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wanted to withdraw into silence to contemplate what was going on, something else would be thrust in front of him. Some new attack, some new problem. He felt stretched; he felt thin. But he kept going, because people were relying on him, and the fog in his mind told him he had to.
    Yet it ate at him. Every second it ate at him that he couldn’t do anything for Nida, that he couldn’t find her, that he couldn’t figure out whether she really was alive.
    He didn’t have time to contemplate that thought once again, though. Just as he withdrew into a rare moment of silence and solitude, Travis came marching up, demanding that Carson prepare the Force for their next mission. They had to train with the TI implants. They had to inspect their weaponry. They just had to do something, because, god dammit the United Galactic Coalition was being attacked.
    Everything felt  . . . dreamlike. Except it didn’t. It was absolutely, 100 percent, convincingly real. Everything he fell, every detail he saw—it was all perfect.
    And whenever he questioned what was happening, he was distracted again.
    Again, and again, until Carson felt like nothing more than a robot.
    He wanted to go back to Nida, he needed to find out where she was, yet he couldn’t abandon the United Galactic Coalition, not now, not considering what was happening.
    . . . Right?
    Or at least that’s what the fog told him.
    So he went from situation to situation. From battle simulation to battle simulation, from training session to training session.
    Or maybe he didn’t go. Maybe his mind wasn’t really there, just his body. He felt strangely detached, spread out as if someone had rolled his mind thin.
    So he went about his tasks, for he did not have the ability to stop himself. And though he could not appreciate the truth of that thought then, he was correct.
    Carson could not stop himself, for Carson was being controlled.

Chapter 9
    Cadet Nida Harper
    She fought harder now. Every time she drifted into her vision, she simply ignored it, finding her way back to reality quicker and quicker.
    She had never felt resolve like this; she had never been in a situation as dire as this. For whatever reason the Vex were feeding these illusions to her, it was clear they were after something.
    Information.
    Though her visions didn’t last that long, they always contained the same content. Questions about the entity. Where it was, how to access it.
    No matter what happened and what she endured, she didn’t move.
    Or rather, she no longer proved to the Vex around her that she could. She remained as still as was possible, forcing her concentration into a point to ensure she did not lose consciousness again.
    She’d heard of technology like this before. Whispers, mentions, but nothing as perfect as this. There were several intelligence agencies of the Kore Empire that had once obtained alien technology that enabled them to discretely, torture suspected spies. And the term ‘discrete’ torture was not a misnomer. Apparently, it was a type of neural holographic technology that could be hooked up to one’s brain, forcing someone to inhabit their memories in dreamlike scenes. Using it, the Kore Empire could force their victims to relive some scenario, or they could manufacture some new scenario to find out how their hapless prisoners would react, or to find some fact buried deep in their mind.
    It wasn’t perfect though. For one, it didn’t work on all races, and for another, it was very, very dangerous.
    Yet the more Nida surveyed the scene around her, the more she realised that was what was happening here.
    For some reason it wasn’t working on her though. Perhaps it was the entity, perhaps it was something else, but she could fend off the visions with ease.
    Yet fending off the visions was useless if she couldn’t get out of here, if she couldn’t do something to save Carson.
    He still hadn’t moved. Not once. He hadn’t whispered her name. He hadn’t done a thing. In