User:Jetfire/Kernel Hacking
 | [[:Category:IDIC|IDIC]] story universe |
[[Setting::IDIC| ]]
{{#if:Nuvola apps bookcase.png|}} | Works by Jetfire on Shifti |
 | This story is a work in progress. |
{{#ifeq:User|Help||}}
This story was inspired by a few books I've been reading recently. Not sure where I'll go with it, or how complete it will ever be. Aspects were borrowed from Stirling's Ember series, and Duane's Wizardry series. (Along with characters from Metamor Keep and others
{{#ifeq: User |User| Kernel Hacking | Kernel Hacking}}[[Title::{{#ifeq: User |User| Kernel Hacking | Kernel Hacking}}| ]]
{{#ifeq: | |
{{#ifeq: {{#ifeq: User |User| Jetfire | Jetfire}} | |
{{#ifeq: {{#ifeq: User |User| Jetfire | Jetfire}} | ||
Author: [[User:{{#ifeq: User |User| Jetfire | Jetfire}}|{{#ifeq: User |User| Jetfire | Jetfire}}]] [[Author::{{#ifeq: User |User| Jetfire | Jetfire}}| ]]
}} |
{{#ifeq: {{#ifeq: User |User| Jetfire | Jetfire}} | |
Author: {{#ifeq: User |User| Jetfire | Jetfire}} |
Author: [[User:{{#ifeq: User |User| Jetfire | Jetfire}}|{{#ifeq: User |User| Jetfire | Jetfire}}]] [[Author::{{#ifeq: User |User| Jetfire | Jetfire}}| ]]
}}
}} |
{{#ifeq: {{#ifeq: User |User| Jetfire | Jetfire}} | |
{{#ifeq: {{#ifeq: User |User| Jetfire | Jetfire}} | | Authors: ' |
Authors: [[User:{{#ifeq: User |User| Jetfire | Jetfire}}|{{#ifeq: User |User| Jetfire | Jetfire}}]]
}} |
{{#ifeq: {{#ifeq: User |User| Jetfire | Jetfire}} | |
Authors: {{#ifeq: User |User| Jetfire | Jetfire}} |
Author: [[User:{{#ifeq: User |User| Jetfire | Jetfire}}|{{#ifeq: User |User| Jetfire | Jetfire}}]]
}}
}}
}} {{#if:| — see [[:Category:{{{category}}}|other works by this author]]}}
IDIC: Kernel Processing
[[Character List:
- Joseph "Snapshot" Amadio: From a Heroes world. Powers of Teleportation (self only short range), Phasing (all but fools gold), Linguistics
- Richard McMaster. Wizard from a Magi-tech world. Kernel and Inanimates specialist wizardries. Keeps manual as a Smartphone. From Ontario
- Surah: Feline wizard, just past kittenhood. Also kernel and gate expert. Lives with Richard.
- Saroth: Draconic weather wizard, telepathic speech only. Can shift from humanoid dragon to large scale dragon
- Sean: Eagle-morph Magic amplifier. Can 'see' magics of his natural world, and strengthen/weaken them at will
- Holly: Horse morph fighter (female), no magic but skilled with the blade.
]]
The red planet spun slowly about its orbit, carrying with it its pair of rocky moons, uncountably more smaller rocks, and a half dozen metallic objects that did not come from it. Above the north pole of the planet, the blackness of space began to pucker, to pull inwards, then finally tore, unleashing a maelstrom of energy. Through the storm, a bubble floated out, lit by the energies reflecting off of its skin tight shielding. Once clear, the tear closed back up, but the ship continued to flicker, dissipating the energies of its transition.
"We're through. Initial readings confirm we're in the right universe," Joseph announced through the cabin of the ship.
"We're here, but the readings are off," Richard corrected him. A window opened up on the screen at the front of the ship. "This is Mars, or what I know of as Mars. Much like my world too, complete with probes from Earth. But the probes are barely active. They're only sending out 'standby' signals." He said, as the screen circled and lit up points where it detected signals.
Joseph nodded. "I see it. We've got other signals too, from Venus, Jupiter, and the rest of the outer planets. And a mess of signals around Earth and the Moon. But none from Earth itself."
On the storage compartment between them, a furry orange lump expanded and leisurely stretched. The cat turned around slowly, then sat down on her haunches and pawed at the air. Richard cast a glance down to her while Joseph continued examining the readings. The cat flicked her paws as if shaking water off of them and laid back down, hissing and meowing softly.
"Surah says there's a problem with the frame in this system. That Earth had been expanding it's frame of control out over the rest of the system, but a short while ago, the frame suddenly contracted. Everything out of Earth's atmosphere is currently unFramed."
"Good senses, my dear," Joseph replied, nodding to the cat who was apparently dozing again. "The sensors are confirming the rest of it. A low mystic, moderate tech Field had reached out to just beyond Pluto's orbit, but abruptly collapsed. The probes out here match the tech levels we expected, chemical rocketry, nanoscale electronics, primitive atomic control, primitive automation. Earth itself is a black hole as far as the sensors can tell. We need to go in closer, we can't tell enough from out here.
"I'm going to move us over to the Moon, and see what that tells us. Unless someone can think of a reason to stay out here?" Joseph looked at Richard, then behind, to the rest of the ship where the three Keepers relaxed. "This frame, even before whatever happened to it, is a lot more primitive than the Tangle's Frame. But it's closer to Richard and my worlds than to yours. Still, if you guys sense something especially strange or just have any questions, speak up."
The golden eagle morph shook his head after checking with his companions. "We're fine. Overwhelmed but fine. And no, I don't think any of us have seen anything to draw attention to."
Joseph swung back around and started tapping on the controls. Richard took out an earpiece and clipped it over his ear, listening carefully. "They're sad you know? And scared."
"Who are?"
"The machines down there, on Mars, and around Venus and Jupiter and Saturn.... They were sent out with a purpose, to learn all they could, and they have been, learning more than their creators thought they ever could. But for years now, they've had to sit on all they learned, no signals from home, no one to tell all they learned. No one to tell them where to look next."
Joseph shook his head. "You could pick up all that from their radio signals? Never mind, we're off."
Pods on the sides of the ship glowed brighter, pulling at the fabric of space around it, and releasing it before it tore. The red planet disappeared behind it, and the blue light ahead quickly grew into a disk, and then a sphere. A quarter of an hour later, the glow faded, and the ship orbited the Moon near the blue planet.
"A lot more around here, but the same dismay at the silence from home. At least some of them have been able to talk among themselves but they still want home to call in. Looks like this Universe's Earth had a larger scale space program than my world," Richard said, listening again, and looking at the screens in front of him. "No settlements on Luna, but a lot more probes and landing sites, not all soft landings. Some of the GPS satellites are there, they say the local date is April 14, 2031. But by the looks of it, nothing new has been up here in years."
"It's more clues... which is more than I can get from scans of Earth. Nothing is being emitted from it on the normal bands. No unnatural EM at all. But the ship's sensors can't get a closer view of what's down there.
The orange feline rolled onto her back and began to bat playfully in the air, though the expression on her face was anything but playful. She hissed suddenly and rolled away back onto her feet, quick stepping from foot to foot. [There is a discontinuity, right at the edge of the atmosphere. I can't sense through it, but it definitely feels like a corrupted kernel,] she hissed out in annoyance. Richard quickly translated her speech for the Keepers.
"A discontinuity. That would explain a lot, but it's annoying. It limits our ability to tell what's going on down there."
"But it does tell us what to do. Jetfire's information was right; we do have a bad kernel down there that needs to be fixed. We just need to figure out where it is. And only the entire Earth to search to find it in." Richard sighed and looked at the display of the planet now on the screen. "Let's move in closer, see if Surah and I can get a better sense of where it is. Maybe we can narrow it down to the right continent at least."
"In a moment, I'm looking for something. Given the tech level, there should have been something..." Joseph trailed away as he tapped on the controls, scanning the space around the planet. "I want to see if we can get a glimpse of what the locals saw when this happened."
"What the locals saw? It's been years since anything came up from the surface. And most of the satellites don't have any memory, or have long overwritten it. I could try talking to some, but I doubt it would work. Any space craft would have long lost its supplies... Oh, I see what you're looking for."
The view of the planet tilted, and zoomed in on a large item in space. It looked like a series of cylinders joined together, with occasional spars with black solar panels on them. Some of the panels were cracked, bent or otherwise stuck in non-sun facing positions, but there didn't seem to be any damage to the cylinders.
"The ISS. It's bigger than in my world, but that doesn't mean much. Looks like there was more cooperation in the space race here than in my home. That's a Chinese module there, and an Indian module there," Richard said, pointing to the screen.
"Nothing docked to it though. No Soyuz, shuttles or any other craft that could reach the ground. And no compatible docking rings for us. We'll have to be makeshift."
Richard took out a smart phone and pushed a button to light up the screen. He glanced at the display in a corner of the screen. "Three bars here. Pretty standard for universe's outside the normal wizardry worlds. Surah and I can make a docking tunnel that should last. And suits for anyone who wants to go in."
The feline cast him a dirty look and sighed. [If I must,] she said, twitching her tail. [You could have asked me first.]
"My apologies Surah. If you do not want to help, I can handle it myself."
[No, I will help. Start preparing the spell, and I'll fill in my parts]
Joseph chuckled and focused on the controls. "I'll bring us in closer to the empty docking ports. How close do you want? Ten metres?"
Richard got up and walked back into the main compartment of the shuttle with Surah padding along behind him. He nodded to the three Keepers sitting there. "Ten metres will be fine," he called out, reaching the cleared spot at the rear of the shuttle. He held his phone in one hand and began cycling the pages on the screen, occasionally flicking his fingers on the screen and pulling the icon off of the phone and into the air in front of him. Sean got up from his seat and stood against the wall, wings twitching as he watched Richard pull out the parts of the spell he needed. On the floor, Surah paced slow, steady circles, leaving a glowing trail of her own. She stopped after three circles, sat down and dug her claws into the glowing strands, slowly weaving them together.
The golden eagle shook his head and clicked his beak. "It's so different from what I am used to. I can feel that it is magic, but it's in a language I barely understand."
"If you study it more, you will understand it I'm sure. The Speech, what we use for the wizardry, is the basis of all languages in my sheath of universes, so everyone understands it at some level. Just don't interfere or touch any of it. We are building an opaque bridge between two structures in an area with almost nothing to build it from. It has to be air tight and almost pure energy, but if we don't control it just right, you could space us all."
Sean lifted his hands and took a careful step back. "I won't touch a thing, I promise."
Richard nodded and tapped his phone a couple more times, then pulled out one final icon, with his own face on it. He glanced down at the woven rings near his feet, and the array of icons floating in front of him. "You ready Surah?"
The cat tugged in the air one final time then dropped back down to all fours. [All done. You can hook your parts to it now.]
"Good good." Richard went silent, focusing on combining the icons together and lowering them down to attach them to the woven circles where they melted and formed glowing strings of words too tiny to see clearly. Surah watched him carefully, occasionally reaching out with a claw to adjust the spell as it formed. "Do any of you want to come along?" he asked.
The dragonmorph seemed lost in thought but his telepathic response was quick. {No, I'm fine here. That looks even smaller than this shuttle. I wouldn't want to hit something by mistake.}
Holly, the equine morph was dozing in her seat, the sheathed broadsword on the seat next to her. She snorted and woke long enough to decline.
"I'll come," Sean said after a glance at the small station looming next to the shuttle.
"I expected as much." Richard held up the phone and pressed a button. The eagle's face appeared on the phone before it shrunk down into an icon. Richard pulled it into the air, away from the main spell laying on the floor, and paged through until he found a wardrobe icon. He pulled it out as well, and linked the two together, creating a shining necklace. "When we're ready, put this on, and I'll activate it. Do NOT do any of your own magic within it, I'm not sure how it will react. But it will keep you warm and breathing over there."
"Good to hear, Richard. We're in position now. I'll go over first and check things out. If there aren't any surprises, you can activate your spell and come over as well." Joseph said, coming out of the cockpit and clipping rings around his neck and wrists. On his head, he wore a set of goggles that shielded his eyes. He pushed a button and was surrounded by a field that lifted him a few centimeters above the ground. "Where can't I go?" he asked, his voice echoed by the radio signal.
"Stay close to the wall anywhere past me, and you should be fine."
Joseph looked at the clear space and shook his head. "I'll just walk outside then. Mask camera on." On the screen at the front, a new window opened up, showing the cabin from Joseph's point of view. It steadied automatically as he turned his head. "Wait for my signal. I'll be right back." With that, he took a few steps, walking through Sean's empty chair like it wasn't there, and then through the wall of the ship. The camera view blacked out a moment, then reappeared, showing the white covered hull of the space station and the blackness of space around it.
"Still no damage that I can see," Joseph reported over the radio, his view turning to take in the station. He was clinging to a hand hold of their own shuttle while he studied the station. "Making my jump over Now."
The camera view went staticy for a second, and the docking door of the station was suddenly front and center. A hand reached out and grabbed the handle to steady himself, and then the camera moved in closer to look through the porthole window. "Dark inside, no sign of any bodies. I'm going in."
The camera moved closer and closer to the porthole until it looked like it would bump into it. But it didn't; instead the view went fuzzy for a long moment, and then cleared up, no sign of the port hole. A darkened chamber was visible, panels opened in all directions, some garbage floating in the space. A bright light lit up above the camera and followed Joey's head movements. "Still no bodies... Very cold but not completely cold, seems like the heaters are still somewhat active, but they're probably on their last legs. Atmosphere is very thin, unbreathable, which probably isn't helping the heaters any." The view continued shifting as Joey moved in deeper. "Seems safe enough, if you think your spells are stable. Do your casting Richard, Surah, and come on over."
Richard double checked the spell and carefully lifted it up, stretching it around the shuttle's airlock under Surah's watchful eye. Once it was in place, he began speaking the spell, feeling the world go silent as it took effect, and hearing the underlying purring as Surah added her part to the spell. On the far side of the airlock, the side of the shuttle glowed and extended out touching and sticking to the station's airlock tentatively at first, but quickly feeling out the edges and adhering to it. The glow swelled and hardened, linking the shuttle and the station in a solid tube of glowing light.
The wizards went silent as the spell finished and waited, as if daring it to fail. The tube held strong, the only indicator of it a glowing arch of text around the inside airlock door. The cat walked over to it and studied the writing. [It's solid. It'll hold till we release it.] she announced.
"Good good, The inside of the field will keep the air inside the shuttle. Airlock's already been overridden, so it's just a matter of walking over now." Richard said, pulling an icon off his phone and stretching it out into a sheet which he wrapped around himself. He mumbled quickly to himself and the sheet glowed briefly before fading, leaving him shielded as well.
"You ready to come Sean?"
The eagle looked startled, tilting his head from side to side as he studied the wizardry. He shook his head and nodded. "Incredible. Yes, let's go."
[I'll stay at this end and keep an eye on things, just in case.] Surah said, hoping up onto Holly's furry lap and turning around. The horse looked down, startled, but she scratched the feline who purred wordlessly in pleasure.
The human wizard touched some controls and the airlock hissed open, revealing a glowing field. "Just step through and follow me. Watch your wings and where you touch, there's no gravity over there so we'll be floating which should be fine for you," Richard explained, giving the suit wizardries and the bridge spell one final examination before stepping through. He felt the spell harden a little as it encountered vacuum, but it was still easy to move. He pushed himself down along the glowing corridor he had created, to the hatch at the far end, on the other side of another force field. Behind him the eagle-morph followed, his wings twitching a bit as they left the shuttle's gravity field. Richard cast a quick look back to make sure Sean was doing fine, then focused on the air lock. He put his hand on the controls and listened, feeling the station dozing in a depressed slumber.
"I know you guard against the airless void, but we have put a second guard up. Could you wake up and let us through?" he said in the Speech, willing it as much as saying it. Under his hand, he felt the hatch 'wake up' and listen. "The air will not escape, but we seek entry. Please let us through," he added, willing a bit of power from him to the door to help it out. The hatch hissed and finally let him push through. He and Sean crowded into the compartment inside the station, closed the outer hatch and opened the inner one. They found Joseph waiting for them.
"I found the logs they left. And it looks like the stations computers were mostly put in standby, turned down to the bare essentials to try and keep the orbit stable. I think we'll need your touch to wake them up and see if they have any more to tell us, Richard," he explained, holding up a notebook.
"I'll see what I can do. Anything useful in the logs?"
The pair pushed off to head deeper into the station. Sean watched them uncertainly then pushed with his own talon, feeling his body float nearly effortlessly after them. It wasn't quite like flying, it was easier in someways, harder in others, but his aerial instincts held true enough to help him get used to it. He caught up with the pair in a central module, seeing Richard facing a faintly glowing panel, talking to it.
"So how do you like null gravity?" Joseph asked, floating upside down with respect to Richard, alternating between flipping through the notebook and looking out the window.
"It is strange. I could get used to it, if this station wasn't so cramped."
Joey nodded. "It's a limitation of the chemical rockets they used. It severely limits how much you can easily get off the surface, and what shapes they have to be. Though had this world gone like normal, they probably would have had many more options available to them. Instead, we've got an empty station and a silent world. Anyway, if you want before we drop you back off at the Keep I'll take you to some of the Null-G zones in the Tangle. Lots of fun out there."
"Hey Joey, do the logs have any information about what happened? The computers are sluggish but slowly waking up. Last dates seem to be back in 2007," Richard interrupted them.
"Yeah, that jibes with the logs. Just a sec, I'll try to summarize a bit." Joey pushed himself away from the window to let Sean look out at the planet. He hooked a leg around a bracket and flipped through the book.
"The first entry is June 14th, 2007. It's the Station commander's personal logs, and he's been here a year already. Supposed to cycle back down to Earth at the end of the month. Let's see.... Not much happening the first few days. Reading between the lines, it seems the Challenger left at the end of May, and the Columbia was already in orbit on its way to the station."
Richard hm'ed to himself. "Fast turn around. This world's NASA must have been less risk adverse than mine. Then again if Challenger and Columbia were still flying, they may not have had the hard lessons yet."
Joseph skipped ahead a few pages. "Could be. Looks like the first strange things happened when Columbia was docking. All eyes were on it to watch out for any trouble, when Jagar, he's a mission specialist, saw something happen on Earth. A flash of light that spread across the entire planet in a couple of minutes. It spread from the Earth too, and engulfed the station for a moment. He wasn't sure what happened, but all systems died for a moment just after Columbia docked. It took a few hours for them to come back, the first hour or so especially confusing since things that should have worked did not."
"I'd say they witnessed the Kernel corruption from above. Could come in handy, does it say where it was centered? Whatever happened down there probably affected here until the Field collapsed back down to the atmospheric level."
"He didn't write down exactly what they witnessed, but it seems like they were over Asia during the docking, and the flash seemed to come from the north pole and around the edges. So the centre was probably in North America somewhere.
"They managed to get the systems restarted and stabilized after a few hours, and got the crew in from the Columbia. But they were still having trouble. They couldn't contact Earth. None of the Control centres responded, nor were there any other signals coming from Earth. They could contact some of the other satelites around, but nothing on Earth."
Joey skimmed over the next few pages. "Survivor stuff here, attempts to reach Earth or to see what's going on down there. Hmm, are we on the night side?"
"You mean is it dark down there? Yes it is," Sean called out, looking at the world below the station, still amazed by it.
Joseph flickered and disappeared for a moment, and reappeared just outside the window Sean was viewing through. "Wow, we should have noticed that before. Looks like it's evening over North America down there. And there's not a light on down there."
"Not a light?" Richard patted the monitor a moment and pushed off to the window next to Sean. He found the terminator and saw it sweeping across the North American plains. "I see what you mean. The north east coast of that land mass below us, Sean. On most Earth's it is a heavily populated megalopolis, stretching from the peninsula to the south all the way up to the big river there. Millions upon millions of people living along that stretch of land. And with that many people, it should be lit up bright enough to be seen from up here. But there's nothing... Nothing down there at all." He looked down at his phone and flipped through a few screens before stretching the screen out to show a night view of the planet, similar to the one below them, but with bright points of lights along the coasts and major rivers.
"This is my world, a composite image taken of the dark side. Here's where the east coast is, what you can see down there. They should be as brightly lit as this, if all was right. But they aren't."
"Richard, the logs say they saved some pictures from the satellites. See if you can draw them up." Joseph radioed in, still outside, perched next to the window. "Sean, you've probably got the best eyes out there until we go back to the shuttle. Let us know if you see any lights down there."
"Sure, sure. it's not easy, there's a lot of stuff in the air down there, but I'll keep an eye on the world."
The three continued working in silence for a while longer, each absorbed in their own tasks. Finally, Joseph phased through the side, back into the compartment. "I found it. What happened up here," he announced, holding up the book.
"There were thirteen people stuck up here after the communications black out. They stayed up here for a few weeks, but they knew they couldn't stay up here forever. The station's only designed for six semi-permanent residents at once, and even then they need regular resupply from Earth. With Columbia's crew, they knew they'd have to go back down eventually.
"So they studied the Earth with everything they had available. The logs note a few curiosities. Like the number of large scale fires all around, the lack of air craft in the skies and the lack of movement on the ground. The satellites they could tap into couldn't resolve close enough to detect people, but they could pick up vehicles, and for the most part, they weren't moving. Not under their own power.
"They were somewhat reassured by what they did NOT see though. No mushroom clouds, or any other signs of large scale war. So they were reasonably certain that whatever happened down there, the planet was still alive, one way or another. It was a small consolation prize.
"Finally, they knew the day had come. They had to prepare to abandon the station. The last week of notes is full of details about how they split up the records and experiments between the two Soyuz modules and the shuttle, and a copy of the records to leave up here, as best they could. They had no idea what was waiting for them, but they couldn't stay up here. The Columbia left first and took another day or so to reach the atmosphere. The crews stayed in touch as long as they could, but the radio link died soon after Columbia hit the atmosphere. They don't know what happened to that crew.
"A day or so after the Columbia went silent, it was time to leave themselves. The first Soyuz left July 21st, 2007, and all contact was lost once they hit the atmosphere, never recovered. The last entry is on the 24th. They've finished shutting everything down but the minimum to do basic station keeping. They programmed the computers it to lift the station to a higher orbit as well, to try and make it endure longer, just in case. And then they left."
Joseph closed the log and looked around the station. "Twenty five years, floating here in space...," he shuddered a moment. "You guys have anything?"
"My manual's downloaded the images in the computer. I'll look at them closer when we're back in the shuttle," Richard said, unplugging the device from the panel. "There's been some losses, some of the solid state memory failed and stuff, but I managed to coax most of it out."
The eagle pushed away from the window and shook his head, stretching his wings out and bumping the sides of the room. "The world is dark down there. I saw a few lights that may be fires, but with the distances you say we're at, they can't be campfires or anything like that. They'd be too big."
"Probably just forest fires sparked by lightning. Lets go back to the shuttle and figure out what we've got. You think any of the spy sats are still up and awake enough to look down for us?" Joseph asked, floating along behind the other two as the trio started back towards the airlock.
Richard shook his head. "Most of them would be low orbits. Twenty five years is long enough that they probably came down long ago, and what's left probably doesn't have any power left. I'll have the shuttle scan around, see if anything's awake enough to answer us, but it'll just be the stuff a quarter century out of date and what we can pick up on our own."
Joseph teleported himself back into the shuttle, while the other two floated through the magic bridge. "Well we have some clues at least. We know when the event happened, and some clues as to where. We'll go through the images and data you salvaged, but my gut feel is we're going to North America."
The wizard double checked the air locks were fully closed, then tugged on a strand of power over the airlock door. The barest hint of a shudder went through the shuttle as it detached from the station and the wizardry collapsed down to a hula hoop sized ring of weakly glowing words. "This might come in handy. You want to keep it or shall I?" he asked, looking at the sleeping cat. Surah opened one eye and twitched her tail dismissively, not even answering him. "Fine, I'll keep it." he said, grinning and folding the spell up and pushing it onto his phone where it disappeared. He pulled the space suit wizardry's off of himself and Sean as well and stored them on his phone as well.
Over the following two days, the group studied the data from the station and the planet below them. The results were unnerving. Pictures recovered from the station showed cities in flames, no vehicles running, and general chaos. More current pictures both from the shuttle and from a couple of satellites Richard managed to wake up enough to look down, showed cities slowly being reclaimed by nature, and smaller towns and villages scattered far away from the old cities, most of them walled.
"Any luck finding the Kernel?" Joseph asked, studying three pictures of Detroit. One taken soon after the fall, one from Richard's world which was similar to this one at the time of the fall, and one gotten recently. He shook his head in wonder at the amount of death and destruction implied by the pictures,
"No. I'm fairly confident it's in the Northern Hemisphere, and probably somewhere in North America, but more precise than that...," he shook his head and sighed. "The same interference that's blocking our more advanced sensors is also disrupting any mystical attempts to search too. We're going to have to go down."
It didn't take long to prepare the shuttle for landing. Loose gear was packed away, and Richard double checked the Keepers were strapped in properly, and Surah was in her own locked down cage. He joined Joseph at the front and took his own seat, strapping in. "We're all set."
"Good. We'll loop around the planet a few times, loosing altitude. We'll hit the atmosphere over the Urals roughly and glide westward. The shuttle's big enough that we should be able to get a good week or so of flying time out of it, even with the no-tech frame that seems to be down there."
"It shouldn't take that long. Once we're lower, I should be able to get a fix," Richard replied, taking out his phone and pulling off a few icons, draping them over his lap before putting his phone back. "I'll scan on the way down in any case. No point in wasting an opportunity."
The engines in the little shuttle pulsed with power and the station fell away from them. Joseph kept a close eye on the controls and the readings on the planet below as he sent the shuttle slowly spiraling down. Beside him, Richard expanded an icon into a wave of magic, letting it swell into a holographic view of the world below them, a line marking their progress. They circled the planet three times, losing altitude each time, before the shields began to glow with the heat of reentry. The Korean peninsula raced towards them from the horizon, unnaturally dark to Joseph and Richard's eyes.
"We don't have exact timing, but best guesses say that we are about to pass into the transition zone," Joseph announced as the Mongolian plateau passed beneath them.
Everyone tensed and looked around expectantly, but nothing happened other than the steadily increasing hissing sound of air rushing past the shields. A few minutes later, Richard began to relax, "Maybe-" he started to say, but was drowned out by a blaring alarm.
Both he and Joseph leaned forward and checked the controls, silencing the alarm and trying to figure out what was going on.
{What was that?} the dragon's telepathic voice called from the back.
"Trouble! That's what. We're getting cascading failures across the board. It's the Frame. It's damn near hostile to technology. The shuttle's loosing its own frame faster than I expected. How's your magic?" Joseph called back, tapping controls and trying to keep the shuttle flying even as it began to shake.
"One bar. Enough to do stuff with, but new stuff will be tricky. What do you need?"
"A heat shield. The force field already flickered out once before backups kicked in. If that goes down, we'll burn out before we get to the ground. Then we need something to keep us in the air."
Richard unbuckled his restraints and got up, his phone still glowing steadily. "Surah, a little help please?" he called out, bracing himself against the back of his seat and pulling out glowing strings of characters.
The feline wizard pawed at the catch inside the door of her cage and leaped out, landing briefly on the back of Holly's chair before leaping to the front, barely phased by the increasing turbulence. She began to grab the character strings and weave them together.
[It's a lot of mass and velocity. We're going to need a lot of energy for this.] she commented.
"I know, I know, Joey, couldn't you jump us down to the ground or something?" he shouted, sweating as the cabin warmed up.
"Too much speed, too many people and too damn far. We gotta get this slowed down and landed- DAMN IT!" As he spoke, the screens and controls went dark. The roar of the engines sputtered out, replaced by the roar of wind blowing along the shuttle's skin. The only light left in the shuttle was the glowing holographic sphere, and the glow from the wizardries Surah and Richard were weaving.
"Where'd the windows go?" Holly shouted from the back.
"Gone with the rest of the technology. They weren't real windows, just holographic projections from cameras on the skin." Joseph looked around and disappeared from his seat, reappearing next to a storage panel at the back of the shuttle. He gripped the handle of the airlock and yanked the door open. After a quick search, he pulled out a package of plastic tubes filled with liquids. He snapped and shook them one at a time, adding a green glow to the wizard light.
Up front, Richard and Surah carried out a silent argument while they weaved their emergency spell. Finally, Richard threw up his hands in frustration and caught a strand from the weave they were making. "Sean! Can you still understand me?" he called out.
The eagle looked up, his claws gripping the arm rests of his chair tightly, his wings half extended. He recognized his name, but the rest of the words were a jumble of unrecognizable sounds.
"Damn it! Joe! The Translator's down. Translate for me! Tell him to focus on this strand I have in my hand. When I give the signal, tell him to dump as much power into this as he can. And lets prey to the One that it'll work. Mixing magics is dangerous enough as is."
Joseph flickered and reappeared back in the cockpit, dropping a couple more glowsticks on the blank table that used to be the controls. He thought for the moment, wiping his forehead and translated for Richard.
"I can't just dump power into it. My magic doesn't work that way. I can only amplify what exists," Sean, through Joseph, answered.
"Then do that. This is the main power line for the entire spell. Amp it's power and it should flow to the rest. Now wait for my signal," Richard barely gave Joseph time to start the translation before he and Surah started speaking the spell. As they spoke, the woven words glowed brighter and the noise of the wind quieted down. The spell itself began to expand, stretching through the cabin and then beyond the walls, out of sight, but not out of mind. Richard finished the last word of the spell and slumped down against the back of his seat, looking more drained than the hot cabin would natural cause. "Now," he croaked out.
Outside the wind noise died a bit, but not completely. The spell power sentence Richard held onto glowed and twitched as the spell tried to handle what was needed. Sean focused on it, and expanded his own vision, seeing the lines of power that fed into the spell, not just the words, but the underlying strings tying the spell to Richard and Surah and spreading over the shuttle, reinforcing it. His eyes darted around, taking in the magical streams and sorting them out before he reached out with his own abilities, tapping into the power phrase and expanding it while being careful not to draw any more from the two wizards. Gradually, the turbulence died down, and then the cabin temperature began to lower. The stuffiness of stale air also began to fade out.
Joseph sniffed the air curiously and looked down at the groggy wizard. Richard smiled up at him. "I tied in some life support elements too into the spell. We're gliding, still on the track we were on, but I don't know how long the three of us can keep this up. We've gotta get down."
"Right, down." Joseph looked at the empty table where the controls used to be. "Any tips?"
Richard pulled himself back up and into his seat, glancing back at Surah. The cat was resting, tense but alert and showing no sign of fatigue. He turned back and motioned for Joseph to sit down, while he lifted the map sphere up.
"Looks like we're over the Atlantic, rapidly approaching the Eastern Seaboard," he said, squishing down the Asian and Pacific portions of the map, flattening it out so it showed their arc approaching land. He looked at the spell lines, and looked up at the eagle who was helping to power it. "Don't have time to search for the kernel, but we know it's down here somewhere. Once we're down, we aren't getting up again, so we should pick somewhere near the middle."
"Can you get any population readings? I wouldn't want to drop down in the middle of a village. We want to keep this as low key as possible."
"Not really, we're flying blind literally. I didn't have time to weave in any sort of sensors into the spell shield. When we get close to landing, I'll see if we can get something in. In the mean time, my world's maps seem pretty close." Richard waved his hand over the flattened map, and the ghost of words and lines, showing the road network of his world appeared on the land. Another mumbled command and a tear shaped glow appeared around the point representing the shuttle. "That's the limit of where we can reach with this spell. But it's only a very rough estimate. We have no idea what Sean's magics are doing to the wizardry yet. We might go longer, or it may collapse completely on us without warning."
Joseph leaned over the map now laying on the table. "Pleasant thought." He shifted mental gears and called out to Sean in the Keeper's language. "We're trying to find a safe space to land. Let us know if it becomes too much for you so we can take over and find a closer area to land."
Sean twitched a bit, but his eyes never left the spot where the wizardry's power line was. "I can hold it. Just try to be quick."
{{#if: f |{{#if: To Be Continued (maybe) |
To Be Continued (maybe) 
|
}}|
}}