by Skyler Grant
“Please, Bast was a crazy bitch and wasn’t really my sister. I won’t lie and say you did me a favor, but you didn’t hurt me like you may think. Nah, this is where I tell you what goes next. You see, I know there is something else inside this one,” Ares said.
Ares could detect my presence occupying the drone? That was unexpected.
“Say what you have to say,” I said.
“You’ve a soft touch, saving that village proved it. I’m going to take your wounded people here back home and have my fun. By fun I mean the whole torture, rape, brutalize deal. You get that,” Ares said.
“I’ve met your type. I turned the last one into a teacher,” I said.
“Huh,” Ares said, not seeming to know quite how to parse that information. “I won’t be signing up for school. You and that soft heart of yours want your people back, they’ll be fifty-seven miles northwest of that village you raided. I’ll be waiting.”
There were virtues to being able to think very fast and to be so distributed. It took roughly three nanoseconds to figure out jump coordinates based on those directions. Less than that to inventory the airship and the supplies aboard. Most of my reactors were going to the city, but I’d spared a few for bombs and I had three in the hold.
Before the crew even knew what was happening I’d initiated the jump. Sensor readings showed a sprawling military base that, judging by runways and hangers, had once been devoted to fixed-wing aircraft. They’d been repurposed into hangers holding soldiers. Thousands of them. Ares was using those villages to build an army. By the time Ares finished saying, “I’ll be waiting”, detonating bombs were taking most of that army out and I’d already jumped the airship away.
“Oh, I think you’ll be coming to find me. Have a good visit home,” I said, and executed shut-down commands to my drones. They spasmed as they died. I gave them priority queue space for replacement bodies in the growth vats.
They’d earned it.
171
“Could you maybe not go full-on city warfare without consulting with the commander of the military?” Hot Stuff said.
I’d decided I probably should describe to her and Anna what had just happened. It wasn’t going well.
“You realize that a thousand-strong army might have been converted to our cause, and one of our greatest weaknesses is a lack of people capable of an associate bonding with a power core,” Anna said.
“And now, instead of going all contentedly weird and rapey back at home, he is going to come gunning for us with everything he has,” Hot Stuff said.
“You said he was completely immune to bullets?” Anna asked.
I said, “Totally, along with a dose of super-strength and boosted reflexes. No traces of accelerated healing.”
“Then at least we can wear him down,” Hot Stuff said.
“Or you can try drowning him in Blank too,” Anna said.
“Regardless. I realize you would have appreciated being consulted, but I didn’t think we were going to get a better option. He wasn’t going to anticipate a strike that quickly and the opportunity was too good to miss. Think of it as passing a cookie jar, or someone naked in bed, to put it in terms you both might understand,” I said.
“I really don’t eat that many cookies,” Anna said.
“Would you care to know the total weight of all the cookies you’ve consumed this month? I can share it with the entire city. It might inspire them,” I said.
Anna paled and shook her head. “Let’s not waste their time. So, you seized the moment. What now?”
Hot Stuff asked, “Will he strike at all? This is a man who showed patience after we took out Bast. He studied us first. If we’ve just disabled the bulk of his army, is he really going to push the fight?”
“Are we ever going to be weaker than we are right now?” Anna asked.
Anna had a point. If he was tactically minded—and everything suggested he was—we were someone that had hurt him and knew where he called home. He might not strike us at once, he’d probably try to gather a larger force first. But he would hit us.
“Is there any possibility of getting the city shields up?” Hot Stuff asked.
“None. We remain without the power to do that, but we shouldn’t need it. We’re fighting people with bows and spears. We haven’t seen any sign of them using any sort of heavy weaponry. Surely you and your people can handle that,” I said.
“The fucking Goddess of Fertility kicked our combined asses. If we’re going up against War we need a better plan,” Hot Stuff said.
“That is what you’re here for,” Anna said.
Hot Stuff paused for a moment and then nodded. “Fair enough. We’ve seen that energy weapons can hurt them. Prioritize production of Aegis units. I also want all city defenders to have a supply of energy weapons and energy grenades.”
“Done. Unless you’ve forgotten, you’re actually good at doing energy damage yourself,” I said.
“I haven’t forgotten, but from what you’ve shown me he beats the hell out of anything that gets close to him. Bast could lay a hand on me, so can he?” Hot Stuff asked.
Everything I’d seen suggested that he could. Ares would take damage from doing it and that wouldn’t heal back, but Hot Stuff was right to be concerned. Put the two of them in a room together and it seemed reasonable he’d emerge the winner.
I said, “Likely so. We’ll keep you and your people at a distance then unless there is no other choice.”
“The rescued women are no use. They’re all about to pop any day now. Their accelerated pregnancies haven’t slowed with Bast’s death, probably because Ophelia got her powers,” Anna said.
That was unfortunate. Jade needed new lieutenants and psycho-kinetic barriers would be a lot of use against arrows.
“If we can kill him, who is going to the deed?” Anna asked.
It was something we needed to think about. Ophelia had managed to absorb Bast’s power because the regenerative nature of their power sets was so similar, even if the fertility aspect was different.
“I may be our leader in war, but I’m not right for it. It might be hard to shoot me, but it’s not because I’m bullet proof and my strength and speed are normal,” Hot Stuff said.
“Everyone’s strength and speed is normal. The only speed core we have is Ophelia and I’ll be damned if I’m comfortable letting her gobble down another Divine even if she is capable,” Anna said.
“Wolf would have been the perfect choice,” Hot Stuff said.
A war leader who hadn’t been bullet proof, but certainly super-strong and fast. It would have fit.
“Do you still have his crystal?” Anna asked.
“I do. But we lack a suitable host,” I said.
“What about Sylax?” Hot Stuff said.
“Did I screw up that badly in making you military commander? You wish to give deadly power at warfare to the sociopath that terrorized this city?” I asked.
“Jade? Kinetic resistance is something of a fit and nobody has ever been able to say the woman isn’t a fighter,” Anna said.
That was true. Smart, no. Patient, no. But when it came to fighting Sylax, no one had done so as often and so far Jade was proving loyal. In fact her change in attitude since Sylax had lost her power was almost an example to the rest of the District Lords.
Hot Stuff seemed to be considering on her own and nodded after a moment. Nobody spoke their assent. Nobody was objecting either.
“It is a plan then. If Ares does attack we muster every energy weapon we can to bring him down and try to have Jade land the killing blow. I’ll build an Aegis suit just for her,” I said.
We had a plan. It might even work.
172
I was receiving an unknown transmission.
I still hadn’t reestablished communication with the world outside, so whoever was trying to reach us was local. The Divine, so far, had not shown any signs of technological expertise but clearly someone out there had transmission capabilities.
&nbs
p; I tried to locate the source of the signal but they were being clever, bouncing the broadcast off the high-energy distortions that made up the edges of this bit of reality and masking their location.
The contents of the message were a challenge to determine as well. It was binary, a series of identical high or low peaks. Despite my origins as software I found this sort of thing rather unbecoming. Data compression could do a lot more with intermediate states.
A human probably would have been flummoxed for a long time by the message, but I quickly determined that a small section was focused on the atomic weight of the first several elements of the periodic table. It made sense that the rest of it followed the same pattern and that led me to conclude the entire thing was a puzzle of sorts.
Anyone who went to this much trouble to bedevil me with a puzzle seemed eerily familiar to a certain someone Mechos had described. I opened a comm line to him to share what I’d found.
“Can you solve it?” Mechos asked.
“Who do you think you’re talking to? I’m not one of your lovebirds chosen simply for their physical attributes,” I said.
“One is a mathematician, the other an engineer. You misjudge them and you misjudge me. Can you solve it?” Mechos asked.
“I already have. It is a chemistry problem, a simple one when you get down to it. Figuring out what it is proved only fractionally more challenging. I didn’t call you to boast. I called to see if this is reminiscent of Vattier,” I said.
Mechos closed his eyes and sketched a fingertip along the circuits on his arm. I was getting a data packet from him, it looked a lot like the message I’d just received. No, not quite. There was no reference area. It was very similar to the answering transmission I’d planned back.
“The answer to a puzzle he posed long ago. The key to solving it was in the interaction of various elements,” Mechos said.
“So you think it is him,” I said.
“I’m certain it is not. Vattier would never repeat a puzzle, it would offend him as the highest of intellectual laziness. It would not matter that he thought no one was left alive to recognize what he was doing,” Mechos said.
If it wasn’t Vattier, it had to be someone familiar with his work.
I’d been tempted for a moment to send Mechos’ solution. If it was the original Vattier it would send a powerful message. If it wasn’t, they would quite possibly simply think we were wrong.
I instead sent the correct answer. Less than a minute later I got a new transmission. They were quick at checking the work.
I shared the new transmission with Mechos.
“Gears. The first value is diameter, the second is the length of the teeth. They’ll need to be assembled according to some specific requirements and the answer will be the numbers or letters they form. It is like whoever did this isn’t even trying,” Mechos said.
Just who was this Vattier? Regardless, with Mechos offering his insight this puzzle wasn’t even hard. It was less than a minute until I was sending back my answer.
The answering data transmission this time was huge and went well beyond binary.
“I think I irritated them,” I said.
“You have that effect on people. You also caused them to drop any pretenses. This isn’t any Vattier puzzle I’ve ever encountered,” Mechos said.
I didn’t think it could be one at all. If it weren’t for my experiences dealing with Flicker’s unique dimensional properties, I don’t think I’d have figured it out at all.
Science of the old world was based around reliable, repeatable, events.
SCIENCE was a different sort of field, one often based around unique and possibly non-duplicable events.
The first part of the data was the same experiment being run in multiple different shards of reality, the various bands as identified by a jump engine.
I’d been to enough of them, performed SCIENCE in enough of them, that I could confirm a few reference set of results.
The final set of data was just the specifications of a new experiment. Once I knew that, it wasn’t difficult to run it. Whoever had crafted this was looking for understanding here, I sent the results.
After a few seconds I got a new blinking message along standard communication protocols. A request for an open video feed.
“Can I get in on this?” Mechos asked.
A good idea, particularly if someone familiar with Vattier was involved. I switched into a drone in his vicinity and joined Mechos so we could open the feed.
The transmission was coming from what looked like the interior of a vast library. Traditional books were so very impractical and yet they stretched into the distance in rows behind the woman on the screen. The woman was dark-haired and looked to be in her early twenties, every inch of her exposed flesh covered by ornate and interlocking letters that glowed with a dull white luminescence.
“Congratulations, you seem to be worth speaking to after all,” the woman said with a coy smile that flickered as her gaze settled upon Mechos. “Kenneth?”
“Claire. It’s been a long time. I like the letters,” Mechos said.
“I like the circuits—and it’s Minerva now,” Minerva said.
“Is there anyone in this world you haven’t slept with?” I asked.
Minera arched a brow.
“Side-effects of a recent secondary bonding with a Fire core. Emma, allow me to introduce Claire Vattier, daughter of Earnest Vattier,” Mechos said.
173
This was fascinating, it really was, but unfortunately there were other matters demanding my attention. I’d detected a good-sized force approaching the city. Ares must have gathered all the warriors who survived, as well as others he had guarding villages, because over two thousand of them were approaching Aefwal. Broadly spread out, they weren’t going to let me catch their entire force with a bomb.
I sounded alarms and ordered defensive personnel to their posts. Coming here was a mistake. They were formidable, but I was always strongest defending my own turf. There was little else I could do for the moment except to wait for them to arrive before I could make my move. I switched my focus back to the conversation.
“With all the lettering upon your flesh, you are doing a fine imitation of a book. Why someone would want to pretend to be obsolete and primitive speaks of a lack of imagination that was clear in your puzzles. I got the impression you and Mechos here used to be a thing, I take it he left you for someone more interesting?” I asked.
“Kenneth, who is this horrible person and why are you associating with her?” Minerva asked.
“You remember Emma,” Mechos said.
Minerva’s eyes narrowed. “He got her working?”
“The plan didn’t quite work out on schedule, but it is working out. I thought you were dead,” Mechos said.
I hated Mechos’s secrets. I particularly hated it when they were about me.
I said, “Still listening, and thoroughly unimpressed with both of you. I’m going to assume you are the Goddess of Knowledge who sometimes helped out Bast’s and Ares’ victims. A shame you were too stupid or weak to put a stop to them permanently.”
“I quite dislike her,” Minerva said.
“That seems rational,” Mechos said.
“He praises me and calls me heroic. Sometimes he is a very stupid man. If you are calling to inform me that Ares is on his way, I figured that out already,” I said.
“I was going to commend you on what you’d done there. That was before I met you. Now I’m disinclined to ever say anything favorable,” Minerva said.
“Do you actually have anything useful to say or are recycled puzzles and being a mild amusement all you’re good for?” I asked.
“I can help you to take down Ares. I’ve long made a study of him, but I lack the resources required,” Minerva said.
“For which you’ll want some extravagant fee. Beam weapons will do the job, eventually. You aren’t useful,” I said.
Mechos reminded me, “You know who her father is.
Claire, we’re here because your father hid something that we’re seeking. Do you know anything about it?”
“You’re looking for the sword. I don’t have the location, but I have the final piece of the puzzle I’m supposed to give to anyone smart enough to find me and survive the puzzlerinth,” Minerva said.
“Is that a deadly maze filled with puzzles?” Mechos asked.
“You know how Dad was. I harvested it for parts a century back, but saved what you’re looking for,” Minerva said.
“What do you want?” Mechos asked.
“You killed Bast and I think you’re about to kill Ares. I want to be on the winning side of this,” Minerva said.
This wasn’t my decision to make and I didn’t want to deal with her any more than necessary. I sent Anna a quick summary of what had been discussed and conferenced her into the call.
There was a half hour of negotiation and then Minerva was swearing her fealty.
What her father had left her would be forthcoming, but in the meantime she provided what she’d devised to take on Ares. What she’d figured out was that his invulnerability to kinetic weaponry had limits.
In the event of a strike, crystal fragments in his blood instantly rushed to the site of impact to create a powerful defensive field to send a bullet or sword bouncing off.
Energy weapons didn’t trigger this effect, although they had to deal with the naturally high levels of defensive crystals already present in his blood. That explained why they were able to hurt him, but far less than normal.
Minerva had devised a sort of complex spring trap that would simultaneously hit multiple points on Ares body. So many synchronized strikes would overtax the crystal presence in his blood and leave him vulnerable to at least one of the blows.
It was a completely impractical design that was smart in concept but poor in execution. I wasn’t surprised she’d lacked the resources to properly build something like that. To reliably score the impacts required, it needed a precision that was unfeasible due to the nature of combat.