by Power, P. S.
That, of course, if Tim had it right, was on purpose. Julie White had a deep and unconquerable fear of tall people. It was a thing that had been mentioned, since it meant she couldn't really visit with King Richard at all. The man was about nine feet tall. Timon had always figured that if exposed to such a thing Julie would be uncomfortable, or perhaps shake a bit. She was a sensible person, and while it was built in to her, using Rhetistics, which meant she couldn't just work around it, he could see no reason to have ever made it worse than that.
Maybe it wasn't, if she were prepared, or if the giant coming for her didn't really mean her harm, but in the moment the woman screamed and did something very unexpected, which was to hunch down and start to vomit. At least it seemed like that at first, but the liquid that came out was clear, and even through his shield he could feel a very sudden attraction growing for the woman again. Since what she was doing didn't lend itself to that sort of thing, being sort of gross, it had to be a chemical defense of some kind.
Timon took a deep breath and then another, after a few seconds he forced himself to move into a trance state, and managed to clap loudly.
"Lyn, stop that. This isn't the time for it. Julie, get a hold on yourself. We need to leave. Now. Move." He had to clap a few more times and finally move in front of Red, and wave her back. She glared, which, with her all red eyes was a lot more intimidating than normal, but she did it and after she got about fifteen feet away finally started to change back to her normal self. She started old, but slowly moved into her younger form, her breath coming fast and hard, since she was more than a little upset, it seemed.
"I hate that bitch. It's always the same thing when she's around. Always. Doris isn't like that, and they're practically the same person. White always loved taking people over like that though. Then it's going to be 'oops, I couldn't control myself.' I swear, one of these days will be the last time." She was clearly angry and also, Tim saw, being honest. It wasn't an idle threat, or something to take lightly. She really wanted the woman dead.
"Not today though. Please. We need to get her out of here. I... guess we can get her back to Soam. I really don't want to be trapped on a ship with her for weeks, if I can help it."
"No doubt. I wouldn't either. I... We have some bad blood between us. Most of us do, one way or another. It's part of the reason that we all like you new kids so much. You weren't supposed to be, really, but now that you're here, it makes a lot of sense. At least it will if you can avoid the mistakes that we made, initially. You probably can't though. Not really. Unfortunately, you're all still human, which means that you have the full range of normal problems. Greed, anger, jealousy... and will be prone to thinking that you're superior to others. It's mainly true, which makes it worse. You have to be better than the rest and still remain truly aware that it doesn't matter. Not in the long run. It's a harder thing to balance than it sounds like."
It wasn't clear why she'd suddenly gone off on a lecture, but Timon tried to pay attention. It was rare enough that any of the old ones managed to speak about anything not directly at hand that it was probably a good idea to listen to her. She was, by definition, wise, after all. If she said that it was important to try and avoid those things, then she was right.
Not that he'd be able to. She was probably correct there too.
"I'll keep that in mind, when I can. For now, if you'd collect your people and move them back to 'Julie safe distance'? I don't suppose it would be fair to lock her in a little room again, would it? She seems to have had some issues when the... Enemy did that to her."
Lyn glared at the woman in white, who stood finally, and was staring with hard eyes right back at her.
"Probably not. Don't let her fool you though, she can control herself if she tries. I've seen her do it. Hundreds of times in fact. She just doesn't care to be bothered most of the time."
Which wouldn't work on a small and confined ship. Or even a large one. Not for long.
Timon waited while Lyn called her people away, and walked off with them, including Dorgal who she didn't leave near the leader of Soam at all. Kolb took Tiera away, along with Orange. They were busily looking at Julie as if she were the enemy now too. Well, Tiera wasn't, she just seemed peaceful. The other two didn't however.
When they were all gone, and it was just him, Deshi and Julie left, Timon spoke to her, trying to make himself seem relaxed and not like he was scared of the woman. In a very real way, he was. Sex and terror were together in his mind now. He'd worked on that a bit, with Trice, trying to make it not as intense, but it was still there and being hit like that left him feeling shaken and like he wanted to be sick himself, if only a little.
That wasn't going to work though, so he forced a smile and let his eyes not show it at all.
"We need to get you someplace safe. I don't know if you can protect yourself if we take you to Soam. Do you think you can? They grabbed you from there once, after all, and replaced you with a Cordes infused clone of you." He watched her, her chest rising and falling rhythmically, and her pearl colored skin almost glowing in the orange and green of the nearby ship.
"I do not know, little brother. Perhaps I could stay with you, on your mission?"
He shook his head.
"No. I can't take much more of this. I can't take you to Noram and no place else is any better."
It was a rare thing for him to actually be at a loss for words, even for a few moments, at least if it wasn't about some kind of deep emotional issue. The only saving grace was that Julie herself nodded.
"I can probably go back home then. I'll need to go into hiding, but it won't be the first time that I withdrew from public life, over the millennia. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to cause problems for you. It wouldn't be so bad you know, us being together. I'm not truly your sister, or aunt."
Timon knew that, but shook his head. The name was really enough to make it hard for him to see past it, but not so much that a normal and healthy version of him wouldn't have taken her up on the offer. He wasn't stupid after all, and she was really that wonderful, in certain ways.
"I was recently tortured by a woman. Using Austran pain medicine. I don't know what it's called, but it was bad. A larval Assassin was part of it. There was enough that it's linked to sex now and I haven't really recovered." He tried to sound matter of fact about it all and thought he actually managed pretty well, but Julie teared up and almost as if she hadn't heard what he'd just said, tried to touch him.
Because that's what would have made her feel better. His shield stopped her at least.
"So... If you could keep yourself calm and not influencing people? We can have you home inside an hour, I'm sure."
Not that it was up to him, but Captain Bering didn't seem to be holding a grudge against the other woman and actually had them in Soam, over their main city, about fifteen minutes later. It was fast and efficient, as if she'd already known exactly where to head. Then Julie was given a guard while she set things up, which took longer, but two hours later they were rid of her.
Timon was shown to a room, which had a nice bed in it and was decently large. About twenty by forty. It had its own shower and restroom too. The floor was made to look like black tile, and the fixtures like copper and wood, which gave a very strange sailing ship feel to it all. The bed was soft though, and formed to him perfectly, and he was able to get some sleep for about six hours, which was nearly enough.
He woke when the lights turned on, Monroe standing by the door, touching the glowing orange sigil there. A lot of things were needlessly orange in space, it seemed.
"Rise and shine! We need to go and collect that gear from Austra and the Captain is actually feeding us. It will, as long as I get everything I need, take about a week to make a sample of micro-plasma. If I go over the specifications of it, can you start to work out ways of stopping it? Then we can test them and see which is the best, as soon as the sample is ready?"
It wasn't a bad plan, though it would have been a lot better if Tor was arou
nd to do the work. It might take him a lot longer than that to get the right answer around. Not saying that, he rubbed at his eyes.
"Yes. I'll try to make that work. I should be able to remember what the field of the stuff was like, if I go into a deep enough trance, which might help. I'm going to need a work space. Food first, and then I'll see to those supplies, if it's needed."
That it seemed wasn't really the case. Brown was going against Austran tradition and making certain they had the supplies without paying for them. It was for a good end after all. That meant that Tim just had to get some food into him, which turned out to be very Noram like fare, being bread and cheese with sliced fruit. The women that made it were all young girls really. The short ones that he'd seen who were just now legal adults.
All ones that had been trained to cook for the military at Wildlands Station. It was a program that Tor had paid for, but his wife Ali had put together along with Sam Builder.
It was good enough and as soon as he was full, Timon just sat on his bed in his room with the lights off, and tried to do something useful. The first part was just driving himself into the deepest trance he could. That was the start and prime tool of all building or field sensing after all. Everyone knew that much.
Then he went back in his mind to the rescue of Julie White. Focusing everything he had on that pink glow. What it did to Kolb and then, with a lot more focus, he narrowed the sense of it down in his mind. What it felt like in his head. It was strange and unlike anything he'd ever noticed before. It was like fire in the air, but each part of it was tiny and held bits of information in a simple form.
At first he wanted to work against the plasma fire itself, trying to take the energy away or maybe smother it. As if dumping water on it would work. It turned the water in the air into fire after all. That was what it used as fuel. It took a long time, but he realized that the actual trick to the stuff was the way it held those bits of information, and what it could do with it.
It was that part of it that was vulnerable. If he changed the information, the plasma would stop moving, which would mean that it would exhaust it's fuel in the local area in minutes and go out, like a camp fire buried under the earth.
Not that he had a clue how to do that exactly. He could, he thought, work out how the information was held, basically, but what the different orders meant... He just didn't know.
That meant fighting his way back to the surface of his own being, or close enough so that he could move around and climbing stiffly off of the comfortable bed, to go and find their expert on the stuff. Monroe was, he found, working in a small laboratory space, humming to himself as he did it, when Timon walked in.
"Ah! There you are Tim. I should have the sample ready in a day. Do you have an idea or two already?" He looked hopeful, but there was also doubt in his body language, as if he didn't really think it could be done.
"Yes. I need to know the programing codes though, and how they're passed. Then I can build some devices that will simply keep the micro-plasma from getting new information, and order it to stay in place, making it pretty much useless." Timon waited for the man to claim that wouldn't work, or come up with some other arguments against it, but he just explained how it all worked, going over it several times.
"That's not a bad solution. The hard part is having one of your devices close enough to the release point then. Or can you put this signal out all the time, all over the world? That would work. Can you do that?"
He sighed.
It would take doing something that no one had really managed yet, and having fields that covered the entire planet. Or, well, one person had sort of done that, but he didn't know how really. Tor. Naturally. It wasn't like he could just go and visit and get all his secrets either. If he got too close, his brother would read him, and know that he knew about the Cordes inside of him being far more in control than not. His brother didn't know about that part of things, he didn't think.
If he did, Tor would be fighting. If that happened, Tor either won, or would figure out how to kill himself, to protect everyone else. Cordes was an Ancient intelligence, with hundreds of more years of life than Tor had. His brother however was The Builder. It wasn't a fair fight, but only because Cordes wasn't up to the task, Timon didn't think. The trick there was that he'd infiltrated so deeply that it might be too late.
When the Larval assassins were hunting him, Torrance had used nano-sized dust particles that were programmed to find the Larval and basically drug them into a stupor, and then force them to all go home. They were tiny physical structures, unlike the micro-plasma, which was all energy. If he could do something like that however, and dump the fields all over the world, billions of them or more...
It might work. Each field would have to be long lasting, and powerful, even if anchored to a tiny piece, and he had no clue how to make that part happen at all. Tor the Great and Mighty could make a million field devices in a week, perhaps, or even more than that. Timon's best efforts so far had made a batch of a hundred. No one did more than that.
No one else.
That was going to be a problem, he realized. There had to be a trick to it, but what it was he couldn't see, probably just lacking the information to ask the right question in the first place.
But Tor knew.
His brother was separate from Cordes, and was still his brother, even if they had been fighting for a while, since Tor had warped his mind and made him feel things like other people did. That might have been Cordes though, trying to remove the competition? Or it might have really been his egotistical and bossy brother attempting to make him into a miniature version of himself. Someday, Timon decided, he really needed to figure out which it was. The idea of not knowing would drive him crazy, otherwise.
"I might be able to. I need to work on something for that, I guess. This isn't going to be easy." It might even be impossible, he knew.
For one thing it would mean having to swallow his pride and go to Tor. Over a communications device, and not in person. That would allow him to have enough distance from him, and not really have to deal with him in person. It wasn't like they hadn't been in the same place since it happened. The change. Tor hadn't mentioned it, but if he really thought it was all over, he was a fool. No matter what, Timon was going to make whoever had done this to him pay. If it was both Cordes and Tor, which was the most likely case, then they'd both have to be punished for it.
How that was going to happen he didn't know.
Tiera had mentioned something, likely as a joke, but that held a bit of promise really. She'd told him to seduce Alyssa and have sex with her. He wasn't ready for that kind of thing yet, but taking his wife would hurt Tor a lot more than a beating would. He could forgive that kind of thing, but sex with Ali? No that would warp his mind almost as badly as what he'd done to Tim.
The rest of it was out of what he knew what to do with so far. Cordes could be killed, but not without taking Tor's life too. He might be able to be suppressed, somehow. It was important, but also beyond him so far.
"I'll see to it, if I can. Once you get this done, you should start working on the lunar base idea. It's something to do after all." He was half kidding, since there was no real value to it, he didn't think, other than having some backup people away from the planet while a massive war raged, but it got a big and happy grin from the all black man. He was dressed in a strange white coat at the moment, which made him hard to look at, due to the contrast. It didn't suit him really, having a slightly worn look to it, even if it was magical in nature. Monroe wasn't having a lot of trouble adapting to the new way of doing things at all, it seemed to Tim.
The other man looked at him for a bit, smiling and then shook his head a little. He didn't disagree though. Not in any direct fashion.
"That's not a horrible idea, but this might take some time. I should help you with your side of this, if I can. Then we need to go over what I know about Cordes and Gray's plans for us. It isn't a lot, but I should write it out, before doing somet
hing fun like that. They really didn't tell me anything, but I still learned a lot more than they expected. People forget that I'm not stupid. It's the traits they built into me. Constantly seeming happy and energetic. It's a lie of course. I have to smile, but my feelings don't match that all the time. I have to obey too, if given a direct order, but I can still know what I should be doing, if it's something different." There was a friendly air to the way he said it, but Timon wondered what that might really mean. It could be anything, from the man being forced to, to thinking this was a great and happy situation all together.
"Ah. I don't have Rhetistics. From what I hear that will probably shorten my potential lifespan, since most that don't have them eventually kill themselves. I can sort of see that already." It wasn't the kind of thing he wanted spread around, but it was still the truth. He hadn't really considered it yet, since the time he cut his legs off, but that moment had been telling, hadn't it? If things got bad enough, he would end his own life, and there was no doubt about it in his head at all.
Eventually things would be that bad again, wouldn't they? If he lived long enough.
Monroe nodded.
"That seems to be the pattern. My guess is that I managed it too, eventually. I have five hundred years of memories, but I'm missing big parts of them. My guess is that in the end I was so miserable that the programing broke, after a fashion. There are always loopholes, if you know where to look."
That got Tim to think about what was really going on. The lab was interesting in a quiet way, being filled with large metal cabinets that seemed to be working away at something almost silently. He could feel the movement inside them, as subtle as it was. He'd spent two days focusing on micro-plasma, and it was still resonating with him, even without trying.
