Cosmosis

I explained.

Nai nodded.

I admitted.

Peudra had warned us how justice could be doled out in this town. If we crossed a prominent enough criminal, they might look to get even by aiming at not just us, but our ship at the spaceport or the munchkins with us.

That struck me as unlikely, given the group we were scoping out now, but it wouldn’t do to forget the possibility.

Agent Avi had successfully given us a binding agreement with the Kraknor interplanetary authority. Authorities? Bah. Whatever it was, it was certified by the international planetary defense force and the system’s two Assembly Void Fleets.

Peudra had looked over the legalese and given us the green light.

That agreement along with a waiver from Agent Mashoj would give us some latitude as we started knocking our way down the list of prospective locations for the corpse from Korbanok.

Mashoj hadn’t been kidding about the mall. It was within half-a-mile of the beach, still with three feet of standing water.

Contacting the Flotilla, Dyn and Nerin had told us to watch out for waterborne bacteria. If we were going to catch an alien illness, it would be an infection from something like that.

The wind, however, was finally dying down to merely harsh levels. Definitely not kite-flying weather, but after living through gusts strong enough to tip over boats, this wasn’t so bad.

It was a pedestrian mall, dominating a city block with skyscrapers and high rises on all sides. It was horseshoe shaped, with the curve facing the ocean. Mashoj had described how two different local gangs had wormed their way into the north and south arms of the horseshoe respectively, and there’d been reports of gunfire for the last two days. Patrols had been dispatched, but nothing substantial enough to truly address the problem.

That would not be an issue with us.

Part of me had almost wanted to bring Johnny and Donnie too, have our full Adept might crash down on the place, leaving nothing to chance. But it would have been overkill, and we wanted capable people watching the Jack and the munchkins.

Tasser, Jordan, Nai, Sid, and myself.

No, the five of us would be enough.

”I still don’t understand why you brought Sid,” Halax admitted.

“Tsk, tsk,” I chided. “He’s standing right there. How rude.”

If Sid cared about being questioned, he didn’t show it.

“He’s not a combatant. Isn’t he?”

“It’s because I speak Tarassin,” Sid clarified.

“So do I,” Halax said, still frowning.

Sid glanced at me knowingly.

“Well, I’m not Co…showing you my best psionic tricks,” I said. Halax didn’t need to know any details about Coalescence. Or even its name.

Did I just want to stun him in awe with the abilities of my superconnector, without giving him any context?

…No, I didn’t care about showing off for his benefit. I just didn’t mind keeping him in the dark about my best work.

“Well don’t keep me in suspense,” Halax said.

“I wouldn’t keep you at all if I could help it,” I snarked back.

I did, however, give Jordan a check. She was the one in direct communication with Agents Avi and Mashoj. We were all tuned to their psionic channel, awaiting a ‘go’ signal.

My superconnector was already spooled up and running warm. The preparation I put into the front end, the longer I’d be able to keep us under Coalescence. We likely wouldn’t need more than ten minutes to clear the whole mall. But the possibility remained we could be waylaid by hostile Adepts inside.

Best to have as much uptime as possible.

Keeping the superconnector ready for an extended period proved just as challenging as getting it ready. It could be an interesting point to study later.

Careful, Caleb, don’t get too distracted.

I tensed. I halfway expected to be able to jinx it with just a thought like that.

But we waited for five more minutes.

The signal came from Agent Avi.

Jordan replied.

The reins let loose, and my superconnector flared to life like a sun behind my eyes. I started with Nai and Jordan, giving them each a simple fist bump, building a connection from my brain, to interstitial exotic matter in my neurons, through psionic space, into the same interstitial particles in their bodies, to their minds.

High-fiving Tasser and Sid brought our non-Adepts into the loop.

We were us.

·····

The superconnector was a surprisingly inconsistent thing. Well, I didn’t think so. I knew better. It was a flexibility thing. Connections came in all shapes and sizes, and different ones served different purposes in different situations. There were some common points, but unless you were me, with a wordless, intuitive grasp of its fine inner workings, you’d be thrown, even with experience.

It had taken Nai a while to get used to how different each iteration of Coalescence could be. It was even worse for Tasser, Jordan, and Sid, who had not linked with me as much.

Kraknor must have had me in a mood or something, because we found ourselves in a shared mental landscape. Comfy chairs in the Jack’s common room all arranged around a low table with a holographic display that could only exist in someone’s imagination.

The hologram display was a photorealistic rendering of the mall we were in the starting motions of. The real positions of all our bodies were on the display too, little miniatures of we five as we leapt into action.

We weren’t frozen in air, not completely. Time and our momentum crawled forward in slow motion. But it wasn’t slow motion. We were acting in real time, it was just these shared thoughts of ours were just that fast.

Even now, all five of us were completely in sync, aware of each other’s thoughts and reactions. The humans couldn’t help but think about how the hologram didn’t look like some digital representation, but more like a finely crafted diorama, but with complete inner layers that could be peeled away or made transparent with a thought.

The aliens were stunned more with our own expectations of technology than the display itself, but it was responsive enough for Nai and Tasser to radiate how impressed they were.

We could all experience each other’s feelings coming from inside ourselves though, not just externally. That was the real power of Coalescence. We didn’t just know how they felt and what they were thinking, we knew how they felt about how we felt about how they felt about…

And so on.

“Nai should stay out of sight if possible,” Jordan led. A proposed route for Nai illuminated itself on the mall’s hologram. It took her into a lower level, moving through the waterlogged areas.

“My body has augmentations so I can move the quickest in water like that,” Nai agreed. “But I should go ahead of Caleb on the upper layer.”

A path for my body to follow blinked into existence too, superimposed onto it was a ‘flash forward’ of my current position relative to Nai’s. If she went ahead from below, we would be able to cascade from underneath and further optimize our approach.

“Hammer and anvil,” Sid suggested, pointing out the middle of the mall’s horseshoe shape. It was where all the gunshots had been reported so far, and it was where the two gangs would likely be encountering each other. “One of us can throw themselves in the middle here and divide both sides with heavy barriers.”

“Me,” Tasser said. “A Casti performing Adeptry will heavily disrupt both sides.”

“Agreed,” I said. “On the off chance Nai does get spotted too, or even recognized, she’ll be harder to verify if there’s impossible stories about Casti Adeptry mixed in.”

“Sid should go to the roof,” Jordan suggested. It was such a small point. As a non-Adept human, he was the most vulnerable, medically speaking. He didn’t have meta microbes to help fight off bacteria that could be in the standing water.

It didn’t really matter who went on the roof. Not truly. But when we were this coordinated, making those ultra-minute optimizations cost us virtually nothing.

“Nai advances from below, Sid does the same from above. Caleb pushes in level, I cover our rear, and we have a vertical pincer to complement the hammer and anvil.”

We all nodded, watching the hologram morph and overlay with different glowing visualizations of each suggestion.

Our bodies acted out our plan exactly as devised.

No candled radars were necessary. Plugged into Nai like this, we all carried its effects. Vorak minds within the mall popped into our awareness, their precise positions instantly appearing inside our rendering of the mall.

Eight, nine…thirteen, fourteen…eighteen…nineteen Vorak total, at least in the north half of the horseshoe. Six Adepts. More than expected. Agent Mashoj and their tactical team were in turn a second anvil, awaiting at the exits to the south half.

Once the five of us were finished clearing the north, Tasser’s anvil would become a hammer and we would push through the south gang.

Sid never touched the water. We started on a rooftop north of the mall, but where Nai quietly waded through the water on the street, a scaffolding appeared for Sid to run across. His pace perfectly matched where it appeared and disappeared, like he was just running across the top of a moving bell curve.

The scaffolding had been three stories high, but only existed for fifteen seconds. Sid was on the rooftop with no alarm raised.

Tasser moved into position from outside the horseshoe, readying to throw himself through the east window as soon as we wanted or needed to reveal ourselves. Through his eyes, we could all see what exactly we were interrupting. A cluster of Vorak stood opposite one another at the bend, standing off, ready to kill each other at a moment’s notice.

All of them were eclectically armed.

But with Sid atop and Nai below, it was my turn to get in position.

Unlike Jordan—who crossed the street on materialized scaffolding like Sid—my body was equipped with the augmentations to handle my maneuvering jets. And with a Nai’s worth of magnitude at my fingertips, I could fly even in Kraknor’s gravity.

I jetted toward the building with Jordan only seconds behind.

With Nai and Sid both providing us cascade and radar coverage, we could track everyone’s positions.

In our mental landscape, Tasser prepared his entrance.

In the slow-motion crawl of our holographic table, we saw everything before it unfolded.

He launched himself off a twenty-foot stalagmite, clad in invisible armor to protect him as he crashed through the atrium window on the far east side of the horseshoe. He landed on his feet, sliding across the floor almost perfectly to middle ground between the two groups of armed Vorak.

They were stunned speechless, unsure whether or not they needed to shoot this strange Casti that had thrown themselves in the middle of their standoff.

The Adepts on both sides felt it first. All five of our minds drew through Tasser’s brain, sketching out a display of Adeptry the likes of which most Adepts would never see. The power being moved was unmissable.

Even if they didn’t know what was happening or how it was possible, the Vorak Adepts felt something was about to appear.

They reached for their own weapons and Adeptry, but Tasser’s own arms went up first.

On either side of him, two panels of not-quite-invisible crystal flickered into existence in a flash— literally. The half-meter thick barriers stretched from floor to ceiling, every nook and cranny. Every inch of the mall’s central hallway was blocked, on both floors.

That they were transparent was just icing on the cake. Everyone could still see Tasser right there, interposing himself between two crowds of nasty armed thugs.

Both congregations had more immediate reactions though.

It was thousands of pounds of matter appearing in the blink of an eye. Flash formation. Much of the air was simply trapped within the crystal structure, dissolved or relegated to micro pockets and divots in the material.

But every atom that wasn’t trapped had to be displaced.

The walls appeared with a shockwave, blasting down both sides of the horseshoe mall. Those rak sure were wishing they wore ear protection.

Not that it would help.

Simultaneous to Tasser’s entrance, I blew apart the paneling covering a second story window and found one of the rak posted elsewhere in the mall.

“”

My mouth didn’t have the muscle memory for Tarassin. But it didn’t matter because my jaw didn’t move an inch. It was a party trick, but you could make sound by materializing pressurized gas in waves.

I knew gas pressure. Sid knew Tarassin.

Who was it scarier for? The Vorak who could see me? Or the ones who just heard the disembodied sinister voice booming from nowhere?

As predicted, they reacted poorly.

The Vorak reached for their gun, but my body didn’t need to respond.

Before they could clear their holster, a thick layer of invisible crystal encased their wrist, hand, and thigh all in one chunk. The confused rak fell over helplessly, more crystal forming around their body, bolting them to the floor while I walked past, unbothered.

Jordan’s body followed mine’s footsteps, and we launched psionic attacks on every opponent we incapacitated, probing and extracting for any information they’d deigned to preserve that way.

Strictly speaking, we didn’t need the hammer and anvil strategy. We didn’t even need to enter the building at all. Jordan’s Adept range was large enough to cover the whole complex twice over. Our first draft had involved simultaneously encasing every Vorak present in crystal up to their necks.

This was a similar plan.

Back at Tasser’s anvil, Vorak opened fire on the barriers from both sides, only to instantly find themselves encased in crystal across most of their body.

The Adepts however, broke out.

It was said that Vorak had a better intuition for material science. Here, at least, it showed. With all five of our minds coordinating at full capacity, we had an unprecedented degree of awareness of exactly how our opponents were spending their powers.

The sequence of each Adept mastering their panic and shifting to analyze the crystal with their cascade was odd to behold.

We didn’t try to stop the Adepts in the south wing yet. Those Adepts would spend their time freeing themselves and then their allies, all while we visibly confronted their enemies on the other side of Tasser’s barriers.

Nai waded through the basement, cascading the structure from below and throwing up crystal panels to corral Vorak certain ways. Sid did the same thing from above on the roof.

“Make sure you don’t try to draw on my Vorpal Fire,” Nai reminded us in the mindscape. “No need to let anyone know the big bad Warlock is around.”

We proceeded easily.

The first Adept Jordan and I encountered was armed with a pistol and spear. They tried shooting me first, but Nai erected a panel of crystal in their line of fire. I ran straight toward the Vorak, dematerializing the panel at the last second.

They fired again, but when you had five people thinking this fast, the Vorak was moving in molasses. Even if I wasn’t moving any faster, technically, we could react to their motions perfectly.

I ducked under the Vorak’s arm, circling around behind them to stay away from the gun’s muzzle even as they dragged it around to follow me.

Credit where it was due, the Vorak was quick on their feet, turning the same motion into a swipe of the spear. The blade crackled through the air as it swung—some kind of electrochemical disrupting material—leaving a score of acrid corrosion where it touched the wall.

Two crystal stalagmites lanced down from the ceiling however, one to block the haft and the other to crash into the Vorak’s shoulder.

It wouldn’t be enough to keep them down, but we had my body move on to other opponents while Jordan could come from behind and finish the job.

She jammed a cattle prod into the rak’s neck as they tried to rise, zapping them back into the ground with the aid of the still growing stalagtite. Nai gave her a stalagmite to encase the cattle prod with, leaving it pressed against the Vorak’s neck.

The weapon was rigged with psionic trigger instead of a button, and we could leave the rak and cattle prod there, zapping them if they tried to move.

“” we repeated.

The Adept started to rise again, but instead of zapping them with the cattle prod just yet, Jordan materialized a gun and fired a bullet into the floor three inches from the rak’s cheek—radar and cascade confirming nothing actually in her line of fire.

It was enough to make them reconsider.

That particular rak shifted enough to earn a few more zaps from the cattle prod, but they stayed put like most of the ones that didn’t have the skills to escape so easily.

I glued one Adept to a wall.

Still from the floor below, Nai doused one in near-frictionless oil, leaving them helplessly wriggling on the floor, unable to even find the traction to climb to their knees.

The trick was convincing the Adepts to stay down. Materializing shock collars directly onto a target wasn’t even remotely feasible battle strategy under ordinary circumstances. But against this caliber of opponent, and with us under Coalescence, we outclassed them on another level.

Even the ones we didn’t manage to fit with some kind of incapacitating device could still be taken down, if a bit rougher.

Tasser had the most trouble.

One of the Adepts in the north wing had rallied themselves and was trying to break through his barrier with glowing hot corrosive bombs. They materialized in place on the surface of the barrier and glowed angrily.

Against an Adept with merely high mass, they probably would have melted right through. Exotic corrosives could get gnarly with very little know-how behind them.

But Nai’s knowledge of exotic particles and…

No.

Even under Coalescence, Nai was keeping the specific knowledge from us.

“Tasser and Sid can know since they’re not Adept,” Nai explained inside the landscape. “But there’s some things Adepts need to figure out for themselves.”

“That’s…so weird,” Jordan remarked. “I can tell you have a good reason for withholding…”

She really did. Every emotion came through Coalescence with crystal clarity.

How strange was that? I had no idea what she was keeping from us, but I agreed that she should.

People who weren’t familiar with Coalescence firsthand might expect discord like that to destabilize our link, but no.

Whatever perturbance rippled through our Coalescence lasted less than a tenth of a second.

The modification Nai added to the barriers kept the corrosive payloads from melting through, and Tasser began deploying kinetic bombs in a rapid rhythm to keep the latest Adept off balance.

By the time Jordan and I chewed through the rest of the Vorak in the north half, Tasser’s opponent could barely stand. That poor rak. Whatever legal system they found themselves under wouldn’t believe them for a second.

‘Oh, a Casti Adept throttled me around a food court without ever laying a finger on me. That’s how I got all these broken bones’.

A body cast materialized over the rak’s body as Jordan and I passed them, just to immobilize the injuries and prevent them from worsening…but we included a taser just in case the rak tried to attack again.

With three of us finally in the same spot, Tasser dematerialized the closer half of his barrier dividing the mall.

From ‘go’ to here had taken less than four minutes.

we reported to Mashoj.

They bit off their disbelief and stayed professional.

we reported.

<…If you can really spare the—> They stopped talking as soon as they saw us materialize more scaffolding.

These were basically beat cops going in strictly to get cuffs on the bad guys we’d already barreled through. At least one medic was present to sedate the Adepts too.

“I’ll stay underfoot,” Nai said. “Make sure none of them try to get back up.”

It wasn’t totally necessary. With the radar and the cascade coverage of Jordan and Nai’s skills combined? We could see the entire mall inside out upside down. We were leaving her with them to reassure…ourselves. And all five of us knew it too.

Hmm.

Stranger and stranger, every time I Coalesced it was a new experience.

Sid repositioned on the rooftop, ready to pick up the slack that Nai’s absence created—which wasn’t much. But Tasser, Jordan, and I dropped the second barrier Tasser had put up, and we marched for the Vorak still in the south half of the horseshoe.

“” our voice boomed again. Not a single one of us actually speaking.

More did the second time.

It took us only three minutes to clear the Vorak between us and Mashoj’s tactical team.

The agent made forty arrests that day. Rows of Vorak were boated off toward the jails that weren’t flooded. Mashoj said most of them would be released on extenuating circumstances with the hurricane. Oh well.

The important part was that work to reclaim the mall was underway less than an hour after we cleared the gangs.

By sundown, Mashoj let us comb through the mall’s underground freight delivery records.

God bless the Vorak, the made their filing cabinets to be water proof.

“Godammit,” Jordan swore. “Nothing matching the coffin’s weight in any of our date range.”

“Same here,” Tasser said, thumbing papers we’d ferreted. “This is a secret-but-official bribes list. How crazy is that?”

“Think we’ll get anything from computer records?” Jordan asked.

“No,” I said simply. “It’s not like they’re keeping video from that long ago. We can ask people who worked here if they saw anything, but I think this is a bust.”

But that was fine. Mashoj had promised to help us with more locations. We had plenty.

·····

The next morning, Agent Avi and Agent Mashoj both showed up to help us clear the flooding from a bank with specialized large-scale safety deposit boxes. That might have been the wrong implication. Vaults. It had private vaults.

“Check it out,” Sid nodded to one of the vault engravings.

Cadrune Hovi.

I snorted.

The bank employee who was ‘overseeing’ us while we cleared the flooding in their bank sneered. “They are an esteemed patron of this facility that you will learn nothing about.”

We actually Coalesced for this bank job too. The combined Adeptry made it too easy. Having us all be able to piggy back on Sid’s Tarassin was nice too. But the cascade was the real boon.

There were some materials, both exotic and not, that resisted many Adepts’ cascades. This bank used them liberally to protect its contents. But they were designed to stop the cascades of an individual. Nai’s cascade could saturate thousands of kilograms. Mine and Jordan’s were both high resolution. Each one of our strengths only improved while Coalesced, and Sid could push through the powder and fluid layers to analyze the contents of Cadrune’s vault with just a finger.

Stacks of documents. A painting or two. Something unidentifiable inside a refrigerated unit. Literal gold bullion.

Good grief.

Cardune’s wasn’t the only vault we checked while we siphoned water from the bank basement.

We checked them all.

The one thing we couldn’t find in the lavishly rich bank vaults? An abductee’s coffin. We checked for the corpse itself too, like if it had been moved to a different container. But no such luck.

Little we imagined was more embarrassing than looking for the coffin but somehow missing the corpse.

·····

We checked every morgue in the city.

All it took was a word from Pudiligsto PD. It was highly against the rules for us to check the records—active investigations and whatnot—but I guess sometimes corruption leaned in your favor.

Still?

No dice.

·····

We tore through two of the biggest local smugglers. More specifically, we tore through the now-defunct smuggling group’s headquarters, and the clubhouse of one of the still kicking groups.

They were mad about it, but we made a very convincing ‘stay out of our way and you’ll never see us again’ argument. It worked. Mostly.

What records they did keep told us nothing, and even the most scared of their number didn’t know anything about a human or a coffin.

No dice again.

“Well, before we go,” I said, borrowing Sid’s Tarassin again, “but if you think we were awful coming into your space unannounced like this, imagine how good it is to have us as friends! And if you hear anything about one of our abductees or the coffins? Tell us, and I guarantee you we’ll find something to be friends over.”

“…What about the South ‘Sto Stooges?” one of the rak asked.

The who?

·····

As in most things, the best investigative work came down to timing.

We were all abducted slightly more than three years ago. For most of that first year, most humans had been stuck on A-ships munching on rations floating in nowhere void.

But not our corpses from Korbanok.

They’d been shuffled off that stupid artificial moon within hours of my own departure. The transports had been attacked and pillaged hours into their flights too. The corpses had probably left the system within the month. They would have reached their destinations in similar time frames.

…And then they would almost certainly stay there.

Alien corpses were hot contraband. Moving them at all carried immense legal risk, even in a place like Pudiligsto because of the long history of cooperation between every civilized authority and the Organic Authority.

Very little got the Org hopping mad like violating First Contact procedure. I would know, having interceded with them on Serral’s behalf more than once for his decisions back on Yawhere.

But no Org stir had happened on Kraknor—a more environmentally conscious planet than most. So it was safe to assume that wherever the corpse was, it had been there a while, not gathering much attention.

Almost more crucially though, it meant that whoever moved it there wasn’t talking much about it either. Somehow, against the odds of underworld gossip, the thing had moved mostly undetected.

Or so it would seem.

Because three could only keep a secret if two were dead.

That’s what the ‘South ‘Sto Stooges’ were: dead. Not just a defunct gang of smugglers with only a few people to their name, a truly wiped out organization.

And they had been stamped out within three months of us abductees having arrived to alien space.

Our first answers came in an evidence box of all things.

It was the easiest favor in the world for Agent Mashoj to let us see the archived evidence in the investigations of the slaughtered gang. It wasn’t even illegal. The case was officially shelved in favor of hotter investigations.

We looked through the files in the evening.

“[Pay dirt,]” Sid said. “Look at this document: design specification and handling on the coffins.”

“You’re sure?” I asked.

He handed me the folder, and sure enough there was a diagram of a familiar metal box, and I froze. My fingertips stung just looking at it. I remembered all too well trying to pry them open with Daniel. We’d hammered and clawed at the metal till we bled. Until there’d just been silence.

All four of my friends noticed my reaction. Of course they did. We’d been Coalesced hours before. I didn’t fight it when Nai took the folder from my hands. Tasser just put a supportive hand on my shoulder.

I forced my breath to steady, and hauled myself back to the present. I’d been looking for these coffins for years now. I shouldn’t be this shocked when I found one.

Except, we hadn’t. Not yet. This was just a diagram of shipping standards and instructions sitting in a box.

But it was a start. The document was covered in serial numbers and manufacturer labels. This was one lead that turned into many more.

Mashoj was the one who discovered our next step though.

“Oh, snake venom…” Mashoj cursed, looking at another file.

Jordan peered over their shoulder.

“What is it?”

“List of assets recovered and those still outstanding,” they answered. “The coffin wasn’t recovered in the investigation, but not every property tied to the gang was searched. Look at the one they missed.”

Jordan’s eyes went down the page, and she fixated on the same entry Mashoj had.

“Of [fucking] course,” she swore. “Remember that cargo ship you saw, Caleb?”

“Yes?”

“Guess which gang of idiots held a stake in it?”

Of course they did.

There were still more than thirty viable locations we had to check within a thousand miles, but out number one best prospect had just become a hundred-thousand ton ship that was currently diving into the middle of a hurricane.