Book 4 Chapter 27: Unforeseen Complications
Book 4 Chapter 27: Unforeseen Complications
++As with all magical constructs, the issue with cloudscrapers has always been a limit of physical durability. Aether can be made to withstand stresses that no mundane materials can, but is inherently temporary. Structural reinforcement enchantments can increase the strength of whatever they’re placed on exponentially, but are so terribly expensive as to be unfeasible. As a result, for now, cloudscrapers can go no faster than their hulls are able to physically tolerate.++
- Lecture on the use of mana in engineering, overheard at the Runborg Institute.
My mother stormed away from the conversation as if she had been personally affronted. I was not terribly surprised by this, having gotten long used to her strange entitlement to smother her children’s talents. What distracted me more was Victoria and Qaigor approaching me.
“We want to come with you,” Victoria told me.
“Absolutely not,” I replied. “Where I am going is very likely dangerous, possibly dangerous enough that I myself may perish. I cannot bring you at all.”
“I can handle myself,” Qaigor assured me. “I’m better at fighting now. I’m a veteran!”
That was, while technically close to the truth, quite the ridiculous statement to hear from any thirteen year-old boy. The situation kept me from so much as grinning however.
“You cannot handle yourself in this situation,” I told him. “My decision is final.”
He and Victoria scowled, then ran off, and I was satisfied to note that that was probably final. I glanced at my father. “You…did the right thing,” I told him.
The Baron just shrugged. “First time for everything I suppose. It was good to see you again, Isabel. And uh…please take care.”
I nodded to him silently, not knowing how else to respond, and made my way through the mansion. It was not by my deliberate intentions that I encountered my mother as I went, leaning back in an armchair visible through the open door of the lounge. She had a rag upon her face, as if to nurse some infernal headache.
I wavered, considering whether I ought to say something.
No. I did not want to speak to her much, and I doubted she wanted to speak to me. I was dimly disappointed to find that my younger siblings were not at the cloudscraper to see me off, though the emotion was rather ridiculous and I knew it. Affection was one thing but I was not about to let myself become in any way reliant on their presence for peace of mind.
More surprising was that Blakely was not aboard, though I found out why a few minutes after I embarked, seeing him heading over to the cloudscraper and working at his belt with both hands. I could only hope he decided to relieve himself in an actual toilet, and not the mansion’s grounds.
With nothing more to delay or occupy me, I gave a signal to the pilot and felt the ship lumber up into the air.
Journeying by cloudscraper was far slower than just flying under my own power. Not nearly as slow as mundane means of course, even the fastest train was still nowhere near as quick as aerial vehicles, but I was entirely sure that we were not only moving slower than sound, but moving slower by many hundreds of miles per hour.
This, and the fact that I was using it for transcontinental flight, meant that I had a very long waiting period to look forward to, with precious little means of passing the time.
Blakely saw to his own boredom by promptly falling asleep. He had that ability, probably acquired from his time in the army. Though I had also been in the army, it had never quite come as naturally to me.
I considered, now, that my stimulant abuse at the time may have been responsible for that.
In any case, Professor Johns did not have it either, and the two of us were left to entertain one another over the journey. This was not nearly as boring as I may have feared, for the man proved to be utterly brilliant in matters of archeology.
His field was specialised in Asyran and its masonry, but I found that he knew nearly as much about practically all other areas. In fact, the one or two times I asked him questions about truly ancient history, I was impressed to note that his understanding of the past from ten millennia ago was not terribly flawed even by my own standards. The standards of one who had been there and seen it.
Johns went over the sorts of architecture we might expect to find, some common pitfalls new explorers in the region made, and his own history with it. I soaked up what I could. The hurried nature of this trip had kept me from engaging in my usual routine of buying and eating a whole library on the topic, with my scant spare hours being enough to consume only a mere handful of books on the topic. The Professor was invaluable for compensating.
The journey would have gone on uneventfully, almost pleasantly, for the remaining few hours if a single, critical incident had not occurred. There was a bump somewhere aboard the cloudscraper. Not a terribly loud one, not a terribly ominous one. Clearly different from mere turbulence, but certainly not an attack.
It was, however, sufficient to wake up Blakely, who, in one single motion, snatched a revolver seemingly out of thin air and immediately fired it, happening to strike one of the cloudscraper’s windows.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Cloudscraper windows are tough things by design, roughly an inch thick and made to both insulate from cold weather and withstand the sorts of strain that a vessel’s superstructure may experience at such high speeds. They are not, however, designed to withstand being struck by half an ounce of lead moving at some three-quarters the speed of sound.
The glass shattered instantly, and before any of us could react we were being buffeted by winds from the outside. The cloudscraper caught on the newfound drag and shifted, its hull creaking. I saw tears appear, further worsening the tilt and worsening the tears. One window. One window broken at the worst possible time, and it did this?
No wonder cloudscrapers were used for nothing but transportation.
My thoughts were interrupted when the ship rumbled again, snatching my heels from the floor and flinging me across the room to rebound from one of the walls. Had that happened a mere six months ago my skull may well have split open, but now I was left with a mere headache.
I forced myself to stand, then growled and settled for lying prone and dragging myself forwards once it became clear how unstable any upright position would be. The cloudscraper was, at times, literally upside-down. I risked a glance over to see that Blakely had jabbed his knife clean through the hull and was using it as a piton, while Johns seemed to have wrapped some sort of lasso—or was that a whip—around one of the jutting pieces of wall decoration. Neither was my main priority at the moment. I needed to reach the pilot.
Who was, presently, separated from me by approximately ten yards of near-vertical crawling.
I was not yet such a strong warrior as to do that easily, but I was a cheater, and so rather than relying on my relatively weak body I simply propelled myself forwards with a modest burst of mana and shielded myself at the front as I smashed into the door to the captain’s cabin. It held, and I grabbed it to stand upright and push myself inside.
This was when I discovered how laughably, ridiculously, laws-of-probability-defyingly unlucky we had apparently been. Blakely’s opening shot had done little but cause the cloudscraper to unexpectedly tilt. Apparently the pilot had been reaching forwards to pick up something he had dropped precisely when this happened, because his body had been folded over when the sudden lurch sent it slamming forwards, scalp-first, into the surface before him.
The idiot had gotten his neck broken and died near-instantly.
I did not especially care about that on its own, but the inconsiderate moron appeared to have fallen over the controls in a way that explained the erratic flight path of the vehicle now. I hastily shoved him off to one side and took his seat.
Of course, I did not know how to fly a cloudscraper, which meant this would take some experimenting to work out what each control did.
A few moments of randomly jerking the vehicle one way and the other gave me some semblance of an idea. It was actually rather intuitive, simply building a comprehensive map of the structure in my head and imagining what each adjustment I made must be changing to cause such alterations in trajectory. From there I would enact subsequent changes, compare models, and eliminate the ones that were not consistent.
I was fortunate that the incident had occurred with a good mile of vertical clearance from the ground, because it left me enough margin of error before we crashed that I could take my time and focus on learning the intricacies of the vehicle. This did not, however, mean that I had any chance of actually landing it, at least not in a way that would preserve functionality.
The ship rattled and screamed as it fell, with pieces of the hull simply tearing free and scattering through the air in its wake. Ahead of me I saw a line of sprawling jungle trees rearing up closer by the moment. Three hundred yards away, perhaps. Closing by dozens each second.
I had to slow the vehicle. Blakely and Johns were still onboard, and though I was fairly sure I could protect them if need be, I did not know that I could keep all of Johns’ equipment from being destroyed if we impacted at speed. Drag force alone was not doing the job though.
No, the time had come to truly test the limits of my new power.
Aether shot out ahead of me in great boulders and blocks, and for once I did not waste my mana on absorbing recoil, just bound myself to the cloudscraper and let its superstructure absorb the strain. Every shot sent easily tons of material flying ahead fast enough to turn any lifeform it struck into red mist. None seemed to slow the descent much.
But I was throwing them out almost machine-gun fast, feeling the strain of it in my mind, my soul, my shoulders, my Vessel above all else. There were so many limiting factors to this; were the cloudscraper more damaged I would probably have ripped it in half. As things were, though, it was just barely strong enough that I was bleeding away speed without ruining the whole thing.
This was nature at work. It was the gift of random chance and ineffable talent. I could do many things with magic, and perhaps one day I could even create Vessels out of nowhere, but for now my own natural abilities were still beyond replication. There would never be a Vessel like mine again, not unless I somehow discovered the means by which Zameka had restored mine.
Twenty years, it seemed, was enough time for this miracle to amass the power capable of stopping this ship. Mostly, at least. We hit the treeline and I lurched forwards, but did not go flying. By my estimate we had been moving slower than a man could sprint.
That was still a lot of force, given the sheer size of the vessel. The controls caught me and the glass shattered as its metal frame warped over my head. I heard a terrible screeching as the vehicle strained to bear its own deceleration, reinforcing girders popping and rending. Were it a living thing I was inside, I would probably have been caked in gore, but the metal flesh of this cloudscraper was nowhere near so…unhygienic.
Perhaps predictably, the cockpit’s door had not survived the collision. It was warped and buckled inwards, almost fused into its own fixture as the surrounding metal caved in and pinched it shut. I attempted a few powerful kicks to dislodge the metal, tired as my Vessel was, and then gave up before simply blasting it with a magic missile to break it outwards.
I moved out into the main chamber to find Blakely and Johns sprawled across the floor. Blakely had a gash on his head, though was moving and looking around with enough alert clarity that I knew it was not serious. Johns, the more physically formidable warrior of the second order, did not seem more than bruised.
“What was that noise?” Blakely asked. “The one that made me shoot the window.”
“Nothing made you shoot the window, you fucking lunatic!” Johns roared. “You just did that!”
I ignored him, turning to the back of the vehicle. “It came from over there,” I noted.
Blakely was on his feet by the time I reached that part of the wreckage and started prying the metal apart.
When Victoria and Qaigor, having hidden themselves in the compartment, fell out of it blinking, stunned but largely unharmed, I was only moderately surprised.