The Architect was pleased with the results of his work: having designed drones that were ready for battle, he’d next turned his attention to the task of transporting them. To this end, he’d placed three of the obsolete housing units of Kurg in a line, then removed the internal walls of the unit at the front of the line, instead giving it control systems for the drones to manipulate. Finally, he gave the structure the ability to fly under its own power, which used only minimal amounts of its ample energy reserves.
He watched it fly circles through the air around the workshop. It was good and the telemetry data streaming into his mind showed all of the new additions were functional.
As he watched the experiment, he was simultaneously building new attack drones to populate his new troop transport. The smallest number of these were the centaur-like shape, with still more in the Nicole-shape, but both types were being given gemstone eyes, for if all went according to plan, then the drones would be briefly leaving the confines of the city, to complete their assault. In addition, the tiny spider-like drones were being manufactured in mass numbers, as throw-away troops, all armed with venom-injecting fangs and venom sacks filled with everything from strong acid to weaponized diseases that could easily kill fleshlings.
When the work was complete, he remotely ordered the new ship to land and without a single word spoken aloud, the drones climbed aboard, cramming themselves in as tightly as possible, to maximize their chances of overwhelming their foes, by numbers alone.
Seeing all through the eyes of the city, the Architect watched the Nicole’s every move, for nothing had been done to block his ability to see all the city saw. The Nicole was unprepared and the Ulkun were nowhere near his location. At the moment, there were only the three fleshlings and their sleeping pet in their piece of the city. They hadn’t started to deploy the other fragments, since they’d spent all of their time breaking the city down to fundamental parts, which lay in containers just inside the door of their housing unit.
Oh, it was going to be as easy as stealing life energy from a defenseless tree. The Nicole would be slain, then the real task of collecting the rest of the city could begin.
For the time being, however, the Architect watched and waited for the right moment, while also stockpiling drones for future endeavors. He wanted to catch the Nicole alone, but they were a cautions creature, always locking the housing unit from the inside before the others departed through a strange device, which transported them via a dimensional fold. The three of them appeared to be filling the housing unit with supplies and drawing plans for laying the city’s layout.
As the Architect watched, day after day, the plans became more intricate and it slowly dawned on him, over the course of several days, their plans were nearly complete. He had to admire the fleshlings in that one regard: they moved quickly, probably due to how short their lives were. It had originally taken him several hundred solar revolutions to complete his own the initial layout of the city, but in just a handful of days, the fleshlings seemed to have completed their own design and had even incorporated room to grow, intentionally leaving holes in the city for new pieces to be added, as they were discovered.
Realizing they might possibly be mere days away from putting their plans into motion, the Architect knew he could wait no longer. He decided his drones would attack by the light of morning, when the Nicole opened up the housing unit just after dawn, each day.
Yawning, Nicole walked down the stairs. She’d dressed for the day in a pair of denim trousers and a comfortable, white T-shirt, with her thoughts dwelling on breakfast. The sun hadn’t come up, yet, but she’d been an early riser for most of her life, a habit that had been reinforced by her combat training.
She quickly scrambled some eggs and made them into a sandwich, because she didn’t feel like eating with a fork. She was interrupted halfway through her meal – Pop! – by activation of the teleporter. As usual, the dwarves exited the transport room arguing in dwarvish.
“What are you two always arguing about?” Nicole demanded.
Both of the dwarves shaded slightly red, which was more visible on Vanu’s face, due to her lack of a beard.
Vanu shrugged, “It’s nothing important, just an old childhood disagreement we’ve never settled, that we’ve both got money riding on.”
Nicole finished the last few bites of her sandwich and asked, “What kind of bet is it?”
The dwarves looked at each other, shaded even more red, then Kazic answered, “It’s kind of private.”
“Fine, fine, I won’t press you any further, at least not today, but someday, I’d like to know more.”
The dwarves gave each other a knowing look and Kazic nodded, “Aye. Me thinks that’s reasonable, if things happen the way me wants them to.” He turned and gave Nicole an affectionate look.
Nicole met Kazic’s gaze for a moment and felt her heart skip a beat. She’d spent so much time with Kazic in recent days, she’d started to feel for the dwarf the way he felt for her. Kazic was fun to talk with and even fit enough to keep up with Nicole most of the time, now that she was back to full strength. T?he dwarf didn’t like magic very much, but that was fine; people always needed a few separate interests or they’d end up spending too much time together.
Stepping into the room that had recently been converted into an armory, Nicole called out, “I’m going to do my calisthenics. Do either of you want to join me?”
Vanu stepped over to the table where her plans for the city were laid out and answered, “Me’s already been for an early jog, this morning.”
Kazic followed Nicole, saying, “Me could do with a workout.”
The armory was overkill for the current size of the city, but Nicole had been planning ahead, for when it was larger. There were several hundred Jacobs Model 23 Heavy Blaster Rifles in crates, stacked in the corner, along with an equal number of Jacobs Model 19 Heavy Blaster Pistols, in a lesser number of crates. Last of all, there were three crates that held Jacobs Model 74 Blaster Cannons, which the salesman had told her bore the nickname ‘Blockbuster’, because they were said to easily punch through concrete barricades. Those were large cannons designed to be broken down and carried by three men, each. There were also crates of swords, axes and shields, many with integrated blasters, for those that preferred an old-fashion approach to battle. Tucked beside them were a few crates of medical supplies suitable for battlefield triage, all packaged up in big, red bags.
Hanging on the wall, just inside the door, was a rack holding Nicole’s short swords, gun belt and an ax Kazic had brought from home, just in case. On the floor below that was one of the bags of medical supplies.
Nicole pulled her swords from their sheaths and Kazic picked up his ax. Nicole’s swords were custom-made, with a western-style straight blade, edged on only one side, an undecorated, metal cross-guard and an oriental-style hilt, because it was the strongest hilt she could get. She’d snapped a few off-the-shelf swords while practicing, which was why she preferred the oriental hilt.
Kazic, on the other hand, used a two-handed, double-headed broad ax with a leather-wrapped handle that had an interesting checkerboard pattern in the leather, from two different shades of dyed leather that had been woven together.
They’d been practicing together each day, but Nicole was too fast for Kazic to keep up with, after having spent an entire year drilling her sword skills from dawn to dusk, until her muscles moved without a trace of thought. She’d taken to teaching him as part of their daily routine, since most of what she’d learned was applicable to fighting with any weapon. They practiced with real weapons, because Nicole wasn’t bothered by the possibility of an injury to herself and she’d been moving so slowly compared to her usual pace that she wasn’t worried about hurting Kazic.
Armed and ready for practice, they headed for the door to the outside. Nicole unlocked and opened the wide, double doors, only to be surprised by a set of foot-long claws striking her in the face!
Kazic had been standing right beside Nicole, ready to swing one of the two doors inward, to latch it to the wall, but was quite surprised as Nicole’s blood splattered all over him! Staring in horror and shock, a steel arm with an elbow-length clawed glove had been thrust through the gap between the doors, right into Nicole’s face, then raked downward, leaving her face and torso badly torn up, because the claws on the glove were wickedly sharp!
When Nicole’s body hit the floor, a terrible rage filled Kazic, spurring him out of his shocked state and into a berserk fury!
Screaming out guttural, ancient curses in dwarvish, he wrenched the door aside and looked on humanoid, steel bodies that had been shaped to resemble Nicole, but with rubies for eyes! Each was armed with a pair of the clawed gloves that ended in foot-long, sharp blades along the inner edge, clearly designed for tearing flesh!
Standing behind them were three large, metallic, centaur-like roaches, which stood on four legs, with the last two limbs laid out like arms, which ended in three thumb-like fingers. The eyes of them were also rubies. Each was armed like the copies of Nicole, with bladed gloves, but the design had been tailored to their different form.
Mixed in among them all, on the ground, were small, steely, spider-like shapes, complete with fangs!
Without the slightest hesitation, Kazic laid into the steel women, smashing three of them open with a single swipe of his ax! Inside, they were filled with metallic, muscle-like strands attached to a dark, carbon-fiber skeletal structure much like that of a human. Though he’d swung full-force, he’d only torn the steel skin from their ribs, without doing any serious structural damage. Under normal circumstance, his arms would have ached from having struck solid steel, but he barely registered the pain; he was too angry to be bothered by something so trivial.
The three steel women he’d struck fell back, knocking several others down, for the automatons were standing too close together. Spinning in a way that mimicked the movements of Nicole, he dodged clumsy strikes from the other side, then turned the spin into an even heavier strike than his fist blow! One of the steel women was struck squarely in the chest and with great satisfaction, he watched her ribs cave in! With no organs to absorb the impact, his ax sailed through her spine, severing it! Bits of the metal woman flew everywhere and she fell back, knocking several more of them over.
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Growling like a wild beast, Kazic advanced, weaving his way past clumsy, awkward strikes, untouched, while cutting one or two of his opponents down with each strike of his own!
The spiders began biting his legs, but he hardly noticed, because he was so angry!
Vanu was quickly by Nicole’s side, with a look of deep concern on her face, having already torn a strip of cloth from her clothes to bandage her new friend, but Nicole waved her away and instead took her coat off the rack by the door. Buttoning herself up, apparently for decency’s sake, she gathered her swords, then leaped over Kazic and into the melee, beyond! Nicole’s body was still a bleeding mess, but Vanu was forced to conclude the wounds were superficial, since they’d only briefly slowed Nicole down and that was mostly because she’d been knocked prone.
Vanu stared, in awe, as Nicole literally shredded her way through the ranks of the enemy, all the while spinning like a ballerina!
However, the dwarf woman was soon surprised to find the little, spidery abominations advancing on her, so she ran into the armory and quickly opened one of the crates of pistols.
Each Model 19 pistol was a sleek, lightweight affair, with a matte, black plastic housing. Despite being labeled as heavy pistols, they were lighter than the typical laser, because the functional bits and frame of the weapon only weighed a quarter of a pound, with most of the weapon’s weight being a rack of four pistol cells in the handle, coming to two and a quarter pounds. By comparison, a heavy laser pistol was about three and a third pounds and only held two cells. Magi-tech devices were often like that, taking less weight to do the same job.
Taking two, Vanu stepped back out and worked to defend the place from invasion by spraying the bugs with icy blasts, freezing their legs to the floor!
Nicole was proud to see her lessons with Kazic had sunk in rather well. He was smoothly turning each dance-like dodge into an offensive strike. Feeling the presence of heavy magic, she made it visible to herself, revealing the creatures were surrounded by red and blue ribbons of energy, swirling around their limbs and eyes, in particular. They definitely weren’t Ulkun, because all Ulkun bore an obvious, central life stone, but these definitely didn’t. Based on the way the ribbons moved, she suspected they were nothing more than magically animated automatons, best known as golems.
It was clear her swords were blunting in the process, but Nicole expertly tore the metal copies of herself to pieces, leaving just six of them for Kazic to deal with, a number she judged him to be more than capable of stopping. She paid little attention to the spiders, though she always moved in time to avoid their bite.
As her muscles worked almost independently, she considered an overall plan of attack and looked up by the light of dawn, seeing the most bizarre thing: three housing segments of Kurg were connected together and floating in the air, with the metallic monsters dropping from an open door at one end. With that sight, she was certain the Architect was behind the assault.
As she considered how she might gain enough height to invade the floating piece of the city, one of the centaur-like creatures swung down at her! She idly countered and sliced the offending arm off, while simultaneously chopping the front two legs off the one on her other side!
Hearing a draconic growl of fury behind her, Nicole turned a defensive twirl to her advantage, briefly turning her head to look in the direction it had come from. The dwarves dove out of the way as Ustrina, now larger than ever, charged past them and barreled right through the enemy Nicole had left for Kazic, tearing them to shreds in the process! Frozen bits of spider scattered as Ustrina shattered her way through their flash-frozen ranks!
Steel arms and legs flew everywhere as Ustrina growled, “On my back, Mother!”
Nicole took a brief moment to focus entirely on defense while she judged the timing and performed a backwards somersault, neatly landing on Ustrina’s back! Nicole was somewhat surprised by how much the dragon had grown without her noticing, but then, in the background, she heard the two dwarves mumbling in a prayer-like fashion. In that moment, she knew they’d pinned all of their hopes for Nicole’s safety on the dragon and what a dragon needed to grow was simply human belief, and dwarves were close enough. The dragon was growing moment by moment as the two dwarves furiously hoped and dreamed she would be able to carry Nicole!
With an evil laugh of glee, Ustrina flapped her wings to get airborne and Nicole felt a pulse of levitation magic take effect! As they flew upward, parallel to the enemy leaping from the city segment, the dragon took a deep breath!
Nicole shouted, “Hold your fire until you can blast inside, so they can’t dodge!”
Ustrina obediently held her breath for just a moment, until they were even with the entrance, then let loose with everything she had! Nicole felt a brief, instantaneous drop in temperature as immensely-cold liquid sprayed from the mouth of the dragon and as she watched, Ustrina’s neck muscles squeezed in a fascinating way, emptying the venom-sac-like reservoirs on either side of her neck. Liquid hydrogen sprayed from the left side of her mouth, while faintly-blue liquid oxygen sprayed from the right!
Nicole had only once before seen liquid oxygen during a chemistry demonstration by one of her teachers and she knew enough to find the mere sight of the volatile liquid frightening. As the cryogenically-cold liquids liberally splashed all over the enemy golems, many of the ones in front seized up, but then Nicole glimpsed the blue light of an electric spark from inside Ustrina’s mouth, followed by the deafening roar of the mixture of liquids exploding! Super-heated air blew right past Nicole’s face and she was briefly engulfed in flames, but somehow, she emerged from it without being singed. She sensed a hint of magic from Ustrina, taking the form of a brief, protective effect, preventing Nicole from being burned.
When it was over, the interior of the city segment was filled with puddles of molten metal and super-heated carbon skeletons!
“Take us in, but be cautious.” Nicole requested, “Try not to step in the metal puddles.”
Ustrina grunted and flapped her wings to produce a little forward momentum, taking them inside. The layout was almost the same as what she was used to, though the three hives had been joined together like a long hallway and the stairs were to the side, instead of opposite the front door. Nicole saw no enemies, but wasn’t about to let her guard down. As Ustrina walked around, Nicole pushed the interior doors open with her swords, finding rooms that were similarly filled with rapidly-hardening metal puddles. They went up the stairs, next, finding more of the same. Moving on to the next hive, Nicole wasn’t surprised to see half-melted drones instead of puddles, once again finding the upper level matched.
Finally, they moved on to the last hive, which looked different from the rest. The interior walls and the second floor had been stripped away, to make one large room with transparent walls, no supports and a set of doors at the opposite end that led outside. Where she expected to see the hearth was instead what looked like a control center, with many button-like raised panels and recessed, hexagonal areas that looked like screens, with Ulkun writing streaming along them, from right to left, in various colors. The room was filled with heavily damaged, but not quite destroyed golems.
“Can you hit them again?” Nicole asked.
The dragon shook her head, “No. It will be hours.”
Nicole slipped off the dragon’s back and made her way toward the controls, idly cutting the limbs off any golem that reached out to her, finishing by cutting the arm off the one closest to the controls, which had been reaching up, to a button.
She noted, with interest, the fact that the automatons were mostly hollow, but bore a human-like skeleton that looked like some kind of carbon fiber and muscles that had seemingly been spun from thin strands of metal.
“Would you do me a favor and smash the ones that can still move?” Nicole asked.
Laughing in an evil fashion, the dragon got to work. She seemed to enjoy breaking the golems.
Nicole couldn’t read the Ulkun language. She knew she was going to regret it, but she switched off the nullifier and then concentrated with her eyes shut for a long moment, before switching it back on. While the nullifier was off, the wounds on her face healed.
When she opened her eyes, the labels on the buttons and the text scrolling on the screens had changed to Northwestern Galactic, the language she’d grown up speaking. Likewise, the direction of the text had changed and was now scrolling upward, with new data appearing at the bottom of the screens, with little, triangular indicator icons pressed into the triangular sides that were left-over space.
After reading one of the screens and looking over the buttons, she started to laugh, because the interface was designed for flight control! It was crude by comparison to her shuttle, but everything required was there. As soon as she decided the setup was amateurish, at best, the central control panel reshaped itself, coming to resemble the layout of the shuttle’s controls, with one large, presumably touch-sensitive screen, still with a hexagonal frame. The metal of the central console flowed toward her, forming the shape of a flight yoke, while below the console, rudder pedals were shaped from the floor. She was just thinking it was all pointless without somewhere to sit, when the floor flowed upward and turned into a hard, metal chair, just the right size for a human.
Staring at it all, she offered the city a critique, “That isn’t soft enough to be comfortable.”
Despite her expectation that something would be done about it, nothing happened.
“Well, looks like you can’t do soft cushions.” She chuckled and sat down.
She tried the console out, finding the setup to be a decent approximation of the shuttle’s flight computer, but as soon as she noticed each flaw in the interface, it was gone, as though the interface was learning what it was supposed to be as she used it.
“Nothing more than clever emulation, but still very useful.” She muttered, to herself.
She maneuvered the hive-ship toward the ground and tentatively tapped a control on the screen in front of her, to extend landing struts.
The Architect screamed with rage and kicked one of the small worker drones, scattering its pieces as scrap! Two of the worker drones assigned to cleaning duties quickly gathered their stricken brother and took it away, to be recycled.
The Nicole and her allies had destroyed his drones, mostly thanks to the slumbering reptile he’d originally discounted as unimportant, though also through a level of combat-skill he’d never seen before. Even now, he was watching a mental replay of the city’s memories of the entire incident from multiple angles, seeing flowing, skillful movements that were far beyond the capability of even the drones he’d patterned after the Nicole, making his drones look clumsy and weak, by comparison.
Even more frustrating, he’d lost three segments of the city, because as soon as the Nicole touched the controls, it stopped obeying his remote commands and started reshaping itself to suit the fleshling’s desires, leaving the Architect helpless to do anything other than watch.
He hated the Nicole for working with the vile, murderous Forbidden One, but even more than that, he hated the Nicole for their influence over the city, which grew day by day. It had started with small temperature changes, then grown into granting other small desires, like facilities for cleaning their fleshling bodies and a useful hole in a particular place, but now the Nicole had started actively shaping the city, through the piece in his head.
After witnessing the distressing way one of the the filthy fleshlings bled all over the place, the Architect couldn’t help but feel disgust! The city had been designed for creatures of metal and stone, not flesh bags that dirtied every surface they touched with oils from their vile skin! Even worse was the unexpected way their bodily fluids went everywhere when they were damaged, creating an awful mess!
He hated the idea of spilling their blood, but knew it was necessary to be rid of them. He quickly calmed down by imagining his cleaning drones carefully wiping away the mess that would make, knowing the alloys of Kurg were easily washed and cleansed.
He glanced at Irkith, briefly, but saw only pity in his eyes. Why pity? What was the purpose of that? There was nothing to pity: the Architect was going to consume the Life Giver’s power and then he would cleanse the galaxy of all life! He would start over in his own image, filling it with drones of his own design! It would be glorious, powerful and clean! All the stars would serve him and he, in turn, would make them part of his own Great Purpose!
He heard steadily rising laughter and initially looked at Irkith, confused about the source. It went on for the better part of a day as he worked, before he realized it was coming from his own mouth.
