And When Force Is Gone...
“And the mother set the babe in the basket on the water, and she floated so far away. Away, away, sail so far away, my little tiny daughter, sail away. You're going to the land between the water and the sky, and someday, oh someday, so will I.”
-from “The Lost Child”, traditional song on Olkye
“Iri's back,” Yan said, startling Sylva as they sat on a fence, overlooking a small pasture where a group of goats ran back and forth.
“Oh! Great!” That was a load off of Sylva's mind. “Where's she docking?”
It was a little odd to watch Yan's eyes go vacant and see her commune with the Mother to determine that information, but Sylva was, unfortunately, getting quite used to it.
“South shore,” Yan said after a minute.
Sylva hopped off the fence rather clumsily, and began walking down the beaten path. She turned around and walked backwards for a few seconds. “You coming?”
“I think I'll stay here,” Yan said. Her teeth were gritted.
“Everything alright?” Sylva asked.
“Fine,” Yan said. “You should go see Iri.” Every word seemed forced out, and after a second, the slack, vacant expression returned to Yan's face. She must have been fighting with the Mother about something. Sylva didn't like that.
She didn't like that one bit.
But there wasn't anything that she could do to either extract Yan from the Mother's clutches, or stop the Mother from trying to interfere in Yan's brain, at least not at this second.
It seemed that things were finally coming to a head between the two of them. The Mother must have had some knowledge of what Iri was up to, but perhaps Yan was forcing her not to interfere. It was strange. Sylva had no way of knowing how strong Yan's desire to return to the Empire was, and if she'd be able to fight to leave if it came down to it.
Iri's radio, if it existed and was functional, would be a valuable tool. The two kilometers or so down to the beach passed beneath her feet without a thought. Sylva had done a lot of walking since arriving here, and her feet were half blistered and half calloused beneath the stupid cloth shoes that she wore. She would have killed for a good pair of boots.
She arrived at the beach to find Iri tying the boat on the one long dock that ran out over the water. There were a couple other boats tied up there as well, gently bobbing. The light was a pleasant overcast early afternoon, and the wind was picking up, though not so much as to herald an oncoming storm.
“Welcome back!” Sylva called as she came within hearing range.
Iri looked up from the ropes she was struggling with. “Hey. Where's Yan?”
Sylva decided that Iri's prolonged absence warranted a little bit of a trick. “She is with me,” Sylva said in her best imitation of the weird Mother voice.
“Seriously?” Iri said. “Are you kidding me?” She threw down the ropes that she was holding and hopped off the side of the boat onto the dock, coming towards Sylva, hands on her hips.
Sylva continued walking closer, and Iri caught sight of the smirk on her face and shook her head. “I should have just stayed out on the water, you know. Then I wouldn't have to deal with you,” Iri said. “We don't have time for this nonsense.”
“Is there a rush all of a sudden?” Sylva asked. Time seemed to flow differently in this place. Perhaps it was because the pace of the Mother's work was so slow and steady, or perhaps it was because there was nothing to do but sit around and wait for something to happen.
“Think about it, Sylva. How long have we been here?”
“Err... A couple weeks?”
“I'm thinking that since we left our message in a bottle, this is a realistic timeframe for an Imperial ship to start arriving. Even if we gave them a long time to find our message, the fifteen days of travel time have definitely gone by at this point.”
“The Mother hasn't said anything about a ship arriving.”
“Would the Mother tell you that?”
“Yan would.”
“You have much more confidence in that than I do,” Iri said flatly. “Help me get this thing out of the water.”
“That's your radio?” The thing in question was a massive buoy, probably weighing in at several hundred kilograms. It had a round base, stabilized by large out-runners, and had a giant antenna sticking up and out of the top. It was painted a high-visibility orange, and while it had clearly been designed to withstand major storms, it had also seen better days. Its bottom section was filthy and dented, and water was pooling up around the base of the antenna. “Does it even work?”
“You can practically feel the radio when you stand too close to it when it's running,” Iri said. “Yes.”
“And that'll broadcast into space?”
“I hope so.”
Sylva remained somewhat unconvinced, but she walked towards the dock and knelt down to touch the thing. Her fingers came away salty and damp. Gross.
“And does it receive?”
“Yeah, I think it does for calibration,” Iri said. “I'm pretty sure that's what the smaller antenna is for.”
“How do you think you're going to work this thing without knowing anything about this planet's technology?” Sylva asked, standing back up.
“Radios are like the simplest things imaginable,” Iri said. “I think I can figure it out. You've learned how to read, right?”
“I hate you, but yes.” She had asked Yan, though really the Mother was the one with the information, to teach her this planet's written language. It had gone much more smoothly than she had expected. The words seemed to click into place, slotting neatly against the sounds in her brain, giving them form and function. It hadn't taken very long, and she had practiced reading a few books. Either the Mother had provided her with fanciful reading materials because that was what the Mother preferred, or the texts on this planet were just a lot more enjoyable than translating religious tracts day in and day out as she had done in her apprenticeship.
“Then between the two of us, we can definitely get this to broadcast and receive.”
“You want me to put it on land?” Sylva asked.
“Yeah. I think I know a good place for it,” Iri said. “Give us some privacy to work on it.”
“You know the only reason you think that you have privacy is that Yan is fighting to give it to you, right?” Sylva didn't know entirely how true that was, but it seemed reasonable, considering Yan's reluctance to come.
“That's good. That shows that she wants to get out of here.”
“I wouldn't go so far as to say that,” Sylva said. “But sure. Show me where you want me to haul this.” She bent down again and put her hand on the metal of the buoy. The power flowed out easily through her arm and into the structure. It creaked as she lifted it out of the water, keeping her hand on it and hovering it at about waist level next to her.
“It always impresses me to see you do that, you know,” Iri said. “I'm a little jealous.”
“Don't be. Literally everything about being a sensitive is a pain in the ass,” Sylva grumbled. “I'm a pack horse, a translator, a useless meditator...”
Iri laughed. “Hey, if your inability to do meditation correctly stops you from being lured into the Mother, all the better for it.”
“I really got you earlier.”
“Yeah. Careful of the trees.” Iri directed Sylva to bring the buoy through the forest, along the well trod path, careful to keep the antenna clear of the branches above them. It was pretty rough going, and Sylva went slowly, often having to stop and put the buoy down so that she could clear the branches enough for the antenna to pass through unhindered.
They came at last to a rocky side of the mountain, somewhat close to where the Mother kept her quarry. Sylva set the buoy down near an outcrop with some relief. It didn't matter if it got wet, obviously, but if it rained it would be nice to have a place to sit and not get dripped on while working with it.
The massive orange thing, intended for the sea, looked so out of place among the grasses, trees, and shattered rocks that Sylva had to laugh as she stood back and admired it.
“So, how long do you think it will take to get this thing up and running?”
“Depends on how much you're willing to help me.”
In the end, it took several days for Iri to figure out how to work the antenna. It was more complicated than she had expected, forcing it to do something it was not exactly designed for, and getting it to work with the encryption codes that Iri needed it to use.
Luckily, they had a good test for its receiving capabilities in the Bellringer, which was constantly sending out radio signals to its shuttles. Iri, of course, while aboard the Bellringer, had made sure to scrape their computers for their encryption keys, just in case they came in handy. Even if they hadn't been able to understand what the Bellringer crews were saying, they would have been able to pick up their digital noise.
It was nighttime, a time when both Sylva and Iri could “privately” check on the radio. They had both crept out of the room that they shared with Yan and made their way into the forest. They were certain that the Mother knew what they were doing, and that gave them an overwhelming feeling of dread, but they were powerless to prevent it. Over and over, the Mother had made no attempt to stop them. Sylva still, no matter how hard she thought about it, couldn't wrap her head around that fact.
“Let's see what the pirates are chatting about tonight, shall we?” Iri said.
“I'm sure it won't be anything interesting,” Sylva grumbled.
Sylva's prediction was proven wrong almost immediately. The radio signals they picked up from the shuttles were usually quite distant, and the Bellringer herself was often silent (having no way to communicate with her shuttles outside of the sphere). Tonight, however, the signals from the shuttles were loud and clear, coming from within the orbit of the third planet in the system, rather than outside it, and they were all in a tizzy, yelling over each other about...
A Fleet ship.
Here.
Just outside the bubble.
Sylva and Iri both couldn't speak, they were listening so intently to what was going on, trying to parse what each of the shuttles and the Bellringer were saying.
The Bellringer's shuttles had retreated after an Imperial ship had jumped in and destroyed, or captured, it was somewhat unclear, one of their shuttles. The more bloodthirsty group of shuttle pilots was calling for retaliation, a surprise attack on the invading ship, but the more wary pilots were begging the captain to evacuate the entire crew of the Bellringer to the surface of the planet.
Did they not know that this planet was almost certainly going to be a target of the Fleet as well? Did they think that their half-destroyed pirate ship was a priority in terms of what the Fleet would target?
Either way, the general atmosphere of the conversation between the Bellringer and her shuttles was one of complete panic and chaos. Sylva wondered just how long they had been yelling at each other for. Perhaps hours.
Yan, the Mother, must know. They couldn't not know that another ship had jumped into the system. That awareness out on the edges of the bubble, containing the light, she had to be able to tell when something jumped in, right? Or at the very least, she had to have someone, somewhere monitoring radio and watching the skies. That had to be the job of someone on this planet, and the Mother was in contact, if not close contact, with the government of this planet. Yan had mentioned it once or twice.
Had she been keeping this a secret from Sylva and Iri? Sylva looked across the buoy at Iri, illuminated by the glare of her computer screen hooked up to their massive radio. Iri was chewing on her lip, biting it ragged as they listened.
Sylva was the one to break the silence between them. “Should we send our message?” she asked.
Iri hesitated. Understandable.
But Sylva knew it was already too late for this planet. Simply by having a Fleet ship here, this planet was doomed. They might as well make the best of this bad situation, and get Yan out of here.
Iri nodded. She painstakingly switched the radio to the Fleet standard frequency.
“Godspeed,” Sylva said.
Iri sent their message out into the sky, setting it to repeat in the hopes that some ship would pass through the border and hear it.
IMPERIAL SHIP: BARCARRAN, MAEDES, CALOR ON SURFACE OF 2ND PLANET. COORDINATES FOLLOW MSSG. BARCARRAN SAFE BUT HELD BY FOREIGN POWER. ATTEMPTING TO EXTRACT. SEND SHUTTLE. POWER ON SURFACE CAPABLE OF DESTROYING STARDRIVES. MAIN SHIP DO NOT APPROACH. POWER ON SURFACE CAPABLE OF INCAPACITATING SENSITIVES. DO NOT SEND SENSITIVES TO PLANET SURFACE. MAY ENCOUNTER RESISTANCE. RECOMMEND SENDING UNMANNED SHUTTLE FOR RETREIVAL. CURRENTLY CAPABLE OF RECIEVING MESSAGES ON THIS CHANNEL WITH THIS ENCRYPTION. COORDINATES BASED ON STAR POSITION. MESSAGE REPEATS.
Aboard the Impulse, the message was received like a kick in the teeth. It didn't come in immediately, of course. They received it as a data package from one of the shuttles that had crossed over the barrier and into that other space, that world that existed in some invisible space.
Sid and Kino were both on the bridge when it came in. As the words flashed up on the big screen, Kino actually dropped the tablet she was holding, and it bounced to the floor, landing on her foot. She hardly seemed to notice.
Captain Wen stared at it mutely as well.
“Maedes? Calor?” Sid asked aloud. Maedes he knew. That was Iri, Yan's minder, who he was fairly familiar with, having traveled with her and worked in her general vicinity for months. Calor also sounded familiar, but Sid couldn't place the name. “Didn't Iri quit?”
“She went rogue,” Kino said. Sid looked at her, and she shrugged, then bent down to pick up her dropped tablet. “Clearly she did better as an independent agent than she would have done standing trial.”
“It doesn't matter who they are,” Wen said. “I think we need to change our strategy.”
“We have a strategy?”
“We know where Apprentice BarCarran is,” he said. “It seems like the situation will hold for the moment. I want backup to arrive.”
“We're going to just leave her there?” Sid asked, growing slightly hysterical. He could feel the tightness in his throat that meant his voice was getting loud and shrill.
“They say the situation is holding. I don't want to go into something without backup.”
“What backup do you need? This is a Fleet ship!”
“Apprentice Welslak, I'm not sure if you've noticed, but the Impulse is entirely equipped for ship to ship combat, which is usually what we first encounter when we find the Adversary. This planet has no ships, and we have been instructed not to even enter this bubble on pain of losing our stardrive. I want to wait for the ground force to arrive.” Wen's face was calm, but from the way that Kino cringed ever so slightly away, Sid could tell that his words were not spoken in a friendly tone.
He relented, trying to relax. This wasn't his ship. This wasn't his ship. He couldn't just command that it do things.
Oh, fuck that. He couldn't just leave Yan down there. Not when he knew exactly where she was. He puffed himself up, ready to protest again. Kino grabbed his arm, skinny fingers digging in.
“STOP,” she sent through the power. It came across clearly, ringing in his head like she had hit him. He wanted to yank away from her grasp, but he realized he couldn't win this fight. Not against Wen and Kino. Not with Ervantes standing across the room, watching.
“How long will it take for backup to arrive?” he asked through gritted teeth.
“First Sandreas believed he could get a ground ship to us relatively quickly. Ten days.”
That would be ten days of torture.
“Can we send a message to the agents on the ground?” he asked. “I can't leave them waiting without saying anything.”
“Yes.”
“And if they say that things become urgent, can we go in?” Sid asked.
“By we, you must mean an unmanned shuttle,” Wen said.
Reluctantly, Sid nodded. “Give me the comms.”
He composed a message.
APPR. WELSLAK, MEJIA W/ FLT SHP IMPULSE. IS YOUR SITUATION STABLE? ARE YOU IN DANGER? DESCRIBE SITUATION. BACKUP ARRIVING IN 10 STD DAYS. CAN YOU WAIT/BE READY? CAN ACCELERATE TIMELINE IF NECESSARY.
FORCES ON SURFACE KNOW YOU ARE HERE. SAFE ATM. CANNOT PREDICT MOVEMENT OF POWERS ON SURFACE. CAN WAIT 10 DAYS UNLESS SITUATION CHANGES. IF WE STOP BROADCASTING, SEND HELP IMMEDIATELY.
DESCRIBE DANGERS ON SURFACE.
GROUP MIND TRAPS SENSITIVES USES THEM TO HIDE PLANET. VERY STRONG. VERY DANGEROUS. NOT CURRENTLY HOSTILE. HAS CONTROL OF BARCARRAN THOUGH SHE RETAINS SOME FREE WILL. DO NOT KNOW OTHER MILITARY SITUATION.
CAN SHE ESCAPE?
IF CIRCUMSTANCES ARE RIGHT, POSSIBLE. MAY NEED TO DISTRACT GROUP MIND. MILITARY FORCE?
WE WILL WAIT ON BACKUP. 10 DAYS. KEEP BROADCASTING.
WILCO
The Mother understood what was coming. She could see the ship waiting there. She could see her daughters passing messages back and forth.
For the first time, the Mother was facing a real threat. It was here, hanging in the sky just outside her bubble. She had never heard of a planet that had successfully resisted the Empire. She had never heard of a planet who had successfully surrendered to them, either.
She was certain that she was about to die.
It might take a while for her to be defeated. Years, decades, even. She could prolong a battle. She could do that, and many other things, but she could not win a war.
It wasn't just the historical evidence that said that, either. Yan, inside of her, was sinking into a bitter pit of despair, bringing the rest of the Mother down with her. For all the harm that had come too Yan on this planet, she could just see Etta's half-smile, and feel the warmth that the Mother provided, and see the sky and feel the salty wind, and she knew she did not want this place to be destroyed.
Yan had never seen what happened to planets that the Empire fought. She had read about it only in the most abstract sense, not wanting to think about it too closely, but she could imagine. Now she had no choice but to think about it, and she hated that. She hated being torn apart like this, being pulled in two different directions. Sylva and everything she had ever known on one side, the Mother on the other.
The Mother watched and waited, the ship just outside the range where she could touch it. It made no move to approach, though its shuttles carried messages in and out of the shield. She might as well not have bothered with the shield now, but she kept it up out of habit as much as anything.
And out of a desperate hope that maybe, just maybe, the ship would leave and forget all about this.
If they came closer, she might be able to make them forget.
It wasn't her strong point, but the Mother knew how to do such things. She could give them Yan, and Yan could plant a story in their heads, and they could all go home none the wiser.
But Yan herself didn't have that control, and the ship would not come close, and so that dream died like every other.
If the ship came closer, she would rip it from stem to stern.
But more would come. They would never stop coming. Yan had an image in her head: hundreds of ships, crewed by thousands, hundreds of thousands, of people. It was on a scale that she couldn't quite even grasp, but she had sat so long ago right there in the center of the Empire's power, in Sandreas's living room, and heard him say the numbers.
Yan's imagination fueled the Mother's thoughts. She was there in Sandreas's quarters, the Mother in Yan's body. Sandreas was there, and so was Halen.
“Why are you doing this?” the Mother asked. “Why can't you leave us alone?”
“It is the way it has always been,” Sandreas said.
“It doesn't have to be,” Yan said, then cowered back as Sandreas stood. He was taller than she was, in this dream, though not in reality. She looked at Halen, pleading for help with her eyes, but he sat still.
“Come home, Yan,” Sandreas said.
The Mother wanted to say 'this is my home', and Yan wanted to say 'I have no home' so they said nothing, and Sandreas came closer and closer.
All the Mother's bodies sleeping bodies shook themselves out of the dream, unhappy and drenched in sweat.
The Mother used the power as another set of eyes, watching as Sylva and Iri typed their messages to the waiting ship. So, she had ten days.
She contacted the Circle and told them what was going on. There wasn't much military force on the planet to speak of. Their entire defense rested on staying hidden. All they had were the patrols, a loose policing force that doubled as a rescue operation for lost boats. It wasn't much, but they had lived a peaceful life here for hundreds of years. They hadn't thought to need anything else for a long time.
The Mother didn't want the Circle to tell the population what was just outside their borders, like a shark hiding just underneath the waves. They couldn't do anything. It was better that they didn't know. It was up to the Circle to make that decision, though.
Ten days.
