Anna wordlessly stands up and walks over to stand next to the Marshall and follows him closely. Once a healthy distance away from the others, she quietly speaks to him.
"I get the feeling that you aren't supposed to tell me anything about this, so I appreciate you doing anything you can to help. If it's as bad as your actions seem to say they are, then rest assured, the only way anyone will know I know is if they pry it out of my brain.
So, with that said, lay out the facts for me. I need to know so I can help keep us alive as best I can."
Feuer nods but says nothing. He walks west, away from the still spreading fires. He stops roughly sixty feet from the main group, in the untouched ground between the two colonist structures. You feel a shift in the air around you when he stops, a subtle ripple, and when it's over the sounds of the blaze behind you are garbled and distorted.
"The Unchained have few secrets, we make that a distinction between the Technocracy and our people, but we are not without them." The Marshal's voice is clear and hard, his eyes never leaving yours. "What I am about to tell you is information reserved to senior officers, and only in this situation do I make this exception. You will never make the same decision on your own. Take what I tell you and hide it where no dear friend or ally can come across it. Bury it in your mind, and use it only when you have need."
"Most psionics are those like you and myself, our abilities with us since birth. Those who scored properly in academy were shuttled into special programs that would transform them into shackled weapons, those who didn't score well enough in aptitude or obedience... Well, you know the end of that story." Feuer finally breaks his gaze, looking back towards the ragged band of renegades before continuing. "That is what every psionic of the Unchained knows, but it is an incomplete explanation. We, psionics, are not anything close to a natural occurrence in the human race. The Technocracy altered the children of thousands of mothers under the guise of routine maternal screenings. We were all, since before we saw light, earmarked to be test subjects and foot soldiers. What we have kept hidden is that whatever makes us what we are, was brought back to Sol from here, from Eridani. It was bonded to us in a way that I don't even begin to understand, but it made us as biologically different from unaltered human stock as horses are from mules," Feuer's tone is still intent, but there's is an undercurrent of tired loss when he brings up that last point. "We keep this secret to avoid another break in the Unchained. If the common soldier stops thinking of himself as human, then he has very little left to fight for, and the Technocracy's attempts to cage us like animals gain a glimmer of justification. That, however, is simply an aside to the greater issue. The Technocrat gate has been revealed publicly for thirty-six years, though we have evidence that they were using it for five years prior. That means that the gate to Eridani has been operational for forty-one years, at most. Major Caine is forty-four years old." The Marshal stops for a moment, letting that sink in.
"Those like you and me, modified to be born with the gift, are test subjects. Experiments in how the ability can work in a human being. Those like Major Caine, like the Matriarch, are the earliest prototypes of the project's culmination. They were not born gifted. Their capacity was surgically implanted, arranged to maximize their abilities and allow them to create far greater manifestations with far less effort. They are still human, just upgraded to have the perfected strengths that our kind died to test. We were created to test, they were created to use, and that makes them far, far more dangerous. Technocrats like the presbyter have undergone the refined version of the treatment, making them more than the equal of the strongest of the inborn in terms of raw strength. We are outclassed in this fight because every single one of us was just a stepping stone, a lab rat, and the presbyter has abilities that are the culmination of all of that testing. If the major, the only one of us who could even attempt to be his equal, lost... then things are very bleak, though not quite hopeless."
"Those who had their abilities added to them after birth can never learn to integrate them into their lives as fully as we have. What comes as naturally to us as breathing takes an effort from them. Not a great deal of effort, but it still requires a conscious action on their part. We can tweak circumstances in our favor without even thinking, the legacy of a mind that grew up with the ability attached. It is a very slim advantage, but the only one that I am sure we have."
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Topic: Deviation-22. The End of All Things. (Read 536561 times)