Interlude-Injunction

(English)

The Ronin came at Jordan.

Her first move was to make distance.

Immediately turning tail and running was followed by igniting one of her precious radar-candles. Tracking their positions, and therefore her own too, would be critical for playing to her strengths.

‘Range is your greatest offense and defense’. Nai been unrelenting about making sure she used all of it. Caleb had followed up on that advice with a copy of the combat-flowchart he’d made with Madeline.

That flowchart gave the same advice now, drawing her attention to how much open space there was to work with. The ground wasn’t level, pocked with craters and short ridges instead. But it would be easy to maneuver.

The Ronin were not shy about approaching though.

They came straight for her, and she counterattacked the best way she knew how.

She pointed a finger gun at them, one by one, and materializing clouds of smoke right on their faces. Madeline and Donnie recognized the trick from when Caleb had gotten them, and they threw their arms up to guard their faces.

But not quick enough.

Johnny and Ben both tripped as they lost sight of their footing, and Aarti maintained the presence of mind to stop charging forward.

While all five of them contended with smoke on their faces, Jordan jogged directly away from them. This was possibly the only chance she’d get to unfurl her emitter array. Its arms splayed out, but she kept them from extending all the way. She needed a compromise between intensity and wide-range.

She couldn’t communicate through her superlocator without being unconscious in some form. But she could still orient the little pearls of ‘here’ without falling asleep. It wasn’t a precise location. Not even close.

But standing on the asteroid at the edge of Minshia system she could feel the general direction of one of those pearls, and that was how she aimed the emitter array.

she called.

How long would that signal take if it were a radio transmission? How far away could the Jack still be? Five light minutes? Ten?

The quicker the response came, the better.

Four hours.

The shorter this fight was, the smoother those four hours could pass.

Jordan grimaced as she felt Johnny’s cascade run underfoot. She pushed her own cascade back against his, trying to deny him any information she could. It was a losing battle though.

She had one of Caleb’s junker constructs though. She needed to watch for an opening.

The first obstacle came when Johnny threw up a line of black crystalline iron to block her path. Jordan didn’t slow down though. The gravity on the asteroid was lighter than Earth’s, but she’d still need a running start if she wanted to clear the obstacle.

She created a ground spike at an angle just short of the wall, and ran up it. Leaping off her makeshift ramp gave her the height she needed to catch two handholds and pull herself up and over with her momentum.

·····

Johnny couldn’t believe it when Jordan just jumped right over the wall. She hadn’t even made it look graceful or athletic. But the sight had been so unexpected, he was half-a-second late adding to the wall, trying to catch Jordan’s hands or feet in the new material.

Donnie reminded him.

Johnny swore under his breath, and pulled back the material he’d invested into the wall. But in the second it took him to be reminded and the following seconds for the wall to crack and crumble back into nothing, Jordan was gone.

She’d barely been out of sight for five seconds! How was that even possible?

He pushed his cascade through the ground. The top layer was loose dust, and it fought him every inch. But once his cascade reached the solid rock underneath, it could spread with its usual speed and reach.

Getting it to come back up through the surface dust cut his overall reach even shorter, but it was still enough to find the small crater Jordan had thrown herself into, hugging the side to keep just barely out of sight.

“[There!]” Johnny shouted, pointing.

Only, in the same moment, liquid crashed down on them from above again. Only this time, it rapidly evaporated into smoke with a low hiss, and the Ronin were just as blind as before.

Johnny heard the spray of Ben’s ice gun, but it was the wrong direction to have actually been at Jordan.

“She’s—” he faltered. He could feel where her feet fell with his cascade, but he couldn’t relay that information to his friends. All he could do was throw up more iron spikes in her way. But that didn’t even slow her down.

He could box her in. With a cage, like the one he’d resorted to against Madeline—

A psionic javelin slammed against his mind, ruining his concentration. It had blown through the hardening he’d reinforced his firewall with.

Where the hell had Jordan been hiding these abilities?

Johnny had no time to dwell on the idea, because a second psionic construct crashed into his defenses. He recognized it! It was the same as the scrambling construct Ted had ruined his cascade with.

Jordan was trying to blind him, just like Ted had!

“Oh no you don’t…” he snarled.

Before the construct could lurch through the hole punched in his firewall, Johnny grabbed hold of the scrambling construct and wrung. He had to twist it three different directions before it finally died out on him, but he’d kept it from his cascade…

That had taken crucial seconds though, and the other four Ronin were all no closer to locating Jordan through the smoke. Even if he’d kept his cascade in working order, his attention had still been drawn away from it.

Johnny realized he’d lost Jordan’s position for all of one second before he found her again. Not with a cascade though.

She punched him in the face.

·····

“She’s right here!”

Ben whirled and fired where he heard Johnny’s warning. The smoke was so thick though, he couldn’t see a thing.

His freeze-gun shook as he held down the trigger longer. He tightened his grip and tried to paint a wide area with the spray. Jordan couldn’t be as agile as Ted, right?

“Aaugghh—watch it!” Madeline shouted.

Crap!

Ben let go of the trigger, but the smoke remained. Should he just run in a straight line? This wasn’t like the first time where she’d stuck something smoking to their faces. The smoke was just hanging in the air, so it couldn’t cover an unlimited area, right?

Just before he decided to bolt in a straight line, he heard a motor thunder to life.

The air—how weird was it for an asteroid to have air? —rushed around them, quickly clearing the smoke.

Madeline had conjured her as-of-yet-nonfunctioning rotor wings. They couldn’t get her off the ground, but they still created a gust powerful enough to clear away Jordan’s attempts to block the Ronin’s sight.

Ben saw that one of the rotor wings—and one of Madeline’s legs—was encrusted in ice.

“Sorry,” he said, dissolving the ice with a moment of focus.

She grunted, but didn’t say anything further. The downside of clearing the smoke on top of them was that dust was kicked up all around them now. They were surrounded on all sides by clouds of dust taller than houses.

In the back of Ben’s mind, he recalled that lunar dust was super dangerous to breathe in…because, without wind and water to erode down its edges, it was sharp on a microscopic level. Breathing it in could literally shred your lungs.

This asteroid did have air though. Did that mean they would be okay?

Jordan said. Her voice echoed around them psionically.

“Rescue?” Aarti said.

Ben frowned at the names thought. Caleb? As in Hane?

Jordan said.

Ben thought he saw a shift in the flow of the dust, and he fired another stream of ice into the dust cloud.

Jordan’s disembodied psionic voice just laughed.

“There’s too much dust covering the ground now,” Johnny whispered, rubbing a quickly forming bruise on his cheek. “I can’t track her footfalls.”

Donnie and Madeline were the ones to first form up, loosely back-to-back so they could keep an eye on all directions. Ben joined the other Ronin in the formation. They’d trained for this.

But no sooner had Ben stepped forward than a thin spike lanced up from the ground, skewering the tank of fluid on his back.

“No!” he shouted, trying to sling it off as quickly as possible.

“Where—!”

“How?”

Everyone’s reactions were filled with the same panic. But Ben’s was the worst of them all. For one, the tank on his back didn’t explode like he feared it might. So when he tried to hurl away from his allies, he wasted precious seconds in confusion.

Jordan said, and another oversized sewing needle lanced up from the asteroid’s surface, this time, spearing through the trigger assembly of his ice gun.

“Nonono!” he cried.

This time, he remembered Win’s advice though, and immediately dematerialized the creation before anything else went wrong. He went about moving the psionic blueprints in his head to recreate the weapon as quickly as possible, only for more psionic javelins to tear through his mind.

In a panic, he clutched his freeze gun’s schematics, keeping them clear of the javelin’s path. But in that same panic, he wrapped them in a protective layer of thoughts, just in case.

But as long as he was shielding the blueprints, he couldn’t use them to guide his Adeptry and re-arm himself.

“She got my gun!” he hissed out loud.

·····

Jordan was thickening the dust Madeline had kicked up, Donnie was sure of it.

The dust was hanging in the air too thickly to be entirely natural, even accounting for the asteroid’s lighter-than-Earth gravity.

How could she be this good?

Donnie was the most mass limited member of the Ronin, and it had left him with the sharpest understanding of the tradeoffs between mass and precision. But the spike Jordan had skewered the cold gun with was at least three feet long, and only a few inches at its base. It had to weigh at least thirty pounds.

To place a spike that, accurately, through the dust…

It didn’t feel possible to him. So maybe it wasn’t just dust. Maybe she was adding to it with fog of her own making. Maybe she could see through it somehow.

His hand twitched, and he thought about materializing his pistol. But Ben had just demonstrated the risks of shooting blind.

No, he needed to be smarter with his limited mass.

If Jordan really could see through all this dust…then maybe adding some of their own wasn’t a bad idea. None of them could see freely. Why should Jordan?

“Everybody tighten up,” he said, hopefully quiet enough Jordan wouldn’t hear.

Win had drilled into them to listen to each other. So when one person made a call, they all followed.

“Don’t move,” he said, covering them in a dark cloud.

“What?” Maddie asked.

“She can see through the dust somehow,” Donnie explained. “Maybe she can see through her own smoke.”

“Could she have learned that from what happened to Drew?” Ben asked.

“We need to close the gap,” Aarti said.

“Or attack from a distance,” Madeline said.

“Either way, we need to find her first,” Donnie said.

Donnie flicked through imaginary switches and buttons on his transceiver, creating a looping signal for his fellow Ronin to follow.

“Track me,” Donnie said. “I’ll draw her out and give you guys an opening.”

He dove into the dust cloud, quickly losing sight of everyone.

Jordan said.

He heard the dust crunch behind him just in time for him to whirl and get his arm up to block Jordan’s punch. She poured on the gas though, not giving him a moment to collect himself.

Unlike the rest of the Ronin though, Donnie was most confident up close. He’d done jiu-jitsu back on Earth for years—Jordan drove a quarterstaff into his belly. She’d materialized the weapon in the same motion she’d jabbed him with it.

Donnie knew Jordan had spent some time with the kids exploring non-Adept self-defense, but this wasn’t that! He had to bite his tongue to keep himself from saying anything ridiculous like, ‘that’s cheating!’ or ‘that’s unfair!’.

Instead, he lunged after her desperately.

She battered him away with the quarterstaff again, but he got close enough to fling a creation at her, sticking it to her jacket near the hip.

He allowed himself to be repelled this time, retreating back to his fellow Ronin.

“Still waiting on that opening,” Johnny said dryly.

Donnie ignored him.

“Aarti, remember that time Win had to melt through Ben’s ice?”

Understanding dawned on her face. “Oh yeah! You did that here?”

“Yup, can you track it?”

“Yeah. Maddie should too,” she said. “She helped me figure out to mess with those signals.”

“Get your net gun ready,” Johhny said. “We can flush her out into the open.”

·····

Jordan had split the Ronin into two groups. Johnny and Madeline were the heavy hitters, with powerful Adept abilities and immediate presences in a fight. While Aarti and Donnie had much less mass to work with and had resorted to more to clever tricks, like…

She ducked out of the way of another shower of glowing red sparks flying at her.

Aarti’s plasma trick ‘shocked’ more than it ‘burned’, but it was unpleasant nonetheless. But was more impressive was her aim.

Donnie’s little trick sticking the token to her jacket was neat work.

Honestly, Jordan was reluctantly impressed the Ronin understood psionics well enough to make something that relied on nonconventional transmission bands.

Unfortunately for them, even with how much she missed in Caleb’s psionic lessons, what she did grasp still far outstripped their skills.

Even more unfortunately for them, she had her own new understanding of certain psionic principles now, and one thing she grasped even better than Caleb was psionics’ relationship with location.

She took the shard Donnie had planted on her coat and tore out the psionics embedded it. It was child’s play to swallow up the shard’s contents with her superlocator and alter the signal…it would have to remain somewhere within her Adept range, but she could materialize objects at almost a mile.

·····

Johnny said.

They all moved with a sense of urgency that Aarti couldn’t quite place. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she knew they were forgetting something. But long hours of training with Win kept her lips tight.

Deal with one obstacle at a time. And Jordan was the one in their way right now.

Johnny said

As he spoke though, that very thing happened. The ground rumbled as he assembled his spikes. Aarti stayed behind Ben as they dashed toward the tracking signal Donnie had made.

Aarti said.

Maddie asked.

Donnie agreed, and they rushed forward.

·····

It was, Jordan thought, a deceptively playful sight, watching the Ronin traipse across the moon through dust and fake clouds of fog, chasing after a spoofed psionic signal.

Keep vigilant, her psionics reminded her. Never assume you’re safe.

And she did not drop her guard for even a second. Even if the Ronin were completely fooled, they were still on a Vorak asteroid, and there was only so much dust they could kick up before the Vorak came out to investigate in person.

Even if the Vorak took their sweet time investigating in person, the Ronin were still Adept. Still a threat. Evidenced by what they were talking about on their not-so-secure psionic line.

‘Whole hog?’

When she was younger, she might have thought that to be an Americansim. But not so much after meeting some of her cousins in Alberta.

True to what Madeline’s phrasing implied, she cut loose.

Jordan felt a shift through Adept senses she couldn’t identify. Power and tension built up around Madeline, advancing in fits and spurts as new energy prepared itself to be woven into matter. She was, Jordan realized, building something piece by piece. But she was forcibly keeping it from materializing until she had all the pieces.

Psionically, Jordan caught a glimpse of how Madeline was pushing the energy into molds, filling each one to create a distinct mechanical part.

There was a split second where Jordan had an opportunity to attack. But Maddie had closed her eyes and wouldn’t even notice the smoke. She could have used a more forceful, more dangerous option…but her sense of temperance restrained her.

And the window was gone.

Madeline’s creation burst into existence in a blinding flash of light. When Jordan blinked her eyes clear, Madeline had been replaced by an eight-foot tall, mechanized suit of armor.

The other four were charging toward where Jordan had spoofed the tracer’s signal, and judging by the rumble under foot, Johnny was fencing things in with huge slabs and spikes of crystalline armor.

Madeline hung back with her mech though, ready to…catch where Jordan ran to with some kind of ranged attack. The mech stood ready to point an arm wherever Jordan came into view through the dust of war.

Really, she didn’t need to reveal herself at all. But frustrating the Ronin having them chase after a rabbit lure wasn’t how she took control of the situation. It wouldn’t let her command their attention.

She’d hoped walking right into the cluster of them, socking Johnny point blank, and dancing away unscathed would have daunted them more. But in that case, her smoke worked against her. They hadn’t really noticed the attack, or, at least not its gall.

No, she needed to knock them down a peg with no room to misinterpretation. Putting this ‘whole hog’ on a spit seemed like an appropriately flashy option.

“…Is that supposed to be from Fallout? Or Warhammer?” Jordan quipped, standing just a few feet behind Maddie. “I was expecting more.”

The armored Madeline whirled in surprise.

If she said anything, it wasn’t audible from inside her armor. But her body language said it all.

“Temper, temper, little miss space marine,” Jordan chided.

“Shut up!”

In a sense, it was bad form for Jordan to be the one mouthing off.

She was trying to awaken the Ronin to exactly how serious and deadly of a scenario they’d leapt into. And yet, paradoxically, Jordan didn’t feel all that much in danger herself.

No doubt, she was. One wrong move from her, if just one of the Ronin got lucky, she could die.

But that danger felt well understood. She was giving all the appropriate caution and then some just for good measure.

It was just…Madeline had pulled out what was presumably a trump card, and Jordan’s subconscious immediately nudged her toward all the literal chinks in the armor.

As if it were reassuring her of her own judgement, the combat-flowchart threw up some of the same thoughts as Jordan.

Armor. Weakest at joints. Even invincible armor hampers range of motion at least a little.

Jordan almost laughed out loud. Madeline had contributed to the flowchart, at least a little. But here it was feeding Jordan strategy, and as best she could tell, Madeline wasn’t focused enough to call up the flowchart herself.

Large opponent. Watch for grabs and thrown projectiles.

As if reading both Jordan and Madeline’s minds, the flowchart gave Jordan the perfect piece of advice to avoid the net that blasted out from the wrist.

She darted forward, charging Madeline straight on. Before the armor could show another attack though, Jordan conjured another blast of fog.

It wasn’t wide enough that Madeline couldn’t step directly out of, but that crucial second of repositioning was the window Jordan needed.

The mech’s arm lurched forward but Jordan leapt upward, vaulting over the mech’s head and rolling down its back. The split second of contact was all she needed to cascade its frame and confirm what she suspected.

The limbs and torso were out of proportion for Madeline to actually be wrapped up in the mech like armor. Instead, she was curled into a ball in the lower torso, with a dozen psionic links plugging her into her armor’s control mechanisms.

Madeline’s second mistake was not safeguarding the mech’s plating to block cascades or disrupting Adept materialization. Her body benefitted from the constantly changing chemistry of biology to disrupt most Adept creations. But her mech’s materials were significantly less exciting, at least on a microscopic level.

There was absolutely nothing to stop Jordan from materializing a quart of liquid where the pilot was curled up inside it.

Maddie didn’t realize what happened at first, and the armor whirled again. A metal gauntlet sword swiped through the air where Jordan’s head had been half a second ago, but Jordan had already ducked through the legs. Eight-feet of height left a lot of clearance, and Madeline wasn’t running her cascade through the mech either.

Jordan danced away while Madeline spun around, even more confused where she’d gone.

She picked that moment to play the card she’d been holding in reserve.

Caleb had told her about an Adept that could make walking, talking, even psionic-capable clones of himself. Apparently he wasn’t even the only one.

Jordan didn’t need to make a clone. Just a hollow shell. Not even that. An imitation of a person. A water balloon filled with something red.

She had to let her intentions fill in the gaps of the creation. It didn’t need to last long, and it didn’t need to react with anything. She just needed to texture and shape to convince someone for a split second.

A facsimile of Jordan’s upper half popped into existence, thumping against the ground with a fleshy slap. The creation oozed fake red blood across the asteroid’s surface.

And it was that moment that Jordan chose to judiciously dematerialize a portion of her addition to the dust cloud, giving the other Ronin a good view of Madeline’s power armor standing over what looked to be a bisected Jordan.

Subtlety was out the window. Shock value was her best bet for bringing these idiots back from the brink.

The others were rushing back from Jordan’s decoy to help Madeline when they laid eyes on the bloody sight. Every one of them stared in shock for a moment, before Jordan dissolved the fake-corpse.

“Recognized how high these stakes are?” Jordan called out. “I’m not letting anyone die today.”

It had…almost the desired effect. From inside her armor, Madeline let out a scream somewhere between terror and fury.

Her mech turned and charged toward the source of Jordan’s voice. Its mechanized limbs, moving according to Madeline’s enraged thoughts. It was incredible to see the psionic filaments carrying the instructions between the armor’s limbs, and Madeline’s body, brain, and mind.

“That’s a good prototype,” Jordan said approvingly. She’d never be able to match anything like it. Madeline, Johnny, all the Ronin really; they were superior in Adeptry. But Adeptry was not alone in deciding victory. “But you were too focused on attack: the nets, the swords. What you made is armor. You should have focused more on that: ”

As Jordan spoke, she unfurled her emitter array and cranked up the intensity past 50%. Keeping its broadcast to a narrow beam, she blasted the armor in a three-second burst.

Madeline’s mech stiffened like it had been bit by a snake. The pilot inside tried to fight against the signal, but it wasn’t a signal that could be decoded or processed somehow. Jordan’s psionic beam had been invisible and terrible. The mech fell over without ceremony, slumping into the asteroid dust.

The metal hull was unscathed. But the psionic control surfaces Maddie had been controlling it with were scorched down to ash in her mind…the tangible psionic sensitive materials in the armor’s actuators and servos had been seared of their psionic properties, reduced to (hopefully inert) exotic solids.

Madeline finally dematerialized the suit, freeing herself from the prison of her own making…only to find herself drenched in a quart of crimson liquid, unmistakably evocative of blood.

For a split second, she went still, uncomprehending of the red stains covering her.

I’m bleeding!

Jordan could see the words half form on her face, only for the look—and the liquid—to vanish at Jordan’s whim, just like the fake corpse.

Madeline hesitated, taking half a step back for the first time.

Caution is good, Caleb had once told her. Fear is better.

Was Madeline finally beginning to understand the enormity of the risks they’d undertaken? Could she feel the sword hanging above them all?

Jordan seized the opportunity to convince her.

“Think about the first time I drenched you all. Same thing now. I could have picked something else instead of the blood,” Jordan said. “Acid, carbon monoxide, gasoline—who cares? The point is, I’m playing with kid gloves still, and it’s taking everything all five of you have just to keep up. So listen when I say: the Vorak would kill me in a heartbeat. So they’ll kill you too.

“Please, please turn back!” Jordan begged, trying to force every scrap of emotion into her normally bland words.

Jordan could see her words land somewhere with Madeline. The other girl’s face had gone slack with an emotion Jordan couldn’t quite place.

“Oh, God…” she sputtered.

But she’d made a mistake. Asking the Ronin to turn back also reminded them of exactly how much she was distracting them from.

“Get a grip!” Donnie shouted. “Fake blood, corpse tricks! All this smoke? She’s just toying with us!”

“She can’t actually keep us here,” Johnny followed. “Forget her. Win’s counting on us.”

Three of the Ronin turned to follow his lead. Madeline hesitated. Aarti did too when she realized Maddie wasn’t on their heels.

Two out of five wasn’t good enough.

Damn it…

She grabbed at the first blueprint Caleb had shared with her, and materialized a pistol. She aimed it straight at Johnny’s back and cocked the hammer.

“You’re just going to leave Madeline behind?" She called out. When they didn’t respond at first, she added, “Fine; take one more step, and I’ll shoot you for real.”

Johnny almost didn’t look back. But he looked over his shoulder just far enough to see the weapon.

Donnie and Ben stopped too, almost more out of confusion than actual threat. It was like some part of their brain that was supposed to recognize danger was just…absent. Out to lunch. Kaput.

“You wouldn’t,” Johnny said.

“I wasn’t kidding about the kid gloves. But you’re not giving me much of a choice here,” Jordan said. “If you attack the Vorak, they’re going to shoot you. And unlike me, they aren’t going to be trying to keep things survivable; they won’t stop shooting until you stop moving.”

“And you think you know what you’re doing with that gun? No such thing as a warning shot,” Donnie said, his own hand twitching.

“Do you even hear the words when they come out of your mouth?” Jordan asked. “The verbal warning was the warning. If you think I’m bluffing, feel free to take another step. I will shoot you. Better me than the Vorak.”

“They’re already trying to get us!” Donnie hissed. “They sent spies! Kemon had to shoot down that ship before you came along.”

“Did they kidnap you?” Jordan asked. “Because I’ve got a psionic line back to everyone, and you know what Kemon’s claiming? He’s telling everyone that Knox called in help, and the Vorak abducted us in the night. And Win heroically charged after us with his shuttle.”

“You have to be joking,” Johnny said. “You think we’ll believe anything you say? After all this?”

“What I think…is that I can’t really afford to give you a choice anymore,” Jordan said. “You guys haven’t wanted to listen for weeks now. But you need grow the fuck up and think about five minutes into the future. This isn’t a movie! This isn’t Star Wars. The Vorak aren’t ‘the Empire’. You aren’t going to fight goofy stormtroopers and cartoonishly evil bad guys wearing all black with evil red lightsabers. ‘No such thing as a warning shot’—no shit! They aren’t going to fire warning shots, they aren’t going to give verbal warnings! So this is the last time I’ll say it: stand down, or I’m going to shoot you.”

Ben folded. It wasn’t anything visible. He might not have even realized it himself, but he stopped holding the psionic schematics to his ice cannon so closely. Instead of looking for an opportunity to rematerialize its complex parts, his mind found something else to focus on.

Aarti was torn, looking between Madeline—who’s composure was crumpling—and Johnny, who was still spoiling for violence as much as Donnie.

“No. No,” Donnie hissed. “You can only lie to our faces so much. No!”

Donnie materialized his own gun, firing a shot at Jordan.

It missed wide, but she didn’t blink.

She turned her aim from Johnny to Donnie, and squeezed one shot. The bullet went clean through the meat of his calf, and he fell with a cry. His own gun vanished with his concentration.

Ben and Aarti both froze in shock. Johnny still needed convincing though.

He swept an arm at Jordan, and spikes lanced toward her body in a wide wave. On reflex, Jordan called up the shield that Nai had been so insistent she practice, and it saved her life. Instead of being gored on Johnny’s spikes, they bit into her shield, knocking her clean off her feet.

She rolled back to a stand and darted toward him. Johnny could create a lot of mass in a very short window of time. But he also needed to muster himself for a few seconds before and after, so he couldn’t make huge bursts of mass successively.

So before he could hurl out any more spikes, Jordan dove right for him, twisting his arm and pinning him to the ground.

“Come on, team leader, you have to see this mission’s screwed,” Jordan said. “Call it off.”

He tried to wriggle out from under her. He glanced toward Ben and Aarti to see if they’d help. But Jordan levered his shoulder to force him to look at Donnie’s wounded leg.

That finally broke him. Her attempt at faking it had been just the wrong color. There was something different about seeing the real thing. Knowing it wouldn’t just evaporate into nothingness.

“…What about Win,” Johnny said, voice almost breaking.

“He fucked off as soon as we were out of sight of the shuttle,” Jordan said. None of them believed the words. Not even Madeline in her raw shock.

“Watch,” Jordan insisted.

Johnny frowned at the silence they got in response.

“Oh, he’ll respond,” Jordan assured him. “It’ll just take a few seconds more. Because he’s trying to think of exactly what the right words are to get you to keep going, keep going, and just keep fighting until we’re all dead. But, also, pay attention to the direction the signal comes from.”

She pointed up at the stars.

Sure enough, a few seconds later, Win’s voice crackled back on their psionics.

That lie was a cold shock as they all felt the psionic message come, not from the side, or underneath them from the asteroid.

But straight overhead.

And like divine comedy, it was that moment that Jordan’s first message finally heard a response from her first message.

a message replied, crashing down on the asteroid like thunder. They must have put together one heck of an array. The Jack didn’t know where on the asteroid they were, so they had to broadcast across the whole thing. the message went on.

“Do you idiots need that translated, or can we finally start shutting up and listening to what I say?” Jordan asked.

Finally, finally, no one argued.

“Good,” Jordan said. “Ben, help Donnie. Check the psionic notes for ‘patching’ under the Adept medicine section. That will at least make sure he doesn’t bleed out, and maybe he’ll even stay walking today. Madeline, you start digging with your mech gauntlets. We want a hold big enough for the six of us to hunker down in. Johnny, make as much fog as you can.”

“…Okay,” Madeline murmured, still stunned.

“…The Vorak’ll see it, won’t they?” he said. All their voices were hollow and raw.

“They will,” Jordan said. “But they won’t approach blindly. They’ll figure out a way to neutralize the fog quickly, but you can make so much mass, I don’t think it’ll matter long enough to work. We just need to not be found for the hours it takes the Jack to land.”

“And then we meet this…Nai? And Serral of yours?” Donnie snarled.

“You’ve already heard about Nai,” Jordan said. “I wasn’t here for this part, but Win told you all about Caleb Hane and the super Adept he fought alongside? The Warlock?”

She only mouthed the words ‘that’s Nai’ to them.

Ben fixated on the other name though.

“Caleb,” he recognized. “You said ‘we were lucky it wasn’t Caleb or Nai’ earlier…”

“Yeah, you know him better by his middle name,” Jordan said. “Theodore.”