thedawnofpsi
The Dawn of Psi
1 – The Derelict Base
As Edwin Schumer stooped slowly down in the foggy yellow gas that surrounded him, he often wondered as to what Collective vote, what un-secret but now un-findable policy had authorized his sentence here, to this blasted vegetable patch in the middle of an ocean of methane. Gesturing with his hands, he sought the cold outline of the corn stalk beneath him and, with a simple force of will, snapped it free. It levitated for a moment as Edwin strained with all the concentration of his unusual mind, ripping apart the prickled brown skin and inserting the cob, with an unbearable lightness, into the sack attached to his vacuum suit. He then stood up, slowly—he could never know how soon a leak might develop in his primitive shielding equipment. Perhaps they would even engineer one; he never knew what their true purposes were, in this place.
He might have held off a methane leak long enough to crawl back to the station, but he doubted he could hold back the cold.
Stepping forward and lowering himself meticulously at the next corn stalk, Edwin marveled at how harsh the universe had suddenly become for psionics. Even the staple vegetables he and his peers were harvesting seemed to have a better chance of survival: genetically engineered like the Fliant trees that were around every base, at least they could survive in the methane and cold.
The twenty-two psis who were “subjects” in the compound weren’t managing so well.
For whatever unfathomable reason, once the local militia had discovered Edwin’s presence in the suburbs of Titan City, he had been whisked away—so suddenly that his friends must have believed a dark alley witch-hunt group responsible. Several days of blindfolded traveling and he had found himself here, in a defunct base in the middle of nowhere where food supplies were low and whose life support was barely functioning, which was nevertheless surrounded by fence and guarded at all times. His peers had had similar stories, of being silently overwhelmed and seeing nothing until the dim yellow light of this place served as, perhaps, the last thing they would ever see. Ever since Albert Renee had come forward as the first documented psi, two years earlier, humanity’s reaction toward the psionic had ranged from hatred—to fear. Yet Schumer had never imagined that the government, the very Collective whose wisdom had guided them for the last century, could have been responsible for those same deplorable acts which had been committed by fanatics, “humanists”, and witch-hunters.
Yet, in the thirteen months since, Edwin had begun to wonder at his initial theories. For one, the Titan subsection of the Collective military had apprehended him, and it was not impossible that this may have been an unauthorized planetary action, and therefore illegal. For another, the number they could have captured, before a major media frenzy would have broken out, could have only been a relatively small proportion of Titan’s known psionics. As a matter of fact, all those who were in this base had been previously unknown, having tried to hide their abilities previously to avoid persecution of exactly this sort. Thus, the government had been trying to avoid media attention, and could hardly have been trying to eliminate them all, or even contain them all. So what could they have been doing?
The obvious answer, however, was just as unsettling to Edwin. They were being tested. Their abilities were being strained to the limit, to see just how much the psionic was actually capable of. And undoubtedly, when the testing had been completed, they would be killed to eliminate the evidence and avoid uproar. In these circumstances, a leak in his poorly maintained suit, or in the very life-support system of the derelict base, was not an unlikely situation. Neither could they know when such an outcome might manifest itself.
Thus, Schumer took his measured steps carefully, stripping the corn and placing it in his bundle with the most careful manipulation. He would even have levitated the sack all the time if he could have, to avoid the strain it must already have been putting on his depreciated vacuum suit. But the abilities of any psi had not yet developed to the point of such action, and he had to live with the weakening state of his equipment. Schumer finished five more feet of corn, the extent of his shift, and then turned back toward his rusty base. Hopefully, the yield this time would still be enough to last until the next harvest.
2 – The Tax Collectors
Some time later, Edwin opened his eyes, staring up from his tiny cot. It was not a welcome state of wakefulness, and the pitch black surroundings were hardly the only reason for that. Every inch of him, as with every other person here, was covered in blankets, old coats, dirty bed sheets, whatever else he could find to keep out the night’s cold. The temperature system here was so defunct that on some nights they even considered lighting a fire—though they thoroughly feared what would happen in the case of the slightest methane leak. Edwin would not even have noticed such a leak; the air already smelled so fowl.
He was pondering the reason he awoke so suddenly, then he supposed he already knew. The tax collectors arrived today. They had always arrived, one day after the completion of each harvest, for the past year or so—they were living evidence that the psi group was constantly being monitored. This was something Schumer didn’t want to miss. He overturned the many coverings of his bed and paced out.
Outside, he found the dim living room lights already on and two other psis, Carl Wesiner and the young energy-filled one, William LaForce, awaiting the collection. Apparently Schumer had been sleeping longer that he’d thought, for no sooner had he arrived in the room that a warning bell rang in the air, announcing the opening of the outer gate. The three anticipated tax collectors were visible on the exterior cameras, walking slowly past the vegetable patches, along the path into the airlock. They were pushing in front of them a levitating crate of some kind—not a psionic construction, but rather the same engine that fueled jetpacks—in which they would place the psis’ precious corn and rice, beans and cabbage. Once within the airlock, they waited until the air conversion had occurred, and stepped inside with full body armor and vacuum suit still on.
Care had been taken to assure the psionics were not underestimated. The Titan Militia soldiers were equipped with the most advanced suits available, not a patched up one with an antique navigation shield, and Edwin sensed through the current running around their bodies that they were even using a prototype of the energy shield generator. Expected to be on the market in some twenty years, these energy-cell powered fields were exorbitantly expensive, held a maximum capacity of some 175 kilojoules, and against the weapons of the day would have protected completely against several shots before taking significant damage. Even if the psis had managed to arm themselves—and no guns had been left for them—they would have stood no chance against even just three of these artillerymen.
In fact, that had been how the first death had occurred. It had been right here, on this very table, when the first tax collection group had come. There had been an argument once the three men’s intentions had been realized. Kent Begenner, using his exceptionally powerful telekinesis, had jumped on the table and attempted to fight back. His bloodstained body was all that had been left, three seconds later. Edwin and the others buried him in the soft dirt behind the base. The man he had thrown against the wall recovered without a bruise; the kitchen knife had bounced off the other’s energy shield, dented.
Yes, Edwin harbored many memories of the tax collectors, most of them filled with sadness. And anger.
“Well,” said the leading tax collector right then, through his external communicator. “You know the drill. As we warned last time, we are now charging forty percent. Next time, it will be forty-five.”
No one said anything; there was no point, and it could only lead to a higher body count on their part. They simply opened their storage compartment and lugged a portion of each vegetable category onto the levitating crate, as the collectors watched on, until the computer stated the quota had been satisfied. There was no use hiding goods from taxation; the computer knew the location and mass of every grain of rice in the facility.
What was happening during the tax collection, however, was far more subtle.
Schumer was one of the most telepathic of those on the base, and softly he probed the minds of each of them, trying to find news of any sort. The others, undoubtedly, were doing the same. Immediately, Schumer saw a point of relevance, though he did not know, then, how even this advantage could be used. The soldiers themselves had been stuck on the base too long. Though their alertness had spiked with Begenner’s first, and last, psi attack, it had since dwindled down to the point that they regretted taking a killing measure. After all, they reasoned, psi powers may be formidable, but weak telekinesis could hardly harm them in any way, especially shielded as they were. They were also aware of how important the shield factor was. Begenner had actually tried to crush the skull of the third, apparently untouched collector from the inside; the energy shield had somehow blocked almost all the damage and left him with only a minor headache. The telepathy itself was somewhat distorted by the shield, but over a few hours Schumer had already sensed the soldiers saw no point in being here. Neither did the government see much point, apparently. The garrison had been downsized from fifty soldiers initially to twenty at seven months, then ten at twelve months and now only five, at thirteen months. If the psis were not capable of piercing the shield of even a single soldier, there was hardly any sense in keeping many more.
Worst of all, Edwin knew, they were right. Even if there had been only one soldier and all twenty-two of the psis had come together and hurled knives at top speed, while simultaneously attacking him in every conceivable manner, he doubted that soldier would even be dented. On the contrary, the soldier would have all the time in the world to slaughter, one by one, all twenty-two psis.
There was another part to it, Schumer also sensed. While initially, the Titans had been scrutinizing every psionic action demonstrated in the prison, they now hardly observed at all. If there had been any hidden abilities in these psis, it would have manifested by now; Edwin knew that if he had something to keep himself warm, to harvest more efficiently, or to escape from this place, he would have used it a long time ago.
Yet still, he thought as the tax collectors were leaving, the Titan government orders them to keep pushing us. While, right after the harvest, they had had barely enough food to survive, now they would, half the time, be starving.
Edwin donned a vacuum suit and walked toward a single stalk of corn he had left un-harvested. Neither the tax collectors nor the computer cared for such a miniscule amount, and he began mentally snapping the stalk. “Why would they tax us?” he had wondered toward the beginning of his imprisonment. “Why would they steadily tax us more and more?” he had wondered by the end of the third harvest. The answer, again, was simple—as simple as the reason behind the experiment. The Titans wanted to find out as much as they could, and so were pushing us, making it harder and harder to survive, to the point that all our latent abilities, those which might be necessary for our survival, would be forced out. Edwin knew, as the guards knew, that nothing he did could combat the eventual threat of starvation, but if the Titan government wanted to make sure that psis could not create food from nothing, then so be it.
Instead, Edwin pruned the stalk, stretching his powers to the limit through increasingly subtle usage. It was actually more demanding than to physically pull the stalk, and would probably all be in vain, but Edwin knew that his only hope for surviving his captors was to sharpen his abilities to the fullest.
3 – The Beam Emitter
The next morning found Edwin Schumer outside the base, blasting stone from the miniature quarry one minute’s walk away. It was one of those useless tasks he would allot himself: they hardly needed more rock than they already had. These were times when, disregarding the threat of wearing out his vacuum suit, Edwin’s mind was so restless he was forced to leave the base. What he was doing, he did not know—yet. But being a prisoner that long serves only to send the mind into a sense of overwhelming confinement, even though he may have been happy with the rooms of the base thirteen months before. All people must sate their restlessness somehow, and this was Edwin’s way of doing so. Though he had no idea at the time, he was to become one of the leading soldiers on exterior expeditions.
He was using a miniature laser to carve out the rock. It was pretty much only useful for cutting rock. Weak and slow to load, powered only with a miniature twenty kj energy pack, it could emit a beam for five seconds before taking another two or three seconds to load. It would take many such recharging periods to carve a hole in even an average vacuum suit, and would certainly be of little short-term effect against the enforced alloy of the fence. The Titans of Edwin’s high tech world would not even have considered disallowing many such miscellaneous devices.
However, its only real service had been to protect Edwin from psionic backlash.
That was what had succumbed the other two members of the prisoners’ fatality list. The psychology of one who could perform mental feats must have been somehow affected by the physical mutation, though no scientific studies had yet shown conclusively how. What Edwin did know was that a psi’s mind was exerted possibly more than that of any other person, and was fragile enough. The stress of imprisonment could do no good to it. When Schumer performed his psionic feats, one essential control had been to keep his mind as calm as possible. Not doing so could result in completely unpredictable behavior, like Begenner’s powerful yet chaotic attack on the tax collectors. It could also, when the psionic has kept his power bottled up, result in an involuntary expelling of telekinetic power.
Edwin really did not know the effects of involuntary use; psionics was far too new a field for anyone to have sufficiently studied such a thing. He believed it happened all the time, with no adverse effects. But the two dead psis spoke for themselves. It seemed that, sometimes, when the involuntary telekinesis was so powerful and the psi also tried to suppress it, that the unpredictability of a mental state—say, acute depression—would cause the psionic energy to be directed upon the user himself. And, unlike any of the tax collectors, none of the psis had energy shields to block the damage.
And so, Edwin reasoned, the sessions outside may even be prolonging his life, for work is one of the things that keep the human mind sane. Also, because he constantly used large amounts of psionic energy in moving huge amounts of rock, there was little question of his strength piling up for one fatal backlash.
Edwin had considered, and had already tried, breaking apart the rock using only his mind, but such a thing was nigh impossible even for the more achieved psis. He could not even float many of the heavier ones; the human mind was only so strong. Edwin had only managed to levitate many of the harder ones through constant practice over the months of imprisonment.
The other up to this activity was that he could be sure he was not being watched.
To be sure, moving rocks across space was profound and a sight to go in many a propaganda movie, and to see Schumer lift progressively heavier rocks was exactly what the Titans had been looking for, but Edwin had reached his maximum strength after some five months, and had been since then lifting only rocks of approximately the same mass. During the course of eight months, Schumer had sensed the guards’ increasing boredom at watching the same thing, and after a few months they had simply ceased watching him entirely. Neither had anything he had felt yesterday suggested otherwise. Therefore, he reasoned, it was safe to assume this was as private a moment as he might get throughout his day.
Still, there was nothing of any use that he could have done. As Edwin could have rambled, he was outside, armed with only a few moderately weighed boulders and a miniature beam emitter, used for cutting rocks. Facing the threat of starvation and the dim but inexorable eventuality of equipment failure, he could change nothing here. Yet he was happy. In a few hours, he would join the others in spreading seed over the ground of the vegetable patch—a relatively easy task anyway, compared to harvesting. And what point was there in doing so? He was starving in the midst of technology advanced enough to feed ten billion people; though he knew of tools, he had been reduced to a pre-tool ape by sheer taxation. And so he felt like an ape throughout harvest, for he knew it was all in vain, or throughout the entire day, as he swallowed the pangs of hunger that threatened increasingly to overwhelm him. It was only here, as he strained his mind to lift stones, that he remembered he was something more. And so, for moments at a time, he could feel happiness.
Edwin lay down the beam emitter after having completed cutting the first rock outline. In the moment before he stood back up, he probed the stone with his will, and felt the familiar rush of euphoria and tension as his mind readied to levitate it, but he suddenly stopped, for a reason he did not know. He felt a dim disquiet, as if there was something simple he was not realizing, yet what confused him more was that the feeling of happiness, which he had previously associated only with lifting stones, had not diminished. Schumer did not quite know what he was thinking when he grabbed once more the beam emitter; he could not distinguish between the euphoria of being human and that of slow realization, nor could he say when his intentions became clear. All he knew was that, as he stood upright for the first time, he was surprised at the additional weight of the beam emitter, like an ape lifting up his first tool. He felt all the electronic components within the laser, and their connection to the energy pack, and as he pulled the trigger he bent his will into crystallizing that power in a suddenly new way.
From his mind, and from the twenty kilojoules that formed the powercell, the laser shot, out and upward, a weak bolt of red energy. It bounced once before diminishing in the air.
He waited for the energy to recharge, and concentrated harder, for he had a better idea of the pattern he wanted. The red bolt, this time, bounced twice across the quarry before releasing a small explosion.
Schumer concentrated the hardest ever, and the bolt of psionic energy that now flew from his gun went so high it forced him several feet back and downward; it bounced two times off the quarry wall before it ended its life in a spectacular explosion that heated a part of the stone. But more potent than that was the latent psionic energy he felt piled in that ball, capable of killing a man, clad with whatever suit and armor, in only a few hits. As he started laughing, Schumer lost his entire being; he saw only bolt after bolt, as they bounced through the quarry at an intensity that could only be paralleled by the red.
4 – The Tax Collection
Schumer was torn between two desires: the need to escape now, and the need to escape successfully. To catch their garrison at unawares, they would need to wait for harvest time, when three of the guards would trod unsuspectingly into a death trap. This would, additionally, give him time to arm and train all twenty two of the psis, through subtle mental currents. But no prisoner wished to stay longer after having spent thirteen months here, and overwhelming restlessness had piled up from the moment the others sensed that something had changed. Neither was Edwin sure their diminished food stocks would last until the next harvest. Instead, he waited only a week.
In that time, he finalized his plan and was broadcasting, to all in the base, silent training of the pattern one should seek to unleash that fearful red construct he had discovered. He armed only Carl and William, as only three people were needed to fulfill his plan. From that day forth, Carl was constantly seen with a beam emitter designed to sterilize and clean base walls, while William carried no less than a repair unit. To the others, he ordered a change of consumption habits: to eat more, enough to support his ploy, but not so much that the guards would suspect something amiss. Then, exactly a week from the fateful day when bolts had lined the canyon, he sent out the following message:
To whom this may concern: we analyzed our situation and have found our food stocks to be dangerously low. We are willing to cooperate in any way you wish, in exchange for just 5% of our total supplies, in order to keep us on an equal footing as that of last harvest. We are willing to negotiate right away. Please regard this openly, as we believe it may be a matter of life and death.
Sincerely,
Edwin Schumer
It was a calculated risk. On the one hand, they might come running back for the picking. On the other, they may simply reply back “no”, in which Schumer had plans to conduct the next harvest prematurely as a result of food depletion. The worst case of all, however, was that they might send additional reinforcements—scientists, soldiers—to monitor exactly what was about to happen with the psis’ change of mind.
Worst of all, if the latter had been in their plans, Edwin might not know about it until it was too late.
The reply came within an hour.
Will arrive tomorrow at 1100 hours to evaluate your request and commence “negotiations”.
That night, Edwin fought even harder to keep out the cold. The thought that he might not need to face it again served only to make it even more unbearable. He took the time to subconsciously probe the others, making sure they knew what was happening the next morning and had a sufficient supply of food ready to go. The thought of freedom, however, only made his stomach growl: he had not been a vegetarian before coming here, and planned not to be one ever again. He probed the last few, sending those closest to despair back from the brink, reminding them that they were no longer at the mercy of outside forces beyond their control.
When light came he was fully awake without having even noticed his sleep. He, along with Carl and William, spent the morning performing meaningless tasks, and also stuffing food into some bags. He stared at the enemy base just beyond the fence, from which the Titans centralized their monitoring, and was already determining his assault vector. When, at last, the gate bell rang and the three tax collectors were seen walking down the path, the usual psis were still loitering and even asleep, though they would not be for long. Somewhat more than the usual set was tending to the vegetables outside, for Schumer wanted quick backup in case the primary team failed.
The airlock door opened, and the three tax collectors entered. Along with Carl and William, Edwin was surrounded by two or three more prisoners who were doing miscellaneous jobs and served only as additional distractions to keep an eye on.
“I’m the one who called you”, Edwin introduced. The rock cutter was settled underneath the table, as if he had carelessly dropped it there. Carl himself was cleaning a wall at that moment, and William’s repair module was situated near the airlock with its user hovering nearby, as if he was about to go on an exterior mission. “I’m Edwin. I’m here to suggest an exchange.”
None of the guards offered their names. The one closest to Edwin said “and what have you to trade?”
The first thing Edwin checked, before he even responded, was that there were still only five people in the base. “Many things, perhaps,” he answered after a moment, “that just haven’t cropped up yet. Trying to starve a psi to death isn’t necessarily going to make him reveal all his abilities, you know.” Neither the impassive vacuum suit masks, nor the frail tendrils of the collectors’ minds revealed much surprise that Edwin knew their purpose. “Some of the psionic’s abilities are completely useless. Did you know, for example, that we can turn water into wine?”
One or two of them gave a little eyebrow prick.
“Oh no, not me personally,” Edwin continued, almost reading the next question from their minds. “But there’s a brilliant youngling here who can be bothered to make quality wine once in a while. Absolutely useless in the face of starvation, of course, so you wouldn’t really have noticed it. But it makes you wonder if, for example, Jesus could merely have been a psionic.”
“Yes, indeed,” one of them said cautiously. “I’d like to see a demonstration of this sometime, but it is, as you said, nonessential. You may need to do better to buy your five percent.”
“Well,” Schumer said nonchalantly, “there is one who can rearrange the molecules of a mouse to form a lion. But with the wine: how could you possibly say that such a thing is nonessential? Do you have any idea how much fine wine costs nowadays? And furthermore, I might ask, do you have any idea how little molecular interaction is required to enact such a change, how easily such a feat can therefore be a accomplished through shields, and perhaps most importantly,” Schumer leaned forward, a finger flicking, ominously, “how much of the human body is made of water?”
Before the tax collectors could in any way react, three psi bolts suddenly slammed into the guard to the left, killing him instantly. Anyone may have sensed the mounting tension in the air, but only the psis could use it to telepathically coordinate their actions. The next target, barely a second later, was the collector closest to getting a grip on the situation and raising his gun. The third had enough time to recover, and sprung across the room from between his two dead companions while strafing one or two psi bolts. All may have gone to ruin at this moment had not the other two psis in the room suddenly brought back their arms and gave the soldier a good mental push into the psi bolt bouncing behind him. Disoriented and burning rapidly with the mental energy piling in his brain, the soldier panicked, allowing for the next wave of psi bolts to hit and immediately send him into oblivion.
Schumer allowed himself a brief smile.
The best thing about these psi weapons was that the damage was primarily mental in nature. Though their targets were dead, it was likely both the suits and the energy shield generators were still fully operational. Thus, they now had on their hands the most expensive equipment on the market, unscathed, and equipped with a button that opened the outer gate.
5 – The Dawn of Psi
With remarkably confident steps, the three in the assault team, equipped with the suits of the three in the tax collection team, now approached the outer gate, trailed subtly by the many psis who until now had been loitering in the vegetable patch. Though these vacuum suits were somewhat different from the outdated one he had spent thirteen months in, Edwin quickly managed to find the essential controls, as well as a new unfamiliar gauge with the shield powercell reading, and a command for opening the outer gate.
As the various psis in their primitive vacuum suits followed the three out of the base, one might have noticed they carried a variety of primitive emitters, from microwaves and cutters to even a simple flashlight Schumer had suspected might make a simple bolt. However, when William bypassed the airlock controls and opened the enemy base straight into the methane, Schumer rapidly gestured for the weakly armored psis to linger somewhat behind. He didn’t want people on his side unnecessarily getting killed. The alarms of airlock malfunction rang as William, who had always been good with diverting energy from one system to another, opened the unsealed doors and preceded the yellow cloud into the base. He was quickly followed by Carl, who had had prior military experience and who propped the gun on his shoulder with rigid attention. Schumer quickly searched for a map of the base and found one, telepathically sending the directions to the control room.
Around the corner, they met with a soldier who opened fire right away. But Schumer could sense his vacuum suit was not protected by an energy shield—perhaps the Titans were sparing expense on the people who did not go directly close up—and he fell almost instantly to Carl’s gun in combination with an instinctual psi bolt from William. Though Carl had several bullets lodged in his armor, the shield had slowed down their velocity just enough that there had been no actual penetration.
“Wait,” he called out, and Schumer was confused until he saw, as if in his own mind, Carl’s shield energy gauge. The protection must be proportional to the amount of shielding he has left, Schumer considered.
They opened the control room door and almost instantly gunfire erupted from inside. It was undoubtedly the last of the five. But Schumer could sense that the poor fellow was not equipped with a shield, and so he did what Begenner had been unable to do: reach into his skull to crush his brain into mush.
And this was the second thing that surprised Edwin. For, despite his strength, his ability to levitate rocks and a control sufficient to peel multiple grains of rice, and despite the screams that suddenly erupted from inside, Schumer could sense he was doing no more damage than giving him a nasty headache. He could not even affect the neuron connections of the soldier.
And abruptly, he realized why.
Even though the primitive impact energy field equipped on every suit had little ability to prevent damage from anything with more momentum than a punch, it was still enough to dispel a telekinetic attack into random force vectors, most of which cancelled each other out. The Titans did not have to search for a way to block the most lethal psi attack: they’d already had it, this entire time. Though the standard impact field had not the blocking power of the energy shield generator, Schumer would do no real damage even if he was ten times stronger and more finely controlled. The other two in his assault team immediately sensed this and, nevertheless, took advantage of the situation, running in and overwhelming the soldier with rifle fire.
With a certain finality and satisfaction, Schumer stepped into the control room. The prisoners had revolted; the base was now theirs’. But as he sensed another scrawny vacuum suit equipped Titan—a civilian, this time—holding up his hands in the corner while shaking in terror, he knew immediately that something was wrong. Without really thinking, Edwin asked “weren’t there only supposed to be five of you?”
He had no chance to read the civilian’s mind. Nor did he need to. Before he could react, the door ahead of them burst open, and out poured a swift rain of gunfire, immediately overwhelming Carl’s energy shield and littering him with red-splattered bullets, as Schumer struggled back behind a crate with William on his tail, simultaneously firing back. But the shadows that danced behind the doorframe sprayed the room, dropping the civilian and sending his and William’s shield generators to the brink with zero kilojoules remaining, right before he managed to roll behind the box. He could feel pain at several points in his body, and the footsteps from behind the door sounded as if they were about to charge in. Edwin found a moment to silently curse the slowness of his energy gauge, before reaching out with his mind and finding ten soldiers on the other side of the doorway and cursing himself for having not done that earlier as well. Though, if he had, he supposed, he may well have found nothing. The human mind sees what it wants to see. Edwin started laughing, uncontrollably. He, as a psi, of all things, should know that.
And perhaps it was because he was a psi that William now leaned toward him, comfortingly.
It was hard for Edwin to listen, much less comprehend, nor did he understand the ramifications of what was said until their dooms had already been set in motion.
William said: “I’m going to see if I can try and get you out of this, old friend. I haven’t done anything like it before, but I know I can.” Edwin blinked between sobs of laughter; in the face of the other’s calm, it seemed he suddenly sobered up.
“No, you can’t.” But, then he realized, though without any particular understanding of how, that he very well could.
A high pitched whirr filled Edwin’s suit, and his energy gauge, unbelievably, shot up to full, but just as it finished doing so, William’s posture of tense concentration changed into a brief spasm that sent him down, flat on the ground. There was a mental scream throughout the room as Edwin lifted the helmet of his comrade. William was dead. Twenty years later, the miniature psionic energy recharger, “The Force”, would be named in his honor.
Edwin Schumer stood up slowly with a grim face. The gun in his hand felt foreign and so he discarded it. He ran toward the door in a sprinting run and psi bolted the first soldier who was about to run through it.
Weakened by the earlier fight, the soldier succumbed instantly to the mental damage. What was more, the one right behind him took almost the full extent of the blast, gave a yell, and slowed down.
Edwin bolted him again, and though the soldier recovered enough to deliver a full harmless round, this second bolt made a kill. The others, partially confused at how Edwin had not already died, partially desiring to avoid those fatal red balls of energy that seemed to pierce armor like paper, stopped for a moment. But to confine themselves in a room against a psi bolt is a mistake. Schumer delivered bolt after bolt, and after a moment he was joined by the others, now lining the doorway with balls of energy that bounced into spectacular explosions. Though some were weak at first, they quickly gained in strength, and soon the dark room in which hid the hunters was filled with a halo of red lights. And it continued on, the screaming, the panic emanating from inside the room. The psi bolt in Schumer’s hand gave him a feeling of authority over the animals trapped inside, and suddenly, it was all over. Inside the room lay ten fully armored, dead soldiers.
Schumer allowed himself a brief sigh for Carl and William.
Then, he turned back toward his psionic comrades, who by now had all arrived.
“The second thing we do,” he answered the unspoken question, “is to contact whoever has authority within the psi community.”
“And the first thing?” someone unnecessarily asked.
“Why, we inform the media, of course, while getting the hell out of here. Does anyone here know how to operate the radio? And someone go get a search party out: I want to find the vehicle these newcomers came in.”
While seeing the specter of activity below him, Edwin Schumer wondered at all that would change, with the red bolts that had so slaughtered the enemy soldiers. The psionic was no longer helpless. He suspected that would be even more so the case as further research went into these items. He rolled over William’s body when he suddenly saw a glimpse of something sickening: a blue crystalline structure had, inexplicably, grown out of his friend’s face, partially layered with his blood. Curious at what it could be, Schumer removed the corpse’s helmet and used his rock cutter to slice off a sample. As he held the crystal, he took a few long minutes wondering why it seemed somehow familiar to him. Then, he dispatched it into his pocket, another of the many mysteries to be solved—inevitably, now that the wheels had been set in motion. Armed with a red bolt and a future, he was mastar of the world, and he was not quite sure what to do next.
But he would think of something.
Special thanks to mastar for writing and submitting this story.
Comments
You must be logged in to post a comment.