To flail against infinit.., p.17
To Flail Against Infinity, page 17
part #1 of The Stargazer's War Series
He took three. Maria filed that bit of information away for later.
She watched the strange cadet ram his cart into the void beast before stomping its head in—hardly an elegant solution, but an effective one. She took in every detail of the way he leaned in to pick the boy up, how he directed the class towards the nearest bunker, the way he nobly made sure they all made it in before following them to safety.
She’d have to contain this footage. The last thing Maria needed was the sect to herald the soulless abomination a hero.
No camera monitored the bunker itself—the presence of a toilet in there would’ve made surveillance a privacy violation by sect policy—but she looked on as the cadet emerged a different man.
A chill ran down her spine.
The surveillance cameras unfortunately lacked the detail for her to determine whether his heart beat or his lungs drew breath, but his skin had certainly lost all color, retreating back as if shriveling upon a corpse. With bony hands he pushed his cart, moving with a trancelike calm she’d never seen in the man before.
Convincing Alice Garett she hadn’t seen a walking corpse may prove harder than Maria had hoped. She prayed her threat would at least keep the girl quiet.
Thoroughly unnerved by the image before her, Maria chewed her lip as Caliban paused to glare with cold uncaring eyes at a half-devoured corpse before casually moving on. Her own stomach churned at the sight, at least until she sent a wave of qi through the relevant meridian to quiet it.
She realized she’d struck gold the moment the image flicked to a hallway in which three void beasts feasted on a dead mortal. Her mind raced with possibility as she imagined what kinds of unique or secretive techniques the outworlder might utilize to overcome what seemed to her to be overwhelming odds.
She wasn’t prepared for him to do nothing.
Maria didn’t move, didn’t breathe, didn’t blink as Caliban Rex swerved to the far side of the hallway and walked right by the blackbloods. He didn’t so much as shiver at the horror a few feet to his left as he passed, seemingly unperturbed by the deadly beasts within arm’s length.
More harrowing still, the beasts just let him past. They didn’t twitch. They didn’t try to defend their kill. They certainly didn’t attack. Cadet Rex may as well have been invisible to the creatures for all they reacted to his passing.
Invisible, Maria realized, or familiar.
Could the void beasts have raised this corpse? That seemed impossible, but so too did their behavior towards Caliban. Maria found it more likely that Cadet Rex was hardly his benefactor’s first experiment. She’d just have to add experimenting with void beasts to this mysterious necromancer’s long list of crimes.
She scrolled forward through the rest of the video in the hope it’d reveal more as to the nature of Caliban’s relationship with the blackbloods, but found instead his encounter with Alice Garett much as the senior cadet had described it. The moment he got to safety, life returned to Caliban. Nobody else even glanced at him with suspicion.
Maria’s first step was to store a copy of the footage on her holopad and scrub it from the local net. She still didn’t know enough to definitively declare the cadet a danger, and dared not risk anyone else stumbling upon her discovery. When she finally exposed him, it’d be she and she alone that got the credit for it. In the meantime, he had more to offer her.
She made a note to have her secretary schedule a meeting with the suspicious recruit and turned back to the footage she’d saved. Only as she pulled up the image of Caliban so calmly pushing his cart past three killing machines did Maria’s eyes peel away from the screen to notice her hands were shaking. She forcibly stilled them.
She stared at the image for some time, clasping her hands tightly in her lap as she comforted herself with the reminder that the cadet hadn’t hurt anyone yet. Perhaps he wouldn’t. Perhaps his actions belied his monstrous appearance.
The way Maria shuddered whenever she looked at him disallowed such thoughts. Even she couldn’t deny the sheer heroism he’d displayed, defending the children so, but a hero did her little good. For her purpose, she needed a villain. Caliban Rex certainly looked the part. She’d have to keep a close eye on him, be ready to intervene at a moment’s notice.
If she spun it just right, wrung every resource she could out of him before being the one to save the day if he eventually went rogue, then maybe, just maybe, Elder Maria Lopez of the Dragon’s Right Eye may’ve found her ticket off this gods forsaken rock.
Maria shoved the report she’d faked reading to the bottom of her pile. She’d yet to really start it before the incursion had dumped a veritable mountain of work on top of her, all of which took priority. Besides, with this new footage she’d found, Maria had far more promising leads on Caliban Rex to pursue.
RF-31 had probably just fallen to the void horde anyway.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
I ARRIVED TO breakfast ten minutes late, my brow sweaty and my uniform creased from the vac suit. I received a few more of the curious stares than usual as I crossed the mess to fetch a tray and made for my usual table, but none of the louder attention I’d feared. Nobody confronted me. Nobody appeared frightened or hostile or interested in blaming me for the incursion.
As the sect’s resident weirdo outsider, that last was a real concern.
“I didn’t know you two were friends,” I greeted Xavier and Charlotte as I joined them at their table.
Xavier slapped her on the back. “Charlotte here has offered to show me the Veleraeu family style!”
Well, she certainly knew how to make Xavier happy. The question was why she wanted to. I raised an eyebrow at her.
She shrugged. “If we’re going to be in a cohort together, I figured it’d be better if we liked each other.”
I stared at her for a moment before deciding I was just hungry enough to take her word for it. I’d slept through dinner last night, so the tray of eggs and sausage in front of me was the first thing I’d had to eat since yesterday’s ice cream bar.
Given the choice between eating breakfast and being suspicious of my friends, I chose breakfast.
Charlotte looked me up and down as I shoveled omelet into my mouth. “You certainly don’t look like someone who missed the morning workout.”
I paused to finish chewing and swallowed. “I spent the morning outside, helping with the repairs.”
Her eyes shot open. “You missed dinner immediately after a void horde attack, without messaging anyone to let us know you were okay, so you could vac-weld? Cal, you’re not a mortal any more. That’s not your job.”
“I told Lucy I was… you’re not in contact with Lucy. Right. You’re right. I should’ve messaged you. I had other things on my mind, and I thought I’d be back for dinner. I didn’t expect to fall asleep like that.”
Xavier scowled at me. “You fell asleep? What happened?”
I sighed and leaned in, lowering my voice to stave off any eavesdroppers. “How much do you guys know about yesterday’s attack?”
“A void horde came out of nowhere at around three o’clock,” Charlotte rattled off. “Our orbital defenses handled most of it, but a few stragglers made it planet side. Reports show some eighty dead, double that injured, mostly mortals, but a few cultivators from Family Housing B and the classroo—” She froze. “You were in the attack.”
“I killed one,” I confirmed. “Immediately after watching it stab a ten-year-old boy through the stomach.”
Xavier clapped me on the back hard enough I had to catch myself against the table. “A glorious victory!”
I blinked at him. “Did you miss the part about the stabbed ten-year-old?”
“Did you do everything you could to protect him?”
“Of course I did.”
“And is he alive?”
I nodded.
He clapped me on the back again. “Then it was a glorious victory!”
“He’s right,” Charlotte told me. “You may be bigger and stronger, but you fight and cultivate at a preteen level. The fact you even looked at a type-six void beast and lived is incredible. That you killed one? It’s almost unbelievable.”
I faltered under the praise. “It wasn’t that impressive. I just rammed it with the ice cream cart a few times then stomped its head in.”
Xavier beamed. “You have a warrior’s spirit!”
Charlotte squinted. “Ice cream cart? Why did you have an ice cream cart?”
I started from the beginning, my instructors’ efforts to turn the class against me and my own to win them over. I told of asking Arthur for help, carefully leaving out any mention of Mindy. She had enough to deal with without unleashing Xavier and Charlotte on her.
I explained my panic as Lucy’s voice had crackled its warning and the comms went dead, relived our mad dash down the hall and its abrupt and violent end. They listened in silence as I told of smashing through jagged chitin, of frantically grabbing Vihaan off the floor, of our desperate race to shelter. Curiously enough, it wasn’t the blood that caught their attention.
“You smelled his injury?” Xavier asked loudly enough to draw eyes from other tables.
I glared the onlookers into giving up and lowered my voice. “Gut wound one-oh-one: if it smells like shit, that means shit’s leaking. Shit in the blood means sepsis. It’s not an exact test, but once you stop the bleeding, a good sniff is step two.”
“Unless the patient is a cultivator,” Charlotte said, “and thus perfectly capable of fighting off infection on their own.”
“Yeah, well, mortals get injured too. Children get injured too. This shit’s worth knowing.”
Neither of them laughed at my admittedly stupid pun, but that’s showbiz, baby. You win some, you lose some. They were, luckily enough, so stunned by the bad joke that they stopped talking. I took the opportunity to continue with my story.
“Anyway, I knew I had to get him medical attention, and I knew there were void beasts between us and it. Comms were down, so I couldn’t call for help, and even if I could’ve, gods knew how long it would take them to clear out the beasts. I was unarmed, and a shit fighter besides, so fighting our way through was out. That just left sneaking past. I was easy. With the way my qi cools my body and is damn near impossible to sense, I figured I could slip right by.”
Charlotte blinked rapidly in surprise. “And that worked?”
“I’m still breathing, aren’t I?”
She shook her head. “That’s insane. Some type-sixes can sense motion. Others can feel footsteps through the floor. Threads, just because humans can’t detect your qi doesn’t mean void beasts can’t!”
“What was I supposed to do, just let him die? I took a calculated risk, and it paid off.”
Xavier nodded along. “Makes sense to me. I’ve never known a blackblood to chase after a corpse, and you make a pretty convincing corpse. So after your heroic escape, you returned with reinforcements to clear the way to the children?”
“Not quite. I told you, I had no idea how long Vihaan would last, nor how long it would take to muster up enough firepower to fight a medic back to him.”
Charlotte furrowed her brow. “So what did you—”
I grinned. “I brought him with me.”
Charlotte went silent. Xavier figured it out.
He snapped his fingers. “The ice cream cart! They’d have trouble sensing his qi through that much steel, and there’s no way any body heat leached out.”
I winked. “Waltzed right past three void beasts. Could’ve reached out and touched one if I’d wanted.”
Charlotte groaned. “You’re insane.” She glared up at Xavier. “You’re both insane. Threads, you probably saved that child’s life, but still…” She trailed off, staring into space for a few seconds before gazing intently at me. “You’re either going to change the universe as we know it, or die from making some dumb decision before you make gem.”
“That’s the plan.” I smiled. “The changing the universe part, not the dying part.”
“You deserve a medal!” Xavier chimed in. “Accolades! Extra focus room hours!”
“If nothing else, Vihaan’s parents owe you a debt,” Charlotte added. “I’m sure they’d give you anything you asked for.”
“I’ll pass on all of that, thanks,” I said. “Don’t need to draw any more attention to myself. As it was I scared the crap out some poor woman. I will track down Vihaan’s parents, though. I want to see how he’s doing.”
“And after all that you went and worked as a vac-welder?” Charlotte asked.
“After all that, I passed out leaning against a couch in the lobby. Slept through dinner. Slept through Vihaan’s parents taking him upstairs. Slept through the cleaning crew covering every inch of the place except where I was lying. I managed to roughly approximate a full night’s sleep by four in the morning. I actually ran into Nick on my way up.”
“I’m not surprised he didn’t sleep,” Charlotte said. “His little sister lost her left hand in the attack. Apparently the limb is so torn up it’ll take years of cell treatment to regrow it.”
“Yeesh.” I grimaced. “No wonder he seemed so out of it.” I didn’t go into detail. Nick’s early morning musings weren’t their business, especially if he’d shared them in confidence. I wasn’t too keen on sharing my thoughts either. “Hold up. Why are they regrowing it when a neural prosthetic would work just as well without the painful recovery time?”
Charlotte raised an eyebrow at me. “Because she wants functional blood and tendon meridians?”
“Oh. Right. Those run through the hands, don’t they.” I clapped my hands together to turn the conversation away from my dumb question. “Anyway, I’ve got the day off while they repair and clean up all the classrooms, so once we’re done here…” I looked over at Xavier. “I’m going to need your help.”
“Ooh, sparring or a meridian?”
“Meridians,” I clarified, emphasizing the plural. “I figure I can get my stomach, tendons, and senses all in one go.”
Charlotte gaped. “You what?”
“I don’t know, Cal,” Xavier said. “That’s ambitious, even for me.”
“I know it was a freak attack, but I felt so helpless yesterday. I don’t like feeling helpless. I want to get my meridians open and my core formed so I can be fighting with qi as soon as possible. I’ve cleared three at a time before. Three harder ones, even. Muscles, spine, and brain will all take way more training, but the other three are simple enough. It’s not like I’m low on qi.”
Charlotte collected herself. “If you have the qi, I say do it.”
I glanced at her askance. “That was a quick leap from ‘you’re going to get yourself killed’ to ‘open three meridians at once.’”
Charlotte sighed. “People put a lot of stock in the power of epiphany, but they forget that overcoming adversity is just as important. I’d wager that whatever happened to get you started was worth more than enough adversity to help with those first three meridians. After yesterday’s adventure, your body’s probably more ready to advance than it’s been since. Normally people use this kind of thing to push their core to the next level, but normally cultivators don’t see real adversity before they’ve cleared all their meridians. Some never do. If you can handle three meridians at once, now is the time to do it. Threads, you’d be wasting the opportunity if you didn’t.”
I looked to Xavier, but he just shrugged. “She’s the smart one. If she says go for it, I won’t cower away.”
“Great,” I said, shoving the last of my breakfast into my mouth. Still chewing, I stood and grabbed my tray. “Let’s go.”
Xavier followed me as I left, his long strides more than enough to catch up and keep by my side as we bussed our trays and headed back to housing D.
“I still can’t believe you slayed a void beast and saved a child’s life,” he gushed as we walked. “You’re a real, honest to goodness hero.”
“The ice cream cart did all the real work. I just drove it.”
Xavier laughed. “Still on the first steps of your Way and already your legend begins. They’ll write books about you. They’ll make holos!”
“We’ll deal with my growing legend after I get to wielding my own magic.”
Xavier scowled. “It’s not magic. It’s careful manipulation of the fundamental qi within all things.”
“Yeah. That’s magic.”
“Don’t let any elders hear you say that.”
“Eh, they already think I’m an uncultured mortal.”
Xavier let out a breath. “Let’s focus on today’s task before we start with next year’s. Even if you succeed today, it takes months of preparation for the brain meridian alone, not to mention the others, and that’s not even considering the monumental task of forming your seed core.”
“Yeah, yeah, magic’s a distant pipe dream.” I waved him off as we crested the third floor stairs. We made straight for the showers. “Let’s make it a bit less distant.”
Xavier flashed a nervous grin. “Good luck.”
I undressed and sat cross-legged in my usual stall, letting the warm water wash over me as I evened out my breathing and focused inward.
I had no idea if Charlotte’s speech about overcoming adversity held any water, but my reserve of qi seemed to jump into action, springing about my center in tune with my surface thoughts. I didn’t hesitate, sharpening it into the needle and thread I’d grown so accustomed to visualizing and directing its tip to the entrance of my stomach meridian.
My belly convulsed. Nausea washed through me. I fought back the urge to gag, to retch, to bid farewell to my breakfast. To be clear, trying this immediately after downing a plate of eggs and sausage and whatever else they put in those omelets was no mistake. I had done some research. Conventional wisdom suggested a full stomach to dilute the impurities I was about to vent into my digestive system.
I was about ready to tell conventional wisdom to fuck off and send my breakfast on its merry way when my qi completed its first loop. A second wave of nausea echoed the first, this one lower and nastier.
