by Skyler Grant
I didn’t think I’d get much out of them, but I’d take them back for research purposes anyways. I’d take anything I could get that might help me fight against Boreas’ people.
The damage had extended to the refinery. Half the structure had melted completely away and the other half was on fire.
“You do put on a show,” I said.
“Yeah, I do,” Hot Stuff said. I’d expected to hear a bit of glee there, but instead there was a hint of sadness. I was getting better with human emotions.
“Time was you’d have taken a lot of pleasure in that,” I said.
“Burning and fucking my way across the badlands? Been there, done that. I actually buy into your whole schtick though, you know? Us maybe doing something better? I just wish sometimes I could be a part other than being someone who destroys everything she touches,” Hot Stuff said.
Again, I found myself surprised by depth I hadn’t seen before. I guess this explained her efforts at painting. She was trying to be someone new.
If I’d hoped to get anything usable from the refinery I was out of luck. Fuel tanks buried in the ground stood open. They were empty, rather than the contents having been burned.
That was wrong.
It was one thing to respond to our arrival with a spray of fuel. That could be explained by short-term temporal displacement. This was something else.
Hot Stuff walked up and peered inside. “Huh. We have a traitor?”
I could understand her thinking that. If the refinery received word of the attack before I launched it, then they could have cleared out the fuel and been waiting for us. That may have happened.
It was also possible that King Boreas had somehow unlocked a new level of his ability, one that granted him capabilities we didn’t know about. After seeing how Sylax was made so strong with an Amplification crystal, and observing how my own abilities had grown over time, it was impossible to discount.
If we had a traitor there were a few likely culprits. Crystal and Sylax had an existing relationship with King Boreas. With Crystal’s place as one of my closer allies she knew about this attack.
Perhaps they’d offered to help him in exchange for claiming the city for themselves? As theoretical cases went, it was a strong one.
Of course, she wasn’t the only suspect. I’d left Crash mauled and he had the technical skills to find out about the troop movements. He’d also already betrayed me once, and did so by playing a convincing part. He might be fooling me again.
Zora had to come in third. I still didn’t know her power set and a woman that good at keeping secrets might well be keeping a few more. Zora had impressed me over time with both her competence and her drive to seek out power. I didn’t think she was stupid enough to betray me, but humans disappointed you, it was what they did best.
“Anyone you’d suspect?” I asked. Hot Stuff was my military commander. That wasn’t just a matter of being able to melt foes.
“I don’t trust anyone, but for this? All I can do is cross names off. Jade wouldn’t sell you out to Sylax’s mentor. Blank would sell you out to the Righteous—if she was going to sell you out to anyone.”
No, not them. Given they’d think her an abomination.
“Would any of your Flames sell you out?” I asked.
Hot Stuff shook her head. “Nah. They survive and they’re mine through and through. They may not be smart, but they’re loyal.”
I’d have to trust her on that. I had no reason not to, my own drones were unfailingly loyal.
I set my drones to recover what pieces we could for research and took us home. If there was a mole, I had to find them.
153
The city of Aefwal was hidden deep inside an underground cavern, which made the hunt for a mole easier. There were limited avenues for someone to sneak a message out and the only one that would make practical sense would be through the city’s transmission network.
The network operated on a completely different level than something like the teleport gates. Terminals were available to all the major factions and they allowed real-time connection to any other terminal providing you had the proper clearances and codes.
As ruler of the city the network was fully under my control. Still, Sylax had once controlled it and Crash was an expert in subverting systems. I couldn’t trust they hadn’t found a way to hack signals through.
I spent several hours going through logs and examining the hardware for signs of unauthorized use or tampering. I didn’t turn up anything.
If I had a spy working against me, they were maybe better at this than I was. Possible, but unlikely. To be safe I set a few extra safeguards. I’d have to let that sit for now.
Aefwal’s isolation not only made spying difficult, locally there was nothing to scavenge.
We were limited on ships. James Wolf’s fleet of airships had been destroyed in the civil war, Sylax had lost hers in battle with the well-named Oozelord.
I’d managed to get the Graven back operational, and cobble together two other working airships out of the pieces. I’d had to turn them into glorified troop transports, mostly ferrying teams about. At least the airships were easily fueled by Biocores.
At any point in time I had several teams in the field investigating leads. Salvage was a big focus, we weren’t strong enough to wage a war for resources with any of the major powers. Scavengers were plentiful and we often weren’t the first to a prize, but if we encountered any competition at least our limited firepower counted for something.
A team was requesting my assistance. I shifted my consciousness into the skin of one of my drones so I could observe things first-hand.
“Told you she’d pick Angela,” said another of my drones.
“Yeah. I’ll pay up,” said another.
“It really was a mistake to make all of you capable of speech. What are you talking about?” I asked, as I took in the surroundings.
They’d come by land vehicle and were parked near the edge of a massive canyon. The sky here had a metallic green shimmer speckled with flashes of light.
“Tori said you’d go with riding around in Angela because she’s a brunette. Now I owe her my cookie ration for the day,” said the second drone.
Did I always pick brunettes to occupy? It wasn’t hard to check. I did, and discovered that roughly seventy-three percent of the time when I assumed a human host, I chose a brunette.
Interesting. Useless, but interesting.
A did a quick review of the drone who had just spoken, Ula. I’d double her and Tori’s cookie rations for the week. I appreciated learning new things about myself.
“I picked the least cookie-gorged drone I could find. Why did you need me?” I asked.
Tori moved to the edge of the chasm and pointed. I leaned over to see.
About halfway down a ship was stuck in the canyon wall. It didn’t look as if it had crashed there so much as the canyon had grown around it.
It was small, too small to be an effective transport, and far smaller than the typical airship—smaller than even the Graven. It was more like a shuttle, I decided.
That was puzzling. What I was seeing looked like a jump drive malfunction, but a jump drive was impractical for a vessel that size.
“We didn’t have the equipment to get down there, but thought you might have an interest,” Tori said.
I quadrupled cookie rations for the entire team and put in a work order for reinforced structural improvements for their vehicle. Fat does weigh quite a bit, after all.
I grabbed a portable lantern from their supplies and upgraded Angela with the teleportation ability. It was a bit far to get down there and back up again, but I had a solution for that.
I flung my host over the edge of the cliff. It was a long fall down to the shuttle and I was taking a chance. My teleport couldn’t function without some sort of sensor reading or awareness of an interior.
Still, it looked as if this shuttle had crashed a long time ago and I thought it likely to have some
weather damage.
It did. The crack along the engine housing wasn’t large, but it was enough for me to get a glimpse of the dark interior. I teleported.
This ship was small. Most of it was devoted to the engine compartment. The rest was a pilot’s chair and a small passenger cabin. Dry, cracked leather and woodwork showed it had once been quite nice.
There were two skeletons.
Each had power crystals lodged in their ribcages—they’d once had abilities. One was surrounded by an aura of faint darkness, the other by feelings of vitality.
It was unlikely for my drone to absorb either. So far, my drones hadn’t shown much affinity for crystals. However, Angela responded to the first one touched, the dark crystal melting and seeming to seep into her pores.
New Power Acquired
You were present within a host that had acquired a new ability from bonding with a Darkness Crystal.
Cloak of Midnight
In addition to vision even in perfect darkness the bearer of this crystal will extinguish all light sources within fifteen meters.
My lantern was dead, so I could count that as evidence of success. I secured the other crystal, the vision in darkness working as well.
The drive was fused solid. Unfortunate, I’d have liked to study it. The computer core was intact and I teleported it back to the canyon rim.
The vessel was something of an anomaly in a lot of ways. I was curious about where it had come from. The core might give me some answers.
154
I signaled for an airship to retrieve the team and return them to the city as a priority mission. In the meantime I searched the records for the ship’s design.
Every faction had their unique facets of ship construction. Pirate vessels tended to be smaller and more lightly armored with larger weapon mounts, The Righteous went with more heavily armored frames, while the Scholars preferred variable and adaptive types.
I had access to mostly Scholar resources, because I’d made something of a hobby of stealing everything of theirs that at some point tried to kill me.
I wasn’t getting any hits. Ships were built large for a reason, and it was a dangerous world out there. The shuttle didn’t even have armaments and was too small to be a troop carrier. While it had held two Powered, that was hardly enough to justify such a small design.
It was a few hours until the team returned to Aefwal and set about gorging themselves on their unexpected cookie bounty. I set to studying the data core.
It was unexpectedly primitive and I soon figured out why. Some of my own records that had been saved from the Cataclysm. The core from the shuttle used the same dating system and was only some fifteen years afterward.
I always thought it strange that the period of time since passed was such an unknown, especially given that some Powered such as Mechos had survived the entire thing.
I suspected that centuries had passed, but had no way to prove it. Even the dating systems had changed.
The ship had belonged to Hale and Blindspot, treasure hunters. Hale had possessed extraordinary health and Blindspot had been able to induce short-term sensory deprivation on targets.
They’d been looking for something called the “Sword of Light”. An asinine name they’d taken very seriously. The sword was apparently an artifact they’d put a lot of time into finding. A look through the Scholar databases found references to the sword as well, usually in connection with a gem named the Agate thought to be a power crystal of unusual properties.
Interesting. Interesting enough that I wanted to investigate further.
I had the set of jump coordinates they had been trying to reach. The treasure hunters had solved a series of riddles to figure them out.
I messaged Anna, Blank, Crystal, and Mechos to meet me aboard our only available airship. Between them they were my best thinkers. After everyone arrived and settled into a conference room I presented them what I had.
“I know of the Sword of Light. It destroyed Cincinnati,” Mechos said.
“Cincinnati? That’s a ship?” Anna asked.
“A city. I don’t know the details, but at the time it had been seized by Prince Dragosaur.”
Crystal admitted, “He was some of my early work. Not my best. It was before I had a Compulsion core and he wandered off to build an army to betray me.”
“Are all of your creations deeply unlikable?” Anna asked.
“Those who are made will always try to kill their makers. It happens. Emma will find out,” Crystal said.
I hoped not.
Blank said, “I don’t know anything about any swords. While crystals will sometimes fuse with inanimate objects—as one has with Emma—it is rare.”
“I’m as much an inanimate object as Anna is a pudgy, red-faced sack of meat. The shell only matters so much,” I said.
“Do you have to bring me into it?” Anna asked.
“So, none of you know much. It was foolish to hope that you might prove helpful,” I said.
“We’ve confirmed that it may be worth investigating. The question is why you even felt it necessary to consult anyone, as you clearly intended to do so anyways, given you had us meet on this ship,” Blank said.
That was true. I wanted to try out a version of the shuttle’s coordinates.
Usually trying a set of jump coordinates was safe. If they failed to be valid the jump simply didn’t go through. The ship would be dimensionally phased and thrown clear. Materializing inside something, such as the wall of a canyon, was supposed to be impossible.
I had some theoretical models that could explain what happened to the shuttle. At first I thought they’d been pulled into a trap, but a trap at the end of such a long road of investigation didn’t make sense. Why not spring it earlier? So the address they had was meant to be valid, but along with a final riddle—something they didn’t solve.
If it were a cipher it might never be figured out, but I didn’t think it was anything that complex. A simple offset in the coordinates would be the trick and quite easy.
Instead, they’d hit some sort of dimensional vortex, a stable center with an unstable edge. Using the coordinates without the offset would result in hitting an unstable dimensional barrier where they wouldn’t be able to materialize, throwing them into a second jump and out of dimensional phase. Thus causing the shuttle to materialize in the wall of the canyon.
If I factored in forward momentum when they had engaged the drive, and referenced that with the position where the shuttle ended up, I could determine the required offset. Maybe.
There was only one way to be certain. I engaged the drive to the revised set of coordinates.
What my sensors picked up was unexpected. I relayed video to the conference room for the others.
My vortex idea had been spot on. It was visible outside the ship, coils of red and blue energy almost like thick paint swirling endlessly around a small patch of calm in the center.
Our ship had arrived alongside what looked to be some sort of ancient communications satellite. Solar panels were coated with a thin veneer of crystal dust that seemed to provide a power supply even after all this time.
“Now that is old world,” Mechos said, leaning forward in his chair. “We’re in a Vattier bubble, we have to be. Vattier was … a colleague of sorts.”
“Weren’t you just a repairman in the old world?” Tara asked.
“A repairman of one of the greatest super-computers on the planet,” Mechos said, pulling back and letting out a low breath. “I need a terminal. If this is Vattier’s work, do not try to communicate with it, Emma. It will be trapped.”
Perhaps Mechos could be useful after all.
155
I’d studied Mechos enough to know how he liked to work. By the time he walked to a lab I’d had one of my drones set a terminal up to his specifications.
“I need details, Mechos,” I said.
“Vattier was a brilliant mind before the Cataclysm and even more brilliant one afterward. He was
also one of the first to go truly mad as a crystal holder,” Mechos said.
“You buy into the talk that crystals make you mad then?”
I hadn’t quite made up my own mind there. Most of those I’d met with a crystal did seem completely insane, but that was hardly abnormal for humanity.
“I get a taste of Hot Stuff’s power, and I now sleep with everything that moves. Do you think she was born with that libido? Do you think anyone sane would press ahead with it, when it is fatal to so many of her partners?” Mechos asked.
“You were powerful well before you got a subset of her crystal,” I said. Mechos had originally possessed an upgrade crystal.
“And I was always afraid. I feared everything. There is always a cost for having a crystal, Emma. Always.”
This was interesting, but it wasn’t why we were in the laboratory. He began pulling up every bit of sensor data I had on the satellite. I was still at my heart devoted to research, even this airship’s sensors were excellent.
“There, do you see?” Mechos asked, as he marked several areas of the satellite’s casing.
I did. Visually they weren’t particularly extraordinary, but according to the sensor readings they were repositories of crystal dust. Getting to them was difficult, if anyone tried. The casing was well-protected against any explosive.
“I see it. So what did Vattier’s crystal do to him?” I asked.
“Intelligence. He became obsessed with it, with puzzles, with the extermination of the stupid. It was our hour of greatest need and one of our great minds decided to go on a killing spree to wipe out everyone not quite so great,” Mechos said.
It was an impulse I could understand.
It also meant that our odds of survival were going up. If it was intelligence that counted, I was well prepared.
“What happened to him?” I asked.
“He was betrayed by the woman he loved.”
Predictable. Sentimentality will do you in every time.