Interlude-Pen

Pen died alone.

Honestly, it had been inevitable. He even knew it. That hardly made him feel any better though.

Korbanok had been an epic undertaking, moving hundreds of the finest soldiers the stars had ever produced. But no matter how intricately plans had been laid, they all knew the day couldn’t be seamless.

Every participating Coalition soldier had woken up for the raid knowing they might not come back.

Had everyone figured it wouldn’t be them, like he had?

It stung, but Pen hadn’t truly entertained failure until it had blindsided his team.

·····

Pen lost two soldiers in the first second.

The detention block floor groaned beneath them, like it was about to crack. Everyone under Pen was trained to make snap decisions and respond to immediate threats.

They all hesitated for the briefest moment, not even the span of a full breath.

But their first instinct had been unsure. There were more apparent threats to be more wary of, so they did not dive aside.

The solid floor shattered beneath them, bursting apart as an immense mass surged upward, ramming right through their footing.

It swung a claw and Pen saw flashes of bloody orange spray.

Two of his soldiers fell over with massive gashes through their chests.

A Vorak steadied its footing and Pen had only a split second to take in the massive creature.

Gigantism wasn’t exactly common among any species. The Vorak were no exception.

But Adepts didn’t need to abide by the limits of their birth.

A shiver ran through the Adept, and it grew a few inches taller. It was well beyond two meters tall, unheard of, even for the most enormous Vorak. It was clearly creating extra mass for itself and somehow fusing it to its body. How did it displace the existing cells? Was the new mass distributed evenly, or was it growing outward from set points?

Pen’s mind raced as all combatants moved. Pride swelled in the Farnata as he heard his soldiers fire on the massive Vorak.

Dust was everywhere, and it took Pen precious seconds to extend his cascade into the floor. He molded the cascade’s shape into a long arm instead of letting it radiate evenly. He swept the long cascade through the floor like an arm, passing it under the feet of those still standing, and the bodies of those who weren’t.

The Vorak had erupted up through the floor like a bomb, with even more force than any animal that size should be capable of. There had to be more to this Adept trick than mere size.

Not five whole seconds had passed since the giant Vorak attacked, but it was enough time for their enemy to claw through the first two Casti and additionally find the other two who had opened fire.

He had to even the odds.

Pen thrust his hand out and wove a cylinder into existence under the Vorak’s belly. It swept a massive hand at one of Pen’s soldiers, it was only a glancing blow, but it slammed the Casti into a wall with a thud.

The swipe would have cleaved open the Casti if not for Pen’s piston having sprung extended once it had solidified.

His Adept powers were not the stuff of legend, but he was still a cut above the rest. Particularly when it came to materializing objects under tension.

A famous limit to most Adept creations was motion.

Adepts could not magically manipulate their creations or move them according to will. If a creation needed to move, it would have to be created so that it could move itself.

Tension was the simplest and most forceful way for Adepts to create motion from a distance. Pen was also exceptionally quick to create things one after another.

The first piston’s blow had knocked the giant half a step backward, and Pen followed it with two more. Both appeared horizontally midair, one aimed at the giant’s knee, the other at his head. The two pistons fired, the metal rounds slamming into their targets, though not as forcefully as the first.

If the pistons weren’t braced against anything, then half the energy went into pushing the piston away from their target as much as the other way around.

Still, even half the force was enough to split stone.

There were wet cracks from the impacts followed by the clang of the metal pistons having launched themselves away from the enemy.

Pen had to hope those cracks had been the Vorak’s bones.

The giant stumbled from the impact, coming down hard on its hopefully shattered knee.

Pen took the moment to run toward his five remaining soldiers.

“Run, run!” he shouted.

They couldn’t let themselves be tied down here, even for however long it might take to put down the giant Adept. If they even could.

His men fired on the giant Adept to no avail while they all got to their feet and began running again. A few moments later, Pen saw they shouldn’t have bothered. It wasted a few oh so precious seconds switching between running and shooting in the opposite direction.

The giant didn’t pursue immediately either. They could have dedicated every second to running. It wouldn’t have mattered though. The giant Vorak had not fallen, but it stayed on one knee for a delay. Waiting for something.

The dust had filled the air, but for a split second, Pen thought the flesh under the Vorak’s destroyed knee had shifted like clay.

Pen’s gut twisted as he watched the giant undo its injuries, before bounding on all fours after them.

They had probably a ten second head start running toward the security shutter at the end of the hall. The giant recovered the distance in four strides.

Pen materialized a powerful adhesive in a strip on the ground behind them. Bullets had done nothing to it, and the Adept was fast enough to avoid his pistons. Their only hope was to slow it down.

The adhesive worked in just the perfect way for it to accomplish nothing at all. The Vorak didn’t even seem to notice where it stepped. The gel immediately saturated its fur, but instead of gluing the beast in place, the concrete floor was torn up underfoot, sticking to its limbs.

They reached the door and one of Pen’s men furiously jammed their duped access card into the slot. The Vorak hurtled toward them furiously and the heavy metal door rose agonizingly slow. It wouldn’t even be a quarter of the way open before the giant had eviscerated them all.

Pen acted on impulse, reaching for the most destructive, most desperate creation he knew of: a liquid fuel combustible. They’d just cracked the door to the detention block’s exterior, so whatever fire he lit would have air supply enough to burn them all to death, Vorak giant included.

The combustible bonded to the adhesive already sticking to the Vorak’s fur and the whole creature lit up.

And didn’t stop.

In fact, the flames didn’t surge forth and consume the Rak’s enormous form like they should have. Instead, they flared to life for a few seconds, only to settle evenly without engulfing it.

I can’t beat it, Pen realized. What kind of monster didn’t die when you drowned it in fire?

It was the only thought available to him, when one of his men grabbed his shoulders from behind, dragging him to the floor and shoving him through the gap at the bottom of the door.

“No, dirak—aghh!”

Pen found himself on the other side of the door, bewildered. Screams were audible on the other side, and a plastic clamshell case slid under too. The door collapsed down with a horrible thud immediately after.

He clamped down his grief before it could paralyze him.

His men had known their mission. The computer drive in the case needed to get off this rock, by any means necessary.

Pen swore angrily under his breath, grabbing the case. There was no time to waste. He was not safe and their original evac plan was belly up.

He was out of the detention block. It would be some distance, but there shouldn’t be a door on Korbanok that wasn’t compromised right now. He could get to cargo receiving, and from there, a craft. Or a pod at least.

He needed to get off Korbanok.

No time to waste!

·····

He’d been aiming for Sassik province.

Reaching the Coalition stronghold at Demon’s Pit would have simplified so much.

But unfortunately, the Vorak were not unintelligent.

Anyone could launch an escape pod from Korbanok. It was a safety issue in case people needed to evacuate the orbiting rock in a hurry. You could not, however, enter a custom trajectory launching under the emergency protocols.

So Pen landed alone in Muti Province, more than a thousand miles from any dependable ally. His pod had been the only one to touch down in the emergency landing field, so a full team of Vorak had welcomed him with firearms.

None of them were Adept though, and he blew through them.

The weather was awful for the first few days he evaded his pursuers. Frigid mornings yielded to muggy afternoons and that more than anything tempted him to surrender himself. But the clamshell case and its contents were too valuable.

It had been bought with lives, and Pen refused to see them go to waste. Down the deepest spring in his soul, he would see the data drive delivered.

The Vorak didn’t take him seriously enough.

They couldn’t have known what he was carrying, else they would have sent a more organized response. But to their uninformed eyes, it appeared to be a lone Farnata Adept fleeing from the interplanetary raid. A middling Adept at that.

A significant target, no doubt. But not one that warranted an excess of mobilization. Why risk more than necessary in a confrontation when they could pursue him leisurely?

He was practically on foot.

Stealing vehicles to slip from one borough to the next became more and more hazardous as the density of the settlements thinned. The closer he got to the equator, the more sparsely this span of continent was populated.

It would become easier and easier to track him. More and more Adepts would come. It didn’t even need to be Adepts. Eventually, even an ordinary Vorak could read the briefings more closely than his fellows and realize some critical weakness in Pen’s capabilities and methods.

One of them would get lucky, eventually. And it only took one.

So he had a hard decision to make.

If he kept moving south, they would catch him. Maybe he would win the first few exchanges, but there wasn’t any lasting victory. He was too cut off, too far isolated from allies. This was just the wrong part of the planet to land.

The only thing of note within a thousand miles was…

The Green Complex.

Oh…that was the longest of long shots…he hadn’t talked to Berkha in a year. Or had it been two? If he reached out and Berkha wasn’t even stationed there anymore, he would be in a world of trouble.

The decision was made for him when two Vorak Adepts ambushed him on the road. They’d flown in—not a tactic the Vorak liked to resort to. Needless to say, the sound of two Rak dropping onto the roof of his vehicle caught him off guard.

They’d been skilled Adepts, maybe even better than Pen was. But Adepts did not survive by Adeptry alone.

Pen hadn’t hesitated even a second to haul the steering levers sharply aside.

The first Rak had been wise enough to let go and chance slamming into the ground at speed. The second one wasn’t so wise, and in a panic, clung to the frame of the vehicle even as it rolled over, spilling off the road.

There was a dark violet navy stain oozing from under the vehicle when Pen cut himself out of the wreckage—literally.

Always harness yourself in.

The second Rak was on their feet, materializing a weapon, but Pen shot them in the belly before he even emerged from the car. He easily spied the aircraft that had delivered them lazily circling high overhead. It was more than a mile in the sky, he couldn’t shoot it down. And as long as it was overhead, it could follow him endlessly.

He needed a place to disappear from its eyes.

The arid hills his road cut through weren’t ideal for evading aerial pursuers, but it wasn’t impossible. Especially if he was willing to get wet. And go for a jog first.

He started running west from the road and made it almost half a mile before he realized he’d left the data drive and its protective case back in the car wreckage.

Hopefully whatever Rak were watching him from the air wouldn’t be able to read too much into him returning for something. Water, food, maybe an emergency kit. There shouldn’t be any giveaways about the data drive itself, only that he’d forgotten ‘something’ important, not something so critical he would give his life to see it delivered safely.

Using a piston materialized inside the frame of the twisted car, he blew the steel apart and retrieved the case from where it had fallen in the backseat. Not a scratch on it.

Say what you would about the Vorak, they knew how to make things tough.

Breaking out into another westward run, Pen ruefully refocused on his destination. He would technically have to backtrack North, but this ambush confirmed that reaching Demon’s Pit had always been a pipe dream.

It was damnably hot in the afternoon sun. Being a fugitive of a planetary occupying force was not exactly comfortable work, but it still had moments filled with relief.

Like when he crested a hill maybe a dozen miles from the road and saw the river he’d been heading toward lazily carving its way back and forth through the scorching hills.

Most Adepts didn’t bother learning to materialize transportation. It just wasn’t usually worth the time and investment. Even if Pen had, as he closed in on the river the vegetation subsisting in the dry soil grew dense enough that only the largest, toughest land vehicles would have helped.

But there was one form of transport that almost any Adept, of almost any mass limit could create: a raft. It was just too simple to make things that floated.

This river flowed North, back the way he came. And he would be able to lose the eyes in the sky on, in, or near the river as he floated downstream.

He didn’t even entertain the idea of materializing his raft until he’d dove into the coolest part of the water, all the way at the bottom. The muddy water was downright cathartic after a week of evading the Vorak.

But there was not time to truly relax. At the bottom of the river, he lay flat and materialized a series of rigid tubes fixed to one another. He carefully tailored the color to blend into the muddy water—make it less visible from the air.

The naturally buoyant tubes pushed him up toward the surface of the water and Pen materialized some rudimentary mud-like substance to camouflage himself and the data-drive case on the raft as they floated North. It was hardly the most uncomfortable thing he’d done to evade his pursuers. It only needed to stay until the plane was out of sight.

·····

The Cordani Organic Science Complex was one of the three great isolated technological marvels on Yawhere, along with the Demon’s Pit reactor and the spaceport on Glatten Island. They wouldn’t be isolated forever, except the island. But for the next few decades, while the Yawhere colonies were still growing, other people in the solar system would get to hear about how the most advanced facilities on the planet, and possibly in the star system, were a thousand miles away from anything else.

Colonies appealed to architects and civil engineers like meat did to raptha. There was no preexisting infrastructure to worry about and endless space to design for.

The Cordani Organic Science Complex was more commonly called the Green Complex because of the color of the rock it was sunken into.

The reactor and spaceport were a little flashier to the public because of the singularly identifiable technological marvels at the heart of them. Demon’s Pit and its fusion design were even such a leap forward that the design had been adopted elsewhere, even on Nakrumum and Kraknor—one of the first examples of technology being exported back to the homeworlds instead of the other way around.

The Green Complex didn’t have any one part of it that was really revolutionary. It wasn’t even original as a concept. The Breade institutes on the Vorak home planet had inspired its foundation.

But when the Organic Authority had first gotten involved with early colonization efforts, both to pace and aid, they’d invested heavily in scientific facilities. The Green Complex was made with centuries of future growth in mind. On the premises, they had biological samples of every species that had been introduced to the planet, plant, animal, fungus, or bacteria. If it was alive, and on Yawhere, there was a sample of it in the Green Complex. Plus a redundancy. And probably another redundancy or three. Just in case…

The Complex conducted biological research in dozens of different fields, their hot labs alone employed almost a thousand researchers and technicians carrying out non-stop scientific research in every biological field conceivable.

Vaccines, artificial organs, crop engineering... if it had to do with life, the Organic Authority was mixed up in it. And the Green Complex was their largest facility both on the planet and in the star system.

They were aggressively neutral and divorced from most political interests, save enforcing biological weapons bans or other wide-scale concerns.

The Organic Authority was one of the only interstellar bodies that neither the Assembly nor Coalition could afford to upset too much.

Which is why if Pen could sneak inside the Green Complex without the Vorak realizing…they would likely never think to look, much less secure permission to do so.

Of course, the same things keeping the Vorak out would keep him out too. But if Pen could muster up his memory and charisma, there was one person he could call on for help…

·····

Berkha, like three thousand other Casti in the Cordani borough, worked in the complex. Depending on the assignment, personnel would live in the Complex for weeks at a time before rotating out. The lower lab sections were regularly sealed for months on end to isolate experiments and preserve their conditions.

Pen had made a friend the last time he’d been on Yawhere. He’d been on the ground when the Vorak had dropped en masse from Korbanok. But before the Coalition had ceded the majority of the planet, Pen had gotten to know some of the civilian volunteers at the medical stations.

Berkha had stopped volunteering after the Green Complex hired him, but Pen was confident enough in the relationship he’d built with the Casti to reach out now.

When he didn’t receive a reply for the first two days in Corbani borough, he began to doubt the placement of his confidence.

But Berkha did respond to the cryptic message he’d left.

“I was beginning to sweat,” he confided. “It seemed like you weren’t going to take my call.”

“You left contact information and a time, but no name, Pen,” the Casti complained. “Do you have any idea how suspicious that looks? There are internal audits practically every week to make sure we’re not culturing anything sinister. I thought you were my supervisor giving me a test or something.”

“Well, it’s not a test, and I need help,” Pen said plainly. “I was on Korbanok, and the Red Sails are not happy…”

The Casti suppressed a quiet groan, trying not to draw any attention to them. A Farnata like Pen would catch a few stares out in public, but he raised a far lower profile in a seedy club like this one. Not many Casti would be willing to talk about anyone seen there, if only to avoid admitting their own attendance.

Berkha was embarrassed to say the least. Pen knew he was imposing a huge amount on his old friend, but he was no less desperate now than fighting Vorak directly.

“Diraksi , I know that. Do you know how many medical teams we’ve dispatched in the last week? Every single rumor you’ve heard in this entire star system has passed through here. The Red Sails have reported thirty possible ecohazard sites. Thirty! People think you blackcoats stole some kind of bioweapon off Korbanok.”

“We didn’t,” Pen assured him. “I was on the teams doing the stealing. We weren’t after anything that isn’t metal.”

“Pen…” the Casti said reproachfully.

“I get it, Ber,” Pen said. “But this is me, here. There’s no bioweapon involved. That sounds like smoke to me. Hundreds of us fled to the surface after the raid and the Rak are trying to tie things up and catch whoever they can.”

“Including you?”

“Hopefully they don’t know it, but especially me,” Pen wheezed. “I’ve got something they want, and I need to disappear. I tried making it to Sassik, but there’s no way I can get that far. It’s where they’d expect me to go.”

“You’re bleeding,” Berkha saw.

“What? No I’m, oh. I am. I was in a car wreck a few days ago. I thought I stitched myself up…”

“Pen you need medical attention, this is ridiculous. I’ll admit you to the medical wing.”

“No,” Pen said, voice as forceful and quiet as he could manage it. “I made a decent decoy trail for them to follow away from here, but it’s not perfect and eventually some Rak are going to double back here and they’re going to comb through every public record in this borough and investigate every single Farnata on it.”

“They’ll find you, but if you’re in our medical custody they won’t be able to arrest you, just like the Coalition wouldn’t be able to go after any Vorak patient.”

“If I was only trying to save my skin, that would be fine. But if I’m on the public record, even anonymously, they’ll still be able to identify my role in the raid. And that will tell them what I’ve got to get into Coalition hands.”

“What you stole…” Berkha connected.

“It doesn’t matter if I die,” Pen said gravely. “There’s a case with a computer drive in it nearby. That’s the only thing that matters.”

The Casti looked like he might shrivel and die from the stress, or even the prospect of it. But Pen was desperate. This nervous wreck was his only chance to stay off Vorak radar long enough to matter.

“…It’ll be pointless of me to just hide your computer drive,” Berkha mumbled. “I…I can get you inside the research wing of the Complex. You won’t show up on any registry, but if anyone finds you…I’ll lose my job. I’ll lose my license.”

“Don’t worry,” Pen said. “I can hide easily.”

The Coalition Adept did not resent the look of dread on his friend’s face. This was an enormous favor to ask, and an even larger one to fulfil.

·····

Less than two days later, Pen was inside the Green Complex. Not the above ground areas accessible to the public, but the underground research sections. The ones where researchers disappeared inside for months on end. Every entrance was monitored, every exit carefully metered.

In the dead of night Pen was making his hiding place. If it worked, he would be hidden with only his friend knowing anything about his presence, and boredom would be his only foe.

The Adept was working as quickly as he could without making too much noise. This side hallway was out of camera range, but there were still people near enough to hear.

Berkha slunk back up to him, having taken a convoluted and indirect sequence of halls and stairways to avoid cameras. He was no longer carrying the data drive Pen had entrusted him with.

“It’s hidden?” Pen asked.

He loathed to risk parting with it, but the truth was the only reason to hold onto it was assuming he would leave here soon. And Pen knew he wasn’t leaving any time soon.

The Casti nodded. “It has to stay put. It will raise flags if I crop up on the logs again. Once is odd enough, but someone will notice the repetition.”

That was inconvenient. But they were playing a long game.

“Alright, then we leave it be,” Pen said. “How did you do then?”

“I got you the food supplies and a first aid kit. I think the accounting office can spare theirs.”

Berkha slid a heavy parcel of food through the hole in the wall, along with a very precisely measured amount of catalytic enzyme. One skill most Adepts learned was to measure, or at least estimate, mass with their tactile cascades. It usually helped when doing the mental math necessary to optimize Adept chemistry.

This was roughly two-and-a-half-thousand grams of catalytic agent. With it, he could synthesize food for roughly three months, he could probably stretch that if he rationed carefully. He’d only need water and some simple organic molecules.

Berkha really had gone above and beyond to procure what he needed. Pen wasn’t done imposing yet, but now he had something to give the Casti.

The Adept handed him a slip with names and numbers hastily scribbled on it.

“Please, see if you can’t reach out to these contacts without being discovered, this is important.”

Berkha’s voice trembled, but he did not refuse. “O-okay…what do I tell them?”

“Nothing yet,” Pen said. “Just try to get any response at all. We can go over more details later. I’ll hide here, try to visit in the night. Just knock on the panel in two pairs.”

“I have a lab rotation tomorrow. I won’t be able to visit this section for another four days!” he protested.

“That’s fine,” Pen said. “I’ll just stay hidden for four days. Don’t try to rush. I know how hard it is to get in and out of this place, I knew I might be cooped up here for a while.”

The Casti gave the Adept a horrified look. Was that really such a long time to hide in a crawlspace like this? It would be uncomfortable, but compared to fighting Adepts, it was an easy burden.

“Get going, Berkha, if I get caught don’t say anything. Don’t try to help me. We’ve been careful, there’s no clues leading from me to you. If anything goes wrong, just pretend you have no clue who I am.”

Berkha whispered, “okay,” and vanished down the hall. Pen carefully leaned through hole in the wall he’d made and grabbed the piece of wall paneling he’d painstakingly separated from it’s fastenings.

It was ginger work, and it would have been impossible if Pen couldn’t have cascaded both the panel and the wall to sense how the two needed to line up. But even at the awkward angle, he set the panel back in its place, plunging his little crawlspace into utter darkness.

The Adept materialized a gentle chemical nightlight before cracking open the first aid kit and examining his bleeding belly again.

Dira, he was a poor field medic.

·····

It had seemed like such an elegant hiding place when he’d first thought of it. He was Adept after all, creative solutions were always just around the corner. Not every wall was solid all the way through, not every volume of space was ever perfectly utilized. Every building had some gaps in it. And a building as technical as this one had plenty of pipe junction rooms, airflow interchanges, or even just empty space where the rooms came together at an awkward angle leaving a little gap.

Pen would be living in one of those gaps. It hadn’t taken long scoping the place out with his cascade to find one. With enough time and diligence, anyone could have done what he had, carefully giving himself an access hole that could be replaced so any changes were invisible.

But Adepts could do it a whole lot quicker, and with a lot less hassle.

He’d tapped into the Green Complex’s plumbing and air supply. That tided him over. It wasn’t comfortable, elegant, or dignified. But it was stealthy.

Materialize connections to the piping and vents so he didn’t die of thirst or suffocate.

As long as the wall panel didn’t look off, no one would know he was here!

The prospect of shoving himself into what was essentially a closet he’d carved himself hadn’t even been that unappealing. The alternative was getting shot.

Meditation, sleep, and limited exercise were what filled his time while cooped up like this.

His only respite from the voluntary confinement was the infrequent visits from Berkha. Pen was touched that the Casti had been willing to take his call at all, much less risk so much to help him.

Some late nights there was a knock on the wall panel covering the hideaway hole he’d carved. Pen stretched his legs and got to stand up straight for the first time in weeks. Even if the complex’s security didn’t let him wander far.

Spare samples from the organic labs helped feed him. Berkha delivered raw materials for Pen to catalyze into food. Spongy fungi and fast-growing tubers ground down to paste and mixed with the catalytic agent rendered them into a revolting paste that his body could actually extract some nutrients from.

At first Berkha visited no less than twice a week…but that was unacceptable. The more the Casti visited, the greater chance someone might see something. Find him.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “But only visit unless absolutely necessary. Keep leaving messages at those lines, cover your tracks. Someone will reach back.”

Berkha had acceded to the request.

How long had it been since the last visit? Three weeks? Four? Could it possibly have been five?

Pen stared at the tiny latch he’d rigged to hold the panel in place. All he had to do was pop the latch and he could get out of this hole. Even the idea of just standing up straight made his heart ache.

But his squad had died making sure he escaped with the drive.

It was well hidden in the Green Complex. Even if Pen was somehow discovered, the drive would go unfound, and eventually Berkha could contact someone from the Coalition.

Even if it took weeks…

He stared at the latch, refusing with all his will to open his hiding place, refusing to betray his mission. It was just a matter of time.

And so Pen died alone.