Cosmosis

Obstruction

(Starspeak)

I didn’t like this room. It was bigger than my cabin on the Jack, so it shouldn’t have felt as claustrophobic as it was.

It was probably jail cells lining the one wall.

In practiced form, I was distracting myself.

“She ghosted us for more than a week, and now I can’t tell if she’s just pretending like she didn’t or if she actually doesn’t realize why it’s still a concern. I don’t know, am I just being unreasonable?” I asked.

“Do you feel like you are?” Sid asked completely unbothered.

I glared at him.

I wanted to get Ingrid to the Organic Authority ASAP. Barring that, I wanted to pay a very unfriendly visit to Cadrune’s medical ‘professional’ who still hadn’t seen fit to give Ingrid an Org consultation.

But this vacation had always been in name only, and I was spinning too many plates to follow up on that as quickly as I’d like. Worse, the other demands on my time weren’t guaranteed to see consistent progress.

So while I was hurrying up and waiting on police interogations, my brain had plenty of time to spin its wheels on what do about Ingrid and Cadrune.

“You know you’re being no help whatsoever, right?” I said.

“It’s a decision above my paygrade,” Sid shrugged. “Ingrid might be in a rough spot, but she hasn’t exactly made it easy for you.”

“Yeah, but she’s not really in the Flotilla,” I said. “She’s barely part of the Ramstein crew anymore. I don’t know exactly how much I can force the issue here.”

“I have half a mind to drag her to the Org myself if she tries ghosting us again,” I admitted.

“Like…full on proper kidnapping?”

I paused.

That sounded bad, obviously. But it was remembering Nora that really silenced me. Kidnapping was more or less what she’d tried.

Damnit, it would even be for Ingrid’s own good, I thought. Just like Nora had sworn about me.

“I don’t want to talk about that,” I pouted.

The dry look on Sid’s face told me all I needed to know about what he thought, but hey, I wasn’t above running away from a conversation.

Some of our onlookers had other plans though.

“It almost sounds like you’re a parent,” a Vorak in the cells said.

Sid and I both turned to them, surprised they knew Starspeak.

“Mind your own business,” I frowned.

“Oh come on, whelp,” the alien said, lurching closer to the bars. “It sounds like you’re an alien going through a dilemma.”

“What, did I stutter or something?”

“Hang on, Caleb, you never know what kind of sage advice Voraki criminals might have,” Sid chuckled. “You should hear them out.”

“Maybe I’m not keen on taking notes from someone in jail,” I said. Why had the cops stashed us next to the cells?

“Yeah, ‘cause you only want to take advice from rak who’ve made no mistakes,” the prisoner snorted.

At those words, Sid pointed to the rak with an expression that screamed ‘see?’

All I wanted was participate—or at least observe the interrogations of the Vorak working for ‘Opal’. But instead, Sid and I were corralled just outside the room, forced to watch hazy figures through a translucent window.

“Fine,” I rolled my eyes. It wasn’t like I could eavesdrop on any of the interrogation like this…

“Then you’re going to have to lay it out to me from the beginning,” the Vorak said. “I was mostly asleep when you two walked in here.”

“[Are you fucking kidding me—]” I started.

Sid cut me off.

“A human—her name’s Ingrid—she’s not with other humans right now. She’s hanging out with a billionaire for medical reasons. We’re pretty sure there’s more going on, but either she doesn’t know or isn’t telling us,” he explained patiently. “Caleb is ultimately in charge, so we have to figure out at what point we stop cooperating with her and her so-called-friends for her own good.”

The Vorak nodded, taking it in.

“…Yeah, it really sounds like you’ve got a parent’s conundrum,” they said.

“Yeah, real sage advice,” I glared at Sid.

My friend just held up a hand, for ‘be patient…’ and gestured the Vorak to continue.

“How serious are the health problems?” the rak said.

“Maybe life-threatening, maybe non-existent,” I said.

Sid raised his eyebrows.

“I thought she showed you the scar,” he said.

“She did, but heart transplants don’t survive two years without meds,” I said. “She’s either undergoing treatment she doesn’t know about, or she’s undergoing treatment and not telling us. Either way?”

“…I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I can understand why you’re legitimately considering kidnapping,” the rak admitted. “By the way, not very smart to talk about that out loud in a police office.”

“Yeah, lots of Starspeaking Vorak in this building,” I agreed facetiously.

“Well see, Caleb—can I call you Caleb?”

“No,” I said.

“Well see, Caleb, you should know that being a parent sometimes does involve doing harsh things to the people you’re trying to safeguard. What’s more important to you, this Human’s life or their respect?”

“Their life,” I said, without hesitating.

“That was fast,” Sid said, mildly surprised.

“What? Respect matters, sure, but being alive matters more,” I insisted.

“I dunno, sometimes you come across like a bit of a sycophant,” Sid said. “You can get bothered when people don’t like you.”

“Everyone likes being liked,” I defended. “But that doesn’t mean I’m petty enough to let Ingrid suffer or die just because the alternative means she won’t like me.”

“Then commit,” the Vorak shrugged. “If you really don’t care about the other Human’s feelings, just go and cut whatever corners you have to and keep her alive.”

“Is that philosophy what got you in that cell?” I asked dryly.

“What? No, I’m here cuz I stabbed a rak.” The words came out of their mouth like it was casual routine. Like it was obvious too.

Sid and I traded another pair of glances. His expression had faltered.

“I’m won’t pretend cooperating is a lost cause,” I said. “Not unless I have a very good reason.”

“Every parent says the same thing,” the Vorak chuckled. “Everyone wants to get along with their kids, be friendly. But fact is kids are unreasonable. For those first couple years, it’s the only language they speak, and they’ll either drag you down to their level or you’ll drag them up to yours.”

“…Seriously, Sid, you want to admit listening to this [nutjob] was a mistake?”

“I never said they’d be right, just that you should hear them out,” Sid said serenely.

“Mmm, that’s wise,” the rak in the cell nodded. “Even bad advice can be helpful. What not to do?”

“If you’re self-aware enough to know that, then you have to know why your advice seems terrible right now,” I said.

“What advice?” they said. “I haven’t given any yet.”

“No? You weren’t talking about ‘there comes a time in every parent’s life’ just a few seconds ago?” I asked.

“That was merely observation, not advice,” the rak scoffed.

“Well if you actually get around to offering any, do keep in mind, I’m not Ingrid’s dad. She’s not a kid.”

“Mmm…she kinda is…” Sid said.

“She’s older than you,” I frowned.

“Sure, but not you. And you’re still a kid aren’t you?”

“Really?” the rak said. “But why’re you in charge if you’re a kid?”

“No one else can do the job,” Sid said simply.

I glared at them both. That wasn’t technically true. Plenty of other abductees could lead. Just…not right now.

Oh, who was I kidding? I was stuck in the same boat Nora was. If I tried to quit, everyone in the Flotilla would just force me back into the job.

“Only person for the job? Not unlike a parent, I’d say…” the rak sneered.

“Except parents can quit,” I pointed out. “They’d be awful people for it, but sometimes kids need to get adopted.”

“Again, not unlike your own position,” the rak said. “I bet you could quit, force a suboptimal someone else into the job. But just like a parent would feel like a failure and a traitor for giving up on their own child…”

“Aaand that’s my limit,” I said, walking toward the door. “I’m going to find Avi. Or Mashoj. Or anyone interested in any other line of conversation.”

“What about the interrogation?” Sid asked, pointing to the translucent window.

“Oh, haven’t you heard? I’m in charge,” I smiled meanly. “Consider it delegated to you. Have fun with your sage-in-a-cell there!”

The rak in the cell spoke faster, trying to sneak in the last word before I left.

“I know a few things about parenting, and plenty of parents have died regretting how little they’d earned their kids’ respect,” the Vorak said.

I reached the door only to find it locked. Of course.

“Sure, you’re not this ‘Ingrid’s’ parent, but you are experiencing the same dilemma. Respect their autonomy or preserve their safety?”

I took a closer look at the interrogation room, realizing that it wasn’t so much that, as much a repurposed breakroom.

Sid and I were stashed in intermediate area just outside the cells.

I almost—I almost blasted a psionic call for someone to let me out, but I knew the police rak doing the interrogation didn’t want to be interrupted.

“Why the [hell] did they put us in here?” I asked, utterly incredulous. “There isn’t even a bench.”

“Wait, really? You don’t know?” Sid said surprised. “Actually, that makes sense. You’re mostly talking to people further up the food chain: they’re scared of us.”

I stared at him again, for completely different reasons.

“…What? Because of me—the Lightbringer thing?”

The Vorak in the cell hitched their breath and started coughing in surprise. They even fell off their cell’s cot and writhed on the concrete floor for a second while they regained control of their breathing.

“T-that’s—cough—that’s you all? Now I’m sorry for being so glib earlier. Please don’t fry my brain,” they said.

“People are really that scared of me?” I asked.

“Not just you,” Sid said. “We had to toss some petty cash at some Vorak just to get them to talk with us.”

“Why are you scared of us?” I asked, turning to the rak in the cell. “I didn’t think our reputation was this bad…”

“Oh, it’s dozens of things. Mailroom gossip says humans are an advance force sent from your homeworld and that the Coalition and Assembly are going to have to reunite to fight you off. My favorite one is where you’re actually Uriken in disguise. It’s a bunch of hysteria really, but it’s spooky enough that if even any of it is true…”

“Great,” I groaned, turning to Sid. “Remind me to see about shortening Aaron and Marika’s jail stint, since apparently there was no point in the gesture.”

“Uriken, really? Why would we have to be in disguise then? No one’s ever seen one, I thought,” Sid chuckled.

Finally, blessedly, someone else entered the room. Agent Avi.

“[OhthankyouGod,]” I muttered.

“What are you doing in the cells?” Avi frowned.

“They told us to sit here and wait while they finished,” I said, nodding to the interrogation. “But what are you doing here? Mashoj was the one helping us in city. I thought you were strictly on the you-know-who hunt task force?”

“I was in town again, and I needed to talk to Mashoj anyway. They told me you’re chasing a corpse?”

“Fake corpses too,” I said. “Maybe manufactured by a bio-chemical producer called Opal whose…‘associate head accountant’ is currently being grilled be detectives [Ollie] and [Oscar] there.”

Avi wasn’t alone though, with two police officers trailing behind them into the cell room.

“Alright Cofens, you’re free to go. But under no circumstances are you to leave the city limits. Your attorney will be by to pick you up in a few minutes, but you can get changed and wait out here…” the rak popped open the cell.

“Thank you,” the rak said.

“Excuse me, I don’t know if it makes any difference, but this rak confessed to us a few minutes ago. They stabbed someone,” I said, looking to Avi to translate.

“They know that already,” the rak said. “It was self-defense. Tides, I’m not exactly a career criminal here.”

Avi had a brief exchange with the officers, making sure the rak was not, in fact, snowing us.

“What a weirdo,” I said, watching them be escorted out.

“And they lumped us right in here with them,” Sid nodded. “Shouldn’t that tell you something?”

“Shut up,” I said, turning back to Avi.

“Fake corpses? Really?”

“Someone’s running a scam,” I said. “Exotic item, highly punishable by the Org, so anyone involved is keeping quiet. What about you?”

“We got a sighting,” they said. “There was a shipping container we suspected to be our target’s. The contents were catalogued months ago. It was a stockpile. Cash. False records. Weapons. Everything a fugitive wants. Point is, we put everything back the way it was, sat on the thing, and waited.”

“And someone sprung the trap,” I followed.

“They escaped, but we had psionic tracers planted inside. We have a rudimentary description too, but I doubt it’s enough yet.”

“What do you need from me then?” I asked.

“Nothing this instant—Mashoj had me come to help you. But start predicting how the target might find and counteract the tracers, and if there’s anything we can do to circumvent that.”

They beamed me the specs on the tracers, and I saw a problem right away. But it could wait.

“If you’re here to help us with Opal, I won’t turn you down,” I said. “Experience is worth its weight in gold, and I don’t have enough.”

“Harpe Peudra’s recommendation said you tracked down a bioweapon,” Avi frowned.

“True, but beginner’s luck,” I said. “How fast can you read about Opal?”

I beamed Avi some of our own psionic documents, letting them peruse.

“…Why are you here then?” they asked. “The arrested personnel are the ones would wouldn’t have been warned about the raid. Look at the arrests. Low level lab techs, the janitorial staff, and one mid-level executive. They got arrested because they weren’t warned because they don’t know anything that could incriminate the bad guys.”

“That’s the associate head of accounting right in there,” I frowned. “They picked up the company executive officer too.”

“Associate head? Hah. Okay, you wouldn’t know because you’re not from this planet, but that’s a badly disguised lie. They’re a stooge. An accountant that presides over one set of financial records as an illicit business operates ‘normally’. The person who really knows what we want isn’t them or the executive: it’s the actual head accountant. The one who saw both sets of books: seemingly legitimate and extremely otherwise.”

“Well that rak definitely isn’t in this building,” Sid pointed out.

“Obviously,” Avi said. “You need a manhunt.”

·····

“Okay, I’m not complaining,” I said, looking through the trashed office space, “but wouldn’t some of those low level employees know the name of the rak we want?”

“Yes,” Agent Mashoj said. “But likely only the one: the associate accounting head. And they won’t want to give something for nothing. They want to make a deal, and the pressure on them to do so is dependent upon the prospect of us being able to find out that name without them.”

“Psionics make all sorts of organizational work far easier,” Avi added. “Even the most low-level constructs are helpful to office-rak. Smartest decision ever made was putting a document processor in that intro-module that went out.”

Given that we were trawling through one of those very offices, that made more sense.

I smirked at Sid.

He just mouthed ‘sycophant’ at me.

I stuck my tongue out at him and kept looking.

“In a very roundabout way, we’re the ones turning up the heat in the interrogation,” Mashoj said, scanning a paper weight on a desk.

“That makes sense it just doesn’t feel like it,” Sid chimed in. “Anyone found anything yet?”

“Plenty,” I said. “Half of the items here are embedded with nothing psionics, there’s a day planner from last year stuffed into a pen. I think one rak was writing love letters to someone on the night shift using equipment they shared. And I am disturbed by how many psionic documents have been embedded into actual paper documents.”

“I’ve found a lot of those too,” Avi agreed. “They’re not even always related. Is it possible to embed things by accident? Everything seems so mismatched.”

“…It might be,” I admitted. “Even I don’t have a strong grasp on what happens to a psionic construct when its thrown out of my head. Who’s to say it couldn’t land in something?”

“It have to be inert, though, right?” Sid said. “Active psionics need to be connected to a mind to be active.”

“…Yes,” I said. “That is a good point. Hang on. I’m going to try something.”

My superconnector was designed with other people in mind. It took my mind and another and started building bridges…

But that was using it to its fullest potential. It was still well worth using below that potential however. So far, we’d only found junk psionics, both in the evidence collected and the remains of Opal’s offices and labs.

Anything more valuable wouldn’t stand out until we actually checked it out with our own minds.

So…could I…?

My superconnector spun up, and I cast out connections into the room. Dozens of psionic hits went off as the connections I’d scattered returned results. It was barely any information at all, like feeling heat from toaster while your eyes were closed.

The psionics were there, but nothing else.

But this was good. I’d already checked those desks, and I knew that my superconnector’s dredging had indeed found all the same psionics we had.

I cast a wider net this time.

Oh-ho!

A brighter hotspot returned, in the corner of the room…

Checking on the…water cooler? Samovar? Checking on the Vorak drink machine revealed a psionically based listening device.

“Oh!” I cried out. “Oh that is so clever!”

“What?” Sid asked.

“It’s a bug!” I said, gingerly pulling the construct out of the machine.

My compatriots had seen that I hadn’t pulled out a physical listening device, and so they were confused.

“A bug would be recording…” Avi said. “I know there’s such a thing as passive surveillance, but speaking psionically, wouldn’t recording cross over into the realm of active psionics?”

“Yes, that’s why it’s so clever,” I grinned. “They put a psionic battery in it. Tiny. Only good for maybe five seconds? But it’s set up to turn on for those five seconds when it gets a signal, and store the psionic data it gets in those seconds.”

“Wait, it’s not even a real bug? It doesn’t get audio?” Sid asked. “Lame.”

“Yeah, the stuff it’s got stored are just some vague thought noise. Nothing intelligible, but wow! I’ve never seen something this novel in psionics.”

“Glad you’re having fun,” Sid said, not entirely mocking me.

“But it’s not what we’re looking for,” Avi said.

“No, but…” I cast a wider net, covering the whole floor and most of the one above. “Five hotspots. There, there, there, there, and there.”

I stabilized the connections, just enough for us to trek through the building and retrieve the stuff.

A family photo had been embedded with an identical image, but only that. A small piece of animation was tied into the picture. And when you actually tried to read the psionic image, it gave off an intense emotional response—at least to Avi and Mashoj.

Sid’s and my non-Vorak brain didn’t correctly parse the emotional components of it, but I could at least get the gist.

Two more of our hotspots were recording psionics, not unlike the first one I’d found, and equally filled with junk data.

But the fifth one?

Inside the associate head accountant’s office was a simple black cube of engraved stone. Its design was related to the listening devices, and it had more samples of even more garbled data.

There had been an experiment being run here, someone was refining their bugs ability to capture both active signals and more passive slough. It was well on its way too. Using the older data to help clarify the new samples showed surprisingly cogent words captured at the water cooler-coffee machine device.

But more importantly than that, there was a catalogue of the samples and the employees who’d fallen within the five-second capture window.

Assuming the associate accounting head was the one to do this, they hadn’t managed to record everyone on the payroll…

But what did we care about that?

The psionic device had a list of the rak on said payroll.

“Executive officer, Puscari Matshi. Two files. Associate Head Accountant, Vadtmo Bukasisi. Zero files. Bingo, Chief Head Accountant…[son of a bitch].”

“Who?” Sid asked.

I tossed him the cube so he could see for himself.

“Cadrune Pothi,” I said.

“Can’t be the same rak, though, right?” Sid said. “What would a billionaire be doing working an accounting job? Even a corrupt one?”

“No, our rak is Cadrune Hovi,” I agreed. “But come on. [Coincidence? I think not.]”