Three months in, Nix could catch the intake nine times out of ten.
It had stopped feeling like catching smoke and started feeling like closing a fist, a deliberate physical act with a beginning and an end that he controlled rather than the other way around. He could hold accumulation at a steady level for up to forty minutes before the pressure behind his eyes became something he had to manage. He could release in a controlled direction with reasonable accuracy at rank one and two output levels. At rank three he was consistent about sixty percent of the time, which Sera marked on her datapad without praise but also without the particular silence that meant he'd done badly.
He'd learned to read her silences. There were several distinct varieties.
The ship had a name, he'd found out eventually. The Ashfront. An intelligence vessel registered under a civilian freight designation that didn't hold up to serious scrutiny but didn't need to because anyone scrutinizing it closely enough to notice would already be the kind of problem that a fake registration wasn't going to solve. It ran with a skeleton crew of about thirty, most of whom Nix had exchanged maybe two words with in three months, and it moved on a route that seemed designed specifically to avoid anywhere interesting.
His days had a shape now. Up before five, physical training with Osk for two hours, frequency work with Sera for three, a break that he usually spent with Fen who had an inexhaustible interest in how the absorption process worked and asked questions that nobody had ever thought to ask before and sometimes accidentally said something that helped. Afternoons were situational work, the practical application of everything the morning built toward. Then evenings, which were his own.
He was stronger than he'd been three months ago in ways that were visible and ways that weren't. The physical training under Osk had done what Osk had said it would do quietly and without fanfare, the same way Osk did everything. Nix had put on muscle and lost the particular leanness of someone who doesn't eat enough and works too hard for the wrong reasons. He was faster. His reaction time had dropped to something Sera had noted once, briefly, before moving on.
The frequency work was harder to quantify but he felt it. The awareness of his own interior, that sense of the space inside himself where absorbed energy went, had gone from a vague impression to something he could map with reasonable confidence. He knew where the accumulation sat, how full it was, how much room he had left before the pressure started. Sera called it capacity awareness and said it was the most important thing he'd developed so far, more important than the intake control or the directed release, because without it everything else was guesswork.
Carro Denn had never developed it. Nix didn't need to be told why that mattered.
He was in the mess eating breakfast when Fen came in looking like he'd been awake all night, which was not unusual, and sat down across from him with a datapad and the expression of someone carrying information they weren't sure how to put down.
"What," Nix said.
"There's news from the Boundary," Fen said. "Varek's going to brief everyone at eight but I pulled the raw feed this morning." He put the datapad on the table but didn't push it across. "Two more worlds."
Nix put his fork down.
"Sellan and Voss Prime," Fen said. "Contact confirmed thirty six hours ago. Full silence on both within eighteen hours of first contact." He paused. "Voss Prime had a population of four hundred thousand. Sellan was smaller, about eighty thousand."
Seven worlds now. Nearly a million people across all of them, the number that was too large to feel real still somehow getting larger.
"The rate," Nix said.
"Accelerating. The gap between Grevian and these two was eleven days." Fen looked at the datapad. "Eleven days between five worlds and seven."
Nix sat with that.
"There's something else," Fen said. He did push the datapad across now. "The probe data we got from the Sellan approach. Before it went dark."
Nix looked at the display. A sensor reading, similar to the one Varek had shown in the briefing three months ago, the frequency map of something enormous. But different. The number at the top of the scale was larger than the last one. Not by a small amount.
"They're getting stronger," Nix said.
"Or there are more of them in closer proximity and we're reading the combined output." Fen took the datapad back. "We can't tell yet. Either way the reading is higher than the last confirmed data by a factor of three."
Nix thought about the accumulation ceiling. About Carro Denn absorbing seven sustained rank four discharges in two minutes and what had come out when it became too much. He thought about the number on that probe display and tried to do the math and stopped when the math became something he didn't want to finish.
"Does Sera know," he said.
"She pulled the feed before I did," Fen said. "She's been in the training room since four."
Nix finished his breakfast without tasting it and went to find her.
She was running a combat form when he came in, fast and precise, the kind of speed that a rank four Ascendant could access when they were pushing their frequency to assist their movement. The air around her hands had the deep steady gold of an Ascendant's full output, brighter than the controlled warmth she usually kept suppressed during training sessions. She was working something out. He recognized it because he did the same thing, just without the glow.
He waited until she stopped.
She stood with her back to him for a moment, breathing, then turned around. Her expression was the closed careful one she wore when she was thinking hard about something she hadn't resolved yet.
"You saw the feed," he said.
"Yes."
"Factor of three."
"Yes."
He sat down on the bench along the wall. She stayed standing, which was a thing she did when she was working through something, like sitting down committed her to a position she wasn't ready for.
"Talk to me," he said.
She looked at him. In three months they had arrived at something that wasn't quite friendship and wasn't the professional distance she'd started with. Something in between, built out of early mornings and long training sessions and the particular closeness that came from one person repeatedly hitting another person with controlled frequency discharges and paying close attention to what happened.
She sat down. Not next to him, a few feet of bench between them, but down.
"The timeline Varek gave us was a year," she said. "Minimum. Before you go anywhere near an actual threat."
"I know."
"Three months in you're at sixty percent consistency on rank three directed release. You need to be at ninety plus on rank four before we can even discuss field deployment responsibly." She looked at her hands. "At current pace that's another six months minimum. Probably more."
"And the worlds are going quiet every eleven days," Nix said.
"Every eleven days now. The rate is still accelerating." She was quiet for a moment. "By the time you're ready, at the pace we're going, we could be looking at contact with mid-rim worlds. Populated ones. Millions of people, not hundreds of thousands."
She didn't say what she was getting at because she didn't need to. He was already there.
"You think we need to move faster," he said.
"I think Varek is going to say we need to move faster," she said. "And I think he'll be right about the reasoning and I think it will still be the same mistake they made with Carro Denn." She looked up. "I think both of those things at the same time and I don't know what to do with that."
Nix looked at the floor. The impact plating, scored and darkened in places from three months of his training. His marks on it, getting cleaner and more deliberate as the weeks had gone on.
"What do you need from me to get to ninety percent faster," he said.
She looked at him.
"Not recklessly," he said. "Properly. What does the training need to look like."
She was quiet for a long moment, thinking, the real kind of thinking she did when she wasn't managing a room or maintaining a professional distance. He'd learned to recognize that too.
"More load," she said finally. "We've been stepping up the discharge levels slowly. Carefully. If we compress the steps, increase the load faster than planned, we can potentially cut the timeline. The risk is that we push accumulation toward the ceiling before your capacity awareness is solid enough to catch it in time."
"But my capacity awareness is solid."
"It's good," she said. "It's not solid. There's a difference."
"Then we work on making it solid and compress the other steps around that." He looked at her. "What does your gut say. Not the responsible version. Your actual gut."
She held his gaze for a moment.
"My gut says you're further along than the metrics show," she said quietly. "The metrics measure what we know how to measure. Some of what you're doing I don't have a scale for yet." A pause. "My gut also says the last person anyone trusted their gut about on this subject died at twenty three from the inside out in a Compact holding facility."
"I know," he said.
"I'm just making sure you know."
"I know," he said again.
They sat in the quiet for a while. Outside the training room the ship hummed along its careful invisible route between nowhere and nowhere, deep space doing nothing on the other side of the hull.
"I'll talk to Varek," Sera said eventually. "I'll propose a modified timeline. Faster on the load progression, more intensive on capacity work, with hard stops built in that don't move regardless of what the external pressure looks like." She looked at him with an expression he'd never seen from her before, not quite worry, something more precise than that. "And you tell me the truth about how you're feeling during sessions. Not the version where you're fine. The actual truth."
"I've been telling you the truth," he said.
"I know," she said. "I want it to stay that way."
He nodded.
She stood up, rolled her shoulders, and the Ascendant gold around her hands came back up to full brightness.
"We have two hours before the briefing," she said. "You want to work."
He stood up.
"Yeah," he said.
They worked.