Missing

[Shadow 0]

Missing

 

Shadow was missing.

 

He missed his cohorts, his bond-mates, those of his own kind with whom he interacted on a level unimaginable and unattainable for these beings with whom he interacted in this universe. For Shadow, bonding was a complete assimilation of his energy with the energy of his bond-mates for the total, intimate sharing of information, for support, and especially for protection and defense. This bonding was not possible here, or at least he had not yet discovered it.

 

Yet he had formed bonds of sorts in this universe and, as a Seeker among his own, charged with investigation of the unknown for the strengthening of his kind, he had observed that a sort of bonding existed among the biological beings of this universe.

 

He knew not time, but to put it in the terms of these corporeal beings who called themselves the crew of Agincourt, over time Shadow had formed a type of bond with a certain group and he noticed that they seemed to have types of bonds with which he was not – and could not be – familiar.

 

The Tay was his closest corporeal bond. The Tay being – dubbed strange by the crew, yet no stranger than Shadow – communicated on a basic, familiar level. The subtlety of energy communication known as telepathy seemed to escape the others, so the intimacy Shadow felt with Tay he considered a type of bond. Though the concept of place escaped him, this communication knew no bounds. Shadow received Tay’s thoughts no matter what point in space Tay occupied, though what Tay called distance seemed to hamper her reception and, therefore, her ability to respond.

 

Shadow had also formed a sort of bond with others of the crew: the Harper, the JoNs, the Odile, the Kairi, and the Hefner. Those energy signatures he could pick readily from the rest of the crew; others required more concentration.

 

As a Seeker, Shadow had noticed that, though they lacked the energy bonding with which he was familiar, another type of bond existed among certain of these biologicals, one that went beyond the bounds of the most common union for procreation.

 

For instance, the Harper seemed to have a bond with her crew, a certain resonance that told the crew her mood or the likelihood that she would make a certain decision. Likewise, she seemed to sense her crew’s disposition, which sometimes gave them pause. They used the phrase eyes in the back of her head quite often, which puzzled Shadow, not only because of the literal interpretation but because to him it was logical that the resonance flowed both ways. If they could sense her, why should she not be able to sense them?

 

No matter. Suffice to say that these bonds, however strong they had become during his captivity in this strange universe, were weak in comparison to the bonds he experienced in his own universe, and he regretted having taken those strong bonds for granted. Now he took nothing for granted. He formed the bonds he could, however tenuous, and continued in the hope that he would some day return to his own. Until then, he missed them, and in the missing and the waiting he absorbed the energy available to him, and slowly weakened for lack of true bonds, the all-absorbing intimate contact that affirmed his value, his worth, his need for his bond-mates and they for him.

 

Especially in this time of Soltan attack, his energy waned, the Soltans’ negative energy slowly but deliberately overwhelming his positive energy. He had clung to the junction outside main engineering as long as possible. Then, as one clinging to a bridge no longer had the strength to endure, he had succumbed to the inevitable and passed into the ether.