The Stargazer's War - Chapter 2.4

Chapter 2.4: The Cracks in the Bureaucracy

Three weeks passed in the comfortable haze of routine, of training and meditating and studying and training some more. I managed, for the first time, to convert dark qi to light faster than Charlotte could absorb it, but the moment Xavier walked into the room the two of them far outpaced me. Still, it was heartening progress, and I imagined a day in the distant future where I eventually saturated Lucy’s soul space with more qi than even the focus rooms could deliver.

The others had to keep up with me somehow, after all.

In the here and now, though, that was little more than a pipe dream. In the here and now, it was I that struggled to keep up.

With every passing day, Xavier’s near constant practice and natural talent for combat pushed him further and further beyond my skill level, and while Charlotte spent more of her day hammering away at the bureaucracy that governed Ilirian’s airspace, her few forays into the ring reminded me how narrow a fighter I’d become.

Months of training to beat Instructor Long had left me particularly effective against the Dragon’s Fang but less prepared for the Velereau family style or any other forms for that matter. Sparring so much against specifically Xavier had hardly helped the problem.

So I approached it from a different axis. I’d never be the frontline fighter Xavier was, and aiming for Charlotte’s finesse would leave eternally playing catch-up to anyone who’d started training before their twenties—basically everyone. I still practiced my personal bastardization of the Dragon’s Fang and Cedric’s forms, I still sparred against Charlotte when I could and the simulation of her family’s style when I couldn’t, but a portion of my effort I diverted elsewhere.

I took to stalking Lucy’s halls like a wraith, peering around corners with my spiritual sense and rolling my weight across my foot to walk as silently as possible. Lucy humored my fumbling attempts at stealth, offering tips and encouragement as if I could ever evade her notice here within her domain.

I found great joy in startling Charlotte from around corners or sneaking up behind her with neither breath nor body heat nor even qi to expose my presence. She hated it, taking on the mantle of the sentinel, always vigilant, always watching in her attempt to spoil my fun. It all made for a rather exciting game of cat and mouse, one at which I felt myself steadily improving.

Not being a horrible friend, I did ask if this all was okay with her, to which she beleagueredly replied, “You need the practice, and honestly, I do too. It’s easy to get complacent spending all day going through employee files. It’s good training. Doesn’t mean I have to like it.”

Would that I could, I’d have spared her a portion of the spooks by targeting Xavier as well as her, but the man seemed immune. It truly vexed me how flawlessly I could make my approach, still as the dead and just as silent, only for Xavier to smile and say hi as I popped out from behind the sofa.

If I didn’t know any better, I’d think Lucy was tipping him off. As it was, she was more perplexed by his awareness than I was. I just wrote it off as Xavier being Xavier and left to sneak up on Charlotte again. She was way more fun.

I was halfway across the dining room on one such attempt when Charlotte made her first blackmail call.

“Sia Lustor?” Charlotte’s holopad modulated her voice into a deep, intimidating tone, one that clashed heavily with her real voice that I, being in the room, very much also heard.

“Yes?” a woman’s voice replied with a tinge of confusion bordering on anxiety. “Who is this?”

Charlotte cut straight to the point. “I know what you do during your lunch break.”

There was a pause. Then, “Is that you, Carl?” Sia laughed nervously. “Is this some kind of prank?”

“What do you think your husband would do to you if he found out? What would he do to Carl?”

“You can’t! He’ll…” Sia trailed off as she realized what was happening, her voice cold with shock. “What do you want?”

“Tomorrow morning, you’re going to let a ship through into Ilirian airspace.”

Nerves gave way to a mounting panic as Sia’s voice quickened. “What? No! I can’t do that. My coworkers—”

“Your coworkers will be taken care of,” Charlotte interrupted. “All you need to do is wave WN-72762 through. Do you understand? WN-72762. Don’t write that down. Memorize it.”

Sia didn’t get that far. “T-taken care of? What do you—”

“Sia, stay with me. It’s going to be okay. You’re going to be okay.” Charlotte comforted the woman she was blackmailing. “As long as you do what I say, everyone is going to be fine. Tomorrow morning, WN-72762. Do you understand?”

“They’ll fire me for this. I could go to jail. I could—”

“Sia!” Charlotte snapped. “As long as you don’t breathe a word of this, nobody’s getting fired. Nobody’s going to jail. WN-72762.”

“WN-72762,” Sia’s voice quavered as she repeated the forged designation. “Please don’t tell my husband.”

“That’s up to you. WN-72762. You won’t be hearing from me again.” Charlotte hung up.

“Threads, Charlotte.” She jumped as she heard my curse. I took no joy in it. “That was awful.”

She sighed and leaned back in her chair. “That’s how this works. You apply pressure and hope they don’t break.”

I gulped. “What would her husband do if he found out the was cheating?”

Charlotte shrugged. “No idea. I let her fill in that blank herself.”

“It sounded like you expected violence.”

“It doesn’t matter what I expect. It matters what she’s afraid of, and violent husbands… they’re more common than you would think, especially when cheating is involved.”

Something in her eye told me she spoke from experience. I didn’t press her on it. Charlotte wasn’t normally this easy to read, and I couldn’t tell if the emotional drain of the blackmail had worn down her mask or if she’d let slip on purpose.

“You don’t need to be here for this,” she offered, gesturing with a tilt of her head towards the employee files. “I can handle it.”

I sat down next to her.

Charlotte wordlessly nodded and turned back to her work, reviewing her plan one final time before opening her holopad and dialing Peter Vaughn.

I listened through it all. I learned to recognize the stages of disbelief to nervous uncertainty to full on panic to grudging acceptance that each of her targets experienced. I watched Charlotte expertly navigate her marks, switching on a dime from browbeating to reassuring as the subject needed.

I felt a knot deep in the pit of my stomach.

If I cycled qi through my brain meridian, I recognized immediately the logic behind this unsavory work. The only true harm we were inflicting on these people was emotional, and while that carried a real cost, it paled in comparison to the very physical harm we’d all experience if we didn’t get strong enough to protect ourselves before Elder Lopez spread my secret too far.

We needed to make it to the Right Eye on at least equal footing with her. That meant reaching bronze, and that meant getting to Ilirian sooner rather than later.

The cold calculus fell in Charlotte’s favor.

That didn’t make it any easier. It didn’t stop the quivering panic, the frightened shock, the desperate pleading as I listened to these peoples’ worlds come crashing down around them.

It only made it make sense. This was how it worked. Any edge, right?

Charlotte and I didn’t speak a word to each other as she hung up her final call. I stayed seated as she pushed herself to her feet and walked away. The holo projector flickered off as she left, leaving me staring at a bare table. Just like that, their names and faces and lives were gone. Tomorrow morning, Peter Vaughn and Sia Lustor and Starport Services LLC would, as far as we were concerned, serve their purpose and vanish into obscurity, their suffering hidden from us behind the curtain of distance and irrelevance.

I muttered one final apology, more to myself than to any of them, and made for the gym. I still hadn’t gotten my combat in for the day, and I wanted to be as prepared as possible for what was to come. After three weeks of training and studying and hammering at the cracks in the bureaucracy, the time had finally come to make our move.

Ilirian, the only habitable planet in the entire system, the sole source of each and every natural treasure the Dueling Stars ever saw, awaited us.

——

I skipped breakfast. Twice as I made my way from my room did Lucy try to redirect me to the kitchen, but two refusals were enough for her. I made straight for the bridge, or at least, Lucy’s analog to a bridge.

On any other ship her size, the room up front would’ve been its entire purpose, both a cockpit and the rows of chairs for passengers to be ferried to or from the mothership. With her soul space, Lucy had no need for such seating, and with her sapience, a pilot would’ve been entirely redundant. Nothing, human or AI, could pilot Lucy better than Lucy.

I stepped over the conference table in the floor to gaze directly out the front window, this time not into the dark expanse, but at the great sphere grown now large enough to consume nearly the entire viewport.

Ilirian loomed.

The planet—the first full sized planet I’d set foot on since Brady and I first boarded the freighter all those years ago—existed in three colors: blue, green, and black.

Three great oceans of alkaline freshwater glimmered a deep navy like jagged holes carved into the world’s single contiguous continent. Creeping up the shores of each, like an invasive mold escaping the acidic waters, came the verdant green, where farmers tended their non-native seeds. The vast majority of the system’s food came from such spaces, fruits and vegetables and tubers and grains first grown from the seeds the ancient settlers brought with them then adapted over centuries to thrive under the weak, red suns and local soil conditions.

The green gave way unwillingly, pushed up to the very edge that sect policy would allow it to encroach upon the natural ecosystem. Beyond came the black.

In order to properly compete beneath a red sun, the indigenous flora had darkened its leaves so as to absorb as much of the light as it could. Perhaps, under microscopic examination, a hint of the original green could be found, but I sure as hells didn’t see it.

A dozen shades of black decorated Ilirian. Black meadows to the south, black tundras to the north, and black jungles along the equator. Only the arid wastelands surrounding the poles and the snowy peaks of the tectonic mountain ranges were truly free of the color, not that we intended to venture anywhere near them. We had our eyes set on one of the rainforests, as far from any settlements as we could manage. The trees would offer us cover for the duration of our stay, however long it took to gather the materials and qi we needed.

Despite myself, a well of nerves churned in my stomach.

“What’s our eta?” Charlotte’s voice pulled me from my thoughts, and I glanced over my shoulder to watch her and Xavier step into the room.

“Expecting airspace control to hail us in the next ten minutes,” Lucy replied. “Then it’s just a matter of keeping low and not drawing attention to ourselves.”

I nodded along and turned back to the window, this time ignoring the planet to try and seek out the satellites that would shoot us down if Charlotte’s plan fell through. I didn’t spot them.

Sending a thread of qi through my heart meridian to keep myself calm, I went to join the others where they’d chosen seats from those that lined the walls. I picked one facing forward and buckled in.

“You’ve done the reading I sent you?” Charlotte asked. “We don’t want to be on Ilirian any longer than we need to be, so it’ll help if we know what we’re looking for.”

Xavier patted the haft of his axe. “This’ll be my base. Nothing more personal than a man’s weapon.”

I wasn’t sure I agreed with that, but it made perfect sense coming out of Xavier’s mouth.

“Both of my techniques center on elemental silver,” Xavier continued, “so I’ll want an input channel with a silver attunement—potentially pollen from a glimmer poppy or a bone from an argentivore. For the output regulator, I want something that helps direct the qi back into myself—ideally an ebbstrix feather, but I’d take a nocturl thorn too.”

“Makes sense.” Charlotte nodded along. “Cal?”

Okay, so qi focuses consisted of three major components. The first was something personally significant, something of spiritual importance to me in particular. A lot of cultivators of Xavier’s persuasion used their weapons, but I’d only had Shiver for a year now, and I certainly hadn’t formed that kind of emotional bond to it. I knew Charlotte intended to use her glasses, the same set she hadn’t needed since opening her sense meridian yet still wore to this day.

Next, I needed something that would help guide qi into the focus. This was most cultivators’ first opportunity to aspect their qi with a particular element. Xavier intended to do so with silver, vastly improving his techniques that used the metal while weakening his control over anything else. Elemental attunement was a one-way road, and generally accepted as a requirement to reach any real level of power. The more specialized, the better.

Finally, the output regulator helped shape and direct the qi as it left the focus, aiding fine control and channeling speed. I looked forward to this aspect the most.

“My base will be the piece of Cedric’s rib that first punctured my blood meridian and forced me to learn to cultivate. He’s the only reason I’m where I am today, and in a very real sense he died so that I could touch the infinite sea. Of everything I have, it holds far and away the most spiritual weight. It’s also my only real option because I didn’t take anything with me when I left RF-31.”

I pushed forward, opting not to linger on that emotional can of worms. “For my input channel… it’ll depend. I have no idea how or if elemental attunements will survive the inversion from light qi to dark qi, nor what kinds of elements could even exist for me. Pending further testing, I’m looking for aspects of cold, darkness, silence, and stillness. If I can draw sap from a black corona without losing any memories I’ll do that. Otherwise, frostbite moss, or pretty much any part of a umbral wanderer would work.”

“Output-wise, I desperately need something that’ll help add structure to my qi. It has a tendency to just disperse into a cloud the moment it leaves my body, so anything that could counteract that would be a game changer. I’m thinking ideally something crystalline—death salts and neverthaw come to mind—but anything wooden would reasonably work. I’ll keep an eye out for any trees that look promising.”

Charlotte nodded along. “You’re our biggest question mark since we have no idea what will or won’t work with your qi. It may take a while to find something you can use.”

I tensed. “We have time.” The worst case scenario hung unsaid in the air between us. The possibility remained that nothing on Ilirian would function with my qi, that I’d need to find a an item or organism in the same inherently conflicting state of existing full of the the qi of nonexistence. I could be stuck at copper for the rest of my life.

We didn’t waste time discussing that danger. It wasn’t like there was anything we could do about it.

“I’ll be focusing through these.” Charlotte tapped the black frame of her glasses. “Normally my family would’ve given me a repulsion seed for the force attunement our fighting style requires, so I’ll take one of those of I can find one. Otherwise a petal from a half-inch-lilac would work. For output, I’m flexible. Most of my family uses the vestibular organs from a dancing spark lemur, but I don’t have the skills to harvest those without damaging them. Anything suited for speed, reflexes, or agility could work, so I’m—”

She cut off as the voice of Sia Lustor rang clearly through Lucy’s comms. “Incoming vessel, this is airspace control, please identify yourself and transmit your entry codes.”

I held my breath.

In a voice several octaves below her norm, Lucy responded. “Private ship WN-72762, seeking permission to enter.”

My heart raced. This was it. I knew Lucy hadn’t transmitted anything resembling an entry code, so either the past month of Charlotte’s efforts would come to fruition, or missiles were already in route to blast us to bits.

For agonizing seconds, silence reigned.

I flashed a nervous glance to Charlotte. She looked straight ahead with stony eyes.

“WN-72762, permission granted. Welcome to Ilirian.”

The line went dead before Lucy could even thank the woman.

I exhaled a sigh of relief.

Xavier pumped his fist.

Charlotte didn’t even blink.

In tense silence we watched Lucy’s descent. I let my Vac Suit slip, just in case.

The windshield flared white as we breached the atmosphere, a field of Lucy’s qi redirecting the air around her, allowing it to pass over with neither resistance nor friction. It was certainly an energy intensive way to counteract the extreme heat of entry, but Lucy had qi to spare.

The black splotches gave way to first forests and fields then to individual trees as Ilirian transformed from a sphere hanging in space to a living breathing world, its denizens finally escaping the abstract to become, at least to my perspective, real.

Small, furry mammals flew in great flocks, darting out of our path in a dark cloud on their way to roost in the next ebonleaf. Massive insects shot after them, snatching the rodents from the sky by the dozen, their six translucent wings little more than a blur. Of the terrestrial ecosystem I garnered less than nothing, the dense canopy nigh impenetrable as the towering trees fought to claim as much of the twin sunslight as they could.

That would pose a problem. Lucy may have been far smaller than any other vessel capable of interstellar travel, but I doubted a medium-sized bird pierce those branches, let alone a ship.

Lucy painted me the fool with a single blast from her starboard pulse cannon.

The entire jungle shook around us. Birds and bugs and bats alike exploded from the canopy as they scattered from the source of the shockwave. A single tree, its trunk far wider than I’d even imagined, collapsed as the concentrated qi struck it, blowing a hole through the dense wood big enough to live in.

To say the canopy around it quaked with its fall would be an understatement. Trunks of greater circumference than Lucy herself bent and swayed away from the blast. Roots previously buried emerged from the forest floor, seeing for the first time not just open air, but sunslight from the red stars above.

Its vibrations may not have made it past Lucy’s shielding, there may have been nobody around to hear it, but I’ll be damned if this falling tree didn’t make a sound. I heard it in my bones, in my heart, in my gut. I heard it in the little hairs on the back of my neck that stood on end, in that twinge of tension I held in my jaw, in the twitch of my brow at the devastation before us.

I heard as did the birds that flew away, as the herbivores and scavengers and pest-eaters fled from their home, from Lucy’s approach, from us. I heard the same proud declaration they did.

We’d come to kill.

For a breath, Shiver felt heavy on my back.

The moment passed. Lucy touched ground in her makeshift clearing. Xavier and Charlotte unclasped their seatbelts and stood. I shut my eyes.

Before I could venture out to explore that alien wilderness, before I could re-channel my Vac Suit, before I could bare my blade against whatever predator would make me its meal, I had to confirm something, to banish a fear that’d hung in the back of my mind for weeks now.

I reached out with my spiritual sense, and Ilirian assaulted me.

I’d known this was coming, prepared for it as best I could staring at Xavier, at Charlotte, at Lucy’s fusion core behind its glass window. Ilirian’s ambient qi—both as a full sized planet compared to the dwarf Fyrion, and as the host of a living biosphere—surpassed anything I’d ever experienced outside a focus room.

But I’d cultivated in a focus room before.

I pushed past it. I looked past Lucy’s walls, past the blinding cloud of energy that clung to the jungle around me, past the canopy itself and into the yellow sky. I stretched the bounds of my senses, beyond the range my grasp of the infinite had bestowed, the range I knew surpassed most cultivators at even the gem stages. I stretched and I stretched and I stretched in search of that quiet dark, the cool comfort of the endless that had so come to define me.

I found only light.

My eye snapped open. I reached for my temples in a futile attempt to massage away the headache that’d already taken root. I took a breath.

“Caliban?” Lucy’s voice dripped with concern. “Is everything alright?”

“The infinite sea.” I looked up to meet Charlotte’s and Xavier’s worried looks. “I can’t reach it.”

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