Touchstone 1 - Stray

and he started off, getting even more focused. First Squad is always serious while in the spaces, but I could tell by how tightly concentrated they all were that they’d meant it about it being tough. Everyone except Mara made long blades out of their suits, the first time I’d seen anyone except Ruuel use that. I still hadn’t figured out how to make any bits of the suit be more than tough rubber.
    Staying on Ketzaren’s left put me in the centre of the six of them, and I noticed that Lohn, on my left, had his blade on his left arm instead of his right. I was only just within arms-length of any of them, so that they could reach to keep up their enhancements without risking accidentally bumping me.
    “Coming up, mark seven, twenty in,” came Maze’s voice over the interface. “Three rush.”
    Three rush apparently meant Maze, Mara and Zee would suddenly leap forward, while Lohn, Alay and Ketzaren closed about me and followed at a slower pace. We reached the corner just as something I couldn’t properly see leapt off one of the walls at Maze. Maze, Mara and Zee all have the Speed talent, and unenhanced they move amazingly. With enhancement, they come close to blurring instantaneously from one place to another. Plus both Maze and Mara have Combat Sight, which so far as I can tell is an ability to detect attacks almost before they happen. The thing didn’t really have a chance, in other words.
    I only saw it properly when it was dead, and stopped being so difficult to look at. A lizard, like a gecko except with some uncomfortably humanoid lines to its scaly white body. And too much claw. Chameleons with attitude.
    Even before it was still, Maze added: “Two coming fast from mark two,” and they shifted about me to cover an opening on the opposite side.
    It went on like that for way too long. The maze space is huge, and we weren’t just walking through it to a certain point, we were systematically searching out all of the chameleons and killing them.
    The bright spot of the space was in the centre, the heart of the maze. It was an open, circular garden, with lots of grass between us and the walls, and beds of purple and red flowers which looked like cosmos. We’d been going about two hours by that time, and had cleared most of the chameleons. Maze ordered a break, though still to stick to using only our interfaces, and we sat down in the very centre, resting but on guard, Zee and Maze watching in opposite directions. Everyone was looking worn, and ate silently, so I decided not to bug them with questions and chewed on my entirely unappetising molasses bar. And then there was this cat.
    Half-grown kitten, really, long-legged but not properly grown up. It was one of the slinky, big-eared type I’d seen on Muina, smoky grey with unexpectedly dark moss-green eyes. It was just there, sitting in front of me, drifting into visibility in an eye-blink. And, yeah, I was stupid, but my automatic reaction to cats, even ones which pop up out of nothing, is to hold out a hand, fingers unthreateningly down, and see if it runs away.
    It acted just like a cat should, delicately sniffing, touching a cold nose to one knuckle, then rubbing its face against my hand. I had scratched it behind one ear and under its chin and felt the slightest buzz of a purr before it even occurred to me that maybe I shouldn’t, and carefully took my hand back.
    “Can I pick it up?” I asked over the interface.
    First Squad’s reaction would probably have been comical if, well, if the Ena hadn’t been a life or death thing for them for so many years. Ketzaren was closest to me, sitting at a right-angle, and turned her head only to leap up as if scalded. And then they were all on their feet, the nanoliquid blades appearing, along with Mara’s Light-whip, and the cat very sensibly leaped away and vanished, leaving me sitting there staring up at them.
    I remembered, at least, to keep talking over the interface. “Kittens are evil?”
    None of them answered immediately, but Mara touched her hand to my shoulder and stared about, searching. “Nothing,” she said.
    “Checking the log,” Maze said. When we’re on mission, as well as second level monitoring I’m on mission log, which he can access as team captain, so he meant he was looking at my recording of the cat. And then he looked at me a moment before scanning the area again. “Gone now, at any rate. Or completely undetectable.” He looked back at me, and though his voice wasn’t