Extermination (Daniel Black Book 3) (14 page)

“Probably not. There’s a different kind of flying device I know about, that’s a lot faster and handles more like your bike. But I’m not planning on building any.”

“Why not? Fast is good, right?”

I had to smile at her enthusiasm. “Other things being equal, sure. But airplanes are really unstable, which makes them hard to design and tricky to pilot. I’d end up spending a couple of weeks fiddling with designs and crashing all the time before I got something to work, and teaching normal people to operate it would be a nightmare. They also can’t carry as much weight as an airship, and they need a lot more space to land and take off. An airship can go straight up and down, but an airplane sort of needs a running start to get into the air.”

“Huh.”

She draped herself over the dashboard in front of her, and gazed thoughtfully out the window.

“Your world must be pretty amazing,” she said.

“In some ways. We’re still people, so we have war and poverty and injustice just like any other land. But America was a pretty nice place to live. Most of my inventions are really just a matter of adapting things from back home to work with the magic you have here.”

“That’s a relief. The way you’re constantly pulling stuff like this airship out of nowhere could make a girl feel pretty inadequate, you know? I’m glad you’re with us, but sometimes I feel like I’m not pulling my weight.”

I scoffed. “You? You saved our bacon against the ungols, remember? It took both of us to kill the dragon, and I probably don’t even know half the critical stuff you’re doing on the island. Managing Corinna, running the spy ring, all the work you’ve put in to bring the coven together. You’re doing great, Cerise. Don’t sell yourself short just because you don’t have few thousand geniuses to copy ideas from.”

“I guess.” She sighed. “It’s just, I see you making all these amazing things, and it makes me want to make something amazing too. Only I’m not you. I wouldn’t know where to start.”

I put my arms around her. “I can understand that. Maybe we should try a collaboration?”

She looked up at me, and smiled slyly. “So there are things you can’t do by yourself? What did you have in mind?”

“Well, I think our next step needs to be powering ourselves up to fight tougher enemies. I’ve been wanting to do something about getting you a better weapon, at the very least,” I told her. “You’re our best melee fighter, but your daggers tend not to do much against our more powerful enemies.”

“Ugh. I know. Sometimes I think I should have held off on tying them to my soul until I was strong enough to make something better, but I never would have survived so long without them. I’ve been working on adding more enchantments, but doing that the way I was taught is a slow process. I don’t know how you make things like this airship so fast.”

“Want to see if I can teach you?” I asked.

“Do you think you can? Aren’t you using sorcery?” I could hear the eagerness in her voice.

“Sorcery is what let me invent the process I use to make magic items,” I told her. “But the actual techniques are all things I could explain. I haven’t seen that much of your traditional enchantment methods, but I think a lot of the difference is just the extra work you do to avoid wasting magic. Everything is a lot easier when you can just pull more from your amulet whenever you need it.”

“I can definitely see that. Thank you, Daniel. This means a lot to me.”

“Hey, I’m happy to help. I love you, Cerise. I want you to be as strong as you can be. Besides, any excuse to spend time with you is a good one.”

She chuckled. “Just make sure we get some actual work done. You know I’m going to be all over you as soon as we blend magic.”

“What, the mighty death witch can’t practice a little self-control?” I asked.

“It’s a lot more fun when you control me,” she purred.

“Nut.”

“Yeah, and you love it. Hey, I wonder if anyone’s ever done it in an airship before?”

I should have expected that the little minx would want to join the mile high club. Well, what the hell? Extending the test flight an extra hour wasn’t going to hurt anything.

Cerise turned out to be quite good at enchantment work, which didn’t surprise me at all. There’s no way she would have survived her crazy approach to magic without buckets of talent. I spent several very pleasant hours that evening teaching her some of my simpler techniques for high-energy enchantment, and working with her on ideas for enhancing her daggers.

That was a bit tricky, since they were already so closely tied to her. Fire was deeply incompatible with her shadow magic, so we certainly weren’t going to be copying anything from Grinder’s design. Her powers were really more suited to stealthy hit-and-run tactics anyway, so anything that would give away her position was a poor fit.

On the good side, they already had substantial mana batteries built into their enchantments.

“Normally witches don’t have much raw power,” Cerise explained. “So you build your athame to store magic, and feed it what you can every day. Then you have something with real oomph to call on when you need it.”

I nodded along thoughtfully. “I see you’ve been expanding their capacity recently? That’s good. What do you think about some force magic along the edges, so you can cut things that are harder than silver?”

“Sounds like a good start,” she agreed. “I want to work in something like that strength spell you put on your buildings, too. Oh, and what about one of those monstrous projection fields like you put on Grinder? Only mine would be shadows and death, obviously.”

“Projection field? What do you mean?”

That led to an enlightening conversation, for both of us.

When I’d built Grinder I’d been thinking like a science fiction fan. It built up a cylindrical field of high-temperature plasma using a combination of fire and force magic, and the plasma jet function was just a matter of conjuring more fire and using force magic to push it out at high speeds. Naturally this made for a short-ranged weapon, since plasma disperses quickly in air.

The standard techniques Cerise knew for building attack spells used a completely different approach. They were all based around weaving a spell that does something nasty to your enemy, and then projecting it at them in one way or another. Since one of my major limitations was my inability to cast spells on anything more than a few feet away this was a topic of considerable interest to me.

Cerise knew a method of building a spell and then making it reach out to targets ten or twenty feet away, which is what she’d assumed Grinder’s plasma jet was based on. She also knew several ways to throw a spell, and make it hold together for a few seconds until it hits a target and takes effect. That basically involved anchoring the spell to itself, which was a tricky enough concept that I might not have thought of it on my own.

For her part, Cerise found the idea of using magic to create and project ordinary physical forces a little mind-boggling.

“I guess that explains the guns,” she observed. “I wondered how you came up with an idea as wacky as throwing little rocks at people to kill them.”

“Yeah, too bad it won’t work with your usual tools,” I told her.

She frowned. “Why not? I guess shadow bolts wouldn’t hurt anyone without the magic to make them solid, but blinding people at a distance could be useful.”

“Darkness isn’t a substance,” I told her. “It’s just an absence of light. So I could make a weapon that shines a bright beam of light to blind people, but a beam that gets rid of light would have to be some kind of spell projection. That kind of detail is why you have to be an expert on natural philosophy to build attack spells the way I’ve been doing it.”

I actually meant physics, of course, but ‘natural philosophy’ was the closest the local language had for a word like that.

“Huh. I guess death spells are all magic, so that wouldn’t work either. Hey, but what about that thing you do where you put spells on bullets? We could do that with my stuff, right?”

“Yes, that could be quite effective,” I agreed.

It was a fun night, and surprisingly productive too. I resolved to start doing that with all of my girls on a regular basis. There was a lot I could learn from them about how magic was done in this world, and it was a good way to learn more about what they could do.

Unfortunately I could only spare an hour or two a day for that kind of thing, because I had my own projects to deal with.

It was becoming obvious to me by then that I was never going to have time to personally finish out the interior of the arcology blocks. Making proper living space for thousands of people would require incredible amounts of detail work, especially if I started worrying about things like doors and furniture. So instead I spent a day setting things up so my people could do that for themselves. I created some simple enchantment factories that created stone bricks in various colors, with interlocking shapes like children’s building blocks. Then I set up a store down on the street level to sell them at cheap prices, and hired a refugee family to run the place.

Magic lamps were also pretty straightforward to mass produce, so I set up a second shop selling them. I’d still have to do all the plumbing work myself, but that left me in a much better position to take in the wave of new recruits I was anticipating. Now I just had to be able to go get them.

My third prototype airship was much bigger than the others, since I wanted to be able to rescue substantial groups of people with it. I spent the better part of a day assembling an aluminum hull the size of a small ship, maybe forty feet long and a third of that wide. Most of that space was one giant open cargo hold, with large double doors and a loading ramp at the back. At the front was a control room with big windows of fused quartz, and seating for four crew members. Mindful of the possibility of long voyages I put in a ladder leading to a little loft area above the bridge, where the crew could lay out bedrolls and get some sleep between shifts.

It ended up with a pretty boxy shape, but that was fine. I was more interested in maximizing cargo space than making it look cool, and rectangular shapes are a lot easier to work with than aerodynamic curves. This thing wasn’t going to be fast enough to need more than the most minimal streamlining in any event. The hold was being big enough to hold two railroad boxcars crammed in side by side, and that was the important thing.

Instead of a single force bubble for lift I set up enchantments to create four of them. When they were activated they’d expand until they touched each other, and then fit together like soap bubbles. At full size they’d form a cylindrical shape with rounded ends, fairly similar to a dirigible, with internal force walls dividing the volume into four lift cells.

Mindful of the possibility that the airship could come under attack, I also put in some extra work to make them reform automatically if one of the force fields was destroyed somehow. Growing a lift cell back to full size might take a minute or so, but with four of them I figured that it would be difficult to make the vessel crash. A determined attacker might be able to force it down, but there should always be enough lift to keep the ship upright and slow the descent to something survivable.

As an added safety measure I put a more powerful version of the skimmer enchantments on the vessel’s hull, causing it to float eight feet off the ground when they were active. That would absorb a lot of the shock of a crash, as well as allowing the vessel to maneuver on the ground when the lift cells were retracted.

But the best defense is a good offense. How would we fight back, if the ship were attacked by a dragon or a pack of enemies on flying mounts?

There, I copied my ideas from the bombers of World War II. I didn’t have proper machine guns, but I figured the semi-automatic weapons I was already producing would work well enough. A griffon rider is a lot easier to hit than an airplane, especially since he has to get pretty close to attack you with arrows or battle magic.

So I put in four firing positions along the sides of the airship, each of them basically a normal gun sticking through the hull on a pivot mount. A small compartment under the bridge contained another firing position, and a tail gunner position above the rear doors rounded out our coverage. Of course, they couldn’t hit an enemy who was above the lift cells, and the windows that allowed the gunners to see out were thin enough that they wouldn’t stand up to a lot of punishment. But I figured it was a good enough solution for a threat that might never materialize.

A more pressing issue was how to land to pick up refugees who were besieged. The lift cells on this airship were going to form a cylinder nearly three hundred feet long at full size, which was far too big to fit in the courtyard of a typical castle. In that kind of situation we’d have to land outside the walls instead, which would only be practical if we had some way to drive off a group of attackers. Fortunately I had a viable solution to that problem.

I’d already worked out how to make a factory enchantment for bouncer grenades. Now I made four more of them, attached to the bottom of the airship’s hull and controlled from the bridge. Turn them on, and we’d be dropping about twenty-five grenades per minute onto whatever was under us. A few minutes of that ought to send most enemies running for cover, and the guns and my magic would keep them at bay while the airship was on the ground.