The Stargazer's War - Chapter 2.2

Chapter 2.2: Holding Pattern

“A little to the left… there. Perfect.”

I slid my palm across the poster, pressing the adhesive into the wall. A pale tendril of qi joined me, guiding an air bubble down and out, leaving the familiar image perfectly flat and centered. I took a step back and assessed our work.

It was flawless, of course. Lucy’s sense of her own dimensions made hanging things almost unfairly easy. If it hadn’t been, she wouldn’t have let me help. There was no way in hell she’d have stood for a crooked poster on one of her walls.

“That’s the last one,” Lucy remarked, her voice coming from my left as if she too stood gazing up at the poster.

“Last one,” I echoed, rereading the text I’d read a million times before.

Know the Signs of VIP.

I’d always hated these posters, hated the blocky little figures in their corporate art style, hated they way they stared forlornly into space or devoured a plate stacked high with an unrealistic amount of food. I suppose I still did, just for different reasons.

In the week that’d passed since Nick’s death, I’d managed to move past trying to forget it into accepting I had to learn from it. Like it or not, my presence put those around me at higher risk for void-induced psychosis. Charlotte and Xavier knew better than to go looking for the infinite sea, but I wasn’t taking chances. Anyone and everyone who set foot aboard Lucy would know and memorize the early symptoms.

I wouldn’t miss them again.

My eyes drifted left, away from the poster on the wall to the metal pillar at the room’s center and the glowing orb within. I felt the faint warmth of qi leaking out, what had once seemed to me an overwhelming deluge now reduced to a tiny trickle in comparison to even Fyrion’s third floor dorms. It awed me that Cedric had survived so long on only it. He must’ve been near the brink by the time he made it to roofie.

I shook the thought aside, refusing to substitute one trauma for the other. However barren the natural qi where we floated in distant orbit of the Dueling Stars, Charlotte and Xavier and anyone else who journeyed with us wouldn’t starve as Cedric had. I wouldn’t let them.

It was hard to perceive the spill-off from Lucy’s core without also noting the bright wisps drifting off of me.

It felt like an eternity ago that I’d first noted the dark qi others’ techniques gave off, a fraction of a fraction of the total expenditure converting from qi they could use to qi they couldn’t even see. It’d come as no surprise that my own technique did the same, dispersing most of its energy normally, but converting a tiny percentage back into light qi.

Once I’d discovered that, I hadn’t let the technique go.

Out here in orbit, the infinite sea was closer than it’d ever been on Fyrion, a well of qi so vast I couldn’t comprehend the idea of depleting it.

So I used it.

I hadn’t yet figured out how to keep my technique going while I slept, several times a day I found my focus slipping enough for the unnatural shadows across my body to fade away, but I always noticed, and I always started up again. If she left the door open, I could even keep it up within Lucy’s soul space.

Charlotte and Xavier had found it unnerving at first, the way light seemed to avoid me, leaving me in gloom even beneath the brightest qi lamp, but they’d grown used to it soon enough. Threads, it wasn’t like they were going to complain about the near-tripling of the qi supply, especially when it meant access to ambient qi without having to spend all day in the sparse core room.

They cultivated it faster than I could produce it. I wasn’t sure if that fact would ever change, but according to Lucy I’d already upped my throughput my nearly twenty percent. Turns out, using a skill nonstop for a week straight makes for good practice. My meridians had stretched with the constant use, bolstering—if only somewhat—my capacity to channel qi both through them and into my Vac Suit.

Xavier hated that name. He thought I should’ve called it Umbral Cloak or Barrier of Endless Shadow or some other overly wordy and pretentious bullshit like that. Truth be told, either of those might’ve been a touch more accurate than calling it a Vac Suit, but the latter felt right to me.

The vac suits I’d worn my entire adult life had inspired the technique. Sure, it kept light and heat and qi out instead of in like a normal vac suit, but the concept made sense. Besides, Inverted Vac Suit would’ve been way too long.

I hadn’t, of course, tested how well it would hold up to an actual vacuum. I wasn’t stupid.

I kept pulling from the infinite sea as I departed the core room, focusing hard to keep myself anchored in the here and now lest its vastness sweep me away. It was a delicate tightrope, drinking from it without being lost to it, one that more often than not led to me losing focus on my Vac Suit or on all of reality for a second or two, but I was steadily finding my balance.

Far and away my favorite part of the shell of darkness that flowed around me was the way it muted my sensitivity to light qi. Staring straight at Lucy’s core still left me with a thought-shattering headache, but the ambient qi and the wisps I gave off and even the copper cores at Charlotte’s and Xavier’s centers no longer bothered me. For that reason alone, even without the qi conversion, I might’ve kept my Vac Suit up whenever possible.

I turned the corner into Lucy’s soulspace, and the matte white of her upper deck gave way to the distressed wood and drywall. I spared a glance into the gym as I passed by, spotting Xavier deep in the throes of combat with a faceless hologram. From the looks of it, it was simulating the the Dragon’s Fang fighting style, the same set of moves Xavier—and most of the local sect members—preferred.

Same old Xavier.

I continued on into the living area, where Charlotte had commandeered the entire dining table for her own work. A holo projector that Lucy had mounted overhead displayed dozens of what looked like employee files on the wooden tabletop, all cogs in the scheme she was hatching to sneak us onto Ilirian.

“Any luck?” I asked as I stepped up to the table, leaning on the back of a tucked-in chair to peer over her work.

“Three prospects so far,” Charlotte explained without looking up. She reached out to tap and drag a trio of dossiers over. One by one, she gestured at them. “He’s a couple years’ wages deep in gambling debt, she’s cheating on her husband, and he had a fling with his boss that went south, so now he hates the man enough to turn on him.”

I blinked. “Charlotte, that’s brilliant. How do you know all this? Gambling debt I can see, but there’s no way this woman’s affair was in some public file somewhere.”

Charlotte shrugged. “People are less good at keeping secrets than they think they are. Ask the right person the right questions, and they kind of just spill out.”

I nodded as if that made sense. “Is it enough?”

“Not nearly. These are all low-level traffic controllers. We need either a handful of them all on the same shift, or someone high enough on the chain to get us onto the let-through list. A higher-up will be easier to swing, but I’d rather corrupt a whole shift if I can. No doc trail that way.”

My eyes drifted across the mess of files, glazing over at the dull complexity of it all. “Any idea how long?”

“Could be an hour, could be a month,” Charlotte answered. “In a bureaucracy this size, there’ll always be enough weak links to worm our way through, it’s just a matter of poking blindly until we find them, then applying the right kind of pressure. The latter simple enough if you know how to do it. The former just takes either a lot of time or a lot of luck.”

As if to punctuate her point, she double tapped a nearby file, bringing up a short menu from which she selected “call.”

A man’s voice sounded from Charlotte’s holopad. “This is Darryl Johnson speaking, how can I help you?”

Charlotte’s tone changed entirely, her normal cool alto jumping in pitch and taking on the singsong quality of someone versed in customer service. “Hi, this is Lisa Corrington from Starport Services LLC, calling in regards to one Peter Vaughn?”

“Yeah, I know Pete.” Darryl responded. “What’s this about?”

“Yes, well, Mister Vaughn is applying for a position here with us at Starport Services, and he’s put you down as one of his references. I was hoping you could tell me how he’s been doing as an employee.”

“He’s applying for what? That little shit,” Darryl muttered, “thinks he can abandon me with hunting season coming up.” His voice returned to a more intentional volume. “Look, Pete doesn’t know I know this, but he’s got a wonderblitz pipe stashed in his desk. ’Les you wanna hire a junkie, I’d steer clear.”

“Oh. I’m sorry to hear that,” Charlotte’s tone fell as if she were actually sorry and not grinning ear to ear. “Of course Starport Services LLC doesn’t discriminate against applicants suffering from addiction, but I’m sure our hiring manager would want to know. I’ll make a note of it.”

“Yeah, you do that. Anything else you need?”

“No, that’ll be all. Thank you Mister Johnson.”

“Sure thing.”

“Buh bye.” Charlotte hung up. She craned her neck to grin up at me. “Two strikes. Peter Vaughn is on the same shift as our cheater.”

I gaped at her. “Does… does that usually work?”

“Only like… every ten attempts. Most of the time bosses will cover for their employees.”

I blinked. “Really?”

“Either that or they’re actually good workers. No way to tell.”

“And they just… believe you?”

“Why wouldn’t they?” Charlotte asked.

“Because you’re not a real recruiter and that’s not a real company?” I offered, still in disbelief over how easy that’d been.

“But I am.” She swiped up some documents onto her holopad. “Starport Services LLC, registered with sect administration last week as a limited liability company with two dozen employees. Lisa Corrington is one of their recruiters.” Official registration, employment documents, even tax forms popped into view.

“Threads, Charlotte. This is insane. This… this is fraud.”

“Yeah. Of course it is. We’re trying to break into a secure world. This stuff’s small potatoes. As long as we pay taxes on them, the sect doesn’t care about a few phony corporations.”

I scowled. “A few? How many of these do you have?”

“Six so far,” Charlotte said like it was nothing. “Gotta target different employees with different opportunities, and if I overuse the same corp, word’ll spread.” She look up, misreading the horror on my face. “Don’t worry, it’s not like I got that guy fired. It’s illegal to fire employees for seeking other jobs.”

“I know,” I told her. “Some of us used to actually have a job.”

Charlotte smirked and pulled up more paperwork. “Technically, I have seventy-nine jobs right now. Pay is awful though.”

“You should consider unionizing. What would—” I squinted at her holopad. “—Polgar Logistics do if all fourteen of its employees walked out?”

“Well they wouldn’t hire Peter Vaughn, that’s for sure.”

I laughed. “Just try not to ruin anyone’s life. A bit of blackmail is one thing, but I don’t want anyone getting fired or divorced just so we can sneak onto Ilirian.”

“Hey, if anyone’s life get’s ruined, it’s their own fault. I didn’t cheat on that woman’s husband. She did that all on her own.”

“You know what I mean.” I shook my head. “So now you’ve got two on one shift, does that mean we’re close?”

“Maybe, maybe not. It’s very possible the third worker on that shift isn’t exposed. I could go digging through the folks who might fill in if said worker had a sick day, but that’s an extra layer of maneuvering, and even that might bring up nothing.”

“You can… maneuver someone into taking a sick day?”

“I can set them up for a phony job interview during work hours.”

“Right.” I said. “Six dummy corporations.” I exhaled. “Just keep me updated.”

Charlotte nodded. “I’ll let you know if anything develops.”

“Thanks. And Charlotte?” I stopped before turning away. “Don’t get caught.”

“I’m offended you even thought to say that.” She came off more boastful than anything else, so I figured she wasn’t actually mad at me. I caught the beginning of another phone call—this time as a middle-aged woman named Hilda something or other—as I left Charlotte to her work.

She knew what she was doing—the corporate sphere was, if anything, easier to manipulate than the cultivation one. I just wished she didn’t have to break so many laws to do it.

I stopped off at the kitchen to make some lunch just in time to watch a slice of bread magically float from its bag onto the top of now fully assembled roast beef sandwich. Lucy’s qi pushed the plate in my direction.

I stared at it. “How did you know I was—”

“You certainly didn’t come in here to check up on Charlotte,” Lucy explained. “She’s usually meditating at this hour.”

“Damnit.” I picked up the sandwich. “I thought I had a good cover.” I took a bite. It was delicious. Of course it was. Lucy’d made it. That was the problem. I swallowed. “Thank you.”

“You’re very welcome,” Lucy chimed.

I made it about a third of the way into the meal before I set the sandwich down for good. Lucy had the good grace not to press me into eating more; she knew I wouldn’t. She kept silent as I snatched the plate before she could and moved to dump the excess in the composter. It’d be recycled into something or other. Sentient or not, ships didn’t waste biomass.

Morning tasks and midday meal behind me, I spared Charlotte one last glance and left the living area behind to retread the way I’d come. Sure, I could’ve very happily whiled away the afternoon reading up on Ilirian or researching how I’d craft a focus or trying to figure out how exactly my Vac Suit technique worked, but I’d had enough retrospection for one day.

Xavier had been sparring alone for long enough.

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