Cosmosis

Routine

I’d spent a bit more than six months on Yawhere.

Most of them had been relatively quiet: Tasser and me, stuffed into a small room going over how to conjugate verbs in Starspeak.

But the bookends to my stay on that planet had been fraught, and almost dying made a strong impression. I wouldn’t be going back any time soon.

I was coming up on a month on a new planet. Or rather, a new moon.

Paris was to the Shirao system like Jupiter was to the Solar system. A massive gas giant with a smattering of moons that the Casti had colonized.

It also served as the Coalition stronghold against the occupying Vorak.

And so far, it was living up to that reputation.

Since arriving, the worst thing I’d suffered at the hands of Vorak were dirty looks.

And there were a surprising number of Vorak civilians on this particular moon. Lakandt was home to Coalition System-Headquarters, but every colony on the moon had Vorak making up at least a few percent of its population.

I’d come to understand just where I’d spent my time on Yawhere—the boonies. Demon’s Pit, and even the Green Complex were just plain out of the way. A nuclear reactor and a volatile bioresearch lab…in retrospect, it was no wonder they built those things far away from the largest population centers.

Little could have prepared me for just how big Lakandt’s colony cities were. Or how many of them there were.

I’d spent so much time around the Coalition military that I hadn’t internalized that there was an entire civilization plugging away just around the corner.

On Lakandt, there were dozens of colony complexes: cities sunk into the moon’s surface and built up exploiting the lighter gravity. It wasn’t alone either. Across just its four largest moons, Paris was home to almost ten million aliens.

And exactly two of us were human.

Every day I woke up, I had to force myself not to think about Nora too much.

I repeated the same idea in my mind: There was nothing I could do, and I trusted the ones watching her.

Like at Demon's Pit, routine had become my weapon of choice for fighting nerves.

Every morning I tried to stay as quiet as possible while I grabbed a shower, raided the pantry for breakfast, and slipped out the door for a morning workout.

I practically tripped over Toe.

Right as I walked out, Nai’s horrific little pet had decided to lurch past the door to the bedroom they’d put me up in.

I stumbled, pivoting on my other ankle and hopping to avoid falling on my face. After righting myself, I shot the dog-worm a withering glare. Toe did not even seem to notice.

But Nerin did.

“Caleb! Quit stomping!” she shouted.

Nerin Cal-Yan-Ti was not my biggest fan.

I swear, she slept on a bed of tacks, she woke up so easily. In the mornings, she was always a sleep-deprived goblin. And unlike at the hospital, at home she wasn’t required to keep up any sense of professionalism or decorum.

I knew better than to defend myself, so I stayed quiet and tried to tiptoe as best I could while I fixed breakfast.

She was definitely Nai’s sister. A sleep deprived Farnata, expert in her field, and not fond of Caleb? It was uncanny.

I almost sent a psionic message to Nai on the spot. But I was getting better at resisting that urge.

Nai had her boundaries, and she’d told me she wouldn’t be here most mornings. The Coalition was keeping her busy. Pestering her telepathically from at least a mile away was not only stressful on her, but also potentially distracting.

Personally, I was never distracted by psionics. Half of the point of how I made them was to not monopolize the user’s attention. So I didn’t totally get what Nai meant.

But I was going to respect her boundaries anyway. She was doing the same.

Since I wasn’t going to consult Nai, then I had to deal with her sister myself. That was not a hurdle I was going to clear in a single day.

So for now, the only thing to do was hurry up and get fed.

The best part of getting off Yawhere was not, in fact, the lack of threats on my life.

It was the food.

Months upon months of eating crumbly rations had made me numb to bad food. But I didn’t have to suffer that anymore.

My trip there had nearly seen me killed or captured, but I walked away from Green Complex with an oh-so-precious individual nutritional index.

On my wrist was a bracelet medallion engraved with a complex numerical code that summarized most of the variables associated with food consumption safety. Alien food products were labeled with corresponding codes, and comparing the two would tell anyone what foods were safe to eat.

Half the reason Nerin was pissed was because Nai and I had taken over the pantry since moving in.

Reading the index number was a bit complicated, but I didn’t need to check the items I’d been eating for a few weeks now.

I made a plate, grabbed a couple slab crackers, and materialized a knife to spread something like spicy cream cheese on top. Wikthaw, it was called. If Nai wasn’t messing with me, it was actually a kind of bean paste.

If she was trying to dissuade me, it didn’t work.

I walked out the door to our apartment still holding the plate, and chowing down on my breakfast.

It was nothing special according to Nai: low quality mass manufactured food to feed the Farnata populace. But I didn’t care. Before, I’d been eating gravelly nutrients packed into bricks. This was Olympian ambrosia by comparison.

Discounting me, our building was filled exclusively with Farnata.

We got Casti visitors of course, but insofar as living arrangements went, the building was tailored to suit Farnata. Atmosphere, temperature, even local gravity was modified with Farnata in mind.

And since I had oxygen requirements much closer to a Farnata than a Casti, I’d been put in their housing for convenience. As long as I was in our building, I didn’t need to wear my air mask.

It didn’t hurt that, in the absence of Tasser, Nai was the alien I knew best. She continued to be an invaluable guide around the moon, even with her time becoming extra constrained the last few days.

I missed Tasser though.

That was another thing I had to force myself not to dwell on.

He was nominally okay, but he and Nemuleki hadn’t managed to escape Yawhere’s moon. But as long as they kept avoiding capture, I could at least keep calm about it.

I’d arrived recently enough that there were still Farnata in our building that were seeing me for the first time, but nobody made too much fuss over it. It was one of the perks of living on a military base.

Almost everyone in our building was a Coalition service member in one form or another, or a family member. So when I’d moved in, command officers had made sure it wasn’t a surprise to anyone. In fact, Nai and her Warlock’s reputation garnered more attention.

I was up early enough that there only a handful of other people to see me on my way to the basement.

A few quick bites polished off my breakfast. Adeptry was stupidly handy for small tasks like this. Walking out the door carrying a plate would have been weird if not for the fact that I could just dissolve the plate back into nothing with a thought.

Crumbs would remain, but dumping the plate into a receptacle in the hall beforehand solved that neatly.

The building we lived in was odd. It was more or less military housing, but the bottom floors were dedicated to some common areas that the visiting public could use, including a very cool gymnasium.

I’d only really taken up athletics last year. Except…that wasn’t really taking into account the time I’d been away from Earth. It was closer to two years now.

Before joining the JV baseball team, I’d never been in the habit of exercising regularly. It wasn’t like I’d been inactive, but whatever running around I’d done hadn’t been regimented at all.

And scheduling your exercise was critical when you lived on a moon.

One of the things alien life all seemed to have in common was gravity: all the known homeworlds fell inside roughly similar gravitational constants. The conditions that cellular life flourished under were not unlimited.

Go figure.

But even inside that range of tolerable gravities, bodies functioned better when they were in their natural environments. Dyn and the other Coalition doctors had stressed how much my body could decline living in gravity lighter than my body was suited for.

It wasn’t a huge deal on proper planets like Yawhere, where I estimated gravity was at least sixty percent that of Earth’s. But on a moon like Lakandt, serious problems could develop. And since alien medical knowledge of humans began with me and ended with a comatose girl, they weren’t totally sure how much risk I was under.

For Farnata and Vorak, sporting Adept augmentations meant hugely reduced risk. I had similar augmentations, even in the very tissues they expected might be most weakened, but they’d still advised me to get very regular exercise to keep my muscles and bones from atrophying.

That was facilitated by the gymnasium our housing complex had in its basement.

Some alien engineer must have made quite the profit developing the weight machines that could be adapted to the body types of the aliens using it. Muscle groups varied by species, but all of us needed to stay healthy in the face of low gravity.

Of course, the coolest part about the gym wasn’t the machines but its lack of low gravity.

It was technically a feature of the whole building, but the effect was most prominent in the basement. While most of the building sat at what I guessed to be a comfortable .4 or .5 Gs, the basement was never any less than .8 Gs, but in the mornings it would be a bit more still.

As I stepped across the warning strip on the floor I couldn’t help but relish the sensation pressing down on me. My body felt heavy and slow, but only by comparison. Especially in my limbs, I recognized the sensation of how much I should weigh. It took seconds of walking to banish any feelings of immobility or sluggishness. It wasn’t perfect, but it was so much closer to Earth than anywhere else I’d been.

Nai, Serralinitus, and Admiral Laranta had worked it out with whichever facilities officer that managed the building so the gravity in the gym would be intense enough to match Earth’s for an hour each morning.

When I’d first heard that, I’d been grateful, but the idea of being the only one able to use the gym had been embarrassing.

But to my surprise several Farnata in the building still regularly showed up. Workout junkies maybe.

I didn’t know their names, but I recognized a few faces. No one talked to me, but this wasn’t really a social event either. Aside from putting some odd Farnata music on, no one particularly interacted with anything but their workout. We stayed out of each other’s way and spent an hour staving off atrophy.

I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. Back home, baseball practice had been entirely group exercise. Working out in a group could be nice because you could get encouragement on days you needed it, and a challenge when you wanted to compete amongst the team.

But in the months I’d spent on Yawhere, I’d gone jogging alone almost every single day. Solitude was therapeutic in its own way too. Time all to myself was something in short supply.

Here on Lakandt, some days it felt like the former, others the latter. It was a coinflip.

Today I felt like I was alone, even with four Farnata using the gym along with me.

Recently, being alone wasn’t much of a relief.

There were only a few things that my mind wandered too when I was alone. None of them good.

Focus, focus… there had to be something I could think about that didn’t involve Nora’s coma, or Tasser being stuck.

But if I just kept agonizing about that, I was never going to get started. Today was supposed to be weights…but I was feeling too anxious. I needed to run.

Solving my smaller problems had left me without anything to focus on. Only the big problems were left. Now I didn’t have to be worried about what alien foods were safe to eat or which Vorak might try to shoot me. I got to worry about Nora, or the dozens of humans she’d apparently been with, or Earth itself.

I decided to throw restraint to the wind and run suicide sprints. Maybe I could wear myself out enough to keep from getting too antsy.

As much as I hoped they would, they really didn’t. I was worn out plenty, but I had practice thinking on my feet.

I forced myself to finish thirty minutes of sprints with as few breaks between them as I could, but I didn’t feel any less anxious. Just winded.

Sprinting in straight lines wasn’t exactly mentally taxing, and my Adept augmentations were optimized for similar activities. Without more equipment, or some kind of obstacle course, I couldn’t imagine solving the latter problem.

But maybe I could give myself a challenge with the former.

Adeptry and psionics were always good distractions. As Nai had become busier and busier, she’d had less time to coach me, but she’d left me with instructions that I keep up with practicing my Adept powers. Muscles and bones were not the only things that could atrophy.

Nai still had my radar, and she wasn’t psionically skilled enough to unravel it and pass it back to me. I’d made some progress on a new model, but I’d stalled out somewhat.

Now that I was more or less safe from the Vorak, I didn’t have nearly as much need for it. It was an extremely bulky construct too. With it gone, there was an unexpected amount of free space in my mind, and I’d been eager to experiment with what else besides a radar could fill that gap.

I materialized a blindfold, and spun up my psionic engine.

My radar-rebuild might have stalled, but I still had a few parts nearly complete, specifically the part that recognized three-dimensional space. Before, my radar had tied my psionic senses into the same piece, and it gave me the rough position of nearby minds.

Instead, this would ignore my psionic senses and focus more on my Adept ones.

With the blindfold on, I pushed my cascade through my feet into the floor. I kept it to the surface level: I didn’t need to see a few inches underfoot. I just wanted to see how consistently I could track the surface if I tied my cascade into the spatial model.

Tying the two together in my mind went quicker this time than it had the first. I was getting faster at building the right abstract connections between things in my mind.

So, in complete and total darkness, I ran full tilt forward. With each footstep, I had to push my cascade out in the blink of an eye to capture an image of the floor. And sure enough, as I went forward, my rebuilt spatial model preserved each of the spots around each footstep behind me.

I didn’t even need to turn around to see them. I didn’t even ‘see’ them at all. But my cascade gathered its information, fed it to the spatial model, and the model tracked those points even after I’d passed them.

Every step I took; I left some psionic breadcrumbs to stay aware of.

Except…I wasn’t really leaving anything. It was more like a terrain map in my head that I could add to by moving around real space. It was only a sporadic trail because of speed. I could turn around and retread the space between, adding to my map.

I was a little too satisfied with the result, however. If I’d been less caught up in the moment, I might not have tripped.

It was possible to truly separate yourself from your cascade and still perceive tactile sensations through it, if briefly. But what I was doing was not that. I was taking snapshots with my cascade and cataloging them.

If there was a change to the surface I’d cataloged, I wouldn’t know about it until I cascaded it again. But as I retraced my steps going back and forth in my blind sprints, I began to stop cascading the floor.

I missed whatever fell underfoot. A water bottle maybe.

My foot touched the previously invisible item and my reflexes worked against me. I almost stayed upright, twisting on one foot to avoid falling. But it sent me stumbling off the path I’d traced with my experiment. Too blind to react, I crashed into one of the nearby weight machines, I felt something in my nose crunch, and I fell back flat on my ass .

There was a stir as one of the Farnata began profusely apologizing. But I heard his voice falter, when he saw my blindfold.

Rather than just dissolve it completely, I pulled it down to start staunching the blood dripping from my nose.

“It’s fine,” I told the Farnata. “I wasn’t watching, don’t worry about it.”

It was easy not being mad. Sure, whoever it was shouldn’t have let it tumble into the running lane. But I probably shouldn’t have been running blindfolded.

“Aghhh,” I croaked, tilting my head forward to drain the blood.

This was just perfect.

I headed back upstairs early to clean up. I didn’t want my nose to be bleeding in the middle of a lecture.

·····

Nerin was properly awake by the time I got back, which was a bit unusual.

She sullenly ignored me in favor of her breakfast while I went to the bathroom for a shower and first aid.

Still, alien blood was always going to draw attention, so after I’d washed up she tried to pretend like she was less interested than she really was.

“…So what happened to you?” she asked.

“I tripped,” I told her honestly. “I was trying to run blindfolded.”

She immediately rolled her eyes—an astonishingly human expression on her alien face.

“You have to be joking.”

The look I gave her told her I was not joking.

“Why would you run blind?” she asked.

“An experiment. It’s really not that big a deal. Do you know when your sister is off duty? I haven’t seen her in two days, and I need to consult her on an Adept thing,” I asked.

A large part of it was my eye, but Nerin didn’t always look related to Nai. I didn’t have the familiarity with Farnata to start picking out the facial structures they had in common…with one major exception. The Cal-Yan-Ti sisters got the same restrained dark scowl on their face when they heard something they didn’t like.

Nerin scowled at my question.

“You don’t already know? The two of you are imbra rigsa,” she muttered.

And who knew what that meant?

Interjecting words from another language was a lot less amusing on the receiving end, but I was trying to avoid the mistakes I’d first made with Nai.

That meant being patient, even if Nerin was determined to be snide.

“You know I’d leap at the chance to learn some Speropi,” I said as amicably as I could.

The prospect of me learning her native language appealed to her even less.

“It means—never mind,” she snapped. “She said she would meet me after my shift. You can catch her then.”

“Thanks,” I said. I wouldn’t need to go out of my way.

Fighting the urge to psionically query people miles away was tough. There were probably a few aliens with whom I could get away with it, but Nai had been very clear that she wasn’t one of them for the foreseeable future.

Once I was cleaned up from my morning, I wound up getting out the door at about the same time as Nerin: another thing she wasn’t happy about.

We were headed for the same place, and she was too proud to make up an excuse to keep her distance while we headed out.

My chaperones were waiting for me outside our building. It was Nikrim and Weith on duty today. There was a rotating dozen or so Casti whose standing assignment was to provide me with an armed escort. I’d balked at first, but the truth was they usually kept quiet and professional.

They didn’t say a word when I exited the building, simply falling into step behind me in the lobby. Exiting the building took a load off my shoulders—literally.

Walking beyond the boundary of the building’s gravity manipulation saw us all reduced to a fraction of our normal weight. It made moving easier after a harsh morning workout.

A few minutes ambling took us to the tram station, and we boarded the line that would take us to the High Harbor Naval Hospital.

High Harbor was not the largest colony on Lakandt, but it was close. Colloquially, the name referred to the whole colony, but almost half of that was dominated by the military base that actually bore the name.

Nerin worked as a medic or physician for the Coalition, and she was apparently quite skilled despite being younger than me. It was a military hospital that worked closely with the educational system the Coalition provided.

While Nerin and Nai were each performing their duties for the Coalition Navy, I was sitting in on an eclectic series of lecture classes.

I knew that my chaperones had a daily bet going on how quickly I could take in new material, but it was progressively becoming a less interesting pool.

I always got every answer correct.

Thugnin, one of the other soldiers in the chaperone rotation, was continually frustrated that I seemed to magically recall whatever details I needed to grasp each lecture.

I carried no supplies and wrote down nothing that anyone could see, yet I was still taking notes.

They didn’t know about psionics.

My ongoing battle with my psionic archives organization was beginning to creep beyond my ability to manage it. My filing system had been keeping up so far, but it was reaching the limits of its simplicity. Some time soon I’d need to dedicate a solid day to plan something new and another to organize my information.

I didn’t precisely regret agreeing to an alien education…but it was eating a significant portion of my time.

Upon arriving on Lakandt, Ase Serralinitus and Dyn had both expressed concerns about my age and education. I’d told them exactly how far I’d gone in Earth’s schools, and given the options between educating me with their system or teaching me nothing, they’d impressed upon me that I should continue schooling in some form.

Today’s class was a continuation on a previous lecture on integral equations. The class was three Farnata along with forty Casti and every single one of them threw the odd glance my way.

I was grateful for my chaperones now. They were visibly armed and uniformed. Their presence near me at all times sent a very clear message: don’t bother.

It let me focus on transcribing the lecture psionically.

Casti numbers were in base-8 instead of 10, and unless I wanted to be stuck doing math in alien digits, I needed to learn how to perform the same math using Human numbers too.

Converting between the two took more of my focus than actually understanding the content. I took solace in the fact that Casti electronics were hilariously unwieldy and the calculators some of the class used were extremely bulky. Crazier still, some of them opted for analogue options like slide rules.

It would be very easy to act smug. I had my pick of graphing calculators between the psionic one in my mind and the app on my phone.

After the calculus lecture was a more specialized class just for me: history.

I’d been the one to push for that one. I’d stuck my foot in my mouth badly enough not knowing interstellar history.

So I spent the early afternoon talking with one Professor Obramaus, trading my vague pieces of Earth history for the broad strokes of three planets’ civilizations’ past.

“The first time Nakrumum picked up signals from Farnata, the planet went crazy,” the professor said.

“Communication barrier,” I guessed. “You can receive the signal, recognize that it can’t be natural, but still not decode it.”

“Exactly. For years, the whole planet held its breath. Our history was steeped in being threatened by predators. We were afraid of what might be behind the signals.”

“But eventually, someone must have decoded it,” I said.

“The Farnata decoded our messages faster than we did theirs,” the professor said. “The light-speed delay you see, every message we sent was thirty years old by the time they saw it. But they were thinking ahead more than us. Even before they received a response, they organized prospective strategies to decode whatever response we sent.”

“So you had a thirty-year head start and they still figured out your code first?” I asked.

“Indeed,” the professor said. “They also sent more data. By the time they received a return signal, Shan Ju-Ram-Saer had figured out how to abridge distance. It took them thirty years to receive our response and less than two years after that, they made a stable skip-point on the edge of our star system.”

“Wait, I thought this was like three-hundred years ago,” I said. “But First Contact 1 was only a bit more than a century ago.”

“Remember, most of that first century was spent trading garbled data that both sides knew was thirty years old. We knew someone was out there, but we weren’t really in contact until the first skip-point was there, and communication delay was cut down from sixty years to just a few days. And that skip point wasn't a proper Beacon yet. It couldn't be traversed by anything larger than a bacterium. EM signals could make it through, and that was the extent of our contact for the next hundred or so years. ”

“But even though you were trading signals quicker...it still wasn't in person. You'd figured out each other's math, but everything else still needed decoding, and through a language barrier no less.First Contact protocols weren’t written yet, so efforts probably weren’t organized well.”

“Correct again,” the professor said. “For that century, we were just trading math, engineering diagrams, and miscellaneous data files. It took unbearably long for one of the Kiraeni to unravel Infish grammar, and our planets actually started talking.”

Obramaus was not the only person I talked to. Different days saw me speaking with different people. More than once, certain students had been allowed to sit and listen to our exchanges.

They told me about the nuclear war that had nearly consumed the Vorak homeworld, Atho Azinza and the largest peace movement any civilization had likely ever seen. Other alien figures like Desher, who’d led the Wayfarers to found the largest and most successful colony efforts.

About other colonization pushes like the Pilgrim worlds and even the star we orbited now, Shirao.

Only one professor, a survivor of the event, spoke of Farnata’s Razing, and the bioscience breakthroughs that had likely saved what remained of their species.

But they wanted to know about Earth too.

I was nervous to share. I was underqualified, but the professors were mostly good natured about it.

I demanded that there be a disclaimer of some sort if they ever quoted what I said. I was not a historian, not unbiased, and not at all a suitable source of reliable information from Earth.

But technically I was a primary source, however flawed.

I tried to keep things neutral, mostly using as broad, uncontroversial points as possible. I wound up creating an extremely general list of a few dozen historical figures with just a sentence or two on why they were known.

All the major sciences had at least one or two names under them. Snow, Leeuwenhoek for biology, Newton and Curie for physics, every word out of my mouth felt like I was making up nonsense.

On more days than one, we stopped because I wasn’t sure how much I was editorializing or getting details wrong.

Thankfully, they didn’t expect me to share too much. I learned far more from them than they did from me.

Learning was…profoundly good for me. It made me feel a bit more my age, almost like I hadn’t been abducted. Almost.

But even as satisfying as the lessons and discussions were, they left a bitter taste in my mouth.

Tasser had been my first teacher and friend. Learning more now was a reminder. I’d gotten away from the Vorak, but my best friend among aliens was still at risk.

My daily routine brought up feelings in me that I had to imagine were something akin to bipolar disorder. One minute I could be eminently grateful that I didn’t need to worry about a Vorak Adept trying to kill me. The next I could be angrily depressed about the prospect of other humans out here with me.

Stay busy, that was my strategy. I was alone. But I had friends and allies. Each day would be easier when Nai wasn’t busy every waking moment. I could confide in her.

But as the civilly designated afternoon period dragged on, the professor had to preside over more classes, and I had to sink my evenings into personal research.

My chaperones guided me through the halls of the education center into the military hospital proper. We didn’t need to follow the signs for the ‘High Security’ wing. I knew the way by now.

The checkpoint guarding the entrance to the wing took Weith and Nikrim’s IDs, but not mine. I didn’t need it. I was my own certification, a one-of-a-kind creature that almost every Coalition officer in the system had been briefed on in some capacity.

They waved us through, and we went straight for the ultra -high security section. The section that could admit a municipal figure in an emergency, or command personnel in the event of an attack. This section of the wing was a fortress that would protect its contents even against the most terrifying of Adepts like Nai.

I’d spent nearly every afternoon and evening in one room in particular. I resorted to the psionic copy of the key I kept in my mind and materialized it in the door’s lock.

Nerin was inside, one of the few physicians authorized to preside over the rarest patient the hospital had ever treated.

Nora lay on a hospital bed, an oxygen tube stuck down her throat, multiple IVs stuck into her arm.

Bandages wrapped around her neck, and I knew similar pads covered the wounds under her gown.

She had not awoken in the days it took our craft to reach Paris’ orbit; she’d not awoken in the three-and-change weeks since.

I comforted myself with the knowledge that none of the bullets had gotten stuck in her, and her pulse and breathing were remaining steady.

I hadn’t gotten the name of the Casti soldier who’d shot her. That was probably for the best in retrospect. Nai had told me feeling angry might help prevent me from feeling responsible.

There was no way I could have known beforehand. It wasn’t my fault.

I’d heard the words plenty. I think I was even beginning to believe them.

But Nai needn’t have worried about that.

Nora had alerted me to the fact I wasn’t the only abductee left. There were other people stuck in a situation just like mine.

And that set a fire under me more than anything else. I didn’t need to be distracted from my thoughts when I was in this room.

In the corner I’d taken over, there was a chair and a small table beneath which was a computer the size of a steamer trunk. A cable connected the computer to a heavy, tablet-like screen, but with heavy analog buttons on the back.

The screen was smudged with my fingerprints where I’d tried to pinch or swipe at the image out of habit.

I’d done the Coalition a favor. I’d made sure they got some computer data from the Red Sails.

My condition had been that I get access to the data too. Admiral Laranta had come through.

On this computer was every secret the Coalition had pulled from Korbanok station. I powered up the hulking computer, and got to browsing.

For the last two and a half weeks, I’d spent every hour of my evenings reading every file, every document, every signal on the drive.

While Nora rested, I sat across the room devouring every scrap of information I could on the Vorak who’d awaited me after my long post-abduction spaceship ride.

Somewhere in this data was something.

And soon, I was going to find it.