by Skyler Grant
“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.
