River Queen's Rhapsody

“The river ran backwards on the day the Queen vanished.”

That’s what Kashirod told me shortly after they found me a week later.

Sitting on the ground confused, I was like, “What?!”

Based on everyone’s reaction, even with my head still in a fog due to the pain of injury, it was quickly apparent that there were greater expectations that I would be the one filling in the gaps of what had happened, as opposed to the other way around.

“Hold up,” I said. “What do you mean that the Queen vanished? And how the hell does the river run backwards!?”

“That’s what all of the telemetry was telling us,” said Kashirod. “The energy stream flowing from the ignition kilns to the engine flares, ran backwards,” Kashirod paused for a moment, letting his statements sink in.

The ‘river’ was a slang term that we had given to the visible phenomenon that was the energy and matter stream which flowed from our ship’s fuel source to its propulsion systems.

For those that are not all that familiar with such an apparatus, it is a similar, but far more compact version of an incandescent chamber or kindling furnace which is used by the Union to power their airships.

Kashirod continued, “After you throttled full up, it was like the soul cinders that were mounted in the kilns, started siphoning back the energy that had fed the engines.”

I would love to have seen the look on my face at that point.

Simply because it had to have been complex, displaying a simultaneous array of anger, confusion, astonishment, despair and annoyance. But in the end I knew it had settled on an expression of definitive disbelief that was aching to call bullshit on the whole discussion.

“That’s not possible,” I said.

Cumulatively, my team just looked at one another and pretty much shrugged in unison. “That’s what we said,” added Jardo.

Normally, it would have gotten a laugh out of me with the absolute absurdity I was witnessing. First, my team could never unilaterally agree on anything. Second, they were some of the smartest archeo-techs I’d ever met, and if they didn’t know what had happened, or why, it was troubling.

I am firm believer that in the tapestry of space and time, all things are revealed. So, if anyone ever encounters these thoughts and tries to parse what I it is I myself am trying to unravel, I am going to do my best to explain what I know. That way, at least one of us has a hope in hell to figure out what is going on. Fair warning though, it has already been weird, and I expect it to only get weirder.

Let’s start with some introductions and context.

I’m Jaks, short for Jaklynn.

I’m the defacto leader of our little group, as I own the ‘Shanty.’ Which is a smithy, and our business.

It’s a quasi-salvage yard, forge, fabrication shop and testing grounds rolled into one. It also happens to pull double duty as our home as well. While it has become somewhat dated, I think it’s still quite impressive. Admittedly that might be a biased opinion of a Granddaughter seeing how the whole thing was built by my Grandfather, on my Father’s side. And then it was given to me by my Mother after it fell into her hands when my Dad passed away.

Grandad was a visionary and an innovator, while Dad was a businessman, and a damn good one. The two of them running this place together made it one of the best shops in the land. But when Grandad passed away, it lost some of its spark, and when Dad died, it almost collapsed.

I didn’t want to see that happen, but I knew I couldn’t run the thing on my own. So, I gathered and built my team, as unorthodox as they are.

Kashirod is the tall lanky fellow that is half-Human and half-Tarkin. Pointy ears, long lived, brilliantly white hair and dark horns with a spiral twist. He’s our resident spellbinder and leading expert on archeo-tech. He’s also a brilliant troubleshooter.

Then there’s Jardo, he’s the mid sized Khine with the long tail and feline features. He is a master fabricator. If it needs to be forged or welded together there is no one better. With all of that fur though, I’ve never understood how he hasn’t lit himself on fire.

Next is Perisol. She’s an oh-so feathery Tenku who has an avian mind and eye for detail. When you need something visualized there’s no better draftsman in the world, and her knowledge of mechanical engineering is not far behind that.

Lastly there is Munyon. She’s the Sherpal and honestly the most understated of the group. Which is amusing as she has the most spectacular rack, of antlers, you can find on a Sherpal as petite as her. I’ve also been told by other Sherpal that her coat of fur is wasted on a grease baby, that’s someone who crawls through machinery. It’s sometimes hard to understand the intent of certain comments from Sherpal, but I’ve always interpreted that as one of jealousy. Anyway, Munyon is kind of like me, a jack of all trades, but only better. If you need something wired, rigged, routed or assembled, you’d be wise to keep her in the process. It’ll only save you time, money and frustration.

I of course learned that the hard way.

“We should get you inside before others arrive,” said Kashirod. “There are going to be a lot of questions and it’s clear we don’t have much in the way of answers.”

“One can only imagine how many people saw that,” commented Munyon.

“Saw what?” I asked.

“Your spectacular return,” interjected Jardo.

“Minus the Queen,” Munyon added.

I grimaced at her and she just gave me that doe-eyed look that only Sherpal can do.

“How spectacular?” I asked Jardo.

“Well, there was a loud crack that caused a visible shockwave of sound,” he replied. “That was somewhere over midtown.”

“The audible report was real similar to the one that occurred when you disappeared with the Queen,” Kashirod added. “But that pretty much happened right over the field we are in now, and it still brought half the town out here.”

Perisol spoke next, “After all the noise there was a brilliant flash and you just shot out from nothing, sailing through the air like a dart.”

“Sailing through the air?” I asked. “How high up was I? How far did I fall?”

They all thought about it for a second and Perisol said, “It’s was hard to tell, but I’d guess about ten or fifteen stories.”

I was wide eyed at this point I’m sure. “Was my emergency parafoil deployed? Where’s my rig or harness?”

“You didn’t have any of that on, there was no parafoil,” Jardo replied.

“How did I land then?” I asked incredulously.

“Not well,” stated Munyon.

If the grimace had ever bothered to leave my face, it was most assuredly back. Etching what would become permanent creases in my eyebrows.

“Well it wasn’t,” Munyon continued defensively as she looked to the others for support. “Kashirod, how would you describe it?”

Kashirod gave me that impish grin of his before describing my not-so graceful landing. “While we didn’t know it was you yet, you were spotted just before you broke through the tree line at the edge of the field. Then, about midway in you made your first impact with the ground.”

Holding my hands to my head, I looked up at him from where I sat. “My ‘first’ impact with the ground?” I asked.

“Yes,” he replied with a nod and a smile. “You then skipped about four times across the field digging furrows as you went, until finally coming to a stop here.”

I warily stood up and looked back in the direction he had indicated I’d come from. There were four distinct ruts of exposed earth in the field, each one getting bigger the further they got away from me. And then I looked up into the wood line where row upon rows of forested needle trees reached high into the sky. In amongst the highest branches, some ten stories up were broken limbs that had been shattered by some high velocity projectile that apparently had been me,

Everything that my team had been telling me was starting to become too absurd to not be true.

“How the hell am I alive?” I asked.

Once again everyone unilaterally shrugged.

I responded with the only thing that made sense, “I need a drink.”

“Uh, that might have to wait,” interrupted Perisol. She pointed out over the dew grass to the far end of the field. Beyond has a hard paved road. What none of us could see that her avian vision had spotted, was a fairly expensive looking ground car on the approach. “That is definitely Mr. Shwymer’s vehicle heading our way. I’d say they’re about ten minutes out.”

“Oh rapture,” I stated.

“Yeah, he’s been out here almost every day,” Kashirod said. “We’ve done what we could to stave him off so far, but when he sees you, he’s going to want to know where his aircraft is at.”

Had I explained that I was also our resident test pilot? Probably should have mentioned that.

“The Queen isn’t his, it’s ours,” Perisol corrected.

“Yes,” I affirmed. “Even though he has been paying for everything, it is stated explicitly in the contract. The Queen is ours.”

“He’s still going to want to know where it is,” sighed Jardo.

In short order we walked back to the Shanty and went into the offices above the machine shop. There were only a couple of minutes left before Schymer would arrive and I still hadn’t collected my wits enough to decide what we should tell him. And until I figured out what that would be I instructed everyone to greet him, to let him know that I was back, and I would be down shortly to answer what I could. If he pressed on the issue they could let him know that there has been an incident outside our control with the Queen, but I asked them only to play that card as a last resort. I made it clear, the ultimate goal here was to delay him, giving me more time to think and hopefully find some real answers.

The offices above the machine shop had become the default control room from which all engine tests and flights were monitored from.

The Queen was unique, the first of her kind, at least for us anyway.

As I had stated earlier, Kashirod was our leading expert on archeo-tech.

Since my early teenage years he and I had been risking our butts exploring various sections of the wastes. We would wander through ruin after ruin, and there are many out there in the world. Each holding its own deadly secret left behind by a civilization prior to us. Often we would find ourselves violating the perimeters of forbidden zones or delving into undiscovered sanctuaries deep underground. Other times it was high in the mountains far from the reach of any city state, but we were always in search of one thing, archeo-tech. Functional artifacts left behind by an enigmatic race of ancients known as the Synafax.

By all accounts they were the creators of this world. But they had lived and died long before humans had arrived, and even longer before any of the indigenous races that we now lived alongside had crawled out of the primordial seas.

There is a lot of history in our world, some of which is so old it is best described as myth or legend. One of the more popular stories told is how humanity fled its own ruined worlds and came here, bringing the tool of our salvation, magic. And it was through magic that we tamed this world and eventually elevated the other races to the societies they are today.

It is nicer to say that than explain how we each competed with one another for resources and eventually fought wars. When we weren’t killing each another, you can bet exploitation was the usual tool of trade. After thousands and thousands of years, where we learned the same lessons over and over, we eventually got to the more ‘civilized’ version of today.

If you aren’t detecting a sense of sarcasm, I should make it clear that the process of learning the same lessons over and over has actually yet to run its course. All the while we have picked over the bones of a race that achieved things far greater than us, adapting our knowledge to theirs. It is said by many though that we are all primitives, ignorant to the truer purpose of tools as we pound grain on the anvil of Gods.

And yet here we live and they do not.

Then the advice of my father’s father comes to mind. “Do not let hubris be involved in the assembly of great work. It has no temperance and will always fail under pressure.”

It was a little over two years ago when Kashirod and I found the ignition kilns and the engine flares. The inspiration of what they could do was immediate.

While the Union of the Great City States has built an impressive naval air command with its fleet of armored dirigibles, many have dreamed of aircraft that could fly free of balloons. While there were many versions of attack gliders that have compressed stores of propulsion, no one has managed to reduce the size of a kindling furnace to be small enough to fir in a small aircraft that could sustain itself over long periods of flight, that is until now.

The Queen could fly farther and faster than any glider and had more power than an incandescent powered air ship. But apparently during its most recent test flight, something happened.

Before Kashirod went down to run interference on Schwymer I had him spin up the recorded telemetry on the Auspice Scopes. As he closed the door and went downstairs I started reviewing the data. Everything looked normal until it didn’t.

All the power of the river was flowing from the kilns to the flares and then it just stopped and started running backwards. I reached over to one of the recording coils to back the data stream up a bit and as I touched it, I felt like I was hit with lightning.

Everything was drained of color and I was no longer in the machine shop.

I am not even sure I was in me.

My mother is a witch, a really good one. Her specialty is clairvoyance. Companies will pay a lot of money to get a glimpse of their futures and she has done her fair share of predicting what investments would be a good bet at the right time.

As far as I know, I don’t have a lick of talent. I’ve just never had the interest.

Technically anyone can do magic. Just like anyone can become a surgeon. But some are definitely more talented than others and like everything else, it has as much to do with desire and interest as it does with cognitive skill. Magic is no different.

I bring this up, because what I was now experiencing was only something I could describe as an out of body experience. Mom had told me about a few of hers, and while there seemed to be similarities, there’s a whole bunch of weird she left out. Provided that was what was happening.

I tried to look around at where I was, only to discover I had little control. That made me panic a little, which only made my head swim. That is if I still had a head. Which that though generated a little more panic. And so I thought about utilizing some breathing exercises and quickly dismissed it before I went down the rabbit whole of realizing I might no longer be breathing. Instead I just did my best to relax, easing my mind by simply taking in what I could see.

Pretty soon I realized I was in a place I was familiar with. The offices of Demin Schwymer. I had been here when we signed the financing contracts that funded the construction of the Queen.

Suddenly a desk clerk opened a door and let two people into the room. No one seemed to notice me, if I was there at all. The door closed and I could tell that the two who had entered were Schwymer and the daughter of his old business partner, Greyal Sheinreck. His daughter’s name was Cyn. I don’t think it was short for Cyndi.

Like me, she had inherited her father’s business as well, but Schwymer had ended the partnership when Greyal had died. Simply because Cyn had a reputation. Hot headed and stories of what could only be described as a murderous streak to her nature.

Schwymer was irritated, “You shouldn’t be here.”

Cyn effectively ignored him, “I’d heard they had recovered the Queen, we should take it before those idiots lose it again.”

“That is not your decision, you have no say in this partnership yet.”

“Let us stress the ‘yet’ part, shall we,” sneered Cyn. “Let’s be clear, it is going to happen and if you gank this deal up before the ink is dry, I’ll have your head on a pike.”

“Don’t you dare threaten me woman!” Schwymer hissed.

And this is why my team had thought me insane to get our financing from Schymer and Sheinreck. But a little bird, known as my mother, had told me of their upcoming dissolution a few years back. If Cyn had been involved, I would never have thought to do business with them.

It was at this point I noticed a calendar on Schwymer’s desk. It was showing dates two months from now and then I realized the windows were covered in frost. Plus holiday decorations for Harvestmass hung about the room. As I tried to take note of anything written on the calendar, the pain of lightning struck again.

I was back in the offices of the machine shop and I reeled back in my chair as I let go of the recording coil attached to the Auspice Scopes. I let out a breath and then took one in as it was becoming quite apparent that I had indeed stopped breathing.

But before I could regain my composure, the doors to the office got kicked in.

Schwymer came storming in yelling at me, and asking me where the hell his aircraft was.

There is no way I had any look on my face other than startled. And while I wanted my first response to be, that the Queen wasn’t his, and only a subsequent number of manufactured aircraft would be, my first words were, “Why in the world would you ever partner with that psychopath Cyn Sheinreck and when were you going to tell us?”

Needless to say this stymied him and ended the rant.

The conversations that followed were tenuous at best but they were at least short. I didn’t explain how I knew he was dealing with Cyn. I just let him make his own assumptions and made note to warn my mother. Despite an adamant denial of any dealings with Cyn I had clearly caught him wrong footed. But it at least got him out of our hair quickly as he didn’t to answer questions he didn’t have answers for. Funny that, as we were in the same boat.

About an hour after Schwymer left we sat down as a team to discuss things over dinner. But before Jardo could dish out the first bowl of stew, we head a thunderous crack and the roar of engine flares that had the distict whine of an engine kiln.

We all ran outside and looked up into a night sky just as the Queen lit her vector plumes and brought herself into a vertical descent. The landing struts unfolded from within and in mere moments she was on the ground, exhaust fumes dissipating.

I looked at my team and they all looked at me. Unilaterally we all shrugged wondering what was going to happen next.

The only lights in the cockpit came from the instrumentation panels, but it was enough to tell that there was someone inside. They reached up and slid the canopy to the front cockpit open and stood up on the seat.

Jardo grabbed a directional lantern and lit it, aiming the beam of light it projected on whoever was crawling out of the Queen. Caught in the beam of light, they stopped.

Imagine my surprise when I watched ‘myself’ take off my flight mask and helmet and then look down at me. Yeah, I wasn’t expecting that. It however paled to the greater surprise when my ‘other-self’ pulled a plasma lance and point it at me with a finger on the trigger.

I was done with surprise as I knew what was coming next and tried to duck for cover.

Then it all went black.

____________________________________________________________________

“The river ran backwards on the day the Queen vanished.”

That’s what Kashirod told me shortly after they found me a week later.

Sitting on the ground confused, I wasn’t sure what was going on. Everything was in a fog but as felt the fading sting of a plasma burn on my forehead, I had the distinct feeling I was really mad at myself and I needed to figure out why.