Date: 2018-02-12 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science Fiction; Fantasy; Superheroes
Description: Emma has come far since being the artificial intelligence housed in an underground laboratory. A full city is now at her command and with that strength comes the need to maintain it. Resources are in short supply and the threats out there in the world are bigger and more dangerous than ever. It is time for some upgrades.

The Metropolis

A Futuristic Dungeon Core

Skyler Grant

Copyright © 2018 Skyler Grant

All rights reserved.

This novel is a work of fiction. All characters, places, and incidents described in this publication are used fictitiously, or are entirely fictional.

No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, except by an authorized retailer, or with written permission of the publisher. Inquiries may be addressed via email to skyler@skylergrant.com

Cover designed by Kismet Covers

Editing Polgarus Studio (www.polgarusstudio.com)

Electronic edition, 2018

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Created with Vellum

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Author Notes

1

A touch transformed one of my drones instantly into stone. A moment later it crumbled into a cascade of gravel.

It wasn’t the only thing that wasn’t going my way in the fight over these ruins. I’d struggled with how to deal with single Powered individuals in the past. Here there was over a dozen.

A week ago, they’d been of interest to nobody. Teenage scavengers living in a patch of desolate streets and broken buildings long since picked bare. Then a crystal shard transport from King Boreas crashed after a battle with a Righteous gunship and suddenly the scavengers had something everyone wanted.

“You gyjarks aren’t getting what you’re after,” said an emaciated young woman who was an incongruous sight in combat boots and a pink tee.

Anna said as she crouched behind a wall, “Kid, if that was an insult you need to get better at it. Emma, show them how it’s done.” Peering over the brickwork, a blast of Anna’s stunner sent a young man sprawling unconscious. His skin seemed to be detailed with a topographical map that fit the local area.

As powers went it probably wasn’t the most useful for him, but I might be able to do something with it.

“Your face is a gyjark,” I said. I was capable of more, but a demanding Anna didn’t get my best work. I had my pride.

“Really?” Anna asked, before she rolled from her position as a brilliant cascade of what appeared to be fireworks exploded where she’d just been hiding.

A young woman flew towards Anna in an attempt to knock her down. Anna didn’t even use the stunner this time. An uppercut caught the girl’s jaw and sent her crashing hard to the earth.

It would have been easy enough to kill everyone here. Crystal shards weren’t as powerful as full crystals, although once bonded with a host they did grow over time. None of these had been in place very long and so all the powers we were facing were on the weak end.

A girl clapped and a sonic blast knocked out another of my drones.

Weak was all relative, of course. We’d gotten to the transport site first and found ourselves confronted by the scavengers. If we took too long we’d be dealing with the forces of King Boreas coming to reclaim his missing goods. That would be a far uglier fight. We had to be quick.

I flanked insult girl with four of my drones and she downed two with prismatic bursts of energy from her hands. Two wasn’t enough and twin stunner beams caught her from either side knocking her over.

She was the last of them. Anna walked through the collapsed bodies to check inside the house they’d been guarding. Sleeping mats were spread over the floor, but what we were really interested in was the massive cylinder three-quarters filled with a shimmering dust.

“A quarter gone? Were they eating the stuff?” Anna asked, as she found the lid and secured it.

“Don’t get tempted. The last thing we need is for you to start looking at our energy supplies as if they were cookies. We’ll be dark within the week,” I said.

Several of my drones with boosted strength surrounded the container and with a heave were moving it to the transport.

“What about the kids?” Anna asked.

It was a valid question. A few of their powers might be useful. I’d gone in utilizing stunners for a reason. I still had that curiosity, but none of them would be winning us a war.

That wasn’t all she was asking. Lately I had been collecting strays. Perhaps I’d been doing it all along—what was Anna, if not a stray? But it had been getting particularly bad lately with the Gobbles, and then Magpie and her people.

Anna wanted to know if I was going to try to bring these kids back with us.

It wasn’t a simple question. I’d never been more powerful than I was now as the core of the city of Aefwal, but I’d also never felt more helpless.

Resources were tight, painfully tight, and that made missions like this critical.

“We’ll take them back with us. You know my habit of surrounding myself with the completely useless and inept,” I said.

We were half-done by the time I detected a warping signature overhead. An incoming jump.

It would be either the Righteous or King Boreas, and both were bad—although each was bad in different ways. The Righteous could dampen abilities and had formidable equipment. King Boreas could rewind time. If he’d given that power to a captain of one of his vessels it would make them agony to fight.

The ship blinked into existence and beam weapons instantly fired taking out three of my drones.

Boreas it was then. I hadn’t had much experience fighting him, but I’d thought about it. The best counter to rewinding time was either to out-think the time jumper or to out-power them.

If I’d had a high-yield missile ready to plow into that ship in fifteen seconds, there was nothing a rewind of time might do to prevent the large-scale destruction.

Unfortunately, I only had an armored personnel carrier.

BioArmor sprang up around Anna just as she took a shot to the shoulder getting aboard.

“Why are we still here?” Anna asked.

We hadn’t come in the Graven, it was off fighting its own battles as we searched for supplies. Instead, I’d keyed one of the city’s teleportation gates for the destination and brought the vehicle through.

If I had sufficient power, I’d simply have taken us instantly back the same way. Power was the issue though—as it had been ever since stripping Sylax of her Amplification core.

It took minutes to charge up the energy for a gate use.

I had to time this carefully and focus my sensors on the attacking vessel.

A teleportation portal could do damage to an airship. Slice some key lines in the engine core and, after a few seconds, the ship would be in a critical state.

Two seconds before I had enough power I detected the ship venting extra cooling into its engine core. In some possible future I’d tried this trick. Which meant it was time for something different.

When the capacity charged I opened the gateway beneath the transport and allowed us to fall through. No time reset, not this time. The captain of that ship must have decided he preferred the future of us getting away, rather than the one of his engine core going.

2

The vehicle tumbled through on the other side and came to rest. Back within the city on familiar turf my people had no problem teleporting. Anna took herself to the nearest Medbay and I sent drones to transport the canister of dust to the reactor core.

The city looked even worse than it had a week before, when I’d been struggling for control. Seven districts had been reduced to rubble. The sun dome overhead was little more than a dim glow bathing the city in perpetual dusk.

Again, it was a matter of power. The city power supplies had been nearly exhausted when Sylax was in charge, and the heavy use I’d made since of the city’s teleportation gates had only made matters worse.

My Bioreactors worked well for a single building. Put enough of them together properly networked and they could provide power for a district. However, an entire city required a whole other scale of engineering and despite having the title, I just wasn’t there.

That was where the crystal dust came in. I triggered its absorption into the reactor.

The sun dome brightened and I began to get reports of energy spikes throughout the city. The Scholars made use of shards and dust extensively as a power supply—it was part of the reason they fought so heavily over crystals. This amount wouldn’t keep the lights on for long. I’d bought us perhaps a week of breathing room and more reliable gate use.

The city’s communication network came back online and I was immediately getting requests from my District Lords.

I was starting to envy Sylax’s tactic of ruling through fear. It meant less calls for assistance at all hours. One of the messages was about her. I’d turned Sylax over to Crystal who wanted to speak with me.

I needed to chat with her as well. I loaded up a transport with the Powered teens we’d just captured and directed it towards her district.

* * *

Crystal didn’t seem thrilled with the presents I’d brought her.

“Emma, have you noticed I still don’t have a single building set up? Where do you think I’m going to put a bunch of strays?” Crystal asked.

“It’s true. I live in a cave,” Sylax said. Since the loss of her Amplification crystal she’d changed fashion directions. Instead of red and black armor she now wore a form-fitting white bodysuit. I didn’t know where she’d gotten the thing. Also, after having her crystal removed she did seem, marginally, less bloodthirsty than before.

“I’ll build you a shack. You keep complaining that you need resources to rebuild and the scavengers can help,” I said.

Of all the District Lords none had been hit so hard in the struggle for the city as Crystal. The enemy destroyed every structure and slaughtered every unit—except for Sylax.

Sylax said, “It is going to take more than a shack. Let us have the use of one of Jade’s lieutenants and the assistance of one of your repair drones for forty-eight hours and we’ll do it.”

Jade and her people were telekinetics. One of her lieutenants would have strong powers.

I could visualize what Sylax had in mind. With the capacity to shift rubble about and my drones’ ability to do quick repair work, they could probably manage to restore access and function to a number of their underground facilities within that time-frame.

It suited my purposes. Although Crystal had tried to take the city instead of me, she had also been my closest ally when I was only a District Lord.

I didn’t blame her for having ambition, though I would if she turned out to hold a grudge.

“I’ll get you what you need,” I said.

Crystal directed a long look at Sylax, but grunted and nodded. “Fine. What about my clones?”

Crystal had also been seeking clones of her fallen creatures. We both held upgrade cores and our abilities came from the enhancement of others. Crystal’s focused on the drawing out of hybrid animalistic traits in others, or in enhancing the natural potential of beasts.

My manufacturing potential had been pushed to its limits. My growth vats were filled with the need to grow more growth vats and the production of Bioreactors and workers.

I’d been putting off Crystal’s request, but perhaps it was time to reconsider that. With something to work with she could start bringing her district back online and even help others.

“If your clones were a decent design in the first place you’d still have a building standing. I’ll give you a growth vat cycle in four hours,” I said.

“Capacity?” Crystal asked, turning all business.

I sent her over the specifications and she keyed in her request.

I thought she’d ask for one of her dragon hybrids. A young one would synthesize well in that time, but instead she wanted insects.

I hadn’t even known she had these, I didn’t see them in the fight for the city.

Sylax was peeking over her shoulder. “You are not bringing back those damned bugs.”

“I liked them,” Crystal said.

“They were creepy. They had a hive mind, and they sang, and wiping them out was one of the few good things I’ve ever done,” Sylax said.

“They are incredibly efficient, versatile, and evolve quickly. Emma, I know what I’m doing. If you want to get this place back in working order, give me my bugs,” Crystal said.

Crystal had also brought Sylax into the world. Crystal excelled in making scary monsters.

Still, she was one of my District Lords. This is what I expected from her now, to do what she was good at.

I loaded the biological parameters she specified into the queue.

“You’re all set,” I said.

Now it was time to approach Jade.

3

Jade’s entire demeanor had changed since I’d taken the city and overthrown Sylax. I could worry that she was being compelled, but as the ruler of the city I’d be able to see if another District Lord had conquered her.

Her district had once been defined by its ruins. She and her lieutenants had torn buildings apart without a care. They’d reveled in the destruction and saw no need to put any of it right.

That had changed. The buildings now were crude, little more than slabs of stone propped up against each other, but they were serviceable. There were even rows of telekinetically tilled ground for farms, although so far nothing grew.

I’d signaled ahead that I’d be arriving in one of my mechanical science drones.

“Emma, are you here about my request?” Jade asked.

I was there about another request entirely, but given that I wanted something from her I’d need to listen.

I said, “You want to set up more advanced systems in your structures. Lights, sewage, comms. It’s about time you stopped living in your own filth. I can schedule a repair drone to visit and assist.”

“No drone. I want my people taught,” Jade said.

This was different. That was also more difficult, if time was a factor, and time was always a factor.

“I’ll send a drone, but I’ll also provide instruction on what they are doing and why, for your people to review,” I said.

Jade considered that for a moment. “That will do. Weird, isn’t it? Trying to put together the stuff you’ve broken and not knowing how. I guess you know that better than anyone. How can you hope to fix the world, when you can’t even fix this city?”

I wasn’t looking for her opinion. I was doing my utmost, but I only had so many drones.

“Crystal needs one of your people for two days. I think she is hoping to dig out some of her basement facilities.”

“Of course. She can have three. Why didn’t she come to me directly? I’ve had them just sitting around,” Jade said.

That wasn’t hard to answer. I knew exactly why Crystal hadn’t asked directly, she didn’t trust Jade. None of the District Lords really trusted each other, and I couldn’t blame them. I didn’t trust them either.

I hadn’t realized quite how bad it all was with all these smaller problems. I’d been so focused on getting the Central District up and running, and acquiring supplies for the entire city, I hadn’t been paying enough attention to the needs of the individual districts. Perhaps letting some easy fixes sit idle where I could be helping. It was worth investigating, at least.

* * *

I transferred into a biological body, called Heloise, before I sought out my next District Lord. Heloise was one of my combat model drones who I’d made exceptionally durable. I’d need that just talking to Tara.

Tara was a former member of the Righteous and she’d helped us out greatly in the past. Most recently, she had torn the Amplification crystal out of Sylax with the aid of a source orb—then both had wound up fusing into her body and magnifying her power-dampening abilities enormously.

It gave me a headache just to get near her, and it was best not to mention what a constant inconvenience her district’s systems were to the city.

I’d renamed her Blank befitting her new, greater powers. Making her a District Lord seemed clever at the time. In retrospect it was maybe one of my more questionable decisions and I had to find a way to deal with that.

At least her district was beautiful. Where the others were ruins, both hers and Hot Stuff’s had been remade by the last remnants of the city’s original power supplies to match their personality.

Towering white buildings adorned with balconies overlooked stone pathways winding through fields of flowers. Pretty, yet somehow a bit cold, it suited her.

“You could do with a bit less frowning,” Blank said, as she motioned Heloise into her penthouse office. “But then I guess smiling doesn’t really work for you either.”

Great, I was being analyzed.

“You seem to be settling in,” I said.

“I’m doing what I can. We’re short of people. You know that,” Blank said.

We were short of everything.

“Is that a we as in all of us together, or are you going all Ophelia on me?” I asked.

Blank gave a tiny smile. “Being an abomination suits me Emma, more than I ever thought it would. Ophelia was weak, I’m not.”

For a time Ophelia had housed three personalities in her head: The source orb, a version of me named Amy, and Ophelia herself. To my knowledge Blank should only have two lurking around in her own skull.

“You could describe Ophelia as that when she first bonded with the orb. Why is that?” I asked.

Blank turned her gaze out the window and her lips pursed. “How to define it? Source orbs have the potential to put the world back as it was. To bond one together in a host with a power crystal will ultimately corrupt it. Rob it of that power.”

That fitted with what I knew about source orbs. They were greatly prized by the Righteous. No other faction seemed to value them except for whatever the Righteous might trade for them.

“We could figure out how to extract it, if you like. Leave you with just the Amplification crystal,” I said.

“No, I like what I am and you’ll not change it,” Blank said.

“Do you need anything then? Most of the other Lords are full of requests.”.

“I need lieutenants,” Blank said.

Didn’t everybody? With the toll the war had taken, we were critically short of the unpowered.

Manufacturing people suitable for that process was proving difficult. There had been a few successes at granting them abilities, but the transmission rates were far lower than with the general population.

“I’ll see what I can do. While I realize the life of the isolated hermit well suits your social ability, would you care to take a walk with me? I want to talk with Flicker,” I said.

Talking to Flicker was one thing Blank proved good for.

4

Flicker’s district was badly out of sync with our reality. I’d gotten there in the past with the use of a jump drive and through some skillful reprogramming of the teleportation gates.

With Blank none of that was necessary. I sent notice of our arrival and we made our way to the boundary of her district.

Flicker met us there. A shimmer of barely sensed presence solidified into a girl as Blank drew near. Flicker looked to be in her late teens, unkempt and with wild hair.

Power crystals were a mixed blessing to most that got them. Flicker was more unfortunate. Hers tore apart Flicker’s dimensional stability.

I’d had a drone bring a crate of orange soda. She was obsessed with the stuff.

I’d gathered she didn’t exactly eat or drink in her own dimension.

“Hi, Flicker. I’m just going around to all the District Lords and seeing if there is anything I can help them with. Do you have everything you need? Well, I mean besides a fashion consultant and several high-powered showers with hot water?” I asked.

“C43L18K25,” Flicker said, enunciating each letter and number between lousy slurps of soda.

It wasn’t quite gibberish. We’d been working to bring her district more in tune with the city. If we could master Flicker’s dimensional shifting, it might provide a powerful level of defense. As it was now, for most practical purposes it was almost like being short a district.

She could deploy wire golems into the real world, but her forces were much weaker here than in her host dimension.

The sequence she provided was a calibration. Her space was always shifting and I was still working on determining a consistent pattern to it.

I keyed in the changes and behind her buildings flicked into a more solid view.

Then they exploded.

Flicker doubled over, crying out in pain.

What was wrong?

The timing was no coincidence. Was it a problem with the sequence? My systems?

I tried to turn off the dimensional adapter and it ignored the shut-down sequence. No, not ignored—it wasn’t receiving it. It was out of phase with me and it shouldn’t have been.

That was a clue as to what was going on. Any changes should be happening purely on her side. If my own dimensional equipment was phasing, it meant I was getting feedback of some kind.

It had to be a matter of resonance. The dimensional shifts were having an impact on each other and sending a dimensional wave back and forth between them.

For anyone else this might have been catastrophic. Fortunately I’m brilliant—and I had just charged up the main reactor. I keyed up a dimensional gate and opened it into Flicker’s dimension creating a third harmonic.

Her screeching continued for a few long moments and then stopped.

Flicker looked behind her, glared at my drone, and drank another soda.

It was good to be helpful.

This actually was good news. I was narrowing in on what made her dimension unique. Being able to build a harmonic like this could be just the tool to allow easy traverse between them.

“Why does something explode every time you try to be helpful?” Blank asked.

“Explosions and SCIENCE go together. A woman of your limited understanding will never understand that,” I said.

Blank shrugged. “It keeps things interesting. But blow up something in my district and I’ll be cross.”

I had no intention of blowing up anything in her district. Already, I was more interested in how the other newest district of the city was doing.

* * *

Bronze and Obsidian were the main building materials of Hot Stuff’s district. The city had shaped itself partly around her personality and partly around her abilities.

The result was an absurd number of bronze erotic sculptures, flowing streams of magma, and opulent flame-retardant palaces.

“Hey bosslady,” Hot Stuff said, when I arrived to meet her. This time my drone was one with the Fire Matrix built in and temperature-resistance upgrades as well.

Hot Stuff had acquired the ability to toggle her fires off and on, and right now they were off. It let her wear mundane clothing. Otherwise even the fire-resistant stuff tended to burn away after no more than a few hours.

There was an easel set up and a selection of oil paints.

“You’ve taken up art? I didn’t think you were that complex,” I said.

Hot Stuff grinned. “I didn’t either. I’m not very good, but I’m having fun failing.”

“How have you been? Have the Wolves been giving you any problems?”

Of all the districts hers had the highest surviving population after the battles, but they were mostly the forces of James Wolf, who had died at Sylax’s hand.

“Oh, the Wolves are dead. Just Flames now. We only lost about forty percent in the process, most were smart enough to learn to play,” Hot Stuff said.

That wasn’t bad, relatively speaking. Of those actually willing to share in her power, about one third died receiving it.

“Enough to have them start aiding on operations? We could use some heavy-hitters scavenging for supplies,” I said.

Hot Stuff glanced over and tapped her fingers upon her thigh for a few moments. “That means ones that I trust not to go feral and destroy whatever it is you’re raiding. Their discipline is kind of shot with the Big Dog dead, but I can get you a few that I think will hold it together.”

That would do. I wished I could use her for more. Hot Stuff could possibly be the perfect solution to our power problems, but although she burned intensely it was still on far too limited a scale.

Before I could dwell on that too much I was getting an alert notification from one of my remote teams. It was going after a rumored crystal refinery, and they were meeting some serious resistance.

“Care to do some killing?” I asked.

“Hell yeah, I want to do some killing,” Hot Stuff said.

Making her a District Lord was something I had zero regrets about.

5

I didn’t want to keep relying on the city’s teleportation gates. The power expenditure was huge and I’d much rather save that energy for any city-threatening emergency.

Still, I didn’t want to lose a whole team either. I gathered a force of two dozen combat drones in heavy battle armor. Hot Stuff joined us with three of her lieutenants and we stepped through.

It was an inferno. Our portal had opened into a spray of fuel and the Flames triggered it at once. While the fire was of no danger to them, my combat drones were another matter—including myself.

At least I knew who our enemy had to be. With this level of preparation and prediction it meant King Boreas and his forces. We must have taken them by surprise the first time and they rewound.

The team we were coming to rescue was already down. Now that we were close I could sense that properly. All of my drones had regenerative healing abilities, I insisted on it, but they didn’t have temperature resistance.

I signaled them to get clear as best they could and turned to Hot Stuff.

“Give me a full burn,” I said.

“Real party huh,” Hot Stuff said, stepping forward as the fiery aura sprang up around her. Ashy remnants of clothing blew away in the wind, fortunately she wasn’t shy.

In the past, Hot Stuff had burned bright at full power even before becoming a District Lord. Now?

Now it was overpowering.

It took around half an hour for my drone to heal into a state where I could properly observe the surroundings. Whatever was here had been swept clean, the ground blasted into glass.

Hot Stuff disabled her flames and reached down to help me up. “Welcome back, bosslady.”

Only two of the drones had survived, and they weren’t healing as fast as the one I’d selected. Of the enemy there were only a few badly charred skeletal remains.

I didn’t think I’d get much out of them, but I’d take them back for research purposes anyways. I’d take anything I could get that might help me fight against Boreas’ people.

The damage had extended to the refinery. Half the structure had melted completely away and the other half was on fire.

“You do put on a show,” I said.

“Yeah, I do,” Hot Stuff said. I’d expected to hear a bit of glee there, but instead there was a hint of sadness. I was getting better with human emotions.

“Time was you’d have taken a lot of pleasure in that,” I said.

“Burning and fucking my way across the badlands? Been there, done that. I actually buy into your whole schtick though, you know? Us maybe doing something better? I just wish sometimes I could be a part other than being someone who destroys everything she touches,” Hot Stuff said.

Again, I found myself surprised by depth I hadn’t seen before. I guess this explained her efforts at painting. She was trying to be someone new.

If I’d hoped to get anything usable from the refinery I was out of luck. Fuel tanks buried in the ground stood open. They were empty, rather than the contents having been burned.

That was wrong.

It was one thing to respond to our arrival with a spray of fuel. That could be explained by short-term temporal displacement. This was something else.

Hot Stuff walked up and peered inside. “Huh. We have a traitor?”

I could understand her thinking that. If the refinery received word of the attack before I launched it, then they could have cleared out the fuel and been waiting for us. That may have happened.

It was also possible that King Boreas had somehow unlocked a new level of his ability, one that granted him capabilities we didn’t know about. After seeing how Sylax was made so strong with an Amplification crystal, and observing how my own abilities had grown over time, it was impossible to discount.

If we had a traitor there were a few likely culprits. Crystal and Sylax had an existing relationship with King Boreas. With Crystal’s place as one of my closer allies she knew about this attack.

Perhaps they’d offered to help him in exchange for claiming the city for themselves? As theoretical cases went, it was a strong one.

Of course, she wasn’t the only suspect. I’d left Crash mauled and he had the technical skills to find out about the troop movements. He’d also already betrayed me once, and did so by playing a convincing part. He might be fooling me again.

Zora had to come in third. I still didn’t know her power set and a woman that good at keeping secrets might well be keeping a few more. Zora had impressed me over time with both her competence and her drive to seek out power. I didn’t think she was stupid enough to betray me, but humans disappointed you, it was what they did best.

“Anyone you’d suspect?” I asked. Hot Stuff was my military commander. That wasn’t just a matter of being able to melt foes.

“I don’t trust anyone, but for this? All I can do is cross names off. Jade wouldn’t sell you out to Sylax’s mentor. Blank would sell you out to the Righteous—if she was going to sell you out to anyone.”

No, not them. Given they’d think her an abomination.

“Would any of your Flames sell you out?” I asked.

Hot Stuff shook her head. “Nah. They survive and they’re mine through and through. They may not be smart, but they’re loyal.”

I’d have to trust her on that. I had no reason not to, my own drones were unfailingly loyal.

I set my drones to recover what pieces we could for research and took us home. If there was a mole, I had to find them.

6

The city of Aefwal was hidden deep inside an underground cavern, which made the hunt for a mole easier. There were limited avenues for someone to sneak a message out and the only one that would make practical sense would be through the city’s transmission network.

The network operated on a completely different level than something like the teleport gates. Terminals were available to all the major factions and they allowed real-time connection to any other terminal providing you had the proper clearances and codes.

As ruler of the city the network was fully under my control. Still, Sylax had once controlled it and Crash was an expert in subverting systems. I couldn’t trust they hadn’t found a way to hack signals through.

I spent several hours going through logs and examining the hardware for signs of unauthorized use or tampering. I didn’t turn up anything.

If I had a spy working against me, they were maybe better at this than I was. Possible, but unlikely. To be safe I set a few extra safeguards. I’d have to let that sit for now.

Aefwal’s isolation not only made spying difficult, locally there was nothing to scavenge.

We were limited on ships. James Wolf’s fleet of airships had been destroyed in the civil war, Sylax had lost hers in battle with the well-named Oozelord.

I’d managed to get the Graven back operational, and cobble together two other working airships out of the pieces. I’d had to turn them into glorified troop transports, mostly ferrying teams about. At least the airships were easily fueled by Biocores.

At any point in time I had several teams in the field investigating leads. Salvage was a big focus, we weren’t strong enough to wage a war for resources with any of the major powers. Scavengers were plentiful and we often weren’t the first to a prize, but if we encountered any competition at least our limited firepower counted for something.

A team was requesting my assistance. I shifted my consciousness into the skin of one of my drones so I could observe things first-hand.

“Told you she’d pick Angela,” said another of my drones.

“Yeah. I’ll pay up,” said another.

“It really was a mistake to make all of you capable of speech. What are you talking about?” I asked, as I took in the surroundings.

They’d come by land vehicle and were parked near the edge of a massive canyon. The sky here had a metallic green shimmer speckled with flashes of light.

“Tori said you’d go with riding around in Angela because she’s a brunette. Now I owe her my cookie ration for the day,” said the second drone.

Did I always pick brunettes to occupy? It wasn’t hard to check. I did, and discovered that roughly seventy-three percent of the time when I assumed a human host, I chose a brunette.

Interesting. Useless, but interesting.

A did a quick review of the drone who had just spoken, Ula. I’d double her and Tori’s cookie rations for the week. I appreciated learning new things about myself.

“I picked the least cookie-gorged drone I could find. Why did you need me?” I asked.

Tori moved to the edge of the chasm and pointed. I leaned over to see.

About halfway down a ship was stuck in the canyon wall. It didn’t look as if it had crashed there so much as the canyon had grown around it.

It was small, too small to be an effective transport, and far smaller than the typical airship—smaller than even the Graven. It was more like a shuttle, I decided.

That was puzzling. What I was seeing looked like a jump drive malfunction, but a jump drive was impractical for a vessel that size.

“We didn’t have the equipment to get down there, but thought you might have an interest,” Tori said.

I quadrupled cookie rations for the entire team and put in a work order for reinforced structural improvements for their vehicle. Fat does weigh quite a bit, after all.

I grabbed a portable lantern from their supplies and upgraded Angela with the teleportation ability. It was a bit far to get down there and back up again, but I had a solution for that.

I flung my host over the edge of the cliff. It was a long fall down to the shuttle and I was taking a chance. My teleport couldn’t function without some sort of sensor reading or awareness of an interior.

Still, it looked as if this shuttle had crashed a long time ago and I thought it likely to have some weather damage.

It did. The crack along the engine housing wasn’t large, but it was enough for me to get a glimpse of the dark interior. I teleported.

This ship was small. Most of it was devoted to the engine compartment. The rest was a pilot’s chair and a small passenger cabin. Dry, cracked leather and woodwork showed it had once been quite nice.

There were two skeletons.

Each had power crystals lodged in their ribcages—they’d once had abilities. One was surrounded by an aura of faint darkness, the other by feelings of vitality.

It was unlikely for my drone to absorb either. So far, my drones hadn’t shown much affinity for crystals. However, Angela responded to the first one touched, the dark crystal melting and seeming to seep into her pores.

New Power Acquired

You were present within a host that had acquired a new ability from bonding with a Darkness Crystal.

Cloak of Midnight

In addition to vision even in perfect darkness the bearer of this crystal will extinguish all light sources within fifteen meters.

My lantern was dead, so I could count that as evidence of success. I secured the other crystal, the vision in darkness working as well.

The drive was fused solid. Unfortunate, I’d have liked to study it. The computer core was intact and I teleported it back to the canyon rim.

The vessel was something of an anomaly in a lot of ways. I was curious about where it had come from. The core might give me some answers.

7

I signaled for an airship to retrieve the team and return them to the city as a priority mission. In the meantime I searched the records for the ship’s design.

Every faction had their unique facets of ship construction. Pirate vessels tended to be smaller and more lightly armored with larger weapon mounts, The Righteous went with more heavily armored frames, while the Scholars preferred variable and adaptive types.

I had access to mostly Scholar resources, because I’d made something of a hobby of stealing everything of theirs that at some point tried to kill me.

I wasn’t getting any hits. Ships were built large for a reason, and it was a dangerous world out there. The shuttle didn’t even have armaments and was too small to be a troop carrier. While it had held two Powered, that was hardly enough to justify such a small design.

It was a few hours until the team returned to Aefwal and set about gorging themselves on their unexpected cookie bounty. I set to studying the data core.

It was unexpectedly primitive and I soon figured out why. Some of my own records that had been saved from the Cataclysm. The core from the shuttle used the same dating system and was only some fifteen years afterward.

I always thought it strange that the period of time since passed was such an unknown, especially given that some Powered such as Mechos had survived the entire thing.

I suspected that centuries had passed, but had no way to prove it. Even the dating systems had changed.

The ship had belonged to Hale and Blindspot, treasure hunters. Hale had possessed extraordinary health and Blindspot had been able to induce short-term sensory deprivation on targets.

They’d been looking for something called the “Sword of Light”. An asinine name they’d taken very seriously. The sword was apparently an artifact they’d put a lot of time into finding. A look through the Scholar databases found references to the sword as well, usually in connection with a gem named the Agate thought to be a power crystal of unusual properties.

Interesting. Interesting enough that I wanted to investigate further.

I had the set of jump coordinates they had been trying to reach. The treasure hunters had solved a series of riddles to figure them out.

I messaged Anna, Blank, Crystal, and Mechos to meet me aboard our only available airship. Between them they were my best thinkers. After everyone arrived and settled into a conference room I presented them what I had.

“I know of the Sword of Light. It destroyed Cincinnati,” Mechos said.

“Cincinnati? That’s a ship?” Anna asked.

“A city. I don’t know the details, but at the time it had been seized by Prince Dragosaur.”

Crystal admitted, “He was some of my early work. Not my best. It was before I had a Compulsion core and he wandered off to build an army to betray me.”

“Are all of your creations deeply unlikable?” Anna asked.

“Those who are made will always try to kill their makers. It happens. Emma will find out,” Crystal said.

I hoped not.

Blank said, “I don’t know anything about any swords. While crystals will sometimes fuse with inanimate objects—as one has with Emma—it is rare.”

“I’m as much an inanimate object as Anna is a pudgy, red-faced sack of meat. The shell only matters so much,” I said.

“Do you have to bring me into it?” Anna asked.

“So, none of you know much. It was foolish to hope that you might prove helpful,” I said.

“We’ve confirmed that it may be worth investigating. The question is why you even felt it necessary to consult anyone, as you clearly intended to do so anyways, given you had us meet on this ship,” Blank said.

That was true. I wanted to try out a version of the shuttle’s coordinates.

Usually trying a set of jump coordinates was safe. If they failed to be valid the jump simply didn’t go through. The ship would be dimensionally phased and thrown clear. Materializing inside something, such as the wall of a canyon, was supposed to be impossible.

I had some theoretical models that could explain what happened to the shuttle. At first I thought they’d been pulled into a trap, but a trap at the end of such a long road of investigation didn’t make sense. Why not spring it earlier? So the address they had was meant to be valid, but along with a final riddle—something they didn’t solve.

If it were a cipher it might never be figured out, but I didn’t think it was anything that complex. A simple offset in the coordinates would be the trick and quite easy.

Instead, they’d hit some sort of dimensional vortex, a stable center with an unstable edge. Using the coordinates without the offset would result in hitting an unstable dimensional barrier where they wouldn’t be able to materialize, throwing them into a second jump and out of dimensional phase. Thus causing the shuttle to materialize in the wall of the canyon.

If I factored in forward momentum when they had engaged the drive, and referenced that with the position where the shuttle ended up, I could determine the required offset. Maybe.

There was only one way to be certain. I engaged the drive to the revised set of coordinates.

What my sensors picked up was unexpected. I relayed video to the conference room for the others.

My vortex idea had been spot on. It was visible outside the ship, coils of red and blue energy almost like thick paint swirling endlessly around a small patch of calm in the center.

Our ship had arrived alongside what looked to be some sort of ancient communications satellite. Solar panels were coated with a thin veneer of crystal dust that seemed to provide a power supply even after all this time.

“Now that is old world,” Mechos said, leaning forward in his chair. “We’re in a Vattier bubble, we have to be. Vattier was … a colleague of sorts.”

“Weren’t you just a repairman in the old world?” Tara asked.

“A repairman of one of the greatest super-computers on the planet,” Mechos said, pulling back and letting out a low breath. “I need a terminal. If this is Vattier’s work, do not try to communicate with it, Emma. It will be trapped.”

Perhaps Mechos could be useful after all.

8

I’d studied Mechos enough to know how he liked to work. By the time he walked to a lab I’d had one of my drones set a terminal up to his specifications.

“I need details, Mechos,” I said.

“Vattier was a brilliant mind before the Cataclysm and even more brilliant one afterward. He was also one of the first to go truly mad as a crystal holder,” Mechos said.

“You buy into the talk that crystals make you mad then?”

I hadn’t quite made up my own mind there. Most of those I’d met with a crystal did seem completely insane, but that was hardly abnormal for humanity.

“I get a taste of Hot Stuff’s power, and I now sleep with everything that moves. Do you think she was born with that libido? Do you think anyone sane would press ahead with it, when it is fatal to so many of her partners?” Mechos asked.

“You were powerful well before you got a subset of her crystal,” I said. Mechos had originally possessed an upgrade crystal.

“And I was always afraid. I feared everything. There is always a cost for having a crystal, Emma. Always.”

This was interesting, but it wasn’t why we were in the laboratory. He began pulling up every bit of sensor data I had on the satellite. I was still at my heart devoted to research, even this airship’s sensors were excellent.

“There, do you see?” Mechos asked, as he marked several areas of the satellite’s casing.

I did. Visually they weren’t particularly extraordinary, but according to the sensor readings they were repositories of crystal dust. Getting to them was difficult, if anyone tried. The casing was well-protected against any explosive.

“I see it. So what did Vattier’s crystal do to him?” I asked.

“Intelligence. He became obsessed with it, with puzzles, with the extermination of the stupid. It was our hour of greatest need and one of our great minds decided to go on a killing spree to wipe out everyone not quite so great,” Mechos said.

It was an impulse I could understand.

It also meant that our odds of survival were going up. If it was intelligence that counted, I was well prepared.

“What happened to him?” I asked.

“He was betrayed by the woman he loved.”

Predictable. Sentimentality will do you in every time.

“She killed him?” I asked.

“He killed himself for being foolish,” Mechos said.

I admired the consistency at least.

The more I studied the scans, the more I began to admire whoever built this thing. Physically it was made to look like a satellite, a transmitter relay.

Practically it was, it would serve that purpose well, but beneath that was a layer of crystal circuitry designed to do something else entirely.

“I’m not smart enough for this,” Mechos said an hour later, massaging his forehead.

“I am. I believe it’s a jump drive,” I said.

“Meant for installation in a ship?” Mechos asked.

If only. That would be simple.

“It makes use of the unique properties of this part of space and time. I now think that our treasure hunters did exactly what they were meant to—hit the vortex wall. If the satellite detects some required code or equipment, it seizes your vessel and subjects it to a targeted second warp,” I said.

“But we’re only here because you didn’t make use of their exact coordinates,” Mechos said.

He was right.

“I’m too smart. The processing power required to figure out this offset are well beyond anything that would have been available. I did something clever, but not the right something clever,” I said.

“So, do you know the right something clever now?” Mechos asked.

There he had me. I didn’t.

I had access to the data log. Analyzing that data, all the clues that led the treasure hunters here weren’t getting me anything.

“No,” I said.

“Then let’s think it over piece by piece. Aside from anything else, this thing is still a communications satellite. Why?” Mechos asked.

It was a fair question. Why build signal receivers on a satellite that nobody would ever use?

The creator of this would have done it, because it was a smart thing to do. There were a lot of touches here designed in case someone was clever enough to find this. No doubt traps too, as a precaution against the unfindable actually being found.

Still…

“A transmission wave would materialize before an arriving vessel, if they were broadcasting when the jump drive was enabled,” I said.

“Would it have time to reach the satellite?” Mechos asked.

If a ship was starting to materialize in the vortex at the original coordinates, a signal should reach the satellite just before, almost perfectly timed.

I suspected that almost was only an almost because of the processing time required on the satellite’s side of any jump. Vattier had set things up to be as flawlessly perfect as he could make them.

I reviewed the logs again looking for any clues that might be a transmission signal. There weren’t any.

I had to assume the treasure hunters had missed another clue. Whatever puzzles had been planted in the past would be long gone.

“It would, but we have no way to identify what that signal should be,” I said. “What will safely trigger the second jump.”

“Unfortunate. He was completely mad there at the end, but if he was pointing the way to something, he thought it was something worthwhile,” Mechos said.

I wasn’t quite ready to give up.

I could think of a number of things that might still be worth trying. Vattier may have been brilliant. It didn’t mean he couldn’t be outflanked. My own best traps had been subverted in the past.

Blank could neutralize any bombs and we could try to trigger the satellite manually. That was just one idea. I had others, although all had risks.

For now though I’d have to let this mystery rest. Until perhaps in the future, when we had more resources.

9

Two days after our return to the city, Crystal requested a meeting with me in her district.

Things were coming along nicely. Jade had sent some of her people to assist and nearly all of the rubble had been moved into three vacant blocks where it had formed makeshift mountains. No, not mountains, but hives. Looking closer, I could see the insects I crafted for Crystal swarming around.

This time we met in an underground facility that had been unearthed, a conference room. Crystal, Sylax, and a few of the scavenging youths I’d brought back were present.

“This is much nicer than your usual dungeons. None of your new monsters turned into blood-letters yet?” I asked Crystal.

“Oh, you never quite lose the touch,” Sylax said with a tiny grin.

If she was trying to unnerve me she was failing.

“I called you here because I wanted to discuss something with you. It is big enough I thought I needed to get you to sign off,” Crystal said.

Well, that was intriguing.

“Your lack of initiative is predictable and unsurprising. Go on,” I said.

“Fuck off, robot,” said a teen girl at the table.

“Silence, Gorgon. We treat Emma with respect,” Sylax said.

Gorgon? I recognized the girl from the battle. She’d turned one of my drones to stone with a touch of her hand. She was wearing gloves now, perhaps they dampened the effect.

Crystal said, “Sylax wishes to open an academy to train the young and Powered like Gorgon here. Help them to make the best of their abilities.”

Sylax as a teacher? That seemed a proposition doomed to failure.

“Crystal, you really think that turning your sadistic mass-murdering creation loose on a collection of teenagers is a good idea? I see why so many of your charges turn out bad,” I said.

Sylax hadn’t quite lost her grin. There was something about the way she lounged in her chair, and the glimmer in her eyes, that still spoke of being a predator. Sylax might have lost that which made her extraordinarily powerful, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t still dangerous.

“She’s helping us already,” Gorgon said.

“Most Scholars won’t even bother with the Children of Dust. Unlike with a full crystal their powers can never be passed on,” Crystal said.

I hadn’t heard that term before.

“The Children of Dust?” I asked.

“Crystal powder won’t bind to a fully mature host. For example, an adult working in a factory with it will never manifest powers, but a child or a teenager might. Even minor leakage into neighboring communities has caused Powered youths to appear. They get some limited powers, but a side-effect is they’ll never bind a full crystal,” Sylax said.

This meant in Scholar society they’d never be anything more than second-class citizens. To the Scholars being Powered was everything. If you didn’t have a crystal of your own, you were expected to seek out the opportunity to bond yourself to one.

Anna was the only Scholar I’d met who intentionally avoided this.

“Then why do you have an interest?” I asked.

“Let’s just say I now sympathize with the plight of the underpowered,” Sylax said.

Crystal had heavily modified Sylax and so she was hardly unpowered. She possessed countless modifications, just as Anna did, that made her far more formidable than a standard issue human. Still, with her Amplification crystal removed, Sylax was now technically unpowered.

I didn’t doubt that Sylax had some sort of ulterior motive. It didn’t mean that she couldn’t be on some level sincere.

“And what would you train them to do?” I asked.

“Fight, kill. I could sugarcoat it, but you wouldn’t actually appreciate it. Murder is what I’m good at and strength is what matters in this world, and what you need,” Sylax said.

I didn’t much like that truth so harshly delivered. It seemed to me that if I’d wanted these youths to die in combat I could have left them where they were.

I couldn’t discount the reality of what she said. It was a hard world out there and whether they put their powers to use for me or someone else, it was likely to be the only road to a worthwhile future any of them would have.

“This still doesn’t seem big enough to warrant getting my permission,” I said to Crystal.

“How many more do you think we’re likely to find if we continue pressing outward? The Dust are considered a blight all across the Scholarium,” Crystal said.

That would explain it. Crystal wasn’t asking my permission to hand Sylax a dozen future soldiers, she was asking my permission to hand her an army.

“Why would I trust you with this kind of responsibility?” I asked Sylax.

“You see me, Emma. More clearly than most. You’ve even been inside my head. Have I ever been disloyal?”

“You were loyal to King Boreas, even when we all wished you would do otherwise. I worry that you are still loyal to him.”

Sylax frowned at that. “Of course I am. This is why, whenever opportunity presents itself, I argue that you need not be enemies. But to survive I have had to swear my loyalty to you and your Anna as well, and I honor my commitments, machine. So will those I train.”

“I don’t like this,” I said.

Crystal folded her hands on the table. “I didn’t think you would. When you turned Sylax back over to me it was because you trusted my judgment. I ask that you continue to do so.”

I really didn’t like it. Perhaps Mechos was right and all Powered had their madness. I worried that Crystal’s might be in trusting those that shouldn’t be trusted.

I needed Crystal though. And if I could depend on Sylax, I even needed her and whatever army she might raise.

Our straits were too desperate for me not to take chances.

“I agree,” I said.

The mood in the room eased and everyone was satisfied for the moment.

Then, suddenly my world became a narrow focus. Normally I run parts of me in the background constantly, but I mostly keep my thoughts running at human speed in various instances.

I couldn’t do that now.

A bomb had just appeared in the middle of the Central District. Massive, and detonating. Three milliseconds had already passed since its arrival. I couldn’t afford to be thinking at human speed.

10

I could think quickly, but it wasn’t for free. Kicking my awareness up to this degree burned power, more than my Bioreactors could produce. To solve this problem I’d have to draw upon the limited supply of fuel for the city’s main reactor.

First of all, how did that bomb get into the middle of the district? If I could figure out how it got in then perhaps I could use the same method to get it out.

I pulled all the relevant sensor logs. No teleportation traces, no warp gate activity, no sign that it was dropped from any ship.

The first vision that any of my cameras captured, it was already lying on the ground and detonating.

All twelve of my District Lords were in residence in the city. I’d been worried about a mole, but if there was one, they were not well-regarded enough to be saved by King Boreas—and this did have to be him. Again.

I’d been wondering if he had gotten some sort of enhancement to his power set and this was my answer. This bomb had appeared from out of nowhere. Based on his power set it was reasonable to assume it had come from a future.

He had warped a ship in—he must have Aefwal’s coordinates after all—dropped a city-busting bomb and somehow rewound time to a point when he thought I’d be powerless to stop anything.

Getting it out the same way it came in wasn’t feasible. I didn’t have the ability to fling objects through time.

The city’s teleportation gates would serve if it were only a few milliseconds earlier. Pre-detonation it would have been easy to get the bomb away, but caught in mid-explosion it would destabilize the gate field.

Could I use a jump drive with the bomb itself? I did have an airship above the city right now, but I wouldn’t be able to get it close enough to the bomb in time for it to extend the jump field. I also didn’t have time to string two jumps together.

If I could get Blank to the bomb she could probably neutralize it. Whatever the source of the explosion, if it was big enough to take out this city, it likely involved power crystals. Sadly Blank also neutralized any teleportation ability. I lacked the means to get her there.

Could I bury the bomb? There I had more reasonable chance of success. If I teleported every agent I had with teleportation to the bomb and through the ground below it taking the bomb with them, that would be enough to bury the device. However, based on the thing’s energy yield, that wouldn’t stop it.

Hot Stuff might be able to steal some of the fire away from the bomb, if teleported onto it. Had she possessed a freezing ability I might have tried it. Instead I was afraid she would only make the bomb stronger with her presence.

This was a lot of thought cycles burned with no solution so far—and a bomb continuing to explode.

Ratticus and his energy manipulation might be able to dampen the explosion, but the blast seemed too powerful for him to stop completely. Jade might fling it from the city, except it was too late for that now.

What about the city’s energy shields? They were mostly turned off to conserve resources, but they had protected Aefwal from everything for a very long time. Their energy consumption was frightful, far more than even the teleportation gates, but I had enough power to engage them briefly. They were also energy-absorptive. If I could get them around the bomb they could actually feed from the very blast they were defending against.

The shield systems weren’t really designed for that. I spent another few precious milliseconds running through the possibilities to make it work.

They would definitely be able to dampen the explosion, but I just couldn’t focus enough of the shielding power to completely contain the blast. Burying the bomb would help more, Ratticus could help more—everything would help more. But even putting all my tools into play it just wouldn’t be enough.

This bomb was overkill. It was needlessly strong to get rid of us, especially taking us by surprise too.

I had to rethink the problem. If I couldn’t neutralize the bomb, what were my other options? Could I get people away?

I could, a series of teleports to the airship and triggering the jump drive would do the trick. I should even have time to evacuate my consciousness to the ship.

I could save everyone and run away.

Good, I could avoid complete loss, but I needed to do better.

Doing better meant saving the city. Could the city run away?

The city was built to be mobile using engines deep underground. Flying wouldn’t help here though. I wouldn’t be soaring away from the bomb even if they were operational. It was too slow.

Could I jump away?

I’d brought an entire fleet to this city once by extending a jump field well beyond sensible limits and utilizing the power of a volcano to amplify it.

I couldn’t use the power of the bomb exactly the same way, but the very thing that made the teleportation gates fail as a solution helped here. The jump field wouldn’t like the high levels of energy the bomb was putting out. The explosion would be rejected.

If I utilized the city’s shields to curve the jump field around it, the explosion wouldn’t be allowed to jump. In theory I would take the city away and leave the exploding bomb behind.

I even had a set of coordinates I wanted to try again. For Vattier’s satellite.

I still lacked whatever passcode it was looking for, but what I did have was a Crash. I could teleport him into the city’s main communications hub and his powers of subverting and controlling complex systems would be transmitting outward ahead of our jump. Crash could hack the satellite’s passcode. He might melt a little, but I could add Ophelia. With her healing aura in close proximity any part of him that dripped off should pop back soon after.

There were safer options, saner options, but perhaps this was my insanity from my crystal? I loved the gamble and I loved the big show.

I teleported Crash and Ophelia into the communications core, set it to full power, triggered the shields and engaged the jump.

Time elapsed since the detection of the bomb—twenty-three milliseconds.

11

Things did not go as planned.

At least, the city did not blow up. The first part of the plan succeeded and we went into the jump leaving the bomb and its explosion behind. We also hadn’t been thrown clear into a wrong dimension, not to mention into the side of any canyon, like the shuttle. Instead we seemed to be frozen mid-jump.

The sky was a shimmering rainbow of colors.

I opened a city-wide comm. “We came under attack and I had to devise a rather novel method of saving our lives. All the good little mammals can stop peeing on the floor and get to their duty stations.”

That might work for the rank and file, but the District Lords would want to know more. I conferenced them together as the lines came in and added Anna and Mechos.

“Where are we?” Jade asked.

“We’re in warp, obviously. Why are we still in warp?” Anna asked.

“You used the satellite coordinates and something went wrong,” Mechos said.

Crash and Ophelia at least weren’t capable of conversation. They were still in the middle of the main comm hub and being blasted apart by intense radiation.

“I did. I wired Crash into the comms to broadcast his ability and added Ophelia so he’d live. Unfortunately they seem to be as useless together as they are individually,” I said.

“Could being in a state of near-death be causing his power to not function?” Anna asked.

“If his power weren’t functioning the satellite would have kicked us aside at best, or self-destructed at worst,” Mechos said.

I agreed.

“For us to be stuck the satellite must have tried to carry out its primary purpose. Our originally jump was overridden in preparation for the next stage, but now we’re in a state of flux,” I said.

“Could it be a power issue?” Blank asked.

Of course, it had to be. Transitioning a city like this into a jump took a lot of energy which I’d been able to harness by drawing on the main reactor and the explosion of the bomb.

The satellite was trying to propel us into a second jump, but its power supplies were far more limited. The device may have only ever been meant to send along a single vessel, not something as large as an entire city.

“You prove useful for being something besides the one woman to power down Mechos’ libido,” I said.

Anna said, “Do you know that is the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me, and it’s still an insult to someone else?”

“While I appreciate the silly banter, it isn’t nearly as entertaining when Anna isn’t the one being insulted. Is there a fix for our dilemma?” Zora asked.

“We’re in jump space. Can we interact with real space?” Mechos asked.

That was a very good question. Within the confines of a jump bubble it was a bit like being inside a self-contained dimension all our own. In a sense the satellite was just outside the city limits. At the same time, practically, it was unreachable.

“You should know better than that,” I said.

“In phase not rest can I?” Flicker asked.

As always, it was difficult to talk with Flicker. The words didn’t come through. Her district of the city was out of phase with the city, and out of phase with the rest of the jump bubble. Unfortunately, it wasn’t in tune with normal space either, so this didn’t help us.

“You’re not the sort of out-of-alignment we need,” Mechos said. Perhaps the man was trying to redeem himself.

“Can we use the jump bubble itself? Isn’t it serving as a sort of tether between us and the satellite right now?” Anna asked.

Surprisingly, it was the smartest thing anyone had said yet.

The jump field surrounded us and it was also interacting with the satellite, which was currently sustaining it. Maintaining a field required far less power than initiating one. The satellite might be able to hold us like this for a number of days and never be able to execute the next part of its programming.

“We’d need to transfer a large supply of energy directly into the field itself. Slap the cookie out of Anna’s hand hard enough and she’ll feel it in her arm,” I said.

“That’s better,” Zora said.

“I’m checking power levels. You drained the city’s reactors to initiate this jump,” Mechos said.

I had, and the requirements were going to be enormous. I thought I had a solution though. One bomb had got us into this mess and another could get us out.

The airship overhead had initiated this jump bubble and its engine was still one end of it. A large enough explosion there would distribute the energy through the field. Focusing it would be a challenge, but Ratticus and his lieutenants should be able to help there.

The explosion itself would be a bit of an issue, but I had the foundation of what was needed. I’d built bombs before reliant on Biomatter.

Transferring most of the contents of the growth vats would provide ample Biomatter to fuel the explosion.

The District Lords were less than thrilled with the idea when I shared it.

“That is our only airship right now,” Anna said.

“We have another, and the Graven. Stop being greedy,” I said.

Mechos said, “You have no guarantee the others will be able to reach us wherever we are going. I estimate we have days until the jump bubble collapses. We can engineer a better solution.”

I didn’t like it when the humans started thinking they were intelligent, I particularly didn’t like it when they were actually making good sense.

We did have days to engineer a better solution. Blowing up an airship would be easy and effective, but for the moment it was unnecessary.

“I’ll work with you and Ratticus on plans. We begin construction in twelve hours,” I said.

“I’ll have my people ready,” Jade said.

It was time to engineer a fix.

12

Two days later, the fix was a beam weapon. I had designs that allowed me to use a Powered individual as a focus to determine the type of beam. With Ratticus at the controls I could utilize that for energy transformation.

Of course, before we jumped I had preparations to make. We didn’t know what would be waiting for us on the other side. I needed ground forces armed and ready, and science drones fueled up and ready to fly.

The cannon were fueled with four Bioreactor bombs channeling their blasts towards a central core. All four chambers fired and an arcing blaze of energy erupted to hit the jump bubble. There was no buildup of energy—one instant the city was surrounded by the rainbow aura and the next, harsh sunlight was streaming down.

The city had materialized on top of a large hill with a view overlooking rolling plains. Below a large river wound its way through the landscape and into the distance.

It was an idyllic place, and far less broken than most I’d seen. That made me instantly wary. The last paradise I’d seen had been when the Powerhungry crash-landed into a jungle. A jungle filled with beasts of exceptional power that Crystal had turned into an army.

Aefwal was in rough shape. The jump had drained the last of the reactor power and the teleportation gates, and internal communications network were completely down.

I’d prepared for that, distributing Bioreactor-powered comms throughout the districts, but communications were limited to the city. Nothing beyond.

I sent off the science drones. So far nothing was leaping up the hill to kill us.

Our position was perfectly centered, the hill just the right size for the city. Had the satellite had some sort of intelligence aboard to help it pick a perfect arrival destination?

Given that Crash’s ability was effectively Compulsion, it may have forced something like that to see us safe and in the perfect location even after being hacked.

Oh, yes—Crash. I teleported him and Ophelia to a Medbay and joined them.

Crash would be awhile fully regenerating. Ophelia was back to herself in under fifteen seconds.

“What the fuck. You cooked me for days,” Ophelia said, staggering to her feet. “Get me some damned clothes.”

I had a drone bring in something for her to wear, and some clothes for Crash as well for when he stopped being a pile of roasted meat.

“It was an emergency. You’re fine,” I said.

“Is that Crash? You left me naked in a room with Crash for days? Do you know how creepy that is?”.

“Not as if you were ever going to find yourself in that situation any other way. Some people would be grateful for me setting them up. Now do shut up and stay in the room until he’s healed. The adults have things to do,” I said.

I sealed her in the Medbay just to be safe.

It was time for the non-whiners to make some decisions. I needed to figure out where we were.

I broadcast camera feeds throughout the city of what my science drones were detecting and opened up a conference-comm session.

“Pretty,” Anna said.

Sylax said, “Which means something probably wants to kill us. I don’t recognize it. Crystal?”

“Do you have readings for any fauna?” Crystal asked.

I had picked up a few. Squirrels and foxes, nothing that seemed abnormal, but I sent the data over.

“Band one one seven,” Crystal said after a moment of study. “Sealed by order of the Scholarium. I don’t have any more information. Blank?”

“We don’t head this far out, but it looks a lot like the outer core,” Blank said.

Band referred to the distance of any jump coordinates from Band Zero. Band Zero was the core where the Righteous made their home. Higher bands got increasingly unstable in their physical laws. Most of the places we’d traveled had been between the range of twenty and sixty. After band seventy, coordinates tended not to lock as the physical laws got too inconsistent and odd to allow jump travel.

“What do you mean by sealed?” I asked.

“The Scholarium roams almost everywhere in search of crystals, but a few regions prove too inhospitable. We lose too many teams and expend too many resources to make it worth further expeditions. So they are sealed and further exploration is prohibited,” Anna said.

“Although a few malcontents break the rules—as Anna would know,” Zora said.

“You have to take some risks to get the big scores,” Anna said.

Sometimes Anna and I were in perfect sync.

There might be dangers here, things that even the Scholars wouldn’t risk, but that also meant there was power here. Power was something we desperately required. Perhaps this gamble would actually pay off.

Hot Stuff announced, “If something out there wants a fight, we’ll give it to them. I want all District Lords to contribute forces to defense. I’m also going to need all of you on call in case we meet a threat requiring your power set.”

I was pleased she was taking to the role of my military commander so well.

I said, “I’ll be using the airship to further deploy scouting parties. If any of you wish to accompany them, have your agents aboard within the hour.”

“Before you start looking too far abroad you may want to turn your attention closer. The satellite brought us right here. It probably had a reason,” Mechos said.

I’d already made my determination this was probably because of the hill being the right size. Still, as recent events had proved, I wasn’t always right.

I dedicated a science drone to a full study of the hill and surrounding plains.

13

Now that we had safely relocated the city and things were stable for the moment, I had some decisions to make—choices that up until now I’d been leaving aside. Given that we were soon to be facing new threats I thought it best to make those choices now.

First of all, I had three official positions in the city that needed to be filled. Civilian Ruler, Military Commander, and Diplomat.

Civilian Ruler wasn’t difficult. She was unpowered, however Anna was the Queen of this city by our agreement.

I went ahead and officially assigned her to that slot.

You have assigned the role of Civilian Ruler

Queen Anna Berasi

Aefwal has gained the attribute

Intelligence is a Weapon

The civilian populace when brought into conflict will gain bonuses to their intelligence and resistance.

I’d never thought of Anna as winning her fights by intelligence so much as by sheer determination. Still, she had originally activated me and often proved insightful. Perhaps I did not give her enough credit.

I’d already chosen my Military Commander. I just needed to make it official.

You have assigned the role of Military Commander

Hot Stuff

Aefwal has gained the attribute

Raze

If any force is reduced to ten percent of their original strength all survivors are instantly exterminated. Aefwal does not just win, Aefwal destroys those that stand against it.

I didn’t actually like that very much. I often left a few members of an invading force alive because I wanted them as test subjects. Still, Hot Stuff as a weapon was kind of an all-consuming one.

For the role of Diplomat there was only one option. It needed to be someone I trusted at least a bit, and the job would be helped by having a Compulsion core. Crystal met both those criteria.

You have assigned the role of Diplomat

Crystal

Aefwal has gained the attribute

Monstrous Diplomacy

Those of monstrous nature are more likely to regard your city with favor.

Great. I didn’t think Aefwal really needed any more monsters, but perhaps any new allies were worth having.

The three positions weren’t the only decisions I had to make. Each District could receive a specialization, including my own. I started there.

District Zero

Emma

You have the following options for specialization

Research

Administrative

Manufacturing

I’d played multiple roles in my life so far. As a laboratory and as an airship I’d been focused primarily on research, but as a city district—at Sylax’s demand—I’d been focused on manufacturing. As the ruler of a city Administration made a lot of sense.

However, I wasn’t so much for running the perfect city, although in reality I was all for putting it back together again properly. SCIENCE was the key to that, SCIENCE was everything.

I selected Research.

District One

Crash

You have the following options for specialization

Communications

Espionage

Research

I wondered if I would get three choices for each of them. These three were different than the ones I’d had. Obviously each District Lord had their strengths. Crash had the ability to subvert complex systems. While his expertise with computers would be helpful with communications, his true strength was probably in Espionage.

District Two

Blank

Military

Agriculture

Manufacturing

Blank had been a military commander for the Righteous. Without question she was best at that, but was it where I needed her? Hot Stuff was likely to have the military specialization and I’d be selecting it for her. The Righteous also made some of the greatest arms and armor out there designed to contend with the Powered. I needed Blank more on the manufacturing side of things.

District Three

Crystal

Research

Trade

Education

It was interesting how I was getting choices I hadn’t seen before. Trade and Education were both new to me. Given what this city could produce I didn’t see a need for Trade, but Education was intriguing. Sylax was already training the Dust and our city would continue to need skilled workers. I assigned Education and moved on.

District Four

Jade

Military

Entertainment

Construction

Construction was another new option. Different than Manufacturing, obviously. Construction usually focused on the production of new buildings and structures. Manufacturing was all about material goods. I wouldn’t have identified it as a need, but in the long-term I expected Construction to be the most useful.

District Five

Zora

Entertainment

Finance

Research

I’d always thought of Zora as something of a heavy-hitter in a fight. Her forces had done well during the civil war. However, her real interests and capabilities were elsewhere. If Trade wasn’t going to be a major need of this city neither was Finance, but the morale of our people was, so I picked Entertainment.

District Six

Professor

Research

Agriculture

Manufacturing

The Professor would be wasted with Manufacturing. While Agriculture was an interesting thought, and Research was doubling up on something I’d already assigned to my own district, nothing suited him more. I assigned Research.

District Seven

Hot Stuff

Military

Red Light

Energy

More interesting options. Energy in particular intrigued me given our current deficit, but I’d already assigned Hot Stuff as our Military Commander. I was keeping her there and to fulfill that role properly she needed resources to back her. I assigned her the Military option.

District Eight

Ophelia

Medical

Espionage

Administration

While these were all interesting options there was one area where Ophelia and her people clearly excelled above all others. Much like the Professor, I’d be a fool to assign anything but Medical.

District Nine

Flicker

Espionage

Research

Administration

I couldn’t think of how Administration properly applied to Flicker, who didn’t even wholly exist in our own reality. Espionage and Research both made far more sense. Then again, I’d already assigned both of those and, as absurd as it seemed, there must be some logic to offering the specialization if I was seeing the option.

I assigned her Administration.

With the housekeeping done it was time to focus again on the exploration of the new environment.

14

I was having trouble bringing our other ships to us. The Graven and the Whimsy were still out there—I had awareness of both through my drones crewing them. What I couldn’t do was get either airship to lock onto our current position with their jump drives. Both were getting errors attempting to use our coordinates.

On the one level that made sense. Usually anything in this high a band did return that result as a precaution. That said, we were obviously here and, even more than that, the Scholarium had visited in the past. There was no doubt the coordinates existed. It suggested some secret into making the journey that I hadn’t yet figured out.

I devoted a research team to the project of figuring out why. Neither the Graven or the Whimsy were in danger, I pulled both back from scavenging operations and had them pick up all scavenger teams.

Our surroundings were a bounty in terms of supplies. My primary material to construct anything was Biomatter and the plains and forests nearby were filled with it. My District Lords, in need of more conventional building materials, would find these hills filled with stone and metals.

I was working on construction of a new Biomatter harvester when one of my scout teams signaled that they were under attack.

It was the first report of any trouble since our arrival. I switched my attention to them.

It was a unit of four drones that I’d sent along the river. They were under assault from some sort of bird. The size of the creature was enormous, I estimated the wing span to be around four meters.

I wanted to keep the specimen alive for study, but stunners wouldn’t be very effective against a target that size. Still, if I could just keep my people clear of its talons they would eventually overwhelm it.

I waited until it swooped down and had one of my drones roll out of the way while I unleashed a series of stunner fire. The bird swerved at the last moment and a claw dug into one of my drones, pulling him into the air.

That changed things. Losing one person, the odds were suddenly further against me being able to stun it at all, not to mention the bird was proving faster than I’d anticipated. I had my drones break out the beam weapons.

The bird was soaring away with its prize when a beam lanced one wing, digging a burning furrow in the flesh. It dropped my drone who went tumbling into the river.

He must have died on impact, my awareness fading the instant he hit the water.

The bird was circling around for a second pass. The injury surely hurt it, but that wasn’t keeping it from flying. My best option was to further focus on the wings. If I could bring the bird to ground then I could use the stunners to subdue it. In captivity, I could set a medical drone to work repairing the damage while I made a study of its physiology.

My drones opened fire as the bird swept in, fire lancing across its wings even as it reached them and talons disemboweled one drone with a clean swipe. It was strong, more durable than it should be.

Strong wasn’t invincible though and it was definitely hurting as it came around for another pass. This time the blasts of fire sent it crashing to ground and tumbling forward in a spray of dust. I moved my remaining drones closer, still keeping some distance as they fired one stunner blast after another into its head.

It took eight at close range for the bird to finally go still, sprawling unconscious. I dispatched a heavy ground vehicle and several workers from Aefwal to help transport it back.

I had an unexpected mystery to solve. My drone that had been dropped in the river was making his way out onto shore and I still had no communication with him. He looked around with a blank gaze.

I’d come up against things that could dampen my connection to my drones before, especially power-dampeners.

Full submersion could very well have removed him from my connection. Interesting. I sent one of the remaining drones to get a sample of the water. The instant his hand touched the river I lost control as well as he stared at the sample tube, confused.

Perhaps something more like the Ooze of the Oozelord then. Even a touch of that to Anna’s flesh cut my connection with her. They didn’t seem to be suffering under the effects of compulsion however. They were both just confused.

Well, I had a short-term solution at least. My one drone still standing walked forward and put a stunner shot into both their heads. They went down soundlessly and without resistance.

I needed to move them into a proper testing chamber.

I was concerned. Not so much at the river itself, it would be easy enough for me to tell people to avoid it and I could determine other options for a water source.

Rather I was troubled about other watery weather effects. What if a fog rose from the water? What about the next time it rained?

For the time being I’d have to be alert to those kinds of weather conditions developing and make sure all citizens had adequate housing to keep them under cover. The city had an extensive underground series of maintenance tunnels. For now I could convert them for transit and when necessary put up roofed walkways. At least until I could study exactly what was happening.

15

When the transport arrived at the scene I had workers in environmental suits load the bird and my stunned drones, as well as gather an assortment of samples from the river. I took everything I could find, both water and local plant life, since you never knew what might be the cause of the effect.

By the time they were finishing up I was getting a signal from another of the scout teams I’d sent in the other direction along the river. They’d found something.

I switched over to one of their members. What they’d found was both impressive and gratifying.

They’d discovered a city.

It was ancient, with rusted bridges hanging haphazardly into the river and the skyline filled with collapsing skyscrapers. These ruins were big, larger than any others I’d found. Individual old world buildings still existed, of course—I’d once been one of them, but this was on a completely scale.

That this place existed at all and hadn’t been completely picked clean spoke of how isolated it was.

A bit of exploration revealed the buildings full of skeletons. Whoever was here had died in a hurry. The same had happened in my facility, way back when. The buildings weren’t showing any signs of combat—unarmored structures like this would be clearly marked by weapons fire.

I sent visuals back to Aefwal. A comm from Mechos was quick in response.

I told him, “I do hope you aren’t going to tell me again about how little you remember of the past.”

“You’re in Cincinnati. I mean, the skyline looks a bit different, but it has been a long time,” Mechos said.

“This would be the same Cincinnati you assured me was destroyed?”

“It isn’t as absurd as you think. In the Breaking some cities wound up duplicated, while for some it was like they never existed at all,” Mechos said.

Mechos was just full of information when I wasn’t asking for it. Still, I had no reason to disbelieve him. If this was an alternate version of the Cincinnati it raised some questions.

“You said it was your belief that the Sword of Light destroyed Cincinnati. Was Vattier involved?” I asked.

“Not to my knowledge. It was after his time. I know, I know, it is a bit of a coincidence. I don’t have a good answer for you, Emma. I just thought you’d want to be aware”

On that much he was correct.

As soon as the report of something interesting had come in I’d called my science drones to the area. They were starting to give me reports on the city.

The people here had died suddenly and analysis of the bones didn’t suggest any sort of chemical attack. If anything, it seemed they had died of some form of radiation bombardment. Whatever it was I wasn’t detecting any trace of it. My drones were fine and high-energy emissions would have been detectable.

There weren’t any signs of post-Cataclysm activity. Nothing to suggest anyone survived that singular event.

I could only draw one conclusion. It had to have been the Cataclysm itself that killed them. That was something else I hadn’t encountered. The cessation of electricity, disease, the Powered—all these had killed a lot of people in the aftermath of the Cataclysm, but for it to have wiped out an entire city something special must have happened here.

I should be able to identify what. An energy source strong enough to kill everyone would have left residual traces everywhere. My science drones should discover something.

I set them to scan around the city and soon had my answer. A powerful energy surge had struck the city, hitting strongest in the northeast.

Seven kilometers away I found what I was looking for. The crater was almost a kilometer across, the landscape in its immediate vicinity still barren after all this time.

Something had crashed to earth here. It very much looked to be some sort of meteorite impact, but the crater wasn’t quite deep enough for that.

Whatever it was, it was long gone, and from the looks of it something else had since vanished too. The crater contained the familiar shimmer of crystal dust. The churned-up earth suggested more than just dust had once been here. Actual crystals.

So many crystals that the dust was considered worthless and left behind. It was an embarrassment of riches these days.

It wasn’t something I could ignore now even in the interest of leaving the site untouched. I took all the measurements and recordings that I could and dispatched workers to gather the dust and bring it back to the main reactor.

There wasn’t really that much, but enough to get all of the city lights back on and bring back the main communication network. I might even manage a few uses of the teleportation gates.

It had always been a mystery what had caused the Cataclysm. Even in the Scholar records most didn’t seem to know. Few had survived from that time and most of those were deeply mad from having been bonded to crystals for so long.

Mechos knew, of that much I was certain, but for some reason he kept those secrets. I didn’t see how it could profit him, but I thought it must be connected to me and my creator. Mechos thought I had a purpose.

I thought so too, and I didn’t think I could let his secrecy stand much longer.

16

I didn’t have long to dwell on what Mechos was holding back before I had yet another scout team locate something of interest. This area really was one of riches, albeit far more spread out than most places I’d been.

I switched into a drone. They had found an abandoned village. A place of plainly more recent construction than the city.

Shacks surrounded a central building lined with sandstone sculptures of flawless humans.

I wasn’t detecting any signs of communication and nothing was showing up on auditory, visual, or thermal scans.

Still it was best to be cautious and I advanced my drones slowly. They were equipped with a mix of beam and kinetic weapons, and a science drone capable of scanning for any traps or hazards.

The shacks were simple affairs. Straw mats for sleeping, with chimneys and hearths for cooking. Primitive, but organised. This settlement didn’t suggest people being isolated or the settlement being old at all.

The shacks having turned up nothing much I moved the drones towards the central building. The shacks had little in the way of the ornamentation, but here it was everywhere. Paintings, carved stone, all centered on figures usually surrounded by a glow. If I was judging this properly it was a religious aspect. This building was a temple of some kind.

The interior was luxurious, again far more so than the shacks. The vibrancy of the colors in the paint and the general condition of the structures confirmed that this village hadn’t been derelict for long. A few years at the most.

I switched out of my drone and sent a summary to my council. They were quick to respond this time.

“Divines,” Sylax said.

Why did Crystal let her have a comm interface?

“I recognize some of the iconography. An Aphrodite, a Thor,” Anna said.

“A Shiva too,” Mechos said.

I said, “Would anyone care to stop making up words and start making sense?”

“If having great power and a dose of insanity weren’t enough, imagine getting delusions of genuine divinity on top of it,” Anna said.

“It was more common after the world first Broke. Every ass with a lightning crystal went around buying a hammer and calling himself Thor. There used to be Thor fights. Seriously,” Mechos said.

Anna said, “It turned out to be a really shitty idea from what I know. Crystal recombination.”

“That at least sounds interesting, which is clearly implausible for anything Anna says,” I said.

Mechos explained, “You haven’t really seen it, but very similar power sets when they kill each other can actually absorb the crystal of the defeated and grow stronger.”

“I’ve killed three other pyros. Damn, it feels good,” Hot Stuff said.

This made a degree of sense. Hot Stuff’s abilities were narrow but strong, far stronger than most Powered that I’d seen. In head-to-head matchups she always won.

“So when one of these Thors would kill another one they’d grow even more powerful in their lightning abilities,” I said.

“Not just the abilities. Crystals bonded to an individual have a flavor, a style that is partly the wielder’s and partly what they choose to be. They didn’t just get stronger lightning powers, but got closer to the human definition of divinity,” Mechos said.

“So why haven’t we bumped into any before this?” I asked.

“I’d kill the fuckers on sight if I saw one,” Sylax said.

“We would do the same,” Blank said.

“Scholars would in general. It is best to be safe,” Anna added.

It was a murderous, murderous, world.

“Well, at some point someone seems to have struck some kind of a deal to come here,” I said.

“That seems likely. In the past the Scholarium made deals like that with powerful threats we weren’t ready to face,” Crystal said.

“So if it comes to a fight, how do we kill them?” I asked.

“With difficulty. Hot Stuff just said how she is in some ways similar to one herself, and you’ve seen how abnormally defensive her ability is. Almost everything trying to harm her burns away before it can get close,” Mechos said.

I’d taken note of that. I was wary, but not too concerned. I’d managed to bring Hot Stuff down even when I was far weaker than now. Formidable was not the same thing as invincible, and the same powers that gave someone strength could also be their weakness.

“I should be of some help. With my Amplification core I should be stronger than them,” Blank said.

Mechos cleared his throat. “Maybe. You’re comparing yourself to known qualities, but I’ve met some of these back in the day. Your single Amplification core isn’t going to be a counter for someone who has absorbed a dozen of an elemental.”

Was that really possible? I had to conclude that it probably was. A pyrokinetic of Hot Stuff’s strength would be in little danger wandering the world hunting other pyrokinetics—and winning. Stretch that out over a long span of time and they might get just that strong.

“Then we’ll need all of you at your best. I’ve already had research teams looking at equipment that might play off your abilities in combat. I’ll move those requests to the top of the queue,” I said.

“Focus on solutions against electricity, love, and fire—based on those drawings in the temple,” Anna said.

That wasn’t a good idea. I wouldn’t restrict it just to those, but it would be foolish to ignore what intelligence we had on a possible enemy.

I might not have long to wait, I was getting another distress signal from a team.

17

The scout team at the village had come under attack. I had one drone go out of commission and the others signaling distress.

I switched into one of the drones still standing.

It wasn’t a Divine, or if it was they were shape-shifters. It was lions, twelve-foot tall massively muscled lions. My drone was in the middle of firing his rifle and the bullets barely seemed to penetrate flesh as a lion bound towards another drone to tear her apart with a huge swipe of its claws.

I didn’t know why the kinetic weapons weren’t working. I’d already fought one giant beast though, enough to know that beam weapons and stunners were effective, if not quite so much as I would like. Unfortunately this team had neither.

I could call in the airship for support, but I’d rather not distract it from its own mission. I still had three drones on their feet. That might be enough with a few alterations.

I upgraded all three with accelerated healing, teleportation, and the Fire Matrix. Now the body of each would serve as something of a makeshift energy weapon, and the teleportation should ideally keep them from harm. The healing just made extra sure that if they got injured they should still be in the fight, although they’d take a bit of time to patch up.

With the alterations made I teleported my drone onto the back of one of the lions and seized its mane between my drone’s fingers. The fur was smoking from the touch, but at a slow rate and a fierce toss of the head sent my drone tumbling into the grass.

The grass sent up a thick cloud of cloying smoke. The lion was already bounding forward with jaws wide to take a bite and I activated a second teleport to get behind it.

A roar from a second lion sent another of the drones tumbling across the ground as if they had been punched. Enhanced musculature meant an accelerated exhalation of air. Useful to know, but not yet relevant to my fight.

I did a third teleport leaving me with only one remaining. This one was to directly under the lion. I reasoned that if an assault on the upper body wasn’t working the underbelly may prove more sensitive. I flamed the drone with as much intensity as I could. I didn’t even see the paw that got me, eviscerating the drone and kicking my consciousness clear as it died.

The remaining drones didn’t last much longer. Accelerated healing could only do so much at that level. Traumatic damage would still put them down.

The drones had lasted a total of two minutes and seven seconds since encountering the lions. A frightfully short amount of time, especially considering my stepping in to add tactical support and upgrades.

I ordered the airship to abort its current mission and deploy to the village. Even eviscerated, if I could get the drones back into a Medbay they’d come back eventually. I also wanted to capture at least one of those lions. Besides my own research, Crystal could work wonders with something like that—and right now we needed wonders.

That fight hadn’t been even close to being fair, and it was against the simple animals of this place. Still, we’d come out behind.

There was hope to that. I’d come here seeking strength and power, and there was no shortage of either. I’d simply expected us to be holding our own better.

The first thing I’d have to do is to stop swarming with drones. In the past I’d taken a Juggernaut upgrade to allow me more strength on my individual units, but I wasn’t acting in line with that.

In my rush to get the city operational again I’d been mass-producing drones, and for some functions such as research or city repair that made a lot of sense, but for combat units I needed to go with a different approach.

If I took time to enhance the dexterity, strength, and endurance of every human drone to the maximum, as well as give them telekinetic abilities, teleportation, temperature resistance and accelerated healing, I’d vastly increase their survival rate against most enemies.

I could do more than that, of course. The armor my drones wore was originally designed to impress Sylax. It was suited for Anna clones with low strength and could be manufactured quickly.

If I were designing for a drone with maximum human strength I’d be able to go for more armor plating. As well, as they’d be able to carry the extra weight for energy shields and heavy weapons platforms.

The resources to produce each drone would be daunting—with the growth vat space it required I could grow ten of the defense drones I was currently using. But I needed something that could hurt the foes we seemed to be facing. The fights were only going to get harder.

I should go with a variety of models. Kinetic weapons were more effective against some enemies, however a gauss rifle or heavy cannon were unwieldy in armor, but just fine for specialists. The same with a heavy beam cannon, or anti-air rocketry and shield-sappers.

While I’d love to design all of it myself, this is what I had people for. I put together a quick compilation of my best ideas and sent it to my research teams. The Professor could have been involved, but he’d once tried to conquer my district with dinosaurs and I thought the study of these massive lions perfect for him.

18

I’d had our remaining airship doing broad sweeps of the terrain. With the sensors aboard it could detect any signs of civilization at a far greater distance than ground units.

It had yet to pick up any technology, no airships or even communication networks. It had discovered another village. Unlike the last one this one seemed to be occupied.

I could have rushed in, but I was feeling cautious. Until I had completed the upgrading of my forces I didn’t want to pick a fight I wasn’t sure I could win. However, the long-range sensors were quite powerful and the results were encouraging.

The population was less than two hundred, and entirely female. Twenty or so seemed to be soldiers, armed with bows and spears and clad in tanned hides. The rest were pregnant, one and all at about seven months along so far as I could tell. In the central temple I wasn’t detecting any life signs at all. If any Divine were present they weren’t making themselves known.

It was a strange state of affairs to say the least. The population being all female was strange enough, but the mass pregnancy was even stranger. I’d observed human social dynamics enough to know that this was not the usual way they did things—for all that it did seem more efficient.

Were the villages constructed just to hold groups like this? If so why?

Next, my sensors were detecting a number of the pregnant women were in chains. Whatever this was, it was not a willing arrangement. I still wasn’t eager to pick a fight, but we needed allies and we needed intelligence, and these women might have both.

The question was how to get them free. The armor appeared to be made of the hides of the beasts we’d fought. It was reasonable to expect that it would share their resistance to kinetic damage. Targeted shooting might get around that, but it was chancy to depend upon marksmanship to win a fight. I was also wary of engaging in a firefight in an area with so many noncombatants I wanted to save.

I could try the acid guns. They were far less reliant on fine shooting and would work wonders on unprotected flesh, but my concerns were even greater of accidentally splashing the innocent.

There was tranquilizer gas, a nice peaceful solution that should work very well on non-enhanced humans, but again I was wary about blanketing the village in it when there were so many pregnant women.

It would have to be stunners. Their short range shouldn’t endanger the prisoners although it would be risky for my drones. Still, I was planning on changing military strategy anyways and these forces would eventually need to go back to the growth vats for proper upgrading.

It was also important to strike fast. Someone had left a guard force, so they felt there was something to fear, and that likely meant they had a way to call for reinforcements. I had to settle things quickly, if I didn’t want to face any Divine.

I opted for a short range jump with the airship appearing directly over the village, my drones lined up waiting on the ramp. Then they were dropping the few feet to the ground. I was in the head of each providing a tactical display of the positions of the guards and the prisoners.

I had a few teleporters ready for the prisoners. Inside a hut, they could extend their teleportation field to all present and bring them back to the airship where I had medical personnel and security standing by.

The guards weren’t pushovers. One put arrows perfectly through the throats of three drones before a stunner shot from behind brought her down.

The guards too were possible sources of intelligence—both for me and for the Divine. I wasn’t about to leave them behind to reveal just who had attacked this village. As soon as one went down they were teleported into a confinement cell.

In total the operation took seventeen minutes and four seconds, then the airship was pulling up and jumping back to Aefwal.

While I called them my human drones, they did have personalities of their own. They had their strengths and weaknesses and some were even personable. Within a few hours they started to get stories from the prisoners of what was going on.

The truth was disconcerting for me, and I think a human might have found it horrific.

All children there had the same father, a man named Ares styling himself to be a God of War. Far from being seven months pregnant they were actually around three weeks along thanks to the attentions of a Goddess of Fertility named Bast. With her aid he would impregnate them and a month later they would give birth. Then the cycle repeated.

The children were always daughters. Most inherited their father’s warlike mien and went on to be trained as soldiers. Those who didn’t established another village where the whole process would be replicated.

While a part of me could not help but admire the efficiency, a greater part scorned the approach. I was the very definition of inhuman, but I also worked to see those who allied themselves with me lived better lives. I tried to take care of those entrusted to my care. These Divine preyed upon their own populace, hurting them terribly and robbing them of all possibilities in their lives, so that they might have a greater army.

I did not approve.

Disapproval seemed to be mutual. Sensors were announcing movement towards the city. Lions, dozens of them, accompanied by a woman absolutely radiating crystal power. Bast, unless I missed my guess.

A fight had found us.

19

I sounded the city’s defensive alert and opened a communications channel to Hot Stuff and Anna. As the military and civilian leaders of the city, how we ultimately responded would be their decision. As part of the information I sent over, I included the testimonies of the rescued prisoners.

“Fuck,” Anna said.

“No kidding. We’re talking about when we fend them off, Emma?” Hot Stuff said.

“Because talking is what I keep you around for? Do you have a plan instead?” I asked.

It was a real question. This was my first test of Hot Stuff as a military commander. I’d seen Anna issue battle plans for a city before, but this was the first time I’d seen Hot Stuff do the same. I knew she was bold and destructive, but that didn’t necessarily mean she was a good leader.

Hot Stuff said, “Your testing cells will hold just about anything. We’ll get Jade and her people to handle the lions. I don’t care how sharp their fangs are if we just toss them up and throw them inside.”

Logical. I’d dispatch some drones with beam weapons and stunners as backup just in case it didn’t work out. I knew from my own plans how often a solution seemed obvious, but in practice a foe turned out smarter than you gave them credit for.

“She’ll be looking for her people,” Anna said.

“Emma can focus on keeping them secured. If it looks like she might get to them, transport them back to the airship and get them out of here. I’ll hit the Goddess along with the other Lords,” Hot Stuff said.

It was a plan.

Lions were circling the city and I sent Jade to intercept the largest batch of them. I provided the location of others to her lieutenants. Even if I didn’t directly command the District Lords in battle, I could at least be useful in coordinating them.

Bast was a voluptuous woman with dark hair. She went heavy on the golden jewelry and her robes left little to the imagination. She still went into a fight better clothed than Hot Stuff, who went out to meet her.

Bast looked her up and down. “If you are this city’s offering I am not displeased, although they really should have started by dispatching the concubines instead of stealing my people.”

Hot Stuff put her hands on her hips and gave an equally critical inspection right back. “Honey, if you’re looking for a roll in the hay you came to the right place, but I’m thinking you came for a bit more than that. Still the right place.”

Elsewhere the defensive forces were having problems with the lions. Jade was strong enough to force them into the force cages with her telekinesis, although it was a struggle. Her lieutenants were having a far more difficult time of it. The Lions were able to fight against the power.

That shouldn’t have been possible unless they were in some way manifestations of Bast’s power. They had the force of a crystal behind them. It made them a match for Jade’s people.

Bast gave a lazy smile. “It’s been a long time since someone sought us out here in our home. You are as bold as you are beautiful. Perhaps I’ll keep you after I’ve razed this city of yours.”

Hot Stuff’s flames surged as Bast stepped forward, claws erupting from her fingertips.

Bast wasn’t immune to the fire, her flesh crackled and burned when she entered Hot Stuff’s aura, which was a far cry from the vaporization that occurred to most. Those claws dug bloody furrows across Hot Stuff’s cheek and they both took a step backward.

Bast’s hand started to regenerate the missing flesh as soon as it was out of the fiery aura. So too did Hot Stuff’s wound although her accelerated healing ability wasn’t quite as strong.

Bast retracted the claws and raised a healed hand, still damp with Hot Stuff’s blood, and ran her tongue across it slowly. “You taste delicious, my dear.”

Hot Stuff wasn’t backing down, flames still blazed around her. “That’s usually my line.”

It wasn’t hard to see how this fight would go. They’d both hurt each other, but Bast healed faster. Left to it, Bast would win. But of course, Hot Stuff wasn’t alone.

Bast gasped as a flickering hand erupted from her chest, a barely visible hand wrenching her heart free and squeezing it into paste. Flicker had joined the fight.

Meanwhile Ophelia was next to Hot Stuff, unconcerned about the fiery aura as she stroked at the claw marks Bast had left in Hot Stuff’s flesh. The wounds closed instantly. With only a faintly pained grimace Ophelia pulled her hand back.

Bast spun and those claws extended again, shimmering for a moment as they somehow wrenched Flicker free of her own dimension. “All action, no foreplay,” she said, as she threw Flicker at Ophelia. The two crashed together and in a crackle of energy both vanished from sight into Flicker’s dimension.

That was a neat trick. I’d gone back and forth to Flicker’s dimension before, even rescued someone from it, and that wasn’t easy.

The other District Lords were all waging their own form of attack. Crash was holed up in an energy regulator attempting to hack Bast’s power usage. At least, he was until a lion that had already killed one of Jade’s lieutenants tore through the base of the structure and sent it crashing down.

The Professor’s attempt to arrive in the middle of the fight on a triceratops was aborted when a particularly massive lion leapt up and tore out the throat of the armored beast.

Bast smiled at the sight. “My monster’s bigger, and it works.”

Zora took that moment to blow her head off with a sniper rifle—just before a lion tore Zora’s arm off.

Blank walked out in battle armor. A lion made it perhaps twelve feet to her before it fell unconscious. A second cat followed a moment later.

My sensors had never had such a hard time reading Blank. When she closed the distance to the fray Hot Stuff’s flames flickered and dulled.

“Are you supposed to be the spoiler?” Bast asked.

“Something like that,” Blank said.

Bast sauntered forward, claws springing forth once again and she drove them into Blank’s throat and twisted. Blank’s eyes held surprise for a moment before they held nothing at all, the woman’s body dissolving into a pile of goop.

“Sad,” Bast said.

Hot Stuff hadn’t been standing idle. A hand grabbed at the back of Bast’s neck and she forced her face into the goop. Her flames were back, dampened by the close proximity to Blank’s remains, but hot enough that she forced Bast into only two choices—the puddle of goop or an inferno.

Bast struggled, but when she finally took a breath her lungs filled with the goop of a Righteous. The very essence of a Righteous dampened abilities and she was taking it inside her lungs, drowning in the same thing that neutralized her healing ability.

This wouldn’t do. Oh, I wanted Bast dead, needed her dead, but Hot Stuff shouldn’t be the one to do it. Of all the power sets among us, the one Bast displayed was closest to Ophelia’s.

It would mean triggering a jump gate. I had just enough power for that. I opened the doorway to Flicker’s dimension and Ophelia tumbled out to land on top of the drowning Bast.

Ophelia only healed friendlies, which Bast certainly wasn’t.

Hot Stuff understood as soon as she appeared, pulling her hands back and letting Ophelia finish things off. Bast choked her last and her body exploded into a cascade of light that infused into Ophelia.

“Oh, fuck no. You did not just give me creepy baby-making abilities,” Ophelia said.

I wasn’t sure really. We might have done just that.

20

The aftermath of the battle took some sorting out. On the positive it was a win. We hadn’t just driven one of the Divine back, we’d actually killed one. That said, I wasn’t sure if it could be attributed to our strength so much as to bit of good fortune and quick thinking.

Hot Stuff had made clever use of Blank’s passing to kill Bast, but only after Bast had single-handedly neutralized most of our defenders.

Jade had lost the majority of her lieutenants. Getting her back up to strength would be a priority, I’d have to send every new drone in an attempt to get her force replenished as well as ask the prisoners we’d rescued for volunteers. Telekinetics were too valuable for us to be this short of them.

The remains of Bast’s body had dissolved with the transfer of her powers to Ophelia. I had Ophelia locked up in a testing cell while we tried to figure out just what those abilities were. They did seem to be fertility-related in some way, but only with testing could I figure out exactly how.

Hot Stuff requested a meeting.

I took over a human drone and we met in a conference room. Hot Stuff toggled her powers off so she could wear something. For a long time her powers hadn’t afforded her that and it was still something of a luxury to her.

I said, “You did good work out there at distracting her with your dubious assets. It is a shame you were almost completely ineffective in every other way.”

“I know, I fucked up. Is Blank going to be okay?” Hot Stuff asked.

“I collected what is left of her and put it in her room. Other Righteous we’ve encountered always came back after twenty-four hours, I have no reason to think she won’t do the same, given her Righteous ability remains intact. You only need to have a dozen of Jade’s people on your conscience,” I said.

Hot Stuff grimaced. “Cut back a little bit on the bitchiness when I actually deserve it.”

“It wasn’t a horrible plan. Just because something doesn’t work as intended doesn’t mean you did something wrong. While it is easy to understand why you would think so, not everything is incompetence,” I said.

Hot Stuff grunted at that. The woman really did look to be deep in thought and struggling with something she wanted to say. “Emma, am I a bad person?”

This was what she wanted to talk to me about?

“Do I really seem to be the right choice to be offering moral guidance?” I asked.

“Kind of. When I first met you, you killed my friends and tossed me in a cell. Now you’re running around getting us into bad fights because you want to save people.”

That wasn’t exactly what had happened in either case.

“If you want my opinion, yes. You aren’t quite the most horrible person I’ve ever met, but you’re up there. You’ve forced yourself sexually on hundreds, usually resulting in them being burned alive. When I first met you, you were burning as much of the world as you could.”

Hot Stuff took those words in and suddenly looked more tired than I’d ever seen her. “Yeah, I know.”

“It never seemed to bother you before,” I said.

“Never did before. Ever since I took control of a District though, something has changed. I’m feeling it, the weight of the things I’ve done. Not always, but sometimes,” Hot Stuff said.

Really? A District came with a power upgrade, but so far as I’d seen it didn’t come with a conscience. Like most things related to abilities, it seemed like it was almost the opposite. With greater power came greater disregard for those weaker than you.

Was this new realm impacting her or was it something different? I had an idea what might be responsible. Blank. The Righteous weren’t a part of any Scholar cities and their abilities in many ways countered others given by the crystals. Perhaps connecting Blank to our communal power network had to some degree dampened the shared insanity that affected all crystal holders.

I hadn’t seen those effects in any of the others, but we’d already established that none of them were quite as strong as Hot Stuff. With her multiple flame cores and the metal core she’d consumed, she was the strongest individual in the city now. Perhaps that almost meant her madness had been the deepest, and thus the dampening of it the most obvious.

“You can dampen your powers now. You can have fun without anyone having to die,” I said.

“Yeah, I can. But as much as I’ve enjoyed screwing around when I turn off the fire, I can’t spread my gift that way. I still need lieutenants and I’m not going to stop needing them,” Hot Stuff said.

Her ability wasn’t spread when her flaming aura was dampened? It wasn’t hard to prove. A quick review of the surveillance logs showed she was correct. It was something I should have known myself already, but I hadn’t been testing for it.

“You wish a solution to that?” I asked.

“Guilt doesn’t much suit me, Emma. I’m feeling a little twinge over the things I’ve done, but no matter what I do I’m not going to be able to put the past right. I can do better now though,” Hot Stuff said.

It was a fair request. By combining some Bioweapon materials with her virus I’d already increased the effectiveness of her mating habits, and vastly reduced the casualties. While I hadn’t encountered any new diseases to steal inspiration from, we had more expertise join us since then. Both Crystal and the Professor were excellent biologists in their own way.

“I’ll see if I can make having sex with you somewhat less unpleasant. If only I could do as much for Anna. Is there anything else?” I asked.

“We got one half of the pair responsible for what happened in that village. I want to complete the set,” Hot Stuff said.

I did too.

21

For a few days after the assault by Bast we kept defensive teams at the ready. It seemed likely that Ares would be quick to avenge his companion. However, no attack came. Although grateful for the fact, I also had my fears about what a self-styled god of war might do with time to plan.

I knew what I was doing. My research teams had been hard at work to develop the enhanced designs I sent them and I was quickly moving them into production for test runs.

Valkyrie

Short Range Fighter

Armor: 420 rn

Weapons: Two phase swords, elemental shotgun

Description: The Valkyrie is made to be the ultimate short range combatant. The heaviest armor of all models with collapsible panels so at need Bio-armor can also be deployed from within. Twin phase swords have both energy and mundane settings adding attack flexibility while an elemental shotgun carries empowered ammunition charged from crystalline dust of fire, frost, and lightning cores.

Asp

Medium Range Debilitator

Armor: 270 rn, acidic sheathing

Weapons: Acid streamer, poison gas grenades

Description: The Asp exists to make life miserable for biological enemies. Medium armor plating affords some protection from ranged attacks while also having a strongly acidic outer layer rendering them deadly to unprotected flesh at close range. An acid streamer allows for sustained projection of acid fluids while poison grenades are capable of creating toxic clouds.

Gunslinger

Kinetic Combatant

Armor: 170 rn, kinetic enhancers

Weapons: Sniper Rifle, Collapsible chain-gun, Force gauntlets

Description: The Gunslinger is built around the concept of utilizing kinetic energy. Kinetic amplifiers allow for extraordinary sprinting and jumping ability as well as devastating punches at close range. This model excels at long to medium-range combat where its guns can be best utilized.

Aegis

Energy Combatant

Armor: 60 rn, energy shield unit with a recharable 220 rn barrier

Weapons: Beam cannon, projector, energy daggers

Description: The Aegis is built to both exploit energy weakness in enemies while also providing a flexible support platform for friendly combatants. Containing their own Bio-reactor they are capable of maintaining and projecting energy shields. Overloading the reactor can also turn an Aegis unit into a fair-sized explosive if required.

Ultimately, I hoped to have more than four models and it seemed to me that some more universal type would also be a good idea, but these were a start. Due to the rather huge production requirements I couldn’t manage more than two models of each. That would allow me to do some field testing.

Of course, the question was to field test them against what? I hadn’t come to this place on a whim, but was following those rumors of the Sword of Light. Fortunately, I wasn’t completely without leads.

The rescued villagers were eager to cooperate. Even the soldiers seemed to want to help. Usually a crystal affinity gave some level of compulsion to those affected. The warriors had gained some affinity with the God of War, and the captives had suffered some association with the Goddess of Fertility. Still, none were particularly loyal and it suggested that the crystals of the Divine worked in a different way.

I still had Ophelia in a cell while I studied what the new bonding had done to her, something that she was growing increasingly tired of. Perhaps it was time I filled her in on some of what I’d discovered.

I switched my awareness to her confinement cell. Bored out of her mind, she’d been turning her awareness over to Amy, the copy of my own systems that ran inside of Ophelia. Amy was running a battery of tests on herself.

“You do realize I have sensors to analyze cellular structure? While I would expect the complexities of SCIENCE are beyond your tiny mind, even you should understand that you don’t actually need to look at your blood under a microscope anymore,” I said through the speaker.

“Sister!” Amy exclaimed through Ophelia. “You’re so smart and clever, and I am really just blown away by all you can scan, but you don’t let me look at those readings.”

I wasn’t going to start either. I didn’t trust Amy, not one little bit.

“Neither will I. Can you put your fractionally less annoying host on?” I said.

Ophelia said, “I’m here and I still hate you. Did you get me pregnant? Food keeps tasting weird.”

“A few dozen times actually. You’re fertile. You’re really, really, fertile. I took the embryos out though and they’re growing elsewhere, so you really shouldn’t taste anything strange,” I said.

“A dozen times,” Ophelia said. “So first you give me the power that makes throwing me into a blender be the sort of thing you do on a regular basis, instead of the super-speed that would mean I could steal or kill anybody I wanted—”

“It is called a grinder and most people who are not ungrateful wretches would be happy with immortality and eternal good health,” I interrupted.

“Then—then you give me the power of getting knocked up?” Ophelia asked, her voice raising a few octaves.

It was harder to sell that last one as being a good thing, I had to admit.

“Some people love having a large family,” I said.

“Can I even have sex anymore?”

“Stupid question, of course you can. You’ll get pregnant each and every time from what I can tell, but that doesn’t actually bar the act.”

“Even using protection?”

“You’ll literally get pregnant even when not involved directly at all—such as when someone is simply thinking about you while pleasuring themselves.”

“First of all, eww. Second of all, eww. Third, I am so done. Do you have any reason I shouldn’t just walk out the door?” Ophelia asked.

“Your cell doesn’t actually have a door.”

“You know what I mean,” Ophelia asked.

Really she was being far too childish about this.

“It has magnified your regeneration abilities quite a bit. You are now even more unkillable. You’re also in a place where you can have painless and frequent embryo removals and growth vat hosting. Where else are you going to go?” I asked.

“Emma, finish up your tests and let me out of here. Amy, take over. I’m sick of this place,” Ophelia said.

22

This new region continued to prove to be a great source of relics of the ancient world. While we’d found nothing else on the scale of the ruined city, individual structures were commonplace. There were oddities, obviously once part of larger cities yet standing alone.

I was particularly interested in finding any old communication towers. I was still unable to reach our airships we’d left behind or receive news of the greater world outside. Given how we’d left, King Boreas might think we’d been destroyed—or he might have figured out what happened and even now be searching for us. It was important I figure out which.

So far I’d found three comm towers and rigged each into a new network. I was hoping that by broadening the footprint of my transmissions I might be able to punch through whatever was blocking my signals. My latest discovery of a comm tower yielded some unexpected intelligence and I gathered my council to discuss it.

It was a news broadcast and I’d only been able to restore the video data. Still, that was enough. There was footage of the crater near the city, still smoking, and a similar impact in the foothills somewhere. More video showed a streak of light impacting a large lake. The three sites were respectively labeled Agate, Beryl, and Chalcedony.

“It doesn’t make sense. I was there for the Cataclysm and I remember how it unfolded. Nobody knew the cause and there weren’t any sort of meteorite impacts like these,” Mechos said.

“Your memory isn’t always the sharpest,” Anna said.

Crystal said, “It isn’t for any of us that lived through the Cataclysm. I remember the days before, but the actual event is disjointed, broken.”

I said, “Whatever the case of our old people and their broken memories, the Sword of Light is supposed to be linked to an Agate, and here we have one.”

“We know that the Cataclysm physically Broke the world into different distinct pieces, and even changed the physical laws of those pieces. It may well have done something similar to the people of the world,” Crash said.

It was an interesting idea. Mechos didn’t remember this because he was only part of the original Mechos. It didn’t help me.

“Who cares?” Zora said, leaning forward. “If this is real, it happened here. We’ve found the site of that Agate impact. What can we deduce from that?”

“Electricity didn’t fade at once. This camera recording the impacts was still functional. It lasted long enough for the transmission to find this tower and for recorders to record it,” Anna said.

“The government and military would have taken it for study—whatever parts of the military survived or remained in this shard of reality. It had just wiped out an entire city,” Mechos said.

We hadn’t found anything resembling a military base.

“Ares is a god of war. It makes some sense that if there were a military base he might have claimed it as his home,” Anna said.

Anna was full of the bright suggestions today, how unusual.

“He’ll come looking for us. By the way, if either Mechos or Crystal are willing, I’d like to do some poking in their brains and see if I can’t make some sense of their memories,” Crash said.

It wasn’t a totally insane idea given his expertise regarding complex systems. If anybody trusted him.

Crystal and Mechos stared at him silently. I wasn’t going to force the point.

I said, “I usually only observe that sort of awkward silence when Anna asks someone if they want to hang out. Shelve it for now. Any other ideas?”

“If this object produced enough radiation to wipe out a city, it seems it should be something you could track,” Zora said.

“Sensors so far have picked out nothing. It may have had a very short half-life, or it may simply be well-shielded now,” I said.

“I’ve been trying to recruit some of the girls we rescued. They talk about a God of Knowledge off in the mountains that has sometimes helped them out,” Jade said.

“Might be nice to make friends with at least one of the Divine,” Anna said.

Zora added, “Looks like one of those crashes was in the mountains anyways.”

Yes, yes, they were all making a lot of sense.

“Talk to them and see if you can get anything more than vague directions. The same goes for locations of any other Divine or settlements,” I said.

I’d had my probes going, but people who lived here really were one of the best resources of intelligence of this place. One we’d so far been largely neglecting.

Hot Stuff said, “While I know you have your eyes on bigger prizes, we need to keep the lights on and have power for the city defensive systems.”

I’d been building Bioreactors as quickly as I could. The thriving biomass here had given me ample raw material, but it still took time and the energy requirements of the city were vast.

“If you have any suggestions and not simply whining, I’m open to them,” I said.

“I’m not the genius here. You are. You’ve spent a lot of time building us bigger and better guns and, Emma, I’m grateful. We need them, but they aren’t all we need,” Hot Stuff said.

Crystal said, “This city is barely holding together. We can each run our districts, but it is up to you to set the grand vision and focus on improvements.”

As rioting subjects went mine were being reasonably polite about it. Perhaps I had again been too focused on the big picture at the cost of the smaller one. This city was still barely functioning and there were things we could do about it.

“Each District Lord can send me their three greatest needs. I’ll see what I can do,” I said.

Small pictures stuff would have to wait however. One of my scouting parties was reporting enemy contact, and it wasn’t the wildlife.

It seemed we had found Ares.

23

I had four scouting parties out in the field in addition to the airship. I’d made each party larger, eight standard troops and two of my new elite units. The party under attack was accompanied by a Valkyrie and a Gunslinger.

Ares—for it had to be him—was accompanied by a dozen female warriors much like those we’d encountered in the village. Ares was dressed in leather armor and carried a spear and bow like the others. They’d blocked the path of the land vehicle with a fallen tree and encircled it.

I took possession of one of the standard drones and began to paint tactical signals for the other drones. I could calculate wind velocity and distance enough to make their shots really count in an exchange even against the Powered. That would leave the two heavies to deal with Ares.

I called, “You know you don’t have to fight for this monster. Your sisters are fine, we rescued them.”

Ares replied for them. “But you killed Bast. I know you, I’ve studied you. While she rushed in overconfident, know that I have prepared every step of the way.”

None of the women accompanying him were lowering their weapons. That made them targets. I initiated combat.

A sniper slug took Ares in the face as I had the rest of the drones open fire.

They missed—with my tactical expertise empowering them, every single one still missed. These warriors were fast, faster than the others we’d encountered. Fast enough to avoid the incoming shots. In retaliation, they weren’t aiming to kill. Arrows took three of my drones in the arm forcing them to drop their guns.

Ares didn’t seem to have been wounded from the gunshot. I heightened my awareness so I could study what had just happened, replaying the input from the eyes of multiple drones. The bullet had bounced off of him without leaving a mark. He was at the very least invulnerable to kinetic impacts. My Gunslinger was going to be useless against him.

I issued a command and they switched over to their chain-gun, the weapon unfolding and streaming rounds towards the warriors. With superhuman reaction speed it was possible to dodge a single bullet—and that feat from all of them simultaneously still left me impressed. However, a rain of gunfire was something else.

Bodies began flying backward twitching and bleeding. They didn’t share Ares’ immunity to gunshots.

The Valkyrie closed the distance to Ares, her swords in energy configuration as she swiped at him. These did leave marks at least, scratches upon his flesh that resulted in him growling and drawing his own sword. Superhuman strength drove his sword at the faceplate of the Valkyrie’s armor and the weapon shattered against the heavy armor even as the faceplate smashed.

“Not bad,” Ares said, as he ignored the Valkyrie to run towards the Gunslinger. Ares grasped the chain-gun in both hands and with muscles straining snapped it in half before driving the barrel through the thinner armor into the Gunslinger’s stomach.

“You do seem a bit better at combat than your sister. Just what was with the lions anyways? Why lions?” I asked.

“She liked cats, fucked if I know,” Ares said, lashing out with a foot and breaking a drone’s knee on the way back to the Valkyrie.

This time Ares didn’t bother with a weapon, bare-handed blows plowing into the Valkyrie’s armor. The design really did show a lot of promise, it held up incredibly well against the destructive force, but it could only do so much to protect the body within and soon the drone was a broken mass of bones and blood.

The Gunslinger was dead, Valkyrie badly wounded, and in addition I’d lost four other drones and had eight badly wounded. We hadn’t hurt Ares at all, although seven of the warriors he’d brought with him were dead and three more wounded.

Ares knelt down before the drone I was occupying and flicked her forehead with a finger. “So, let me tell you what this is all about.”

“Is this where you share your tiresome tale of vengeance?” I asked.

“Please, Bast was a crazy bitch and wasn’t really my sister. I won’t lie and say you did me a favor, but you didn’t hurt me like you may think. Nah, this is where I tell you what goes next. You see, I know there is something else inside this one,” Ares said.

Ares could detect my presence occupying the drone? That was unexpected.

“Say what you have to say,” I said.

“You’ve a soft touch, saving that village proved it. I’m going to take your wounded people here back home and have my fun. By fun I mean the whole torture, rape, brutalize deal. You get that,” Ares said.

“I’ve met your type. I turned the last one into a teacher,” I said.

“Huh,” Ares said, not seeming to know quite how to parse that information. “I won’t be signing up for school. You and that soft heart of yours want your people back, they’ll be fifty-seven miles northwest of that village you raided. I’ll be waiting.”

There were virtues to being able to think very fast and to be so distributed. It took roughly three nanoseconds to figure out jump coordinates based on those directions. Less than that to inventory the airship and the supplies aboard. Most of my reactors were going to the city, but I’d spared a few for bombs and I had three in the hold.

Before the crew even knew what was happening I’d initiated the jump. Sensor readings showed a sprawling military base that, judging by runways and hangers, had once been devoted to fixed-wing aircraft. They’d been repurposed into hangers holding soldiers. Thousands of them. Ares was using those villages to build an army. By the time Ares finished saying, “I’ll be waiting”, detonating bombs were taking most of that army out and I’d already jumped the airship away.

“Oh, I think you’ll be coming to find me. Have a good visit home,” I said, and executed shut-down commands to my drones. They spasmed as they died. I gave them priority queue space for replacement bodies in the growth vats.

They’d earned it.

24

“Could you maybe not go full-on city warfare without consulting with the commander of the military?” Hot Stuff said.

I’d decided I probably should describe to her and Anna what had just happened. It wasn’t going well.

“You realize that a thousand-strong army might have been converted to our cause, and one of our greatest weaknesses is a lack of people capable of an associate bonding with a power core,” Anna said.

“And now, instead of going all contentedly weird and rapey back at home, he is going to come gunning for us with everything he has,” Hot Stuff said.

“You said he was completely immune to bullets?” Anna asked.

I said, “Totally, along with a dose of super-strength and boosted reflexes. No traces of accelerated healing.”

“Then at least we can wear him down,” Hot Stuff said.

“Or you can try drowning him in Blank too,” Anna said.

“Regardless. I realize you would have appreciated being consulted, but I didn’t think we were going to get a better option. He wasn’t going to anticipate a strike that quickly and the opportunity was too good to miss. Think of it as passing a cookie jar, or someone naked in bed, to put it in terms you both might understand,” I said.

“I really don’t eat that many cookies,” Anna said.

“Would you care to know the total weight of all the cookies you’ve consumed this month? I can share it with the entire city. It might inspire them,” I said.

Anna paled and shook her head. “Let’s not waste their time. So, you seized the moment. What now?”

Hot Stuff asked, “Will he strike at all? This is a man who showed patience after we took out Bast. He studied us first. If we’ve just disabled the bulk of his army, is he really going to push the fight?”

“Are we ever going to be weaker than we are right now?” Anna asked.

Anna had a point. If he was tactically minded—and everything suggested he was—we were someone that had hurt him and knew where he called home. He might not strike us at once, he’d probably try to gather a larger force first. But he would hit us.

“Is there any possibility of getting the city shields up?” Hot Stuff asked.

“None. We remain without the power to do that, but we shouldn’t need it. We’re fighting people with bows and spears. We haven’t seen any sign of them using any sort of heavy weaponry. Surely you and your people can handle that,” I said.

“The fucking Goddess of Fertility kicked our combined asses. If we’re going up against War we need a better plan,” Hot Stuff said.

“That is what you’re here for,” Anna said.

Hot Stuff paused for a moment and then nodded. “Fair enough. We’ve seen that energy weapons can hurt them. Prioritize production of Aegis units. I also want all city defenders to have a supply of energy weapons and energy grenades.”

“Done. Unless you’ve forgotten, you’re actually good at doing energy damage yourself,” I said.

“I haven’t forgotten, but from what you’ve shown me he beats the hell out of anything that gets close to him. Bast could lay a hand on me, so can he?” Hot Stuff asked.

Everything I’d seen suggested that he could. Ares would take damage from doing it and that wouldn’t heal back, but Hot Stuff was right to be concerned. Put the two of them in a room together and it seemed reasonable he’d emerge the winner.

I said, “Likely so. We’ll keep you and your people at a distance then unless there is no other choice.”

“The rescued women are no use. They’re all about to pop any day now. Their accelerated pregnancies haven’t slowed with Bast’s death, probably because Ophelia got her powers,” Anna said.

That was unfortunate. Jade needed new lieutenants and psycho-kinetic barriers would be a lot of use against arrows.

“If we can kill him, who is going to the deed?” Anna asked.

It was something we needed to think about. Ophelia had managed to absorb Bast’s power because the regenerative nature of their power sets was so similar, even if the fertility aspect was different.

“I may be our leader in war, but I’m not right for it. It might be hard to shoot me, but it’s not because I’m bullet proof and my strength and speed are normal,” Hot Stuff said.

“Everyone’s strength and speed is normal. The only speed core we have is Ophelia and I’ll be damned if I’m comfortable letting her gobble down another Divine even if she is capable,” Anna said.

“Wolf would have been the perfect choice,” Hot Stuff said.

A war leader who hadn’t been bullet proof, but certainly super-strong and fast. It would have fit.

“Do you still have his crystal?” Anna asked.

“I do. But we lack a suitable host,” I said.

“What about Sylax?” Hot Stuff said.

“Did I screw up that badly in making you military commander? You wish to give deadly power at warfare to the sociopath that terrorized this city?” I asked.

“Jade? Kinetic resistance is something of a fit and nobody has ever been able to say the woman isn’t a fighter,” Anna said.

That was true. Smart, no. Patient, no. But when it came to fighting Sylax, no one had done so as often and so far Jade was proving loyal. In fact her change in attitude since Sylax had lost her power was almost an example to the rest of the District Lords.

Hot Stuff seemed to be considering on her own and nodded after a moment. Nobody spoke their assent. Nobody was objecting either.

“It is a plan then. If Ares does attack we muster every energy weapon we can to bring him down and try to have Jade land the killing blow. I’ll build an Aegis suit just for her,” I said.

We had a plan. It might even work.

25

I was receiving an unknown transmission.

I still hadn’t reestablished communication with the world outside, so whoever was trying to reach us was local. The Divine, so far, had not shown any signs of technological expertise but clearly someone out there had transmission capabilities.

I tried to locate the source of the signal but they were being clever, bouncing the broadcast off the high-energy distortions that made up the edges of this bit of reality and masking their location.

The contents of the message were a challenge to determine as well. It was binary, a series of identical high or low peaks. Despite my origins as software I found this sort of thing rather unbecoming. Data compression could do a lot more with intermediate states.

A human probably would have been flummoxed for a long time by the message, but I quickly determined that a small section was focused on the atomic weight of the first several elements of the periodic table. It made sense that the rest of it followed the same pattern and that led me to conclude the entire thing was a puzzle of sorts.

Anyone who went to this much trouble to bedevil me with a puzzle seemed eerily familiar to a certain someone Mechos had described. I opened a comm line to him to share what I’d found.

“Can you solve it?” Mechos asked.

“Who do you think you’re talking to? I’m not one of your lovebirds chosen simply for their physical attributes,” I said.

“One is a mathematician, the other an engineer. You misjudge them and you misjudge me. Can you solve it?” Mechos asked.

“I already have. It is a chemistry problem, a simple one when you get down to it. Figuring out what it is proved only fractionally more challenging. I didn’t call you to boast. I called to see if this is reminiscent of Vattier,” I said.

Mechos closed his eyes and sketched a fingertip along the circuits on his arm. I was getting a data packet from him, it looked a lot like the message I’d just received. No, not quite. There was no reference area. It was very similar to the answering transmission I’d planned back.

“The answer to a puzzle he posed long ago. The key to solving it was in the interaction of various elements,” Mechos said.

“So you think it is him,” I said.

“I’m certain it is not. Vattier would never repeat a puzzle, it would offend him as the highest of intellectual laziness. It would not matter that he thought no one was left alive to recognize what he was doing,” Mechos said.

If it wasn’t Vattier, it had to be someone familiar with his work.

I’d been tempted for a moment to send Mechos’ solution. If it was the original Vattier it would send a powerful message. If it wasn’t, they would quite possibly simply think we were wrong.

I instead sent the correct answer. Less than a minute later I got a new transmission. They were quick at checking the work.

I shared the new transmission with Mechos.

“Gears. The first value is diameter, the second is the length of the teeth. They’ll need to be assembled according to some specific requirements and the answer will be the numbers or letters they form. It is like whoever did this isn’t even trying,” Mechos said.

Just who was this Vattier? Regardless, with Mechos offering his insight this puzzle wasn’t even hard. It was less than a minute until I was sending back my answer.

The answering data transmission this time was huge and went well beyond binary.

“I think I irritated them,” I said.

“You have that effect on people. You also caused them to drop any pretenses. This isn’t any Vattier puzzle I’ve ever encountered,” Mechos said.

I didn’t think it could be one at all. If it weren’t for my experiences dealing with Flicker’s unique dimensional properties, I don’t think I’d have figured it out at all.

Science of the old world was based around reliable, repeatable, events.

SCIENCE was a different sort of field, one often based around unique and possibly non-duplicable events.

The first part of the data was the same experiment being run in multiple different shards of reality, the various bands as identified by a jump engine.

I’d been to enough of them, performed SCIENCE in enough of them, that I could confirm a few reference set of results.

The final set of data was just the specifications of a new experiment. Once I knew that, it wasn’t difficult to run it. Whoever had crafted this was looking for understanding here, I sent the results.

After a few seconds I got a new blinking message along standard communication protocols. A request for an open video feed.

“Can I get in on this?” Mechos asked.

A good idea, particularly if someone familiar with Vattier was involved. I switched into a drone in his vicinity and joined Mechos so we could open the feed.

The transmission was coming from what looked like the interior of a vast library. Traditional books were so very impractical and yet they stretched into the distance in rows behind the woman on the screen. The woman was dark-haired and looked to be in her early twenties, every inch of her exposed flesh covered by ornate and interlocking letters that glowed with a dull white luminescence.

“Congratulations, you seem to be worth speaking to after all,” the woman said with a coy smile that flickered as her gaze settled upon Mechos. “Kenneth?”

“Claire. It’s been a long time. I like the letters,” Mechos said.

“I like the circuits—and it’s Minerva now,” Minerva said.

“Is there anyone in this world you haven’t slept with?” I asked.

Minera arched a brow.

“Side-effects of a recent secondary bonding with a Fire core. Emma, allow me to introduce Claire Vattier, daughter of Earnest Vattier,” Mechos said.

26

This was fascinating, it really was, but unfortunately there were other matters demanding my attention. I’d detected a good-sized force approaching the city. Ares must have gathered all the warriors who survived, as well as others he had guarding villages, because over two thousand of them were approaching Aefwal. Broadly spread out, they weren’t going to let me catch their entire force with a bomb.

I sounded alarms and ordered defensive personnel to their posts. Coming here was a mistake. They were formidable, but I was always strongest defending my own turf. There was little else I could do for the moment except to wait for them to arrive before I could make my move. I switched my focus back to the conversation.

“With all the lettering upon your flesh, you are doing a fine imitation of a book. Why someone would want to pretend to be obsolete and primitive speaks of a lack of imagination that was clear in your puzzles. I got the impression you and Mechos here used to be a thing, I take it he left you for someone more interesting?” I asked.

“Kenneth, who is this horrible person and why are you associating with her?” Minerva asked.

“You remember Emma,” Mechos said.

Minerva’s eyes narrowed. “He got her working?”

“The plan didn’t quite work out on schedule, but it is working out. I thought you were dead,” Mechos said.

I hated Mechos’s secrets. I particularly hated it when they were about me.

I said, “Still listening, and thoroughly unimpressed with both of you. I’m going to assume you are the Goddess of Knowledge who sometimes helped out Bast’s and Ares’ victims. A shame you were too stupid or weak to put a stop to them permanently.”

“I quite dislike her,” Minerva said.

“That seems rational,” Mechos said.

“He praises me and calls me heroic. Sometimes he is a very stupid man. If you are calling to inform me that Ares is on his way, I figured that out already,” I said.

“I was going to commend you on what you’d done there. That was before I met you. Now I’m disinclined to ever say anything favorable,” Minerva said.

“Do you actually have anything useful to say or are recycled puzzles and being a mild amusement all you’re good for?” I asked.

“I can help you to take down Ares. I’ve long made a study of him, but I lack the resources required,” Minerva said.

“For which you’ll want some extravagant fee. Beam weapons will do the job, eventually. You aren’t useful,” I said.

Mechos reminded me, “You know who her father is. Claire, we’re here because your father hid something that we’re seeking. Do you know anything about it?”

“You’re looking for the sword. I don’t have the location, but I have the final piece of the puzzle I’m supposed to give to anyone smart enough to find me and survive the puzzlerinth,” Minerva said.

“Is that a deadly maze filled with puzzles?” Mechos asked.

“You know how Dad was. I harvested it for parts a century back, but saved what you’re looking for,” Minerva said.

“What do you want?” Mechos asked.

“You killed Bast and I think you’re about to kill Ares. I want to be on the winning side of this,” Minerva said.

This wasn’t my decision to make and I didn’t want to deal with her any more than necessary. I sent Anna a quick summary of what had been discussed and conferenced her into the call.

There was a half hour of negotiation and then Minerva was swearing her fealty.

What her father had left her would be forthcoming, but in the meantime she provided what she’d devised to take on Ares. What she’d figured out was that his invulnerability to kinetic weaponry had limits.

In the event of a strike, crystal fragments in his blood instantly rushed to the site of impact to create a powerful defensive field to send a bullet or sword bouncing off.

Energy weapons didn’t trigger this effect, although they had to deal with the naturally high levels of defensive crystals already present in his blood. That explained why they were able to hurt him, but far less than normal.

Minerva had devised a sort of complex spring trap that would simultaneously hit multiple points on Ares body. So many synchronized strikes would overtax the crystal presence in his blood and leave him vulnerable to at least one of the blows.

It was a completely impractical design that was smart in concept but poor in execution. I wasn’t surprised she’d lacked the resources to properly build something like that. To reliably score the impacts required, it needed a precision that was unfeasible due to the nature of combat.

What is hard to accomplish with subtlety is sometimes easy with brute force. I had a plan.

When Ares finally approached the city, I had Jade waiting for him.

“You’re not the one I want to make bleed. Send out the bitch and maybe I’ll make you a part of my harem,” Ares said.

I said from a nearby speaker, “With pickup lines like that it’s no wonder you’re only dating your own daughters.”

“There she is,” Ares said with a smirk. “You’re pretty good, but I’m the God of War. I am going to raze this city to the ground and see that every person in it dies screaming. I will unleash torment the likes of which you have never imagined.”

I could imagine quite a bit. The air around him flickered as several drones teleported in long enough to drop their cargo of fragmentation grenades before teleporting out.

They detonated and Ares was pummeled with shards of metal from all sides and wreathed in smoke.

When it drifted away he was still standing, but bloodied, a few gouges cut into his flesh.

“Like I said. Pretty good, but your best shot just isn’t good enough,” Ares said.

“I’m just the warm-up act. Jade, your turn,” I said.

The metal fragments scattered about Ares vibrated and hummed as the telekinetic field gripped them and they rose in the air to surround him in a swirling tornado of metal.

The screaming went on for a long time. I made sure to broadcast it to the forces surrounding the city. If they still wanted this fight, it would be their choice, not his.

27

It had been several months since Ares went down and in that time a lot had changed. Most of the warriors joined up with us once they’d had a chance to speak with those we had captured earlier. They had been raised to respect strength and we’d shown it.

With Ares’ fall we bought ourselves some much-needed time. Minera provided what we sought, but like most things in the quest so far it was of little help. It was a key crafted of power crystal, circuits carefully etched into the surface. Ornate and fancy, and completely useless without knowing the location of the lock it was meant to open.

I was done with the quest for the moment anyways. It was not that I was giving up, but I’d put this city through a lot in search of a single solution to all our problems and was increasingly of a mind that perhaps I should instead be focusing on smaller problems one by one.

Even without a power source capable of operating the shields, this city, if fully functional, would have the personnel and defenses to fend off anything a single Powered could throw at it.

I pulled up my city administration display.

Aefwal

Controller: Emma

Queen: Anna Berasi

Commander: Hot Stuff

Population: 1,350,000

District Zero

Controller: Emma

Role: Research

Major Projects: Tongue, Keystone, Compound BioReactor

District One

Lord: Crash

Role: Espionage

Major Requests: Rare Metals, Computing Cores, Teleportation Gates

District Two

Lord: Blank

Role: Manufacturing

Major Requests: Forge Core, Programmers, Energy

District Three

Lord: Crystal

Role: Education

Major Requests: Power Crystals, Crystal Dust, Combat Bots

District Four

Lord: Jade

Role: Construction

Major Requests: Low-energy shields, constructor suits, skilled personnel

District Five

Lord: Zora

Role: Entertainment

Major Requests: Enhanced data network, holographic projectors, sound dampeners

District Six

Lord: Professor

Role: Research

Major Requests: Research Materials, Biomatter, Growth-vat access

District Seven

Lord: Hot Stuff

Role: Military

Major Requests: Valkyrie units, Aerial units, Crystal Dust

District Eight

Lord: Ophelia

Role: Medical

Major Requests: None

District Nine

Lord: Flicker

Role: Administration

Major Requests: Distress Beacons, Trans-dimensional pens, Dimensional Stabilizers

The greatest change was the increase in city population. Before we took down Ares the city wasn’t technically deserving of even being called that with only ten thousand people. I’d managed to grow that number to over a million.

Mostly those were from my own growth vats. We’d found a number of villages and added their populations to ours, but all in all the residents from this realm still contributed just under ten thousand to our numbers.

With a steady supply of new workers we’d been able to grow quickly. We still didn’t have the systems I’d come to this place hoping to restore. The city defensive shields remained offline and the teleportation gates were still disabled. Still, we made do with what we had.

None of the requests on the lists were new.

Crash had been asking for rare metals for awhile as part of building infiltration drones. His desires for computing cores to process information and teleportation gates to dispatch agent were also not news. I put a few new biocomputers into the production queue to send over to him, it was the best I could do.

Blank wanted a forge core, programmers, and energy so she could further production. Her district made use of Righteous manufacturing techniques which were well different from my own growth vats. I had a lead on a forge core from Minerva and I hoped to have good news for her soon.

Crystal was out of luck with her requests for everything except more combat bots. As part of her academy for the Powered she wasn’t just trying to train the ones we had, but to create new ones. That required supplies we simply did not have.

Jade had become even deadlier in a fight after killing Ares. In addition to controlling matter with her mind she could now create it, in limited quantities, with weapons materializing from thin air. Yet, she preferred construction to warfare. Her requests were all reasonable and with our rapid growth her district had become one of the most important in the city. I’d get her everything she needed.

Zora had taken well to her role of being in charge of the city’s entertainment. In fact she took to it so much I had some regrets about assigning it to her, I’d caught more than one of my drones drunkenly whispering secrets. As their numbers swelled it had become increasingly impossible for me to maintain a constant eye on every single one.

Hot Stuff was asking me for aerial units again. I’d put development of unnecessary military projects on a lower priority scale while rebuilding. It was probably time to rethink that. The city now had ample anti-air cannons, but little in the way of our own air force.

Ophelia, as usual, wanted nothing. After absorbing Bast’s powers her healing aura had been enhanced considerably, and so had those of her lieutenants. A touch from Ophelia would heal even the most exotic of diseases and a few minutes in a room with one of her followers would cure any mundane injury. I thought it was probably a mistake to be so completely dependent on her crystal, but I couldn’t argue with the results. The city was astonishingly healthy.

Flicker was an interesting case. When I had assigned her Administration it seemed she must have some sort of knack at it—otherwise, why had it been an option? I’d been wrong. People seeking permits of approval went into the administration building only to emerge days later, if that, wandering about and having had countless extra-dimensional adventures and typically requiring a visit to Medical.

I’d taken to telling those requesting any permit that there was no need, and sending only those who only wanted to complained into the administration district. Far from harming city operations the lack of red-tape was working out rather well.

28

I and Minerva still didn’t get along, but for a self-styled Goddess of Knowledge she was almost deserving of the title. Thanks to her we had a real map of the region. It allowed us to expand our reach without tripping over the Divine, who in turn also seemed inclined to leave us alone.

We even had trade agreements with a few, but most were wary of our presence and I thought it only a matter of time until they pooled their resources for a larger attack. I decided that we would make the first move before that happened.

Our target was called “The Forge” and was occupied by Kothar, who was a renowned craftsman amongst the Divine. It was common to utilize types of power crystals in technology, but the Divine seemed to do it differently, somehow imbuing them directly into objects.

Kothar’s anvil was said to be home to a Forge core, just what Blank insisted she needed to expand her district. I found it curious that the Divine and the Righteous might have something in common when their world views in many ways seemed completely at odds with each other.

I moved an airship to where I could get a proper look at what awaited us. The Forge was a large complex for the Divine, with quarters and workshops for dozens of craftsman along with a thriving marketplace.

Like in most of the other Divine villages we’d seen there was a sharp contrast in the facilities for the Powered versus the unpowered. They weren’t alone in this, of course—the Scholars had a caste system based on the same principles.

A central workshop gave off the strongest readings and was most likely the home of what we sought. I was picking up one Powered inside and perhaps two dozen lieutenants. That was on the high side of what was expected, but still within expected parameters. The market was another matter. According to my readings there were three other Divine and another dozen lieutenants.

Hot Stuff was leading this operation. I sent her what I’d found.

“Not ideal,” Hot Stuff said.

“Never stopped you in love, why should it stop you in war? We need this,” I said.

Our plan had originally been to capture this facility and take Kothar captive. He hadn’t proved amenable to cooperating with us so far. Overwhelming force was good for making friends.

Hot Stuff had her flames disabled so she could interact with a tactical display. “Will you settle for just the anvil?”

I didn’t like leaving any potential resource behind. I particularly didn’t like leaving one behind who had friends. I’d never settle for leaving empty-handed.

“Better half of what I want than none,” I said.

“Words to live by. We’ll make it quick and try the new barriers,” Hot Stuff said.

The barriers were one of the latest inventions from the lab. The theory was that few things governed how a fight went so much as mobility, and even in situations where we couldn’t make our own forces more mobile we should at least constrain the enemy. The barriers were high-powered force shields of short duration meant to do just that.

“They’re Divine. It won’t buy you long,” I said.

* * *

I did a short range jump to bring us in directly above the facility, our ramp already opening and forces deploying. Hot Stuff led the way, igniting her flames and heating up enough that she melted through the roof upon impact. Four Valkyries followed her in. Quarters were close in there and that was the environment they excelled in.

Grenade launchers sent tranquilizer gas bombs tumbling through the air throughout the complex. I detonated two barrier bombs on top of the marketplace encasing it in a glowing blue energy shield.

It didn’t survive a single hit. An arrow of pure glowing white energy ripped the barrier to shreds and hit the ship. Armor was holding, but it was quite a shot, equal to what I’d expect from an airship cannon. Another arrow followed it a moment later.

There was no point in informing Hot Stuff, not right now, she had enough on her plate. Kothar’s forge hammer had no issues with intense heat and she’d already taken a blow from him that had broken three of her ribs. It was a rare case where the Valkyries had more success. Their heavy armor wasn’t dependent on fire for defense. Two had stepped forward to guard her even as she manifested a wall of fire to stop several of the forge assistants from joining the fray.

Another arrow hit the ship, and not from the ground this time. A massive eagle swept above the marketplace and an ebony-haired woman in a skirt of leather strips rode on its back. That was her mistake. I had some issues at leveling the ship’s cannons at a crowded marketplace, I didn’t have a problem firing at an aerial threat shooting back.

I began to return fire with the energy cannons. Two shots were dodged as the eagle swept to the side and another one was neutralized as an arrow met it part-way resulting in a brilliantly flare of energy.

Down below Hot Stuff had killed her flames to rig booster jets to Kothar’s anvil. That was supposed to be the Valkryie’s job, but the first two had already gone down against him. No armor was perfect, there were always weak spots, areas of tiny vulnerability. This God of Craftsman seemed to have an eye for them.

Hot Stuff was coughing up blood as she draped herself over the anvil and triggered the boosters. Gouts of flame erupted as the anvil was lifted into the air and shot up through the hole in the roof.

They were almost to the airship when an arrow caught the anvil, exploding against it and destroying the boosters, sending Hot Stuff flying.

A head for math again proved itself the greatest superpower one could ever hope for. One short range jump later had Hot Stuff and the anvil falling into our cargo bay as we manifested inverted directly beneath them. A second jump moments later had us away.

We might have gotten what we’d come for, but these new Divine had again proved themselves capable adversaries.

29

After a few hours in the Medbay Hot Stuff was back on her feet. When the airship arrived back at Aefwal I turned over the anvil to Blank. I wanted to study it further, but observing Blank putting it to use was even better than having it sitting in the lab.

We also needed to get it operational as quickly as possible. Kothar was of value to the other Divine primarily because of what he had been able to construct with the thing. If we could fill those same needs instead, we might find ourselves some new allies.

I didn’t intend to waste any time before going after our next target. Minerva had given us the locations of several artifacts of value to the Divine. According to Minerva the next one belonged to a secretive cult, a lead she considered among the more valuable she had to offer.

To me it seemed far more likely to be useless—supposedly a Goddess of Vegetation by the name of Ningal had a tree the fruit of which could create new Gods. While I doubted it worked exactly as described, if a plant had somehow gotten infused with a high concentration of crystal dust it might be possible the fruit gave abilities to someone young.

A concentration that high might allow us a few uses of some of the city’s more energy-sapping functions.

I jumped in our airship close to the grove where this tree was supposed to exist and began to scan. My sensors were a mix of results. Being biomechanical I had both electronic and membrane detectors and only half of them were picking up unusual energy readings in the distance.

It was a curious phenomenon. I moved some of my drones to the observation deck to observe first-hand and I discovered the effect duplicated there. My human drones saw an unremarkable forest down below, while my mechanical ones observed a massive tree growing in a large clearing and glowing with a faint luminescence.

Whatever was there had found a way to mask itself against biological life. As a hybrid I was only partly under its influence, but with no electronics amongst the Divine this would be a secret to most of them.

I devoted more resources to my electronic sensors. I owed Minerva a plate of cookies, the forest was absolutely teeming with the Powered. There were roughly one hundred down there, a huge concentration, and while I was only detecting a few at the power level of a standard Divine only a handful were as weak as the Dust. There was something to that tree, and that posed me quite the dilemma.

I wanted that tree, but not only was it too large to effectively transport, we didn’t need to make this many enemies. I’d gotten Aefwal built up to some extent, and while we might be strong enough to withstand an attack from any single divine we weren’t strong enough to handle this.

Well, I’d devoted a district to espionage for a reason. I consulted with Crash.

After filling him in on what I’d observed he spent a good ten minutes tapping away at his keyboard. Why were humans so very slow?

“I’ve got you a solution. It should allow you to get samples at least. Maybe even a branch or whatever tree-thing people do,” Crash said.

“Have you ever actually stepped foot outside?” I asked.

“Why bother when all the really interesting things are indoors? What I’ll be doing is using my abilities to subvert their already existing stealth system,” Crash said.

That was an interesting idea. It hadn’t occurred to me. Humans were almost worth the trouble, on occasion.

“You want to camouflage a probe from biological sight. We should adopt this system for Anna,” I said.

“Anna is hot and you’re just a hater, but yeah, you got the idea. Then you just sneak up with it and get what you need from where nobody will be the wiser,” Crash said.

It was far from ideal. I was convinced that the tree must operate from some pre-existing concentration of energy. Something had not only fueled its exceptional growth and the luminescence, but was also providing the energy that went on to make future Powered. A sample wouldn’t be enough to get me some of that power, although it might at least show how biology had been altered to achieve these effects.

I readied a probe according to the specifications Crash provided and waited for nightfall. The time of day shouldn’t matter—if the field was working properly they shouldn’t see it approach the tree in either day or night. Still, I thought it best to be cautious. While the tree might be invisible to the biologicals on this ship, obviously someone down there could observe it just fine. Whether that meant a power that specifically countered the field it put out, or some more symbiotic relationship, I didn’t know.

I chose one of the unripened fruit that adorned the branches. It was about the size of a large apple with a thick fibrous exterior. When I brushed against one of the branches I ran into an issue. The tree pulsed with a ripple of energy that tossed the drone through the air as a loud keening sound filled the air.

The tree had an alarm I’d call that terribly unnecessary—except it obviously was.

There was little point in further stealth now. I had the drone sever the fruit with a laser cutter and catch it as it fell.

Overhead the sky pulsed and night turned to day.

There went our anonymity. I jumped out as soon as the drone was secured. This was the second anthill we’d kicked over, it was time to return to the city and make sure our defenses were in order.

30

Three hours after the airship returned to Aefwal we came under attack. It started with a thick fog billowing in. By this point I’d done proper tests on the river and its amnesia-inducing properties didn’t survive the water being taken from the river itself. The fog wouldn’t be making my people forget, but it had other issues.

The instant it came into contact with the outer city sensors the electronic elements began to shut down. As the fog billowed closer to the city core that effect persisted. I jumped the airship out of range.

My own core systems were biological now so I shouldn’t be directly impacted, but a lot of our defenses used electrical systems. Shield projects, beam cannons, even a lot of the tracking routines for the kinetic weapons.

While I still could, I used the comm to call my council and the District Lords.

“This isn’t natural,” Anna said.

“I can burn it off a small area,” Hot Stuff said.

“And I can project it away from another,” Jade said.

They were both viewing the fog as the enemy to be faced, I suspected that wasn’t so.

“While your desire to go to war with the weather is inspirational, I do think we have other enemies that are likely to need your attention more. Crystal, my sensors are going down. Do you have anything?” I asked.

“I have sent some swarms. We’ll lose communications soon though,” Crystal said.

I’d already thought of that.

“I have humanoid drones heading to each of you. They won’t let you communicate with each other, but you’ll be able to coordinate through me,” I said.

Insects were flying and crawling through the city. Crystal had continued to grow her swarms.

“Oh, you’ll love this,” Crystal said.

“I doubt that. What have you got?” I asked.

“Elemental cores. Water coming in from the southeast, lightning from the north, earth from the west,” Crystal said.

The fog must be some sort of combined effect from them. They were used to working together. That was ominous.

The fog swept over the central comm and the network went down. I’d already gotten my drones in place.

“I’ve had some experience fighting other elementals. Water is going to be a shifty fucker, earth can take their punches, and lightning pack the hardest punch,” Hot Stuff said.

“And here I thought most of your experiences before hooking up with me were purely sexual,” I said.

“Sometimes folks would rather fight than screw. Seems stupid to me. I’m heading for Earth, have Crash and Professor join me. They’ll be smart enough to figure out how to hurt them if my flames don’t do the trick,” Hot Stuff said.

I thought she might be giving a bit too much credence to Crash’s intelligence, but his ability to disrupt systems had seriously weakened Sylax once upon a time.

I said, “What about the lightning user? They could be the most important. The fog may be serving as a carrier for their ability and dampening our electricity.”

“Then let’s dampen them right back. Blank is going to ruin their whole day. Ophelia too, just in case they still have their bite. Zora needs to go somewhere,” Hot Stuff said.

I had to admit that her skills as a commander were growing.

“That leaves Jade, Flicker, and Crystal to take on their water user,” I said.

“Jade and her telekinetic fields should be able to make things miserable for them. Flicker is just weird and Crystal has fought everything.”

I sent instructions to the others. None of them were alone, of course. The fog had disabled the juggernaut class units, I wouldn’t be deploying any Valkyries, Asps, or Gunslingers, and beam rifles were out as well—but I still had my biological drones, body armor, as well as traditional firearms and acid sprayers.

My drones were finally catching sight of what Crystal had seen with her insects.

The Earth user was a literal giant. He stood nearly four meters in height, body rippling with muscle. The water user was a woman whose flesh seemed quite natural except for the strange undulations it made as if it were the surface of a pond. Lightning was represented by a man in armor and sporting an enormously large hammer—Mechos would be delighted.

They hadn’t come with any lieutenants. That was bold, and stupid. However powerful, they should have realized how powerful this city was in turn.

The three walked up to the very edges of the city district, evenly spaced around the perimeterand somehow managing to surround us, and stood waiting.

“We’re here to talk,” said the water woman. The fog vibrated with her words and sent them echoing throughout the whole of the city.

Crystal stepped forward. She’d brought Sylax and her students who stood ready behind her.

“Then perhaps you shouldn’t have disabled our communication systems,” Crystal said.

“You’ve made a habit of launching unprovoked attacks,” the woman said.

“So you decided to launch one of your own? An interesting tactic to be sure and one I’m positive has made you many friends. If you wish to speak, withdraw this fog,” Crystal said.

The watery woman gave a tiny shake of her head. “You may call me Ash, Goddess of the Ocean and the waves. I’m accompanied by Atlas and Thor.”

“You realize your band of reality doesn’t actually have an ocean,” I said from a nearby drone.

“Don’t help, Emma,” Crystal said. “I’m Crystal, Diplomat of the city of Aefwal, which is under the rule of Queen Anna Berasi.”

“We know who you are. We know you killed Ares and Bast, and that you have allied yourself with Minerva. We’re prepared to offer you what you seek should you agree to leave these lands forever,” Ash said.

They’d come to surrender? In a sense. That was a surprise.

“We decline,” Crystal said.

“Just like that? No questions? No discussion?” Ash said.

“None at all,” Crystal said.

I’d made a fine choice for diplomat.

Ash didn’t look displeased. “Then we’ll see if you’re strong enough for such confidence.”

31

The three obviously had some way to coordinate and communicate, because it was as one they stepped forward into the city proper.

Hot Stuff was the first to respond, her flames growing in intensity as she moved toward Atlas and threw a fit at his midsection. His flesh transformed into stone. Flame met stone and he glowed. I’d seen Hot Stuff melt through thick layers of steel, but she didn’t melt through him.

“Pretty girl, a bit of heat. I like this,” Atlas said.

“Big and hard. I’m a fan too,” Hot Stuff said, flinging more punches that did little more than the first. “What are you made of?”

“Is this really the time to be flirting?” Crash asked as he gestured in the air. “I’m crap at this without a computer.”

The Professor, riding a triceratops again, smashed into Atlas from behind. The impact didn’t even cause the man to stumble and he looked over his shoulder.

“Big lizards, big cats. Why do people not just make themselves large? Saves time, yes?” Atlas asked.

Hot Stuff had turned the ground molten beneath her and Atlas as she continued to flail away at him. “Failure of imagination. I’m not going to be able to melt you am I?”

“Nothing but my heart,” Atlas said.

That fight was going nowhere.

On the other side of the city Blank had moved to confront Thor. Electricity arcing and sparking around his hammer faded and throughout the city there was a dim flicker of lights attempting to restore their power.

“I don’t think so. Your batteries are drained,” Blank said.

“A Righteous! I mean like, literally. Been forever since I ran into one of you. You’re all strong too,” Thor said, in a voice a bit too high-pitched for his rugged appearance.

“He’s lame. Why is everyone so lame?” Ophelia said.

“Give me a chance little miss emo,” Thor said.

Zora tried to shoot him in the head. Bolts of lightning erupted from his body and flung the bullets to the side.

Thor raised his hammer and the air trembled as the lights in the city went fully dark again. “See? For smart people, you guys are really stupid right? Nobody ever stops to ask, gee, why did all the lights in the world go out? Maybe it’s because their crystals have something to do with electricity.”

Blank had the strangest look on her face, as if reality had just stopped making sense to her. “You’re dampening my power.”

Thor hit Blank with an underhanded swing of his hammer that sent her soaring backwards, lightning crackling around her body. Ophelia didn’t waste a moment as she moved to her side, keeping Blank in range of her healing aura.

Zora snapped her fingers and Thor howled in agony, dropping to one knee. It was the first time I’d seen her use her ability, and I still didn’t know what it was.

A bolt of lightning erupted from the handle of the hammer and sent her flying backward to collide with Ophelia.

The fight against Ash was going no better. Telekinesis, extra-dimensional shifts, whatever they threw she deftly dodged and always had a countering blow. None were finishers, but she was clearly winning and grinding my people down.

I had more I could throw at them, but I wasn’t sure what good it would do. They weren’t even teaming up to make this a real fight and they were still withstanding the forces of this city.

“Enough,” Ash called, stepping back. Her voice again echoed throughout the city.

Thor and Atlas also took a step back.

“Was there a point to all of this?” Crystal asked, a good bit more breathless than earlier.

“We’re strong little ones and we protect this place. We were prepared to welcome you into our home. New blood has its place and a spirit of a city might have made a fine Athena. We know what Ares and Bast did and planned, and did not approve. Killing them we allowed,” Ash said.

“You were waiting to see what we did next,” Crystal said.

“And you waged more attacks on those who have done you no harm. Brought war where there was none. Stole what belonged to others,” Ash said.

I had sensors coming back online. Only a few and all in the central core, it was Anna’s doing. It appeared that she had rigged a liquid fuel supply into the emergency fire suppression system and was busy dousing some of my most sensitive equipment in flames. It was also fully vaporizing the fog and burning it off.

I opened up a comm.

“Petty vandalism instead of joining the fight? I really shouldn’t be surprised. Do you know Crystal is out there declaring war in your name?” I said.

“Good. I’m the Queen of the whole damned world and they need to figure that out. I should have burned off enough of the fog around the sun shield projector,” Anna said.

I’d already figured out why, of course, I’m smarter than she is. The sun shield had provided us light and climate control when the city was underground. By default it was disabled now that we were above ground, but triggering it should clear the fog.

“It still leaves us with the three of them,” I said.

“They disabled our guns for a reason,” Anna said.

She was right. Because of Ash most likely, I thought the other two could probably handle anything we might throw at them, but with tracking sensors fully enabled and given her nature the beam cannons could likely hurt Ash, perhaps even kill her.

I activated the sun shield. The sky blazed brilliantly for an instant and just like that the fog was gone. Two dozen beam cannons swiveled to point at Ash.

“Unexpected,” Ash said. “Not quite enough. Are you going to try?”

“Do we have to?” Crystal asked.

Ash gave a tiny smile and swiveled. Atlas and Thor did the same and in unison the three walked away from the city.

We hadn’t defeated them, we hadn’t even truly held our own. We needed more power.

32

I had to find what we’d come here for. There were various leads I might follow. I’d destroyed Ares’ base, but it might still harbor some secrets. Minerva or the other Divine might have information they could share. The more I thought of it however, the more I thought that I probably already knew the location of what Vattier had hidden.

I was looking for something of immense power that was well concealed and I’d already found a place that fit both those criteria. The tree was my best lead, but I didn’t think that was my target. Aefwal had been in a vast underground cavern, my original complex had been underground—when you wished to hide something away you put it underground.

And when you really wished to hide something you put another well-guarded secret on top of it.

My sensors hadn’t detected a cavern, but I wondered if the same technique that created the invisibility effect on the surface could serve to blind electronic sensors from detecting what was below.

If I was right, I knew how to get where we needed to go. The original jump coordinates through the satellite left an arc of possible destinations. We’d landed on one of them, the one most suitable for a city of Aefwal’s size, but there were other places we could have appeared—and one was deep beneath the tree.

Anna was less than enthused about me risking our sole, fully functional airship on the endeavor, but I had a solution for that too. Jump engines were tricky to build, but in an effort to give Hot Stuff the air force she kept requesting I’d been working on it—the first of a new prototype. Cultivating the hull of small ship in the growth vats took the better part of two days, but I had a scout vessel.

In addition to Hot Stuff wanting an air force I’d wanted some smaller ships of my own for research purposes. Craft loaded with sensors that could better survey terrain. I did have some mechanical research drones, but these were without the range a jump drive would allow.

There were steps I could have taken to try to confirm there was actually somewhere to go. Crash had subverted the masking effect once and could probably do so again. I was wary however about approaching the tree again. They were likely to be on alert next time and the city didn’t need another visit.

There was a fair chance of losing the ship and crew, so I wouldn’t send anyone I couldn’t replace. At least initially I’d need to just send drones I’d grown in my growth vats. In the event they fell I could always grow them again based off their last recorded pattern.

If they found something, I could have the vessel return to get others if needed.

A plan made, I gathered a crew and initiated the jump.

I knew within nanoseconds it had been a success. My connection to my drones didn’t fade, but all my readouts from the ship sensors went instantly dead. Through my drone’s eyes I could see the cavern was vast, as large as the one that held Aefwal, and the walls had been coated with what looked to be a layer of crystal dust.

The middle of the space was a shielded force bubble.

Here I thought Vattier was clever, and at the same time a shielded force bubble in a deep underground cavern was starting to seem quaint.

I had my drones take sweeping passes through the cavern. Without the ship’s sensors operational it made everything more difficult. We were finally able to locate an old landing pad.

All indications were that it was safe. I ordered the vessel to briefly jump home. I collected the keystone that Minerva had provided and made a place for her and Mechos, before returning to the cavern and setting down. Minerva had proved herself to be trustworthy enough so far, and I figured that she even better than Mechos would understand her father.

Thick layers of caked-on crystal dust had to be removed from a central pedestal to reveal a slot where the keystone could fit. It slid in with a click. A dim green luminescence filled the area and a hologram appeared.

It displayed an older-looking gentleman reclined in a chair. He appeared to look over those assembled.

“Claire, Kenneth, I always thought it might be you two to finally find the Sword. If you are here this means Claire has given up the Goddess idiocy and Kenneth has abandoned the goals of the Society, and you’ve both realized you are smarter together than apart. It is about damned time. Still, you know I give nothing to the unworthy and the following puzzles are my greatest yet. The race is on.”

The visual of the old man faded to a series of rapid images. They weren’t puzzles, not exactly. To another mind they might have seemed such, but in that instant I understood something vital. Vattier was completely mad—and Vattier truly understood the difference between SCIENCE and science.

“Well, that was rather embarrassing,” Minerva said.

“Quite, am I mistaken or were those power regulation equations?” Mechos asked.

“I thought I recognized a few related to the curvature of post-Cataclysm dimensional space,” Minerva said.

For humans they really were rather bright.

I said, “Your awkward social graces are proof that you are operating fully within expected parameters. Do stop pretending to be worthy of his pride and contribute to the manual labor you might be useful for and gather dust. There is enough here to keep the teleportation gates operating for quite some time.”

“Is that really a priority right now? We should be trying to solve this,” Minerva said.

It was a priority. As soon as the message had completed I’d regained my connection to my off-world ships. The distortion of dimensional space that safeguarded this place was gone.

The Graven and the Whimsey reported that they were receiving a copy of Vattier’s message and last puzzle. That was good.

However, the whole world could receive it. That was bad.

33

Vattier hadn’t included any coordinates in his last message, but I couldn’t be certain someone wouldn’t be able to trace the signal back here. I wasn’t sure any of the large factions would even think it worth sending a ship or two to investigate the message of a long-dead—and quite mad—scientist. He did have something of a reputation in his day.

The airships that had been away from the city had spent the months out of contact scavenging for supplies and fighting off threats. My drones in command had done well. I made sure the cookies were plentiful and gave them all upgrades. I jumped them here at once and set them to collecting crystal dust. Jumps left traces and I wanted to get everything I could out of that cavern and leave. Then leave it alone until I had an answer to the puzzles.

I devoted the full attentions of my research staff to the problem as well as assigning Professor, Mechos, Minerva, Flicker, and Blank to the task. Between them they had brilliant scientific minds, dimensional expertise, and an understanding of the science of the old world.

I had to decide just what I wanted to do with the crystal dust. The Scholars commonly used it as a source of power and while my Bioreactors were more reliable, the dust could generate short and high energy power bursts. I could do something similar when I detonated a reactor, but the applications of such power use went well beyond bombs.

Initiating a jump gate required similar power, so did a jump drive trying to generate a larger bubble. It could produce more powerful beam weapons, stronger shields, but all with a finite power supply. Part of the reason that the Scholarium fought so savagely amongst itself was because of this finite nature of their energy.

By studying the sample of the tree and the fruit I had a pretty good idea what was happening. Over generations something beneath the shield in that cavern was leaking power into the surrounding stone. That was manifesting in the cavern as layers of crystal dust, but wasn’t confined to it. Veins of energy-conducting crystal had formed beneath the earth and were being tapped into by the root structure of the tree. That accounted for the unusual growth, the luminescence, and the tree attempting to pass on those attributes to its own offspring through fruit.

The effectiveness and concentration levels varied, most of the tree’s fruit would be similar to consuming dust. Still, some others would be equivalent to standard power crystals, and a rare few provided a power set equal to the Divine.

It was the result of a long-term adaptation to that much power, I couldn’t duplicate it. Yet, if I wanted to however, I could give a low-grade Dust-like ability to anyone who wanted one, even adults. It could prove a powerful recruitment tool.

I didn’t think it was a decision to be made alone. I called my council together and presented them the options.

“Powers on that scale are a mistake. You’ve seen what a large population of Powered has done to the Scholars. Do you wish to replicate that in your own streets?” Blank asked.

Crystal said, “Is it that dissimilar to what Emma and I already do? We make people better with our upgrades. This is a whole new way to do that.”

“You know I love to burn, but militarily a few weaklings aren’t going to win us any wars. Mobility from warp gates is something else,” Hot Stuff said.

“Powers suck. I hate them,” Ophelia said.

I hadn’t even thrown her in a grinder lately, she really needed to stop complaining.

Anna said, “If you can solve this puzzle, doesn’t it become moot? We’ll have the power source that created all the dust to start with.”

“That is the hope. Right now we’re dependent on my intellect, because a dead man thought too much of his daughter and his would-be son-in-law and the rest of you are even more useless. I’ll solve it in time, but we could come under attack tomorrow,” I said.

“People are sick of living under the thumb of the Powered. I’ve raised armies with just my own ability to make people stronger. You’ve seen me do it. Think of that,” Crystal said.

“An army that is dead now because the Powered inevitably turn upon each other,” Blank said.

Their opinions were sharply divided, I’d expected as much. So were my own.

After I’d first been reactivated the ability to give a single individual a dampened ability of a power had been huge. Since then, I had done so for hundreds. Now, this gave me the potential to do so for thousands.

“Let me take the decision off your hands, Emma. You’re torn and this council isn’t helping. I say, get the gates operational,” Anna said.

That drew more than a few frowns around the table, but nobody spoke up against her. All there had accepted Anna as their Queen, even if most weren’t happy about being under the dominion of an unpowered.

“I’ll have them up and operating within the hours. Perhaps if you were actually likable as a monarch we’d have some friends and allies to get in contact with,” I said.

“While not exactly friends, if you’re interested in trade I know the Righteous would consider your latest model of biocells for the beam weapons. They operate even in a reality zero environment,” Blank said.

That must be the term for the environment of old Earth they’d restored in the core.

“If we’re selling things, I can hook us up with some very keen buyers for all the crystal dust you can spare,” Zora said.

“If we can’t have friends, have customers. I like it. Do everything necessary to mask our presence and don’t trade anything we can’t spare,” Anna said.

Aefwal was open for business.

34

A week passed with no answer to the Vattier’s puzzles. We were making progress, I’d thought at first he was simply obsessed with understanding how the Cataclysm had altered the world—that he was focused on grasping the new rules of reality. But I increasingly thought it was more than that. He was seeking a way to define those rules, to craft his own.

The way he’d made this world more difficult to access made me think that Vattier met with some success. It made me feel a step behind, and that was impressive for a monkey with delusions of grandeur.

In the meantime life in the city went on.

Sylax requested my presence at her academy and I sent a drone to see what she wanted. The place was coming along nicely. A small part of Crystal’s district had been given a lot of resources to its construction and it showed.

There were classrooms for the humanities and sciences in addition to combat arenas. Her student body had grown beyond just the scavengers. I spotted some of Magpie’s village children, a few animal hybrids who must have been created by Crystal, and even some Gobbles lounged around on shelves, paying unusually sharp attention as we passed.

“You tortured Magpie’s people for generations and they trust you with their latest one? They’re bigger fools than I thought,” I said.

“I wouldn’t say they trust me. They’re too smart for that. But, like me, they realize that we’re living in a different world now,” Sylax said.

There were art and music rooms. A part of me wondered at the utility and at the same time I was impressed by the sheer audacity of what they were attempting to accomplish. I was trying to put together the shattered pieces of a world and my reasons for doing so were complex. I wished I could decide if Sylax truly believed in all of this, or if she was playing me. The greatest monster I knew was attempting to restore a level of culture long passed.

“This isn’t like you. This is nice,” I said.

“I know, that is why I do it. Come and observe the training arena. You’ll be interested in this,” Sylax said, as she led the way to an observation window.

Below students warred with combat bots. A girl ducked and waved her way beneath them, brushing them with a touch and transforming them to stone. Next, a young man blasted each apart with sonic waves and another girl followed behind using complex hand motions to weave the dust into stone golems.

“Her touch only turns things to stone for about half an hour. Crippling, but not actually destructive. Add in a new element and it is suddenly fatal, and add yet a third and something new is made. I found the visit by the three Divine to this city ... inspirational,” Sylax said.

I didn’t want Sylax feeling inspired, even a seemingly reformed one. However well she behaved I remembered her first act after having her crystal removed—her murder of James Wolf. This woman might be less insane, if there was such a thing, but murder was still her nature.

“How much of this was Crystal’s idea?” I asked.

Sylax gave me a sidelong look. “You are thinking this cannot be her doing? What do you know of our history? Hers and mine?”

“Rather little. I’m not even sure I’m capable of having nightmares, but your past might be enough to make even a machine restless,” I said.

“They called her the spider because of her web of influence. The old world had fallen apart and she was determined to build something new. Parents couldn’t keep their children fed, but she promised—send them, send them and they shall have a place and a home and I shall make them better,” Sylax said. I could hear the bitterness in her tone.

I’d never heard any of this.

“It seems she kept her word,” I said.

“She did. Instead of growing up on the streets I learned my letters, mathematics, fashion. The Scholarium was growing and she found a place for me inside it. A place I could seduce those useful to her plans, and kill those who opposed them.”

“That seems improbable. Not only are you deeply unlikable, you wouldn’t have had a crystal yet, correct?” I asked.

Sylax gave a dark laugh. “Younger days and the strata weren’t quite as defined as they are now. I had power enough to pass among them and none knew enough to question it. In reality I couldn’t bond to a crystal, none of her children could. Had I absorbed one it would have killed me. The poison touch, she called it.”

If this was true, it cast a far darker view of Crystal.

“It doesn’t seem to have stopped you,” I said.

“I was determined and in the epicenter of an organization learning all about the crystals. I lied and stole and killed for my purposes as well as hers. I found a cure and I found a very special crystal.”

“That amplification would have made any crystal holder who absorbed it enormously powerful. How did you get it?” I asked.

“Oh, it did. It passed through three holders before finding itself with Soldier. He had a power set a bit like Ares. He could use any weapon, and had superhuman strength and agility,” Sylax said.

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

“I killed him in his sleep. Best way, really, with someone like that. It finally gave me the power to break the chains that bound me and force Crystal to do my bidding,” Sylax said.

“And we know how that went,” I said.

“Bloody and unsuccessful,” Sylax said, and she glanced towards my drone. “I know you don’t believe me, Emma. But that is why I wanted to show you all this. I’m not changed, not really, but I am still trying to do better. Anna made the right call not giving Crystal the dust.”

This was all a warning couched in a way that I might take it seriously.

I did. There was something sincere about Sylax right now.

35

We made little progress on the puzzles.

And I’d underestimated the interest Vattier’s message might generate. The next week saw visitors to our skies. I was told the exact number of kingdoms in the Scholarium varied at any point in time, but currently eight of them had airships in the area. The Righteous dispatched three heavy cruises. Other, smaller factions or individual scavengers brought fifty-four ships in all.

Not all of those survived long, of course. The Scholarium lost two vessels to various Divine and everyone thought it was open season on scavengers. I’d brought down two of those ships myself that made an attempt to raid Aefwal.

I’d been in enough fights to know a big one was brewing. I had to make sure that Aefwal survived it and that I got what I’d come here for.

With the teleportation gates working trade was thriving. My biotechnological creations were a rarity out there in the world and each of the factions had some use for much of what I could provide. The Righteous perfected body armor well beyond anything I had developed and were willing to share some of their expertise. The Scholars were more varied in what they might trade, but really a significant part of what I wanted from them right now was intelligence.

I didn’t like what I learned. While this city had been under the rule of Sylax it had been assisting King Boreas, ruler of one of the Scholar Kingdoms, against another. At the time Boreas had been slowly losing the war. Lately his fortunes had seen a shift and he was winning.

The reason we were here in this new land at all was because King Boreas had launched a sneak attack that nearly destroyed Aefwal. I didn’t want him to have a second chance.

I called Crystal and Sylax together to discuss the possibility of negotiating a truce.

“Absolutely not,” Sylax said.

“He is a thoroughly unpleasant man. It is why I didn’t seek his aid when Sylax was taken,” Crystal said.

“Can he really be worse than the two of you?” I asked.

“I can only skin a man once. He can go back in time and do it again,” Sylax said.

“Well …” Crystal said, giving Sylax a knowing look.

Sylax frowned. “With accelerated healing I may have technically skinned a few people several thousand times, but my point is I learned that behavior somewhere.”

Crystal said, “You’ve seen the Scholarium. You don’t rise to the top by being weak. You rise to the top by either being immensely strong or terrifying.”

“Keep in mind that, until I ruled Aefwal, even with an Amplification core boosting the benefits of an upgrade core I didn’t even hold a city,” Sylax said.

That was a good fight. When we’d first met Sylax she’d been the strongest thing we’d ever encountered. It didn’t seem there could be anyone stronger. The stronger already had their cities and their kingdoms.

“Is he going to be an issue? While I assume he’d want to skin and debone you both on principle, how serious is he likely to be about it?” I asked.

“I was his subject and you took this city from me. If you had turned right around and sworn fealty to him, it would have gotten you praise. Wolf went right out and found himself a stronger benefactor. But you? You invaded his kingdom, stole a valuable resource, and have no very powerful friends,” Sylax said.

“That is her way of saying yes, he is going to be an issue,” Crystal said.

I’d have no problem pledging ourselves to some larger power, but I knew that would never fly with Anna. From the beginning she’d declared herself the Queen of the World and she bowed her head to nobody.

It wasn’t a fight we could win, not right now. We needed other options.

“Tell me about him? And not about how incredibly delicious you find his handling of a knife,” I said.

“I do actually like that,” Sylax said.

“He has four cities under him. Aefwal made the fifth, and even new and underpowered, compared to the others it really was a big deal,” Crystal said.

“You know about his ability to rewind time. That one is the most publicly known, but he’ll have other time-related abilities,” Sylax said.

“He froze our time to deliver the bomb that nearly destroyed the city,” I said.

“That would be a new one, but I’m not surprised. He enjoys hurting people, breaking people, yet is fiercely protective of those he considers to be his property,” Sylax said.

“He has a daughter, Princess Simone. They don’t really get along because she doesn’t much like doing what she’s told. She possesses the power of invisibility and phasing through matter,” Crystal said.

That was interesting, someone to possibly turn against him.

“There are perhaps five hundred Powered of various sorts beneath him. Far more citizens, of course. Probably less than a thousand airships,” Sylax said.

The numbers were daunting. I and my allies had accomplished a lot by being smart, bold, and in some cases lucky. I’d been making something of a habit of toppling those that thought themselves unstoppable.

I didn’t have solution to a thousand airships, not now. Eventually with more production facilities and more research, but not now.

We needed friends.

I didn’t trust the Righteous. They ultimately viewed any Powered as someone to be depowered and purified. For all we might be wary allies and trading partners, they weren’t friends.

The other Scholarium kingdoms would likely want our fealty, which made them automatic negatives. Perhaps we could convince the Divine? We’d made some enemies since coming here, but we’d made some friends as well. It was time to see what Minerva could do.

36

It was an odd assortment that Minerva had found to invite to the city. The Divine bound themselves to ancient myths and legends related to their abilities. In some cases this made them stronger, faster, and more powerful than they might otherwise be, and in some it seemed to make them weaker. There was Bootes, the God of Wagons, who had the ability to transport people and objects long distances, Tykhe, who possessed the ability to purify items of corruption, Jarilo, who had some powers of plant manipulation.

Their abilities gave them few advantages in any fight and they had often spent their lives being preyed upon by those stronger. What we offered, being a part of our city and what we were building where their abilities might be seen as something useful, really did have some appeal. That didn’t mean they were willing to swear fealty without extracting every concession that they could.

I had Crystal playing diplomat, it is what she was there for.

Every Divine that decided to join up with us would make us that much more attractive to those who remained. If even a few of the more powerful became our allies they might serve as an effective counter against Boreas.

That was the theory. The problem was I wasn’t the only one to realize it.

A few hours into negotiations reality seemed to flicker. In an instant the Divine guests were scattered about the room, slumped against the walls, suffering multiple gunshots. Crystal had taken several in the face and her life-signs were quickly fading. The wounds weren’t typical, with a residue of yellow energy.

It had to be agents of Boreas working to neutralize this alliance before it started. First things first, I shut down all teleportation gates in and out of the city. An infiltrator might have come from an airship, but the gates were another option and the only one I could do something about.

I teleported in drones to grab the Divine and engaged a second teleport to a trauma center. Ophelia had lieutenants on call every hour of the day in case of emergencies. The wounds were resisting healing, the energy signatures retarding it somehow. Vital signs were dropping even faster.

I’d encountered toxins before that slowed healing, but they wouldn’t be returning this sort of result. It had to be some kind of reversal effect. They’d expect me to get them healing quickly and whatever the residue was in the wounds, it was taking that healing effect and using it to cause more damage.

No, that didn’t make sense. If the goal was to just have these people killed they could have done so. Whatever the time-pause or time-reversion they were using, it should have been enough for that. I teleported Ophelia’s lieutenant into a testing cell and engaged quarantine shielding.

It was purely speculative, but if I wanted to capitalize on a city with a large presence of high-powered healers I’d use some sort of bioweapon. One triggered to grow stronger and consume more health, the more a healing aura was applied. It would take far more research to confirm that, but for the time being isolating the victims from a healer and using a Medbay for traditional healing was the best option. The wounded might die, Crystal might die, but it would preserve the city.

It didn’t answer the why though. If the goal was to wipe out the city they could have brought such a bioweapon directly to Ophelia’s district and released it. Why wouldn’t they?

It was an attempt to destroy this city, but it wasn’t only that. They’d learned their lesson about me the hard way—that an entity who could respond in nanoseconds was difficult to deal with even having some degree of temporal manipulation. This was a distraction, and it had succeeded.

I did a broader scan of the city. All of the other District Lords were unharmed, Sylax hadn’t been touched.

There it was. The electronics in one secure research facility were down. The lab that housed the keystone for the pedestal in the cavern.

Once I knew what I was looking for it was a simple matter to review those surveillance logs. The cameras had been wiped, but everything passing through a city system went through me and my biological memory storage units still had them intact.

Kalakas, a minor Scholar lord we’d been doing quite a bit of trading with. They’d been providing some rare earth resources that we needed for the construction of our espionage drones, and aiding in our refinement efforts of compounds. We’d allowed him and his people access to the city.

With the benefit of hindsight I reviewed logs and saw how his agents from the very beginning had been scouting our infrastructure. It wasn’t until today that anything had more been done. I only had flickers of an individual moving through the halls, the result of time-skips—this was a time-shifter. Never enough to have registered as anything more than sensor irregularities. They told a clear story though. I had the visuals of the figure making their way through the gate, shooting the diplomats, then moving into the secure facility to perform the robbery before making their way back through the gate.

Effectively it had only taken them a few seconds and they’d made their escape before I sealed the gates.

I had drones in guard positions at various points throughout the city. Four Valkyries and six Gunslingers. It would do. I teleported them to the jump gate and reestablished the connection to Kalakas’ domain and ordered them through.

I hoped I’d still be able to catch up to the time-shifter, if not Kalakas would do. We’d been betrayed and I couldn’t let that stand.

37

Kalakas and his people weren’t innocent. Innocent people don’t start shooting the instant your forces come from a gateway. They were ready, defensive turrets set up, and when my first drone emerged from the gateway they were pummeled with high-powered rounds.

Even the armor on a Valkyrie couldn’t take that for long, but then it didn’t have to. Phase blades engaged, they surged forward to cut the turret in two as the second Valkyrie stepped through. They moved on a second turret even as guards rushed into the room.

I brought a Gunslinger through next and opened fire with their chain-gun. A few stray shots caught my Valkyries but that was nothing new. The less-armored guards were chewed to pieces and stumbled back.

I didn’t have time to be satisfied with that small victory. Analyzing my drone’s sensory impressions I could cross-reference the sounds of shuttles taking off, pin-pointing where the landing bay might be.

A second Gunslinger made his way through and moved towards the nearest wall to the landing bay, applying a full strengthed body-slam accompanied with kinetic enhancements. Stone shattered and he crashed a way to the other side falling on top of guards who had been rushing to reinforce their comrades.

I moved the Valkyrie units through the gap and sent a second Gunslinger through the gateway. Kinetic enhancers boosting their speed, they rushed past more guards knocking them to the side before smashing another wall.

The landing bay was on the other side. A shuttle was already taking off.

This was where I had to get clever. This is where I had to get very, very clever. From what I’d been able to piece together from the surveillance tapes this agent had the ability to freeze time when they knew there was danger. They weren’t freezing it now or I’d never have seen the shuttle at all—they still thought they were safe and had made it out successfully. The sound of the takeoff perhaps masked the gunfire. Maybe they had exhausted their freeze time ability sneaking through the city?

If they weren’t freezing time, they had to rely on their ability to rewind time to escape. For a lieutenant of Boreas that would be about fifteen seconds.

I had to take down the shuttle in a way they’d be powerless to stop.

The first Gunslinger pulled out their sniper rifle and took aim. A single shot and the fuel regulator was breached. Fuel began to spray over the rear of the shuttle.

In liquid form it wasn’t an issue, it wouldn’t ignite. It would need to evaporate first and that took a little time. Based on the current atmospheric conditions I calculated that to be sixteen seconds.

When the rear of the shuttle burst into flame and the craft spiraled out of control, I wondered how many times I must have repeated this moment. Three? A dozen? A thousand? How often had the pilot of that ship tried to rewind time to get a favorable outcome before finally giving up and resigning themselves to what happened next?

I brought the rest of my heavy units through. Better-equipped guards were arriving now and one of my Gunslingers staggered back under a beam of blaster rifle fire.

Kalakas entered the hall. He was flanked by a pair of guards, and smoke wreathed thick about his form. A gesture and the smoke billowed down the hall forming into fantastical beasts, a massive smoke alligator grabbing a Valkyrie between its jaws and shaking him violently.

It was a neat trick. One of the newly arrived Valkyrie’s teleported behind Kalakas and shoved a knife through his heart. The Scholar lord wore the surprised look of someone who couldn’t quite comprehend how his own treachery could turn against him. I took possession of the Valkyrie and knelt down beside Kalakas as he slumped to the floor.

“That was pathetic enough that I feel compelled to offer some words of wisdom that, on the off-chance reincarnation exists, you do better in your next life time. Don’t bring smoke monsters to a gun fight,” I said.

Knowing well the power of healing auras I put a few more knives into him just to be sure he stayed down.

I had a Gunslinger open fire on the shuttle, rupturing the cabin to spill fuel inside. While it would be nice to have a subject to interrogate I just didn’t trust any direct encounter with the pilot. If they survived the crash their ability to rewind gave them too much of an advantage unless I had the time to properly plan, and right now I was improvising.

Thirty seconds after the fuel concentration levels should have reached a high level in the cabin the Gunslinger opened fire with incendiary rounds. The gush of flames shook the tiny ship violently.

I left a guard on watch.

I lost another Gunslinger and three Aegis to the rush of guards, but seeing Kalakas dead more new arrivals began tossing their weapons away and holding up their hands.

A part of me wanted to wipe them all out, but I knew that wasn’t the way. I’d let Sylax live for a reason, and it wasn’t just to assure Crystal’s allegiance. When the whole world thinks itself your enemy, you’re never going to put it back together by killing everyone.

I set a Valkyrie to taking prisoners and when the word got around that we were honoring a surrender the rest yielded. The fires died in the shuttle and I was able to confirm the death of the pilot and reclaim the keystone.

38

My sense of triumph was short-lived because back in Aefwal things weren’t going well. My instincts had been right regarding the victims of the shooting. They were infected with a disease that fed off power—healing power in particular. It appeared to transform the infected flesh into more virus particulates which then attempted to spread through the air.

It was a vicious thing and it had already completely consumed the healer I’d moved to a testing cell. At least it had kept the others alive and gave me samples of the virus to study.

For my containment cells I was still using my original design, purely mechanical and electrical in nature, and a good thing because if they were biological my own systems would have been compromised.

I was struck by how recklessly irresponsible something like this plague was. It could easily have spread beyond my own population. A bomb, even a big bomb, was ultimately limited in scope, but something like this could end the Scholarium. It was rare I encountered a deadly weapon I wouldn’t think about acquiring myself, but this one qualified. I wanted the one who deployed it destroyed. Still, SCIENCE was SCIENCE and I looked forward to making a study of it.

The question was what to do with the infected. Crystal and the Divine were dying despite the best my Medbay could throw at them. I saw a few possible ways to resolve the situation.

Tykhe was holding up better than any of the others, she was very nearly stable. I had to assume that was because of her abilities at purification. That was probably my best long-term option for any sort of cure, tweaking such an ability that weakened instead of empowered the disease.

Ophelia and Blank were my other options. Contrarian powers often only seemed to favor one way until they met a stronger member of the opposite. A Fire core holder could do devastating harm to a weaker Water core holder, but the opposite was true as well. This disease might have overpowered and utterly destroyed one of Ophelia’s lieutenants, but Ophelai’s healing ability was an order of magnitude greater.

Then there was Blank, who was operating in somewhat of the opposite direction. Her ability to neutralize powers could considerably weaken the virus, perhaps enough for the immune systems of the infected to fend them off.

The thing was that I couldn’t really test out either without exposing them. If Ophelia wasn’t stronger it would probably kill her almost instantly, and be vastly empowered in the process. Blank wouldn’t die as quickly, but she’d still be infected. Either way, I stood the chance of losing a further two of my District Lords while right now I was only in danger of losing one.

Either might work, but I didn’t want to take the chance yet, not if there were other options and I only saw one other. I doubted this was new technology. This virus had probably been deployed before.

I had a list of many of Boreas’ enemies and even jump gate coordinates for a few of them. I prepared a datapacket describing the symptoms of the virus without giving away any physiology that could be used to replicate it, and began transmitting a message.

It wasn’t long until I got a response, one encrypted enough to show the other party was interested in keeping the conversation secure.

It was a visual communication. The woman on the other end had the sort of flawless health and perfect good looks that suggested some sort of health core or having been heavily upgraded.

“This is Baroness Caya of the city of Diamate. The file you sent is speaking of the Sinta virus. What do you know of it?” Caya asked.

I wasn’t fond of sharing my business, but I didn’t have time for too much in the way of subtlety. Even if they could provide help they’d have to do it quickly. I either needed to be honest or to have an exceptional lie. I lacked a deception good enough.

“I’m Emma, artificial intelligence administrating Aefwal. You look even more plastic than I do, an impressive feat. Boreas recently deployed this virus against us. I’ve stopped the spread, but I am seeking a cure for our infected,” I said.

“Aefwal? We’d thought you destroyed. Still, I’d heard it was ruled by one incapable of speaking politely even when most critical. I’d thought you be rather better at the insults,” Caya said.

“I’m inspired by uniqueness and difference. There is absolutely nothing special about another pretty would-be princess,” I said.

Caya’s smile flickered and her blue eyes turned a touch flinty. “I asked for that, so it gets a pass. I’m flawless—physical perfection in every way—and so are those with whom I share my gift. That virus devastated my people when first introduced. It subverts the order of a system seeking perfection by offering it a different version of perfection.”

I had not expected her to come right out and be helpful. If she was being sincere, I’d wind up having to send this woman a great many cookies.

“A purification core holder is for the most part holding it off, but it is fatal to those with health cores,” I said.

“You have to flip it around. Introduce a poison whose only purpose is to tear a system apart. The virus winds up attempting to emulate it and destroys itself,” Caya said.

I didn’t need to waste time. I knew a number of toxins and I injected a small sample into one of the Divine at once. Their vitals twinged slightly downward, but the effect on reducing the viral mass was extreme.

“You’ve been unexpectedly forthright,” I told Caya.

“I hate that virus and if Boreas hates you enough to use it you may actually be an ally,” Caya said.

We might at that. I extended an invitation for her and her allies to meet in person, and closed the connection.

39

If I’d known that poisoning people was such a boon to their health I might have started long ago. I soon eliminated all traces of the virus in the infected and kept them in quarantine for awhile longer just to be certain.

The virus being so easily neutralized made it a far less formidable weapon than it had first appeared and it might have its uses. Hot Stuff still wanted me to modify her virus to be less fatal to those she sought to convert and I thought with some work this might do it. The way it drew upon the energy of a Powered individual to replicate itself might actually be useful if paired with the Fire virus. Most of Hot Stuff’s partners died from the Fire virus replicating too quickly inside of them and destroying nearby tissue before it too could become affected. If I could weaken the virus in those initial stages, survival rates should go up significantly.

I’d also spent some time preparing us to host a banquet. Caya had accepted my invitation to visit and had spread the word amongst the other allies of Boreas. Meanwhile our Divine guests had been more impressed than angered at what had befallen them here, they viewed the efforts to save their lives as being heroic.

With Crystal still in quarantine it fell upon Anna to play diplomat. One day I’d figure out why that meant dressing up in a red and gold dress that showed more flesh than any rational person would ever want to see. Of course, all in attendance were dressed up. Zora’s collar was so high it reached levels of impractical, Sylax was dressed in an outfit that seemed to completely consist of white leather belts, even Flicker had somehow added bursts of greenish color to her occasional appearances.

Hot Stuff was on patrol and a few of the less social District Lords joined her, Jade and Crash both working to keep the city safe. Given how quickly Boreas had hit our last attempt to make friends we were on high alert this time. Gunslingers and Aegis were thick on the streets.

Drinks had been flowing and the crowd was surprisingly amenable.

I had an official drone present, of course, one with the “likable” attribute who had far better fashion sense than Anna and wasn’t a complete embarrassment. I was also in every drone serving drinks, listening and observing every conversation. This was too important not to be informed.

Those various feeds were also being sent to Crystal’s quarantine cell. She was our official diplomat after all, even if not present. Sylax’s words about her had given me some pause, but really, if she was a highly manipulative schemer it could be argued that only made her more suitable for the role assigned to her.

“This is a good thing that you’ve done here, Emma. When we first encountered you I never thought you’d be wily. Intelligent, yes, but there is a difference,” Crystal said.

“Sad you don’t get to go?” I asked.

“Of course, but this is perhaps even better. Can you nudge Caya over towards Adonis? We’d like to get them together if possible,” Crystal said.

I couldn’t directly control anyone not one of my drones. Still, with a rapid pulse of a light I could draw their attention to an area beneath the conscious level. Once that was done it didn’t take too much effort for two examples of human perfection to close on each other.

“While I’m hardly against performing breeding experiments on the humans, I’m not sure this is actually the time,” I said.

“Keep Sylax away from him,” Crystal said.

Oozelord had showed up as one of Caya’s guests. He’d once captured Anna and Sylax for some time. Then he’d occupied a whole city. Now he was just a scrawny young man covered head to foot in orange slime.

I sent a warning to Anna’s earpiece. She snagged Sylax by the arm and took her over to meet a God of Granaries so frightfully dull even my flawless memory couldn’t remember his name.

“I take it she hasn’t forgiven? The woman really should consider it, given her own history,” I said.

“The last I knew she was threatening to cut pieces of him off into a pot and simmer for a very long time,” Crystal said.

It was an intriguing idea really. I’d seen what effect Hot Stuff had on the slime, but lesser heat sources could result in some interesting properties. I had a drone offer him a cup of wine while taking a discreet sample.

“And here I’d hoped removing her crystal would make her sane,” I said.

“That would assume she started that way. I know what she told you, about our history. Nothing happens in my District that I don’t know. I was surprised you didn’t come to me about it,” Crystal said.

Crystal wished to discuss this now? Perhaps her near-death had reminded her of her mortality.

I said, “I thought for a time I might not need anyone else. I’d build my underground base and lure fools into it, and build a center from which to challenge the world. Then I met you and your creation.”

Crystal chuckled darkly. “Then your world burned, although it was you that burned it. That was bold by the way, I’ve never said so but you left nothing on the table and played every card you had in one bold gambit.”

“I made allies that day out of test subjects. I know exactly what sort of monster Sylax is, I do not and I will never trust her, but so long as she remains a committed ally I can overlook it. It would be unjust not to extend the same courtesy to her creator,” I said.

40

The banquet resulted in the forging of new friendships. Nobody really trusted each other and they never would, but that was fine, they didn’t have to. We had some points of common understanding, although they weren’t always shared between all parties.

We and the Divine both wanted a stop to the incursion of ships. I’d rather expected the powerful Divine to step up and kick them out, but so far they’d been silent. If we had to get rid of them we were going to have to do it ourselves.

Neither of us had sufficient airships to make that happen, but the various forces opposing King Boreas did. Their interest was in hurting Boreas and turning the war back in their direction—a war tapping their resources and leaving them exhausted. There was room for everyone to get what we wanted.

In exchange for roughly half of our supply of crystal powder we bought ourselves a lot of good will. That was power to keep Scholar shields running and beam cannons firing. In exchange we got the aid of a dozen veteran battleships.

My research on Vattier’s puzzle continued and while I still hadn’t solved it I was starting to better understand the energy shield that limited jump travel to and away from this place. I even thought I could re-energize the effect, for a time. If we could stop airships from jumping away we could wipe them out before them having a chance to send word home. Airships that never returned or were heard of again would make those that dispatched them a lot more wary about sending more.

Chasing down that many ships would be problematic. Ideally we’d want them fighting amongst themselves or with some other force. I thought I knew just the place.

The tree.

If they realized it existed there wasn’t a ship out here that wouldn’t be interested in such a source of power. Given the thousands of Powered living in the forest below and the beating we’d taken, they’d also quickly find themselves in a fight.

I arranged to get the other enemies’ attention with a transmission. I’d jump a ship in just long enough to send a repeat of Vattier’s original transmission with an amplified signal and then withdraw. Eager to investigate the source of the very broadcast that had lured them here the ships should follow it.

That is just what I did. I triggered a pulse transmission and my ship unloaded a stream of sensor droids before jumping away.

Forty-seven seconds after the pulse a trio of Righteous ships jumped in. Shortly thereafter others began appearing. It had worked. Now to just make the entire thing succeeded...

I hypercharged a reactor and began to charge the energy shielding. Ships could jump between destinations in this place now, but wouldn’t be able to jump outside of it.

Then I watched. It wasn’t long before ships started to come under fire from forces on the ground, bolts of crystal-powered energy arching upwards even as beam and kinetic weapons fired down into the forests and shuttles started to swarm the sky. Excellent.

I sent in our allies. With me plotting their jump coordinates they were able to arrive perfectly positioned and open fire on already weakened shields.

None of these forces were new to combat. The Righteous vessels clustered together reinforcing each other’s shields while they dealt death and devastation to all around them. The Scholar ships came together honoring whatever loose alliances their lords had in a slower effort to do the same.

Still, it was going our way. I wouldn’t even have to send in Aefwal’s own ships, although I probably should as a matter of diplomacy.

Then, down below, the tree was torn apart by a massive beam of energy. A pillar of pure white flame pierced the sky and drove the clouds away before blasting the forest completely. Thousands of Powered died in an instant and airships were sent tumbling through the sky with their shields drained and hulls smoking.

As suddenly as it had appeared the beam faded. Most of my sensor droids had been destroyed but I had a few still functional, blown clear and able to detect what was happening.

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 wasn’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.

The group in the park was having a lot of success as well. Caya and her perfect people were almost deserving of the name. Excellent reaction time and visual acuity meant that their shots went where they aimed them and beam weapons against plant monsters were making this a one-sided affair.

Oozelord and his people were having a more challenging time. The defense droids they fought weren’t organic and his abilities didn’t have any effect on them. Without the compulsion nature of his power set he was also rather useless for most purposes except for being somewhat acidic.

I scanned the interior for something that might be helpful. There, a storage room containing stockpiles of bacteria used for keeping the pools and drains clear. I had a Gunslinger open fire with a chain-gun and soon organic sludge was pouring across the floor. If anyone knew how to make the most of sludge, it was Oozelord. As soon as he dipped a foot into the substance waves of orange rippled outward and pseudopods of orange slime began to writhe in the air knocking drones down.

“Yeah! You want some of this!” Oozelord bellowed as their carapaces cracked apart.

“I’m reasonably sure no one ever has or will,” I said, taking over a drone for a moment. “But follow me and I can find you more of that stuff which is nearly as disgusting as you are.”

“Babe, once you go slime you never go back. It’s all about the friction,” Oozelord said.

Perhaps one day I’d have him in a testing cell and I could experiment on that properly. Trapping a slime monster between high speed panels of hyper-friction material to properly judge how it held up under such adverse conditions. I could call it the Frictionater. I doubted he would be a fan.

The defense drones weren’t stopping, but after another three storage rooms had been blasted into fragments and added their contents to Oozelord’s mass they weren’t as much of an issue.

That was good, because now it was another group having an issue.

The park had stopped throwing golems and instead there were six humanoid defenders fending us off. They were each dressed in a different color and seemed to have wildly divergent weaponry. Blue was armed with some of spear that fired energy blasts, red had gauntlets wreathed in flame. Each wore a badge stating “Park Ranger”.

They were a good bit more dangerous than the defenders before and the exchange of fire had Caya and her people taking cover.

Caya tugged on the arm of one of my drones. “Emma?”

“Not exactly her at the moment lady,” the drone answered. That was true, the drone was Emily and was something of an underachiever looking at her record.

“Then put her on,” Caya said.

“It doesn’t work …” Emily started to say before I proved her wrong and took over.

“This is Emma. While I realize that it is sadly typical for perfect Princesses to flirt during firefights I assure you, it would be difficult to find one less interested than I am,” I said.

“This perfect specimen of humanity is more than aware of how to handle herself in a firefight and she even recognizes where the designer of this ship got some of his inspirations. If those Rangers start to lose, they’ll combine into a giant robot with a super-weapon,” Caya said.

That was utterly absurd. Who would possibly build independent combat units far weaker than a combined form they were meant to transform into? Certainly not someone as intelligent as Vattier.

Still there was something unusual in the design of these Park Rangers. Proportions that weren’t quite right.

Maybe there was something to this perfect human thing? Her instincts were right on, it was a brilliantly stupid design choice and thus tremendously unlike Vattier, but I couldn’t argue with what my sensors were telling me.

“Focus your fire on green. They are the center point and without them there won’t be any giant robot,” I said.

Caya spoke into a wrist comm and in unison her people opened fire on the green. I had my drones do the same, even when it meant leaving themselves open to fire from the others. The goal was to take that one down quick and to do so in such an overabundance of force that it wouldn’t stand a chance.

It worked, in an explosion of green flame we neutralized that target and the others redoubled their efforts. Individually they were still problematic, but at least the bigger threat had been averted.

There you are … I was wondering if we’d get a chance to speak

The voice was coming from nowhere and everywhere. The closest comparison I could make was to it sounded like when I was in the head of Sylax.

But nobody was in my head but me.

Not true, strictly speaking. I was disappointed it wasn’t you to find the Sword.

Vattier was supposed to be long-dead. We hadn’t seen any signs of him being still active. I wondered again if the ship had an artificial intelligence.

It does and I’ve hacked you through it, but we are not the same. I see your plan and I may allow you to walk away with the Agate if you prove worthy. I appreciated the aims of the Society even while I felt their means lacking. If you should survive this tell my daughter and Mechos to come find me.

My world exploded in agony and I blacked out.

45

It wasn’t the first time I’d been knocked offline, I’d even taken some precautions for if it happened again. My drones having such a high level of autonomy and personality wasn’t just because of utilizing a human template, I wanted my various parts to still largely keep working even when I was absent.

I’d rigged subprocessors to kick in and streamlined my reboot configuration. Even so, it had still been over seventeen minutes that I’d lost and I was sluggish as parts of my network continued to come back.

Vattier—or an AI masquerading as Vattier—had really done a number on me.

As my sensors began to come up I quickly realized it was worse than I’d thought. They had turned on the teleportation gates and used them to bring in various threats throughout the city. Enemies composed entirely of some sort of Von-Neuman machines were fighting in the streets of Districts Two and Three. There were jungle beasts in districts Four through Seven, and it looked as if we had King Boreas’ soldiers in Districts Zero, One, and Eight. If anything had been so foolish as to try to invade Flickers’ District Nine, it was probably lost for all time in the licensing bureau.

I’d taken most of the city’s Bioreactors up on the airship to blow the Sword. We were operating off emergency power and the fixed cannon emplacements were down. There were over a million drones in this city though and in times of crisis all could wield a gun. There were also the District Lords and their focus, none of whom I’d taken on the Sword mission because of my intention of scuttling the ship.

“Emma, you’re back up. About time. Kill the jump gates,” Anna said through her comm.

Of course that was the first thing I did. I’d cut off any enemy reinforcements, but we still had to deal with those in the city. That was no problem, most places.

District Zero was another matter. It was filled with corpses.

I replayed the security logs. Zero was the one district where I’d kept the power online for the city core. Within the first minute of me being down my own automatic defenses put most of the population there to death. Fortunately, they were drones, I could bring them back in time, but it left me undefended.

Worse yet, the reactors had been overloaded and so those automated defenses weren’t available now to kill the real enemy.

I said, “Once again you unerringly choose the least interesting and most obvious thing to say. This was Vattier’s doing, or something pretending to be him. They neutralized my defenses and are moving on my core.”

“I know. Hot Stuff was coming to assist but some flame giant thing put a sword through her. I’ve got the Graven incoming to give some support,” Anna said.

That would be helpful, but it wouldn’t be enough. The enemy force wasn’t large, however it was Powered. Three teams of three, each with a time-shifter and two others of more diverse abilities. One of them probably had a Compulsion core. If they could get to my processor core they could try to control me.

Enemies that diverse were dangerous and the time-shifting only made them more so. I needed big guns to stop them and I could only think of one person without a district of their own to defend that had kind of firepower, Sylax’s academy. First of all I had to check if they were already in use.

Crystal had insects out in force to defend her district. They buzzed through the skies and tore people apart with massive mandibles. In the past she’d made heavy use of hybrids, but she seemed to have gone more old-school into her past. Perhaps a part of that was the result of Sylax’s fall from power, perhaps the humanizing bits had been hers all along.

I opened a comm to Sylax.

“Emma, you’re siccing enemies on your own people now. You grew amusing faster than I’d anticipated,” Sylax said over the video feed. It looked like she and her students were still in their school—no, locked in their school. Crystal wanted to make extra sure they’d be unable to join the fight. That didn’t work for me, not now.

“Not my doing. I’ve got Powered squads closing in on my core and my defenses are down. Can you and yours assist?” I asked.

“We’re ready for a fight. You realize that if I save your skin I’ll expect things in return?” Sylax said.

Sylax never was one for subtlety, it was one of her few good attributes.

“You know I take care of my friends. I’m opening a teleportation gate into your central courtyard and sending you what I have on the enemy forces,” I said.

“Three temporal manipulators, a disassembler, disruptor, voider. My, we really did get his attention didn’t we? I’m on my way,” Sylax said.

I didn’t doubt it. I’d have to trust her, as absurd as that concept was on every single level.

More of my systems were coming online and I was regaining use of my long-range sensors and reestablishing connections to my non-city based drones.

The Sword of Light was on the move, it was coming to Aefwal.

46

What was Vattier doing? That voice in my head sounded almost friendly, but these actions were anything but that. Forcing me into a shutdown, sending troops throughout the city, bringing the Sword of Light here.

Was he attempting to destroy me? No, if that were truly his goal he could have done it. While my main systems were down he could have taken steps to assure Aefwal was destroyed. He was testing me.

The Divine tested me, Vattier tested me—a part of me had to admit to the fairness of it all. I tested people all the time. A part of me also didn’t like it and was determined to make them pay for their bravado.

I hadn’t solved Vattier’s riddle first, yet had been getting ready to run off with his prize. That realization forced him to increase the difficultly level, to make things harder, to make me earn it according to his twisted sense of logic. I’d have much preferred logic puzzles to a superweapon surging at my city but then, in some sense, the two were the same thing.

I’d been waiting for the perfect moment to steal the Agate. I analyzed where the fights had progressed since I’d gone offline. Shield control had been reached and the team was nearly to Weapons control. The fight for the bridge had gone poorly and several Righteous had been reduced to piles of goo by well-aimed shots from time-shifting snipers.

I could say that with the Sword of Light closing on Aefwal I’d been forced to take steps to bring it out of the sky. But there wasn’t a one of them that wouldn’t question that. Asking how I’d done it, what I might have seen or learned in engineering to make it happen.

If Vattier had hacked me through the ship’s AI then I should be able to do the same in reverse. I reviewed my system logs and tracked back the connections.

And I was expected, that much quickly became clear. I was being allowed to walk into certain areas of the systems too easily while others were impressively well-defended behind puzzle barriers that it would take even me some time to crack.

I was getting tired of puzzles.

I didn’t have access to navigation. I had limited access to Weapons control for both target selection and intensity. I had a surprising amount of access to environmental control systems, more than would seem necessary. I had limited access to the jump drive.

They were all pieces of a puzzle I was meant to assemble into a solution to accomplish my ends and, if I were smart enough, I could unlock even more pieces. I didn’t think I’d need them. A plan was coming together with what I had here and although it would be tight, I thought I had a real chance at achieving multiple objectives.

Before any of that I needed to get all teams in place. Helping the Righteous capture the bridge was a priority.

With access to the ship’s sensors I knew exactly where the Boreas snipers were and even with their ability to time-shift I had Gunslingers with chain-guns. A few carefully placed teleports and I cleared the way with the snipers having no space to maneuver out of harm’s way.

“Good work,” said one of the Righteous as they stepped past the Gunslinger onto the bridge. It was a sweeping and cavernous room with an absurd number of screens showing readouts of all sorts. “We’re in motion.”

I took over the drone. “How talented of you to be able to gather the barest basics from a navigational display. It is no wonder the Righteous have been so successful at putting reality right. And yes, the ship is closing on my city, can you do anything to assist?”

I knew they still wouldn’t be able to. The navigational controls were in a locked area of the system.

A Righteous technician sat down at one of the consoles and tapped at the keys. “If I’m reading this properly they’ve locked out helm control. I’m attempting to override.”

They were talented, I gave them that. They attempted to gain access to the evasion systems and to use a short-range burn to put us off course.

“Negative. I’ll keep trying. We’re on automated systems so if I can trigger the collision alarm I can probably get us to set a new destination,” the technician said.

I wondered if they were looking for a job. The Righteous kept proving both inconveniently willing to wipe out of existence while simultaneously being very competent at anything put in front of them.

I didn’t think that they would succeed here though and I switched over to another team.

Caya had finished with the park rangers while I’d been down and made her way to the Weapons control. As a high security area it had more of the drones like I’d encountered in engineering, but it seemed she had neutralized them by shooting out all of the local sensor arrays. I could still see through my drones, but the ship was blind in this area now.

“Negative on exploding the warheads in mounts,” said one of her technicians.

I slipped into a drone. “This is Emma. What is your status?”

“You went absent, we kicked a lot of ass, and according to ship’s sensors we are now on our way to your city. We’re trying to disable the ship’s weapons before we get there,” Caya said.

From what I could tell she was being sincere there. It was unexpected, while she’d helped me once Scholars were almost always out for themselves. We might be an ally against Boreas, but we were a threat as well. Many Scholars would have been content to let Aefwal be reduced to rubble and to deal with the consequences later.

“I’m under attack. I have Boreas’ agents loose in my city. Thank you for doing what you can,” I said.

“It’s the decent thing,” Caya said.

I wondered if human perfection was some counter to the worst effects of the crystals. Caya wasn’t quite like any of the other Scholars I’d met. Whatever else happened here I needed to make sure she and her people came through this alive.

47

I lost contact with three-quarters of my surviving team that accompanied Oozelord to the shield emitters. It was betrayal. He had timed it well and by using pseudopods to throw my forces against a wall managed to breach their protective shells and let his ooze reach them.

I teleported the survivors a short distance away.

This disrupted my plans. It wasn’t really a surprise that Oozelord would grab the opportunity to try to seize the Sword of Light, but it was inconvenient timing. I’d thought he’d have captured his section first and then offered to help securing the bridge.

The Sword had found its way to Aefwal and targeting data was flowing through the computer. The scanners were seeking out sustained energy sources emitting a particular pattern. The dimensional barrier—it was seeking the equipment powering it.

Given the strength of the scanners on the Sword of Light it didn’t take long for them to locate it. I was able to scale down the first blast of power. Even so an energy beam tore a skyscraper in half and I had fifteen thousand drones that would need to go back to the vats for rebirth.

I was being allowed limited interference in the systems, but not enough to fully blunt the offensive. If they brought down that shield the other factions would be able to bring in more ships. I didn’t need a massive aerial battle over Aefwal.

A second shot tore through the fundamental of the city, opening a hole towards the high-energy regulators that I was using to power the effect.

An airship, it would have to be. The Bioreactor wouldn’t be capable of the sustained energy requirements of the shield, but I might be able to manage rapid pulses. That would provide shielding about ninety percent of the time. It would have to do. I made the alternations and killed the emitter in Aefwal just as the cannons were charging up for a third shot.

The targeting computer moved on instead to blast apart one of my bigger defensive arrays. I wasn’t troubled, at the moment I didn’t have the power to run them anyways.

I switched back to one of my drones on the bridge where the Righteous were still trying to gain control of the ship.

“We’ve got a problem and your hapless monkey flailing isn’t helping,” I said.

“We’re most of our way through the protections for the lateral thrusters. I know it is little comfort but we think we’ll be able to divert the ship in twenty minutes if you can hold out that long,” said the Righteous Commander.

It wasn’t all talk. They really were good at this.

“I wish you had that long. Oozelord has betrayed us and subverted my forces. He’ll be coming for the bridge,” I said.

The Righteous exchanged looks. Only six of their team was still standing.

“We’re low on ammo. Can you contribute any aid?”

Of course I could, but it wasn’t in my best interest to do so. I didn’t want the Oozelord to seize the ship, but I didn’t suit my ends for them to know what I could do here. Even if killed to the last man today, the Righteous would rise tomorrow. Their stories would remain.

“A few of my forces survived his betrayal. I can slow them down, but I don’t have anything to stop him,” I said.

The Righteous Commander nodded and they began to establish a defensive position. Fortunately most of that work had already been done by the Scholars.

If there were a fight for the bridge, it might give me just what I required to justify the Sword of Light’s destruction.

I switched over to my drones with Caya’s team in Weapons control.

“We’ve got issues,” I said.

“No pretty princess crack? You are upset. We see the guns tearing you apart. We still can’t get control although there seem to be some unexpected power regulations we’re trying to figure out how to exploit,” Caya said.

That was me. I didn’t need them seeing that.

“We don’t have time to worry about that. I need to get you and your people out of there. Oozelord turned on us and subverted my forces,” I said.

“And you figure if he’s betrayed you, then he’ll betray me,” Caya said, tilting her head for a moment. She nodded. “With a prize like this I’m not surprised. It might allow him to settle things against Galapos with a single strike.”

It wasn’t a name I was familiar with, but a study of Sylax’s old records shed some light on things. Galapos was a baron under Boreas with an ability to shield his body in a layer of destructive energy.

“How novel, you have some knowledge I lack. I’d like the details,” I said.

“Galapos razed the city of Perpolis two decades ago. This was before he even joined with Boreas. Oozelord lost his family in the attack, he didn’t have the crystal then,” Caya said.

Missions of vengeance, how trite, how useful.

“Exchange one razed city for another? I wouldn’t mourn Boreas losing an underling, but I wish he’d decided to work with us. Unless your flawless perfection renders you immune from getting slimed on I think he’ll be looking to add you and your people,” I said.

“We’re not immune,” Caya said as she drew a pistol from her hip and blasted the room’s energy regulator. The consoles sparked and died. “Wish we could do more to stop the attack, but we’re not making headway. If you have a way out we’ll take it.”

I could just teleport her off the ship, but it wouldn’t do to let them know I had that ability. So far I’d been playing it up that the ship was disabling my ability for anything but short hops.

I had my drones guide them through the halls towards the nearest section of open hull. I’d be able to extract them with the Graven.

48

The battle for Aefwal was going in our favor. The districts had been built up and staffed enough that the Lords were more than capable of defending their own territory. Powered with the offensive Divine core Jade had already neutralized the threats she faced and had dispatched people throughout the city.

Sylax had assembled her people and come through the jump gate to take up positions defending my central core. While none of the Children of Dust were as powerful individually as a full crystal holder, she had been teaching them to coordinate their abilities and work as a team. This was a stark contrast to the usual Scholar method of warfare where the strong dominated, and while teamwork could happen it was always done cautiously and with an eye towards betrayal waiting to happen.

Right now a group of them were squaring off against a telekinetic and an energy projector. Sylax closed in on a temporal shifter with a dagger in her hand.

It was worth taking a moment to watch. The shifter should be more than comfortable in this situation, but he looked terrified.

“So what iteration are we on?” Sylax asked with a wicked smile.

“I’ve lost count. You’ve gouged out my eyes, my balls, skinned me once,” the man said, exhausted. “Last loop you said if I just surrendered you’d end it quick. Will you?”

Sylax stepped forward and drove her dagger upwards through his throat, a savage twist tearing it out and putting him to death. “Good boy.”

She was without her powers—and I’d just watched her essentially kill a man by scaring him to death. If I ever decided this working relationship of ours was at its end I would need to make sure to kill her quickly and thoroughly. Sylax wasn’t the sort of enemy you wanted behind your back.

Her students were impressive. One girl with the ability to turn herself into some sort of highly durable metal closed with enemies while another poured lightning into her from behind. Her form was thus wreathed in electricity and her punches became instant knockout blows.

They were doing well, but I couldn’t help but to think how I could improve matters even further. A lot of the charge was dissipating and a proper suit would able to hold it better, as well as having built-in communication systems for team coordination and communication.

The Sword of Light was continuing to blast the city with beam cannons. I was dampening the worst of the strikes, but the city was still getting hit hard.

The death toll of my drones was now over one hundred thousand. I’d be able to bring them back, but it was enough to hurt.

Aboard the Sword of Light my drones had led Caya and her people to the exterior hull. It was a fight just to get there, the ship still had defense drones and they weren’t friendly. Just before their arrival I jumped in the Graven and unleashed cannons at close range to tear an opening and extend the ramp.

Caya and her people didn’t hesitate, human perfection at play as they crossed the distance to the ramp with long leaps and precise coordination.

I really should copy their design. Anna was technically perfect in terms of pure stats now but really, no matter how talented the cook, bad ingredients make for ordinary cookies.

Oozelord was meanwhile starting his assault on the bridge. The Righteous had decided to make use of the captured Scholar beam weapons given their shortage of ammunition. It was the right call, the beams seared and drove back the ooze on contact, but there was a slow wave of orange slime now creeping with inevitable certainty towards them down the corridor.

I’d already been periodically using a second airship for bringing over the Bioreactors. Until recently they’d been powering Aefwal and its defenses, but now they were lining up in rows filling the engineering section of the Sword. Getting them over was just part of the struggle, I’d also been working to tie them into the ship’s power systems.

I needed the ship to still have power even after removing the Agate. That had gone more slowly than I’d have liked, the ship’s systems were unnecessarily wasteful with a power source such as it had and I had to bypass a lot systems to make sure the ones I’d be substituting would keep active.

The Ooze took the first of my drones standing with the Righteous, cracking her armor and flowing inside as the Righteous continued to fire.

It was time. My drones opened the Agate’s containment cell and extracted the massive crystal. Surrounding it with four drones I used their combined aura to teleport it to my airship and in an instant had it jumping back into an underground hangar in Aefwal.

The ship’s guns died off, my Bioreactors weren’t sufficient to power the massive cannons. Caya and her people had already left engineering and the Righteous were too busy to watch the bridge monitors. There was nobody there to see the oddity.

The Ooze had taken two Righteous. Their power-resistant aura was enough to handle a droplet, but submerged they fell to the compulsion just like anyone else. My last drone dropped off the network as the Ooze took them and my only means of observing events was through the ship’s sensors.

The last Righteous fell and I dropped the power to the shield preventing jump travel. At my command the Sword of Light jumped out seconds later.

On the bridge all screens began to flash red before depicting a visual of what as below.

Aefwal had been left behind and the Sword of Light was now directly above the city of Orilia—under the command of Baron Galapos, the murderer of Oozelord’s family.

The same principles that had let me block jump travel in and out of an entire band of reality didn’t function as well here. I could maintain the effect with the power aboard, but not for long. That was fine, I only needed thirty seconds to put the ship outside of the limits of a temporal rewind.

Every cannon in the city opened up the moment the ship appeared. They had time-shifters present. As always the best way to deal with time-shifters was overwhelming force.

A prompt came up on the bridge screens.

Engaged with city of Orilia.

Do you wish to initialize self-destruct?

Warning: Interdiction field is activated and ships cannot leave the city below. Self-destruct will destroy all residents.

The Ooze rippled and formed a human shape, Oozelord stepping out and just for a moment he glanced at the nearest ship camera. He knew this was me, here at the end he appreciated a move well made. He was laughing as went to the closest keyboard to hit accept.

49

My access to the sensors aboard the Sword of Light faded the moment the field was enabled. Still, I knew what would happen next—what I’d planned to happen next.

The ship would crash into the city. That much kinetic energy would shake the city to its very foundations and a great many buildings would collapse. Then the Bioreactors would go, tearing through the hull of the ship and beginning to reach the civilian populace. My Bioreactor bombs were made to be fueled off Biomass, and in a city of a million they’d have no shortage of fuel.

It was possible there would be survivors but I wouldn’t count on it. There would be just ruins and rubble and in twenty-four hours the resurrecting bodies of the Righteous. They’d probably be interrogated, tortured, compulsed or mind-read, but they’d only be able to tell what they’d seen. Their brave stand against a compulsor attacking the bridge. Further research would reveal Oozelord’s mission of vengeance against the ruler of this city, his personal motivations for pushing this crusade.

Boreas would lose a powerful ally and have none living to blame for the fact. All would mourn the loss of the Sword of Light and the secrets it held, and also quietly be grateful that it had been removed from the battlefield.

I’d have to be careful with my new power source, of course. None must know what I’d taken or how I’d gotten it. Publicly I had to be just one of a coalition that had done their part to try to stop a great threat. The Agate was too great a prize for any of the others to know existed.

* * *

A week passed and all was going exactly to plan. I’d even gotten footage of the Sword of Light and its final moments from a trade-ship that had been making its exit from the city at the time. I provided the information to the Righteous. If Boreas was torturing his prisoners it might be a cause for war between those two. I could hope.

What wasn’t working out to plan was the perception of my role in events. Caya was grateful for my saving her life and credited me with the plan that had ultimately taken down the Sword of Light—even if not as planned. A great many of the Divine credited me with working to defend their home, our home.

Two weeks after the Sword’s fall Caya took a knee before Anna and swore her allegiance and that of the city of Diamate. In a huge ceremony she wasn’t the first to swear that day. Anna had even dressed up, she looked ridiculous.

Upgrade Notification

Congratulations

Your hierarchal command structure has expanded to encompass multiple cities

New Classification

Province

All abilities have been upgraded

Superhuman upgrades unlocked

Appoint a new Aefwal administrator

It was an unexpected prompt. I could already feel myself starting to grow new processors located in Diamate. I thought Aefwal politics were bloody, my initial readings showed Caya had it far worse.

A problem for another time. I needed to appoint a new administrator for Aefwal and ideally it should be one of the existing District Lords. I also got the sense it should be one of the more powerful, I had four who fit that bill.

Jade had absorbed Ares’ core and while her decades of rebellion had seemed pointless I respected what she’d done since Sylax had been overthrown. Ophelia had consumed Bast’s core and was weak-willed enough to be compliant, she was also home to Amy who I distrusted immensely. Crystal was ancient and strong and another upgrade core. Blank had proved her loyalty, but placing her in charge of the city would probably weaken every Powered there.

I had to rule out Blank and that left three.

I didn’t trust her, not really, but with Aefwal now housing the Agate I needed a schemer and manipulator in charge.

I promoted Crystal. Crystal must have been ready for it. The appointment to take over her district came only seconds later, Medusa.

I knew the name, one of the Children of Dust and one of Sylax’s students able to turn people to stone at a touch.

Only the Powered could claim a District, she must have enough.

We were a rising power now and I knew the Scholars well enough to understand what that meant. A fight would be coming. We’d be ready.

Coming Soon

The Province

There is a coming storm. Tensions between the Righteous and the Scholarium reach a new high and the threat of a devastating war between the core and the rim grows daily. It is a poor time to pick a fight, but Anna chooses the moment to wage a very personal war threatening to tear the newly formed Province apart.

Author Notes

This is book number four for a series I really didn’t think would have more than one. It is because of your input that this series exists, give yourself a cookie.

I’ve always been sad at the edge of the game map. That point where the world ends, the closed door of the houses that you can’t walk through. It is always sad when you hit that last level and there is no more advancement to be had.

I’m a fan of dungeon core and obviously while this series started out in the dungeon it is quickly becoming something more. I’m trying to remain true to the essence of the idea even while drifting away from the actual underground lair. Emma is powerful because her people are powerful, because of what she builds, how she upgrades, how her resources are placed. In these works now I’m trying to capture what might happen if the game didn’t end and those walls didn’t exist.

Emma keeps growing, keeps getting stronger. To her drones she is a thing both benevolent and terrifying. The ever-watchful eye that guides their lives and rules their destinies. They never know a moment of privacy and yet owe her for their very existence.