What little camp had been set up was rapidly erased as Lyn — carried by Tanner this time — and Nat took a few minutes at the stream to rinse and clean up.

  With speed and precision borne of experience, Lyn cleaned wounds, applied burn salve, and then retired into the coach to finish eating and sleep.

  Nat also applied salve to his burns, at Lyn's insistence, but was discovered to have suffered little tissue damage, once the coating had been washed away. Still, better safe than sorry.

  The coach master was almost chomping at one of her horses' bits to get a move on. The trip back to the spot of the attack was quick, camp re-set up, and the confused and irritable horses tended to once more.

  The agitated energy was good for one thing though — it helped get through over an hour of the most disgusting work any of them had ever experienced. This in spite of the fact that the coach master worked with horses on the daily, including sickness and foaling. She said so.

  “I understand why this was necessary now, but let's never speak of this again. I'm going to sleep.” Nat returned from a brief trip to the stream to rinse off, climbed up into the coach, pulled a clean shirt over himself as all the blankets were holding… stuff… and was fast asleep in moments.

  Tanner was staring at his forelimbs. “It is going to take me days to get this out of my fur.”

  “I still don't understand why some of it was cooked. Why was it cooked?” The coach master looked to Tanner, bemused.

  “Talents are weird,” he shrugged at her.

  “A Talent? I thought Ber'Duun didn't get Talents exactly. What job does that? Slaughterhouse Barbecue? You know what? I don't care. Help me unload and pack this into the boot before the scavengers get bold. The tack and other gear can sit out for the night.”

  “When do you want to head out to market? I can't be gone for days on end — Bettany would have my tail.”

  “We'll plan to leave a few hours before dawn, that'll put you back on schedule and get me in before other sellers. There are a couple towns that wouldn't be too far out of our way. The trading posts won't pay enough so they're out. The packlands would be best, time-wise, but I don't know where the camps are at the moment. Do you?”

  “No, I'm mostly holed up at the mill these days. Trips to the creche and Bell are all I have time for.”

  “Okay, I'll think on it. Let's finish up, get cleaned up, and get some sleep. I'll wake you.”

  “Appreciated, Ellie.” Tanner looked over at the closed coach door. “I guess we're sleeping under the coach. Okay, I've got to wash up now. Skies above, this is disgusting.”

  “Eh, it's not my worst Fivesday night.”

  Nat awoke to Lyn poking him with a length of stick from just outside the coach. It was still dark outside, so it was well before dawn yet.

  He rose groggily, his muscles reminding him that if he didn't want it to hurt so much when he exerted himself, perhaps he should consider exercising more regularly.

  Stepping down, he noticed some oiled leathers laying under the coach near his feet when he landed, from where Tanner and Ellie had apparently slept. Whoops, he probably should have asked if they'd wanted room in the coach itself. Well, too late now — he'd apologize later, when he was more awake.

  Tanner and the coach master were already up and making ready to depart by lantern light. The horses were also up, idly grazing on whatever scrub was nearby. They were in their overnight blankets, not yet in tack and harness, so departure wasn't quite imminent.

  Lyn seemed in a better mood, even considering the missing foot that the stick was now serving as a crutch for. “Tanner and Ellie — that's the coach master — are going to head to market to sell the meat, and while I'm not exactly thrilled at being left behind while down a leg, the coach might be too close to a town or forest come dawn. So we'll be staying here for now.”

  Oh, right — dawn.

  The work of packing continued in companionable silence, and Nat helped pack the coach with the rest of the gear. Well, pack was being generous. There was nowhere to really put it away — everything that could be was filled with meat, so the rest was thrown into the coach haphazardly.

  It wasn't long before preparations were complete; the horses had been cajoled back into readiness, and Tanner had taken position next to Ellie on the driver's bench. Lyn and Nat sat on the side steps and hung on for a quick trip back to the original camp. The coach came to a stop and Nat and Lyn both climbed down, Lyn more carefully, of course.

  The coach master, Ellie, apparently, addressed Lyn. “I'll be back once we've gotten to town and sold this. Tanner's going with me for safety to town, but I'll be dropping him by his home before I return to pick you back up, probably midday.”

  “We'll stay near the original camp as much as we can. It's less visible, and I'd rather not have any more unexpected visits, especially in my condition.”

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  “Sounds good. I'll be back as soon as I can. If for some reason I'm delayed, don't leave unless you have to.”

  With that, she clicked her tongue twice and the coach started rolling away back up towards the road.

  Lyn waited for them to be out of sight, then snapped and summoned Moira's arc.

  “Okay, they're off. We've got half a day to finish resting, plan, educate, and perhaps train.” Lyn was still all business, not that Nat blamed them. He wasn't down a foot, after all.

  “Good morning, Nat. Lyn gave me the full rundown of the evening's adventures before you awoke. Doing okay yourself?”

  “Can't complain, it wouldn't help anyway. In all seriousness though, I'm fine. My arms are less burned than I'd thought, and I'm more sore from bending down to pick up… stuff, than from the hit. I'm certainly better off than Lyn is at the moment. Speaking of, Lyn, you said this will regrow, earlier. Does it really come entirely back?”

  “Yes, Sil'ther'tha — that's silverpaw to you — can regenerate almost anything that doesn't kill us outright; skin, bones, organs. Eyes and brain are the exception, and we've got therapies that can restore an eye given time, but that would require a long trip, so let's not put that to the test. While my foot will regrow quickly compared to most species healing, it will be at least a week to be suitable for walking, and more to be fully restored.”

  “Well, that's good to hear. So what's our plan?”

  “We've got a little over an hour till dawn…”

  “Dawn will occur in one hour and thirty-six minutes at this position.” Moira interjected.

  “Okay, apparently we've got slightly less than two hours. I'd like to finish resting — it doesn't look like I'm doing much, but believe me this is exhausting. We'll find somewhere less exposed that the other spot and wait out dawn there. Is that acceptable, Nat?”

  “Oh, sure. I'm too awake to go back to sleep, so I'll just organize things a bit.”

  It was time, per Moira, to move to where they'd meet the dawn. Nat was a bit apprehensive, given the events of the evening. He decided it was time to ask some of the questions he'd been holding for a more opportune time.

  The found a cliff side with a niche Lyn could nestle into — nobody was taking chances with another standing rock — and sat as they had the night before.

  Nat decided to get right to it. “Can either of you explain this Talent a bit more to me? Yesterday it seemed, strange, but still within normal parameters for strange. Last night was something else entirely, and I don't understand.”

  “The simplest explanation is that you've got a Helmsman package — that's a Ber'Duun grouping of skills. I'm not sure why, but apparently AMA thought it best for some reason I could not begin to speculate upon. It's not exactly uncommon among Ber'Duun, but it's certainly unusual at this point in the terraformation cycle. That it was given to a human is also strange — the odds that you'd ever encounter a ship, let alone crew one, is infinitesimal.”

  “Helmsman? Like a ship navigator? We're nowhere near the ocean though. I've never even been.”

  “Starship. Spaceship. It's meant for ship to ship relativistic combat and navigational hazard avoidance.”

  “Hazard avoidance makes sense. Even combat, I get. What do you mean relativistic?”

  “Fighting other ships, or avoid hazards, where such actions occur close to light speed — so fast that even computers struggle to process the information fast enough. The progenitors, for reasons of their own, prefer to avoid synthetic intelligences that could manage it, and instead prefer to awaken and assign Ber'Duun. Helmsmen typically work in groups, allowing otherwise impossible feats of response time. In terms of hazard avoidance, a single stone, while travelling at those speeds, could utterly annihilate a ship in an instant.”

  “How does that work?”

  “Basically, helmsmen are sequestered in large isolation chambers, with the ability to control ship systems, typically by hand with the most minute pressures applied through the relativistic reference frame. Like grabbing my hand, only far less pressure — just enough to signal the ship to take action. There's more to it, but I'm no historian; I'm only familiar with the core of the ability. It's not hard to identify though — the event horizon that surrounds you is… unique.”

  “How so?”

  “It looks like a statue covered in a glistening oily cloak. The same way you can't see things while you're in your Talent? When your time to act is over, the ‘debt’ it incurs must be paid off, and so you freeze for an equivalent time — typically three seconds. It gets less and less effective each time you use it in rapid succession, however, as it essentially draws ambient energy from the aetheric substrate, which takes time to equalize. Like emptying a glass of water, it has to fill back up before you can pour it out again.”

  “Hmm. Okay. I think I understand somewhat. What about the scrav? Why did it flee? What happened to it? Did you do something?”

  “Oh, right, you couldn't see it happen. I'd forgotten — it's hard to understand relativistic effects intuitively. So, what happened there is it hit you, but because you were so ‘slow’ compared to it, very little of the force could translate into you. Unstoppable force met immovable object, and the results speak for themselves.”

  “But that doesn't make sense. If it hit a wall as hard as it could, it wouldn't have exploded like that.”

  Moira decided to field this one. “That's true, but there are two things to keep in mind in this case. Number one — nothing actually swings at full force when it expects to meet resistence. It saw you as a flimsy thing, and it swung — hard, assuming you'd become Nat paste. Two, even a wall absorbs some force. If it had angled the strike differently, it would have done little to either of you. It's like hitting ice — the ice takes little damage, and you take little damage, right? But in this case, none of the force was transferred to you, or to the ground through you, as it was a lateral swing, not an overhead one. But the claw couldn't go through you. So all that force, the entire thousand kilos of mass, with the speed you saw them move at? It had to absorb that kinetic energy itself.”

  Lyn picked it up, their knowledge of scravs obviously being more specific, “And scravs just aren't that durable. It may seem strange, but they're not built for impact. They shovel, not pick. Their shells are a thin layer of rock, they're not rocky all the way through. So, the thin layer of rock, and the meat had to absorb all that energy. It was like taking a sledgehammer to a melon.”

  “So wait, am I invulnerable in that state?”

  “Absolutely not, but anything hitting you both hard and fast will be punished, basically. Slower, heavier hits will transfer more to you — and can crush you. A wall falling on you, for instance, would be lethal the moment you exited, even if it broke apart and didn't crush you afterward.”

  “Okay, so, this sounds both cool, and completely terrifying.”

  Lyn thought for a moment, and responded, “That is perhaps the best way to think about it. We should probably have you practice with it later. But not using the whole three seconds. The skill can be activated for fractional moments — that's actually the most common way of applying it, not using all the time up at once.”

  Moira chimed in “Okay, game faces everyone. Dawn's in five minutes. Let's check positioning so we don't need more burn cream.”

  Both Lyn and Nat performed quick checks of their readiness, and then waited in silence for the dawn to arrive, and bring what horrors it may.