by Skyler Grant
A ship was rising from the cavern beneath the tree, a massive vessel as big as the city as Aefwal. Unlike a city though there was nothing that spoke of anything but war. Turrets and heavy cannons adorned the surface, shield projectors, and sheaths of sinister-looking bombs just waiting to be dropped.
The Righteous didn’t hesitate. With their reinforced shields they’d survived its arrival the best and they opened fire in unison. They were broadcasting a distress call at full power—one that given the energy barrier would never reach home.
The blast of a huge cannon shredded their remaining shields and sent one Righteous ship crashing into the forest, its engine section completely vaporized.
The few Scholar vessels still surviving moved into a formation with the remaining Righteous ships. Old rivalries were set aside in an instant against a new and terrifying foe. It didn’t make a difference, another tremendous blast of energy sent one more Righteous ship tumbling.
A Scholar vessel overloaded its engines and three beams of light coalesced from the new vessel to send it spinning downward. Why? The larger ship hadn’t bothered with the smaller Scholars so far and had been focusing its attacks on the Righteous.
I calculated what the Scholar vessel might have been trying to accomplish with that burn. They may have been trying to crash themselves against a window that might be a bridge. The ship had rewound time to avoid an attack to come that had actually damaged it.
Boreas, it had to be. I’d pointed the way to the prize and Boreas’ forces had claimed it. Then I understood. Forget ancient swords and artifacts.
This enormous battleship was the Sword of Light.
I jumped in the Graven just long enough to send narrow beam transmissions to the various surviving vessels of a rally point, before jumping out.
41
I maintained the power to the energy barrier preventing jump transit. It was steadily eating through our supply of crystal dust, but I didn’t see an alternative. If I lowered it the huge ship would almost certainly jump away and Boreas would be able to learn everything—I doubted Boreas himself was aboard.
I guessed the crew was a small one—little more than a raiding party. They must have solved Vattier’s puzzle apart from the location until I provided it, then freezing time infiltrated the cavern, unlocked the ship, and figured out how to fly it.
A skelton crew. They were undermanned and still learning what the vessel could do. We’d never get a better shot at it.
That required keeping fresh battles from breaking out amongst our own ranks. It was a bit difficult to convince the unaligned Scholar and Righteous ships that we now meant them well after we’d clearly lured them into an ambush designed to kill them.
Still, everyone had lost a few ships to that monstrosity and that at least made diplomacy a possibility. Crystal was out of quarantine and so far she was doing an admirable job.
I’d brought Anna aboard the Graven and was focused on the next bit of diplomacy needed. Those ships weren’t going to be enough, not to be certain.
We were going to pay a visit to the three powerful Divine. Ash, Thor and Atlas.
Their city was the largest we’d seen here outside of ourselves, and the healthiest looking. While they obviously didn’t have our technology the people didn’t seem to be suffering much for it. I set the Graven down in a clearing outside.
As I thought, it wasn’t long until we were greeted by Ash.
“That dress is absurd. Is that the machine’s idea?” Ash asked, catching sight of Anna who as usual for this sort of thing had chosen to go in her full queenly regalia.
“What? No, have you ever seen Emma dress a drone? I’m Queen Anna Besari, you’re Ash. I’m afraid I don’t know your title,” Anna said.
“Don’t know if I have one. I always thought big titles were for weak people. Why are you here?”
“The Sword has been deployed,” Anna said.
“Against you, instead of for you, I know. Minerva was smart enough to leave things alone and then you and your murderous thugs just had to go poking and wouldn’t let it go.”
Ash did know how to deliver a good verbal barb. They are always best when they’re true.
I said, “Anna’s endlessly poor judgment isn’t the issue here. That vessel tore through the people in the woods without even thinking about it.”
“Interrupting your attempted mass-murder of the people in the skies above. We saw. We disapproved,” Ash said.
Perhaps I should have left Anna behind and brought Crystal. This wasn’t going very well.
“What do you think they’ll do if they find your people here?” Anna said.
“They don’t know where we are and they’re more likely to find you first. If they do find us they’ll be able to leave this place and will,” Ash said.
They were aware of the barrier that I was maintaining. That was interesting as they hadn’t shown any signs of having airships to make use of a jump drive or of any jump gates.
“Are you just playing hard to get in the hopes of a better price or do you really have zero interest in stopping that ship?” Anna asked.
Ash regarded her for a long moment and grunted before replying. “Oh, we’ve an interest in stopping it. We’ve been discussing plans. We’ve just lived as long as we have by having a good sense of those who are good news and those who are bad, and you’re both. We don’t like that.”
“We have cookies,” I said.
“One of the points in your favor,” Ash said without missing a beat.
“What can I do to ease your minds?” Anna asked.
“You have no power crystal of your own. You could, why not?” Ash asked.
“Pride. It is barely under control now and just manageable. With a crystal my pride would run out of control and destroy me. I’m too proud to allow that,” Anna said wryly.
Ash leaned forward as if peering into her soul and said, “Huh. I’ll accept that as truth. And this Emma of yours. What is her story?”
“I think that’s obvious,” Anna said.
“It isn’t. There is history there and if you are to have our help I must know what I’m working with. I insist,” Ash said.
“Then I’d rather discuss it in private,” Anna said.
Ash shook her head. “You don’t have to reveal every secret in your head, girl, but I think you’re holding a few too many. You two are linked, I can see that.”
I knew I had a history, but I didn’t know what it was. I’d never felt that much of a compulsion to dig into it. I was aware of how strange that was.
Anna gnawed on her lower lip. “Fine, but this isn’t a good idea. In broad strokes Emma is meant to handle power better than most. However, built with a glaring flaw so her madness would proceed down a known route.
Was that it? That was very nearly disappointing if true, and it probably was true. There was no reason for me to be as endlessly insulting as I was, I didn’t even mean it, not always. Still, from the very moment I’d come online after Anna had activated me, it had been on my sheet.
I said, “I’d give you a cookie for your honesty, but truly one more and the structural integrity of that dress is finally going to fail and all hopes of an alliance will be done,”
“We can work with that. We’ll bring down that ship’s shields in four hours,” Ash said.
As Ash said, we could work with that. We had to.
42
The battle required planning. I’d already learned some important lessons from Aefwal. A threat could only bring allies together for so long, and as soon as a tempting prize appeared, any alliance would fall apart. Neutralizing the Sword of Light would be challenging enough, but unless we made sure it was destroyed the factions would turn on each other the instant it was convenient.
I didn’t want to do that, I’d love to study that vessel and all Vattier had learned. However, I saw no convincing way to pull it off. Even if I could somehow jump the ship away while seeming to destroy it, seizing the vessel would likely require more
than my own drones aboard.
I could try transferring my processing core to the ship, it wouldn’t be the first time I’d been housed in an airship.
I didn’t want to be a devastating weapon of war. Aefwal seemed a better foundation for me to build my future on.
I did have an idea of how we could still come out of it ahead, but it would be risky. The power supply for that ship had to be the Agate. In legends, the Sword of Light and the Agate were inextricably linked. I still didn’t know exactly what the Agate was, but by all appearances it offered a lot more energy than the combined might of my Bioreactors. We needed to steal it.
I thought it might be possible. We just needed to sell the others on the idea of stealing the entire ship first. I devised an attack plan that focused on neutralizing the ship’s bridge, weapons array, and shields at the same time. We’d contribute forces to all three attacks. We had far more ground units to offer and it also made us the most invested in legitimately claiming the ship afterwards.
For taking the bridge I wanted to bring along the Righteous. It seemed likely that was where the Powered would be and neutralizing their abilities was important. Shield control we’d be taking out with the help of Oozelord and several of the other Scholars. I’d seen the man easily subdue an entire fleet. In the close quarters of the ship he should be devastatingly effective. I’d already tweaked Asp suits so that my drones should be fully insulated from his control.
Weapons control would be up to the remaining Scholars with a selection of my heavy units ready to assist them.
These were all forces the others knew that I was bringing, but I planned for the actual bulk of our efforts to be directed elsewhere.
Once I had drones on the ship and could conduct a proper scan it would open the interior up for teleport. I should be able to bring my forces into engineering. I’d already started transferring Bioreactors up from the city to an airship. The plan was straightforward. Kill all defenders and begin to transfer over Bioreactors to the ship. When the time was right I’d teleport the Agate back to one airship and blow the reactors.
Done properly it would look like the ship was destroyed in the struggle, or that Boreas’ people decided to scuttle the vessel.
I might even be able to score some points by rescuing our allies, if there was time. The Righteous wouldn’t need it, they’d return after a day anyways, but the Scholars wouldn’t have that luxury.
I’d been jumping in a scout ship periodically to keep track of the location of the Sword of Light. I didn’t know how the Divine would know its location to hit the shields, but I presumed they knew what they were about. At the appointed time a thick cloud of sparkling energy drew close to the Sword of Light and exchanged a series of multi-colored sparks with the shields.
The vessel fired its main cannon directly into the heart of the cloud. It seemed completely unaffected. It made me wonder about Anna and us clearing it from the city. Had we really outsmarted the Divine or simply passed some sort of test they’d decided to throw at us to see how we’d react?
More beam weapon shots followed the first. Wherever they sought to land the cloud simply billowed away from them while sparks of power continued to crackle outlining the shield as a bubble of energy around the ship. Then with a snap the shield faded, the energy drawn away.
Ships jumped in. I’d calculated the precise jump trajectories for the entire fleet. If we appeared within the firing arc of one of those guns they would take the shot.
Cannons unloaded at close range blasting massive rents in the ship’s hull. Then forces began to dive through the gaps.
The need for caution meant that no team was especially near their objective, and on a ship so unnecessarily huge there was a lot space. The weapons team emerged into what looked like some kind of internal park, trees and flowers carefully trimmed, but what must be some sort of automated system. The shield team entered a recreation center with an enormous pool beneath a bank of windows with a view on the outside world. The bridge team meanwhile found itself in a casino. Slot machines and gaming tables stretched as far as the eye could see.
All were empty. In a ship this size Boreas’ crew was barely present, for all that they had no doubt come excellently armed and if there were any automated defenses they’d have taken control of them.
The interior of the ship wasn’t what I’d been expecting. It was clearly a ship of war, but looking around the interior it seemed almost something else. A ship of leisure.
43
As all teams were getting settled it quickly became apparent this would be more difficult than expected. Once we got past the ship’s exterior defenses the hopes were that it didn’t have any sort of automatic defenders inside.
It wasn’t proving to be the case. Within the park trees were coming to life, animated in some fashion into golems. One swatted a Scholar aside and sent them soaring through the air at least ten feet.
In the recreation center it was more mundane combat drones. Oozelord tried to slime one and it shot him with a beam weapon that left him stumbling back clutching at his shoulder.
In the casino it was robotic security guards. Firing pistols at the Righteous, who were firing back with their rifles.
I couldn’t let myself get too involved with any of these fights. Oh, I’d provide them my usual tactical support and overlays, but my focus had to be the Agate. I’d only step back to these teams if needed.
One of my Valkyries had far less armor. I’d instead filled her suit with high-powered sensors which were even now sweeping the inside of the Sword of Light. When I had my destination I began jumping an airship to close by.
I couldn’t do so for long, but then I didn’t need to, teleporting a few dozen drones to where I detected the strongest energy reading—engineering.
I lost three drones instantly upon arrival to perfectly placed headshots by Boreas’ lieutenants. I wasn’t surprised. It also didn’t matter. I didn’t have the hindsight of a temporal rewind to help me, but I did have vastly more computing power than the human brain and I began to lay down fields of fire that couldn’t be escaped.
They were winning. My first drones were all felled and had only taken one of the lieutenants down, then my next wave appeared and we finished off the rest of Boreas’ people. Of course, that was when the automated defenders arrived.
There was nothing mundane about these defense bots. They hovered about a meter off the floor, completely encased in rippling bubbles of energy. A whip formed out of some sort of plasma emerged from one and cut one of my drones in half even through the Valkyrie’s heavy armor.
A set of phase blades slid right off the shielding and a few rounds from a Gunslinger met with a similar poor fate. I hadn’t expected to encounter energy shielding that strong inside the ship. Normally they had more limited use in personal combat.
With the unusual strength of these shields and the fact that the teams elsewhere on the ship hadn’t encountered them, I suspected they had to be drawing power from the Agate itself. It was also possibly a result of Vattier and his technology simply building a better defense drone.
I lost another two drones while I was thinking about it. Whatever intelligence was powering them was fast, quite possibly faster than I was.
I paid a price in operational speed for being a bio-computer, for all that I still outdid your average human. It also let me think beyond the immediate. If these drones were drawing power from the Agate there had to be some sort of distribution node. It would be the first thing an attacker would think to target. Vattier was smart, he respected intelligence before all, and he’d want every drone to be as intelligent as it possibly could. There had to be a central controller at least for this section of the ship—and maybe for the entire vessel.
For security he’d likely build local clusters that switched over to the next node if they were damaged. That would assure redundancy for the systems.
I teleported over a few sensor droids.
There were so many systems here it was
n’t easy to locate the core, but by focusing upon the timing of the droid’s blasts I was able to detect the specific data traffic controlling each one and follow it back.
Once I’d identified the processing core it was simpler to check for safeguards and the relay to a secondary system in case of failure. I didn’t want to use any of the Bioreactor bombs yet, but they weren’t the only explosives I had. I had drones teleport over a few blocks of high-yield explosive and soon the deck was trembling beneath my drones’ feet as it detonated.
One enemy defense drone snapped off a last shot still in the system before they all went silent. Repair routines were already engaging. A part of me wondered if this vessel were actually self-aware. I hadn’t met any other artificial intelligences since my awakening apart from Amy and really she was barely worthy of the name. By taking it out, I could be killing something of a family relative.
Still, the relative was doing a fair job at trying to kill me first. I really shouldn’t waste any time on sentimentality.
With the drones gone I could take a moment to really study the Agate. It was a large sliver of stone suspended in a glass tube in the center of engineering. It shared many of the attributes of a power crystal although I’d never seen one so large or having the coloration.
The power readings were huge.
I’d have no trouble removing it from the cell. The deactivated defense drones were supposed to keep away those that didn’t belong here.
It was there for the taking.
44
With things in engineering taken care of I needed to help the other teams accomplish their mission and get to their goals.
Of the three teams we’d deployed so far the Righteous were having the most success and were making slow but steady progress through the casino. The defenders here were some of the fiercest, but firepower made a difference. For the moment the Righteous were fine on their own. They were a few minutes away from an elevator that would take them to the bridge.