Mike Wild - Engines of the Apocalypse

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. S he 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 and for the same duration. She was onto something. Now all she had to do was work out how to get that magnet to interact with the others, from there determine how exactly they influenced the magnetic forces on the surface, and from there to determine a way to use them to disable the Engines.

For the first time in her life Kali began to regret dropping the moroddin lessons that Pete Two-Ties had once tried to thrust upon her, because the more she experimented with the controls the more she realised it was like playing some complex musical instrument. Still, she had to try.

Kali began to move her hands in a more relaxed manner, remembering Pete's words before she had aborted his teachings to feel the instrument in her hands, to let it be the guide, and as she did she found that she was gradually moving all of the magnets in the chamber at once, and not only that but managing to slow and speed up the accelerator as well. The whole process gave her an overwhelming feeling of power. If she weren't feeling so much like death, she might even have begun to enjoy herself.

The feel of the control panel much more familiar now, the magnets moving at her whim, Kali began to concentrate instead on the panel, which seemed to have warmed beneath her hands, so much so that she could feel the flesh of her palms beginning to tingle. Then she realised that it wasn't heat that was causing the sensation but the softest of magnetic pressures being emitted by the metal. As she moved her palms across its entire surface once more it was like moving them over a series of small, invisible hills and valleys — a miniature topography made of magnetism.

That was it!

Eager now, Kali placed her palms above the three spots that represented the positions of the Engines and there felt peaks of magnetic push far sharper than elsewhere on the etched map. As she began to gently manipulate them they actually began to soften in their resistance and began to move .

I have you now .

It would take a good deal of concentration and dexterity but, in theory, she should be able to move the Engines anywhere she wanted.