Andra had never expected to be a teacher. Well, not really. Sure, she had taught people things before, how to fix a ship. How to plot a nav-path. She even taught two of the girls who lived under her dirty little flat on Asteroid Base 42 how to throw a punch when she found out they were having trouble with some of the local flavor form the shipyards.

But teaching a whole class of the galaxy’s most powerful psionics how to fight an alien race? Well, she supposed that wasn’t exactly anybody’s first guess.

“Reach for each other,” she told her class of almost thirty psionics, all telepaths with strong telekinesis for the moment, and all of them powerful enough to reach between solar systems when they needed to. They were in groups of two and three, all syzygy-linked, and used to working together. It made things easier. Andra might know how to fight the alien queens, but she didn’t know much about basic telepathy except what Cygnus taught her on the fly. “You’re all comfortable with your bonds, so you shouldn’t have too much trouble finding your bond and getting a good, firm grasp on it from both ends.”

She was glad that she and Cygnus spent hours on the ship to Blood Star base working out how to explain what they did, and how to do it. She wasn’t used to the language needed, and he, by virtue of being the Blood Star’s leader, was needed elsewhere.

Which left Andra in the odd, uncomfortable position of teaching everyone how to do the trick she had discovered to defend her own mind. To think that she had started this whole adventure as a nobody Edge mechanic with a dirty, broken old ship and a laughing telepath making jokes about space dust in the manifold.

Things had changed, just a little, since then.

“You’re used to thinking of your bond as a single road between you,” she continued, pacing through the crowd. There was a podium, but she couldn’t bring herself to use it. It felt too much like playing at being someone she wasn’t. “But it’s not. You aren’t the same person, so your bond is actually made of more than one thread. Yours, and those of your partner.”

She could feel her own bond with Cygnus now, the sharp-edged silver of his mind, woven with the deep bronze of her own. He was working with another group, trying to find more syzygy bonds. They had some, but they would need more, a lot more, for the coming fight. The call had already gone out through the galaxy, and everyone with even a pinch of psi-sensitivity was gathering to try and help.

Andra didn’t want to distract him, and so she set her mind on her current task.

“Feel for the way your minds work together,” she continued as she caught the eye of Indus Crux, who circled the room, a box of crystals in hand. He set one out between each group. When he passed her, Andra claimed one of the clear lumps of crystal, one that came to a fine, terminated point and shone in the sterile light of the base. “The aliens work by themselves. They’re all lone minds, and that makes them vulnerable. We can use that against them.”

With a care for her own control, which wasn’t perfect, Andra opened her mind to them, and showed them how to take a mental ‘tone’ and echo it between their minds until it became a resonance that could shatter apart the very matrix that made up their inhuman enemy.

“You have to work together,” she said as she felt across the room and gave a nudge here and there as the groups felt their way through the exercise for the first time. “An echo needs a hard surface to bounce off, so once you’ve started, you need to be able to control it so that it builds to the right frequency.

Cygnus was at a stopping point, and just in time. She sent a little spark of thought down their bond, and he responded easily when she followed it with the same tone they used to defeat the last queen they fought. This time was different, of course. Now she had thirty students watching as they tossed the tone back and forth between them, flavored with his power and her steady determination.

When the frequency was just right, she took it from telepathy and shot it through their shared telekinesis.

The crystal in her hand shattered apart and pooled off her fingers as glittering sand.

“This is how we beat them,” Andra said as she dusted crystal dust off her hands, and Cygnus left her with a ‘kiss’ on the cheek before turning back to his own work. The students tittered a little amongst themselves, but it was an understanding sort of laugh. No few of them were together in one romantic configuration or another. Her relationship with Cygnus was no secret, especially on a base full of telepaths and empaths. “Now that you’ve seen how it works, let’s see you put theory into practice. Time to break some crystal.”