#psionic ability

Andra’s mind was a wreck. Her control, which had been Cygnus’s anchor for months, was shattered.

Every noise made her jump, and when she did, the ship trembled. Everything that wasn’t bolted down floated through the air, the mark of a telekinetic pushed far past the bounds of their own ability. 

Humans could do incredible things when it came to survival.

(Breathe with me,) Cygnus said, his own mind woven into Andra’s the only thing that was holding the ship together through her nightmares. It was a struggle. As his syzygy, she was just as powerful as he was, and panic tore control apart faster than anything else. (Andra. You’re safe.)

“Cygnus?” His name echoed across their thought-bond even as she said it out loud. He rose from his chair and came to sit beside her on her hospital bed. She reached for him, her hand shaking but warm when he tangled their fingers together. “Where (am) I?”

It was never good when a telepath couldn’t separate thought-speech and verbal, but at least she was communicating. It was the first time she was awake enough to truly form a coherent sentence since her miraculous reappearance. He feared her lost to the terror that threatened to swamp her every moment.

“The medical bay of one of our cruisers,” he told her, opting for verbal speech in the hopes of grounding her out. “You’re safe.”

Relief echoed across their bond, turbulent blue that was soothing and overwhelming at once. Towering waves of orange fear rolled between them until he leaned forward, careful to telegraph his every move, and gathered her into his arms. She was always small, but after weeks of captivity, she was so thin she felt fragile. 

Her touch on his mind was soothing and so tentative it broke his heart. 

She didn’t know if he still wanted her in his thoughts. 

(You are always welcome in my mind,) he whispered to her, and filled their shared mind-space with starlight glimmers of the hope he thought was lost with her disappearance. Slowly the waves of vivid orange terror faded into cool twilight calm. (Andra, what happened? I felt you die.)

(They hate us,) she said, eyes closed against the memories that threatened to swamp her. He carefully bolstered up her trembling control. (The aliens. They’re from far away. Their world, it’s a rogue planet, drifting through space. They heard us, heard our telepathy first, and came to investigate. They thought we were like them. A lost colony that found the perfect home to thrive.)

With her words came flashes of memory, so vivid he could barely hold himself to reality. 

Her capture. Crystalline beings, their bodies as changeable as their minds, who moved too fast for their own limbs brutally murdering the people around her, only to drag her away, impossibly strong. 

The feeling of their bond snapping as a mind far more powerful than hers alone crashed into her shields and bundled her into impassible silence.

The ship, every inch of it plated in a metal she didn’t know, that blocked her every attempt to reach for him. 

And the Queen.

(Tell me,) Cygnus prompted her softly as he laid back on her bed with her tucked so close he could feel her heartbeat against his side. (You’re the first to ever see them.)

(They’re like ants,) Andra told him, her eyes closed, and her head on his chest. (Every ship has a queen, but the queens, they’re the only ones with psionic abilities. The rest are just workers, soldiers, scientists. Grown for their purpose. They’re individual, sort of, but connected with their whole hive. They hate us because so many of us have abilities, but they don’t realize we’re not a hive-mind.)

(Why did they take you?)

(They thought- they thought I was a Queen, because we, you and I, we tore their ships apart, but it was me who killed that first queen.)

(You spoke to her,) Cygnus whispered in realization. He remembered Andra, raw from the loss of Asteroid Base Forty-Two and too angry for reason. He remembered the feel of that powerful mind blinking out in one sharp, angry twist. (She told the rest?)

(The last thing she did was tell them everything. They thought I was a queen,) Andra repeated, quickly coming to the end of her strength. (When they found out I wasn’t, that we don’t have queens like theirs, they tried to get information out of me. They- they’re so strong, but they didn’t know what to look for in a mind that’s not part of the hive. You remember how we met?)

He did. The meeting that seemed so long ago. Her mind that shone interesting where everyone else was tediously dull. Her thought project, the buggy, broken little ship that was lost in one of the first attacks. Her humor and easy acceptance of his presence in her mind. Her strength, the unexpected anchor against the precognition that always left him torn apart.

(They don’t know how to get around those stupid little exercises. They don’t have anything like it,) Andra explained tiredly. (So I flooded them with sand-thought. Meaningless nothing, until they left me alone. But they gave me something too, because they didn’t know I could get into their minds while they were in mine. As soon as they left, I got out of my cell and hid.)

More images came. Flashes of glowing crystal bodies in dark hallways. Of stealing the odd mushrooms that grew from the walls. Of building a crude little scanner from scavenged parts to determine what was toxic and what was safe. 

Of her tiny little camp, tucked back under a monstrous crystal growth. A little hollow, so hidden that no one ever looked there. Her refuge, as the queen searched and searched for her in the deep parts of the ship.

Of shattering her own control so that her own mind flickered in and out, untraceable in a ship she couldn’t escape.

And finally, finally feeling the weapons unloading, feeling the tremble of a psionic attack, and seeing her chance. 

Finding a ship. Blasting out, guided only by intuition and desperation.

(Tell the generals,) she whispered to him as her mind faded out into sleep. (I know how to beat them.)

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Guiding Stars:

Andra was a mechanic and a pilot with nothing but an old, battered ship to call her own. Cygnus Volans is the most powerful psion to ever live. They were on opposite sides of a messy revolution, until a shared vision of the future brings their two warring sides together against a much greater threat.

Procyon Moon

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Vega Dignity

Cappella Besieged

Canopus Emergent

Nihal Collision

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“Pull our forces off this world.”

Cygnus stared up at the sky, where yet another huge invader juggernaut was splashing through the sky. Wind screamed around them, and static lightning crawled across bottoms of the clouds.

All around him, ships roared to life, scattering for the faint safety of the sky. He wished them luck and watched them go, reverse-comets, shooting up into the sky, through the clouds and friction-lightning and into the black beyond.

“Sir, we need to get you out of here!”

Cygnus didn’t know his name, but the aide who shoved at him to get him on the ship seemed kind. A touch against his mind confirmed that thought, and Cyg shook his head, but managed a smile.

“Get out of here,” he commanded, and turned his full attention on the great ship, which very soon would be low enough to destroy the planet, and everyone still on it. “That’s an order.”

“What about you?” The aide was scared. He should be. Cygnus was scared too, but he was also angry, and more than that, he had a way to share that anger with the invaders.

“I am going to buy us time,” he replied, and walked forward towards the ship. Wind caught his cloak and billowed it back from his shoulders. “When you get to the command ship, find Andra. Ursa knows who she is. Tell her I’m sorry.”

She would be furious with him, but the lives of so many fleeing refugees were worth his. He hoped she would forgive him eventually.

Not that it would really matter if she did. He was very probably going to die before ever seeing her again.

It was time to show these aliens who they were really up against.

He raised his hands to the sky, all his focus condensed to one single purpose.

Once, long ago, he shattered a moon, just to prove that he could. While he drew breath, that ship would not move one inch farther.

The juggernaut fought him when he grabbed it, engines blazing as it struggled to break free of him and resume its terrible decent into range. No matter what it tried, he held on, his mind a wall that it would have to break before they could continue.

The concrete around Cygnus shuddered, and splintered as he braced himself against the world itself, and refused to let go, even when a trickle of blood ran down from his nose, and his mind trembled under the strain.

Ships screamed past him, escaping the planet in swarms, and he took strength from them.

Humanity might be on the run, but they weren’t beaten. Not yet.

And then the juggernaut fired its massive engines, and Cygnus strained to hold it back as all that energy blasted against his telekinetic hold.

For a long minute, he struggled, straining against enough power to jump a ship the size of a city across the galaxy.

But no one, not even him, could keep that kind of force back for long.

Like a wire snapping across skin, Cygnus felt his grasp on the ship break, stretched far beyond his ability to hold it.

The ship roared overhead as it resumed its attack on the planet. The shockwave as it hit the lower atmosphere very nearly blasted him to the ground.

Cygnus fell to his knees, straining against his own limits as he tried to catch the ship again.

A small hand, strong hand slipped into his, rough with calluses and mechanic scars.

When he looked up, it was into Andra’s eyes.

(Together,) she said into his mind, and pulled him to his feet. (Let’s show these guys what we can do.)

(We can’t hold against those engines,) Cygnus said grimly, although he let her pull him into syzygy. Her mind was like cool water where he had strained himself too far, battling against the ship above. (They’re too strong)

Hard satisfaction rippled across her mind and into his.

(We’re not going to hold them back,) Andra said viciously, and wrapped his sheer power around her iron control with an ease most would envy. (We’re going to wreck them. They can’t drop their bombs if we tear them apart.)

(How?)

(Remember how easy it was to break my ship?)

Memories flashed from her mind to his, of crushed screws and paneling torn off, twisted beyond recognition. The accidents wrought with the smallest bit of misplaced power.

Ships like the destroyer above them could take any amount of damage from the weapons aboard a starship. They could hold off a dozen human warships and never take a scratch.

But they were never meant to take on a pair of furious telekinetics who had only one goal.

To cause as much destruction as they possibly could.

(Yes.)

Andra threw their shared mind upward, her mechanic mind picking apart the ship. It was the failing of any structure as big as the destroyer. There were always places where a fingertip of power could get in. If they could get in, they could rip something off.

The ship, which came to kill a planet, came apart in pieces , slowly at first, and then faster as they tore away plating, wires, and everything contained within.

And then there was resistance. Not enough to stop them, or even slow them. With the resistance came the brush of another mind, completely inhuman, and outraged at their defiance.

If he had been alone, Cygnus might have tried to reach out. Tried to speak with that alien mind. Tried to learn about it, and about why these invaders wanted them all dead.

But he wasn’t alone, and Andra seized the mind in a ruthless grip even as it projected wordless alarm along with the outrage.

(This is for Asteroid Base 42,) she snarled vengefully to the presence, which struggled in their grasp, and tried to sink psionic fangs into their minds. (And every other world you took from us!)

With one final twist of pinpointed intent, the ship burst apart. The mind, trapped by theirs, shrieked, and died.

For a long time, they stood there, wrapped together so tightly neither of them were sure which mind ended where.

Cygnus offered up a wordless apology for not telling her what he was doing, and felt the champagne glitters of forgiveness skate from her mind into his, tinged with faint purple annoyance. If she wasn’t allowed to go down fighting, neither was he.

He shimmered unrepentant green amusement back at her, and felt her laugh.

Finally, reluctantly, they began detangling themselves as a ship, one of their own, skated down through the clouds.

(Now they know we can fight back,) Andra said quietly, almost a whisper across Cyg’s mind. He wrapped his arm around her as exhaustion swamped them both. (Maybe we have a chance after all.)

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Guiding Stars:

Andra was a mechanic and a pilot with nothing but an old, battered ship to call her own. Cygnus Volans is the most powerful psion to ever live. They were on opposite sides of a messy revolution, until a shared vision of the future brings their two warring sides together against a much greater threat.

Procyon Moon

Altair Chariot

Vega Dignity

Cappella Besieged

Canopus Emergent

Nihal Collision

+++

More stories!

+++

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