Engines of the Apocalypse

The pattern in which the magnets orbited it, however, did present one or two moments when protrusions of the rotating stones almost touched the platform. If she could get onto one she should be able to make the jump across. There was no way onto them from this side of the chamber, but on the other side one of the objects that passed near the platform also passed near the edge of the chamber, and that distance, too, looked jumpable. It sounded easy enough — A to B to C — but the only problem was that getting to B would involve having to hitch a ride on the accelerator. The very, very, very fast accelerator.

Kali looked down. There was some kind of access hatch beneath her feet and she bent and flipped it open, staggering back as a wave of velocity seemed to slam through the gap. The accelerator lay directly under the hatch, as she'd hoped, but there was no way she could drop onto it while it was in motion. Kali swallowed, watching it ram first one way and then the other, each transition marked with an almighty clang. Gods, it was fast — the moment in which it paused to change directions fleeting — and her timing would have to be perfect. She waited while it stopped once, twice, and on the third time dropped without hesitation, flattening herself and grabbing hold as tightly as she could before it started again.

Thankfully, the accelerator was layered with tiny ridges and these afforded Kali a better grip than she would otherwise have had. Even so when, a heartbeat later, the accelerator punched back into life, she was almost ripped from its surface like a leaf. Kali skidded backwards, grabbing at the ridges to slow herself, and heard herself screaming, partly in exhilaration, partly in shock. She felt her teeth bared, her cheeks flapping and the flesh of her face rippling against her skull as she was carried around the perimeter of the chamber at unimaginable speed, the room blurring. The ride was over almost in an instant, however, and Kali screamed again as she found herself flipped heels over head, her grip snatched away, skidding helplessly forward on her back. She had only a second to react and she clamped her fingers onto the ridges and, with a grunt, flipped herself over, grabbing them once again.

The accelerator punched itself in the opposite direction once more, and now Kali found herself travelling backwards, her bodysuit almost torn from her body. She suddenly hadn't a clue where in the chamber she was and, for a moment, nearly panicked. Then her eyes fixed on the central control platform, the only constant in an ever changing blur, and she kept her gaze trained on it, marking its position and the magnets around it each time the accelerator stopped. At least she was no longer being thrown, having splayed herself over the accelerator like a human limpet.

Kali had to endure another five of the sudden punches while she waited for the floating magnet to rotate into a position where she would be able to reach it. It was hellishly slow and, by the time it finally did come round, she felt as if she'd been locked in a stable with a rampaging bamfcat. She simply wanted to lie down and die. This was hardly the spot to do so, however. If she relaxed, even for a second, her only memorial would be a Kali Hooper shaped hole in the chamber wall which no living thing would ever see.

Kali rode the accelerator for what was hopefully the last time, slowly and very, very carefully lifting herself into a crouching position. With even her hair whipping at her, she was almost torn free before the accelerator even stopped — and in that position certainly would be when it did stop — but her plan was to make the leap between accelerator and magnet in the split second before it did, using the speed and angle to propel herself to the target. Despite her calculations, this was going to be a leap of faith and the last thing she needed was the sudden, dizzying pounding in her head. Kali didn't even have the strength to curse, and certainly not the strength to hold on any longer, so she simply allowed herself to be thrown into the air.

Impact with the magnet was, of course, potentially as lethal as impacting with the chamber wall, but somewhere within her throbbing world of pain Kali calculated just how much she needed to adjust her trajectory to lift herself above the magnet. It seemed to have worked because she wasn't staring at her own backside splattering the surface of her destination. She quickly scrabbled beneath her for the surface — all she was capable of doing, really — almost broke her fingers as they touched, and then grabbed. She was once again thrown head over heels, slamming hard onto her back, but roared with determination and clung on despite her arms being wrenched so hard she thought for a moment they'd been ripped off. Kali lay stunned for a second as the magnet rotated beneath her, her eyes beginning to bulge slightly, and groaned loudly.

Something tickled her feet. She looked up to see one of the spider machines poised over her legs, ready to sweep down with a blade that would have amputated them. She was so thoroughly pitsed off that she just booted the maintenance machine off the magnet, sending it clattering into the abyss below.

More weary than she had ever felt, Kali picked herself up, waited for the slow rotation of the magnet to bring it into alignment with her destination and leaped.

She landed, at last, on the control platform and found herself among the collapsed remains of the soul- stripped who had been deployed there. She tried not to pay too much attention to them, to wonder who they might have been. She tipped their stiffened forms over the edge of the platform to tumble silently after the insect machine. Then she turned her attention to the control panel itself.

Oh hells.

Kali had lost count of the number of Old Race cryptograms, riddles, puzzles and traps she had been forced to decipher or solve in her time, but this one took the biscuit.

The panel was etched with a fine and impossibly intricate pattern of lines that glowed slightly and seemed to move, an optical illusion that didn't help her dizziness at all. The pattern was made up of circles, ellipses, ovals, plumes, radial spreads and whorls, all in various sizes and all overlapping. There were no other kinds of control mechanisms, buttons, levers or otherwise, and Kali felt her heart sink, wondering why for once, just farking once, the Old Races couldn't have designed something with a simple on/off switch.

Kali gazed at the panel woozily, and for a second thought she was about to make the task of deciphering the panel even more problematic by splattering thwack and kebab all over it. She swallowed the impulse down, however, and tried to ignore the pounding in her head. Each of the curving lines had to represent the line of a magnetic field, surely, so was it possible that somewhere in the pattern were also representations of what they affected? Working on that theory, she gradually began to discern three shapes that seemed static within the shifting of the etching, and guessed that these could be what she was looking for — the Engines themselves. The problem was that while the Faith had pinpointed the real locations of the Engines, their positions here, forming the three points of a triangle, seemed only symbolic, not relative to the sites they physically occupied. She was missing something, clearly — some term of reference that could relate how the magnetic fields interacted with the Engines in the real world — and without it she had no idea how they could be manipulated.

Suddenly, however, a thought struck her. Or rather, an image. She once again saw the map she had discovered in Redigor's tower — the one she had at first thought represented battle manoeuvres and had subsequently dismissed — and realised that it could be, after all, a vital piece of the jigsaw. If it wasn't battle manoeuvres it was illustrating, what if it were magnetic fields?

Kali once again shoved aside the pain in her head to concentrate hard, struggling to summon what she remembered of the map, its lines, and where they were positioned in relation to the coastline of the peninsula. She kept the image in her head and stared down at the control panel, trying to match up the slashes and curves. It seemed next to impossible, but she realised that all she really had to do was find the first. And there it was, a great sweeping line that ran from Scholten and across the Anclas Territories to grasp Miramas in its encompassing curve. Another ran across it, roughly paralleling the Territories themselves and was bisected by a third in the region of Andon. More of Redigor's smaller scrawls then became discernible, but they weren't really necessary. With their main counterparts identified, Kali was able to work out where on the control panel the coastlines of the peninsula lay, and with that knowledge the overall pattern laid out before her began to make a lot more sense. It really was quite ingenious the way every field of magnetic force affected every other across the whole landscape. What the dwarves might have accomplished had they survived could have been staggering. Now all Kali had to work out was how to ruin their achievement of a lifetime. To throw, as it were, a spanner in the works.

The problem was that there were still no visible controls and yet, clearly, the lines on the panel had to have been set somehow.

Experimentally, Kali moved her hand across the surface and nothing happened. She tried once more and still nothing. Then she looked up and realised that by looking at the control panel for changes to its settings she had been looking in the wrong place. Her gaze fixed ahead of her, she moved her hand experimentally once more, this time in a circle, and smiled as one of the magnets across the chamber rotated as it did, at exactly the same speed