He was luxuriating in the peace and quiet of alien emotions, not so sordid and intrusive as others of his own kind, when a voice said in his head: “What did they do to you?”

He opened his eyes, expecting to see an alien sky over him, black velvet and diamond dust, but instead it was the saffron colored ceiling of a recovery tank, its translucent side letting him see the techs beyond, arguing and thinking he couldn’t hear them. But he could; he could feel the pulse of their emotions, raw and angry, lava pouring down his neural pathways, their words simply imprints in the molten stone. “ – freak, we put them out of their misery,” the female said. She was tall and slender, Asian physiotype, wearing the pale green smock of a gengineer first class. Her name was Lala Sumi, and she didn’t like people. She did like working with cells and clusters, the building blocks and rough materials of people, but not the finished product; the finished product was messy and intrusive, traitorous and disappointing. She resented being here, with a finished project gone so horribly, monstrously wrong, a failure bleeding into her time.

“They want him alive,” the man replied, his voice as sharp as it was cold. He was wearing the grey coat of a MoSys “efficiency officer“, one of those specialized bureaucrats who rode the line between the people who were the government and the ones who kept things functioning. They usually lived in their own stratospheres, unable to cross atmospheric lines into either’s territory. His name was Gren Ercott, shorter and more solid, of Northern European physiotype, and he hated engineers, complainers who didn’t seem to understand the first thing about how you had to bend laws to suit their will, even if it was a law of physics. People were simply commodities, and if they didn’t give out more than they took, they had no reason to exist; they could easily be replaced with a more efficient unit. So he and Lala were quite the team to draw to – if they had scalpels, they would have sliced each other to ribbons, and never even felt bad about it, except for the fact that the blood was bound to stain their suits. “They think he can survive.”

Lala slapped her hand on a diagnostic table, the sound like a small explosion, and Khal would have flinched if he wasn’t so drugged that he felt totally detached from his body. It was a soft prison with flimsy borders, a horizon dissolving into a puddle of nutrient fluid. “What do those fucks in planning fail to understand? If a circuit overloads, it ceases to work.”

“A brain isn’t a circuit.”

“In this case it is very much equivalent. What happened to the others of this genetic line will happen to him; he will melt down brutally, messily, and it’s impossible to say how many people he’ll take with him.”

“As long as they’re the right people, who cares?”

Khal found himself back in the cave of that unnamed moon, the laser carved dome of rock arching over his head. He watched the cyber-techs with their mechanical interfaces glinting in the light chem lights as they attempted to mesh MoSys tech with what was clearly an alien technology. The metal looked almost like black glass, and Khal realized it was almost the same stuff that made up Skr’Takk’s prison; it was Tk’Tk’Skree technology. And suddenly, just like that, he knew what had happened on that moon, why they had found bloody body parts inside the rock walls.

“You’re messing with their transporter technology,” he said to the metal side of the tech’s head. Of course they couldn’t hear him. “Either they booby-trapped it, or it was just so far over your heads you fucked up royal without realizing it. Either way, you’re dead. You were torn into pieces and rematerialized in solid rock.” He wandered down the stone corridor, out onto the flat expanse of the moon where a handful of Cryers stood standing guard around a field projector, surrounding the cave with a force field that would dampen emanations and any explosions, if there were any, and enhance a carrier wave if necessary. Overheard, in very low orbit, a cargo skiff hovered waiting for the test cargo to materialize.

“You broke the deal,” he muttered, aware of what the Tk’Tk’ Skree had sent before they destroyed the MoSys ship. The Cryers stood by emotionlessly, humanoid shaped mounds of crystal, unaware they were about to die.

He looked around, strangely thinking he could feel the electrical field raising the hair on his arms. “The transporter failure will cause a feedback loop in these emitters, and you will all be shattered in the shockwave, too close to ground zero. It probably was deliberate sabotage on the Tk’Tk’Skree part – that’s how they’ll know you broke the deal. MoSys messed with technology of theirs you said you wouldn’t, probably illegally acquired. The skiff is far enough away that it will survive, and as it flees orbit, it will send a distress signal made of Cryer chimes, an unexpected message that will have no meaning to the Tk’Tk’Skree, but will to the MoSys people who designed it. They’ll know that’s the high sign of catastrophic failure. It was a distress call, but not for you poor things, like we thought. It’ll be for your stupid MoSys masters.”

Khal sighed heavily and rubbed his eyes, no longer wanting to see this frozen moment in time before the world changed, before his life started sliding away like so much sand through his fingers. “I can’t know this,” he muttered to himself. “There’s no way I can fucking know this.”

“You’ve always known it, you just don’t want to,” a woman’s voice said. It was the same one that had asked what had they done to him.

He looked up, to find himself sitting on the white sands of the planet Xentropha, the mica sprinkled within the grains glittering like silver, the night sky the velvet cover with gleaming shards of stars like ice he had been anticipating before. Standing several feet away from him was a woman as blue as the morning sky, her clothes as much a part of her as her skin and just as blue, her scalp bald and her ears small whorls, almost like afterthoughts. Her eyes were yellow, and that told him who this was. “Blue?” he asked, rubbing his neck. Something in him ached, but oddly enough, he wasn’t sure what or where. “This doesn’t make sense.”

“Yes it does. You hide behind chemical walls because you’d rather not deal with anything. But you have to at some point, Khal, and that time is now.”

He shook his head, aware that his was a mindscape, where anything could happen and things rarely made a great deal of sense. “I know I’m special to your people, Blue, but among the humanoids I’m just another commodity.”

“You think we think you’re special simply because you’re one of the few savages who can speak our language?” she replied, her voice dripping with disdain. “There was great power in you, locked away. We thought you knew about it, but clearly we were wrong. You didn’t want to know about it.”

He really didn’t know what she was talking about … or did he? Oh, fuck it, he was tired. “Look, whatever, I just want to sleep.” He collapsed back on the powdery sand and looked up at the sky. Xentropha was really a very peaceful planet; he hoped MoSys didn’t ruin it, like they ruined nearly everything else.

“If you sleep, you die.”

“So?”

He felt a sharp pain in his leg. “Ow!” He sat up to rub his calf, which Blue had somehow kicked, even though she hadn’t moved from where the purple-blue water lapped at her ankles. Still, mindscape – if you knew how they worked, you could do anything. “Do you have to be so fucking bossy?”

“You don’t have to give in to death just like that. Yes, you’re going to die, but you can make it count.”

He glared at her. “Maybe I don’t want to make it count. Maybe I don’t care.”

“Do you know what you did?”

“When?”

“Before you came here.”

He had to think about it for a moment, but it was a curious thing – he had no memories beyond being in the water. He thought there was something about the ship, but he couldn’t say what, any more than he could pinpoint the dull ache somewhere deep inside his body, as insistent as a toothache. “No. What did I do?”

She gave him a hard look with her pupil-less yellow eyes. “If I knew for sure, I wouldn’t ask. But I believe you projected the pain you absorb outward.”

He just stared at her, pretty sure that entire sentence made no sense at all. “Huh?”

“The Tk’Tk’Skree attacked the ship. I think you gave the pain back, and it overloaded their central nervous systems, causing them to shut down.”

“Okay, first, central nervous systems don’t shut down; if they did, everyone would die. Second, I can’t “project” pain, I can only take it in.”

“Every entrance has an exit,” she replied cryptically. “There has to be a release valve for the pressure, even if it’s psychic pressure. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. And everybody did die.”

Something twisted hard in his gut, making his stomach feel like it had just turned to stone. He’d have accused her of making a sick joke, but Blue didn’t joke; he didn’t think she actually had a sense of humor. “What?”

“The Tk’Tk’Skree. You didn’t kill that one on the ship already, Skr’Takk. Why I don’t know; she seems like an odious creature.”

He just sat there, mouth agape, feeling the rest of his insides ice over and turn to stone. So he was a killer now. He wished he was surprised, but no, he wasn’t. He felt that there was always something in him that would be, if he could only get past the fact that he felt everyone else’s pain. Finally he’d found a way around that. “But … that doesn’t make sense. I can’t do that. Also, I’m a lazy dick.”

The look she gave him was equal parts weary and scolding, like she was his mother all of a sudden. “No, Khal, what you are is a coward. It’s always been inside you, you’ve just been afraid to touch it. You took on too much pain, and a switch tripped; it made the decision for you. A self-destruct sequence started in your head, some kind of failsafe I imagine, but it’s been stopped. You’re still dying, Khal, but I think we have one last shot.”

He shook his head, wondering if he could be actively delusional in a mindscape. “Blue … this doesn’t make any sense. I don’t know what you’re telling me.”

She huffed out an exasperated sigh, her grasp of humanity and its odd noises greatly improved since she first thought a burp was some kind of Human compliment. “I’m telling you that you can stop them, possibly you alone. But you have to act as soon as you can. I don’t know much time you have.”

Impending death might explain the constant but otherwise indefinable ache that seemed to radiate from somewhere deep inside him. Now this was proof of just what a lazy dick he was, because he honestly didn’t care that he was dying. It didn’t seem worth raising a fuss about. “How did you stop my “self-destruct”?”

“I didn’t. I told you to.”

That made no sense at all. But since arguing with Blue was like … well, arguing with an alien squid, there really was no point in pursuing this further. “Fine, whatever. Who are we stopping and why? The Tk’Tk’Skree?”

“It’s not the Tk’Tk’Skree we’ve been running from.”

“Oh, okay. A revenge thing.”

“If you wish, but I don’t think of it that way. They damned you; is it not right to damn them back?”

“But what’s the point? I can’t stop them. They won’t stop trying to make people like me. It’s a nice idea – well, in a bloody minded sort of way – but it seems pointless.”

“You deserve better.”

“Says who?” he replied, although he appreciated the sentiment. At least someone in this universe had cared about him. But that wasn’t fair, was it? Kvec probably did too, and maybe Dar, somewhere in her tin can heart, felt some smidgen of duty to him …

And that’s when he realized any revenge done for him would be pointless, but it wouldn’t necessarily be for anyone else. He could buy the others time, let them get as far from MoSys as possible. At best, he could simply delay MoSys creating more people like him, and not for long – they always thought they’d “worked the kinks out” when they really hadn’t done anything but rearranged the same old troublesome genes – but he could put the others off the radar for a while. “Are you coming with me?” he wondered.

She stiffened, as if that had been offensive. “Of course. Where else would I go?”

“Home?”

The look she gave him was slightly bewildering. “I left with you. I go where you go. I also believe I can help.”

Maybe she could. There was a special solace in the alien rhythm of her emotions, in the way they transformed into colors and the way colors transformed into them. It was all a language, and yet so few could speak it. Now it was his chance to speak for those who couldn’t, to turn on the beast tracking them and stalk it instead.

They would never see it coming. And how stupid – they should have. Betrayal was the lingua franca everyone could speak.

Okay, so maybe he was dying, and maybe he had somehow unleashed the monster that MoSys had planted inside him. On a cosmic scale it was so small as to be ultimately meaningless.

She had the medical scanners trained on Khal the whole time, and everything they were reporting was, to Dar’s eyes, gibberish. He was having some kind of massive brain seizure, especially concentrated in the areas of the brain which were the “empathy” centers. She had lots of brain energy patterns stored in the database, all personalized for Khal and his unusual brain … and none of them came even close to matching.

When things stopped, they almost stopped dead, as if a sudden downpour had given way to an eerie, dry calm. Khal, who was already on his knees, stopped screaming and keeled over, hitting the deck face first. By the time he did, all the Tk’Tk’Skree – save for Skr’Takk – were dead. She was still going over the data to determine how.

“What the fuck just happened?!” Gen demanded angrily, slumping against the wall and grabbing the stump of her right arm. “And where the fuck’s my arm?”

Kvec instantly went to Khal’s side, turning him over. Blood was streaming from his nose and ears, and as soon as Kvec had him on his back, Khal started choking on it, so Kvec propped him up against his arm at a more friendly angle. Kvec made hand gestures that seemed to ask the same questions Gen did. Except that thing about her arm; everybody else knew where her arm was.

Vani came out of the lift just then, and started seeing to Gen. No one here was even close to a medical officer, but Vani – like most of her species – was intellectually inquisitive and happy to learn what she needed to know to help out. With her was a small bag containing what was essentially the entirety of the medical equipment onboard the ship.

Vani, with absolutely no hesitation, picked up Gen’s severed arm (she had to work the bolt thrower free of the fingers first), and used an osmotic pressure bandage to temporarily attach Gen’s arm once more. She then injected a dose of surgical nanites into the fluid of the bandage; they’d pass through and do the actual dirty work of reconnecting the arm. All that you really needed to know about the nanites was how big a dose to give someone, and when to program them to self-destruct.

Finally she made some sense out of the current readings. “Khal is currently undergoing a massive cerebral hemorrhage. Do we have any nanites rated for brain surgery?”

Vani looked up at the camera nodes embedded in the wall, her usually laconic face betraying shock. “What? I … er, I’m not sure.” She dug through her kit as she went over to Khal and Kvec, stumbling on the dead carcasses of Tk’Tk’Skree.

“They’ve probably pulled back to assess the new weapon,” Skr’Takk clicked. “We won’t have a lot of time, though, so we’d better think of a better defense.”

“No, they’re all dead. The ship’s adrift.”

Everyone looked up at the camera nodes, even Vani. “Every single bug?” Gen asked first. It sounded like she thought this was a bad joke. “Did you shoot them or something?”

“No. The same foreign energy signature that appeared in the Tk’Tk’Skree here appeared to manifest in the Tk’Tk’Skree over there, but I can’t completely confirm that. All I can say there is currently no life signs aboard the vessel.”

“Foreign energy signature?” Gen repeated, as if testing the words in her mouth. “What the fuck’s that supposed to mean, Dar?”

Skr’Takk clicked in a way she took to be meaningful. “What kind of drone is he?”

“Telekinessiss?” Vani wondered, sifting through her kit for nanite tubes. “I’ve got none rated ffor brain ssurgery, but ssome rated for major repair. Sshhould I try it?”

“Yes. And I’m not sure telekinesis has ever been proven, even in an experimental context.”

“If telekinesis existed, MoSys would have an entire fucking army of telekinetics already,” Gen interjected, grimacing from the odd sensation of having the nanites reattach her arm at the molecular level. “Cryers would be extinct, last year’s model. No offense, Kvec.”

Kvec gave no sign that he even heard her. He was cradling Khal’s head gently, attempting to stroke his hair, apparently unconcerned with all of the blood sluicing down his crystal skin and pooling on the floor. Kvec was close to Khal because Khal could communicate with him more directly than anyone else, but there was something so oddly gentle in Kvec’s handling of him that she wondered if Kvec had some kind of emotional attachment to Khal. Technically Cryers were incapable of feeling emotions, but supposedly they were incapable of independent thought too, and Kvec had already proven that wasn’t true. Kvec seemed to watch intently as Vani injected the nanites into Khal’s eyeball. Opening the lid, they could all see that Khal’s eye was now red as blood with burst blood vessels; there wasn’t a single hint of white left. It was a disturbing sight, as it made it look like his eyes were bleeding as well.

Bruno cut through on her private comm. “Blue’s goin’ bugfuck, Dar.”

She checked the sensor nodes in Khal’s quarters, and saw that yes, Blue was hitting her keyboard with such intensity that it appeared she had a strobe light in there. It was Khal, wasn’t it? There was no denying the link she had with him. “Kvec, can you go get Blue and bring her to Khal? I think it might help.”

Kvec looked up and nodded, laying Khal down carefully – and turning his head to the side, so he didn’t drown in his own blood – before getting up and returning to the lift. He was slicked in blood, dripping it as he walked. As soon as he was gone, Gen asked, “And how the fuck can the squid help?”

“He’ss dying, Gen,” Vani said. “Give hher a chance to ssay goodbye.”

“Dying? He can’t die.” Gen sat forward, almost skidding in her own blood. “Hey you fucking junkie, wake up! You don’t get to die until you tell us what the fuck you did!”

“So that’s why you sent the drone with me,” Skr’Takk clicked. “He’s a weapon. You were going to kill me if you thought I wasn’t being honest.”

“Would you shut the fuck up?” Gen roared, her face flushing dark. She was upset, angry, and also, if Dar was interpreting the medical readings correctly, actually somewhat unsettled by the thought of Khal dying. It was a distressing thought; he was an invaluable sensor system that couldn’t be detected or blocked by technology. “He wasn’t a weapon, he was an over-sensitive junkie squid fucker! And knock it off with this “drone” shit, all right? It’s annoying!”

Skr’Tak made a noise that sounded half way between an angry buzz and a mechanical whir. “You don’t use that tone of voice with me.”

Gen scoffed, rage and indignance making her feel braver than usual. “It’s my ship. I can use whatever fucking tone I want.”

The lift returned, and Kvec came out holding Blue like she was a fragile creature, her tentacles wrapped around his thick arms as if she was afraid he might accidentally drop her. Everybody stopped talking, perhaps because they were still surprised by Blue’s ungainly appearance, or just taken by the somber atmosphere. But while Kvec knelt down beside Khal and lowered Blue down to his side, Vani got in contact with her privately via her implant. *It was telekinesis, wasn’t it?*

*How could it be? It doesn’t even exist in theory, not according to any files I’ve seen. Do you know something I don’t?*

There was enough hesitation that Dar wondered. In the meantime, Blue had slid down to the floor, not concerned with the growing pool of Khal’s blood, and laid a tentacle across his forehead. It was a gesture both comforting and familiar, and Dar detected that unusual energy that was essentially the empathic communication of her people. It seemed to be having an effect on Khal, or perhaps it was just coincidence that his left leg stopped its spasmodic twitching.

Finally, Vani admitted *They were looking into all sorts of mental powers, from telepaths that could act as secret police to soldiers who could work at a farther range than a Cryer. But the engineering of empaths proved that extensive brain alteration was a risky gamble that almost never paid off. Even if you could keep them sane – a big “if” – controlling them was something else entirely. And could you imagine trying to control someone who could kill you with a thought? They tried, and cancelled all projects into alternate psionic abilities.*

*Could no one have pressed forward with their own project in secret?* Khal’s heartbeat was slowing, but into a move even, regular rhythm; the bleeding inside his skull was starting to lessen. The nanites were working, and Blue was getting through to Khal, speaking to him at a level that no one else could reach. While their “relationship” was hard to fathom, this was certainly proof that Blue was intelligent on some level, and that Khal wasn’t crazy for thinking that.

*In the MoSys bureaucracy? Unlikely, not without having papers okaying it signed and stamped in triplicate.* Out loud, Vani said, “Hhe’ss responding.”

“To what?” Gen asked testily. She was probably going to be a royal pain the ass until her arm was back on.

“The treatment or Blue; I can’t tell which.”

“I need to get to the ship,” Skr’Takk interjected. “If it is indeed devoid of life, I can commandeer it.”

Gen snorted derisively. “Oh yeah, sure. We nearly get killed for your segmented ass, and now you’re gonna take off in a war ship. How stupid do we look?”

“Do you want an honest answer?” she replied.

“The ship has a beacon that went off almost the instant the crew stopped living,” Dar reported. “It was too rapid for me to intercept it. We have to assume the other Tk’Tk’Skree know what happened and have sent out a response team.”

“Do you meatbags know what this means?” Skr’Takk said, antennae jittering in irritation. “They were just going to neutralize you and take this ship for study. Now that you’ve killed an entire crew, they’ll consider it an act of war.”

Gen started flexing her fingers on her formerly severed right hand, and apparently could. The nanites must have been just about done. “That’s for MoSys to worry about, not us.”

“Except it will tell them where we are,” Vani retorted. That even made Kvec look up, probably concerned, but you could never quite tell from his facial expressions; that was the inherent problem in being a life form made of crystal. He basically just had the one constant look, never changing unless someone managed to take a chunk out of it with a weapon of some sort.

“Bullshit,” Gen argued. “It could be pirates or some other aliens for all they know. Why would they assume it was us? There’s nothing tying us to this.”

*You think there is* Dar sent to Vani through the implant. It wasn’t actually a question.

*If someone knows or even suspects what Khal could be capable of, under extraordinary circumstances …*

*This is a red flag.*

*This also could be what they’ve been waiting for.*

Khal seemed to be in what was physiologically a coma, and finally the bleeding had stopped, although he was so covered in it it was hard to discern. He’d lost a lot of blood, much more than you would have thought such a slight man could possibly produce. They had no blood substitute aboard, but perhaps she could program the nanites to make some. *Explain.*

*As you said, telekinesis and other mental abilities have never been proven in an experimental context. What if this is something that simply can’t be done in a lab? What if this is only something that can be proven in a field test, with the right set of circumstances?*

This was pure conjecture of course, nothing but speculation, and yet what Khal had just done proved that the realms of conjecture were muscling their way out into the real world. Vani’s hypothesis was troubling, and yet had the bitter taste of plausibility about it, more so than anything she could brainstorm at the moment. *If your assumption is correct, then MoSys let us escape.*

Vani was packing up her small kit, but as she did so she bobbed her head, a truncated kind of nod. *Yes. And now they’ll be wanting us back.*

Entropy could only increase in a closed system; it could never decrease. Perhaps that’s why they had gone from dead Cryers to a singularity weapon to aggressive alien insectoids to a psionic time bomb living on their own ship. Their own closed system was imploding at an ever increasing rate, and there was no way to stop it now. There was no turning back.

The Tk’Tk’Skree had a weapon of unimaginable power, one you couldn’t defend yourself against; as soon as you were within range, you were dead. But now it seemed MoSys had a similar weapon, albeit one much more subtle in intent and design. So subtle that even the weapon hadn’t known that’s what he was.