Descend- Seeing Stars

by Sean Oswald

  Interlude 2- Let Him Sleep

  Trina was waiting with the other wives and fuses for Ava to reach the spatial jump drive. She was excited to reach the other leviathan. Years of training had empowered her beyond anything that she could have imagined. Of course, the fusions had a big part to do with that, but she had trained and trained.

  Now they were almost at the first stop for this trip. She had no anticipation that this was going to be the end of the trip. But hopefully they will learn valuable information here. Information to help them find Higen. While she didn’t have any children of her own, she hurt in a way she could never have imagined for her sister Meikiyo and Jay over the loss of their son. An injury to any part of the fusion was an injury to all of it.

  That level of belonging was beyond sublime and if she hadn’t already liked other things about Jay, she would have been eternally grateful to him for including her in that. It was even better now that half of her team was in fusion. She could share a closeness with Kayla and Sora now that defied even the connection they had felt after their life and death battles together. Of course, that only made her yearn for Uremi and Abby to be included in the fusion.

  She was confident that eventually Jay would include them but did understand his hesitation to add to the fusion too quickly. The group mind that they were becoming was a bit intimidating to someone who grew up on the idea of individuality. But the potential was undeniable.

  Hopefully, this stop would bring them more than just information on Higen’s location. She hoped that it would give them more insights into how to defeat the A’snkarnt and the Forlorn. As bad as the Forlorn were, her true hatred was reserved for the A’snkarnt. They had felt that their cause was noble and that it justified the things they had done to the human race. But as the saying went the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

  Deep within her there was also a hope that they would find allies here. Perhaps there would be another race that was being experimented on by the A’snkarnt. She liked to envision freeing those creatures and gaining more aid. Of course, she was a realist too. The lesson of the Bal’gi was in place. Just because another race was also the enemy of the A’snkarnt didn’t mean that they were allies of humanity.

  When Ava arrived, she said, “He’s sleeping. I’ve never seen him sleep so soundly. It is like an actual sleep, not that fitful thing he does for an hour or two a day.”

  Trina smiled at Ava. She wasn’t particularly close with the engineer, but she admired her accomplishments, and they did share part of each other, so it was more an issue that Trina felt closer to some of the other fuses. Huong, Mia, and Jessie had all come around and hugged Ava a moment after she appeared.

  They were so excited for her to get what she had wanted. It definitely gave Trina pause for thought. She had never planned on having children but that didn’t seem to be a likely outcome now. Assuming she survived the coming war, she would have to do her part. They needed children from as many women because even with their enhanced genetics there was still a need for as diversified of a genetic pool as possible.

  What shocked her about that line of thinking was the undercurrents of emotion that she felt. Jay was amazing in so many ways. It may have taken the end of the world to bring it out, but he was bold and decisive now while still being kind. He somehow managed to make her feel like she was the only woman in the world when she was with him. That was no small feat with the minds of more than twenty other women linked to both of them around the clock.

  Out of that emotion rose a certainty that she had never expected. She wanted to bear Jay’s children. There she had admitted it, if only to herself. Now was not the time for daydreaming though.

  “Ava, we called you here to help us make the last jump,” Trina said.

  “Uh, but Master isn’t awake yet,” Ava replied

  Amelia tsked, “Yes, that is exactly why we want to make the jump now. Let him get his rest. He has been doing so much for all of us. This way we will be able to scout the new leviathan and present a report to him when he does wake up.”

  Trina felt the balance of uncertainty about if it was okay to do this without Jay and the desire to do something nice for him. It rushed all around the fusion, but her and Amelia had already decided on this as soon as they realized that Jay was actually going to sleep. His consciousness seemed so suppressed in the fusion that it was clear he was actually in deep rem sleep. For just a moment she wished she could have peeked in on his dreams but then decided that probably wasn’t for the best.

  Instead she said, “Amelia is right. We are sure about this. Each of us is nearly as strong as Jay was when we started this journey or at least half as strong. While not all of us are combat specialists, all of us have the ability to kick ass and there are twenty-five of us.”

  Trina heard a coughing sound behind her and turned to see Scarlett or rather Scarlets there. The one in front said, “Twenty-seven. There are twenty-seven of us.”

  “Yeah, yeah, sorry. It is hard to keep you straight. There is so little difference in your thought patterns and none at all in your appearance,” Trina replied.

  “That is why, I’m changing my name to Vermillion,” said the one to the left, while the one to the right said, “and my name will be Saffron.”

  Somehow as soon as they each named themselves, she was now able to identify them in the fusion by their names. Their thought patterns were still virtually indistinguishable, and they all still looked exactly alike, but if what she understood was true, then over time they would develop into their own more distinct people. She just smiled and said, “So twenty-seven of us. Half of us will stay here as guard and half of us are going to go out and scout the ship out as soon as we dock with the leviathan. We will be counting on you science types to make that part work.”

  Amelia then said, “If you want to stay behind and protect the ship then go stand over by Huong, and if you want to scout the ship, go stand by Trina. We won’t make anyone go scout, but we also won’t let more than half of us go. The rest need to stay here.

  After a few rounds of discussion Trina, Amelia, Jessie, Meikiyo, Maddy, Charlotte, Bong Cha, Samantha, Vermillion, Kayla, Sora, Trudi, Esseme, and Martina were discussing their plans for once they hit the ship. Martina would help cloak them, but if it came to a battle, she would focus on creating illusions of extra troops to distract the enemy.

  Amelia would be their assassin striking down any threats before they endangered everyone else. Meikiyo would be their aerial support. Sora, Esseme, and Maddy would also be in the back row, using their abilities to heal or control the environment. Trina would lead half of the others while Charlotte led the others into direct battle if necessary.

  Of course, hopefully they wouldn’t have to fight at all. Trina really wanted to rescue whoever was being experimented on here. She realized that early on she had been too violent. The fusion as well as time with Jay had worked a change in her. She wasn’t afraid to do what needed to be done, but she would prefer to keep things peaceful if at all possible.

  Chapter 17- Forgot to Set the Alarm

  Jay sat up. A spike of fear shot through him. Something was wrong. His mind was adapting to the rush of information. His fuses were being hurt. Well, some of them. They were fighting.

  He sent out a broad scan and drew information about what was happening even as he quickly dressed. Oh, he wanted to scream. They had gone to the new leviathan without him. As soon as he got angry, he could sense why they had done it through the fusion. It didn’t ease his anger, but it did make him understand. They had wanted to do something nice for him, to let him sleep and not have to worry about something for one. They had thought that they would be able to simply scout the ship but found out that it was better prepared for them than they expected.

  He couldn’t tell what was happening but could sense that they were involved in a large-scale battle. It looked like thirteen of his fuses and, oh shit. Miguel and a few of his girls were there. Miguel’s team was enormously powerfu
l compared to normal humans or even compared to the other clusters of evolved humans thanks to his refining. But they still didn’t hold a candle to any of his fuses and thus were much more vulnerable.

  His second boot slipped on and Jay locked onto where Trina was. No doubt she would wherever the fighting was the heaviest. Instantly with a single Astral Step, Jay was there. His mind took in the scene far faster than he ever could have before. A portion of his brain was allocated to keeping track of all his people and those of Miguel’s. Another assessing the enemy and yet another to evaluating the best reactions he could make.

  The enemy was fascinating. They were cat people of a sort. Some were as big as him, broad with black skin and stripes of orange fur just like tigers. Others were almost as large and covered in golden fur with large manes running down backs. Then there were smaller ones that were covered in the spots of a leopard and moved with deadly grace and precision which only a few weeks ago would have been almost unbelievable to him. The smallest zipped around the battlefield so fast that again until recently it would have seemed impossible for a flesh and blood creature to move like that.

  His scans told him that much. They were definitely flesh and blood creatures. There was no sign at all of any Forlorn technology in them, but they did all have one piece of tech embedded in them. Each had A’snkarnt implants in their brains. That meant this was another experiment race. He felt sympathy for them because of that, but they were attacking his people.

  The assessment came back that they ranged from thirty to one hundred times as strong as a normal human. They had tech in the form of pulse cannons but also seemed to prefer to fight hand to hand with claw or strange vibrating blades. Up above there seemed to be a few individual fighter crafts flying around locked in a battle with Meikiyo and he could see where she had brought down more than a dozen other of the crafts, but they must have become more cautious in how they fought her after learning the hard way.

  As he evaluated the locations of the other humans, he noticed that they were being slowly but steadily split into smaller groups. The defenders were trying to isolate the humans and it was working, even if they were being made to pay a horrible price for it. Still, this had to end. The scene was confused more by Martina’s illusions. She had made it seem there were more than three hundred humans fighting. Every time one of her illusions drew an attack it spared one of the people so that was a good thing.

  Jay saw Trina pushing back. He felt shame and relief swell up in her when she sensed his presence. A moment later, Amelia appeared next to him. Jay said, “I need you both for a second.”

  Then he pushed his power first through Amelia and then into Trina. Whereas this might have taken more than a minute when he first learned how to do it, many years of practice had it down to a mere second for the first merger of channels and two seconds for the second. His PSI was doubled and then doubled again, giving him more than seven million PSI. It would easily be enough for him to do what he needed to do.

  A pulse of energy blasted out from him and the battlefield seemed to slow around him. This time it wasn’t just a sense of battle that made it feel like that. This time it was an actual fact. His temporal mastery had reached the point that with this much power he could slow the reactions of everyone around him. It did affect the other humans too, but he hoped with more practice that he would be able to fix that downside.

  That he started sending out sweeping blasts of kinetic energy to push back each prong of the enemy attack. He drove them back into a cluster. There were more than five thousand of them on this open plain that looked vaguely similar to an African savannah. He Astral Stepped to Meikiyo in the air and laid his hand on her slowed but still burning arm before stepping back with her.

  Then he erected the largest PSI construct he had ever made. The bigger they got the harder it was to make them as the PSI cost became almost exponentially greater. But this done was a thousand feet in diameter and protected not only all of the humans but also all of the illusions. He might as well maintain the lie that there were more of them.

  With that accomplished Jay released his hold on the time flow and shuddered from the effort as time snapped back to its normal pace in the area. Tanks and fighters blasted away at his dome. Warriors rushed in using smaller guns which appeared to be mostly A’snkarnt pulse type weapons. Everything from missiles to claws was thrown against the shield, but Jay had expanded his circuit to include Meikiyo and pushed his PSI up over fourteen million.

  So far that was more than enough to hold them back, but he was fully prepared to extend it further. Jessie and Bong Cha had already telepathically offered themselves for the circuit once they realized what he was doing. There was a certain temptation to expand the circuit as far as he could. It would definitely be god-like to hold onto more than twenty-eight billion PSI. But Jay had already recognized the danger in thinking too much of himself. These jumps needed to be made little by little so he could adjust and maintain his humanity.

  After a few minutes the bombard slowed and then stopped. They must have come to the conclusion that his wall wasn’t gonna fall. Truthfully with this much PSI and his regen rate he could have kept it up for days. Jay had steadily been trying to read the minds of the defenders. While he could catch glimpses of their thoughts, most of it still came out garbled.

  He assumed that was because they were alien creatures, and their thought patterns might be different. But he was also confident that given a little time he would be able to learn to read their minds. Now he just needed to try to communicate with them. He hoped that making himself understood would be easier than reading their minds.

  Jay focused on emotion and intent as he tried to communicate with them. He broadcast out a telepathic message as broadly as he could, hoping to catch all of them. The five thousand had grown to more like seven thousand and more vehicles and cat men came. For just a moment, Jay was struck by the oddity that the warriors facing them were nearly 99.9% male while his force was almost exactly the opposite.

  “Stop!”

  Apparently his message worked because they all suddenly got very attentive. Equally apparent was the fact that he had yelled a bit too loud as the first dozen ranks of the defenders all dropped to a knee and held a hand to their heads. Jay filed that away a useful note for the future. With enough PSI to back it, even telepathic communication could be turned into a weapon.

  Now that he had their attention he continued, “We do not mean you any harm. We have come to talk and barter for information.”

  There was a flurry of communication going on between the cat people. Their voices ranged from deep guttural growls to the almost comical sound of a house cat in distress. It was going to be hard to keep a straight face when talking to some of these people. Rather than listen to their words though he focused on their thoughts.

  Some wanted to keep fighting. The words ‘hunt’ and ‘prey’ kept coming through. Then he sensed some personage that was respected make his way. The word ‘elders’ was repeated again and again. While listening, Jay freed up the part of his mind that had been assessing the battle capacity of the enemy and instead dedicated it to learning to translate their language. This partitioning thing was great. He only wished he’d had it back in school. So many nights wasted studying when he wanted to be hanging with friends or playing video games.

  Finally, the wall of the cat men’s bodies split and a lion man larger than any of the others came flanked by a dozen females. He wasn’t wearing armor like the others but instead was adorned in rather ornate robes. Clearly this was not just a martial people but one which also had a social hierarchy.

  The lion man stepped forward again after looking at their dead strewn all over the ground in the hundreds. No not lion man, Leon. That was what they called themselves. Or rather it was a translation of what they called themselves if his telepathic scan was working correctly. The Leon elder then called out in a deep voice that Jay could hear even without enhanced senses.

  Jay heard the messag
e and then instantly threw up a Tempus Fugit field around himself. It would only affect a hundredth of a second but would still give him over fifteen minutes to study the language and process the message. Thankfully, that was enough time for Jay to feel fairly confident that he had the general meaning of the message.

  He now also felt that he had enough understanding of their language to be able to speak it. He was definitely digging this new processing power. Just minutes to learn a new language. So now he used his Body Modification ability to reshape his vocal cords in subtle ways. It felt weird but was necessary for him to be able to speak the alien tongue. Human mouths were simply not meant to sound like this.

  “I regret the deaths of your people but mine assure me that they did not attack first. They came to scout out this leviathan and find out what people might be here for us to meet with. They did so in order to prepare a meeting for me with your leaders.

  My name is Jay and I speak for what is left of the human race. Despite our beginning, I would still like to speak with our leaders if you are willing.” Jay didn’t stop and tell them that he was going to get the information whether they wanted him to or not. He would tear the leviathan apart if it would help him to learn where Higen had been taken. He also didn’t try to pass the buck for the girls’ decision to scout without him onto them, no matter how rightful. He wanted to be the type of leader who took responsibility for his subordinates.