The Airship: A Futuristic Dungeon Core (The Laboratory Book 2)

by Skyler Grant

  The Wolf ships were hitting back hard, and Sylax was using the distraction of our appearance to mount a full blown offensive.

  Ratticus caught a nasty blast of beam fire with our own, neutralizing it, but the steady drum of bullets were wearing through our shields and when a dragon flung itself at us, they finally snapped out entirety.

  The team handling the archives had completed their mission. Mechos had found a small crystal block containing the entirety of their data files. Guards were rushing to respond, but it didn't matter, I teleported everyone back.

  The vault team was having more difficulty. In response to Hot Stuff the guards had switched to cryo rounds and she'd taken several wounds. The manifestation of her motorcycle took them by surprise though and the guns cut them to shreds. The rest of the team was still up, but was retreating back towards the vault.

  Ratticus hit a dragon with a burst of the beam weapon, stealing its momentum and sending it tumbling towards the city.

  There was a massive energy pulse from Reevesport and I detected some sort of gravity distortion. I'd seen something similar once before, when we'd been stopped from using our dimensional drive.

  Sylax was locking down the entire battlefield.

  It was overconfident of her. I didn't think she was winning this battle. Regardless, it was very bad news for us. This was supposed to be a robbery and a quick escape, not a battle.

  In the vault Hot Stuff had just melted her way through a six-foot thick steel door. My sensors hadn't been able to penetrate here before. The vault seemed to contain a single item, a crystalline pyramid etched with circuitry glowing with a dim blue light.

  It was all I needed. With the sensor lock and the presence of an agent, I brought the team and the loot home.

  I teleported Anna directly to the throne room and she wasted no moment in settling down at the command console. "Situation?"

  "While you were busy staring at Hot Stuff's ass I've been busy fighting dragons. Sylax deployed some sort of dampening field to the whole battlefield that’s preventing our dimensional drive from working," I said.

  "She is linking all the vessels together. We don't have the power to move the whole fleet, so none of us can jump."

  Is that what it was? If it was just a matter of power I had some ideas. But no time to explain them.

  41

  Now I teleported Anna and the rest of the crew into the safe rooms. Anna wasted no time in storming to a comm panel and hitting it. "What the fuck are you up to, Emma?"

  "Unlike you, I know how to make sparks fly. I'm getting us a power source," I said.

  I triggered the growth bombs. The interior of the ship was filled with electrical discharge. I channeled it all into the weapons array where Ratticus could absorb it with his power crystal and convert it into something usable by the dimensional drive.

  I tried to trigger a transit. Unlike before, this time something happened, a shimmer in the air over the entire fleet—but it still wasn't enough.

  "Emma, it takes a lot of power. A lot. You aren't going to shift us all out of here and if you did, you'd just be bringing our problems with us," Anna said.

  That much was true. I had in mind the one place we could go that might make them fight even more violently. Aelfwal.

  If they were ready to engage in a life-and-death battle for just the idea of the city, what would they do when they discovered it was real? Of course, that applied to us as well, but I suspected we had stumbled across a key to the shield, and we had the best sensors of any ship in this battle.

  I was convinced I could find this "socket" before any of them.

  None of which fixed the power issue.

  This was a problem I'd solved in the past. Before, it just hadn't gone as planned. I scanned below and found my bombs still in place in the volcano. They were no longer ideally placed, and the explosive force wouldn't be optimal.

  It would still be an immense amount of power.

  I triggered the bombs and maneuvered so our main cannon would have a clear shot of the volcanic crater.

  When the eruption began I was prepared. I fired the main cannon directly into the explosive force and channeled the full power of the eruption through Ratticus and into the dimensional drive.

  Reality lurched—or to be fair, it tore itself apart.

  The ship rocked violently and the sky shifted into a thousand different hues before it seemed to shatter. The ship’s armor was torn away by contrasting forces. Still, we were structurally stable enough to handle it. Most of the warring ships survived.

  Reevesport was falling to pieces though, the city’s structure finally having had too much and was at last falling to earth.

  We shifted.

  42

  We materialized in a strange realm. We rocked violently and I reoriented the ship to stabilize us. There was no ground beneath us, simply layers of crystals floating free in a red tinted sky. The crystals were of every imaginable color, large bolts of electricity crackling from one to the other.

  “If this was your plan, your plan sucks,” Anna said.

  That wasn’t helpful. Clearly this was not my plan. I dispatched my science drones off above and below us. Those directions did exist, for all that there was no visible ground there was gravity oriented clearly in one direction.

  “I can only hope your level of competence is not contagious. Do you recognize where we are?” I asked.

  Anna pulled her lower lip between her teeth as she flicked over the screens at her console. “No, I don’t. Things on the Rim can get crazy as you’ve seen but I don’t recognize this particular batch of crazy. Is the dimensional drive still online?”

  The dimensional drive wasn’t there. It and the hull surrounding it had either evaporated away or been wrenched apart because of the powerful forces that had gone into trying to shift an entire battlefield at once.

  “Consider the drive to be as useless as you are right now,” I said. No other vessels looked to have transitioned with us, wherever we were we had been separated from the rest of the forces that were locked in combat.

  Analysis of the hull damage around the dimensional drive was giving me some idea what had happened. It was more “wrenched apart” than “melted”. Moving the entire fleet had been rather like using a lever to lift a great weight. We’d been on the wrong side and it snapped and that force had carried us far further than intended.

  “At least we’re alone,” Anna said.

  It was good that she could catch up, eventually.

  “You’ll see how you feel about that when I get bored due to a lack of new test subjects,” I said.

  My science drones still hadn’t picked up anything new of note. Oh, it was all very interesting with crystals in all direction and I was gathering samples for study but it was all also very uniform.

  “Can you repair the drive?” Anna asked.

  “It is as gone as any realistic hopes of you having a happy and fulfilling life. Constructing a new one would require compounds I’m not detecting in our surroundings,” I said.

  “Send details of our surroundings out to the crew. We’ll see if anyone else recognizes it,” Anna said.

  As ideas went it wasn’t the worst one she’d ever had. Tara in particular was from a completely different corner of reality as Anna and was well travelled as well.

  It took perhaps half an hour and the news was uniformly negative. None of the crew had ever seen or heard of anything like our current surroundings. While the humans were continuing to be a useless infestation in my hull I was busy analyzing options.

  In the current situation what was important was direction. We needed somewhere to go, some way to orient ourselves. The first option there was obvious, gravity. Something was generating that force, whether a naturally occurring mass or some connection to physical laws that otherwise seemed mostly absent. What was interesting was the crystals which did not seem to be experiencing the same pull.

  Apart from gravity I wasn’t finding much differentiati
on in our surroundings. The electricity arcing between the crystals did not seem to be flowing in any direction. The light in the surroundings didn’t seem to have a singular source, even when tracking the individual photons I was getting a uniform distribution.

  The only other oddity was a subtle one and involved Ophelia. There was a force being exerted against her that was not applying to the hull or the rest of the crew, a minor repulsion that was acting on her and her alone.

  I informed Anna of the crew’s uselessness and my brilliance.

  “Set course towards whatever is repulsing Ophelia,” Anna said after only a moment of thought.

  “Why that one?” I asked.

  “You are probably thinking that following the gravity is most likely to return us to somewhere familiar and I agree. Let us solve this mystery first. Start repairs and we’ll see what we can find,” Anna said.

  A sense of scientific curiosity? Perhaps Anna did have a redeeming virtue or two after all, or more likely much like a part she was learning to mimic her betters.

  The opportunity to do repairs was welcome for we’d taken a lot of damage in the battle. I didn’t know what was happening right now with the rest of the fleets that had been warring. Had they made it to Aelfwal? Even if they had without what we’d stolen I didn’t think they’d be able to get through the shield any more than the Righteous had.

  43

  A week later and we were no closer to finding the source of whatever repulsed Ophelia. From what I could estimate the force had increased roughly seventy percent since we’d begun. It was proof of some form of progress at least.

  Repairs had been performed but as we progressed I was growing more concerned about the crew’s health than that of the ship. It started with the original crew of the airship, all of those with an animal transformation ability were becoming more animalistic. The remaining Wolves snapped at anyone who got close, the rats hid themselves away while the bats lurked in darkness.

  Hot Stuff was both burning hotter than usual and had reached a level of licentiousness unusual even for her, as had her Lieutenants.

  The only members of the crew unaffected were Ophelia and those few like Anna that had no power crystals of their own. If it were just a matter of behavior it might be one thing, but their powers also seemed to be both amplified and more erratic as well. Hot Stuff had several times melted her way through one deck and while we hadn’t lost a member of the crew yet I knew it was only a matter of time.

  Ultimately, I wound up putting the most dangerous into testing chambers. It both allowed me to more thoroughly study what was happening to them as well as providing a shielded environment to isolate them from the rest of the ship.

  It was two days after securing them that we finally came into scanning range of what we were looking for. To say that it looked like anything would be in error, the structure we detected changed dimensions with every pass of my sensors. It was as if the more intently I scanned the more that structure refused to be defined.

  “Are you broken?” Anna asked as her fingers tapped at the display before her.

  It was a reasonable question in this case. A sensor error was the first thing I’d thought of and I’d dispatched my science drones as well. It was if every sensor was completely disconnected from every other, it wasn’t just that the object was in a constant state of flux, it was in flux from every different angle.

  “It is something that seems to defy all logic and sense. It is as if you suddenly had friends or people who cared about you,” I said.

  I tried teleporting one of my drones inside the structure and lost contact at once.

  The air on the command deck shimmered golden and a woman materialized. Dark haired and yellow eyed she looked to be garbed in some sort of cocktail dress, golden and shimmering. There was something not quite right about her, her flesh in place shifting into scales very much like those of a lizard and the proportion of her limbs just ever so slightly off.

  44

  I might not know who, or perhaps even what this woman was but I knew how to handle intruders on the ship. I teleported one of my drones beside her to make contact and then initiated a teleport into one of the containment cells.

  My drone went, but the woman did not go with it.

  “I’m not that easy,” said the woman and she snapped her fingers. A lit cigarette appeared between them and she took a long drag before letting loose a puff of smoke. “Your ship is a shithole.”

  “Least ours can hold its shape,” Anna said straightening up from her console.

  “Hardly a virtue is it when this is the shape it holds,” the woman said as she walked over to the throne to prod it with a fingertip. “These aren’t even real skeletons.”

  “They’re real enough. I made it out of one of our crewmembers,” I said through a bridge speaker.

  The woman leaned in and put an ear to the throne. “You did! You tossed her in a blender? Now that is mildly interesting. An insane and incredibly rude science obsessed manufactured intelligence with upgrading superpowers, I like it.”

  “And you are?” Anna asked.

  The woman snapped those golden eyes to Anna to look her up and down, “Really? A megalomaniacal sidekick? Does she do any tricks?”

  “I beat the fuck out of condescending bitches,” Anna said.

  The woman regarded her for a moment more before grinning, “Fire, you overdo it a touch, but I like it. I’m Iska. So here is the thing, you’ve come somewhere you really shouldn’t be and you really aren’t worthy of. I like your style though so I’m going to give you a chance.”

  “I’m Anna,” Anna said just winding up into her usual long-winded introduction, Iska cut her off before she had a chance to finish.

  “Don’t care. We’re going to play a little game because I find it funny. If you win, I’ll send you back where you came from and include a prize or two. If you lose I’ll probably do terrible things to you,” Iska said in a cheerful tone.

  If I couldn’t teleport her I could incinerate her. I teleported Hot Stuff up from her quarters into the air above Iska. Unfortunately, she fell only about a millimeter before vanishing in a golden shimmer and reappearing back in her quarters.

  Anna blinked out and reappeared behind Iska throwing a punch towards the back of her head. There was a shimmer of gold that suffused the bridge.

  45

  My focus was suddenly elsewhere. I couldn’t detect the ship or my components there at all, I wasn’t even quite sure what I was seeing through for all that I did seem to have some sort of top down view on what appeared to be some sort of medieval peasant hovel.

  Two cows and a few chickens wandered aimlessly about. Mechos, less fiery than he was recently was bare chested and wore a tool belt about his waist. Anna was there too, dressed in a resplendent suit of red and gold armor with a savage looking sword buckled around her waist.

  The only structure was a single decrepit looking shack, otherwise a small field was surrounded by a thick forest and a nearby mountain towered overhead.

  “Well this is disconcerting,” I said. My voice boomed through the air without evident source.

  “You’re telling me,” Anna said moving to Mechos who was staring blankly into space. Anna waved a hand in front of his eyes to no response. “Where are we?”

  That was a very good question. I couldn’t reach the rest of my systems, it was as if I had been cut off in some ways. I tried to pull up a status screen.

  Food: 45

  Stone: 0

  Iron: 0

  Lumber: 0

  Population: 2

  Leader: Anna

  Peasants: 1

  Two of the chickens stumbled into each other and with a flicker an egg appeared as both wandered off in different directions.

  “I’ve got a status indicator with various things. Food, stone, iron, lumber, and peasants,” I said.

  Anna grimaced, “Great. We’re going old school. How many peasants?”

  “Just the one,” I said.
<
br />   “I’m going to kill the bitch,” Anna said grabbing Mechos by the hand and dragging him towards the shack. “I’ve got an idea what this is all about. Keep an eye out for attackers and let me know if any appear.”

  “What are you going to be doing?” I asked.

  Anna didn’t answer. She and Mechos disappeared in the shack which rocked violently for a few seconds. A toddler stumbled out the door, perhaps thirty seconds later the entire sequence of events happened again. It was time enough for toddler number one to grow to adulthood.

  If only the humans on the ship were this efficient. I felt a faint connection to the new peasant much like I would with one of my drones on the ship and I issued an order for them to begin gathering lumber. They quickly moved to the nearest tree and began to chop.

  There were ten new peasants created in that fashion before I observed the first attackers that Anna had feared would be on the way. There was a cave into the nearby mountain and out of it came several yellow eyed reptilian men in loincloths and wielding spears.

  “We’ve got incoming,” I said.

  Anna stepped out of the shack, straightening her armor.

  “Well that was tremendously disappointing. We are also never talking about it again,” Anna said.

  “What would be the point? We know in the real world he’d never have touched you,” I said.

  Anna drew her sword and moved to meet the invaders. They were little match for her, although they swarmed around her stabbing away they didn’t do much. A health bar appeared above her head, they’d taken perhaps ten percent off.

  I had split the new peasants between gathering lumber and food. Food seemed to involving scurry around behind the animals and herding them into each other which resulted in new chickens and cows popping into existence.