That led to an explanation of atmospheric buoyancy that seemed to impress him, although I noted that he followed along easily enough. The wolfen girls obviously had no idea what I was talking about, and weren’t really interested anyway. Embla was too busy looking down at the ground passing by beneath us, and Daria seemed to be writing off the whole thing as wizard’s business.
Elin had figured it out all on her own a couple of days ago, the first time she saw one of my prototypes in action. Apparently some ancient Greek philosopher had actually written about the idea of a balloon, but no one had ever managed to make the idea practical.
Now she looked up from the book she’d brought with her to ask a question. “Daniel? How tightly woven are the barrier spells that make up the ship’s lift cells? Are they truly impenetrable, or will air slowly leak through them?”
I frowned. “You know, I haven’t actually had a chance to test that. We might get some leakage, especially if something solid hits the lift cells. Not enough to be dangerous, but we could gradually lose lift on a long flight like this. We’d all better keep an eye on that, just in case.”
“That’s easy to fix, right?” Cerise asked. “We’d just have to land and reform the lift cells.”
“Yeah, but to do that we need terrain that’s flat enough to land on and isn’t overrun with monsters. It shouldn’t be an issue as long as we’re paying attention, but it’s one more complication to keep an eye on.”
We conferred a little longer, until I felt comfortable that Cerise and Irithil were going to be able to fly the ship and navigate without my help. Then I excused myself, and went back to the hold to do some enchantment.
If we were going to fend off an army of frost monsters well enough to rescue a bunch of noncombatants we needed fire, and lots of it. So my first order of business was creating a factory enchantment for flamers. My men had gotten a lot of use out of the original batch of those weapons, but I’d never gotten around to designing a mass production version.
I was planning to make a lot of these things, so having them be self-powered wasn’t an option. But tying everything to a central power stone could also be problematic if I was going to have airships flying people around, so I decided to try a different approach. Flamers were a close combat weapon, and that kind of fighting rarely lasts more than a few minutes at a time. So I designed an enchantment that would collect and store ambient mana, with an internal battery that could hold enough power to run the flamer for twenty minutes or so.
Twenty minutes of continuous fire is a heck of a lot of ammunition for any weapon, so that should be more than enough. The recharge rate would be a little slow, maybe ten minutes of idle time for every minute of fire, and having too many of them in close proximity would slow that down further. But they’d start out being fully charged up by the factory, and once we got all the refugees on board it wouldn’t matter if it took a few hours for all the flamers to be ready for another battle.
Mindful of recent experience with my guns, I also put a force bayonet on the end of the weapon to deal with the occasional enemy that was willing to run through fire to get at you. I was tempted to add some more controls to adjust the intensity of the flame, and maybe try to get a longer range out of this model. But no, it was better to keep things simple. I needed a weapon any idiot could pick up and use with minimal instructions, not a complex work of art that would take months of training to master.
I was interrupted around sunset when the crew decided that the cargo hold was the only place for them to lay out their bedrolls. I arranged to have them take turns standing watches just in case something tried to sneak up on us, but letting them take turns getting some sleep seemed like a reasonable plan. The hold would be pretty dark with just the emergency lights marking the doors and control panel, but I didn’t need a lot of light for my work.
I briefly contemplated putting up some kind of partition, but anything I could make would end up being heavier than I’d like. Too bad I couldn’t conjure up curtains or something. In the end I decided it wasn’t worth spending time on, and just made a really dim light for my work area. Good soldiers can sleep through anything, so it wasn’t likely to cause them any problems.
It was some hours later when I finally had a design I was happy with. I turned on the flamer factory, watched the first couple of flamers roll out of it into the bin I’d set up to hold them, and nodded in satisfaction.
“Finished?” Elin asked.
I looked up to find that she was perched on a little stool nearby, with a book in her lap and a dim ball of light floating in the air above her hand.
“Finished with the flamer factory,” I said. “But I’ll need more than that before I feel ready for this fight. You didn’t go to bed?”
“Daria and Embla were flirting with Irithil’s bodyguard for half the evening,” she said with an exasperated sigh. “I didn’t want to be in the loft if they succeed in luring him up there, and then I got interested in my book. Besides, I wanted to speak with you about our preparations. I don’t expect that my magic will be of much use against wraiths, and a frost giant might be a bit much for me.”
“I don’t want you involved in the fighting,” I said firmly.
“Good,” she agreed. “I want nothing to do with it. But things happen in battle. Trying to keep me out of danger didn’t work out very well last time, and I’d prefer not to face that sort of situation again. Is there anything we can do to prepare for the unexpected?”
I thought about it. “Carry one of the flamers, for starters. That will deal with any wraiths that get too close. As for the giants… hmm. You got the hang of managing the enchantments on your amulet pretty quick. Come sit with me, and let’s see if we can work something out.”
She carefully put the book away and dismissed her light, and then settled herself into my lap with a shy little smile. For a moment I just hugged her, enjoying the feel of her deceptively delicate-seeming body in my arms. Too bad we didn’t have more privacy. But she was right, I needed to do something to give her better protections if she was going to be involved in an adventure like this.
Maybe a force field? But I’d need something to put it on, and she already had an amulet. Impulsively, I took a gold coin out of my belt pouch and shaped it into a ring sized for her finger.
Her breath caught. “Daniel? Is that for me? I mean, I know we’re practically… but I wasn’t expecting… you don’t have to…”
I silenced her nervous stammering with a finger to her lips. “I love you, Elin. Give me your hand.”
She held her hand up, wordlessly. I slipped the ring onto her finger, and kissed it.
“A promise,” I said. “We’re going to make it through this thing together, and one of these days we’re going to have a proper wedding.”
“Wedding?” She squeaked. “Me? B-but, what about Tina, and Cerise?”
“Every woman deserves to have a special day,” I told her. “They’ll get one too. But you’re the one who gets a ring tonight.”
Her shy little smile was the widest one I’d ever seen her wear. “Thank you, Daniel. I never expected something like this from you. I hope you realize I shall never take it off?”
“Yes, that was my insidious plan. Now, let’s see what we can put on it to keep you safe, shall we?”
The metal accepted the enchantment I impressed on it a lot more easily than anything else I’d worked with, and I wondered for a moment if maybe I should look into that. It had never occurred to me that it might matter what material I attached an enchantment to.
But no, that was an issue for later. I merged my magic with Elin’s, and showed her what I was doing as I wove a force field enchantment much like the one on my own amulet. That was the easy part. Then I started in on an intent control mechanism to let Elin control the force field, since she couldn’t do it directly with sorcery the way I did.
“Do you think this will work?” I asked as I showed her the general layout of the control scheme I was considering.
>
“It’s a very odd arrangement. I think I see what you’re getting at, but we don’t need to invent a whole new paradigm. Here, let me show you how a normal wizard would do that.”
She couldn’t just throw a lasting enchantment together on the fly the way I could, but she could weave a temporary spell that I could then use as a template. We spent quite a while experimenting with it, our magic merging and separating again at intervals as we worked.
By the time we finished the intimacy of shared magic was taking its toll on both of us. I couldn’t resist kissing her when we finally came up for air. Her tongue dueled eagerly with mine for long moments, before she suddenly remembered where we were. Then she pulled away, flushed with mingled embarrassment and arousal. I pulled her back into my arms, and held her close while we both struggled to get ourselves under control.
“I should test it,” she observed, groping for a distraction.
“Go ahead,” I replied.
Elin activated the ring with a thought, and shaped the force field it projected into a simple dome enclosing us both. Then it contracted into a cylinder barely big enough to hold us, and she tried making openings of various shapes and sizes. Her control was a little rough, but as far as I could see that was just a matter of practice.
“Looks like you’ve got it,” I murmured in her ear.
She shivered, and ran her hand over my chest. “Yes. This is marvelous, Daniel. How strong is it?”
Her eyes were luminous in the dimness of the cargo hold. My hand found its way up her side, to cup her pert little breast. My thumb grazed her nipple, and found it already crinkled into a hard point. She gasped.
“Strong enough to stand up to a frost giant,” I told her. “Only the best for my girl.”
Trapped in each other’s eyes, our lips were inexorably drawn back together. Elin squirmed against me, grinding on my erection. The scent of her arousal was intoxicating.
Somehow she found the strength to break the kiss, and bury her face in my chest.
“Not here,” she whispered, her breath coming in ragged gasps. “Please… the men…”
Oh, right. Yeah, I didn’t want to give anyone a show either. That was one of the reasons I’d put in that loft above the bridge, but the wolfen girls were up there now. I wouldn’t necessarily mind them getting an eyeful, but Elin was far too shy to be comfortable with something like that. Damn it, there really wasn’t any way for us to get a moment alone, was there?
“I suppose you’re right,” I said. “I don’t want to embarrass you. I guess I’ll just have to save it all up until we get home.”
“That would be wise of you. I expect that I shall be quite demanding, and then Tina will wish to welcome you home.”
“Good thing I have magic,” I pointed out.
She blushed, and buried her face in my chest. “Pervert. I can’t believe you use magic for such purposes. But I suppose I can’t pretend that I don’t enjoy it.”
She held up her hand and inspected the ring again, while playing with the force field.
“It still amazes me how you create such artifacts so casually, Daniel. Any normal wizard would need months to work such an enchantment, and would consider the result a prized possession.”
“Only the best for my girl,” I repeated. “But personally I think we can do more. It needs some kind of offensive function. Maybe a force blade, or a concussion effect? I bet we can work in some general purpose telekinesis too, and you definitely need a safe fall enchantment.”
She groaned. “Your largess shall surely be the death of me. Very well, one more enchantment before I collapse in exhaustion. Perhaps the safe fall spell?”
“Sure. You know, you could just use your amulet to banish the fatigue.”
“That hardly seems healthy.”
“That’s why I-”
She covered my mouth with her hand. “Don’t you dare tell me to just heal that too. I value my sleep far too highly to hear of such things, you slave driver. Now, show me how this works.”
It was a relatively simple enchantment, but it still took us an hour or so to assemble. By the time we were done with that she really was dead on her feet. She swayed drunkenly when she tried to stand, and ended up leaning against me.
I stroked her hair, and took a deep breath of her scent.
“Sorry,” she muttered. “Help me to bed?”
“Sure.”
I scooped her up in my arms, her slight weight no burden at all. She sighed happily, and leaned into me.
“You’re spoiling me,” she chided.
“Good.”
I opened the door to the bridge with force magic, since my hands were full. It was a bit brighter than the hold, with moonlight shining in through the windows.
“Everything alright up here?” I asked.
“It’s all under control,” Cerise assured me. “You should check out the view.”
I carefully made my way across the little room, to stand next to her at the windows.
The moon was nearing the horizon off the starboard bow, almost full and looking close enough to touch. The sky was darker than I’d ever seen it back on my Earth, dotted with a million hard pinpoints of light. There was the North Star high overhead, with the Big Dipper curling away from it. Dimmer stars I’d never seen before dotted the sky around it, and the diffuse glow of the Milky Way stretched across the sky like a giant arch in the heavens.
Far below, the snow-covered landscape shone softly in the moonlight. I could barely make out a pair of frozen lakes to port and starboard, and the dark shape of a low hill in the distance ahead.
“Pretty,” Elin mumbled.
“Yeah,” I agreed.
I stood and watched for a few minutes, just drinking in the sight.
The constellations were the same ones I’d learned as a Boy Scout back in America. The moon looked the same as well. I’d known for a while that this was some kind of alternate version of Earth, but seeing so many things that were the same made me wonder about the differences.
Why was the Baltic Sea a chain of lakes here?
Why did this world have magic, when mine clearly didn’t? Although, was I really sure there was no magic in my world? Maybe it was there, and we just had a shortage of wizards.
My metamagic sorcery provided an answer for that mystery. No, magic is made up of elementary particles that interact with normal matter. If it existed in my world some physicist pouring over the results of a particle accelerator run would have noticed it long ago.
So, there was magic on this world but not mine. Gods, too. I was pretty sure that a bunch of mythological gods running around on Earth beating each other up would have left tons of archeological evidence behind. Although that left me wondering how this world’s reality came to be my world’s legends.
The history was oddly similar as well. The Varmlanders were like Vikings who’d had a chance to carve out a nice kingdom, and then settle down and start acting like their southern neighbors. Not to mention all the passing references I’d heard to famous philosophers from classical Greece.
Come to think of it, there was another interesting question there.
“Elin?” I whispered. “How long ago did Aristotle live?”
She stirred slightly, settling herself in my arms. My only answer was a soft snore.
Cerise chuckled. “Sounds like she’s down for the count. It was, um, two thousand years ago? A little more, maybe. Why?”
I’d been assuming this was an analogue of medieval Europe. But that sounded like the date was about the same as in my world. Interesting. So there was never an industrial revolution here?
“Just thinking about parallels and differences,” I said softly. “But I think it’s time I got sleepyhead here to bed. Where did the wolfen girls end up?”
“Embla got her wish, but it turns out sound carries pretty well from the loft. Irithil chewed out his guy for being rude, but I think they ended up sneaking back to the tail gunner’s position or something. They never ma
de it back, anyway, so it’s just Daria asleep upstairs.”
“Alright. Let me see if I can manage this.”
Obviously I wasn’t going to be climbing any ladders with a sleeping girl in my arms, but levitating myself was a trivial feat with the amount of energy I had available. I floated up slowly, keeping myself tethered to the floor and wall with magic so I wouldn’t drift around and bump into something. A little more force magic to open the hatch, and I floated up into the dark space of the loft.
The ceiling there was less than four feet high, so it was more of a crawl space than a room. But it was easily big enough for half a dozen people to stretch out and sleep. It took me a moment to pick out which blanket was Elin’s in the dim illumination spilling up from the bridge, and I made a mental note to install a night light up here.
Elin stirred as I was tucking her in, and made a little questioning noise.
I kissed her cheek. “Everything is fine, Elin. Go back to sleep.”
She latched onto my arm, pulling me down into her blankets with inhuman strength. Then she rested her head on my shoulder, and went back to sleep with a contented sigh.
I laid down beside her, and just held her.
After a few minutes there was a slight sound, and another female form brushed against my back.
“Do you want me to clear out?” Daria whispered in my ear.
I smiled. For such a ruthless opportunist Daria could be surprisingly thoughtful.
“No,” I whispered back. “She’s out for the night, and I have work to do. I think she needs someone to hold, though. Mind taking my spot?”
“Sure.” She retreated, and there was a soft sound of blankets being shifted. Then she was back. “Here, pass her over.”
Not wanting to wake her again, I used a touch of flesh magic to keep Elin soundly asleep as we moved her. We managed to shift around so she was in the wolfen girl’s arms instead of mine, although I learned in the process that Daria was naked. I froze for a moment when my hand accidentally brushed against a bare breast, but she just made a happy little sound.
“Careful there, boss. You know I’ll jump you if you give me half a chance.”
Extermination (Daniel Black Book 3) Page 16