Deep-space is hellish to navigate. Visually it's white with rainbow washes, and it's full of gates which are only visible from certain angles. It does have a kind of 'ground' but the level of it – and angle of it – is unpredictable. It's an Escher drawing where all the lines have been erased, and going off course could result in a collision or unexpected emergence in a dangerous part of real-space. And, of course, it's where deep-space Ionoth come from, although it's so vast and weird that ships rarely encounter them. The Diodel went in lead to the point where the people had been sighted, scanning madly, while the other two ships lagged well behind. Third Squad was on the Diodel, with Eeli trying to path find.
The rest of the squads were on the Litara, and Kaoren went off to have a captain's discussion about how to deal with going outside ships in deep-space. It's not totally full of aether, fortunately, but aether tends to collect around the rifts and even though it doesn't hurt 'Muinans', it's still not something they want to fight in. I sat with Zee and petted Ghost (who I couldn't risk leaving behind and who was really twitchy and unhappy). Nobody was talking. Ever since the report of the Nuri investigation had come back, everyone had barely seemed able to put two words together. The discovery that the problem had reached the stage of Cruzatch invasions and moons exploding – despite the Nurans being the most talent-rich settlement – made it all seem beyond discussing. Everyone was drained and grim.
The fact that I'd been brought along at all was a sign of how desperately KOTIS wanted more detailed information. Only by properly understanding what had happened to Nuri could KOTIS make a real evaluation of the current threat level, and what steps it would need to take to prevent the same thing happening to the worlds it protected.
We were all in mission channel, though the only people talking were Taarel and Eeli giving feedback on path finding on the lead ship. I'd only been half-watching the output from the Diodel's scanners, and started when Taarel said crisply: "Massive sighted."
I checked the multiple 'screens' of feed to see not only an enormous, spindly, vaguely humanoid, um, scratch figure, but also accompanying swoops – and a huge fireball taking them out. It wasn't a very good view – the massive kept vanishing as bits of folded deep-space got in the way – but it was a pretty sure bet that where there were fireballs there were survivors. The Diodel changed direction and began working out how to reach them, and we trailed along behind, achingly slow.
When we finally got a proper glimpse of the survivors, I wasn't the only one who caught her breath and stared to confirm what Taarel (rather less crisply) said: "Survivors sighted. Thousands. Children. It's almost all children."
I'm willing to bet Taarel practically never lets her voice shake like that. The Captain of the Litara immediately ordered the Chune to go on to Tare and report, and then Maze began talking everyone through how we were going to go about fighting, once we were able to get within range. The navigation tools were going to be overlaid directly into the Setari's channel, making a visual representation of the landscape we couldn't properly see. The roof of the Diodel would be the staging point. Wind talents would focus primarily on any encroaching aether. Par was going to be my toter. Squads were to stick tightly together and, if possible, draw the massive's attention away from the survivors.
I tucked Ghost in a pod when it was time to go outside – not that it would hold her, but I was hoping she would get the message. We paused on the roof of the Litara and Kaoren enhanced to start with, and took the opportunity to give me a long survey, very much in captain mode. I was feeling a bit weird – like I'd been on a boat and had come ashore and was still feeling the waves – but nothing major. Deep-space, like all of the Ena, is uncomfortably cold but unlike the spaces it feels particularly strange and wrong.
As the Diodel and the Litara took up a hovering position as close as they were willing to go, another fireball took down another cluster of swoops, but the massive was leaning forward, reaching down a...well, not so much a hand as a hand-shape. That massive was the weirdest thing I've seen yet – a three-dimensional humanoid shape, but formed out of scratchy nothingness. It wasn't even solid – it was like cross-hatching around a pearly-white mist.
"Light will be best," Kaoren said. "All others to lesser effect. Sound may usefully disorient. We need to open the chest and use Light within. Avoid physical contact at all costs."
"First we'll draw it back to the marked position," Maze added, as the massive's hand was knocked aside. He signalled for enhancements to begin while he outlined a quick plan of attack.
I was staring at the Nurans, ignoring the quick succession of hands touching me. There were so many kids, all in a single huge mass with just a few figures flying above them. I couldn't count how many. The younger ones, huddled in the centre, looked tiny: three or four years old.
More and more information about the area ahead was appearing in the channel's simulation, including a big circle outlining relatively clear ground to the right of the massive. Maze's plan for getting the massive's attention involved a strafing run up the length of it and over its head, trying to draw it toward that area. I wasn't involved in that (and couldn't even bear to watch it). A second group had been assigned to getting rid of the swoops and, after they'd enhanced, my small guard group (Kaoren included) carefully followed the massive as it turned.
The thing looked so fragile and intangible. But that was half the problem – it mightn't move quickly, but attacks seemed as effective as shooting arrows into a haystack. Worse, another cluster of swoops lifted into view, right where the main attack force had been headed and the leading edge of Setari suddenly found itself in close combat and in disarray. I saw people fall, and closed my eyes.
"Throw the swoops at the massive's chest," Kaoren ordered, which has to be one of the odder tactics he's come up with. But it seemed effective – particularly since two of the swoops were encased in blocks of ice – and the cross-hatching was ripped away to expose pearly interior. Maze immediately gave the order for the Light talents to blast, and the thing reeled, and covered its chest with an arm.
"Group two, gather up the swoops you're fighting and hit it from behind," Maze said. "Light talents circle to join them. Second, Squad Three, continue the frontal assault to keep it oriented."
My group paused, then joined up with the Light talent group so they could re-enhance. I saw Lohn's face – stiff and white-lipped – and realised Mara was one of those who'd been caught by the swoops and injured. When the next order came for him to attack, he did so with a furious anger, putting everything he had into it.
The thing fell – the quickest massive fight so far, but the one with the highest number of injuries I'd seen. Only Grif Regan and Alay from First and Second hadn't been hurt. Mara was bleeding badly – a swoop had flown right into her, raking and biting and she'd used her arm as a shield against its teeth. Combat Sight apparently doesn't work very well when you've got a massive on one side of you emanating overwhelming threat. And when it had crumpled and pitched over, a lot of the forward group had barely avoided being crushed, and been jolted with agonising pain which had left them all weak and sick and meant that a few of them fell hard because the person levitating them abruptly stopped. Best I can tell it was like instant radiation poisoning – though fortunately something they started recovering from once they'd moved out of range.
Maze was temporarily out of it, but Regan took over command without more than a moment's pause, getting the Levitation and Telekinesis talents to let their squads down at the nearest edge of the vast stretch of Nurans, and then take the worst of the Setari injured straight up to the Litara.
There were eight thousand, seven hundred and sixty-nine Nurans.
Or, at least, eight thousand, seven hundred and sixty-nine Nurans were how many there were when we got them to Pandora and counted them. There might have been more during the fight, but I don't like to think about that since it really was almost all kids. Only six hundred or so adults. We only got that figure this morning. Coming do
wn from the air, all I could think was what had happened to their parents, and I guess Regan was wondering the same thing since, as soon as three of the Nurans who had been defending the survivors dropped down to join us, he asked: "Are there other groups we need to look for?"
"This is all of Nuri," said the woman who stepped forward to talk. She was basically a female version of Inisar – same hairstyle, same clothes, same upright calm – except absolutely exhausted, and her eyes were red-rimmed. It was the woman who'd been watching my testing session back on Tare. I could tell that because of my weird people sense, and I searched about for Inisar as well, but couldn't make him out among all the other Nurans and felt rotten, though it turned out that he was there, just badly injured and unconscious.
Regan and the woman quickly got down to practicalities, postponing any explanation of what had happened to Nuri in favour of sorting out the injured and getting them and the youngest kids on board the Diodel and Litara. And bringing down everything the two ships had in the way of supplies, since the kids had been walking for hours in the cold without food or water. They were at least reasonably dressed – Nuri mustn't have been a shorts and Singlet kind of place – but most of them were dropping from exhaustion.
I don't know if there was any argument about whether to take the Nurans on to Muina, or to Tare or Kolar instead. Still, even though Muina isn't exactly set up to look after thousands of orphaned kids, anyone who knew anything of Nuri wouldn't doubt what planet the Nurans wanted to be on. They'd walked almost the entire way there.
While the Litara and Diodel were being loaded, the captains gathered together with the three Nurans (with an audience of a few hundred more in earshot) and talked over whether to continue the trek through deep-space or wait in the same spot, weighing up the threat posed by the Ddura once they'd reached Muina compared to the almost certain attack by more deep-space Ionoth. It was Taarel who suggested that people be sent to all of the platform towns, to call the Ddura to them. That way they'd be certain no Ddura would be scouting the area around the rift, giving KOTIS a chance to ferry everyone to Pandora by ship.
By the time they'd decided to push on, the Litara was crammed full of children. The Setari who'd been sick after getting too close to the massive had recovered (more or less, they looked pretty grey), and Maze and the lead Nuran, whose name was Korinal, discussed the route, then distributed the Setari squads to each corner of the huge mass of children.
Nuran kids are very quiet and obedient. Or maybe it's just that they were all dead on their feet, too tired to even cry any more. They ranged from toddlers to nearly my age, with a smattering of adults, and seemed very wary of the Setari and the ships, but didn't put up any fuss about being taken away. The only other question Maze asked Korinal before the Litara and Diodel started off was whether Kolar, Tare and Muina were likely to be under imminent threat. The short answer was no, which was a huge relief.
The long answer had to wait for another couple of hours, until we had reached and cleared the rift gate, since too much attention and energy had to be given to navigating deep-space's weirdness, with pauses to fight Ionoth (no more massives fortunately), deal with aether clouds, and untangle snarls of children who had reached the point of dropping in their tracks. Most of the work for the Setari was in preventing drift off the back of the pack, and more than a few of them had to divide their time between fighting and carrying some of the remaining smaller ones.
I had one of those, and a flower, a tiny deep purple daisy, bruised and wilted but still jauntily floral, presented to me with great solemnity by a girl of four or five about twenty minutes after we'd started out. I think it had taken her that long to work her way to the front where I was walking behind Korinal and Maze. She was a very pretty girl, her hair in a long, thick black braid, and her eyes were confident not frightened when she held the flower up to me. After I'd accepted it, she lifted her arms up. A very imperious little creature, the demand to be carried totally clear.
Since she was white with exhaustion, I couldn't not do it, though my cousins long ago taught me that kids are fun to carry for about five minutes and then they're wriggly little torture devices. Kaoren looked at me, then past me to two other kids, a curly-haired boy and a short-haired girl both around twelve years old, who were giving me basilisk glares as the girl wrapped her arms around me, sighed once, and fell immediately asleep.
"Your sister?" I asked.
They didn't answer, instead glancing at each other as if deciding on a way to rescue the girl. I figured that Tarens have a pretty bad rep with Nurans, which is going to make this whole mess even more complex.
Kaoren just said: "It will be easier if you adjust your suit into a harness," and I experimented with this for a while, keeping an eye on the worried reaction of the two twelve year-olds to black suit-goop suddenly oozing over their sister. I was also keeping an eye on Kaoren. Walking through deep-space wasn't easy on him – I could see that he was having trouble blocking his own Sights while remaining on alert for attack. I managed okay carrying the girl – the harness helped a lot and she slept limply collapsed. Not that I didn't deposit her in the first dry patch of grass I could find once we were through the rift gate, leaving her to her close-mouthed siblings.
Getting through the gate was a challenge in itself. Third went ahead with all the available Wind talents, who worked up a gale to blow it free of aether while Third searched real-space for predators. But there was just a meadow studded with rocks, and goats, the whole thing slushy with snow melt. It quickly turned to mud as an endless stream of Nurans flooded out across it.
That became complicated, because the kids would rush through the rift gate, blink at all the sunlight and sky and grass and goats, and promptly sit down. After the first few mass tangles, all the Telekinetics and Levitation talents began picking up batches and flying them a short way across the meadow. The other Setari set up a loose perimeter, while the goats sensibly ran away. Then we waited.
Tare sent every available ship as soon as the Chune brought word, but even though some of these were larger than the Litara, it was hours later, approaching sunset at the rift and well into evening at Pandora, before the last ship was loaded. Most of the Setari remained until the final flight so that, if a Ddura showed up, they had the option of taking everyone still there back through the Rift.
During the long wait the Captains had plenty of opportunity to work down the list of Things We Wanted To Ask Nurans. As soon as everyone was safely through, and the guards sent out, we all gathered around a trio of the Nuran Setari (for they are, apparently, Nuri's version of Setari) on a high pile of rocks with a good view of the meadow. The Captains were streaming the conversation back to Pandora, and to their squads, while clumps of Nurans – mostly teens – gathered in a circle below us to listen, even though we were speaking in Taren. The one called Korinal, my watcher from back on Tare, was designated spokeswoman since she could speak the Taren dialect, though with a very strong accent.
"We have not been unaware of developments on your world," Korinal began, and didn't sound like she was going to go into just how they knew. "As you ventured into the Ena, we saw an increase in the number of Ionoth, and there was much debate as to whether the change was linked, and what damage you might cause. This anxiety only increased when it was reported that you had gained access to Muina, and the reports made it clear that you had done so through a touchstone."
"What does Nuri know of touchstones?" Maze asked. "And of Gaia, for that matter. Tare and Kolar retained no information of either."
"Of Gaia we know only that the path to it had been lost, but that it was once deeply tied to Muina. Of touchstones..." Korinal turned her head and gave me a long look. A really strange look, as if I was something wondrous but deadly, which fascinated and repelled.
Okay, yeah, that's probably reading a little too much into it, but she did stare at me for an uncomfortably long time, and made me glad that Kaoren was at my side.
"It is rare for a touchstone to
exist," Korinal went on. "One born with a profound link to the Ena, a focus connecting all that is to all that once was and all that could be."
"That is–" Maze began, and stopped. Which was his polite Maze-ish way of going: "Wut?"
"You have been experimenting with the abilities of the child of Gaia, have seen that this connection can, in a limited way, be used to create objects, even small spaces. And you have seen that the great devices on Muina draw upon the aether. You have not understood the potential of a device powered by aether, and a touchstone."
Machine component. As job descriptions go, that one is probably the worst so far.
"In truth, we barely understand it ourselves," Korinal went on. "The device makers died with the Shattering, and we retained little of their craft. But it is known that a touchstone existed at the time of the Shattering, and we believe that touchstone was used to create the Ddura." Korinal glanced back at me, expression closed, evaluating. "Among my people, there are those who believe that that touchstone was responsible for the Shattering."
Kaoren slid his hand into mine, though my reaction was delayed trying to unravel her accent. Once I understood, I immediately wanted to change the subject, so I said: "What are the Cruzatch?"
"That we do not know," Korinal said. "We have encountered the Ionoth known to you as Cruzatch in two separate spaces, and also as travellers. The behaviour of those generated by spaces is distinctly different to those which travel through the Ena. We suspect that the Cruzatch linked to spaces are memory-imprints of the travellers, while the travellers–" She paused. "There are a number of theories, but it appears that the traveller Cruzatch are active in real-space, possibly on multiple worlds."
"Active how?" asked Raiten Shaf, moving a little closer. The Kolaren squads had followed the Taren squads' lead during the battle, but as Senior Captain of the Kolaren Setari, Shaf had been biting his lip holding back questions. "Were they active on Nuri?"
The Touchstone Trilogy Page 75
