Andra looked out over the grand meeting hall. It was huge, packed full of psionics, from the students, some of whom were so young that they were carried in the arms of their caretakers. High test empaths, all of them, there was no better care for psionic children than under the watchful, loving gaze of the Blood Star teachers.

The older students were in small packs of three to five, and they clustered together, minds buzzing as they wondered what could be so important that their leader needed to address the whole base at once.

The adults, of course, had been on the front lines this whole time. Blood Star had suffered heavy losses in the early days, when they didn’t know how to destroy the great ships, and could only serve as a warning system, and communications for the fleet.

None of them knew what was coming.

Cygnus stepped up to the podium. He didn’t need the microphone to make himself heard, but psionics knew better than anyone that sometimes things needed to be said aloud. This was one of those times.

“What we’ve been facing up to now has been scout ships and front runners,” he delivered the worst of the bad news first, unflinching at the murmurs, mental and vocal both, that filled the room. “There are more, bigger ships coming. A whole fleet that makes ours look like little one-man fighters. They build ships in hollowed-out planets and asteroids, and they’re coming here.”

“How can we face them?”

It was Indus Crux, Cyg’s best friend. Andra knew him well by now, and shared a little nod with him in greeting. He was one of the few people who stayed near enough to keep Cygnus functioning during her capture. Without him, she wasn’t sure Cygnus would have remembered to sleep, let alone eat enough to keep his psionics strong.

His question was a good one. Andra stepped forward and laced her fingers with Cyg’s. He offered her a slight, reassuring smile.

“Most of you don’t know me,” she started, a little uncertain, even with Cygnus, a veteran of public speaking, in her mind, helping her along. “My name is Andra. I’m from Asteroid Base 42, and I’m Cygnus’s syzygy. The aliens, we still don’t know their name because they don’t speak the way we do, took me captive for several months. During that time, I learned their weakness.”

She carefully dropped her still-unstable shields to the base, and let them see what no one but Cygnus ever had. The great, sweeping, crystalline aliens. How she was captured, taken alive because the aliens were seeking the enemy queen who destroyed their own. How their entire existence circled around their queens.

“They hate us, because of what we are,” she told them as they watched how she survived. How she learned the weakness of their own kind when the queen, the queen who desperately wanted to know what the humans were, discovered a faulty worker and shattered it apart. “Psionics, in their race, are always queens. They don’t understand us, and that frightens them, but they also believe that if we’re here, this much be a rich place of resources. Resources they need to expand further.”

“But we can fight them,” Cygnus took over, his mind a light touch and a solid anchor when she eased into the memories of the first time they turned the resonance on a queen, and shattered her apart. “They don’t have syzygy, and that’s what makes us strong. They can’t use psionic resonance because the queens are always alone. They don’t’ even really work with other queens. We can use that against them.”

“Does it work for those of us without a syzygy?” Indus asked carefully. “What can the rest of us do?”

“First, we’re going to be testing everyone, including those who already have a syzygy,” Cygnus told him, with a nod to the groups of two and three who were too close, mentally and physically, to be anything but syzygy themselves. “We don’t know if empathy can be used in the same way as telekinesis and telepathy, but we’re going to be running tests as soon as we get another report of an attack. Until we know for sure, everyone, including Andra and I, will be going through the testing to find possible syzygy matches.”

Fortunately, that part was reasonably easy, particularly in Blood Star, where everyone knew precisely what their abilities were, and how powerful they were. Separated by powers and complimentary strength, it wasn’t that hard to spot a possible match, after that, it was just a matter of the two psionics linking up, and seeing if the match worked.

“And last,” Andra said, although she felt Cyg’s surprise. “Some of you may have heard that Cygnus and I… we managed to teleport me off a planet, to a ship in orbit. Now that we know it’s possible, we have to figure out how to do it reliably.”

There were more murmurs, and small wonder. Teleportation was a legend, thought to be lost with the great psionics of a bygone era.

But the time of legends was back, and they had a war to win.

“Nothing is impossible if we work together,” she added when the murmurs quieted. “Nothing is beyond us. Nothing cannot be done, if we are willing to fight for it.”

“Now we take the fight to them,” Cygnus said on her heels. “Blood Stars. Your assignments will come through before the end of the day. Report to testing and ready yourselves for the fight of our lives.”