Since that was at dinner, and I could go to bed after, I made a projection of an orchestra for him, showing people using the usual sorts of instruments, and then did a projection of the instrumental version of Eleanor Rigby for him. He was just skipping with delight, and was a lot of fun to talk to.
Ghost caused a bit of a fuss, since so many people arriving meant the Ddura kept turning up and so she wouldn't let me out of her sight. Lots of strong reactions from people, but mostly positive, even though she's an Ionoth. She is terribly cute. One of the Rukmars had brought her kids along (a pair of twins around ten years old), and they positively stalked me because not only was Ghost a very appealing cat, she was one which kept turning invisible.
I sat between Isten Notra and Kaoren for all the formal speech-making and watching of the signing, and Isten Notra told me on a private channel how they'd decided on a paper signing for the Kolarens' benefit, even though many of the Tarens had had to then learn how to physically sign something. Isten Notra made the whole ceremony easier to get through.
There was one speech – one of the elected leaders of Kolar's southern pole talking about how she'd grown up believing that the people who had fled Muina had a shameful past, that there was little to gain in constantly looking back. It was only when she'd seen the projection of the ritual at Kalasa that she'd felt that there was more to the story than overweening pride and death, that there was something to be embraced. She had tears in her eyes. So did Isten Notra, who patted my hand. A lot of the speeches were pretty mortifying for me, but at least they let me stay sitting down.
The statue, which arrived the day before yesterday, wasn't as bad as it could have been. It was basically a huge white column with a slanted top (more moonbeam imagery) made out of some kind of quartzy rock growing out of a base of dusty-looking grey stone which kind of made you want to stroke it. There was a hazy outline of a figure inside the column, tall and androgynous and meant to be Muina. Sitting at the base of the column was me, in slightly darker dusty grey. Someone had obviously given the sculptor an extract of the mission report from my retrieval, because it was the exact image of me from Sonn's log – sitting wide-eyed, ill and alone on a rock, my school bag held against my legs, my uniform looking worn and tattered. Standing to my right, though, were Kaoren and Sonn, again in darker stone: incredibly cold and professional and upright. And to my left were Shaf and Nalaz from Kolar's first squad – Nalaz was gazing all far-eyed into the distance, but Shaf was looking down at me with the faintest hint of a smile. Bit of a Kolaren bias there. Still, not being the only one represented makes the statue relatively tolerable for me. Especially because Kaoren looks particularly gorgeous.
Lots of big announcements along with the signing. KOTIS is going to continue to be in ultimate control for twenty Taren years – military rule – while Muina's initial stage of settlement is underway. After a Taren year after the signing, all the residents and citizens of Muina will be asked to nominate a provisional ruling council to begin ratifying Muina's system of laws and government, which are likely to end up being a compromise between Tare's and Kolar's. The biggest announcement was the opening of the application process to be a Muinan colonist. There would be certain requirements (psychological testing for being able to stand being outside for Tarens) and lack of criminal convictions and desired skill areas, and obviously being young and healthy and talented with dozens of degrees and an artistic bent helps, but it sounded like it would be possible to just get lucky for some applicants, which is nice. It's going to be really weird when people start calling Pandora home. Isten Notra and Shon are both going to become permanent Muinans, and at least half of the staff already on-site at Pandora are predicted to apply to bring their families here. The Setari aren't allowed to apply, as yet.
I'm having a very quiet day – almost everyone has a leave day now that they're done playing escort to VIPs – and Kaoren and I stayed in our room all morning, except for a dawn trip downstairs to grab breakfast and also some stuff to take away for a picnic lunch. The only other person I've spoken to is Nils, who came in with Ghost riding on his shoulder – he said he likes watching the mist which has started rising on the lake recently. We talked about Ghost while Kaoren was looking for something to put the food in – I double-checked whether Nils really was okay with taking Ghost with him, but he absolutely is enjoying having a pet. I was glad, and said he'd seemed kind of down lately, and he gave me an amused look and said Ruuel made me far too scary a proposition to flirt with. But then was more serious and told me his father had died recently, so he'd been a little preoccupied, but there was no need to worry on his account. And then teased me about being in danger of being overly sweet.
I'm glad Ghost decided to adopt Nils as her human.
Since the Ddura was still in the area, we took Ghost with us on our picnic, flying down to the otter stream a bit before lunchtime. They're still there – I'm so glad about that. And glad that I can tell where living things are, since they were hidden away in some kind of burrow and didn't show themselves for an age. We ate lunch and enjoyed the peace and quiet and the views, and now Kaoren is practicing sensing his connection with the Ena and trying to focus it without me touching him – something which he's found impossible to attempt the past few days. Everyone's still diligently working on this when they get the chance, but hectic mandatory socialising doesn't exactly make for the best atmosphere. I'm writing this up while watching Ghost explore, and Kaoren says we have to jog back to Pandora later (and has been talking to Zee about amping up my training, bleh).
Double bleh – a bunch of people just flew overhead gawking at us. It'll be a couple of days before all of the tourists and news reporters have been shuffled back to Tare and Kolar, though most of the really important VIPs are already gone. But soon there'll be people actually living here – non-KOTIS people, I mean.
Wednesday, August 20
The best laid plans...
Overwhelming day. The only good thing I can say about it is that I've continued my run of not being seriously injured.
It started when Tsur Selkie woke me and Kaoren up hours before dawn and asked us to come down to the common room where he was waiting. He'd been reviewing the logs from the last time the Tarens had sent a ship to Nuri and been turned back, and wanted to enhance and also for Kaoren to enhance and review them as well. I'm not sure if he was actually reviewing all this stuff at 3 am, or had maybe been having the kind of insightful nightmares that Sight Sight talents suffer from.
I looked at the logs as well, but all I saw was some fields and trees and a guy dressed like Inisar floating in the air in front of what I guess must have been a hovering spaceship. He didn't project telepathically, just kept repeating in a stern voice that they had to leave or be destroyed, which the ship fortunately had the external sensors to pick up. Kaoren and Selkie watched it three times, then Selkie said: "Your evaluation?"
"There is an overlay of...constraint." Kaoren was frowning, looking very puzzled, and shook his head. "A reading from scans rarely works for me with Sight. Symbol shows a guard turning away an intruder, implacable rejection. But still, there is a hint of something more. And – I have a sense of urgency."
Selkie nodded, all curt and intense. "This is similar, a stronger impression, to what I saw with the one named Inisar. There I interpreted the sense as disobedience, twisting orders to suit his own purposes when he provided that book. Yet here I have the same sense, on a far stronger level. It is almost as if this Nuran is acting against his own will."
"Mind control?" Kaoren said, doubtfully, while I said, "Geas?"
They both gave me that wide-eyed and still reaction which means one of their Sights has triggered, then Selkie made me explain what the word meant. "Just myth and fiction," I said. "A kind of spell put on people to make them perform a particular task. But – Inisar was obeying strictly to the letter of his orders, yet able to work around it, and that's how geases are said to work."
"Have you been able to visualise usi
ng an individual as point of focus, rather than a place?" Selkie asked.
"Have had real dreams of Kaoren a few times," I admitted, going all hot and embarrassed. "Haven't tried to do that when I'm awake, though."
"Ever while on different planets?" Selkie asked
I shook my head. Kaoren caught and kept hold of my hand while he watched the logs again.
"Constraint," he repeated. "And urgency."
"Very well," Selkie said, and brought us into a channel, then sent override requests to the captains of all of the other squads on-site – First, Second, Third, Fifth, Twelfth, Squad Three and Squad One (who had been sent to attend the ceremonies) – and also Zee, who I've started to realise does a lot of captain-duties in a kind of 'senior female' capacity.
Selkie's override message said: "Prepare for Ena mission, channel members only, secure event." Which means they couldn't tell the rest of their squads. Kaoren grabbed a bunch of energy drinks from the kitchen, and I hit the ground floor bathroom.
As soon as everyone was awake (and presumably able to process what he was saying), Selkie went on to describe Inisar's second visit (something which I'm pretty sure only Maze and Kaoren knew among the Setari), then went on to say: "Sights indicate that there are critical developments on Nuri. We are going to attempt to use Devlin to visualise the situation there."
I'd hate to be a Setari captain, woken up in the middle of the night just to watch me. It was finding out that there'd been events they hadn't been told about which would be the bigger issue, though. But they didn't comment, or show more than a crisp readiness to get on with the job – even Kajal was totally proper.
We went to the same spot I'd previously been testing in, hauling along the usual drone and medical monitoring chair. Selkie told me to attempt to visualise without projecting until I had some idea of how much energy it was going to cost me, then stepped back to let me try on my own.
I closed my eyes to do it, picturing Inisar as I'd seen him last, but not getting anywhere. Deciding that he mightn't necessarily be dressed the same way, I just began repeating his name to myself. And saw him, not the tall, proud samurai, but a filth-smeared man sitting chained to a wall, wrists held above his head by glossy white manacles, face swollen and bruised, chest covered in burns. Shock made me open my eyes, and I found that as usual I hadn't managed to just visualise. But the projection of a single room isn't really that much extra energy for me, and being in the Ena had made other-planetary visualisation not nearly as hard as the first time.
"Nuri leaders not very nice people," I said, after a horrified moment. Inisar had been seriously tortured.
"Those burns–" Maze said, voice flat.
"Cruzatch." Selkie looked at me. "Are you able to move your focus point?"
I tried, but it made me feel queasy. Regan and Taarel were at the projection's door, a very solid white slab. "Nothing we couldn't break," Regan said.
"It's likely the projection continues outside the room," Kaoren said, then moved forward and cautiously touched the projected Inisar's shoulder with a gloved hand.
The Nuran's unswollen eye flickered open, and he looked up at Kaoren, then turned his head and looked at me. Even so very battered he still managed the same look-right-through-you expression he'd been wearing the first time I'd seen him.
"Child of Gaia," he said, voice a hoarse whisper, then looked toward Selkie (who doesn't let being short stop him from being the one obviously in charge). "Nuri is lost," he continued, totally without inflection. "Betrayed from within. They will hunt the Gaian child, for she is valuable to them. And a threat. As you have become. Guard your people."
"How has Nuri been lost?" Selkie asked, then paused when I stood up – which was really not an easy thing to do – moving and projecting at the same time made me totally dizzy.
Fortunately he was only a couple of steps forward. I knelt down and put the back of my hand to his cheek – the same gesture Kaoren had made for me once. His skin felt cold.
"It's a projection, Cassandra," Kaoren said. "Aiding it will not alter the Nuran's situation."
"But isn't everything connected?" I asked, and pushed out as I had been doing at Mesiath, not to sense the living creatures around me, but to follow the link which had to exist for me to be able to see what was happening to Inisar. That was a weird moment, as if I'd moved out of a tiny box into a cathedral, except I felt like I was being smothered, like I was surrounded by glue. The projection faltered, but it was like when I was in Earth's near-space talking to my family, and I could see Inisar still, a greyed-out image of him, and just vaguely feel his skin against my hand shifting as he woke and looked at me and his unswollen eye went very wide.
It took everything I had to lift my hand to the funny-looking seal thing which fastened the chains of his manacles to the wall above his head. Moving was harder even than projecting seal which was cracked, was shattered, broken, falling to dust. There was a moment like being at the bottom of a pit and having an ocean drop into it, a thooming resettling of whatever I was holding out of the way and then I was just kneeling in Muina's near-space, dripping with sweat and shaking.
Kaoren, keeping himself out of touching distance just in case, moved into my line of sight and I flapped one hand to show I wasn't about to have a heart attack. He nodded, then said to Selkie: "Those manacles were more than a physical restraint. Whether freeing a badly injured man will make any difference to Nuri being lost I cannot see."
I couldn't tell if Selkie was angry that I'd gone and done my own thing, but obviously the news that Nuri had apparently been overrun by Cruzatch (or something) was an overwhelming development, and he ordered us back into real-space, upgraded Muina's security status, and sent the Diodel screaming off to Tare with the news. After that was a nail-pulling delay because it's a kasse to reach the rift on Muina, in addition to the time for a return trip through deep-space. Once the Diodel reached Tare they just waited at the rift until they had return orders. Kaoren said that one thing we obviously need to do is ensure that there's a ship stationed at all times near the rift on Muina so that there's less delay in sending urgent messages. The small Arenrhon settlement is closer, but unfortunately there's no working platforms there (and apparently even with security clearance standing on the Arenrhon platform takes you nowhere – I hadn't even known they tested that).
Naturally I spent most of this time in medical, having scans done (and sleeping, since I was pretty tired), but did manage before falling asleep to talk with Kaoren about my occasional tendency to be impulsive. He admitted he wasn't exactly happy that I'd done that without any warning, but nor did he feel that he could ask me not to do anything like that again, since that would amount to asking me not to try and help someone who had tried to help me, and neither of us would be happy to be in that situation.
It was just after dawn when a response finally came back from Tare that they were going to send a ship to Nuri to investigate the situation. Setari squads were deployed to active guard at Kalasa and Pandora, and personnel withdrawn from Arenrhon and Mesiath. The remaining squads had been ordered to rest, though I'm not sure if anyone managed it. I woke up about an hour after this, and quietly fretted about the whole idea of three planets being put on security alert because of something I'd projected. And fretted more about how I'd feel if the ship didn't come back, if it was destroyed investigating. Kaoren had me released from medical and we ate breakfast, then had a shower and lay down together to talk and rest more. We were both really keyed up, and though lying together in the dark helped a little, neither of us could pretend to be anything but really worried. It was mid-morning when a ship brought word of the Nuri investigation, and we were both beyond stressed out by then.
And Nuri was gone.
The investigating ship had recorded very odd readings from the Nuri gate and chosen not to fly through it – and lost three drones before finally succeeding in getting one to go into Nuri real-space and return. It came back incredibly damaged, its scans showing what looked like a
n asteroid field. No-one had expected that, and everyone's seriously freaked. Even massives pale in comparison to moons blowing up.
After we heard the news I kept finding myself on the verge of making comments about Death Stars, or a million voices crying out at once, and despite being hugely upset I couldn't get my mind off not-funny things to say. Nuri isn't a place I've been, and so most of the people there weren't more than an abstract idea for me. But Inisar was real, and tried to help, and was tortured for it. And whatever I did wasn't enough.
There was a kind of frozen patch during the middle of the day where we were waiting to hear more orders, and no-one had any real suggestion about what we could do other than fret and watch ships take off, hastily ferrying more officials back to Tare and Kolar. Except for a handful of people who refused to return on the grounds that Muina was safer because of the Ddura. Orders finally came through after lunch, recalling most of the Setari squads to their home planets, with just First and Fourth remaining here with me. All Setari were given an overriding mission of finding the Cruzatch's home space – the best defence being a good offence approach.
But the captain of the Diodel – the ship which brought the orders – completely threw everything askew again by announcing that on the trip back they'd seen people, hundreds of people, in deep-space. It had only been a glimpse, and deep-space is incredibly weird, but the ship's scanners had recorded it. They think it might be survivors from Nuri, and all the Setari on Muina, and me, have been sent to investigate. Not long to the rift now. The big party seems like forever ago.
Thursday, August 21
Fallen
We went in three ships – the Litara and Diodel and one called the Chune. The idea was that if there were survivors in deep-space, we might just be able to cram them aboard. If there were too many, one ship would be sent to bring more ships while the Setari helped protect them.
The Touchstone Trilogy Page 74
