Touchstone 1 - Stray

like changing channels, and he flicks through them.
    I felt no nostalgia seeing my tower again, was simply glad not to be there as my trackers easily cleared away my makeshift door and passed the clutter of junk I’d kicked down the stair, then the second floor I’d been in the process of clearing. Then they were on the third floor, Fort Cass, with my bowls of washews and red pears carefully lined up, and my pathetic collection of tools in their corner. My bag. My blanket. Me.
    Huddled in my stained and worn school uniform, with my hair greasy and lank, I looked bony and ill. ‘Condition poor’. Ruuel looked at me with normal sight first, then one which made me light up in dull greens and blues and reds.
    “She’s been here some time,” said Ruuel’s partner, Sonn, over the interface.
    “Weeks, not days,” he agreed.
    “The time limit’s close. What do we do with her while we look for a gate?” An edge of irritation had crept into Sonn’s voice. They weren’t there for me.
    But Ruuel didn’t seem overly concerned, turning from studying the ceiling to look at me as I stirred groggily. “Put her down at the lake’s edge for the escort to collect.”
    I watched myself perform this magnificent recoil worthy of a scalded cat. So scared. Ruuel just changed whatever Sight he was using and started looking around the room again, seeing a strange overlaid image of rubble, and a few different fragmentary ghosts of me.
    “Do you understand me?” Sonn asked in Taren, then said almost the same thing, but pronounced the words differently.
    “Who are you?” past me said, staring back and forth between them.
    Sonn tried again. I swapped later to watch her log, and she was carefully sounding out the same question using a “Stray Encounter Guide” which had a little stock of useful phrases from the languages of strays which had been picked up in the past. They’re all wildly varying dialects of Muinan, which is something I couldn’t tell at the time.
    “Nothing you’re saying sounds like anything I know,” past me said.
    “Not getting anywhere,” Sonn murmured.
    “Just use gestures,” Ruuel said. “We don’t have the time to waste with this.” He left to go up on the roof, telling the rest of his squad to keep scanning for gates.
    The time limit for visits to Muina is strictly enforced. Looking over the whole of the mission report, they’d started out miles away, at the ruins of a major city where a network of scanning drones had been installed both in real-space and near-space.
    Robotics here are more advanced than Earth’s but the AI is still nowhere near real AI, so there are limitations to tasks drones can perform. The news about the Ddura had involved a complicated chain of drone messages. They have drones seeded about the spaces near the big interplanetary rift on Muina which stay powered down most of the time, waking themselves up on a regular schedule to scan. Another drone wakes itself up and collects the scans, and yet another drone travels back and forth between Muina and Tare with the collected scans. A Ddura had passed by the scanning drones, and that was enough to get Fourth Squad hurriedly sent out, two days later, in the hopes that it was still about.
    Once they reached the city, they’d gone straight into near-space to get the latest information from the drones there and to try and track the Ddura. They were able to calculate the direction it had moved and had chased off after it in their ship, finding my town as a consequence, where they’d stopped to see if they could find a gate and look for it there. And found me instead.
    Leaving me sitting on the lakeshore, Fourth Squad had located a gate a short distance south of the town and gone through. After two days they weren’t surprised that the Ddura was gone, but they’d been able to identify which gate it had gone through, though how something as big as that aurora ‘goes through’ those little gates I don’t know. They’d tried tracking it until the constraints of their time limit had forced them to return.
    I think I’m going to have to go through the Muina files from beginning to end rather than jumping about. Why, for instance, aren’t they searching that big city for records? Sssso much technical jargon: it’s like someone gave me everything NASA has ever written.
    Friday, March 7
    tl;dr
    I decided, before I started on my file review, to read more generally about Muina and Tare, now that I had access to more than