Day Trip

Being on the run shifted your priorities quite a bit. You didn’t care about having a pillow so much as the fleeting safety to sleep at all. Water, food, basic hygiene, you became willing to go without for the sake of survival. The sustained imminent threat to your life carved away at you.

But it wasn’t anything that couldn’t be restored.

In the first few weeks I’d spent at this power-plant turned military base, a new normal had settled in. I’d been given a bunk, water, the Casti even had a way to synthesize the food the otters had cursed me with. But there was one thing they hadn’t been able to supply or substitute.

Clothes.

In our escape from ‘Korbanok’, Daniel had saved my life weeks in advance when he’d reminded me to grab a change of clothes. I’d stuffed the first backpack I found with any article of clothing that looked remotely big enough to fit me, every piece of electronics I could find, and whatever other miscellaneous stuff that had caught my eye. Nothing I’d grabbed was particularly ‘winter’ wear. It had been late October when we were abducted, but it had been unseasonably warm. So to keep from freezing to death, I’d doubled and tripled up on layers.

But most of my options had been worn by kids a lot younger than me. I only had about five shirts, a change of pants that didn’t fit at all, and my hoodie. That wasn’t even mentioning socks or underwear.

Tasser and Dyn had tried to modify a few Farnata uniform pieces to fit me, but they didn’t fit properly or keep me very warm.

As it stood, I was washing my entire wardrobe every three or four days; frequently enough that everything was fraying and developing holes.

Tasser had done what he could to help, but sewing and patchwork was not a realm that Casti excelled in. Nor was the problem easy to communicate, especially in the early days.

But in those same early days it hadn’t been quite as pressing.

It occurred to me that Tasser and the other Casti hadn’t completely appreciated the mounting severity of the problem because they didn’t depend on clothing to walk outside like I did. But Dyn had a bit of a different perspective.

“It’s the laminated skin,” he explained. “They’ve got fat membranes layered and layered over each other. Traps their body heat, keeps them warm.”

“Every alien has its biology advantages, don’t they?”

Dyn grunted in agreement. I didn’t really have a choice or any complaints about my alien physician, he was the only other Farnata I knew besides Nai, and one of the only aliens on the base to treat me completely at face value.

To everyone else, maybe with the exception of Tasser, I was a novelty of some kind. Dyn was curious too, but it didn’t feel the same. Every question he ever asked was detached and professional. Medical. Clinical.

Given that, I would have expected him to dislike small talk or being posed questions himself.

And while he wasn’t an enthusiastic sharer, he would participate in conversation as long as I propelled it forward.

“Are you packed for today?” Dyn asked.

“I’ve been ready since last night,” I replied, maybe a bit too eagerly. “I’ve left this base once since I got here, and I still don’t know what that first trip was for.”

Dyn frowned, “About a week or so after the attack?”

“Yeah, you knew about that?”

“Of course I did,” the Farnata huffed, “you were babbling so much about that Vorak tracking you, Serralinitus took you and ran a convoy through the borough to see if there was anyone who’d react to you being on the move again.”

“Wait…so I was bait?”

Dyn wobbled his hand, “Yes and no. There were enough guns no one would stage an attack on impulse, plus Nai was there. It was just too see if anyone got spooked.”

“Isn’t the borough Casti?”

“I’m one of six Farnata living in this borough, half an hour north of here is another borough with almost a dozen.”

“Tasser said there were thousands of people living here. I can’t believe there’s so few Farnata that you can know all of them.”

Dyn’s voice grew lonely for a moment. “There just aren’t that many of us,” he shrugged. “It’s a Casti colony. Even the Vorak civilians outnumber us by an order of magnitude or two.”

“I’m a little surprised there’s civilian Vorak here at all,” I confessed. “They can’t be very popular.”

“Depends on the Rak,” Dyn said, “Most of them aren’t any bigger fans of the occupation than the Casti.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because it doesn’t matter what species you are, if you call a planet ‘home’, you don’t want to see it under military occupation, but especially by your own species.”

“I don’t suppose there’s anything to worry about today?”

“Of course not, Nai is in top form, you won’t even be off base for more than a few hours. I almost hope the Rak do snap their jaws at us.”

“I only bring it up because you conspicuously didn’t say whether that first excursion turned up anything.”

“Sorry, can’t say.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

“The latter. This is a military; missions aren’t public.”

“I’d hardly call myself part of the public.”

“Maybe not, but you’re not part of the military either.”

“I’ve had to fight too many [otters] to completely agree with that.”

“Well you won’t be the first to fight one today,” Dyn said vehemently. “If, and that’s a large if , we run into any Rak, then Nai will probably engage first. That means unless they have an Adept to match her, they lose.”

“And even then…” I said.

Dyn gave another hum in agreement. Everyone on this Casti base had a high opinion of Nai’s combat prowess. I was no exception. But even before Nai had arrived, the soldiers here had known her by reputation and name.

‘Torabin’. Most Casti weren’t great with the ‘b’ sound, but they could pronounce it in that word. It wasn’t a rank like I’d originally thought, but it was still common address for her.

I’d been meaning to ask Dyn what it meant, but he was the chief physician on a military base of at least one hundred. He was a busy alien most days.

But today he and I were going on a short road trip about an hour west.

Nai was coming too, but unless she was going to share some more Adept knowledge I wasn’t excited about that part.

“How many Farnata are going to be at this thing?” I asked.

“At least forty, could be as many as eighty. Every one of us for a few hundred miles will be trying to attend.”

“Are they all coming for the same thing?”

“Food,” Nemuleki confirmed. She walked into the garage wheeling a heavy looking refrigerated case on a dolly.

“That or clothes,” Dyn nodded.

“Is that a regular occurrence for these forums?” I asked, “Getting new clothes?”

“Not on most colonies,” Dyn said. “But Byr operates a textile factory that supplies all over the hemisphere. She’s one of the only ones who can take custom orders for Farnata.”

“Now human orders too,” Nemuleki pointed out.

Physically, the Farnata were the most similar to humans, so were their clothes.

Tasser had insisted I be very quiet when I figured it out, but when they’d brought up a Farnata tailor and textile manufacturer to make clothes, I hadn’t taken it to be coincidence. But since I had no real proof, there was no good reason to advertise that this same manufacturer was also producing and delivering uniforms to the military group Ase Serral represented, the Naxoi.

And if this tailor was willing to secretly make clothes for the Casti and Farnata fighting the Vorak occupation, then it wasn’t too large a shock when they agreed to make a new kind of custom order and keep very quiet about it.

“I didn’t know you were coming,” I told Nemuleki.

“Before here, I was stationed on the Paris moons for a few thousand hours. I got to know a lot of Farnata there, but there’s enough of them there that they don’t do these forums the same way. So I’m curious.” She said.

Nemuleki beckoned me over and had me help her load the refrigerated case into the back of the vehicle we were taking, “Thanks, that thing is heavy.”

“What’s it for?” I asked.

“No clue, I’m just loading what Rahi Dyn asked for.”

“Dyn, what’s this for?”

The medical officer looked over at the case, “Perishable medical supplies. Winter is ending soon, and Casti always fall ill when things start thawing out.”

Nemuleki nodded awkwardly, the motion was unpracticed coming from her compared to Tasser, “That’s true.”

“Huh, [flu] season back on Earth was always right in the middle of winter, not after.”

“I want to hear more about your planet during the ride,” Nemuleki said. “Tasser gets to talk with you all day, but I’m always stuck doing tactical review with Ase Serralinitus and his staff.”

“Tasser and I haven’t actually talked that much about Earth or Nakrumam.”

“Nakrumum,” Nemuleki corrected me.

“Like I said,” I grunted while I loaded the last of the crates into the trunk, “we just haven’t talked that much.”

“That sounds like Tasser,” Nemuleki said honestly, “but between the two, I’m sure you’ve talked about your homeworld more than ours.”

That was probably true. While he was definitely the least curious alien about Earth, Tasser had also not seen fit to share much about the Casti home planet; we’d been driven by other priorities. But from what I’d inferred from listening to him and Nai, he hadn’t lived on his homeworld for long before leaving it.

“I can answer some questions, but I was also going to take advantage of the ride and do some experimenting.”

“Experimenting?” Nai asked accusingly as she walked into the garage.

“Relax Torabin,” I chided, “just psionic stuff. If you’re right and it doesn’t exist, you’ve got nothing to worry about.”

Nemuleki shifted uncomfortably for just a moment, and though Dyn hadn’t, I suspected it was because he’d forced himself not to react.

They expected Nai not to react well to the name, or at least me saying it. But if the other Adept was upset at my sarcasm, she was more determined to not let it show.

She only said, “You shouldn’t try to speak about what you don’t know,” before climbing into the driver’s seat.

I climbed into the backseat when Dyn took the other front seat.

“Why do you think I don’t know the word?” I probed. Her reaction had genuinely surprised me. Sarcasm was one of the harder parts of mastering Starspeak, but it had been something of a priority for me. It had always made Nai glare a bit harder at me.

“Because it’s a Vorak word,” Nai said simply. “They give special names to their enemies.”

“So what does it mean?” I asked.

Nai didn’t respond, choosing to ignore me instead and begin driving.

That was fine, curiosity and a temporary failure of my self-preservation had been the only things sending me down this line of questioning anyway.

I wanted to focus on my psionics for the trip anyway.

I didn’t actually have any dedicated time built into my schedule to practice either. I had the occasional lessons with Nai about Adept safety, but Nai kept the interactions frosty and on topic.

The rest of my time was consumed with Tasser’s improvised classroom and medical scrutiny from Dyn. So I could only practice my psionics while they were busy, which meant while I exercised, or when I was winding down to fall asleep.

Nai wheeled us down the long driveways leading to and from the base. Looking at the deep trapezoidal chutes carved into the land surrounding the base took on a different meaning after having seen an attack on the base first hand.

They were trenches deep enough to trap enemy vehicles, so they were forced to stay on the straight roads to approach the base. They could probably also be filled with ocean water, considering how far they stretched around the complex.

It wasn’t until we pulled onto the streets of the borough. Tasser must have told me its name, but I couldn’t recall it. How dumb was that?

Using my psionic journal still wasn’t second nature. Unless I was sitting down with Tasser being taught, it took me a second to remember the tool and take advantage of it.

“What are ‘psionics’?” Nemuleki asked, “is it a human thing?”

“No,” I said, “well, maybe. I don’t know.”

As she asked, I started spinning up the greater construct in my head. Unless I fully activated it and let it run autonomously, it took quite a bit of concentration to work.

“It’s hard to explain,” I continued, “I think it’s a subset of Adept powers, but Nai…disagrees.”

“Yeah, you two don’t like each other. We get it,” Dyn grumbled. “Skip to the explanation; I’m curious too.”

“Alright…” I needed an example. The clock would be a good one. “So Adepts can create matter right?”

Dyn nodded and Nemuleki quoted what was probably a textbook, “‘Adepts simulate materials with characteristics determined by the Adept, circumstances, and limitations of physics.’”

My own understanding of what she said might be a bit shaky, but it would do.

“Okay, so you create something that’s useful right? Need to tighten a bolt, make a wrench. Need to touch something hot? Make a glove. But there’s some creations that are valuable not because of their physical presence, but the information they can give or preserve for you.”

My mind skittered across the surface of my creation, and the psionic construct felt like it hummed to life in my mind. I aimed it at the mental clock that I kept in my head. Currently, I pictured it as a digital clock. Only, it didn’t use lights to form the bars of each number, it was…well I imagined it as a mechanical digital clock. The little bars flipping around their own length.

But it wouldn’t do in this form, not for what I had in mind. Because I knew Nai could make solid objects, so it probably wouldn’t be any leap at all for her to make the simple gears and axles that would go into a clock like this one.

I needed something that demonstrated the difficulty a little better.

The clock measured time, and there were plenty of ways to do that. I pulled at the fringes of my mechanical clock and took away some of the key pieces I needed to preserve, putting the rest back.

Sounds of ticking, alarms going off, and sand slipping away came into my head unbidden. This was the frustration of working with these constructs. It was so easy to get lost in my own head if I wasn’t paying attention.

Luckily, it wasn’t too hard to find myself either.

My psionic alarm clock was now a psionic hourglass. I’d pulled the stopwatch part out and separated it. I didn’t need it, and the hourglass was easier to focus on if it was isolated.

The whole affair took only a second or two.

“Give me a second, and I’ll show you what I mean,” I said, holding up my hand.

This was going to be the hard part. I just wasn’t as good making solid things. But the idea was simple, and I already had the psionic version to base my design off of.

The material didn’t really matter so long as it was transparent and inert.

Atoms and molecules lit up in my palm and I made a small glass tube with a constriction at its midpoint. A moment later, I made a few grams of dust in one end of the tube.

There, now I had a real hourglass, and a psionic one.

“Here,” I handed the hourglass to Nemuleki. “If you flip it, the sand takes… thirty-ish seconds to go from one end to the other.”

“You can create it so precisely that you know how long it will take?”

“No, I already timed it in my head.”

She gave a click, in the negative. “What do you mean?”

“So I made that, right?”

“Yes...”

“Well, I made a copy too. In my head,” I said tapping my forehead. “I can make the version in my head do everything this one can, it’s just not solid.”

Nemuleki looked at me skeptically, “But if I tip this over, and you already know how long it takes, you could just be counting nonverbally.”

“I mean, in a sense, I am.”

“If this one only times out thirty seconds, that’s not long enough to prove what you’re talking about. It would have to be longer, enough that you couldn’t reliably count it out otherwise.” Nemuleki retorted.

“Yes, but how did he know how long it would take in the first place without measuring it?” Dyn said to the Casti. “This is what Tasser was talking about: how you remembered so many words.”

I nodded, “I’ve been making a small dictionary in my head with words, their meanings, and synonyms. Every entry is doubled up, once in Starspeak, once in English.”

“How many entries do you have?” Dyn asked.

“Hang on, let me count…” I wasn’t going to count all the entries, but I was going to count the ‘pages’. No longer did I imagine them bound like they were in a notebook, but I still chunked the information in roughly the same way. To keep with the metaphor, the writing on each page had gotten a lot smaller over time. At exactly twenty entries per page, our total was…

“Forty-four thousand and six.” I said.

Dyn blinked at me, and Nemuleki gave me an odd look like she was trying to do some complicated math.

Oh. Right. “That was decimal,” I said, “Uhh, hang on…base eight…”

Nai beat me to it. “Forty-four thousand and six,” I heard her say.

Well, she wasn’t wrong. What she’d actually spoken, in Starspeak, had been ‘125,746’. But one of my proudest, and most inconsistent, achievements was connecting a psionic math filter to my sense of hearing.

I’d hear numbers in base-eight, and a filter would translate the numbers to base-ten for me. It didn’t always work, and it wasn’t context sensitive, but occasionally it made things a bit less of a headache and I got to feel proud for figuring it out in the first place. Unless I forgot to turn it off. Then it just ended up catching me by surprise.

Trying to apply the same principle to full sentences hadn’t worked at all. Much to my chagrin. I’d had my hopes that the idea would let me learn the alien language more easily, but not only were numbers simpler to convert, the filter only worked if I knew how to convert to base-eight anyway.

“You made that number up,” Nemuleki scoffed.

“I could go over them if you want, but I don’t think this ride will be that long.”

“Alright, get your watch out,” she said to Dyn. “Can you make a bigger one of these? I want to put these ‘psionics’ to the test.”

·····

Nemuleki tried to devise various ways to test that I wasn’t just messing around, and even as the overall energy in the car settled down for the long ride, she kept timing the physical hourglass against my mental one.

At first, it wasn’t very impressive. The thirty second hourglass just didn’t last long enough to put anything to the test. I didn’t have to pay attention to it, but without getting to see the inner workings of my mind, it just didn’t offer any definitive proof, but Dyn was the one to recognize one impressive part.

I was just too consistent. Any differences in timing were from how long it took us to say ‘stop’ or Dyn eyeballing the bar watch strapped to his arm.

Nemuleki became more convinced when I caved and made a slower hourglass. It had to be bigger to work properly, and I was pushing the very limit of how much mass I could bring forth. The walls of the hourglass had to be perilously thin. But if it broke, at least cleanup would be easy.

The hourglass measured twenty-nine minutes and fifteen seconds, at least Casti minutes and seconds. Until I got one of the smartphones working, I’d have no way of knowing if the original psionic stopwatch was accurate.

I knew it was consistent. Precise. But I somewhat doubted it measured exactly by seconds. It was probably by my own mind’s best approximation of a second. Which was probably pretty close. But consistency was what counted in my mind.

“Three, two, one… time ,” I said and Dyn checked his watch.

“Twenty-nine fifteen exactly,” he said, shocked. “Yoe .”

“Yoe indeed,” Nemuleki said. The word was just a simple exclamation. Like ‘wow’.

I expected Nai to say something in response to another psionic demonstration, but her eyes stayed glued on the road in front of us. She hadn’t said a thing the whole trip until now.

“Nap and die, folks,” Nai said. “We’re here.”

We all sat up a little straighter as we rolled through an alien town. I frowned though. ‘Nap and die’ was perhaps a little too literal of a translation for what she’d said. I made a mental note, and added it to my humble-but-growing list of alien idioms—‘heads up’ might have been something more comparable, given the context.

It was the early afternoon on our hemisphere of Yawhere, and I had to say, the weather was a lot nicer two hours inland from Pek Nantra, the name of the military base, the power plant it housed, and the surrounding borough.

There was still snow on the ground, but it wasn’t even half as deep. Instead of giving everything underfoot a nice layer of ice, it was merely patchy in most spots where it had melted unevenly.

We pulled up to a long warehouse with corrugated dark green siding that I could swear had to be aluminum. The building had a few chimneys peeking out the top where steam was puffing up, but Nai stopped our car at the far end of the warehouse where it was adjoined to a three-story square section made of bricks that looked a little too small, but painted the same color green.

Nemuleki handed me a plain black poncho with orange and navy trim to conceal myself with, and we got out and started toward the building. From the distance, I would look like a third Farnata walking with them. And unless anyone was close enough to see under the hood, no one would know any different.

It wasn’t the same as the intricately textured, pure black ponchos that the Naxoi often featured in their uniform. But the black coloration was the same, although theirs didn’t feature the trim.

Still, I was finding myself rather liking ponchos.

We walked around the square building to a large wooden single door, and I raised my eyebrows.

Tasser had just begun to teach me about Yawhere. The planet we were standing on had to be a good introductory course to bigger interstellar geography, right? But I knew it was a Casti colony a bit less than two-hundred years old. The ecosystem hadn’t been present half that long, much less flourishing.

It drew attention to the prefabricated and artificial building materials that comprised almost every structure on the planet. Metal, stone, glass. Those were typical.

But wood?

This was the first wooden feature I’d seen on the planet. It felt special. The tiny specks of visible wear on its surface gave it a sense of age that nothing else on the planet had.

This was supposed to be a textile factory wasn’t it?

Nai rapped on the door exactly twice and waited for a voice from within. I didn’t recognize the language it spoke in, but Nai listened for a moment and uttered a short passphrase in return.

The door’s locks clicked in series, and I remembered I had a mental radar that I could be using. Casting it into the building, I felt only one mind, non-Adept, in the square section; it was isolated, so it was easy to pick out.

I didn’t get anymore information from just feeling their presence, but they opened the wooden door with a creak that made me instantly nostalgic.

“Hello,” an older Farnata said, “you come expected.”

Up until now I’d only seen the two Farnata with me, but this was the first one to have any noticeable signs of age. Thin wrinkles tugged at the corners of their mouth and eyes. In a human, it would have given them the appearance of middle age.

We filed into the house, and I felt a small hum in the air as I passed through the doorway. I was still new to the Adept sense Nai had told me about, but this was a large enough change I noticed anyway.

Tactile cascading spread further and more clearly based on how firmly in contact each material was. Consequently, it was almost useless with liquids and gases. Almost. For the briefest moments the molecules touched my skin, I could perceive murky changes in the air.

“You won’t need that here,” the elderly Farnata said, looking right at me. I knew Ase Serral and Tasser trusted this alien enough to ask for their help, but I still hesitated before I pulled the poncho hood off.

“Not that,” the Farnata said, their tone was like an impatient grandparent. “The mask ,” she said.

I saw that Nai had pulled off her mask, identical to my own.

Even more than the hood, I was reticent to take off the mask. I didn’t even take it off to sleep most of the time. The last time I’d gone any amount of time without it on was when Chief had nearly drowned me in my own blood.

Still, the first breath I took without it was electrifying. It was the first time I’d taken the air-mask off since learning about tactile cascading, and my lungs could feel the difference in the air I was sucking down. I hadn’t even realized cascading worked from anywhere but my hands.

The hum at the door was some kind of barrier, a field that kept oxygen inside the building. The air inside here was even more breathable than what my mask provided.

It was only now that I noticed the older Farnata didn’t wear any such mask.

“My name is Byr,” she said, beaming at me, “Others will be arriving within the hour, and I understand you’re trying to keep a low profile. So, let’s get started.”