Karzon helped his subordinates open up the containers and assemble the transmitter, which was easier said than done without a manual. It was a core of metal, polymer, circuits and cables, encased in an outer shell of black-stone panels covered in occult symbols. The bottom was a narrow, solid spike, designed to be anchored into the ground. The pyramid-like top of the obelisk was on a jointed mechanical arm, and was intended to be directed towards the target area using whatever means necessary. In this case, it was a PDA that one would use to manually calibrate the transmitter, but it also had a small number of pre-loaded target receivers such as the exile town, the supply depot, Canyontown, and the nearest oasis.
The blacktech device came with a single-use void energy accumulator, trapped in a bulky, black-stone insulation case. No hinges, no screws, no seams, just a matte-black cube as tall as a grown Thinker. It was also far too heavy for any one man to carry, and as far as they could tell, indestructible. The only opening on the ominous thing was a power cable slot with some sort of hieroglyphs etched above it.
One of his subordinates walked up to him. She was a Warrior with huge, sand-brown scales and spikes all across her body. she was a relic of a dead clan, engineered to have supreme natural armor, the procedures having rendered all the males and most of the females sterile. Those that could still produce eggs effectively just created clones of themselves, further dooming the bloodline. Her plates had spiraling grooves in them, but were unbroken. “Never noticed what a walking tank she was,” a deep voice in his head pondered. He could feel the woman’s concern even through the expressionless visage that was her face, but he wasn’t sure what it was about. Not until she spoke.
“We can’t get it high enough. The power source is too heavy for the grav-platforms to raise it more than a few meters up, and our longest power cable is only a hundred meters,” he rumbled, his voice like gravel in a concrete mill.
Karzon looked at the antenna, then at the spire. It was small enough to carry, but the spire was almost perfectly smooth. He’d try anyway. “Alright, strap the transmitter to my back,” he barked.
One of the voices in his head piped up, “We’ll splatter if we fall.”
“Then we won’t,” another retorted.
The others were already milling about lifting the antenna-like device to one of the cargo platforms, while the Armored One questioned before joining in. “...You sure about this?” she rumbled.
Karzon nodded. She squinted at the spire, then looked back to him. “It’s all smooth, and you don’t have climbing pads. How?”
Karzon raised a hand, mentally fanning his inner embers into a flame, channeling them into tiny maelstroms focused around his fingers. She nodded and turned to join the others, muttering “Let’s hope it doesn’t explode when you break the surface…” as she went.
They strapped the transmitter to his back with a makeshift harness and placed the power source on one of the cargo platforms, which though incapable of lifting it to the top of the spire of its own strength, still significantly reduced the weight Karzon would have to lift. The platform was then fastened to his harness. In anticipation of a possible catastrophic outcome, the others took cover behind what was left of the bar’s street-facing wall.
Stood at the base of the spire, his hands firmly against its surface, Karzon channeled his inner fire and manifested miniature distortion fields around his fingers. Tiny pieces of glass began chipping off, accompanied by horrible scraping noises. His fingers soon sank into the glass, but no cracks spread from the holes.
He briefly thought on how long it would take to get up and down, and how cut up he’d be by the time it was done. It didn’t matter. He’d survived far worse.
Karzon the Liberated lifted himself along with the antenna, then slammed the fingers of his left hand into the spire in an attempt to get a grip. The glass gave under the force, and holes soon formed around his fingers.
Left.
Right.
Left.
Right.
Between the transmitter and the power source, it felt like he was climbing with the weight of another full-grown Warrior on his back. He didn’t think he could get all the way up this way.
Left.
Right.
Left.
Right.
He kept going, but with each handhold, each meter of the spire scales, he felt the damnable cube weighing on his more and more. It felt like it would make his harness embed itself into his scales if it went on for much longer. “What’s the fuckin’ thing even good for? It’s a glorified battery!” an angry growl resounded in his head. One of the softer voices chimed in with a retort of “The transmitter runs on void energy. It’s not as we can just plug ourselves into it.”
Left.
Right.
“...Can we?”
It wasn’t as if he would make it to the top with the power source dragging him down. The weight made his fingers carve channels into the glass, and the closer to the top he got, the thinner the layer of tempered glass, and the faster he had to move so he wouldn’t slide down. With his left hand, he grabbed at the rope which held the cargo platform to his harness and shredded it away. He’d expected the cube to tumble with a thunderous noise, but thankfully, its weight only overpowered the cargo platform’s lifting capacity and only caused it to drift down and skid across the scorched, glass-covered ground.
Left. Right. Left. Right.
Without the power source to weigh him down, climbing the glass spire wasn’t a matter of whether he could, but how long it took, and at this rate, it wouldn’t take more than long. He could hear his comrades yelling, having heard the power source falling and skidding along the ground. “Come down! Transmitter’s useless without the power source!” one of them yelled.
Left. Right. Left. Right.
The wind was whipping him, now, strongly enough that he had to compensate for the force pushing him sideways. He took as deep a breath as he could and belted out “I’ll just take a second trip!”
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
Despite the fact there was no way his voice penetrated the incessant scraping of glass and whipping, he knew they heard him.
Left. Right. Left. Right.
Of course, he didn’t intend to do a second trip. There wasn’t enough time, he felt it in his bones. He felt the warmth of his own blood running down his arms, his wounds reopened by the glass fragments and continuous exertion. “You think we’ll bleed out before we get back down?” a voice questioned.
“It’d take days at this rate. We’re more likely to slip and go splat,” another replied.
Left. Right. Left. Right.
Minutes passed, and he climbed. His blood ran down the spire’s walls, and he climbed. Hours passed, and he climbed. The sun peeked over the horizon, and still he climbed.
Left. Right. Left. Right.
Left. Right. Left. Right.
Left. Right. Left. Right.
Left. Right. Left. Right.
Left.
Right.
Left.
At last, he reached the top, a needle-tip pointing to the sky. He willed the distortion fields around the fingers of his right hand to merge into one around his arm, and carved off the tip of the spire into a flat surface. It was just big enough for him to sit atop it. And that he did, if only for a few minutes to rest himself, legs crossed.
He proceeded to plunge his right forearm into the empty space, the distortion field drilling into the crystalline glass and throwing shards of glass all around. After he unfastened the device from his back, the transmitter’s anchor was unceremoniously jammed into the hole, and its transmitter pointed towards Canyontown. He couldn’t hear them this high up, and they weren’t yelling, but Karzon knew the others wanted him to just come down and try to get the power source up here on a second trip. “Even if we get it up here, there’s nowhere to put it,” he thought.
All the voices in his head agreed upon one thing.
“We might burn up if we try to power the transmitter ourselves, but if we don’t warn them, nobody will.”
Karzon tapped in a code on the PDA to unfold the transmitter’s panels and expose the cabling inside, reaching in to grab the main power cable. The plug was twice as thick as his index finger, and half as long. “Here goes nothing,” he thought, already fanning his inner flame in preparation. He jabbed the plug into his thigh, in a spot where it wouldn’t sever major blood vessels. Not because he would bleed out if he did, but because the amount of liquid gushing out might make him slip or damage the transmitter, or even impede energy transfer. The pain was… What he’d expected. The plug was relatively dull, and its structure meant it anchored itself in his muscles well, so it didn’t move around too much to cause further damage. Frankly, the most painful part was the fact he’d forgotten to rip out a scale so the plug wouldn’t break it and drive it into the wound.
Karzon began funneling all the inner fire he could muster into the cable, and felt the area around it go numb. A lilac glow began pulsating along the cable, and the glyphs upon the machine’s surface began flickering in and out. He saw the scales around the plug turning to iridescent gemstone as he pushed harder. The machine slowly but surely came to life, and at the press of a button on the PDA, the transmitter slowly aligned itself towards Canyontown.
The words “FULLY CHARGED” flashed in bright red letters on the PDA’s screen, and he feverishly pressed the record button. He only had a quarter of a minute or so until it would fire the transmission, message or not, and he could speak faster than he could type. It would be a little distorted due to the wind, but it was this or nothing.
“Exile-town razed, everyone dead, Clan Igron did it! Used assault rovers, sacrificed speed- and machine-blessed! Warn the Old Dragon!”
Five.
Four.
Tongues of lilac lightning began leaping across the pyramid-shaped transmitter, and the symbols on the other black-stone plates began to fade.
Three.
Two.
A pylon of unworldly light grew from the transmitter like the flame of a plasma torch, stretching for hundreds of meters outward.
One.
As though sucked into an invisible hole in reality, the light lurched forward and disappeared. The transmitter fell silent and began folding back into itself. It was done. Karzon breathed a sigh of relief, yanked the plug from his leg, and folded the cable back onto its rack inside the machine’s casing so it could close properly.
The wound didn’t bleed, and he couldn’t feel it. It seemed the flesh around the plug had turned to gemstone, he approximated no more than half an inch from the center. He already grinned in pain at the prospect of having to remove the crystal plug at some point, but that wasn’t his concern right now.
Right now he needed to get down, before the exhaustion caught up with him and he got blown off.
He looked over the edge to try and find the nearest hole in the spire, only to see his comrades at the base of the spire with two cargo platforms, one taken apart and the other rigged up with an extra grav-drive. From what he could make out, the Armored One waved at him, pointed at the beefed-up platform, then upwards. Two others lifted it, and with a mighty heave threw it upwards a solid hundred meters thanks to the grav-drives. It came to an apex, stopped for a moment, oriented itself to face upwards, and began slowly, ever so slowly rising.
He manifested distortion fields around his fingers, and hung himself over the edge on the side he’d used to climb up.
Right. Left. Right. Left
The fact his distortion fields made him drift downward as they carved away the glass became an advantage, as all he had to do was find the holes he’d already made, plus he could use those further down for his feet. Like climbing a gigantic, glass ladder that melted under your fingers.
Right. Left. Right. Left.
Soon enough, he met the grav-platform and stood on it. His weight overpowered the twin grav-drives, causing it to begin drifting down at a surprisingly comfortable pace.
It had taken him until now to gaze out across the ruins of the exile-town, across the great desert. He only hoped the message would get to the old dragon. If it didn’t, they’d have to come in person, and walking there would take weeks.
His gaze fell upon one of the wrecked assault rovers. It was still mostly intact, it just had a few holes where its armor was weakest and where a well-aimed high-power shot could kill a passenger or even the driver.
When he reached the bottom, he immediately got up and took up his role as commander once more.
His comrades were both ecstatic and worried about the feat he’d just pulled, especially about the gaping crystalline hole in his leg, and the glass fragments wedged between his scales, and the blood seeping from his spiral wounds, but none of that mattered just yet.
“We’ll repair three of the rovers and use them to get to Canyontown in case the message doesn’t arrive. Two for people, one for supplies,” he said.
One of the others piped up, “Even if they’re near-pristine, it’ll take a couple of days to get them in working order. A couple more days to get there, even at full speed.”
He recognized him as a trained combat engineer. He was machine-blessed, before all this, strong enough with his blessing to match an elder. His blessing was the very thing that led to his dishonorment, he’d made a highborn elder too envious and the murder of a Thinker was pinned on him.
“And it’ll take us weeks to walk there. This is our best option,” he retorted, and received a simple nod of acknowledgement in response.
“Alright, get to work, you don’t need my supervision to do your jobs,” he belted with a ragged voice. He tasted blood. This wasn’t good.
“I do need some help picking glass out of my scales…” he admitted just before the others could disperse, and the Armored One turned around. He was just about ready to politely refuse, but when she raised her right hand, it was spindly, nearly skeletally cybernetic. It seemed to go all the way up to the elbow, and was just mounted inside the hollowed-out shell of her original forearm.
He nodded, and began walking towards the cargo container with their stimmix supplies. She understood, followed, and spent the next several hours painstakingly picking the glass from his wounds and between his scales, whilst he chugged stimmix and the others worked.