Touchstone 1 - Stray

this freaking planet that I see on a near-daily basis. I can’t remember hanging out with any super-serious girls in the past, let alone someone who is part of the military and kills for a living. She makes me curious though.
    After this we went and had another stepping session, and I waited till she was escorting me back to my room before I asked her again: “Setari competitive why?” And when she paused, since this was definitely not the sort of question she was likely to answer, I added: “Your squad, why unhappy, holiday?”
    “The Setari don’t compete directly,” Zan said eventually. “But how we perform affects privileges, which assignments we are given, and even whether we remain on active duty. Fighting in the Ena is greatly preferred to the more basic duty which is usual on Tare, and not simply because being in the Ena makes us feel…twice as alive. Twelfth Squad had only just been activated for Ena assignments, but were transferred to training routines, and are very disappointed.”
    “Mostly fight Ena, not planet?”
    “The whole concept of the Setari is to prevent anything from the Ena reaching this world. And to find a way to fix the fractures which have made it so easy for the walls around this world to be crossed.” She looked even more than ordinarily serious. “The numbers increase every year and the fractures are widening. Working on Tare, it’s just clean-up unless there’s a major outbreak. The war is beyond this world.”
    That was a good deal more dramatic than I’d been expecting. Where I’m going to be placed in this war is something too large to think about.
    Thursday, January 31
    A proper history lesson
    I passed the stupid interface test! Only just – I still didn’t finish a lot of the questions, but I got almost all the ones I did answer right. So I now have a new year of school to plough through. Still no entertainment channels or anything, but a small library of children’s ‘textbooks’, which is good. I much prefer being able to freely read the books than to sit through the pre-set lessons and their snippets of information. A thorough browse has given me a lot more background and a better explanation of just what happened on Muina and what the situation on Tare is now.
    So, whatever it was happened on Muina happened thousands of Taren years ago. They’re pretty imprecise about exactly how long ago it was, because they went through a really rough and chaotic first few decades on Tare, so don’t have a very good written record. Kolar is the other main planet which properly remembers being from Muina, but its early records are no better than Tare’s. The best I can make out, the evacuation from Muina was between 1500 and 2000 Earth years ago. So ha! to the idea of Earth having been populated by people from Muina – the Egyptian pyramids are over 3000 years old and that barely scratches the surface of Earth’s archaeological and fossil record. I guess it is possible that some Muinans came to Earth long before that, but we definitely weren’t part of the evacuation dispersal. I never believed that, no matter how similar I am to them genetically. It still makes vastly more sense to me for the Muinans to have originally come from Earth, especially because Tare’s population also reflects some of Earth’s races.
    ‘Lantar’ doesn’t refer to the entire population of Muina, either, but to a psychic ruling caste which caused the disaster that made Muina uninhabitable. Back then the Ionoth monsters were only an issue for these ruling Lantar (Lantarens?) when they travelled between planets. It’s not clear why they were travelling between planets, but it was common enough that they started a huge planet-wide project to make it easier: creating a little network of permanently aligned wormholes. The result of this was like if you decided to stop earthquakes in California by nailing the tectonic plates together: everything started to rip apart around the nails.
    The tearing allowed things from the Ena to more easily get to Muina, where they liked to throw themselves on people and eat them. The Lantarens couldn’t immediately undo what they’d done because the places where they’d constructed the main supports of their interplanetary superhighway had been flooded with too many Ionoth. So they built these things called Ddura – the massives the Setari are so interested in investigating – which are artificial Ionoth whose job was to clear out Ionoth from the