Soleil had not a single reference point in this universe-sky… not one! She was good at making sure she had some, which is how she noticed that she had none. She kept her individual sled with the group, but with part of her attention she continued to search for her location.
Soleil mused on Uixtr’s word for their waypoint technology, a transanchor. What words did they combine from her language, and why? ‘Anchor’ has a clear meaning: it holds something in place. A transanchor could be something that holds something in place to a different place, both anchor and transport. This really did look like a totally different place from their usual exit. How would a ship be so big that it had different stars on another side? Behind her, the ship with its doors closed was invisible to sight as usual, and in her glance she marked three star shapes that framed its location from this direction.
The team paced, weaving in a kind of search pattern. Soleil made sure to keep her return flags identified in view. Since she didn’t know what they were searching for, she tried interpreting their pattern. She wasn’t entirely sure they knew, either.
Ah! There was something on her readings. What was it? Soleil tapped her console to alert the mission leader of the detection. He returned a clear message: go find it, and figure it out. A nervous chill washed over her, suspicions of a brewing situation not entirely wrong. The others now monitored her instrument readings.
Faced with an open-ended quandary, the Princess decided to have some fun with this puzzle. Freed from the constraints of flying formation, she did some strategic wheeling and whizzing – justifiable maneuvers with a dash of grace and whimsy. She was chasing blips, after all. When going back to the same coordinates didn’t work, she switched to disorganized logic. Her freeform trajectories encountered two more instances of blips, which they pondered. “Continue combing,” was the order given.
Carefully courting danger, the Princess decided to experiment further. The glove control movements for her sled reminded her of the moves on the page given her by the three Kao-Sidhe. Observing the approximate precision preferred by the vehicle interface, Soleil tried moving with increased gesture arcs and an adjusted speed differential. With her moves, she could enact what to one part of the field was an unnoticeable torque, while in another part creating a visible and calculated rotation, and she could link these gestures smoothly from one to the next. As she followed her readings, the motion reminded her of a giant invisible geochronmechane, the toy of sliding dials that only came apart after seemingly endless flipping, spinning, and switching towards a solution.
Soleil adjusted her base settings a little, just four of the obvious ones that she knew well enough. This would skew the workings into different but still understandable directional sensitivity and scale. Her Vedani teammates made no comment to interrupt her, though she knew they were monitoring her decisions. Soleil knew there was no proof yet for what she was trying, and her included factors would probably fill a chalkboard, if the Vedani had chalkboards. At least there were people nearby if something went wrong.
Her new settings acted stable, so she launched into a chain of movements. The sled field could now read a sizable 75% of her kinetic input, and her movement allowances let her respond more dramatically to the unknowns when they appeared on her readings. The team let her continue unremarked, and their silent, intense focus boosted her concentration. Soleil moved her sled along the edges of the problem. She hoped they were recording on all layers, as she appeared to be tracing something.
The Princess was mapping the shape in her mind as she moved around it. It was a structural, locational convergence point made of sound or vibration, exhibiting edges and angular crossings – like a cluster of intersecting, emitting windowpanes. It was able to hold together in the vacuum, throwing off the disturbances that clashed with the Vedani’s new alliance technology. Parts of the cluster shook with varying degrees of difference, and she noted their frequencies against her own contrastingly reliable and consistent biological movements. Going from this fast part to that slow part, she worked transitions between minor degrees of difference, linking similar resonances along her unified spatial path. She pursued a definition of each glimpsed factor. Directional multiplicities in magnitudes: the Princess tied them together in the moment with her presence of mind, motions, and timing.
Soleil thought it possible that the directionality of each windowpane worked like a signal dish, but she couldn’t divert the attention to study that with a handy detection. Instead, as the order of this thing became clearer, she matched her movements to directionalities, and her rhythms to frequencies – finding what she could link most smoothly with her own body, the sled an extension thereof.
Soleil’s breath slowed, and time seemed to slow with it, as she examined the differences with greater fineness. With her understanding, she glimpsed a path through the panes, like an eye opening directly in the swing of her rhythm. With a burst of urgency, she surged into it – and then, she was somewhere else.
Bones of Starlight 3 : Greater Beyond 