Page 14 of Blightfall

“Wait, I can explain,” he said, his voice now sounding perfectly healthy, and definitely not male. In fact, I recognized that voice.

“FM?” I asked.

“Drop illusion,” Jorgen said, and suddenly his body shifted as well, revealing FM, one of my former wingmates who now headed the DDF’s department of diplomacy. She had short blond hair, fair skin, and was roughly as tall as Jorgen. The slug on her shoulder changed too, swapping Boomslug’s black stripes for a rainbow of colored spines that cascaded down the back of its ivory body.

“Your Jorgen impression is terrible,” Arturo said.

“Yeah,” FM said. “I should have worked on the voice more. But I wanted to demonstrate the results of our latest taynix research. In the most ridiculous way possible, apparently.”

I blinked at the slug. “The taynix did that?”

“Yep!” FM said. “Show them again, Hoid. Illusion up!”

“Hoid!” the slug fluted, and suddenly FM looked like Jorgen again.

Now that I knew it was fake, I had to admire how realistic it looked. The image of Jorgen’s skin and features moved realistically with FM’s facial expressions. She looked like Jorgen doing an FM impression—though if I hadn’t known them both, I wouldn’t have picked up on the differences.

“It’s a hologram slug?” Arturo asked.

The DDF had encountered holographic technology that could disguise full bodies, but our engineers hadn’t figured out how to replicate a hologram that advanced, so its use was limited to the couple of devices we had that worked. If the rainbow taynix could do the same job, though, we could use illusions all over the place.

“We’re calling them illusion slugs,” FM said in her own voice. “But yes, basically. Hoid here is going to accompany you on your mission.”

“Hoid!” the other slugs chimed from the table, their voices singing in harmony.

“I like the name,” Ferret said. It was apt; Hoid was a wanderer from Old Earth mythology who performed illusions, traveled the stars, and appeared in the unlikeliest places.

“Name!” Hoid fluted back, wiggling his spines happily.

“Will this be useful?” Alanik asked from her wooden chair. She said the words in English, though she still wore her translator pin. She’d been working on learning our language, and I wanted to learn hers in return, but I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to make my own words sound as elegant and flowy as hers.

“Good question,” Katri said. “Why would we want to change what we look like to approach the humans?”

“We don’t know what you’re going to encounter beyond that inhibitor field,” FM said. “Drop illusion.” She changed into herself again. I’d read about the strange disturbance around the planet when I’d finally received the mission briefing. It did sound bizarre and out of the ordinary, which was kind of our team’s specialty. “Hoid can do things like color the bottom of your ships to match the sky so that you’re camouflaged from beneath. Then the scout ships can fly close over the planet without being seen, to gather better intelligence before you approach.”

“Before you approach!” Hoid added, fluffing out his spines and preening, inordinately pleased to be the center of attention. I wondered how much of this conversation the slugs understood. They seemed to pick up on our emotions. I wished I had that power. It would be really useful to cytonically sense when people were annoyed by me, instead of having to guess.

“Okay,” Arturo said, eyeing Hoid’s rainbow spines. “So you’re telling me that taynix can disguise itself to look like anything, and it chooses to look like that?”

“Actually,” FM said, “We think the rainbow colors are an illusion. They disappear if the slug is caught in an inhibitor.”

“That,” I said, “makes Hoid my new favorite flightmate. Sorry, Gilaf.”

“It’s fair,” Gilaf said. “Who can compete?”

“Can one slug disguise all our ships?” Arturo asked.

“Only a few at a time,” FM said. “The surface area one slug can affect is limited, and it goes down the more complex the illusion is. One slug can camouflage three or four ships against a blank sky—or a few people and their clothing, plus the color of their slug. More than that and you’d need a team of illusion slugs. We don’t have reason to think you’ll need that on this particular mission. Just a little gloss to help you check out the planet before Dasha, Katri, and Suki decide how best to make themselves known to the populace.”

“That’s awesome,” I said. “Can the slug give everyone blue hair to match mine?”

“He can!” FM said. “It’s easiest to have a cytonic relay the instructions, because they can speak to the slug mind-to-mind to make the intention clear.”

“Alanik should be able to create the hologram, right?” Gilaf said. “She’s supposed to have all cytonic powers.”

Alanik gave Gilaf a blank stare, and the air in front of her shimmered a bit. “That is all I can do so far,” she said. “I am still learning.”

“Is Hoid asking permission from a commslug before he makes his rainbow stripes?” Katri asked. “Wouldn’t he have to ask permission all the time?”