The Stargazer's War - Chapter 3.16

Chapter 3.16: Incident Report

The airlock we wound up at was a small shuttle dock, whatever vessel it served conveniently absent.  The no-at didn’t fit, so Bill had to leave it secured outside as we maneuvered inside.

A medic—and, thankfully, nobody else—was waiting for us.  “I had a call about a vac exposure?  Where’s the patient?”

I pulled off my helmet.  “That’d be me.”

She placed a hand on her hip.  “Is this some kind of prank?  Vac exposures don’t talk.  Depressurization vaporizes all the moisture in the mouth and throat.  You definitely shouldn’t be standing.”

“I have a strong constitution.”

She glared at me. 

“He’s a cultivator,” Bill explained.

The medic blinked, then let out a tired breath.  “I’m not qualified for this.  I’m calling in a—”

“No need,” I interrupted, hopping up onto her gurney.  “I just need you to patch up my arm.”

One look at my vac suit’s tattered sleeve was enough to spur her into action, pulling apart the fabric to peer at the wound beneath.  “Why aren’t you bleeding?”

“Strong constitution,” I replied, rather than explain the vastly reduced circulation my heart and blood meridians caused.  I felt her hand on my wrist.  Her eyes shot wide.

“Shit, there’s no pulse.  I need to—”

I caught her arm.  “I just need you to patch up my arm,” I restated.  “If you’d prefer I bleed all over the place, I can do that.”

Why that of all things spurred her to reach into her tool bag and get to work, I couldn’t say, but soon enough the remnants of my sleeve had been cut away and she’d started cleaning the wound.  I waved away her offer of local anesthesia, my spine meridian more than sufficient to dull the pain.

It took nearly an hour to get everything cleaned, bound, and sealed.  I walked away with a cooler full of stem gel and a three week treatment plan to regrow the half-inch diameter cylinder of muscle and tendon the debris had torn through.  The chip it’d taken out of my bone hadn’t actually left my body, so the medic had simply reattached it.

Only once she was finished and cleaning up her tools did I take the time to fully strip off the remains of my vac suit.  Bill’s assistance helped make up for my useless right hand.

For approximately eight seconds I envied Charlotte’s nanites, which could’ve recovered from such an injury in under a minute, but then I remembered that Charlotte would’ve fallen unconscious within seconds of the vac suit losing power.  My own iron body wasn’t without its advantages.

It thankfully didn’t take much convincing to get the medic to report the incident as just a debris-inflicted puncture wound, both because that was technically my only injury and because she’d long learned the same lesson all mortals eventually do: it’s usually best to just give cultivators what they want.

Bill wasn’t so easy.  “I’ll have to file an incident report for this, Cal.  You almost died.  You’re not clear of blame because you started fucking walking instead of staying put like you should’ve, but the department’s liable too.  This wouldn’t have gone half as sideways if they’d given us no-ats that actually fucking worked.  If that’d been anyone but you out there Foreman Lou’d be on the hook for wrongful death.  You’re due compensation, and the rest of us are owed functional gear.”

I sighed.  He had a point.  I really, really didn’t want to let on that I could survive in a vacuum, and if Bill filed this incident report, the sect would absolutely realize something more was going on here.  It’d mean more scrutiny.  It’d make it harder to stay separate from sect politics.

It’d also probably save lives.  We griped, all of us, about how unreliable the no-ats were, how much time and effort they ate in constant repairs.  If ours had worked properly, Bill could’ve come picked me up the moment the debris hit me.  The ultimate truth of the matter was that incidents like this happened, and sooner or later they would happen to someone else.

I could handle a bit more sect attention if it meant a safer environment for my coworkers.

“You’re right,” I finally said.  “File it.  One of these days those no-ats are going to get somebody killed.  I’ll have a chat with Harold about replacing them.”

Bill laughed.  “Sure, just waltz up to the head of exterior for the entire fucking station and make demands.”  He paused.  “You’re serious, aren't you?  Of course you are.  It’ll probably work, too.  Must be nice to be a cultivator.”

“Mostly it’s dick-waving and people trying to kill me, but it has its perks.”

That earned me a chuckle.  “I’ll bet it does.”  His eyes flitted down to my bandaged arm.  “I’ve gotta take the no-at back and write up my report.  You good to get home okay?”

I nodded.  “Got a shuttle dock right here.  I think I’ll manage.  What should I-ah… do with the suit?”

Bill thought for a moment.  “I’ll take it.  Maybe they’ll want to repair it, maybe not.”  He pointed at the sleeve the medic had cut off.  “Any luck the sight of that should get the bean counters’ attention.”

“Thanks, Bill.”  I put my good hand on his shoulder.  “You saved my life out there.  I won’t forget that.”

Bill huffed.  “Don’t see why you couldn’t have used that trick to go straight to an airlock.”  He stooped over to pick up my suit.  “At least some good’ll come of this.”

I nodded.  “I’ll make sure of it.”

He replaced his helmet and stepped back into the airlock.  As the door sealed behind him, I pulled up my holopad.  I had a number of calls to make, a number of people who deserved to be informed of the day’s events.  My new technique—I hadn’t settled on a name yet, but was leaning towards Warp—probably justified its own karaoke night.

That would come later.  I had two whole weeks of medical leave ahead of me for everything from celebration to research to practice, and I intended to make full use of it.  The first call I made, however, wasn’t to Xavier or Micaiah or Lucy, but to Jeremy.

He got a shuttle to my position in under five minutes.

I messaged the others one by one to let them know there’d been an accident, I’d been injured but would be okay, and that I had some exciting news, but the rest would have to wait until we could meet aboard Lucy.  I didn’t trust the station’s comms network to not be monitoring us in some way and lacked the technical knowledge to better secure it.

For similar reasons, I had to fight off the urge to input the sigil for the technique into my holopad to start running analysis on it.  It seemed downright likely the shuttle Jeremy’d sent me had a camera or two hidden in it, and every bit of information I could deny the sect felt like a win to me.

That was my first action item after I’d made it home, told Lucy the whole story, assured her I was fine six times, and eaten the bowl of soup she put in front of me.  It took a handful of hours to map the complex qi flows into the software, but once I did, I finally had a point of comparison to my other technique.

The problem with the chunk of the Death sigil I remembered was that it was only a tiny fraction of an enormous whole, and I hadn’t the slightest idea what that tiny fraction actually did.  I knew what my Vac Suit did.  I had an idea what Warp did.  It’d take some experimentation to learn the ins and outs of the technique, but in the meantime I could get the AI to start looking for shared motifs between the two techniques.  If I could find commonalities, I could start decoding the purpose of individual pieces, the first step to deciphering the building blocks of dark qi techniques.

In the meantime, I had a more annoying problem.

My meridians were strained.

The damage was minor enough that I hadn’t noticed until I’d made it to Lucy and started channeling my Vac Suit to continue building up the ambient light qi within her soulspace, but it was there.  Warp had taken such a monumental quantity of qi that I was certain somebody had noticed the burst of light qi it’d generated from seemingly nowhere.  With any luck they’d assume it was the full payload of a light qi technique I’d kept hidden the same way I ‘hid’ my core rather than the conversion loss of a dark technique a hundred times the strength.

I hoped Bill wouldn’t run his mouth too much.  Warp was exactly the type of thing needed to be kept under wraps.

Only after the others arrived did I realize how true that was.

“You did what?!”

I exhaled at Micaiah’s outburst.  “I bent space.  I reached across two thousand feet as if it were two.”

We sat around the dining table in Lucy’s soulspace, Ariel comfortably perched on my shoulder as I fed them chicharrones.  Every once in a while, Xavier’s hand snuck its way into the bag.

“That’s impossible,” Micaiah said outright.

“But I did it.”

“Maybe you changed your velocity with your qi, or maybe you sped Bill up towards you.  Maybe he was closer than you thought.  There’s plenty of ways—”

“I believe him,” Xavier cut her off.  “Caliban isn’t prone to that kind of error, not while his brain meridian is running.  Dangerously distractible, yes, but outright wrong about something?  Never.”

I blinked.  “I-ah… wouldn’t go that far.”

“Space is inviolable,” Micaiah argued.  “It’s one of the handful of fundamental laws we’ve definitively proven.  Cal, you’ve taken a long haul freighter.  Do you think trade would move at that pace if an iron could bend space?  Even celestial cultivators have to exit reality entirely to travel along the threads.”

“Dark qi can’t interact with most of the things light qi can,” I said, well used to how frustrating it was that my qi—plentiful as it was—didn’t seem to do much.  “It stands to reason there are things it can interact with that light qi can’t.”

Charlotte, who’d thus far spent the entire conversation in stunned silence, quietly uttered what might’ve been the most horrifying series of words I’d yet heard.

“If you can manipulate space, you can manipulate time.”

Nobody spoke as Charlotte’s statement hung heavy in the air.

“Ugh,” I groaned in an attempt to ease the tension.  “I’m going to have to study relativity, aren’t I?”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Lucy said.  “We have enough to worry about without getting into what other techniques might be possible.”

“Imagine the possibilities!”  Xavier perked up.  “If you could Warp the space between your blade and your opponent, you could strike from range.  If you can do more than shorten the distance between two points, all sorts of options open up.  You could lengthen the space between your enemy’s strike and you to block attacks, or reposition their weapon to create an opening!”

Micaiah gave him a sideways glance.  “Of course Cal figures out a way to break a fundamental metaphysical law and your first thought is how to use it in the dueling arena.  We need to scale this up.  If we can figure out a way to automate this technique as an enchantment or even just apply it to something Lucy’s size, we could implement true faster-than-light travel.  Trade, government, warfare, every single societal system in the galaxy is built around the fact that interstellar travel is only feasible with a high tier cultivator involved.  If that’s no longer true…”

“We’re still getting ahead of ourselves,” I echoed Lucy’s sentiment.  “I overstressed my meridians using it once.  It’s possible with smaller distances it needs less qi, but I won’t be able to safely test that until I’ve had at least a day to recover.”  I looked to Xavier.  “I’ll need a lot of practice before it becomes combat viable, and that’s not going to happen if I can only use it a few times a day.”

I answered Micaiah next.  “Warping myself a thousand feet took more than enough qi to push you to iron.  Warping a ship lightyears might take more than exists in the galaxy.  The light qi that would generate alone would be tantamount to a bomb.”

Finally, I turned to Charlotte.  “This is too important not to start working on, and it seems right now my meridians aren’t up to channeling as much qi as they need to be.  There’s an easy solution to that.  Tomorrow, once I’m recovered, I’m going to start pushing you the rest of the way through iron.  Then we can have a conversation about which mental crucibles your family has access to.”

Charlotte’s brows shot up.  “Cal, I’m barely halfway to titanium.  If I just show up one day ready to advance, it’ll cause an uproar.”

I gestured with an upturned palm.  “I’m sure you can find a way explain it.  Say it was a gift from Lucy.  Maybe we can even ask for an iron crucible in return, ostensibly for me but actually for Micaiah.  Besides, it’s not like it would be overnight.  I’m not burning out again for this.  We’ll take it slow—a few days at least.”

Charlotte balked.  “If people get the idea that Lucy is handing out qi in those quantities…”

“I can handle a bit of pestering,” Lucy said.

“Exactly,” I followed up.  “If there’s anyone above sect politics, it’s Lucy.  What are they going to do, attack her?  She’d tear them to shreds.  As long as they think she gave you qi in exchange for the materials to push me to iron, worst case they start trying to offer her deals.  Hells, some of them might even be worth taking.”

Micaiah scowled.  “Cal, you can’t just give her qi.  There’s a reason high tier cultivators don’t just force their kids up the stages.  The foreign qi will kill her.”

“I thought I explained this.  Charlotte can’t even use my qi, but the percent or so of the spill-off from my techniques converts to light qi.  In practice I’m not directly giving her qi, I’m generating a cloud of ambient qi for her to cultivate.”

Micaiah exhaled.  “That’s not what I meant.  There’s no feasible way for Lucy to have given that qi to Charlotte.  Your whole cover story falls apart.”

“Lucy’s older than their entire sect,” I countered.  “They’ll assume she knows things they don’t.”

Charlotte nodded.  “It doesn’t strictly matter whether or not they believe it.  Their only recourse is to confront Lucy, and we all know how that’d turn out.”

“They know Lucy cares about Cal,” Micaiah warned.

“And they’ll know the best way to get what they want is to stay on Lucy’s good side.  She’s not exactly going to give away qi to someone who’s antagonizing her.”

Charlotte sighed.  “It’s not that simple.  There’s a real chance someone is stupid enough to try and hold you hostage.  If you’re set on tipping our hand like this, we should consider countermeasures.”

“How are they going to hold him?” Xavier asked.  “He can teleport!”

“I can bend space,” I corrected.  “I don’t think that extends to traveling through solid walls.”

“Let them delay,” Charlotte suggested.  “Ask for an iron crucible and imply there’s no rush.  If they think you’re still bronze when you’re secretly titanium, anyone who comes after you will be in for a nasty surprise.  There’re only so many titanium cultivators in the sect, almost all of whom are tied to people smart enough not to antagonize a soulship.  Most likely a few irons come after you, you show them what’s what, and then we can extract concessions from the sect for the attempt.”

“I don’t like it,” Lucy stepped in.  “It’s a lot of risk just to accelerate your advancement by a few months.”

“What actually happens if they do kidnap me?” I asked.  “Killing me wouldn’t get them what they wanted, and all it’d take would be a holopad call for the entire sect to know they could earn Lucy’s favor by returning me safe and sound.  It probably wouldn’t be pleasant, but I’d be fine, and that’s if they succeed in the first place.”

There was a pause before Lucy finally agreed.  “You’ll need to keep Shiver with you.  I won’t have you looking like an easy target.”

I nodded, instantly moving to grab the blade.  “Right I’ll just…”  I trailed off.  “It’s in my cubby back at exterior maintenance.”  I pulled up my holopad.  “I’ll have Jeremy send someone to fetch it.”

Charlotte placed both palms on the dining table and pushed herself to her feet.  “Sounds like we have a plan, then?  I’ll go petition my father for a list of potential crucibles.  It’s not unheard of to select one far in advance to tailor one’s meditations in the leading months.”

“I think we’ve covered everything,” I said.

I walked the others back out of Lucy’s soulspace, exchanging goodbyes and smiling proudly at their repeated congratulations on my revelation.  

Micaiah lingered.  “Are you sure you’re okay?  You had a close call today.”

“Not my first and definitely not my last.  I’ll be fine.”  I held up my bandaged arm.  “Hells, I even get two weeks paid vacation.  Far as I’m concerned this is an absolute win.”

She sprung up onto her toes to kiss me.  “Be more careful.  This place, it’s… I don’t think I could handle it without you.”

“Please, it’ll take more than some space debris or a few greedy secties to take me down.  I’ll die when I mouth off to a cultivator at least three stages above me and not a day sooner.”

She smirked at me.  “I’ll just have to keep that mouth of yours busy, won’t I?”

I stepped closer to her.  “Oh, is that so?”

“With that hand of yours out of commission, something’s gotta take up the slack.”

I chuckled and kissed her again.  “See you tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow.”

I stood on the gangway alone as I watched her cross the hangar and disappear into the lobby.  I took a breath.

I spun on my heel and sped back inside.  So much had happened, and the adrenaline from my near death experience and the startling implications of my newest technique yet coursed through my veins.  I wanted to practice; I wanted to experiment, but I couldn’t yet, not until my meridians recovered.

In the meantime, I had an AI to program.

——

Harold O’Conner gripped the edge of his desk with white knuckles.  His jaw clenched tight.  Sweat beaded on his brow.  His heart pounded in his chest as he reread the incident report in front of him.

The cultivator that had signed on as one of his vac welders last year had nearly died after being struck by a piece of space debris.

That alone was enough to send Harold into despair.  He’d known the fatality rate of his position before he’d taken the job.  As the chief mortal in charge of maintaining the enchantments that delivered the cultivators their precious qi, the head of exterior maintenance was both easily replaced and a clear target for any sect member frustrated with their progress.  Two of his last three predecessors had suffered death by angry cultivator.  When he’d first arrived, it’d taken Harold two weeks to clean the blood out of the carpet.

He forced himself to exhale slowly.  Hyperventilating would get him nowhere.  He scanned through the incident report, searching desperately for something, anything that would get him out of this.  It wasn’t good.

The cultivator, Caliban, had broken safety protocol.  Maybe, maybe that could prove Harold’s saving grace.

It didn’t seem likely.  Understaffing had left him isolated out there, and a malfunctioning no-at had prevented swift rescue.  Both issues, while products of insufficient budget, would land squarely in Harold’s lap.  It didn’t matter if the man had broken protocol.  Never in his life had Harold seen a cultivator take responsibility for their own actions when someone beneath them could justifiably be at fault.

With a quaking hand, Harold pulled open the drawer to the right side of his desk and withdrew a bottle of scotch and a single tumbler.  He poured a glass.

He sipped as his fingers danced across his holopad, submitting orders for an upgraded non-atmosphered vehicle fleet and green lighting salaries for a dozen new hires.  The sect was liable to come down on him for the overextension of his budget, but what did he care?  Harold gave it even odds an angry cultivator would turn him to red paste at any moment for endangering one of their own.  His best chance at survival was to put an honest effort towards addressing the issues, sect opinion be damned.

With any luck, their sect overlords would blame him for the overreach and not his replacement.  At least some good would come of this whole fiasco.

Immediate tasks complete, Harold glanced over the annual reviews he’d been signing off on.  He closed the document.  He downed the rest of his whisky in a single gulp.  He rose to his feet.

He called his husband.  “Hey, babe, could you run by the school and pick up the girls?”  As he spoke, he tapped at his holopad, digging into his savings to purchase four tickets.  “Yes, everything’s fine.  It’ll be fine.  I’m taking the afternoon off, and I was just thinking… Sadie’s birthday is coming up, so why don’t we surprise her?  We’ve been meaning to check out that new amusement park that opened out in Rumford.  I hear they have a zero-g restaurant the girls’ll love…”

——

“What can you tell me about the anomaly?” Sect Master Karina Sokolov of the Dragon’s Left Eye prompted her aide.

The steel cultivator didn’t drop his salute as he spoke.  “At approximately eleven hundred hours circadian time, a bloom of qi roughly equivalent to the spend of a mid-iron technique appeared from seemingly nothing.  The bloom occurred some thousand feet into the Right Eye’s capture formation, well away from the station itself.  At this time we have no indication of the qi’s source nor its intended purpose, only that the capture formation has taken it and delivered it to focus rooms like any ambient qi.”

Karina leaned in, her elbows on her desk.  “Any hint of the technique itself?  There has to be a reason they’re testing it out in the open.”

“No, ma’am.  As far as we can tell, there was no technique, just qi.”

Karina scoffed.  “You expect me to believe, what, that an iron cultivator went outside and just… jettisoned half their qi?  Of course there was a technique.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Find out what they’re doing,” she ordered.  “This is either a precursor to something larger, or a surprise they’re planning for one of their newest generation.  Barustra’s Cache will be here in a few years, and I won’t have our most promising sions blindsided by Right Eye trickery.”

“Of course, ma’am.”

When he didn’t leave, Karina raised an eyebrow.  “Is there something else?”

“Well, ma’am, each of our spies in the three houses have found evidence of investigation into the anomaly.  Unless they’re covering their tracks at a level we’ve yet to see from them, it would seem the Right Eye know little more than we do.”

“The soulship’s behind it, then?”  Karina let some surprise drip into her voice.  “Or at least the houses would have us think the soulship’s behind it.  Just because we haven’t caught them engaging in competent counterespionage doesn’t mean they haven’t done it.  Either way, keep pressing.  The only thing I like less than uncertainties are uncertainties in Right Eye space.”

“Yes, ma’am.  Right away, ma’am.”  The aide finally dropped his salute as he spun on his heel and left the office.  The door slid shut behind him.

Karina browsed through the report on the holoterminal built into her desk, unease finding its way through her.  Qi appearing from nowhere was a harrowing portent.  Either the soulship was up to something beyond them, or her rivals were preparing a nasty surprise.

Karina hated surprises.

Whatever it was, they’d get to the bottom of it soon enough.  Even if they couldn’t negate whatever advantage the ancient had gifted the Right Eye in time for Barustra’s Cache, The Black Maw would have representatives at the intersect tournament.  Then, at least, the Right Eye would have to play fair.

In the meantime, Karina sent a message to her secretary, requesting the Dragon’s Left Eye’s most promising young masters convene for a special training session.  Karina would lead it personally.  

If the Right Eye was going to invest in their cache run, the Left would not be found wanting.  

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