“What’s on your mind?” I sent back. A question like that always hinted at something unpleasant. I forced myself to forget the operation for now and focus on the conversation.
“Well, sir, we went on that mission with her, and I understand she was playing a part; all the same, it was odd,” he sent.
“Odd in what way?” I asked.
“Well, we were acting as bodyguards while we moved through a rough-and-tumble kind of station. Dave and I have been in a few places like that, so we know some fighting is usual there,” he sent.
Dave nodded. “Yes, but when we go to a place like that, we make an effort to blend in to minimize the risk.”
I figured I knew the kind of bar they were talking about. I had often visited them to meet with informants, and had been involved in more than my share of fighting. Of course, as a cyborg I’d always won.
Master Raquel was not someone I would worry about, whether alone in a bar or anywhere else. I wondered why she’d even brought them. “And?”
Stones looked at Dave, then back at me. “Well, we were all in new, cutting-edge armor, and she even left her helmet off.”
Dave sent, “It was almost like she wanted to be noticed.”
I sighed. She’d probably wanted to make a spectacle of it, letting the locals know how powerful wizards were so we would get more respect. “What happened?”
“Pretty much what you’d expect, sir,” sent Stones with a shrug. “We were accosted and quickly dealt with a few thugs, but then a larger group came up. I thought we would need to use our spells to handle them, but then a fellow named Claw appeared and cut off the head of one of the thugs. Apparently he works for one of the bigger names, and everyone scattered when they saw him.”
“I see,” I sent.
Dave put the two datapads on the desk. They seemed to have survived the fall, after all. “Master Raquel brushed off the beheading without even seeming to notice it. No, it was more as if she was annoyed that she hadn’t had the chance to do the killing.”
Dave and Stones looked at each other, then Stones continued. “After the meeting, she must have been angry, because she threw everyone down.” He accompanied that with the memory of Master Raquel’s spell which had literally thrown everyone to one side.
“Impressive,” I sent, buying time to digest what they were saying. Sure, her behavior might have been excessive but it made her point; she was not to be messed with. The whole event had clearly been about that; she was making herself known to the underground in a way they would understand.
“Yes, sir. I understand her playing a part, but she played it too well. Like Dave said, it was almost as if she were sorry she didn’t get the opportunity to fight more people,” sent Stones.
“Now you’ve done it; he’s pacing again,” sent Dave.
I stopped in mid-stride. When had I started doing that?
Stones chuckled, then continued. “Sir, we all do things we have to do in the line of duty. We do things we don’t like, but that’s the point; we don’t like doing them. We do what we have to, no more.”
“Master Raquel is from a different era than ours. She comes from a much more warlike version of wizard culture, and I think she’s still finding it hard to adapt to our ways.” I had to admit that she did seem to hover on the edge of what was acceptable for a wizard; maybe just over the edge at times. “I think that what she really needs is for us to help her.”
“Help her, sir?” sent Dave.
“Yes. She didn’t come up through the academy like you did. She doesn’t have our cultural framework to fall back on. We need to help her to understand our culture, in a gentle and respectful way,” I sent. It dawned on me that I hadn’t come up by that route either, and I was starting to wonder about myself. They were clearly bothered by her actions, and although these were excessive, they didn’t cause me the same anxiety.
Did I still have a moral compass? Had the wizards forgotten to put that back in when they patched me up? I would have to talk with Priestess Shea about this. She would know if any action needed to be taken, for either myself or Master Raquel.
Stones had a thoughtful expression on his face as he sent, “How?”
That was a good question, and one for which I had no answer. Thankfully, I was spared from replying by a beep from my datapad. “Finally!”
Stones and Dave looked up, and Stones asked, “Is that it?”
“I guess I’m done pacing, for now,” I remarked. I slid into a chair at a terminal and pulled up the report. “Looks like a lower-power transmitter, so the cyborgs definitely have at least one operative on the station.”
“Does it have the decryption keys?” asked Dave.
“Yes. With this, we can decrypt everything we have in our files. Get a sandbox set up for that, and can one of you let Greymere know?” I wanted to dig into the data, but a proper sandbox had to be created first. We were confident our systems had not been breached, but extracting these messages without proper security could change all that in an instant and expose our hand.
In the excitement they forgot their discussion about Master Raquel, but it sat at the back of my mind, not to be easily dismissed. It had implications for myself as well as for her.
Priestess Shea would know the answer, I told myself over and over, hoping to convince myself. In the end, I failed to do so and felt more lost than ever.
68
05-29-0067 — Greymere
Now that the encryption keys had been captured, Master Raquel wanted to get Wolf Pack’s mission out of the way. There was a family with that had been taken hostage. Wolf Pack did not include much in the way of details, just that the family needed to be rescued and brought to a certain location.
The station where the family was being held was listed as abandoned, making it the perfect place for the less savory elements of society to hole up. Phym and I were going in first to get an idea of what we’d be facing.
We drifted towards the station, tacking back and forth against the current of energy leaving it. She kept trying to push ahead of me, but had not yet fully mastered the art of swimming through the vacuum of space. Still, she was an alluring sight to watch. Her sleek form undulated as she crossed the currents of power, leaving swirls of color in her wake. It was distracting to watch the movements of her shimmering form.
We were both absorbing all the normal wavelengths that air-breathers used to search space, making her almost completely invisible to air-breathers, but I could easily see her form as she moved alluringly through the colorful background.
I had spent the last few centuries alone, without seeing another sentient member of my species for longer than I could remember. I had thought I was happy, but now I realized I’d merely been resigned to my fate. Phym represented a whole new part of life that I had missed sorely. I’d missed it so much that I had buried it deep inside me and forgotten what it was like. I sighed as she passed over me, tantalizingly allowing part of her body to brush against mine, sending a pleasant chill through my body.
“Phym, we’re getting close to the station. Can you see it?” I sent, mainly so that I could feel her voice again.
“Duh! It’s that really big thing right over there,” she sent back.
“Good. Where do you think our target is?” I sent. I had worked it out already, but I wanted to teach her. She needed to learn to use her natural-born senses and see beyond the limitations of the human world in which she’d grown up.
“Well, the map we … ”
“No,” I interrupted gently. “Forget the map and look. What do you see?”
She was silent for a moment and then did a flip around me. “The area off to our left has most of its power turned off. Power usage seems to be focused only on the right third of the station. If the prisoners are being kept under guard, as we were told, they are likely to be where the power usage is high. Right?”
“That depends,” I sent back as I took another look at the station. “Again, forget the map and just look at the sta
tion. Do you see any other clues?”
We continued to move towards it, her progress perceptibly slower as she tried to figure out what I was getting at. There was a clue, but she might not be practiced enough to see it. It was subtle, but I had learned to pick out such minor discrepancies during the decades on my own. Perhaps, with my teaching, she won’t need decades.
She did another loop around me without answering, then another loop and another.
“What is the deal with the loops?” I sent.
“Just trying to change perspective. You obviously see something I don’t, and I’m hoping if I reset my view enough times I’ll see it too.”
That brought a smile to my face. She’d figured that much out at least. “Is it working?”
“No.”
“Look toward the left half of the station. What do you see?” I sent.
She looped around again and then sent. “It’s mostly dark, except for that small area that’s using just a bit more power than any other . . . Do you think that’s where they are?”
“If they want to keep the prisoners’ location secret, they would put them in an abandoned area of the station, but they would still need power to support them and whatever guards they might have,” I sent back.
She responded with a long, drawn-out, “Oh.”
“In time you’ll get good at spotting inconsistencies like that. Air-breathers are very much dependent on things like light and heat, so you can usually spot groups of them in that way.”
“Air-breathers?”
I would have smacked myself if I’d been in my bipedal form. How had that term come back to me, and when? It must have been at least a century since I’d used that word. “Sorry.”
“Wings? Sorry for what? And what are air-breathers?”
I sighed. “Sorry, I slipped into ways I had long forgotten. ‘Air-breathers’ is a term we use in the way you use ‘mundane’.” It seemed the more I helped her to become her true self, the more I drifted from my human disguise. I was supposed to be teaching her who she was, but she was making me more myself than I’d been in a long time. Old ways were coming back to me, and I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad one.
She turned and looked at me. “You mean, people unlike us? People who have to live in environments where there is air?”
“Yes,” I sent.
“Is it a derogatory label?” she asked.
“In a way, I suppose, but only if it assumes that we’re superior; anything that does that is derogatory,” I sent. I had never considered it before; it was just an expression I used.
She was quiet as we made our way towards the station. I couldn’t tell if I’d annoyed her or not. She still thought of herself in human terms, so she might take the label to heart. I didn’t want to hurt her, but she had to stop thinking of herself as human.
“Like when we call others ‘mundane’,” she said, breaking the silence.
“Yes, but we do need a way to distinguish the different kinds of people that are out there. So, I guess it is what it is. Not really derogatory, just a descriptive label.” We reached the station as I sent that. “We should enter someplace where the power is off. We’ll be much less likely to stumble on a guard.”
We flew over the station until I spotted a way in, near one of the station-keeping engines. The radiation leaking from the engines would have killed most life-forms; for us, it was food of a sort.
“Yuck,” sent Phym.
The power did taste horrible, but I wanted to stock up on some extra power in case we were attacked so I forced some down. “These engines were probably the cheapest they could find.” Horribly inefficient, but they were probably not used often. Thanks to the basic laws of motion, space stations rarely need any significant adjustments to keep their relative location.
We slipped into the station and used the maps provided by Wolf Pack to work our way towards where we’d seen the power signature. The map showed that section as abandoned, which made it the perfect place to hide prisoners.
I steered us through the sections that had the lowest temperature, reasoning that those would be the least-used ones. In our bipedal form we would be affected by the cold, but our battle armor was rated for the absolute zero of space and was more than sufficient to protect us here on the station.
As we crouched, studying a corridor before crossing it, Saraphym remarked, “You know, every time we switch back to this form I feel claustrophobic for a little while. Eventually I remember how to be human and the feeling goes away, but it’s always there at first.”
I nodded. I felt that way every time; air pressed in on my body like a thick, heavy blanket. “You must remember you are not human. You never were. Feeling claustrophobic is normal; just think of the vastness you had to leave to come in here. We weren’t made for this; we were made for the outside.”
As we neared the place where I suspected the prisoners were being held, she sent, “I’m not human at all? Not even partly?”
“No, not in the way you mean it. We are Shadow People: creatures of the vacuum.” Strictly speaking, we were transgenic humans like everyone else, but I figured that was so far in the past as to be meaningless.
Further musing was cut short as we reached the room. Inside at least five guards were deeply engrossed in some kind of card game. Beyond them were bars, and beyond those I could just make out a group huddled in the corner.
“Not the best layout for us,” I commented.
She studied the room for a while. “If we run in, they could use the prisoners as hostages. If we fire on them from here, there is a high risk of stray shots hitting the family in the cell.”
“What should we do, then?” I asked. I had an idea, but she had proven resourceful on previous raids and I wanted her opinion.
“I could teleport directly into the prison from here, and Master Raquel could open a gate at my location. We could have them out in a couple of minutes,” she sent.
“The guards would need to be distracted, otherwise they would just open fire into the cage.”
“You could rush them. They would open fire on you, and you could use your ‘immune to energy attacks’ thing,” she commented.
“That would work until they tried punching,” I sent back. I rifled around in my pockets, trying to be as quiet as I could though probably unnecessarily.
The guards were thoroughly engaged in their game, calling out taunts and insults as they played. They were passing around flasks and taking swigs from them. It was unlikely that those flasks had water in them. Their dress was disheveled, and some of them looked ready to topple over. The lack of discipline would be beneficial to us, but I suspected their superiors would not be happy with them when the reckoning came.
I pulled out a canister and held it up with a smile.
“Sleeping gas?” she queried.
“None of them are wearing masks or helmets. We gas the whole room, you teleport in, and Master Raquel gates the family out.” An elite traveler like Master Raquel could use another magus as a marker for a gate, if she was within telepathy range. It was a handy trick for missions like this.
“That’s cheating!” she said, no doubt because she hadn’t known I had the canister and therefore hadn’t considered it.
“If cheating means that everyone lives, count on me to cheat every time,” I sent, and opened a comm channel to Master Raquel, who was on a cruiser hiding nearby. With our helmets on, we could use the comm without risk of being overheard. “Master, we will need a gate soon. How soon can you get in range?”
“About five minutes,” she replied.
I outlined the plan for her and concluded, “Just let us know when you’re ready. We’ll stay out of sight until then.”
“Wings, how many did you know before me?” sent Phym.
“What do you mean?” I sent back.
“I mean, we’re so rare, I just wondered, well, am I your first, you know, love?” she asked.
I wondered at the question and the timing of
it. “I never knew my mother or father, and if I have any siblings, I never met them either. I’ve come across a few of our kind, but only in passing. I suspect that Curetes might be one of us, but besides that I don’t know any others of our kind.”
“Such a lonely life,” she replied.
“It was what it was.” She had grown up thinking she was human among humans, not knowing why she felt out of place. I wondered if she had dated humans. That seemed wrong to me, very wrong, but she had thought herself human so she wouldn’t have seen anything wrong with it. It was far more likely that she had dated than not. I had to force down the disgust brought on by that thought.
Master Raquel clicked in over the comm. “We are in position. When I open the gate, I will first send through a couple of Battle Wizards as a precaution.”
“Good thinking,” I said and sent to Saraphym. “Remember that you don’t actually need to breathe, so if your armor is compromised, just hold your breath.”
She nodded.
I looked back at the room and activated the canister. The gas was colorless and odorless, but would take a few minutes to fill the room. I rolled it into a dark corner when their voices seemed to have reached a crescendo.
I said into the comm, I said “Canister away. It will need several minutes to work.”
“Understood. We shall be ready,” replied Master Raquel.
We watched quietly while the gas slowly filled the room and the soldiers started nodding off. We waited for a good five minutes after we were sure they were asleep.
“Okay, teleport in and get the family out. I’ll watch from here, just in case,” I sent.
She smiled, squeezed my hand and vanished.
“I wondered if I’m your first love?” Her words echoed in my mind as I watched her appear in the prison cell. Yes, you are, I admitted to myself, and someday I might be brave enough to tell you so.
The family had fallen victim to the gas also, so several Battle Wizards had to carry them out while Phym and I watched the guards for any sign of life.
Mage Hunter (Lost Tales of Power Book 8) Page 35
