by Skyler Grant
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 a
iding 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 a
ny 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.
