Chapter 3: Kiris Orbit, Kiris Retrieval Station

Antheia Geracimos was ushered without comment away from the Skafti who had called her name, to a bare room with neither window or decoration. A small padded circle in the center of the room suggested a place for rest or meditation, but Antheia was in a mood for neither. There had been something about Gordon Truitt that had attracted her, from the beginning back on Earth aboard the ferry to Skopelos. The attraction had seemed more realistic once they had awakened, and she had found herself in a young woman's body again.

She had always had a knack for reading people, and her reading of the young Brit had been as strong as any she'd had. Most of those she'd formed relationships with in her life had left eventually because they were unable to deal with that knack. There had been some hope that in such a different situation, things might work out differently, but they were being taken down different paths, it seemed, and she didn't yet know where hers would take her.

The edges of the room were lined with soft cushioned benches, long backless couches really, and a spot on one where she could keep the entrance she had come through in front of her seemed a good place to sit and collect her thoughts.

Gordon was obviously a computer person, and with a predilection for advanced math, if what she had learned of him meant anything. He would go into science or technical work somewhere, she was sure. That left the mystery of what the Skafti would want with her. They surely did not need a soup maker in this world of miracle food dispensers! What would most of the people retrieved from Earth do, in the Skafti scheme of things?

"Like you, most of them will join the Iri Var. Your people it seems have a knack for war," a voice said from beside her. Antheia turned to find a being standing at the center of the blue circle. She was so stunned by the arrival, she didn't think to wonder at first how the creature had answered a question that she hadn't spoken aloud.

"I am Dusad. I will be your guide, and I hope, your friend, within the Ken Eic."

"I am Antheia," she answered. As she got the words out, it finally hit her. "Did you just read my thoughts?"

"Read is not the proper term, for your thoughts do not lie open, like the pages of a book," the being said with a nod of its goat-like face. "I did however answer the unspoken question you were asking yourself."

"Is this Ken Eic my benu then?" Antheia asked.

"No. The Ken Eic does not have that status, but we are useful to the beheri, in our way, and so some efforts are allowed us in recruiting those we find who are sensitive. We are each devoted to our benu, but also seek to grow and learn as Ken Eic, and to better follow the path unseen."

Antheia was concerned at first that Dusad seemed to couch everything he said in terms any fake mystic on Earth would have loved. Their conversation was brief, only the time it took for him to lead her to her destination, a docking bay.

"You have been chosen for the Iri Var, as most humans have," Dusad said. "You will meet the rest of those so chosen, and together, you will be sent to an Iri Var training facility."

"Do you know where we are being sent?" Antheia asked.

"Officially, no. Unofficially, yes, but it would serve no purpose to tell you. It would be meaningless to you at this time."

The rest of the people she had been retrieved with, or rather, most of them, appeared then at an entrance at the far end of the corridor.

"We only have a moment," Dusad said. "We will seldom have an opportunity to contact you while you are in training. You will know it is one of us if it should happen."

we will speak to your mind, as I do now. Dusad's word's came into her thoughts, not as if they were spoken words, but as if she had just remembered them.

"In the meantime, during your training, probe your own mind. Examine what you just experienced and seek understanding."

Antheia had barely enough time to nod a somewhat bewildered acknowledgment, and then she was moving with the others into the ship.

The ship was the Calis, a military transport, and their 'quarters', and that was a generous description, consisted of a section of beefy looking sleep fields in a small section of a much larger deck full of sleep fields.

Corporal Rega, a Skafti, was their nominal officer in charge. He made it abundantly clear that he was little more than an escort.

"My purpose is to make sure you make it safely to the training station at Abruni 3, called Ai Ru locally," the corporal said. "You will have to worry about the staff at Kri Masa, but not me. You keep yourselves alive and well fed, and in eight days or so, I say goodbye and good luck."

Kri Masa, it became obvious later, was the name of the Iri Var training facility. Rumors circulated constantly amongst the humans regarding their destination, and as the deck began to fill with other beings along the way, the rumors grew.

"Ghost stories," one of the Norwegians said with disgust. Mads Sindreson, Antheia thought she remembered him saying his name was. "We are like children, trying to scare ourselves by the fires at night."

"We know at least that we are not the only beings capable of having overactive imaginations," Antheia said. "at least half of what we're hearing is coming from other beings around us."

== Ai Ru, Kri Masa Training Center ==

The Ken Eic agent, Dusad, may have briefly lifted the veil on new mysteries and held out the promise of something greater beyond it, but Antheia had no time to ponder it. She was too damned busy learning to be a soldier. It was very different than she had assumed it would be at first. Yes, they had to learn to shoot weapons, and use explosives, and drive a variety of military vehicles, but it was a very different process than she had been used to, thanks to the Skafti learning technology. Their days were spent processing and applying what their minds had garnered during the previous sleep period.

"The knowing of a thing is not the same as having the knack for using it," Sergeant Imni lectured them. "You must use what you wake up knowing in an intelligent way."

Antheia spent her first two weeks as a member of a field unit called 'Mecur', along with twenty six other beings. Mecur simply meant 'seventh' in Ancient Skafti. Mecur was further broken down into three nine person teams called a Sep, Also Ancient Skafti, and meaning 'foot'. She was one of nine people in the second Sep of three that made up the Mecur unit, and there were nine other units like it. Her Sep might as well have been a single beast with nine stomachs, they were so seldom apart.

There were a fair number of Ormins, the hairless humanoid species that humans most closely resembled, and for which their species type was named. In Skafti terms, they were all 'orminoids', not humanoids. In some ways that was the key piece of data that shifted Antheia's perspective on her place in the universe. Within a large interstellar society, itself only a part of a larger galactic milieu, she was just a new variety of orminoid, nothing special.

The eat-sleep-move-as-one period of their training finally came to an end, but not with an announcement or ceremony of any kind. The instructors simply began screaming new orders one day, and they obeyed them.

They were broken up into teams of different sizes, depending on the exercises, and pitted against each other. Some days they fought with other Seps, some days against them. One day it was capturing a communications post, the next it was defending a supply depot. They fought on foot through city streets and jungles, empty deserts and dense forests. They fought with pulse rifles and they fought hand to hand.

"Ren, there's movement in the tree line," came the whispered voice of one of the sentries.

"Cell check!" Corporal Ren called down the line in a whisper of her own. Antheia passed the whispered command on down the line and checked the charge on her pulse rifle. Just under eighty three percent. She was in pretty good shape, having spent the morning at the rear of their line getting the mess tent set up. While she had been busy making soup and baking bread, the rest of her unit fought a holding action against a strike team trying hard to overrun their position. It overlooked a pass through the hills, and would be advantageous for whoever held it.

"Eyes up!" came the call. Antheia lifted her pulse rifle over the retaining wall and let her eyes come up behind it, scanning the distant tree line. All she could see was utter blackness, mottled with patches of almost-utter gray. Moments later the gray and black vagueness resolved itself into a line of warriors advancing on their position through the cover of the darkness. Then the shooting began again.

-oOo-

Antheia worked hard, as did the rest of their class, and when they had finished the Iri Var version of basic training, she was proud to have finished the course with honors, or at least the Skafti equivalent.

She found she wasn't alone. Eighty percent of the humans in the class finished with honors as well.

"Mads, Mosa, did you find the link I pointed you to?"

"Yes, Ed and Kristy left a message. They sounded hopeful," Mosa Obukwe said in Skafti.

"There's more than that. This morning I got a new message from Gordon Truitt. He's gone into the science and technical benu, the Maga. He's set up some resources on the datanet for us all to share."

"You agree then, with Ed and Kristy, that its important that we work towards preserving humanity?" Ted asked.

"I do," Antheia answered. "We've all got a few years to go, getting ourselves established within the beheri, but once we have our collective heads above water, we'll need to begin in earnest."

"Breeding?" Mosa asked with a grin.

"Yes, and before you ask, the answer is no."

Both men laughed, but Antheia knew she hadn't given the answer either man was hoping to hear.

There had been fifty humans, more or less, in their 'class' at Kri Masa. The incoming class overlapped theirs by a few days, and there were five hundred humans in that class. Rumor said that those who entered the Iri Voch trained here as well, but they must have had separate facilities, because Antheia never saw one, though there were occasional signs of beings training in groups that were unfamiliar to any of them.

"There are a lot more," one of the new group said. "We saw other groups, but they didn't come with us."

In the brief amount of time they had to interact with the incoming group, they shared what they knew of humanity's fate and future. They spoke of the datanet, and the links where they could find out more. Somewhere, Gordon Truitt had access to more, or perhaps just the understanding to find it, and he had been sharing it with Ed and Kristy Bell. Antheia saw brief messages on the net with Gordon's signature, but for the most part, she relied on Ed and Kristy's regular messages, plucking out phrases here and there that stood out, for some reason. He could be quite poetic, in his way.

The Skafti have chosen us to be the reapers of souls. We stand on the great field of flowers and they choose which shall live and which shall die, and we are the hand that plucks them.

From our beginnings on Earth, we are reborn, and this birth too is likely to be painful and perilous. But once reborn, what shall we become?

Something in Ed Bells words seemed to resonate, and not just with Antheia. There was something in Ed's past that seemed to mesh with parts of the Skafti philosophy, and the requests for more information began to build. It seemed to draw the survivors of Earth in a way no one understood.

Word was that the retrieved humans now numbered in the hundreds of thousands, and if what they heard from Gordon was accurate, they were being kept in their sleep fields for long stretches so they could be run through Kri Masa in manageable groups.

"It appears, based on what we've learned through the net, and confirmed by the number of us in the class just starting, that the Skafti have decided that humans are the very definition of Iri Var," Mads said.

"Possibly the same is true for the Iri Voch," Fred Delgado added. "Captain Ed can't tell us how many have been selected for the Iri Voch, but he says the percentages are shifting."

"Whatever that means," someone muttered.

"Some of us are making it into other benu," Antheia said. "We're not all being selected for the Iri Var and the Iri Voch. Gordon has risen the quickest, but even he seems to believe that he's still on some sort of probation."

"He's going to be our savior?" Mosa asked. "Are you letting your feelings get in the way? We all know you have some feelings for him."

"That possibility never made it past the exploratory stages Mosa, and I know where that comment is coming from, so we can just drop it. The point is we don't know where its going to come from, so we need to be as ready as we can be. It could be Gordon, it could be Ed Bell. It could be someone we don't even know about."

"I'd put my money on Ed," Sam Cruz said. You see how much in awe most folks are of the Iri Voch in general."

"And all that stuff from him about the Yoeme and the Skafti philosophy have gotten a lot of attention," Fred Delgado added.

"Attention can be a good thing," Mads said. "It can be a bad thing too. Antheia is right. We need to put away the paranoia, and work on being in the position to do whatever we can when the time is right. At the moment, that just means being as good at what we've been asked to do as we can be."

== Mar Chine Hills, Retici IV ==

The Omicin Brigade, Third Division, First Advance Corp had been on the ground for three weeks. The resistance in the hills surrounding Mar Chine was proving to be a tough nut to crack. The Skafti high command, as usual, had denied requests for orbital bombardments to weaken the defenses. The emplacements were strategically and tactically well designed and laid out. The camouflage was effective and the hardened sites, when found, were difficult to penetrate.

"Commander, we're making progress, but its slow. We've been taking out a position every couple of days, but the cost is high, and we're going slower than we might otherwise to keep our losses as low as is practical."

"Captain Geracimos, we understand that this is not easy, you don't have to make excuses," Commander Flesthej said in a dry voice.

"Begging your pardon Commander, but these are not excuses. I've asked repeatedly for permission to ramp up the force we're bringing to bear, but we've been denied repeatedly. These are, once again, the reasons why there is a need."

"Relax Captain," the elder Skafti said. "As it happens, Captains Delgado and Bebeite agree with your assessment and have been making the same arguments. High command, as it happens, agrees with you as well."

"Well then what's the holdup? We've got good soldiers dying out there!" Antheia said with some venom.

"Once again, calm down Captain, and that's an order!" the Skafti said with a little steel in his own voice.

"My apologies, Commander," Antheia replied quickly.

"Your anger is understandable Captain, but it is misplaced. While high command agrees with your assessment of the situation, it disagrees with your recommended solutions. We have brought a solution of a different kind to bear."

Mar Chine was one of those problems the Skafti often ran into. A planetary government and economy was brought into the fold, with pockets of beings, fiercely independent before the Skafti arrived, refusing to participate. The planetary government had requested Skafti aid in rooting them out of their strongholds, and the Dur Vai had agreed, with limitations.

While battles had been ongoing, a search for political solutions had continued unabated, but without success. These beings were admirable in their way, but they had been a drain on the planetary government's coffers before the Skafti had arrived, and there was no doubt in their minds that they would continue to be, even if they acquiesced to the government's demands for unity.

During her time in the shuttle alongside Commander Flesthej, she had wondered what solution he was going to offer them. The Operational HQ was a few miles from where they had met, on the front lines of the latest skirmish, and Captains Delgado and Bebeite were in the operations room waiting for them. The two men gave the Commander a sharp salute, something the Skafti commanders didn't require, but which Antheia thought secretly pleased them. She could sense the warmth radiating from the old Skafti over their gesture.

The two men were carefully neutral with Antheia. Both had been her occasional lovers in the past, and there was always some hesitation over what their current status might be with her. Fred was supposed to have found someone he wanted to settle down with, so she could only assume his neutrality was for Franco's sake.

The two men were not alone. There were four others in the room with them, one human and three others whose species Antheia wasn't familiar with. The human though she recognized immediately.

"Ed Bell!" she said out loud.

"Nice to see you again Antheia," he said with a smile.

"Iri Voch?" she said, spinning to regard Commander Flesthej with a glare. "You could have just told me you were going to call in the Iri Voch!" She said it with some heat, but she was grinning as she said it, and fortunately the Skafti was used to human facial expressions by this time.

"I could have. But then you'd have had no excuse to visit with Sergeant Bell."

"Well, thank you," Antheia said, her grin softening into a warm smile. "You enjoyed this whole show though, didn't you?"

"Of course I did. We Skafti may insist we aren't fond of displaying our emotions, but we don't pretend we don't enjoy seeing the displays of others," the Skafti Commander said with a laugh. "Now, I'm going to go spend some time with the local politicians, let them buy me lunch and reassure them that the Dur Vai and the high command are always looking out for them. Sergeant Bell, do you need anything more from me while you're here?"

"No sir, thanks for the lift, and the nice introduction," Ed said with a smile.

"Very well then, I'll let you and your team find its own way home then."

Once the Commander and his bodyguards had left, Antheia found herself sitting at a table with her two fellow Captains and the four Iri Voch.

"Sergeant?" she asked.

"There aren't really ranks in the Iri Voch, so we're all Sergeants. Its intended to garner respect from officers and enlisted men in the Iri Var, but we all know that's not really needed. Its really to give old military types like the Commander a proper placeholder for their tongues when they're talking to us."

Ed's three companions laughed, with a combination of a hiss and a rough thrum that sounded more like a cough than anything else.

"This is Piet, Deff and Lios, my teammates," Ed said. "They're Argantans, and the backbone of the Iri Voch."

The group exchanged greetings, and when that wound down, Antheia suggested they get their own lunch and talk while they ate. As they stood at the food dispenser waiting for their turn, Ed suggested she order the roast palvak that Piet had ordered ahead of them.

"These Argantans are as fond of burned meat as we are, and this is as good as any Texas grilling I've ever had," Ed said. "But get your own vegetables. The Argantan stuff is like eating drywall compound at its best, and you don't want to know about the worst."

The meat was delicious, with a crisply burned outer crust, wildly seasoned with something Antheia couldn't identify, but really liked, and the meat was melt-in-your-mouth tender and juicy. Much lighter than beef, more like the thigh meat from a Godzilla-sized turkey, but with the kind of marbling that she was used to from prime cuts of beef. She ordered boiled baby red potatoes and butter to go with it, and the combination was fantastic.

The conversation was personal to start, Ed asked to save the business for the end.

"Talk to me about this Yoeme stuff. I've read what you've written, and its interesting."

"I'm finding it a little strange how much interest so many people seem to have. It's just something I learned about as a kid. I was raised in a Catholic family, but I had a lot of exposure to the Yoeme philosophy from our Yaqui housekeeper and her husband, and there's a little overlap due to the strange influence the Jesuits had, followed by some reinforcement from the Franciscans later on down the road. These influences brought Easter and Lent to the Yoeme."

"It seems like a strangely mashed together religion," Antheia observed.

"It is, when viewed as a religion," Ed said. "but that's the trick really, the Yoeme don't have a word for religion in their language you know. They borrow words from Spanish, but that's mostly so they can communicate with outsiders in a way that makes sense to the outsiders."

"So its not a religion then?" Franco asked.

"Not as they see it," Ed said. "Its just the truth of things, the reality of existence."

"How can they simply add things like Lent and Easter?" Fred asked.

"Because their philosophy is a supernatural one. It doesn't depend on logic or reason, as most western philosophies do. Anything which resonated in their physical existence found a counterpart in the supernatural, and since logic and reason aren't required, the lack of it is not important."

Three faces stared back at him, somewhat blankly.

"Look, most of this is based on my own, geeky musings during a solitary childhood and a less-than-admirable adolescence," Ed said. "I'm not sure why its so fascinating to all of you, but there are some convenient connections to some of the Skafti beliefs that sort of explain why others are."

"I guess I'm just curious," Antheia said with a chuckle.

Once the personal conversations were over, they got down to business, and Ed asked for details on the current situation, and any intel they had on the location and movement of all the known leaders of the renegade forces.

"We need you to plan and launch a coordinated assault on these four installations within the next 30 Tan," Sergeant Lios said, once the briefing had finished.

"We will each need to accompany an advance scout team into those four areas, and be in position 2 Tan before the assault," Sergeant Piet said."

"Your advance teams will lose contact with us once we're in position. They shouldn't try to find us, or communicate with us. There will be no communications with us until some time after your assault is under way, and then we will contact you."

"How serious an assault do you want?" Antheia asked. "Is this just a feint, or are you bringing down the walls Jericho style?"

Ed laughed, but the three Argantans looked perplexed.

"I don't think biblical references are going to go very far in this brave new world," Ed said with a laugh.

"I guess not. Where's Kristy, by the way?"

"Kristy and I never work as part of the same team," Ed said with a frown. "Too much concern that it would impact on our performance. The safety of a teammate should never outweigh the mission."

"That's too bad," Antheia said.

"No, its probably better this way anyway," Ed said, then his frown brightened. "We'll get to work together once this mission is over though. We're getting assigned to some project Gordon Truitt is working on, and its non-military all the way."

"I heard Gordon has some kind of project in the works. Some new wrinkle in the subspace wave field theory or some such."

"That's pretty much all we know about it too," Ed said.

"But there's a saying in the Iri Voch... ," Gordon said.

" ... No mission an Iri Voch is assigned to is free of danger," the three Argantans all quoted at once.

A day and a half later, the assault began. The first shot was fired an hour before first light, and Ed and his team, each accompanying a different scout unit, disappeared without a trace. The attacks were concentrated on known sally points, but dedicated recon teams were assigned to observation duties on each front, in the hopes that other, previously unnoticed entrances might be spotted.

Six hours later, the four Iri Voch were back with the scout teams and were quickly routed back to the Iri Var HQ. Three hours after that, word came from the Mar Chine rebels requesting a parley.

By dinner time the next evening, the resistance was done, the resistance forces had surrendered and the Mar Chine bases had been opened and occupied by Iri Var forces. Not one of the four leaders of the resistance were at the bargaining table, and any mention of them was met with angry silence.

Antheia didn't ask Ed or any of the other Iri Voch if the assassination of the four leaders had been their task, but she suspected it, and when others did ask, something told her it was the right supposition. The Ken Eic side of her kicked in a little, and she shuddered at this sign of it.

"You will know without information, and understand without knowledge. You will see beyond lies and hear truths in the silence," Dusad had told her in his pedantic, oracular tones, during one of their earlier conversations. "You will fear yourself long before others learn to."

'Perhaps being part of something not considered important enough to be its own benu makes you take on an air of self-importance.' she had thought to herself.

Regardless of the shortcomings she saw in her Ken Eic mentor, she couldn't dispute the fact that under his tutelage she had definitely developed some increased sensitivity with the quirky psychic side of herself, and perhaps some clearer understanding of what she did feel when it kicked in.

-oOo-

Antheia was surprised to find that the Iri Var High Command, and the Dur Vai military council felt she was adequate to the task of administering the peace that fell on Retici IV. She moved from her sub-commander status under Flesthej to that of liaison to the planetary government. Commander Flesthej moved on to some other holo-op elsewhere in Skafti space, Dassi III, she'd heard. Space pirates, or some such glamorous foe.

Retici IV was known as Marsom by the locals, a humanoid species somewhat reminiscent of the Argantans. The planet was almost classically terrestrial, with a single moon, though a moon that was considerably smaller than Earth's. The temperate bands were small and much closer to the poles than their Earth counterparts and the tropical and subtropical regions were large. The Marsomi, as the race called itself, was born of the tropics, but their most advanced societies were all 'border' states, existing at the edges of the tropics where the jungles faded into the hilly forests and grasslands.

The Marsomi had been active in the past hundred years in reclaiming the jungles and reducing the footprint of Marsomi technology on them. The Skafti had negotiated their treaty with this need in mind, and a good part of Antheia's day-to-day duties involved coordinating the transition of certain parts of Marsom's transportation, building and energy industries over to Skafti technology and products.

It was difficult when those sectors saw themselves being co-opted out of their markets, but everywhere she could, Antheia saw to it that those entities who were most a part of the old, and most affected, had a part to play in the new.

"Master Gelf, I understand your frustration completely. Of course you want to feel you are doing more, any reasoning being with a sense of self worth would," Antheia said to the former director of Crimati Motor Works. "I thought we had done an excellent job of ensuring a minimum of layoffs and the transition times are still holding to the scheduled time line we had agreed on in advance of the switchover, aren't they?"

"Yes, they are, and the layoffs have been even less of an impact than we had feared, but Gab's Teat!, it doesn't mean there aren't still problems adjusting!"

"Of course. As I said, I understand. Listen, my home world doesn't even exist anymore, except as a broken and shattered ball of rock. If it weren't for the Skafti, I would not only have nothing, I wouldn't even exist. I am trying to earn my way and make a place for myself and for others of my kind who they rescued. Do I sometimes feel like it is impossible for me to give back as much as I've been given? Absolutely!" Antheia said, all the while trying to stifle a laugh over the phrase 'Gab's Teat'.

"I can appreciate that," the Marsomi replied.

"Trust me when I say that we've barely scraped the surface in our efforts to identify meaningful trade items. You would do well not to dismiss the importance of the ones we already have identified. The Semberian fruit woods are looking to be very popular with certain segments of the Skafti sphere. The pearl blossoms you use as jewelry and decorative materials is, as far as I know, unique, and being snapped up as fast as it can be made available, especially on Tenerif. The locals there are agog over the stuff."