Pinpoint

I was worried about the satellite images we received. The psionic hotspot mapping worked perfectly despite how hastily we’d put the idea together.

Funny thing was, it probably wouldn’t work ever again after a few more months. They would continue to spread, and soon there would be too many positive results to turn into meaningful data.

No, the true source of my worry was the list of ship profiles we’d imaged from orbit. It was tricky enough capturing good profiles from a bird’s eye view, so it was hard not to feel like the effort was wasted when nothing in Mistina colony matched the specs we had on the abduction craft.

Absence of evidence wasn’t evidence of absence though. Aerial images couldn’t image the inside of covered hangars, or anything being kept under the jungle canopy. If pirates had hidden an abduction ship somewhere in the colony, it would be impossible to locate.

But tracking the ships was secondary. It was the humans we were after.

The psionic heatmap of the colony was our best bet. Five dense clusters of psionic minds lit up, along with a few less dense spots. Hopefully they were also marking the location of human Adepts capable of producing the psionics placed in so many brains.

Three dockside warehouse complexes were the more likely possibilities. The pirates who’d pointed us here would probably have strong ties to the shipping sections of the city. They had to move their spoils somehow.

However, the other two locations were more suspicious, in a way. In a colony famous for lawlessness, smuggling and organized crime wasn’t out of place around the docks. Crime tended to avoid prying eyes, but docks were integral to smuggling.

The other two hotspots being neither of those things caught our attention.

One of those hotspots was a long-abandoned automobile factory, since reclaimed by the jungle. That it was any psionic register at all was a dead giveaway there were people occupying it anyway—it was a good place to keep a low profile.

The other dense hotspot was a decommissioned gun manufacturing plant that—insistently according to local authorities—'had not produced a single weapon for years’.

Somewhere down among those locations were some human abductees.

The remaining spots on the map were less promising because only one or two psionic minds were present. Several apartment buildings on the north end of town, a small local hospital, and a hydroelectric dam nestled a mile into the jungle.

All the wrong places to hide humans—though we had checked with the hospital just to be sure.

No, it was the five dense hotspots that almost certainly hid our humans.

The only question is if it was just one, all, or some combination of them.

But even narrowing down their locations to these five had problems. Even if we knew exactly which one they were at, we still had the conundrum of actually extricating them without anyone dying.

Some scouting was in order.

And humans and Farnata would stick out like sore thumbs in Mistina, so Tasser and Fenno had hit the ground ahead of us, blending in with the local Casti.

Six hours later, they crackled back on the radio.

“Not one Adept in all three port locations,” Tasser said.

“How close did you manage to get?” I asked.

“Thirty meters for the one. The other two, we got within arm’s length of the buildings. It’s possible we missed the timing by sheer chance, but I don’t think that’s likely."

“No range or coverage problems?” I asked.

“Nope, the candle radars worked great. Nai’s specs were very accurate. Downside of that is: she was completely right about quick we’d burn through them. We only have three copies left between the two of us,” he reported.

“Field testing is good, but the priority is locating Humans,” Serral said. “If they aren’t being held at any of the waterfront locations…they must be in one of the inland spots.”

The abandoned automobile or firearm factories, out on the edge of town. The colony became less dense the further from the ports you went, with jungle overgrowth encroaching the city on all sides. The major roads leading to other cities on the continent were tended to and kept clear, but the remaining two psionic hotspots were far even from those highways.

They were isolated in every sense of the word, save for a river passing close by each abandoned factory.

“There aren’t any approaches from the ground to either location,” Fenno commented. “The jungle is so overgrown, gangs are the only presence there. There’ll be no one for us to blend in with. We’d never get close enough to sense anyone, even with the candles.”

“On the other hand, doesn’t that mean there’s fewer people to catch you sneaking closer?” I asked.

“This isn’t our territory,” Tasser reminded me. “They definitely know it better than we do. We’d be noticed for sure.”

“I’ll say,” Fenno said. “Captain, we might have to cut this short. I think we’re being watched.”

“Risk?” Serral asked immediately.

“Low, I think,” Fenno said. “Tasser, they’re over your left shoulder, on second level balcony.”

“How do you know they’re watching us?” he asked.

“They have a spyglass aimed across the street at our reflection in the window, here, pick that up and take a peek. But don’t look long.”

There was a small clatter through the radio, and I tried to visualize where exactly on the streets of Mistina they were.

Satellite photos were not adequate enough, it turned out.

“Huh, look at that,” Tasser mused. “That’s not a small setup. Did you clock the bag at their foot? They came prepared for a whole day.”

“I didn’t…” she said.

“Take your time,” Serral said. “They can see you’re on the radio, yes?”

“Definitely. I don’t think it’s obvious that we’re broadcasting to a ship though. Could just look like we have our own rig.”

“Not a lot of Casti carrying around any long-distance radios,” Fenno said. “It’s hard to say how much we stand out.”

“…No, we’re on the edge of the largest spaceport on the continent—albeit a small continent—two Casti with a radio is not enough to earn scrutiny like this.”

“Then what could have given us away?” Fenno asked.

“Not to second guess the field decisions,” Serral interjected, “but are you sure you weren’t detected psionically? Maybe candling the radar isn’t as subtle as we thought.”

“Sorry Captain, we would have noticed a panic, someone breaking routine, there would be something. If we were sitting out here for days on end? Sure, then we might have been blown. But on the first day? Before lunch?”

Almost like someone was waiting for us, specifically.

“What if our targets were tipped off?” I asked. “We already had one anonymously-sent-document trip us up so far.”

Serral next to me gave a hard look.

“…Tasser, Fenno, if you even pick up a hint that someone might be a threat, you move.”

“Understood Captain, but I don’t think our voyeur is making a move any time soon.”

Serral asked.

“…You’re right Tasser, they aren’t going anywhere,” Fenno said. “Look at the warehouse. The south wall, does it look low enough to see over?”

“Not for us,” he remarked.

“But maybe for them,” Fenno said. I could imagine her subtly indicating the one surveilling them. “Advanced counter-surveillance says what, especially when the manpower is disparate?”

“…Ah,” Tasser and Serral both said. The Captain was a moment behind Tasser realizing, but the signal delay from the surface synchronized the reactions.

I gave Nai and Deg an inquisitive look.

Both of them returned blank expressions.

I suppose there was a reason none of us had been given the surveillance assignment.

“There’s never a guarantee you’ll be the only one watching a target,” Serral explained for the rest of us. “And surveillance is intended to hide from its subject, not peers.”

So the question wasn’t why Tasser and Fenno were being watched…it was who else would be spying on the same psionic-enabled dock loading operation?

“Confirm for me,” Serral asked. “You’re sure this Casti has made you? You’re sure they’re not just watching your same target?”

“They definitely have eyes on us,” Fenno said. “They know we’re watching the dock, but they haven’t realized we noticed them.”

“” Serral asked. The Captain turned, posing the question to the rest of us.

Where and when we landed was an important decision. In the end stage of whatever was about to unfold, one thing consistently defined succeeding here.

Whether it took an hour or a month, we wanted to fly away from Cammo-Caddo with more humans than we arrived with, and if those humans needed rescuing, every bit of distance between wherever they were and wherever the Jack would launch mattered.

There were a lot of factors that could possibly mitigate that, like if the abductees were still with one of their own A-ships. Then they wouldn’t necessarily need to be evacuated to the Jack.

But with so many details uncertain, and the situation evolving with or without us…

“I say we touch down quick,” I said. “The advantage of sending the two of them ahead was to gather information without giving any away, so if that’s no longer happening, we need to eat the risk and get the rest of our players off the [bench].”

“That probably sounded better in his head,” Nai said. “But I agree. Caleb might not be in my league of combat Adeptry, but he’s still an overwhelming resource if this comes down to a fight, even without Coalescence. The quicker we’re all on the ground, the better we can figure out who’s involved with Humans and psionics.”

“What’s it called? [Devil’s advocate?]” Shinshay asked. “If we get further involved now, we might scare off whoever’s got the Humans. This is a fishing trip, and we lose if the ones who have Humans realize what we’re after.”

“You think we should pull Tasser and Fenno back?” Serral asked.

“Acknowledging the risks, I think there are also merits to resetting the scenario,” Shinshay said. “I honestly don’t know what we should do, but it seemed like a dissenting opinion might be valuable.”

“…The value of waiting is in acquiring more information about the abductees, wherever they are,” I said. “But the arrests on Sidar put us on a clock. The reason we knew to come here is the same reason why we have to act before gossip about a certain human looking for other humans spreads.”

Looks went around, and we were all on the same page.

“ Serral instructed.

“” Weith said.

“You two get all that?” Serral asked into the radio.

“Confirmed,” Fenno said.

“We’ll sit and look pretty ‘til you’re down here,” Tasser said. “Stay near the radio.”

“Confirmed,” Serral replied.

·····

When I’d first escaped Korbanok, I’d gotten a very brief glimpse of a large colony city before being shuttered away and fleeing not long after.

Ever since then, all the alien settlements I’d seen were either smaller planetary towns, or lunar colonies.

It wasn’t until seeing Mistina that I better understood why that distinction mattered. Planetary colonies versus lunar ones were designed differently. My time on Archo and Lakandt had shown me there was more focus on pedestrian and mass transit in lunar colonies. Lower gravity made construction cheaper, and limited atmosphere made expanding colonies expensive.

Planets, on the other hand, had more highways and personal vehicles. Roads were more clearly reserved for wheels with pedestrian sidewalks not unlike some seen on Earth.

So for the first time in several months, I was actually riding in a car. Funny thing was, we’d made it ourselves without any Adeptry.

Well, I say ‘we’ but the truth was Shinshay and Weith had fabricated most of the parts weeks ago and stored them disassembled in the Jack’s cargo bay since. With Nai trivializing the heavy lifting, the vehicle was rolling less than an hour after we touched down.

Tasser sent. Now that we were on the ground with them, we didn’t have to rely on the radio.

Fenno complained.

Serral said.

Weith asked.

Fenno reported.

Of course, Casti didn’t drink coffee, but it was the closest translation I had for the word.

That was another difference between planets and moons. Lunar colonies did more interstellar traffic and trade, so they used Starspeak more. It was the lingua franca of the void by design, but planetary colonies were larger and native tongues edged out Starspeak in usage.

Five Casti on our crew, but only Fenno and Weith spoke the most widely used languages in Mistina. The crew had labored over expanding the psionic dictionary, but the more languages we added to it, the more unwieldy it became.

Tasser suggested.

We could have burned a candle construct—Nai was right here, after all. But it seemed unnecessary when my superconnector was capable of connecting me to her radar without trigging full blown Coalescence.

Neither of us needed the head splitting aftereffects right now.

I sent as we drew closer. There was a psionic equipped mind sitting roughly one story above street level. A moment later, Tasser and Fenno’s psionic presences appeared on radar.

We rolled past Fenno and Tasser’s location, and I finally got a glimpse of where they’d actually been posted up. Like the other surveyor, they were seated at a little streetside alien restaurant.

Fenno asked me.

I said.

Serral asked.

I said.

Nai pointed out.

Touche.

Of course, that was ignoring the two facts we’d all collectively failed to put together up until now.

While anyone else would surely struggle to even detect the signals we were trading between us, disguising a psionic mind itself was much harder. For all that the constructs were invisible to the naked eye, psionics were not subtle before psionic senses.

The firewall I’d included in the intro-module was especially hard to miss.

And as we rolled further down the street, I sensed another psionic mind enter our radar coverage.

Nai noted.

I said.

It figured that not every psionic-enabled group in the city would be friendly. It was only natural for each one to get curious about the others.

In fact, depending on how psionics had been shared through the colony, one of the groups might have bought or sold the secret from another.

Hopefully we could take advantage of the situation.

A psionic voice rang out, and my heart skipped a beat.

it said.

Everyone inside the car immediately traded worried glances. How could they have broken—wait…

Calm down, I told myself.

They hadn’t broken our psionics. This message was being sent on bands accessible to the intro-module. Any of the psionic-enabled dock crew nearby would hear it too.

the voice said. Responding to someone unseen?

Whelp. We were blown.

I took it as a sign of trust that neither Tasser nor Fenno asked if I was sure about our comms being secure.

Tasser asked,

Serral instructed.

Tasser was the one to turn in his seat and stare directly at the other one watching.

Tasser asked.

At least this Casti was using Starspeak.

they said.

Tasser replied.

From where we stopped at the end of the block, we could see Tasser lean over to Fenno, pretending to whisper into her ear.

he prompted.

God, my friend was so smart. We knew they couldn’t hear our comms, but if Tasser didn’t visibly consult someone, but still waited to respond, they might be able to put two and two together and realize our psionics were a cut above theirs.

But this way, it just looked like he was collaborating with the person sitting right next to him.

Serral suggested.

Tasser said.

the Casti asked.

Serral sent Tasser an affirmative click, clearing him to answer.

Tasser said.

the Casti said.

Tasser glanced toward the docks, painfully aware of the fact people there could overhear the psionic conversation. His and Fenno’s location had already been betrayed to anyone trawling the public channels, and the Casti seemed to note that they didn’t do the same.

A small olive branch.

This time Fenno leaned toward Tasser to cover our second layer of psionic communication.

Tasser said.

There was no time to strategize excessively, and Serral knew it.

was all he said.

Tasser said.

Tasser said.

We all perked up at that critical slip of the tongue. Had it been intentional? Or was it a real mistake?

Tasser said, carefully measuring our response.

the Casti said.

Tasser said.

Fenno confirmed.

The other psionic mind I sensed would keep an eye on us while this first Casti retreated.

The Casti stood, withdrawing a pad from their bag and scrawling something on it before leaving the café’s terrace.

Serral asked.

he said.

Serral agreed,

Weith asked.

I said.

I said.

Weith did so, and he vanished from psionic radar and our less precise psionic senses. What Nai had previously done accidentally, Weith now did on purpose.

We’d learned a lot about manipulating the psionic mirror and perceptibility since then.

I reported.

Even if his transmitter was taken offline, his receiver would still be perfectly fine.

Serral ordered.

We sat back until the second mind moved out of radar too. We hadn’t been able to pinpoint that one without moving more, so we were forced to abide by the agreement.

A few minutes later, we picked up Fenno and Tasser and drove back the Jack, awaiting a critical call.