Chapter 17: Wide open Spaces

The battles of Precipice angered and elated us. It left us feeling glad and empty at the same time. We were still kids after all, and even though we admit we are precocious compared to others our age, we still see life through young eyes, and young hearts.

The mighty Sh'kxu technology had been a shell, covering the ultimate truth. Everyone had wondered how a race with such an extreme ability had developed a technological society advanced enough to travel between the stars.

They hadn't.

They had simply latched onto the technology of their captors turned slaves, and with their absolute command of their subjects, demanded knowledge and service.

Through the Dream World, we were able to follow the Light signature of the ship's hull back through time and space, and see the people who called themselves 'The Children'. The words in their own language were 'Moz Tai', as we might say it. Inhabitants of Moc Credeq, their generation ship, they were explorers and collectors, until the day they visited the Sh'kxu home world, and on a wide and open plain, they found, stunned and collected a cluster of Sh'kxu. Later that day, when the Sh'kxu woke up, the nearest Moz Tai became slaves, the first of many non-Sh'kxu slaves to be bound in the generations to come.

The Moz Tai strove, with all their skill to do exactly as their masters commanded. When asked to teach, they did, when asked to demonstrate, they did. But the questions - ah, the devil is in the details, the saying goes, and it was the details unasked that wound up meaning everything. It was the answers never sought that spelled the Sh'kxu doom. After the last of the Moz Tai died, the following generations of Sh'kxu could operate and repair any and every part of the Moc Credeg, and the lesser ships which traveled with her, but they understood not a whit of the how or why of her. On they flew, endlessly efficient, and endlessly ignorant. Until finally they came to Preci.

Destroying the ship-borne Sh'kxu turned out to be far easier and quicker a process than we had imagined. The Wood Furies were horrifically efficient in rooting out the Sh'kxu on board the eight heavily damaged ships. Within what they thought of as their home, they were almost completely helpless in the face of something hostile which could not be coerced. In the end, hundreds of thousands of them died where they stood, unable to comprehend a being who was neither slave or master. Being neither slave or master, the Furies became their doom.

We were glad at last when we were able to return the remainder of them to the planet of the Wood Wise, untainted in their pure, mindless vegetable hunger.

With the ships now being swept in an inch-by-inch follow up pattern by teams of the awakened, accidents happened here and there, and people died. Space was not a safe environment, especially not in ships so badly shattered. It was only going to be a matter of time before they were cleared. When that happened there would still be years of research and investigation ahead. But it would be many years before more than a token amount of time and personnel could be invested in the effort.

As dangerous as space was, it was on Preci that we had the two losses that hit us the hardest. If war is harsh and cruel, then chance can be crueler still.

After having cleared a hydro-electric station in an isolated river gorge, Mike Weiker and a dozen PFF warriors and War Hounds died instantly when a shunt on an electrical relay failed, and a tower support arced white hot, the suddenly molten supports gave way, collapsing it onto a nearby support structure, and sent almost the entire electrical output of the dam's eight massive turbines through the catwalk they had stopped on for a quick break before leaving.

Doc Aillard's death was a more calculated act of war, as a single nameless Preci slave, still under the last desperate compulsion laid down by his Sh'kxu master at a nameless Industrial Salvage complex, managed to hit him in the head with a shot from an industrial laser from almost a quarter mile away. Doc had his head cover down to take a drink of water after what his team had thought was a completed operation.

The war left other marks upon us, though mostly temporary to those we knew well. Ia Sardic and Sheb Halliday, along with eighteen others in their team, were sent to the hospital for several months when a percussion wave from an air burst ruptured their eardrums and caused other tissue damage. It was one of the few times when Mom and Dad showed some personal favoritism, and dropped in and used their Light healing skills on the two of them, shortening their stay by several months.

During war, warriors will die. There is no escaping the brutality of it, and there is no rhyme or reason to its pattern. But that knowledge does not lessen the heartache when you lose a friend.

There were eleven billion confused and mostly non-functional Preci wandering the surface of Precipice, without a clue of what to do next.

Dad, the Legion, the PFF, the volunteers from Taluat and Meadow, not all of them combined could come close to fielding a force large enough to keep all of them safe and healthy while their world returned to some vestige of its former self. Though the losses had been light, there were losses. Five hundred and thirty three Warriors, eighty of them Yaru, and twenty six Falcons, along with all their crew. With all the forces, land air and space, diverted to relief efforts, it was still barely more than 38,000 people.

There were still deaths, still tragedies, still sad stories to last a lifetime.

The infamous Seed of Life, which the Preci had been slaving to prepare for the ship-borne Sh'kxu, turned out to be our biggest surprise victory. The soporific nature of the highly processed final form of the Seed of Life was not naturally present in the grain, and when processed normally, it was an amazingly complete and efficient food source. It was going to take years to get the Preci diet to something approaching a normal variety of foodstuffs, but in the meantime, the Seed of Life was aptly named, and would keep the Preci alive and healthy during the period of transition. Beyond that, it was hoped that it could solve some of the problems we had feeding the hungry on Earth, when the time was right to introduce it.

We sat with Spinner and the Wood Wise beside the stream that ran past Spinner's Dream World home, and we talked about the Preci and their fate.

"We know that millions, perhaps even billions of the Preci will die, even if they do nothing but simply stand and wait for help to come. Not a single living Preci, save those we've rescued to build the army, and the miraculous TeJon, is able to function on anything more than a short term basis without the direction of their master's commands. They were born under a system that has conditioned them so severely that it will be a miracle if even half of those living are saved." Trevor said at one point, after enough light and pleasant conversation had taken place to satisfy Spinner and the Wood Wise's sense of social propriety.

"The Legion, and all the Soul Divers and Spirit Masters combined, working twenty four hours a day will not be sufficient to do PNM dumps, even basic ones, into the Preci in time to save them all." Maia added. "Adding the eight of us to their effort would not even make a measurable difference."

"Mom, Dad and the rest of them will try to save the children first, but even limiting themselves to the children will not allow them all to be saved." Ren added.

"You do not have sufficient numbers, this is true." The Wood Wise said. "But you children have sufficient gifts, and sufficient strength, if you only knew the way."

This set us all off at once, and the Wood Wise stood there, in today's guise as the Scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz, and waited for our outburst to subside. Once were were all quiet again, and looking at him with the question in our eyes, he tilted his head, a little straw falling from the neck as he did, and looked at Spinner. Spinner let him stare for quite a while.

"As usual, my friend the Wood Wise is finding ways to involve me in things I prefer to remain separated from." Spinner said. "My friends, there are things about me that, away from the Dream World, you would find... unpleasant. Perhaps even abhorrent, so I avoid those kinds of contact which might pull back the curtain which hides those aspects of my real self from you."

It was funny he said it that way, since he was currently wearing the Wizard's visage from the Wizard of Oz.

"We understand that you hide a part of yourself from us Spinner. We accept it. But, if it will solve this problem, then we need to know what it is that the Wood Wise are hinting at."

"Very well. I will compromise. I will show one of you. But you must agree before I name one of you that you will accept my choice."

We thought about it for many long moments, and the thought that it might be Ian or Grace, our youngest, left an unpleasant taste in all our mouths, but we accepted.

"Serenity." Spinner said.

Ren had always been the 'mysterious' one of us, the one who couldn't be predicted, who saw things before we did, and thought in ways the rest of us didn't. Her time with Spinner seemed to amplify that aspect of her, but she wore it proudly. And spinner remained our friend when we were done.

But after their session, Ren gave us the tools we needed, and we wove the Dream Stuff and built a path, using TeJon, and Kru, and all the other Preci we had met who had found their way through the battles and the indecision, and doubt and come out whole on the other side. We wove and molded out of the things that existed as pieces of the Dream World. We started with some Still of the Night, and in it bound together threads of Longing and Hope, and sprinkled in bright flecks of Promise and Family. And when we had it built we stained it's framework with shades of Tejon's enduring thoughts, and washed it's surface with bright swathes of Kru's cheery pragmatism.

And when we were done, our creation seemed to fade quietly into the Dream Stuff from which it had come. But the Preci, lost and unformed, hungry and afraid, eventually found sleep, and in their sleep they did dream, and dreaming they were found, and touched and... filled.

Not everyone could be saved of course. Some were beyond hope, untouched by longing, or already wrapped too tightly in a Nightmare from which our Dream could not break them free. A great many were just too weak and tired to respond.

When the People of Preci began waking, and were found to have been given a foothold in reality, and a path to normalcy, it became an official 'miracle', even among those of Precipice, Earth, Meadow and Taluat who were not the type to believe in anything spiritual. It officially became a holiday in all those places, except Earth of course, though those on Earth who knew and remembered observed the day in private, or else joined those they knew on Meadow for the celebration. They called it 'The Day of Grace'. A beautiful obelisk was built on Preci, in the center of the city of New Estirem, and on it, in English, Taluat and Preci, was inscribed a familiar four lines.