by G Aliaksei C
Still shaken by the flight I barely managed to move out of the way of the first strike, rolling on my back to look at the crawler’s numerous face-cameras.
What followed is best described as competitive wood-cutting, except these trees resisted, struck back, and repeatedly zapped me. My clothes kept me safe from the shocks while my suit, now reinforced against such attacks, harmlessly channeled the vast lightning-like strikes into the ground. By the time the first crawler went down I was surrounded by steam, rain instantly evaporating on my suit’s red-hot armor, the resulting fog making it harder to see.
The second and third crawlers were more of a skill reinforcement exercise for me. Feeling immensely satisfied with myself, I ripped the axe out of the final corpse and headed back for the wall. Adrenalin-fueled muscles made it no big deal to climb the rope to the parapet.
I knew that, without my brother, I would need to learn to stand up for myself. But, perhaps for the first time, I also realized what Gale Frost found so enjoyable in combat. It was the adrenalin in my blood, the sensation of success, the realization that I had improved, gotten stronger. I had put something on the line, and won.
And it felt good.
Four Jims loudly applauded as I climbed between the merlons, engulfed in a shield of raging steam, feeling rather demonic within the cloud. Inna was laughing, leaning on one of the Jims.
“With an axe!” She wiped a dramatic tear. “He did it with an axe!”
“Stand em up, I’ll go again!” I waved the axe over my head, feeling quite refreshed. Fighting really was more fun than I had ever expected.
The foam-concrete under me audibly cracked from the heat as I shifted.
Foam-concrete was not a very brittle material either.
“I’ll be at your camp in a few minutes,” I added, hooking the axe back on my belt and heading towards the stairs. “As soon as the armor cools enough for me to climb out.”
Having achieved something this early in the day I felt quite upbeat, which did not fit well with the mood in the Cafe.
The Cafe was a work-in-progress thing, a partially-built bunker with empty openings for windows and doors, yet already equipped with a large table and chairs. All twenty Gate-town refugees - villagers as I called them in my mind - were seated around it, quietly talking. Every one of them had a glass of water. A spare glass was set aside for me.
“Good morning,” I said as I walked in. Unwilling to completely switch to casuals I tried to walk softer as my boots clanged against the foam-concrete, a challenge with ten kilograms of restrictive, armored clothes. Accepting the choir of greetings I sat at an empty chair, noted that I still towered over everyone in the room, and brought a glass of water closer.
My height was starting to give me complexes.
“I can’t help but notice you people seem to be digging in and setting up, as if you don’t intend to leave. So, how can I help?” I brought the glass to my lips. Twenty pairs of eyes watched me drink.
“Mr. Frost,” Inna began.
“Drake.”
“Drake.” She agreed. “Do you know what real estate value is?”
“It’s how much the chunk of land you live on is worth.”
“Right. And I hope you don’t take offense when I say that the value of this land is,” - she made a show of counting on her fingers and then spread her hands - “zero.”
“That’s kind of the point. There’s no competition for something without value.”
Everyone nodded amongst themselves, satisfied with my answer. Inna continued. “A solid plan, and the same one as we had when we built our Gate Town. You have the monument, but, I’m sorry to say, it’s not impressive or useful.”
“Have some respect for my grave.” Nineteen pairs of widened eyes - I clearly confirmed a suspicion of theirs. “Don’t dis it just because it doesn’t have Wi-Fi.”
Inna smiled. “You also have fuel crystals growing all around, but they are fairly common and hard to export.” She was talking about the red mounds of crystals growing across the valley floor. I had wondered if they were at all useful.
“Finally, you are now a vast distance away from the nearest Gate. About ten days. That’s a lot. All that comes down to a negative income, taking into account maintenance, and a zero real estate value. Before I continue, we would like to know how you were planning to make money to survive out here?”
“I was actually planning a demonstration,” I said, unwilling to relay my work just yet.
“Alright, it does not matter much right now. Drake, what happens when you multiply zero by a hundred?”
“Zero,” I said, not fooled by the seemingly rhetorical question - Inna was getting to her point.
“That’s your value with water taken into account. Water sources are, relatively speaking, to a degree, incredibly rare. Their number is one of the main limiting factors to Hades Ring population. If you have water, you can survive. However, because you don’t have a Gate, you can’t effectively export it, so your total value is still zero.”
“Nice,” I said, thoughtfully tapping the table. “Glad I got here first.”
“Now, what do you think of the water?”
“What I think of it?” I looked at my cup. “It tastes really good?”
I had been tracking several of the villagers as they stood, moving towards the walls. They lifted metal sheets, salvaged from some of the transports, setting them into the empty window frames. A larger sheet was set into the door frame, blocking off the last source of light and sinking the room into darkness. My eyes adjusted, but slower than I was used to.
Inna was pointing at my cup. I looked down.
The water in the glass was lightly glowing, lighting my hands with a soft, aquamarine light.
“Oh,” I said, feeling my stomach twist. “Oh fuck, how many rads did I just ingest?”
Everyone smiled. “None Drake, this isn’t uranium.”
“There’s plenty materials that glow, and, in case you didn’t know,” - I pushed the cup away - “almost none should be ingested!”
“Let’s put it this way. If you had radiation poisoning, this would cure it.”
“Healing water?”
The villagers set the shields down and returned to the table.
“Very rich outfits buy it by the gram. Two grams to a liter of normal water creates a cocktail that, in normal creatures, repairs bodily damage at several tens of times the natural speed. Muscles regrow. Amputated limbs can be reattached by simply pressing the stumps together. Third degree burns vanish. Bones and exoskeletal growths grow back together and burned out eyes repair.”
“Wait,” I said. “I can do that naturally!”
I shut up, realizing the error of my assumptions. I had, several times, survived damage that should have killed me. It had nothing to do with my Corporate nature or the nanites in my blood - it was the water I had drunk on the first day and later, from the flask I refilled at the pump.
“You have been drinking pure Healing Water, Drake. Your head could grow back to your body if it was cut off.”
“Ah,” I said. “I see.”
“Do you?” asked Inna.
“Yes.” I suppressed the sudden flash of gold in my vision. “Something as valuable as a source of Healing Water is surely an item even you would want to have.”
“We thoroughly discussed killing you and taking this place for ourselves,” confirmed Inna. “And any sane local would, considering you are an outsider, but there’s two factors that contributed to our final decision. First, this is your gravestone, and fighting you for its possession feels… wrong. Second, your first offer was of help, which we greatly appreciate.”
I looked over them and felt my Fall Coefficient slipping. The twenty men and women were highlighted in a golden outline, an overview of how best to kill each.
“You know,” said someone as I looked over them, their eyes reflecting the gold, “I comprehend that you don’t have the resources or strength to do anything to us, but that thin
g you do with your eyes is still terrifying.”
I paused my stare on the woman who spoke, then turned back at Inna. “You want to stay?”
“We want to tell you a story, in return for yours. If we like each other’s story, we can work from there.”
“How strange,” I said. “We have the same traditions.”
“Would you like to go first?” Inna offered me.
I thought a bit. This was a general’s tradition, a means for two people to understand each other, not just one-another’s words. The story should never be direct, but rather more abstract. The story should not prove a point directly, but rather show what lies beyond it.
It was a Corporate tradition, one of the few our mindset appreciated.
“There was once a man. In a fight, he lost an arm. But he did not let it turn him weak. Instead, he worked to build himself a better arm, stronger and tougher than the last. He exercised to become better in combat too, and soon became a proficient fighter.
“Some people didn’t like that - they took away his other arm and his eyes. But the man learned his lesson. He made himself another arm and a pair of eyes that saw all. In the second fight he took his revenge, and found himself without enemies. He spent his time surviving where few others would, until he started thriving.
“But he had learned a terrible truth, one he accepted as part of himself. It’s a truth that can make or break. He realized that the darker the weather, the better the man. And he taught this truth to me.”
I think they liked my story. Nodding, thoughtful, they sat in silence for a minute. Then, one by one, they turned to the Lady of War. Inna seemed to be gathering her words. I set a low bar with my story, one she had no trouble matching.
“People wish others success. Health. Wealth. Victory. Luck. Joy.
“But once, a long time ago, someone wished me excitement. At the time I thought it more a curse. Excitement meant bloodshed, drama, combat, loss. Excitement was definitely not something I thought well of.
“Then, sometime later, I had to fight. For years, I fought without rest or pause. It seemed as if nothing mattered beyond the battle, and I began to curse the constant adrenaline. My life consisted of little more than death and sleep.
“And then I was pulled out. Someone else took my place, and I could rest.
“The joy lasted only a day. I began to feel sick. My body was overproducing adrenaline. I could barely sleep or eat, and my hands began to shake.
“Then came the boredom. I would go about what little business I had, I would get it done, and then I would go back to idling. And I realized that I, in fact, missed the excitement. It felt as if I stopped living, stopped mattering. Everything I did, someone else could do. Everything that happened was boring.
“I didn’t know what I wanted or needed. Not until I fought again years later, a real battle with stakes, where the outcome had value, did I realize what I was starved of, and what made it worthwhile for me to wake up in the mornings.
“And later I found out I was not alone. There were other people to whom the excitement was the antidote to inaction. The solution, in the end, was simple. I didn’t have to fight anyone specifically - I just had to fight the boredom.”
“I like that.” I opened one eye, and returned their smiles with a bright, golden glow. “I like that a lot. And now I can give you another reason not to kill me.”
I reached under the table and set a wrapped cylindrical object on the table. “I can guarantee it won’t be boring with me around.”
5 : Steel Fruit from a Tree of Fire
Day 22
Any sane person would test a prototype weapon on a limited scale, without any living beings in range, to make sure it works right the first time.
Any Corporate would do it right the first time and bet his life on success, as any using it later would.
Which is why I was driving out of my fortress now with a garage-made weapon strapped to me.
Twenty men and women gathered on the wall, flanked by Jims. They watched as my tank passed through the Comfort Dome and stopped, letting me off.
Light rain began to ping off my helmet. I felt uncomfortable without my powered armor.
Raising my arm I ran through the weapon’s insides again. Convincing myself, once more, that I was safe, I pointed my fist away from the base and pressed the button on the oversized gauntlet’s side.
Gravitational fields formed all around my hand, crushing bits of air. In a moment air collapsed inwards, first growing hot, then igniting into plasma. The resulting sparks paired up again and again, mixing together into a single bolt of light, shivering within a powerful gravity field.
A powerful, localized gravity field. A more educated reader will laugh. A physicist will cry. Let me explain for everyone else, for those without a general interest in these things.
A normal rifle fires a bullet with vast speed, in a straight line. That line becomes a curve under the force of gravity. On Earth, the bullet accelerated down at about ten meters per second. A shooter must account for this falloff at even medium ranges. If unaccounted for, gravity may cause a miss.
But gravity is a very weak force. It takes the entire mass of Earth to pull the bullet down with that acceleration, and the effect is only noticeable at larger ranges.
The weapon I held now had very small, compact, powerful gravity generators. How in the void of space they worked, I didn’t know. But they consumed power, and they created focused gravity fields so powerful they would not be out of place in the core of a star, where the force crushed gasses to cause nuclear fusion.
Because science.
The best part was that I had to reinvent absolutely nothing within this ugly weapon. Designs for gravity generators of all specifications already existed, yet no one knew how to reform them manually. I figured out the process out in but a few days, leaning on prior knowledge of the topic, and created a stable, simple, compact hybrid. Gravity fields collapsed air in several locations around the device, which was then ignited and turned to plasma, making it susceptible to much stronger magnetic manipulation. The resulting fireballs were merged and launched at the target. All this power did not source directly from the Gems, but rather from the capacitors they charged, allowing for the short, violent field manipulations.
In simpler terms, I created a compact weapon that compressed air into fireballs.
Very deadly.
This was where the system partially failed. The gravity field shifted and opened, releasing the blast, however the energy of the resulting explosion was not completely redirected forward. As the bolt lost induced compression and began to expand, interacting with the air it was passing through, part of the energy reflected back.
The shockwave ripped my arm off and sent me flying backwards, through the energy dome. This Comfort Dome saved my life when the bolt impacted the target a hundred meters away, digging into a crystal mound and fully losing stability. The dirt, air and rock of the explosion washed over the dome, forcing it to harden in resistance.
I had lost my hearing by then. My face, surviving arm and neck were burning from the heat damage of the initial launch. The crash also dislocated my left shoulder, the pain leaving me undecided about the positive nature of my continued life.
Another incredibly interesting marvel of the future. The Comfort Dome consumed power, and somehow turned it into a lid of something that covered the whole base. If I called it solid energy I would get slapped by the invisible hand of science, so I will call it a field instead. The field was almost self-sustaining, growing thicker as it accumulated energy, and was very selective on what it let in and out. Rain, ice, fire and strong winds were a no-no, as was a shockwave. But a flying body passed right through it!
Laying in the dirt, shaken and broken, I remembered the Hive, my lab, and the years spent developing weapons for the Corporation. Too many died in accidents like this, progressing science for the sake of survival. But I was immortal now, and a measly explosion wouldn’t be enough to halt th
e progress of technology!
Not much had changed across thousands of years. I blew up things then, and I blew up different things now. Except now I knew how to blow up said things better than anyone else.
Might as well make a business out of it.
I focused on controlling the few undamaged muscles in my body. Crushed organs screamed in pain as I set up, shifted onto my knees, and got up. Fractured ribs rebelled against the motion.
I had managed to close by eyes against the blast, and now the burned skin of my eyelids strained to open. Squinting, I looked around.
A few of the villagers were frozen mid-step, staring at me through the dust cloud caused by my impact. I tried and instantly abandoned the initiative to smile at them, my burned face refusing to cooperate with me.
But as amazing as Healing Water was, it could not keep me moving for long after such a trauma. Hands caught me as I fell. Someone snapped my remaining shoulder back in place and my disabled body was dragged into safety. I was lowered into what felt like a bathtub, and a cold substance, probably more Healing Water, was poured over me.
I was glad the decision was made to save the body rather than put me out of my misery.
Hours later I climbed out the metal coffin and rolled onto the bench next to it. Bloody Healing Water dripped off of me. Regrown organs, muscles and skin felt rubbery and tense, and the fractures in my ribcage felt inflexible and constraining. My new right arm felt quite normal, but looked like an exotic prosthetic. The skinless, skeletal, nanite construct flowed seamlessly into my skin, merging mid-shoulder as flesh transitioned into plastic-like material. It felt and behaved no worse than its predecessor.
I wondered if that was how a perfect limb looked - minimalistic, skeletal, gray and indistinguishable from the original in function.
Jim’s new frame handed me replacement clothes.
“Mr. Frost, what happened?”
“The sound of progress, Jim. Is the base alright?”
“The Comfort Dome the Lady of War provided managed to stop the blast.”