat area with a large number of buildings, and then a steep rise up a hill and some very impressive buildings on top of it. It’s all very overgrown, but beautiful in the dawn, the whitestone gradually picked out in pink light. It must have been a very grand city once.
It was still only half-light outside when I had an uneasy sense of being watched and turned my head to find Ruuel standing looking at me. I’ve no idea how long he’d been there.
"Is watching the dawn a custom of your home?" he asked, coming over to where I was sitting on a window seat arrangement before one of the long viewing windows: my favourite spot on the ship.
"Think I’ve seen more Muinan dawns than Earth’s." I turned back to the window, since that was the easiest way to deal with how good he was looking just then. "Generally stay up a lot later on Earth, so don’t get up as early. Is better when you can hear the birds."
He didn’t say anything, so I risked a quick glance at him. Ruuel has a way of gazing off at things – maybe using Sights, maybe just thinking – wearing this distant, contemplative expression which makes me want to stare at him in turn. I hastily looked back outside, and said: "More sensible roofs here."
"Sensible?"
"The trees are what Earth calls deciduous – they’re losing their leaves in Autumn – so chances good it snows in this area. Flat roofs like those at Pandora must have needed a lot of clearing in Winter. These almost all seem to be sloped." Though I guess, since they were built out of whitestone, the weight of snow on the roof mightn’t be a big problem. "Couldn’t work out what they did for heating and cooking, either. Nothing that looked like a chimney or smoke vent in those houses. Only found a couple of kilns or ovens and those were separate from the other buildings. Could find very little information on Tare about what daily life was like on Muina."
"We have lost almost all that we were." He didn’t sound particularly upset, but it made me wonder just how much the Nuran had gotten under his skin, saying that Tarens don’t even know what Setari means. And almost as if he knew what I was thinking, he added: "If we are to believe the one calling himself Inisar, we are not to be trusted with the past."
"Nurans as human as Tarens or people from Earth. Chances are just as fallible and ready do stupid things."
"An observation almost equal to Tare mostly treating you as civilised people should."
That made me turn around, but he was already walking away. And of course after that I spent the entire day thinking about him and being stupidly aware of everything he did, which was annoying. Being assigned to Fourth Squad is giving me way too many opportunities to look at Kaoren Ruuel, and my resolution to just sit back and enjoy the scenery isn’t all that easy to keep.
Otherwise it was an uneventful day for me. First Squad, minus Alay, roamed about killing Ionoth and mapping the immediate area, while Fourth Squad escorted the greysuits about as they uncovered and looked over a small pavilion in the park, and then moved on to the buildings nearest to the ship. The greysuits switch constantly between eager excitement, nervous glances at all that sky without ceiling, and avoiding creepy-crawlies. All of us were slathered in a very effective insect repellant, but every so often someone would turn over a rock and try not to shriek.