BECMI Chapter 123 – Fallen from the Stars

is such a useful spell. At higher levels, that x100 forward magnification is really quite impressive. You can survey a city from the horizon if you are doing it right, or from orbital space.

Or, you know, a few thousand feet in the air on the back of a giant bat Familiar.

The had definitely seen better days.

I didn’t know if it had equilateral symmetry, but it had definitely landed on a ‘bottom’, plowing a path nearly ten miles long across the plateau as it did so. The prow was pretty much stripped of paint, but largely intact as it drove through the stone with the force of great speed and a lot of mass, the debris of stone and soil hurled away by the incoming starship spread for at least a half-mile on both sides of the ship, with rocks and stones often going much further as they helped dump kinetic energy. The risen walls of the valley on the southwestern side also had a nice -shaped opening punched through them, which we made our way around towards as I examined the area thoroughly.

The ship itself was a good two miles long, three-quarters of a mile wide and started at two hundred feet thick, with what looked like a command deck raised to five hundred feet, and flaring wings to the side that were shredded and torn and definitely not intact. The flying wedge ended in the massive engines that had powered the ship, the thrusters also now broken and damaged.

There was… atmospheric burning searing the paint, but the metal alloy had held up to the descent without much problem, even if the ship’s shields must have been down. There was clear damage to the underside, naturally, as plowing through miles of stone wasn’t something even duralloys were going to endure without something giving, but the only major damage on the top were two different breaches back in the rear third of the ship. They were visible because of the jagged edges of the holes torn through the ship from the inside, and the white-gray stony appearance of the ceramic material that had been used to seal the breaches.

I had seen the diagrams of the ship on Technician Horst’s pad, and indeed had routinely memorized them. That was still not the same as seeing a starship bigger than most cities just lying atop an isolated plateau out in the middle of nowhere.

Here and there nodules sprouted from the top of the ship, most of them meant to bear sensory devices or shield emitters, but point-defense weapons were certainly among them, although the primary ship cannons seemed to be withdrawn and concealed. If the records were correct, they were extremely damaged and off-line, the energy conduits corroded and infested with some strange energy that was crippling their firepower.

That said, there were lights all about the thing, and there were a lot of drones and combat bots around it, orbiting in circles of surveillance and defensive stature, accentuated with security poles with field emitters and scanners set in a rough wall at about a thousand paces from the city itself, meant to detect and dissuade anything approaching on the ground.

Speeding warbots zipped around the ship on preset courses. Quick circular scanner drones in white flitted about with unerring speed, looking for threats and surveying land and sky. Worn tracks on the ground indicated the passage of wheeled tank-like bots bristling with cannon and guns, drab green hues daubed and dusted by the soil and actually making them quite difficult to see if they weren’t in motion.

The major threat were the dbots in black, which looked like seven-foot armored knights zipping along with impressive, dangerous speed, maneuvering jets accentuating some sort of anti-grav. They had flickers of force-field protection, and carried weapons too heavy and large for anything human.

They were incredibly deadly combat droids, and if you didn’t have access to magic, they were going to rip you apart, and that was without fire support from the tanker-bots who would be sniping you from a mile off, easy.

No combat wingcraft around, although I identified the hangar deck as I made my circuit, knowing they’d had at least a dozen fighter craft stacked up there. How many were intact was a different issue, although their systems had also been affected by the energy surge which had disrupted the anti-matter primary power core of the .

Guess the Immortals didn’t want them swooping down on hapless cities and subjugating them effortlessly.

I could see the remains of at least a dozen dragons scattered on the landscape, dead with holes through them from lasers, exploded body parts from particle beams, or simply blasted apart by missile fire. The ship didn’t use rail guns or most solid projectile weapons for cost/weight purposes, with needlers being the sole exception as a sidearm alternative. Relatively cheap energy weapons carried the day in the Galactic Federation they came from.

There were two minor points of excitement as we completed our circuit from a good three miles out. I was aware that we’d been picked up on scanners, and somebody was likely tracking us. I was also aware that was within weapon range, but there were no dragon corpses more than two miles out, so I felt pretty safe with that.

Another Red dragon came raging up to us, an older adult with a chip on its shoulder, fire in its breath, and a lot of goldweight value in the carcass that went falling half-frozen from the sky and was for later processing.

There was also a light show in the quarter ahead of us, as a flight of White dragons came in low and fast. They were chasing a couple of the fast-moving scanner-drones, who were fleeing right towards an instantly-responding flight of three dbots. The knightly droids hovered as they drew out particle beam heavy rifles, while two tanks immobile in the waste turned their turrets casually on the dragons.

White dragons are good fliers for their size, and one caught up close enough to the scanner to hit it with their cold breath. Its rotors and engines froze solid instantly, and it plummeted from the sky sharply, shattering into pieces upon the ground as it hit and tumbled freely.

Then the whole area lit up with some concentrated energy beams.

Cirru hissed as she watched the largest of the White dragons die instantly, easily as quickly as taking one of my full salvos. The bots had extremely good aim, the dragons were big targets, and the largest dragon spiraled down to the ground, its head blown off and holes punched right through its pale wings.

The other dragons instantly scattered, but they didn’t have much chance. Pulsing las-rounds reached out for them with searing light from each of the two tankers, while the dbots’ flash-crackle green-white particle beams blasted the side and flanks of the third dragon.

All three hit the ground within ten seconds of one another, tumbling, rolling, and very still, large portions of their anatomy missing.

That was about fifty, sixty goldweight of dragonparts down there, I reflected absently.

“Take us down low and slow to retrieve those corpses,” I said. Duum and Cirru both looked at me as if I was mad. “And don’t attack the flying metal things, please.”

Just to be on the safe side, and went on the stack. Cirru was likely nigh-invulnerable to the particle beams, but the ship had likely deduced who was immune to what by now, and they’d just try to laser her dead.

Rockets, now, they’d require a solution, but it shouldn’t come to that.

The drone hovered about fifty yards away, watching them intently as they walked from one White dragon corpse to the next.

All the blood seemed to mix without issue within a species, so that worked out pretty well, and it tended to coagulate/freeze pretty quickly when exposed to air, so not too much had been lost before we made it down.

There were a lot of guns focused on us, but I just ignored them as I went from one corpse to the next, and them down one by one into rolls of paper with dragon carcasses inscribed on them, before inserting three-foot rolls of paper up my ornate sleeves casually, followed by a big jar of dragon blood that came up to my chest.

Duum snickered, and even Cirru was amused. It was a lot of Slots to spend on spells, but hey, worth it.

Then I pulled the comlink out of my sleeve, hooked it over my elegantly pointed ear, and said in Federation Galstandard, with a Transyvian accent, “Now then, you’ve been spying on me long enough. Would the little peeping tom care to identify themselves?” I asked calmly into the device.

There was an instant crackle and pop on the other end, like someone’s com had just fallen off their head and bounced on the ground. The scrabbling continued as someone picked it up off the ground and hastily reset it. “Uh, um, hello there, native speaker! We, we weren’t expecting you to attempt to communicate with us…” said a man’s voice on the other end.

“Attempting to communicate. Mmm, yes,” I continued on in Galstandard. “I am the Lady Edge. Yes, your drone may approach. Cirru, no breathing on the flying disc, it’s just a tool.”

“Yes, Mistress,” she replied in excellently impressive Draconic, her horned head with the elegant swirls of white on azure scaled rising high with a sniff. “There is an orange mechanical thing coming this way,” she pointed out to me.

“It’s coming to salvage the drone the whites ruined. Just ignore it,” I said calmly, eyeing the thing that looked like an orange canister sitting on a flat disk, moving along on an anti-grav wave and probably compressed air jets. “Who might I be speaking to at this time?” I asked calmly.

“Security Corporal August Derrimond, Lady Edge, ma’am.”

“A fine day to you, Corporal. Are you directing the security forces here? Excellent shooting, by the way. Draconic corpses are worth a fair amount of goldweight, and you saved me the trouble of exterminating them.”

“Uh, Lady Edge, ma’am, you have one of those dragons sitting right next to you,” the man responded slowly.

“And I am eager to see how feral Whites taste!” Cirruluxual responded primly, still in Draconic, her ears quite sharp and translating for her.

“Did, did that winged lizard just respond to me?” the voice in my ear exclaimed to me in shock.

“You don’t speak Draconic? Well, yes, dragons are sapient creatures, Corporal Derrimond. However, they are also dragons.” I waved my hand in the air dismissively, aware I was being watched closely as the scanner drone zipped in much closer, and the utility bot was humming on by us, as if daring us to react. Duum and Cirru watched it go by warily, while I just ignored it. “Would Captain Emeril be available for a few minutes? I’ve been sent to hopefully open up an honest discord with him by the ruler of a local kingdom to the north of here.”

“You know the Captain’s name?” the security man asked suspiciously.

“Corporal, I’ve spoken at length with a dozen members of your crew who’ve fled the ship. And no, I’m not in any way associated with your mutinous superior. Do I look like the type of woman who would associate with a man who thought it a good idea to take over a cult of swamp-dwelling worshipers of a demonic frog?” I sniffed coldly. “The cretin’s head is sitting on a brazier in my laboratory.”

There was a significant pause. “You… killed Chief Ferru?” the man swallowed.