I already had plenty of reasons to hate these officer meetings, I thought to myself, but now I had a new one: Jules had also been invited this time. That wasn't so bad, in and of itself. I didn't dislike the man, to be honest, but rather, the palpable tension that his presence caused was rather offsetting. I was definitely in the minority of crew officers who didn't automatically hate him. Elaine, Larry, Susan, Jim, and Margaret were actually able to maintain a level of polite friendliness, which made it feel like I was part of a coalition of officers that were still trying to reason with the man. But most everyone else did little to hide their opinions. Even Henry was more focused on hating Jules than hating me. He hadn't even glanced in my direction the whole meeting.
“...the ship has a total of five hundred repair bots, all of whom could be equipped with high-tech gauss rifles. We’ve already added sentry posts at various key points, and last but not least, we have three 15 gigawatt anti-meteor point-defense laser cannons that can be brought to bear at any point within a few kilometers of the ship,” our Chief Security officer was offering a presentation on the starship’s defenses. Presumably, we were discussing our response against any potential invasion by the natives, but everyone in the room knew that it was aimed squarely at mayor Jules, who sat in on our meeting with a perfect poker face.
“Well I am reassured, this place is truly a fortress.” He said with a rueful chuckle, once the security chief was done, “I can see that even two to three thousand natives,” he stressed the word slightly, “would have a difficult time capturing this place.”
Captain Tanlier and mayor Jules were done being polite with each other, I thought to myself as I slouched in my chair. I’d been forced to attend this meeting in my android body because I looked more “intimidating”. And that was really the whole point. The two men were trying to intimidate each other. It was a dick-waving contest, the mayor may have fired the first shot by mentioning the number of former soldiers among the colonists, but Captain Tanlier was escalating things with this detailed “security” briefing.
“But what of the rest of us? You plan to let us all retreat here if we get attacked?” the mayor asked with just the slightest hint of sarcasm.
“If I may be blunt, mayor Townsend, I’m afraid that given your group’s attitude with regards to people such as ourselves who choose to use neural implants and other body modifications, I am not certain that would be safe for us.” Captain Tanlier said coldly, “Nor do I see much reason to assist you with providing you with weapons, even if we had a store of gunpowder for such a use.”
“We don’t have a problem with neural implants used for legitimate purposes, such as operating a starship, stop using straw man arguments to try to villainize us. But, do you have the materials to make gauss rifles?” Jules asked angrily, “Because other than those ship lasers, I feel like your entire presentation has been a bluff.”
“We want assurances that you will not attempt to interfere with members of our crew, or hijack our ship to steal it for yourself. We want to be an independent enclave, with our own laws. We can trade our services, such as use of the autofab, electricity, and use of our Shipmind’s tech field in exchange for enough food to sustain us.”
“So you want the rest of us to be the peasant farmers while you control all the important resources here in your steel tower?” Jules asked. “Sounds like you think you should be treated like an aristocracy. If you want food, farm it yourselves. A colony only works if every member shares in the work equally, and if all the resources are shared equally as well.”
“The ship belongs to the crew. Did you think we’d surrender it to you? This isn’t some communist dictatorship where you can just take our private property.” Captain Tanlier growled.
“That’s an interesting statement from someone who helped themselves to a thousand of our prefab houses and uses our tractors for their own projects.” Jules pointed out, “How about we do this democratically? I say we wake up all the colonists and vote on how the resources should be handled. You’ll get your 90 votes against our 10,000.” Jules argued. Jules had forgotten to count the votes of the three full cyborgs on the crew and my own, I noticed, as our crew count was actually 94. It just so happened that 4 of us were brains in jars and had our own built-in life support systems. Was that an accidental oversight, I wondered.
“We can farm our own food, but then what do we need your people for? I suppose maybe the best solution is to simply shuttle the lot of you off our island to some alternate site where you can have your pure human utopia, subsistence farming with whatever hand tools you happen to have.” Captain Tanlier growled.
“Your island? By what right? We’re all squatters on an alien planet that somehow interferes with our technology, filled with potentially hostile natives. And whose fault is that? You’re the ones that accidentally brought us here because of your incompetence. You owe us for breach of contract…” Jule’s face was turning red, I noticed.
“Yeah, why don’t you take us to court? Oh, wait. You can’t.”
“That’s how it's going to be then? You’re the one with the laser cannons, so you make the rules? Might makes right?”
“You’re the one that thinks we should give you guns for your two to three thousand soldiers! Funny thing to want if you didn’t already plan to be using that might to enforce your ideas of what’s right!” Captain Tanlier yelled.
“Boys, as entertaining as this little shouting match is,” Margaret said, “I have an announcement that might prove more urgent. I’ve spotted an incoming native vessel.”
“That timing seems pretty convenient,” Jules observed, his face still flushed with anger.
“I spotted it this morning but figured that waiting a few hours for proper dramatic timing was worth it,” Margaret admitted.
I frowned, how had Margaret spotted it without my notice? Margaret noticed my suspicious look and added. “I added a telescope to the top of the ship. You lent me a repair bot remember?”
I nodded, though technically, that hadn’t been me, that must have been Doppel. I’d given Doppel a fair bit of autonomy though, so that wasn’t a problem. I also understood why Margaret and Elaine were keeping Doppel’s existence under wraps, so I often found myself accepting responsibility for things Doppel did. I was just a bit miffed that Margaret hadn’t told me about the visitors sooner. Margaret read my frown and guessed the cause, using augmented reality, she waggled her fingers on a keyboard only she could see and sent me a text. UR A TERRIBLE ACTOR, it read. I guess she hadn't trusted me to keep it hidden? I shrugged, whatever, not worth getting worked up about, I decided.
Margaret created a holographic projection; it was a small vessel, perhaps the size of a bus, with room for maybe ten to twenty passengers. What was strange about it was that it had no visible method of propulsion. No sails, no oars, it wasn’t clear how the vehicle was propelling itself. It was clearly wooden, but it was extremely elegant in its design, with a rounded symmetrical flair. There were no visible gaps between the planks that made the hull, so it looked like it was made from a single block of wood, it was a flattened teardrop shape with a hemispherical bulge on the top with clear windows. There was a flair about it that said Ulderani to me, the Ulderani seemed to really like using rounded geometric shapes in their designs, as opposed to human’s tendency to use sharp angular or even boxy designs.
“How is it moving?” Jim asked. The wheelworld’s wind rarely rose to the level of a gentle breeze, so sails weren’t very useful here, I remembered.
“Well either it has an underwater propeller like a motorboat,” Margaret opined, “Or the answer is magic.”
“Magic?” Jules asked, scoffing. “Looks to me that your survey’s conclusion that the natives were at medieval tech level was also incompetent. How much longer until it arrives?”
I shook my head, honestly, magic seemed more likely to me, but I didn’t offer my opinion, instead, I asked a different question. “Where did it come from? Didn’t we confirm there are no fishing villages around this lake?”
“Should be here tomorrow afternoon, this lake is hundreds of kilometers wide and it’s moving pretty slow, a lot slower than I’d expect from a motorboat with an underwater propeller. As to where it came from? I think it’s amphibious, sort of. Tracing its route back to the shore it likely came from, I found this:” Margaret said.
Another image appeared, of an odd flat cart with a rounded convex surface barely higher than the wheel’s axles. Margaret helpfully projected an image of the alien vessel sitting on top of the cart, and I realized that it must have at one point been a large carriage that separated into the discarded bottom part left behind and the boat currently heading in our direction. I’d seen similar, if smaller, setups being hauled by cars back on Earth, I suddenly recalled. But this carriage didn’t look like it had been towed, it lacked anything that looked like a towing mechanism. Was that part built on the ship, I wondered, or had the carriage been self-propelled too? There were no hoof marks anywhere near the undercarriage, no evidence that anything had been used to pull the large vehicle.
“How did they move the boat off that undercarriage into the water? It looks to weigh a few tons,” Jim asked, “We’d use a ramp or small crane to do something like that. But that's pretty far from the water, and there’s no crane there…”
“Again, my guess is magic,” Margaret said with a shrug. “But feel free to imagine a team of big burly men who picked it up, then hopped inside the ship to power a propeller on a crankshaft built into the hull, like this old-timey manually powered submarine used during the US Civil War.” Margaret put up an illustration of a preposterous-looking device called the H.L. Hunley.
“Well,” Jules said with a sigh, “It looks like we’ll have to set our differences aside for the moment and focus on this new crisis, then.”
“Agreed,” Captain Tanlier said with a sour look on his face.
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The Ulderani woman who gently floated off the boat to the shore below was beautiful in her own alien way, I reflected. The rest of the crew seemed more focused on trying to guess how she had floated like that, seeming to think it was a magic trick of some sort rather than an obvious display of magic, but I was more interested in examining her appearance.
The Ulderani as a species had six limbs, four of them being slender delicate-looking arms. All their limbs had three fingers, and their legs were digitigrade, with three oversized toes looking a bit like an enormous chicken leg. The legs were not scaled or thin like a chicken, though, rather they were firm and well-muscled. The Ulderani tended to be better sprinters and jumpers than humans, though, in a long-distance race, humans would win.
The Ulderani also sported two sets of breasts, one pair each at shoulder-like articulation on their upper body, though their breasts tended to be rather small in comparison to humans. Their waists narrowed and their hips were wide to accommodate their slightly larger than human legs. Their skin was made of purple and green stripes in about equal amounts, and their faces were fairly human in appearance, except for the fact that they had four eyes, two pairs on top of each other.
The smaller set of eyes was close to their hairline and had no visible pupils, as they were actually optimized to perceive in the infrared, but the larger pair of eyes were large and expressive, and surprisingly human-looking complete with eyebrows. These pair of eyes were a shade that looked like aquamarine gems but they varied from Ulderani to Ulderani.
They had bluish hair with an almost metallic sheen, and they mostly recognized each other by the unique patterns of stripes that adorned their bodies, especially on the face where the lines became finer and more detailed, forming elaborate, seemingly random patterns.
They lacked ears, instead relying on small pockets of liquid inside their skull bones for hearing. It was pretty well established that human hearing was actually better than Ulderani hearing, and their audible range was a bit lower than ours.
Overall the Ulderani were appealing enough to human sensibilities and open-minded enough that human and Ulderani couples were rare but accepted back in our universe. It should be noted, however, that there was a bit of a hiccup when it came to gender.
The Ulderani were actually hermaphrodites of sorts. They had evolved in such a way that they started out gender-neutral, hit puberty at about ten to twelve to become male, then at about thirty to thirty-five, they hit a second puberty aptly named “The Withering” where they lost their male genitalia and morphed into being female. For that reason, they were a matriarchal society with males being considered “too young” to have much authority.
The Ulderani woman, who was dressed in what looked to be colorful silk, examined the group of humans waiting for her and immediately focused her attention on the females. Then she seemed to do a double-take and focused on me. What was surprising about me, I wondered. Then I thought to myself, I was probably showing up as considerably cooler than the other humans on the beach. Belatedly, I turned on a heating element that would bring me up to normal human body temperature, a feature I’d turned off as being wasteful. But, the damage was done, she’d picked me out as being unusual in some way, and I wasn't sure that my built-in heaters would generate anything like a normal heat profile for a human, as whoever had built this android didn’t have infrared vision.
“What a strange group of barbarians,” she muttered to herself softly, likely unaware that those of us with better than human hearing, such as myself, could hear that. I was at least relieved to learn that I could understand her, though her accent was completely different than what I’d learned.
“Greetings, Matriach, welcome to our village,” Elaine said, stepping forth. It had been agreed to let her do the talking, simply because she was an older female. Ulderani aged much the same way humans did, gaining fine lines and greyer hair, so our two species could perceive each other’s age fairly easily. This Ulderani was still in the prime of her life, perhaps fifty, which given the longer lifespans, was more like forty for a human. Back in my old universe both species could augment their natural lifespan a bit, and alter their appearance, but they still used normal unaltered biological age as a way of describing how old someone looked.
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“Ah, you can speak, though your accent is terrible. How convenient,” the Ulderani woman said, stepping up to Elaine to hold her hand out, palm down. This was the way Ulderani shook hands, I knew, but they had two different handshakes. If an Ulderani held their hand out palms up, it meant that they considered you their equal or superior, and you placed one hand on top of the offered hand so that the Ulderani could then place a third hand on top of both. By offering a palm down outstretched hand, the other person was expected to use two hands to clasp the offered hand from below and above.
Elaine completed the gesture without hesitation, acknowledging the Ulderani woman as a superior, by clasping the offered hand in both her own. She could have placed her own hand palm facing downwards below the Ulderani’s hand, which would be a way of rejecting that suggestion of lower status as it would force the Ulderani to put the third hand, palm up, below Elaine’s hand. But that gesture was considered a direct challenge, used to insist that you were not of lower status than the other person, and was a risky move.
The handshake was easier to do when you had two sets of arms, as the Ulderani typically used both hands of one side to complete the gesture, but they seemed to have no problem with the human version using both of our two hands.
The key thing was that the hand in the middle was the person of higher status, and you needed to offer your own hand palm down if you wanted to have it be gripped on both sides, palm up if you planned to grip the other person’s hand between your own two hands to proclaim yourself as inferior. Among two Ulderani of equal status, the person who offered the hand first was expected to take the inferior role, which often led to hilariously tense situations where both sides refused to offer their hand first.
“I have come to see what manner of trespassers would choose to live in the deadlands, and I am surprised at what I have found. Why do you have a treasure trove of metal built into an enormous tower like that? It seems ludicrously wasteful. Are you the mage of this village?” The Ulderani woman asked Elaine.
“Perhaps my Ulderani is too poor,” Elaine said nervously, “I am not certain what you mean by "mage".” I had recognized the word, but it was not a common one. In Ulderani fictional entertainment programs, it was used to describe those who used magic, but why would Elaine have ever heard that word in her dealings with adult Ulderani from our universe?
The Ulderani woman frowned slightly, withdrawing her hand. “Mage. User of magic?” She explained, using one hand to form what appeared to be a miniature fireball. This drew gasps of surprise and a little fear from most of the humans gathered behind Elaine, but Margaret actually let out an involuntary squeal of glee at the sight. The fire was about the size of a tennis ball and swirled rapidly despite having no visible fuel source. I stared at it, enthralled, trying to sense the magic it contained.
Elaine hesitated, giving me a quick glance that the Ulderani woman picked up on, as she too glanced in my direction. “I am not a mage,” Elaine admitted.
“No? Then why are you speaking to me as if you were this place’s leader? But I definitely sense magic here, perhaps, you have a young mage, a male who is not trusted to lead your colony? I have heard of commoners acting as regents, though I’ve always thought the custom rather unsavory.” The Ulderani stepped towards me, turning away as if Elaine no longer mattered at all, and I tried not to flinch. Instead, I simply stretched out my own hand, palm up, so as to greet the Ulderani woman as a superior. Males almost always took the inferior role when greeting a female, regardless of any other status factors, I recalled. “There is something very strange about this large specimen though. I am not certain he’s properly alive. How unsettling.” she muttered to herself, again speaking loudly enough for me to overhear.
The Ulderani woman hit the edge of my tech field and hesitated. “A nullity domain? How unusual, I don’t believe I’ve ever met anyone with this innate domain type before. A bit rude though, to be carelessly pushing your domain out freely like that.” She chided me with a frown. I noticed the fireball she’d been carrying had flicked out and disappeared as soon as she crossed the invisible line that marked the beginning of my tech field. “Are you at least trained enough to withdraw it?” She asked me.
If I hadn’t turned off my pores, I’d be sweating nervously right now, I reflected. Concentrating, I pulled my tech field inwards as close to my body as I could. The Ulderani woman nodded in approval then walked the rest of the way towards me to place her palm down upon my own. I placed my other hand on top, to complete the handshake. I then tried to pull my hands back, but to my shock, the Ulderani woman reached out with two more of her own hands to grip mine, two additional hands sandwiching my own pair of hands. This was not a gesture I was familiar with, and I hesitated. She was preventing me from pulling away.
“This is a golem body you are wearing. I feel your magic is giving it life. How can you possibly animate a golem with a nullity field? That is impossible from everything I know about magic.” She told me with a puzzled look. “It feels more like I’m holding a core beast's hands than a golem, how could that be? Is this a corespire artifact you’ve found? Is that what that tower is? Are you actually creatures from the spires, burst free to the surface?” She asked, muttering to herself in concern, likely unaware I could hear her.
“We are from another dimension,” I hurriedly corrected her, “Not from these spires you speak of.” I had no idea what these spires were, other than perhaps the spokes of the wheelworld’s wheels? But the way she spoke of them did not sound positive.
“An unlikely story.” She said dismissively, but she didn’t seem to completely disbelieve it. Had she heard of extra-dimensional travelers before? “It does not behoove a young mage like you lie like that.”
I felt it then, some area of space with a magic that was different than my own. It pressed into me, pushing back my tech field even further until it was only barely enough to cover the small area in my torso where the ansible was. I collapsed to my knees, my android body just as crippled as Henry’s had been, and would have fallen over had she not been holding me up with her own grip. “How feeble, you hold onto your domain as strongly as a child holds on to candy.” The Ulderani woman scoffed, “I am not even certain you are worthy of me asking your name, much less offering you my own.”
This was a test then? I pushed back, releasing my grip that I’d been using to hold my magic in, and instead started pushing my tech field outwards, trying to push out this alien “domain” as she’d called it, out of my android body. I regained control of my feet and struggled to my feet, but my arms were still paralyzed, the woman clearly had a better grasp of how to use her magic than I did, or perhaps I was at a disadvantage, channeling my power through an ansible rather than in person. “Better, but still unimpressive.” The woman said, “Perhaps I will ask your name if you can reclaim your hands.”
I strained to push back the woman’s magic, slowly recovering control of my arms by forcing her magic back with my tech field.
“Sam, I’m already having to add sugar to your blood, don’t push yourself so hard,” Doppel whispered invisibly into my ear with a concerned note, “The EKG of your brain when you do this sort of thing is really concerning,” She added.
What choice did I have though? This was no different than the meeting between Captain Tanlier and Mayor Townsend, this was politics. I was representing humanity itself, and she was trying to intimidate me into submission to gain political advantage. I kept pushing, harder.
I’d almost managed to push my tech field all the way into my hands when, concerned and likely bewildered by the invisible struggle between myself and the Ulderani woman, Captain Tanlier decided to intervene. “Hey. Stop what you doing. We have more threat than her.” the captain ordered in a gruff voice, using broken Ulderani with a thick accent that even I had a hard time understanding. He walked towards us.
“Her?” the Ulderani gave me a confused look, releasing my hands. “With that warm organ under your clothes? Your species is stranger than I thought, or that commoner’s grasp of my language is truly terrible.”
I blushed slightly, remembering that there was a reason that a lot of spacers wore thermally insulated clothes around Ulderani. The Ulderani also had no nudity taboo, perhaps since they were technically unisex, often only wearing clothes to formal occasions rather than all the time. That distracting thought was enough to make me react slowly as the ulderani turned to the captain and waved a hand at him dismissively.
“Silence commoner, the mages are speaking.” As she waved her hand, a wave of force slammed into the captain, and others standing near him, not hard enough to hurt him, but enough to make him stumble backward several meters. A hard shove.
“Mistress please,” I used the honorific for a high-status female, but it also denoted submission and sometimes, a concept of patronage. Had I picked the wrong word, I wondered as the Ulderani quirked an eyebrow at me in a considering way, but I pushed on. “Our customs are different, he was just concerned for my safety.”
“Concerned, my ass.” The captain muttered in a mix of English and Ulderani, “Now I’m pissed. Jim, demonstrate the laser cannon.” With doubt in his eyes, but unwilling to disobey, Jim reached for his wrist comp. “Observe the power of our weapons.” Captain Taniler said proudly.
This was a terrible idea, I thought to myself as I watched the laser cannon orient and point towards a spot of water near the shore but not close enough to damage the Ulderani’s boat. But I held my tongue as the bright flare of laser light flashed and a wide circle of water immediately boiled into a gust of vapor creating a thick cloud of steam.
“There was no magic in that weapon,” The Ulderani woman observed, disdainfully. “If you had hit me with it, I’d have died, for certain, but it’s just a corespire artifact. And I saw how it needed to be aimed, which makes it useless now. For your insult, I think I shall take it with me, as corespire artifacts are rightfully property of the Magocracy anyways, unless they are claimed by a tower mage.” She paused to give me a considering look, then shook her head. “And I don’t see any tower mage here.” She concluded.
With that, she held out a hand to the laser cannon and pulled. I felt enormous magical energy emanating from the woman, and from my connection to the ship, pain. There was an outcry of alarm as the metal above us squealed in protest as the Ulderani mage yanked on the laser cannon with her magic. It twisted out of alignment, the gearing on the turret’s motors jamming and breaking under the strain. Still, the pull intensified as she meant to tear it free. But that turret was firmly attached with a great deal of steel reinforced with Ulderani superconducting alloys that carried power and prevented overheating.
Ripping it free would be no easy task. The Ulderani mage’s face showed strain as she continued to increase the strength of her pull, but alarmingly, what I felt was the ship shift slightly in its foundation. The mage was pulling hard enough that the ship was in serious risk of tilting over if she didn’t stop, I suddenly realized. The stone bracing wall wasn’t completed and the sheer power of that lateral pull was weakening the clay foundation the ship was moored in. The Ulderani woman likely had no idea she was about to tip the whole ship over, but that wouldn’t prevent a sudden calamity if I did nothing.
“Stop!” I cried, “Please, you…”
The woman gave me a merciless look, “Make me stop. Or I will not be the last mage who will come here seeking to claim your corespire artifacts. Without a tower mage to claim it, this community, or whatever it is, is doomed. Is this your tower, mage?” She asked me.
The Security Chief and his men had had enough, they raised their weapons, gauss pistols from the ship’s armory. “Stop or we will shoot!” He yelled at the Ulderani woman in surprisingly passable Ulderani, his accent was as good as mine.
“More corespire artifacts? How bothersome, but pointless.” The mage said dismissively, yanking the pistols out of the men’s hands with a gesture. Then with a frown, she did something more, created an area of space where gravity itself felt heavier, all the humans on the beach, including my own android body were squashed flat, barely able to move. It felt like somewhere between six to eight G’s I guesstimated, enough to render the others unconscious soon. How was this Ulderani so powerful, I wondered.
I had a sudden flashback, to how it had felt when Margaret had rendered me helpless with her magic inside the VR world. It wasn’t exactly the same, of course, I doubted this woman planned to seduce me, but the sudden spike of anxiety and panic reminded me that for all the fact that my head had forgiven Margaret, my gut, my instincts, had not quite gotten over it.
“I said STOP!” I yelled at her.
Without properly understanding what I was doing, relying only on the blazing fire of my emotions overriding my reason, I slammed the gravity domain away from me in a burst of tech field that pushed it back by several meters. Then with a growl, as I clambered back to my feet, I yanked a few gigawatts of power from the fusion reactors and just threw it at the Ulderani mage.
The massive lightning bolt ripped from my hand, charring it, but it slammed into the Ulderani woman with all the force of a truck, slamming her back across the beach much harder than her own push had thrown back the captain. Thankfully, or not, depending on your perspective, she’d thrown up something that felt a lot like my own magic, a nullity sphere that had deflected away most of the intense bolt of lightning, and looked relatively unharmed as she clambered back to her feet.
The look that she gave me was not angry or furious, instead, it looked pleasantly surprised, even relieved somehow. “Ah, there we are.” She said in a voice she likely didn’t think I’d be able to hear from this far, then louder. “I felt that. You pulled power from that tower, it was strange, not magic I recognized, but definitely enough for me to recognize you as a tower mage.” She informed me.
As soon as I’d slammed her with lightning, she’d stopped pulling on the laser cannon and dropped her gravity spell. Now, she walked calmly towards me as I huffed and panted in exhaustion. Wait, I thought fuzzily, androids don't get tired.
“Sam, you’re going to pass out. I can only give you a tiny bit longer by flooding your blood with sugar. Give me permission to take over your android body, I’ll try to fake being you.” Doppel told me, urgently.
“Yeah,” I said breathlessly, as the world started to spin a bit, “A nap sounds good…”
The Ulderani woman had reached me, offering her hand, palm up in a gesture of submission? Why, I wondered. But I felt too lightheaded to think. I carefully placed my own burnt hand on top of her own so she could complete the handshake by gripping my hand between a pair of her own. “My name is Il'antra, now that I have recognized you as the tower mage of this unusual tower, this negotiation becomes much less complicated. Let us discuss things like reasonable adults and discuss terms by which both our people can peacefully coexist?” She asked me with a smile.
“Of course,” I said, smiling back weakly if a tad insincerely. Then the world went black and I went away.