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Save Point: Aboard The Airship

The crate is roughly the size of a full coffin, or perhaps a sarcophagus, given that it's deeper and thicker and wider, and is lashed down to the deck with six pale blue hempen straps lashed closed with the sort of ratcheting fasteners that mostly haven't been reinvented yet. It reminds him of an Azatlani military cargo crate, ridged indents and clipped corners to facilitate handling, but there's something different about it, perhaps a suggestion of weight, crimped dense layers of heavy metal designed to isolate. Out of the corner of his eye it seems to glimmer.

"That?" says Quella, following his gaze toward the crate. "That's a weapon obviously, provided by our erstwhile backers. They've asked us to set it off once they're safely gone. I am reliably assured that it has an effective radius of about four thousand years. Your culture will never have existed. Like something out of that novel. A literal time bomb set to blow up history."

She seems to be deliberately playing at crisp diction and precise speaking, like some upper crust lady of the aristocracy taking tea, to try and make herself clear to him. It's hard to tell whether she ever fit precisely in any place she's been, or just extemporizes her personality as she goes along.

"It's not my culture. I'm from the last one they did this to. It doesn't end well."

"Of course, I'm not actually going to use it," she forestalls his argument. "It's not like that would in fact fix the problem, would it? We would survive, most of us, with powers and close together, but it wouldn't bring back any of our loved ones you already killed, restore our culture, or change the fact that you're already here. It would just be us, thousands of years later, suddenly having always lived on a mesa in the middle of nowhere with next to nothing."

"So then, what do you plan to do instead?"

"The machinery our backers use to move between the worlds? It's a lot like this weapon, only far less dangerous. And they have underestimated us substantially. They had to give us the technical education to built all of these things -" she waves at the airship, "- yet it never seems to have even occurred to them that we might be just as clever as they are. We worked out how to operate their tools, read parts of their language, did they really think we'd just do what they said? We've done a little tampering of our own, modified the bomb, turned it into something to blast open a gate, not blow up the entire block. I will force them to accept us, even if they think we are savages."

Terrowne knows without even thinking that she is wrong. His dragon senses can smell the aura around the inert crate, like a black rainbow of negative light, oily with the same filthy blade sheen as the daggers from the first time, even when it isn't powered up. Whatever changes they made are wrong, they haven't removed everything they needed to, or maybe the sethura really are that much smarter and have expected tampering, building in some sort of self-repair packet.

Either way, the future is closing in because now he can only see a few minutes forward, like a wall of sandstorm churning red across the Arizona desert, consuming lizards and stones and cacti and eating up the view. Something definitely happens soon. It's the terrible thing, all over again.

And after all the effort he went to, to be here, tied to this chair.

"It won't work," he tells her regretfully, knowing that she won't even listen. What she wants in her mind trumps what already is, otherwise she wouldn't have gotten this far. "They do know more."

They haven't even given you the armlets that protect you from the effect, he thinks.

"We were supposed to take it to the West Coast, deploy it over a major population center," Quella continues obliviously. "Maybe Sacramento, San Francisco, Napa Valley. It wouldn't really matter as long as it was far enough away to avoid the direct exposure. After all, the whole planet would have been the target. But instead we're going way out over New Mexico, where there are as few people as possible, and then we are going home and leaving you to your grubby little world."

Being tied to the chair is no longer constructive. The rip-claws explode out of the knobbles on his outer wrists just a fraction of a second before the rest of him starts to turn.