Assumption

I wanted to take a photo so badly.

It would only take a few seconds. This was a view to die for.

Of course that was why I wasn’t. Death was an uncaring infinite void, and I was separated from it by a few layers of…what were spacesuits like this made of?

Climbing the exterior of the colony had proved to be more difficult than expected. For starters, there was almost no seam between the golden panels roofing each district of the colony. I’d really expected to just climb right up the side, but even in less than one quarter of Earth’s gravity, the sides were smooth and steep enough to offer no traction.

So I was climbing up one of the arches instead.

I’d reach the top, continue west, and slide down the other side. Then it was just a straight shot north to my exit.

…There might be time to snap a photo while I was sliding down the other side. But would my phone’s touch screen work properly with my hands wrapped up in the space suit like this?

It was very easy to get distracted.

There were new blank areas in my mind where my radar used to be, and I just didn’t have the same tools to reassure myself while I climbed toward the roof of the colony.

Changes in air pressure were the worst part.

The way the colony’s air barriers were arranged made sure that every part inside and under the gold paneling maintained positive pressure, ensured by at least two fields. But since the air barriers were most easily made to be spherical, a lot of them reached just a bit further outside.

But it wasn’t everywhere, and so it was worse than if there had been none at all.

Inside one stretch of positive atmosphere, I heard something slam into the inside of the gold paneling nearby. I nearly let go of my handhold in shock.

I wasn’t sure what Nai or one of the Vorak had done to throw something into the colony’s roof from the inside, but I’d definitely heard some panels break…

The lunar gravity made mistakes slightly less punishing, but I still chastised myself for almost falling. As I climbed, I found myself ducking into and through invisible pockets of air pressure, and diving back into hard vacuum only a few feet further.

I hadn’t fallen yet, but I was paranoid that an unexpected change in pressure was going to make me lose my grip.

A third of my attention was reserved for making sure I was ready to magnetize my hand and a surface within reach so I could catch myself in the event I fell.

Most of the rest of my focus went toward plotting my route upward.

All said, I was having fun climbing to the top of a moon base. That feeling was tempered by the knowledge that I had friends and allies fighting for their lives below me, but I couldn’t help but enjoy it.

My job was to go as quickly as I could and stay safe.

For the last section, I wouldn’t have the benefit of the archway’s structure. It dipped under the paneling to support it from the inside. There was only the smooth gold surface for the last few dozen feet. But I was still ready to magnetically cling to the steep incline.

“Confound it, Stacy,” I muttered under my breath, climbing upward. “That web-headed wall crawler is a masked menace to this entire city! Every day that arachnid swings free is another day sweet justice goes unfulfilled!”

…

“You would have laughed at that, Daniel,” I said quieter. I wasn’t used to being alone recently.

Summiting the colony was eerie, and far more disorienting than I would have guessed.

The footprint of each colony cell was roughly one kilometer by two. The flat section of the roof was maybe half that size, but even just taking a few steps was bizarre.

There just weren’t many times you could find yourself in the middle of such a wide flat area. Even Kansas had fields instead of just featureless plains.

The gold panels stretched toward the horizon in a way that picked at my brain.

The first few steps I took felt normal, but in just a few seconds, I was far enough from the edge that it was hard to see if I was making any progress at all. Just one long leap after another across a yellow brick road stretching in every direction.

…Some poor Casti is going to clean my footprints off these things, I realized. That grounded things, at least a little.

The view underfoot might have been surreal, but the view over my head was hypnotic.

I could point my eyes upward and see literally nothing but stars. For as far as the eye could see, horizon to horizon, just stars and stars.

Look away, I reminded myself.

It was so, so easy to get lost just staring up at infinity.

Sights aside, I didn’t dally. Long, bouncing hops took me across the roof and it was only a few minutes before I could make out the drop off on the far side.

The climb up had been annoying with the changes in air pressure, but I had a feeling the way down was going to be more enjoyable.

I didn’t even slow down when I leapt off the edge. I sailed fifty feet forward before I fell far enough to land on the slope.

Surely it would just be vain to say I looked cool staying upright while I slid down the roof of an alien lunar colony.

But I looked cool doing it.

It reminded me a bit of skiing, only it was steeper than all but the most extreme slopes, and instead of slaloming to regulate my speed, I was weakly magnetizing my uphill foot while I slid down in a straight line.

There had to be a better way of doing that…I was having to continually recreate the charge in new places as I slid. That mass added up quickly. If I hadn’t practiced rapidly creating, dissolving, and recouping my mass I might not have been able to slow down.

I kicked out of my slide a couple dozen feet from the bottom and landed atop one of the tunnels connecting the colony.

This low gravity stuff was easy! I could have done a flip and still landed on two feet. At least, it felt like it…

Lying between the colony cells were long corridors of lunar surface. Buildings, hangars, launchpads and more poked out from each colony cell.

If I was consulting the colony map properly—and I knew I was—then I needed to head directly north for about two kilometers.

I sent Nai, knowing I couldn’t hear her response.

That would deliver me to…a private spaceport, if I was reading that properly. It didn’t need to be a large one though. I was standing in view of three similar spaceports. On a rock with this little gravity, they only needed to be about twice the size of a helipad.

Moving outside the colony was surprisingly similar to inside. A few minutes earlier, Nai and I had been jumping from rooftop to rooftop and here I was jumping over similar obstacles here.

I was between the two colony cells, jogging through the bottom of a valley whose sides were shimmering gold. It made me feel like a very small insect crawling between massive bars of bullion.

As I made my way north, I didn’t relax.

Atop the colony, I hadn’t been so paranoid. There was too much unobstructed space for anyone to sneak up on me.

But Nai had hypothesized that the Vorak had committed every Adept to her position.

And she definitely had the sharper tactical mind.

Yet, as I picked my way past the extra-colonial structures, I awaited Vorak. Any second now, one of them was going to ambush me. Surely…

In the back of my mind, I was scrambling as calmly as possible to create some functional radar I could use to see any enemies coming.

Even with me anticipating it, knowing I wasn’t lucky enough to get through this without something going wrong…

I was still caught by surprise.

There was a public walkway going between the colony cells that I needed to hurdle. It stretched the whole way across, so I couldn’t go around it. Only over.

But I’d just climbed more than a dozen stories. This was nothing.

I neatly leapt up to the platform, just high enough to clear the edge and still get two feet under me.

The primitive psionic senses I’d begun reassembling instantly went haywire.

Two Adepts in spacesuits were standing on the far side of the platform, not thirty feet from where I stepped up. My psionics weren’t ready to track their positions, but I did still feel the mental energy radiating off them that marked both as Adepts.

…and both of their backs were to me.

The crappy makeshift radar was only working on light of sight. Had I tied it into my vision somehow?

I had not. In fact, it wasn’t even really a radar, because it didn’t react at all when the two of them both jumped off the far side of the platform and continued north.

They hadn’t noticed me.

The two Adepts were taking the same route that I’d planned to, and it was taking them directly toward my launch point.

No way was that a coincidence…

I sent to Nai.

I was on my own until she was finished fighting her Adepts.

Nai had been confident the Red Sails had dedicated all of their Adept resources to hunting her and therefore also apprehending me.

But these two were definitely both Adept.

They were almost identical heights, both tall for Vorak, but not taller than me.

But where one was visibly brawny like most Vorak, the other was skinny like a rail, even wrapped up in a spacesuit.

They were, without a doubt, the skinniest Vorak I’d ever seen. If it had been any other circumstance, my first instinct would have been that it was a Farnata inside the suit.

So what were they doing here?

No, that was a stupid question. They were Adepts, too valuable to be wasted on trivial tasks. They were here to make sure I didn’t make it off this moon.

Like me, they were not very inconvenienced by the floaty gravity, both of them bounding along the moon’s surface in the same direction I needed to head.

I weighed the possibilities.

Waiting for Nai to catch up wouldn’t protect our launch point in the meantime.

If I tried to divert to another launch point, there was a huge risk of running into additional Vorak. As soon as even one group saw me, all the rest would be alerted.

…And if these two Adepts were allowed to sabotage my current launch point, then I would be stuck with the same problem as before.

Nai and I going alone had been a mistake. It basically guaranteed I was going to be isolated if we ran into even one enemy Adept. We couldn’t have predicted my receiver failing, but the problem was undeniable.

I was stuck making a decision alone.

Dyn was supposed to be coming to this launch point too, and even if he’d foregone my offer, there should be at least one in his group who could be nearby.

Except…no, we wouldn’t have even made it this far if Nai and I hadn’t been moving independently.

And…just because my receiver was failing, didn’t meant my transmitter was useless. And I could broadcast to more than just Nai.

…

I received no response. But someone had to have heard it.

The two Adepts were quickly moving toward the launch pad, and once they got there, it wouldn’t even be a chore for them to prevent anyone from leaving by it.

How did they know what my destination was, but not specifically where I was?

I wanted to scream.

There just wasn’t time to consider every possible angle. And I could only see two possibilities.

To use this launch point, I would have to fight these two Adepts. To use any other launch point, I’d wind up fighting any number of Vorak soldiers when they discovered me.

It was a truly bad decision, but where I stood, there were no good ones.

My gut wrenched as I remembered what Itun had told me. I loathed to heed his advice, but I couldn’t dismiss an idea just because it came from an asshole.

“It’s not enough to avoid losing…” I breathed. And today?

I needed to win.

My best chances—Nai’s too, since she was following me—would be if I waited as long as possible so I could stay undetected longer, and then attack these Adepts before they could prevent my ride from leaving.

If I attacked too soon, then even if I won, there would still be further to reach my exit, and I doubted the Adepts wouldn’t call in my location immediately.

But Adepts were destructive, if I gave them even a few seconds too many, they could irreparably damage the ship, the launch pad, virtually anything.

Hitting my mark would be critical.

·····

I decided to go after the skinny one first.

If I could…if I could kill them in the first moment, the following fight with the other Adept would be one versus one.

My chances to incapacitate them in a single blow were better going after the smaller one.

I came at them from above.

The psionic clock was untouched by the gaping absence of my radar, using it conjunction with some estimations of distance, and firsthand experience of the moon’s gravity, I gave myself a curve that told me how far I could fall and about how fast I’d be going.

Catching up to them was tricky. The variation in structures gave me an edge though. One particularly large building didn’t block the whole space, so where they proceeded to the side on foot, I magnetized my hands and scrambled upward.

The two Adepts advanced in view, but neither one noticed me closing distance far above them.

I materialized a sharp spike—basically an icepick—and did my best to ignore how much what I was about to do felt like murder.

I said.

“It’s not about who deserves it,” I murmured before quietly adding, “sorry.”

I jumped.

My estimating curve was spot on. The trajectory was almost perfect. I overshot but only by a single footstep.

Instead of landing directly atop the skinny Adept, I came down right in front of them. I thrust my icepick at their neck with both hands.

They got one hand up to intercept the blow, catching my hands with the spike between their fingers. The reaction had been completely automatic and for a single moment, they froze, unsure of what was happening or how else to react.

I pushed the spike toward their neck.

My two arms to their one saw the pick press against their spacesuit, but I didn’t have the force to penetrate the material.

Of course space suits were durable.

What was more frustrating was how sharp I’d made sure the pick was. We were in a vacuum. I would have thought cutting would have been a viable strategy.

Unfortunately the other Adept had other ideas.

As soon as I tried to push the icepick further, my psionic vestiges went even further haywire as I felt something materialize beside me.

Sound was odd in the vacuum of the moon. Gunshots weren’t silent, but they didn’t sound the same either.

I threw my body backward, conjuring a flashbang where I guessed the other Vorak’s face was.

They squeezed off two shots, but this second Adept’s reflexes weren’t as good as the firsts, and definitely not as good as mine.

My leap back was faster than they could adjust their aim, and in low gravity, it was too easy to overcorrect. I spun midair, only waiting for one foot to touch the ground, and sprang at them.

They weren’t totally blinded, and could still see enough to bring the pistol back toward me. I had to gamble on my augmentations.

I reflexively threw my hand forward and the gun went off. Once. Twice.

I wasn’t hurt though. Covering the barrel of the gun, my palm stung angrily. I felt a hiss in the right arm of my suit as I began leaking air. But I’d been sealed up in this suit for dozens of hours now and Nai had made sure I cascaded well.

I replaced the damaged portion of my suit’s palm with a thought before wrenching the gun out of the burly Vorak’s hand.

“That’s right,” I hissed. “Bulletproof hands.”

Low gravity close quarters fighting depended on leverage. Unless you braced your body properly, a punch wouldn’t impact your target so much as it would push you both away from each other.

But Nai really had prepared me well.

It was two actions, carried out simultaneously.

My cascade went out through my feet, like the roots on a tree. An exotic magnetic material followed those roots into the loose lunar dust and below, anchoring me in place.

At the same time, my fist crashed into the Vorak’s stomach, both doubling them over and shoving them off their feet.

The same way I clung to walls, I could make my own leverage, even when there was no gravity.

Skinny was ready to back up their ally, but they too seemed slow to me.

I materialized a quarterstaff and gave a few probing jabs at their face.

They ducked back to avoid getting hit, but I smiled. That was the wrong choice. Skinny backstepped right into the wall of the superstructure.

It was a rookie mistake, not just for Adeptry, but for fighting in general.

You had to pay attention to what was around you, and you couldn’t blindly move to somewhere you couldn’t see.

Adepts with cascades bigger than mine could feel out the terrain behind them though. This Adept hadn’t.

I punished their mistake by ramming my quarterstaff into their neck, but it wasn’t a solid blow, connecting with more collarbone than anything else.

It was enough to stun them for a moment.

Brawny once again tried to materialize something, and I swung my quarterstaff in an arc behind me, swiping at the Vorak’s hands.

The half-formed pistol smashed apart when I struck.

Neither Adept wore a gun. That meant the gun they’d tried moments ago was materialized too. Was Brawny an ‘Arsenal’ Adept like Nai mentioned?

That complicated things if they were.

An enemy capable of making guns made this fight more complicated if they were allowed to gain distance.

Except it was Skinny who bolted.

Instead of attacking me, they materialized a wriggling black tendril and hurled it aside, latching onto the superstructure. The tendril coiled forcefully, dragging the Adept through the air closer to the launch pad.

The tendril was several inches thick and six or seven meters long at least. It seemed organic, which, according to Nai, was an uncommon Adept presentation. Considering how forcefully it hauled Skinny, there must have been quite some tension in it too. A few dozen kilograms of soft fleshy organic matter, imbued with tension? That clocked Skinny as an L2 in magnitude at least.

It would have been fascinating to consider the two Adepts’ powers further, but my number one priority was stopping these two from ruining my ride off this rock.

My first flashbang hadn’t properly blinded Brawny. They wore a spacesuit. The visor was built to block glare from far more intense light sources.

But there was more than one way to blind a bat.

Cribbing Itun, I created a thick cloud of orange smoke to burst into existence.

They couldn’t shoot what they couldn’t see.

I sprang after Skinny, magnetizing to the wall and kicking off and up over the next obstacle between us and the launch pad.

It was in sight, and Skinny was sprinting straight toward it.

I hadn’t seen a Vorak travel this fast without trying to drop to all fours before. They were accustomed to moving in this gravity, I saw. But they weren’t creating more tendrils to pull themselves forward faster.

I could catch up.

Once again, I created magnetic particles in my feet and what I was standing on. Only this time, they weren’t opposite charges, but identical ones. It took more effort to fill the creation with tension—like my kinetic bomb did.

But this trick didn’t demand quite as much force as my best offensive option.

I jumped at them, propelled by the charges. I got a hand on their back and magnetized their spacesuit to the augmentations anchored in my hand. Magnetizing my feet the same way, I yanked them backward, over my head, and slammed them into the ground.

The gravity made it easy to yank these Adepts around, but it also made them impact with less force.

Soft ground also wasn’t helping much.

I was standing between Skinny and the launch hangar behind me, but I was going to have trouble if I couldn’t stop both of them.

Brawny stood atop the access tunnel Skinny had yanked themselves over with their tendril. They held a new pistol, but hesitated to shoot. Skinny was technically in the line of fire. That hadn’t stopped them the first time though. Had they been too surprised to realize the first time?

Even knowing it was tempting fate just thinking so: these Adepts had yet to really scare me.

They didn’t have to be that scary to ruin the launch platform though.

I needed a way to move this fight to somewhere else.

I said,

The most forceful creation I was currently capable of was my kinetic bomb. It was high-impact and nearly instant. But it left me feeling completely drained for at least a minute after. Materializing one was like sprinting all the way to third base, but compressed down into a single moment’s exertion.

I couldn’t afford that now.

So improvise…

Making the bomb weaker would probably make it easier to create…it would be a question of how much weaker…

Skinny materialized some kind of sword and thrust it toward my chest. My hand snaked up to catch the blade. I levered their wrist by twisting the blade around, but the sword had only been a distraction.

With their other hand, they’d made another slimy tendril, throwing the other end so it attached to the colony superstructure.

But instead of retracting immediately and pulling them along with it, they tossed the end attached to their arm at me instead.

On reflex I tried to bat it away, but the tendril only stuck to my hand. It yanked me toward the superstructure.

Brawny had a clear line of fire…but they hesitated still.

No time to question it.

I materialized a flashbang only a few inches from my palm and the tendril blasted apart. The detached tendril recoiled toward the wall it was anchored to, sticking to the superstructure wherever it touched.

The angle it yanked me threw me upward enough for me to land atop the superstructure where it connected to the gold paneling.

I wanted to drag this inside and there wouldn’t be a better chance.

I could get Skinny easily, and it looked like Brawny was coming to me. They weren’t trying to shoot me. The Adept had even dissolved the gun. That was disconcerting.

Still, there wasn’t any more time.

Pairing with the lingering charged material I’d intertwined with Skinny’s spacesuit; I made an opposite charge in my hand again.

It had to be far more intense than normal to account for the distance, but the low gravity once again worked for me.

Skinny was pulled off the ground, magnetically yanked toward me.

Another tendril went out from their arm, tethering them to the ground, but a quick flash bang burnt through the tendril.

Brawny leapt toward me, trying to intercept Skinny.

And just like that we were all three where I needed us to be.

The gold panels that roofed the colony were actually double layered, with a few feet of empty scaffolding between them. The inner layer was far less durable than the outer one, but Nai had said it was because they were designed to take impacts from both sides.

The outer layer of panels was reinforced with meteoroids or spaceship debris in mind though. From the inside, they were supposedly quite fragile.

The kinetic bomb I made was slightly different.

It wasn’t an instant explosion this time, rather, the pressurized gas was contained inside a membrane for half a second, letting it fall a bit further away from where I’d created it just on the other side of the outer set of panels.

The two Adepts weren’t prepared for the triangular sections of the panel to suddenly crack apart.

With one hand on Skinny’s spacesuit, I dragged them with me as I fell. Brawny’s leap carried them clean through the hole I’d blasted in the colony.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that the inner layer of panels had been blown apart too.

Skinny flailed and kicked at me as we fell into the colony, landing on a flat rooftop thirty feet below the hole in the gold paneling. Brawny crashed down with us, a few feet away on the same rooftop.

I was ecstatic. That had worked better than I could have possibly hoped. They didn’t have as simple access to the launch platform, and I could rendezvous with Coalition soldiers heading to that same launch pad from inside the colony.

The two Adepts got to their feet, still ready to fight, but I didn’t feel outmatched.

They were…predictable. Threatening, but with no sign of novelty. They weren’t being proactive, and it didn’t seem like they realized that either.

A grin broke across my face as I realized my mistake.

Nai had been correct that all the Red Sails Adept resources were pointed at her.

These two didn’t count as ‘resources’.

Nai had told me most Adepts weren’t combatants.

They weren’t put into the battle properly because they weren’t ready for it. They were probably trainees, or maybe even support personnel.

But they weren’t seasoned fighters.

I had more experience than they did.

The two of them warily circled me on either side, looking for an opening.

I materialized a card in each hand with identical writing on it and showed them to both Adepts.

‘Sorry, just trying to escape. I’ll try not to kill you.’

The larger one lurched forward but I was ready for them. I flung the card, and the moment it left contact with my hand, it ignited into a blinding flare. The burning card adhered itself to the Vorak’s visor, blinding them steadily rather than in one flash.

That would deal with them for a few seconds.

I turned to Skinny and went on the attack.

Today…I needed to win.