Storiesonline.net
-------

                              The Retrieved
                               by Sea-Life

Copyright© 2008 by Sea-Life


-------
Description: Sometimes the end of the world isn't the end, but a beginning. Sometimes when you are cast out by fate you are lost. Sometimes, the lost are retrieved.

Codes: ScFi
-------



-------

Chapter 1: Warrior



I was good at my job, but not enthusiastic about it. Melliza, the aluminum hulled catamaran, with its twin water jet engines and its bow thrusters was a dream to pilot, and the run between Port Isabel and South Padre Island, and between Isla Blanca and the Laguna Atascosa wildlife refuge had long since been burned into my brains and my muscle memory. I could make any of my three regular routes with my eyes closed. Not that I would.

I was in my mid fifties, I had a bad valve in my heart that the doctors kept telling me I'd have to have surgery for one of these days. I had false teeth and an extra eighty pounds of beer belly that had been slowly growing on me since childhood. I wore glasses which had been thickening over the years right along with my waist, and which were now threatening to become bifocals.

During spring break each year, and during most of the summer season, my job offered one of the world's best perks for a confirmed and enthusiastic heterosexual such as myself. Endless waves of women and girls who were ready to become women, all wearing the bikinis they couldn't get away with wearing back home. From the spring break hard-bodies to the summer vacation families, it was a visual feast.

Something had to make the tiny little shack I could barely afford worth keeping, and that was it. I had been working the Laguna Madre harbors off and on for almost fifteen years now, since my divorce.

Yes, I was married once. Helena Boniface had allowed me to sweep her off her feet when we met. She thought my job was glamorous, and by extension, that made me glamorous. The glamor wore off pretty quickly once she realized I wasn't glamorous in any way. She left for a bigger pay check, a bigger life, and if you listened to her, a bigger dick. No surprises there I suppose, but who was listening?

The beginning of the end was a 'winter carnival' cruise down into the South Bay of Laguna Madre. It was a mixed bag of passengers and a small crowd, only twenty or so, mostly families, a few foreign business-types with a day off and no sense. This tour was usually taken by those people with little to spend, or those who'd already seen the good stuff. It was an evening cruise, and with the early setting winter sun, there was little to see in the way of scenery, except for the lights along the shore. We had to dress things up with the winter carnival hype, doing some fake Christmas trees, and old Palo, the tour guide dressed up as Santa. We played Christmas carols through the sound system instead of our usual mix of mariachi and elevator music, and served eggnog and beer for the adults.

Palo was the oldest of the tour hands, and his crew on this trip was Kristy James and Peter Lewes. Pete was a good guy, and Kristy was one of those College hard bodies who'd decided to drop out and stick around. I was the ship's captain, of course. Captain Ed. 'Good old Captain Ed'. I had two deck hands, both young local tex-mex school boys, Sammy and Fred. I had crewed with the two boys many times in the past couple of years, and they were good workers.

We had passed Clark Island on our port side about five minutes ago, headed for a loop through the Loma's, a series of seven islands, all of a size, except for Loma Silvan, which was smaller than the others. These shallow waters were a risk at anything but high tide for most boats our size, but it was high tide and Melliza's twin catamaran aluminum hulls drew very little water.

We were making for the waters between Loma Silvan and Loma de la Banderita when we hit something. The passengers reacted, with yells and some panicked screams at first. Most of them had been tossed to the deck by the sudden stop. Then the ship tilted for a moment, at the oddest angle, and in a calm sea, without even a winter storm from the gulf to raise a chop on the waters, without a rising swell for a warning, the bottom seemed to drop out from under us and the world went black.

I was awake for a while before I even realized it, afloat in a sea of muted sensation - no sound, no light, no feeling. I wiggled my toes experimentally, and felt some comfort when it seemed to work. The motion, or my attempt at it, must've triggered something. There was a sudden lightening of the air around me, and I heard a soft rustling noise from behind me. I strained to turn my head towards the noise, wondering if I was succeeding, and through a soft fog my eyes finally found something to focus on, smoothly gliding into view. Through that fog I saw a slick, oily mass of mottled skin, a series of small blue beads that looked like buttons, but which I realized were eyes once the cluster of tentacles beneath them came into focus. A mouth opened, and a hissing, popping noise struck me. I was looking at something as alien as anything I could have ever thought I'd see. Behind the hissing, were rows of sharp, triangular teeth. I screamed and twisted away in panic.

And blackness came again.



== Kiris IV, Kiris Retrieval Station ==

When he woke up this time, Ed could tell right away that something was different. He saw a wall in front of him, and when he looked down, a floor at his feet.

He saw his feet!

He decided that they felt like his feet. The perspective was right, but the feet looked bigger and rawer somehow than the feet he remembered. That one grungy toenail on his right foot that seemed to suffer permanent contamination from some sort of fungus looked clean as a whistle. Ed wiggled his toes, and the ones he was looking at moved. 'Yup, they're mine', he thought.

Ed tried tilting his head a little further down to see the rest of his legs, but when he did, a wave of vertigo hit him, followed by a surge of nausea. His stomach rebelled, and he felt the bile rising in the back of his throat. He was vomiting a few seconds later, and couldn't seem to turn his head enough to keep it from collecting in his mouth, he spat, and vomited some more, and the vomit seemed to collect where it would do the most harm. He began to choke on his own ejecta, and again panic rose, followed by the fog again and then the strangely comforting blackness.

The third time's the charm, they say, and for Ed, at least this time, it proved true. He woke feeling clear-eyed and alert. Again he saw a wall in front of him, and his feet beneath him. When he moved his head, he saw legs, and with a quick movement that didn't nauseate or panic him, pulled an arm around in front of his eyes. He had arms and hands. He touched nose, lips and ears in a quick trinity of reassurance. Then, being a man, reached down between his legs for that little moment of reassurance. Phew! There was a dick there, thank God! He thought, before suddenly re-examining the plumbing.

There was definitely something wrong here! This was not his dick! Ed knew how much of his hand the penis he had been born with filled, and this filled that with some left over. He looked at his hand again, focusing this time on the details of it rather than on the mere existence of it. This wasn't the hand he remembered. It was larger and younger!

Suddenly he was aware of himself standing in a room. He was naked and he was young, and had dark, reddish brown hairs everywhere that he had once had dull brown or graying hair. The legs holding him up looked powerful, as did the arms he held out. He made a muscle.

Yeah, then he laughed as he caught himself standing there primping!

Ed's awareness soon shifted from the body to the room. The wall he was facing was blank, white and featureless. He turned, and behind him found a slender clear tube that ran from ceiling to floor, with two smaller tubes of some silvery metal running alongside it. He could see a bubbling clear liquid moving down through the clear tube. He reached out to touch the tube, and a cloud of tiny clear filaments reached out to meet him. They touched and penetrated the flesh of his hand, writhing, as if seeking with seeming inquisitiveness, then, finding the hand was something unexpected, retracting to sink back into the clear column. Ed looked at the palm where he'd seen the filaments sink in. He had felt nothing, and there was no mark left behind. The entire column chose that moment to retract itself into a circular spot in the ceiling above him, leaving only a shiny metallic spot. There were a half dozen other spots on the ceiling where columns like his might be lowered.

Beyond the column, the far wall of the room appeared to have two windows, and Ed walked over to them. He touched the surface of the first one, thinking it might be a painting at first. There was a glassy-feeling surface, slightly cool to the touch, but behind it, or beyond it, maybe in it, all that could be seen were stars. Not the blinking, wavering stars he was used to seeing in the night skies of Texas, but what even he knew enough to recognize as the hard, unblinking light of stars as seen from space.

While Ed stared at what he still wasn't sure was a window, a soft musical tone sounded, and as he turned towards it, saw a door open silently in the wall to his left. In his mind he silently added the sound from all the old Star Trek TV shows. You know, the 'SHWEET!' sound that the doors made when they opened?

Ed was in space, he knew it, and if he hadn't already been thinking it, the wide, squat, oily looking body with the mottled skin and the face full of tentacles would have gotten him thinking it. He remembered panicking over this creature, or someone like it back when his brain was working on a much more basic level, anyone from Earth could understand why he was bothered. That face full of tentacles was kind of creepy.

They stood, a dozen feet apart, staring at each other. Well, Ed was staring. He could only assume his host, or whatever it was, was staring. Those tiny blue eyes were all facing him. There were a couple dozen of them, in three soft crescents clustered around a common center. The cluster of tentacles below the cluster of eyes began to move, and shortly afterward, the room spoke in a soft, soothing voice.

"Hello. My name is Trugar. I am the medical technician in charge of your care."

A translator of some kind? Ed couldn't tell where the voice came from exactly. Somewhere overhead.

"Hello, my name is Ed Bell. How are you doing?"

There was another slight pause, as whatever had translated for it did the same for Ed.

"I am fine, Ed Bell. More importantly, how are you feeling?"

"Please, call me Ed." He answered. "I feel pretty darn good, to be honest. I can't say I've ever felt this good in my life. You are definitely an alien, so I can assume we are on a space ship?"

The tentacle waving took a while this time before the reply began.

"Yes Ed. We are aware of the use of familiar addresses, such as first names, but did not want to presume. You are on a space station, permanently stationed in orbit around a planet called Kiris. As your people are called Humans from the planet Earth, I am a Penod from the planet Demelor."

"How is it I can't hear you speak, but your names can be said using words I can hear? Is that a hard translation to make?"

"The names we are using for these places are the transliterations of the names they have been given by the Skafti, the beings who have brought you here."

"What has happened to me?" Ed asked, the floodgates opening. "How did I get so young, and in such a different body? How far from Earth are we?"

"I cannot tell you how far away Earth is. The Skafti have not shared that information with me. The body you had when you were brought aboard the craft that retrieved you was inadequate to the purposes for which the Skafti retrieved you, so a new body was grown, using optimized genetic material from you species. Your current body's age is within the optimal range for your species, and should provide for maximum stamina, endurance, healing and adaptability."

Well, that explained a lot, in an 'I-still-don't-know-shit' kinda way, Ed thought.

"Who are the Skafti?"

"The Skafti are your employers and mine." Trugar said. "However, as a member of an unrecognized species from a primitive planet, your status is somewhat fluid. If the Skafti wish to use you in any public capacity, they will have to treat you as an intelligent being, and that gives you certain rights. The fact that I was allowed to treat you and the other humans suggests that you will be given those rights. I am bound by my oaths as a healer to report it if you are not, if I believe, as I do, that you meet the intelligence requirements."

"So I"m not a slave?"

"You are not. Slavery is one of the things the Rift Conventions abolished, many, many generations ago. Not that it doesn't still exist here and there. Those who still engage in the custom are remote societies, and insular. The Skafti are too much into trade and politics to risk dabbling in slavery."

"You said there were other humans. Did you mean the people who were with me when I was 'retrieved'?"

"Some of them, yes Ed. But others as well. The Skafti's retrieval procedures are not harsh, but the process is not without its dangers."

"How many other humans are there here? Where are they?"

"There are forty seven humans who have been successfully retrieved aboard this station. They are all in another location, and you will get to see them once you are done here. They have been awake and functioning a bit longer than you. You are the last to be brought back to full consciousness, as the medical efforts required for you were the most extensive. You were the oldest, and had the most significant health issues."

"Okay, so what's next then?"

"You have passed all the medical requirements for release, but the Skafti have a standard set of requirements in cases like yours, so you must pass a few physical tests. Nothing too strenuous."

With those words a foggy blur of light seemed to coalesce beside them, until it resolved into a more or less human form with a bald head and wearing nothing but a pair of shorts.

"This is a holographic projection based on your species. It will conduct some drills designed to test your physical status. Please put on the clothing in the drawer."

As Trugar said this a drawer slid out of what Ed had thought was a seamless wall, and sitting in the drawer it revealed was a pair of shorts similar to those worn by the holograph. Putting the shorts on was no different than any pair of shorts he'd ever stepped into, but once these were on, Ed could feel the material seeming to readjust itself to him until the shorts were a perfect fit. Perhaps too perfect, as they were form fitting and left little to the imagination.

'Oh well', Ed thought, 'I have nothing to complain about in that area any more, let 'em look!'

Trugar excused itself for the moment, off somewhere to monitor Ed remotely, he assumed. He made a mental note to ask it about gender the next time they were together. Then he was busy, as the holographic gym teacher ran him through his paces for over an hour. Most of it was pretty familiar stuff — sit ups, push ups, jumping, bending and stretching. Ed had no problems with any of it, and it felt good to be in a body that could do these things so easily and so well. He hadn't had that kind of body since he was an eight year old. In the end, he felt good, was barely sweating at all, and finally felt truly at home in the new body.

Trugar returned, and his holographic companion disappeared at the same time.

"You did very well." Trugar said. "The extra time required may mean you will have an easier time than some, in the end, but you are performing as well as could possibly be expected. Are you hungry?"

Ed swore his stomach grumbled the minute it asked. He was starving!

"Yes, I am." He said.

"I will escort you to the other retrieved humans now, and you will be able to have a meal there."

"Thanks Trugar. By the way. Are you a she or a he, or do those gender terms apply?"

"I am a he, as my species defines it. Gender is important to you?"

"Only because of some language issues. Whatever is doing the translating for us is doing a very good job, by the way."

"There will be some issues to resolve shortly with how you humans are allowed to deal with languages." Trugar said. "Translation devices such as this one are essential when it comes to differences such as ours, or when dealing with races that do not have a verbal speech component at all. Still, for the most part, the prominent races do communicate within the same basic parameters, and learning the major languages is advisable. Yours will have an easier time of it than most races, I expect. I have been told that your home planet is already multilingual, and most of the retrieved speak at least two languages already, I've noticed."

"I'm not what you would call fluent in anything useful besides English, but you don't live where I did without speaking good 'Tex-Mex'." Ed said, which was something of a lie. He was fluent in Spanish, having studied it, once he decided it was worth knowing on its own merits, during high school and college.

What he was also pretty fluent in was Yaqui, or Yoeme Noki. Yoeme is how the Yaqui call themselves. Your guess as to how that evolved to Yaqui was as good as Ed's, but his personal opinion was that it had something to do with the Rio Yaqui, the big river in the Sonora state of Mexico. There had been a lot of Yoeme in old Sonora. Ed's thoughts returned to his childhood.

The Escalante's, Anselmo and Herminia were the family's handyman and housekeeper respectively, and Ed grew up with their son David, who was a year older. David Escalante tried hard to be an American boy, and that eventually meant, in his mind, rejecting his heritage at the same time Ed was becoming fascinated with it. His parents weren't Pascua Yaqui tribe, the American Yaqui, but immigrant Mexican Yaqui from Sonora.

David learned English and baseball and cars and rock and roll while Ed was learning Yoeme and the mix of mysticism and Jesuit catholicism that passed as their religion. The Catholic aspects, particularly their emphasis on Lent and Easter fit in well with the practices of his parents. The Escalante's Yoeme nickname for him was Allea, which means happy. Ed was happy, as a child, sedentary - but happy.

He came back out of his thoughts as they came to a door and stopped.

"I will leave you here. The others are through this door, and they will be able to show you where the food dispenser is."

'Food dispenser huh?' Ed thought to himself as he watched Trugar trundle away on the dozen or so large, lower tentacles that he used for moving about. 'Maybe I could ask it for some Romulan ale.' He thought, grinning at his own silliness over that one. The grin was still on his face when he stepped towards the door and it opened silently in front of him.

Forty six people, Human people, met Ed inside the door. He knew four of them. Kristy James, Peter Lewes, Sammy Cruz and Fred Delgado.

Kristy looked almost unchanged and he recognized her immediately, though Ed's eyes had a hard time moving back up to her face once he realized she was wearing a pair of shorts and something like a sports bra, and nothing else. Peter Lewes was changed very little as well, but he could see that Peter was now a physical specimen like he had become. Sammy and Fred were older looking than he remembered, slightly more mature, but they had both been sixteen or seventeen, if Ed remembered correctly. The change was noticeable, but not huge.

He scanned their faces and the faces of the other people he saw in the room. They couldn't have all been from the Melliza, but he saw no spark of recognition in any of their faces. Ed Bell just didn't look like Ed Bell any more. A man he didn't recognize approached as the door closed behind me.

"Hi there!" He began, holding his hand out for a shake. "I'm Gordon Truitt. We had heard there was one more person undergoing treatment. It looks like we're all here at last."

"Guess I'm glad to be here, considering the alternative." He answered shaking the offered hand. "I'm Ed Bell."

"Captain Ed!" Came the cry from Sammy, Fred and Kristy. "Oh my God!" came Peter's comment a second later.

"He was the captain of our boat!" Fred called back to the rest of the crowd. Ed found a dozen people later who had also been aboard the boat, but didn't get a chance to see their reactions at that moment, because he was swamped by a group hug from his four former shipmates.

"Palo didn't make it?" Ed asked.

"No." Peter said. "We don't know if they tried to take him and he died, or if they left him. They didn't take any of the children aboard or any of the children's parents."

"We've done a survey of those aboard, and everyone taken was either unmarried or with their spouse or significant other." Gordon Truitt said. "The Skafti were able to be pretty selective."

"We seem to be from five different groups." Kristy said. "Our twelve, taken from the Melliza in Laguna Madre; eight from the sea of Japan; nine from a bus near Bergen, Norway; ten from a ferry near the Greek Island of Skopelos; and eight more from a small village near Boende, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo."

"That seems to be a pretty diverse group. How's the communications working?"

"The translation capabilities of these beings have saved us." Peter said. "It would have been a lot harder for us, especially with the Congolese. Everyone else had at least some working knowledge of English, but they all spoke only something called Lingala."

"I was told there was food here, and I'm starving. Any chance of getting a little chicken fried steak or something?

"Of course!" Kristy said, grabbing his arm. "The food dispenser is over here, allow me."

"How long has everyone else been awake?" Ed asked.

"Almost a month for most of us. A little less for a few, but everyone but you has been awake for at least three weeks."

We stopped in front of a small counter built into the wall. A smooth voice, from nowhere, asked. "Service or query?"

"Service please." Kristy said loudly.

"Attending." the voice answered.

"Go ahead and ask it for whatever you want. If it can't make it, or doesn't know what it is, it'll tell you."

"Chicken fried steak and gravy, cottage fries and buttered toast please." Ed said. There was a momentary pause.

"Processing."

"You are probably going to benefit from being such a late comer." Kristy said, "and from Fred and Sam being such chow hounds. They've probably waged all the culinary battles with the food system that you might have, unless you stray away from the standard Texan and Tex-Mex menus."

There was a pleasant dinging sound, and suddenly a large plate with what looked like a fine chicken fried steak and potatoes breakfast appeared on the counter top.

"Coffee?" Kristy asked.

"Oh yeah!" Ed said with some enthusiasm. "Sounds great."

"Cream and sugar?"

"Black for me."

"Two coffees please!" Kristy said.

Kristy and Ed sat at one of the small tables that clustered around the dispenser and she watched him eat while she sipped her coffee. Gordon and another man, along with a woman from the Norwegian contingent came over after he was close to finished.

"Mr. Bell, there are a few things we'd like to ask you if you don't mind."

"Not at all." Ed said. "Pull up a stump."

He was introduced to Ken Itokawa and Berit Schau. Berit was almost as distracting as Kristy, Ed thought.

"We've checked with Pete and the others from your ship that remembered you, and while the rest of us are all still looking pretty much like young, healthy versions of ourselves, it appears you bear no resemblance to your old self. Do you know why?"

"According to Trugar, my body didn't make it through whatever process was involved in getting us all here. On top of that I had some genetic problems, including a bad heart valve. A new body was created for me, using ... how did he say it... 'optimized genetic material from my species.'"

"Trugar?" Kristy asked.

"That was the name of the Penod medical technician who got me squared away after I woke up."

"Are those the ones with all the eyes and tentacles?" The woman asked in heavily accented English.

"Yea, pretty unsettling at first, but once I got used to it I decided I liked Trugar. He had a good bedside manner as they used to say."

After Ed finished the last few bites of his breakfast, he decided it was his turn to ask a few questions.

"Kristy says that you all have been awake for at least three weeks already, and most of you have been here a month. What have they had you doing?"

"Not a damned thing." Gordon answered.

"We exercise every morning." Berit said. "There is a holographic instructor."

"Other than that, they've left us alone, as if they're waiting for something." Kristy said. "Maybe they were waiting for you to be ready?"

"Your guess is as good as mine." Ed said. "Maybe better. I've been awake and aware for less than a day. Have any of you seen our Skafti keepers?"

"Once." Ken answered. "We saw a bunch of them at the very beginning."

"What do they look like?"

"Short and stocky." Gordon said. "Faces that remind me of a badger more than anything else."

"Snouts and teeth, but the hands were almost human looking, and they have soft, hollow voices, when you listen to them instead of the translation."

-oOo-

The speculation that they Skafti were waiting for him proved to be just as wrong as all the other speculation. They sat on their hands for a couple more weeks after Ed joined the group. Beyond finding out where the bathrooms were, and finding one of the small but comfortable sleep surfaces in the 'sleep chamber', as everyone called it, Ed learned nothing new.

He had a small problem with the sleep chamber at first. They employed a 'sleep field', at least that was how he thought of it. You got very little time after your head hit the pillow, and then you were asleep. There was no laying in bed ruminating over the days events, pathetic as they were. Sleep was automatic and unavoidable once you lay down on the sleep surface.

This bothered Ed, mostly because he didn't like the feeling of loosing control, and it interrupted a lifelong ritual of his. It wasn't that the Yaqui influences of his youth had carried over to his adult life so much, or even that he was a lapsed Catholic, which is what his parents had considered him. He liked to spend a little time at the end of each day considering the four facets of the world as they related to him.

The Yoeme divided the world into four aspects: animal, people, flowers and death. Ed had borrowed that concept, greatly twisted from the meanings the Escalantes had tried so hard to share with him, and made it his own. At the end of each day he considered his animal aspect — how he dealt with the urges and passions felt or encountered during the day; his people aspect — how he had dealt with people, and how he had presented himself to people. Those two aspects of the world were pretty concrete. But the worlds of flowers and death he approached more abstractly. Ed asked himself at the end of each day if he could accept death, if it came for him. He had always felt that death was not a horrible fate waiting for him at the end of his life. It was the fate of every living thing, so why fear it?

The world of flowers was another story entirely. This was the spirit world. The Yoeme blended a lot of their original beliefs with the Catholicism of the Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries that came to them, but Ed didn't borrow the trappings of anything, Yoeme or Catholic for his purposes. He used the framework of that origin to examine his own soul at the end of each day.

How do you examine your soul? How do you survive a daily crisis of faith where you convince yourself that you are not yet evil and that your beliefs are true? Or at least true to you?

A good question, and one Ed thought he might never answer. His ex-wife, in a period of evangelical fervor had condemned him to rot in hell for his lack of faith. Ed saw her faith as a blind subordination of will that he wasn't willing to consider. Her fervor barely lasted as long as their marriage, he heard.

So to be able to keep his routine, Ed took to spending a little time each evening before he went to the sleep chamber sitting, cross-legged in a corner of the main room, eyes closed and following his usual end-of-day routine. Most everyone thought it was meditation, but it wasn't really, at least not in the traditional sense. Even so, a few people began to join him. Gordon Truitt had been doing something similar from day one, according to Kristy, but he was always off in a corner by himself, and claimed that what he was doing wasn't meditation either.

Ed tried a couple times to explain what he was really doing to Kristy and a few others that had joined, but nobody really seemed to understand, always reading more into it than was there. It was really more like a nightly self-evaluation and mental inventory. He often thought of a line from an old movie that he used to love called Innerspace. Dennis Quaid's character, Lt. Tuck Pendleton looks at himself in the mirror, decides everything is fine and declares -'The Tuck Pendleton machine: zero defects.', followed by his trademark big, goofy grin. His nightly mental self exam was like that. He looked for defects and flaws, and hoped he could end the exam with a statement like Tuck Pendleton's. Ed rarely made it, but took pride in coming close most of the time. Well, as long as he'd ignored his growiing wasitline.

When things did begin to happen, they happened quickly. Ed saw his first Skafti in the morning of his fifteenth day. He agreed with Gordon Truitt's assessment. They reminded him of badgers as well, maybe with a little Lemur thrown in.

They were sorted into five groups of seven and two groups of six, seemingly at random. Ed's group included Kristy, but all the rest of the Melliza survivors that he knew were in other groups. There was a Skafti for each group. Theirs was obviously female. Once off by themselves, she introduced herself through the translator.

"Hello. My name is Chara. Today you will be taken to the learning center. You will receive a language implant and a personal translator while you are there. Some initial evaluations will take place during this time. The results of these evaluations will determine your initial placement within the Beheri."

That last word didn't translate, and they all heard it only as an echo of her speaking it.

"What is the Beheri?" One of the men in the group asked. This caused some silence before Chara finally answered.

"This is the ... collective enterprise for which the Skafti find continued reason to exist?"

The translator managed to convey the hesitancy with which she answered. They at least understood the words, if not the true meaning this time. This opened the floodgates, and suddenly everyone in the group was asking questions and demanding answers. Ed's group wasn't the only one, and soon the clamor had escalated to cacophony. It took only seconds of this to get him annoyed.

"People!" he hollered into the room at the top of his voice. "Quiet!!" he hollered a moment later to still the last few voices.

"Chara, if we object to being here, will we be returned to our home?" Ed asked loudly.

"No." She replied.

"Ever?" I asked.

"No." she said.

"Is what you are asking us to do today going to harm us, or put us in danger?"

There was some hesitation this time, and a couple of them conferred before she answered.

"No."

"This isn't a cruise ship folks." Ed said to the crowd. "Complaining and making demands is not going to help."

"Thank you." Chara said once we were back to normal. "Please follow me."

Their Skafti led them out the door Ed remembered coming in, and down the hall, back the way he remembered coming. That was an assumption, but Ed left it unvoiced, so who cares if he was right or wrong?

The learning center seemed very similar to the room he'd awakened in. There were the clear fluid-filled columns with the metal companion tubes running from the ceiling to the floor, as he remembered. None of the rest of my group showed any signs of recognition.

They were each ushered to a column and Chara indicated that they should stand with their backs against them. Ed did, and felt nothing, but a moment later the world went black.

I dreamt I was floating, and it wasn't a dream. The world was dark, but there was no world. A voice spoke from the darkness, and I didn't understand, but I knew every word. In the darkness, and without form, I ran where there was no ground, and jumped where there was no air. I kicked and punched and rolled. I aimed weapons I didn't have, flew and swam and danced. I lived and died a million lives in the blink of an eye, and when the darkness went away and was replaced by the face of Chara in front of me and the learning center around me, it was as if I had once been here a lifetime ago.

"Wow!" Ed said in English, then said it again in Skafti. "Sha!"

He might not have even realized what he had done, if Chara had not spoken then.

"Yes, you all can understand and speak Skafti now. You may have some problems with the speaking part until your vocal apparatus become comfortable with the language."

She had said it in Skafti, and there had been no translation.

"Perhaps we should speak in Skafti as much as possible for the time being to aide in the process?" Kristy offered in Skafti.

"Sounds good to me." Ed answered in Skafti as well.

Their group was led back to the common room from which they had come. So it was assumed. There had been no way to collect any sort of personal effects to leave cluttering the place, and it was always spotlessly clean every morning when they woke up. This could be a different but identical room for all they knew, but it seemed to Ed that knowing that wasn't important at the moment.

They were all eventually back in the room, and the Skafti began taking turns calling out names

A flowing display on her forearm began to glow, and Chara looked at it for a moment before addressing us again.

"Ed Bell, Kristy James and Kanu?" Chara called out. "Please gather behind me." Ed and Kristy began moving forward together, and were soon joined by one of the Africans.

"You three have been assigned to my Benu."

Benu was another of those words that didn't translate. With the Skafti language percolating in his brain, Ed understood it to mean, more or less, an aspect of the Beheri which was beneficial.

The door to the learning center opened and another Skafti, wearing the same sort of uniform as Chara, came in and walked up to the three of them standing behind Chara.

"I am Corporal Rega. Please follow me."

They were escorted down the same corridor, not back towards the room were they had left the others, but in the opposite direction, until the corridor they were in opened up on a huge multi-leveled open plaza. The room was full of people of every size, shape and description. Imagine a room the size of the old Astrodome in Houston, filled with an Astrodome-sized group of aliens from the cantina scene in the original Star Wars movie. There was no band playing here, and it was well lit and airy, but the background din of so many voices talking in so many languages, pitched high, low and in between, and you have some idea of how it hit them.

Kanu looked a little wide eyed. He was one of the villagers from the Congo, and Ed was concerned that he was having trouble adjusting to all this.

"You alright Kanu?" he asked in Skafti. Ed didn't think the two of them could have communicated in anything else at the moment, even if they wanted to. Their humanity and knowledge of the Skafti language were the only common points they shared.

"There are so many kinds of people? So many different skins their spirits wear?"

Curiously, Ed recognized that the Skafti word for spirit, Tehe, was similar to the Skafti word for flower, Tehu. He had to assume that this similarity to the Yoeme was coincidental. Probably just a linguistic bit of happenstance. Now was not the time to be bringing spiritual significance to any part of what was going on.

"Many shapes, but their souls are still souls, right Kanu?"

They circled the plaza rather than attempting to walk through it. And came to what Ed assumed was a bank of elevators. Yet another silently sliding door opened. He had managed to get over the tendency to substitute the silent 'shhwwee' sound in his head, but this time Ed was thinking 'Ooh! Turbolift!!'.

It is sad sometimes to know you have grown up with a certain outlook. A certain geek-ish outlook. Ed was determined to keep that aspect of who he was buried for now. Perhaps this new Ed Bell would be different.

"You three are the first of your kind to be welcomed into our benu, the Iri Var." Rega said as we stood in the lift, or whatever it really was. "Soon you will give your oaths, and your new life will begin."

If there was a new Ed, he was as blown away as the old one when that door opened again. Up, down or off on a tangent, the movement had been unnoticeable, but its results definitely were not. They were in a hanger, and in that hanger were space ships!

In huge letters along one wall of the hanger were painted words which he realized he could now read. The Skafti lettering said 'Shuttle Bay 2-15'.

"Shuttles!" Kristy said beside him.

Ed's eyes, and his sense of proportion did some adjusting, and he realized that these were probably all far too small to be full-fledged space ships. The largest of them wasn't even as big as an old Earth space shuttle. Only a couple of the dozens of craft had wings.

They followed Corporal Rega to one of the shuttles and he found them seats, showing them how to strap themselves in. They sat for several long minutes, during which another half dozen beings arrived and took seats in the shuttle.

"You may find this ride unsettling." Corporal Rega told them. "The shuttle has gravity generators, but the compensators are not as powerful as those aboard a normal ship, and not all the effects of movement are canceled."

Ed barely heard him. He was still struggling with what the Skafti had said in the lift.

Iri Var. In Skafti Iri meant 'bringers of', and Var was their word for death.

Iri Var, it turned out, is the Skafti version of the army, navy, air force and marines, all rolled into one. Their shuttle trip had been short, moving them to the Calis, a real space ship, which they got to see through the shuttle's view screens as they approached it.

"The Calis is a multipurpose transport, intended to move personnel and equipment wherever it is needed." The corporal said as he took us through a maze of corridors to a huge barracks. "We will be aboard for ten days en route to Ai Ru, one of the core Skafti worlds, and the location of the Iri Var's primary training center."

The barracks looked like it had room for a couple hundred, but there were only twenty or thirty people there when they arrived. Corporal Rega led them up to a being who wore a uniform similar to his, and the two of them exchanged what Ed assumed was a salute, when each of them slapped their open left hand onto their right shoulder. Or haunch might have been the proper term as it applied to the sergeant. He had six legs and two arms and a long thin head that seemed to be all neck. A pair of squinty black eyes stared out from that head, and they looked us over silently for a while before glancing down at a forearm display like the one Ed remembered Chara having.

"I am Sergeant Gan. You three are new I see. You look something like the Orminites, except for the hair. We've got four Ormin here, if you'd prefer bunking near them?"

Ed looked at Kristy and Kanu, and neither of them did more than shrug.

"Doesn't matter to us, I guess." Ed answered. "We are from a non-space-faring race, so you are all new to us."

"You Engeri need to report to the night crew over at the Red and Black partition you can see towards the back." The sergeant said to two of our companions from the shuttle. They were both wearing wraparound sunglasses. "The rest of you fall out and find a free node. We'll be breaking orbit shortly."

They weren't sure what a free node was, but the sergeant didn't wait for a reply, and they were suddenly on our own in a room full of alien strangers.

"Do you think we should ask someone what a free node is?" Kristy said.

"Perhaps it is what they call a bunk?" Kanu asked. "The activity of the others here seems to be centered around the sleep fields like those we had back at the space station."

That made sense to Ed, so they tried to find a spot they liked that they could settle down in. He was shooting for one along one of the edges, so they had at least one side that didn't face someone else. Not that the sleep fields left you worried about restless nights. Looking around he realized that some of their companions were sitting in mid-air rather than laying down.

"We need to find out how to do that." he said, nodding to an example as they passed by. With only thirty people in the huge room, there was no problem finding sleep fields near the edge. They stopped near a small blue-green fellow with long ears and friendly eyes who was sitting on his field in the manner they were curious about.

"Excuse me, but could I ask you a question?" Ed asked. "These sleep field things are new to us, and we don't know how to operate them for anything except sleeping. We see you are using yours to sit in. Could you show us how to do that?"

"Sure." The creature said. "Low tech recruits are you?"

"Way lower than this." Kristy said. "We managed to send a few men to the moon orbiting our home planet, and a few unmanned probes to other planets in our system, but that was about it."

"My name is Ledda. I'm from Parandi 9. What do you call yourselves?"

"I'm Kristy, this is Ed and Kanu. We are from Sol 3."

They made their introductions and then Ledda gave them a nice introduction to the Skafti universal comfort station, military version.

"You came from the processing center at the Kantes Station, I take it?" He asked later as they all sat on their 'bunks', getting to know each other. "You had to have been taken rather than recruited, I'd guess."

"Yes." Kanu said. "I wonder how it is possible for these people to take us. Are there no laws amongst these beings to prevent taking innocent people from their homes without asking?"

"Yes and no." Ledda answered. "Primitive societies, those without space travel or unified governments are supposed to be off-limits for recruiting unless there is some near term mass extinction event predicted for their planet. Were you aware of any likelihood of that happening?"

"No, but there were many governments with the capability of launching weapons that could very well do that sort of thing." Ed answered.

"I would suspect that something like that was predicted to happen then, or some other natural event which might have caused it. A predicted collision with an object in space, or a stellar event. Did your scientists believe your home star to be stable?"

"We are not scientists, but to the best of my knowledge our scientists did believe our star was very stable." Kristy answered.

"Well, I would expect that even if you could return to your planet today, the day is not too far off when you would not be able to or want to." Ledda said. "That is how the Skafti usually operate."

"How reliable is that 'usually'?" Ed asked.

"Pretty reliable." Ledda answered. "The Skafti do have enemies, politically and otherwise, who would like to catch them doing something unsavory or unethical, so they would be careful to make good choices, but even if it were not so, they are a fairly honorable species, compared to most. Odd in some ways, pretty normal in others, but when you start comparing species across the galaxy, you have to ask yourself how is it possible to decide what's normal?"

"What about meals?" Kanu asked. "On the station we had food dispensers. Is it the same here?"

"Here it will be." Ledda said. "I hear that once we get to the training facility it will often be a little more primitive. I guess that's by design."

"We're still absorbing the concept that we are suddenly members of a military force, even if only in training." Kristy said. "I never had any kind of military training back home."

"Me either." Ed said. "I had health problems that kept me from serving."

"I was once in the military of my home land." Kanu said. "before the current unrest, when I was young. The military there now is at the center of a horrendous and cruel conflict which finds my people pitted against each other. I am happy to be away from it."

"How quickly were you selected from your group?" Ledda asked. "Were you among the first or the last?"

"I'm not absolutely sure, but I think we were the very first ones selected." Kristy said, to which Kanu and Ed immediately agreed.

"Interesting." Ledda said. "They select for the best units first, the Iri Voch. They are considered the elite. If you are going to that Peshbenu, your training will take much, much longer than mine."

More new Skafti terms that didn't quite translate. All in good time, they assumed.

"Many of my people volunteer for service in the Iri Vas." Ledda said. "The Parandi often make good pilots, especially for surface to orbit combat craft. I have taken the pre-recruitment tests back home and I have high hopes for qualifying in that area. We have never had anyone selected for the Iri Voch."

A gong sounded, and the area's lighting began to flash.

"We are breaking orbit." Ledda said.

Their ten days aboard the Calis were educational, to say the least. They did meet the Ormin on board, and they did seem very human, except for the lack of hair. They all had high-pitched, squeaky voices, and were obviously uncomfortable in the gravity they were sharing. Ed hadn't thought about it before, but they were grouped together with these others because they shared a common set of physiological parameters, but that didn't mean they were all as comfortable with the 'average' settings the Skafti used. For the Ormin this meant that the gravity in the common areas was about twenty percent higher than they were used to.

That twenty percent was about as big a difference as the Skafti would allow, and at the other end of that spectrum in our group were a couple of Tomon — large, blocky quadrupeds with Horns like a good 'ol Texas longhorn and a mouth full of what looked like very sharp, needle-like teeth. They were also the first beings any of them had seen with obvious signs of scales.

One of the first thing they had noticed, back when they awakened on the space station, was that the Skafti day was a little shorter than an Earth day. Since they were allowed to eat and sleep whenever they wanted there, it made little difference. On the Calis though, they observed a normal Skafti day, and meal times followed the Skafti standard, or rather the 'universal time' which had been modeled after it.

The 'universal day' was divided into 15 'tan', and each tan was divided into 45 Lotans, which were themselves further divided into 90 hotan. A hotan was a touch longer than an Earth second, so a lotan was close to two minutes and a tan was close to an hour and a half. That made the Skafti day approximately 22 hours, as close as they could calculate. With no Earth clock to use for comparison, the three humans had no way of knowing for sure.

The Skafti had three meal times in their day. First meal was after awakening. Two more meals, lighter than the First meal, came at 3 tan intervals. Lights out came at ninth tan.

The Calis' food dispensers were a bit problematic at first. They hadn't received the data the ones in the processing center had, and food items familiar to them weren't available for the first four days. They notified Sergeant Gan, and he passed word up channel.

"The beings upstairs must like you homins." the Sergeant told them when they found the dispensers had finally been updated. "Four days is damned quick for something like this."

"Humans." Ed corrected automatically. "We appreciate the effort, and some of what we had to eat while we were waiting was pretty good. Educational too."

Ed don't know if it was the return to familiar food, or if his days had been numbered all along, but that fourth day, after the third meal, Kristy jumped him in the waste facilities.

As little concern for privacy as the Skafti seemed to have when it came to sleeping and bathing, as evidenced by the communal areas they built for those purposes, they did at least have some concept of privacy when it came to restrooms. There were long rows of 'waste cells', which were the only areas they had access to that had doors which could be closed. These rooms strove to be universal, and whatever fixture you needed came up out of the floor or out of the wall once you'd closed the door.

Kristy and Ed took their usual walk to the facilities after the last meal had a chance to settle, about an hour before lights out, and when Ed broke off for a waste cell, he was surprised to have Kristy shoulder him in, closing the door behind them.

"This has gone on long enough, Ed." She said. He had a little trouble dodging the toilet that came up out of the floor. The toilet was close to what they were used to, but it sat a little lower and was a little wider. Ed forgot about the toilet immediately though. Kristy was in the process of stripping her top off. He had seen Kristy in the showers of course. There was no privacy there. Ed was used to heading straight to one of the waste cells after their shower because he would develop a problem that prevented him from getting anything done until it had been taken care of.

This wasn't the showers, and Kristy's dark nipples were stiff with excitement.

"I need sex, Ed." she continued, beginning to slide her shorts off. "You have been a perfect gentleman, but dammit, I don't need a perfect gentleman right now, I need a stiff dick!"

'Well, I have that, sure enough.' Ed thought. 'Guess I'd be glad to oblige her.' he said so as he struggled to get his shorts off over his stiff cock.

"I guess I'd be happy to oblige, Kristy."

Kristy didn't look for help or stop to consider how to proceed. She pushed him down to a sitting position on the toilet and climbed on. As hard as he was, and as wet as she was, and as desperate as they both were for this at the moment, their first coupling was done on biological autopilot, and was quick, hard and heated. Ed's roar, and Kristy's scream when they climaxed in turn echoed through the waste cell.

Kristy sat there for a while afterwards, silent and sweating against Ed. He lifted her head up, once the stars had stopped spinning, and kissed her. She let out a long, low laugh after they broke the kiss, and he joined her. The natural movements they made as they laughed together produced some interesting sensations where they were still coupled. Ed had softened, but not completely.

"Oh God!" he said.

"God yes!" Kristy added, doing something with her muscles that squeezed Ed's dick lightly. She lifted slightly, then dropped down. "Do you think you can go again, a little slower and less primal this time, so we can enjoy it?"

"If I enjoy it any more than that last time, I may not live through it, but I'm your man. Lets go." he said, flexing himself.

"Mmmm." she said, flexing against him. He felt himself growing harder, and they began moving slowly in a rhythm as old as humanity.

"You are mine, aren't you?" she said into his shoulder later.

Of course Ed was. He always had been.

== Ai Ru, Kri Masa Training Center ==

None of them couldn't have revealed much about Ai Ru for a while after they got there. They made orbit and were transported to Kri Masa within a tan of their arrival. There were view screens in the shuttle that brought them down, but with their control of gravity, The Skafti shuttle dropped straight down through the dark sky on the night side of the planet. It was the middle of the night at Kri Masa. All they saw were lights. Lots and lots of lights, though the area they ultimately descended into was surrounded by a great deal of darkness.

"It looks like We'll be isolated." Kristy said.

"Looks like they don't want us mingling with the citizens until we're housebroken." Ed said.

That was the last cute comment he had the energy to utter for another six weeks.

It was a given, they all assumed, that everyone had learned Skafti by the time they arrived, but they sure didn't know Skafti like the instructor who greeted them at the door of the shuttle knew Skafti!

They were colorfully and loudly encouraged to move, at speed, towards a distant building, where they were told, in the same manner, to line up and wait for further instructions.

The voice belonged to Sergeant Hok, they were informed, as they stood in that line. Then some deficiencies in the forming of that line were pointed out, and they corrected those deficiencies, again accompanied by loud and colorful Skafti encouragement. Only when the Sergeant was finally, and regretfully satisfied did the camp commander put in her appearance.

"I am Commander Lega." She said as she walked down the length of their line. "Every deficiency, every failing, every weakness that Sergeant Hok and his staff find will be reported to me."

The Commander had an artificial hand. The artificiality of it became obvious to Ed as she turned to walk back up the line. It didn't look artificial in the way it would have back on Earth. Hers was bright, shiny and metallic, yet smooth and flowing, as if the entire thing were made of liquid. Like those liquid metal terminator robots from the movies.

"If you prove to be too weak, too prone to failure, too full of deficiencies, you will see me again, and I will be affixing my signature to the papers which wash you out of the Iri Voch." Commander Lega continued. Ed hadn't had that much practice reading the facial expressions of the Skafti, but even so, the measure of distaste which formed as she spoke was obvious. "If that happens, you will be moved back to the Iri Var, or perhaps given an assignment in a civilian benu, where you will lead a useful and fulfilling life, but it will not be Iri Voch!"

The Skafti may have been a high-tech society, but they believed in starting with the low-tech side of things when it came to training the Iri Voch. Much of it would have been at home at any boot camp known to man. A lot of running, obstacle courses, muddy fields, climbing up, climbing down and getting over under or around. Beyond that, they were taught survival techniques — how to build a fire from a couple pieces of wood and some attitude, how to make shelter, clothing, and equipment starting with nothing.

"If you do not die in training, if you do not wash out, if you show some signs that the evaluators back at the retrieval points or recruiting centers you came from were correct in their initial readings, you will someday fire a weapon and wear the battle armor of the Iri Voch." Sergeant Hok would say. "But today you will make a fire, and if you have time, maybe catch and kill something, and eat a meal today."

After three weeks of primitive training, amid primitive conditions and with either no cloths or nearly no clothes, They were finally issued uniforms. Gray-green, form-fitting once piece suits that self-adjusted in the same ways the shorts and the women's tops that they had received on the space station did.

While the initial field training had been brutally low tech, the Skafti were used to many of their recruits needing education and training in what were considered the basics of Skafti society and technology, so those who needed it got extra hours of work whenever they were not in the field. Ed was surprised at how many there were.

The Skafti had medical and technological methods of increasing their capacity for learning, and the rate at which they could learn, but while some of it was sort of miraculously 'planted' in their minds, they still had to do a lot of the learning the old fashioned way. Almost old fashioned, anyway. Most of the instructors were holographic, after all. Still, some of the teaching had to be done by real people. There were no holographic tutorials for some of the basics of life, so they had to learn them from someone who already knew them.

What kind of things were the real instructors teaching? Imagine you had an ancient Roman living at your house. He might figure out the shower and the bed pretty quickly, but what about the television and the dishwasher. Could you find anything on the educational channels designed to teach someone how to use your cell phone? An iPod? The microwave?

So some of the teachers were real, and some of the lessons were basic facts of life. As they were being taught to kill, they were also being taught how to live.

Kanu had not stuck with Ed and Kristy, once they'd arrived. He seemed to favor the Ormin, and Ed suspected that the physiological similarities were encouraging enough to make sex a possibility. He was morose and withdrawn around the couple when they were together, and barely better away from them. He had hated military service back on Earth, and wasn't enjoying this new version much either, despite his early successes. If they had known him better, perhaps Kristy or Ed might have prevented it, but four weeks into the program, Kanu attempted suicide in one of the waste cells.

He wasn't the first to do so, apparently, but he was the first from their group, and the cluster was a gloomy place for several days. Of course the waste cells, as much as they had been designed to give those who felt a need for some privacy a place to go, were also designed to watch out for these sorts of things, and Kanu was 'saved' by a suddenly arriving medical team. He was treated and brought before Commander Laga, where she signed the papers removing him from the rolls of the Iri Voch.

Ed and Kristy never saw him again.

A week after the suicide attempt, they moved on to real weapons and combat training. They had slowly collapsed down to a single 'barracks' as their numbers diminished, and when they were all moved to their new location at the end of week four, they saw the next class come in, and Ed remembered then that there had been others in the camp when we had arrived, moving in orderly fashion here and there. He had just been too busy and too tired to wonder who they were. He imagined these newcomers would be going through the same thing.

Sergeant Posa, their first real combat instructor was not Skafti. He introduced himself as an Argantan. Argantans were the second species they'd encountered that were similar to humans, but they were, Sergeant Posa told Kristy and Ed privately, universally hairy, thin and wiry. Collectively their society had a history of warfare, and individually, the warriors of Arganta had a history of martial excellence. 'He certainly can kick our asses.' Ed thought.

Once they began to show some progress with hand-to-hand techniques, they added knives, swords, sticks, darts, you name it. If it could be swung or thrown and kill or injure, Ed swore that at one time or another in that six weeks, they had it in their hands.

"Almost anything is a weapon in the hands of the Iri Voch." The Sergeant took pride in saying.

They saw other humans in the new group coming in, and received permission from Sergeant Hok to visit with them during their off hours. There were eight humans in the new class, none of them looked familiar.

It must have been odd for them, seeing two fellow humans from Earth, dressed in the uniforms of the Iri Voch, while they were still barely dressed in their minimal processing center shorts and tops, approach them in the mess hall.

"Welcome to Kri Massa." Ed said in English. "I'm Ed Bell, and this is Kristy James."

"Luther Rutan." The nearest man said. "We don't all speak English, I'm afraid."

"What news of Earth?" Kristy asked in Skafti.

"There had been reports of an asteroid." One of the women said. "Before they took us, I had been hearing that there was an asteroid coming, a big one."

"There was a lot of panic when the announcement was first made saying we had a year and a half until the end." Another woman said. "A lot of people died in riots, but it wasn't going to matter. We were all going to die anyway."

"The scientists were saying it was too big. It was going to wipe us out, wipe out all life. Some people saw that as an excuse to do whatever the hell they wanted with the rest of their time."

"We're under the impression that the Skafti began pulling people off the planet in small groups as soon as it was confirmed that this would happen." Kristy said. "Have you heard any more than that?"

"That was what we were hearing too." a slender man with sandy hair said. "Once the riots started they became a little less secretive, I think. I had heard several BBC reports of 'strange craft in the sky' and missing citizens. Of course it all made sense when I woke up in the processing center."

"Bullshit!" said another of the men. "Sorry, name's Wyatt Ames. I don't think anything made sense when we woke up in the center. It made sense later, but not at first."

It was little more than that, the first time. Some introductions, and a little word of home, and some hope that the Skafti had taken more humans than Kristy and Ed had thought.

"There may be enough of us left, that we won't die out, if we can keep in contact with each other." Kristy said later in one of the waste cells, after a strangely melancholy, yet urgent session of lovemaking.

The two of them had been doing a lot of thinking, once they began the ball rolling. It made them realize there were questions they hadn't thought to ask yet. One of them got them an interview with Commander Lega.

"I understand you two have questions about mating?" She asked, once they had been told to be at ease.

"Yes sir." Ed said. "We are of a species which didn't exist, to my knowledge, off our home world. We have learned that our home world is due for an asteroid impact which will render it lifeless. Those of us retrieved by the Skafti will be all that is left of us."

"Earth, you call it?" she asked. "I've read your files of course."

"We are learning what it means to be Iri Voch, but we cannot be Skafti, so we must try to be ourselves. To that end, Kristy and I wish to be bonded, to be a couple."

"You are worried that this may not be permitted in the Iri Voch?"

"Yes." Kristy agreed. "Also we wonder about having children some day."

"These are understandable concerns, especially for a refugee species such as yours. Do I assume correctly that the arrival of more homons in the camp has spurred these questions?"

"Humans." Ed and Kristy simultaneously corrected. "Yes. We wish to share our thoughts on this with them. We remember what happened to Kanu, because we let him isolate himself, and hope to prevent that from happening again."

"Nothing you do or say can guarantee that, but I agree that it would be a good thing for you to try. You have my permission to speak further with the other humans. As far as bonding goes, that will have to wait until you have left Kri Masa. I will send a message with you to your next station. Your status will change there, and a bonding will be possible."

A week later, with their time at Kri Masa almost over and all the preparations made that they were allowed to, they made a point of meeting with the others again.

"The Skafti may have saved the human race, if they've rescued enough of us." Ed said to the group. "I am living proof that they are adept at manipulating genetic code. I was a mess of a man on Earth, but here I'm more than I ever dreamed I could be. Even if the numbers are few, they can provide the genetic material needed to ensure more humans in the future."

"We're all optimized, compared to what we were on Earth." The sandy haired fellow said. He seemed to have moved into something of a leadership position amongst the group. "But farmed chickens were physical specimens compared to their wild and free cousins, and it didn't do them any good in the end."

"The motives of the Skafti aside, the question is, are you prepared to put out some efforts to preserve the species?" Kristy said. "If you are, there are some things we think we all should be doing."

"The motives of the Skafti aside, what do you suggest we do?" he asked.

"While you are here, you are in danger of isolating yourself, and loosing hope. Don't let that happen." Kristy said. "We were three when we came, but we lost our third. He tried to commit suicide, and is no longer among the Iri Voch. I'm not sure if they let him remain in the Iri Var, or moved him to another benu entirely."

"You are all currently primed for learning. The Skafti have opened us up to learning, so learn! Keep the old Earth languages alive by sharing them with each other and learning them."

"Forget politics and the kind of history that we learned in schools. Remember the places and people of Earth that made us proud." Ed said. "Tell each other about the Grand Canyon or the Great Wall, talk of the sea and the mountains, the desert winds or the open plains."

"Remember Einstein and Ghandi and Mother Teresa. Pass along the words of people who are our shining examples." Kristy said. "If they're not familiar to you, it doesn't matter! You're not remembering for yourselves, you're remembering for those who will come after us. The next generation."

"We will be leaving a record, for others who follow in the camp data system." Ed said. "Commander Lega has given us permission. Add to it when your time comes, and near the end of your time here, keep an eye out for others of us, as we did with you. Use it, and share it, and together, maybe we will keep who we were and where we came from alive."

"Remember Earth. Remember what it means to be Human." Kristy said in parting.

There was a ceremony, their last day at Kri Masa. More of a mustering out, as they were gathered for transport to their new stations. Ed was surprised that not everyone who made it through this basic training was automatically moving on to the same place, but instead we were splitting up into groups. Kristy and Ed were part of a smaller group of eight who boarded a shuttle and headed into orbit where they became passengers aboard a ship called the Igen.

Six days later the Igen dropped them off on a planet called Ketik, and a camp called Kri Ruvai.

== Ketik, Kri Ruvai Training Station ==

They weren't hustled out of the shuttle by a screaming instructor this time. Instead, the eight of them from Kri Masa, along with twelve others who we had joined them on the ship, walked calmly down the ramp and into the base itself from a rooftop access point. It was raining and windy, and they were ushered out of the weather with due haste.

"Welcome to Kri Ruvai. I am Captain Risch." the uniformed figure who greeted them said. "The rain and the wind you saw briefly is the prevalent condition on Ketik. You will get used to it, or drown trying."

The loud, grating sound that followed this statement was laughter, they decided later. Captain Risch it seemed, thought himself a witty person.

At Kri Masa they had slowly but inevitably lost all the quadrupeds and others whose physiology made it difficult, if not impossible for them to climb or swim. They were all bipeds or multi-peds. There were some there more agile than Kristy and Ed, and some less, but there were none left who could be called slow or awkward. Ed was wondering who they would be loosing here, but the camp commander put those thoughts to rest very quickly, once they were mustered in front of him.

"You are here because you are Iri Voch." Commander Paruz said. "Unlike your previous station, there is no way to wash out of this one. You are Iri Voch. Whether it is tomorrow or a thousand years from now, you will die Iri Voch."

There was a loud 'Hu!' from our collective throats then. It surprised Ed to hear his own voice adding to it.

"You have two hours each morning for exercise. There are no instructors. You are Iri Voch, you will keep yourselves fit. You will have weapons and armor training. Those who do well will advance quickly. Those who do not will keep at it until you are competent. There are no incompetent Iri Voch!"

"Hu!" They replied again.

"There are sixty beings in this class. There are three captains. Each of you have already met your captain, and each captain has two corporals who will assist him and you with your training. Dismissed."

Captain Risch presented them to corporal Asi and Corporal Nem, and asked them to escort the group to their barracks.

"Bell, James? If you'll remain with me please?"

Other than a couple of 'hu!'s yelled along with everyone else, Ed hadn't opened his mouth even once so far at Kri Ruvai, and he was in trouble already?

Captain Risch somehow recognized the look on his face and laughed, a slightly less grating version of the laugh they'd gotten earlier.

"Word was sent ahead from your previous station." He said. "Commander Paruz is waiting in his office to see you. Follow me."

They jog-trotted from the formation hall down a series of corridors until they arrived at an open door. An officer sat at a desk, behind which could be seen another office, partially obscured. The officer tapped something on his desk, then spoke.

"Commander? Captain Risch is here with Bell and James."

"You can go right in." He said almost immediately.

The commander was standing behind his desk, and motioned them forward to stand in front of it. Captain Risch and the officer from the front office stood behind us. There was a large black machine of some kind on his desk, with two flat gray disks on top of it.

"Bell, James, it is my understanding that you two wish to be bonded. Is that correct?"

"Yes Sir!" Kristy and Ed said almost simultaneously.

"Very well. Would you each place a hand on one of the disks?" He said, motioning to the machine on his desk. They both did, and there was a brief glow beneath their hands. A sheet of material came spooling out of the top of it, and the commander took it, gave it a glance and put it on the desk in front of him, breaking into a tight smile.

"Congratulations. You are now officially recognized anywhere in the beheri as a bonded couple. A beheri bonding is the most widely recognized in the galaxy." he bragged. "These records are kept electronically, but this printout is for ceremonial purposes." With that the commander brought out a small tube from a drawer in his desk, placed the flat end of it on the printout and pressed down. A glimmer of light escaped from between them, and when he lifted it, there was a very stylish hologram embedded in the material. Ed recognized it immediately, as its duplicate could be found on the right shoulder of everyone in the room except the newlyweds.

The commander handed Ed the printout, and he glanced at it then passed it in turn to Kristy.

"Bonded couples in the Iri Voch aren't unusual, but the bondings don't often form this early in the process. Still, its understandable I suppose, given your refugee status. I would expect others amongst you homons will be bonding early as well."

"Humans." Kristy, Captain Risch and Ed all said simultaneously. That generated one of the Captain's laughs.

Fast, thorough and without much emotion. That same description was frequently appropriate when dealing with the Skafti. Sadly, another Skafti constant was their odd sense of privacy, or rather, lack of it. This meant that even the newly bonded didn't get any consideration for privacy. The captain dropped them off at the group's quarters and told them there would be a group assembly in half a Tan. That was close to 90 minutes, old Earth time. They were each assigned a storage cell by Corporal Nem. The sleep fields were first come, first serve, just like they'd been at Kri Masa. As soon as they had the precious printout stored in Kristy's storage cell, which was their only possession other than uniforms, Kristy dragged Ed to a waste cell, which in that moment became their honeymoon suite, and almost all of those remaining minutes were spent executing a little connubial bliss. It was near the showers and they weren't late for the assembly.

"Ladies and gentlemen, what I have in my hands is the standard issue Iri Var pulse rifle." Corporal Asi said. Indeed, it looked very much like a rifle might have on Earth, a little smoother flowing, with a larger bore on what Ed assumed was the business end.

"The standard issue pulse rifle is a selectable mode attack weapon that is capable of firing either single or triple pulse blasts. Each blast is rated at 150 luhn. For those of you still getting used to the Skafti standard units and measures, this is enough energy to kill an unarmored Skafti or Skafti-equivalent lifeform. It will damage or destroy even moderately insulated electromechanical systems and will knock most unshielded biosynths out of action for at least half a Tan."

They learned to shoot a pulse rifle, they learned to care for a pulse rifle, how to keep it clean and happy so it would kill on command. They carried them wherever they went at first, though the ones they were first issued did not have power cells. When they went to the practice range, the instructors had a power cell that they shared, as each 'candidate' stepped up to take their turn.

Ed had held and fired a .22 caliber rifle when he was a boy. It had been David Escalante's, and he was a dedicated 'plinker', taking his rifle out into the outskirts of town to plink away at cans, bottles and whatever small scurrying critters happened by. Ed hadn't enjoyed it then. He had been intimidated by the feel of the cold, hard steel and a little put off by the hard edge that David took on whenever they were shooting. Ed was a lousy shot and only went a few times before he started saying no when David asked.

Despite his childhood memories, Ed loved his pulse rifle, and he found he was good with it. He focused his artificially enhanced, wide-open, ready-for-learning brain cells and muscle memory and worked hard to move beyond good, and Kristy came along for the ride.

Two weeks after they'd begun rifle training the group was introduced to pulse grenades, MAM charges and seeker units.

Pulse grenades operated off of the same technology as the rifles, but they were designed to deliver a much higher volume discharge, and were meant to be thrown or launched from their rifles. They were sort of a cross between the old Earth hand grenades and RPGs, they weren't rocket propelled, and they weren't guided. They were more like a hand held mortar than anything, and were designed to tackle things a standard pulse rifle couldn't crack.

MAM charges were explosives. The kind you set next to something you really wanted to blow up. They used a matter/anti-matter reaction, and were, as Corporal Asi described them, 'highly energetic'. The charges came pre-assembled in several sizes, the largest of which was about the size and dimensions of the bags used as the bases in baseball. They only got to see one of those fired off, and it required a field trip to one of the airless moons that orbited the planet.

Seeker units were hand-launched guided missiles, but they, like most everything that required propulsion, used some kind of gravity generator. They were fast, close to silent, and curiosities only until the first time they saw one explode.

These devices were impressive, and the Iri Voch that was growing in all of them was enthusiastic, but they paled in comparison, in Ed's mind to what came with it.

Battle Armor. Yes, it is something that should be capitalized now and then.

This wasn't the power-assist stuff like what Ed remembered from Starship Troopers - the Heinlein novel, not the abortion of a movie they made back in the 1990's on old Earth. It didn't make you jump higher or run faster, but it kept you safe, warm and dry (or cold and wet, if that was what your species required.) It would stand up to most field weaponry, including the Skafti pulse rifle - though three or four shots from a pulse rifle would eventually overload something if the discharge cells didn't have time to cycle.

What made the battle armor so awesome was the electronics, or the Skafti equivalents. The suits had a communications suite that tied into the Skafti battle-net, allowing suit-to-suit communications, as well as links that could tie into the entire network. In theory an Iri Voch, sitting in the jungles of some hostile planet in the middle of a firefight, could be directing operations for an Iri Var battle group, deep space Nova class battle carriers and all.

Along with the comm suite, came the detection gear, both the standalone stuff built into the suit and the links to the orbital arrays that usually were inserted around any planet where the Iri Var were operating. They had infrared, ultraviolet, chemical, gravitic, x-ray, radio and particulate detection systems that were as adept at spotting rotting food as they were nuclear reactors.

The introductions to the suits were gradual, but again assisted by the overnight educations that got pumped in via the sleep fields. They learned to put them on and take them off under every possible condition. They ran in them, slept in them, grew comfortable in them, and then, after their fifth week, things got serious.

== Helidi, Middle of Nowhere ==

They got dropped into the middle of a jungle on a planet they learned was called Helidi. Ed abbreviated it, and just called it Hel. Their sleep fields had been used against them and they were kept asleep until the day they woke up in the jungle in groups of six. They were left on Helidi for 35 days. No pulse rifles and no supplies, except for their battle armor and standard issue field knife, strapped into its familiar spot.

The denizens of Helidi did not like them much, and chose every opportunity to demonstrate this. Their group lost two of six, and did better than most. One group was wiped out completely.

They might have lost three themselves but Ed was carrying Kristy strapped to his back, with her broken leg in a makeshift splint, when the pickup ship came. You don't even want to hear about the creature that could shatter a leg through Skafti battle armor. Someday Ed planned to return to Helidi and kill one of the bastards just to make himself feel better. Who cares if they are just mindless beasts?

Helidi was the Skafti equivalent of a wilderness preserve. The entire planet. No one who was ever called Iri Voch existed who hadn't survived their 35 days on Helidi. Everyone at Kri Ruvai took on a new measure of respect in Ed's eyes from then on. They had been measured in that way as well. Upon their return, that nifty patch that Ed had noticed on everyone's shoulder appeared on theirs as well.

== Ketik, Kri Ruvai ==

It has been noted repeatedly that the Skafti have different ideas about privacy, but that was not the only way in which their thought processes differed from Ed and Kristy's. Once they were back, they were turned loose on the final phase of their training, and it was a killer, but not the way you're thinking.

Six months of independent study. Oh, and during those six months, there were a couple of surgeries here and there.

Independent study. They were given access to the Skafti datanet, with all the access that their benu granted. Study, learn, explore, whatever the hell they wanted. No restrictions, no limits, no questions.

Ed was sure they were tracking every single data request, but he didn't care. He dove into the Skafti histories to begin with, while Kristy struggled with their technical and scientific records. At the same time both of them tried to collect as complete a picture of what had happened to the rest of old Earth's refugees as possible.

They were surprised by the numbers. Ed thought there would be a couple thousand people retrieved, but in the end there had been 124,631 people retrieved. Of those 74,655, about two thirds, wound up in the Iri Var. The percentages were revealing. There were only 18 humans in the Iri Voch.

"Ed, look at this." Kristy said from across the room one day. Ed went over to where she sat watching a data readout flow across her display. "The Dur Vai has ordered the Genetics council to re-scan the human genome, and reclassify it."

"Do they give a reason?"

"We surprised them, it appears, with the high percentage of us that were found to be fit for the Iri Var."

The Dur Vai was the administrative benu, and the civilian benu most heavily dominated by the Skafti themselves.

"This could mean a little more favorable outlook for us, as a group." Ed thought out loud.

They were still pondering those possibilities a few days later when the first surgeries came due.

You know Wolverine? The comic book character? Or maybe you saw the movies back on old Earth? Okay, maybe your parents did. Wolverine had an adamantium skeleton. He had this really incredible healing ability, but it was the adamantium skeleton that made him so tough. Of course he had the wicked claws made out of the stuff too.

There's no such thing as adamantium, but Ed and Kristy got the Skafti equivalent as their first surgery. A mesh of nano-woven metallic microfibers now sheathed every bone in their body, as well as all of their internal organs. The broken leg that Kristy suffered on Helidi would have never happened if they had these sheaths then.

Yes, in theory Ed could now get kicked in the balls and laugh it off.

He did not run off looking for someone to test this for him though, he was still a little wary. Besides, despite the Penod doctors best reassurances, his entire body felt itchy for days. Imagine an itch you can't scratch, and then imagine it everywhere, from head to toe.

Yeah. At least the sleep field doesn't care. They were still getting their full amount of sleep.

The Skafti, Ed had been learning, had been expanding through this part of the galaxy for close to three thousand years. It was not a race, in their minds, to find and exploit suitable planets, it was simply another aspect of the beheri.

Not every planet the Skafti found was settled immediately, not even among those that were likely candidates. Not every intelligent species they encountered was brought into the beheri and given purpose within it.

There were many benu within the Skafti Beheri, and some species found their niche within them. Pai Sud, the medical and genetic benu, was almost completely made up of Penod and a few brilliant and determined individuals from a variety of other races. There were three races that were more or less equally represented in the Maga, the science and technical benu. The Skafti themselves of course; the Tolchorans, a race of warm-blooded spider-like creatures with a lot of legs and hands and bright, bright minds; and the Diadin, a pseudo-amphibious symbiotically paired species from a world called Caalb.

"I don't know if we could ever be as brilliant, technically or scientifically, as the Tolchorans or the Diadin, but I believe we could at least be as good as the Skafti. As a species, I mean, not you or me." Kristy said one evening. "Particularly if we had Tolchoran teachers. The universality of the technology the Skafti have, and the common understanding of it within the many races in their beheri is due mostly to the Tolchorans."

The fact that the Tolchorans were one of the first species that the Skafti came across when they began moving through the stars may well have been the key to their success. The Tolchorans were dramatically non-aggressive, and were content with the few planets they had settled, willing to expand only when they needed to. They were a more advanced society, technologically and socially, than the Skafti when they met. The Skafti, ever adaptable and pragmatic, began recruiting them into the Maga almost immediately. The Dur Vai was pragmatic too, but the recruiting there was slower. The advantages the Tolchorans brought to the Skafti society in general were slower, and done more by a sort of osmosis, as Skafti leaders were exposed to them.

"The Tolchorans are almost a 'separate but equal' partner species in the Skafti society." Ed said one day after reading a treatise on the subject that he had found in the Skafti datanet archives. "When you look at their interaction with the Skafti as a whole, both within the beheri and outside of it, there is a lot of the basic structure that is Tolchoran."

The Skafti, and the Tolchorans were both pragmatic and practical species, with no grand plan to conquer and no great fear that others might wish to do what they chose not to. But they could be almost cruel sometimes in their approach to things.

The second surgery grafted an artificial neural net alongside their natural ones. The neural net would tie into the battle suits, and through that into the rest of the Iri Var electronic and pseudo-electronic equipment.

The existing natural neurons and synapses complained about this, long and loud. The five weeks following the surgery were spent battling a fire that burned from within and would not end. They fought their own bodies every waking moment for the first two of those five weeks until the Penod doctors finally intervened and let them stay in the sleep fields for all but a single Tan each day. At the start of the fifth week they were able to begin weaning them back to normal activity as their existing nervous systems finally adjusted and things began to approach normal.

It seemed hard and cruel, but Logai, a classmate put it in perspective.

"It is cruel, but it is necessary." he said. "The jungle, the surgeries, the pain and discomfort, it is all meant to temper us, like the steel on the edge of our blades."

"We are being hardened for what lies ahead?" Ed asked.

"Of course." Logai said.

Put that way, it made some sense, Ed thought, but it still hurt dammit!

They studied and exercised, learned and grew closer.

The final surgery was the exact opposite of what had been experienced before. The surgeons opened their skulls and inserted a few small nodes here and there within the cavity, tied them into the new neural net they'd finally gotten used to, added some storage in a few other places they weren't using and then closed them up again. No pain, no itch, no burn.

Instead, each of them wound up with their own personal 'Jiminy Cricket', as Ed called them, a disembodied voice to guide and assist them. The Skafti, and the technicians who taught them how to use it called it an Ora. That was a Skafti term, originally a name from one of their own legends, a mythical figure who guided the lost souls of the Skafti through the fields of the dead to the afterlife beyond.

== Urjat System, Narisi Flight Station ==

They moved back into space, to an orbital facility called Narisi in the Urjat system. There were five planets in the system, and two separate asteroid fields. Two of the planets were gas giants with close to a dozen moons each. One of those moons was large enough to have an atmosphere and liquid water seas on the surface.

During their time at Narisi, they became pilots. Only shuttle pilots at first, the controls were standardized and the procedures were simple enough to learn, especially with the Ora there in the back of their heads. They were given a standard shuttle training course, the same course taught everywhere in Skafti space, and at the end, were certified shuttle pilots, employable anywhere. Unlike their bonding certificate, Kristy and Ed didn't get a printout as a keepsake this time.

With the commercial shuttle certification out of the way, they moved on to a variety of other orbital craft. Learning to fly transports, fuel barges, and a dozen different kinds of military cargo and personnel transports. Every kind of dedicated surface-to-orbit ship in their benu, and a lot of the most common ones outside of it.

Ed keep returning time and time again to comparisons with things he knew from old Earth science fiction, books, movies and television. When it came time to fly the Rek, the Iri Var combat fighter craft, Ed struggled and failed to find a comparison.

The antigrav generators that were the standard drive for most planetary and orbital craft were incredibly efficient systems, in and near planetary space, but they were slow and clumsy in some ways. The Rek used something called subspace threshold wave generators that, in combination with the otherwise standard gravity engines, provided incredible speed, thrust and maneuverability. They used fuel at a hundred times the rate of a standard drive, but they were lightning fast, and man could they dance!

Rek were limited to planetary and in-system distances only. The engines and navigational and computational devices needed for interstellar travel were massive and complex, and there was no way to fit them in something the size of these fighters. There were ships in the Iri Var fleet whose purpose was to transport fighters to wherever they were needed, and they functioned a lot like the aircraft carriers of old Earth's navies.

They all had to learn how to fly them, but they were not going to get certified on them. The true Rek pilots had special neural implants, far more pervasive than the ones they'd received.

"Remember Ledda?" Ed asked that night.

"The Parandi who showed us about the comfort stations?" Kristy asked.

"Yeah. He was hoping to get selected into the Rek program as a pilot. I thought it was a bit of boasting at the time." Ed said.

"Its admirable, what these people do so willingly, given the drastic alterations they have to go through." Kristy answered.

Drastic enough that it left them unfit for combat anywhere outside of a Rek. Their Ora made those used by the Iri Voch look like mere pocket calculators too, but man did it let them be good fighter pilots!

The only way their group of Iri Voch could do it at all was to let the Ora take charge for a while, and for that reason, none of them expressed a desire to change jobs with the Rek pilots. They wouldn't have qualified anyway. They just didn't think 'right' for that job.

Ed called his Ora 'JC'. Yea, he said Jiminy Cricket to Kristy, but she understood the initials as well as Ed did. Ed thought JC would come in handy when he was too busy doing things like dodging blaster fire or charging enemies positions. JC could keep an eye on the electronics and the data coming in from the comm and battle nets, as well as being smart enough to keep in touch with the orbital resources available in the field.

The Skafti year, based on their home planet's orbit, was 279 days long. Slightly more than one full Skafti year had passed since Ed and Kristy had been retrieved. In that time, Kristy and Ed had become soldiers in an alien army, surgically altered and augmented, and trained to use equipment that was only a science fiction author's dream on old Earth.

And in the end, they had been given a confidant, confessor and aide that rode in their minds and swam in their thoughts, and tapped them into the FTL datanet that covered almost an entire arm of the galaxy.

Healed, trained, educated, armed and armored, Ed and Kristy left Urjat as Iri Voch, which in Skafti meant 'Bringers of Dread'. Elite soldiers and masters of their trade.

Warriors. 



-------

Chapter 2: Scientist


== Earth, Northwest Agean Sea, Sporades Ferry Line ==

Gordon Truitt was a British citizen by birth, but had been working and living in the United States for the past five years. He worked for the NSA, the American National Security Agency, which most people would have found hard to believe, if he had been at liberty to tell them about it. Gordon didn't know any secrets of course, but he had done his doctoral work in the U.S., and the NSA had become deeply interested in it, as it concerned designing intelligent search systems. He suspected that it was being used to augment the American data mining programs, some of which could be presumed to be highly illegal. Gordon suspected it, but of course, he couldn't prove a thing. Everything he did was theoretical to begin with, and as compartmentalized as they were, he never got to see any of his work put into practice. Still the pay was good — better than the offers he had gotten from the private sector coming out of university.

This trip to Greece was a long overdue vacation. The first week was already over, and it had been a hedonist's getaway among the Cyclades Islands, with most of that time spent in Mykonos and Santorini. Gordon's next stop was Skopelos and the other Sporades islands. This was a little more laid back, with more literal wildlife and less of the pub-hopping wildlife.

He had already spent a few days on Skiathos, and was taking a small ferry to Skopelos, where he would stay for the rest of his time in Greece. Six more days of low energy, low stress relaxation, then a ride back to Skiathos, to catch a flight to London. He would visit his Aunt Beatrice and Uncle Owen for a few days before heading back to work.

The ferry crowd was light, this early in the morning. Most of the vacationers would catch a fast hydrofoil ferry later in the day, but Gordon had never been a late riser, even when on vacation, and the thought of getting to the island and settled in before the tourists began to crowd the streets appealed to him. He had the New York Times open in front of him, but hadn't read much of it at all so far. This would be where his Greek memories were strongest. The trip he had taken with his parents when he was eight, and the time they spent on Skopelos were among the best memories he had of them.

"You seem lost in thought." a heavily accented female voice said beside him.

"I beg your pardon?" he replied, somewhat automatically.

"Sorry to intrude, but I saw the newspaper, and that you seemed to be staring off over it and thought I might find someone to practice my English on."

The woman was bundled up against the morning breeze, wearing a headscarf, but was probably no more than ten years older than Gordon.

"Just some old childhood memories that I will have plenty of time to relive while I am here." Gordon said, standing and holding out his hand. "Gordon."

"Antheia," she replied, giving his hand a firm shake. "You have been to Skopelos before then?"

"When I was eight." Gordon said. "I came with my parents. Do you live here?"

"No, I come in the summers to work at the Stafylos."

"At the hotel? What is it... , the Prince Stafylos?"

"Yes, that's it. Are you staying there?"

"No, I'm at the Dionyssos. What kind of work do you do, if you don't mind my asking?"

"I work in the kitchen, making pasta and soups for the tourists." Antheia answered, laughing. "What do you do?"

"I write computer search programs." Gordon said.

"Oh! Like Google?" Antheia said with some enthusiasm.

"No." Gordon said laughing in return. "Nothing so commercial or well known as that."

The conversation might have continued, and Gordon might have worried about diverting the conversation away from the current topic, even if it meant they delved into more personal areas still, but there was a sudden flicker of light, or dark, or something in the early morning sky to the south, and then the sea seemed to drop out from beneath the deck of the ship, and Antheia's hand managed to just reach out to Gordon's arm in alarm before everything went black.

== Kiris IV Orbit, Kiris Retrieval Station ==

Gordon woke, still dreaming, he was sure. Was the strange event on the ferry to Skopelos the dream, or was it this strange arrangement of forty people standing in neat rows, like tinned sardines? His vantage point at one corner of the grouping, and facing towards it gave him that perspective, for the long moment when he was fully conscious, and after he had turned his head to look around him. He stirred more fully, and while he seemed suspended and held by something invisible, found he could move, and did so, making an effort to turn his body entirely to look behind himself more completely.

Whatever held Gordon gave up its grip then, and he was suddenly free and walking. He saw other eyes open, and began helping get those others moving about as well. Most of them spoke English, but not all. The room was threatening to turn into a sea of babble, especially when they discovered that some unseen translator was interpreting between any two people who tried to speak but didn't share a common language. This was particularly true for some who it was determined were Africans from the Congo, who seemed to speak nothing but a couple of local dialects.

Several of the asians were Japanese, it turned out, and spoke their native tongue of course, but all of them spoke English, though a couple of them did so only with a halting, harshly accented English that was almost as hard to understand as the Japanese. There were a few who were almost that bad, with just a few words of English, but most spoke it at least haltingly. It was hard to keep sorted out.

Everyone seemed to be about his own age, and they were all fit and healthy looking, which was easy enough to see, because every one of them was completely naked.

Faced with everyone's nudity, Gordon began to exam himself. He was changed in some ways, though not greatly. The soft little belly that had been growing from too many hours at a desk was gone. So too was a small benign cyst that had developed on the knuckle of his left hand. He had been scheduled to have it looked at again while he was back in London. A small series of moles were gone as well, he realized, ones that had been there his entire life, so far as he could remember.

That was the moment that he realized he wasn't wearing his glasses. Gordon had gotten his first pair of glasses when he was five. He didn't remember life without them, and yet here he was without them, and everything was as clear as a bell.

"They fixed my eyes." He said out loud.

"They've fixed a lot of things, it seems." A voice behind him said. Gordon turned and found himself looking at a young woman his own age — but of course everyone was his own age. The woman looked familiar somehow, but Gordon wasn't sure why. Seeing his confusion, she laughed, lightly.

"Antheia, remember? Antheia Geracimos. We were speaking on the ferry just before whatever happened that has brought us here."

"Oh yes!" Gordon said. "I was thinking you looked familiar, but couldn't figure out why."

"I've been doing a little checking, and we all appear to have had our bodies restored to an age I've heard estimated as being twenty five. Some were a few years younger, some a lot of years older than that, but everyone got adjusted towards that point."

"Wow!" Gordon said, trying, but failing to keep his eyes from giving her a quick going over. "So you've gotten ten years younger, just like that!"

"You're sweet to think I had only been ten years older than you. Don't think I don't appreciate the compliment. It was closer to twenty than ten though." Antheia said, patting his arm.

There were some efforts to get the group sorted out and a head count made. His initial estimate of forty turned out to be pretty close. The count came out as thirty eight individuals. The individuals came from four different groups; one each from Greece, the U.S., Japan, and The Democratic Republic of the Congo, which had been labeled Zaire on the old globe Gordon remembered growing up with.

The groups were far more culturally diverse than the groupings suggested. Gordon himself was living proof of that, being a British national, on vacation from his job in America, and caught up in a Greek ferry.

The strangest bit of it was discovered later, when it was found that one of the Japanese tourists who had been aboard the small U.S. tour boat lived only a couple blocks away from one of the people from the Japanese houseboat that had been taken in the Sea of Japan. They did not know each other, but both had common acquaintances.

Several hours of mingling and unanswered questions later, they saw their first aliens. A door opened in a wall of the room they were in, and a dozen beings came through. Half of them were carrying what were obviously weapons. The creatures had two arms, two legs, two eyes a mouth and a nose, but were obviously not human. They reminded Gordon of badgers. They were shorter than all but the shortest of the humans, and stocky, with wider necks, but they didn't have the pronounced pointy noses that badgers did. Their faces were much flatter and more human looking.

Perhaps it was the stiff-looking hair on their heads that seemed to run down the back of their necks without thinning in any way that made him think of badgers, Gordon thought to himself.

"I am Marshall Sopon." the translators near them said, in whatever language was needed. "We are Skafti." It said, gesturing at the others with him. "This processing station will be your home for a short while before you are assigned to your benu. There are food dispensers against that back wall where the lighting is now blinking."

The creature pointed, and all eyes turned to see the blinking lights, and the wall beneath it as indicated.

"There will be some adjustments possible to the food dispensers over time, but for now you will have to make do with food offerings that have been determined to be physiologically and nutritionally compatible for your species." The Marshal said, bringing our attention back to him. "There are waste cells - facilities for the processing of bodily waste, as well as refresher cells - body cleaning stations, through that doorway."

The alien pointed again, and where he pointed, they saw a wide, arching doorway that hadn't been there before.

With those words, and while focus was directed at the new doorway, the Marshal and his entourage left them alone once again. There was a burst of activity as groups of people were quickly drawn to the newly presented facilities.

Gordon was as curious as the next person, but not fond of crowds, so he didn't move when the crowd surged away. Instead, he walked over to a corner and sat, leaning back against the wall, and closed his eyes. He considered what he knew. He was no longer on Earth. He was under the control of some aliens who called themselves 'Skafti'. They had technology far in advance of what he knew of on Earth. They had modified each and every person in the room to an approximate 25 years of age, and left them in perfect health, including obvious things like fixing bad vision and removing moles and cysts. This presumed the ability to fix far more serious ills.

Gordon began counting in Lucas primes, a self-calming technique that he equated with counting sheep at bedtime. If he couldn't get at least thirty numbers into the sequence, he knew he was too stressed. Today he seemed to stumble trying to get past 3010349. He sighed and opened his eyes. That wasn't working. The crowd continued to swirl at the opposite end of the room. He closed his eyes again and tried to pick up the mental thread of his current pet project, what he thought of as potentially the core of the next generation of data search and retrieval tools that he was working on in his spare time. It was primarily a mathematics problem, and a coding problem secondarily.

The levels of focus and concentration required to get his head around the project just wasn't there. His stomach grumbled a little and he took that as a sign and got up from his spot in the corner and began walking over towards the knot of people at the food dispensers. One of the Japanese men was standing, with a look of frustration, holding a small bowl of something. As Gordon got closer, he realized it was rice, raw, uncooked rice.

"I asked for rice." the man said with a wry frown. "I got exactly what I asked for."

"Maybe we need to do some troubleshooting on this whole process." Gordon said. "Has anyone gotten any further than your request?"

"Not before I got pushed back away from the dispenser."

People were meeting with varying degrees of success, mostly the successes involved uncooked, untreated ingredients such as fruits and vegetables. Some of those were happily being consumed, and in fact someone had asked for fifty ripe bananas and fifty ripe oranges and was happily passing them out amongst the crowd.

The distraction of that let Gordon get to a dispenser with his Japanese partner right behind him.

"service or query?" came a calm voice.

"Query." Gordon said.

"Query mode active." it answered.

"Do you understand the quantity 'one cup'?" Gordon paused and then emphasized the measure.

"Yes." came the answer.

"Do you understand the term 'cooking pot'?"

"Yes."

"Do you understand the concept 'boiling water'?" he asked next.

"Yes." came the immediate response.

"Can you accept new definitions?" Gordon asked.

"Yes." the voice answered. "Prepared to receive new definition."

Gordon began describing the process of boiling rice, giving the ages old formula of 2 cups of water for every cup of rice and a container capable of holding twice as much water as the total amount of rice and water. It was one of the few things he could do in a knowledgeable way in the kitchen, to be honest.

"End definition." he said when he had made it through all the steps.

"Please identify this definition." the voice said.

"Boiled rice." Gordon said.

"Definition accepted." the voice said, and then after a pause, "Service or query?"

"Service please." Gordon said.

"Attending."

"May I have two cups of boiled rice please?"

"Processing." came the now familiar voice. A moment later, there was a pleasant ringing sound, and a bowl appeared on the counter in front of him, and in the bowl was what appeared to be cooked rice, still steaming hot.

"Want to share?" Gordon asked Ken. The two of them dug into the rice happily.

"Wish I'd have thought to ask for some melted butter." Gordon said. This made Ken groan out loud, and Gordon quickly asked him what was wrong.

"I was just considering what it would take to go through the process you just did to get the food dispenser to understand how to make soy sauce."

"Ouch!" Gordon said sympathetically. "Do you think anyone in your group knows the process well enough? It's made from soy beans, right?"

"It is. Fermented soy beans, and its one of those things that is very important to my culture's cuisine." Ken said. "I'm sure we will spend some time working with the food dispenser to make some. At least now we know it is possible."

Gordon's demonstration of defining boiled rice created quite a stir, and small groups of people began making efforts to reproduce cooked foods of various types.

Once he'd eaten, Gordon decided it was time to investigate the Skafti 'waste cells'. He excused himself from Ken, and walked to the back wall and through the archway.

So far the Skafti living arrangements, at least those they had been given, displayed a lack of concern for personal privacy compared to what Gordon was used to. The waste cells at least had doors. The area he entered was empty, until he closed the door behind him. As soon as the door closed however, some unseen system went into action, and out of the floor came what seemed to be approximately usable as a toilet. A little lower and wider than he was used to, but it was close enough.

The lower, wider seats, it became apparent as Gordon finished, facilitated a 'bidet' kind of cleaning system, but something as beyond that as this toilet had been beyond the ones he was used to on Earth. He was dry and clean when he stood up, despite having felt the cleaning system 'wash' across his backside.

That was going to be easy to adjust to, he decided as he stood and opened the door. No odors lingered, either. Maybe that would change as their bodies began processing solid foods again.

The refresher stations were basically public showers. Nozzles shot high pressure water from multiple locations, and there seemed to be some sort of sonic component. Gordon could feel a low vibration move across his body as the spray did, and again, when he was done, his skin was dry. He reached up and felt a slight dampness in his hair.

Most of those in the group managed to adjust to their nudity pretty quickly. It helped that they all possessed young, perfectly fit bodies now. You could tell the ones who still hadn't adjusted pretty easily. Their eyes couldn't seem to stay in one place, and they sat awkwardly, and covered themselves, or tried, when they moved about.

Gordon was back in his corner, eyes closed, his mind wrapped up in his project. He had asked himself why he bothered, when it was so obviously useless now, but had decided that this was knowledge for knowledge's sake. He didn't need a paycheck or a product at the end of the process for it to be enjoyable.

A sudden swell in the noise level brought him out of his own thoughts, and he opened his eyes to see what the commotion was about. The entire group seemed to be knotted around the wall opposite the food dispensers. He got up from his corner and began walking in that direction, when he spotted Antheia, carrying a couple pieces of cloth.

"What is it Antheia?" he asked. "What are we getting now?"

"Clothes!" Antheia said, excitedly. She chose then to stop, right in front of him, letting him watch her slide into a pair of form fitting shorts, and then she slid into something that was something of a cross between a sports bra and a tube top. Watching her put that on was the nicest thing that had happened to him since he'd been here, Gordon thought to himself.

"The men are just getting the shorts, but the women get the tops too." she said.

It hadn't taken long to get to the wall. There were eight stations, outlined by a glowing seam in the wall, and you just walked up to it, and if you hadn't gotten anything yet, a drawer popped open and the clothes were there to take. With eight drawers at a time dispensing the items, there were few people still waiting by the time he got there, and Gordon soon had his own shorts, retrieved from one of the drawers, and was wearing them in short order.

The issuing of the clothes, as minimal as they were, was the last exciting thing to happen for a long time. Well, except for the arrival of their exercise instructor, but it was just a hologram, and it led everyone in a series of calisthenics and stretching exercises every morning. A few people tried to sit out and ignore the exercise sessions, but when the food dispensers refused them service for 'noncompliance with the fitness program', they changed their tune pretty quickly.

A few days after the issuing of clothes, the group woke up with new members. Nine more people, all from a bus that had been near Bergen, Norway. The new people were shocked of course, and in a daze for a while. Like Gordon's ferry, the bus had contained a mix of locals and tourists, but the bus had not been part of an established tour, so there were only a couple of tourists aboard.

People quickly organized themselves to help the newcomers get adjusted, including getting them outfitted with clothes. Gordon and Antheia took charge of getting people adjusted to using the food dispensers.

Gordon had discovered that someone had managed to get very good scrambled eggs programmed into the food dispenser, as well as bacon, so between those items and the rice he had programmed for Ken, he was happy most of the time. Fred Delgado and Sammy Cruz, a couple of the younger men from the American tour boat, had spent almost every waking hour at the dispensers, programming in their favorites. They were younger originally anyway, now they were all the same age, physically. One of the women who knew them had insisted that they not try to replicate some of the food too exactly.

"No Big Macs!" She said. "Program in a good cheeseburger, made from good, fresh materials!"

Mostly they seemed intent on recreating a lot of food from southern Texas, enchiladas, tacos, a lot of barbecued meats, and something called chicken fried steak which Gordon decided he liked. They may not have had a broad cuisine to work with, but they were tireless, and what they managed to inveigle the food dispensers to produce was all good food.

Getting the newcomers adjusted was far easier than it had been for them, and a few folks tried teasing them about that a little, but the newness and shock needed to wear off a little before they'd see the humor in it, Gordon thought.

They had just settled back into a routine when it was interrupted. The Skafti weren't back, this time it was a group of medical people, odd looking creatures with lots of bright blue eyes and tentacles around their mouths. Penod, their race was called. They all got examined, Gordon's mind flashed on some old apocryphal stories of alien abductions and the 'probing' the victims had been subjected to. Supermarket tabloid stuff, at best, he thought, and nothing like these exams. They were done standing, and without actual physical contact. The biggest news from the exams was that there was one more person likely to join them, once he had finished his treatment.

Things went back to normal after the medical exams, and things moved along for weeks without change, until another disturbance arose. A new arrival, a man named Ed Bell, caused quite a stir. He had apparently been the captain of the tour boat in southern Texas, and he no longer looked anything like he had on Earth.

"Hi there!" Gordon said, holding his hand out for a shake. "I'm Gordon Truitt. We had heard there was one more person undergoing treatment. It looks like we're all here at last."

Gordon had been nearest the door when he came through, and had been the first to greet him, but after a handshake and smile from the new man, he was quickly pushed aside by the others from his crew, once he'd identified himself.

Gordon heard from others later, after things had settled down once again, that Ed Bell had been an older man, in bad shape and with some serious health problems. The Skafti, or the Penod medical techs, had basically rebuilt him, from 'optimized human genetic code'.

He certainly looked optimized, and Kristy, the young woman who had insisted that Sammy and Fred not rebuild the Big Mac, was soon attached to him at the hip. Gordon didn't think Ed realized it, but she was definitely sending out 'taken' signals. Gordon wouldn't have spotted it so quickly if he hadn't been standing next to Antheia and heard her snort, then snicker while looking at the two Americans.

"I guess she's staking her claim." Gordon said.

Antheia pulled Gordon around so the two of them were facing each other, a few feet apart and looked him straight in the eye.

"There are others here who might talk about staking claims and what that might mean."

"I'm not sure I'm ready to stake a claim, or have one staked, Antheia." Gordon said. "I can safely say there is no one here that has more of my interest than you. We just don't know enough about what is going on yet to make such things practical."

"I agree." Antheia said, stepping in and raising herself up on her toes to kiss him briefly, right on the lips. The soft warmth of those lips had just enough time to fully register on Gordon's senses, and then were gone. "A wish to avoid making decisions without all the information doesn't preclude a little friendly exploration of the possibilities though, does it?"

"No." Gordon said, suddenly sporting a stupid grin. "No it doesn't."

Those possibilities remained only that, possible, while everyone got back to being busy doing nothing. That lasted for a couple of weeks, and then finally one day the 'something' that everyone had been waiting for arrived. A group of Skafti came into our room, and they were sorted into seven groups. Gordon was a little unhappy to see himself separated from Antheia, but had little time to ponder that, as the Skafti at the head of their group spoke.

"Hello. My name is Porog. Today you will be taken to the learning center. You will receive a language implant and a personal translator while you are there. Some initial evaluations will take place during this time. The results of these evaluations will determine your initial placement within the beheri."

The translator got everything but the last word. Someone asked what it meant, and Porog said all questions would be answered at a later time. Other groups must have had questions as well. The sound level in the room rose sharply, as dozens of voices grew louder, demanding answers. It might have gotten ugly, except for Ed Bell's level head. He managed to get everyone focused on the realities of the situation, and eased back off the mob mentality that had threatened to loose itself upon the Skafti in the room.

Once calm had been restored, they were led, by groups, to another area, Gordon assumed it was one of the learning centers they had been told about, and assigned to a clear, liquid-filled column that had two metal tubes running on each side of it and directed to stand with their backs against. Gordon felt nothing, but there must've been a sleep field, or something else involved, because seconds later the world went black.

I dreamt I was floating, and it wasn't a dream. The world was dark, but I was the world. I saw the Project in front of my eyes, roiling and writhing like a snake. Except this snake was not smoothly bending, but stiffly, harshly jointed, and each of its billion joints was a blur of fractal feynman diagrams wrapped in hypnotically coiled pseudo-infinite chains of reducing algorithms. I chased the snake, like the hounds to the fox, and it danced madly in front of me, seductive, insane and as much mine as my name. I stopped my chase, and let the world that was no world wrap around me, and the snake kept on slithering away until it ran into me on the other side of reality, where we both exploded in a blaze of light.

"Oh my!" Gordon said out loud as my eyes opened. "Tehe'nu!"

"Tehe'nu em bai!" said a voice nearby. Gordon focused his eyes and saw a Skafti. He realized then that he had said the equivalent of, 'Our Spirits!' in Skafti, and the Skafti in front of him had replied, 'Our spirits guide us!'.

Gordon had just held his first conversation in the Skafti language, and had done it using conversational Skafti!

Everyone in the room looked a little pale in the face. Gordon assumed he did as well. As they were led back to the common room, he wondered what each of the others might have seen during the time they had been under. In the common room, they saw the same look on the faces of those other groups.

Ed Bell and two others were the first names called, once they were back, and the three of them were escorted out of the room by a uniformed Skafti, though, to be honest, everything they wore looked like a uniform to Gordon.

His name was called in the second group, along with three others, none of which he knew. Antheia was not one of them. He squeezed her hand and smiled as he joined the other three.

"I am Classifier Seventh Trinimak," the Skafti who had called them up said, once they were gathered. "Please follow me."

The Skafti led them down a hallway that ran at right angles to what Gordon recognized as the corridors they had traveled previously, and they were soon at a balcony sort of arrangement, an overlook that stood above a huge open deck, on which a dizzying variety of space craft sat, there was constant motion in the area below as ships landed, took off, and were loaded or unloaded. There was writing on the far wall, in Skafti, that said 'Shuttle Bay C-3'.

Rather than make their way down to that deck, the five of them entered a small, elevator like pod at the edge of their overlook, and they ran, on a wire it appeared, across the upper half of the bay to another overlook just inside the outer wall of the shuttle bay. Here the group was led by Trinimak onto a small flat platform that began moving them down a long, curving corridor, the outside wall of which had a long series of windows or ports, and through which they could see the stars.

"I don't recognize any constellations." a woman said, one of the Norwegians, Gordon thought.

"I shouldn't expect we would," Gordon said. "unless this massive facility is orbiting around our sun. That seems unlikely."

That got a laugh from all three of the others, mostly a laugh of relief, as the tension of the moment was broken.

"I"m Nora Kappfjell. From Norway." the woman said.

"Gordon Truitt. I'm British, but was living in America." Gordon answered.

"Norio Kimura. Japan. Hokkaido, Japan"

"Teodor Vacek. Czech Republic, Olomouc was were I lived."

With the introductions made, or remade, since they had all had some association during the weeks stuck in the common room, there was a sense of ease among them. While none of them had taken their eyes off the view, they were now refocused on it, and realized that they could see something large looming ahead.

"Is that a space ship?" Norio asked.

"Yes, that is the Ttroken. It is our destination." Trinimak answered.

The platform moved them very quickly down the curving corridor, but it took a good ten minutes before it stopped in front of what appeared to be a massive dock connecting the ship to whatever they were on, a larger ship or a space station perhaps.

Their escort led them through the dock and into the ship itself, up a set of metal stairs and out of what was obviously a cargo hold, and into an empty corridor.

"We will find a waiting area ahead, and you will have to remain there for now. We will not begin placement evaluations until we have broken orbit." Trinimak said.

The room they were taken to was pleasant enough, there were soft benches, and a food dispenser. An open doorway led to a small 'refresher' facility, with several waste cells. Trinimak told them there would be an announcement when they were preparing to break orbit, and that he would return after that.

Gordon asked the food dispenser for coffee, and got an 'unable to process request' in return. When the unit returned to the 'service or query' question, he asked for query mode.

"Query mode active." the unit said.

"Can you access the food dispenser database of the station to which we are docked?" Gordon asked.

"Affirmative." came the reply.

"Are you authorized to update your databanks from theirs?"

"Affirmative." the pleasant voice replied.

"Please access the stations food dispenser databanks and copy all new data."

"Processing."

The voice was silent for a long moment, then finally,

"Completed. Service or Query?"

"Service please. I'd like a cup of coffee, black."

Norio and Nora followed, getting tea, and Teodor had coffee, as I did, but added sugar and cream to his.

"Do you wonder at the ability of their technology?" Teodor said once he had taken his first sip. "Their voice recognition seems flawless."

"And the system's ability to process natural language queries is amazing!" Nora said.

"That's not what amazes me." Gordon said. "What amazes me is that they seemed to have cataloged all the basic foodstuffs of Earth before we ever began trying to program in dishes. The system understood rice and corn and beef and pork and watermelon and oranges. You name it, and we've had no problems building food items from the basic ingredients."

"That's true!" Nora said. "How could they have done that?"

"I suspect they have been observing Earth for quite some time, and these recent 'retrievals' are something new." Norio said.

"Then it makes no sense that the food dispensers would not know how to make Earth dishes." Nora said. "I can believe that the data might not follow us automatically from station to station, but the knowledge of ingredients without the knowledge of recipes or meals?"

"It seems contrived." Teodor said.

"Like a test." Gordon said. "It may have been that everything we endured so far was a series of tests, to sort us out, measure our adaptability."

"But if they've been watching us all these years, they have our measure, surely?" Nora asked.

"Collectively, yes." Norio said, "But this strikes me as designed to measure us as individuals. Doesn't it seem strange to you that we saw none of our group descend into hysteria or paranoia? Was I the only one who wondered how we managed to avoid any violent or aggressive behavior?"

"Well, I saw some people having problems with the nudity, but none of them seemed to let it get to them completely." Gordon said.

"Exactly my point." Norio said. "In a group our size, statistics say we should have had at least a few bad reactions, but we didn't."

"So your saying they were controlling us?" Teodor said.

"No I don't think so." Gordon said. "I'm betting Norio and I both are thinking the same thing."

"We didn't have those kind of reactions because those who would have had them had already been weeded out before we even woke up." he said.

The obvious implications were enough to keep them thinking for a while. Gordon wondered what less-than-obvious implications they would discover over time. Those would be the ones likely to contain the major 'gotchas'. It had kept their minds off the passage of time, so it was almost a shock to hear a loud musical tone, followed by a pleasant, feminine Skafti voice say "Attention all hands! All docking and umbilical connections released. Standby by to break orbit in thirty hotan."

'Interesting', Gordon thought. 'I know what a hotan is!'

"I know what a hotan is!" he said out loud.

"Language wasn't all we got, obviously." Nora said.

"And so smoothly integrated, we don't even know its there until we use it." Teodor added.

With our understanding of Skafti time units made evident, we began some exploration, looking for similar understandings. It was all there; weights and measures. Most of the measures were based on an artificial measurement, the Skafti equivalent of a nanosecond. Theirs was slightly longer, since the Skafti hotan was a touch longer than a second. A nanosecond was one billionth of a second, and the Skafti equivalent was called a horotan. The basic unit of distance then was the Sor, the distance light traveled in one horotan. This was a little more than three meters, by Gordon's quick and dirty calculations. The common Skafti unit of length, based on this, but more probably an approximate of an earlier measure was the Golon, which was a hundredth of a Sor, and which was close to an Earth millimeter.

Gordon shuddered at the poor Americans trying to do the same thing for feet and inches.

Their ruminations, collective and individual, were interrupted finally by the door opening and two Skafti and another being entering the room. The other being was briefly unsettling, as it was a spider-like creature, with a large number of legs and arms and bristly fur. Gordon looked at the sad, wise eyes and relaxed a little. The spider imagery was mostly superficial. The mouth was small and circular, and barely moved as the being 'spoke' through the translator.

"Greetings, fellow beings. I am Magai Arimacha, Senior member of the Ttroken Magani. You are human, I am Tolchoran. We are all of the Maga benu of the Skafti beheri."

A series of words flipped from nonsense to sense as their new knowledge popped up facts and definitions in support of the unknown terms.

"We are part of a star-spanning, generations long, multi-cultural, multi-species enterprise?" Gordon asked, hoping to confirm his sense of what he had heard.

"Correct." Arimacha said.

"And this enterprise is both commercial and social in nature?" Norio asked.

"Yes, and philosophical and scientific as well. We of the Maga are the scientists and technicians of the beheri, as the Pai Sud is medical and genetics and the Iri Var are military."

The Maga.

Gordon quickly took to thinking of them as the Magi instead of the Maga, to himself anyway. Arimacha had that staid, dignified, aloof air of every schoolboy's version of the Christmas pageant Magi that he could remember, and the two other members of the Maga that they met seemed equally Magi-like.

They were escorted to a 'cabin' that was more like a suite of rooms, really. There were four alcoves with sleep fields, a communal refresher and an adjoining bathroom with two waste cells. There were four desks as well, with something like a short stool in front of each, but the stools had no seats, instead there was a small curving, triangular wedge. 'Like a bicycle seat' Gordon thought.

"These are your quarters." Magai Arimacha told them, once everything had a chance to sink in. "The desks will give you access to the Maga datanet, once you have received your implants."

"Implants?" Nora asked.

"Yes." the Tolchoran replied. "These things will be explained to you." With that, the Magai and his companions left. The four of them were alone again.

"Implants!" Nora said, as soon as the door closed.

"All in good time, Nora." Norio said. "We have been brought across space, our bodies restored, and miracles of technology and science displayed, all with no more concern than if it had been the latest gadget available in Akiba back home. I do not see legions of beings wandering around looking tortured by their implants."

"Akiba?" She asked.

"The local name for the street in Tokyo called Akihabara - Electric Town." Teodor said. "It used to be a real mecca for the worlds hardcore electronics hardware junkies. I went there twice during my life on old Earth, but it isn't the same anymore. Its all anime and manga shops now."

Gordon had to look at Ted in a new light now that he knew that about him. Especially knowing that he had been in his forties before their retrieval.

It was also becoming obvious that there was an attraction forming between Nora and Norio.

For the next two days, they were faced with a parade of technicians, and a series of sessions in the 'learning center'. Most of what they got was what Gordon thought of as mental infrastructure, knowledge on society, government, basic customs and beliefs. Sprinkled in, here and there were the interesting bits, as far as he was concerned. They learned Tolchoran, which like Skakfti was a verbal language well within the range of the human vocal chords. They learned Diadin as well, but the language was more of a mathematical/musical exercise than a language. Technician 1st Grade Semerit, a Skafti, was happy to tell them all about it.

"The Diadin are great thinkers, but hard to understand. Some mathematical concepts are far easier to express in their language than in any other though, since it is half mathematical to begin with. At the moment, you are all officially rated as 'Candidate'. What areas of knowledge you show affinity for, and how you handle them will determine your future ratings. An affinity for the Diadic language is one such measure."

Gordon never considered himself very musical, but he found himself diving into the Diadic language with enthusiasm. He was very quickly feeling somewhat frustrated with it.

"That's to be expected." Semerit said. "The general purpose translators that you all currently have aren't well suited to Diadin. I'm noting your affinity for Diadin on your records. They'll tune your implants to optimize for that."

Implants did become the order of the day, once the visits to the learning center had been completed.

"Today you will receive your Ora." Technician Prime Almac told them. How you adapt to this will determine a basic part of your classification within the Maga.

I came out of the blackness into a sea of purple mist and pain. There were flickering nodes of information and capability, feathery streams of data and clustered calculations were draped like Spanish moss all around my perceptions. I saw bright, hard knots of storage and black, wrinkled navels of undefined interfaces. Fluttering through it was a bright blue glowing presence that I was finally able to intercept.

'Who am I?' it asked.

I reached out and ate the bright ball with my thoughts.

'You are me.' I answered. 'There is only me here, sides of me, edges of me, clouds of me. me. me.' 

== Troken, Interstellar Commercial Transport Ship ==

Gordon woke in a panic, feeling like he had clawed his way to the surface of something in which he'd been drowning. Their was a Penod standing above him. Another being, of a species Gordon hadn't seen before, stood beside him, and after a moment, gave a nod.

"You may relax, Candidate Prime," it said. "All is well now."

It took them three sessions of not-exactly learning center work to get him comfortable with his new self. Gordon had always had a very good memory, but now it was perfect, and perfectly tied into all his senses. The new Gordon was asked to describe the difference to the being, who he had since learned was an Eih, that had been with the Penod who had attended him when he awoke.

"I'm me, but I..." Gordon fought for the proper words. " ... I extend further into the world than I did before."

That got more nods, and the Penod nod, using as it did a particularly eerie movement of the tentacles around its mouth, was odd and utterly unforgettable.

A few minutes later Gordon was released back to the quarters he was still sharing with the others. It became obvious to Gordon, very quickly, that the others had not shared his experience with the Ora.

They treated theirs as companions, and gave them names, addressing them sometimes out loud, as if they were another person wearing the same flesh. It made him shudder to think of it.

It took all of five minutes to realize that his was the only one whose status had changed. Candidate Prime, whatever that meant. It was easier to understand the new clothes, a jumpsuit sort of arrangement, almost like the stuff you saw pilots in the military wear, but a little less puffy and more form-fitting.

Gordon found himself alone after they left the Ttroken. Nora, Norio and Teodor were escorted one direction and Gordon was escorted in another.

"You will have very different levels of training." Counselor Prime Mido told him. "You will train with your peers, and your fellow humans are no longer your peers in the Maga."

Their stay on the unnamed orbital station was brief, but painful. He underwent two more surgical sessions, adding a few more implants. Some of those puckered navels Gordon saw in his thoughts, in the part of him that was the Ora, were no longer dark, but shone with their own light.

Two days after the last session, Prime Mido escorted him to another ship, the Biri Bisi, and that ship broke orbit almost the moment they were safely aboard. Gordon was addressed by those who met him as Prime Truitt. It was said with a surprising measure of respect.

Primes, he learned, were trained on Gova, a Tolchoran planet. Gova, in Tochoran meant 'center', but it was not the Tolchoran home world.

For those in the Maga, the difference between training and education was indistinct, but critical. At some point, your career branched off into either the technical or the scientific sub-benu. Scientific meant a lifetime of study and research, and a much more academic life. Technical could still mean much of that, but seemed to imply more of the implementation and application of the knowledge.

== Gova, City of Em, Burlan House Residential Research Center ==

With a better understanding of the Maga, Gordon now understood the staid aloofness of Magai Arimacha. He was the Maga equivalent of the old retired people back on Earth that had been employed as greeters at WalMart. Still able to serve a purpose, but no longer contributing to the advancement of knowledge. 'No wonder the old coot was so stuffy!' Gordon thought. 'I'd be crufty too, if I was put out to pasture that way.'

There was no crowd of new recruits at Gova. The Maga did not get their recruits in waves, and Primes were rare, even when they did find new recruits. Gordon was greeted at the orbital transfer station by Administrator Prime Garis, and escorted personally, just the two of them and their shuttle pilot, from orbit to the city of Em.

"Em is quiet, it is out of the way, and it is designed for Orminoid inhabitants." Prime Garis told him. "It is an older city, in a scenic area, and there are plenty of opportunities for recreation. If I've gotten accurate information, you humans like to run and swim, sail boats powered by the wind, among other activities?"

"Yes, we do. I personally was never fond of running, bit I did enjoy swimming."

"You will have time to explore, and decide on what recreational activities to engage in. It is understood by all in the Maga that a healthy mind requires a healthy body."

A subtle hint, Gordon decided, to keep his freshly perfect body in shape.

The place he would 'study' was the place he would live, official designation 'Residential Research Community House 908099/21'. There were seventeen people in residence, including him. There were common areas, both study and recreational, common waste centers, common refreshers and common dining facilities. Despite this, each resident had his, her or its own private quarters with its own waste, refresher and dining facilities.

Gordon and the others in the facility were in the care of Counselor Prime Ambor. If this had been the more familiar collegiate scene back on Earth, Gordon would have been tempted to describe her as the house mother. She made it clear that she was a she, though these Tolchorans seemed to have very little in the way of sexual differentiation that he could see.

"As the Administrator said, this is Residential Research Community House 908099/21." Prime Ambor said as they walked together to the common room. "We call it Burlan House, familiarly, after the neighborhood it is in."

The common room was close to full when they arrived. There was always great interest in new arrivals apparently, and Gordon's arrival had been timed, it seemed, to happen just before the evening meal.

"Students and staff are required to eat at least one meal a day in the common dining facility. Socializing is considered an important part of good mental health, and our health is an important part of who we are." Ambro commented as they entered.

"Students, may I have your attention please!" she called over the increasing babble in the room. She had no trouble at all getting their cooperation. "I would like to introduce you all to Prime Gordon Truitt. He is the first Prime candidate from his species, called Humans, and I hope you will all make him feel welcome."

The seventeen residents were from five of the six recognized 'Orminian' species. The Ormin of course, who had become part of the Skafti Beheru almost from the beginning; the Taanu, a stocky, thick, high gravity species; The Arcellans, with six students, had the greatest representation in the group; Gordon was the Human representative of course, and the last group were the Kuftasa, who were represented by a pair of twins, Rella and Rika.

Gordon quickly came to think of the Kuftasa, or at least the twins as 'Tigger-ish'. They had no tails, and were in no way cat-like, except for a certain slinky grace, but they did have the seemingly boundless enthusiasm that was the character's hallmark. They seemed to bounce wherever they went, and as soon as the introduction to the group was made, they seemed to bound over, each taking an arm and pressing what suggested themselves as perfectly lovely breasts against his arm.

"Welcome to Burlan house!" the first twin said. "I'm Rella."

"And I'm Rika. Will you sit with us for evening meal?" the second said.

Gordon noticed that when they smiled that they both had very sharp and pronounced canines, or at least what approximated the canines in his mouth.

"Those teeth look pretty sharp!" he said. "You two don't bite, do you?"

"Oh, we're known to nibble a little." Rika said.

"When we get excited." Rella finished. They both trilled at that, a throaty sound, somewhere between a giggle and a purr, and Gordon wondered if he was getting into something he couldn't handle.

They must've seen the look on his face, because they immediately became a little more serious.

"You needn't worry, they're retractable, see." Rika demonstrated.

"And we are quite civilized, if not completely ... domesticated." Rella added, giggling once again.

It all struck Gordon as far too reminiscent of secondary school, particularly his later years in Chatham. He welcomed the socializing for the moment, anyway, and with enthusiasm. The twin Kuftasans, if not a known quantity, were at least an understandable one, and they did appear to have potential for some fun.

"Well, I'll be happy to join you for the meal. Would you ladies like to try some food from my home world?"

Gordon had come to understand, almost immediately, why the house mother insisted so much on everyone maintaining the social side of their lives. He understood the minute he unplugged from his first session at his study node. While plugged in, he was the data! He lived in a galaxy of information, every tool, theory, thought and idea ever expressed by anyone in the Skafti beheri, and many, many things from outside of it. The universe was not at his fingertips, it was closer than that, more intimate, and every detail was fresh and bright and fascinating.

One of those bright access points that had been added to him during the last set of implant surgeries connected the datanet in this way to his Ora. As part of its basic design, the implant would not let him remain plugged in for more than four tan. He had to remain unplugged for at least two tan before it would allow another session. It was probably a good thing, Gordon thought. He could see where the information, and the sense of being part of something infinite would be addictive.

To begin with, He studied the datanet itself. The Skafti had a technology, adapted from a Tolchoran precursor, called iril, that was as far beyond silicon circuits and electricity as that technology was above scratching in the dirt. Maybe further. That was the basis for what would have been called electronic devices back on Earth. The big advantage, particularly when it came to the datanet, was its close ties to the FTL communications technology that allowed the datanet to be what it was.

Irilonic technology and the science behind it might have been interesting, but it wasn't where Gordon's interests pushed him. Instead, he was interested in the way things got tied together, the way these systems communicated and exchanged information. Even more of interest was how that information was protected.

Hunger was waiting for him when he unplugged, and he would have made a quick trip to the food dispenser, but he had a flag at the periphery of his consciousness, a part of his Ora he had set to keep track of incoming messages. The twins were inviting him to have a meal with them when he was free. It wasn't that old, so he opened a link to the public comm node that the message came from.

"Gordon!" came Rella's voice.

"I just unplugged for the day and got your message. Am I too late for that meal?"

"No, a little early still, but we'll get serious about it, now that we know you're coming. Give us a tan?"

"Sure. I need to get cleaned up anyway. I've been plugged in for four straight."

"We all do it. That's what the built in limiters are for. See you in a tan!"

Gordon hopped into the 'fresher', setting it to real water at first, then letting it go back to the sonics for the end. He had acquired his first pseudo-earth clothing already, having discovered the local processing unit, and how to make it 'see' what he saw in his head.

Gordon had it make him a pair of Bermuda shorts and a flowery Hawaiian shirt. That was the sort of getup he tended to lounge around the apartment in back on Earth, and he'd quickly fallen back into it here, but he wasn't going to wear that to dinner, at least not by itself, so went for his other option, which was a pair of trousers that he'd managed to get the processor to build for him, along with a Penguin Computing t-shirt, a favorite he'd had the processor build, based on the memories of one he'd nicked from some swag someone where he worked had brought back from a conference. He wore it underneath the Hawaiian shirt, which he could now leave unbuttoned.

'The way they should be worn anyway' he thought to himself.

He had a pair of nice slip on shoes, sort of a cross between the old leather slippers he'd worn around the house and the neoprene water shoes he used to take hiking. They were ultra comfortable, and fine for running around the Burlan House.

The apartment doors were designed to appear old fashioned, or at least old Gova fashion. There were titanium coated call plates on the wall next to each door, and though the doors were capable of passing ident along the way modern doors did, they were programmed to wait for the call plate to be pushed, except in emergencies. There was even a slight whooshing sound when the door opened.

Gordon made a slight whooshing sound himself when the door opened. Rika was standing on the other side, and the outfit she was wearing was ... cloudy, he decided. Except that cloudy implied far more solidity than there appeared to be, and the connotation was wrong. Misty, he decided at last, very misty. On Earth it might have been called diaphanous, except this outfit somehow moved, like clouds rolling across the sky.

"Too much?" Rika asked.

"I don't think that phrase could be applied to this outfit." Gordon answered. That earned him a trill.

"Well, come on in" Rika said, kissing him on the cheek as he walked past. "Rella is tending the sivvi."

Sivvi, it turned out was the main course for their dinner. Rella, was wearing an outfit similar to Rika's. Hers however, left the impression of a forest mist instead of a sea mist.

"I wish I'd thought to whip up something dressier to wear, but these were all I'd had made so far, and they are very, very casual. You two look amazing!"

"Our clothing is beyond casual" Rella said coming out to greet me with a kiss to the cheek, just as Rika had. "Ours are more aptly described as ... intimate apparel, even back on our home world."

"You are from Dumor 2, correct?" Gordon asked. "Called Ranamor?"

"That's right," Riki said. "been doing some research?"

Gordon had been here only nine days, but he already recognized that as something of an inside joke amongst the rest of the house members.

"I did read the public profiles of all the Burlan residents, so I knew that much about you two by the end of my first day here." Gordon said. "I do confess to having done a little more research since then."

Gordon had considered doing the traditional thing, and bringing a bottle of wine with him, but his further research of the Kuftasa revealed an intolerance for alcohol, but no problems with caffeine or related compounds. So instead he had simply made sure the food dispensers knew how to make iced tea.

"Can I offer you both something to drink from Earth?" he asked.

The sivvi had an appetizing sweet and sour smell, warm and rich. The sweetened ice tea with lemon that he had the food dispenser make would complement it perfectly, Gordon thought.

The sivvi was served along with a grain dish called lampa, similar to rice, but with a nuttier flavor, and fatter, longer grains than anything Gordon recognized. The sivvi itself consisted of oblong chunks of meat, on skewers, thickly coated with a reddish sauce thick with bits and pieces of vegetables and fruits, all unknown to him. It was delicious, smoky hot and spicy, but with the sweet finish that kept it from overwhelming your taste buds.

"This is delicious." Gordon said, between bites.

"Thank you," Rella said. "It is an old favorite, and relying on food dispensers too completely is frowned on back home, so Rika and I both are decent cooks. Limited perhaps, and parochial, but competent at least."

They finished the meal and after a little cleanup, which Gordon was happy to help with, they moved away from the kitchen/dining area.

"You two seem to have gone to a lot of trouble to befriend me." Gordon said as the three of them settled into a large pillowy piece of furniture caught somewhere between being a sofa and a giant throw pillow.

"We Kuftasan's are known for being highly empathic." Rika said.

"And we tend to know immediately when someone we meet is compatible, on an empathic level, and you registered highly." Rella added.

"Very highly." Rika emphasized.

"Well, I confess to feeling conflicted at first" Gordon answered. "There was something very comforting about the two of you, yet at the same time your energy and forwardness reminded me of some of the people who made my adolescence difficult."

"We sensed your reluctance" Rika said. "We did try to tone our enthusiasm down after that first meeting."

"I think you've succeeded, and I appreciate it."

"We confess, we were also concerned about you" Rella said, sliding over to oat my right shoulder. "We know that you have learned more about the reasons why you were retrieved from your home world, and what its fate will be soon."

"Dealing with that on your own, with no other humans around to share your grief, we were concerned for you." Rika said, now at my left shoulder.

Gordon had indeed had to fight back the emotions when he learned of the expected end of life on Earth, and the impending impact of a world shattering asteroid. Unlike the movies, Bruce Willis wasn't going to be able to save the day.

"I've been tracking the Skafti retrievals" Gordon said. "They've tripled the rate of their efforts."

"That is a good thing then." Rika said.

"I agree, but they are doing it because they reevaluated our species, and decided were were better suited for military service than their initial estimates."

"So most of the retrieved will wind up in the Iri Var? That is not so bad a thing, the beheri is not often involved in large scale war." Rella commented.

"So my research tells me, and that is good to know, but it looks like the numbers are going to peak at somewhere between one or two hundred thousand people. That is more than enough to preserve humanity, if we can organize ourselves and make the effort, but we still have to survive long enough to do it, and if the great majority are in the Iri Var, that will decrease our chances."

"Keep at it, there will be others sharing your concern." Rella said, kissing my cheek, a lingering kiss this time.

"We understand too, that the time will come when we will leave here, or you will, and that you will find a human woman to bond with." Rika said, caressing his cheek with an equally lingering kiss that managed to trail up and linger briefly on an earlobe.

"But in the meantime, you have us for comfort and companionship."

While I hadn't really tested it, since awakening after my retrieval, I'd had a sense that along with the feeling of physical fitness the Skafti med techs had provided, there were now much deeper reserves of stamina and endurance available to me.

I had no idea.

== Burlan House, Day 86 ==

"Kesh, you can argue all you want. The math doesn't lie." Gordon said to the holographic projection in front of him.

"I am not arguing about the math, Gordon. I do however, dispute your conclusions, and do not see at this point how you can set about proving it."

"I am not setting out to prove anything. The Prime council has directed Senior Physics Prime Algo Nurek to investigate my idea and see if there is merit to it. Perhaps you should argue with him?"

"I have spoken to Nurek. He is an unpleasant and unreasonable being."

"Because he refused to be swayed by your arguments. He has decided that the best way to explore my idea is to let me put together a team and give me half a standard Skafti year to try to build a system based on my theory."

"This is ridiculous! Why do you insist on physical construction when we can have a working prototype up and running in a simulator within weeks!"

"Because the simulators use the wrong math too, Kesh!" Gordon said, shaking his head. "To do it right we would have to build a simulator from scratch, and then you would complain afterwards that it had a biased design."

"Tell me who you want on your team, and I'll see what the Committee has to say about it, even with Nurek's approval, you can't just have anyone you want."

"Very well. I want Kyer Amson and Prieam Grec for the power team, and Wax Feldain for materials and structure."

"You cannot have Waxalin Feldain, he is committed to his current assignment on Ladeer 3 for at least two more standard years."

"I'm telling you who I want. If this becomes a problem, we can dicker later about who I actually get." Gordon said. "I also want Rika and Rella for the subspace stuff. They're familiar with some of what I've been doing and shouldn't have any problem coming up to speed on this."

"Well, I could understand why you might want those two, so I won't argue there."

"Of course you'll argue with me about it, Kesh, but you'll save that one for later, and do it in public, just in case you need to embarrass me." Gordon said. "But I can tell you right now that it won't work. I'll refuse to be embarrassed, and I know for certain that you can't embarrass a Kuftasan. Not about 'companionship', as they call it."

"Very well, but you will be rejected. This idea of yours is insane."

With that, the connection was dropped. Sophont Keshamir Keshamon, advisor to the Candidate's Council, had disconnected.

Gordon Truitt, Candidate Prime, had seen something in the math of subspace field generation, something he hadn't been looking for, and it had given him an idea. It wasn't even his math, really. It had been a part of what Rella and Rika had been working on, and had to do with the subspace threshold wave generators that were used in the Iri Var air/space combat craft, the Rek.

The Maga had a saying — 'energy is information and information is power.' It was one of the underpinning ideas at the base of their science and technology.

Sophont Keshamon — Kesh, as he liked to be called, was more politician than scientist. Sophont was one of those positions ambitious beings in the Maga found themselves in when they weren't deemed bright enough for the Science Council, or any of its sub council's such as the Candidate's Council that Gordon had to submit all his requests to.

Having drawn the favor of Prime Algo Nurek had been a major coup, but Nurek's own area of specialization had been subspace wave theory.

The Sophont Keshamon was only interested in maintaining the status quo and in currying favor with the more powerful members of the Science Council. Nurek was a respected junior member.

With or without Keshamon's cooperation, it would be another two hundred days or so, assuming nothing negative was reported, and Gordon would move from Candidate status to Mathematician Prime, and he would be free to follow whatever course he wanted, and would have the right to petition the Science Council directly for resources. More importantly, if the proposal he was making now panned out, he could get complete freedom to work on extending the idea into something bigger.

The beings on the Science Council were the very brightest minds there were. Someone besides Nurek had to be seeing what Gordon saw in the math, but there had been no inquiries, no demands for more detail. A concept from old Earth had occurred to Gordon. Maybe they were giving him enough rope to hang himself.

== Spolti Cluster, Tenebara Research Station, Day One ==

"Welcome to Tenebara!" came the booming voice of the station administrator as Gordon and his crew came through the docking collar into the station proper. Gordon had been communicating with the man for weeks now, and recognized the voice even before he saw the pot-bellied, walrus-like being that was Administrator Suu Amhak Rhee.

"Good to be here at last, Suu." Gordon said. "We've a cargo hold full of equipment to unload. Should I trust your handlers? I've got members of my crew willing to supervise the moving of the delicate stuff."

"Don't worry about it. We're a research station. My crews are used to moving just about anything, and managing to avoid the wrath of the Science Council while doing it." Suu Rhee said. "What you should worry about is keeping up with me while I escort you to the reception lounge for a drink and a chance to make some introductions, perhaps?"

Tenebara Station was not on the planet Tenebara. Nor was it orbital. The station was built on the surface of Bor, a tidally-locked, airless moon, one of three natural satellites Tenebara had. The reception lounge had a wall-sized view screen that showed Tenebara itself from the surface. The planet was a study in lavender blues and purplish greens.

The found some comfortable seating near the window and a floating attendant took their orders. Gordon asked for a pint of Guinness. He'd finally gotten the food dispensers programmed for it properly, but it had been a struggle, and he had to cheat really, and rely on some advanced systems designed to replicate foods based on a person's sense memories.

"Suu, I believe you've already met Rella and Rika?" Gordon asked. There were nods of agreement from all three of them. "This fellow to my right is Physics Prime Prieam Grec. The person beside you there is Physics Prime Kyer Amson. The two sitting to Rella's left are Engineer Prime Chanu Whitlak and Engineer Prime Logat."

"You didn't get Feldain then?" Rhee asked.

"Yes and no." Gordon answered. "He's going to be consulting via holo, and he's been freed up for several site visits. Whitlak and Logat here are both excellent in the field, and I doubt they'll get stuck on anything, but we'll have access to Wax if we do. I'm more likely to be the one to get stuck."

"Well, welcome again everyone. We've assigned you one of the isolated labs, as requested, but there are no living quarters on site. There is a day room, and you could slap a sleep field in there if you need. The day room does have a food dispenser, and there's a waste cell, but only one."

The crew had eaten on the ship only a few tan earlier, so it was decided to go examine their piece of the research station and get everything situated that they could for now. The used a grav cart for transportation, one of the low, open ones that Gordon thought of as flying carpets, due to their low, thin profile.

The personnel tube met the lab at the day room, which was the upper tip of a sphere, most of which was buried under the surface. The day room wasn't all that small. The seven of them should have no problems coexisting in the space, even for extended periods. The single waste cell might be an issue, but they were reasoning beings, they could work out a schedule if they had to.

The day room led to the monitoring ring, a large catwalk that circled the main lab floor below it, which was actually divided into four separate work areas at the moment, but could be reconfigured to three, two, or even one. They had a universal simulator in one, but that tool was going to be useful only for the hardware design side of things.

"We will use that one for the fabrication plant." Logat proclaimed, pointing a thin arm at one of the labs. "It has ready access to the loading dock."

"I want the other one next to the simulator then." Gordon countered. "We'll be going back and forth between those spaces a lot at first."

"We get the last one then." Kyer declared. "We will be routing and rerouting power pathways for weeks trying to come up with a system that meets the specs you say we'll have."

"And by then you'll finally have made some progress and change those specs on us completely." Prieam added."

"More than likely." Gordon said. "We're scientists. Isn't that what we do?"



-------

Chapter 3: Kiris Orbit, Kiris Retrieval Station


Antheia Geracimos was ushered without comment away from the Skafti who had called her name, to a bare room with neither window or decoration. A small padded circle in the center of the room suggested a place for rest or meditation, but Antheia was in a mood for neither. There had been something about Gordon Truitt that had attracted her, from the beginning back on Earth aboard the ferry to Skopelos. The attraction had seemed more realistic once they had awakened, and she had found herself in a young woman's body again.

She had always had a knack for reading people, and her reading of the young Brit had been as strong as any she'd had. Most of those she'd formed relationships with in her life had left eventually because they were unable to deal with that knack. There had been some hope that in such a different situation, things might work out differently, but they were being taken down different paths, it seemed, and she didn't yet know where hers would take her.

The edges of the room were lined with soft cushioned benches, long backless couches really, and a spot on one where she could keep the entrance she had come through in front of her seemed a good place to sit and collect her thoughts.

Gordon was obviously a computer person, and with a predilection for advanced math, if what she had learned of him meant anything. He would go into science or technical work somewhere, she was sure. That left the mystery of what the Skafti would want with her. They surely did not need a soup maker in this world of miracle food dispensers! What would most of the people retrieved from Earth do, in the Skafti scheme of things?

"Like you, most of them will join the Iri Var. Your people it seems have a knack for war," a voice said from beside her. Antheia turned to find a being standing at the center of the blue circle. She was so stunned by the arrival, she didn't think to wonder at first how the creature had answered a question that she hadn't spoken aloud.

"I am Dusad. I will be your guide, and I hope, your friend, within the Ken Eic."

"I am Antheia," she answered. As she got the words out, it finally hit her. "Did you just read my thoughts?"

"Read is not the proper term, for your thoughts do not lie open, like the pages of a book," the being said with a nod of its goat-like face. "I did however answer the unspoken question you were asking yourself."

"Is this Ken Eic my benu then?" Antheia asked.

"No. The Ken Eic does not have that status, but we are useful to the beheri, in our way, and so some efforts are allowed us in recruiting those we find who are sensitive. We are each devoted to our benu, but also seek to grow and learn as Ken Eic, and to better follow the path unseen."

Antheia was concerned at first that Dusad seemed to couch everything he said in terms any fake mystic on Earth would have loved. Their conversation was brief, only the time it took for him to lead her to her destination, a docking bay.

"You have been chosen for the Iri Var, as most humans have," Dusad said. "You will meet the rest of those so chosen, and together, you will be sent to an Iri Var training facility."

"Do you know where we are being sent?" Antheia asked.

"Officially, no. Unofficially, yes, but it would serve no purpose to tell you. It would be meaningless to you at this time."

The rest of the people she had been retrieved with, or rather, most of them, appeared then at an entrance at the far end of the corridor.

"We only have a moment," Dusad said. "We will seldom have an opportunity to contact you while you are in training. You will know it is one of us if it should happen."

we will speak to your mind, as I do now. Dusad's word's came into her thoughts, not as if they were spoken words, but as if she had just remembered them.

"In the meantime, during your training, probe your own mind. Examine what you just experienced and seek understanding."

Antheia had barely enough time to nod a somewhat bewildered acknowledgment, and then she was moving with the others into the ship.

The ship was the Calis,  a military transport, and their 'quarters', and that was a generous description, consisted of a section of beefy looking sleep fields in a small section of a much larger deck full of sleep fields.

Corporal Rega, a Skafti, was their nominal officer in charge. He made it abundantly clear that he was little more than an escort.

"My purpose is to make sure you make it safely to the training station at Abruni 3, called Ai Ru locally," the corporal said. "You will have to worry about the staff at Kri Masa, but not me. You keep yourselves alive and well fed, and in eight days or so, I say goodbye and good luck."

Kri Masa, it became obvious later, was the name of the Iri Var training facility. Rumors circulated constantly amongst the humans regarding their destination, and as the deck began to fill with other beings along the way, the rumors grew.

"Ghost stories," one of the Norwegians said with disgust. Mads Sindreson, Antheia thought she remembered him saying his name was. "We are like children, trying to scare ourselves by the fires at night."

"We know at least that we are not the only beings capable of having overactive imaginations," Antheia said. "at least half of what we're hearing is coming from other beings around us."

== Ai Ru, Kri Masa Training Center ==

The Ken Eic agent, Dusad, may have briefly lifted the veil on new mysteries and held out the promise of something greater beyond it, but Antheia had no time to ponder it. She was too damned busy learning to be a soldier. It was very different than she had assumed it would be at first. Yes, they had to learn to shoot weapons, and use explosives, and drive a variety of military vehicles, but it was a very different process than she had been used to, thanks to the Skafti learning technology. Their days were spent processing and applying what their minds had garnered during the previous sleep period.

"The knowing of a thing is not the same as having the knack for using it," Sergeant Imni lectured them. "You must use what you wake up knowing in an intelligent way."

Antheia spent her first two weeks as a member of a field unit called 'Mecur', along with twenty six other beings. Mecur simply meant 'seventh' in Ancient Skafti. Mecur was further broken down into three nine person teams called a Sep, Also Ancient Skafti, and meaning 'foot'. She was one of nine people in the second Sep of three that made up the Mecur unit, and there were nine other units like it. Her Sep might as well have been a single beast with nine stomachs, they were so seldom apart.

There were a fair number of Ormins, the hairless humanoid species that humans most closely resembled, and for which their species type was named. In Skafti terms, they were all 'orminoids', not humanoids. In some ways that was the key piece of data that shifted Antheia's perspective on her place in the universe. Within a large interstellar society, itself only a part of a larger galactic milieu, she was just a new variety of orminoid, nothing special.

The eat-sleep-move-as-one period of their training finally came to an end, but not with an announcement or ceremony of any kind. The instructors simply began screaming new orders one day, and they obeyed them.

They were broken up into teams of different sizes, depending on the exercises, and pitted against each other. Some days they fought with other Seps, some days against them. One day it was capturing a communications post, the next it was defending a supply depot. They fought on foot through city streets and jungles, empty deserts and dense forests. They fought with pulse rifles and they fought hand to hand.

"Ren, there's movement in the tree line," came the whispered voice of one of the sentries.

"Cell check!" Corporal Ren called down the line in a whisper of her own. Antheia passed the whispered command on down the line and checked the charge on her pulse rifle. Just under eighty three percent. She was in pretty good shape, having spent the morning at the rear of their line getting the mess tent set up. While she had been busy making soup and baking bread, the rest of her unit fought a holding action against a strike team trying hard to overrun their position. It overlooked a pass through the hills, and would be advantageous for whoever held it.

"Eyes up!" came the call. Antheia lifted her pulse rifle over the retaining wall and let her eyes come up behind it, scanning the distant tree line. All she could see was utter blackness, mottled with patches of almost-utter gray. Moments later the gray and black vagueness resolved itself into a line of warriors advancing on their position through the cover of the darkness. Then the shooting began again.

-oOo-

Antheia worked hard, as did the rest of their class, and when they had finished the Iri Var version of basic training, she was proud to have finished the course with honors, or at least the Skafti equivalent.

She found she wasn't alone. Eighty percent of the humans in the class finished with honors as well.

"Mads, Mosa, did you find the link I pointed you to?"

"Yes, Ed and Kristy left a message. They sounded hopeful," Mosa Obukwe said in Skafti.

"There's more than that. This morning I got a new message from Gordon Truitt. He's gone into the science and technical benu, the Maga. He's set up some resources on the datanet for us all to share."

"You agree then, with Ed and Kristy, that its important that we work towards preserving humanity?" Ted asked.

"I do," Antheia answered. "We've all got a few years to go, getting ourselves established within the beheri, but once we have our collective heads above water, we'll need to begin in earnest."

"Breeding?" Mosa asked with a grin.

"Yes, and before you ask, the answer is no."

Both men laughed, but Antheia knew she hadn't given the answer either man was hoping to hear.

There had been fifty humans, more or less, in their 'class' at Kri Masa. The incoming class overlapped theirs by a few days, and there were five hundred humans in that class. Rumor said that those who entered the Iri Voch trained here as well, but they must have had separate facilities, because Antheia never saw one, though there were occasional signs of beings training in groups that were unfamiliar to any of them.

"There are a lot more," one of the new group said. "We saw other groups, but they didn't come with us."

In the brief amount of time they had to interact with the incoming group, they shared what they knew of humanity's fate and future. They spoke of the datanet, and the links where they could find out more. Somewhere, Gordon Truitt had access to more, or perhaps just the understanding to find it, and he had been sharing it with Ed and Kristy Bell. Antheia saw brief messages on the net with Gordon's signature, but for the most part, she relied on Ed and Kristy's regular messages, plucking out phrases here and there that stood out, for some reason. He could be quite poetic, in his way.

The Skafti have chosen us to be the reapers of souls. We stand on the great field of flowers and they choose which shall live and which shall die, and we are the hand that plucks them.
 
From our beginnings on Earth, we are reborn, and this birth too is likely to be painful and perilous. But once reborn, what shall we become?

Something in Ed Bells words seemed to resonate, and not just with Antheia. There was something in Ed's past that seemed to mesh with parts of the Skafti philosophy, and the requests for more information began to build. It seemed to draw the survivors of Earth in a way no one understood.

Word was that the retrieved humans now numbered in the hundreds of thousands, and if what they heard from Gordon was accurate, they were being kept in their sleep fields for long stretches so they could be run through Kri Masa in manageable groups.

"It appears, based on what we've learned through the net, and confirmed by the number of us in the class just starting, that the Skafti have decided that humans are the very definition of Iri Var," Mads said.

"Possibly the same is true for the Iri Voch," Fred Delgado added. "Captain Ed can't tell us how many have been selected for the Iri Voch, but he says the percentages are shifting."

"Whatever that means," someone muttered.

"Some of us are making it into other benu," Antheia said. "We're not all being selected for the Iri Var and the Iri Voch. Gordon has risen the quickest, but even he seems to believe that he's still on some sort of probation."

"He's going to be our savior?" Mosa asked. "Are you letting your feelings get in the way? We all know you have some feelings for him."

"That possibility never made it past the exploratory stages Mosa, and I know where that comment is coming from, so we can just drop it. The point is we don't know where its going to come from, so we need to be as ready as we can be. It could be Gordon, it could be Ed Bell. It could be someone we don't even know about."

"I'd put my money on Ed," Sam Cruz said. You see how much in awe most folks are of the Iri Voch in general."

"And all that stuff from him about the Yoeme and the Skafti philosophy have gotten a lot of attention," Fred Delgado added.

"Attention can be a good thing," Mads said. "It can be a bad thing too. Antheia is right. We need to put away the paranoia, and work on being in the position to do whatever we can when the time is right. At the moment, that just means being as good at what we've been asked to do as we can be."

== Mar Chine Hills, Retici IV ==

The Omicin Brigade, Third Division, First Advance Corp had been on the ground for three weeks. The resistance in the hills surrounding Mar Chine was proving to be a tough nut to crack. The Skafti high command, as usual, had denied requests for orbital bombardments to weaken the defenses. The emplacements were strategically and tactically well designed and laid out. The camouflage was effective and the hardened sites, when found, were difficult to penetrate.

"Commander, we're making progress, but its slow. We've been taking out a position every couple of days, but the cost is high, and we're going slower than we might otherwise to keep our losses as low as is practical."

"Captain Geracimos, we understand that this is not easy, you don't have to make excuses," Commander Flesthej said in a dry voice.

"Begging your pardon Commander, but these are not excuses. I've asked repeatedly for permission to ramp up the force we're bringing to bear, but we've been denied repeatedly. These are, once again, the reasons why there is a need."

"Relax Captain," the elder Skafti said. "As it happens, Captains Delgado and Bebeite agree with your assessment and have been making the same arguments. High command, as it happens, agrees with you as well."

"Well then what's the holdup? We've got good soldiers dying out there!" Antheia said with some venom.

"Once again, calm down Captain, and that's an order!" the Skafti said with a little steel in his own voice.

"My apologies, Commander," Antheia replied quickly.

"Your anger is understandable Captain, but it is misplaced. While high command agrees with your assessment of the situation, it disagrees with your recommended solutions. We have brought a solution of a different kind to bear."

Mar Chine was one of those problems the Skafti often ran into. A planetary government and economy was brought into the fold, with pockets of beings, fiercely independent before the Skafti arrived, refusing to participate. The planetary government had requested Skafti aid in rooting them out of their strongholds, and the Dur Vai had agreed, with limitations.

While battles had been ongoing, a search for political solutions had continued unabated, but without success. These beings were admirable in their way, but they had been a drain on the planetary government's coffers before the Skafti had arrived, and there was no doubt in their minds that they would continue to be, even if they acquiesced to the government's demands for unity.

During her time in the shuttle alongside Commander Flesthej, she had wondered what solution he was going to offer them. The Operational HQ was a few miles from where they had met, on the front lines of the latest skirmish, and Captains Delgado and Bebeite were in the operations room waiting for them. The two men gave the Commander a sharp salute, something the Skafti commanders didn't require, but which Antheia thought secretly pleased them. She could sense the warmth radiating from the old Skafti over their gesture.

The two men were carefully neutral with Antheia. Both had been her occasional lovers in the past, and there was always some hesitation over what their current status might be with her. Fred was supposed to have found someone he wanted to settle down with, so she could only assume his neutrality was for Franco's sake.

The two men were not alone. There were four others in the room with them, one human and three others whose species Antheia wasn't familiar with. The human though she recognized immediately.

"Ed Bell!" she said out loud.

"Nice to see you again Antheia," he said with a smile.

"Iri Voch?" she said, spinning to regard Commander Flesthej with a glare. "You could have just told me you were going to call in the Iri Voch!" She said it with some heat, but she was grinning as she said it, and fortunately the Skafti was used to human facial expressions by this time.

"I could have. But then you'd have had no excuse to visit with Sergeant Bell."

"Well, thank you," Antheia said, her grin softening into a warm smile. "You enjoyed this whole show though, didn't you?"

"Of course I did. We Skafti may insist we aren't fond of displaying our emotions, but we don't pretend we don't enjoy seeing the displays of others," the Skafti Commander said with a laugh. "Now, I'm going to go spend some time with the local politicians, let them buy me lunch and reassure them that the Dur Vai and the high command are always looking out for them. Sergeant Bell, do you need anything more from me while you're here?"

"No sir, thanks for the lift, and the nice introduction," Ed said with a smile.

"Very well then, I'll let you and your team find its own way home then."

Once the Commander and his bodyguards had left, Antheia found herself sitting at a table with her two fellow Captains and the four Iri Voch.

"Sergeant?" she asked.

"There aren't really ranks in the Iri Voch, so we're all Sergeants. Its intended to garner respect from officers and enlisted men in the Iri Var, but we all know that's not really needed. Its really to give old military types like the Commander a proper placeholder for their tongues when they're talking to us."

Ed's three companions laughed, with a combination of a hiss and a rough thrum that sounded more like a cough than anything else.

"This is Piet, Deff and Lios, my teammates," Ed said. "They're Argantans, and the backbone of the Iri Voch."

The group exchanged greetings, and when that wound down, Antheia suggested they get their own lunch and talk while they ate. As they stood at the food dispenser waiting for their turn, Ed suggested she order the roast palvak that Piet had ordered ahead of them.

"These Argantans are as fond of burned meat as we are, and this is as good as any Texas grilling I've ever had," Ed said. "But get your own vegetables. The Argantan stuff is like eating drywall compound at its best, and you don't want to know about the worst."

The meat was delicious, with a crisply burned outer crust, wildly seasoned with something Antheia couldn't identify, but really liked, and the meat was melt-in-your-mouth tender and juicy. Much lighter than beef, more like the thigh meat from a Godzilla-sized turkey, but with the kind of marbling that she was used to from prime cuts of beef. She ordered boiled baby red potatoes and butter to go with it, and the combination was fantastic.

The conversation was personal to start, Ed asked to save the business for the end.

"Talk to me about this Yoeme stuff. I've read what you've written, and its interesting."

"I'm finding it a little strange how much interest so many people seem to have. It's just something I learned about as a kid. I was raised in a Catholic family, but I had a lot of exposure to the Yoeme philosophy from our Yaqui housekeeper and her husband, and there's a little overlap due to the strange influence the Jesuits had, followed by some reinforcement from the Franciscans later on down the road. These influences brought Easter and Lent to the Yoeme."

"It seems like a strangely mashed together religion," Antheia observed.

"It is, when viewed as a religion," Ed said. "but that's the trick really, the Yoeme don't have a word for religion in their language you know. They borrow words from Spanish, but that's mostly so they can communicate with outsiders in a way that makes sense to the outsiders."

"So its not a religion then?" Franco asked.

"Not as they see it," Ed said. "Its just the truth of things, the reality of existence."

"How can they simply add things like Lent and Easter?" Fred asked.

"Because their philosophy is a supernatural one. It doesn't depend on logic or reason, as most western philosophies do. Anything which resonated in their physical existence found a counterpart in the supernatural, and since logic and reason aren't required, the lack of it is not important."

Three faces stared back at him, somewhat blankly.

"Look, most of this is based on my own, geeky musings during a solitary childhood and a less-than-admirable adolescence," Ed said. "I'm not sure why its so fascinating to all of you, but there are some convenient connections to some of the Skafti beliefs that sort of explain why others are."

"I guess I'm just curious," Antheia said with a chuckle.

Once the personal conversations were over, they got down to business, and Ed asked for details on the current situation, and any intel they had on the location and movement of all the known leaders of the renegade forces.

"We need you to plan and launch a coordinated assault on these four installations within the next 30 Tan," Sergeant Lios said, once the briefing had finished.

"We will each need to accompany an advance scout team into those four areas, and be in position 2 Tan before the assault," Sergeant Piet said."

"Your advance teams will lose contact with us once we're in position. They shouldn't try to find us, or communicate with us. There will be no communications with us until some time after your assault is under way, and then we will contact you."

"How serious an assault do you want?" Antheia asked. "Is this just a feint, or are you bringing down the walls Jericho style?"

Ed laughed, but the three Argantans looked perplexed.

"I don't think biblical references are going to go very far in this brave new world," Ed said with a laugh.

"I guess not. Where's Kristy, by the way?"

"Kristy and I never work as part of the same team," Ed said with a frown. "Too much concern that it would impact on our performance. The safety of a teammate should never outweigh the mission."

"That's too bad," Antheia said.

"No, its probably better this way anyway," Ed said, then his frown brightened. "We'll get to work together once this mission is over though. We're getting assigned to some project Gordon Truitt is working on, and its non-military all the way."

"I heard Gordon has some kind of project in the works. Some new wrinkle in the subspace wave field theory or some such."

"That's pretty much all we know about it too," Ed said.

"But there's a saying in the Iri Voch... ," Gordon said.

" ... No mission an Iri Voch is assigned to is free of danger," the three Argantans all quoted at once.

A day and a half later, the assault began. The first shot was fired an hour before first light, and Ed and his team, each accompanying a different scout unit, disappeared without a trace. The attacks were concentrated on known sally points, but dedicated recon teams were assigned to observation duties on each front, in the hopes that other, previously unnoticed entrances might be spotted.

Six hours later, the four Iri Voch were back with the scout teams and were quickly routed back to the Iri Var HQ. Three hours after that, word came from the Mar Chine rebels requesting a parley.

By dinner time the next evening, the resistance was done, the resistance forces had surrendered and the Mar Chine bases had been opened and occupied by Iri Var forces. Not one of the four leaders of the resistance were at the bargaining table, and any mention of them was met with angry silence.

Antheia didn't ask Ed or any of the other Iri Voch if the assassination of the four leaders had been their task, but she suspected it, and when others did ask, something told her it was the right supposition. The Ken Eic side of her kicked in a little, and she shuddered at this sign of it.

"You will know without information, and understand without knowledge. You will see beyond lies and hear truths in the silence," Dusad had told her in his pedantic, oracular tones, during one of their earlier conversations. "You will fear yourself long before others learn to."

'Perhaps being part of something not considered important enough to be its own benu makes you take on an air of self-importance.' she had thought to herself.

Regardless of the shortcomings she saw in her Ken Eic mentor, she couldn't dispute the fact that under his tutelage she had definitely developed some increased sensitivity with the quirky psychic side of herself, and perhaps some clearer understanding of what she did feel when it kicked in.

-oOo-

Antheia was surprised to find that the Iri Var High Command, and the Dur Vai military council felt she was adequate to the task of administering the peace that fell on Retici IV. She moved from her sub-commander status under Flesthej to that of liaison to the planetary government. Commander Flesthej moved on to some other holo-op elsewhere in Skafti space, Dassi III, she'd heard. Space pirates, or some such glamorous foe.

Retici IV was known as Marsom by the locals, a humanoid species somewhat reminiscent of the Argantans. The planet was almost classically terrestrial, with a single moon, though a moon that was considerably smaller than Earth's. The temperate bands were small and much closer to the poles than their Earth counterparts and the tropical and subtropical regions were large. The Marsomi, as the race called itself, was born of the tropics, but their most advanced societies were all 'border' states, existing at the edges of the tropics where the jungles faded into the hilly forests and grasslands.

The Marsomi had been active in the past hundred years in reclaiming the jungles and reducing the footprint of Marsomi technology on them. The Skafti had negotiated their treaty with this need in mind, and a good part of Antheia's day-to-day duties involved coordinating the transition of certain parts of Marsom's transportation, building and energy industries over to Skafti technology and products.

It was difficult when those sectors saw themselves being co-opted out of their markets, but everywhere she could, Antheia saw to it that those entities who were most a part of the old, and most affected, had a part to play in the new.

"Master Gelf, I understand your frustration completely. Of course you want to feel you are doing more, any reasoning being with a sense of self worth would," Antheia said to the former director of Crimati Motor Works. "I thought we had done an excellent job of ensuring a minimum of layoffs and the transition times are still holding to the scheduled time line we had agreed on in advance of the switchover, aren't they?"

"Yes, they are, and the layoffs have been even less of an impact than we had feared, but Gab's Teat!, it doesn't mean there aren't still problems adjusting!"

"Of course. As I said, I understand. Listen, my home world doesn't even exist anymore, except as a broken and shattered ball of rock. If it weren't for the Skafti, I would not only have nothing, I wouldn't even exist. I am trying to earn my way and make a place for myself and for others of my kind who they rescued. Do I sometimes feel like it is impossible for me to give back as much as I've been given? Absolutely!" Antheia said, all the while trying to stifle a laugh over the phrase 'Gab's Teat'.

"I can appreciate that," the Marsomi replied.

"Trust me when I say that we've barely scraped the surface in our efforts to identify meaningful trade items. You would do well not to dismiss the importance of the ones we already have identified. The Semberian fruit woods are looking to be very popular with certain segments of the Skafti sphere. The pearl blossoms you use as jewelry and decorative materials is, as far as I know, unique, and being snapped up as fast as it can be made available, especially on Tenerif. The locals there are agog over the stuff."

The elder Marsomi was nodding, but still had a sour look on his face.

"I know you were used to building things, and now you're not. That must be particularly frustrating. If you look at the global picture though, and beyond global, Marsom is not an 'industrial' world. You are not going to out-build or outsell or out-produce any of the seriously industrialized worlds in the Skafti federation."

"What would you do then, if you were me?" Gelf asked, sitting back in his chair and taking a sip of his tea.

"Understand that on Earth where I was born, I was not, and am not now at an age where I would have been looked to for words of wisdom," Antheia began, to a chuckle from Gelf.

"Understood."

"You strike me as being of an age where you no longer spent time on shop floors, except as a way to keep in touch with your own past. You lived through the contact you had with the bright, energetic young men who worked for you, and because they were still building things, you were as well."

"That is an accurate assessment of it," Master Gelf said with a sigh. "Are you sure you're not really old and wise?"

Antheia laughed and gave the old industrialist a nod.

"Master Gelf, you have been shepherding young men along the path you took before them. Perhaps now that there is a new path known to you, you can continue shepherding them — but in a new direction. Set up a plan for getting your best and brightest to sit for the Skafti testing, encourage them to go out and meet this new challenge, but keep them aware of where they are from and that they are Marsomi. When their service is done, they will return to Marsom armed with the best education available and with the skills and judgment needed to move Marsom and its people fully into the interstellar community."

"So, my job, and that of others like me will be to remain here and keep the lines of communications open. To keep those young men and women posted on the news from home. To point them towards others and keep the thought of home strong and fresh in their minds," Master Gelf said out loud, but not really to Antheia. "I can see the merit of that approach, but it would take great levels of cooperation across the globe."

"You have said you were a builder. So build this," Antheia said quietly. She had convinced him, she already knew it. She'd felt the shift with that hidden part of her.

"I am a builder," Master Geld agreed, with a grin.

== Juniff IV, Central Continent, Western coast ==

The Sun was a comforting yellow-orange ball, and sank into the sea nearby with all the majesty of any sunset Ed could remember having seen back on Earth. The Sky was almost the perfect shade of blue, and the forested hills behind him were achingly familiar on the surface, even if closer examination would reveal unmistakable differences.

Kristy's presence impinged on his neural net, and he knew that dinner was ready. He stood and turned back to the redoubt and began walking up the hill, away from the shore and the late sea breeze that had drawn him there in the first place.

"The sunset was incredible," he said as he walked in the door.

"That's what you said last night," Gordon Truitt said from the low cushioned seat by the front window. "And I saw it pretty well from the window anyway."

"Yeah, but there's a breeze when the sun is setting that feels great," Ed said.

"Dinner's ready," Kristy called.

As the 'hosts' for this get-together, the menu had been up to the Bells, and Ed and Kristy had decided that a good old fashioned Texas barbecue would have to wait for some other time, but that didn't mean they couldn't do a little something from home, so they were having chili and cornbread tonight, along with the best of the replicated beers that they'd been able to produce.

"I still prefer a good room temperature Guinness," Gordon said, "but with the chili, this is good. What did you call it again?"

"Curveball," Ed said. "Someone somewhere had a very good sense memory of this stuff from Earth. It was a Kolsch style beer from a small west coast American brewer called Pyramid back before the big splash."

Once dinner was out of the way, the dozen humans gathered again by the large picture windows overlooking the bay.

"Okay," Ed said once they'd settled in and Kristy had finally left the food dispenser unit to snuggle in beside him. "I've put off asking for your impressions until now, but it is the point of all this, after all. What do you think?"

The people scattered around the room looked at each other, scanning the faces for some hint of how to proceed. Finally Gordon spoke.

"I like what I see right now," he said. "Based on the planetary data I suspect I'll like it all. The axial tilt and orbital data suggest there'll be real seasons, and the year, day and seasons will all be very close to what we remember from Earth."

"There's not a lot of long term data on it, but what we do have suggests the planet is tectonically stable, and there's no sign of stellar instability either," Mads Singridsen said.

"Certainly the local flora and fauna is about what you would expect," Antheia said. "No surprises there, and no sign of anything inimical at the microbial level."

"Its got the gamut," Ken Itokawa said. "High mountains, wide plains, deep seas. Lush jungles, heavy forests and every kind of beach, island, river and stream you could wish for. Records suggest there'll be heavy weather, but the analysis also suggests that the lack of large expanses of open ocean like we were used to on Earth will minimize the threat of hurricanes. Everyone always complains about the weather anyway, so what's not to like?"

There was a long pause then, finally broken by Antheia.

"I know what you're really asking, Ed," she said. "We all do, even if we don't realize it. Does it feel like home?"

"Well?" he said.

"That's such a subjective thing," Lasa Longassa said. "It doesn't feel like its NOT home. I can definitely say that."

"There are going to be differences," Kristy said. "There are no marine mammals here for example. No dolphin or whale equivalents."

"All the trees are broad-leafed as well, nothing like a pine tree at all," Ed said. "But Antheia is right, what I'm hoping to find out is if this world feels like it could be home."

"So far so good, I guess is the impression I've got," Berit Schau said. "We'll want to get a lot larger sample of opinions than just ours though, don't you think?"

"Yes of course, and that should be easy enough to arrange. Portable redoubts like this one are easy enough to arrange, and they can be placed anywhere on the planet," Gordon said.

"Perhaps the question that needs asking then is, will we get cooperation from the Skafti if we do come to a decision? Will they just give us this planet. Any planet for that matter?" Peter Lewes asked.

"No," Ed answered. "There will be a price. We think we'll have what it takes to meet the price, but that depends on some work by Gordon."

"Gordon, I hear that the work you've done with that subspace wave field stuff has paid off handsomely, and you've gained quite a bit of status within the Maga," Antheia said. "Is that going to be enough to swing this?"

"I'm pretty sure it will, using even the most conservative numbers," Gordon said with a frown. "If the impact is all that I think it will be, and there are ... extensions to the work that are less than obvious, then a standard payoff would be far beyond enough. That is what I have been working on, and continue to work on. If it works out as we are hoping it does, we will not only become enormously wealthy, but we'll also have a major bargaining chip with both the Maga and the Skafti in general."

"We've heard that the work you've been doing will allow Skafti ships to react far more completely with subspace than in the past, and that ships using your new generators can travel further and faster than the current fleet of star ships. Is that true?" Mads asked.

"That's most of it," Gordon said.

"We would all wonder, naturally, what something like that would have to do with a couple of Iri Voch like Ed and Kristy," Mads continued.

"You will all have to continue to wonder for now," Ed said. "If what we're doing works out, every human in Skafti space will know what it means."

"Keep it in your thoughts. Anything else would still be premature. There is a road we have found to travel though, and we work to put all our feet on it, and find ourselves a people with a home again somewhere down it," Gordon added.

The talk had run into the night and people and couples began excusing themselves to find their beds. Antheia stood in front of Gordon with a smile.

"Come tuck me in. You can tell me about Kuftasan comfort and companionship."

== Andrassi, Panu II, Galides Sector ==

It was called Suror, the Sacred Forest.

The Second Division had been engaged for more than sixty days when the reinforcements arrived. Five hundred of the newest Iri Var, all human. Their commander was a human as well, named Duncan Ames.

"The sacred forest is the problem, commander," Colonel Sh'Din said. "The terrorists are using the forest as a safe haven and striking out from it at will."

"The report we received en route said that you had them contained. Is that true or not?"

"Its true. We've put in a complete sensor network that they don't have the means to get past undetected. We've caught every attempt to send anyone out in the past thirty days, but whatever the Andrassi weaknesses are, hand to hand combat isn't one of them. Every unit we've sent in has failed to return, as have those individuals we're tried to insert covertly."

"What about remote intelligence?"

"The trees that make up this forest have some peculiar metallic compounds in them that make orbital or high altitude scans unrevealing. In the meantime, their ability to track and shoot down low flying craft seems unimpeded."

"Remote probes are forbidden?"

"Affirmative. Major Geracimos is the Iri Var liason to the planetary government and she is definite in her reports. The local religion prevents their use in sacred areas like this, and of course we can't just fire into the forest with heavy weapons. The trees are sacred."

Duncan Ames sat at the desk in his command redoubt, staring at the map while the situation reports flickered in the display that hovered over the table. These terrorists — the Intivara, as they called themselves, were once again a group of believers struggling to keep their reality alive in the face of the Skafti-prompted changes that the rest of the local people and government had agreed to. They saw themselves as freedom fighters, struggling to maintain their way of life, and those were always the toughest nuts to crack, given the Skafti mandates regarding pacification of resistant sub-populations.

"Mac, what am I missing?" Duncan asked his Ora. "We don't have a huge technological advantage over these people, but we do have one, and yet they seem to have no trouble spotting us, no matter what we've tried."

"Difficult to say," the Ora said in return. "When the facts don't fit the equation, then something in the equation is wrong."

That was a pretty generic piece of advice. Duncan almost suspected it to be a canned response. It got him thinking though. These damned trees and their odd metal compounds were what had their remote scanners stymied. Maybe their other problems were related.

"Mac, can we access the Andrassi datanet? How do they deal with these compounds in their own technology?"

There it was, they had the answer all along if someone had thought to look at the Andrassi for answers instead of the tried and true Skafti procedures and practices. Duncan called a meeting of his captains and the other senior staff already present following dinner that night.

"The Intivara, as do all the Andrassi, live with the limitations imposed by these trees on their electronics, and over the years they've developed some alternative technologies for working in and near them," Duncan said to the dozen men and women sitting in front of him. With a thought, he had Mac throw up a dark, blurry holo image.

"This is what Corporal Edgars looks like to our scanners through six feet of forest," He let the murky, unrevealing picture sink in for a while.

"Here is what he looks like to our scanners once they've been tuned, as the Andrassi have learned to tune their own, emphasizing the low subsonic bands rather than the standard ultrasonic, infrared, radio and x-ray bands."

Mac flipped the image, and the holo before them changed to show a brightly glowing human shape standing in the middle of the the rest of the still-murky image. The room exploded into chaos as the image registered on everyone.

In the dead of night, a hundred volunteers shed their beloved battle armor, painted themselves, as warriors had back on Earth for countless generations, took weapon in hand and slipped quietly into the night, moving slowly through the high grassland that surrounded Suror, and made their way into the sacred forest. Eight died, and another thirty came away with wounds, some requiring major rebuilding by Penod medical techs. Their sacrifice paid off, though. The Intivara were subdued and brought out of Suror.

"Duncan that was a good piece of work on Andra," Ed said via holo. "Sorry for your losses, but your team showed some real initiative."

"I appreciate that, Ed," Duncan replied. "We don't quite get the full primitive ground training I hear you Iri Voch get, but I was one of the few old Earth military types to make the cut, and remember some of my old training."

"Did you include some of that training with these units after finishing the Skafti basic?" Ed asked.

"I did. Sergeant Chivers and I both had some similar ground training. Mine was mostly ADF and the reserves in Townsville, and his was far more glamorous. He was Recces,  the SANDF special forces in South Africa. He had a lot to show us, I'll tell you that."

"He's still a sergeant with that background?" Ed asked.

"He refuses promotion. Says he's not cut out to be an officer."

"If someone gave him the job of sharing his skills with those like us in the Iri Var, like he has done with your boys, how would he do?"

"He'd do great, as long as there was someone above him responsible for it all," Duncan said.

"Someone like you?"

"I wasn't volunteering."

"Too bad," Ed countered with a snort of laughter. "I've got some plans, and you my friend are going to be a part of them."

"Okay," Duncan said after some silence. "Explain to me how the Skafti will allow this to happen?"

"Come see me and I'll explain," Ed said. I'll send you the location. Bring Sergeant Chivers with you. What's his first name?"

"Arend," Duncan answered.

== Spolti Cluster, Tenebara Research Station ==

The holo-call had been contentious from the beginning, but at least Gordon was dealing with someone in a position to make a final determination. He had been working his way up the ladder for weeks now.

"Prime Tergent, I'm not asking for any sort of special treatment here. Researchers have always had the right to ask for compensation for their work, and the new subspace fields are going to mean tremendous savings for the Skafti, and for us all."

"And because they will be so enormous, what you are asking for would be an incredible number!" the senior Maga counselor complained.

"It is a tenth of a percent, that's all. Maxalin Feldain's work on hyper-irilonic communications platforms netted him a full two percent!"

"But the totals are not comparable!" the elder Tolchoran sputtered.

"Well its not like I'm asking for it all up front. I'm not even asking for an advance. The central credit consortium is already willing to loan me almost any amount, once an agreement is in place," Gordon said.

"Wealth like that doesn't go unused, Gordon," the counselor said finally. "Just what are you planning to do with it, if you don't mind my asking."

"You know my story, and that of my people," Gordon stated.

"Of course."

"We are looking for a new home for humanity, and understanding and cooperation can get you a long way, but at some point, you still need to buy the plot of land, and the tools and supplies with which to build your dream."

The elder Skaft nodded his head, but remained silent for an excrutiatingly long interval. "I'll state your case before the council then. There will be a lot of arguing about how to calculate the amount."

"Even if the most miserly method is chosen, it will mean enough for my people."

"Your people have made a huge impact on the Iri Var and the Iri Voch, it is said," Tergent commented.

"You can ease the council's concerns," Gordon said. "We have no intention of running away from our service. We might seek to gain a little greater control of just how we contribute that service; we might find a new way to serve that will change what we do, but we are fully aware of just what we are good at, and where we fit best into the beheri."




== Juniff IV, Central Continent, Western coast ==

"Okay Ed. We're here. Why was it important we have this conversation face to face, rather than via holo?" Duncan Ames asked.

"Nice to meet you in person too, Duncan," Ed said with a laugh.

"Arend Chivers," the other man who'd come in with him said, extending a hand. "A pleasure to meet you at last, Sergeant Bell."

"Ah!" Ed said, shaking the hand offered. "Someone with some social skills. Please, call me Ed, and welcome to Juniff IV. Have you met Mathematician Prime Gordon Truitt and Ambassador Antheia Garacimos?"

They exchanged greetings and Ed began leading them back to the house a couple hundred meters from the beach from where their shuttle had landed.

"My wife and a few others are waiting to meet you in the house," Ed said as they walked.

After further introductions were made in the house, Ed got down to it.

"Gentlemen, you were asked to come here in person so that we could invite you to join us in a great conspiracy. Not against the Skafti, or any of the beings we've met since our retrieval, but rather against fate."

"Fate?" Duncan asked.

"Fate might have left us all dead on a smoldering and ruined Earth, were it not for the Skafti and their society," Gordon said.

"Fate might have left us with none but good soldiers, tried and true culled from the dying Earth, but we got brains like Gordon's and souls like Ed's along with all the good soldiers," Antheia added.

"We also got good minds and wide hearts like Antheia's," Ed added. "Truth be told, whatever else we wind up bringing to the table, as a people we're definitely going to remain associated with the Skafti military benu, and that's not a bad thing. The Skafti aren't conquerors and they're not cruel. They believe in using only the minimum force necessary. But we've already shown that we are capable of excelling in other fields, and in the Skafti scheme of things, success definitely has its rewards."

"We're sitting on Juniff IV today, but next year this planet could be called New Earth," Gordon said. "Humankind will have a home again, and we can establish a place in this new reality to replace the one fate took from us."

"There's a lot that we get for nothing, because of where we are and what we do, but I know that things aren't really free. Are we going to be able to pay for this?" Mads Singridsen asked.

"Gordon is about to become incredibly, stinking, filthy rich," Ed said. "His little bit of research in the Spolti Cluster has paid off big time for the Skafti, and they have finally conceded that he deserves a share."

"Transit times between points in known space are about to be cut in half, on average," Kristy said. "Some will be even more dramatic than that. Oh, and at a lower cost."

"More importantly for us," Gordon said, "Central Credit has already authorized an unlimited credit line, based on an 'intent to reconcile' notice published by the Maga High Council, acting on behalf of the Dur Vai full assembly."

"No published intent has ever been denied, in the history of the Skafti beheri," Antheia said. "Adjusted perhaps, but not denied."

"If I get a tenth of what I"m asking for, it will be a hundred times what we'll need, and what I'm asking for is already a fraction of what is normally given in these sort of things," Gordon said.

The clamor over this news was long and loud, and ideas about the establishment of a New Earth, and the possible ways forward were long and heartfelt. Into the din, Duncan Ames threw out a thought that brought the various conversations to a halt.

"This isn't conspiracy material," Duncan said. "When is the other shoe going to drop?"

"Very well then," Ed said. "Duncan, have you examined the details of your contract?"

"Contract? What contract?" Came the confused reply.

"Your contract of service to the Skafti beheri. We all have one, it has been in effect since the day we were retrieved."

Duncan and Arend were suddenly not-quite-there, as they and their Ora began digging through the datanet.

"Damn!" Duncan muttered.

"Fucking hell!" Arend said more forcefully.

"Don't make more of it than it deserves, gentlemen. The terms of that automatically imposed contract are not odious, and while the terms are open-ended and renewal of the terms is automatic, barring a request for change by either party, it is, you'll notice, legal for either party to terminate it after the initial service period is met."

And so it was. Six standard years. Skafti standard of course, which came close to being Eight old Earth years. The finances were tricky. A large amount of the pay owed each of them for their minimum length of service was deducted up front for the genetic optimizations and regeneration done at retrieval. Another percentage was deducted each year as fees and there was even a payment for the processing of the yearly calculations. There was an accrued amount of credits, but it wasn't a life-changing sum.

It wasn't indentured servitude either. They weren't all debt slaves.

"What's the deal then?" Arend asked. "Why weren't we told of these things?"

"Its a combination of things, really." Antheia said. "First, we're assumed to be intelligent beings with self interest. We were all given access to the datanet. It was assumed we would realize that all aspects of our own condition would be there for review. Our contracts were definitely there for our examination at any time."

"Second — well, I guess its a bit of a test. Somewhere within the beheri, someone is watching with interest and waiting to see what we do with the information. More than one someone, because I know that the Ken Eic are tracking us as well, for those reasons among others."

"So what do we do?" Duncan asked. "I assume this is one of the reasons we are here."

"These terms of service are expiring now. Half of us here were a part of the first group taken and the first to enter service. Our minimum term has already expired. We're already cut loose and working for ourselves, sort of."

"That doesn't make me feel all that secure," Arend said.

"Nor should it, on its own," Gordon said. "But with or without that contract in effect, we are still a part of the beheri, and so we are expected to find a place where we can contribute. For most of us, that will continue to be as soldiers in the Iri Var, because that's what we do best."

"Drop the shoe then, dammit!" Duncan said. "I'm still waiting to hear your plan."

"Duncan, you and Arend and the rest of the humans in your command will soon reach the ends of your minimum service. When you do, we want you to bring them all here and continue the training you've begun with them."

"You want to make an Iri Var special forces?" Arend asked. "Isn't that what you Iri Voch already are?"

"I want soldiers with that level of training, but minus the heavy duty modifications and all the implants," Ed said. "There will be some of that down the road if things work out as we hope they will, but with or without any future changes. What we will be able to do at that point is write a new contract, with terms we like."

"Offer the Iri Var a better product and demand a higher price?" Duncan said. "I like it!"

"The Dur Vai is going to have to approve this at some point. We need a way to make it palatable to them," Antheia offered.

"You're right, and I think I might have a good start on that," Ed said. "We should include the Argantans in this."

"Aren't they already pretty dominant in the Iri Voch?" Antheia asked. "I remember three fourths of your team on Retici IV were Argantans."

"They definitely do make up the bulk of the Iri Voch, but they already see the trend that suggests they will be sharing that status with humanity down the road. The difference is that the Argantans don't see the Iri Var as a fall back position. When they apply for the Iri Voch, it is as a direct placement, not a promotion out of the Iri Var."

"So we will be offering the Argantans who don't qualify for the Iri Voch an attractive alternative to the Iri Var?" Arend asked. "How would that work? Would we become some sort of mercenary company?"

"To answer your first question Arend, yes, I think they would find it an attractive alternative," Ed said. "I do think it will work, if the Dur Vai is willing to go along. As for the second question, we wouldn't be mercenaries, in the sense that we were available for hire to anyone. We would only offer our services to the Skafti beheri."

"I can see why that might be an attractive offer, but it seems like a pretty slim hope to hang our destinies on," Mads commented.

"True enough," Gordon said. "But we're working on something that we can sweeten the pot with. We'll have more to show you soon, we hope. Its getting late, why don't we all get some sleep. We've got a trip planned tomorrow to try a little sailing on the bay."



-------

Chapter 4


== Spolti Cluster, Tenebara Research Station ==

"Look, the big risk has always been there, right?" Ed said. "We've known from the beginning that we'd have to stop playing with the simulators eventually and actually try this."

"Yes, but I didn't expect you to be the first test subject," Gordon said. "You're too valuable."

"I'm not. I'm no more valuable than anyone else you might find, and I've got one advantage. I've got this damned genetically optimized body the Skafti had to whip up for me."

There was a long silence as the two men faced each other, waiting for the other to add something.

"All right," Gordon said finally. "But you have to tell Kristy."

"She already knows," Ed said with a laugh. "We had to fight between ourselves when we first signed onto the project over which of us got to volunteer for this."

"And you won?" Gordon said, grinning.

"I did, but I had to cheat. I promised I'd make sure she was pregnant before we began the final phase. She is, so that's why I'm making the offer today."

"I see," Gordon said, his grin growing wider. "All right then. I'll schedule the surgery for tomorrow."

It was a strange series of events and revelations that had brought Gordon's research to this point. He was no physicist, and certainly no subspace wave field theorist, but as he was fond of saying — 'The math never lies' — and the math had led him inexorably towards this point. First he had decided that the mathematical models Rella and Rika were studying as part of their education in the field of subspace physics was incomplete somehow, and he kept mulling it over in the back of his brain until one day it just popped out, clear as day.

To have a subspace wave field generator, you must presume such a thing or place as subspace, but just what was subspace? The theoretical physicists did not all agree, in either broad or detailed terms, about what subspace was, but that had not prevented them from developing theories which the Tolchoran and Skafti engineers had built upon. The primary beneficiaries were the existing FTL engines that moved their ships between the stars.

"It is as if subspace is more firmly fixed in reality," Rella had explained. "The FTL engines are able to push harder against it than they can against normal space, and that translates into traveling faster and farther for the same energy expense."

"This is the same reason why our generators make the Rek so much more maneuverable," Rika had explained. "It gives the ships control surfaces something to push against, even in the vacuum of space."

That conversation had been the beginning, and the stint here at the Tenebara Research station had been the realization of a big part of that idea, but not all. Spaceships, shifted part-way into subspace, gained even greater efficiencies, travel times shrank and distances traveled in a single transit grew another exponential step beyond the current norms.

Gordon might have been content with that, except for another conversation — this time one with Waxalin Feldain, the current bright star among the Primes in the Maga. While he was considered a materials and structural engineering genius, he had been, and remained, as Gordon was, a Mathematics Prime.

They met through the datanet at first, but eventually spent hours arguing and laughing over their wilder ideas via holographic vid sessions.

"Its a shame we're not irilonic beings," Wax had said. "We might be able to push ourselves into subspace, and wouldn't that be interesting to see!"

The offhand comment had come while they were discussing the differences in power demands for the older subspace designs and the new ones they had been theorizing using Gordon's 'new math'. The theory, and Wax saw it in the numbers as quickly as Gordon did, suggested that for small scale objects, with volumes and surface areas which would easily describe all but the smallest and very largest of the known intelligent beings in Skafti space, it might be possible to carry sufficient power to move them into subspace.

The three years since the completion of the original work found Gordon gnawing on that thought, and it was only after having heard from Ed Bell, and having gotten curious about the range and depths of the modifications made to those who were Iri Voch, that it came to him. We may not be irilonic, but some of us were, due to Skafti artifice, far more irilonic than others.

The possibilities were instantly intriguing, but along with the interest came concern. Something like this could work, but might well do so in gloriously fatal ways. Even if it proved non-fatal, how would an intelligent consciousness handle the exposure to whatever subspace was?

Again the Iri Voch seemed to be ideal candidates. Their Ora were second only to the Maga in complexity, and unlike those of the Maga primes, theirs were not integrated into their own consciousnesses, but maintained their own unique consciousnesses, apart from their hosts.

Then came the cruel stage of his research. After Ed did some arguing on his behalf with the Iri Voch themselves, Ora from Iri voch who had died in action started being brought to him, and with the consent of those consciousnesses, they were re-implanted in non-sapient creatures that had been heavily modified with irilonic implants, as the Iri Voch and others were.

Then the subspace wave field modifications were made.

Made and remade and made again as Ora after Ora sacrificed themselves for Gordon, and what might come. The early ones died in ways that seemed horrific and cruel, but the data allowed them to refine the theory, and slowly the Ora began to survive. Then it was a matter of keeping their consciousnesses whole and sane.

Near the beginning of the process, Waxalin Feldain joined the team, and he insisted that he do his share of the processing from that point on.

"I need to take my share of the pain and the burden" he explained. "Some of what you do here can be laid at my feet, and if I can be considered responsible for an idea, I must share the burden of the grief and pain it causes."

Slowly they came closer and closer to the time when they felt it would be safe for sapient trials. Ed insisted it had to be him. Kristy disagreed of course, sometimes violently, but once she was pregnant, Ed was finally able to insist.

"You know they've got me recorded every which way but loose. The complete genetic rewrite they had to do for me was stuck away in a drawer somewhere, and its just waiting to be pulled out and reused."

"But I don't want a copy of you," Kristy argued.

"Sweetheart, what you've got is already a copy. You know that."

"Not what's up here," Kristy said, stroking a temple as she came to stand behind him. "That's what I worry about loosing."

In my Yoeme dreaming, was I the Pascola or the Deer Dancer? Was I both? I felt the Sun on my back and dirt on my bare feet that were from a place that no longer held such. I felt the air moving around me and in it, the scent of mesquite. Voices joined me in song and I didn't know the words, but somehow my voice answered theirs. I sought the field of flowers in the dance I did in my own head, and as I had become used to, saw the new, bright flowers that were my recently fallen brothers among the Iri Voch. My thoughts toe-stepped to them, bent low and unfocused. The flowers leapt into my hands, held high and wide and shaking, and I let the smell of my brothers wash over me.

Ed woke without moving. The dreams seemed to be growing more frequent and intense as the day of the test grew closer. The ever-more-mysterious Antheia had called the day before, 'just to say hi' and to encourage him with reminders that all he need do was keep focused on being Ed and it would all turn out fine. He hoped so. He didn't have enough reference on the old ways, despite his childhood attentiveness to the Escalante's instructions.

Where is this leading me? Why me? What does it all mean?

Ed's waking thoughts were much more anchored in the present than his dreaming ones these days. Today the sleep field would hold him in ignorant nothingness while the knives worked again to change him.

The surgeries had been nothing compared to some he'd had in the past. Ed didn't sense any pain. He hadn't slowed down any, as far as he could tell, and JC would have told him if he had. His balance was the same, his reaction times unchanged. He knew that would change soon, when the tests began, but for now he felt good about his state of being. He folded his thoughts through himself and into the place he was able to go now, even waking, where he could see the flowers on the field, and dance with them, and sing their song.

I feel JC coming along with me now. Sense his eyes behind mine, seeing the great plain and the flowers stretching out and beyond. Again the dust is on my feet and the Sun on my back. Through the dust and beyond the sun I run now with the steps of the deer, alert and open to the moment. Open to the story. The story that was us and is us. The story of what we become. Each deer step of the story. There are others waiting. Waiting to find this place, waiting to trace the deer's steps through the world and sing past the barrier and into this field and join their spirits with mine, and add their steps to the dance. Almost but not yet. Almost.

"Am I a spirit too, Ed?" JC asked when they returned their minds to the world.

"Not yet my brother, but you will be," Ed said, turning to run back to the house. "We will be - together."

== Spolti Cluster, Tenebara Research Station ==

The central lab space had been emptied out and its interior was now thickly covered with sensors and data pickups. Ed, wearing a heavily modified suit of battle armor stood at its center. Rella and Rika Suu scurried around him, examining the leads and external nodules that were attached to the armor at various places.

"We're ready for power-up of the external exciters," came Gordon's disembodied voice, booming through the chamber. "Rella, Rika, everything is in the green. Leave it alone and get back to the observation blister."

The twin Kuftasans left the chamber and it grew silent, and remained that way for a long, tense moment.

"External exciters are powering up," came Gordon's voice. "Feel anything?" he asked Ed.

"Nothing," Ed responded. "Should I?"

"No," came Gordon's reply. "All indicators are green, status looking good on the internals."

"Power up of external exciters complete," came Rella Suu's voice.

Another long moment of silence followed.

"All systems show stable," Rika's voice announced into the quiet.

"Activating internal taps," Gordon's voice came, this time directly into Ed's comm system.

Ed suddenly had an awareness of the power nodules attached to his battle armor, and knew that with the flip of a mental switch he could flood the new circuitry embedded in his body with power.

"Cycle on the grav field interlocks," Gordon called out. Ed flipped a mental switch and felt his world suddenly grow stiffer and more distant as he was wrapped in a stabilizing gravitic field.

"Gravitic field stable and holding all green," came Rika's voice after another long pause.

"Everything reads green at this end. Ready for subspace field generator power up," Ed said, out loud and through the comm unit.

"Medical team status?" Gordon's voice called out.

"Medical team standing by," came the response.

"Green and go on activation at your discretion," Gordon's voice spoke softly, after the longest pause of all.

Ed had been preparing for this for a long time, and not just the technical side of it. He took his mind partway into the state that took him into the world of souls, and with a mental nod to JC, pulled power out of the exciters and into the subspace field generators embedded into his body.

Suddenly the world flared around him and he was wrapped in shimmering uncountable layers of translucent cloth, all black and white and every ghostly shade between. Nothing was steady or stable, and the shimmering assault on his eyes was echoed by a wavering, queasy sensation in his stomach and a screeching warble in his ears. He almost lost it then, but managed, just barely to pull an image of the plain of flowers out of his thoughts, and with that visual in front of him, pull himself a little further onto the plain where things stabilized and held, for just a hotan or two — but they held. He thought of trying to move, and decided against it, suddenly feeling very weak. Ed tried to summon the mental strength to trigger the field's kill switch, but couldn't quite muster it. Before his failure could register, JC, sensing the need, shut the field down for him. The world returned to its normal state for the briefest of seconds, and then Ed was unconscious.

== New Earth, Central Continent, Western coast ==

Kristy Bell lay sleeping, baby Palo in her arms. Ed sat in a chair, watching his wife sleep, and resisting the desire to hold the baby in his own arms. Time for that soon enough, he knew. The nurse, recommended by the Penod birthing tech who had done the delivery, was waiting to take the baby at the first sign of movement, but the idea at the moment was to let mother and son sleep together. Penod maternal guidelines were as much about nurturing and bonding as they were about health and nutrition. Ed was happy to be able to agree.

The tests had gone well. They'd gone in the direction Gordon Truitt had predicted, with some tangential effects that Ed wasn't prepared yet to share with anyone, even Gordon. Ed didn't think he understood them well enough yet to explain them to anyone, let along turning a Maga Prime's mind loose on them. Gordon's explanation of the apparent and known results was still at the front of Ed's thoughts.

You 'ghost warriors' won't be impervious and invulnerable, but to your foe it will seem so. Projectile weapons, of the type typically used in ground combat will have little effect. The subspace field itself will be impinged on by the kinetic energy of the projectile, but anything smaller than a shoulder launched rocket won't have the mass to do more than warm the ambient field temperatures slightly. Energy weapon effects will vary depending on the type, but even that is again minimal with the standard level of power available to hand weapons. High powered weapons from ships and gun emplacements will be as dangerous to the ghost warrior as they are to anyone else.

Ed stood swiftly and left his wife and son to their sleep. He felt guilty for even thinking about the new reality in their presence. He walked out onto the veranda in front of his house and looked at the sweep of sea and shore. No more portable redoubt for his family. The time had come to build permanently.

Juniff IV had indeed become New Earth. The Vai Dur had approved their plan for establishing a planetary government, conditional on Antheia Garacimos' willingness to serve a full ten year term as planetary president. If Antheia hadn't been there, an effort might have been made to draft Ed into the position, and none was happier than Ed that Antheia accepted.

The combined Human and Argantan units that were currently training a few hundred miles away in the Red Clover Valley had the provisional approval of the Vai Dur as well. The quick initial approval had come as something of a surprise, but Lobuc Cruda, the Argantan Senior who had come along with the troops, and who now served as the Argantan ambassador to New Earth, said it best.

"The Skafti aren't stupid. They see that your people and mine get along together, and have similar outlooks on many things. They remember what a difference their association with the Tolchorans made on their society, and its goals. They know that sometimes the reality of certain pairings can exceed the sum of the separate individuals."

Still to be seen was if the subspace implants could be made to work in anyone but Ed Bell. The second and third test subjects, one human and one Argantan, had both been spectacular failures, though only the first one had ended in violence. The Argantan volunteer had simply gotten lost somewhere in his own mind, unable to adjust, and never returned to consciousness.

Ed was their one spectacular success, and to everyone else who saw him in active mode, he was 'The Ghost Warrior'. With the subspace field in effect, and Ed balanced between the 'known' real world and the 'other' real world, he was a strange and fearsome foe. To those who watched, or those who saw him coming, he was a flickering, ghostly image that moved faster than expected, and in ways that twisted perception. Projectile weapons couldn't find him and energy weapons found their power lost somewhere in between the him they found and the him that was.

"Its not the extra implants," Gordon had decided after the latest round of testing. "We have had absolute and utter success with inanimate objects. Its something mental. Something that even seems to impact the Ora."

So Ed Bell, Iri Voch assassin became Ed Bell, philosopher and teacher. A dozen students were assigned, the next round of volunteers, all of who were aware of the failure of every volunteer except Ed. They became philosophers themselves and clustered daily at Ed's feet.

Together they sat, in a quiet place beside a lake, in a small shelter open to the air and the senses. Ed spoke of the lost but not yet forgotten Yoeme and the four faces of the world they knew, and of his striving to reconcile those aspects in himself. He spoke of the animal aspect — how he dealt with the urges and passions felt or encountered during the day. Together they shared the burden of instinct, discussed the dangers of needful urges and compelling desires. He listened as those before him spoke of failure and triumph, and spoke softly of his own.

He spoke of the people aspect — how he recognized and dealt with other people, and how he presented himself to people. Those two aspects of the world, he explained, were pretty concrete, but cautioned about the desire to define and exclude, speaking softly of what it meant to be receptive and accepting while still being a warrior.

But When Ed finally spoke of the worlds of flowers and death, this was where the listeners found their greatest inspiration. These were the aspects that should have been the most difficult to share, the hardest to find a path to.

The men and women who sat at Ed's feet each day were trained warriors, every one. For them, Spirits and Death were familiar concepts. The plain of flowers, and dancing with the dead were not foreign and unacceptable concepts. Here the seeds of Ed's vision found fertile ground, and because of it, the fruit of Gordon Truitt's invention grew.

For six months Ed spoke and they listened. They had questions and Ed answered. Together they spoke, and meditated, sharing words and silence, and in that time there began to be those who saw the field of flowers in their minds, and could find themselves there, dancing the spirit dance, guiding and being guided.

Maria Morrison was the second Ghost Warrior, and two days later Borona Vesek was the third. Ed and his original 'philosophy class' volunteers became the first twelve person platoon of the 'Ghost Legion', Tehemek, in Skafti.

In the artificial 'ruined city' of Udeza, the Ghost warriors trained. A rain of pulse grenades softened the path, but before the smoke and dust had even begun to settle, amid the wall of pulse beams and barricades, Captain Peter Lewes and the seven members of his advance skirmish team came, moving through the smoke as if a part of it. The human and Argantan defenders for whom the transition to the Ghost Legion was still to come, or never to be, had been given a single goal — defend the old church tower at the center of town.

"Treg! I've got movement in the southeast corner!" Corporal Inness called over his suit's battle net.

"Affirmative," came the reply. "I make it two unidentified objects moving past the outer wall near the blue plaza."

"Speed?" the corporal asked.

"Slow enough to be people on foot, but damned fast people if they are!" Treg responded.

The rules of engagement had been made clear to them, and there was no hesitation among the defenders in firing at anything moving and unidentified, and the weapons fire began to build in intensity over the next few moments as more fast moving ground targets were identified.

"We've got them Sergeant!" Corporal Inness called at one point. "our pair are running right into the crossfire we set up in the blue boulevard."

"Don't take any chances," Sergeant Bilig replied. "As soon as they hit the blue market blow the charges."

The Argantan grinned in the typically toothy Argantan way at the thought of their 'foes' running into the wall of mayhem the shape charges they had planted would generate.

"More movement to the north!" came a report through the net. "The walls aren't slowing them down!"

"Pick up your rate of fire," the Sergeant sent. As he did, the charges in the blue market went off. There was a flash of light through the high window, and the sergeant risked a quick peek through it to glance down at the square beneath the tower.

A shimmering, blurry blade went snik! Next to his ear, just inside his peripheral vision, and a gloved hand slid around his throat.

"Nice try, sergeant," came the whispered words.

-------

Every session had been recorded, and those sessions were distilled down into forty hours of video, and against Ed's wishes, became something of a datanet phenomenon. There were quite a few people out there who decided they had been called to be disciples to Ed Bell, prophet. Fortunately for Ed, and certainly even more fortunately for those people, arranging public transport to New Earth was not yet an easy task, and most who managed it were quickly dissuaded by those who met them at the orbital dock and asked if they really thought they would be welcomed on a planet of trained warriors and assassins.

The few who made it past the orbital station and onto the planet didn't last long, but here and there a being or two won through to sit, for a moment, with someone who knew Ed, or claimed to.

Hasha Mada, an Argantan, was the first of many who found that no matter how hard they tried, they could never quite bridge the gap that allowed one to 'see' the plain of flowers, and it was this achievement that came to be seen as symbolizing the successful integration of control and understanding required. Every Ghost Warrior followed the way that Ed Bell showed them, a way he hadn't known he was finding until he had to show it to others.

As Ed had taught himself to do, they ended each day with a silent self-evaluation, a recounting of their day and their life. Ed had asked himself the same questions daily for most of his life, and so now did they.

How do you examine your soul? How do you survive a daily crisis of faith where you must convince yourself that you are not yet evil and that your beliefs are true?


-------
The End
-------
Posted:  2008-04-11
Last Modified: 2008-08-27 / 01:10:39 am
-------
http://storiesonline.net/
-------