"Good. You haven't gone quite as blind as the bat. There were two targets that needed hitting and this was the heavier-defended of the two," I said.
I turned my attention from that fight and let Candice have control of her own body. Even my multitasking abilities weren't fully up to the task. Appearing right in the middle of the Wolf fleet had made sure our weapons could inflict damage and get their shields down. It also had some advantages in taking them by surprise—but that advantage was short-lived.
The Wolf ships were hitting back hard, and Sylax was using the distraction of our appearance to mount a full blown offensive.
Ratticus caught a nasty blast of beam fire with our own, neutralizing it, but the steady drum of bullets were wearing through our shields and when a dragon flung itself at us, they finally snapped out entirety.
The team handling the archives had completed their mission. Mechos had found a small crystal block containing the entirety of their data files. Guards were rushing to respond, but it didn't matter, I teleported everyone back.
The vault team was having more difficulty. In response to Hot Stuff the guards had switched to cryo rounds and she'd taken several wounds. The manifestation of her motorcycle took them by surprise though and the guns cut them to shreds. The rest of the team was still up, but was retreating back towards the vault.
Ratticus hit a dragon with a burst of the beam weapon, stealing its momentum and sending it tumbling towards the city.
There was a massive energy pulse from Reevesport and I detected some sort of gravity distortion. I'd seen something similar once before, when we'd been stopped from using our dimensional drive.
Sylax was locking down the entire battlefield.
It was overconfident of her. I didn't think she was winning this battle. Regardless, it was very bad news for us. This was supposed to be a robbery and a quick escape, not a battle.
In the vault Hot Stuff had just melted her way through a six-foot thick steel door. My sensors hadn't been able to penetrate here before. The vault seemed to contain a single item, a crystalline pyramid etched with circuitry glowing with a dim blue light.
It was all I needed. With the sensor lock and the presence of an agent, I brought the team and the loot home.
I teleported Anna directly to the throne room and she wasted no moment in settling down at the command console. "Situation?"
"While you were busy staring at Hot Stuff's ass I've been busy fighting dragons. Sylax deployed some sort of dampening field to the whole battlefield that’s preventing our dimensional drive from working," I said.
"She is linking all the vessels together. We don't have the power to move the whole fleet, so none of us can jump."
Is that what it was? If it was just a matter of power I had some ideas. But no time to explain them.
41
Now I teleported Anna and the rest of the crew into the safe rooms. Anna wasted no time in storming to a comm panel and hitting it. "What the fuck are you up to, Emma?"
"Unlike you, I know how to make sparks fly. I'm getting us a power source," I said.
I triggered the growth bombs. The interior of the ship was filled with electrical discharge. I channeled it all into the weapons array where Ratticus could absorb it with his power crystal and convert it into something usable by the dimensional drive.
I tried to trigger a transit. Unlike before, this time something happened, a shimmer in the air over the entire fleet—but it still wasn't enough.
"Emma, it takes a lot of power. A lot. You aren't going to shift us all out of here and if you did, you'd just be bringing our problems with us," Anna said.
That much was true. I had in mind the one place we could go that might make them fight even more violently. Aelfwal.
If they were ready to engage in a life-and-death battle for just the idea of the city, what would they do when they discovered it was real? Of course, that applied to us as well, but I suspected we had stumbled across a key to the shield, and we had the best sensors of any ship in this battle.
I was convinced I could find this "socket" before any of them.
None of which fixed the power issue.
This was a problem I'd solved in the past. Before, it just hadn't gone as planned. I scanned below and found my bombs still in place in the volcano. They were no longer ideally placed, and the explosive force wouldn't be optimal.
It would still be an immense amount of power.
I triggered the bombs and maneuvered so our main cannon would have a clear shot of the volcanic crater.
When the eruption began I was prepared. I fired the main cannon directly into the explosive force and channeled the full power of the eruption through Ratticus and into the dimensional drive.
Reality lurched—or to be fair, it tore itself apart.
The ship rocked violently and the sky shifted into a thousand different hues before it seemed to shatter. The ship’s armor was torn away by contrasting forces. Still, we were structurally stable enough to handle it. Most of the warring ships survived.
Reevesport was falling to pieces though, the city’s structure finally having had too much and was at last falling to earth.
We shifted.
42
We materialized in a strange realm. We rocked violently and I reoriented the ship to stabilize us. There was no ground beneath us, simply layers of crystals floating free in a red tinted sky. The crystals were of every imaginable color, large bolts of electricity crackling from one to the other.
“If this was your plan, your plan sucks,” Anna said.
That wasn’t helpful. Clearly this was not my plan. I dispatched my science drones off above and below us. Those directions did exist, for all that there was no visible ground there was gravity oriented clearly in one direction.
“I can only hope your level of competence is not contagious. Do you recognize where we are?” I asked.
Anna pulled her lower lip between her teeth as she flicked over the screens at her console. “No, I don’t. Things on the Rim can get crazy as you’ve seen but I don’t recognize this particular batch of crazy. Is the dimensional drive still online?”
The dimensional drive wasn’t there. It and the hull surrounding it had either evaporated away or been wrenched apart because of the powerful forces that had gone into trying to shift an entire battlefield at once.
“Consider the drive to be as useless as you are right now,” I said. No other vessels looked to have transitioned with us, wherever we were we had been separated from the rest of the forces that were locked in combat.
Analysis of the hull damage around the dimensional drive was giving me some idea what had happened. It was more “wrenched apart” than “melted”. Moving the entire fleet had been rather like using a lever to lift a great weight. We’d been on the wrong side and it snapped and that force had carried us far further than intended.
“At least we’re alone,” Anna said.
It was good that she could catch up, eventually.
“You’ll see how you feel about that when I get bored due to a lack of new test subjects,” I said.
My science drones still hadn’t picked up anything new of note. Oh, it was all very interesting with crystals in all direction and I was gathering samples for study but it was all also very uniform.
“Can you repair the drive?” Anna asked.
“It is as gone as any realistic hopes of you having a happy and fulfilling life. Constructing a new one would require compounds I’m not detecting in our surroundings,” I said.
“Send details of our surroundings out to the crew. We’ll see if anyone else recognizes it,” Anna said.
As ideas went it wasn’t the worst one she’d ever had. Tara in particular was from a completely different corner of reality as Anna and was well travelled as well.