by Skyler Grant
“She killed him?” I asked.
“He killed himself for being foolish,” Mechos said.
I admired the consistency at least.
The more I studied the scans, the more I began to admire whoever built this thing. Physically it was made to look like a satellite, a transmitter relay.
Practically it was, it would serve that purpose well, but beneath that was a layer of crystal circuitry designed to do something else entirely.
“I’m not smart enough for this,” Mechos said an hour later, massaging his forehead.
“I am. I believe it’s a jump drive,” I said.
“Meant for installation in a ship?” Mechos asked.
If only. That would be simple.
“It makes use of the unique properties of this part of space and time. I now think that our treasure hunters did exactly what they were meant to—hit the vortex wall. If the satellite detects some required code or equipment, it seizes your vessel and subjects it to a targeted second warp,” I said.
“But we’re only here because you didn’t make use of their exact coordinates,” Mechos said.
He was right.
“I’m too smart. The processing power required to figure out this offset are well beyond anything that would have been available. I did something clever, but not the right something clever,” I said.
“So, do you know the right something clever now?” Mechos asked.
There he had me. I didn’t.
I had access to the data log. Analyzing that data, all the clues that led the treasure hunters here weren’t getting me anything.
“No,” I said.
“Then let’s think it over piece by piece. Aside from anything else, this thing is still a communications satellite. Why?” Mechos asked.
It was a fair question. Why build signal receivers on a satellite that nobody would ever use?
The creator of this would have done it, because it was a smart thing to do. There were a lot of touches here designed in case someone was clever enough to find this. No doubt traps too, as a precaution against the unfindable actually being found.
Still…
“A transmission wave would materialize before an arriving vessel, if they were broadcasting when the jump drive was enabled,” I said.
“Would it have time to reach the satellite?” Mechos asked.
If a ship was starting to materialize in the vortex at the original coordinates, a signal should reach the satellite just before, almost perfectly timed.
I suspected that almost was only an almost because of the processing time required on the satellite’s side of any jump. Vattier had set things up to be as flawlessly perfect as he could make them.
I reviewed the logs again looking for any clues that might be a transmission signal. There weren’t any.
I had to assume the treasure hunters had missed another clue. Whatever puzzles had been planted in the past would be long gone.
“It would, but we have no way to identify what that signal should be,” I said. “What will safely trigger the second jump.”
“Unfortunate. He was completely mad there at the end, but if he was pointing the way to something, he thought it was something worthwhile,” Mechos said.
I wasn’t quite ready to give up.
I could think of a number of things that might still be worth trying. Vattier may have been brilliant. It didn’t mean he couldn’t be outflanked. My own best traps had been subverted in the past.
Blank could neutralize any bombs and we could try to trigger the satellite manually. That was just one idea. I had others, although all had risks.
For now though I’d have to let this mystery rest. Until perhaps in the future, when we had more resources.
156
Two days after our return to the city, Crystal requested a meeting with me in her district.
Things were coming along nicely. Jade had sent some of her people to assist and nearly all of the rubble had been moved into three vacant blocks where it had formed makeshift mountains. No, not mountains, but hives. Looking closer, I could see the insects I crafted for Crystal swarming around.
This time we met in an underground facility that had been unearthed, a conference room. Crystal, Sylax, and a few of the scavenging youths I’d brought back were present.
“This is much nicer than your usual dungeons. None of your new monsters turned into blood-letters yet?” I asked Crystal.
“Oh, you never quite lose the touch,” Sylax said with a tiny grin.
If she was trying to unnerve me she was failing.
“I called you here because I wanted to discuss something with you. It is big enough I thought I needed to get you to sign off,” Crystal said.
Well, that was intriguing.
“Your lack of initiative is predictable and unsurprising. Go on,” I said.
“Fuck off, robot,” said a teen girl at the table.
“Silence, Gorgon. We treat Emma with respect,” Sylax said.
Gorgon? I recognized the girl from the battle. She’d turned one of my drones to stone with a touch of her hand. She was wearing gloves now, perhaps they dampened the effect.
Crystal said, “Sylax wishes to open an academy to train the young and Powered like Gorgon here. Help them to make the best of their abilities.”
Sylax as a teacher? That seemed a proposition doomed to failure.
“Crystal, you really think that turning your sadistic mass-murdering creation loose on a collection of teenagers is a good idea? I see why so many of your charges turn out bad,” I said.
Sylax hadn’t quite lost her grin. There was something about the way she lounged in her chair, and the glimmer in her eyes, that still spoke of being a predator. Sylax might have lost that which made her extraordinarily powerful, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t still dangerous.
“She’s helping us already,” Gorgon said.
“Most Scholars won’t even bother with the Children of Dust. Unlike with a full crystal their powers can never be passed on,” Crystal said.
I hadn’t heard that term before.
“The Children of Dust?” I asked.
“Crystal powder won’t bind to a fully mature host. For example, an adult working in a factory with it will never manifest powers, but a child or a teenager might. Even minor leakage into neighboring communities has caused Powered youths to appear. They get some limited powers, but a side-effect is they’ll never bind a full crystal,” Sylax said.
This meant in Scholar society they’d never be anything more than second-class citizens. To the Scholars being Powered was everything. If you didn’t have a crystal of your own, you were expected to seek out the opportunity to bond yourself to one.
Anna was the only Scholar I’d met who intentionally avoided this.
“Then why do you have an interest?” I asked.
“Let’s just say I now sympathize with the plight of the underpowered,” Sylax said.
Crystal had heavily modified Sylax and so she was hardly unpowered. She possessed countless modifications, just as Anna did, that made her far more formidable than a standard issue human. Still, with her Amplification crystal removed, Sylax was now technically unpowered.
I didn’t doubt that Sylax had some sort of ulterior motive. It didn’t mean that she couldn’t be on some level sincere.
“And what would you train them to do?” I asked.
“Fight, kill. I could sugarcoat it, but you wouldn’t actually appreciate it. Murder is what I’m good at and strength is what matters in this world, and what you need,” Sylax said.
I didn’t much like that truth so harshly delivered. It seemed to me that if I’d wanted these youths to die in combat I could have left them where they were.
I couldn’t discount the reality of what she said. It was a hard world out there and whether they put their powers to use for me or someone else, it was likely to be the only road to a worthwhile future any of them would have.
“This still doesn’t seem big
enough to warrant getting my permission,” I said to Crystal.
“How many more do you think we’re likely to find if we continue pressing outward? The Dust are considered a blight all across the Scholarium,” Crystal said.
That would explain it. Crystal wasn’t asking my permission to hand Sylax a dozen future soldiers, she was asking my permission to hand her an army.
“Why would I trust you with this kind of responsibility?” I asked Sylax.
“You see me, Emma. More clearly than most. You’ve even been inside my head. Have I ever been disloyal?”
“You were loyal to King Boreas, even when we all wished you would do otherwise. I worry that you are still loyal to him.”
Sylax frowned at that. “Of course I am. This is why, whenever opportunity presents itself, I argue that you need not be enemies. But to survive I have had to swear my loyalty to you and your Anna as well, and I honor my commitments, machine. So will those I train.”
“I don’t like this,” I said.
Crystal folded her hands on the table. “I didn’t think you would. When you turned Sylax back over to me it was because you trusted my judgment. I ask that you continue to do so.”
I really didn’t like it. Perhaps Mechos was right and all Powered had their madness. I worried that Crystal’s might be in trusting those that shouldn’t be trusted.
I needed Crystal though. And if I could depend on Sylax, I even needed her and whatever army she might raise.
Our straits were too desperate for me not to take chances.
“I agree,” I said.
The mood in the room eased and everyone was satisfied for the moment.
Then, suddenly my world became a narrow focus. Normally I run parts of me in the background constantly, but I mostly keep my thoughts running at human speed in various instances.
I couldn’t do that now.
A bomb had just appeared in the middle of the Central District. Massive, and detonating. Three milliseconds had already passed since its arrival. I couldn’t afford to be thinking at human speed.
157
I could think quickly, but it wasn’t for free. Kicking my awareness up to this degree burned power, more than my Bioreactors could produce. To solve this problem I’d have to draw upon the limited supply of fuel for the city’s main reactor.
First of all, how did that bomb get into the middle of the district? If I could figure out how it got in then perhaps I could use the same method to get it out.
I pulled all the relevant sensor logs. No teleportation traces, no warp gate activity, no sign that it was dropped from any ship.
The first vision that any of my cameras captured, it was already lying on the ground and detonating.
All twelve of my District Lords were in residence in the city. I’d been worried about a mole, but if there was one, they were not well-regarded enough to be saved by King Boreas—and this did have to be him. Again.
I’d been wondering if he had gotten some sort of enhancement to his power set and this was my answer. This bomb had appeared from out of nowhere. Based on his power set it was reasonable to assume it had come from a future.
He had warped a ship in—he must have Aefwal’s coordinates after all—dropped a city-busting bomb and somehow rewound time to a point when he thought I’d be powerless to stop anything.
Getting it out the same way it came in wasn’t feasible. I didn’t have the ability to fling objects through time.
The city’s teleportation gates would serve if it were only a few milliseconds earlier. Pre-detonation it would have been easy to get the bomb away, but caught in mid-explosion it would destabilize the gate field.
Could I use a jump drive with the bomb itself? I did have an airship above the city right now, but I wouldn’t be able to get it close enough to the bomb in time for it to extend the jump field. I also didn’t have time to string two jumps together.
If I could get Blank to the bomb she could probably neutralize it. Whatever the source of the explosion, if it was big enough to take out this city, it likely involved power crystals. Sadly Blank also neutralized any teleportation ability. I lacked the means to get her there.
Could I bury the bomb? There I had more reasonable chance of success. If I teleported every agent I had with teleportation to the bomb and through the ground below it taking the bomb with them, that would be enough to bury the device. However, based on the thing’s energy yield, that wouldn’t stop it.
Hot Stuff might be able to steal some of the fire away from the bomb, if teleported onto it. Had she possessed a freezing ability I might have tried it. Instead I was afraid she would only make the bomb stronger with her presence.
This was a lot of thought cycles burned with no solution so far—and a bomb continuing to explode.
Ratticus and his energy manipulation might be able to dampen the explosion, but the blast seemed too powerful for him to stop completely. Jade might fling it from the city, except it was too late for that now.
What about the city’s energy shields? They were mostly turned off to conserve resources, but they had protected Aefwal from everything for a very long time. Their energy consumption was frightful, far more than even the teleportation gates, but I had enough power to engage them briefly. They were also energy-absorptive. If I could get them around the bomb they could actually feed from the very blast they were defending against.
The shield systems weren’t really designed for that. I spent another few precious milliseconds running through the possibilities to make it work.
They would definitely be able to dampen the explosion, but I just couldn’t focus enough of the shielding power to completely contain the blast. Burying the bomb would help more, Ratticus could help more—everything would help more. But even putting all my tools into play it just wouldn’t be enough.
This bomb was overkill. It was needlessly strong to get rid of us, especially taking us by surprise too.
I had to rethink the problem. If I couldn’t neutralize the bomb, what were my other options? Could I get people away?
I could, a series of teleports to the airship and triggering the jump drive would do the trick. I should even have time to evacuate my consciousness to the ship.
I could save everyone and run away.
Good, I could avoid complete loss, but I needed to do better.
Doing better meant saving the city. Could the city run away?
The city was built to be mobile using engines deep underground. Flying wouldn’t help here though. I wouldn’t be soaring away from the bomb even if they were operational. It was too slow.
Could I jump away?
I’d brought an entire fleet to this city once by extending a jump field well beyond sensible limits and utilizing the power of a volcano to amplify it.
I couldn’t use the power of the bomb exactly the same way, but the very thing that made the teleportation gates fail as a solution helped here. The jump field wouldn’t like the high levels of energy the bomb was putting out. The explosion would be rejected.
If I utilized the city’s shields to curve the jump field around it, the explosion wouldn’t be allowed to jump. In theory I would take the city away and leave the exploding bomb behind.
I even had a set of coordinates I wanted to try again. For Vattier’s satellite.
I still lacked whatever passcode it was looking for, but what I did have was a Crash. I could teleport him into the city’s main communications hub and his powers of subverting and controlling complex systems would be transmitting outward ahead of our jump. Crash could hack the satellite’s passcode. He might melt a little, but I could add Ophelia. With her healing aura in close proximity any part of him that dripped off should pop back soon after.
There were safer options, saner options, but perhaps this was my insanity from my crystal? I loved the gamble and I loved the big show.
I teleported Crash and Ophelia into the communications core, set it to full power, triggered the shields and engaged the jump.
>
Time elapsed since the detection of the bomb—twenty-three milliseconds.
158
Things did not go as planned.
At least, the city did not blow up. The first part of the plan succeeded and we went into the jump leaving the bomb and its explosion behind. We also hadn’t been thrown clear into a wrong dimension, not to mention into the side of any canyon, like the shuttle. Instead we seemed to be frozen mid-jump.
The sky was a shimmering rainbow of colors.
I opened a city-wide comm. “We came under attack and I had to devise a rather novel method of saving our lives. All the good little mammals can stop peeing on the floor and get to their duty stations.”
That might work for the rank and file, but the District Lords would want to know more. I conferenced them together as the lines came in and added Anna and Mechos.
“Where are we?” Jade asked.
“We’re in warp, obviously. Why are we still in warp?” Anna asked.
“You used the satellite coordinates and something went wrong,” Mechos said.
Crash and Ophelia at least weren’t capable of conversation. They were still in the middle of the main comm hub and being blasted apart by intense radiation.
“I did. I wired Crash into the comms to broadcast his ability and added Ophelia so he’d live. Unfortunately they seem to be as useless together as they are individually,” I said.
“Could being in a state of near-death be causing his power to not function?” Anna asked.
“If his power weren’t functioning the satellite would have kicked us aside at best, or self-destructed at worst,” Mechos said.
I agreed.
“For us to be stuck the satellite must have tried to carry out its primary purpose. Our originally jump was overridden in preparation for the next stage, but now we’re in a state of flux,” I said.
“Could it be a power issue?” Blank asked.
Of course, it had to be. Transitioning a city like this into a jump took a lot of energy which I’d been able to harness by drawing on the main reactor and the explosion of the bomb.