The Flesh is (Not) Weak [025-026]

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[025] [Sky Bridge]

There’d not been much to do in the small town at the base of the massive metal pillar. The place was little more than an oversized waystation, its main utility being to carry people up into the tower and down. Everything else was centered around this labor, from robot repairs to buying and selling carts and parts and pieces.

Damon was not having a grand time. His forehead was throbbing, like he’d just tried opening a hole in a wall with his head.

“Another one?”

“Just how many languages have you learned?”

“I don’t know.” He muttered, rubbing his temples. “The system just keeps installing new ones.”

“Oh! This sounds like that dialect near the Sandy Coasts!” Han laughed, patting Damon’s back. “Worry not, I am certain the Goddess will know how to patch your axon.”

“That’s certainly one thing to look forward to.”

They stood at the “station”, a large flat area with landing-zones marked out as red squares on the floor. There were at least a hundred other people milling about and waiting for their own rides.

“Roses is here.” Sybil pointed at one of the flying robots that was rapidly approaching.

“You shouldn’t worry too much. If we fall, Sybil and I have puffer seeds.” Han patted Idina’s shoulder. The green-skinned woman was several shades paler than an hour ago.

Damon caught the mischievous glint in Sybil’s eye. “Is that normal?”

“If it happens, you’ll know since the puffer seeds are very loud.” Sybil proclaimed.

“There are taverns in Sky Bridge with drinking games.”

Han’s enthusiastic comment gained several squints, but their focus had turned back to ‘Roses’. The robot was little more than a large flat piece of metal with a bunch of rotors attached on top. And hanging underneath was a slightly smaller basket. Damon eyeballed it to being barely able to handle six people comfortably.

“We had to ask for a bigger robot, since Damon has to count for two.” Sybil proclaimed, watching the basket touch on the landing area while the robot remained hovering, its blades whirling and creating a powerful downdraft of wind. “Hop on!” She had to raise her voice to compensate for the noise.

Idina clenched Damon’s arm with clammy fingers. He could only laugh and hold on to one of the ropes tying the basket to the robot. The moment they took off, the sasin gave a small shriek and Han burst into laughter while Sybil looked on in amusement. They rose into the air, where the number of flying robots swelled.

Looking on to their destination, Damon was reminded of a beehive entrance, with the bees flying in and out. Except this time, the bees were the size of buses and cars, and each one was using propellers to hold themselves aloft. Over-sized drones by all accounts. Idly, he wondered what’d happen if someone fell and landed on one such propeller, but a quick check confirmed there was an order to the madness.

Not one robot flew above another, sometimes even swerving and changing direction just so the robot, a couple dozen meters above or below, would not be directly vertically aligned.

And the closer they moved to the void-black tower, the more Damon began to feel a sense of awe at the sheer scale of it. Their destination, a ‘hole’ on its side, had been barely large enough he could’ve covered it with his thumb when looking at it from the ground, but as they got closer, he realized it had been yet another trick of the perspective.

They could’ve built the town within the station itself if they’d wanted, and there would’ve still been room to spare for three more. Instead, it was currently occupied by thousands of people, cottages, some small houses, and mountains of what could only be cargo. LOTS of cargo. Damon spotted at least two robots that were moving things around, and each was the size of a whole house.

There was a creeping feeling within him.

“Just how large are the… cable cars?”

Han and Sybil shared a mirthful look, chuckling. All they had to do was to point off into the distance, into the large gaping hole through which the four monumental cables that punctured into the flat wall at the back. Each one was at least four stories tall. Damon could only stare as he tried to comprehend what had gone into making this, let alone the materials or effort.

And in the direction Han and Sybil had been pointed at was a gigantic box.

A box hanging from the two lower cables. It was not made of glass, it couldn’t, but it certainly looked the part. A gigantic glass box with more of that void-black material as the roof and floor. The entire box was criss-crossed with metal struts, but Damon’s eyes kept trying to find where or how the thing was moving in their direction.

“That is transport box one.” Sybil said. “The ride to Sky-Bridge will take roughly a week.”

“It supposedly moved faster in the older days.” Han nodded along.

“Even if it were half as fast, it would still be better than having to walk there.” The vulpes shuddered with the proclamation.

Damon raised an eyebrow at that. “Story time?”

“I had to walk, once.” Was all the answer she gave.

Glancing at his side, Idina stood stock still, eyes wide, mouth slightly agape. Her hands kept opening and closing as she could only keep staring at the approaching box that could have fit the entirety of her village twenty times over and still have room to spare. It was as if someone had looked upon the biggest container ships back on Earth and, in a fit of madness, decided that it just wasn’t enough, that they needed to make something several times that size. And then hang it from cables the thickness of a building.

It was hard not to feel entirely speechless at the sight of it.

***

The trip in the ‘cable-car’ had been a mostly sleepless one. Even with the ride being smooth and silent, day and night, Damon and Idina just stuck around, taking in everything. The mountains were colored, somehow, yellow, red, and blue, with certain points of greens, purples, and oranges. Snow capped near every peak, hills and valleys stretching all around underneath.

From the altitude they hung, it was hard to spot, but Damon could also make out monsters all over the place. Wandering the forests, sometimes fighting one another, sometimes just chasing and rushing about as if with a destination in mind.

The other people within the cable-car gave Damon a very wide berth, which he did not mind at all, as just sitting there and watching everything around them was taking up just about every bit of his attention. It was like he was fighting to regain his capability to just breathe. And when night fell?

The damn black roof became transparent.

The stars hung over them like the universe was their personal chandelier. The moon, stars, and nebulas hang over their heads in a near psychedelic display of colors and light.

Somehow, by the time they were reaching the end of the trip, Damon had felt like it had been too brief.

“Come on over.” Sybil had insisted on the night before they’d arrived. “You need to see this.”

“Are you sure?”

“Oh, I am sure.” She declared, grabbing his hand and pulling him over, Idina following closely as they moved to the front of the box.

In the relative darkness of the not-glass box, the starlight from above still proved enough to not trip between the boxes or people. The general surprise the others showed around Damon was mostly gone, and he was mostly sure it was because Sybil was announcing their approach.

And when they finally reached the front, Damon had to stop and attempt to make sense of what he was looking at.

The sky and its shining rainbow glitter reached all the way to the dark, jagged horizon the mountains created. And though the snow was clearly visible under the dim illumination from above, reflecting the light in a pale blue sheen, there was something obscuring that. A structure that had lights of its own and seemed to be floating between the mountains.

Damon frowned, leaning forward.

Realization was slow to dawn on him.

Quietly, his eyes just kept broadening further and further.

It was a bridge.

A dark bridge that connected two of the largest mountains, a massive flat plane with thousands of lights shimmering on top. Underneath the plane was an empty void that led directly towards mountains underneath. It was a bridge the size of a city that actually had a city on it.

So far off the ground, there were snow-capped mountains underneath.

It was a city suspended by only God knew what feats of engineering.

“Welcome to Sky-Bridge city.”

Sybil whispered in his ear, clearly enjoying his stunned look of awe.

“How?”

It was a singular question of disbelief, the entire focus of his being. How? How was this possible at all?

“The Gods made it.” She answered, smug. “One of their many miracles, the proof of their incredible power.”

Damon could only slump to the ground and stare mutely.

How could he answer such a claim? That this could only be the product of technology that was worlds ahead, even the world he’d lived in?

It was hard to fathom the sheer scale of it all.

***

Damon had remained seated quietly, even as the suns slowly rose over the horizon while they kept approaching. The large darkened slab of suspended civilization slowly became clearer. Its size was even larger than he’d suspected, the lights that had been scattered around its surface only covering the central parts of the structure. Giant green archways held the entire flat plane aloft, the sparkling metal burrowing into the mountains to what must have been impossible depths.

Steam rose from all over the city, even the parts where there didn’t seem to be any activity. From this far out, the place was clearly partially abandoned. Yet it was just so large that the parts that were being in use should have housed millions of people.

The cable-car’s angle of approach was a poor one, but Damon was sure he could even spot farmland or something that looked very close to it.

And in the center of it all was the tower.

A tower of glass and steel in the form of a spiral, its colors reflecting the mountains all around it, shining under the early morning rays.

“That is the Thalaring temple and the royal palace.”

Damon nearly jumped. Had Sybil been there all this time? He awkwardly nodded and swallowed, glancing back at the city they were slowly approaching.

“Why is it so empty?”

“See the steam? Those are points of conduit, the main source of water and heat for the city. Most of them had not been working for… a long time. Living anywhere too far from the temple was very tough back at the time. But the king managed to get the archways working again. The population has been steadily growing since. When I first showed up, there were just two of them, one being the Thalaring temple itself, but in the years since, more of it was fixed.”

Damon nodded slowly at the sight of it, trying to drink in as much as he could. One question did emerge, however.

“Fix how?”

“They’ve managed to figure out that there are ways to repair some of the God’s work using monster parts. Though I’m not sure exactly how that works.” She chuckled. “It’s thanks to that, users have started having a surge again, what with the kingdom paying good coin for anyone willing to hunt for parts and seeds.”

As she spoke, Damon couldn’t help but frown slightly at the sight of the massive city. A place built way before either of their times, with resources no one could ever be able to dream of, let alone achieve. Yet capable of being repaired through the parts harvested from monsters?

The Nameless God had made the monsters intentionally this way, or so the myth had told.

Damon started to wonder about that.

[026] [Space]

They stepped out of the monumentally oversized cable-car and stepped onto an unloading platform that was teeming with robots and other people. Cargo began to unload and people began arguing. Prices, costs, money. It was a battle of merchants with at least a hundred or so people bargaining even as the cargo was being unloaded by workers or robots or both.

Damon kept his hood and mask on, walking unperturbed out of the giant box with Idina close at his side. Though he did notice Sybil and Han taking part in the haggling, they waved the duo off, pointing at an area relatively away from the hustle and bustle. There were some guards there, but the moment they saw Damon, they very promptly pretended he wasn’t there.

A meager ten minutes later, Han and Sybil caught up.

“Just a friend that owed me money.” The sasin declared. “We should head over to my home and put everything down.”

“You actually own a place?”

“There are houses to spare. The king gifts them to citizens that have become users.” Han shook his head. “It took me about a year to pay for the repairs for mine.”

“The king's gifted broken homes?” Damon laughed. “Why are they broken?”

“It’s what you get from a handful of thousand years of misuse and looting.” Sybil explained. “The city was built during the age of heroes, but was mostly abandoned shortly after.”

“Because the cable-cars broke down.” Han pointed out. “It was impossible to sustain anything more than a hundred people or so when you couldn’t get water or food up here. The Golden King put a lot of resources into fixing the cable-cars shortly after the age of Ruin, sending expeditions to salvage parts from the other pieces. It was thanks to him that trade between the west and east of the continent was reconnected. His successors fixed the Thalaring temple during the age of… um…” He grimaced, scratching his temple, trying to recall the name.

“Yeah, they fixed it, things have been improving since.” Sybil interrupted, grinning from ear to ear as she reached out to grab Damon’s hand and pull him closer. “The city is basically centered around the Goddess’ temple since it doubles as the royal palace. There’s a main road connecting the two cable-car transports at each end of the city, but get far enough from either and you’ll start seeing the empty homes. We should-.”

There was a jolt and a pause. Her eyes went wide from underneath the hood as her head shot skywards. And it was a gesture everyone around them had caught onto. There was a sudden silence, all heads turned upwards. “What is-.”

“Shh.”

Han made a quieting gesture. His posture was relaxed but his expression was somewhat shocked. Damon looked in Idina’s direction and she was confused, keeping her voice to a whisper. “There’s… a hymn. It is… so loud.”

“It’s the Goddess of smithing, Irsi.” Sybil hissed, wide eyed and full of shock.

A sizzling wheezing sound soon made itself heard, and Damon’s eyes turned upwards in the direction everyone had been looking at. The contraption looked like a V22 Osprey, except one that had its proportions all wrong. The wings were closer and the body was too narrow, with the rotor replaced by the jet engine. The first actual set of jet engines Damon had seen where everything that flew had rotors in some shape or form.

Painted in pearly white, gold, and ochre, the machine was circling around the tower at the center of the city. One, two, three, then it started making larger circles, sweeping over the city in a growing outward spiral. Many people around them fell to their knees, bowing their heads when the machine passed over them.

Damon half expected for the show to be over in a handful of seconds once it had gone wherever it was going. Instead, the pearly white machine stopped and swerved as soon as it had passed over them, turning the lazy route into a tight spin, aiming itself in their direction. It was getting lower and closer.

“… it’s coming our way.” Damon spoke with dawning realization and horror.

The approaching robot had halted. And it aimed.

At him.

There was a crackle as the speakers on the machine came to life.

“Welcome to Sky Bridge Two, Administrator Damon.” The synthetic voice, one that crackled and popped as if being spoken through a radio with too much static interference. “Unfortunately, the network array is still under repairs. Please visit the workshop for a detailed breakdown of the situation.”

Nervous looks from his three companions were followed by all three simultaneously stepping away from him. “Hey!” He hissed, even as the flying robot broke its attention from him and turned to leave.

“The Goddess spoke to you!” Sybil hissed, eyeing the robot as it flew off. “Called your name, and used that weird title.”

“Did you understand what she said?” Idina asked, looking at him in exactly the same way she’d been staring at the grand monuments just a couple days prior.

“She… uh… invited me to her workshop.” His gaze wandered, finding everyone else in the area looking his way with no small amount of interest. “I think we should leave.”

Han glanced about and nodded. “Let’s.”

***

Deep in space, well outside any planet’s atmosphere, Emilie’s scouting ship continued its unseen trajectory through the void. Its sole live occupant could have been worried about a potential destination, but instead focused on the pieces of scrap, cabling, and unused parts that floated around.

The room had been lined with the thin resin casings typically used to protect and insulate devices. All to isolate the space within the room itself from the rest of the ship. It was as good as she could go in terms of preparations for her set-up. She couldn’t afford a mistake, not here, so she had rationed her lukewarm water and stale meals while working on the entire thing.

In the corner of the room, the water recycler floated listlessly. She had checked the documentation, which was obviously not enough for what she wanted to do. So she’d had to focus on the parts she already knew, adapt the connectors, seal tubing, set up an improvised pumping system. She’d bought herself time by getting water out of the pipes of the ship, the pipes the machine had been connected to.

After what felt like a week’s worth of effort but had probably been closer to four cycles without sleep, Emilie plugged the recycler to the cables that connected to the Boom-box. She turned it on. And waited, keeping a keen eye on the diagnostic tablet for any and all glitches or signs of anything anomalous. The error messages and software complained about the clearly illegal utilization of company property, and Emilie thanked her stars about the time she’d spent in her younger years bypassing such restrictions on gear stolen for her clan.

With bated breath, she kept waiting.

And waiting.

The lights were green, nothing was twitching or changing or happening.

Slowly, she turned on the vacuum pump and poured some water, watching the floating blob of liquid being sucked up into the tube and into the recycler. The machine acknowledged the income, and…

Done.

It worked, the new clean water being dumped into a separate container.

Emilie waited another minute, holding her breath.

Turning off the boom-box generator, she stood, hands trembling. She’d done it. It worked.

It worked.

With a scream and a flailing of limbs, floating in zero gravity, Emilie shouted and trembled. The pressure of days of work crumbled down on her chitin as she kept screaming and flailing until she ran out of breath. Her whole body was shaking, all the way through and into a final heaving stop.

“Ok, water works, I have water, I can… now last until the food runs out.”

Her food supplies consisted of what had been available in the fridge, which would run out within a dozen or so cycles, and what was in storage. Storage being in the rear of the ship, it had been one of the areas that had received the most damage during the explosion. The ship had gone offline while in the process of fixing that. There was little doubt the area would have lost its atmosphere, though the question was whether it had lost its cargo as well.

Emilie had delayed going there. Opening doors to that area could mean losing some or a lot of her air. And sure, her EVA suit could recycle her breath for months, but how would she drink or eat if the room didn’t have air?

Maneuvering carefully, she left the ‘clean room’ that had once been her personal quarters, and closed the doors in a slow, achingly exerting effort. Then she prepared. If the storage area was in a vacuum, then opening the door would cause strong air currents until the pressures were equalized. But if there was a leak or a hole, then that equilibrium would only be achieved until all air ran out.

To avoid decompressing the whole ship, she’d have to make do with an improvised ante-chamber, to minimize air loss. One that could withstand the pressure differential.

She got to work.

***

Five cycles, an unreasonable amount of scrapped panels, and Emilie’s favorite new toy the resin gun and she’d made herself a cozy closet dividing the corridor with the doors leading to the cargo area.

And thus, once safely strapped to the wall, she started the process of opening the doors. Within seconds, she heard a hissing sound, and her suit warned her of external depressurization. Emilie opened the breach a bit more, allowing for the air to escape a bit faster. She waited until her suit confirmed near total vacuum. Then moved to sprinkle some metal dust around the improvised wall she’d built.

The dust remained suspended. Which was good, it meant there were no air currents.

Her wall worked.

“That’s good.” She mumbled to herself, working to finish opening the door. Once at the other side, she closed it and checked her surroundings to see the damage. “Oh.”

The cargo bay had been breached, pierced open, a gaping hole in the side. There were signs of abrasive damage, with some of the metal melted and deformed. But what drew Emilie’s attention was the smooth, flat hole in one of the walls. It matched exactly the sort of damage the nanomachines made when eating up the ship.

“So that’s how they got on board.”

It had hit one of the diagnostic sub-systems. She’d take the time to figure out what that meant at a later time. For now, she tethered herself against the wall with the largest length of rope she’d been able to find. With barely more than a little impulse, she jumped out of the ship to look at the external damage.

“Oh, my dear Sussie…”

Emilie grimaced at the state of her ship.

The engines were just about ready to get thrown to the scrap heap, the damage to the thrust modules would’ve likely turned the whole thing into a bomb if the engine ever turned on… though she doubted it would be able to, as the engine was tied directly to the main generator. The nanomachines no doubt would have made quick work of the thing.

She activated her EVA suit’s magnetic boots and untied the tether.

The rest of the ship looked mostly untouched, even if there was heavy scorch damage on the front. With the assessment complete, she sighed and looked outwards. The darkness of space was all that met her. The twin stars that occupied the center of the system twinkled in the distance.

By the looks of things, she’d been dumped quite far off in the system, probably not too far from the edge of the heliosphere. There wasn’t really anything that could catch her attention other than the stars and nebulas.

Besides, if she could actually spot a planet or large object with her suit’s meager sensors, then it would definitely mean it was too close for comfort. Still, she took as many pictures and recordings of the ship and its surroundings as she could. Emilie did not want to come back out here unless strictly necessary, so being able to review the information from the safety of the interior would be preferred.

Returning to the storage area, she began to check what part of the cargo hadn’t flown off into the vacuum of space. Just about everything she’d been carrying had been strapped down and secured, but a good chunk of it was missing.

Using the tablet to check on the box codes, she began to sift through it all.

“Some spare parts, some spare gravitonic floor modules, cryo-chamber?” What was that doing on her ship? She shook it off, continuing through the boxes. “Food!” Another small cheer, this bought precious time. She made sure to mark the metal container as a priority to bring inside.

Actually, she’d want to pull everything inside.

She’d find a way out of this mess, for sure.

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