Cosmosis

Ocean

(Starspeak)

Tactile cascades were a strange facet of Adeptry.

Classically speaking, Adeptry always involved creation of some kind, adding to reality in some way. But Adepts were also widely known to enjoy some extra senses.

Nai could feel hot and cold spots just by being near them. I knew electrically inclined Adepts like Railgun were similarly sensitive to magnetic fields. Radiation sensitivity, infrared or ultraviolet. That wasn’t even considering Adepts with sensory based augmentations. Sense of smell. Hearing.

Even me, with my psionic senses. Even if I cast away all my constructs, I could still sense when people’s emotions changed, and how intensely. From talking to Mavriste and the various Adepts the Flotilla had picked up, that ability actually more closely resembled Adept-borne senses than something purely psionic.

But then non-Adepts like Sid and Tasser were showing signs of similar abilities.

Neuroplasticity went a long way in explaining how brains were adapting to new inputs—the software side. But senses ultimately came from physical interactions—hardware. Light bounced of retinas. Sound vibrated cilia in the inner ear. Chemical reactions on the tongue led to taste.

It was a lot harder to pin down the physical interactions of Adept senses. Nai’s sense for temperature didn’t involve her coming into physical contact with any of the ‘hot’ or ‘cold’ in question. Adepts who became electrosensitive had shown some patterns of certain metal deposits in their bodies and bones—almost like radio antenna, but it was still a bag of cats to research. Psionic senses weren’t any better—there were just too few subjects for heavyweight research.

Tactile cascades were the exception. More than two-thirds of Adepts were blessed with the sense, and that trend was born out in our human abductees too.

Inconvienently, cascades were just like most Adept senses, in that, the physical interaction was very poorly understood. Even the best theories were vague. But ignoring how the Adept’s body picked up on the sensation…the sensation itself had been studied in depth.

The tactile sensation would ‘cascade’ outward from the Adept through solid substances. The less ‘solid’ the substance, the harder it was to spread through. There were other factors that could hamper or assist the spread of a cascade like density, static charges, temperature, and even vibration.

More sensitive cascades were generally harder to spread out and vice versa, but it wasn’t a hard and fast rule. Nai could spread out a low-resolution cascade over a huge area, pushing it through obscene amounts of mass. I could do the opposite with my high-detail cascade; I couldn’t push it very far. But some Adepts were just innately talented and weren't forced to compromise.

Mavriste and Macoru both had enormous cascades that also captured lots of detail.

Those talents alone made them worth hiring for our little heist.

“So do you trust Cadrune’s scouting?” Macoru asked.

“If there’s one thing I trust about that [rat], it’s their hiring policies,” I said.

Nine people were gathered around a table in the Jack’s cargo hold. Macoru, Mavriste, Halax, Peudra, Jordan, Nai, Tasser, Sid, and myself.

“Black [fucking] tides, Caleb…” Halax murmured. “Just what have you been up to?”

I couldn’t keep the grin off my face.

Scattered before us was the fruits of almost a year’s worth of top-notch criminal research and reconnaissance. Blueprints, shift timings, employee rosters…I hated to admit it, but Cadrune came through.

They’d been putting together an attempt to rob the Diving Bell for more than a year, but there’d been certain limits on personnel. Not that the criminals they’d picked were lacking, it was just…the Jack had even more exceptional talent to pick from.

“Caleb certainly does seem to have picked quite an auspicious start to his criminal career,” Peudra agreed, looking over our planning material. “…But come now, Halax, you’ve seen my project. Mine’s still more ambitious.”

“Peudra, you’re the one with the sense of legality here,” I said. “If we went forward…what’s our level of exposure?”

They scanned their eyes across our documents again, taking their time to check both the psionic and hard copies.

“I can’t believe I’m saying it…but, low. Agent Avi was right to imply you wouldn’t see consequences of this. Here. These documents show why,” they explained.

Peudra drew our attention to a pair of employee rosters as well as some computer readouts that I didn’t understand the technical details of yet.

“First, the official staff,” they said, indicating one of the lists. “This is the personnel attached to desks, facilities and maintenance, those operating the casino floor, and the reputable portions of security.”

“That list has all the legal employees according to…whose laws?” I asked.

“The planetary authority, technically,” Peudra answered. “But that caveat is doing very heavy lifting. Those legal structures are slow to respond to any breaches, especially minor ones, and they’re not likely to stay on top of an operation like this beyond taxation. The ‘official’ list of employees is almost certainly outdated, and it’s definitely incomplete.”

“Hence the second staff list,” Nai recognized. “No names though. Not very useful, is it?”

“Harpe Cadrune’s second list is certainly speculation,” Peudra agreed. “But that’s why the machine readouts are so critical. Halax, you know the science. Would you explain?”

“Cadrune’s crew was smart,” he said, displaying the readout. Clearer labels appeared as he edited them. “Underwater facilities need an air supply. Realistically, there are two ways of getting one. Filtering dissolved oxygen out of the water—not recommended. Or electrolyzing water into oxygen and hydrogen gas.”

“Ah…” several of our technical minded crew figured it out before I did. Jordan. Nai. Sid. Macoru too.

“They figured out where the facility’s water intake for electrolysis was,” Halax explained. “From there, they monitored flow rate and usage. Once you know how often the place needed to make new air…”

“…then you can calculate a rough total headcount inside,” I realized. “That’s how they estimated the number of off-the books employees.”

“You’d have to monitor the number of guests in and out too, otherwise your math would always be incomplete,” Mavriste pointed out. “That would take round the clock surveillance.”

“Their data was gathered over six months,” Halax noted. “There’s more documentation showing the calculations for any given day, but the data is consistent. Within a margin of error of three heads, you’re looking at roughly forty unofficial guards at any one time.”

My eyes bulged out.

Forty?

“That’s assuming that all the unofficial personal are security,” Macoru pointed out. “It’s unlikely they’re all combat-capable.”

“The number of hostiles isn’t relevant,” Nai said, almost absentmindedly.

Every Vorak at the table ground to a halt to stare. ‘Had she really just said that’ and ‘is she crazy confident or just crazy out of touch’ were the questions scrawled across all their faces. Even Halax was taken aback.

“This is a well-financed operation, even on the legitimate side,” Peudra pointed out. “They’ll have skilled Adepts of their own.”

Nai frowned at the unexpected pushback.

“It doesn’t matter, they could be as good as I am, and they’ll still be a non-consideration in the end.”

“Maybe it’s just because you’ve never fought in underwater close-quarters before,” Mavriste warned, “but you shouldn’t count on overwhelming Adept power to save you.”

Nai caught my gaze for a fraction of a second before answering, and her expression said it all; she hadn’t.

“You misunderstand,” Nai said. “With our combined skills, we should be more than capable of countering all security measures without raising an alarm. Even if they have every vault under a field vacuum and constant cascade, those of us here are capable of skills that no one could have conceived of when this place was built. An ideal version of this heist would involve no one being the wiser…

“…but even if it did come to a fight, we’d win,” she insisted.

I could tell Jordan wanted to gripe, just for the arrogance of the statement. Sid too. But they both thought better of it. It hadn’t been that long since we’d all Coalesced. The memory of all five of us working in perfect concert wasn’t easily forgotten.

Halax did a much better job of moving past Nai’s bragging—though her expression said she thought of it as simply stating facts.

“How do you plan on locating the coffin without raising the alarm?” he asked.

“Most likely a combined cascade,” Nai explained simply.

“They have their own Adepts,” he repeated. “They’ll be monitoring as much as they can with their own cascades. And I guarantee you, a facility like this has an advanced network of security cameras. They’ll have eyes all over the facility.”

“It almost hurts knowing what your bar for ‘advanced network’ is,” I said, looking over the blueprints. “Even assuming these blueprints don’t mark all the cameras, we can scout any unexpected ones, and Cadrune’s scouting indicates their preferred camera model is static, not revolving.”

“Why does that matter?” Halax frowned.

“Static cameras are much more easily fooled,” Sid said. “With Adeptry and psionics? We can create false images and interpose them over the lenses.”

“You’re kidding,” Halax said, face deadpan.

“No, we are not,” I said.

“It’s not possible,” Halax frowned. “In theory I understand what you mean, but you can’t expect to reliably materialize so precisely, from so far away. It would require pushing your cascade through multiple different sections of the building, and praying that no opposing Adepts detect it. That’s not feasible under these—under practically any conditions.”

“You didn’t quite hear the words ‘combined cascade’, did you?” I snarked. “I think your old pals ‘Mac’ and ‘Mav’ might be able to speak more to that point?”

Halax had a point.

Volume and clarity weren’t the only tradeoffs in tactile cascades. Subtlety was also a factor. One cascade could push against another, denying it progress as it tried to spread out.

Given how many Adept attacks could be launched by materializing hazards near your opponent, it was an important defensive tactic for an Adept to ‘claim’ surfaces around them with their own cascade.

It wouldn’t make you safe from enemy attacks, but they would have a harder time aiming them and anchoring their constructs in nearby material without a cascade to help guide the process.

When cascades clashed like that, they were extremely noticeable in the mind of the Adept. Not unlike humans being unnaturally talented at visually recognizing others’ eyes and gazes, cascades too seemed predisposed to recognize other cascades in many forms.

But not all.

Cascades could be…’fuzzied’, not pushed so forcefully through the matter. It cut down on clarity and detail, but it was entirely possible to then sneak a fuzzy cascade through a much more vivid one.

The veracity of Halax’s point was simple. One Adept compromising their cascade so much as to sneak it into place surely would be forced to sacrifice too much clarity to materialize any picture clear enough to fool the camera.

But what he didn’t know about was Coalescence.

We didn’t have to make do with merely one Adept.

“It’s possible,” Mavriste assured him. “I have a psionic construct that lets me combine the best traits of Macoru’s into my own. With that, I can cascade…maybe five thousand square feet? Down to a precision of three or four millimeters too.”

“That’s absurd,” Halax scoffed.

“It’s true,” Macoru said. “I can only push to about three thousand, but I can get one millimeter precision fairly easily.”

“You’d cook your brains!” Halax protested. “It’s too much data to parse at once. You can’t maintain that much detail across that much area.”

“You can if you have two perspectives processing the information at once,” I said.

Halax returned an exasperated scowl.

“It’s a twin thing,” I said, not quite the truth. “They can still only focus on one part of the cascade, individually, but you can map the cascade directly into a psionic recording construct and review the whole thing later.”

“Even assuming you could do that kind of nonsense with a cascade, you still have to contend with enemy cascades detecting you,” Halax said.

Macoru and Mavriste both grinned, and the sensation from underfoot changed.

To be polite, Halax hadn’t been pushing his cascade into my ship beyond his footfalls. If he had, I might have swatted his nose. He would still be cascading the area of his footprint though. Few experienced Adepts could turn that reflex off once they slid into the habit.

But to demonstrate the principle, the M&Ms had been spreading their cascades underfoot, virtually invisibly.

I’d been looking out for it, so I’d caught whispers, but still only that. I could only detect them when they tried to expand their reach.

“How…” Halax breathed, turning his attention underfoot.

“Cooperative cascading,” Mavriste explained. “Mac and I both have a construct that…well, it’s a bit like the telepathy transceivers. But instead of sharing words and language, it reciprocally shares our cascades’ feedback.”

“You think one person can’t materialize a photostat in front of a camera?” Macoru smiled. “What about two?”

“You’d have to both cascade simultaneously,” Halax said, notably mollified. “You would have to do one camera at a time.”

“Well then it’s a good thing Caleb and his crew can actually do a superior trick,” Mavriste said. “I can’t be sure, but I bet their combined cascade trick can cover half-a-square kilometer down to—what, Caleb—half-a-millimeter?”

He was right on with the clarity, but the truth was, a cascade by Coalesced me, Jordan, and Nai could comfortably cover a whole square kilometer.

“You’re sure you can do it without alerting anyone?” Halax asked.

“The only way they notice is if someone is running their cascade through the camera itself the exact moment when we materialize the false picture,” I said.

“That’s the part I’m skeptical about,” Sid said. “You’re talking about fooling a camera by…what, materializing a polaroid in front of it?”

“It’s actually pretty slick,” I said. “Jordan?”

She materialized a thin transparent film-gel panel, sliding it over to Sid.

“Microtubules, like honeycomb,” she said. “A psionic signal primes the material to change color based on what light travels through the tubules, and in what direction.”

She sent just such a psionic signal to the gel, and it instantly colored itself. From our angled perspective, the whole sheet seemed to morph color. But from Sid’s perspective, perpendicular to the panel, it colored itself identically to the background from his perspective.

It wouldn’t fool a moving eye for even a second, but a camera that didn’t move? The change wouldn’t even be visible as the transparent film colored itself perfectly according to the background.

The camera lens’ position had to be meticulously calculated beforehand so the perspective lined up seamlessly, but with the camera specs included in Cadrune’s scouting, it was barely an afternoon’s work to make the setup bulletproof.

“Alright,” Halax nodded ruefully. “You want this to be a red team?”

“That was the idea,” I nodded.

“Then show your work. Roving guard patrols?”

“Psionic radar,” I said. We didn’t need to bother like that one didn’t exist. I knew the Red Sails and Deep Coils both had their own prototypes of that one—still not as good as ours though.

“What if one of them is clever enough to have hidden themselves from psionic radar?”

“Then the combined cascade will pick them up,” I said. “We have to sacrifice clarity to keep it undetected, but not that much. We’ll be able to pick up foot falls, and if there isn’t a psionic presence on radar to go with…”

“Entry point?”

I pointed to Nai who’d masterminded that.

“Southwest side of the main complex,” she said. “We materialize an airlock before melting through the bulkhead wall.”

“You can’t possibly expect that to go unnoticed,” Halax said.

“Not forever, no,” Nai nodded. “But we can reseal the hole behind us when we leave, keep it watertight. It won’t be discovered until a patrol walks by or the camera trick is discovered.”

“But you can’t know when that happens?” Halax noted.

“No,” Nai conceded. “But with Adeptry and disciplined operational conduct, we can keep the whole disguised at all moments that we aren’t actively entering and exiting.”

“…You really think physical opposition would be irrelevant if discovered?” Halax asked.

“I have a mass limit of several hundred thousand kilograms,” Nai said. “If we are discovered, I can force a stalemate just be materializing solid barriers to block corridors. I can trap all forty guards in crystal before they can react, if need be.”

“At least some will break out,” Halax countered.

“And I can waylay them with crystal barricades a meter thick,” Nai said. “Even if there are Adepts of chewing through my barriers, they won’t be able to without risking damage to the structure itself.”

“…Okay,” Halax conceded. “You actually have given this some thought.”

“I won’t even be the only one capable,” Nai snorted. “I’ve trained Caleb, Jordan, Johnny, and Donnie. Any one of them would be capable of handling the security single-handed. That’s not even beginning to mention whoever Mavriste and Macoru are bringing to this potluck.”

Halax turned to eye his childhood friends.

“How did you two get involved in this heist?” he asked.

“We were asked,” Mavriste said simply.

“And you just decided to become accessories to this very illegal crime?”

“…It technically might not be a crime,” Peudra reminded Halax.

“Halax, we know you knew us before we set down this path of ours, but we’ve given aid to much worse crimes than this one,” Macoru said honestly.

“After the fact,” Halax said, almost irate. “You help ‘sinners’ find some redemption afterward, you don’t help people commit those crimes.”

“We fight in wars,” Mavriste said. “And this heist is a more respectable cause than every war I’ve ever set foot in.”

“If you’re discovered, even if the Warlock is right, and she can neutralize opposition, you still might have to kill rak. All for a corpse. Is that something you’re prepared to do? That you’re all prepared for?”

Halax cast his question to the whole table, especially Jordan, Sid, and me.

“This corpse was stolen by bad people. Bad people have held on to it a long time,” I said. “I’m willing to put in a lot of work to keep this bloodless. But knowing who we’re stealing from? Even half the rap-sheets of the personnel we’ve already identified? Yeah, if push comes to shove, I’m ready to fight.”

I almost missed where Halax was coming from. He was a soldier. We’d met almost killing each other. Why was he so stuck on the idea of our using lethal force?

He’d only been with the Jack a few scant weeks. We in the Flotilla operated very differently from Nora’s crew over in Archo. The Mission was a more civil establishment. It was in a colony. They talked with mayors, businesses, charities. Their idea of ‘defense’ was security and determent. Thugs or nosy aliens.

The Flotilla didn’t always stay in civilized society. We had our fingers in more pies, and we knew not all of them would agree with us. Our idea of ‘defense’ was rigorous combat training. Just in case.

Halax was too used the Mission abductees.

He was, I realized, being protective.

I had to bite my tongue. If not I might have mocked him for the familiarity, just out of habit. I might have resented his relationship with Nora, but I would never hold this against him. Concern? A desire to look out for us? I’d never hold that against anybody.

Could he see that on my face? Was I really trying to reassure him that we knew what we were getting into? That this barely scraped the top five for ‘crazy stunts’ we’ve pulled off?

Eventually Halax faltered. He’d genuinely expected us to have no response to that.

I almost felt sorry for them.

·····

We went at the plan another two days, bulletproofing it from every angle. We designed tactical plans, created mock versions of the target, Adepted ourselves models to analyze our heist from every angle beforehand.

Nai even proved her ‘melting airlock’ method would be viable for getting us in through the Diving Bell’s exterior hull.

But anyone who’s ever seen the Thomas Crowne Affair, Reservoir Dogs, Heat, or any heist movie ever knows that no plan goes off without a hitch.

And our first one came a full twenty-four hours in advance of our curtain call.

I was refining the psionics we’d be using to sweep the Diving Bell for their own psionic defenses and sensors. Tackling those would be almost exclusively my purview. My latest scanning module was running smoothly and detecting every construct Nai tried to hide from it, when I got a ping.

I went still, as I usually did when I got the ping.

It didn’t happen often.

But I paid attention when it did, because it meant a certain alien laptop hidden in my captain’s quarters had received a message.

I dropped what I was doing, climbed up through the Jack, unsealed the floor panel in my quarters and withdrew the case that contained the laptop I’d looted from Kemon. Double checking the psionics embedded in the case confirmed it. The laptop had received a signal and given off a chime to alert anyone of a new message.

Cracking the thing open, the network of activity in the Margatha system looked the same as I had checked it weeks ago, but now there was a new message.

TO: LIGHTBRINGER

FROM: ENVY

‘Beware. CENSOR fields an asset in the Diving Bell.’

…

That complicated things…