The Province

by Skyler Grant

  "Power looks good on you," Ophelia said.

  "Everything looks good on me," Anna said. "What is the status of Aefwal?"

  "Power reserves are critically low and we took massive damage in the attacks. We have over a million dead. We're growing replacements as quickly as possible."

  "I'm more interested in talking about you, Anna," Caya said.

  "Oh, I'm amazingly interesting, but now isn't the time. Vinci hit us hard and it’s time that we hit her back. With the Chalcedony in her possession she happens to have just what we need to repower our city," Anna said.

  Caya cleared her throat. "I'd like to propose an alternative. The Beryl."

  Anna leaned back and shifted her gaze thoughtfully over to Caya. "The crystal the Righteous hold? Interesting. We haven't pursued it before because we don't have enough ships that can operate effectively in their space. That hasn't changed."

  "There are countless Royals who can attack Vinci. In the wake of her losing another fleet they’ll be doing just that. Blood is in the water and they'll be swarming."

  "You're saying that we don't need to neutralize Vinci while she’s weak. There are others more than happy to do it for us," Anna said.

  "More than that. The Agate worked to neutralize a Reality Zero environment and allowed our ships to operate under those conditions. You absorbed the Agate. Not only are you now one of the strongest of the Scholars, but the only one who should be able to maintain her gifts even deep in Righteous space," Caya said.

  I could tell that Anna was intrigued. The riskier option always appealed to her.

  "You think I could keep my gifts even in Band Zero? Emma, do you agree?" Anna asked.

  I'd been scanning Anna almost nonstop since her arrival back in the city, trying to figure out exactly what had been done to her and how to reverse it. There were minor physiological changes that came with her transformation—her irises had turned a brilliant shade of gold, for example. Anna now had small fangs, the power had chosen a vampire archetype and manifested as such. Typically a human being remained mostly human with some crystalline reinforcement running through their cells providing a conduit for their abilities.

  "You manifest the same reality distortion field. I can't be certain, but I believe you would," I said.

  That was troubling for a few reasons, not the least of which being I wasn't sure I could get those crystals out of Anna. The removal process involved using a Source Orb for weakening the crystals considerably until the bonds with the host to become tenuous enough they could be torn out. If Anna could handle a full Reality Zero environment a Source Orb was minor in comparison.

  "I very much want to drain Vinci dry, but it can wait. There is no need to be subtle here, not anymore. Send word to the other Royals of what happened and the location of the crashed fleet," Anna said.

  "I suggest sending word to scavengers as well. They'll be hungry for parts and if they're taking them, Vinci isn't recycling them," Ophelia said.

  "Do it," Anna said, leaning forward. "Do we have any idea where the Chalcedony is?"

  "That is one of the more interesting bits of information retrieved from the Righteous ships," Caya said, tapping on her tablet.

  I'd never reviewed that data, there had been too many other concerns of late. I understood now why Caya was suggesting this course of action. The Righteous were being ambitious.

  Righteous ships were being told to consider Source Orbs a priority and to do anything needed to obtain them. Engineers, AI, and raw materials were also a priority along with some specific electronic components.

  Yes, they were being ambitious.

  Caya tapped a few more keys and a new sequence of diagrams appeared on the monitors.

  This was all theoretical, but it was her opinion on what the Righteous intended to do.

  Caya's interpretation was a perfect sphere with every inch of the interior lined with Source Orbs and the Beryl located in the center. This would be located at the Zero Point, the exact place in Band Zero where the old rules of reality were still the strongest.

  A massive magnifier to expand and reinforce the rules and spread them outwards. It was brilliant, and it was terrifying.

  "You're overestimating their intelligence," I said to Caya.

  "Am I? They went from a crude terraformer producing temporary reality adjustments to a bomb capable of more lasting ones very quickly. This isn't beyond them," Caya said.

  "A jump field won't form that deep in. Anna would have to walk."

  "I've never felt better in my life," Anna said.

  "It is hundreds of miles. The Righteous probably use ground vehicles. Anna asking someone for a ride has never worked well," I said.

  "So I kill someone and I steal their vehicle," Anna said with a shrug.

  "And fight off the entire Righteous army over hundreds of miles?"

  Caya said, "You aren't actually invulnerable. Physically durable and quick to heal, but you are still vulnerable to something like a compulsion power,"

  Anna scowled but nodded. "Reasonable, not that the Righteous have those."

  "But the fact is we don't know what they have. You are a weapon of mass destruction in your own right best used in short bursts where they don't see you coming," Caya said.

  "Can we manufacture Righteous armor and a vehicle?" Ophelia asked.

  Ophelia had for a time headed our intelligence services. It was a short and largely unsuccessful tenure. Perhaps a little of it had sunken in. We'd killed a lot of Righteous in our time and I had schematics for all of their armor. I'd even deconstructed a Righteous personnel carrier once.

  "Perhaps we need to set you on fire alive more often? It seems some of the idiocy got burnt away," I said.

  "That is still a long way to go unnoticed," Caya said, ignoring me.

  "So we attack," Anna said. "I love a classic feint. We hit them hard enough to bring them running in the one direction and I go in from the other. There will be a lot of traffic out of position and all headed the wrong way."

  It was a smart plan. Chaos would make Anna's infiltration more likely to succeed and while it wasn't resource-free, losing drones wasn't quite the loss for me that it was for most. I could throw an army at them and afford to lose it. I really was a lot like Vinci in some ways.

  "As Ophelia already said, we lost a lot of drones during the assault. Replenishing an army with enough weapons and armor to make the attack believable is going to take me a week," I said.

  "Do it," Anna said.

  The week passed quickly. Creating an army didn't require any great attention on my part, it simply meant spawning the drones. In the past the availability of Bio-matter had limited my abilities. Now I could quickly convert an acre of jungle into an impressive number of humans.

  I made multiple sets of Righteous armor manufactured and Blank trained five of my drones in what they needed to know. The personnel carrier held six. I'd have Anna in the back with the others where she was least likely to draw attention and let one of my drones be the driver.

  Otherwise my time was spent working with my new collection of geniuses. With Mechos and Minerva back the brainpower in the city had increased greatly and they were already getting along well with Caya.

  I gathered them together so that we could discuss just what to do with Anna.

  "I don't see the problem. We've always been at a disadvantage because our Queen wasn't Powered. Now she is the better for it in nearly every way," Caya said.

  "Abilities are curses, not blessings," Mechos said.

  "I've never found my intellect a curse. I'm grateful for what I have," Minera said.

  "Look around you. Look at the nonstop war and slaughter you see everywhere. That is what crystals do," Mechos said.

  "We're both survivors from the world before. You know as well as I do that people murdered each other just fine before crystals came along," Minerva said.

  "We should be letting the Righteous win," Mechos said.

  That was a sentiment I didn't hear ver
y often.

  "You've always been a coward and a bit prone to surrender, but this pushes the limits even for you," I said.

  "I’m being serious. I've read the reports of what happened while I was away and you've confirmed that the fabric of reality itself is frayed and tattered. Everything they are doing is aimed at setting that right. Why are we fighting them?" Mechos asked.

  That led to a bit of awkward silence.

  It was an argument I'd had with myself before. I wanted to put the Earth to rights and what the Righteous wanted to do would do just that. They would also kill SCIENCE. All the untapped possibilities and oddness that our world provided would go away. Even if I managed to survive the transition—something by no means certain with the Agate gone—what I most cared about would not.

  "My reasons are selfish. I like being perfect," Caya said.

  "I like being smart," Minerva said.

  "You were smart before the Cataclysm," Mechos said.

  Minerva smiled thinly and shook her head. "I wasn't. I thought I was, sometimes, but I wasn't."

  "As much as you'd like to run away, Mechos, you can't," I said.

  Mechos frowned but nodded. "In that case let me raise another possibility. Currently our very bad plan is for Anna to go in, kill a bunch of people, steal the Beryl crystal and smuggle it out."

  "It best applies her abilities," Minerva said.

  "Is it ambitious enough?" Mechos asked.

  "Dear, one moment you're informing us it is too bold and a poorly thought idea, and the next you are saying it isn't bold enough? Make up your mind.”

  "We may be the four greatest minds in the Scholarium. The Righteous are building the ultimate tool to reshape reality in their image. Is there some way we can utilize that for our own advantage?" Mechos asked.

  I wasn’t surprised that he’d thought if it, I'd already pondered this idea. Just as Vinci had been able to convert the Reality Zero effect design into a Zero bomb, it should theoretically be possible to reverse what the Righteous were planning to do in a way that would remove the Reality Zero region completely.

  It was impossible to know what would happen on the other side of that. The fundamental nature of our reality would be altered forever and shifted well away from our origins.

  "Vinci used crystal dust as a substitute for Source Orbs. That approach was partly effective. Power crystals would work better yet, but still aren't strong enough," Caya said.

  "The Righteous aren't just making use of the Source Orbs. They are magnifying their effect with the Zero point. Well, at least if Caya is correct. That would increase the power of the effect enormously," Minerva said.

  "But it is also in some ways their weakest point. There is nothing that inherently makes the rules of Reality Zero any more durable than the other rules of reality. They are a persistent reminder of what was that can be duplicated," I said.

  Caya started tapping away excitedly on a keyboard and brought up various Righteous transcripts. Their response to Ophelia when she first bonded with a Source Orb and crystal, and the response to Blank when she did the same. Abominations.

  "You think they know something?" I asked.

  "We have a friendly Righteous. Let’s find out," Caya said.

  I had one of my drones teleport Blank to the conference room.

  "Well, this is quite the party," Blank said.

  "We're hoping that you will surprise us and actually prove a good source of intelligence for once. Can tell us what you know about Source Orbs and abominations?" I asked.

  "I've said before that I'm a military commander and not a scientist, but I can tell you what I know. It is the Righteous belief that Source Orbs are fundamentally crystallizations of order. And that the old world was based upon perfect, meticulous order," Blank said.

  "That wasn't true even in the old world. Scientists decided that reality was macroscopically ordered and microscopically chaotic," Mechos said.

  Blank shrugged. "Not saying that they are right. I'm saying what they believe. They feel that crystals are manifestations of chaos and Source Orbs of order."

  "And abominations?" I asked.

  "Humans are creatures embodying both the best and the worst of reality. Therefore it is possible for both to combine inside someone. The Righteous consider it a huge travesty, a corruption of the Source Orb into something else," Blank said.

  Caya and Mechos exchanged looks, they seemed to be on the same page. I was there myself. It was a mistake to assume too much of an enemy already proved wrong on their fundamentals, but if they were in some way correct it might be possible to corrupt the Source Orbs that made up the Righteous machine. It might be possible to corrupt the very center of their whole reality.

  "Send the Tongue with Anna," Caya said.

  From my own experiences the Tongue actively repelled Source Orbs. It had resisted the one I'd had aboard when I found myself in the same dimensional space.

  "It isn't a magic wand we can just wave about to make things turn out like we want," I said.

  "Anna is an incredibly powerful counterforce in her own right and the Tongue is another. We don't know what will happen when we expose them both to the environment created there. It’s something we should explore," Caya said.

  I didn't like it. In theory I should be able to keep contact even that deep in Righteous space through Anna. We were loyal to each other and effectively her eyes worked like those of my drones, I could see through them and her senses. I could communicate with her if needed. There were too many unknowns. Still, what was life without surprises?

  "As usual you overestimate yourself, but we'll see what happens," I said.

  It was time to go to war.

  19

  I managed to make an army one million strong. That left me enough forces in Aefwal to provide some security and manage basic operations. It meant we were committing a lot of resources to this offensive—this distraction to help Anna get where she needed to be.

  Apart from Anna we had several new Powered, she had wasted no time in making her own lieutenants. Given the vampiric manifestation of her abilities it was no surprise that allowing others to drink her blood could imbue them with a version of her crystal corruption. The first person she'd offered this to had been Sylax in return for her absolute devotion.

  Crystal holders were the true nobility in Scholarium society. Having the second tier of an ability was vastly better than being completely unpowered. Sylax took her up on it and while it didn't pack the punch of the Amplification crystal, Sylax was again a formidable threat. Blank turned down a similar offer, choosing to view her loss of a crystal as a good thing.

  Elsewhere in the Scholarium the other Royals had renewed their assaults against Vinci and by all reports were having little more success than the first time. Every inch of taken ground was arduously fought for with the waves of Vinci’s automated ships endless and the resources of the attackers far more limited.

  Our fights with the Righteous were more even. Death for them and my drones was transitory. Although I had the resources to make weapons that could make render the Righteous permanently dead it was expensive. Weapons and armor were costlier for us both and losing equipment was worse than a downed soldier.

  With that in mind that I set our target as being the Rosalind airship docks on the edges of Reality Zero space. It was where their airships brought in supplies from other territories. This included not just materials vital for Righteous manufacturing, but items to be purified. Power crystals, crystal dust, all things that we could use. It was therefore a rewarding target to take even as a feint, and a facility they had to defend.

  A week was enough time for us to scavenge the crystal dust needed to power the teleportation gates long enough to get a portion of our forces there.

  Anna was already over the Righteous border, her team in their personnel carrier having slipped through and they waited in the wilderness for our assault to begin.

  I activated the gates. Around Aefwal they flickered to life and ra
nks of Aegis Zeros began to march through.

  The gates opened into the crystal dust storage yard. The sudden arrival of hundreds of heavy armored foes in their midst took the Righteous completely by surprise. Even so they were well trained and I lost a dozen soldiers by the time the fight was done. Fifty guards set up a defensive perimeter while the rest began to move crystal dust through the gates.

  With the added resources I could bring more gates online. This time they opened onto the base rooftops sending through Gunslinger Zeros. Alarm klaxons were going off and troops were responding. My forces waited until the first guards almost made it to the storage yard before the snipers opened fire, focusing on the officers.

  The base was in disarray. Now it was time to really strike fear into them. With the Righteous communications we'd captured, we located a great many of their scout posts on their borders and they all got visits from Aegis Zeros.

  Our army was already massive and it appeared to be everywhere along that border. More Aegis Zeros were sent to the supply post. They had more crystal dust then I'd imagined, I really should have been raiding the Righteous long before this.

  The port was protected with heavy anti-air defenses and seizing those was a priority. The Righteous were sure to respond with airships and we weren't equipped to fight them. Turning their guns against them was crucial.

  Righteous communications were spiking with panic. I signaled to Anna that she should proceed.

  The first responders to our attack weren't airships but tanks. The Scholarium didn't make a lot of use of armored vehicles, they were too slow and with energy shielding largely obsolete, but the Righteous made more use of them. They started shelling the port with high powered explosives.

  I hadn’t anticipated that, although in retrospect I should have. We were still engaged in combat with their local forces, but they lost nothing from killing their own people and if it interrupted our theft of supplies and blunted the force of our offensive it was well worth it.

  I re-oriented the gate destinations so I could bring in my next wave on top of those armored units. The blade of an Aegis Zero could cut through tank armor with a bit of work. Still, the battle wasn't going as I liked.