The Engineer (The Last Horizon Book 2), page 16
But Omega didn’t think so, because he had been watching Varic all along.
The Captain was in the mess hall, eating with the Sword. He hadn’t given his console any attention.
There was every possibility he was doing it remotely, but why? Why wouldn’t he watch Omega openly? Why would he notify Raion in secret?
Omega could make guesses, but he didn’t know the answers, which disturbed him. There was something about Varic that suggested he knew Omega better than Omega knew him.
For the first time in many years, Omega felt wary of another human.
It could be that he wasn’t the biggest predator on the ship after all.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-TWO
Though Shyrax had left the task to her Karoshan subordinates, I had to be on the bridge when the Advocate fleet arrived.
It had been a day since we’d returned the three prisoners to their installation and backed up into a defensive formation, surrounded by blocky Karoshan ships. Instead of a crude invisibility spell, The Last Horizon was protected by good old-fashioned hiding.
We were just sitting in the back of the Karoshans. The Advocates wouldn’t get close enough for a detailed scan, and of course no one could spot us visually from so far away in the system. At least, not through the Karoshan cruisers screening us.
The Advocate fleet was very thorough, a thousand ships in blue and white, all arranged around their planet. They had clearly taken this Karoshan incursion very seriously, despite the lack of overt threat.
Their flagship was a hulking dreadnought, a five-mile-long massive battleship shaped vaguely like a disk. Shyrax’s ships didn’t have anything that could check that kind of firepower, so if it came into play, our only choice would be to use The Last Horizon’s weapons.
Which was why I stayed on the bridge, making sure nothing went wrong.
A copy of the Advocates’ transmission appeared on my monitor as they hailed the Karoshan fleet. To my surprise—and discomfort—I recognized the face on the other side.
The broad, gray-bearded human was a familiar enemy.
“Karoshan fleet, you have initiated aggressive action against the Advocates and one of the Free Worlds,” Steel Avalanche said. “Identify yourself and explain your behavior, or I will be forced to personally intervene.”
I sneered before I could help myself.
There was a version of myself that wanted him to try.
Even outside of his massive dreadnought, Steel Avalanche was no easy opponent. I didn’t know if he’d tried out for The Last Horizon, but he was the sort of person who would have acquitted himself well in such a competition.
In fact, I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that he was one of the finalists. In a previous life, he was just under Starhammer in our threat estimation. If Mell and I couldn’t overwhelm and outnumber Steel Avalanche, we ran away.
But that was then. I was a whole different person this time, in a literal sense. Even if I didn’t embarrass him with my magic, I would pay to see Shyrax fold him in half.
Of course, that was just my resentment talking. If I really had to fight him, I’d seal him in Absolute Burial and toss him into a sun.
Upon delivering his message, Steel Avalanche leaned back in his chair and folded huge arms. A pair of Aethertech gauntlets covered him from the forearms down, steel hands with innards that shone bright, electric blue.
It was an intimidating sight, to be sure. But the Karoshan flagship responded by playing Shyrax’s recorded message.
Steel Avalanche was only large for a human.
Shyrax lounged on her own seat, and her yellow arms were thicker than his. She wore armor that was elaborate but still darkly effective, shimmering with enchantments, and a silver diadem held a jewel on her forehead.
The background had been obscured, to hide the fact that she had recorded this message on The Last Horizon, so the Karoshan Queen delivered her pronouncement from a shadowy void.
She rested her head on a few fingers and spoke. “Advocates. I am Shyrax the Third, rightful Queen of Karosha, and I have taken shelter in your sector. If these worlds are truly free, then I will enjoy my time here, as I have no enemies outside the Empire.
“Your local security officers required a demonstration of my sincerity, so I dispatched my agents to invite them for a personal briefing. I have sent them home, and I trust they will convey my benevolent intentions.”
Shyrax brought her hands down and her eyes flared. “If you would prefer more aggressive negotiations, then commit to your course and open fire. I will respond with swift, immediate retribution.
“You should pray to the Aether that I allow my ships to deal with you. If you are unlucky, I will teach you a lesson myself.”
I had seen Shyrax pacify foreign representatives before. She was capable of actual diplomacy, and I wasn’t sure why she thought it was unnecessary here.
But personally, I found it gratifying. Even if I did tense up and start counting the number of paces between me and my staff.
The screen switched again as Steel Avalanche responded. He was leaning forward this time, and I swear I saw a vein throbbing at his temple.
“Queen Shyrax, you have come into our territory without—”
She cut him off. “I have spoken. I leave you now in the hands of my Ambassador, as my time is required elsewhere. Choose wisely.”
I was alone on the bridge, so I laughed openly. Shyrax had recorded the message that way intentionally, leaving enough of a gap for them to respond and then cutting them off by shifting them to a subordinate.
The screen flicked to show a Karoshan woman whose leathery purple skin had begun to wrinkle, and whose violet hair-cables had faded and grayed.
“I regret that our queen’s presence has been required by other, urgent business, but I am pleased to meet you, Advocate representative. High Councilor, isn’t it? Would you prefer I call you by your code name, or is there a personal name you prefer?”
The Ambassador was pushing ahead a little too hard, trying to brush past Shyrax’s rude dismissal, but she didn’t seem too put out. She’d worked with the queen for a long time, after all.
When I saw Steel Avalanche again, he was loosening his right gauntlet and breathing carefully. “Steel Avalanche will do. I must say, Ambassador, it almost sounds like our organization is being underestimated.”
“Not at all, High Councilor! Not at all. In fact, as my queen indicated, we chose the Free Worlds precisely because the reputation of the Advocates is without peer…”
The Ambassador continued smoothing ointment on the burns Shyrax had left on the man’s ego, but I had turned my attention.
As expected, Starhammer wasn’t here. At least, he wasn’t involved in this action. No reason he should be, except that I knew he had to be close by. He’d be recovering somewhere.
I wouldn’t be able to figure out where. The best Archmagi in the galaxy had tested Starhammer and found his magic countermeasures without flaw. Even I hadn’t found him with my pathfinding spells.
But, just for my own peace of mind, I tried one. A quick spell to locate Starhammer.
I tend to talk about pathfinding spells as though they’re all the same, but there are subtle differences in each one. Generally speaking, my brand of navigational magic involves giving the Aether a destination and requesting a route to it.
The Cosmic Path, the pinnacle spell of the discipline, is specialized for starship travel. Not all of them are like that, but all have three of the same requirements.
The spells need a defined target, that target’s location needs to be knowable, and there needs to be a path between me and them.
Eyes of Malice was a niche spell I learned on my own, after my own magical knowledge had eclipsed the man who taught me the Cosmic Path. The target has to be someone looking for you with hostile intentions, and rather than guiding you to them, it gives you a path they could take to get to you.
There are various other restrictions on the magic, so it’s not as useful as it sounds. For one thing, there are usually so many people after me that the Eyes of Malice tells me something like “There are an uncountable number of people hunting you and they could come from anywhere at any time.”
Doesn’t do much for my paranoia.
There are also enough ways to circumvent the spell that it becomes little more than a footnote of my pathfinding magic, but here, I thought it was worth a shot.
If Starhammer was after me, he’d likely be the closest signal. And since the spell didn’t target him specifically, but rather anyone hunting me, it could possibly bypass his countermeasures.
With all that in mind, I cast the spell.
And immediately heard a deafening scream and a flaring red light.
I cut off the spell immediately, heart hammering in my chest. I settled back into my chair; I had instinctively started to leap out.
Horizon noticed. She popped out immediately, projected in six colors, leaning over me with exaggerated concern. “What was that magic, Captain? What did you see?”
The Karoshan Ambassador continued to talk with the Advocate High Councilor, though Horizon had muted their conversation.
“Starhammer’s looking for us, and he’s…” I took a moment to determine how to phrase my thoughts accurately. “It felt like having a World Spirit hunting me.”
Horizon ran a soothing hand over my head, adding substance to herself with the Aether. “Oh, Captain, that’s all right. Soon, we’ll be able to hunt him down. Him, and everyone else who scared you.”
“Stop talking like that. I’m saying we need to avoid him. As he was before, we could have taken him down if he ever got out of control. Now, if he starts taking over planets, we’ll have a real fight.”
“A fight we would win.”
“Yes, but the worst-case scenario is beating him again without killing him. One more time, and I have no idea what the Aether will turn him into.”
She gave him a smile. “All the better to challenge the Ship of Heroes, wouldn’t you say?”
“I’m not concerned about what he’ll do to us,” I said. I wasn’t the first person I’d seen executed by Starhammer. “If he gets to the point where he can personally match the Zenith Starship and our entire crew, what can he do to the rest of the galaxy?”
Horizon adopted such an exaggerated look of horror I was sure it was feigned. She even conjured a few eyes out of nowhere to stare in fear from behind her head.
“So we need to get out of here,” I added.
“Do we?”
“You know as well as I do that if we stay in the Free Worlds, we’re going to end up against Starhammer again. We haven’t covered our tracks well enough.”
“How long do we have, would you say?”
I sighed. “That’s our one lucky break. Only the most powerful reconstructive magic will work on Starhammer, and we’d be able to detect that. Realistically, it will take a few weeks to repair him, and he doesn’t know who we are yet.”
Horizon held out one palm, where she projected the image of a space station. Or the artistic, idealized version of one, perhaps. It was smooth and almost seamless, glossy and dark as obsidian with a tint of reflective purple, and shaped like an elongated diamond with all its sharp edges smoothed down.
“Do you know the ID of the Zenith Colony?”
Even the alarm from the spell faded away when she asked the question. “Is that it?”
Horizon answered her own question. “Shadow Ark. When locked away, it cannot be found. Not by magic, not by Aethertech, not by a million ships with a million scanners. What better shelter from those who pursue us?”
“So you’re saying we should keep looking for this.”
“That’s right. My brother—”
“We should keep trying to find the colony whose one power is that it cannot be found.”
Horizon gave me a reproachful look. “Please, Captain, don’t pretend not to understand. Of course Ark’s cloaking system is not engaged, he’s just lost. Let us follow this lead on Murrok. Not to mention…Well, I’m not sure if I should tell you this, but Shadow Ark is a repository of valuable materials. He should have plenty of the thought-conduction alloy and synapse nodes it would take to return me to peak condition.”
That was enough to tip the scales, but wasn’t comfortable about it.
We should have the time, I just preferred to be more careful. Originally, I had planned to stay away Starhammer for the rest of my life. As long as he never snapped and became a crazy conqueror, he remained an asset.
“I feel like we’ve set a self-destruct sequence,” I said, “and we’re just waiting for the numbers to tick down.”
“Don’t worry, Captain! I don’t have a self-destruct.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-THREE
I stood once more in the fabricator room of The Last Horizon, but I was astonished by the change.
I had thought they were impressive before, but we finally had an Engineer.
The towering tanks of the fabricators ran with lines of purple light, shining in mystically significant patterns. Power hummed within them as they worked, lasers tracing matter into being.
Those lasers printed robots.
Nova-Bots began from a humanoid skeletal frame, standing lifeless at the center of the room. Those were the basic building blocks, and Horizon fabricated one in a handful of seconds. Only a breath later, the lasers left wiring and circuitry in its wake. A few seconds after that, smooth armor covered the exposed machinery.
As guided by Mell’s gift as an Aether Technician, Nova-Bots all sported a few common features. They were generally human in shape, though their number of limbs was variable and they could be as small as a fly or large enough to carry fighters.
Besides their general outline, their other common feature was a single blazing red eye. I wasn’t clear whether that was a requirement of Mell’s Aethertech, a functional design, or just an aesthetic preference of hers.
She could make bots without it, or cover it up, but she almost never did. The red light as an eye was such a trademark of hers that the Advocates had gone after Dragonslayer, a criminal in a war-mech with one red eye, just because they thought he might be related to her.
But when the first of Horizon’s Nova-Bots came to life and its eye ignited purple, Mell gasped so hard she swallowed a piece of hard candy.
When the robot walked away and she finally finished coughing, she straightened and looked to Horizon. “Why does it all have to be purple? It should be red!”
Horizon rested her hand on the head of the newly printed robot like a proud mother displaying her child. “Doesn’t it look better this way? It’s the color of your aura, after all.”
“Red is classic! And menacing!”
“I suppose we can change the color. People might think they belong to Raion, though.”
Mell hesitated. “Couldn’t he be purple?”
I tried to picture Raion wearing anything but red and my brain short-circuited. “I don’t think so, no.”
“…Fine. These aren’t as intimidating, though.”
The one created Nova-Bot drooped and began staring at the floor.
After the prototype was proven, Horizon printed more Nova-Bots as fast as she could, in every size and configuration I could think of. Some had obvious functions, like the ones with guns built into their arms, but others didn’t strike me as particularly practical. I managed not to make fun of the one with three pairs of bladed arms sprouting out of its back.
At first, Mell muttered complaints about Horizon’s speed. Given access to materials and advanced fabricators, Mell could do as much herself.
Then Horizon began printing two at a time. Then four. Then eight.
By that point, Mell looked excited. With a glance at me, she muttered, “I guess that’s pretty fast. I can see the advantage.”
“Where are you getting the material for this?” I asked Horizon.
“Asteroids!” she responded happily. “Before we depart for Murrok, I thought we ought to stock up on materials. I have stretched my Engineer’s gift enough that I can compensate for the lack of costly components in the production of Nova-Bots. In my current condition, I could print Nova-Bots from nothing more than carbon, silicon, and iron. And a little copper.”
“How much?” Mell asked immediately. “Send me the data. Depending on how much you can stretch the material compensation effect of my Technician’s gift, we could do some crazy things. And, wait, can you take on multiple Technicians at once?” She spoke faster and faster with every sentence. “Could we switch off? Oh, and what can magic do for us? I’ve heard of wizards that can conjure ore from the Aether; can you do anything like that?”
Light sparked inside her glasses as reports from Horizon streamed into Mell’s vision. She was looking forward to a future where she took full advantage of the Zenith Starship, but I was distracted by something else.
“Do you want to rely on magic?” I asked. “You used to…I mean, the other version of you hated magic.”
Mell took her eyes away from her reports long enough to shoot me a disapproving glance. “I didn’t hate magic. It’s a resource, just like anything else. I hate how unreliable it is. At least a Technician’s gift respects the rules even while bending them.”
Off the top of my head, I remembered at least five instances of Mell shouting ‘I hate magic!’ Usually after an enemy mage outperformed one of her Nova-Bots or I summoned something particularly illogical.
“I’m a water elementalist,” I said. “I can also summon rabbit-spirits, conjure pieces of Horizon’s former enemies and crew members, create seals and bindings, find safe paths between two points, and temporarily clone objects.”
Mell lowered her glasses enough to peer at me over them. She didn’t break eye contact as she reached into her pocket, pulled out a toothpick, and began chewing on it.
“Maybe I do hate magic,” she said at last.
“Oh, but there’s such synergy between the two of you!” Horizon said fondly. She placed a hand on each of us, her seven-pointed eyes shining in many colors. “For example…”
