"You're as nosy as Dr. Knightwood!" Erin exclaimed, weakening.
"I can't help that. Anyway, didn't we always promise not to keep secrets from each other? Didn't we?"
"All right," Erin acquiesced, responding to this higher appeal. "The truth is I just can't—draw any kind of attention to myself."
"What? What's that supposed to mean?"
"It’s just a feeling. I don't even know why I'm doing it," Erin admitted.
* * * * *
Later that day, Erin pulled the seed pod she had found in Sumeria from her bag. Holding it in her palm tightly, she headed straight for the bio-research labs. One of the technicians on staff offered her a questioning gaze as she walked in.
“May I borrow a genetic grid analyzer for a few minutes?” Erin asked him politely.
“Is this for official class purposes?”
“I need to analyze a seed pod I found in Sumeria,” Erin said with a shrug.
“Let me see it,” said the technician.
Erin produced the seed from her hand and waited as the technician gave it the visual once over.
“That’s not a seed like any I know,” said the technician. “It’s not an angiosperm—um, flowering plant or a conifer that I can tell, and those are our only two options. You sure it’s a seed? Maybe it’s man-made. No, I guess it can’t be. It seems natural. Isn’t that a mystery! Well, here’s an analyzer, kid. Let me know what you find out.”
Erin took the analyzer grid device and went to one of the lab tables to start an analysis. She knew the basics of how to do a genetic analysis with a tissue sample or small swatch. She carefully put the seed into the analyzer whole and waited for the computerized device to come up with a verdict.
“Not of Earth origin.”
Erin sucked in her breath sharply, but somehow, she wasn’t surprised. “Nothing,” she called over to the technician who had looked up with a worried or at least interested glance.
“Thank you,” she called as she returned the analyzer. “It’s nothing that the analyzer can identify.”
“Now isn’t that strange.” Said the technician. “Wonder what it could be. Well, I’m sorry I couldn’t be of more help to you, you got me curious there, girl.”
“I’ll be going, but thanks again,” said Erin. When she returned to her quarters, alone in the dark, she rubbed the seed pod. The dry, old, husky pod that should have been decayed by now cracked in half. Inside she saw a smooth, hard, ball of a seed of some sort, the color of pure silver. It looked more like metal.
What could it be? She wondered. But before she could think of what to do, the seed began to glow within of some pale, strange light.
Almost against her control, Erin picked it up, and swallowed it whole.
Chapter Twenty
The last day of childhood training for Erin Mathieson and Colleen Arnaud inevitably dawned. There was a rainstorm passing over the dome of Statue City, darkening the skies. A distant echo of the shower sounded through the domed city as Erin packed her things, then shut the open window in her room. After the last training run, they were going to depart early that evening by shuttle transport home for a brief leave. They were sixteen now, and had two more years of training until they had to go to the Charon front line.
Erin glanced around her room one last time; with the walls now bare and all of her belongings packed into totebags to be taken to the shuttle, her thoughts now turned to dreams of a better future. In the time following her trip to the Middle East, and her discovery of the strange seed pod, she had noticed a significant change in her life.
After ingesting that alien seed, Erin had become stronger, faster, more intelligent, and more focused in her strange abilities, psychic abilities she could not talk about to anyone.
"Don't bother to hurry, blond bitch," a voice interrupted her from ahead as she turned the corner into the main corridor linking the dorms and docking bay. Erin stopped several meters before one of her peers, cadet Blaine Richards, who stood regarding her with a lopsided grin.
"Why don't you do us all a favor and give up?"
Erin stared into his face, fighting down a reaction. Dark anger crept over her, heightening her thoughts and senses and tempting her body to react, but after a moment, she decided to ignore the insult. Perhaps she valued her dignity too much to sink to his level of name-calling—or perhaps she was just afraid of that dark whispering voice urging her to hurt the one who had hurt her.
"Get out of my way," she said tiredly, her voice barely above a whisper, yet there was a dangerous chill in it.
That Cadet Richards didn't hear. I'm not finished, not by a long shot, he thought. He didn't care that she was pretty; in fact, he hated her for it, as much as he hated her flippant attitude, especially when he had tried to be nice to her the first day she got there. If she couldn't see how she mocked him by copping that superior, oblivious, high and mighty attitude. He had done so many times, but this was his last opportunity, and tormenting Erin gave him a rush unlike any other. Didn’t the stupid girl know she was nothing, nothing!?
He spread his arms, grazing both sides of the corridor with his fingertips.
"Oh, and what are you going to do about it?" he challenged. For a moment, nothing happened. He was about to laugh triumphantly into her face as he had so many times before when something did.
He grasped his chest tightly when all at once his heart began to race. He could hear it like a heavy echo hammering away; then he felt an uncomfortable heat rising up his throat to his head and face. Yet his attention was drawn elsewhere, to the strange light that seemed to have illuminated Erin's face.
As he stared at her, it was as though a veil was lifting from her features. The surface of her unflinching sea-blue eyes had begun almost to ripple, like pools of water in a rainstorm, mesmerizing him but filling him with unexplainable fear. Despite the increasing heat in his face, he shivered.
Those eyes were not human, he thought dimly. They were alien eyes. Horrified, he watched her take a step towards him without seeming to hurry, like a predator toying with its prey; he found himself rooted to the spot where he stood.
Erin—was that who she was? That word was alien to her now, as she felt a current of energy crawl over her skin; she felt strangely invigorated. Then, as she waited for the sensation to end, expecting nothing, her senses suddenly flowed away from her, as though her body were melting away, yet she was at the same time conscious of where she stood; it was a terrible, frightening feeling yet delicious, too.
She felt drunk with power. It was a welcome relief she had always expected, as though her helplessness had been but a test of her will or a comforting, benign illusion. For at that moment, weakness was incomprehensible. There was only possibility surrounding her. Her power was not completely conscious, an extension of her will, a power to be manipulated; it was who she was. There was no part of her that didn't know this feeling; she was herself at last.
She heard the vibrating air beckoning to her with its infinite powerful sensations; unconsciously, she let it pull her thoughts beyond her body. At that moment, other, alien thoughts crept into her head fully formed.
damned bitch is giving me the creeps
Her blood raced faster, as though she feared this alien poison might contaminate her mind. She reached for her own identity and used it as a shield, but there was no battle, no resistance.
She felt the other thoughts rush away from her onslaught.
Blaine took a step back.
He stared at her, suddenly the complete pawn of his own emotions—only they were not his emotions at all. He felt the hostility of his fellow cadets like a blunt weapon gouging out his dignity piece by piece until there was nothing left but a shapeless mass of indignant shame, harboring a small, hard kernel of fiery-hot anger, potentially destructive anger. The only thing holding it back was the force of a cool, rea
soning mind and an iron will.
Seconds passed, then suddenly the feelings retracted, sending him reeling.
Erin had released his mind from her grip. What had she done? she thought, extinguishing her power in one sharp stroke of will. The power retreated, satiated for now. As it left her, she tried to bury the memory of it. It never happened, she told herself. It never happened! So what if this was a lie—she simply could could not bear the truth and refused to let the horror of it creep upon her.
What creature am I?l
Ah! she protested. The truth would have destroyed her cherished fantasy, the life and identity she wanted for her own, that she now chose to retain, yes, had she known it, a life she had chosen to lead even against her fate.
Meanwhile, Blaine stood shaking off the hallucination; as it passed, he blinked, disoriented, remembering little, but enough that he said no more but instinctively escaped down the corridor.
Erin continued to the training room, her thoughts and emotions still muddled, unhappily vacillating between resentment of others and anger towards herself. Sitting on a velvet-backed chair near to the entrance, she dropped her flight bag in agitation.
Nearby Jeremy Benford suddenly lashed into his best friend with uncharacteristic vehemence. Erin listened, disbelieving. Jeremy had never raised his voice in all the years she had known him. Yet his voice had nearly grown to a shout—only no one else was paying attention. They were all caught up in similar altercations.
"What's going on?" Erin's thoughts rolled out, but it seemed no one had heard her.
You are projecting your thoughts, your emotions, a voice answered her, almost approvingly. Erin gave a start, horrified, and looked around helplessly, as though to find the owner of the voice. With a sickening recognition she sensed that the voice had come from within her. She had once created it, this imaginary entity, to entertain her when she was young. Only now it seemed to have its own mind. No, she thought. It's a part of me, only a part I never wanted to admit was there.
Well then, she thought, maybe now it's about time that I do.
* * * * *
She wasn't entirely sure when she had begun to notice that there was a difference between her and others, but ever since she had learned about it, she had always been careful to keep it her secret.
What made this difficult was that she was constantly reminded just how out of the ordinary she felt. Microseconds before a light switch or appliance activated the electric current of a circuit, she heard a loud crackling sound in her ears, but only animals could hear electricity, she told herself; she could count the dots of ink on the smallest line of the eye charts with eyes sharper than any hawk's.
Was she more like some wild animal than a human being? she often wondered. After all, she had come from the rural zone. Was she then, some example of primitive humankind, like the vanished Neanderthal?
No, she was not. The thought that she was more animal than human always made her dislike herself. It wasn't normal, she knew, to possess the heightened senses that she had, yet who could she tell about them? Who would believe her?
Or was that what the inner voice was, tempting her to use her gifts? she wondered.
Since the time that she had eaten the alien seed pod, her powers had only begun to increase.
What could it have been, how on Earth could she have found it after all those years impossibly lost in a temple, and how could it have been from another world? All of the questions came to the fore when she thought about it, but most of the time, she suppressed them.
It couldn’t have happened, was what her mind kept telling her.
* * * * *
"Ready for launch, all systems ready," Scott announced coolly over the net, moments after the last training run began at the UESRC.
Scott eased his plane out smoothly when he was given the go-ahead. His training run had been scheduled two minutes behind John Thomson. Once he had cleared the docking bay by a good twenty meters, he began to look for the markers and targets that composed the new training course. The sensors would detect his weapon fire and immediately relay his progress on accuracy of climbs and turns as well as monitoring his speed and flight time.
At the end of the course, all of the planes in group two would meet for a simulated alien attack. At such time, their positions as team leader or co-leader and advised tactics would be relayed, and their ability to work together as well as maintaining the security of their assigned section would be recorded and evaluated.
Scott turned his plane up to full speed. He was rewarded for his action with a warning across his screen, advising him to cut his speed and calm down. He ignored it, and accelerated. Then the markers appeared.
The course, though short, had been carefully devised, first calling for a high climb and then a left turn. Two sudden targets on his far left required the precise coordination of several elements, not only a difficult climb and turn, but also a high and low target, which meant he had to be prepared to shift his sights rapidly, even with the demanding flight path. He dispatched them with ease.
Next he sped straight ahead, shooting at eight moving targets on either side of him, all of them trying to fly out of his fire range. The narrow strip appeared deceptively easy; in fact it was difficult to turn from side to side to sight them. Next came a short series of sudden turns, up, down, right, left, up and hard right with random targets placed here and there—not too bad. At the right turn ahead, Scott suddenly came close to hitting John Thomson, but he quickly veered left and climbed in a perfect arc around him, though he had to deviate from his flight path to pass him.
Continuing on, a similar pattern of unexpected turns and targets met his as he flew at full speed. He sighed when the markers ended and he saw the others ahead; it had been far too easy. His screen flashed a recorded time of 2 minutes, 6 seconds, and one hundred percent target destruction. He slowed and hovered at minimum speed with them as they waited for instructions and the last four planes.
"Good run, John," one of the pilots hailed him over the comnet. He gave a start when he established a visual linkup and saw Scott's amused expression. "What are you doing here, Scott? I thought John was supposed to start before you."
"He did," Scott answered calmly. Immediately, he heard the others discussing his response over the net. Something had happened to John, they feared.
But he appeared a moment later. John wasn't sure how Scott had passed him, but he had seen someone speed by and assumed he had been monitored by one of the training coaches. Only they could fly outside of the flight path.
Scott ignored the others' speculations and waited for his assigned sector.
Ten minutes later, he was designated co-leader by the computer and the skirmish began. Now the real test began. Outnumbered by a factor of two to one, the goal for the trainees was to take as few hits as possible but still take out as many aliens as they could. With random holograms rushing at them and invisible laserfire simulated just as the enemies used it in the space vacuum, which required constant monitoring of their laserfire sensors, they would not have lasted long had it been a real combat situation. However, in this case, the damage was measured by a light bar on the lower left of their computer consoles.
As co-leader, Scott headed into the denser airspace with John Thomson. Glancing around him as the battle began, he quickly memorized the general areas of free space, ready to dart in and out of them and watching for new gaps to be opened up and old ones to be filled. He kept his hand poised above his trigger and his left hand on his throttle but left the brake pedal alone. The faster he could go, the safer he would be among the quick alien craft, assuming he kept control of his direction.
Ten minutes passed slower than in the reality they were used to. When the simulation finally ended, the team headed to the docking bay where the first group waited for the teams' critique. The third and fourth training runs had been scheduled after
lunch, giving the first group and Scott's second group two hours to discuss their last simulation training run.
Major Dyre Henrikson paced back and forth at the head of the room when they arrived, making sharp, clean clicking sounds with his calf-length black boots. He was a man of forty, of average height, in impeccable shape, with a dark beard flecked with grey and flint-hard eyes.
Michael Strong sat near the back and signaled to Scott to come join him. Glancing about the room calmly, the major waited for all of them to be seated on the floor before addressing the assembled company.
"First of all, I want to commend all of you on an excellent run." The way he said it compromised the compliment somewhat. "No one scored less than 75% on the targets, and the longest run did not exceed five minutes." Scott thought he seemed rather disappointed to admit this.
"However," Henrikson went on, glancing around them severely, "there are some areas of improvement we should discuss. I will begin with the first team and then move on to the second." His delivery was crisp, almost monotone; he was a man who would brook no objections.
"After I have made my suggestions according to what you see here on the monitor," he continued, "I will expect you all to head to the assembly room and study the maneuvers on your personal monitors. All right, Vasilias, let's begin," Major Henrikson gave a signal to the operator, who switched on the giant three-dimensional vidigital screen that displayed the relayed recordings.
"The first run, if I recall, ah yes, cadet Chou. Ease up a little on your turns and recover faster." Henrikson said, making each comment more an ultimatum than a suggestion. "You missed a target because you sped too quickly around without giving yourself a chance to respond. Keep one hand on your trigger at all times."
Scott listened absently until she heard his buddy Michael's name called.
"An excellent run." Henrikson admitted. "You only missed one target, though I would like to work on your speed. You fly cautiously where you sometimes need extra speed. Make sure that you get some practice in the acceleration programs." He added, as though Michael would not have thought to do so on his own.