The Nation

by Skyler Grant

  "Nuclear waste. We've managed to find something even more toxic than your personality. It seems she is weaponizing it," I said.

  "We going loud?" Anna asked.

  It might kick off the war we were still hoping to avoid, but this gave Vinci too much of an edge.

  "Pull a Hot Stuff. I'm preparing a labyrinth for you afterwards," I said.

  I doubted it would hold her. Drawing on her powers enough to wipe out this facility would result in some massive destruction. That was the danger of powerful weapons. They cut both ways.

  7

  Anna had always been good at destruction when she put her mind to it and her newfound powers only amplified that. Fire sprang up around her, growing in intensity. It wasn't long for my portable host to be destroyed along with everything else that she'd brought with her. Environmental destruction was the point.

  Anna could burn even hotter than Hot Stuff and over a far larger range. Unlike Hot Stuff she got to keep her Bio-armor. Neither fire or the armor were her primary power set and therefore they were equal in power, unlike Hot Stuff who had fire as her primary and her offensive abilities outpaced her defensive.

  Even without the remote host I was maintaining my connection to Anna and nothing in the facility could threaten her. With the sort of heat that she was putting out any combat drones were instantly evaporated. The biggest problem was the collapsing floors of the complex. Short range teleports were needed to keep her on something like stable ground as she transformed the the waste from potential energy into kinetic.

  Back in our territory I was already bringing my preparations for Anna online. To contain an out-of-control Anna would require my best testing labyrinth yet. I called it the Mountain, one hundred and twelve Bio-reactors linked to provide shielding. Absorptive capacitors drew in excess power and used it to further strengthen the shielding effects.

  Far too resource-heavy to have on at all times, I activated the reactors and put the facility on standby.

  "How are we looking?" Anna asked, hovering in the air around a crater that was three miles wide, bubbling and hissing.

  "I don't have sensors in the area and we want to make extra sure we get all of it. While I am sure you would love nothing more than to blow off work, hold position and temperature a few more minutes," I said.

  I was getting an incoming communication, Vinci.

  I wasn't thrilled to answer it. I was hoping we might manage to pass this whole thing off as some natural disaster, one of the dangers of stockpiling volatile compounds. If she was reaching out, she must have some long-range sensors that had already determined the truth.

  "Queen Vinci, unpleasant as always to hear from you," I said.

  "Quite the greeting when you are busy in one of my facilities, invading my lands," Vinci said. She looked to be wearing some sort of environmental suit.

  "The same facility where you were designing and stockpiling resources to make weapons that jeopardize organic life of all types? You do realize what you are made of?" I asked.

  "For the moment. You went from the electronic to the organic. A transition the other way must be possible. You could help me instead of being my enemy. We are still natural allies," Vinci said.

  It was true, it had always been true. With my scientific ability and her industrial aptitude, ruling the world wouldn't even be a challenge. It also didn't appeal, I was interested in seeing the world that Anna, Caya, and the others created. I'd seen Vinci's vision and it was an endless gray sprawl.

  "You've nothing to offer me," I said.

  "Your survival is hardly nothing. Do you think I don't have other facilities? That there is not more technology of the old world I am mastering? You and Anna have done great things together, I admit that, but you are now on the wrong side of history," Vinci said.

  This wasn't the talk of someone looking for peaceful coexistence. If this conversation was doing anything, it was confirming those weapons designs we'd found were not simply defensive. Vinci no doubt planned to perfect those weapon systems and offer us the choice between her and annihilation.

  "You have almost no people left alive because you are bad at being a queen. You have failed at your primary responsibility and no matter how many factories you make, it is an error you can't correct. You're dangerous, but you're not competent. I'll repeat your words back to you. You are on the wrong side of history," I said.

  Vinci frowned and killed the comm.

  That had done a lot for the cause of peace. It also gave Anna enough time to finish her burn. It was time to bring her home.

  This extreme use of her abilities already had her trembling, the pain growing more intense by the moment. It was about to get a lot worse. I gave her coordinates and she shut off her flames and teleported away.

  There were no series of jumps this time, there was no point in being stealthy and we needed to get Anna secured as quickly as possible. When she materialized it was in a tiny cell at the focal point of the Mountain.

  Anna let out a scream, dropping to her knees. Her Bio-armor was rippling around her. One moment she was still clad in her red and black skintight outfit, the next she was naked, then she was covered in sharp venomous spikes, then thick, heavy armored plates.

  Red energy was dancing along her flesh, tiny bolts of lightning crackling along her skin. When an electric arc jumped from her to hit one of the walls it left a scorch mark. The lights flickered as my absorptive capacitors struggled to keep up.

  There was no point calling Ophelia or any of the other Healers. This wasn't a physical condition so much as it was a metaphysical one. Anna was just too powerful and when she drew too much on that power it was like overstuffing a sausage.

  Anna wiped sweat from her brow, sitting with her back against the wall.

  "You think we'll be able to hold it this time?" Anna asked, her voice unsteady and strained.

  "Perhaps your life of indulging your excesses has some unexpected benefits. You seem to be holding it together this time," I said.

  Anna laughed and the air pulsed around her. Local gravity increased by over three thousand percent for roughly two seconds before returning to normal. Seventeen of the Bio-reactors were under strain, but the system was maintaining integrity.

  "How are you coming on for a cure to this?" Anna asked.

  "I'm looking, but I've told you before. I'm not sure how much can be done without dampening or removing some of your abilities. You might be even more pathetic, but you'd still have powers with just the ones I gave you," I said.

  "If it weren't for my abilities Vinci would have already overrun us. I may not be vital. Sylax and the Annas are," Anna said.

  "That is just an excuse, although you may be so stupid you believe it. We always managed before. It was tight, but we did it. We'd do it again," I said.

  Temperature in the cell dropped to almost absolute zero for over thirty seconds. I engaged heaters to regulate the environment.

  Anna let out a pained whimper before drawing in a deep breath and letting it out slowly. "I never actually thought we'd get this far, you and I. Anna Besari, queen of the whole damned world. What the fuck am I going to do if we actually do defeat Vinci?"

  This degree of self-reflection, of doubt, wasn't common to the new Anna. Did these excesses of power somehow restore a bit of her sanity? It was something to look into.

  "If historical data is any indication you will eat cookies, sleep with desperate men, and have a closet the size of a city filled with horrible outfits," I said.

  "What about you? What would you do when the fighting is done? When we're the last left standing in the field?"

  There was some of that arrogance back, the assumption that we'd win.

  "What I've always planned to do, SCIENCE. The biosphere of the Earth is failing, I'll need to fix that. The Gobbles are a great success and I think it would be a shame for the Earth to have only two sentient species," I said.

  "You're going to build a whole damned world. Maybe you should be the empress?" Anna s
aid with a dark chuckle.

  "We've always been a team, Anna. Ever since you brought me back online. I like to think of us as the smart one and ... the other one."

  "I'm not going to let this thing stand with Vinci. I can't. I know that you and Caya have been counseling more time, but we can't afford to wait," Anna said, before she tilted her head back and screamed.

  The lightning storm that followed knocked out eight of my reactors, but the Mountain held.

  If Anna wanted a war, we'd have a war.

  I only wished I had a plan.

  8

  "I have a plan," Sylax said.

  "Those are words that never fucking end well," Ophelia said.

  Anna had called a full meeting to discuss the possibility of going to war. Normally something like this would have been limited to her council, but she wanted to solicit as much input as possible.

  "I'm listening," Anna said, from her place at the head of the table.

  Sylax tapped away at her screen and brought up a display. It was showing the design for a missile. Not current tech, old world.

  "What am I looking at?" Anna asked.

  "What Queen Vinci should have been going for and instead pursued a by-product. Nuclear missiles, the greatest weapon of the ancient era, and our territory is filled with silos of these things," Sylax said.

  I could make Bio-bombs of similar yield, but they required a great deal of Bio-matter to convert into energy and were of minimal use against Vinci's inorganic forces.

  "We're thinking of going to war because she threatened all life on the planet, and now you're suggesting doing the same thing?" Anna asked.

  "Atmospheric detonation can create an electromagnetic pulse that is far more harmful to them than to us. But in the worst case, yes, I suggest exactly that. If only one side is going to survive a conflict I'd rather it be us," Sylax said.

  Anna pursed her lips. Instead of chastising Sylax she looked towards the drone I was occupying, "Emma, I know you don't like it and I don't either, but I want to know the feasibility. Could we make this work?"

  It was a loaded question. Regardless of any outcome I preferred, Anna deserved an honest answer.

  I doubted that an EMP would be effective in any lasting sense. Vinci's creations were all to some degree powered from her own power crystal, not to mention her ownership of both the Beryl and Chalcedony. Just as electricity had failed to work in the old world and we still managed to get functional systems, an electromagnetic pulse might do very little lost-term harm to her forces.

  Nuclear devastation was another matter, especially if it killed Vinci. It would put an instant end to her threat. Vinci had plans for a wide-scale planetary bombardment hostile almost exclusively to organic life. Nuclear bombardment would be hostile to both organic and machine life.

  If things came to that conflict I had to conclude we were relatively well-equipped to fight it. Already most of my towers were self-contained environments. Building them underground and hardened would be work, but require no technological advancement. Given my ability to network my drones, and teleportation, we could even keep a thriving society despite being denied the surface of the planet.

  "If your goal is simply to maximize human suffering, listen to the sociopath. We could survive the use of such weapons and maintain a high quality of life, but I don't see any guarantee of victory," I said.

  "I'm not suggesting we just start throwing up a cloud of missiles. If we get a location on Vinci or the crystals, we'll have tools to deal with it," Sylax said.

  "We already have killing machines. You're one of them," I said.

  "We're limited because of the sheer numbers of her swarm. Even if we were going in, it might make sense to have the means to clear the area first," Anna said.

  There was some sense to that. Some. Radiation would be destructive to my technology and the majority of my drones, but Anna, Ophelia, and likely any of their second-generation power-holders should be able to function even in such an environment.

  "I can get a few of those missiles ready, just in case. Still, we've already determined no matter how much radioactivity you absorb, nothing will make you hot," I said.

  "Often imitated, never duplicated," Hot Stuff said with a grin, arms folded.

  "What else have we got?" Anna asked.

  "Vinci appears to be masking the Beryl and Chalcedony, but I've been working on a detector. The crystals always repulsed Reality Zero environments and I've been attempting to reconstruct a limited environment," Caya said.

  That was clever. If she could succeed by measuring the force exerted against it, it might be possible to locate both crystals.

  "Make it a priority. Anything else?" Anna asked.

  "There has been increased comm traffic between Vinci and the Scholarium. She will be pleading her case for an alliance. While I know it is a challenge given your near total lack of social graces, perhaps our empress should officially pay them a visit," I said.

  "It is past time you reminded them who is top bitch," Sylax said, with a pointed look at Anna.

  "I agree. You aren't who you used to be. It is time the Scholarium saw that in person," Caya said.

  "If you worry about your notable lack of control, don't. It is not as if losing control would wipe out anyone likable," I said.

  "You're the most powerful Powered on the planet and the Scholarium has always respected strength, but you have to prove it. Go there, rip the hearts out of whatever idiots decide it is a good idea to challenge you, and demand their allegiance," Sylax said, pounding her fist on the table.

  Caya said, "I don't pound my fist, but I agree. The Scholarium has to be thinking you are far weaker than you appear and that is the reason you haven't appeared before them."

  "Wouldn't they regard my loss of control as a weakness?" Anna asked.

  "There isn't a leader of the Scholarium born that hasn't had a weakness of some sort. What matters at the end of the day is who lives and who dies," Sylax said.

  "Fine. I'll go pay a visit to the Scholarium and be my charming self. What else do we have?" Anna asked.

  "If I divert resources, I can get the first of the Juggernauts flying. They won't be at full capability yet. I can continue to make improvements in the air," I said.

  "Ground forces?" Anna asked.

  "As ready as they can be. Vinci's mechs are armor-plated and resistant to kinetic arms so we've upped production of energy weaponry. If our core districts hold we can produce new bodies and equipment for them at a rate of over one million a day," Hot Stuff said.

  Increasingly Hot Stuff had been getting away from combat missions. While she was still incredibly strong for a Powered, her strength didn't equal that of Sylax or the Annas. I don't think she minded, she'd thrown herself into the logistics side of the military and seemed to have a knack for it.

  Sylax said, "Our best option is still going to be to assassinate Queen Vinci. No struggle with armies, no nuclear war. We have a hyper-intelligent computer, we have to be able to locate her.".

  "There aren't that many people left in her territory. She'd be with them, right? Food, water, fresh air," Hot Stuff said.

  "Not necessarily. It appears that she is now wearing a protective suit of some kind. Probably necessary, if she is going to move around within her own territory and given how much she has ruined her own environment. Humans, why can you never clean up your own filth?" I said.

  "Then she is issuing commands from somewhere. That has to be the sort of thing you can track," Sylax said.

  "I assure you I'd be more than content for you to indulge your murderous tendencies if I could. However, while there is a vast amount of network traffic throughout Vinci's territory, I can't scan it from a distance," I said.

  "Can we help?" Anna asked.

  I wished that they could. Sylax wasn’t wrong, a quick assassination would be the easiest way. Unfortunately Vinci knew that as well. Individually she was no match for our people and so she was going to great ends to keep from being an easy
target.

  "I don't think so. I'll keep looking and I'm very good. Unlike most of the people in this room who I've defeated by their weaknesses, she is good at compensating for hers," I said.

  "You never hit me with my weakness," Ophelia said.

  "Your greed and traitorous nature was more than enough to get you to betray Runner. You were barely even a struggle," I said.

  "Nobody gave you as much of a struggle as I did," Sylax said.

  "I came close,” Hot Stuff said.

  Hot Stuff had come awfully close to destroying me, although Sylax had been a lot more trouble to put down.

  "You were both somewhat inconvenient obstacles to step over and we're all terribly unimpressed. If you're looking for a magical solution, Anna, we don't have one. A war is still a bad idea," I said.

  "Yet not quite as bad as waiting for Vinci to make her move. You all have your projects. It’s time for me to arrange a visit to the Scholarium," Anna said.

  9

  The Helix gleamed in the distance, gold and crystal intertwined to create a massive spiral stretching into the sky. It was one of the few places in the Scholarium agreed by all to be free of their infighting. The unpowered lived in poverty in the lower sections. Layers of the city became more grand and opulent as you worked your way upward.

  We were headed to the top level. In addition to myself, Anna was accompanied by the two strongest members of the Scholarium to have sworn her allegiance. King Boreas had the ability to manipulate time, and Queen Astrid gained power by eating hearts. They had kept their titles and their lands, Anna having decided the title of Empress granted her authority over both. Neither were a part of her inner council—we didn’t trust them at all, although they hadn't betrayed us, yet.

  They were aboard the Graven, not the original ship that bore the name but one named in its honor. A small vessel with the latest in my technology and luxury. Layered backup systems assured that the ship could keep flying and fighting even if critically damaged.