Touchstone 1 - Stray

waited to go through.
    The Pillar was a lot bigger than I’d realised. With nothing around it except white or washes of rainbow colours, I’d judged its height by the door. If the schematic was correct, then the door was nearly three times as tall as ‘normal’ doors. The Pillar seemed to have a hollow inner tube running all the way from top to bottom which was marked ‘power core’. The gap between the inner and outer wall didn’t seem to have any stairs or levels or more than possibly some structures on the ground floor. Built, if anything, like a giant thermos.
    Once we were all in near-space, Haral and Zan both gave the order for a quick march in formation. The squads each settled into three pairs and we started off, with me settling beside Zan and Lenton, while Quane played offsider with Tenth Squad.
    “During the external examination,” Haral continued, “three groups of swoop-types and one tarani attacked. These were well within projections, and easily dealt with. A little over one zelkasse ago, the decision was made to open the Pillar.”
    A kasse is about two and a half Earth-hours long, and a zelkasse is a quarter that, so it had started less than an hour before Zan collected me.
    “There was no apparent locking mechanism, and the doors were opened easily using a drone. When no negative reaction was detected, Third and Fourth engaged in another set of scans preparatory to entering. They had not yet completed when this happened.”
    We’d reached the first gate out of near-space, and though all these spaces would have been recently cleared, Haral and his partner did exactly the same pause, scan and clear through that had become familiar, but he gave us all a fragment of recorded memory to digest first. It had a ‘mission display’ overlay and had “Quane” written in the lower left and a little ‘life monitor’ for the rest of the squad along the right side, which of course made me think of gaming in a far from positive way. No infinite lives or save games here.
    The first image was of the Pillar space through the gate from the Platforms space. Quane had looked left, where there was only white flatness with a rainbow-tinted backdrop, and a handful of Setari. Then he’d looked right, back past more Setari to the tower in the distance. It was a lot further than I’d thought, maybe a hundred metres away. The doors were open, and Third and Fourth Squads were standing well back from them, playing with a drone.
    I saw Ruuel just before he moved. He turned his head sharply and I think he shouted, but it was too late.
    White light. A massive beam of it, roaring out of the open doorway, spreading to completely block sight of the Pillar and the Setari. For about ten seconds nothing could be seen and Sixth Squad bit back startled comments. Then the whiteness began to lift, or drain down, quickly clearing at the top. The hazy outline of the Pillar came visible first, and then black shapes, lying in a settling mist.
    “Kormin sent Ammas in, and confirmed aether effects,” Haral went on, while we were still watching the end of this. “He was able to reach Tsennan with talent and return, bringing him out, but even that brief exposure left him debilitated. Tsennan’s vitals were steady, but he showed no immediate sign of recovery. At that point Kormin sent Quane with the emergency call.”
    We reached the next gate, and after we were all through Haral switched to handing out orders.
    “On reaching the Pillar space, Kantan will enhance and create a vortex, drawing up as much of the aether as possible. Then the Telekinesis talents will enhance and bring out as many of the fallen squads as can be reached. Our major challenge will be successfully reaching the most distant squads while suffering the effects of aether. And Ionoth.”
    That was a big ‘and’. I wasn’t sure what swoops were, but it was obvious that they’d deployed a lot of squads to ward them off. At about this point I was starting to really have to work at not slowing down, and was glad the space before the Platforms space was this short remnant of a flagstone road, all tumbled and broken and not the sort of thing you can jog straight across. And then we were in the Platforms space, and Sixth Squad weren’t waiting for us.
    “Twelfth, stay with me,” Zan said curtly, as Tenth and Quane doubled their speed and dashed up the crisscrossing white squares. She increased her pace, and lifted me easily with Telekinesis. Then Tenth