Boon smiled at Gonders. "We're super good."
Gonders smiled back, but spoke to Cora. "Are you enjoying your time out of the tank?"
Cora got a faraway look on her face. "Oh, you have no idea how much."
Sara cocked her head at that, but Cora continued before she could make a comment. "Boon, your pants look a little tight, do you want to borrow a pair?"
Gonders gave Boon's butt a quick pat, and said, "Nope, she’s fine. They're just right."
Boon's face turned as red as Sara’s and Cora's hair, which made the twins laugh out loud.
Then Cora clapped her hands and dropped to the floor in a cross-legged position. "Okay, let's do this thing."
Sara was taken aback. "Just like that? I figured we would have to convince you more."
"Nope. Grimms made a really good argument, and I have to agree with him. The sooner I do this, the faster I can adapt to the new casting. I want to be ready in a few days when we ship out for Suttri."
"Uh, okay. Wow. I didn't think you would be so gung-ho about this. Do you remember the spellforms?" Sara asked, coming to sit beside her sister.
Cora gave her a look like she was an idiot, and Sara found herself missing that look. "Of course I remember,” she said tartly. “I made them."
"Okay," Sara replied with a laugh. "I was just checking."
Cora shook out her hands, closed her eyes, and took a deep breath. "Okay, I'm going to do it."
"It's okay if it takes you a while. Boon and I both took..." Sara trailed off when Nyx began to glow with a bluish Aetheric light.
"Holy shit, is she getting it on the first try?" Boon asked incredulously.
"Showoff," Sara grumped, but there was no real heat behind the words, and everyone watched the glow around Nyx grow in intensity.
Cora slowly began to float off the ground, like Boon had on the beach; unlike Boon, Cora didn't seem to be fighting the spell at all. In fact, she wore the most serene expression Sara had ever seen on her sister’s face.
The power built up, creating a static charge around them, and Sara was shocked several times from the carpet. A humming started up in a frequency that was felt more than heard.
Sara looked to the pixie on the couch. She was glowing so brightly that it was hard to look directly at her, but Sara wanted to see what was going to happen to her, so she continued to watch even after her eyes began to water.
Nyx stood and walked to the edge of the couch, her arms held up like she was praying, but she seemed to be growing shorter with every step. It took Sara a moment to realize the pixie wasn't getting shorter; she was morphing into another shape altogether. By the time she had taken three steps, she fell forward, landing on all fours, and her hands grew into thick but tiny paws. Pointed ears began to sprout from her head, while her nose and mouth pushed forward into a snout.
The glow became too much for Sara to stare into. She had to look away, or she would be seeing spots for days. Just when she turned her head, there was a flash of blue, like a flash bulb, then the room was back to its normal luminosity.
Sara turned when she heard Cora squeal with delight and clap her hands a few times.
There, on the couch, was no longer the regal, blonde pixie, but a tiny, blonde fox with giant ears.
"Oh my god, a fennec fox!" Cora said, holding her hand out to the familiar.
Nyx jumped off the couch and came forward, stopping in front of Cora—who had somehow not passed out or fallen over, to both Sara’s and Boon's slight irritation.
"Oh my god. Pixies? Are you shitting me?" Cora said, staring at Nyx. Then, after a beat, she held out a hand and shook one of Nyx's paws. "It's a pleasure to meet you, Nyx Morenna. I'm so honored that you chose to pair with me."
Cora looked over at Sara, a smile threatening to split her face in half. "This explains so much."
Chapter 13
The small shuttle jumped and bucked slightly as it dove through the ever-thickening atmosphere of Earth's northern hemisphere. Sara and Cora had decided that they needed to find some open ground where Cora could practice her new abilities without the restrictions of an Aether dampener, like they had used in their final exams.
After a few calls to the UHFC, Sara got the clearance to go ape-shit out in the northern territories of old Canada. They were heading to a spot just north of the Arctic Circle, where there was the least likelihood of causing serious damage.
Sara hadn't told Cora that she was keeping both Boon’s and Cora’s new abilities secret from the UHFC for now, but she couldn't shake the feeling that the secrecy was going to save her ass at some point.
I really should trust my government more. Oh well.
Boon and Gonders were strapped into seats in the back, while Sara piloted and Cora sat next to her, petting and talking with Nyx. Alister was somewhere in the back; probably curled up on a seat with Silva, if Sara had to guess.
"Do you have any ideas about how you want to test your powers?" Sara asked, when Cora finally stopped fawning over the appreciative Nyx.
"Well, I wanted to start with some of the balancing you were talking about. The last thing we need is for me to go berserk while I'm in the tank," she said, craning her neck to see the green treetops that spread out in all directions when they punched through the clouds.
"Yeah, we're not all that good at it yet, either," Boon shouted from the back, and Sara had to nod in agreement.
"She's right. On the dreadnought, I was nearly gone before I remembered to center myself. The power can get away from you rather quickly if you're not careful," Sara warned.
Cora looked down at Nyx, who in turn looked back at her for a second. Then Cora said, "I think we have a few ideas. I'll try them out, and we can see how effective they are."
" ‘We’?" Sara asked, looking over at her sister with a raised eyebrow.
Cora gave her a smile. "Yeah, me and Nyx. I think we can figure out a few combinations that could work."
The treetops quickly began to thin the further north they traveled, eventually giving way completely. The ground was covered in fluffy, white blankets of snow and ice. Sara could only tell that they had started crossing the Arctic Ocean because the sensors on the shuttle told her so.
"There it is," Cora said, pointing out the window.
Sara craned her neck, but couldn't see a difference between the white area Cora was pointing out and the rest of white surrounding it.
"Uh, how can you tell? It all looks the same to me," she said, checking the navigation computer. To her ever-so-slight irritation, Cora was right. They were above Bathurst Island.
"I don't know," Cora said, cocking her head to the side in thought. "Maybe it has to do with the time I spend in the tank, using my powers to transport us places." She looked over at her sister, watching her maneuver the ship around for a landing. "It's like when you mark a place on your viewing bubble; I don't know where that place is, but I can suddenly feel its location. You were a controller when we were training at the academy... wasn't it that way for you?"
Sara thought about all the hours they had spent in the simulators, back when they thought she was going to be the controller twin, but she had never felt what Cora was describing.
"Actually, it was nothing like that. I'm sure it’s a property of the tank system and our connection. When we were using the standard setup, the locations were a calculated number that I just sort of inputted into the spellform for a warp. But on the Raven, we don't use the navigation computer except to confirm our location. When I pick a jump point, I'm using my intuition, and then I think the Aether provides the details according to my wishes," Sara said, deploying the landing skids and bringing the shuttle down the last fifty meters onto what the sensors said was a level landing zone.
It was such a glaring white outside that Sara was starting to see purple spots, and she regretted leaving her aviators on the Raven. For all she could see, they could have been landing on a cliff face, and she wouldn’t know.
"That would make sense as t
o why I don't get the 'calculated position' feeling. When you input a location, I just know where it is," Cora said, pulling on her bottom lip in contemplation. "You would think it would make our warps and jumps less accurate, but the Raven is far more exacting than a standard ship."
The shuttle rocked slightly as it settled fully on the struts, and a billowing cloud of snow and ice blew up from the disturbance made by the gravitic engines.
Sara shut them down, but left life support on to keep the ship from getting too cold inside while they were out. She turned to Cora and continued their conversation. "I think it makes perfect sense. Our computers can only calculate inside the parameters we input. Space is so vast that leaving the hundredth decimal place off a calculation could lead to thousands of kilometers’ difference in the final calculation. With the Aether, I'm not choosing a location so much as a place."
"Isn't a location and a place the same thing?" Boon asked, following the conversation from the back.
Cora shook her head. "No, I think I know what Sara is saying. A location is a calculated spot; like this island, for example. It has a longitude and latitude that corresponds to a point on a map. But a place is just that, regardless of its location. The universe is always moving and expanding, so locations change. But places stay the same. Earth is a place, but its location in the galaxy is constantly changing as it hurtles through the void."
"Right. So when I mark a place on the viewing bubble, I'm actually marking a place I want to be, and the Aether I use to send that marker to Cora translates it exactly. I say I want to put us three kilometers away from a ship, instead of requesting the specific coordinates, because the coordinates are constantly changing for us and the moving ship I want us to end up beside," Sara said, looking back at the blonde woman, who had a thoughtful look on her face.
"I get it,” Gonders said, jumping into the conversation. “Though it’s a little spooky, when you think about it. It's like the Aether can think for itself."
"Who says it doesn't?" Cora and Sara said at the same time.
They both gave an identical laugh, then laughed again at their mimicking of one another.
"Twins are creepy sometimes," Gonders said quietly to Boon, as the sisters continued to laugh.
Boon turned to her with a sickly sweet smile. "I'm a twin, babe. Am I creepy?"
Gonders leaned back from the too-large smile, "You are right now."
Boon laughed at her girlfriend’s expression before unbuckling her restraints. "Come on, we need to get into our armor so we don't freeze to death out there."
"What about these guys?" Gonders asked, waving a hand toward Silva and Alister as they began to stretch awake.
Cora came out of the cockpit and said, "Oh, I made something special for them."
Chapter 14
"Oh, my god. You three look adorable!" Boon nearly screamed with excitement as she squatted down in front of the three familiars and clapped her armored hands together with clanking booms.
The three pixies-turned-animals were all wearing custom-made Aetheric armor of their own. Each set was designed with their animal form’s natural movement in mind, and was powered with a wireless link to their owner’s suit. The armor was matte black, like the human armor, but where the human armor glowed blue at the seams with the power of the Aetheric, the seams on their armor were a deep red. In addition, each suit featured a small plate above the left breast, bearing the pixie’s name.
"Why is their power red, and not blue?" Sara asked Cora, as she admired her sister’s handiwork.
"I don't know," she admitted, tugging on her lip. "I didn't do anything different with the power design, except make it wireless. There are plenty of examples of wireless Aether power transmission, and it's never changed the properties of the Aether itself. I honestly don't understand why the color is different."
"Could it be dangerous?" Sara asked, looking Alister over with concern.
The light coming from the familiars’ suits began to change from red to orange, then to a kind of green, and finally fell into the blue spectrum. After maybe thirty seconds, they were the same blue as the rest of the armor.
Nyx cocked her head at Cora, and they stared at one another for a few seconds, before Cora slapped her armored forehead.
She was not used to wearing the armor, so the slap was far harder than she intended, and her head snapped back with the clanging impact.
"Ow, shit. How do you ever get used to this?" Cora complained, trying in vain to rub her sore head through the helmet.
Sara burst out laughing, as did Gonders. "You just need to practice. Honestly, I still forget sometimes," Sara told her.
Cora growled with frustration, then said, "Anyway, I think I know why the color changed. The suits work off of our power, but they need to be in range to charge; I'm not sure what that exact range is, so I installed a small Aether battery in the suits. Anyway, when the power is being used up, the color will probably change to indicate how much they have left."
"You don't know for sure?" Boon asked, helping Silva onto her shoulder. There was a clicking sound as the ferret’s tiny gauntlets magnetized to her shoulder plate.
"I didn't actually design them. Well, not completely. They were stored in the core," Cora said, stepping up to the ramp controls, and pressing the button to open the back of the shuttle.
The back ramp began to lower, and a strong gust of wind caught in the opening, rocking the small shuttle with a shudder. Snow and ice swirled into the compartment, announcing the Arctic winter they were about to step into.
"How did you even know to look for something like these?" Sara asked, holding out a hand to Alister, who climbed into it. She raised him to her shoulder, while Cora did the same with Nyx. Both familiars locked onto their mage's shoulder plates.
"It just made sense. War Mages were constantly going into battle, and I was sure they didn't carry their familiars in their pockets. I thought there had to be something already designed for them, and I was right," Cora said, her smugness barely audible.
"Why didn't I think of that?" Sara wondered, as they made their way down the ramp.
"Because you've been a little busy lately," Cora said, and Sara could hear the smile in her voice.
She smiled herself and blushed inside her armor, then took in their surroundings.
The landscape was beyond barren. Bathurst Island was really nothing more than a 16,000 square kilometer, flat-topped boulder, sticking out of the Arctic Ocean. There were slight variations in the terrain, but nothing more than a few rolling hills that became lost in the endless whiteness of it all.
"A blank canvas," Cora observed, putting her hands on her hips, taking a slow deep breath. "Let's fuck it up."
Fire rained from the sky, sending up plumes of white snow and steam where the flaming orbs landed. Great swaths of ice were torn from the ground as force blades sliced them free, and shield walls batted them like person-sized baseballs across the frozen tundra. Walls of ice and stone were formed from the ground, only to be shattered by blasts of Aether, similar to what the cannons on the Raven launched.
That's a new one. I never thought to use the cannon blast spell, Sara thought as she watched her sister sling spell after spell into the frozen waste. Kinda stupid that I didn't, she admitted to herself.
Just when Sara was about to stop her sister before she threw herself too far out of balance, Cora knelt down and placed a hand to the ground. A familiar blue glow surrounded her, and the torn-up chunks of ice began to melt and recede back into the divots Cora had made.
Sara stood slack-jawed as she watched her sister mend the destruction she had wrought over the last twenty minutes.
When the area looked nearly the same as when they had stepped out of the shuttle, Cora stood and turned to the three mages. "That was freaking awesome!"
"Holy shit. You just mended all the damage! How do you feel?" Boon asked, excited to watch someone else use their power set.
"Well, I was starting to feel that tipping sen
sation you mentioned, so I figured the fastest way to get back to center was to fix what I had just done. Worked like a charm," she said, flexing her left arm comically.
"Combat is great, but you're going to be in the tank most of the time. We need to be able to test what you can do in there. Do you have any ideas about how to do that out here?" Sara asked.
"Actually, I do. And I'm pretty sure you two will be able to use it to your advantage," Cora said, looking over at Nyx, positioned on her shoulder. After a few seconds, she nodded and turned back to Sara and Boon. "So, we're pretty sure we can use the jump spell on ourselves. Nyx says the records talk about War Mages that could jump around the battlefield, so I'm going to give it a try." She lowered her head in concentration.
"Did you just say that Nyx told you—"
Sara's words were cut off when Cora disappeared. The resulting shock wave that the air made as it violently filled the resulting vacuum slammed into the three mages, blowing them off their feet as the sound dampeners in their helmets kicked in and blocked most of the resulting blast of sound. Enough got in, though, that Sara had to blink away tears as her ears rang.
Then a secondary blast of sound pushed the cloud of snow and ice that the first implosion had flung into the air, moving it to the side like a gale-force wind.
Sara could hear the groans from both Boon and Gonders as they struggled to get to their feet. Alister and Silva stumbled over as Sara finally got to a sitting position, and the two familiars sat down, a little woozy from the blast, but Sara figured the sound dampeners on their suits were working just fine, because they were not writhing in pain.
"Oh, shit," Cora yelled, running over to them and sliding to a stop on her knees in front of Sara. "Are you okay? I didn't even think about the shock wave a vacuum that big would make."
Sara held up a hand, and worked her jaw a little to get the ringing in her ears to stop. "We're fine, but it looks like my armor took a thrashing." She looked down at the dented and warped plating of the super hard material. She noted that two of the polymer plates on the chest had even broken.
War Mage Chronicles- Part One Page 56
