The Metropolis

by Skyler Grant

  There were classrooms for the humanities and sciences in addition to combat arenas. Her student body had grown beyond just the scavengers. I spotted some of Magpie’s village children, a few animal hybrids who must have been created by Crystal, and even some Gobbles lounged around on shelves, paying unusually sharp attention as we passed.

  “You tortured Magpie’s people for generations and they trust you with their latest one? They’re bigger fools than I thought,” I said.

  “I wouldn’t say they trust me. They’re too smart for that. But, like me, they realize that we’re living in a different world now,” Sylax said.

  There were art and music rooms. A part of me wondered at the utility and at the same time I was impressed by the sheer audacity of what they were attempting to accomplish. I was trying to put together the shattered pieces of a world and my reasons for doing so were complex. I wished I could decide if Sylax truly believed in all of this, or if she was playing me. The greatest monster I knew was attempting to restore a level of culture long passed.

  “This isn’t like you. This is nice,” I said.

  “I know, that is why I do it. Come and observe the training arena. You’ll be interested in this,” Sylax said, as she led the way to an observation window.

  Below students warred with combat bots. A girl ducked and waved her way beneath them, brushing them with a touch and transforming them to stone. Next, a young man blasted each apart with sonic waves and another girl followed behind using complex hand motions to weave the dust into stone golems.

  “Her touch only turns things to stone for about half an hour. Crippling, but not actually destructive. Add in a new element and it is suddenly fatal, and add yet a third and something new is made. I found the visit by the three Divine to this city ... inspirational,” Sylax said.

  I didn’t want Sylax feeling inspired, even a seemingly reformed one. However well she behaved I remembered her first act after having her crystal removed—her murder of James Wolf. This woman might be less insane, if there was such a thing, but murder was still her nature.

  “How much of this was Crystal’s idea?” I asked.

  Sylax gave me a sidelong look. “You are thinking this cannot be her doing? What do you know of our history? Hers and mine?”

  “Rather little. I’m not even sure I’m capable of having nightmares, but your past might be enough to make even a machine restless,” I said.

  “They called her the spider because of her web of influence. The old world had fallen apart and she was determined to build something new. Parents couldn’t keep their children fed, but she promised—send them, send them and they shall have a place and a home and I shall make them better,” Sylax said. I could hear the bitterness in her tone.

  I’d never heard any of this.

  “It seems she kept her word,” I said.

  “She did. Instead of growing up on the streets I learned my letters, mathematics, fashion. The Scholarium was growing and she found a place for me inside it. A place I could seduce those useful to her plans, and kill those who opposed them.”

  “That seems improbable. Not only are you deeply unlikable, you wouldn’t have had a crystal yet, correct?” I asked.

  Sylax gave a dark laugh. “Younger days and the strata weren’t quite as defined as they are now. I had power enough to pass among them and none knew enough to question it. In reality I couldn’t bond to a crystal, none of her children could. Had I absorbed one it would have killed me. The poison touch, she called it.”

  If this was true, it cast a far darker view of Crystal.

  “It doesn’t seem to have stopped you,” I said.

  “I was determined and in the epicenter of an organization learning all about the crystals. I lied and stole and killed for my purposes as well as hers. I found a cure and I found a very special crystal.”

  “That amplification would have made any crystal holder who absorbed it enormously powerful. How did you get it?” I asked.

  “Oh, it did. It passed through three holders before finding itself with Soldier. He had a power set a bit like Ares. He could use any weapon, and had superhuman strength and agility,” Sylax said.

  “That doesn’t answer my question.”

  “I killed him in his sleep. Best way, really, with someone like that. It finally gave me the power to break the chains that bound me and force Crystal to do my bidding,” Sylax said.

  “And we know how that went,” I said.

  “Bloody and unsuccessful,” Sylax said, and she glanced towards my drone. “I know you don’t believe me, Emma. But that is why I wanted to show you all this. I’m not changed, not really, but I am still trying to do better. Anna made the right call not giving Crystal the dust.”

  This was all a warning couched in a way that I might take it seriously.

  I did. There was something sincere about Sylax right now.

  35

  We made little progress on the puzzles.

  And I’d underestimated the interest Vattier’s message might generate. The next week saw visitors to our skies. I was told the exact number of kingdoms in the Scholarium varied at any point in time, but currently eight of them had airships in the area. The Righteous dispatched three heavy cruises. Other, smaller factions or individual scavengers brought fifty-four ships in all.

  Not all of those survived long, of course. The Scholarium lost two vessels to various Divine and everyone thought it was open season on scavengers. I’d brought down two of those ships myself that made an attempt to raid Aefwal.

  I’d been in enough fights to know a big one was brewing. I had to make sure that Aefwal survived it and that I got what I’d come here for.

  With the teleportation gates working trade was thriving. My biotechnological creations were a rarity out there in the world and each of the factions had some use for much of what I could provide. The Righteous perfected body armor well beyond anything I had developed and were willing to share some of their expertise. The Scholars were more varied in what they might trade, but really a significant part of what I wanted from them right now was intelligence.

  I didn’t like what I learned. While this city had been under the rule of Sylax it had been assisting King Boreas, ruler of one of the Scholar Kingdoms, against another. At the time Boreas had been slowly losing the war. Lately his fortunes had seen a shift and he was winning.

  The reason we were here in this new land at all was because King Boreas had launched a sneak attack that nearly destroyed Aefwal. I didn’t want him to have a second chance.

  I called Crystal and Sylax together to discuss the possibility of negotiating a truce.

  “Absolutely not,” Sylax said.

  “He is a thoroughly unpleasant man. It is why I didn’t seek his aid when Sylax was taken,” Crystal said.

  “Can he really be worse than the two of you?” I asked.

  “I can only skin a man once. He can go back in time and do it again,” Sylax said.

  “Well …” Crystal said, giving Sylax a knowing look.

  Sylax frowned. “With accelerated healing I may have technically skinned a few people several thousand times, but my point is I learned that behavior somewhere.”

  Crystal said, “You’ve seen the Scholarium. You don’t rise to the top by being weak. You rise to the top by either being immensely strong or terrifying.”

  “Keep in mind that, until I ruled Aefwal, even with an Amplification core boosting the benefits of an upgrade core I didn’t even hold a city,” Sylax said.

  That was a good fight. When we’d first met Sylax she’d been the strongest thing we’d ever encountered. It didn’t seem there could be anyone stronger. The stronger already had their cities and their kingdoms.

  “Is he going to be an issue? While I assume he’d want to skin and debone you both on principle, how serious is he likely to be about it?” I asked.

  “I was his subject and you took this city from me. If you had turned right around and sworn fealty to him, it would have gotten y
ou praise. Wolf went right out and found himself a stronger benefactor. But you? You invaded his kingdom, stole a valuable resource, and have no very powerful friends,” Sylax said.

  “That is her way of saying yes, he is going to be an issue,” Crystal said.

  I’d have no problem pledging ourselves to some larger power, but I knew that would never fly with Anna. From the beginning she’d declared herself the Queen of the World and she bowed her head to nobody.

  It wasn’t a fight we could win, not right now. We needed other options.

  “Tell me about him? And not about how incredibly delicious you find his handling of a knife,” I said.

  “I do actually like that,” Sylax said.

  “He has four cities under him. Aefwal made the fifth, and even new and underpowered, compared to the others it really was a big deal,” Crystal said.

  “You know about his ability to rewind time. That one is the most publicly known, but he’ll have other time-related abilities,” Sylax said.

  “He froze our time to deliver the bomb that nearly destroyed the city,” I said.

  “That would be a new one, but I’m not surprised. He enjoys hurting people, breaking people, yet is fiercely protective of those he considers to be his property,” Sylax said.

  “He has a daughter, Princess Simone. They don’t really get along because she doesn’t much like doing what she’s told. She possesses the power of invisibility and phasing through matter,” Crystal said.

  That was interesting, someone to possibly turn against him.

  “There are perhaps five hundred Powered of various sorts beneath him. Far more citizens, of course. Probably less than a thousand airships,” Sylax said.

  The numbers were daunting. I and my allies had accomplished a lot by being smart, bold, and in some cases lucky. I’d been making something of a habit of toppling those that thought themselves unstoppable.

  I didn’t have solution to a thousand airships, not now. Eventually with more production facilities and more research, but not now.

  We needed friends.

  I didn’t trust the Righteous. They ultimately viewed any Powered as someone to be depowered and purified. For all we might be wary allies and trading partners, they weren’t friends.

  The other Scholarium kingdoms would likely want our fealty, which made them automatic negatives. Perhaps we could convince the Divine? We’d made some enemies since coming here, but we’d made some friends as well. It was time to see what Minerva could do.

  36

  It was an odd assortment that Minerva had found to invite to the city. The Divine bound themselves to ancient myths and legends related to their abilities. In some cases this made them stronger, faster, and more powerful than they might otherwise be, and in some it seemed to make them weaker. There was Bootes, the God of Wagons, who had the ability to transport people and objects long distances, Tykhe, who possessed the ability to purify items of corruption, Jarilo, who had some powers of plant manipulation.

  Their abilities gave them few advantages in any fight and they had often spent their lives being preyed upon by those stronger. What we offered, being a part of our city and what we were building where their abilities might be seen as something useful, really did have some appeal. That didn’t mean they were willing to swear fealty without extracting every concession that they could.

  I had Crystal playing diplomat, it is what she was there for.

  Every Divine that decided to join up with us would make us that much more attractive to those who remained. If even a few of the more powerful became our allies they might serve as an effective counter against Boreas.

  That was the theory. The problem was I wasn’t the only one to realize it.

  A few hours into negotiations reality seemed to flicker. In an instant the Divine guests were scattered about the room, slumped against the walls, suffering multiple gunshots. Crystal had taken several in the face and her life-signs were quickly fading. The wounds weren’t typical, with a residue of yellow energy.

  It had to be agents of Boreas working to neutralize this alliance before it started. First things first, I shut down all teleportation gates in and out of the city. An infiltrator might have come from an airship, but the gates were another option and the only one I could do something about.

  I teleported in drones to grab the Divine and engaged a second teleport to a trauma center. Ophelia had lieutenants on call every hour of the day in case of emergencies. The wounds were resisting healing, the energy signatures retarding it somehow. Vital signs were dropping even faster.

  I’d encountered toxins before that slowed healing, but they wouldn’t be returning this sort of result. It had to be some kind of reversal effect. They’d expect me to get them healing quickly and whatever the residue was in the wounds, it was taking that healing effect and using it to cause more damage.

  No, that didn’t make sense. If the goal was to just have these people killed they could have done so. Whatever the time-pause or time-reversion they were using, it should have been enough for that. I teleported Ophelia’s lieutenant into a testing cell and engaged quarantine shielding.

  It was purely speculative, but if I wanted to capitalize on a city with a large presence of high-powered healers I’d use some sort of bioweapon. One triggered to grow stronger and consume more health, the more a healing aura was applied. It would take far more research to confirm that, but for the time being isolating the victims from a healer and using a Medbay for traditional healing was the best option. The wounded might die, Crystal might die, but it would preserve the city.

  It didn’t answer the why though. If the goal was to wipe out the city they could have brought such a bioweapon directly to Ophelia’s district and released it. Why wouldn’t they?

  It was an attempt to destroy this city, but it wasn’t only that. They’d learned their lesson about me the hard way—that an entity who could respond in nanoseconds was difficult to deal with even having some degree of temporal manipulation. This was a distraction, and it had succeeded.

  I did a broader scan of the city. All of the other District Lords were unharmed, Sylax hadn’t been touched.

  There it was. The electronics in one secure research facility were down. The lab that housed the keystone for the pedestal in the cavern.

  Once I knew what I was looking for it was a simple matter to review those surveillance logs. The cameras had been wiped, but everything passing through a city system went through me and my biological memory storage units still had them intact.

  Kalakas, a minor Scholar lord we’d been doing quite a bit of trading with. They’d been providing some rare earth resources that we needed for the construction of our espionage drones, and aiding in our refinement efforts of compounds. We’d allowed him and his people access to the city.

  With the benefit of hindsight I reviewed logs and saw how his agents from the very beginning had been scouting our infrastructure. It wasn’t until today that anything had more been done. I only had flickers of an individual moving through the halls, the result of time-skips—this was a time-shifter. Never enough to have registered as anything more than sensor irregularities. They told a clear story though. I had the visuals of the figure making their way through the gate, shooting the diplomats, then moving into the secure facility to perform the robbery before making their way back through the gate.

  Effectively it had only taken them a few seconds and they’d made their escape before I sealed the gates.

  I had drones in guard positions at various points throughout the city. Four Valkyries and six Gunslingers. It would do. I teleported them to the jump gate and reestablished the connection to Kalakas’ domain and ordered them through.

  I hoped I’d still be able to catch up to the time-shifter, if not Kalakas would do. We’d been betrayed and I couldn’t let that stand.

  37

  Kalakas and his people weren’t innocent. Innocent people don’t start shooting the instant your forces come from a gateway. They we
re ready, defensive turrets set up, and when my first drone emerged from the gateway they were pummeled with high-powered rounds.

  Even the armor on a Valkyrie couldn’t take that for long, but then it didn’t have to. Phase blades engaged, they surged forward to cut the turret in two as the second Valkyrie stepped through. They moved on a second turret even as guards rushed into the room.

  I brought a Gunslinger through next and opened fire with their chain-gun. A few stray shots caught my Valkyries but that was nothing new. The less-armored guards were chewed to pieces and stumbled back.

  I didn’t have time to be satisfied with that small victory. Analyzing my drone’s sensory impressions I could cross-reference the sounds of shuttles taking off, pin-pointing where the landing bay might be.

  A second Gunslinger made his way through and moved towards the nearest wall to the landing bay, applying a full strengthed body-slam accompanied with kinetic enhancements. Stone shattered and he crashed a way to the other side falling on top of guards who had been rushing to reinforce their comrades.

  I moved the Valkyrie units through the gap and sent a second Gunslinger through the gateway. Kinetic enhancers boosting their speed, they rushed past more guards knocking them to the side before smashing another wall.

  The landing bay was on the other side. A shuttle was already taking off.

  This was where I had to get clever. This is where I had to get very, very clever. From what I’d been able to piece together from the surveillance tapes this agent had the ability to freeze time when they knew there was danger. They weren’t freezing it now or I’d never have seen the shuttle at all—they still thought they were safe and had made it out successfully. The sound of the takeoff perhaps masked the gunfire. Maybe they had exhausted their freeze time ability sneaking through the city?

  If they weren’t freezing time, they had to rely on their ability to rewind time to escape. For a lieutenant of Boreas that would be about fifteen seconds.