Descend- Seeing Stars by Sean Oswald (the ebook reader .TXT) 📕

every one of you that didn’t object to this plan and didn’t wake me up is equally responsible. You all made me your leader, well that has real meaning. I have let you tell me when I do something boneheaded, even if I didn’t agree. Well, this was some boneheaded shit and you all should have known better.

      I love all of you, but for nowyou are banished from my sight. If I work things out with this council tomorrow then hopefully things can get back to normal, but for now there have to be consequences. Trina and Amelia, I want you to set up a guard rotation schedule. Ava and Huong, you can see to whatever duties you have in the labs, but only essential stuff. The rest of the time I want you all in your rooms, and no telepathy.

      This cost lives today. It is not a game. They may not have been human lives, but they were still the lives of fathers, who now have wives and children that will never see them again. I am your husband, but right now, I am your commanding officer, and we are at war. This sort of thing cannot happen again. Just pray that they don’t ask me to give up one of you to them.”

      A bit of the edge of his intensity was blunted by his lecture but then he saw Huong standing there with a wicked grin on her face. “What could possibly be funny about this?”

      The smile left her face, but she said, “I’m not laughing, that was my pleased smile. Certainly not about this. I agree it was a tragedy. But I did smile because you called all of Team Jay your harem.”

      Jay just shook his head and then Astral Stepped back to his room and laid down. He had no intention of turning over even a single strand of hair from one of his precious wives to them, but he was still angry after all. The sleep he had gotten really had been something he needed. He felt so much more recharged now. He was going to have to cut way back on the time dilation fields. Whatever they were doing to him was unnatural but for now he was just going to mediate.

      Jay began circling his PSI energy and feeling it flow through him. A portion of his mind was partitioned off planning contingencies for the meeting tomorrow, assuming that the council would agree to meet with him. For now, he just needed to relax. Watching the PSI speed through his channels was almost hypnotic. He sped it up and followed the flow.

      After a while, Jay started to pay attention to how the energy bled out of him into the environment. That prompted him to keep his eyes closed but activate his PSI sense. He could see streams of PSI pouring out of him and every other one of the fused. The non-fused had tiny drops but most of it just dissipated without any clear stream of movement.

      Not so for him and his fuses. They had clearly defined streams of PSI flowing out of them into the world around. Instead of wondering why he couldn’t see what was powering up his core to create the PSI he focused on where it was going when it left him. It passed through walls and many of the streams drifted out into space far beyond his ability to sense.

      But something was different now. In the past whenever he had observed the flow of PSI leaving him it had always been uniform. An equal amount has always gone in every direction forming a sphere of streams leaving him. Now it was different. More like seventy percent of the PSI was pouring out of him towards the areas of the leviathan housing the cat people.

      As he spread his senses out, he could see that the same was true for all of his fuses. Most of the energy seemed to pass out beyond the leviathan but some of it was stopped, almost like it was being absorbed.

      Jay wasn’t sure what the significance of this was yet, but he knew it had to mean something. If the…, he couldn’t keep calling them cat people in his head. He knew the one race was Leon but didn’t know the names of the other races. If these people could benefit from PSI then maybe they did have something to trade after all.”

Interlude 3- To Flee Fate

 

Eesa was walking around the traditional meeting tent of the clan chieftains. It was a long-outdated structure made of materials that their ancestors had used thousands of years ago. It came from at time before her people had made it to the stars, from before they had mastered the atom, even before they had learned the resins necessary to craft the layered metallic alloys.

      It was a cloth tent, sewn from the fur of animals taken in the hunt and bound together with metallic threads. The craftsmanship was fine, but it felt like a reenactment of their history. Still tradition always seemed to be important to the elders. Some of the clans valued it more than others, but even her father, Al-na-mar, chieftain of the Lepar clan had repeatedly said that tradition was what balanced a society.

      Eesa wasn’t sure that any of that made sense to her, but she had been up in one of their mini fighters today. She had seen a woman flying in the air if she could be called a woman. It seemed more likely that she was a fire demon from the tales told to scare children.

      Now the entire camp was abuzz. The normal tensions between the clans were gone. Tygar and Civet walked arm in arm and Leon laughed with Lepar. Coming face to face with monsters