Cosmosis

(Starspeak)

Ingrid was irksome. For reasons not the least of which was she was right. But there were plenty of other points too. Like how she let our line go dead at the first sign of agreement.

But the situation demanded putting the mother of all pins in that topic.

Our police escort was probably going to catch a lot of flak for not dragging us back to the spaceport, but it was all-hands-on-deck. So, when we showed up? No one argued.

An emergency coordination center had been predesignated in a police station atop a hill in the city, but one look at it explained half of why things had gotten so bad so fast. The forty foot antenna array that would normally crown the building was currently hanging upside down, halfway through the front windows.

The building was at least uphill enough to have avoided the flooding. Mostly. So far.

Aa inch of water in the street became two just in the time we waited. And wait we did. One rak looked to be in the middle of everything, going from alien to alien, frantically talking in as few words as possible while each group.

We only caught snippets of their conversations, but even without words like ‘food shortage’ or ‘radio failure’ it was obvious how frantic they all were. Police officers were sent in every direction, looking for anyone at risk and getting them indoors.

Ideally, the city would have evacuated. Maybe it would have with more warning.

Something had gone very wrong somewhere very high up the food chain for a city of this size to be this unprepared. I wouldn’t be the one to figure out that mystery though. There was no reason to mull it over right now, because however things led to here?

They had.

All we could do was deal with it.

Two fire crews were already deployed to ensure the local power plant stayed viable. Medical operations were being directed toward a building in danger of collapsing—probably another fire crew going with them.

But all these were stopgaps at best.

Hundreds of people were going to die today. That number might already be behind us.

The minutes it took for our group to be addressed by the disaster chief dragged on. We were just standing around, waiting to be told what to do. Not even. We were just waiting to inform what we could do.

Assignments would come slowly and messily until something was done to coordinate everyone.

It was an agonizing wait. Few sensations were worse than while Tox stood patiently ready to explain for us. We turned more than a few heads. It was understandable. We were rare aliens.

But the storm demanded everyone’s attention. No one’s gaze lingered for more than a second or two.

Twenty minutes we waited, and finally the Vorak in charge decided we were a priority worth checking.

Tox liaised.

Nai and Johnny were immediately sent to the waterfront. If the Vorak thought anything of their alien species, they didn’t show it. Every Adept in the city M2 or higher was being conscripted into the breakwater efforts.

Nai and Johnny put together would be able to contribute half-a-mile of solid barrier ten feet high. Keeping the water at bay was the number one priority, but also the thing least likely to be solved. It required so much coordination, and the one thing clear was that communication had failed on some level.

This city surely had thousands of Adepts. But could the lot of them make a seawall?

Maybe.

Could they all reach the waterfront, given they were aware of the task?

Not so likely.

Were they all aware?

Not a chance.

In a storm like this, most Adepts would be doing the same thing as everyone else: keeping their heads down, staying sheltered, looking out for themselves. Who could blame them?

Donnie was sent north with a medical crew. Every boat for five-hundred miles was trying to come in, and there was only so quickly they could be pulled from the water. I didn’t like splitting one of our Adepts off from the rest of us, but there was no helping it. At least most of the medics he’d gone with spoke Starspeak.

The disaster chief seemed to know what they were doing, because checking our languages was the first thing they did with our group.

The disaster chief had almost sent Jordan and I—both low magnitude Adepts—with Donnie, but Tox had intervened.

“You want these two here. Me as well, to translate,” he said.

“Why?”

“” Tox asked.

“” the disaster chief said. “Explain faster.”

“That one invented them,” Tox said, pointing to me. “And she’s an R3. Between the two of them, they can make a network to replace the brakkot communications.”

The disaster chief’s eyes widened.

“Deputy!” they shouted, “take over coordinating for me. If the mayor manages to call, tell them I’m busy restoring communications.”

A rak looking significantly more overwhelmed immediately approached, taking the chief’s clipboard and trying not to vomit.

·····

The language barrier made it tough, but for all his other failings Tox did have grace under pressure. His translations were concise and straightforward, cutting away extraneous detail that he knew wouldn’t be relevant to the psionics Jordan and I were making.

It was a half-hour crash course in large-scale emergency aid. The disaster chief laid out exactly what the emergency response should be and how it was organized.

There were five main roles to coordinate in a disaster.

The first dealt with fire, shelter, and threatened structures. Buildings were equal parts protection and threat. No one wanted to be exposed to the elements, but a bunker could easily become a cage with just a small section of its structures compromised. Buildings that fell could block roads, destroy other fortifications, and otherwise add to the general chaos. On earth, at least in America, this group would have been almost exclusively firefighters. As the disaster chief explained, the group would also likely include road crews. But the message was clear. Almost all of their work was after the fact, so they were largely being swept up into the second group: medical.

Keeping people alive was the number one priority. That meant treating injuries or preventing them in the first place. So included in this group was mass transportation. The normal progression of disaster work like this was to prepare as much as possible, then act decisively afterwards as soon as it was safe. But this wasn’t the normal progression. Ambulances, busses, even gondolas were being made available to evacuate the coast. This was the largest group and the most in need of coordination.

The third group was law enforcement and secondary personnel. Technically, the disaster chief themselves fell under this category. Us too. This group was the flexible personnel that mostly contributed manpower. They would need to be divided into groups and dispatched throughout the city as needed. Currently this was happening through handheld radios that could only reach so far. The wind ripping down antennas was cutting off areas, forming bubbles of noncommunication.

Fourth was dedicated infrastructure. Hydraulic barricades, flood channels, power generation. All the pre-existing infrastructure that could do anything to help. This was the group in need of the least communication. Their procedures were prewritten, and should already be underway.

The fifth group was…well, everyone else. Victims. All the people that needed to be evacuated, rescued from boats in the harbor, put on busses to high ground. The more we could communicate with and organize them, the better.

Five groups.

Creating a modular psionic system to fit their roles was not hard. The Flotilla already had similar psionic communication networks, subdivided into different roles across different ships. Any given person could flit between a dozen psionic channels, each one dedicated to a certain topic or goal.

Adapting that model to fit a city’s worth of first responders was not difficult. The disaster chief gave us the quick rundown on how many layers of command there were, who needed to be able to report to who.

No, the hard part was getting it in place.

It was a network. You couldn’t just press one button and have all the right psionics fall into all the right heads automatically. Although…the Beacons had done that exact thing, more or less, when they’d scattered psionics for me. It wouldn’t help this time, but maybe in the future they could be given ways to broadcast help.

No, each person needed to be individually given their module in the network. Even assuming only one in ten civilians needed the module to effectively communicate, that was still tens of thousands of modules just for the fifth group.

I could only make three or four every minute.

The disaster chief took the dozen or so Jordan and I put together initially and started building the network amongst the field HQ on the corner, but we needed a better way to produce the modules.

The first psionic ‘module’ I’d made was the introductory one. It wasn’t really ‘modular’—it didn’t come together with others to make something larger. Each one was just a self-contained package with some helpful starter tools.

But I had made the intro module thousands of times. I could make it dozens of times in a single minute. I knew how to put it together, and moreover, I’d learned how valuable it was for others to recreate its contents for even more people.

Facilitating that, each intro module contained a simple psionic diagram, explaining how to build more intro modules.

That was what we needed to make for today’s emergency module. A blueprint on how to make them.

That too was simple work. But still slow.

The emergency module was not made up of complex psionics. Each module was little more than a transceiver with pre-installed channel organization, a self-perception tool to make sure it was easy to handle, an auto-ID function, and a brutally simple map system.

But even if those tools were all simple in operation, sketching blueprints for them was not. Quality mattered here. An extra twenty-minutes on the blueprints now would make it that much easier for Adepts all over the city to start creating and sharing the emergency module.

When in doubt? Of course I resorted to Coalescence.

I bumped Jordan’s fist and fell down into our now shared mind.

Without thinking, Jordan sat down out in the rain, crossing her legs in the most natural meditative position she could get. Her habit bled through to me and I copied the position next to her while we worked.

Even if my psionic senses left me more aware of her quirks than most, it still caught me off guard just how emotional she was. My psionic senses were sharper than hers, but hers reached dozens of times further. She could feel the intensity of the emotions sinking into everyone in the city west of us, and it wasn’t hard to guess exactly what that emotion was.

People were dying while we put together our network.

At first blush, the two of us probably looked ridiculous, sitting motionless side by side in the rain, seemingly doing nothing.

But as each person in the field HQ acquired the emergency module, they got a better sense of just how intense our psionic work was.

We connected to Tox for a split second and got a glimpse of ourselves from an outside perspective. Physically, we were just two idiots getting rained on. But our minds were ablaze, so much it was hard to look at directly.

It took too long to get the blueprints ready. Neither one of us wanted to think about how many people had died in the interim. The only thing that made the thought tolerable was that far more people would still die even if we did everything perfectly. Margins were the best we could do.

But we did get those blueprints ready. Candled radars would help too. They usually only worked over a more limited area: a hundred meters, give or take. But that was strictly if you wanted the crisp, high definition, precise mental perception of people’s positions. If you were willing to increasingly sacrifice accuracy, the range could be hiked out as large as you wanted. Under Coalesence, with both of us burning candled radars, we could probably locate any given mind within ten miles down to a vague radius about the size of a house.

That was more than enough to start hurling blueprints at every Adept we could find in that ten mile radius.

Most of them missed, the psionic files scattering into the void never to be seen again. But as soon as one landed…

Nai was one of the first to get one, and for a moment she began to slip into our Coalescence too.

She was just one of forty, fifty, sixty Adepts raising miscellaneous jagged barriers up through the beaches. Blink and you might mistake her section for empty. But a line of Nai’s transparent crystal spanned nearly a hundred meters across the beach. And growing. Every wave that crashed into it was smoothly turned back by a curved lip built into the upper edge.

Adjacent to her section of breakwater was Johnny with a line of his trademark black fractal iron.

Other barricades stretched for shorter distances. One section looked to be made of twelve foot stone cubes sealed with a puffy glue. Another looked like it was made of solid gnarled wood. It wasn’t enough. Not yet. It didn’t reach far enough on both ends. There were too many gaps in the middle.

We couldn’t let our selves get suckered into Nai’s perspective though. She was a good starting point though. She copied the blueprint to Johnny and started sharing the emergency module among the breakwater Adepts. They could start sharing it more widely too.

Next, we hurled one toward Donnie up north. He got the message quickly and started producing copies of the emergency module. One by one key people got back into communication.

The admitting physician on duty in the hospital nearest the water. The duty coordinator of the gondolas being commandeered for emergency evacuations. The scores of police and paramedics making decisions to evacuate certain people or advise them to shelter in place.

Over the next few days, I’d regret not adding a headcount function to the initial version. Thousands of people would gain the emergency module. Who knows how many exactly?

As Jordan and I approached Coalescence’s time limit, we shifted our focus from spreading the blueprint to making more modules themselves for distribution. From an empirical perspective, she and I probably saved more lives than any other two people in the city.

But it didn’t feel that way. We’d sat in the rain for an hour just to help everyone else do the heavy lifting. We weren’t going to tuck tail either.

Both of us knew it as our Coalescence petered out. We were going to go anywhere we were needed.

“…We probably could have done that under an awning,” Jordan decided.

“Hey, I was just following your example,” I said.

Both of us were soaked to our bones, even beneath our…ponchos? When had we materialized those?

It took me too many seconds to realize we hadn’t, and that Nemuleki had slung them over our heads while we’d been absorbed in our psionic trance. A vain attempt to keep us dry, but a touching gesture nonetheless.

“Nem, you and friends ready to move?”

Tasser, Corphica, and Wurshken had positioned themselves out in the rain with us, keeping watch while Nemuleki and Lorel bickered with Tox inside. The disaster chief had left us to our work once they’d laid out the specs we wanted for the network.

Even now, while they appeared to be taking a much needed break to collect themselves, their mind was still humming, tossing out psionic instructions through the network. Directing evacuees toward the spaceport, spreading the word that the city trains were mostly flooded, and otherwise directing people the best routes east and north, inland and uphill.

“Just tell us where,” Nemuleki said, even as Jordan and I turned toward the west, into the storm. Not even a trace of hesitation. God it was good to have her back in our orbit.

One look at our shiny new network said that the ports were the biggest problem. Boats were piling up, and people were beyond unruly trying to get themselves and their craft out of the water as quickly as possible.

Johnny was on the scene, raising an alert for more manpower every two minutes.

I checked with Sid and Deg, still sheltering in the Jack back at the spaceport. The reservoir it used for a launch platform was probably the only calm body of water in the city right now.

Given the green light from them, I contacted Donnie.

<[Sit tight, we’re on our way. Ten minutes out.]>

<[How the hell can you get here in ten minutes?]>

·····

“Boat. Of course,” Donnie said as we pulled up.

“Would it be too much to say I want lunch?” I said. “We got here too quickly to eat any rations.”

At a certain depth, the water became a boon to travel instead of a hinderance. Especially for Adepts with mass to spare. I’d wanted to make a boat with Adeptry, but one durable enough withstand the rough water and six passengers required double the mass Jordan and I could cobble together combined.

Luckily there was a convenient new emergency network through which one could request supplies or transportation through the rapidly flooding city.

All told, the overflowing canals had been a much gentler ride than I’d expected.

Even if the breakwater efforts at the beach weren’t water tight, they were still absorbing the lion’s share of the waves’ force. Even if the water crept inland, it’s momentum was dulled, merely flowing instead of crashing.

That must have been a priority for Nai’s group. Heavy waves and impacts brought down buildings. Mere flooding did not.

At least, I didn’t think it would. This was a Vorak planet. The Vorak planet. Surely they knew how to build with water in mind. This place had more ocean than Earth for crying out loud. More today than usual even.

“What have we got?” I asked.

“You all armed?” Donnie asked.

“What?”

Jordan snorted in disbelief while Nemuleki casually confirmed she and the Casti were.

“Of course.”

“Then look mean,” Donnie said. “A dozen boats tried shoving their way inside the docking cove. Crews are mooring boats as quick as possible and getting people back on dry land, but a ton of people are trying to get their boats beached to protect them. A couple of them have already tried ramming their way through.”

“Seriously?” I asked, bewildered.

Donnie jogged atop a seawall surrounding the port while we navigated our boat through the flooded street on the other side until we found a suitable spot to beach it and climb over the levee overlooking the port.

It was a civilian port, mostly filled with small sailing ships, but about a third of the vessels could have been large enough for fishing too.

The first shock was the water level. The levees surrounding the port to the south and east were somewhere between twelve and fifteen feet high. The water we’d carved through on our way here was roughly six feet deep, coming up the levee just under halfway. The port’s water level came up at least three feet further on the levee.

It was also more crowded than ever intended. Instead of being moored in neat rows at the docks, boats were jostled into all corners, just inches between each other. One look told me that you could walk across the whole port just by stepping from boat to boat.

Not that you’d want to.

Our Adepts’ breakwater didn’t extend nearly this far north yet. Waves were battering the ships nearest the mouth of the port, and beyond…

Oh, God.

Beyond the port’s mouth, more than a hundred ships had either dropped anchor in a desperate bid to stay put or were still trying to inch closer to the relative safety of the port.

When I laid eyes on the mostly flooded boat ramp, I understood why Donnie’s first thought had been guns. Half a dozen rak were trying to secure a sailing yacht to a trailer let halfway into the water.

Part of the scene was shocking just for how ‘human’ the moment seemed. It could have been picture perfect to something you’d see at the Great Lakes one summer, if not for the otters and alien design sensibility to the hauler-truck they wanted to tow the boat with.

The rest of the scene was shocking for the knife one of the rak was brandishing at other otters wearing high-vis emergency vests.

“Me or you?” I asked, not Jordan or Donnie in particular.

“All you, boss,” Donnie said, laying eyes on the same rak.

From their perspective, there was only a flash of an orange beam accompanied by a stunning impact where their head was slammed against the hull of the boat.

The emergency personnel flinched in surprise at the obstinate rak suddenly on the ground groaning, but they recognized Donnie as he led us closer.

“There’s consequences for pulling a weapon,” he said in Tarassin. The rak trying to bring the boat ashore hesitated. Donnie did too, but he hid it better.

Instead, he glanced toward the rak in high-vis vests. Nobody was sure whether or not we were trying to pull boats from the water. Would it even help? There was no way we could pull all of them. We couldn’t even clear enough to open a passageway to the cove’s mouth.

No, the priority had to be getting people at least to land. Not dry land, surely. The rain was only coming down more.

“You wanted help, we’ve got some,” he said. “Two Adepts better than me plus four of the toughest Casti orbiting this star.”

The rak in charge regarded us with a mixture of suspicion and relief. We’d left Tox behind, so only Donnie could translate, but our message was clear: ‘we’re here to help’.

“We need to get people to abandon their boats, now,” the rak said. “I don’t care what the property damage is, I don’t care who’s crying about livelihoods lost. If we can’t get to the people stuck outside the harbor, they’re going to capsize and drown. It won’t matter how gifted of swimmers they are.”

Donnie and I both reiterated another request for an evacuation crew into the emergency network. Something needed to come up this way ASAP. A gondola, a bus, it didn’t matter. Half the reason people weren’t disembarking boats was a lack of standing room.

The docks floating in the cove had risen with the water level, but they were unsteady. More than a few had already flipped from the turbulent waves or the jostling boats.

Threatening people was not how I envisioned helping people when the storm had really set in, but it was how we all spent our afternoon.

Hopping from boat to boat, basically demanding people start making their way across other boats to the docks or the levees.

I was not surprised to learn several aliens did not want to abandon their vessels. ‘Livelihoods lost’ indeed. Some of these looked like small houseboats or something to tour up and down a coast. These boats were homes and jobs. It made sense people didn’t want to just leave them behind.

But not every rak had that reasoning.

‘I’m not letting a single person on my boat—not even to crawl across to land!’

‘If I leave it now, someone else will leap aboard, slip below deck, and steal our heirlooms!’

‘Why in the blood would I ever listen to some filter-feeding scrape like you? Tides, what even are you?’

I should have been surprised. Donnie sure was. But I just couldn’t muster the emotional energy to care.

The rak got obstinate? We either left them right where they wanted to stay, or handcuffed them if they wanted to stop us from reaching the boats further out.

Evacuating the one-hundred and sixty-five rak trapped aboard the boats in the cove took more than an hour. Even moving as fast as we could, some people just weren’t in good condition to move.

A lot of them were families that had been renting a boat to take out in the morning—only for the arriving storm’s waves to turn them back a hundred yards from the dock. Kids. Elderly. More bruises and broken bones than I could count.

Three points of contact was the rule for navigating a space-ship in weightlessness, but that actually seemed deficient as we made our way to the boats in rougher and rougher water. The only reason I could move faster than Donnie and Jordan was years of practice materializing hand and footholds and magnetizing my body parts to them.

Too many of the boats we came across already had corpses in them—drowned and barely recovered. Most of the boats closer to shore didn’t have any corpses aboard. But was that because they’d actually made it in safely or because drowned people didn’t usually make it back on the boat?

I almost wondered why more Vorak weren’t swimming for safety. They were otters. Amphibious in behavior for thousands of years.

Then I watched one of the ships still stuck in open water capsize.

Thousands of pounds of steel, aluminum, and wood caught a wave that was just a bit too tall at just the wrong angle, and the center of gravity shifted.

The rak aboard felt it before we saw it. The boards beneath their feet tipping out from under them too far to be an ordinary swell.

One of them dove into the water, cutting through it only an otter could. It didn’t take three seconds for a wave to pummel them from overhead, vanishing them beneath the dark water.

Another rak jumped in a few seconds later, as the boat tipped over. The stern dragged underwater quickly, leaving the bow to poke up like the Titanic. But that much mass going under created a down current.

The second rak was sucked beneath the surface in the blink of an eye.

The boat was a couple hundred feet past the mouth of the cove. The shore crew would take minutes to drag a rescue raft into position.

Materializing life jackets for ourselves was the only precaution we took before Jordan, Donnie, and I all jumped into the water after them.

The water was almost hot compared to blowing wind we’d just left, and everything below the water was pitch black.

All three of us ignited candled radars as we swam toward the capsizing boat. Donnie broke off early, diving for the rak who’d been swallowed by a wave. Jordan stayed on a line for the third of the boat still peeking above the water, while I dove for the one sucked downward by the sinking mass.

Activating my pressure jets did not accelerate me like I wanted, but dematerializing the life-jacket in favor of weights to pull me down did just so.

I reached the Vorak—fifty feet down now—and I knew I was risking the bends, drowning, and all manner of things they taught you not to do the first day of lifeguard training, but I couldn’t care.

I wasn’t worried about wearing a lead jacket to sink because I knew I could turn it back into a floatation aid with a thought. And I did, creating a similar jacket around the Vorak’s torso too.

The two of us shot upward, just as intended.

We broke the surface, and even as my inner ear and gut screamed bloody murder at me for the whiplash changes in pressure, I realized…

I was having fun.