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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
T.A. White
Read between
January 6 - January 6, 2021
The station was like a curse. Every time she visited, it brought nothing but upheaval to her life.
This time was going to be different. Even if she had to trample a few obstacles in the shape of people to do it.
A common fixture on any station, the cafes were civilian owned but government sanctioned. They were necessary so the masses could keep in touch with family and friends when traveling.
Most ships weren't equipped to communicate over the distances needed to reach any of the colonies or stations dotted throughout human space. Their reach was limited, a solar system or two in most cases. It was possible to upload your files to the broadband satellites from the ship when you stopped at any station, but transmission was slow and laborious. It could take a week or more, depending on the data load and whether a bigger fish paid for priority transmission. That's where the cafes came in. For a fee, you could piggyback off the station's network, one usually kept in much better repair
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When she first began this little endeavor, she'd learned quickly she was in over her head. Deciphering the Tsavitee's starmaps and ship logs were outside her skill base. She was decent at some hacking, but parsing information as complex as this and breaking the code they wrapped everything in? No. Not even Jin's considerable skills would have been up to the task.
That's where her friend came in—a hacker without equal, a genius among geniuses, someone the human government would kill to get their hands on if they knew of his existence.
The starmaps and data logs from a Tsavitee ship were capable of shifting the power dynamic in the Consortium. More so, if they could decipher the Tsavitee's way of coding their information.
Their partnership consisted of each having a set of skills just as important as the other's. Kira salvaged what she could from the Tsavitee ships and when she saw something interesting, she'd find a way to drop the data package into a hidden cache on the galactic web. There, Odin would sift through the information, trying to break the code.
Any chance of finding the Tsavitee homeworlds would be gone. No finding and returning those taken by the Tsavitee. Nothing.
Allfather: The wizards' starmaps could speed things up too.
Once upon a time, before she took up a solitary life and when she still hung around people, she'd been told her gaze could be disconcerting, that something about the way she locked onto someone challenged them on a primal level, leaving them with the twin urges of fight or flight.
That ought to do it. One job posting on the station's forums and some of her problems would be solved.
On her console, the words flashed—job accepted.
the station's night had begun. Above, the lights dimmed as the station's dome began to fold back to reveal the deep black of space. A thin, transparent membrane kept the atmosphere inside, allowing those below a glimpse of a star-speckled sky.
the sight of the cosmos stealing her breath. Purple and blue dust filled one corner of space, the rest dotted with millions of stars.
Well, when you were trapped on three sides, there was only one choice.
She'd never really been one for orders. Probably why she was no longer in the space force.
Two people crazy enough to play leapfrog with moving pieces.
Her smile was dark when it came. No one had ever considered her civilized, not even when she bowed to humanity's will and served on the front lines in the worst war of their long history, a war where more people died than lived.
She might want nothing to do with Centcom these days, but that didn't mean it didn't want something from her. And this man—he was the personification of Centcom.
There was sadness there, something Kira ignored. Himoto might regret having taken certain actions, but that didn't mean he wouldn't do them again if he felt it benefited humanity. No matter who got hurt along the way.
Inside, she fought against a thread of sadness and discomfort. It seemed that was to be her fate, never aging or dying, while the friends around her did both. It was one of many reasons for her self-imposed isolation.
She might look human, but she wasn't. That fact had been made clear to her a long time ago.
O'Riley was an important waypoint, pivotal because of its closeness to both the Tuann and the Haldeel, another alien race humanity had stumbled across in the course of their war. The Haldeel were slightly friendlier than the Tuann, though they were equally convinced humanity was a young race in need of guidance and restrictions.
"I looked for you when you left." She flinched and looked away. She didn't want to dredge up the past. There were too many demons there.
"You always have to do things the hard way." "It's the only way I know to be."
Maybe once, before she'd rebuilt herself from the ground up, but now, she embraced all her jagged edges.
"Parts from a Tsavitee cruiser in your engine, a new power source none of my engineers can explain and a drive capable of at least three times the speed your ship is classed for. To say nothing of the weapons and defenses it shouldn't have," Himoto said, almost admiringly.
"They claim you're Tuann."
Another part—the part she thought dead—felt a wild fluttering of hope, the thought of not being alone, of not being the only freak out there, taking wing. She firmly squashed it. Even if by some odd, unlikely coincidence she did turn out to be Tuann, it didn't mean she was no longer alone. It just meant her freakishness now had a name.
She'd learned many hard lessons about the peril of letting hope run away with you. It was the ultimate liar, an illusion turning smart people into fools, sundering their hearts from their chests when hope inevitably crashed them against the rocky shore.
Their beginning had started with blood and fire. Kira had been near death after doing her utmost to destroy the compound where she'd spent her entire life being tortured and experimented on. Himoto and his team had rescued her from all that, killing the group of scientists who had been trying to train Kira and the others to be the best monsters they could be. Children as young as three taught to fight and then beaten as their caretakers tried to mold them into living weapons.
The mark preexisted all that. For as long as she could remember, she'd had it. It didn't match any symbol she’d been able to find. It was tempting to classify it as a birthmark, except the edges were too precise and the shape too detailed. "Every Tuann I've met has something similar on their body."
three crescents over a circle, smaller lines joining some of the crescents.
Kira had been a legend during the war. She had more Tsavitee kills than any other wave runner. Throw in her special abilities and she could see why Centcom kept knowledge of her to themselves.
"Rothchild." Kira froze, her hand half lifted, her insides icing over. "You manipulative bastard," Jin swore. "Do this for me, meet with them, and all debts are wiped clean," he bargained.
She'd thought about having it removed a couple of times but something always stopped her. What if it was something her parents had given her? And even if it wasn't, it was a tangible symbol of the hell she'd survived.
As long as it remained, the tattoo was a reminder the things behind her were worse than anything she faced in the future. Sometimes, when her thoughts turned down dark paths, that was the only thing keeping her going, the promise of better times ahead.
Where the Haldeel were slightly condescending to the younger humans, they at least were helpful—there when they were most needed and willing to let humanity's best and brightest into their territories where they could study at places of learning and interact on a regular basis.
The Tuann, by contrast, seemed to want nothing to do with humans. They had only interfered under the most extreme circumstances during the war when the threat of casualties on their side were almost nonexistent or when the Tsavitee had strayed too closely to their borders. They didn't have time for humanity, and they made their disdain perfectly clear.
the Tuann military were virtually unbeatable, and they were one of the few races to have held the Tsavitee off for longer than humans had been in space.
Himoto possessed the rare gift of getting people to see him as almost harmless, while he manipulated them onto the path he wanted.
Her home. The place where the most dangerous of her secrets resided.
Graydon unsettled her on some deep level.
She'd stopped growing years ago. There was no way she was still a child, biologically or mentally. Could a child have fought in a war? Become a hero, then a villain because of her successes and failures? Could they have taken a decrepit ship and restored her to perfect condition? Or run a business and survived on their own for as long as she had? No.
Kira has no history with your people. She was discovered at a young age—the equivalent of a thirteen-year-old human—in a compound deep in our territory," Himoto said. "She'd been severely mistreated and there were signs of torture. She has no memories of the Tuann. As far as she or anyone knew, she'd been born in that place. Whatever you might think, she did not choose ignorance of your people."
Himoto left out the experiments and the belief among some of her rescuers that her unique qualities stemmed from those experiments.
"In the early days of first contact, the Tuann were careful to appear nonthreatening. Even today, we don't know much about them. They’re a secretive race. We do know they've arranged themselves in what they call Houses. People of differing origin work together for a common goal,"
The Consortium was a collection of Earth's former colonies. When humanity first entered into space and established themselves outside their home planet, they did so to benefit Earth. As a result, much of their resources went to Earth. However, in the vastness of space, retaining control over territories that were sometimes a year or more of travel away was difficult. War happened and Earth lost control of her colonies. The individual planets created identities for themselves that endured to present day. Each planet had representatives on the council and was tasked with meeting a quota for
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they seem to have a strong warrior class that seems to share similarities to the samurai
