Chapter 11: Steel and Light

Several days after the events on Dust, and the 'catch and release' of Gordon Halsey, I sat bolt upright in the middle of the night. That brief moment when Gordon Halsey had instinctively tried to coerce Titan, and the amazing reaction Titan had to the assault had obviously got my subconscious to working overtime.

"What is it?" Ginny asked from beside me in the darkness.

"Something that happened on Dust when we brought Gordon there. In all the excitement I missed something I should have followed up on. I need to go to Aruh in the morning."

"Okay. Now go back to sleep" Ginny said from the darkness.

I sent off a quick thought to Eru, and snuggled back down into bed. With a hand comfortably cupped around Ginny's warm, smooth breast, I let sleep take me.

On Aruh the next day, Titan and I were taken by Mudfoot to the Hurim-built stockade. I saw once we got close that the building was not the crude structure of wooden poles as I had thought, but merely designed to seem so. The building was made of some synthetic material, intended in this case to be able to hold a grown Yaru who did not want to be there.

"This is White Toe Splashing the Cold Water of the Night River." Mudfoot introduced me. You really had to love these descriptive Yaru names.

"And White Toe's crime?" I asked.

"Murder. Out of anger and jealousy, he took the life of another. His life is forfeit, and as the Elders have decreed, he is now yours to deal with. You may not return while he lives."

I thanked Mudfoot and moved to stand beside Titan, to stare at White Toe through the barrier.

<Be ready!> I thought to titan, and jumped us to Dust.

The sudden change of location didn't phase White Toe at all. He must have been preparing for this instant, because he launched himself at Titan immediately, his coat flashing into armor mode in mid jump. We were not there when he landed. I jumped us to the spot White Toe had just left, reorienting us in mid jump so we remained facing White Toe. The Yaru murderer slid to a stop and spun around, snarling in rage as he launched himself at us again.

This time I reached out with my mind and caught him in mid-air, holding him there, five feet off the ground.

"You are here so that we can use you to test something. We do not require your cooperation for this. You will die soon, no matter how you struggle."

I jumped White Toe into the section of the dome where Lark's Bright Song was held, still separated by a barrier that kept him restricted to an area near the outer wall. I signaled Eru with a thought, and several hundred sensors equipped with high-speed motion capture filters went active. As soon as they were, Eru, the twins and Laik Hulin, joined me in a high level fusion.

<<Titan, you will not be able to monitor things safely. Please remain here and do not move.>>

With a flick of remote touch, I dropped the barrier between the Sh'kxu and the Yaru. Like a bolt of Lightning, Lark's Bright Song ran immediately for White Toe. The instant the Sh'kxu got within ten feet of him, White Toe's coat went into that stealth mode I'd seen Titan's do for that second when Gordon had attempted to coerce him.

We watched the visual replay later, in slow motion and from all angles. While it was happening our five person Light-fueled fusion was in the mind and body of White Toe, observing, measuring and recording a different kind of information.

The visual replay showed a very one-sided battle. The Sh'kxu lost his target, and stopped, screeching in frustration. In that moment White Toe simply stretched out his neck, grabbed the Sh'kxu in his jaws, and with a sickening crunch, ended the life of the captured alien.

With our main goal accomplished, our fusion turned to one last task. We took the thoughts and memories of White Toe.

"We have learned what we needed to know." I said to Titan, once we'd dropped out of our fusion.

<Your calls in the middle of the night always turn out to be interesting, Dave. We will work on making this data presentable while you finish the task here.> Eru said in parting.

"Now there only remains White Toe's final fate."

"Let me fight him!" Titan said.

"No Titan. I have no doubt you would prevail, but White Toe knows he will not live long, even if he were to defeat you, so his desperation will give him an edge in the battle. There is no need to expose yourself needlessly when all we are doing is carrying out the sentence of the condemned."

"What will you do to him then?"

"I will give him what he wanted, the right to run free without barriers. I will give him to Dust."

"This planet?"

"Yes. Outside the dome, White Toe will be free. But Dust will not let him live free for long. Its atmosphere will not support life for more than a few hours, and even if it did, the very light from the sun here is deadly, and it too will kill him eventually."

So with Titan watching through my eyes, we gave the freedom of Dust to White Toe. Seeing the barrier of the dome gone, White Toe ran. He ran free for hours across the dunes and dusty plains of Dust, until finally Dust took the freedom back, and the sentence of the Yaru Elders was complete.

"You are an interesting person, Dave McKesson." Titan said at the end. "That was a far kinder death than White Toe would have ever received from the Yaru."

We met that evening in the large meeting room on Obsidian and reviewed the data from the confrontation in the dome. Both that captured by our sensors and what we gathered from our observations while in fusion.

We had the entire 'War Council' there, including all three Legion teams and the Spirit Master teachers and students. I even managed to drag Con out of the Arena to attend. We watched the slow motion video playback of the encounter.

"It seems obvious from what we see here that the Yaru are essentially coercion-proof." Eru said. "This is in no way associated with the defensive reaction of their protective coat. That reaction seems to be an instinctual reaction designed to give the Yaru time to act in finding and attacking the coercion source while maximizing their safety from physical attack."

"The mechanism that provides this defense is biochemical, believe it or not." Laik added as the display changed to show a model of the Yaru brain. "This gland secretes a chemical which is carried by the brain's blood supply throughout the brain, where it coats the synaptic gaps. When anything matching the signature of coercive signals is detected this chemical does a state change."

"This state change of the areas of the synaptic gaps acts like a instant reset." Zaia continued. "Every mental state change from the previous moment is instantly negated, as everything snaps back to the original state."

"There is some concern that this means while assaulted by a coercive field, the Yaru cannot have a new or original thought. They can only act on instinct and existing memories." Riah added. "We are not sure how significant this might be to the Yaru's effectiveness in a battle where there are many Sh'kxu."

"You've heard me mention that the Yaru have a racial memory, and that they recognized Andy and I as Guardians, or 'Walkers', as they call us." I said. "They remember serving in the army of the Guardian's of old, and that information is unaffected by the chemical reset that protects them from coercion."

There was a long silence as everyone looked for a new angle, a missed detail, or some possible flaw in what we had seen. Titan himself broke the silence.

"Guardians, you have found your shock troops, we who call ourselves War Hounds. We can close on this enemy and kill him. When you begin looking for our partners in battle, perhaps you should look for those who can protect us from those things that can strike from a distance, and who can themselves strike from a distance."

The facet of Cascade, and the rolling hills, plains and forests of what would have been Western Europe was where we decided to house our army. Our growing core of Obsidian staff, along with a large number of volunteers from the Taluatan and American settlers of Meadow did the building, assisted by the tools from the Hall of Gifts.

As the building on Cascade progressed, I took Long Night Hunting, Titan and Constantine with me to visit the leaders of the nine other Hunts on Yaru. Titan insisted that Con come with us after meeting him at the meeting.

"It may be a matter of the Yaru senses and our racial memory, but he smells of the Ancient Walkers." Titan said. "No Yaru will question your authenticity with him present."

And so it was that the four of us journeyed to the other Hunts and met with the elders of each. The Great Hunt was declared, and the adult Yaru, and those seeking adulthood answered the call. We set up a gate near each Hunt's 'capital', and built ourselves a recruiting station around it. On Cascade, our camp was loosely divided into ten sections, matching the Hunts of Yaru. We had an Elder volunteer as Camp Leader, and each camp was named for them.

Mudfoot, Longeye, Sharptooth, Springrunner, Skyseeker, Hawknose, BrightRiver, Howler, DawnVoice and Moondancer.

Of course Mudfoot we knew, but it was interesting meeting the rest of these Elders. Free from their traditional duties and the company of their fellow Elders, their behavior began to convince me that Titan was not just building a defense for himself when he told me the practical joke was the highest form of art and entertainment among the Yaru.

One thing I made sure of was that each camp was equipped with an industrial strength sandblaster.

Our nine Elders spent the intervening weeks, before the recruits started coming in learning the basics of life with the Guardians. They visited Obsidian and received the same basic session in the Garden that everyone had. Everyone of them met TeJon, the Preci fugitive we had found at the focus on Precipice.

The decision to pick Cyrus' Uncle Chunk's restaurant near Arlington, Texas was mostly a matter of giving Cyrus an excuse to stop by and see his Uncle. The restaurant did a decent daytime business, but we reserved the entire restaurant for the whole day.