35

  Near the Mainland, in highly unusual times:

  He had never excelled at following orders. Blame Rogue Flight for that, or maybe just Boomer, Icebox and Ace, the show’s most consistently violent loose cannons. Whatever the reason, Pilot wasn’t disposed to cooperate, now.

  Something had happened. He remembered a sudden sharp blow to the back of his neck, searing red pain and a foreign code-string, followed by a rush of invasive circuitry. A hostile program deployed and tried to take over him next, plunging deep into Pilot’s main processor, knocking out systems like bursting lights on a string. Firewalls rose to protect what was left. Files shut down and locked, leaving his base personality trapped in shallow, random-access memory. Utterly lost, if the system went dark.

  A robot would have been doomed. Pilot was a cyborg, though, possessing 47.5329% organic, elven-stock wetware. Bottom line, not all of his mind could be easily seized or erased.

  With no time at all to think, Pilot stumbled forward across the deck, hearing a deep, syrup-slow voice beginning to form a command.

  “Goooo…” it rumbled.

  So, he went, deliberately misinterpreting that order. Long before the rest of the deadly statement was uttered, Pilot disconnected his meat brain and processing unit, then blasted up off the wooden deck like an elvish missile. Out and away, hurtling skyward past rolling clouds, burning ashes and air like hot glue, leaving that speck of a ship far behind.

  He redlined his speed, ignoring fiery heat and wild turbulence in the name of escaping control. 7.81 ticks later, Pilot reached a place where the atmosphere thinned to near nothing, and manna flowed in great torrents. Any higher would take him out into the void, without the protection of his mech or a space station. Up there, where the horizon showed a broad curve, Pilot bled his momentum away, coming to a long, swooping halt.

  Fortunately, this was a low-tech planet, or someone would have followed up that attack by launching malware or transmitting deadly commands. ‘Take a deep breath’ would have gotten the job done, swiftly freezing his lungs, cracking skin and bursting a landslide of blood-vessels.

  This wasn’t the time that he’d come from, though. Not the Two-Hundred Worlds but their sleeping embryo, Midworld. As dawn swept like a rosy-gold curtain over the mainland and ocean, Pilot hovered overhead, shielding himself from the void with manna rather than technology. His cyborg parts were at war, deploying internal countermeasures to battle invasive circuitry. The intruder burned along Pilot's wires and logic gates, destroying files, rewriting code. Painful, yes, but also confusing, as access to cybernetics was stripped away layer by layer.

  Down below, daytime chased shadow across the face of the globe. The burning-white sun crept into view, dousing a handful of stars. Pilot’s helmet didn’t engage, but an improvised spell worked just as well, keeping him warm and alive while refreshing a bubble of conjured air. He had Val and Miche to thank, for that one.

  Pilot was trapped outside as the battle raged on without him. All he could do was wait, as his hardware and programs nearly brought down the system trying to defend themselves. Down below, the crew of the Flying Cloud struggled to deal with a team of murderous captured assassins. Their problem, now. He’d just been relieved of command, the hard way.

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  “I hate this drekking place,” grunted Pilot, though Vee wasn’t present to hear and respond. There were no servers, no infrastructure or net to support his AI companion. Not with Pilot locked up in a pound of pinkish-grey muck, anyhow. “It’s too barren and quiet.”

  There was no chatter, no background communication or Flight Command to enmesh and position him. Nothing but blank, eerie silence and crackling stellar radio noise. No one to link with, not that he had time to talk. Pilot’s missile launchers came alive briefly, threatening to self-destruct until his countermeasures got them back under control, three ticks from melt-down. Next a drone launched, shot wildly away, and then came rocketing back. Pilot used his left arm (still partly responsive) to smash the hijacked device before it could bury itself in his face.

  CRACK, and then there was nothing left but an expanding cloud of shrapnel that pitted and burned him wherever it struck.

  Next, his impeller system cut violently on, pushing the out-of-control cyborg farther away from the planet below; tumbling, whirling, flailing. He stopped that by diverting power away from his torso and legs, then hooking into Midworld’s frail gravity well for stability.

  Then the invader enslaved Pilot’s right hand. It made a grab for his sidearm, meaning to shoot him stone dead. Pilot bent and twisted, trying to keep his holster out of its reach. Barely noticed a blizzard of glowing ion-sprites heading his way through the exosphere. Too busy just barely not dying. His countermeasures fused Pilot’s right hand into an armor-plated lump, which then whipped around to smash at his jaw like a cannonball. Might have lost a few teeth. Certainly gave up a shower of instantly crystalized blood, but he did manage to get his right arm trapped under the left one, before it could haul back for another strike.

  It was a war of attrition, with nowhere to hide. Just… had to await the outcome of a battle he couldn’t join. Not by himself though, because all at once, something happened. Just as those rippling ion-sprites reached him, they knit themselves together, taking the shape of Firelord.

  The elven warrior god rose up to hover beside Pilot, shining in every color from gamma to radio. Stretching forth a translucent hand, Firelord touched Pilot’s right shoulder, then forehead, ending the chaos within.

  “An attempt has been made to place you under control,” he said. “Hyrenn has done this, with the collusion of My shard-brother, Ashlord. They shall be punished, but not at cost to you, who sheltered and carried Me, then freed Me from the Machine. Return to your own time and place with My blessing, free of compulsion or bondage. Back to your Two-Hundred Worlds, where there are troubles and battle enough.”

  See… once, the planet below had been plunged into darkness, almost entirely stripped of its manna. There had been only a single, small god and his fugitive worshipper, then; hunted by witches, constructs, monsters and ghouls.

  Much had changed since that awful timeline. Valerian… Miche… Pilot… had ascended by reaching Etherion, the hiding place of their cowardly Masters. He was Builder of Cities now, Pilot remembered. A god in his own right, sharing a very close bond with Firelord.

  Had Pilot not been an avatar, the Lord of Battles’ unfiltered glow would have burnt the eyes right out of his half-metal skull. Instead, that rippling god-light strengthened and healed him, bringing back memory.

  “The souls of Lady Alfea and Lord Orrin,” Pilot said hurriedly, as the lone correct timeline of billions snapped into place. “They’ve been imprisoned by Kaazin the drow.”

  Firelord nodded, smiling a little.

  “The selfsame warg-son responsible for this bit of future-drek, I believe,” mused the god, holding up a melted control chip. “And there is nothing I like better than war, except tormenting atheists. Leave him to me.”

  Next, a great light flared, hurling Pilot back to Glimmr, in time to salvage those delicate peace talks… or not.