That had been the final touch, the piece de resistance. The wood and copper hull had been coated with a thick sheeting of ice, which had been frozen solid. Water was an excellent insulator, an excellent radiation absorber, and, in a pinch, excellent ablative armor. And with her alchemical skills, she was fairly confident she could handle ice.
“We’re receiving a radio burst from HQ,” the goblin in charge of the radio set said. Kailee kicked off the floor to swing her chair around. She beamed.
“Put it on!” She rubbed her palms together.
The goblin in charge of the radio set – Lt. Xeno – flicked a few switches. He adjusted a wire. Kicked a bit of machinery. The United States Air Force had had no idea that their communication gear would be re-purposed like this, and Quinn wondered if they would be offended to see such a messy, kludged together mass of different circuits, wires, and crystals. The magical amplifier had been her suggestion – based off the same magic that Kaliee used to channel energy into her riastrad – and it would ensure they’d be linked up to Babylon even at some distance.
“Greetings from Babylon Command, Morrigan’s Kiss.”
Kailee grinned fiercely.
That had been one of the very last requests. Before she fully took command, she had demanded that the ship be given a name of her choosing. The Admiralty had gritted their teeth, but accepted it. And a good thing too; Rocinante was a silly name for a ship.
“Captain Kailee,” a warm, husky, female voice spoke. “This is Free Lord Mary, calling in to wish you all a good maiden voyage.”
“A pleasure to hear from you, ma'am,” Kailee said, her voice practically overflowing with pride.
“This is an unprecedented moment in the history of Purgatory – of the whole solar system,” Mary continued. “A synthesis of three different forms of technology and the blessing of the gods themselves, to do something that the Earth has never accomplished. For the past two years, Purgatory has been in awe of everything we’ve seen from Earth, in stories and songs. Today, we take the first step to make Earth in awe of what we can do.” She sighed. “You may launch when ready.”
Kailee grinned. “Helm?”
Ensign Adisa nodded and started to flick switches.
In the belly of the Morrigan’s Kiss, three spheres began to move. They were gloriously complex things – nested skeins of crystal, with layers of lubrication to allow smooth rotations without grinding and friction. The outer spheres, though, each bore an enchantment. They had enchantments from the gods of wind and sailing and sea – Poseidon had only been the first. The Tuatha and the Aesier had both given enchantments as well. The effect was simple: within the spheres blew an endless wind. But contained within the sphere, that wind roared to no purpose. An endless loop of motion.
The inner spheres, though, contained clouds of nanites, blown about in that wind. They danced, unharmed, around one another in complex patterns that were familiar to anyone who had sneezed into a cloud of dust.
On the helm, Ensign Adisa pressed a button. A borrowed laptop and keyboard sent an electrical signal into a jerry-rigged piece of Ancient technology. That electrical signal sent a command to those nanites. In a single instant, an electro-static charge surged through the inner sphere and the nanites formed into a gauzy sail, adhering to the sphere. By shaping themselves along a complex pattern that had been designed by nearly a dozen magicians using scrying magic, divination from gods, and technical knowledge from a suite of books delivered by Boeing Aerospace as part of a trade deal with the United States, those nanite crafted sails were able to catch the wind.
The inner spheres then moved against the outer spheres.
And the outer spheres, contained within cross beams within the center of the ship, pressed against the ship.
And so, the Morrigan’s Kiss began to move.
They had done quite a bit of experimentation with the trapped winds, asking the gods to dial the speeds up and dial them down. Hurricane force winds destroyed nanite sails. Gentle breezes provided too little thrust to make a measurable impact on the Kiss.
But a headwind that was exactly the kind that Kaliee would have used on the Platonic Sea?
That was enough to send the Kiss gently drifting down, out of the long disused cargo bay-doors of the Purgatory research facility. From the outside of Purgatory, it didn’t seem to drop. Rather, it floated upwards, away from the pitted and scarred surface of the moon Charon. A needle of ice and bronze, a ship of magic and technology, the Morrigan’s Kiss looked like a near perfect shadow in the dimness of the distant sun. But in the minds of Babylon Command, standing about the radio transmitter, it glowed like the spear of Apollo himself.
“We are away, Babylon Command!” Kailee’s voice crackled over the radio. “We can see space outside with the cameras. It’s beautiful! Over.”
“Take it easy out there, Captain,” Admiral Cochrane said, frowning as he turned on the radio transmitter. “We have a few paces to put you through before we move onto an actual mission out there. Over.”
“Aye, aye, admiral! Over.”
***
Cochrane put the radio down. He looked at Mary. She was the only member of Babylon’s command staff not literally beside themselves with joy. Several were clapping. Others were cheering.
Mary, though, looked solemn.
Cochrane frowned. “You did the right thing, Madam.”
“Did I?” Mary asked, her voice bitter. “When Liam finds out what we’ve done – why we’ve done it...” She looked down. “I don’t think he’ll ever be able to trust me again.”
Admiral Cochrane nodded. His eyes drifted from the table of maps and plans. To the red vellum scroll that contained the orders he would send to the Kiss once their shakedown cruise was complete. The name was all that was visible.
Project Ragnarok.
Cochrane sighed.
Liam Vanderbilt would not be happy about this.
He would not be happy about this at all.
Epilogue
Ares rolled five meters before smashing into a tree. The tree shattered into splinters and slowly toppled to the ground with a sound not unlike a dozen firecrackers going off at once. As quiet slowly returned to the forest, Ares sat up, hissing as his palm cupped his shoulder.
He hissed as he felt the burn. Blackened flakes of his shirt crumbled away under his fingertips, and smoke continued to curl and wisp from under his fingers. He slowly stood up and glared around himself. The vast, dark forest that he had landed in was... somewhere. The where was less important than the fact it was several thousand kilometers from where he had been.
Kilometers.
Gods. He shook his head and let out a rueful smile at the memory of trying to wrestle with pygme and pygons and pechys. It had seemed easy enough during the Peloponnesian War, but realizing that units could be segmented into easy units of ten and multiples of ten after millennia of fractions and messiness was like, well, it had like been becoming unbound by the restraints that humans put on him. His rueful smile vanished at that thought. He glared at his wound, willing it to close.
It did not want to close.
He had been in the middle of a talk with a rather unfriendly Russian. Their particular faction, the Communists, had been rather interested in retaking their government. They had been few in number and nearly unarmed, their dreams little more than fantasies. That was what made them such delicious converts. But as he had drawn power into himself to bless them, that four-armed, blue-skinned bitch had literally flown through the roof and started to vaporize the place.
Ares shook his head. He strode forward through the forest, trying to burn off some nervous energy. Slowly, his focus let his skin re-knit and his flesh reform. But he was still missing a good chunk of shirt. He stepped between two trees and emerged, between eyeblinks, in a city called Istanbul. It had been founded literally a decade or two after he had been banished – and yet it oozed with age and antiquity that matched anything on Purgatory. Striding through its streets, Ares wondere
d if maybe it had anything to do with Byzantium, the city he faintly remembered being here before Istanbul and her mosques.
The question was moot. The furious and the disenfranchised were everywhere and after a time, they began to blur together, as all humans did. They were little better than batteries. Troublesome batteries. But sometimes, they were useful. Such as now, when he arrived at the tiny tailor, tucked between two older buildings. Stepping inside, he smiled.
“Mr. Blacke!” the cheerful, round-cheeked tailor exclaimed.
“Mr. Susskind,” Ares said, his voice clipped. “I’m afraid I’ve torn another one of your suits.”
“I should be more suspicious!” Mr. Susskind chuckled, his Turkish flowing thick and fast. Ares had learned it in roughly two hours. And humans sometimes wondered why he looked down at them.
As Mr. Susskind worked on his suit, Ares let his persona of Mr. Blacke fill the air with some quiet conversation. It was better to let his subconscious mind handle the lies and deceptions, so that he could focus on how to deal with the slight frustration of his every open move being dogged by those damned Hindus. His brow furrowed as he noticed an old magazine sitting on the pile near the chair that he was supposed to be waiting in – save that Mr. Susskind had no other customers.
The cover asked: Is Another Cold War on the Horizon?
The art showed a sleek missile, looming in silhouette behind a bustling city.
Ares began to smile.
“Maybe,” he murmured, “I don’t have to do all the work after all...”
Grapeshot Pantheon Page 18
