“Like, the greater the belief, the more they send?” Frog had trouble wrapping his head around the idea and she sympathized. He wasn’t the only one.
“No,” the large warrior answered. “If they believe she is worthy, they only send a token force—one or two. If they are undecided, the number will be above that but no more than four. If they’re a little against, five—”
“And if they’re dead set against it?” she asked.
“Eight or more.” He shrugged. “Some have been known to send many, many more.”
“How is that respectful?” Frog protested, and Vishlog laughed.
“The ones who send a few show respect by sending a warrior for you to display some of your skills against them. It is also a chance for you to show respect in return in the manner in which you defeat them.”
“So, I need to make it a fair fight,” Stephanie commented.
“Yes,” Vishlog confirmed. “A fair fight in which you show respect to your opponent and honor them in their defeat.”
“That’s…broken,” Frog muttered, but the Dreth shook his head.
“No. Not broken. Different.” The guard subsided and he went on. “If they do not respect you or if they feel the need to test you in order to feel comfortable with supporting you, they send more warriors.”
“How can you tell?” She wanted to know since she didn’t want to punish anyone for disrespect when they only felt uncertain.
Vishlog shrugged. “It is hard to be certain until they send more than eight warriors. Ten is definite disapproval. Twenty is—”
“Twenty!” Frog exclaimed, and the warrior looked at him.
“Are you saying you don’t think Stephanie can defeat twenty Dreth on her own?” he asked. “Because I’ve seen her eliminate more and make it look easy.”
“It wasn’t that easy,” she admitted, and he smiled.
“That is not how it looked.”
She blushed. “Trust me, I need you guys fighting with me when the numbers get anywhere near that.”
“See?” Marcus teased and nudged Frog. “She does need us.”
“Well, that’s nice to know,” his teammate grumbled and looked disgruntled.
“So,” Stephanie said. “I simply beat their warriors up—uh, respectfully—they agree to support us, and we all go home?”
Vishlog looked at V’ritan and they both chuckled.
“That’s not comforting,” she told them, and they sobered.
“What you must understand is that beating them will only win their compliance and grudging support. If they lose, they also lose standing in the Council and respect among the clans. Their political power diminishes.”
“So that’s a good thing, right?” she asked. “If they lose power, their opposition has less pull, doesn’t it?”
“That depends on how they lose,” Vishlog replied. “If you beat them with overwhelming numbers, they can justify their loss and the reduction in political power is minimal—and in some cases, it is only a token loss of support.”
“Well, what about if the numbers are even?”
“Again, they can reduce the impact of the loss.”
“So you’re saying I have to beat them with less?”
“Less is good,” he agreed, “but the very worst thing that can happen in the Fortress is for a clan that strongly disagrees with you to have its forces beaten by only one opponent.”
“One?” Frog sounded alarmed and Lars groaned. “You know she’s gonna have to try that now, don’t you?”
The Dreth looked at them. “It would be best if she was prepared to do so. My guess is that she is facing very strong opposition from among my people.”
He looked at V’ritan for confirmation, and the King’s Warrior nodded.
“Very,” he confirmed, “and I don’t think she’ll win them all over. No matter how well she does in the arena.”
“What does beating them with only one person do to their standing?” Stephanie asked, and Lars put his hand on his forehead and shook his head.
“See?”
She ignored him. “Well?” she pressed.
“Beating them with only one person causes them to become the least respected group in the hierarchy. It basically strips them of all their political clout regardless of their size or wealth. They would lose their seats in all governing bodies, be forced to renegotiate their contracts, and it could cause a loss of territory and definitely of supporters.”
He gave them a Dreth smile—all fang and tusk with no sign of warmth. “Dreth could benefit from a shift in power.”
Her face lit up and her eyes darkened. “Then, since they have insisted, I will bring it.”
The next day, Brilgus gave Stephanie a tour of the ship. The team went with her so the Meligornians could meet them.
“And here are the engine rooms,” he told them as he led them through a bulkhead into a large airlock and out again. The noise on the other side could be felt as well as heard, even though they entered on a control center platform set well above the massive engines that propelled the ship.
When the door slid open, the head of engines turned toward them. His expression of startled curiosity shifted to one of anger when he saw humans and not Meligornians, and he hurried over.
“What are they doing here?” he demanded and glared at Brilgus. “You know this is Meligornian space only.”
He sighed. “Peace, K’vila. They are Meligornian.”
“A piece of paper does not change the race to which you were born,” the engineer snapped, and she rolled her eyes.
“It’s okay,” she told him. “We’ll go if we’re not welcome, but I was curious to see what these engines were like compared to the Dreamer’s.”
“The Dreamer’s?” he asked and swung to face her. “The Meligorn Dreamer’s?”
“Yes,” she answered. “I charged them.”
She waved a hand at the engines below. “I merely wanted to see what real magic engines looked like. I didn’t mean to intrude.”
“You’re the one who charged them?”
“Yes. They’d been damaged and—”
He waved her explanation away impatiently. “You’re the one?”
Stephanie raised an eyebrow. “Yes. Should I be sorry?”
“No! No, no, no. You’re fine, and that was a fine job, but if you want to see a real engine at work...”
“If it’s no trouble.”
“Then step this way. You don’t mind if I ask you a few questions, do you?”
Brilgus rolled his eyes behind the man’s back and looked apologetic, but Stephanie smiled and indicated that K’vila should lead the way.
He led them down the stairs. “It’s the best way to truly get an idea of exactly how big these things are. They’re the biggest engines of their kind. Tell me, how do you think you’d go about charging them?”
“How do I think I’d go doing what?”
“Charging them. If we had an emergency like the one that struck the Dreamer.”
Stephanie looked at the engines around them. “I don’t know if I could. What kind of energy do they take?”
“Being in deep space, these are geared to run mostly on space energy. It’s almost perfectly clear but the silver sparkles give it away.”
“I think that’s the energy we call gMU.” Behind her, one of the team members groaned but Stephanie and the engineer ignored them. “I thought that was too diffuse to be useful.”
“No, it’s merely a matter of spinning it down to a more condensed form. That’s why the engines are so large. At this end, we have something similar to a centrifuge, and that end takes the power we channel through it to drive the ship.”
Behind him, Brilgus shrugged. “Sorry,” he mouthed, but she smiled. She was enjoying the discussion. They ran through the different kinds of energy the engines could use. While they worked best with the more diffuse gMU, they could also run on MU.
“I don’t know about eMU,” the engineer admitted. “We’ve never t
hought to try it with it not being locally available and all. Perhaps I should send for a battery of it and put it through a testbed in case we’re ever in the area and need an emergency top-up.”
“So they can take all kinds of energy, then?” she asked when they’d walked the length of the engine room and returned to the stairs.
“Well,” he said. “They don’t do so well on Nihilistic energy. That stuff isn’t good for them—it messes them up if you know what I mean.”
“No,” Stephanie said. “How do you know? Isn’t Nihilistic energy difficult to detect?”
The engineer nodded. “Oh, yes. You can’t see it so at first, it’s not obvious what’s going wrong, but you can really feel the difference in the engines. They go sluggish, if that makes sense, and become very unpredictable.”
He frowned as though trying to find a decent analogy. “It’s like a Meligornian in transition, you understand?”
She shook her head. “Not really. Humans don’t have a transition.”
He laughed. “Oh, sure they do. Every species has a transition time. It’s when a youngster stops being a child and begins the transformation into an adult. Their hormones are all over the place and their moods...well, don’t get me started on their moods.” He shrugged. “Anyway, that’s what the engines are like. They’re slow to answer and then, when they do, they go too far the other way. It’s horrendous.”
Frog snorted and Marcus laughed. “Teenagers!” the former exclaimed and his companion nodded.
“Yup. Moody, hormonal, resistant to instruction, and overly enthusiastic. You’d better watch out Frog, or he’ll start thinking you’re suffering from too much Nihilistic energy.”
“Hey!” He shoved his teammate who responded in kind and immediately caught his arm to steady him before he could fall against one of the engines.
“Steady on there,” the engineer told them and turned back to Stephanie. “It’s powerful but hard to detect, and you have to actually try. Usually, the first hint we have that we’ve run through a patch is when the engines start acting up.”
“I tried to locate some on Earth,” she told him, “but I simply couldn’t.”
“Yes, it’s very tricky stuff, but if you were looking for it and it was there, you’d have found it. Once you’ve touched it, it’s not something you forget easily.”
She thought back to the battle she’d had with Nihilism.
“No,” she agreed and shivered.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The ship tour took several days but it helped to fill the time and gave the team something else to do besides train.
“You don’t want to go into this fatigued,” Vishlog told Stephanie when she worried that they wouldn’t be ready.
“But I do want to go into it ready,” she protested, and V’ritan organized time and space for them in the training center closest to their quarters.
“What do you have here? A small army?” Lars asked the first time he saw the space, and Brilgus had nodded, his face solemn.
“Something like that,” he confirmed. “This is the king’s ship and we have a large contingent of King’s Guard on board. We are the vanguard of the Meligornian armed forces. Our elite train here.”
Despite what he said, they did not see the Meligornian elite in training.
“You need to make sure you are as prepared as you are able,” V’ritan told them. “I will give you the space and time to do that, but you will need to rest, too.”
Time passed rapidly after that. One morning, he looked across the table at them. “The captain tells me we’ll arrive at our destination in a few hours.” He turned to Marcus and Vishlog. “How are you feeling?”
The Dreth nodded quickly. “Very well, thank you.” He rotated his shoulder. “I have no more pain.”
“I did my first full session of training, yesterday,” Marcus told him. “The healers are happy that I’ll be able to survive the Fortress.”
The healers weren’t exactly happy, and what they’d really said was that he should survive the encounter, but it was enough. Meligornians used magic to assist the body’s natural healing processes because it demanded much to wield it correctly and more for the body to adapt to it.
They’d taken weeks off the healing process but they said it was dangerous to go faster.
“They want to see me again this morning,” he continued, “and they said they’ll be on standby for when we return.”
V’ritan frowned but accepted the healer’s word, and Stephanie looked worried.
“You could always sit this one out,” she suggested but Marcus shook his head.
“You won’t go into that arena with anything less than your full team. Firstly, because we are your team and secondly, because it would probably be seen as some kind of insult if you came with anything less.”
He looked at Vishlog for support, and the Dreth nodded.
“To go without your full team will be taken as a sign of disrespect toward all Dreth. Even your potential supporters would need to protest that. Marcus is right. He has to attend.” He glanced from Stephanie to Marcus. “But that doesn’t mean you have to use him in every combat. Use him in some of the first and let him rest while you use the rest of us. If you do it carefully, they will never notice that he doesn’t fight as often as the others.”
She relaxed slightly. “I can do that.”
Still, as they descended to the planet’s surface, she hoped the words wouldn’t come back to bite her. She hated risking her team and hated even more that to keep him safe was to risk the entire Federation falling through the loss of the Dreth alliance.
It was a heavy burden to bear.
To take her mind off it, she focused on the view beyond the shuttle windows.
Once they’d dropped into the atmosphere, she studied the world below. Her heart leapt to see an entirely new planet but it sank when she realized what a hard world it was. From that height, all she saw were mountains.
Hard gray rock rose in jagged peaks, and the edges of continents plunged in sheer cliffs to the sea. There were no foothills and no plains. Here and there, flat areas created pools of grassland amidst a forest of boulders and cliffs.
Mazes of gorges and rivers of ice sliced through the rocks. Trees grew straight and tall in the shadows between cliffs, obscuring where rivers ran, or they grew as thin, straggly specimens where they clung to pockets of soil in the rock.
Here and there, the steep stone roofs of several buildings were visible but no truly huge settlement.
“There are caverns,” Vishlog told her. “Fungi and seaweed provide a staple. We do not have many surface crops, although aquaculture and hydroponics have grown in popularity.”
Stephanie nodded. “It looks like a hard world.”
He shrugged. “It is why we are so strong. Our world does not favor the weak.”
The logic seemed indisputable. “A hard world requires a hard people to survive it.”
His gaze followed hers and he looked thoughtful. “It is not that hard. They are slowly rediscovering much of what was lost and it is making their lives easier.”
“You are one of them, too.”
The twist of his lips was almost a smile. “My people do not seem to think so.”
She looked at him, but his eyes were shadowed and his expression distant. “You are my people,” she told him, “and the only Dreth I have accepted. Your people will have to respect that.”
“You cannot make my people respect anything, Stephanie. I thought you had realized that by now.”
Stephanie gave him a hard smile. “I do recognize that, but I also know that it can be done. You are proof of that.”
That brought a genuine smile to his face, and they looked out the window together. Vishlog pointed out some of the settlements he recognized.
“There G’nareg’s Vor. You see? It is built along the walls of a canyon overseeing one of the greatest falls of water on the planet. Much of the power for this continent is generated in that one fal
l.”
“I don’t see a dam.”
He gave her a strange look. “We don’t need a dam. Why would we impede the flow when that provides us so much of what we need? We use a series of turbines built into the cliff itself. The water flows over them and turns them, but it doesn’t stop. We harvest it as some worlds harvest the sun.”
She thought back to what she’d read but couldn’t find a way to make that work, pulled her tablet out, and made a note. Perhaps the world of Dreth had more than merely fighters to offer.
And if their power generation was beyond what Earth could provide in the same field, perhaps their farming techniques were as well.
“Does Dreth bring in much of its food?” she asked.
He shook his head. “As a world, it is self-sufficient in food production, even if some seasons are leaner than others. Like I said, aquaculture and hydroponics are growing in popularity, and the cavern families grow enough fungi for the lean times.”
Stephanie jotted down those items as something she and Burt could explore later.
They crossed from day to night and more cities were revealed—not as skyscrapers or highrises but as strings of light shining out of the cliffs. Vishlog pointed them out.
“See that? The Dreth learned long ago that when the world was at its most inhospitable, only the world itself could shelter us.”
She made another note to look into Dreth mining advancements and also systems of power, lighting, and air conditioning because such large cities would surely need all that and more. The planet had been overlooked by the Federation for years. Perhaps it was time that ended.
They landed in the capital to the news that they were expected to dine at the Council of Families and had an hour to prepare. Vishlog’s expression became thunderous.
“They do you disrespect,” he protested, his tone almost a growl, “to give you so little time and no forewarning.”
V’ritan looked at him. “Be calm, Vishlog. I have made preparations. We will not cause diplomatic insult as we set out to impress.”
He was almost right. They did not cause insult as they set out.
The car from the shuttle port took them to their quarters in time and Ambassador Jaleck waited to meet them.
Witch Of The Federation III (Federal Histories Book 3) Page 28