NOVEL NEXT 3.2 Custom
Custom
“That’s a [potluck]. You’re describing a [potluck],” I said.
“Shut up,” Nerin said. “It’s bad enough Nai invited you, you don’t get to make jokes on top of that.”
“Oh relax,” I told her. “I’ve already been to one of these.”
There was something oddly entertaining about trying to avoid conflict with Nerin.
She was younger than me, which went a long way in helping me avoid the mistakes I made with Nai. She also wasn’t Adept. But she was still an accomplished doctor—and surgeon, if I understood her job title properly—so it wasn’t like she was incapable of being intimidating.
“…Really?” she said, trying to hide her surprise.
I nodded, stirring the contents of the bowl. “A few weeks before we got off the planet, Nai took me to one meeting in a tailor’s home. She made the clothes I’m wearing now.”
Details like how I’d spent the whole event upstairs and out of sight did not need to be shared.
Nerin made a sour face, but didn’t object further, distracted by what she was pouring.
If we were in the same room, not even an hour could go by without her trying to intimidate me, insult me, or otherwise antagonize my poor old human self.
So it was increasingly becoming my responsibility to rise above, and make peace.
But she made it easy. Because, while she clearly didn’t like me, she was just bad at actually bothering me.
While she measured masses of ingredients for one recipe, for another she had me mixing some kind of batter in a bowl: the latest in a long string of cooking duties for today’s event. If I read her correctly, then she was foisting all the tasks she hated doing onto me. She was then complaining about the way I did them, and then just being jaded about whatever I tried.
And I felt pretty awful, but in no way because of her.
Nora’s condition was a dark cloud following me around, Tasser still being stuck on Archo was similar, and my slog through the Korbanok data was the worst combination of tiresome and infuriating. I wasn’t sure what it said about me that I felt this badly after escaping the ones trying to kill me. But that might have been unfair to myself.
I was still in a bad situation; it was just my trips across Yawhere had been worse.
Even if I was out of harm’s way, all my biggest concerns had lives at stake: I was entitled to let myself acknowledge the pressure.
So whatever Nerin’s beef was with me, it didn’t seem too serious. I was more than content to luxuriate in a problem that I didn’t need to solve so urgently.
The batter she had me mixing would be for a Farnata dish similar to crepes, and she wanted me to make them since Adeptry could be extremely useful for cooking. Molds, utensils, specialized tools, none of those things were intricate enough to demand higher order precision, so virtually every Adept was capable of some kitchen hacks.
Today was home-day.
Every thirty-two days, or rather, twice every sixty-four days, Farnata would throw large, if very mild, parties. Home-day was a new tradition, started after the Razing to keep communities together.
Often, it didn’t amount to anything more than everyone bringing food to share amongst everyone else. A potluck, essentially.
Without the ecosystem of their homeworld, Farnata food production was decidedly engineered and manufactured. Farnata mostly ate (nominally) processed foods by sole virtue of what they had the means to produce.
Home-day was the exception.
Everybody in the building was cooking something right now. Like Nerin, Nai, and I, they’d also probably started the night before.
Come mid-morning, every one of us would pile into the ground floor of our building and mingle.
The prospect of something similar on Earth still unsettled my stomach. But so many Farnata had passed me in the halls without incident, I didn’t think anybody but the younger children would do more than glance or point at me.
And with Nai on her way to attend as well, I doubted even the youngsters would be looking at me.
“You’re sure I have to keep stirring this stuff?” I asked Nerin.
“Yes!” she huffed. “It’s only been a few minutes. You’re not even halfway there.”
I kept stirring, unconvinced the mixture was going to thicken up. It was making me wonder if the result would actually be similar to crepes. The thing Nerin described certainly sounded like a crepe…
Food chemistry was not one of my strong suits.
“Why don’t you just cascade it?” Nerin asks.
“Well…it’s liquid,” I said. “Do you know how hard it is to get even vague cascade feedback from fluids?”
“You’ve been chummy with my sister for, what, six months? I’ve known her my whole life, you really think I don’t know a few things about Adeptry,” she said. “You can still get texture, especially because the consistency of the liquid is what you’re watching. The easier it is to cascade, the closer it is to done.”
“Okay…” I said slowly. “Is there something I should look out for specifically to know when it is done?”
“Just keep stirring it for now,” she said.
I did, shooing Toe away when he wiggled over to try and scavenge anything that dropped.
Nai had said not to disturb her…but she’d also said she was on her way…
No. This wasn’t an emergency. Nai had been quite clear about contacting her psionically: emergencies only unless she specified otherwise.
I kept stirring the bowl, trying to cascade its texture, for another minute before Nai actually rang me.
<’Course,> I sent back.
“Hey, do we need anything else?” I asked Nerin.
“What?”
“Anything else,” I repeated. “If we’re missing any food or ingredients or something else we should pick up before going?”
“And if we were, you would be the one to go pick it up? I know you’re technically older than me, but don’t pretend that you’re an adult.”
Dang, that actually stung a little . Nerin wasn’t usually that direct.
“So we don’t need to double check?” I asked. “Absolutely nothing we could be forgetting?”
Nerin gave me a withering squint, but did set down her bag of flour and poke her head into the pantry cabinets.
A moment later I heard her swear under her breath.
“What are we missing?” I asked.
“Trigi!” she spat. “Shut up. I will get some…” she had been ready to run out the door but her prep work for the last dish she was making was still out on the counter.
“…as soon as I’m done with this,” She grumbled.
That sounded conceptually close enough to icing to translate it as such.
Nai corrected,
Huh. That was actually an excellent point.
·····
Nai arrived almost exactly fifteen minutes later.
Toe was the first to react. The filthy little dog-grub slithered over to the apartment door a few seconds before Nai sprang the door.
I might not have had my radar, but my less structured psionic senses were still more than enough to sense her coming. I caught the bag of what had to be ‘Trigi’ without even putting down the pitcher I was pouring batter with.
“Spei nu!” Nai cooed her pet as he frantically bounced at her feet. She scooped up the animal, Adepting a carrying harness on her chest to dump him into.
Her words must have been something like ‘good boy’ in Speropi.
“No!” Nerin shouted, threatening Nai with a dripping spoon. “You are not bringing that filthy mongrel into the kitchen.”
“I’ve been on assignment for the last four days straight,” Nai objected, “let me spend some time with him.”
“He rolls around on the floor all day,” I pointed out. “It’s not exactly sanitary.”
“You shut up,” Nerin said.
“I was agreeing with you,” I frowned.
“Shut up,” she repeated before readdressing her sister. “You still have to help us finish the cooking. Toe is not allowed near food preparation. Therefore, you are not bringing him in the kitchen.”
She shot me a huffy look, but did put Toe back on the floor.
Nerin saw the bag Nai had tossed me. She frowned, looking at the Farnata-sugar.
“What is this?” she asked, confused.
“Trigi,” Nai said. “We were out. I grabbed some on my way here.”
Nerin threw an icy glare at me, unable to find the right words.
She had not been told about psionics. In retrospect, using them as casually as I tended to might not have been the best idea.
“How did you know to pick up any?” Nerin said.
“Caleb told me,” Nai shrugged. “Looks like topping is the last thing we need to do?”
It was enough of a distraction to force Nerin’s attention onto something else. She had Nai start mixing the sugar to make an icing for her…well, I wasn’t sure what she’d made. Something baked in a casserole dish, like blonde brownies or something adjacent.
My not-crepes were cooking fantastically, to my surprise. Despite no experience or familiarity with the desired result, they were coming out thin and chewy. I did not understand why, given how the batter was thick, but my lot was not to question it.
I settled into a rhythm piling them on a plate for Nai to take. She took each wafer-thin pancake and added some filling before sliding it to Nerin who folded each one and packed them into a basket.
It would not have gone so smoothly without Nai in the middle. She was a mediating influence, which, wasn’t that just rich? Our little assembly line worked quickly, and in just a few minutes we were ready to bring our grub down to the party.
Nai and I were the ones to carry the food down the eight flights of stairs. We were older after all.
Dozens of Farnata filled the open first floor, more than I’d ever seen in one place before. Not a single Casti was here. A few table games were set up across the lobby, things resembling mini-cornhole or…charades?
A few Farnata children, no more than three feet tall, ran past us wildly. One of them stopped and stared at me for a moment.
Nai spoke a Speropi phrase at them, and the poor kid’s eyes widened for a moment before saying, “Sorry,” and running after their friends.
I glanced at Nai and was surprised to see that she was as overwhelmed as I was.
“The radar,” she said, awestruck. “I can sense so many Adepts here.”
Opening up my own psionics, I picked up on some of the same energy. Adept minds were connected to the vast energy we temporarily wrestled into material form. I probably wasn’t as sensitive as Nai right now—the radar I’d put in her head was the second psionic thing I’d made—but it was still more Adepts in one place than I’d ever seen.
How much of the party supplies were temporary? The tables? The games? The cutlery? Adeptry was so, so cool.
In the center of the party was a pair of huge round tables piled high with all the food people had prepared. I couldn’t even start to describe it all. There were fruits I didn’t have names for, slabs of cracker as thin as paper, sweet smelling noodles, slices of root vegetable? Meat? I didn’t have any frame of reference. I wasn’t sure what foods came from what, what any of would taste like, hell, I didn’t even know if I could—
“…[crap],” I swore, setting down the fruits of this morning’s labor.
“What’s that?” Nai asked.
“I didn’t think this through,” I said, flashing her the index on my wrist. “This is all homemade, no labels. How am I going to know what’s safe to eat?”
“I continue to be one step ahead of you,” Nai bragged. “Find Dyn, he can help.”
Normally, she would have helped me find him, but I knew she was trying to keep a low profile for today. Unfortunately for her, Dyn found us before she could steal away to a quiet corner and enjoy the vibe.
“Caleb, Nai!” he shouted—the loudest sound I’d ever heard from the field medic. He held up an awkward fist that I was too eager to bump. “This is huge, this is the biggest home-day I’ve ever seen!”
“That’s not really surprising: you spent the last four years in Sassik province,” I pointed out. “It’s the middle of nowhere.”
“Still!” he gushed. “Is this how most parties on Lakandt go?”
“There’s usually not this many people,” Nai said. “But every now and then there’s a bit of a special occasion.”
“I’ll say,” Dyn grinned manically.
Was he drunk? Did Farnata have something like alcohol? It was like…11 AM—the Lakandt equivalent anyway.
“Hey everyone!” Dyn announced, “Look who made it: Nai Cal-Yan-Ti!”
“No wait—” I started, but it was too late.
Every head present turned toward Nai, and I swear not a single pair of eyes fell on the new, exotic, rare alien. Instead, every single voice at the party murmured or shouted “Warlock,” and I sensed Nai stiffen.
In a way, it was the most reassuring thing I’d ever seen.
I would never choose risk of bodily harm at the hands of Vorak Adepts over the prospect of a high-body-count social situation, but it was a way closer decision than it ever should have been.
Nai was of similar mind.
It was a little reassuring to know that, despite how easily she comported herself in combat, she still wilted under the spotlight.
She was saved, at least temporarily, by the fact that home-day didn’t have a particular host. There was no single person who could force Nai to stay at the center of attention.
Nerin took the opportunity to pull Nai aside, breaking enough lines of sight on her sister. I didn’t miss that, without the Warlock to stare at, most of those gazes finally fell on me.
But Admiral Laranta had really covered my bases. No one wanted to risk offending me, which was a little too perfect. That happened to be my exact priority too.
·····
Dyn was downright methodical, tracking down the cook for a particular dish, investigating its precise ingredients, and finally comparing them to a list of food-compounds.
He helped me get a plate of food that wouldn’t poison me or destroy my immune system, or make me hallucinate again (that had been an awkward conversation with hospital staff).
The party itself was very laid back. Lots of standing around and talking, lots of coming and going.
A few Farnata with whom I occasionally shared the gym swung by to chat. One showed me some neat Adept tricks, but my ability to materialize sheets of paper complete with writing trumped theirs.
It was my first exposure to more average Adepts. Most people didn’t need to use their powers to fight. In fact, it was most often better to learn how to create tools or some specialized creation that you could market.
The building super was a genius with her cascade and blind materialization. She could find pipes behind walls by tactile cascade, and tighten them or fix leaks with her creations, all without ever opening the wall.
But even that kind of specialization wasn’t common. I got to hear about the work most Adepts did: making things no one else could. The exotic components, catalysts, or impossible substances that enabled all sorts of new manufacturing.
Right up until this conversation, I’d still been a little surprised at how far behind alien computers were when compared to their spacefaring or bioengineering.
Listening to a Farnata try to explain zero-heat capacity conductors to me was equal parts confusing and illuminating.
Dyn and I caught up too. He gave me some updates on Ase Serral and the other Casti who’d made it off Archo with me.
More than once I spied Nai trying to politely duck away from an eager fan.
Huh. I’d thought she seemed cagey or pressured. But after that…she almost seemed sad. Resigned.
She wasn’t the only one though.
The festivities, however mild, left me exhausted. The expectations weren’t the same socializing amongst aliens; it didn’t feel as hard talking about nothing with strangers. I was an alien, they were curious. I got it. I felt the same way often.
Still, I was caught off guard by how drained I was. I would definitely be eager to repeat the experience, but as I walked toward the tram station with my silent chaperones, I understood why they didn’t hold home-day more frequently.
The day had been excellent fun, but the afternoon saw the crowd break up. People withdrew to their own apartments, spending time with family, decompressing, or otherwise occupying themselves. Nai and Nerin were going to crash early, both of them having very dense work schedules. It left me on my own to go out for the latter part of the day. Even if there weren’t any classes for me to sit in on today, I was still going out to visit Nora in the hospital.
I got there in the late afternoon.
Nora remained unresponsive, the only sound from her being the occasional beep from the medical equipment monitoring her. Every tube and wire poking into her hooked up to refrigerator sized computer towers.
None of it had been meant for human usage. Some Coalition technician had to custom create the programming using the medical baselines from the data the Organic Authority had assembled on me.
My first four days on Lakandt, I hadn’t left this room.
I’d been back every day since.
Nora would wake up. Eventually. She had to.
Except comas didn’t work like that. Non-induced comas were basically a crapshoot, but with worse odds. Losing consciousness, from what could only have been blood loss, was the kind of thing people never came back from. The only time you just ‘woke up’ from a coma was when a prince kissed you.
She was Adept though.
It took every scrap of hope and logic I had to keep insisting that to myself. Her body could keep itself alive on facsimile cells while her real cells multiplied and filled in the injuries. It was conjecture, but maybe her body could even replace irreplaceable cells, not by creating facsimiles of them, but by creating a pseudo-cell capable of taking in real materials and building a replacement for the previously irreplaceable cells.
Then she would wake up.
And until she did, I would keep scouring this stupid data drive.
The data Nai, Tasser, Nemuleki, and I had retrieved held nearly all the data from the Vorak’s fortress asteroid: Korbanok.
Over the last month, I’d been reading, reading, and reading everything the Vorak had written down. Tasser had once told me that Vorak could be restrained speakers, but exhaustive scribes.
They took notes, wrote down observations, conjecture, conclusions, all of it organized and presented for their superior officers’ viewing.
Report after report, log after log, I pieced together what the Vorak’s files alleged.
It started with Korbanok receiving a distress signal.
Different emergency signals often came with different codifiers to give as much information as possible about the crisis in question. The signal identified in Korbanok’s records was devoid of any of those codes. It was one of the first standardized repeating signal codes. There was utterly no room in the transmission for details of the crisis or emergency offload data, the oldest one that would still be automatically recognized by most comm systems. It was just an archaic scream for help into the void of space.
Triangulation had placed the source of the signal almost a hundred million miles from Korbanok station.
The first time I read that, I’d almost broken the computer’s viewscreen, I gripped it so hard.
It was a huge distance. The ship signaling for help was further away than the next closest planet.
The communication officer in the signal room had attempted to hail the vessel only to learn how unexpressive the emergency signal was.
Still, according to the logs, formal protocol was to respond to emergency signals, but with a contingent of armed Vorak and at least two Adepts: in case it was a Coalition trap.
Twelve Vorak had been launched in an intercept craft, and hurtled toward the ship at absolutely breakneck acceleration. It would have taken them twice as long, except the distressed craft had been travelling on a vector roughly away from Korbanok, and it wasn’t accelerating despite its own immense velocity.
It meant the Vorak ship didn’t need to spend as much time slowing down in order to match the distressed craft.
Twelve Vorak had found the ship’s exterior airlock controls non-responsive. Their Adepts had formed their own bulkhead airlock, and cut their way into the distressed ship to investigate.
Twelve reports swore up and down that it had to be a Coalition trap.
Scores of alien bodies. Red blood and oil floated in the air, the inner hull of the ship mangled with twisted metal, chaos painted on every corner of every deck.
No one was sure what to do with the two survivors.
‘One and a half’ one report listed.
Technically, those reports were classified and redacted. The first week and a half on Lakandt, I hadn’t gotten to read them. There were still some files the Coalition hadn’t decrypted yet. Reports on the other abductees. Reports on Daniel.
But me? Those had been cracked.
I’d even had a small hand in helping. Knowing some of the contents beforehand could be helpful decrypting data. I’d been there. I still remembered some of the exact words used when the Vorak had come for me.
When the intercept craft returned, hauling my and Daniel’s abductee ship with it, there had been panic.
It was a Coalition trap, it was First Contact, it was a mess.
Marshall’s Adjutant, Tox Frebi, the second-in-command of the entire Red Sails fleet had been the one in charge of Korbanok.
He’d heard serious talk of routing us to a different station: Korbanok didn’t have the medical facilities to handle wounded aliens.
Technically, I now knew better than he had. No facility in the star system actually had those facilities. But some would be better prepared to perform the guesswork with ever-so-slightly fewer risks.
Nine days. I’d been on Korbanok, in the Vorak’s stupid space-age glass wall prison cell for two-hundred hours. I could scarcely believe it. I knew my mind had been unbalanced to all hell, every last one of my faculties twisted like pretzels, but I’d swear it felt like less than three days.
It wasn’t that hard for me to question my own assumptions and biases, but this went a step further. Things like this forced me to question the reality of what had actually happened.
Retreading the events today, I started shaking more than once.
Daniel had convinced me I wasn’t hallucinating by urging me to hedge my bets. Get abducted by aliens? Hallucinate people? Sure, you’re probably having a psychotic break and nothing you’re experiencing is real.
…But on the off chance it was real?
No hallucination would leave me with this much… faculty… right? Psionics were too consistent to be the product of a fever dream.
But in the course of hedging my bets, Daniel and I had erred on the side of reality. Between the unequal choices of ‘it’s all real, or none of it is’ we’d assumed the former.
Now, I was confronting evidence with a cruel reminder: the truth isn’t always simple.
So where was the line?
How much of my recollection could I actually trust?
Even just asking that question made me want to scream. I’d worked so long, been through so much to keep myself invested in everything that happened to me.
It felt real. I knew these people. They were people, not just figments of my imagination.
I missed Daniel, tagging along, ready to counsel my every thought.
I’d been down this road before. That only made it worse. It didn’t matter how much of my own recollection was trustworthy.
What mattered was how much could be proven.
I had a checklist of hypotheses to compare evidence against.
1: The Vorak (the Red Sails specifically) abducted Daniel and me.
I had no evidence of that. The ship they’d found Daniel and me in wasn’t even a profile on record. Everything I’d learned about Vorak ships had concurred with what Nai and Tasser had shared: computer helmed ships were not common, and never interstellar—strictly interplanetary.
2: The Red Sails were ‘taking delivery’ of the abductees and me; they were waiting to receive us.
There was actually counter evidence to this theory: our ship had first appeared on Vorak scopes nearly half a star system away. Any delivery to them should have been reasonably closer.
Worse, Korbanok wasn’t prepared at all to receive abductees. It wouldn’t even have been that hard to hide preparations in their record keeping, but there were simply none of the materials or equipment an alien military might want in anticipation of taking delivery of alien abductees, alive or dead.
3: The Red Sails had—
I lost my composure, slinging my materialized papers across the room.
It was infuriating. Humiliating. Every single worst impulse I had wanted to scream that this had to be fabricated.
The frustration had been building for weeks, but the longer I went, the deeper I dug, the less I found.
Absolutely no one on Korbanok had been prepared for the arrival of alien abductees. Absolutely no one could have known we would arrive.
I wanted evidence, damning, incriminating proof that the Red Sails Vorak had a hand in my abduction, in Daniel’s death, in…in any of it.
And I had not a scrap.
I gave up resisting the urge to press my forehead against my knees. It just hurt to be wrong like this. One of the most important things Daniel had done for me was remind me to let myself be weak, vulnerable, wrong.
It took a conscious effort to begin crying. It was easier knowing there was no one to see.
Just how long I sat there, I’m not sure. But I would be disturbed before too long.
There was a knock at the door, half ajar.
It took a second to place the Casti who’d come to check on me.
Coalition Admiral Laranta walked quietly into the room.
“[Mister] Hane,” she said in her strange, scraping smooth voice. I thought she might say more, an explanation of why she was here, or…anything.
But she was being polite.
“Admiral,” I said, voice hollow. “I’m having a bad evening.”
“I figured as much,” she said. “One of the doctors said you looked distressed. And these folk put their hands inside rib cages, including mine once. So when my surgeon rings me up and says the alien visiting the secure wing looks like he might tear a wall down, I listen.”
“…Someone really called you?”
“I told them to, a few weeks ago. This was going to happen sooner or later, I just had them keep an eye out.”
I stared at her, seething. My anger and frustration weren’t aimed at her in any way, but I couldn’t just pretend I wasn’t feeling it.
“Caleb, you’re one person. You knew I had my own experts analyzing these drives.”
“Then you’ve known for weeks,” I said. Maybe accusing her.
“Just the one week for sure,” she said. “But yes. I think you and I are overdue for a conversation with an unappetizing truth.”
“…the Vorak didn’t abduct me,” I choked.
“No.” she said.