Chapter Sixteen — Palliative Care

“This is not great,” Isaac muttered, his words nearly drowned out by the high whine of Sarah’s energy rifle.  The reestablishment bunker would have been safe enough, with the layers of reinforced stone etched with runes creating a palpable hush and solidity, if it weren’t for the problems they brought with them.  No Moonblast, but Ike’s unsuppressed talent was still an issue.

“I am aware,” Ichabod said patiently, his fingers tapping on the control panel of his chair.  Definitely a nervous tic, given that there was nothing to control at the moment.  They were completely blocked from the outside world, and with the loss of the travel saucer there weren’t any systems around to interact with.  Though it did have some guns, little energy-bolt ports at the base that packed as much of a wallop as one of Sarah’s rifles, they were clearly only meant as a last resort.

A last resort they might actually need, with the manifestations of Ike’s talent still appearing even after taking shelter.  Nothing as big as the sky-rip that had threatened something very bad coming into being, but there was still a constant stream of critters, creatures, and monsters appearing from nowhere.  It seemed to be in a roughly spherical shell around them, meaning the lower levels of the bunker were just as much of a threat as the upper ones.

“How’s it looking, Sarah?” Isaac called, hearing a muffled explosion which he didn’t think was theirs.  She was out with the raptors while he was closeted with Ike and Lia in a dead end room, trying to help Ike take back control of his power.  Or at least enough control to stop an unending horde of assorted gribblies from crawling all over them.

The bunker reminded Isaac a lot of the ones in Star Central — not the public take-shelter rooms off the main streets, but the ones under schools and hospitals.  Heavy, reinforced stone, emergency lighting, a bunch of simple rooms with cots and sinks, and closets of emergency supplies.  In fact, he was pretty sure it was based on the Star Central bunkers, just with runes rather than technology.  Weirdly reassuring, though at the same time disconcerting with the combination of familiar and unfamiliar.

“Still okay!”  She didn’t have to yell it, the words coming out of a faintly hazy portion of the room where Sarah kept a small bit of herself.  “Can’t keep this up forever though.”

“I know, I know,” Isaac said, grimacing as he turned back to Ike.  Lia loomed and glowered next to them, apparently unhappy about her lack of contribution to the situation.  But events had escalated beyond what a native guide could help with, and she was more of an information caster than a combat one.  Since they knew exactly what was going on with the enemy, she was mostly along for the ride.

Isaac sympathized.  It hurt when the mounts were doing more to defend them than the actual superheroes.  Admittedly, he could tell through the link that Shay was having a grand old time ripping things to shreds with teeth and claws, but even the deep kingdom crystaltech-augmented raptors had limits.  Combat for more than a few minutes was exhausting.

“I admit, I did not realize it was possible to adjust my power so directly,” Ike said, as Isaac continued to tinker.  Wrapping his head around exactly what Ichabod did and how he saw his own power was a bit brain-bending, since the man did not do anything by feel.  He had jargon, technical vocabulary for every aspect of his power and very little of it made sense, especially since Ike was still fumbling to recall what those aspects were.

For Isaac, he had to think through what Ike wanted and then filter it through how his own talent worked, on what resistance to which change.  It wasn’t even like a physical entity that he could play with and get a feel for; this was concept and it was power and it had to be done right.  So he had to nail down exactly what he was going to be changing and pitch it back before actually doing it.

The process was not helped by the fact that Ike hadn’t used his power in so long because he had never been able to tell what parts of his power, or understanding of his power, were even true thanks to the damage done by the Sovereign of Lies.  Which was unfortunate, because his power sure knew what it was doing.  Otherwise it wouldn’t have been able to rip open a hole in reality that way.

“It wasn’t a hole, actually,” Ike said, and Isaac realized he must have muttered something under his breath.  “The breach was, itself, part of the memory.  If you want to look for the gate between dreams and reality, it is me, my existence itself.  It is why the function of the travel saucer and Star Central itself is more containment than anything else, and it’s why it’s so astonishing that you can make adjustments.”

“Right,” Isaac said absently, though he couldn’t help be struck by how weird it was that he’d never heard of what Ike’s talent was.  Not a whisper or a hint anywhere, and while he didn’t exactly have access to classified records or anything, there really should have been some reference in the older histories.  It wasn’t like there weren’t newspapers around back then.  “Okay, try — heck.”

He was about to ask Ichabod to try flexing his power again, but it was obvious that Isaac’s most recent attempt at making it harder for the pseudo-smoke of Ike’s defeated summons harder to reform had not well.  It was an obvious way to cut down on the danger and give themselves more breathing room, but the result went very far sideways.  Instead of clamping down on the manifestations, the sort-of smoke that accompanied unresolved pieces of Ike’s power had started taking chunks out of the rock.  Which meant also the protective runes.

A distant rumble sent the floor to dancing, something Isaac could only guess was a result of Moonblast’s explosion going off again, and cracks shot out from the weaknesses introduced by Ike’s power.  If that weren’t bad enough, there was a sudden and unexpected clang from the hallway, and Isaac glanced over to see a spheroid in Mechaniacal’s style rolling lifelessly across the floor.  Ike’s smoke had gotten it too, and it was only by virtue of Isaac and Lia being right next to Ike that they were not at risk of instant death.

Sarah, being smoke, wasn’t at risk regardless.

“Make it harder for me to lose focus,” Ike said with a strained voice.  “I need to interrogate my power if we’re to make any progress.” Isaac complied, throwing his efforts behind something that was very easily classified as mind control.  He’d intentionally used it very infrequently; once during the fight with the Deep Kingdom minder, something he still remembered exceedingly clearly, and a few times while practicing with Sarah. 

It might have seemed to most that being able to induce a monomaniacal focus was great.  Everyone wanted to be able to get more work done without distraction.  But what Isaac’s talent created was less a flow state and more a prison, chains and blinders preventing the target from all the normal vagaries of thought.  An altogether unpleasant and unnatural state of mind, and given the permanency of Isaac’s talent, not one he was confident in perfectly reverting.

After all, he didn’t remove his power from anything, just applied it in the other direction.  With physical items, he’d had years to learn how to judge the base inertia and tune it back to normal, within a fraction of a percentage point or so.  With the mental stuff, that was a lot more difficult to measure, and mind control was highly restricted anyway.  Using it on the head of Star Central was, permission or no, not something he wanted to do.

Too bad there wasn’t much choice.

He had an idea to make it far more useful, however, and that was to reduce the resistance to a certain kind of change.  The change in confusion, the change in understanding.  It shouldn’t be possible to get more confused if Ike was testing things, and understanding should only grow.  Some people would get more confused, but Ike was not one of them.

Weirdly, it was a lot harder to shift Ike’s mind than Isaac had expected.  In fact, he’d encountered little resistance when plying his talent in general, given how unorthodox it was.  It seemed like nobody else had a power in the same sort of region.  But whatever Ike had, his own talent or just anti-mind-control protections, actually fought him, forcing Isaac to strain muscles that had never been challenged before.

When he’d first started on the conceptual path, Cayleb had cautioned Isaac against thinking of power too much in the way of physical muscles.  But with apologies to his brother, that was exactly what the strain felt like.  That strange, weak and uncertain feeling of flexing something he didn’t realize existed.  And the fact that he couldn’t do nearly as much with it as he would have liked.

The wisps of dream-mist around them made an eerie hissing noise that sent prickles all along Isaac’s back, whipping themselves into a violent frenzy.  Lia threw out force shields around them, and Isaac focused on his armor, pushing some physical inertia into it. He’d already reinforced the ontological resistance to change, to keep his armor as armor, but every bit would help.

“Hurry,” Lia said somewhat inanely, clearly shaken as one of the wisps of mist shattered a piece of conjured force with a noise like breaking glass.  Ichabod merely gritted his teeth, not replying.

“Behind you!” Sarah’s voice came, and Isaac whipped around to see a miniature version of one of the sea monsters that occasionally came up to the port, a tangled three-headed serpent with shark jaws.  He lashed out with one of the lengths of cord that he’d kept just in case, the inertially augmented whip sending the apparition flying.  It smashed against the wall, sending further cracks through the already crumbling façade.

With an unsettling rumble, part of the ceiling collapsed, a single solid mass of stone thudding down to lean at an angle over the entrance to the bolthole.  The momentary, instinctive pulse of panic came and went; with Sarah’s help even a full cave-in wouldn’t be a serious problem, but it did mean that whatever protections had been set up were pretty thoroughly trashed. 

There was another all-encompassing boom and rumble, this one from what had to be Moonblast in the distance yet again, shaking loose gravel and dust from the broken edges of the room. A moment after the sound hit the entire room bucked with a shockwave, tossing them into the air for a moment of free fall. Isaac landed weirdly on his elbow, hitting it on Ike’s chair in that exact spot that made his entire arm go numb despite the low gravity and armor.  In return, the extra inertia in his clothes and body crumpled the metal on the offending corner.

Every single time he got thrown around only made Isaac more sure he hated super fights.  Supers with flight and toughness powers, or tinkers in mechsuits, could slug it out with each other, but he was just some guy in the end.  Even with his inertia up he was still leagues below what the heavy hitters were used to dealing with.  The fact that the newest injury wasn’t even debilitating just made it worse, because he knew he shouldn’t be so offended by it.

Ike didn’t seem to notice any of it, his eyes half-shut yet still bulging, the life support chair beeping and chiming softly in some way that at least didn’t sound like an alarm.  It was drowned out by the whine of laser fire from just outside the collapsed entrance, closer than before, which meant they hadn’t done much to stop the flood of enemies.

Isaac shook out his half-numb arm and flicked the cord at the mini-snake that was somehow still alive, this time whipping it sideways, not wanting to catch on the much-closer ceiling.  The tip cracked as it reached full extension, tearing through two of the three necks by luck more than skill and sending the apparition puffing into smoke.    

Sarah’s own smoke thickened nearby as she clearly fought with the stuff.  Isaac winced, hoping his girlfriend could handle whatever consequences that would bring down the line.  There was no way subverting the stuff of dreams was at all safe, but they hardly had a choice.

“Ike, how—” Isaac started to ask, glancing at the man after another quick surveillance of their increasingly less safe room, but stopped as he saw the contortion on Ichabod’s face.  The hairless skin was drawn tight or deeply wrinkled with no in between, brows furrowed and eyes squinted, lips contorted in a way that went past comical to disturbing.  Ichabod coughed or sneezed, some convulsive respiratory attack, and spittle ran down his chin.

It was, Isaac realized after a moment, exactly what it looked like when he’d seen someone hit be a seizure when he was still at the hospital.  Not that he could apply the normal anti-seizure palliative care, and besides, the life-support chair hadn’t sounded any alarms even if the beeping was more insistent than it had been before. It took a moment for Isaac’s brain to catch up and he hurriedly reached out to return Ichabod’s focus back to normal.  Monofocused as he was, the administrator wouldn’t have been able to properly signal that he was finished with what he was doing.  Or maybe he wouldn’t even know it.

Pushing Ike’s ability to change focus back to normal was as much of a struggle as it was altering it in the first place, complicated by the fact that he needed undo the second set of changes at the same time to prevent any untoward effects.  He was distantly aware of some insect-like whining coming close to his ears before Lia did something to shove it away, and of course there was the ever-present sound of Sarah’s Smoke Army doing battle.  Raptor roars occasionally joined the other sounds, though a distant corner of his mind was pretty sure the noise of battle was lessening.

“That’s enough, Hartson,” Ike said, his voice sounding ever so slightly hoarse.  Isaac wasn’t sure that he’d actually put things back the right way, but it’d have to do.  He stopped pushing, and glanced around to see that the consuming wisps of smoke were gone.  Even better, there was a ringing silence where there had been laser fire.

“How are we looking, Sarah?”  He bent down to try and squint through the little bit of entrance still open to the rest of the bunker, only to be met by an enormous raptor eye as Shay snorted at him.

“I think there’s still some trapped in some of these rooms, but nothing new for the past few seconds,” she reported.  Isaac glanced at Ike, eyebrows raised.

“It’s not under full control,” Ike said, still clearly under strain.  “That would require far more work than we have time for at the moment, if it’s possible at all.  But I have figured out how to direct the energies…”  He paused for a moment, one eye twitching.  “Away.”

Isaac added that to the list of things to worry about in the future.  For the moment they had enough trouble, especially since even with Ike’s power partially under control they still had to worry about Moonblast.  And the moon as a whole, for that matter.  Moonblast’s intervention had torpedoed what he’d hoped would be a diplomatic resolution, but he wasn’t going to simply give up.

“Then we need to get you back to Earth, and that means we need to find whatever is putting up that barrier,” Isaac said.  He was pretty sure that his talent could blow through something that made teleportation to Earth harder, but only if he could get his hands on it, physically or metaphorically.  Trying to go at it from the first principle of changing from being on the moon or Earth would have consequences he didn’t want to think about it.

“That is indeed a plan,” Ike said without much approval.  “Unfortunately with just ourselves as resources, it is likely to run into ruin before fruition.  Directing my power elsewhere does have consequences, especially over time.  I would suggest that we return to Queen Selirayne.”

Isaac was struck by two things. One, that Ike was suggesting, not ordering or just doing it, which was a little bit intimidating.  Somehow Ike had decided Isaac was in charge, rather than himself, which was a vote of confidence he wasn’t ready for.  It was something he’d have to talk with Sarah about, since he actually didn’t know nearly as much about Ike as she did.

The other was that Ike still wanted to go to the authorities, even though it was made fairly clear they had no interest in actually working with Scheherazade and The Custodian on the issue of the war.  Or anything, really.  It was probably because Ike was one of the authorities himself, used to dealing with fellow peers and working through the systems they represented. 

“Got a better idea,” he said after a moment, glancing at Lia.  “That strategic scry — think it’d help?”

“It should,” Lia said, with some degree of reluctance.  “Though I wouldn’t trust anyone but Grandfather to find the origins of such an effect.”  Isaac agreed, though more on a social basis than a technical one.  Ostra definitely had his own agenda.

“Scheherazade, can you get us out of here?”  If their reinforced room was falling apart and on the verge of caving in, he doubted that the hallways or entrance were in much better shape.

“Yes.  Brace yourself,” she said, and then there was the blurring, confusing dissolution of smoke.  Then came the sensation of movement, of being tossed through the air like a petal on the winds, tumbling and whirling, and the world resolved itself back into solidity atop Shay.  Sarah grunted unhappily.  “Your power does not like mine,” she said to Ike.

“It is only to be expected,” Ike rejoined.  “You suborned some of it, and that has it rather upset.”

Sarah grunted again, apparently not knowing what to say to that.  Isaac didn’t blame her, because they were just doing the best they could at the time.  Not that Ike’s tone had any note of accusation or censure, just dry facts.

Isaac settled further into Shay’s saddle, the raptor sending the feeling of being inordinately pleased with herself through the bond despite some obvious scrapes, gouges, and bite marks on her hide.  Isaac patted her scales absently, his attention dominated by the massive wall of storm clouds whirling with visible speed barely a mile away.  It was like a hurricane on fast-forward, the dark, viscous maer clouds looking more like solid water than vapor as they flowed from one side of the horizon to the other, lightning flashing and strobing within.  The bolts seemed to be as thick as skyscrapers, crossing the miles and grounding themselves on the surface in sprays of fulgurite debris.

“The heck?” Isaac said, loudly over the rumbles of thunder and the distant howl of wind.

“That’s where Moonblast was,” Sarah called back, and Isaac took a moment to orient himself.  The bunker was in the middle of an abandoned town, half-ruined but with the runic bones still active.  One of many such cases they’d seen in their moon-wide tour.  Isaac stared at the out of place hurricane and looked at Ike, who shook his head.

“Not my doing,” the administrator said, instead gesturing off to their left.  Isaac turned his head, and stared at the enormous plume of aurora rising up into the lunar north sky, mingled with the characteristic look of Ike’s summoning smoke.  He wasn’t sure how he’d missed that, even with the eye-catching storm wall. 

Once again Isaac had to revise his estimation of the sheer power output for Ike’s talent upward.  It felt exactly like when he’d seen Moonblast really let loose, that vertiginous underestimation of the magnitudes involved.  He felt incredibly small; even if he was trying to coordinate a moon-wide solution, it was all nudges and guides, nothing seriously potent in the way that Ike or Moonblast could produce.

After a moment he tore himself away from gawking, glancing up at the crescent of Earth visible just beyond the storm wall and gripped Shay’s barding.  There wasn’t much he could do about either of those ongoing disaster, not without veering into territory he preferred not to.  The Tyrant would set his hands into reality, gouging it like clay to shape paths toward the answers he wanted and putting up uncrossable mountains where he didn’t want people to tread.  Isaac didn’t want that to be the solution, but it was starting to become hard to think of other options.

“Come on, let’s head back to Muiraton,” he said, nudging Shay to take to the air.  The crystalline panel wings spread again, and she hopped over to grab onto Ike’s chair.  He made sure that the chair was closed up and then gave Lia the go-ahead to lead them off.  Norastra banked off to one side of the storm and the other two raptors followed, armor shifting into high-speed mode before they shot forward. 

Rising into the air he saw that it wasn’t just a single wall of cloud, but the edges of some bizarre multilayered hurricane.  No doubt there was magic at play, but a towering mushroom-shaped pillar at the center dominated the entire thing.  It was only visible because of how tall it was, rising up into the pale sky to the point where it probably reached vacuum, and Isaac was quite glad that Moonblast had teleported them out far away from civilization before whatever that was had happened. 

The center of it was lit by an apocalyptic glow coming from underneath in the precise shade of Moonblast’s signature power, and something about it looked wrong enough to make him even more uncomfortable than the unnatural storm itself.  He didn’t have nearly enough experience with actual super stuff to know what he was looking at, but the way it hurt his eyes implied it was more than just regular light, somewhere down deep.  The inside also didn’t appear to be moving the way the outside was, but he just chalked that up to weird rune magic.  At the level of Moonblast’s abilities, anything was possible.

As they started to move, the chair created an obvious drag, and cut down their top speed, forcing Isaac to think for a moment before he tried his hand at a solution.   Using the link he still had with it, he altered its resistance to becoming more aerodynamic.  He wasn’t sure how well it’d work, but he’d let the raptors figure it out and pick up speed.

“Thanks for back there,” Isaac said to Sarah, making sure to key the barding communication to just her, rather than the general channel.  He didn’t need to broadcast a private moment for everyone to hear.  “I think combat would ruin me if I only had myself to rely on.”

“You can rely on me,” Sarah’s voice came back, a little amused.  “Besides, I couldn’t fight like I do if you hadn’t boosted me, so it’s a joint effort.”

“Joint between you and the raptors, mostly,” Isaac laughed, patting the crystal barding that was protecting him from the wind.  “I guess I should pay more attention to their hunting.”  It was a little inane, but he couldn’t help feel like he’d messed up somewhere to have the raptors fighting so much on their behalf.  Or indeed, fighting at all.  The entire point of his presence was to minimize that.

“You’re being too hard on yourself again,” Sarah said, clearly picking up on his thought process.  “I’d say things are going great for the scale of what we’re doing.  One fracas with a superhero and some minor spats here and there?  Compared to a century-plus of war it’s really not that bad.”

“Sure, but we still don’t have any real momentum toward a solution,” Isaac said, watching the frozen heart of the strange tempest.  As they flew around the expanse of the storm they passed over deep cracks that glowed with that selfsame light, strobing along with the lightning and growing incrementally brighter with each one they passed.  Which was terribly ominous, but something he dared not touch without knowing more.  He could make it harder to grow, or easier, assuming he could get close enough without getting vaporized, but there was no telling whether bandaging or lancing the phenomenon was a better idea.

“I still think the two-moon solution is the best way to go about it,” he continued, as they continued to pick up speed.  A glance below showed that Ike’s chair was at an angle, somehow slipping through the atmosphere near-frictionlessly.  Another success for allowing his power to work without restraining it too much.  “But the fact that both sides don’t like it means it probably won’t work.  They won’t let it.”

“You could make their minds easier to change,” Sarah pointed out.

“I could,” Isaac said reluctantly.  “But I’d rather keep from too much mental influence.  It seems like that might be the only solution I have, but it still bothers me to even consider it.  I am, but…”  He sighed.  “I hate to think that this civil war is like some terminal disease and the best that can be done is symptom management.  Or that anything we do won’t address the root cause.”

“You’re overthinking it,” Sarah said with breezy assurance.  “We know the root cause.  The two different sets of runes.  They can’t coexist, so they have to be separate. Or there has to be one set of runes, and that’s probably not possible anymore.  Just because they don’t like it doesn’t mean they won’t lump it.”

“I feel like we might be a bit egotistical believing we’re the adults in the room,” Isaac said doubtfully.  “But then again, everyone hires outside experts and hates to hear what they have to say.”  It wasn’t on nearly the same scale, but he remembered the few times that the hospital had brought in consultants to solve some half-imagined problem or another.  Most of the time, the managers and department heads had categorically rejected – in private, at least – the common-sense solutions. 

Hospitals weren’t active war zones, though, and consultants didn’t generally have to worry about sovereign superheroes expressing their displeasure.  He trusted Sarah, and Lia was generally helpful, but that wasn’t enough to properly deal with the potentially explosive results of what he’d set in motion unless he started leaning even harder into control of the situation.  Once again the abilities of the Tyrant came to mind, and though he had turned away from that path, it would be so much easier.

“We’ll figure something out,” Sarah said, her tone already leaning toward the distracted one she used when her brain was fully engaged.  Which was good, because he felt like he was missing something about the situation, though nobody had been able to come up with particularly good suggestions.  Not even Ike.

Their speed meant they left the storm behind  fairly quickly, once they finished circling around it, but the sheer height of the central cloud – as well as Ike’s aurora funnel – meant both were still visible even as the storm vanished into the distance.  They were headed back toward Muiraton as the raptor flew, so passing by other settlements was only by-the-way, but it didn’t take long for one of the cities they’d previously visited to come into view.

It wasn’t completely on fire, but the telltale pall of smoke hung over it.  That would have been bad enough, even if it was expected, but what made Isaac’s stomach sink was the sight of a giant hologram of Mechaniacal projected above it.  At that distance, he could only see a flash of silver from a drone, but even then it seemed larger than he remembered. 

“What’s going on there?”  After he said it, he realized he was still on the private channel with Sarah, and clicked over to the public channel before repeating himself.  “And why is Mechaniacal involved now?  He said he’d only bother if...”

“If things got out of hand,” Lia said, her voice flat, out of range of the rune translator.  “Something more than mere disorder.  A true threat.”

“We were only gone for like an hour,” Isaac said, half protesting.  “How could things devolve that much in an hour?”

“Catastrophe has a way of arriving quite suddenly,” Ichabod said, his voice desert-dry.  “It is why I try to head off so much brewing trouble before it can reach that level.  At a guess, Moonblast’s actions were a catalyst for consequences based on the potential you created.”

“We’ll add that to the pile, then,” Isaac muttered as they changed course, drawing close enough to hear what Mechaniacal was saying.

“—as your new ruler, I will not allow any useless fighting over past grievances.  All that I require is —”

“He’s taking over the moon?” Sarah more said than asked.  “That’s not going to last long.  Moonblast would do something.  Earth would do something.”

“Most likely,” Ike agreed, sounding resigned.  “This is not something that we could simply let stand.”

“Okay, well, now we have to solve the lunarian problem and the Mechaniacal problem,” Isaac said as they banked away, so as not to get caught in whatever the old tinker was doing.  “One might do the other.  I don’t think he really wants to be involved.”

“I believe Mechaniacal thinks he is the solution to the lunarian problem,” Lia said, this time putting enough actual emotion into her words that he could hear her distaste over his phrasing. 

“Right,” Isaac muttered, making a little tossing-away motion as he tried to ignore the mounting stress.  “So we’ve got to do something, some kind of change that makes Mechaniacal irrelevant and resolves the civil war.”  He glanced up toward the north, at the billowing aurora.  There was also Ike’s power to consider, which could cause untold devastation if it ran rampant.

“You know,” Sarah said, her voice coming over on the private channel. “I think I might have a suggestion.”