"You really aren't going to change?" Anne demanded as we walked out to the garden by the pool.

  "You're the Diviner, sis, you tell me," I told her with a smirk while readying an invisible force construct. Since making constructs needed at least Force Awareness to see what you were doing, Forcefield Creation for the field itself and one other power for the effect to be made into a field, being able to hold seven powers active instead of six made forming elaborate constructs with varied abilities not only easier but faster, needing much less shifting around of powers to accommodate the process.

  "I don't look into your possible futures all the time," she lied with an indignant huff. "The absurdity would kill my brain cells. Look;" she pointed at my two-piece swimsuit. "A single example is threatening to do so even now."

  "I'm on vacation. I can be as absurd as I want in my private time." The construct snapped around Anne with a sound that was not a sound, an invisible layer of protective energy hugging her form. "If other people want me to spend said private time on their meeting but don't like my attire..." I shrugged. "That sounds like their problem. As in, not mine."

  "That is not how it woooooooaaaaaahhhhh-"

  In the infinitesimal span of time between one second and the next we left the spa, Colorado river and the state of Texas far below, dragged upwards by a force that could have thrown around a warship. Except for atmospheric drag that was still a fraction of what it should have been, the several thousand gravities of acceleration felt like a free-fall, the force evenly distributed across the entirety of my body and, through the construct, Anne's as well. Then the bulk of the atmosphere was below us and we flew faster and faster into space, narrowly zipping by within a few meters of a satellite so quickly even the average super would not notice.

  From what my Force Awareness could tell me about my sister's physique, Anne had gotten significantly stronger and tougher since the last time we'd performed an orbital transition. Smashing in the Wizard's face had agreed with her, and though she wasn't one of the more physically focused supers she could still comfortably endure light artillery after her new growth. Yet being pulled into outer space in seconds was only an option with the proper defenses, not just to avoid burning from atmospheric friction but to handle collisions.

  The orbitals had a lot of debris, and their number seemed to be constantly increasing. Not once, not twice but seven times we collided with bits of metal smaller than a fingernail yet with more kinetic energy than a dozen artillery strikes. I shrugged off my share, feeling little more than momentary discomfort, but the field around my sister was the only reason we could afford to go so quickly. Maybe she should make an enchanted item that allowed for rapid spaceflight? I made a note to talk to her about it later then adjusted our trajectory to catch up with Earth's latest and largest artificial satellite.

  Jerry had overhauled the Valkyries' space station again. Where it had once been a conglomerate of distinct modules in a rough cylindrical shape, now it was a single hull in the shape of a flattened ovoid with a flattened rear where its engines were. Instead of bristling with individual weapons turrets, antennae, landing bays, exhaust vents and similar components, its surface was an almost entirely smooth metallic grey. The only interruptions were dozens upon dozens of viewing ports gleaming like tiny lights on a Christmas tree, a much smaller number of golden obelisks that looked ornamental but definitely weren't, and a single enormous turret at the ship's bow. All in all, it looked less like a station and more like an actual space ship.

  It was also much larger than it had once been, easily more than twice as long as the largest supertanker I'd ever seen, with maybe thirty times the bulk. As we crossed the last five hundred miles of our trip in a couple of seconds I created another force-field, one conferring Focused Invulnerability to high-speed collisions. It was large enough to cover both me and Anne and extend a few feet beyond. Thus upon smashing into the space station at several hundred miles per second, both we and the surface we struck were immune to the impact. Instant deceleration without making a big mess and unlike the previous times I'd used it there were no unfortunate side effects. Now there was only one thing to take care of.

  "OK, we're here," I 'said' by causing the proper vibrations in Anne's ears through Proximakinesis. "Now where's the door?" Because unlike my other visits when the airlocks had been easily identifiable, the ship's smooth surface was entirely unbroken.

  "Maya you ass, I could have teleported us!" my little sister complained. Strangely enough, I didn't have to 'listen' by reading the vibrations of her vocal cords with Force Awareness; she could somehow speak normally in space. I was very interested in how that worked but Anne was still grumbling about time instead. "Now we're late!"

  "For future reference, that's information you should share before the trip, not after." We couldn't be more than half a minute late in any case, the space flight hadn't taken that long.

  "I would have if someone had not launched us into space without warning," she shot back. I opened my mouth to reply but time seemed to stretch eerily, the whole world slowing to a stop as energy my Force Awareness could not pick up at all crackled around Anne and myself... and then we were elsewhere.

  xxxx

  The twenty-foot-long, cone-shaped grey cloud cut through the air at absurd speeds, for a cloud. It had easily broken through the sound barrier very early in its ascent, climbed faster and faster and faster as it went up dozens of miles, then condensed from a three-hundred-foot cylinder to its current form and had proceeded in downwards trajectory. It had slowed down in the final part of its trip, going only at a few times the speed of sound and decelerating further as the denser air at much lower heights pressed against it.

  It flew over the rapidly expanding desert below, canyons of gravel and dust and peaks of barren rock and ice growing larger and larger as its altitude decreased rapidly. Thin tendrils of white-grey fog barely visible under the morning sun sprouted from its upturned nose, domes of condensation expanding from their ends to capture the howling wind. Pulled back by these imitation parachutes the grey cloud braked hard, its speed falling under the sound barrier. Then, with its speed reduced to no more than a commercial plane, it slammed into the arid ground with a sound like thunder and a burst of soil, stone fragments and fog.

  The dust cloud from the impact slowly dissipated as bits of rock and soil rained down around the impact site and out of it walked a humanoid figure with thick grey fog clinging to them like a hooded cloak. Said figure walked forth, fog wafting off them with every step until their cloak of mist faded away to reveal a tall, thin man in their sixties. Clad in a well-cut grey suit, they had short-cropped salt-and-pepper hair, a face lined more from stress than age, a narrow chin, and green-grey eyes usually narrowed into a flinty glare only this time they shone brightly with a heady mixture of excitement, awe and childish glee.

  "So?" a young woman with long black hair demanded with impatience from where she sat upon a cast-iron chair. "How was your first trip beyond the boundaries of our little fragile jewel of a world?"

  "It was..." the man's voice ground out slowly as if the heavy emotion that could be heard in it barely let it out "...everything I had imagined."

  "Really." The young woman's tone was flat and as dry as the desert surrounding the pair. "Riding the imitation of a sixty-plus year old death trap of a spaceship was somehow the fulfillment of your lifelong dreams? Color me unimpressed, General."

  "Careful my dear Warden, your cynicism is showing. Besides, old ship or not, it's not as if a small space accident could kill me," the old man said as he sat in a chair of solid fog and checked the old wind-up watch on his wrist. "As for an old man's dreams... I was six years old when Armstrong and Aldrin landed on the Moon. I saw the landing on the television along with half the world, or so it had seemed back then. Tried to become an astronaut ever since." He shook his head, then took out an old-style pipe from his pocket and set it on his lips. It began smoking on its own accord without being filled or lit. "Never had quite the temperament for it and thus I remained just a soldier."

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  "Why now? Why not try it out the first chance you got?" the young woman asked as she flicked her fingers over a gleaming pale mass of seemingly liquid metal.

  "Because there was no time," the old General explained. "Alas, for nearly a year now never have emergencies or enemy action ceased for the eight days it'd take for a trip to the Moon. This little test was all we could afford."

  "And I suppose conjuring something faster than that ancient rocket was out of the question?"

  "That 'ancient rocket' young ignorant people look down on remains the fastest manned vehicle ever built even more than six decades after its creation," the old man shot back snidely. "Unfortunately, it's not fast enough or maneuverable enough for our purposes."

  "Wow, three generations without improvement. No wonder national space programs failed." The brunette waved her right hand and the gleaming mass of liquid metal flowed out and upwards, thinning and bending and turning around until it formed a twenty-foot bubble. Something about the metal itself shifted and its silvery gleam became a kaleidoscope of colors before vanishing entirely and leaving an entirely transparent bubble behind. "I guess we'll have to do it my way after all."

  The two of them got up, their seats vanishing each in their own way. The one made of fog lost consistency and solidity, dissipating into loose mist carried away by the wind with a hiss. The one of cast iron crumbled away into black dust which immediately started rusting. In a few seconds it had become a patch of reddish soil otherwise indistinguishable from the arid wasteland around them.

  Meanwhile, the transparent bubble did not remain idle. It surged forth like a tidal wave, splashing against the young woman and old man like so much water then flowing around them, reforming until the two stood inside the seamless, transparent orb. Then with a subtle vibration that pushed bits of gravel inches away, it stopped being beholden to gravity and began to float.

  "What is this made of, transparent aluminum?" the General asked, poking at the orb's internal surface.

  "Yes," the brunette Warden said with a nod. "Except real aluminum, not aluminum oxynitride. The right microstructure can make it transparent as well as other metals and their alloys." The bubble was picking up speed now, rushing through the air as if a giant's invisible grip was pulling it along faster and and faster. "Of course the metal is also enchanted for durability and a few other properties otherwise it would be already shredded by the pressure differential." Once again the desert and its canyons and peaks was getting small as the bubble was already several miles high and rising rapidly.

  "How fast are we going? The meeting is in only twenty minutes," the General said as he peered around before mumbling under his breath "At least the view is great. Much better than in an actual spaceship."

  "Then we should have started earlier," the young woman said only to chuckle at the General's narrowing eyes. "Relax. At twenty gravities of acceleration we'll be there in only thirteen minutes or so. There's more than enough time to enjoy the view."

  "...thank you, Liz," the old man finally said after a good twenty seconds of silence.

  "What for?" the young woman asked but her small smile said she could already guess.

  "For making the walls transparent."

  "Any time, General Rinaker," Liz whispered under her breath so as not to distract an old man enjoying the awesome view of planet Earth spreading beneath their feet.

  xxxx

  The bubble-spaceship seemingly slowed down as it matched the orbital velocity of the over half mile long leviathan of a space station. Except it wasn't a station any more, was it? As General Rinaker inspected the titanic ovoid hull with the dozens of obvious weapons jutting from its surface, he couldn't help but be reminded of the new balance of power in the world and the many reasons for the meeting they were about to have. Or at least his own reasons and probably Liz's reasons too; he was old enough and traditional enough he couldn't begin to guess at what the other invited parties wanted to bring up. The only things he was certain of was that this discussion needed to happen and that the other parties that had been invited had finally proven they could be trusted to be there and at least listen to what he had to say.

  Liz had her eyes closed and was muttering not to herself but to someone not present in the bubble. Or at least the General assumed they were not present; given the endless variety of possible powers a super could well be standing next to them with neither Liz nor himself being able to pick up their presence. It was the same reason for all the paranoia in government circles lately... except was it really paranoia when an invisible demon could start eating your face at any moment?

  Apparently following directions, Liz adjusted the bubble's trajectory, leading them along the underside of the ship. They passed under the ship's nose, flew by a turret as large as a Virginia-class cruiser, between a double row of golden obelisks that resembled the lightning-throwing spikes both Liz and the Invaders used in their bases, until their bubble-spaceship stopped below a bare, entirely flat patch of hull. There they remained for a few seconds until the hull started to peel, no, to melt away. No seams, no apparent mechanism, metal plating thicker than a main battle tank was long flowed like liquid until it formed a hole wide enough for the bubble to move through.

  Rinaker had seen such things many times in The Pit. Liz liked her doors that were not doors that only she could open and her mastery of metal made them not merely viable but the most secure doors physically possible... but that required said mastery of metal. Until recently the Valkyries had not revealed any member with such powers, had they recruited someone new? Or had their co-leader's mastery of enhanced technology improved to a level of reshaping their ship's hull for as trivial a thing as entering or leaving?

  General Rinaker's mind could not stop asking such questions and evaluating both friend and foe any more than he could stop breathing... which was to say he could force himself to do either for maybe an hour at a time but he would not like it. Now that the bubble was inside the massive spacecraft, his eyes and other senses kept scanning his surroundings for clues as to the ship's potential and its creator's way of thinking. That all he could see was a featureless metal tube did not change things; what others chose not to display often revealed even more about their thoughts and capabilities than what they did. Unfortunately, unlike with mundane humans and their technology, there was neither precedent nor easily defined limits as to what was possible, let alone probable. That little fact had greatly contributed to the old man's stress levels over the past year, so much so that he suspected he'd have long since suffered a heart attack or a stroke without powers of his own.

  Finally, they reached a large, high-ceilinged, circular chamber with four different exits other than the vertical tube they had flown through, which had sealed itself behind them after their arrival. There two people waited for them; a young man with short-cropped brown hair and a face with 'Hollywood average' levels of looks that could have played a typical 'nerd' in some great blockbuster movie if not for the high-tech armor of golden plates he wore, and the most beautiful woman Rinaker had ever seen. Phrases like "smoking redhead" or "supermodel" were woefully inadequate to describe an appearance that was simply superhuman and only the General's familiarity with a girl almost as pretty plus long years of self-control let him offer a casual greeting as the bubble vanished and he and Liz walked out.

  "General Rinaker, Liz, welcome to our not-so-humble home," the greatest magitech expert on the solar system greeted them with a broad smirk.

  "Oh stuff it, nerd," Liz shot back, crossing her arms. "As if we didn't notice you doubled the size of this ship in preparation for the meeting. Compensating much?"

  "Jerry has no need to compensate for anything," the redhead spoke back calmly. "I like him exactly as he is. Now if you're done being boorish and deliberately insulting, we may begin."

  "Are we all here then?" the General asked, looking around expectantly.

  "No but the last two members have yet-" the most powerful sorceress in the world paused and scowled at an empty corner of the room. Two seconds later, a pair of blondes appeared out of thin air with a thundering flash of actinic silver light. One of them was still a teenager yet clad in medieval armor of simple style, if one ignored the fact it was made of silvery-white crystal. The other was a tall amazon in her twenties, and the woman who had given Rinaker enough exposure to both superhuman looks and shenanigans to inoculate him against the usual foolishness... unfortunately.

  "Hey guys," Maya Wennefer greeted everyone with zero shame despite having arrived to a highly delicate political meeting in a two-piece swimsuit...