Not quite left to my own devices however, since a greysuit had obviously been assigned to make sure I didn’t go off the rails during the trip. There always seems to be someone now: usually one of the squads, or a greensuit or a greysuit who will pop by and pretend they’re not checking me over for signs of imminent meltdown. It’s hugely annoying, but I guess they felt they’d been forgetting my psychological aspects too much lately. Why they think reassigning the useful stray without warning is a good way of dealing with me is another question.
Not just a useful stray: I’m a multi-purpose stray. I enhance, hear LOUD noises, act as a key to lost civilisations, and see blurry! From the looks of my calendar, I’m going to be Third Squad’s babysitting problem now. Pass the bloody parcel.
There was one good point to counter my gloomy morning. Tsur Selkie had organised a techie guy called Voiz Euka to recreate Earth’s calendar, and I spent an hour with him after my inevitable medical exam, explaining the way Earth measures time, letting him measure the time units from my phone, and working through all the variations of the calendar. He seemed to think it not too difficult an exercise, once we’d properly compared my phone’s seconds and minutes to Tare’s time units, and so now I won’t have to fret about losing my phone. A whole clock and calendar program, written specifically to keep me happy. I even remembered leap years.
And as soon as First Squad heard I was back, they arranged to meet up. They were heading out on rotation soon after I arrived, and I was on a slightly earlier shift to them, but we met at Mara’s quarters when they finished their rotation and had nuna (crepes) for dinner.
It was great to be off-duty and off-record. As off-record as second level monitoring lets me be, anyway. Also fun to not have to wear my uniform, and to eat food which involved a lot of sweetness and not a lot of attention to nutritional value. To be teased by Lohn and hugged by Mara and have Maze be kind and a little worried.
I wasn’t even close to surprised when Zee took me back to my room and interrogated me mercilessly about the whole thing with Ninth Squad. And, to my dismay, about what exactly Fifth and Seventh Squad had done to make me not want to work with them. But she said that my squad preferences weren’t general knowledge, that Maze gets told stuff like that because he’s senior captain, and that she was asking on his behalf.
I really didn’t want to bring Zan into it – I don’t think she’d be at all happy about me talking about the way they bully her – so I just said I’d seen how nasty Kajal and Forel were toward other Setari, and explained about the testing session I’d had with Fifth Squad.
"It’s not that I think they do anything to me," I said. "Just that I think they find it funny if I scared or embarrassed. Going into spaces, need to trust squad more than that."
Zee was more than a little annoyed after reviewing my testing session with Fifth, and said I should have told someone, at least about the part where they went ahead of me in the Ena. And then she asked me if anyone or anything else had made me uncomfortable or unhappy. I gave her an entertaining description of my meeting of Squad One, and she seemed satisfied that I was getting along with most of the Setari.
I’m so glad Zee’s okay. They all looked tired, but I couldn’t spot any new injuries. It’s so messed up that when I meet up with my closest friends here, I check them for damage.
Oh, and it’s Jules' birthday. Happy birthday, brat. Hope you scored lots of loot.
Monday, April 21
Something a little different
Taarel from Third had me meet her for breakfast, and explained what we’d be doing for the next few days. One of the gates from near-space to real-space is in a tremendously inconvenient spot on Unara: a major travel junction. Over the past few decades it’s slowly been growing, and they’ve continually had to increase the size of the lock around it. It’s nearing the point that they’re going to have to do some major infrastructure rejigging if it grows any further, and it already causes a huge amount of blockage and trouble.
Ever since they figured out that with my enhancement there was a possibility of actually closing gates, there’s been an increasing amount of pressure to assign Taarel and me to "closing really annoying gates" duty. The mayor (Lahanti) of Unara, one of the most powerful people on Tare, finally ordered KOTIS to give this particular gate highest priority and get it done. Guess that explains my abrupt reassignment.
The problem was that even with my enhancement, it’s exhausting work and they estimated it would take just Taarel and me weeks to get this Rana Junction gate closed. They decided multiple talents assisting would speed it up, if Taarel initiated a closure, but they couldn’t take off rotation every strong Ena manipulation talent, particularly now KOTIS is posting squads to Muina as well, so they’re using the strongest of the Kalrani Ena manipulation talents instead.
Today was a test day, to see whether a mass effort would work, so after breakfast we met up with the Kalrani who had been selected for the experiment. There were ten, all very correct in their brown and cream uniforms. The youngest looked about twelve and the oldest the same age as me: probably one of the candidates for Fourteenth Squad. Thirteenth Squad has already been chosen and is on pre-rotation training and has moved into the rooms on the same floor as me, though I haven’t seen any of them about yet.
They all seemed to know Taarel, at least to say good day Tsee Taarel to. I hadn’t thought about it, but the graduated Setari would be the logical candidates to give the Kalrani some expert tutoring. And of course before the Setari had qualified for their squads, they’d been Kalrani as well. Since it was Taarel, I wasn’t surprised that most of them couldn’t quite hide being awestruck by her presence, and were more than a little nervous and determined to be excellent for her.
They didn’t know how to treat me. I’m a curiosity and the prospect of a massive increase of power. I wondered if they’d heard about Ninth Squad, and politely said hello back when they greeted me, and otherwise kept my mouth shut, even when I saw that the test session was in my old room in the medical facility, and the gate they were testing closure techniques on was the one I’d torn into near-space. It was very strange seeing my old room-with-a-view with a thick metal gate-lock built around where my bed had been. They’d removed one of the walls, but there still wasn’t much room for the twelve of us, and I had to be careful about where I was standing.
Taarel took them through the touching-the-stray rules, then enhanced herself and started the closing process. Once she’d demonstrated, she had each of the Kalrani enhance and try in turn to close the gate just by themselves. I found this very dull, even with a projection of the gate for me to look at, and so it was simply a procession of serious kids frowning at the air. One of the Kalrani, a boy about fourteen called Dayn, managed to start it closing. It meant so much to him, and he was trying so hard not to show it that he went white and then red when Taarel gave him one of those brief, approving nods which Ruuel does so well, except Taarel adds a warm smile. Taarel is definitely charisma-plus.