The Lap of Luxury 4.4

The Lap of Luxury - Part 4

The door to the engine room slid back with a hiss, revealing a confused looking arteficer wearing blue coveralls. He was an alf, tall and slim, with bright green eyes and closely cropped salt and pepper black hair. His face was narrow and drawn, and his expression was bewildered and bemused. He looked up at Astrid and Mishka has they passed through the membrane that Mishka had conjured, the shimmering barrier wicking away the moisture and leaving Astrid feeling mostly dry.

He was standing in the centre of the large roughly oval room, next to a big cylinder of glass and metal that reached from floor to ceiling, and presumably connected off to other systems. It was, however, clearly broken. The glass in the core was shattered, and had exploded outward, although rather than jagged shards, the consoles and machines and whatever else the stuff in the cluttered space was, were all covered in fine, soft white sand. Which, since Astrid was barefoot, was a relief.

There were a few passages and doors leading off into other rooms that looked like storage for machinery and parts and seemed to have escaped the explosion, as well as some kind of emergency airlock at the back of the room, but there didn’t seem to be anyone other than the single confused arteficer.

“Hello?” said Astrid, peering at the man’s unfocused green eyes. “Hello?”

“Oh,” he said, turning his gaze to her, his head cocking jerkily to one side. “You are new.”

“Right… yes, I’m Astrid, and this is Mishka,” said Astrid, gesturing to the little cub. She peered at the man’s uniform, spying his nametag. “Callum?”

“Oh,” said Callum, looking down at the tag on his coveralls. “Yes, that’s what it says - doesn’t it?” He looked at Mishka, his cheek twitched. “Are you going to take us away from the darkness?”

“Um, hello,” said Mishka in a squeaky voice, peeking out from behind Astrid. “It’s… nice to meet you. I use she/her. And, um, I’ll try…”

“Mishka thinks she can fix the reactor,” said Astrid, looking around. “What happened here?”

“Everyone died,” said Callum. He clicked his tongue. “All dead.”

Clearly, whatever had happened had rattled a few screws loose. Mishka, the older one, had mentioned that the Beneath could affect the mind, and Astrid had experienced that herself back at the Beautiful Tree.

“Mishka, can you make a start?” asked Astrid. “We need to be quick.”

“Um, OK,” said Mishka in a small voice hesitantly shifting out from behind Astrid as she looked over the shattered reactor. “This is a mana-slip drive, isn’t it, Sir or Madam Callum?”

Callum stared at her blankly.

“Um… well, that’s OK, I know it is,” said Mishka, moving over to a work bench on the side of the room and beginning to tap away on the bracelet. “And I think I can make something compatible, as long as the fuel lines are still intact.”

Astrid gave her a squeeze on the shoulders. “Let me know if I can help.”

Mishka nodded vaguely and stood on her tip-toes she began to sift through things on the workbench. Astrid was just about to find her a box or something when her feet left the ground and she began to levitate.

Right. Wizard.

Callum also seemed particularly taken by the overt display of magic, despite the fact he was an artificer, and stared intently. Then again, most artificer’s couldn’t conjure more than just a warelight.

Plenty of people had the potential for magic, Astrid even did, but there was a world of difference between the mathematical precision and scientific method behind established arteficing, and the free-casting, seat-of-the-pants stuff that Real Wizards like Mishka could pull off, which was less ‘there are rules you follow to get definite, discrete, predictable effects out of an object’ and more ‘there are rules to know but there’s also imagination and emotion and creativity and, oh look, you just turned yourself into buttered toast because you failed to properly harmonise the universal constant and Hizzard’s Third Law or whatever by getting distracted thinking about what you had for breakfast that morning.’

Plenty of normal people were arteficers, only nutcases were wizards.

Mishka fumbled around for a few moments, before turning and looking across the room. She frowned, and then sniffed.

“What is it?” asked Astrid.

“N-nothing,” said Mishka, turning back to her work. “I think I have what I need - it won’t last that long, just a few weeks. But it will get us out of the blue hole’s field.”

“Great, that’s great Mishka,” said Astrid, squeezing her shoulder again.

Astrid left the cub to work and went over to the broken reactor. She still had Mishka’s magnifying glass from before, and without anything better to do began to play with it.

Although she was still very annoyed at the older Mishka for tricking her into putting a parasite that translated languages in her head, Astrid had to admit that it was damn useful. She could read the sharp Ursulan runes as easily as if they were Pescian Basic - even though they were actually considerably more complex in their forms than the only language she had ever actually learned. Each symbol seemed to each represent entire words or concepts or sentences - with certain marks adding or taking away aspects or elements depending on their shape, size, and both absolute and relative position to other elements. They were less letters or characters, and more… glpyhs. It would doubtlessly be a nightmare to learn, but it had a definite elegance to it.

She peered through the device, tapping runes here and there as she studied the reactor, watching as complex magical matrices and enchantments spun themselves into existence and documented, catalogued, and analysed every inch of the destroyed piece of arteficing.

It occurred to Astrid that the device was probably the most expensive thing she had ever held.

It beeped, and she frowned at a message that appeared on the clear lens, the result of some kind of scan: Results Compiled: Cause of Explosion, Sabotage. Certainty rating >99.9997%.

Astrid felt her mouth go dry. Sabotage?

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

Who would sabotage a cruise ship? Hold it hostage, sure, but sabotage it? Presumably, so it would deliberately fall into the accretion disc of the blue hole? What was the possible benefit of doing that? There had to be a mistake.

She played with the magnifying glass a bit more, but it kept on returning the same result.

“Um, Mishka?” she asked, wandering back over to where the small cub was wearing a pair of welding goggles and gouging runes into a sheet of metal with a jet of plasma that was shooting out of one of her fingers.

“Oh, um, hello Astrid,” said the cub tiredly, looking up at her and releasing the spell. “What is it?”

“Sorry, but… your magnifying glass keeps on saying something weird, about the reactor?” said Astrid. “It says it was destroyed via sabotage?”

Mishka accepted the magnifying glass and turned it over, as if she’d never seen it before.

“Oh, I see, it’s a modified ursulan mark six scanner?” she said, tapping at the menu. “Pretty heavily customised… ugh, the engram organisation is terrible-”

“Yes, it’s yours,” said Astrid in an exasperated voice. “You gave it to me to use just before you got… cubified.”

“Oh,” said Mishka. “Well, um, no - the diagnostics say it’s in perfect order. If it says it was sabotage, then unless an equivi-tech enemy deliberately arranged things to fake the readings, it’s probably correct.”

“Equiv-what?” asked Astrid.

“Equal to or greater than the arteficing that went into the scanner,” said Mishka.

“So basically no one except a few dead species’ stuff,” said Astrid. “Right, so it was sabotage?”

“Yes, an explosive device,” said Mishka, tapping at the device’s projections. “Oh, interesting - some kind of cursed alloy - dormant and built into the reactor itself, and then presumably triggered by a remote command.”

“Built- built into the reactor?” said Astrid. “You mean it was put there when the ship was construction?”

“Or in a retrofit,” said Mishka, handing the magnifying glass back to Astrid. “Now, um, err… Mr. or Ms. Callum, I need some kind of crystalline medium. Do you have anything like that?”

Callum looked at Mishka blankly and licked his lips, but said nothing. The little cub huffed, and wafted to the ground before moving over to the other side of the reactor room where there were the storage areas.

Astrid turned back to the reactor and did another scan. A section of cursed metal designed to act like a bomb within the reactor? That meant that whoever had made this ship had put it there, either a worker, the designer, or perhaps even the owner…

Astrid gulped. She had a very bad feeling about this. This ship was owned by her boss-

A scream echoed through the air, and Astrid turned around to find Callum standing directly behind her, his eyes boring into her own. He raised an arm towards her.

“Mishka!?” shouted Astrid, stepping around the clearly mad arteficer and rushing over to where the scream had come from.

Thankfully, red cloaks were eye-catching, and she found the small cub standing just one step inside one of the storage rooms, beyond which lay…

Carnage.

Dozens of bodies, so badly ripped and mangled and torn that they weren’t identifiable, beyond the fact that all of them had been dressed in blue coveralls.

The rest of the arteficers.

“What the fuck happened here?” asked Astrid, grabbing Mishka and pulling her away from the scene as she turned back to Callum, who was slowly walking across the room towards them. “What happened, Callum!?”

“I told you,” he said, his face splitting into what might have been academically called a smile, but came off as bizarre and unhinged. “They died.”

Astrid glanced from side to side. She spied a large fire-axe on a rack, and pulled it free, hefting it. “What did you do to them, Callum?” said Astrid.

“Callum?” said Callum, still slowly moving towards them.

Astrid grabbed Mishka and pulled her along behind her, out from the corridor and around the reactor, away from the slowly moving alf. “Yes, fucking Callum,” said Astrid. “You!”

“Oh,” said Callum, looking down at the name-tag. “That was the name of this shape, wasn’t it?”

Astrid gulped.

“We just wanted to know them. To see inside,” said Callum, still ‘smiling’ as he walked towards them. Something moved on his neck, beneath the skin, twining its way up and vanishing into the back of his skull.

“Back off, whatever the fuck you are!” said Astrid, raising the axe higher. “I’m warning you!”

“We just want to know you,” said the thing wearing Callum, raising its arms as it moved towards Astrid. “To see inside.”

Astrid screamed as she lunged forward, bringing the fire-axe down on the monster’s head. It bit deep, but the creature didn’t so much as flinch.

“We just want to know you,” said the monster as the weapon pushed itself out from its ‘skull’ and fell with a loud clang to the ground. ‘Callum’s’ mouth began to shift and distend and split, and icy white-blue tentacles wormed out from between now razor-sharp teeth. “We just want to know you. To see inside,” it repeated yet again, this time coming out in a twisted, eldritch cadence that seemed to rip and tear at her ears.

More of the creature’s skin on its arm and torsos and legs split and twisted, shearing apart the uniform and transforming it from a tall alf into a hideous, eldritch horror that began to shamble towards them. A tang of ozone filled the air as it moved forward, Astrid desperately looked for some kind of weapon. But there was nothing beyond the rough sand beneath her feet-

Kracka-BOOM!

A blast of golden lightning erupted from behind Astrid, streaking across the gap between them and striking the monster, hurling it back against the far metal wall. The monster hit hard, and tools and pieces of machinery shattered and went flying, but it immediately picked itself back up and began to surge forward, totally unharmed.

“We just want to know you! To see inside!”

Astrid screamed and pushed Mishka back in some futile attempt to shield the little cub. The creature closed on them a second time. Before it could kill them the golden lightning that hadn’t quite dissipated from its body suddenly massively increased in intensity, playing over the creature’s form and creating some kind of… cage that contained it.

“Astrid, the- the airlock!” said Mishka.

Astrid looked back to see the small cub with her hands extended and flexed into claw-like shapes, golden energy swirling around her fingers as she lifted the trapped creature off the floor. Sweat was pouring off her in great rivulets, and her hands were trembling.

Airlock! Right!

Astrid sprinted over to the door controls, half a dozen meters over from where the monster was thrashing and trying to break free from its prison.

“It’s dead!” said Astrid, slapping the controls.

“Use… the scanner - the power transfer matrix,” said Mishka.

Astrid pulled the magnifying glass out and tapped and it wildly for a few moments, trying to find whatever setting ‘or matrix’ that Mishka meant. It was quite confusingly laid out, and took her almost twenty seconds before she spotted it, down in the ‘auxiliary’ menu.

“Astrid!”

She looked back to see Mishka struggling to contain the monster.

“Got it!” said Astrid, slapping the rune. A cone of blue energy coalesced on the lens, and then jumped into the airlock’s console. A mana screen lit up, and the heavy door retracted with a hiss. “It’s open!”

She scooted away as Mishka shifted her hands, levitating the monster slowly over towards the open chamber. The creature seemed to realise what was happening, and redoubled its attempts to break free.

“We just want to know you!” it roared as it was roughly shoved inside the chamber. Astrid slapped the airlock seal again, and the doors shut with a ‘clang.’ Across from her Mishka slumped into the sand, and the monster slapped at the heavy, reinforced glass window of the airlock as Astrid pressed the ‘Lock and decompress’ button.

“Warning, lifeform-detected inside,” came a pre-recorded woman’s voice from a vox-box. “Saftey overrides engaged.”

“The… the scanner,” said Mishka weakly. “Use the… lockpick matrix, to… override.”

Astrid flinched as the monster smacked the window again, hard enough to rattle the door. Override? Right. Easy. She could do that.

Thankfully, it seemed to be one of Mishka’s ‘favourite matricies’ - which had she not been quite so exhausted and terrified Astrid would have snarkily pointed out likely spoke volumes of her friend’s character. But the real Mishka wasn’t here, only her kid self who was trying her damnedest to help, so Astrid restrained herself, activating the matrix and telling it to ‘override safeties.’

“Disengaging safeties,” said the vox-box. “Emergency Decompression in five, four, three, two, one…”

The other door opened and the monster shot from the chamber like a bullet, vanishing off into the murky, misty blue darkness beyond.

Astrid exhaled and slid down the metal wall behind her, letting her head flop back. Damn, that had been close.