Chapter 8: Minds of Iron

Thoughts of steel. That's the impression I had of the Sh'kxu.

TeJon proved to be a wealth of information about the aliens and the Preci, as his people called themselves, but it was all at least fifty years out of date. Even old information is a start, and slowly we pieced together a picture of the aliens and their impact on Precipice.

Two hundred years ago they had appeared in the skies above Precipice, and began bombing without warning or prelude of any kind. This was not some real life version of the movie independence Day, they did not crowd the skies with huge ships with impenetrable shields. They dropped their bombs from orbit, safely above the effective range of the Preci military aircraft and weapons. The people of Precipice had not ventured even so far as their own moon, and had only a small number of peaceful satellites in orbit, aides to navigation, weather, and communications.

Every major city and military installation on the entire facet was bombed into oblivion within the first year. Still the ships remained in their high orbit, hunting hidden bases and pockets of resistance. This lasted for five years.

When the alien ships finally slipped into lower orbit, they were met by a barrage of missiles, long kept in reserve in underground locations, but the attempt was frustrated by completely accurate antimissile fire. The hidden locations where the missiles had originated were tracked and bombed, practically before the missiles they'd launched had been destroyed themselves.

Only then did the troop ships begin to land, and the true nature of the aliens become known.

This had been the story we had heard from TeJon, and which he shared with the Director's at our emergency meeting.

We were fortunate, with the urge to 'do something now' pervading the room during that meeting, that A.J. McKesson and Eldo Lev were not as young as their current appearances made them out to be. Men who have experienced a long life and contemplated its end are not prone to making rash decisions.

Even old Tejon understood. "We cannot hope to undo a horror that has been two hundred years in the making in an hour or a day. Better to take our time now, so we can do it right."

Our first step was to expand and realign the Legion. We created a third team consisting of the four people we knew with the most military and combat experience. Chet, Cyrus and Tony and Sylvia Herrera became Team Three. Ariana Burgess took Chet's place on Team one and to fill in for Cyrus on Team Two we tapped Byl Thron.

Until we began any kind of full scale military operations, Team One and Team Two would continue their duties as usual. Team Three we gave the role of gathering intelligence and formulating a plan for the freedom of Precipice. The development of a force for large military options became a big question, and it was one I wasn't sure yet how we would answer.

I did something I hadn't felt the need to do in a long time. I sat down with my Dad and asked for his advice.

"Dad, I don't know where to start on this one. I need help." Dad was a Director, he knew the details, as I did. He thought for a long time after I finished, before speaking himself.

"Dave, when did Lincoln make the Emancipation Proclamation?"

"!863." I answered automatically.

"And when did the Civil War end?"

"1865."

"Over 150 years later, have we eliminated the problems the Emancipation Proclamation sought to address?"

I thought about that.

"Politically? It depends on whose version of Lincoln's intent you adhere to I suppose. Socially and morally? I suppose not, if the elimination of bigotry and prejudice were the intent."

"Martin Luther King used the phrase 'I have a Dream' instead of 'I have a goal' for a reason. He knew that the ultimate end would not happen in his lifetime. Instead he dreamt of what his struggle might achieve for his children or his children's children. He saw change happening across generations and lifetimes." Do you see where I"m headed here?"

I did, but it was a difficult shift in my thinking to make. I had to stop thinking of rescuing the people who were alive on Precipice today, and begin thinking about how to free her future generations.

Dad must've caught it written on my face, because he hugged me, and I saw he too had tears in his eyes.

"You are not signing death warrants here Dave, you are seeking a path to the future. A future where these people are free again."

It took us two months to decide we had enough information to safely take one of the Sh'kxu.

To visualize a Sh'kxu, think of an ostrich. Now imagine that ostrich had arms instead of wings and a hump the size of a basketball where the ostrich's long neck would have been. Imagine also that the hump had its own set of smaller arms, and on top of that hump imagine you saw a cone of white feathers, and inset into that cone were four eyes. Bright green eyes, with dainty delicate eyelashes.

They had a highly sophisticated communications technology, and used a modulated gravity wave carrier that allowed almost instantaneous point-to-point communications, but they did not monitor themselves, or track each other's locations, and now and then, one of them died in some stupid accident.

Our arranged stupid accident cost two Preci lives, and destroyed a grain silo in what would have been Fairview Heights, Illinois on Earth. The explosion was spectacular, even deafening, and certainly deadly for a couple of unfortunate farmers who fate put too close to the blast.

For our prison we used a facet I had found years earlier and designated as 'Dust'. A dry, barely breathable atmosphere and an occasional thin wisp of a cloud gave false hope of normalcy, but Dust was a dead world, its oceans dried and gone, and its surface an endless sea of dust and rock. Utterly, utterly lifeless.

We built an open dome of force fifty feet across, similar to the honeymoon retreat we had once built on Meadow's moon. Inside that dome we made breathable air. Inside that dome the harsh and ever present solar storm that had brought Dust to its dry end was held at bay.

Inside that dome we jumped our stolen Sh'kxu.

Thoughts of Steel, I thought.

We five stood, in the Light, and held him with our thoughts, unmoving. If any one of us had gotten within a body's length of him, we would have been lost.

The Sh'kxu mind was an eternal and unblinking generator of coercive force. A generator of awesome, incredible, irresistible force. And it was always on!

When two Sh'kxu met, one of them took control. It was not an option, no decision was made to coerce or be coerced, There was no protocol. It was completely automatic, completely unnoticed, as natural to them as breathing. When a Sh'kxu met a mind that was not Sh'kxu, he had a slave, when he met a mind that was Sh'kxu, he had a slave, or else was a slave himself.

A Sh'kxu's best weapon was proximity, so natural selection made them fast. A Sh'kxu's best defense was his wit, so natural selection made them smart. With our joined minds we wondered at just how close to the edge of extinction must these creatures have skated along the way to achieving a technological society. Given the nature of their existence, to have become this starfaring race without destroying themselves was almost admirable.

Amazingly, despite the unstoppable strength of their 'zone of coercion', they were utterly ungifted. Our captive couldn't feel even our most heavy-handed efforts to sift through his thoughts.

We almost had to stop the first time the phrase 'zone of coercion' sprang into our thoughts. Ginny and I had been big fans of the Legendary author and Space Opera icon E.E. 'Doc' Smith, and had read his entire Lensman series multiple times. We had compared ourselves to the heroes and heroines of his stories on more than one occasion, and that phrase had such a Doc Smith over-the-top feel that we almost laughed when it sprang out of our combined mind.

Our captive's name was Lark's Bright Song. There was no other way to translate it. He had been born and raised on Precipice and was only thirty years old. He had never been to the ships in orbit, and had no expectation that he ever would. He was in charge of Grain storage in region 22093. The growing, harvesting, grinding and shipping of the Seed of Life to the great ship in its far orbit was the high purpose of every Precipice born Sh'kxu. Lark's Bright Song had 5000 Preci slaves and five Sh'kxu 'wives'.

Once we understood that the Sh'kxu mind was defenseless against any of the awakened, we shifted the task of keeping our prisoner immobile to Team Three. With that burden removed we were able to dive more deeply into the mind of Lark's Bright Song. We took his language, and every memory and thought he had ever experienced. When we had that we began to explore his brain and body.

When a mental joining such as ours holds an internal dialog, it is not quite the same as talking to oneself, but it is close.

<<Here, and here.>> Ginny directed our senses. <<These are the structures that generate their coercive field.>>

<<They're just nerve clusters! Its not a brain function at all!>>

<<There would be no sneaking up on these creatures during their sleep cycle. These organs do not appear to have a dormant phase.>>

We worked until we sensed our approaching exhaustion, and we finally broke out of our Light fusion

"I don't think I can actually replicate their spoken language with my vocal chords, but I do not want him to know we can send our thoughts into his mind, so that rules out mental speech. Any ideas?

Cyrus was the inspired thinker in the group today.

"How about that Sonox thing that Con built for Jeni? Isn't that what its supposed to do, allow you to produce the sounds you can't make?"

"We'll come back with one in the morning. We're all dead tired, to the point where Light boosts are barely having an effect."

We jumped back to Obsidian, sending a quick thought to Shelaana that we were jumping straight to our room for a four hour nap, and asking her to wake us if we weren't up in time for dinner.

Exhaustion claimed me before I could even muster a pretense of other bedtime activities. Even so, I think Ginny was asleep before me.

The next morning, before breakfast, I gave Con a shout and asked him if he had any more of the Sonox device's he had built for Jeni.

"A simple matter! He said. "Would you prefer it to tie in to your suit's Comm suite? We can produce a version that will fit in the palm of your hand if we let the comm suite handle the actual audio output."

I did, He did, and so I had one of my own in very short order. Of course there is no hiding things from Andy and Serenity. They both knew we had captured one of the aliens yesterday, and were curious, as usual. At breakfast, we were asked a million questions, Andy begged and pleaded to come with us. Serenity said nothing, but I knew she was simply biding her time and letting Andy test the waters. To show them the seriousness of what we were about and that it was too dangerous to allow them anywhere near our captive, we gave them all our memories of the alien exam.

"Even our group of five, fully linked and in the Light would have found it difficult to resist these creature's coercive field if we had been close enough to feel its effects. You are staying home!" Ginny finally said, putting her maternal foot down.

Andy fumed over the rest of his breakfast, but Ren just gave us one of her little Mona Lisa smiles. Sometimes I really did wonder about my daughter. She was far more the mystery to me than her mother had been.

We gathered on Obsidian, and I tested the Sonox a little before we made the jump.

"Hey Boss, I've been thinking." Chet said after the demonstration.

"What's gnawing at you today, Chet, and please don't call me boss!"

"Well, the Legion is expanding, and you have three groups of us now, and we get to be called Team Three, but what about you spirit masters? Are you going to have names for your groups? Are you guys going to be like 'Mental One' or something."

Even the snickers from the twins didn't prevent yet another niggling detail to worm its way into my brain.

"Suit up, link up, lets get ready to go." I said without answering Chet's question. "Here's what I want to try to do today. I want him free to move, but restricted to a ten foot circle at the center of the dome. Can you guys manage that?"

"Sure, if you allow us a body thickness margin of error." Cyrus answered.

"Absolutely, and I will not come close to approaching that ten foot area, believe me. We will not be running a tight Light fusion ourselves, we will only be in a normal tight link. This morning is not interrogation, this is diplomacy."

"Do you really think diplomacy can work with these creatures?" Zaia asked.

"No, I think it will fail utterly. But we will try, because we are not them."

Linked and ready, we reached out with our senses to Dust, and found our prisoner pacing the edges of the dome. We jumped him to the center, and the rest of the group began their task while I approached within twenty feet of him, my mind already in his, monitoring his thoughts.

"Peace to you Lark's Bright Song. I am Dave McKesson."

His reaction to being addresses in his native tongue was impressive. The limp feathers that hung from his body went stiff, puffing him up suddenly, and his larger set of arms waved wildly.

"Tell me what you know of this place. Tell me how I came here. Tell me how is it possible for slaves to speak as Sh'kxu. Tell me what you intend to do to me."

The Sh'kxu it seemed were incapable of asking questions. There was no way in their language to ask. Every sentence was either a statement or a demand. The closest they could come to a question was to demand information.

"This place is a dead world we call Dust. We brought you here with a thought, just as we kept you from moving yesterday, and just as we keep you within a small area today. We are not slaves, but free beings, as the Preci were before you came to their world and took that freedom from them. I speak as Sh'kxu because it is a simple thing, easy to learn. You are here to teach us about the Sh'kxu."