It took perhaps half an hour and the news was uniformly negative. None of the crew had ever seen or heard of anything like our current surroundings. While the humans were continuing to be a useless infestation in my hull I was busy analyzing options.
In the current situation what was important was direction. We needed somewhere to go, some way to orient ourselves. The first option there was obvious, gravity. Something was generating that force, whether a naturally occurring mass or some connection to physical laws that otherwise seemed mostly absent. What was interesting was the crystals which did not seem to be experiencing the same pull.
Apart from gravity I wasn’t finding much differentiation in our surroundings. The electricity arcing between the crystals did not seem to be flowing in any direction. The light in the surroundings didn’t seem to have a singular source, even when tracking the individual photons I was getting a uniform distribution.
The only other oddity was a subtle one and involved Ophelia. There was a force being exerted against her that was not applying to the hull or the rest of the crew, a minor repulsion that was acting on her and her alone.
I informed Anna of the crew’s uselessness and my brilliance.
“Set course towards whatever is repulsing Ophelia,” Anna said after only a moment of thought.
“Why that one?” I asked.
“You are probably thinking that following the gravity is most likely to return us to somewhere familiar and I agree. Let us solve this mystery first. Start repairs and we’ll see what we can find,” Anna said.
A sense of scientific curiosity? Perhaps Anna did have a redeeming virtue or two after all, or more likely much like a part she was learning to mimic her betters.
The opportunity to do repairs was welcome for we’d taken a lot of damage in the battle. I didn’t know what was happening right now with the rest of the fleets that had been warring. Had they made it to Aelfwal? Even if they had without what we’d stolen I didn’t think they’d be able to get through the shield any more than the Righteous had.
43
A week later and we were no closer to finding the source of whatever repulsed Ophelia. From what I could estimate the force had increased roughly seventy percent since we’d begun. It was proof of some form of progress at least.
Repairs had been performed but as we progressed I was growing more concerned about the crew’s health than that of the ship. It started with the original crew of the airship, all of those with an animal transformation ability were becoming more animalistic. The remaining Wolves snapped at anyone who got close, the rats hid themselves away while the bats lurked in darkness.
Hot Stuff was both burning hotter than usual and had reached a level of licentiousness unusual even for her, as had her Lieutenants.
The only members of the crew unaffected were Ophelia and those few like Anna that had no power crystals of their own. If it were just a matter of behavior it might be one thing, but their powers also seemed to be both amplified and more erratic as well. Hot Stuff had several times melted her way through one deck and while we hadn’t lost a member of the crew yet I knew it was only a matter of time.
Ultimately, I wound up putting the most dangerous into testing chambers. It both allowed me to more thoroughly study what was happening to them as well as providing a shielded environment to isolate them from the rest of the ship.
It was two days after securing them that we finally came into scanning range of what we were looking for. To say that it looked like anything would be in error, the structure we detected changed dimensions with every pass of my sensors. It was as if the more intently I scanned the more that structure refused to be defined.
“Are you broken?” Anna asked as her fingers tapped at the display before her.
It was a reasonable question in this case. A sensor error was the first thing I’d thought of and I’d dispatched my science drones as well. It was if every sensor was completely disconnected from every other, it wasn’t just that the object was in a constant state of flux, it was in flux from every different angle.
“It is something that seems to defy all logic and sense. It is as if you suddenly had friends or people who cared about you,” I said.
I tried teleporting one of my drones inside the structure and lost contact at once.
The air on the command deck shimmered golden and a woman materialized. Dark haired and yellow eyed she looked to be garbed in some sort of cocktail dress, golden and shimmering. There was something not quite right about her, her flesh in place shifting into scales very much like those of a lizard and the proportion of her limbs just ever so slightly off.
44
I might not know who, or perhaps even what this woman was but I knew how to handle intruders on the ship. I teleported one of my drones beside her to make contact and then initiated a teleport into one of the containment cells.
My drone went, but the woman did not go with it.
“I’m not that easy,” said the woman and she snapped her fingers. A lit cigarette appeared between them and she took a long drag before letting loose a puff of smoke. “Your ship is a shithole.”
“Least ours can hold its shape,” Anna said straightening up from her console.
“Hardly a virtue is it when this is the shape it holds,” the woman said as she walked over to the throne to prod it with a fingertip. “These aren’t even real skeletons.”
“They’re real enough. I made it out of one of our crewmembers,” I said through a bridge speaker.
The woman leaned in and put an ear to the throne. “You did! You tossed her in a blender? Now that is mildly interesting. An insane and incredibly rude science obsessed manufactured intelligence with upgrading superpowers, I like it.”
“And you are?” Anna asked.
The woman snapped those golden eyes to Anna to look her up and down, “Really? A megalomaniacal sidekick? Does she do any tricks?”
“I beat the fuck out of condescending bitches,” Anna said.
The woman regarded her for a moment more before grinning, “Fire, you overdo it a touch, but I like it. I’m Iska. So here is the thing, you’ve come somewhere you really shouldn’t be and you really aren’t worthy of. I like your style though so I’m going to give you a chance.”
“I’m Anna,” Anna said just winding up into her usual long-winded introduction, Iska cut her off before she had a chance to finish.
“Don’t care. We’re going to play a little game because I find it funny. If you win, I’ll send you back where you came from and include a prize or two. If you lose I’ll probably do terrible things to you,” Iska said in a cheerful tone.
If I couldn’t teleport her I could incinerate her. I teleported Hot Stuff up from her quarters into the air above Iska. Unfortunately, she fell only about a millimeter before vanishing in a golden shimmer and reappearing back in her quarters.
Anna blinked out and reappeared behind Iska throwing a punch towards the back of her head. There was a shimmer of gold that suffused the bridge.
45
My focus was suddenly elsewhere. I couldn’t detect the ship or my components there at all, I wasn’t even quite sure what I was seeing through for all that I did seem to have some sort of top down view on what appeared to be some sort of medieval peasant hovel.
Two cows and a few chickens wandered aimlessly about. Mechos, less fiery than he was recently was bare chested and wore a tool belt about his waist. Anna was there too, dressed in a resplendent suit of red and gold armor with a savage looking sword buckled around her waist.
The only structure was a single decrepit looking shack, otherwise a small field was surrounded by a thick forest and a nearby mountain towered overhead.