Slip

Aside from a killer headache and feeling like I’d just sprinted a quarter mile, I actually felt fine after a couple minutes.

“I’m fine, I’m okay!” I said, trying to fend off two different doctors.

“Auto-immune reactions are exactly the kind of reason we quarantine—”

“I know,” I shouted. “This isn’t the first time, [dang!]”

Hearing that made them pause for exactly a single breath before doctors Mo and Maburic exploded further.

It took Tasser a full five minutes to calm down Dr. Mo enough to recall that not only had this already happened once, possibly even twice, but that Dyn had reported on it in the documents we’d brought with us.

“Back on Earth I didn’t have any allergies,” I explained. “But when I broke out of the cell on Korbanok I had a few minutes to grab things from the other abductees stuff. My—I saw an [epi pen,] I knew what it was for, and it seemed like one of those things that was good to have and not need rather than the reverse.”

In truth it had been Daniel’s idea. He really had saved my life more times than I could count. And I could count pretty high.

“He spent the first one in the first month at Demon’s Pit,” Tasser added. “But our medical officer examined it after. There was enough residue in it for him to reproduce the molecule.”

“Did you ever find out what set off the first immune response?” Dr. Mo asked.

“No,” Tasser said. “Exposure would have been the only way to test for it, and Dyn didn’t want to risk another attack.”

“What all can you tell us about the molecule then?” Dr. Mo asked, turning to me. “If that wasn’t the genuine article but only a reproduction, then technically you’ve put an alien biochemistry into your body. There could be side effects, risks, we need to know everything.”

“I have another dose back in the room,” I said. “Tasser and I both usually carry one, just in case. But I’ve gotten a bit lazy about it since getting here.”

“What all do you know about the medicine? You might have details from your home that we can’t deduce from its chemistry.”

“I’m pretty sure it’s just [epinephrine—adrenaline,] it’s a neuro…” I trailed off. I didn’t know exactly how to translate ‘neurotransmitter.’ The word I used for ‘transmit’ when I talked about telepathy with Nai connoted telecommunications, not biology. “…neurochemical that humans make in high stress situations. It’s for fight or flight.”

“Ah,” Dr. Maburic said. “The volume of that injector leads me to believe the dose is a concentration of the neurochemical well in excess of what your body produces naturally?”

I nodded, “Biology isn’t one of my strong points, but I’m pretty sure it’s like a thousand times more.”

“Not very subtle…” Dr. Mo complained, “but you seem stable at least.”

“How quickly can we do a test to figure out what all I might be allergic to?” I asked eagerly.

“Meta-microbes make testing for allergies extremely annoying,” Dr. Mo said. But he must have seen the look on my face when I’d tasted real food again. “…but I’ll see what I can do.”

For all that the allergy scare inspired panic in the aliens, Umtane stood out to me.

Nai wasn’t on edge until Dr. Maburic had explained it to her. But that was more or less expected. She hadn’t been there the first time this had happened. Tasser had, but even he’d gotten caught up in the moment.

I could count on one hand the number of times I’d seen his huge Casti eyes actually widen in shock or panic.

Umtane was positively serene though. I couldn’t figure out if he really was as calm as he seemed. My instinct was that, if he were forcing himself to not react, he might be stiff in some ways.

But I was the only one watching him right now, and much to my chagrin, there wasn’t much to see.

“His afternoon testing needs to be cancelled,” Dr. Mo insisted. “We should consider isolating him to prevent further exposure.”

“The rest of today’s tests can be rescheduled,” Dr. Maburic agreed, turning to me. “I know isolation might seem like an extreme measure, but until we can determine what set off the attack, it might be the only way forward.”

“To my amateur medical opinion,” I said, “it does seem a bit extreme. I know jumping to conclusions would be bad, but it sure seems like we can safely assume it was the bread. Or at least something in it.”

“We could observe if your condition improves for now,” Dr. Mo conceded. “Just, give us some space to dispose of the food.”

I snorted. “As if you aren’t taking every single scrap back to another lab and analyzing to death.”

He frowned. “That isn’t a problem, is it?”

“No,” I said. “Your phrasing was just funny to me, that’s all.”

Things cooled down enough for everyone to agree to sit in the lab for a while and see if I keeled over dead. Someone called Security Chief Niza, and I was unconvinced it wasn’t the two escort guards posted outside.

Since I was not, in fact, poisoned, his arrival was a little pointless. But given that my afternoon had just cleared up…

I asked Nai.

She still wasn’t totally used to being contacted psionically like this, and she gave a tiny start.

Pen’s body was a closely guarded secret right now. In fact, I was pretty confident neither doctor in the lab right now knew of his discovery. Outside of the five of us who’d been there, only a handful of people knew.

Whoever was conducting the autopsy, and the security personnel Chief Niza had tapped to sit on the morgue.

That made eight people, two of whom might not actually know what they were guarding in the morgue. Although…that was assuming Umtane hadn’t told any of his staff. And since everyone on our side had known about Pen’s body going into this thing…

Yeah, eight people was lowballing.

It was hard to say how long it would stay secret then. Almost everyone involved had a strong reason to keep the information from spreading.

I leaned over to Tasser, saying, “We can use the afternoon to investigate Pen’s crawlspace.”

“Oh, am I helping with that now?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said. “Your assignment was expressly to follow me around right? And if I’m helping out, why not?”

“Someone’s going to lose their minds about me being anywhere near this,” he remarked.

I gave him a hard stare. “Before we leave here, you’re telling me what the deal is with you and all the other Casti. Deal?”

“You made a deal with Nai because you weren’t friends. You want a deal with me?”

“Fine, no deal. But tell me anyways, would you?”

“…Sure. Before we leave the Green Complex.”

“[Cool,] let’s get the doctors to clear me to leave.”

Nai talked to Umtane in the meantime.

she sent.

“Alright,” I said loudly. “It’s been almost two hours now. My heart rate is stable. I’m breathing fine. Unless we all want to spend the night, can we get out of here?”

I pulled my arm free of the monitor cuff, putting a little extra flair into it for dramatic effect. Considering how familiar these aliens weren’t with me though, it likely went unappreciated.

Doctors Maburic and Mo gave us resigned glances. “…Fine,” Dr. Maburic said wearily. “But commander Nai, if there’s even the smallest hint that his condition changes, you raise the alarm. Understood?”

I didn’t miss that the doctor addressed Nai instead of Tasser. It might have been because Nai was in command, but Tasser had been with me to every experiment so far.

“Yes,” she affirmed. “Got that Tasser?”

“Sure do,” he said.

After the medical degrees in the room folded, we flagged down Chief Niza.

He didn’t even ask us anything before he dismissed the security following Tasser and I.

“We wanted to take the opportunity to investigate the hallway,” Umtane said simply.

Niza looked at Tasser, the only new face to this group. “Is he trustworthy?” he asked.

“I trust him more than you,” I said honestly.

The Farnata gave a conciliatory grunt, and the five of us started climbing stairs.

·····

We were walking toward the sealed off corridor when I heard Umtane mutter, “How’d you do that…?”

“Sorry?” I asked.

“Well, Tae Tasser is the one who knew about your medicine,” he said slowly. “But the Torabin was actually the one to say it out loud…and she didn’t seem to know what she was talking about. You tipped her off somehow, and I can’t figure it out.”

I tried to play off the panic that was creeping into my bones. Umtane wasn’t just attentive, he was razor sharp.

“She’s got better ears than you do,” I lied. “I only mostly couldn’t breathe.”

I regretted not telling him the truth as a misdirect. Umtane hadn’t believed the first thing out of my mouth at every turn so far, and this was no different.

“Right…” he said. “I guess I can’t be too surprised you’re keeping secrets too.”

I still wasn’t used to acting civilly around any Vorak. Umtane was the first one to not make an attempt on my life or freedom so far. But that made him the first Rak I might actually be able to learn about.

If he wanted to pry at my stuff, two could play that game.

“What does ‘Torabin’ mean?” I asked abruptly. I’d been told it was a Vorak word.

“It’s an old Tarrasin word,” he said. “That’s one of the more common languages on Kraknor, but it’s a little hard to translate into Starspeak.”

I just stared at him, expecting him to elaborate. He was a little thrown off by it, but for more than a moment. “Starspeak is a relatively new language. It was artificially constructed, forced into existence and usage by treaties. The point being it’s well suited to modern words and concepts and not so well suited for older ideas. I don’t know if your people were like this, but the Vorak of five-hundred years ago believed in some illogical superstitions. Chants, special words that could bend nature, or lines carved into bone that would make powerful items. That sort of thing. Grafta.”

“[Magic,]” I said. “Earth had similar superstitions.”

“Pretty sure every species did,” Umtane confessed. “But no one likes to admit it. A ‘torabin’ was someone who used those ‘magics’ for evil. Curses and doom and the like. I’m not sure how else to translate it.”

It sounded like that made Nai a witch. But Tasser and Dyn had told me Vorak didn’t gender jobs or titles like that. Besides ‘witch’ didn’t quite capture the raw destruction that Nai was capable of. She wasn’t a crooked old lady stooped over a cauldron.

She called up fire and didn’t even leave skeletons behind.

“[Warlock…]” I decided, just in time to arrive at the tarp covering the hallway where Pen’s body was hidden.

Chief Niza inserted a key into a tiny padlock keeping a zipper in place, and the five of us slipped inside and got to snooping.

“The Director isn’t overseeing this?” I asked.

Once again we had five, but Tasser instead of Director Hom-Heg.

Chief Niza shook his head. “You three Adepts make for the most impartial investigators because the timeframe excludes the possibility that any of you are directly involved.”

“That’s not what I…” I frowned, missing something.

“The Director is distancing himself to keep the investigation impartial. A bioweapon is being made in his facility. He is technically a suspect until proven otherwise,” Umtane said.

I raised my eyebrows at that. But maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised. Before we’d gotten here, who had Umtane been looking at—who else could he have been looking at? A lowly grunt probably wouldn’t have the access, so we were looking at someone higher up the totem pole, or someone who had stolen their credentials.

“Doesn’t that mean you’re a possible suspect for the same reasons? You’re not as in charge as the Director, but the Chief of Security could get away with a lot with no one knowing…”

Chief Niza actually gave a mean grin and I saw some of his teeth were synthetic. “Saying that right to my face…that’s good. You’ve got wagra at least.”

“Was that Speropi?” I asked Nai across the hall.

She nodded.

she sent.

“Chief Niza is one of the few higher-ups I’ve cleared,” Umtane said. “Given how much ground the culprit has needed to cover, it’s unlikely we’re looking for a Farnata. Our culprit is Casti, almost certainly.”

“By itself, that doesn’t seem like it would be enough,” Tasser said. “He could have a subordinate helping him.”

“Actually, I don’t think any of us have brought up if there could be an accomplice,” I mentioned.

“It’s not impossible,” Nai said. “But I think not. The note we got is implicitly someone reaching out for help. I don’t think the culprit would risk contacting anyone outside as long as they still had a coconspirator within the facility.”

“It boggles the mind to think that our culprit thought the Coalition would actually help develop a bioweapon,” Umtane said.

“I think it boggles the mind even more to think the Assembly would condone abductions,” Tasser added.

“True,” Umtane conceded. “If Assembly personnel were involved, it’s conceivable that the whole Void Fleet could be disavowed.”

“It wouldn’t be disbanded entirely? Punished?” I asked.

“Technically, no. The Assembly doesn’t actually preside over the fleets, per se. Each one is independent and under contract for the specific conflict it’s assigned to. Obviously, individuals could be prosecuted for misconduct, but the fleet would have to be shown to be in violation of contract first, and disavowed.”

“That sounds like a lot of red tape to cover for anyone important enough to be responsible,” I said.

“Red tape?” Umtane asked quizzically.

“Never mind,” I said. I’d spoken the correct words, but the idiom didn’t survive translation.

“Then where is the spot, exactly?” Tasser asked. He was the only one to not have seen it already.

“Up here on the right,” Nai said.

Late at night, the facility had dimmer lighting, so when we’d visited last time after dusk, it had been darker. Seeing it now was a little surreal.

“One of you help me with the panel,” Nai said.

The walls were made of huge lightweight slabs that attached to support points built into the wall. It made accessing things behind the wall, like wires or piping, easier than a material like drywall. When we’d found Pen’s body, the panel in question had been sealed to the wall brackets with an adhesive foam. It had taken cutting last time, but today the whole panel came free easily.

There was a hole in the wall’s substructure just under two feet wide. Just big enough for someone to slip through.

But the crawlspace behind was small enough to make it more efficient to search it from the outside.

So while Tasser and Niza examined the removed wall panel, we Adepts turned our attention inside the hideaway.

All three of our cascades could reach far enough to feel out any spot on the inside, though mine was really reaching in some of the far corners. Nai could wash hers over the wall, the wall behind it, both floors above and below, plus some more area, with zero effort.

She could cover such a massive area, but not without drawbacks.

Umtane and I did most of the fine scouring because she couldn’t feel the difference between a lump in the wall and a pipe unless she had a solid minute to let her cascade sink in and settle.

Those very same pipes were surprising. All four were sealed off with some kind of foam cement, and according to Umtane, were connected to the water, waste disposal, and HVAC conduits of the facility.

“This pipe bends six inches behind the wall and goes straight up about seven feet to one of the water lines. This one here dumps into the waste outflow. Then the two near the top both go to the nearest ducts. They’re fused right into the metal. How does that happen?”

“An Adept could do it,” Nai said.

“How?” I asked.

“I’ve told you about two types of creation,” Nai said. “Acute creations fade virtually immediately, and momentary ones stick around for a while.”

“There’s a third type? Ones that are permanent?”

“They’re called indelible creations, but they’re prohibitively costly,” she said. “It takes an enormous amount of energy to create even a few grams.”

“These don’t necessarily have to be indelible,” Umtane countered. “They could be lingering constructs.”

“That’s a myth,” she dismissed.

“I’ve seen otherwise firsthand,” Umtane said.

I asked Nai.

she complained.

“What’s this myth?” I asked again.

“Sometimes, in very rare cases, when an Adept makes something and then dies, the creation lingers instead of fading. It can even take on new traits and qualities,” he explained. “Although…momentary constructs just fade after ‘some time.’ It’s unlikely, but not impossible, that these could be extraordinarily persistent momentary constructs.”

“How could we tell which one of the three these are?” I asked.

“One of the two. The third is a Vorak myth about some of their first Adepts,” Nai countered. “It doesn’t actually happen.”

“I know my people’s history is steeped in superstitions, but at least some people only called it magic because they didn’t know anything about being Adept.”

“Should I ask when the first Adepts cropped up on your homeworld, or are we trying to stay focused here?” I asked.

“…Fair enough,” Umtane said. “Regardless of how they were made, they’re here.”

“So how did these get here then?” I asked. “Could Rahi Pen have made them?”

“Less than a third of Adepts are capable of indelibles, and to my knowledge Rahi Pen wasn’t one of them,” Nai said. “But crisis can push people past their old limits. He might have gained a grasp of indelible materials. Or Umtane could be right; these pipes might just be extremely long-lasting momentary creations.”

“That’s assuming your Adept even made them,” Umtane pointed out. “This crawlspace obviously isn’t on the original blueprints. It could have been made by another Adept, maybe even when this facility was created, and merely used by the culprit to hide the body. The foam cementing the pipes wasn’t created by an Adept, so the culprit likely sealed them to prevent anyone from smelling the body.”

“Why make the pipes in the first place?” Tasser asked.

When it didn’t seem like anyone had a good answer, I was surprised. “Isn’t the answer obvious?” I said. “Water access, air circulation, and waste outflow. It’s to survive.”

“That is the obvious conclusion,” Nai conceded. “But then why was Pen’s corpse here? He couldn’t have wrapped up his own body. Someone sealed the pipes and the wall panel covering the entrance. Just because we found his body here doesn’t mean Pen was alive in this…this hole.”

I had some personal experience with being trapped in claustrophobic spaces like this one.

But even Daniel and I had only been in the coffins for a few hours. This space was only a little bit larger, but the idea of being stuck inside for so long that the occupant would need water and air?

I could sympathize with Nai here. Even Umtane looked sickened at the idea someone might have been alive in this space at one point.

“The autopsy could reveal more about when the Adept died,” Niza said from behind us. “What else do you need to examine?”

“Well, we should look for [forensics,]” I said, quickly translating the word for the aliens. “Small traces the culprit must have left when they left Pen’s body. Even something like small dust could be tied to pollen from a certain planter box in the atrium. You never know.”

“Is that considered regular investigative procedure on your planet?” Umtane asked.

“Sure,” I said. “[Cops] collect even tiny pieces of evidence and try to compare that evidence to possible theories.”

“Vorak investigative method tends to focus more on the psychology of the events,” Umtane admitted.

“Like, think about this,” I said. “Whoever the culprit is, we’re pretty sure he used the foam stuff to make the chamber as airtight as possible to prevent the body from being found. So, he must have sealed the pipes inside the chamber before sealing the wall panel in place right?”

“So they must have been able to fit through the hole,” Tasser said. “It doesn’t eliminate many people, but most of the security Casti are too bulky.”

“The wall panel is unwieldy,” Nai said. “But I don’t think it would be impossible to reattach and seal with just one person.”

“So we’re looking for someone thin enough to get inside, but strong enough to handle the wall panel on their own? Doesn’t really narrow it down,” Umtane said. “It’s also not very [forensic,] as you’ve described it.”

“Give me a moment then?” I asked, focusing on one of the lowest corners of the crawlspace. The floor of the area was essentially a series of joists keeping a set of very thin floor boards up off the subflooring that the whole floor of the facility was built onto. Only nothing involved here was made of wood, maybe ‘boards’ was the wrong thing to call this floor.

But after this, I was confident my cascade was more precise than Umtane’s too. Using my yo-yo method, where I kept a bubble of my cascade on the end of a very thin ‘string’ portion, I’d found something stuck between the joists, below the floor ‘boards.’

I winced at how awkward this was going to be, but since even if Casti had fingerprints, they didn’t have a database for them, so it was pointless trying to preserve too much of the scene.

I leaned through the crawlspace’s entrance bracing myself with one hand, while in the other I materialized a long pair of tweezers.

Snaking them between the floorboards, I snagged a crumpled-up sheet of paper.

Extricating myself from the crawlspace with the paper was tight, but I had good balance. I pulled my torso free with the tweezers pinching the paper.

“How’s that for small evidence?” I asked.

I made a second pair of tweezers to carefully unpack the paper without tearing it. It was too small to be a full sheet of normal Casti paper. It could have been from a notepad or something.

Once I had it unfurled, I couldn’t make sense of it.

“It’s not Starspeak,” Tasser observed. “Looks like math though.”

“Those are Farnata digits,” Nai observed. “Not Speropi, but I recognize them enough.”

“This was probably Pen’s then,” I said. That was rotten. I’d hoped to find something the culprit left behind instead.

“That doesn’t strike you as odd?” Tasser said. “The body was wrapped up tight. You really think it could have fallen off his body out of the tarp?”

“It’s possible a Casti simply wrote this note in Farnata script,” Umtane pointed out.

“I doubt it,” Tasser said. “Look at how big the paper and the writing are. We can do fine-detail work, but unless someone was trying to pass off something as written by a Farnata, a Casti wouldn’t use that small of paper. It would just be awkward to write on.”

“It isn’t large…” the Vorak conceded. “You cascaded that under the floor?” He glanced toward me, sounding impressed.

“Yeah,” I said. “Even random dust could turn out to be some identifiable residue down there.”

“So take a step back,” Nai said. “What’s our priority? We have a body, a note, and a bioweapon somewhere. But none of that points us toward anyone or anywhere in particular.”

“That’s why I think it’s important we collect some odd samples, even if they seem totally unrelated. Whoever made this bioweapon is going to have spent some time around odd chemicals right?”

“This entire facility is odd chemicals,” Umtane pointed out.

“Identifiable odd chemicals,” Nai realized. “You’re talking about trace-science, Caleb.”

“Oh,” Umtane said, finally recognizing the Starspeak word. “That’s not very reliable unless you can get the right machinery—”

He cut himself off.

“You just remembered where you’re standing?”

“My expertise is in economics,” he defended. “Specialized machinery isn’t really my forte.”

“I believe your actuary cover about as far as I can throw you,” Nai said.

“You could probably throw him pretty far,” Tasser mused.

“We could tear out the wall,” Chief Niza interrupted.

Umtane looked over at the panel that had covered the hole. “Haven’t we already?”

“No, I mean we could cut through the sub-wall too. The culprit had to fit through the hole, but that doesn’t mean we need to. Between three Adepts, we could remove the sub wall and push the wiring aside. It would let us inspect the space closer and with more light,” the Chief said.

I sized up the section of sub wall he wanted to crack. It was not small, but he was right. There were five of us. “We’d have to be pretty careful to not disturb the contents, but it should be doable.”

And ‘doable’ it was.

Umtane materialized a simple hydraulic cutter that he could pump with his hand. In just a few minutes, he’d cut through the metal holding up the panel’s supports. It had caught me off guard. I’d thought of pillars in walls as being tough things, but that was what made things ‘load’ bearing, didn’t it?

These supports weren’t holding up the ceiling, just the wall itself.

Soon enough Umtane and I had been tapped to actually carry the piece of wall free. We set it against the far wall and inspected the crawlspace, no longer limited by the hole.

It was barely six feet wide and tall, but it went less than three feet deep.

“We could tear out the wall on the other side too,” I pointed out.

“Let’s keep the remodeling to a minimum,” Chief Niza suggested. “This buts up against an electrical utility closet—not exactly a highly trafficked area, but I only have authorization for this hallway right now.”

Still, this gave us a ton more access.

We pored over everything in the hiding space. Umtane and Nai both collected samples of dust and powders that had accumulated beneath the flooring slats, but I was the one to nab the day’s best evidence.

A blank notepad that matched the kind of paper as the earlier slip. It had been wedged down between the joists and the wall.

I flipped through the pages, just to confirm there wasn’t anything else written in it.

“Alright, it’s been a while since cursory education for me, so I’m following your lead on this trace-science,” Umtane said.

“We can’t just get anyone to test the samples, but if we can clear someone important in the materials wing, then we might start making some headway,” Nai said.

“Oh, trust me,” I told her, waving the blank pad at her. “If this was Pen’s, we’ll make some headway.”

“There wasn’t anything written on there,” she frowned. “You’re not interested in the actual sheet with writing on it?”

“” I told her.