Touchstone 1 - Stray

open, he passed us to collect the usual rotation gear, and was back just as the lock was fully open. His black eye, sadly, had receded to a faint yellowish shadow, and he didn’t seem to be favouring his knee. But mission efficiency hit a snag before we’d even stepped into the Ena. Ruuel paused as the gate-lock was closing behind us, and then Selkie joined the mission channel.
    “Devlin,” Selkie said, making me feel exactly like someone called out of class by the school principal. “Does the word ‘Gea’ mean anything to you?”
    “Gear?” I repeated, since that’s how he’d pronounced it. “Part of machine?”
    “Specifically, ‘child of Gea’.”
    “Oh. Gaia, maybe? Gaia is the same as Earth, or Terra. Different names for my planet in different languages. Gaia is Greek mythology mother-planet-goddess, a bit like how Muinans think of Muina. Child of Gaia would either be myth people called Titans, or anyone from my planet, depending on which way look at it. Did you find record Earth in histories?”
    “No. An emissary from Nuri has walked out of deep-space and asked that the child of Gea be brought to speak with him.”
    Even Ruuel reacted to that one, frowning, and there was a little pause while Selkie was probably talking to someone else. Then he said: “Continue your rotation, but return within a kasse.” He dropped out of the channel, leaving Fourth Squad looking at each other and at me, very startled.
    “Focus,” Ruuel said, eyes narrow, and sent us through the gate. I don’t think he was at all pleased to have such a big distraction waved under his squad’s nose at the beginning of a mission. It was lucky that the most I have to do is stop and start in time with my escorts because I’d certainly been given plenty to distract me from the rotation.
    Nuri is the moon world with the Luddite ex-Muinans. It was located around eighty years ago and when the Tarens turned up the Nuran response was pretty much: “We don’t want to have anything to do with you. Go away.” Since then they’d unbent only enough to say the same thing in rather more detail. They felt the Taren use of technology, particularly the interface, made them a corrupting influence and they could not risk exposure. No, they would not join an alliance to find or investigate Muina. No, they did not want to share their knowledge of Muina’s disaster. The last time Tare had sent a delegation to discuss the apparent increase in the severity of Ionoth incursions, the Nurans had barely stopped short of accusing the Tarens of being responsible.
    So having a Nuran turn up on Tare asking to talk to me was big news.
    I had a couple of hours to stew on that while Fourth Squad headed back through the same spaces First Squad had cleared last rotation. Ruuel was taking an extreme-caution approach to each space, since traps had been encountered last time, but we reached the container space without any sense of threat. And once in there, we found only the little greyish people watching us from a fortification they’d built.
    There were over a dozen gates out of that space, and Fourth Squad examined every one. Although the one which the hairy people had run through had shifted out of alignment, they were able to detect signs of them at three other gates, and Fourth chose the most-travelled gate and headed through to the next space. It was a small island, no bigger than a couple of house-blocks, with exposed sandbars around it. Lots of sand-coloured mice lived in burrows beneath the tufty grass. And there were sharks in the water, given the stinking pile of butchered carcasses we found.
    Again Fourth mapped the gates, and picked the one which was the most frequented. The next space was big, some kind of multi-story car park full of vague memories of cars, which made it very confusing. From what I could make out of the blurs, they were low and large, with what looked like chimneys in swirls of chrome. Ruuel and Sonn paused a long moment before gesturing us through, and when we were in Ruuel said over the mission channel: “Next level up, perhaps a dozen. There was a lookout.”
    There was a trap, too, but Ruuel could tell it was there before it was set off. He had Sonn send an enhanced ball of lightning up the ramp to the next level and we all stayed well back listening to the noise. Then Ferus pulled the trap apart with Telekinesis, and we went up. Eight stories of car park, and scads of gates, but once we’d tracked down and cleared the