Stray: Touchstone Part 1 by Andrea Höst

Author:Andrea Höst
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: young adult, australian, space adventure, girls own adventure, psychic space ninjas
Publisher: Andrea Höst

Monday, February 18

Eighth Squad

It's a weird feeling to have a group of strangers all eager for me to show up. Or really eager to try out what their powers are like enhanced, anyway.

Eighth Squad is one of the Setari teams 'stacked' with high impact talents instead of being more all-round. They're not usually used for spaces that require close fighting: there's apparently some spaces where you don't want to go in and make things explode because parts of the spaces explode right back. Memories of oil refineries, perhaps. And there's some Ionoth that you have to kill by hitting them because it's a bad idea using psionics on them.

Their captain is Ro Kanato. He tracked me down about half an hour before I was due to meet them, to introduce himself, show me the way to a new test room, and double-check my preferences for people grabbing hold of me. He kept making references to the rules which had been set up regarding my 'handling'. I'd love to be able to read these rules, and the reports and things filed about me, but though I've access to the public parts of the interface, there's an awfully large amount of the KOTIS network which I can't look at. I'd like to be able to look up more information about the rotations I'm assigned to before going into them. Although maybe that would be a bad idea and give me nightmares. Hard to tell.

Kanato is about my height, with long black hair which he catches up in a ponytail, and he comes across as unfussed with a mild-mannered efficiency that turns mountains into molehills. I kept wondering where I'd heard his voice until I recognised it as the person who'd first spoken to Ruuel from Fourth when we returned from my 'excursion', just sounding considerably less surprised. He's not quite as correct as Zan, but all sensible and by-the-book, which kept me feeling less embarrassed than I might otherwise have been.

Test Room 2 is built for testing the high impact talents, divided into two by a massive amount of shielding, with the larger side full of angled walls of metal – targets – and the rest of Eighth Squad waiting on the 'safe' side of the shielding. Two girls and another three guys, all polite and professional, with an edge of underlying excitement. Kanato introduced them in the order they were standing: "Henaz, Kade, Trouban, Bryze, Hasen. We'll do a complete run of each skill set per person, starting with Hasen. Remember your instructions regarding contact. Anyone who fails to keep to the restrictions will spend the rest of the day on a training run."

Hasen was a tiny, bird-like girl with soft black hair cut really close to her skull, gorgeous dark brown eyes and darker skin than most Tarens. She stood before a hatchway which was the only opening to the other part of the test chamber and did the whole 'current strength' base level test first. Her primary talent is

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