ΔV Pt. 08

Markova snorted. "The historical ironies are striking me as quite bitter..." She shook her head.

"Huh?" Cinder asked.

"Nothing," Markova said, frowning. "We shall be reaching the portal in a few days - we will shoot through and perform a gravity slingshot around Saturn and each Stark several days after that. Once there, Command will want you to demonstrate local magic. To prove that it works on Stark as well as Arcadia. If it works, we shall see about making you a spokesperson for the trow and give you a Zion of your own."

The word didn't translate - so it could not mean home. But Markova did not deign to explain. She just swept away, leaving Cinder feeling somewhere between hopeful and terrified. She returned to her room, rubbing her shoulders, and found that Kaleb was inside, shirtless.

She was irritated by this.

Kaleb, shirtless, was...

Was...

He was a divinity, damn it. His shoulders were broad and sculpted with hard, hard muscle. His emerald green skin was seamed and lined with the scars of many a battle, including the puckered marks of arrow impacts that should have killed him - but that orcish toughness that she was always envious of. She could remember dozens of marches where she'd been held together by spells and dogged determination and the orcs she had been marching beside had been able to still get laid in a brothel with their big green cocks and- Cinder shook her head, then scowled. "What are you doing?"

Kaleb was holding one of the legs of the only chair in the room. He had unscrewed it from its mounting and was swinging it through the air, twirling it, thrusting it. He glanced at her, his lips pursed. "Keeping practice," he said.

"These people have these things called guns, greenskin," Cinder said, trying to sound annoyed as she crossed her arms over her chest. "Where they pull a trigger and a small explosion launches a bullet at you fast enough to rip you to pieces."

"I know," he said, then glanced her way again. "Reach for your 'gun.' Try it."

Cinder rolled her eyes, then mimed reaching for a gun.

Kaleb's chair leg blurred and then stopped, touching against her wrist, before she had even gotten halfway to her imaginary holster. She froze, her whole body buzzing with electric excitement. She was so glad that her dark skin made her blush almost invisible. She tossed her head and made a soft 'tsch' noise. Then she walked past him, to her bunk and crawled inside. She closed her eyes and readied herself to try and sleep.

Cinder learned, as the entire human fleet had, just how uneventful crossing from one universe to another was a few days later when the Russian ship with its unpronounceable name shot through the portal and swung around Saturn, burning its engine the entire time at full strength. This put her and her magic to a new, ultimate test - her body strained under the immense weight of five gravities and her teeth strained as she pushed her mana into the water spell, trying to keep up with the guzzling, ravenous nuclear thermal reactor as it upped the thrust. She knew that the term 'demon core' was some sarcastic reference - she had yet to determine to what - but she could easily imagine the NTR as being a demon, guzzling up water, ready to kill them if she didn't slake its thirst.

Only once the acceleration dropped down to a single gravity again - and Kaleb proved himself to be infuriating in this situation as others by springing to his feet, stretching, and pronouncing himself recovered - did she learn the truth behind the name 'demon core.' She went down to renew her spell and Chief Naumov was there, humming cheerfully as he checked on readouts and gauges. "Ah, the beauty, the beauty is working and she is not tiring," he said, cheerfully - and for a moment, Cinder wondered if he was referring to her bony, trowish ass.

Then he noticed her and laughed. "Ah, Miss Spiderblood - your spell worked perfectly."

"What is the beauty? Your ship?" Cinder asked.

He nodded. "Nuclear thermal rockets are made to work basically forever - but practically speaking, we don't run them constantly. The idea was, design them for constant acceleration and they won't crap out on you. Material science did a lot of trickery to get that right."

"Alchemy?" Cinder asked. "Like turning lead into gold?"

"Yes, or, close enough to it." He shrugged his broad shoulders. "Still, it is good to see our designs are as good off paper, eh?"

Cinder nodded. "Why do you call it the demon core?"

The engineer leaned against his console, careful to not bump any of the buttons, levers, switches or touch screens. His other technicians kept up their work in the cramped room - but the etiquette of sharing so little space with so many people kept them from glancing their way. Cinder had never been in the old trow cities, where space was just as desperately precious. She wondered if they had been the same way. Naumov spoke, quietly: "In the 20^th century - ah, that would be two hundred and twenty years ago, roughly - American scientists were working on a secret project during the second World War-"

"World War?" Cinder asked, her eyes wide.

"Yes. You might say we had our own Dark Lord," Naumov said, then grinned impishly. "Save we had two. One was bad, the other was worse, and which was which is still a debate in Russia." He made a 'weighing' gesture. "Tankies, you know - well, actually, no, you wouldn't." He chuckled. "Still. During this great war, the Americans worked on a secret weapon called the atomic bomb. And one of the pieces of the atomic bomb was the demon core: A chunk of plutonium this big." He held his hands out about three inches away from one another. "It killed two of the people studying it - released radiation when they were fiddling with it - but, hey, they figured out the issue and were able to make more without killing anyone else."

"...wait, I'm sorry, two Dark Lords?" Cinder asked, her eyes bugging out further. "Go back, explain that."

Naumov sighed. "I cannot explain every thing that led up to it all. But...basically...the old world had kings and dukes and barons - but they had weapons like you've never seen. Machine guns and airplanes and tanks," he said, and Cinder remembered those AK-47s she had seen. "The old world fought a great big war and the kings and the dukes and the barons died. They left the world so broken that everyone went mad - and in their madness, they started the next war. The bigger war. The worse war." He shrugged his broad shoulders. "That's how they teach it in history class, at least. This was two hundred years ago."

Cinder rubbed her shoulders. "Was there a third?"

"No," Naumov said, cheerfully. "So, see. We humans can learn after all."

Cinder's eyes narrowed. "Wait, if there weren't any other wars, why did you make more of the atom bombs?"

Naumov grinned at her. "Why do you think we never had a third World War, little trow?" He leaned forward, his voice soft. "If everyone has an atom bomb - no one wants to use them or else..." He mimed an explosion. "Kaboom. We all go."

For some reason, Cinder felt the opposite of comforted.

That sense of unease built as the ship began to decelerate. She didn't notice a difference, save for the disquieting few moments it took for the engine to shut down, for weightlessness to return, and for the ship to swung around and begin to fall towards Stark. The world grew larger and larger on the simulated window in their cabin - and for Cinder and Kaleb, that image was more and more fascinating as it grew. Stark was so like their world...and so different. The coasts were wrong: They had become swollen in some places, oddly geometric in others. The oceans were a subtly wrong color. Deserts that they had seen from Arcadia's orbit were fat and swollen. Patches of green were thin and attenuated. And there were so few clouds.

But around the world was a haze of dots and lights and glimmers. They moved like rivers - no, no, they moved like hoops. As if the world had gained rings, like Saturn. According to Naumov, those rings were accentuated by the telescopic camera, giving extra definition to pieces of the orbital ecosystem.

"What a shithole," Kaleb said.

A shithole, Cinder thought. With...how many of those atomic bombs? Hundreds?

She shook her head, pensive.

Watching as Stark grew on the screen.

***

Dalethraxius sat in his girlfriends room and considered...

Not.

He drew his knees up to his chest, his arm flung across his shin. He could feel the faint fluctuations of energy - an attunement of the senses that he had worked long, hard years to gain. It wasn't quite a taste, wasn't quite a scent, wasn't quite a sound. It was somewhere in between all of them - a tugging awareness that power was being drawn and used. He tried to be happy to feel Annie as she gathered power into herself. But instead, all he felt was that consideration.

It was a thought he had had before.

It had been in the burning village of Talesfallow. His eyes closed as he remembered seeing the smoke - hearing the screams. He had dropped the bucket of riverwater and gone sprinting, and dove into some bushes as he heard the hooves. From between the leaves, he had seen them flashing: Stags and elk, their hooves pounding on the ground, the fae in their gleaming armor, their faces flush with excitement, their bloody spears dripping.

It was only years later that he had found a book, penned by an old knocker, that described the Telling: The Battle of Baeren. Baeren was long burned to ash, its villagers long dead. But the fae didn't care. They didn't build a new Baeren. They just had to pick a town that had chosen the ill fortune to be in a reasonably approximate place to be the new Baeren, with roughly the right number of folk. There had been four other villages in the same area of the Faelands - but one had been all dwarf. One had been a mixture of knocker and orc.

Only Talesfallow had been the right mixture of orc, knocker, dwarf and gnome.

And for years, Dale had wondered...

Had the Battle of Baeren been untold for years until he was out of the town because...

Because Talesfallow had been the right mixture of orc, knocker, dwarf and gnome...save for one, lone, solitary human?

That question, all questions, had been a thousand miles away, and a million years off, in the hideous hours that he spent walking slowly through Talesfallow, his hands aching from the memory of the bucket, his nostrils thick with the scent of his slaughtered neighbors. He had come to his home - and seen it burning, his adoptive mother, her red cap stained dark black with her blood, arrows sprouting from her back like some...hideous new growth forest. He had not been brave enough to find his father.

They had been unburied - he had fled.

Wandered.

Learned.

And then sat, as he sat now, thinking about what he was about to do. Was it worth it? Could he do it? Was he the right person? The just person? He closed his eyes and rested his forehead against his knees as a frisson of air rushed through the room. Annie's laugh - gay and full of delight - rang against his soul like the call to prayer. Dale lifted his head and felt his smile growing, seeing her own look of awe, her delight, her...

Nudity.

"Heh. Uh, you missed something," he said, his voice playful.

Annie squeaked, clapping her hands over her breasts. "Shit! Shit, I thought I-" She blinked at him. "Dale. I just teleported."

Dale's grin grew lopsided. "That you did."

"I..." Annie wobbled. Dale stood, his tall body unfolding rapidly. He caught her in his arms and she leaned against him. Her nose pressed to his neck and he shivered as he felt her breath, warm and eager. "I think I'm ready for the necromancy." She whispered the words.

"I know you are," Dale said. His hand caressed her head - and he closed his eyes. The consideration came again: To not. No one knew he was here. No one knew his power. His abilities. He had a choice, he and Annie. They could...

Not.

He could see it, tantalizing as a drop of water on the tongue of a man in the deep desert. He and Annie could be happy, together. He loved simply making things for people - people who he could see, people he could talk to. There was a deep, abiding joy in that, one that he could cup and hold in his hands. He nuzzled against Annie and her voice, still giddy with the delight of a newly trained mage, whispered: "Does it ever stop being thrilling?"

"No," he said. "You just start to get more worried about what you're doing. But the rush of power never goes."

Annie nodded, her eyes closed.

"Annie," he said. "We don't have to...do..."

Annie drew back. She met his eyes. "You're thinking about just retiring. Being quiet, right?" She bit her lip slightly. "That's what they want. The status quo works cause it hides the suffering - it puts it under a blanket. But it's there. And I know you, Dale. You'd never be able to live with yourself, knowing you could have done something, but you didn't." She gulped. "N-Now, that doesn't mean I'm not scared shitless..." She cupped his cheek. "But I think we can make a difference."

Dale nodded.

"Together," Annie whispered.

TO BE CONTINUED