Touchstone 1 - Stray

to break my momentum, and I went down on my hands and knees, gasping.
    The Fourth Squad captain walked a little way ahead while I recovered, looking annoyingly unaffected by sprinting up nearly-vertical stairs. Breathing a little deeper. I stared back over my shoulder and shuddered and said: “Cthulhu lives.” And could probably chase us through the gate, since Ionoth theoretically could move from space to space. The idea was enough to get me to my feet and looking around.
    We were on a branch, wide and soft with moss and lichen, and so far up that if there was any ground in this space it was lost in the gloom below. I became very glad I hadn’t kept running. The Fourth Squad captain had walked down to where another branch crossed over the top of the first, and was making handholds in it using another blade made out of nanoliquid. When he climbed up, I followed, though I was starting to feel very rubbery-legged and ill. I’d managed to count through the worlds we had crossed – red desert, tola forest, tunnel, beach, skyscrapers, pyramid, tree – which made six more until we reached Tare’s near-space. In retrospect I’m glad the Fourth Squad captain didn’t show any sign of caring about my opinions, because I really wanted to stop and hug my knees and rock back and forth for a while, and it was only that he seemed to expect me not to that kept me walking.
    Thankfully the next gate was one he immediately gestured me through, and I grew a little more hopeful about getting back without being eaten. That space was a huge one, impossibly tall, with all these white platforms crisscrossing a black chasm and climbing up into stars. There were tons of gates, the most I’d seen in any of the spaces, but I was glad that the Fourth Squad captain seemed to be heading for one on the same level as us, since I wasn’t keen on more climbing.
    Head jerking upward, he stopped so abruptly that I almost ran into his back. Given it was the first time I’d seen him act at all surprised by anything, I stared too, of course, but all I saw were some distant washes of colour, something like what I’d expect the Aurora Borealis to look like. And there was a faint, vaguely familiar noise which I thought might be whale song. The Fourth Squad captain found it far more interesting than anything else we’d encountered, and was standing stock-still, staring.
    Then he said, “Augment me,” and held a hand back.
    He’d been very careful all along not to touch me, and alone in the middle of the spaces was not a good place to test my effect on whatever talent set he had. At the same time, I doubted he ever gave an order without a reason, so I took his hand without stupidly saying: “Are you sure?” But with great misgivings.
    And he fell to his knees. Totally not what you want your sole rescuer to be doing, especially since he was standing near the front edge of one of the platforms at the time, and yanked my arm half out of its socket in the process. And just stayed there, staring upwards.
    With his eyes opened wide, he didn’t look like he was in pain, more like he was having some sort of religious experience. I thought it was damn stupid timing, but I’d been wanting some knee-hugging time, so I sat on the platform’s edge and waited. And waited.
    Eventually I lay back and watched the distant light show, and tried to get the suit’s fingers on my free hand to turn into knives, which wasn’t very successful. I could make them go out to spiky points, but they were soft, rubbery spiky points, just like the rest of the suit. Mara hadn’t shown me how to make weapons.
    The noises grew a little louder, and I realised that they were the noises I’d heard on Muina, except not nearly so close. The ‘massive’ that they’d come racing to investigate, and found me instead. And these Ddura were supposed to be some tool or weapon to use in fixing the problem tearing all the spaces apart, so I guess I understood why the Fourth Squad captain was so interested in that one, but if he had stayed like that much longer I would have given in to creeping weariness and passed out, and wouldn’t even have been able to shout a warning if something came along to eat us. Fortunately the Ddura faded away, and the Fourth Squad captain closed his eyes and took a long shuddering breath. I wasn’t sure he’d even blinked for all of the time he’d looked at it.
    “Beginning think your brain melt,” I said, and he looked down at me so blankly I knew