MIA I

(Starspeak)

The aftermath on Rava was practically identical to that of the station orbiting the moon.

For the denizens there, it was a close call that had come at a sharp cost. But the day's dark mood was blunted by the knowledge it could have been so much worse.

Nineteen people were dead from the Black Knight's rampage. Two dead in the initial explosion at the power plant. Eleven more in its attack on the residential tower. Six in the police station.

That number would go up as people succumbed to injuries, and more destruction was uncovered. More than four hundred Vorak had been admitted to local hospitals with grievous burns and crushed limbs.

Tasser had missed all the fighting, so his after-action report was virtually non-existent. He'd boarded the Artemis with Nai, flown to the moon's surface, and then parted ways with her. He'd spent the next five hours helping direct civilians to stay evacuated and helping compensate for when the local psionic emergency network found itself overtaxed.

Meanwhile, Nai had been beaten unconscious, and Caleb had been abducted. Again.

Serral was one. But he was busy interfacing with Peudra and compiling Flotilla personnel's statements about events. Even if Rava's colony had gotten off easy, they were still outraged. Dozens were dead, and everyone demanded answers that no one could give right now. Even slightly mismanaging the Flotilla's response and cooperation could easily steer that outrage to be aimed at the them.

That sentiment was going around. To the people who didn't know Tasser, the successive disasters left him quiet and stunned.

Only a handful of the Flotilla recognized his silence for the rage it masked.

What kept his cool was the thought of Caleb's parents.

When had he started looking forward to meeting them? Even on good days, his relationship with his own parents was acrimonious. 'Parents' just weren't something he thought of positively often.

It must changed last year then, when they'd briefly crossed paths with Nai's mother. She'd called Tasser 'son'. It wasn't the first time, but Tasser hadn't appreciated how much commitment she had for the sentiment. Caleb had briefly met the woman too, to Nai's simultaneous embarrassment and delight. He didn't know for sure, but Tasser suspected Cal thought of Caaleb the same way. Parents like Caleb's loved their children and extended it to friends. Tasser knew that Caleb's phone background hadn't changed. It was still a picture of his birthday with his loving parents looking on.

Those parents had lost their Caleb. They had no idea what happened to him, or if he was even alive. They'd suffered with that mystery for four years now. It was dour, but if they'd suffered through Caleb's absence that long, Tasser could keep himself focused for the time being.

So, while everyone else was receiving medical attention and collecting themselves, Tasser was dissecting the battlefield in retrospect.

Half of him wanted to curse out Nai and Caleb for fighting so sloppily.

Nai of all people, being taken out in less than thirty seconds? It was unbelievable. Except she hadn't been sloppy or negligent. She'd taken a smart gamble where the odds were in her favor…and lost.

Tasser was a regular player at the Flotilla's D&D game: you could stack things in your favor all you wanted, sometimes you still rolled bad.

If it had been anyone else but Nai, they would have been dead. It spoke to Nai's reflexes and skills that she'd been able to protect herself so solidly even after falling unconscious.

Caleb had played it well too. He'd fought head to head with an opponent of Nai's caliber, and the Black Knight hadn't laid more than a scratch on him. It just wasn't always possible to spare the attention to guard against third-party threats.

Tasser's brow furrowed as he reviewed the drone footage that Jordan and Madeline had captured.

After HUNGRY had grabbed Caleb, the Black Knight had still tried to shoot. Had it been aiming for Caleb? Maybe…but it had been taunting Caleb a moment earlier. It fired when HUNGRY had exposed itself.

It was more evidence that the Black Knight and HUNGRY weren't allied.

Looking at the remains of the police station told a more interesting story though.

"[Jesus…]" Jordan sword, limping up to Tasser. Inspecting the wreckage showed more bloodstains than possibly could have come from one person.

Tasser understood her feelings, but he was fixated on cold interpretation of events instead of grieving.

"Found anything?" she asked.

"…Maybe," Tasser said. "You have the list of victims from the apartment high-rise?"

"Yeah."

The list in question went well beyond just the injured. It was a preliminary list of occupants for the entire structure, both names on property deeds as well as anyone subletting. Really, it was a list of names based on mail delivered to the building for the last six months.

It was thousands of names, but Tasser was only interested in one detail.

Out of all the victims in the police station, one stood out in the footage the Cyclops's cameras had captured.

The Casti who had appeared to run, throwing a Vorak to the ground in what looked like desperation.

It was easy to look at their actions and dismiss them as just panic. Plenty of people had fled in abject terror. But this Casti had only started running after laying eyes on the Black Knight itself. Even more telling, when they'd thrown the Vorak down, it was a deliberate motion sending them to the floor. It wasn't just shoving them out of the way.

The Casti had been doing their best to throw the Vorak out of the line of fire.

They'd known who the Black Knight would be shooting at: them.

"There's a Casti on the list of high-rise occupants, right?" Tasser asked.

"…Yeah," Jordan realized. "The same one in the police station?"

"This building adjoins a combined police and fire training facility. It's the designated emergency evacuation point for most of the nearby residences."

Jordan frowned.

"The station didn't seem that full when we were fighting."

"You had plenty else to focus on," Tasser reminded her. "But I doubt they were directing most evacuees to the lobby."

"Tasser…" Jordan's voice grew quiet. Her eyes roved the documents the local police had shared. "The Casti's apartment…I can't say for sure…but it's in the right spot. It could be the one the Black Knight targeted first."

"Madeline can to tell us for sure," Tasser noted, "but come on. There's only, what, a thousand in this colony? Maybe two? And ninety-nine percent of them are in their own little quarter. Statistically, this 'Tursov' guy might have been the only Casti in this whole colony to be living in this section of the city. The Black Knight practically went straight for him."

"Could be a coincidence," Jordan pointed out. "No all the bodies have been identified yet. I'm sure plenty of Vorak evacuating from this building ended up at that station too. We still need to check everything out."

Tasser grimaced.

She was right, but it was so aggravating. Hours would turn into days soon, and there was still no sign of Caleb. Madeline and Johnny were still in the colony's defunct underground tunnels trying to find which pile of rubble Nora had been buried under. The Siegfried wouldn't even touch down on the moon for another forty-eight hours. The whole Flotilla was still reeling from their casualties on the space station. Even if none of their own had died here on Rava, Caleb going missing might actually be worse. They were scattered, worn, and confused.

"I'm right," Tasser stated. "The Casti was the target. You're right that we need to confirm, but…"

"…But it'll turn out to be him?" Jordan asked.

"Yep."

"Just a hunch?"

"Mostly," Tasser admitted. "But eyewitnesses and footage agree: this Casti only ran after the Black Knight showed itself in the station itself. And he shoved a Vorak out of the line of fire and kept moving. At first blush, it looks like cowardice, but he look at it. Tursov isn't just running scared, he's trying to isolate himself from collateral targets. That can only happen if he he was going to be picked out from the rest. He knew he was going to be targeted."

Jordan's face was motionless as ever as she psionically rolled back through their footage from Madeline's mech. She reviewed the same section over and over, rewinding the same two seconds.

The very moments where Mackli Tursov broke into a desperate run, shoving a Vorak to the ground.

Alien facial expressions and body language had a threshold of difficulty when someone first interacted with new species' emotions. But given weeks and months, that confusion consistently gave way and became something intuitive.

Jordan's intuition was dissecting the Casti's motions down to the tiniest pixel.

How odd. Psionics didn't necessarily record video in binary computer code, but the electronic cameras in the Cyclops certainly encoded video that way. Pixels, entirely in one's own mind.

"I see it," Jordan said.

Tasser eyed her. Did she? He hoped so. Their minds had touched before, and he was confident she wasn't prone to telling him what he wanted to hear.

Whether or not Jordan saw the same subtleties Tasser did, he couldn't say. But her eyes picked up on something else too. She closed her eyes for several long stretches, checking footage in her mind against the savage aftermath before them now.

"…We need to find that one," she said.

Her psionics highlighted one of the Vorak in the footage. Once she drew his attention exactly to it, he picked up on it too.

When the Casti had broken into a run, one of the Vorak huddling nearby had reached a hand out, trying to stop them.

Tasser's heartbeat accelerated.

That Vorak had known the Casti would be targeted too!

"Look," Jordan said. She indicated a portion of the police station's lobby that had been relatively unscathed. It was stained with navy blood and caked with rubble dust, but the section of wall was free of buckshot marks. It was approximately the same area the Casti's friend had been.

The Casti's last act had succeeded. He'd drawn the Black Knight's fire away from bystanders, including his friend.

"No body," Tasser noted. He couldn't do anything about the note of dark satisfaction that crept into his voice.

This Vorak knew something.

And they'd survived.

ꞏꞏꞏꞏꞏ

Even working from both ways, digging Nora out took more than thirty-hours.

Rava might have had a fraction of the gravity of Earth, but at a certain point it was immaterial. Being buried under two hundred feet of very un solid rock made for complications like 'if I move this pebble, a couple square blocks might implode'.

The moment the bomb went off, she protected herself from the cave-in every last scrap of flesh she could muster. It was a crude cage of inky-black muscle and bone. But it held. She still lost consciousness in the blast, and when she finally came to, the air in the tunnel was running dangerously thin.

But she was still an M3 Adept. Taking as shallow of breaths as possible, she oozed out more semi-liquid flesh. It seeped between the rubble and painted a picture of exactly what mess had come down on her head.

The nearest empty pocket of tunnel still intact was further away than her tendrils could squirm.

So, she went slowly.

Conserving every scrap of air she could, orienting herself psionically, constantly calling for help, she extended her Adeptry into the tendrils. Slowly thickening them, building their muscle mass. Centimeter by centimeter she shifted concrete and steel.

After it was all over, heavyweight Adepts came to work the other side of the rubble pile.

It was slow going, triggering half-a-dozen smaller cave-ins in the process. More than a couple city blocks saw their foundations compromised.

But Nora was eventually pulled from the rubble.

It was Johnny and Madeline actually doing the digging, but they had plenty of help and supplies on hand. Someone shoved a water bottle into Nora's hand as soon as she was above ground again.

She swallowed her first drink in more than a day, chugging the whole thing in one go.

"[Damn, girl, slow down,]" Johhny said.

Nora ignored him.

"[I n—]" her voice crumbled and cracked in her dry throat. Why had she even bothered? <[I need surgery.]>

<[What for?]> Madeline asked.

Still pretty delirious, Nora eyed the other girl. She was more stand-offish than Johnny. Madeline didn't like her. Didn't take a genius to guess why.

<[I got shot a few times before the cave in,]> Nora said.

Johnny scowled.

"That's the kind of thing you mention while we're digging you out," he complained. "We could have had Nerin ready and waiting."

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<[Bones], how quickly can you ready the surgery? Bullets.>

Nerin came back quickly.

<Who would I be operating on?>

<Me,> Nora chimed in. <I've got slugs in my arm and thigh.>

<…Okay. I'll prep for your augs,> Nerin said. <The Siegfried is docked in the bulk-heavy yards. Northeast corner of the colony. Come immediately.>

Every word was dripping with clinical formality.

Nora winced.

Caleb was not the only person she owed an apology. Looking back at her time in High Harbor, she might have actually spent more time overall with Nerin than Caleb.

The psionics from Caleb might have given her a huge headstart, but the lion's share of the actual teaching had come from Nerin. Hundreds of practice conversations, feeling her way around the alien grammar and syntax. Nora reminded herself those conversations hadn't been work for Nerin. She'd done that in her off hours.

This was going to be a very awkward surgery.

ꞏꞏꞏꞏꞏ

"I thought you could make armor," Nerin said.

The Farnata was hunched over Nora on the table, digging scalpels into her shoulder.

"I could have," Nora admitted. "Thought it might slow me down too much."

"Idiot."

Nora tried not to sulk. She'd made the best choices she could in the moment and pushed to embrace risks well beyond her normal comfort level. Because retrieving Caleb had been that critical. And she'd still failed.

The Flotilla had some of the most advanced Terran medicine in the cosmos, but localized anesthetics were still too advanced. So Nora had only psionics to numb the feeling of surgical instruments digging through her for bullets.

If Nerin had been even slightly less skilled with psionics, Nora might have been tempted to ease up on some of the numbing constructs. She'd failed to rescue Caleb, so punishing herself didn't feel too unreasonable.

But Nerin was a hawk when it came to her patients.

Intellectually, Nora knew it was a bad idea. She failed.

"[Alright Nora, don't pitch anything. Don't stage a nutty. Have a drink. Take a shower. Cause that's how it is in the NBA…]" Nora grumbled.

"[N-B-] what? My English isn't that good," Nerin said.

"We lost today," Nora said bluntly. "Just trying to keep it from getting in my head."

"Mmm. Better yet, how about you shut up and not talk while I'm cutting into you."

<You got it,> Nora said, leaning back. Steady breaths. Ignore the jittery impulse that came from sitting so still. It was just like needing to ignore the feeling of steel cutting through her bicep. Every twinge of pain tried to force itself into the forefront of her mind, but her psionics clamped down on the sensations like vices. So much of her day was paperwork, brainstorming, and phone calls. And every day she just wanted to run away from it all, literally. Hike a mountain. Shoot hoops. With her augmentations, even lifting weights was fun.

But she had a job that needed doing. So no matter how restless she felt, no matter how much she wanted to flinch away from the necessary…she buckled down and did it.

She gotten a ton of practice.

Looking across Nerin's infirmary, Nora saw a small gap in a curtain around another berth. Nai lay motionless behind it.

For a moment, Nora thought the Farnata might have been still like a corpse, but seconds later her chest faintly moved up and down.

In the corner of her eye, Nora saw some something go out of Nerin's shoulders.

"…Thanks," she said.

"For—" <For what?>

"Battlefield evac," Nerin said simply. "She was in bad shape. Still is. But she'd be worse if you hadn't gotten her out."

<I was just doing what Caleb told me to,> Nora admitted. <I choked. He had me get her out of there so I wouldn't be in the way.>

"This 'Black Knight' took out my sister in five seconds flat," Nerin said. "Freezing up is the normal reaction."

<Normal reactions aren't good enough,> Nora glowered.

"Not in the [NBA]?" Nerin asked.

The alien had no idea what the letters meant, and yet she understood perfectly.

<Exactly.>

Nora glanced at the still-unconscious Nai. Thick bandages wrapped around her head. Beneath her medical gown, several bandages peeked out. Nai must have broken a dozen bones in the seconds the Black Knight had its hand on her. Nora wasn't the only one who'd needed surgery.

<How is she?> Nora asked.

"Better than she should be," Nerin admitted. "Broken wrist. One of her leg bones fractured too. Three broken ribs and a dozen more cracked. Her collarbone broke, which, if you know anything about her augs, is just crazy on its own…She's got contusions across almost a third of her body: she lost enough blood to her own bruising that she needed a transfusion. And she's got massive skull fracturing. Her head is basically an eggshell right now."

Nora tried not to react to the horrific extent of the injuries. Put that way, it underscored exactly how much punishment Nai could endure. If the Black Knight had caught anyone else in the entire star system…they'd be dead.

<…No concussion?> Nora asked.

"It's hard to say. She's got augs in her brain," Nerin said. "But, yeah, I'd bet she's got a nasty one."

<Humans can suffer long term cognitive decline from even just one bad concussion,> Nora said, concerned. <Can Farnata recover from brain injuries more reliably?>

"No, they're just as bad for us," Nerin said.

<Her Adeptry should help her heal though, right? Fewer long-term effects?>

"It's possible," Nerin said. "But there's never a guarantee."

A sharper pain than before went through Nora's arm, and a metal clink confirmed that the last bullet had been pulled from her body.

"There," Nerin said. "Patch yourself."

Nora did so. Her aptitude for biological-Adeptry made Nerin's job especially easy. She'd even been applying temporary patches as Nerin cut into her arm. She'd only lost a few tablespoons of blood from surgery.

Nora sat up on the gurney and materialized replacement clothes for herself. Flecks of blood fell to the ground as her surgery attire disappeared. She cleaned up the mess before Nerin could notice.

"Hey…" she started.

"Save it," Nerin said brusquely. "Whatever tune you want to sing, I don't want to hear it right now. You were my patient. I've treated you. Now scram."

She held out a slip of paper to Nora.

"What is it?" Nora asked, taking it.

"Someone left a note for you. Now leave. If you're around when my sister wakes up? It might not be pretty."

Nerin more or less shoved Nora out of the infirmary into the ship's corridors without any further explanation.

Examining the paper, it was a very short note.

Come to Cargo Hold B. We need to talk.

ꞏꞏꞏꞏꞏ

Inside the Siegfried was a small warehouse sized room: Cargo Hold B. Its interior was covered in heavy plastic sheeting and sealed with zippered airlocks. Standard practice containing unknown biologicals.

The Black Knight's escape had been covered by four organisms taller than elephants. They were bottom heavy with long legs, but none of them had stood atop them. They'd kept their knees bent, like they were perpetually squatting.

Their feet and arms were tipped in mean bony claws the size of anyone's forearm, adding to their disproportionate appearance. So did their bulbous torsos and stick-thin limbs.

They were surprisingly durable too. They'd broken a few tools before customizing something with the bite to tear through it.

One of the four grotesque organisms had been subjected to a preliminary autopsy in the field before the Siegfried had even landed. The results had been promptly shared with the local authorities—no doubt eager to conduct their own dissections on the remaining monsters.

So, the Flotilla's specimen had been sawed apart and transported to the Siegfried as soon as the ship landed. Turned out Madeline knew her way around a chainsaw.

Aside from operating the heavy metal necessary for the job, Dyn was the one doing the autopsy. And the more results he revealed, the stranger things showed themselves to be.

"You're Tasser," Nora noted. "Caleb talked a lot about you."

"He talked more about you," Tasser said wryly. "I promise."

Nora bit her tongue, keeping her from scoffing or letting out some other offended noise.

Instead, she said, "I got your note."

"Yeah," he said. "Caleb talked to me about what you two plotted, so I know a little about what happens next. Thought you might have some reactions to these things."

He indicated the drawn-and-quartered pile of flesh and bone spread out across the cargo bay. Nora had been underground and unconscious when they'd hit the battlefield, so she'd missed seeing them in action.

She frowned. Organic opponents like these would have been trivial for her. The thought reminded her of a Vorak she knew of which steered her thought process back to Caleb's Casti best friend.

"You did a stint in that Coalition resistance cell on Archo, right?" Nora asked.

ꞏꞏꞏꞏꞏ

Tasser blinked at her.

"How, y'know, in the cosmos, do you know that?"

"I recognize some of your psionics," Nora said. "You guys were doing some pretty advanced work months before Caleb and the Beacons spread them far and wide."

"Caleb said you were good with psionics, but there's no way you can see through my firewall," Tasser frowned.

"No, the firewall is the bit I recognize," she explained.

Tasser grunted noncommittally.

"I ask because…if you were on Archo around then…then looking at these things your first thought is probably the same as mine."

"Hideous organisms explosively growing in washes of white light," Tasser summarized.

"Shaper," Nora nodded.

The Red Sails headliner had vanished years ago. Nai and Caleb had debuted Coalescence and kicked their ass along with three of the Red Sails' other finest Adepts, plus its Marshal. Thinking of that day brought a faint smile to Tasser's face. That had certainly been a good one.

He saw Nora's face slacken a bit. For her, that day hadn't quite been so nice. Tasser imagined it had been an anxious, fraught, and fear inducing stretch of hours for her.

Good. Just desserts, considering what she'd done.

Tasser's mind had gone to the same place though. These creatures, and especially the visual style how and when they appeared all but screamed 'Shaper'.

Except…

Dyn's autopsy was showing less than nine-percent exotic material by mass. A few percentage points more in the bones and muscles, but still; Shaper made organisms that were one-hundred percent exotic material.

Plenty of questions were still pending, but things were moving toward one conclusion. Against all intuition, these monsters weren't Adept made, just Adept reinforced. Augmenting another creature rather than yourself was technically possible, but it was the kind of Adeptry that maybe one-in-a-billion Adepts could pull off.

Statistically, that meant there were probably a few Adepts alive today who could do that kind of thing…but to this degree? To this level of modification? If the organisms weren't Adept made, then highly advanced Casti biotech would have gone into custom-engineering them.

"You've been to Nakrumum, right?" Tasser asked.

"Yeah, last year."

"Then your second thought was probably the same as mine," Tasser said.

"Megafauna."

The Casti homeworld was unique even among homeworlds, because the sapient species it had produced wasn't an apex predator. To this day, 'wildlife' remained among the top ten causes of death globally. Lions, tigers, and bears? Earth's most dangerous land predators would have been light snacks for some of Nakrumum's best killers.

Yargo resembled crocodiles, but with longer limbs and a frame comparable to a school bus. More built for running. They had three pairs of eyes for overlapping three hundred sixty-degree vision, and they could casually chew through wrought iron.

Toghri were a genus of mammalian insectoid-apes. They were highly competitive and even cannibalistic. They were twice the size of gorillas with the weight to match. They could brawl anything alive, but they preferred ambushes and ripping their prey limb from limb. If that didn't work, they sported some of the most neurotoxic venom of any organism in the cosmos.

Caleb's pick for the most terrifying was the Oya birds though. Solitary and migratory, they sustained themselves by swooping down from several thousand feet in the air and plucking Casti-sized animals right off the ground. They'd adapted the same silent flight as owls on Earth. It was estimated that three people on Nakrumum would be snatched by Oya every day. Tasser had never seen it actually happen, but there were so many tales about people turning their backs for a moment, hearing a rustle of air, and turning back around to find a friend suddenly missing from their side.

These things resembled none of them though.

"You didn't call me down here to chat about the meat," Nora said. "Not to be blunt, but…"

"You've got a lot of urgent priorities," Tasser clicked. "I get it. I said I have some idea of what happens next, so I wanted to get you alone and let you know that I'm going to try to specifically help you out."

"Oh. Okay?"

"What, do you not want the help? A lot of people aren't going to like what you have to say," Tasser pointed out.

"I know," Nora said. "I just thought you'd be one of them. Aren't you Caleb's friend?"

"His best friend," Tasser preened. "But I didn't say I'd like what you're going to say either. Just that I'd help."

"So you do hate me?"

"Madeline, Nerin, and Nai probably hate you more. Caleb is our friend, and you hurt him. So yeah, I hate you too. But that's a good thing for you!"

Nora gaped at Tasser, and he couldn't help but enjoy her bewilderment.

"A good thing?"

"It means nothing you do can possibly disappoint me," Tasser said. "Besides, before he got taken Caleb decided your Missions and our Flotilla were going to cooperate more closely. So, I might hate you, but I'm a professional, there's a job to do, and you're going to need all the help you can get. A lot of the Flotilla are going to push back on you, and I have the knowledge you're going to need to lead our little operation."

"…Okay," Nora said. "You're professional. But you can't be the only professional. Why help me?"

"You're right," Tasser nodded. "I'm not the only one who can put duty before personal vendetta. Nai certainly can too. I suppose I'm doing it so she doesn't have to. But the simpler way to put it is that I love Caleb more than I hate you."

"Well thanks," Nora said. "I know that can't be easy."

Tasser laughed.

"Oh…if you think that wasn't easy, you're in for a rude awakening when we all sit down. Serral's going to want us all to sit down and plan our next move. [It's gonna be a gas.]"

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