"We can give you something for the pain once you're fully awake," Tani said, holding a glass filled with cold water close enough for Astra to reach the straw. She drank thirstily, nearly draining the glass.

"Thank you, Tani," she said. Tani set the glass down, then checked the readouts on the medi-cot. "How bad is it?"

"Not bad at all. It's going to hurt some for a while, but it's not serious." She went on to explain what she'd done, and what they'd have to do in the near future in order for the wound to heal without complications. By the time she was finished, Astra was fully awake, so Tani gave her a mild pain killer.

"Please tell me I can have a shower," Astra said, reaching up to touch her hair which was sticky from the hibernation gel.

"Of course you can shower," Tani said. "I'll put a waterproof patch over the bandage, but you need to remember to take it off again when you're dry." Tani placed one hand over Astra's. "Thanks for saving me, Astra. I'm sorry you got hurt."

"It certainly wasn't your fault, Tani," Astra said. "I'm sorry for getting you caught up in this, but we really are desperate."

"So your cousin has told me," Tani said with a smile. "By the way, Steel raided your closet for me. I hope you don't mind."

"Not even a little bit," Astra said. "That sweater looks great on you, and it makes me itch, so it's yours if you like it."

"Thank you, Astra," Tani said, her smile widening. "What do you want first? Rest, shower, or food?"

"Shower first, Food second, sleep last," Astra replied.

"Steel, where's the nearest shower?"

"There's one through that door there," he replied, pointing.

"All right," Tani said, already digging around through drawers and cabinets. She found what she was looking for and went back to Astra's bedside. "Steel, if you'll help her into the bathroom, I'll help her with a shower. After that, I'll get her to her room if you can get her a food tray."

"You sure you don't need me to help with getting her to her room?" Steel asked.

"I'm stronger than I look," Tani said. "We'll be fine."

"All right," Steel said as he reached over and lifted Astra out of the bed. The muscles in his arms and shoulders flexed and Tani had to look away and think about cleaning and packing Astra's wound while hurrying ahead of them to the bathroom. She looked around to make sure everything Astra might need was there, then she lowered the lid on the commode so Steel could set Astra down on it. After that he left, and Tani gratefully closed the door so she could think.

Half an hour later Tani helped Astra don a clean med gown, and combed the tangles out of her wet hair. Even though Tani was significantly shorter than Astra, she really was very strong, so she had no trouble helping her friend up and out of the bathroom, across the infirmary and into the corridor.

"Which way?" she asked. Astra pointed and they set off.

"The wound is in my side, so why is it so hard for me to walk?" Astra asked.

"It's a reaction from the hibernation tank," Tani said. "If I knew more, I'd probably be able to give you something to counteract the muscle weakness and dizziness you're experiencing. I'm sorry that I can't, but you should be able to walk on your own tomorrow, after a good night of real sleep."

"If not for you, I'd still be in it," Astra said. "I've got no complaints and you have nothing to be sorry for." They stopped in front of the elevator and Tani pressed the button for deck two, where the sleeping quarters were located. A few minutes later, with a bit more help from Tani, Astra was wearing her own pajamas and sitting in her own bed, propped up with a stack of pillows and extra blankets. A couple of minutes after that, Steel arrived with a tray that Tani placed on a rolling table like the one that was in her room.

"I'll get out of your hair now," Tani said when she was sure Astra didn't need anything more from her. "I'm sure you and Steel would like to talk without me around."

"No, Tani," Astra said, then looked at Steel. Steel nodded, then grabbed a chair from the corner of the room and moved it closer to the bed. "Sit here," Astra said to Tani, who shrugged and sat on the foot of Astra's bed, careful not to jostle her or her food tray.

"I know you, Tani," Astra said with a smile. "You're dying to know what all this is about, but you won't ask until you think I'm healed. I also know Steel. He won't say anything until I'm healed, either, but I'm fine, so let's just do this."

"If you're sure you're up for it," Tani said.

"I am," Astra said. "I'm just a little sore." She reached for the glass of juice on her tray and sipped. "The reason I came to find you Tani, is that we've been trying for over a year now to get help from ICARUS, but they keep ignoring us. We haven't even gotten a response from them. I know you aren't connected with ICARUS personally, but you're the only person I know who might be able and willing to help us and, like I said, we're desperate."

"You've contacted ICARUS directly, not the Academy, correct?" Tani asked.

"Yes, that's right," Astra said, frowning. "We know the difference between the two."

"Forgive me, Astra, I don't mean to insult you," Tani said. "It's just that about six weeks ago it was discovered that the Director of the ICARUS Academy had been compromised."

"Compromised?" Steel asked.

"The Xanti had a device that they implanted into people's brains called a controller. Are you familiar with that at all?"

"No," Steel said slowly as he and Astra shook their heads. "Can you tell us more about it?"

"It's nano technology that's injected into the host's brain. The host is then at the mercy of whoever controls the controller, and it's impossible to fight. The host will do absolutely anything and everything they're told."

Astra and Steel both looked a little sick. Tani didn't blame them. It was a horrific device. "How is this controller removed?" Steel asked.

"That's the hard part," Tani said. "No one's ever found a way to remove a controller using mundane means without killing the host. However, there are two women on Jasan who, working together, can shut it down and destroy it using their psychic abilities."

"The Director of the ICARUS Academy had one of these devices?" Steel asked.

"He did," Tani replied. "My parents took him back to Jasan to have it removed. From what you're telling me, I have a very bad feeling that someone...whoever put the controller in General Christoff probably...has infiltrated both the Academy and ICARUS."

"Who?" Astra asked.

"I've got no idea," Tani said.

"Tani, is there any way that you can get ICARUS to help us?" Astra asked.

"I'll certainly try," Tani replied. "But I need to know more before I can tell you whether or not they're even the right people to contact."

"I thought that since the Xanti were involved, ICARUS would help," Astra said.

"Not necessarily," Tani replied. "There are specific guidelines that ICARUS must follow in order to determine whether or not a situation or problem is a direct result of the chaos left by the Xanti. If what was meant to be, what Fate had ordained, has been altered, then it's the sworn duty of every member of ICARUS to do what they can to put things back on track. Obviously they can't turn back the clock, but they try to right as many wrongs as possible. But, just because people are in a bad situation doesn't mean that it would be right for ICARUS to interfere. If that is their fate, unaltered by the Xanti, then they cannot interfere."

"I understand," Astra said, obviously disappointed.

"I don't," Steel said, frowning darkly. "By that code, no one can help people who are being exploited or enslaved unless the Xanti enslaved them."

"No, that's not what I'm saying," Tani said. "I'm saying that ICARUS can't interfere. The Jasani can, and do, interfere in situations where basic rights are violated, as do most of the planets in the Thousand Worlds that signed the Law Enforcement and Defense Treaties."

"I apologize, Tani," Steel said. "I misunderstood you."

Tani smiled, accepting the apology, and continued. "I know the rules that ICARUS operates by because my parents helped write them, and invited me and my sisters and brothers into some of the discussions they had about it. Tell me what the problem is that you need ICARUS's help with, and I will tell you whether or not I think it's a matter that ICARUS can involve themselves in."

"If it is?"

"Then as soon as it's safe to do so, I'll contact my parents and tell them the situation."

"And if it isn't?"

"Same answer," Tani said.

"Very well," Steel said. "Do you want the long version or the short one?"

"I don't have any appointments that I'm aware of, so let's go long."

Steel smiled, then glanced at Astra who nodded. "Please understand that much of what I now tell you is old knowledge, passed down through our families for generations," Steel warned. Tani nodded her understanding. "It all began four hundred and fifty years ago when a thousand of my people, the Khun, were stolen from their home world by the Xanti, and taken to what was to become our new home, Garza. When the Khun were put down on Garza, about two hundred Nomen were already there, waiting for them."

"Excuse me for interrupting, but who are Nomen? You mentioned them earlier, but I don't recall ever hearing of that planet, or those people before."

"As far as we know they don't have a planet, and they aren't truly a people. They're part human, and part machine. They refer to themselves as Nomen, so that is what we call them." Tani nodded again, her face showing none of the nausea that churned in her stomach as Steel continued. "They were bigger and stronger than our people, and had weapons that appeared magical to the relative primitives our people were at that time. They ruled over the Khun, and their rule was cold, emotionless, and absolute.

"The people soon learned that they were expected to mine a rare liquid metal that the Xanti wanted. The Nomen taught the men how to mine, and the women how to grow food without soil and raise livestock to feed everyone. Then they made sure everyone worked hard enough to satisfy them.

"For four and a half centuries the Khun mined the metal for the Xanti, living and working as slaves with no hope of change. Then one day, without warning or obvious cause, the Nomen ceased to function. They just fell over dead, every single one of them, all at the same time.

"We were afraid at first. We'd long prayed for freedom, but this was so unexpected that we didn't know what to do. Not only had the Nomen died, but none of the machinery worked, either.

"For two weeks we waited, terrified of what would happen when the Xanti came to collect the metal as they did every month. But when that day came and went, and the next, and the next, we began to understand that something had happened somewhere in the universe, and whatever that something was, it had freed us.

"We abandoned the mines completely. For the first time in centuries men, women, and children lived and worked together. The women taught the men how to farm, and we all tried to get used to living as free people. Then, a few months after the Nomen had dropped dead, a ship landed on Garza, near our new village. I was nine years old at the time, and I remember watching my father and his three most trusted men go out to meet it while the rest of us got ready to run and hide.

"It turned out that the new ship wasn't filled with Xanti or Nomen. It was a Welfare ship, and inside of it were the first kind people we'd ever seen. With their help, the Khun began to prosper. There weren't very many of us by then, fewer than five hundred, and the Welfare captain confirmed that we were the only people on the entire planet. But they didn't care how many of us there were. To them, the Khun were in need, and it was their creed to help, so they did.

"They built a school and provided a teacher who taught anyone who wanted to learn, child or adult. They brought new, up to date farming equipment, seeds and fertilizer, and machines that would dry and preserve our harvests much more quickly and easily than the methods we'd been using. They told us which crops were in demand and helped us learn to grow and sell them so that, for the first time, we had money. Not a lot, but enough to buy things we needed, like this old ship. They even made it possible for those of us that were interested to leave Garza and go to college. For sixteen years we learned what it was to live as free people, and true citizens of the Thousand Worlds.

"Then, about a year ago, the Nomen returned. They looked completely different, so we didn't know who they were at first. My father and his men went out to meet their ship, as they'd done with the Welfare ship years before. They entered the ship which took off, heading in the direction of the old mine. They did not return.

"The next morning, before dawn, I led a group of twenty males to the old mining compound in search of my father and his men. When we got there we found their bodies hanging from posts in the middle of the compound, on display. There was no one else there so we took them away and gave them a proper burial deep in the mountains where they could never be found."

"I'm so sorry for your loss," Tani said, while placing her fist over her heart and bowing solemnly in the Jasani way.

"Thank you," Steel said, his voice rough with unshed tears. He cleared his throat and continued. "By the time we got back to the village, the Nomen had come and gone, taking not just the men, but the women and children as well. Only the oldest, the infirm, and the very youngest children were exempt. Babies were handed off to the care of men and women too old and weak to mine. The new Nomen had dehydrated food for the prisoners to eat so there was no need to leave people on the farms to raise food when they could be mining instead."

"This is why you didn't come to school this past year," Tani said to Astra.

"Yes," Astra said. "Steel and Khurda offered to take me, but I refused. I could not attend classes knowing what was happening back at home."

"No, I wouldn't have been able to do that, either," Tani said. "Although, I have to ask how it is that you're still free."

"Paranoia," Astra said.

"Pardon me?"

Steel arched a brow at his cousin, but Tani caught that little twitch at the corner of his mouth and knew he wasn't really annoyed with her. "After living for centuries as slaves, we Khun had a difficult time accepting that our freedom would last. We'd learned by then that the Xanti were no more, but that didn't take away our fear of what the future might hold. After a while, the village elders decided to do something about it.

"It took about a year of exploring but eventually a cliff was discovered deep in the mountains that was riddled with caves. Dozens of caves of all sizes, some with one chamber, some with as many as five chambers. We chose the largest and deepest of the caves, sealed it off, and began storing food and supplies there. We planted more than we needed just so we could stockpile more and more food against the day we all feared. It was a ten day walk from the village to the caves and back, but it was worth the effort for us to know we had a safe store of food, and a place to hide if we needed it. It helped."

"I imagine so," Tani said, shivering as she tried to picture herself in such a hopeless situation.

"Two days before the Nomen returned to Garza, fifteen young women and fifteen young men had gone to the caves with a large load of freshly preserved food to store. Astra was one of those, a happenstance I am forever grateful for as she is the only member of my family still living.

"When my companions and I returned to the village after burying my father and his men, we gathered up the older people and the littlest children that had been left behind and took them to the caves. Then we returned for the farm animals and anything else we could carry away. Sometime between our fourth trip and the fifth, the Nomen destroyed the village and every crop, house, and building they could find.

"During the first few weeks there were a few escapes from the mine, but there've been none since. Right now there are a little over a hundred of us, about sixty males, and forty females, including the little ones. The remaining four hundred Khun are once again enslaved. We don't know how they're being treated, if they all still live, or if some have died. All we know is that if we don't free our people soon, the Khun will cease to exist altogether."

"I'd say that this is definitely a legitimate ICARUS matter," Tani said. "The fact that the Khun were taken from their home world by the Xanti to begin with would be enough, I think."

Steel and Astra both smiled with relief. "Thank you, Tani," Astra said.

"Well, don't thank me yet," Tani said. "I haven't done anything. I will though, that much I promise. Do you have any idea who's making these Nomen? Or who's giving them orders? Because I guarantee you it isn't the Xanti."

"Unfortunately, our efforts to learn more about where the Nomen come from have failed," Steel replied. "We've tried several times to follow their ships after they come to pick up the metal, but we simply can't keep up with them. But, even though we haven't been able to learn anything about our people, we've collected a great deal of information on the compound itself. We've got maps, a couple of surveillance images, and we know which buildings hold what, where everyone sleeps, when they begin work and when they're allowed to quit for the day. We know what type of security they have on the fence, what kind of ground transports they have and their capacity. We have stacks of lists and images and maps, and it's all useless information because it doesn't tell us how to free our people without getting everyone captured or killed in the process."

"What's in the mountains where the caves are that prevents the Nomen from coming in to get you? Or just dropping bombs on you, for that matter?"

Steel looked at Astra, who nodded at him. He looked back at Tani. "Blind Sight."

"Did you say Blind Sight?" Tani asked, shocked. Steel nodded. "How did you manage to get your hands on a Blind Sight?"

"Khurda was very quick to catch on to anything having to do with technology. Like my father before me, I had three best friends when I was a child, and we all did everything together, including going away to school. The first thing we did when we got home from college was go to the old mine compound. There was so much that we'd never understood before, but we knew enough by then to identify almost everything we found. It was Khurda who figured out that the reason everything stopped all at once was because the Xanti had planted a transponder that received a signal at regular intervals. If that signal wasn't received, the transponder sent out a different signal that caused everything to stop working."

"Wow," Tani said, impressed. "That means that the Nomen are, or at least were, either androids, or they had controllers. What else did he find?"

"He found a Blind Sight device that was so big it hid the entire planet," Steel said. "That explained why the Welfare ships hadn't found us sooner than they did, something we'd always wondered about. It didn't work because of the Xanti's kill signal, but that didn't stop Khurda. He took it apart, put it back together, figured out how it worked and what had been destroyed when the failsafe fried it. Then he built a new one on a smaller scale using parts from the original. It took him over a year to do all this in his spare time, but when he was done, we had a Blind Sight that no one else had. We set it up to hide the area around the caves where we'd stored all of our supplies because, even then, we were still concerned about what the future might hold.

"After that, Khurda went to work making another one for the village. Before he finished it, the Nomen returned."

"What if one of your people tells the Nomen where the caves are?"

"It's been over a year, and no one has yet," Steel said. "It's always a possibility, of course, but even if they do talk, most can't give more than general directions such as walk for a week that way. We keep guards posted all the time, and so far we've seen no sign of the Nomen."

"I think it's deliberate," Astra said.

"What's deliberate?" Tani asked.

"They have enough people to work the mine right now and make their quotas," she said. "They don't need more of us because the new equipment requires fewer people to run it. I think they're content to let us be for now. We aren't causing them any trouble, and if something happens and they need more workers, they know where to find us. In fact, I believe they allowed those men and women to escape at the beginning because they didn't need them. The more people they have, the more they have to feed, so letting some of us stay free is to their benefit."

"What do you think, Steel?"

"I agree with Astra," Steel said. "I just haven't shared the theory with anyone else. I'm worried it will take away too much of their fight if they realize we're being allowed to be free until they need us."

"I agree," Tani said, relieved that both of them understood the truth of their situation. "What is this metal that they want so much?"

"We know it only by our own name for it, rhagyrum, or liquid metal. We know now that it's a key element in the construction of the Xanti's bio-suits, but what its other uses are I can't say. We do know that it's not found on the periodic table, and not even the most advanced scientists in the Thousand Worlds know what it's called, or where it comes from. They think it's an alloy of metals mined in the Xanti's galaxy. But it's not."

"You never told anyone about it, either, did you?" Tani asked shrewdly. "Not the Welfare people, or your professors at school."