Destiny Abounds (Starlight Saga Book 1) (27 page)

Prisoner 286 made a vague motion and the pillow drifted slowly aside. She peered around it with a sarcastically raised eyebrow. “Um, I think a better question is why you don’t know what the Hel Kinetics are.”

Merlo eyed her, and tried to decide whether to sit back down or continue to get up. She especially eyed the strange glow around the Prisoner’s hand—similar to the pillow, like all the light was refracting, warping, and almost reversing its color and contrast. “Know what
what
are?”

286 sighed and “dropped” the pillow. Her hand almost immediately stopped semi-glowing. “Okay. Just wow. So, if you don’t know what Kinetics are, you must be really,
really
oblivious, or you’re not from around here.” She cut her eyes sharply, consideringly, at Merlo.

Merlo sighed as well. “It’s the second one. I’m, well, like you said, I’m not from around here.” She hesitated, considering. In the end, she didn’t really see how it could matter much anymore. “And by around here, I mean these clusters.”

286 kept eyeing her for a long moment, and Merlo figured she was probably deciding whether to believe her or not. “So how’d you end up here, then?” 286 relaxed back, and Merlo relaxed as well, in relief. She didn’t really have any way to prove what she said, and didn’t want the issue of her origins to come between her and other people more than it had to.

“Short version? My people sent a ship through a temporary slipstream trying to contact anyone that might be on the other side. I was the pilot. But I didn’t do well enough, and my ship got torn up when the slip collapsed on top of us.” She sighed again, deeper and more heartfelt this time, trying to push back against the vague sadness that distantly gripped at her. “Then we stumbled into Urebai’s planetary defenses and our IFF failed, so they blew my ship apart, and everybody but me died.” The last half of it just fell awkwardly out of her mouth once she started.

286 leaned back, looking impressed. “Huh, wow. You got blown up over my old house. That’s neat.” Merlo glanced up at her sharply, a bit of incredulity in her eyes. “Or, well, I guess it kind of sucked, too. But
you
didn’t die, so that’s awesome, right?”

Merlo found her gaze drifting back down toward the bedsheets. “Sure, I guess.” She shrugged one shoulder. “Your turn. So what are Kinetics?”

286 snorted lightly, drawing her other leg up onto the bed and crossing them. “Two things, really. It’s an ability, but it’s also what they call people with that ability.”

“So, it’s a thing you can do? Like what you were doing a second ago? What was that?”

“Yeah. Kinetics, when you get down to it, is the manipulation of dark matter and dark energy to manipulate the rest of the universe. It manifests in ways we can easily see by warping or altering other forces, like gravity or potential energy. But, when it first surfaced, people didn’t know all that.” 286 flexed her hand, and an aura surrounded it.

At first, Merlo couldn’t tell what she was doing, but then she saw where 286’s gaze was fixed on a point past her, and turned at the waist enough to see her room’s metal table and chair floating in midair, seemingly free of the constraints of the ship’s simulated gravity. “Hey! Put those down!”

Prisoner 286 grinned broadly and released them, the pair of suspended objects thumping abruptly to the floor. “The most basic disciplines, the things people usually manifest first and master easiest, seemingly manipulate kinetic and potential energy. Therefore, Kinetics.”

Merlo leaned forward, heavily interested. “What can you do with it?”

In response, the rough looking criminal had a good, long laugh. Merlo waited it out. “What can
I
do with it? I’m probably not the best choice to give you a good perspective.” She started laughing again.

Merlo raised an eyebrow, but the woman kept laughing for at least a solid minute. Again, she just waited it out, too interested to do anything else. “Why not?” She asked when 286 finally calmed down a bit.

“Because I’m not just any Kinetic, I’m the most powerful Kinetic. I can do stuff no one else can.” Prisoner 286 drew herself up to her full height without standing, straightening her back and looking kind of down at Merlo with a toothy, crooked grin and a possibly crazed gleam in her eye. “As for what’s common, there are several different disciplines it’s split into.” She seemed to slowly relax again, sinking back down onto the softness of the bed, taking the pillow Merlo had thrown her way and tucking it behind her back.

“There are ten, in fact.” 286 continued, ticking the numbers off on her fingers as she spoke. “Stasis, gravity, force, enhancement, aegis, instability, dampening, translocation, pyrokinesis, and vibration. Almost nobody can do them all, or even more than a couple, especially without a lot of training.” She grinned even wider.

“Except you, I guess? Is that it, that you can do all of them?” Merlo guessed expectantly.

286 smiled slyly back at her, almost leering as she looked her over and locking eyes intently with her once again. Merlo barely suppressed another shiver. “Nope. Just more than most. Also, I invented an eleventh discipline: neural. It’s mostly internal manipulation, though. But no one else’s been able to mimic it yet.” The Prisoner’s expression was fierce and proud.

“So, that’s what makes you so special and awesome, then?”

“That and the fact that I’m
far
more powerful.” 286 raised both hands and gripped them in fists. They were outlined in the strange, non-color almost instantly, and an odd, sphere-like thing that light didn’t properly sink into began to form between her and Merlo. In barely a second, Merlo saw where her hair, clothes and loose bits of her cover began to drift toward it.

“Kinetics are generally categorized into classes one to five.” 286 told her over the tiny dark singularity warping the light and space between them. “I’m a class six.” An edge of Merlo’s plain white sheet rose as if on strings toward the little singularity, and 286 released her fists just as the cover reached up and touched it. The singularity popped out of existence and the sheet fell to the bed, the minor pull Merlo had felt on her body suddenly dissipating. She noted with a flat expression that the edge of her bed cover had been eaten away by whatever forces the warped space had contained.

“There many of those?” She didn’t exactly trust the woman, but she did believe her. She was being serious. That or she was just plain crazy. Merlo couldn’t deny the whole Kinetics thing, though, which lent a lot of believability to her story. And, now that she considered it, maybe it explained what Branwen talked about when she said people on her planet had strange powers, too.

“Nope.” 286 grinned that crooked grin at her again. She hadn’t really ever stopped.

“Just you?” Merlo asked as she watched the other woman curiously, but 286 didn’t answer, just kept grinning. “So what kind of things can
you
do?”

286 shrugged. “There’s a lot of nuance and variety. The basics are pretty easy to nail down though. You can make a kinetic energy-based barrier that keeps stuff from hurting you or insulates you from dangerous conditions. You can lift stuff, throw it, send force through objects, warp space, almost teleport, heat stuff, cool it, run faster, jump higher, break things. Stuff like that. It’s pretty neat, overall. I like it.”

Merlo smiled, amused. “Sounds pretty awesome. So how do you get it? The ability to do all of that, I mean?”

286 nodded as if she’d expected the query. “You gotta be born with it. Of course, some people are, but don’t know it unless they’re tested. There have been a few scientists that have messed with implants and stuff to try to create the ability or enhance it, but with no real successes.” She paused to rub at the odd metallic tattoo on her neck, and Merlo eyed it suspiciously. “Kinetics are mostly common in space-faring societies, and much more common in systems closer to the galactic rim. Thuruz particles, a type of dark energy particles, get into the body and bind with proteins in the nervous system. They react to the action potential in a person’s individual bioelectromagnetics to enact changes on a macro scale outside the body. In short, a Kinetic’s neural impulses can affect the interactions of physics outside their body.”

286 finally noticed the lack of comprehension evident in Merlo’s expression and sighed, rolling her eyes mildly. “Anyways, a planet’s magnetosphere will tend to deflect the buildup of those particles in the human body in typical cases, which is why planetary cultures that aren’t to the spacefaring stage yet rarely if ever exhibit Kinetics. Though Kinetics can also be hereditary, once introduced into a substantial amount of the population.” Then again, all of that explanation probably nixed Merlo’s “Fade powers” theory.

Merlo nodded anyway, then voiced her suspicions. “If implants don’t work, what’s that thing on your neck?”

286 burst out laughing immediately, and Merlo was once again forced to wait. “This?” She asked, wiping a bit of a tear of mirth from one eye. She tapped the metallic circuit-work patch on her neck, etched into the jugular side. “This is my explosive collar.”

“Your
what
?”

“Yeah, the Altairans implanted it in me a couple months ago. Trying to keep me from doing stuff they don’t like, you know? Gave its controls to Sirrah. If I do anything too out of bounds, it’s supposed to blow my head off. Via my neck.” She said it all completely casually while scratching at the little metal plating, as if talking about something as commonplace as how gravitational conditions would affect atmospheric reentry.

“
What
? That’s insane!” Merlo felt her temper lift off. She found herself increasingly infuriated, growing angrier and angrier at an alarming rat. It was
wrong
to control someone like that.

But Prisoner 286 just shrugged again nonchalantly. “Eh, can’t blame them.”

“
What
?” Merlo sputtered again.

286 breathed out, speaking as if explaining a simple concept to someone slightly slow. “Someone’s trying to do stuff that hurts you? You try to stop them. Or control them. Someone’s hurting you or messing up your day? You make them stop. Nothing wrong with that. It’s natural. Only fools or the weak try to convince themselves otherwise.” She leaned forward, close to Merlo, and looked intently down at her. “Their only mistake is thinking it’ll work.
Nobody
rules me but me, and I don’t die that easy.”

Merlo tucked her hair behind one ear, unable to easily look away from the vivid, violent energy inherent in those hazel eyes. Her temper was subsiding, and she felt something in her gut, not nervousness, but something else. As the moments passed, she slowly began to identify what it was.

“So, what else ya wanna know?” 286 was now very close, leaning in and peering down at Merlo.

“Um…” She could feel 286’s hot breath as the Kinetic uncrossed her legs and moved in even closer. She didn’t edge away though, not even as the Prisoner leaned in all the way, opened her mouth slightly, and kissed Merlo intensely, gripping the back of her head securely as the kissing grew more aggressive.

Far from resisting, Merlo let it keep happening, and then suddenly, hungrily, returned it. In a sense, she didn’t really know how things had gotten this far, and she didn’t really care. She wasn’t exactly a stranger to these kinds of feelings, or actions, and something about Prisoner 286 really “interested” her as well, down to a primal level.

286 slammed into her, and, despite everything, wasn’t quite strong enough to knock Merlo over. But Merlo let her anyway. 286 pressed her down into the softness of the bed, raking her fingers roughly through Merlo’s hair and gripping the back of her neck possessively. Merlo ran a leg up 286’s thigh and wrapped it around the small of her back as 286 gripped it, hard enough for her to feel fingertips through the nanoweave of her armor.

“So…” 286 took a break from running her mouth and tongue along Merlo’s lips, ears, and neck just long enough to ask a question. “How do you get this damned suit off?”

10.3
- Merlo

A couple of intense, energetic hours later, Merlo rolled over, giving a long look over her companion. 286 sat on the edge of the bed, still stark naked, lighting up one of those vapor-smoking devices she’d seen around. Merlo watched 286 silently, sitting there silhouetted against the
Destiny’s
ambient lighting, as she lit the long cylinder, inhaling deeply and then puffing out a long breath trailing a plume of translucent vapor.

She honestly thought 286 was attractive, despite the light scarring criss-crossing her body in places, despite the somewhat plain face, despite the seeming lack of empathy or care in her attitude. Even despite her gratuitous amount of height, which no person could possibly have a use for. There was just something about the woman that drew her in, and kept her attention.

Sex with her had been interesting, to say the least. To say that Prisoner 286 was dominant would be to understate the matter heavily. Merlo was pretty sure she had more than a few fingernail or bite marks for her suit to heal up, and she was… sore in a few places. But she found she liked the feeling. It was also just good to connect with someone like this again. It wasn’t like there was no one around she’d had any interest in, but nothing had ever come of it. Not that she’d really pursued it, anyway. So having someone come out of nowhere and, well,
want
her so deeply and aggressively, it made her feel pretty good. She could get used to this.