Cosmosis

Lockup

(Starspeak)

After action drove me crazy and restless. Maybe Mav had a point about me needing to do things. The only thing that helped me keep a lid on myself was watching Nai fidget even more.

We busied ourselves by repairing our psionics from the carnage the twins had inflicted on us. Nai did not have the same psionic talent as our foes had; her skills lay much more in Adeptry. But she benefited from experience and expertise that they lacked, and she'd weathered the psionic attacks adequately. Her damage was limited to her firewall and a couple peripheral constructs and files—all of which would have backups stored on the Jack.

My damage was equally limited.

I knew it shouldn't have been.

Mavriste had made a few inspired psionic attacks, and he'd punched clean through my firewall. He'd had more than one opportunity to try blowing up some of my most sensitive constructs.

He could have obliterated my Superconnector if he'd wanted to.

If he had…would I even be able to recreate it?

That was not a comforting thought to dwell on while we waited for transport to arrive.

Helicopters and airships from New Balumspar eventually flew in, all of their crews dressed up in hazmat gear. Just in case.

In addition to the Missonary Marines who decided to surrender themselves alongside Vo, three of the marines' most skilled Adepts were arrested too. Including Macoru. She was either too exhausted to resist or too distraught to care

It was a tactical decision made on Agent Avi's authority.

Old Balumspar was purportedly a nuclear hot site, so securing transportation for this many prisoners was tricky.

There were simply too many Missionary Marines to arrest them all. And without Mavriste or Macoru, what was left of their leadership was directed to withdraw to the submarines.

What happened after that wasn't Agent Avi's purview.

The submarines docks were unbelievably well hidden. Two pairs of gangways connected the dock to some of the colossal trees rising up from the swamp. Hollowed out inside the trunks were makeshift hatches and ladders leading down under the water's surface to where the submarines awaited.

It was good we'd managed to avoid letting the conflict drag further. Those entryways would have been extremely difficult to find, much less attack.

Small as it felt, it was a comfort. For as awful as I felt killing Mavriste, in the rational parts of my brain, I knew this was a win. For a battle involving more than two-hundred people, the dead could be counted on one hand.

All of them were Vorak, all but one on the Marines' side.

I hadn't ordered my people to go easy on the M&Ms. I knew Avi hadn't. And yet reviewing the battlefield with each of our people, there was an obvious trend.

Not a single human had been killed.

Jordan had the worst injury out of anyone: a big gash on her bicep from broken glass. All of our scrapes and bruises were self-inflicted, avoiding enemy fire or helping our alien allies.

Even Nemuleki's team didn't have any causalities.

Mavriste and Macoru had to have given orders. It beggared belief that a battle could unfold like this otherwise.

But I knew that probably wasn't the case. Not wholly.

Mavriste had clearly been willing to kill if pressed. He wouldn't have held his troops to a higher standard than himself.

'Do as you see fit'.

'Spare enemies according to your own judgement'.

It was probably something like that. Mac and Mav were both the kind of people who would encourage their troops to exercise that kind of irrational mercy in combat, but they wouldn't order it.

And they'd actually followed through on it.

All of them? I doubted it. Itun couldn't be the only unrepentant marine. But enough of them had.

They must have.

"That went better than I expected," Avi admitted. "Sorry to think the worst of you, but I thought you might try to sabotage something."

I glared at them.

The sun was beginning to dip in the sky, and Mavriste's body had long since been moved, but we were still only a stone's throw from where he'd fallen.

"I know, sorry. Probably could have phrased that better. There's just been a lot of nerves on this task force, and well…"

Someone else had come in and found Vo in just a couple weeks, by complete accident.

As bad as it would have looked for us if Vo had gotten away? The task force might end up looking like incompetent fools depending on how it was spun.

We finished talking to local decontamination authorities, and we were finally cleared to start getting our own people onto transports. But as those in charge of our respective groups, Avi and I would be stuck on site for some time still.

·····

The sun had long since set. The last heavy airship had taken us back to Pudiligsto, and most of our exhausted crew had retired to ships' quarters, awaiting our likely launch in the morning.

Most.

Nemuleki and her squad had volunteered to stay up for any of the ugly legwork that still needed to be done through the night in preparation for our departure.

She and some of our old friends from Demon's Pit drove me to the hospital. Not for a checkup. Though, I'd need one of those after today. A dozen bruises covered me from where my armor had absorbed blows from Mav's gun. A couple burns marked where my armor hadn't held up against his plasma.

No, this hospital visit was to collect an outstanding passenger and deliver some bad news in the process.

Technically, Ingrid's discharge was against medical advice, but if alien doctors had their way, every human would be kept in a hermetically sealed bubble for the next twenty years.

She was still in her room, passing time with Adeptry while paperwork got filed by the night shift. Sid was standing silently outside her door, half asleep on his feet.

I gave him a nod and ducked inside.

Ingrid instantly stiffened up, like a kid caught stealing.

"[…Hey,]" she finally said, tone cautious but trying to sound casual.

Or maybe she was just tired.

"[What have you heard already?]" I asked.

"[Nothing,]" she said. "[I've just been here with Sid and staying off the airwaves.]"

She made a gesture pointing at her head, obviously meaning psionic channels, but the motion could be easily mistaken for pointing a gun at her head. Even just a finger gun, it sent a chill through me.

I took a seat, making sure not to get too comfortable. Ingrid liked to clam up, I knew. She'd want to bolt as soon as she heard.

"[We caught up with the M&Ms,]" I said. My voice was so dry and clinical I wanted to vomit. "[They didn't give Vo up.]"

"[You knew?]"

"[Found out soon enough,]" I said. "[When did you find out?]"

I was pretty sure we already knew, but I needed to ask this to make sure she hadn't run afoul of some Vorak obstruction of justice laws.

"[This morning? Or—I mean, yesterday morning. We were going over the documents, and I noticed Mavriste and Macoru's submarine in the dock logs. Made a deduction.]"

I nodded. That was good. She hadn't been sitting on the information for days or weeks. But Ingrid didn't agree with my relief.

She squeezed her own shoulders in a death-grip hug.

"[You didn't confirm the information another way?]"

She shook her head.

Good.

"[I wanted to talk with them first,]" she admitted. "[It's why I made up that bullshit about needing to visit Cadrune's place. I figured I could get them to pass a message, but then you went and invited Mav and Mac anyway.]"

"[So you talked to them in Cadrune's garden,]" I nodded. "[While I was inside talking with them?]"

She nodded again.

"[Mav shot me up with something almost as soon as they found out I knew though,]" she said. "[I don't…I don't get it.]"

"[They were trying to protect you,]" I said. "[They were also protecting themselves—but sedating you was them making sure you weren't put in a position where you'd have to pick between us and them.]"

Ingrid's grip on her shoulders tightened enough to turn her knuckles white, and my psionic eye saw her emotional turmoil pitch and heave.

"[…I would have chosen them,]" she said.

She was admitting something she knew to be unforgivable.

She was, however, wrong.

"[I know,]" I said.

The words had their desired effect. Ingrid was so shocked that, for a moment, she forgot about how much she blamed herself for all this.

She blinked, trying to figure it out.

"[Mav and Mac,]" I explained. "[They knew you better than I did. They knew what you'd pick, and they didn't approve. They did not want you to have to make that decision. So they took it from you.]"

"[What happened to them?]" she asked, deathly mortified.

"[Mavriste's dead,]" I said. "[Macoru was arrested. Vo too.]"

The intensity of her emotions flared, almost to the same heat that ran through Macoru. Ingrid's didn't carry the same way, though. They petered out as she remembered how much she felt like all this was her fault.

"[Who—]" she began to ask, but I cut her off.

"[I did.]"

She stared at me, confused and disbelieving at first.

"[It was me. I was in charge. I killed him. I put the cuffs on Vo,]" I said. "[Even if it had been someone else, they would have been working for me.]

"[It's all me,]" I told her.

Her eyes didn't move from mine, and for the first time, I saw the glint of recognition in her eyes. She understood exactly who I was to our people.

Ingrid was not the first abductee the Flotilla had friction with.

Every one of us had learned to survive in literal alien lands, and that built up a sense of independence.

When the Flotilla burst into their life looking to bring them into the fold, a lot of them didn't take it well. They wanted to be in charge, at least of themselves, and there was always a moment where they realized why that wasn't actually true.

None of them knew what I did: that the only difference between me and any given abductee was six months. I had a head start. Nothing special to it.

But I did have that head start.

And it was why I learned exactly the kinds of things we needed to do if we ever wanted to get home.

It was why I could make friends with Mavriste…and kill him too.

Ingrid comprehended the weight of the decisions she couldn't bring herself to make, and her emotions went haywire.

And I was right.

Because for a panicked split-second, her eyes darted toward her hospital room's window. She wanted to be anywhere but here.

Another lesson I'd learned being in charge?

Sometimes just giving people what they want is good enough.

"Let's get out of here," I offered, switching languages as a mild distraction. "Put some distance between us and today."

She took the out.

"Yeah, let's."

"Just one stop to make," I told her.

·····

Macoru was damaged.

Anyone watching her cell's cameras could see it.

It was easy to miss at a glance because of her fur's pitch-black shade, but huge swaths of her body had been scorched and seared in her battle against Nai .

She had to have dozens of broken bones set in place only by whatever Adept medicine she'd had the breathing room for.

Her medical report after being arrested would likely tell exactly how much blood she'd lost, along with a detailed summary of all the other physical ailments that still pained her.

But physical ailments were not the damage threatening her right now.

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The emotions she radiated invisibly. Anyone with psionic emotional senses would feel the burn of her warring emotions even hundreds of yards away. Like a warzone gave off sounds of gunfire and explosions, Macoru's emotions shook outward.

She was, I realized, distracting herself.

It wasn't easy to see on the grainy closed-circuit feeds inside her cell, but Macoru's body language suggested she was antsy. Angry. And yet still restrained.

<Got it. She's just on a shock plate,> Jordan informed me.

Ah. That explained a little.

At least one of the things Macoru was fighting herself about was escaping.

The Pudiligsto authorities' Adept detention facilities left a lot to be desired. Top shelf Adepts were hell to imprison for the endless possible security threats they could pose. The rarely seen and prohibitively costly option was a specialized field vacuum.

More popular were damper bolts: exotic solids that, when pierced through an Adept's flesh, would interfere with their ability to create material that lasted for more than a few milliseconds. But damping materials came with a lot of risks, both in harming the health of the Adept they were used on, as well as just their low consistency overall. Adding the fact that they needed to be implanted or embedded into the Adept's body, they were unsuited for long term confinement.

But shock plates?

They were downright archaic, some of the earliest form of Adept detention, when neither Vorak nor Farnata had understood what made someone Adept. But rudimentary Adept field detectors had been made, and so the earliest detention models involved hooking one of those detectors up to an electrified floor surface. Try to create something? Zap.

Cruel and unusual punishment, probably. But it was at least, notionally, effective, at least on novices.

Any Adept worth even half their salt could improvise their way though a countermeasure in seconds.

It would have taken Macoru exactly zero seconds to protect herself from the shock plate, obliterate her restraints, and leave the jail a smoldering wreck.

She didn't, I knew, because of the many rak simply doing their lawful jobs in the local criminal justice system.

She and her brother were too nice.

I'd promised Mavriste she would survive, but I felt obligated to do more. Maybe I was too nice too.

<Mac,> I said, <the camera feeds for the whole building are going to go dark in a couple minutes. We have the guard routes mapped out. You can get to the roof in thirty seconds.>

<Caleb?> she asked. Confusion cut through her previous emotional storm.

I tweaked my transmission a smidge, opening it to only a select few of the prisoners within the building.

<We're getting you out,> I said.

<No,> Macoru said plainly.

It was almost funny to hear her be so straightforward while simultaneously knowing how many knots she was tied into right now.

<Why not?> I snorted.

<Because…> she faltered, and I knew why. The only objections she'd have would be the same ones I'd already hashed out with my people in advance. <Because you'll be punished. The authorities won't let you leave the planet.>

<Nah. They'll have no idea we were involved,> I said. <Because in about a minute now, the cameras are going to go dark. By the time they get back up, you will have exited your cell to have disappeared into the night, never to be seen again.>

<If Vo and I escape, you don't think it will blowback on you Humans? You would waste my brother's life so—>

I cut Macoru off.

<I'm not offering for Vo,> I said.

<Good,> the rak in question said, entering the conversation. <I knew what I was doing when I surrendered. Macoru, it's not a waste. I made my choice. I'm following through to the end.>

Macoru said nothing, conflict warring in her even more intensely.

<In fact, I don't think any of those who surrendered should go,> Vo said. <Only Mac, Dimas, and Teed: the ones who were arrested involuntarily.>

<We can do three,> I said. <I've got no objections…Mac?>

<Why are you risking yourselves?> she asked.

<I killed your brother today,> I said. <You really think I'm not feeling guilty about it?>

<You shouldn't,> Macoru insisted. <I know exactly how my brother would react, and he would insist that you did nothing wrong. So why are you jeopardizing the very thing you fought us to obtain?>

<I'm just greedy,> I said.

<Nobody is going to reward you for breaking me out,> Mac said.

<Sure. But maybe I'll sleep better at night.>

<Maybe?>

<Maybe not, but I'm willing to roll the dice and find out.>

<…No,> Macoru repeated. <Maybe I want you to lose some sleep. Or maybe—even though you killed my brother—I don't want to see you risk yourselves trying to help me.>

<Valid points, but if you don't go to the roof, then the preparations we have are going to go unused, and that's going to leave traceable evidence,> I said. <So if you don't start escaping in the next ten seconds, it will blow back on us Humans. So if you want to keep us from risking our safety? Get moving.>

I gave Jordan the signal to proceed with the security interference, and my feed of Macoru's cell winked out.

Without the camera to spy on her, I had to rely on psionics to track her movements. We weren't using proper radar either, just to minimize the risk of tipping someone off.

For a few tense seconds, I thought she wasn't moving.

She couldn't be that obstinate, could she?

But then she gave off an involuntary psionic shift when she got to helping her other two arrested marines free from their cells and shock plates.

Thirty seconds later, they'd bounded up the stairwell and emerged onto the gravel rooftop where I awaited them.

The second Macoru broke out onto the rooftop, I realized we'd overlooked a potential problem.

Deciding to jailbreak her had been mostly opportunistic. It wasn't very planned. And so, with how hastily the day's events had dominoed into tonight's, nobody had thought about what Macoru might do to me on sight.

I found myself not worrying. I trusted her and her brother's moral compass.

Macoru and her two compatriots plodded over to where I sat on the roof's edge.

Her two tagalongs slowed cautiously as they approached, and Macoru considered doing the same.

But she decided against it, and strode right up.

"You have nothing to worry about from me," she said.

"I know," I said. "Thanks for taking me up on this."

"How are you planning on getting us out of here?" she asked.

I pointed upward, and a pair of ropes dropped down on cue.

Ingrid's time at the local airport had actually left her rather well informed about how some clever Adepts might go about avoiding radar.

An invisible hot air-balloon hit all the right notes.

There was a little bit of a sweet spot below conventionally monitored airspace while staying high enough to escape the notice of anyone on the ground. We could keep a balloon aloft without a bright flame by simply creating the hot air ourselves with Adeptry. It was silent, and the basket was the only part of our contraption that needed to be even a little bit visible.

Crazy part was? With the strength-to-weight ratios of exotic materials and the lack of need for heavy fuel storage containers, instead of weighing eight hundred pounds like the real deal, ours weighed less than three hundred.

Jordan and I could create the whole things between the two of us. It had to be the lowest tech jailbreak ever.

As we floated up from the high-security building, both of Macoru's marines kept it to themselves, but everything about their demeanor said they absolutely loathed heights.

It was a tight fit with five of us in the basket, and the utter lack of safety mechanisms would have been laughable if not for the fact that all of us could materialize parachutes.

Our balloon floated in silence over the bright lights of the city. Casinos and theaters were lit up even this late at night, and consumers were getting out more as the hurricane cleanup made more progress.

Macoru didn't say a word the whole flight, and her soldiers followed her example. Jordan and I traded some silent conversation, but there wasn't much to say until we were sure the police weren't tracking us.

With the remote-bug Jordan had crawled into the security office, we got an alert when the jail finally tripped an alarm. They were understaffed tonight, and we'd timed the camera blackout with the foot patrol timing to maximize the delay.

We were more than a mile away by the time the klaxon started sounding.

We'd landed on a dark and quiet stretch of unscrutinized beach before there was even a perimeter set up.

"By now, they're going to be very confused," I said.

"Because by all rights, all their prisoners should have escaped," Jordan agreed.

"Vo staying behind will give you cover," Macoru said. Her voice was friendly enough, if tired and stressed out.

But I could read between the lines. She was expending huge effort to be civil with us.

"Our agreement with the Prolocutor was to bring in Vo," I agreed. "You guys didn't have anything to do with it."

"Or so we thought," Jordan added.

"Vo is going to explain that they abstained from this breakout voluntarily," Macoru said. "And based on that, the authorities will deduce whoever facilitated the breakout abided by that decision."

"They won't be wrong," I pointed out.

"No, they won't," Macoru said. "But they won't assume Humans were involved. Leaving behind only the ones who surrendered? They're going to think it was the rest of my Marines who helped break us out."

"I'm fairly sure they were cooking something up," I said. "We just got there first."

Macoru looked like she'd just swallowed a sour grape.

"…Mavriste might have given you a more optimistic picture of our troops' loyalties," one of the other soldiers (Dimas?) said.

"You think there'll be mutinies?" I asked.

"There has already been an attempt, I'm sure," Mac said. "…And I do not know how I am going to lead us alone."

I frowned at her and checked her psionics.

Her brother's Simulacrum was gone.

She saw me looking.

"The Sim grasped what the original intended quicker than I did," she explained. "It distracted me in an effort to protect me, and destroyed itself when my brother died."

My frown deepened. Jordan was equally confused.

"Why? That doesn't seem like Mavirste: leaving you alone? Seems like your sim would have been a comfort right now."

"No," Mac shook her head. "Having the sim here would only make it more painful. A pale reminder of exactly who I've lost."

"…I'm sorry," I said.

It was lame. Entirely inadequate. Basically a slap in the face given I was the one who'd killed him.

But it was all I could manage to not say more. The past several hours had been filled with me clamping down on the impulse to profusely cry and scream and beg forgiveness from anyone who might care to offer it.

Not helping that impulse was the knowledge that I'd done my best. In the end, when Mavriste had drifted into my and Nai's Coalescence for a second, they'd been no disagreement. I was as blameless as I possibly could be given the circumstances. But tell that to my subconscious.

Macoru jutted her head at her compatriots, tacitly ordering them to scram for a minute.

"…I have a problem," she admitted. "I am concerned. About you."

"Can't say I don't understand that," I said carefully.

She shook her head.

"My brother and I long since accepted that we were going to die in battle," she said. "I understand why I am angry with you right now. Rage is transient. I also understand why you are not at fault for what happened."

I didn't want to say anything to that. Jordan came to my rescue.

"That's reassuring," she said plainly. "We need this guy, and you're really scary."

Had she just tried to joke?

If so, Macoru ignored it.

"My concern is that I am not a perfect person," she said. "Tonight, right now, I understand both my anger and your culpability—lack thereof, specifically. But I am imagining years from now. I know myself well. I cannot guarantee that I won't succumb to my own resentment in the future, let it fester into a grudge neither of us can spare."

My hackles raised. She wasn't about to try to fight me now, surely?

No.

Because my psionic senses found a shift in her emotions. The intense storm that had been raging before came into greater clarity. Still violent, but smoother. Like a perfect whirlpool rather than a tornado.

She looked right into my eyes, and I knew it wasn't a question of getting anything over with or settling a future grudge right now.

She was in pain.

And she had no one else to talk to right now.

"…I might be able to help with that," I offered.

I was saying all the right things tonight to stun people. Macoru genuinely didn't expect me to have anything to say beyond maybe an apology.

She looked almost hopeful.

"Your superconstruct was custom?" I asked. "You could only make sims of yourself or your brother, right?"

She nodded.

I held up my fist, spinning up my superconnector in parallel.

"I have some ethical concerns about exactly how much of a person your Simulacrums are," I said, "but I'm at least willing to try something."

Macoru was confused what my fist meant until Jordan prompted her on what to do with pantomime.

The rak clamped down on her emotions and tapped my hand.

I kept the connection that flared between us carefully managed. I didn't want to pry, and she didn't need to know everything about me—that would ruin the point.

My superconnector with her Simulacrum…creator?

That things needs a proper name.

Macoru frowned at my quirk. Hey, I liked naming things, and I wasn't going to apologize for that.

I had a proof of concept for this from my fight with Mavriste. I'd connected to his sim and created some quick and dirty ones of myself.

They had not lasted.

This time, I took my time, and I got to see firsthand why Mac and Mav didn't consider their sims to truly be alive.

"[It's Pokémon,]" I realized.

"[What the fuck?]" Jordan snorted.

"The Simulacrums," I said. "[There's this trio in Pokémon where each one represents emotions, knowledge, and willpower—]"

"[Mesprit, Uxie, and Azelf,]" Jordan said immediately. "[I have played video games, dude.]"

"Sims are lacking though," I said, and my newly created Sim actually finished the explanation.

<Oh. Oh wow, that's strange,> sim-Me said. <No willpower. Maybe only half emotions too? It's like…I'm somewhere between one and two-thirds of a human mind.>

"What are you doing?" Macoru asked, realizing that when I'd made the sim, I'd left it in her head.

"You're worried about holding a grudge a decade from now," I said. "Best I can do? Get to know me in the meantime."

"You're just going to leave your sim in her head and ditch for another planet?" Jordan asked.

I looked at Macoru, and more specifically the copy of myself I'd just made.

<Yeah,> sim-Me said. <It's fine. I can feel it. I'm static. I won't be changing or getting bored or feeling abandoned.>

"<You're sure?>" Jordan asked. "<Talking about being a literal fraction of a human mind kinda sounds uncomfortably like a three-fifths situation.>"

That actually gave me pause, and my sim agreed, giving the thought serious consideration.

<I'll take it under advisement,> sim-Me said, <but firsthand? I think the similarities are purely notional.>

"Three fifths situation? What does that mean?" Macoru asked.

Before sim-Me could humor her with an explanation, I wanted confirmation.

Still linked via-superconnector, I wordlessly asked Macoru if this was any help at all.

She traded glances between me and her new Simulacrum of me, and she actually cracked a smile. Only for tears to immediately follow.

"You really are a lot like him."