Bruce W. Paulik’s Mindfall Inception Launch!!

Chapter 2: The Thunderbolt

—Riann—

One year earlier…

The largest space warship ever built, the ISD Ulysses, floated in orbit above Luxor. Riann Jameson stood motionless at an entrance to a flight hangar, imagining the quarter million ton vessel around her and its four immense fusion drives. She could sense the six thousand people on
board—Imperial Sentinel Force crew and marines, VIP guests, and graduating Knight Cadets. All gathered here on this day, the Tenth Day of January in the 634th Year of the One True God, for the annual graduation of the newest Knights of the Empire.

She had never felt so nervous prior to a parade. No, not nervous. That was a gross understatement. Anxious. So anxious she felt nauseated—she couldn’t take a deep breath because of the tightness in her chest. She stood there as the movement of people ebbed and
flowed around her, waiting for her moment to walk out into the vast hangar and mount the stage.

As the Cadet Knight Colonel, she would take the salute from the graduating cadets in her brigade. Almost three thousand graduating cadets, two battalions making up her brigade, gathered to salute her as their leader. Three thousand young men and women who had survived the rigors of twelve years of study and intensive, grueling, and dangerous training. Ten times that number didn’t make it. The lucky ones simply sent home, the less fortunate faced varying periods of rehabilitation from injuries, and many returned home in coffins, draped with the imperial flag.

Her anxiety did not stem from taking the salute.

She didn’t know if she could shut out all the voices, and that terrified her.

For over a year, she had been imagining she could hear everyone’s thoughts. At first, she self-diagnosed a psychotic episode—that’s what all the psychiatric information she found suggested. But she approached the problem with the trained logical analysis of a knight and
carried out multiple small experiments before she realized she could indeed hear other people’s thoughts.

It wasn’t long before it was common knowledge among her fellow cadet knights that telepathy had started appearing at about the same time over the previous year in major population centers across the empire—mostly in people in their teens and twenties. More
worrying—once Emperor Cyraxian named telepathy as a heresy, she heard the rumors of people across the empire being executed if they claimed to hear the thoughts of others.

She hid her problems at her monthly interviews with her Defender of the Faith. It became easier when she realized that being able to hear his thoughts gave her a head start on providing the right answers to his questions.

Over the past year, she had discovered she could tune out people’s thoughts. She had been training herself to handle larger groups of people in her vicinity without being overwhelmed by the cacophony of their thoughts, made easier by focusing on the thoughts of a single person. But silencing three thousand?

A deep tone sounded throughout the super-dreadnought—a tone she felt through her bones as much as heard. Time to go. She managed a deep breath and marched into the vast flight hanger with her Adjutant Lieutenant following hard on her heels.

Approaching her position at the center of the dais, Riann acknowledged with a nod the senior Knights of the Empire who had overseen their extensive training over the past twelve years. As the cadets assembled, she would focus on the thoughts of whichever cadet was situated
immediately in front of her, to the exclusion of the thoughts of the other cadets, knights, and VIPs—whose thoughts were bombarding her now. The graduating cadets arrived in dramatic fashion. From the ceiling of the hangar some thirty meters above, a force field was released and two hundred cadets plummeted to the floor of the hangar. The cadets cheated death or injury by the last-minute firing of the boosters in their battlesuits, and by their nanite-enhanced bodies—that and the fact that the ship’s gravity field was set to point five g. As they straightened to attention in unison, they slammed right fist against left chest, then leaped aside to allow for the next group to fall until eventually three thousand cadets stood before Riann.

Impressive and finely timed.

Riann merely stood to attention and focused on one face in the group in front of her. He was recognizable from his file image—Conley Duin, the top graduate of his battalion. She would present his award. Riann absorbed the fact of his size and obvious physical power without
qualm. But nothing prepared her for the clarity and strength of his personal thoughts—

—Conley—

Standing directly in front of Cadet Colonel Riann Jameson. Her sapphire-blue eyes lock on mine. I catch my breath, can’t move or breathe. As if a thunderbolt has hit me. Something inside me shifts. Her thoughts flood through my mind.

Unaccountably, I feel cut adrift—something momentous has just changed in my future. The vision that I have always had of my future has dissolved. I have no idea where this moment will take me.

Her thoughts continue to pervade my mind, loud and crystal clear—she had decided to focus on my thoughts alone, so I am experiencing the full power of her telepathy.

—Riann—

—as Riann returned the salute to the three thousand graduating cadets.

Conley’s projected thought burst into her mind. Hell! Are you reading my thoughts, Colonel?

No one had ever sensed that she could read their thoughts, and she struggled to maintain her composure as she completed the salute.

I am focusing on your thoughts to ignore the thoughts of everyone else! Riann belatedly realized that could be a fatal mistake, admitting to telepathy.

Colonel, we need to meet in private and sort this out—we are both in grave danger. Make no sign of this connection now, I beg you.

Agreed.

Riann switched her attention to her Adjutant Lieutenant’s thoughts. The colonel has such a shapely ass.

She presented awards to several cadets in a daze, then the final award to Conley. She blocked her mind to his thoughts as her focus turned to the danger inherent in using telepathy with someone she didn’t know and couldn’t yet trust.

* * *

Riann left the flight hangar as soon as acceptable, once the ceremony concluded. She came to an abrupt halt in a corridor when blocked by an armed squad of four unsmiling Defenders of the Faith, led by a Colonel Abel Augustus, according to his nameplate.

“Come with us, Cadet Colonel.” The colonel had emphasized Cadet with a smirk.

Riann felt as if her heart had stopped beating, and certainly held her breath. “What is this about, Reverend Colonel?”

“We need you, as Cadet Colonel, to be a witness to the punishment of one of your cadets.”

“What is their crime?” Riann struggled to keep her voice calm and confident.

“Well Cadet Colonel, you’ll be pleased to know that we have been vigilant during the last year of your cohort’s training, on the lookout for heretics. This cadet is guilty of the heresy of telepathy. Follow me.”

The Reverend Colonel spun on his heel to march away and missed Riann’s face blanching. She knew what the “punishment” would be. The other four Defenders of the Faith—“Blackshirts” to most of the empire’s civilians—marched only a pace behind her. What? Do they think I’ll run away?

The Reverend Colonel led them through the Ulysses, up five decks and moving ever further aft. Riann had spent a few weeks aboard this ship during her training, but still found its immensity overwhelming. With a sickening sensation in her stomach, Riann began to suspect
their destination—this suspicion was confirmed when they entered the engine room of one of the massive combination fusion and nuclear fission drives used for sublight travel. They moved through a maze of piping and machinery of indeterminate function until they reached a red hatch with a warning sign: “DANGER. HIGH RADIATION.” A rack of bright orange hazmat suits hung in an open locker to the side.

“Well, this is where we’ll need to change to hazmat suits. Unless you want to count your lifespan in days rather than decades. Of course, we all need to strip before we deck ourselves out in fashionable orange.” That smirk reappeared on the Blackshirt’s face. He was enjoying himself now.

As Riann stripped to her thin, formfitting bodysuit, she could feel the major’s lecherous eyes on her, but ignored him. She climbed into the thick orange suit and donned gloves, boots, and helmet.

Shrill alarms sounded as the massive radiation door swung open. A negative pressure space, Riann sensed the blast of air into the radiation space despite her hazmat suit. They hurried through and resealed the door.

Ahead of them in the narrow corridor stood two hulking figures in hazmat suits, supporting a tiny figure between them. Only a thin striped shift covered the young woman, leaving her otherwise exposed to the radiation. They had tortured her, and Riann catalogued her
condition for any future prosecution of the torturers—her head shaven, with burn marks from electrodes, her body crisscrossed by cuts and burn marks and bruises, her face so swollen even her own mother wouldn’t have recognized her, bleeding from several locations and blood
pooling around her feet. She was conscious but did not look up on their arrival.

Anger surged through Riann. Her vision narrowed, and her pulse thudded in her ears. “Have we moved on to physical torture in the name of the One True God?”

The colonel turned to her, scrutinizing her face through the helmet faceplate. “Our current drugs used during prisoner interviews don’t seem to work on telepaths. More traditional methods of questioning are required. I found it quite instructive to watch our specialist Brothers work
their way through various drugs and a range of traditional inducements—unfortunately this heretic did not divulge any secrets.” The external speaker on his suit made his voice both robotic and gleeful. His eyes gleamed as he seemed to relive the “traditional” methods.

The Blackshirt colonel turned to a panel next to a red hatch and punched in a long code. Piercing alarms sounded as the powered hatch swung open. They threw the young woman through it into an enormous blast chamber, and the hatch closed with a thud.

“We have added a camera to the chamber. The fusion blast will, of course, destroy the camera the moment it starts, but we need proof of her demise as required by Imperial Edict 9245D.” The colonel all but rubbed his hands in anticipation of the entertainment.

Riann could not help herself, despite the danger. She reached out to the young woman with her mind, but she was so far gone she did not respond, her mind blank apart from her desire to hold on to the knowledge that her name was Clarissa, and the pain of betrayal.

The colonel hustled them all out of the high radiation zone and they changed back into their uniforms. The colonel was so keen to get to the next stage of the proceedings that he didn’t even remember to ogle Riann’s body.

They stood before a screen in the engine room control area. He touched his wrist terminal and spoke a command. “We’re ready for that brief blast on Fusion 4.”

On the screen, the young woman lay on the floor of the fusion chamber without stirring.

In the engine room around them, warning lights started flashing and a great humming noise began. It seemed to penetrate deep into Riann’s soul. Within the space of a fraction of a second Riann experienced two things—Clarissa’s mind screaming of her pain, and a blast of blue-white light obliterating the young woman, then nothing. The woman was gone, the screen blank.

Riann stood motionless, traumatized, changed.