Star Law: A Marshal Cole Series

Chapter 28 (d)

She was running out of places to hide. And still Orion had so much to do. As per the plan with Marshal Cole, she was trying to send a message to Goroshenko. She had not spent a lot of time training with her and always called her "kid." Still, He did treat her with care though he hid it with a gruff demeanour.

Back on Earth he always tried to teach her things. Some of those things were secrets regarding her psi powers. Goroshenko showed her how to communicate so that only those who shared their powers could see it. He said this was a good thing and a bad thing. It was good that only psi people could see it. However, he said it was bad that some psi people could read it even if you didn't want them to.

This is when Orion learned about code and why you used it. Goroshenko made it a game as he showed her how psi energy could be imprinted on something like a wall so that it glowed neon bright to those sensitive to it. The Organization was creating its own code for psi work but it didn't mean they could not have their own code too. Using letters, numbers, images, symbols and colours, they created a code that only the two of them could understand.

The private code they created was always in a circle and no wider than a handspan. The circle was a veiled in colour which could only be lifted by a mental password. Inside was the message which could only be read by those who had an intimate knowledge of the code. Once the message was read; a mental note closed it and dispersed the energy.

The big question was how to get Goroshenko to read the message. To this end, they had developed a simple system of small arrows that directed the viewer to the message. The arrows, read, left, right, up and down. They were plainly visible to anyone who had psi abilities to see. By following the directions, it would lead someone to the main message; usually placed in a public space so it was not clear who it was for.

Orion had one disguise that was highly effective but also very flawed in how it could be used. In the days and weeks after her escape from Earth, she had been like a babe in the woods not knowing where to go or what to do.However, she was trained in many things and her psi abilities made it possible to find food, shelter and currency. But this didn't serve any purpose but to survive. Her driving need was to find out what happened to the kids she had attempted to rescue. Guilt and anger wracked her conscience every day.

She bounced back and forth on passenger liners between Saturn Super Hub and beyond. It allowed her to gather snippets of intelligence whenever she was in the Solar System but generally kept her off the radar or so she thought when Aubrey Chase Chen and a team of assassins came for her. That had included Goroshenko but it was he who gave her the brief person to person telepathic message to flee shortly before she had been trapped in an airlock. And flee she did: Through space and to a passing ship leaving everyone believing her dead.

Since then her ability to remain hidden improved even more. It helped when people thought you were dead but her advantage improved even more when her mind was touched telepathically by a non-human. A member of the Sertaxian species, a child really, had been watching her and for whatever reason sent her a psi message of hello. She had been so startled that the little blue humanoid child with sparkly eyes laughed in a lilting sing song voice.

This began her first encounter with a non-human species with psi powers akin to her own. The child was named Kintan and she and her parents were refugees from their own homeworld where psi was hidden and forbidden. Somehow Kintan had determined that Orion was running from the same problems and had messaged her. For a few brief weeks, Kintan and her parent's sheltered her and took care of her on a liner headed to a marshalling planet for colonists headed out to the rim.

On the last day before the family's departure, Kintan gave Orion a gift. It was an object the size of a fist. It kind of gray and blue and looked clay-like in that it had no form aside from a lump. She held in two hands with gloves and it seemed to have real heft to it.

"This is an Arkon," her friend told her. "It is a lifeform from our homeworld. This one is the issue of my Arkon and from someone else we met planet-side days before our travels."

"It's a baby?" asked Orion. Kintan scrunched up her small oval face as she was apt to do when contemplating something. "Of a kind. It is not a pet nor have we been able to determine if is intelligent. It is a symbiont."

This was all new to Orion. "A symbiont?"

"Yes," replied Kintan. "In nature, an Arkon lays in black waters in the mountain streams seemingly dormant. We don't know where they come from. Some say from deep in the planet. What we do know is that the stream waters send Arkons down the mountains into lakes and rivers of the valley. It was there that we noticed that certain wildlife could do remarkable things like change colour or shape or even disappear."

"How?" asked Orion, excitedly. "It was because the creatures had bonded with an Arkon in symbiosis,"answered Kintan. "It affects creatures of different species differently; even within a species it can have vastly different reactions or none at all."

"I'm not sure I understand," said Orion.