Chương 276: Volume 2 - Intermission 84.999 - Grand Viewing Gala V (3/3)

The next major moment was yet again something that stopped everyone inside the ballroom dead in their tracks. Karania Faulkner. Two-Star Palladium. Most Valuable Marine. Second place. In the entire Assessment. The clip played.

Everything Karania Faulkner had done in that recording, she had done it with a precision and an absence of hesitation that made several Legacy representatives visibly uncomfortable in the way that genuine excellence sometimes made people uncomfortable—the unsettling feeling of realising that the upper limit of a category you thought you fully understood had just been redefined. The pause, thankfully, came quickly. The confusion that followed was not the brittle, defensive confusion of earlier in the evening.

It was fully and authentically genuine. It moved through the room in overlapping exchanges carrying a collective bewilderment.

"How has nobody heard of her before tonight—""Viscero isn't—it's not even an unknown planet, someone should have—""Second overall. Second. Among Tier 1 Primes. From a First Assessment. How is that—""Has anyone managed to find anything on her? There's nothing. She isn't in any of the pre-Integration registers and watchlists that I can—" Datapads were out across the room in numbers that exceeded even the reaction from earlier. The searching had a frantic, slightly disbelieving quality to it.

Like people who had run the same query twice and received the same null result were now running it a third time in case the first two had, somehow, both been wrong. Veyra observed all of it and looked, simultaneously, at Madam Sen. The smile from earlier was back and had widened. Not much—a fraction, by any objective measure—but from a woman whose face operated within a range that most people would have described as essentially static, a fraction was considerable.

The fan moved slowly, and Madam Sen's eyes were on the frozen image of Karania Faulkner on the screen with an expression that Veyra was now, after a full evening of careful observation, prepared to describe as something close to complete and utter satisfaction.

'What are you to her, girl…?' Veyra turned the question over for the fourth time tonight and arrived, as she had the previous three times, at no answer. She ran the Sen-plant theory again—briefly, out of thoroughness rather than genuine belief—and discarded it for the same reason she had discarded it before. The Sen Legacy was many things, but it was nothing if not consistent.

Their markers were not subtle, were not designed to be subtle and were, in fact, specifically designed to be visible to anyone who knew what to look for: The scar beneath the left eye, the makeup, the particular hairstyle that had not deviated in living memory, the emotional architecture of someone raised from childhood to perform composure as a first language. Karania Faulkner had none of it.

The clip had shown a young woman who felt things visibly, who moved with the urgent, physical directness of someone whose relationship with emotion was entirely unmanaged by Legacy training. She was not a Sen. She was not even Sen-adjacent. She was something else entirely, and whatever that something was, Madam Sen had apparently known about it well in advance of tonight. Veyra made a note of it, filed under a category she labeled " long-term research, priority one."

It would take months to find anything useful, no doubt. Possibly even years. Finding anything substantive on a Sen, in Veyra's experience, took the kind of patient, incremental intelligence work that produced results only if you were willing to accept that the results might arrive too late to be immediately useful. But Madam Sen had also, she noted, positioned herself in the ballroom in a configuration that placed only Veyra and Madam Dravain at angles from which her expression was directly visible.

Everyone else in the room was looking at the screen, Madam Sen's fan, at each other, or at Veyra herself. Nobody else could see what she was seeing.

Which meant one of two things: Either this was the first genuine mistake a Sen had made in a formal social setting in recorded Legacy history—possible, technically, in the same way that any statistical impossibility was technically possible—or it was another test, and Veyra was being shown something deliberately, and the question was whether she would know what to do with it. She filed that as well, under the same category, and returned her attention to the screen as Thal Masters restarted the recording.

And, finally, the final award was announced. Thea McKay. Two-Star Crysium. Most Valuable Marine. The room did not erupt. It did not produce the arguments or the outcries or the brittle, defensive noise of the earlier hours. It simply— stared. A collective, wide-eyed, suspended staring at the screen as the girl walked up for the sixth time, a half-dozen medals already in her other hand, and the ballroom held every single thing it might have said.

Whether that was decorum or something closer to shock, Veyra couldn't have said with any confidence. The footage behind Quinn had been running throughout the announcement.

The earlier clips had already covered the ambush on day one, the forest sequence—a nightmarishly injured version of the Cyan girl hunting down a fully Integrated squad with her armour's camouflage and what appeared to be nothing but sheer unwillingness to stop—and the double-shot on the Anti-Armour Cannons atop the Wall alongside Lucas Callahan, the twin explosions in the distance captured in stark, distant detail. The footage shifted to the tight, compressed geometry of service tunnels.

It was clearly some kind of infiltration route underneath Nova Tertius' inner wall. Alpha Squad—minus Corvus and at least some of them visibly injured—moving through the tunnel system toward a fortified junction. Two auto-turrets were set up in a cross-pattern, the defensive configuration immediately legible to anyone with field experience as the kind of chokepoint designed to make forward movement practically impossible.

Lucas Callahan bracing against his Full-cover shield, absorbing the barrage, providing the anchor point the squad needed. And the young woman suddenly laid down on the floor. She didn't take any shots—not that she could have, as she was behind the shield. She didn't move either. She just— lay there, for around a second, while the auto-turret's targeting systems cycled through hundreds of rounds and the tunnel echoed with the noise of it.

Veyra simply watched, only tangentially realizing that she had stopped breathing. The girl gestured. Not at the turret, but toward the right, directing the rest of the squad from the floor. Lucas and she moved in perfect, synchronized coordination a moment later, her one-and-only-chance shot hitting the first turret with an accuracy that the angle and the chaos of the junction had no business permitting, before the turret's instantaneous target acquisition could kill her in turn.

Two drones had, meanwhile, launched simultaneously—the first was destroyed the instant it cleared the corner, the second managing a disabling shot through the auto-turret's barrel before it too was taken out. Isabella Itoku moved through the right side with the chainsword, and the rest of the squad pushed up behind her through the left.

'Precognition,' Veyra realized then.

'She's using active Precognition. She lay on the floor because she was reading the junction forward. She already knew which direction to send them before anyone had fired a shot and the synchronisation with her Defensive Heavy was only perfect because she made it so…!' But it was what happened next that made the realization fully complete.

Because as the skirmish continued and began to push toward a worse outcome, the Cyan girl—no, Thea McKay, as Veyra remembered, stepped out from behind Lucas Callahan's shield entirely. There were audible gasps inside the ballroom, but she didn't even recognize which directions they were coming from—whether it was her own, even. Her full attention, as was likely everyone else's in the room, was on the screen. Thea McKay stepped out into the junction, with no cover, no protection from any angle.

Directly into the fire, into an area still active with return fire from the right side and suppression from the remaining enemies on the left, in a space that offered no physical reason for a person to survive the next second uninjured. The recording slowed to a crawl. The ballroom watched in suspended silence. She, somehow, danced through it.

That was the only accurate description and Veyra was aware, even as she produced it internally, that it was not a description that carried the full weight of what the screen was showing. The girl did not charge through, did not sprint or push or absorb hits on her armour and then continue. She danced: Shots grazed her armour at angles that deflected cleanly.

Shots that should have connected missed by hairbreadths as she shifted at the last instant, the adjustment coming a fractional second before the shot that required it. Her own fire was constant and precise throughout, each shot miraculously finding its mark—sometimes on targets she wasn't facing directly, the weapon swinging to angles that the body's natural targeting logic shouldn't have been able to produce in real time.

She was not reacting to what was happening, but merely playing out a sequence that had already been determined to work. Veyra's mind went very, very still.

'She's a Psyker.' The thought arrived and then immediately ran into the evidence that complicated it, because a Psyker—a proper combat Psyker, the kind that did what combat Psykers did—was not possible in the Recruit Tier. It would have produced an entirely different category of response from the UHF than six medals and a Two-Star Crysium. That was, decidedly, not what this was. It was only then, that her mind finally remembered the small sidenote of information from her own Psychic 101.

It had been decades upon decades since then, and it had never been relevant to her, nor anyone that she personally knew. But there had been a way for a Psyker to technically exist as a Recruit, that had been covered in the Psychic 101 all the way back in her first year of Integration; something that would become practically useless as a designation almost immediately, but existing nevertheless.

'... She's a Wielder.' And then, one beat later, after her mind had just found the frame that made everything inside it fit:'Short-Term Precognition. Veritas Inheritance. Has to be. There is nothing else that could possibly produce something like this with a single Power available.' The recontextualization that followed happened all at once, and it was not a comfortable experience for her. Veyra ran it backward through everything she had watched tonight.

The Cube Trial footage: Every single Duplicator, found and eliminated, without fail, in a sea of identical targets—not through analysis or through pattern recognition, but because she had already known which ones they were. Every clip where her reflexes had seemed to exceed what the human body could produce under Integration at that Tier. Every moment that had produced the room's confused murmurs of " how is she identifying them?!" and " there's no mechanism for this!" There had been a mechanism.

They simply hadn't recognised it, because it was a statistical anomaly so unlikely, that it wasn't even on anyone's radar.

'She's been doing this the entire time. From the Cube Trial forward… Likely even before then. Every impossible read, every shot that shouldn't have landed, every movement that was a fraction ahead of the thing it was responding to—Veritas. She sees the True future, and… She is changing it. Actively. On her very first Assessment. Without even a hint of formal UHF training, without even a primer… How… How is this even possible?

It takes years, if not decades, for a Veritas Precog to be able to change the True future like this. How—she is barely even Corvus' age. If that. She looks younger, even!' The thought that arrived immediately after that one was no longer about Thea McKay. Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings. It was fully about Corvus once again.

'He has no idea,' she thought, and felt her blood turn ice-cold as she realised something that was already in motion that she had not prepared for and could not now retroactively prepare for.

'Neither do we. We gave him everything we could—the history, the strategy, the social architecture, the tactical framework, more than a decade and a half of everything we knew how to give him. And not one day of it all covered this. Not one conversation. Not one scenario. We never even considered the possibility that he would need to know how to lead a Veritas Precog Wielder… Or any Wielder, for that matter. To build trust with a Psyker…

To understand what it means for squad operations when one of your members is reading a few seconds ahead of everyone else at all times.' The danger of it was real and she immediately catalogued it as precisely as she could: A Wielder in a squad, unmanaged, misunderstood, or— worse —in a dynamic of friction with her squad leader, was not merely a lost asset but an active liability of extreme proportions.

The trust that the footage had shown Corvus placing in this girl had been correct, instinctively, but instinct was not the same as understanding, and what Corvus needed to manage this relationship properly was understanding that neither she nor Orvyn had ever thought to give him. And yet…

'It is also the single greatest opportunity this Legacy has encountered, ever,' she thought, and meant it with the same flat, precise weight as the assessment of danger that preceded it.

'A Veritas Short-Term Precog Wielder in an Alpha Squad, actively capable of using their limited Power-set to change outcomes in real combat… The probability of that specific combination existing is—I… cannot even calculate it. I'm not certain the number is even meaningful. And she is in his squad. She chose to trust him. He chose to trust her. The hard part is already completely done with. He managed it all, without a single idea of what he was dealing with.' The footage had continued throughout her realization.

The junction was cleared. Veyra became aware, with the pricking sensation of someone who has been watched without realising it for far longer than they are comfortable with, that she was being observed. Her mouth, she discovered at approximately the same moment, had opened at some point during the last thirty seconds without her permission. Not widely or visibly, from a distance. But open, nonetheless. Involuntarily, like a person whose composure had been outpaced by the speed of what they were processing.

She closed it with a measured speed, to not draw any more attention to it, then reasserted and straightened the fractions of her demeanour that needed straightening. Let her breathing find its depth again. Only then did she let her eyes move to Madam Sen—who was, unsurprisingly, the person looking at her. The fan was moving slowly, with the unhurried rhythm of a woman who had been watching Veyra's face for the last thirty seconds and had found it entirely satisfactory viewing.

The eyes above the fan were bright with a warm mirth of someone who had been waiting for a particular moment to arrive and had found it exactly as enjoyable—if not more—as anticipated. Veyra held the gaze for a moment.

'You knew,' she thought.

'You knew what she was from the beginning. You knew what I would see. You positioned me to see it… Even gave me a hint earlier.

"Her particular condition," is how you phrased it. The condition of being a Wielder…' Madam Sen's fan moved once more, slowly. Whether the nod that accompanied it was confirmation or simply acknowledgement, Veyra could not have said with any certainty. She looked back at the screen, and kept her face composed, and did not ask the questions she was holding—because Madam Sen would not answer them tonight, and they both knew it.

Asking would only demonstrate that Veyra had not yet understood that asking was not the point. The point was that she had seen them. And Madam Sen had merely made sure that she would. Veyra did notice, however, as she returned her attention back to the screen fully, that Masters had not paused the recording when the young woman had received her medal, like he had done for every single other medal so far.

Which, especially after an unbelievable showing like they had just seen, was downright torture for the assembled Legacies, as the need for a break was palpable in the very way breathing had stopped, then accelerated and bodies were visibly strained from the effort to remain still. Veyra's eyes moved immediately back to Madam Sen. And she was now grinning. Not the fractional, barely-visible curved smile from earlier. Teeth.

Actual, visible teeth, the full expression hidden behind the fan from everyone in the room except the two people positioned to see past it—Madam Dravain, on her left, and Veyra herself, on the right. The cold moved down Veyra's spine before she had time to decide whether to allow it. A full, involuntary shudder, that came not from temperature but from pure animal recognition of something that had just exceeded her current model of the situation by a significant margin. On screen, Thea McKay accepted her medal.

The recording still continued. Stepped back from Proprietor Quinn. The recording still continued. Began to move away from the podium. The recording still continued. And then she stopped.

The quiet that settled over the ballroom in that single moment had a texture that had nothing to do with decorum—not the natural quiet of people watching something, but the held, suffocating silence of people who had sensed, collectively and without discussion, that something was about to happen, and had stopped breathing to make room for it. The girl turned back and spoke for the first time.

"Using my earned rights as the holder of the Two-Star Crysium MVM Medal, I wish to issue a Challenge." Her voice was level—unhurried. The voice of someone who had, at some point, decided what they were going to say and was now simply saying it.

"While I am already part of Alpha Squad, a winner of an MVM Medal, and thus immune to being challenged, your rules said nothing about a Medal holder issuing a Challenge themselves. Is this correct?" Nobody in the ballroom breathed. Proprietor Quinn looked at the young woman for a long moment.

The pause on screen—the considering stillness of a woman who was, by every account, among the most precisely calculating officers the UHF had produced in several generations, looking at a Recruit who had just found a gap in her own ruleset and was standing in it very calmly—was not something Veyra would forget quickly, if ever.

"I guess that would be correct," Quinn said finally, "based on the rules I've laid out, yes." The girl turned. Not toward Quinn nor toward Alpha Squad in the front row. Toward the camera—directly, deliberately, with the full awareness of what that camera connected to: Every ship in the Assessment cluster, the Apex itself, every set of eyes that had spent the last several hours watching this ceremony play out, wherever they happened to be watching it from."

Every single one of you has spent the past few hours watching me stand up here again and again." Her voice carried easily, without being raised.

"You've seen the recordings. You've heard Major Quinn herself list the feats I've accomplished, the awards I've been given. Time after time, I've proven myself to the UHF—not just once, but over and over, in every category they've deemed worthy of recognition." Around Veyra, the ballroom was absolutely still. Not a foot shifted.

"Despite all of that—despite the Medals, the recordings, the recognition—there are still those among you who simply can't seem to accept it. Maybe it's because I'm a Midworlder, born from the dirt and the ashes of a place none of you have ever even heard of or thought about existing in the first place. Maybe it's because I'm a Cyan, someone you see as less-than-human, simply because I was born from the corpse of my very own mother.

Or maybe it's simply because the very idea of someone like me being better than you— actually better, with the proof to back it up—burns you to your very core." A brief pause as the Cyan's eyes swiped across the assembled hall of Recruits.

"Maybe it is all of the above." Veyra found, somewhere in the third sentence, that she had stopped tracking the room and was simply watching the screen. She noted the lapse and did not bother to correct it.

"This is the UHF. This is a meritocracy. Your bloodlines, your upbringing, your family's honours— none of that matters here. What matters is skill. Results. And I've proven, beyond any doubt, that I belong here. That I belong in Alpha Squad. That I deserve every single one of these Medals." The certainty behind it, Veyra could tell, was not the performed, but a settled certainty in the girl's mind.

"But if you still can't accept it—if you really, honestly think I don't deserve to be here—then let's settle it right the fuck now." Several people near Veyra's left had gone the colour of old parchment at the curse.

"I am laying down the Two-Star Crysium MVM Medal's Challenge. To every single person in this hall. To every single Recruit in here, without exception. You think I'm not worthy? You think Alpha Squad doesn't belong to me? You think a Cyan like me has no place in the UHF? Then step the fuck up. Approach me of your own accord. Ask to be challenged, and I will oblige—without hesitation." She looked directly into the camera for a moment that felt, even through the recording, considerably longer than it likely had been.

"Put your credits where your fucking mouths are. Prove me wrong, if you can. Because I promise you this: You will experience firsthand why I am the very best this Drive has to offer." Then she walked off the podium. And finally, the pause came. The ballroom, however, remained entirely silent.

It was not the silence of a room processing something difficult, or the silence of decorum being carefully maintained, or even the silence of shock, which had its own particular texture and had made several appearances tonight. This was distinctly different.

This was the silence of approximately two hundred Legacy representatives—press corps included, datapads forgotten in hands, not a single one of them writing at this very moment—who had just watched a Cyan Undercity Midworlder stand in front of every ship in the Assessment cluster and issue an open Challenge to all of them simultaneously.

Who had, in the space of the five seconds since she had walked off that podium, run the recordings of the past two hours back through their heads and arrived, to a person, at the same destination: She had meant every word of it. And every word of it was backed by a Two-Star Crysium MVM medal, half-a-dozen other medals beside and recordings that nobody in this room or any other was going to be able to argue with. Nobody reached for a datapad. Nobody spoke. Feet did not shuffle.

Veyra stood inside the silence with her hands perfectly still and the shudder still residing somewhere in her spine. She did not look away from the screen and, specifically, did not look at Madam Sen again, because she was fairly certain that whatever expression the woman's face was currently carrying was more than she could absorb in the same evening as everything else that had already happened.

When the recording finally continued and the Awards Ceremony came to a close with the leaderboard reveal—Rachel Masters at #3 for the whole Drive, which put a visible, satisfied smile on Thal Masters' face; Karania Faulkner at #2 with nearly twice Rachel's points; and Thea McKay at #1 with more still—the ballroom had quietly arrived at a single, shared conclusion. Nobody said it out loud. Not during the recording, not in the hours of the after-party that followed.

But it was there, sitting in the room the way certain truths sat in rooms—present in the silences between conversations rather than in the conversations themselves. That Cyan. That one Cyan, from the Undercity of a world that most of the people in this ballroom couldn't have placed on a star map an hour ago, was going to be the catalyst for a level of discussion inside the UHF that nobody alive had seen before. What shape those discussions would take, or where they would land—nobody could say.

Even the Sen, Veyra suspected, were working without a complete picture on this one. But that the Mid-World Recruitment Drive had justified itself tonight—that much was going to be very difficult to argue against, in any room, by anyone who had been present for the last several hours. A generational talent. A statistical anomaly that might be singular in the entire Universe. The kind that appeared once every few centuries, if even that, and only if you were looking in the right place at the right time.

The UHF had looked, just experimentally, in the right direction at the right time, and it had found her... The evening kept Veyra busy well past the point where she had any hope of recovering her composure fully, the mingling beginning in earnest once the recordings had wrapped and the after-party took hold. More than two dozen Legacies found their way to her over the course of the next few hours—from every region of UHF space, it seemed—and every single one of them wanted to talk about Corvus.

'Squad Leader of an Alpha Squad with a Two-Star Crysium Ace Squad award, and two Two-Star MVM recipients among its members… One of which being a capable combat-viable Wielder at this young age…' She ran it through her head more than once that night, still trying to find the edges of it. Still trying to fully absorb the distance between what they had hoped for him and what he had actually done.

She and Orvyn had carried a quiet worry for years—that they had pushed too hard, too early, that the weight of expectation placed on him before he was old enough to carry it might have done something to him that wouldn't show until it was too late to fix. That worry was gone now. Corvus had clearly not bent under any of it. He had simply grown into it, and then past it, in ways she genuinely could not have predicted.

By the midpoint of the after-party, even Thal Masters had made his way over to the small cluster that had formed around Thal Sen and Madam Dravain, and the four of them had settled into the quiet, comfortable exchange of people who had earned the right to speak plainly with each other. Pleasantries, briefly. Then Thal Sen leaned fractionally closer to Masters, her fan raised now even against Veyra and Madam Dravain, her voice dropping to the register she used when something was meant only for the immediate circle.

"You know," she began, with the particular lightness of a woman who was about to say something that was not light at all, "about the Cyan girl that upstaged your Rachel, Raymond." The fan moved once, back and forth, slowly.

"There is one more thing the recording did not cover. Something that even I nearly missed—were it not for a rather fortunate coincidence."

"Oh?" Masters said. Genuine curiosity hushed across his face, completely unguarded. Which was, Veyra noted, a relatively rare expression on him.' Something a Sen would have missed, if not for luck?' She turned that over once and set it aside, because the full implications of it were too large to process while simultaneously listening.

"The girl is an orphan," Madam Sen continued.

"Or rather, was. The last name should point the way, if you follow it far enough. Because this McKay—the specific one she has claimed as her own—is not just any McKay." She let that sit. Veyra watched Thal Masters' eyes go still in the way eyes went still when someone was running records internally, pulling on threads, cross-referencing. She was doing the same thing herself, instinctively, moving backward through everything she knew under the name McKay, and there was a lot.

Such a common name was hard to get anything from a vague nudge like Thal Sen had just provided. She went back years—thirty years, forty, further—and found nothing that landed with any weight before she ran out of road entirely. Thal Masters, as was expected, got there first. His eyes went wide." No." He shook his head once, firmly.

"No, Eve. Don't—" Thal Sen lowered the fan. It was, in Veyra's entire experience of the woman across this single evening and every prior occasion she had been in the same room as her, the most she had ever seen on that face. The grin was full and uncontained, and what it revealed—what the fan and emotional control had been hiding all evening, what perhaps only a handful of people alive had ever been positioned to see—were teeth that had been sharpened.

Each one individually, deliberately, ground to a razor-point, the full set of them pearl-white, perfectly maintained and arranged into a smile that had absolutely no business existing on a human face. Veyra knew immediately that this specific image was going to find her again in the dark, years from now, at moments she would not be expecting it.

"She is General Harbinger's adopted daughter, Raymond." The voice was warm, almost gentle. Her hand came to rest lightly on his armoured gauntlet, a brief and precise pat.

"And you have just volunteered to go headhunting for a Titanicus-class Void entity in her immediate vicinity." A small pause, perfectly weighted.

"I wish you the very best of luck. And I sincerely hope—for your sake, and for the sake of our long-standing friendship—that the girl has not inherited her adopted father's peculiarities." The colour left Thal Masters' face entirely. Veyra had attended a great many events in a great many rooms across her lifetime, and she had seen powerful people receive bad news in a variety of ways. She had never, in any of those rooms, seen Raymond Oleaven Masters go pale like this…