Sunday, February 6, 2011
Floating in shallow water a few miles from the Quebec coast, Taylor looked north. The night was clear this far north, also much colder not that it made any real difference to her, and as a result the stars were blazing overhead to an extraordinary level in the still air. Toward the Arctic she could see a wall of green and red light flickering and waving like a curtain, a sight that had enthralled her for nearly fifteen minutes. She'd never seen the northern lights before, but since her merger with the Varga granted her such remarkable senses, they presented an even more spectacular vision than she'd seen in photos.
"That's absolutely incredible," she murmured, looking up at the light field. Her electrical vision showed even more structure to the sight than normal sight did, producing something she could spend hours staring at.
"It is amazingly beautiful," the Varga commented softly, also fascinated by the sight. "I have never seen an aurora so bright. My original world had them, of course, but they were a poor second to this."
After another five minutes or so, she blinked and shook her head, then peered around. There was more than enough light to make the entire scene visible to her eyesight almost as brightly as noon daylight. In the distance she could see the coastline, while closer to her there were dozens of islands ranging from small piles of rocks to fairly large ones several miles long. She remembered from Geography that the north side of the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, where she was, consisted entirely of the province of Quebec, and had a truly stunning number of lakes and islands.
Before Leviathan it had been sparsely populated although it had a lot of fishing and hunting lodges and the like, and a few small towns, but the climate was so bad so much of the year that relatively few people lived there all year round. After Leviathan, no one did, the inhabited places were all within the range of the coast that was dramatically affected by the sinking of Newfoundland and had all been completely wiped out.
One interesting side effect of that was that the seasonal ice cover of the Gulf had changed enormously due to shifting currents and undersea topography. Twenty years ago, where she was floating would be engulfed in ice, as would almost the entirety of the Gulf. Now, though, while there were a lot of icebergs floating around and a rim of ice extended a mile or so from the shore, most of the water was open and empty. She vaguely thought it was mostly due to a part of the Gulf Stream that had ended up flowing more north and closer to the shore, warming the shallow water by several degrees.
Idly swimming closer to one house-sized block of ice, she prodded it curiously. Several hundred tons of frozen water bobbed like a cork.
The water here was very shallow, only about fifty feet or so, although it dropped off quite a lot not too far away. She'd slowed to a gentle cruise some miles out when the water depth reduced below the level either of them felt was a safe one for the very high speed travel method they'd semi-accidentally invented, resuming normal swimming velocities. That was still a high speed in nautical terms, but not a ludicrous one.
Flowing smoothly from the optimized sea serpent long range swimming form into the aquatic combat one, at the same eighty-some foot height she'd decided on as the right one for 'Kaiju', she put her feet on the bottom and stood erect, the water only coming up to her waist area at most. The sea bed here was silt over rock, only a few feet deep. Reaching out she grabbed the iceberg with both hands and lifted, smiling when she found it easy. The thing wasn't all that heavy but it was bulky for the weight.
Balancing it on one hand she looked at it. Thirty feet or so across and perhaps forty high, it was a very rough cube in shape, making her snicker as she tried to picture how large a glass she'd need for it to be suitable. Shaking her head with amusement she tossed it over her shoulder, the huge lump of ice arcing through the air and splashing down a few hundred yards away, disturbing the otherwise flat calm water.
"Amusing, but not what we're here for," she commented to her companion.
"No, not really," the demon agreed. "What would you like to try first?"
Taylor thought for a moment, then replied, "Let's find a little island that no one will miss and try the blast voice on it. I want to get a feel for how controllable it is before I risk using it around people."
"All right, that's reasonable, Brain," he told her. "I can control it well, in fact, but there is a certain minimum amount of destruction which is inevitable. At maximum power the amount of matter which will be annihilated is considerable, so I wouldn't recommend using it unless you genuinely need to remodel the landscape wholesale." He snickered as she sighed.
"When am I ever going to need to do that?" she asked as she sank back into the water and started slowly swimming up the coast on the surface, keeping an eye open for good targets.
"I have no idea. Perhaps you might need to clear a troublesome mountain out of the way? Or dig very large holes." He seemed very amused.
"Maybe. Let's put that on the back burner for looking at later, shall we?" she laughed. "Hey, what about that one?" She stopped, pointing at a small islet half a mile away that was perhaps a hundred and fifty feet across and about a hundred feet high in the middle, a jagged spire of dark rock sticking out of the water with small ripples of waves breaking on it.
"It should suffice, yes," the Varga agreed. "If you're concerned about bird life perhaps you should hit it a few times to make any of them that are there fly away."
"Too early in the year for them to be breeding but that's a good idea," she commented, altering course and heading for the islet. When she reached it she stood up, finding the water around it was about sixty feet deep, then produced a suitably scaled warhammer with a handle nearly fifty feet long and swung it.
Too hard, as it turned out.
There was a huge rending crash, a shock wave rippled out across the water, and the majority of the rocky islet crumbled to fragments, sliding into the ocean. Some of it where she'd hit vanished into powder with a visible flash of heat, while shrapnel flew far out over the sea, even reaching the coast a couple of miles away.
"Oops," she muttered, embarrassed, as they watched the tire-sized lumps of rock splash down near the shore. The Varga was laughing so hard he couldn't speak. "I forgot to allow for the larger size." She inspected the hammer with awe. "That was incredible. I hit it hard enough to make a flash from the kinetic energy and I wasn't even really trying."
"Find a bigger one and do it again," he suggested when he stopped laughing. "That was very funny."
Looking around she located a slightly larger islet fairly close and waded over, the water getting shallower until it was only up to her knees, about twenty feet deep. Eyeing up the hundred-yard wide block of rock, which still showed signs of scouring from a vast wave in the fairly recent past, she aimed and swung, much harder this time.
The noise that resulted was astounding, a thunderous crack coming from the hammer as it broke the sound barrier, then an enormous boom when it impacted the rock. It was a genuine explosion, the area around her hammer simply vanishing with a bright flash while most of the remainder of the rocky outcrop turned to gravel. A huge cloud of dust enveloped her, making her blink in shock, while a large circular wave spread out from the impact site, racing off across the water. "Holy shit." She stared at the hammer again. "That's horrifying. It's just a hammer, for god's sake!"
"It is an extremely heavy hammer and you have an enormous mechanical advantage, Brain," the Varga reminded her. "You can work out the energy involved yourself, you learned the formula required at school. Assume it's moving at, hmm, roughly three times the speed of sound, I'd think, based on the handle length. Call it a thousand meters per second."
Remembering the equation for kinetic energy and working it out in metric units as physics required, she pondered the problem. "OK. Leet came up with about seventy grams per cubic centimeter for the density of Vargastuff. That sounds insane but I think he's right. The head is… maybe twelve feet long by three square." She examined the thing closely then nodded. "So about four meters by one by one, which gives four million cubic centimeters. Times seventy grams per cc, that's… two hundred and eighty tons. Plus the handle, so call it three hundred."
"Plausible," the Varga commented, listening to her working it out with an air of amusement.
"Kinetic energy is one half mass times the square of the velocity. Which is three hundred thousand kilograms times one million, all divided by two."
The calculation was easy, but the result was preposterous. "One hundred and fifty gigajoules of energy!? Holy shit, that's just silly!" Taylor stared at the thing in her hand with shock. Remembering another figure she'd read once in an encyclopedia, she worked the calculation in her head. "About the equivalent of thirty-five tons of TNT, I think."
"All applied in a small area. I'm not surprised the island crumbled like that. This rock is hard but brittle." The demon sounded pleased. "Think how much energy it would release if I converted the mass back to the correct level at the moment of impact."
She did, then nearly fell over.
"Admittedly I can't convert that amount, as I explained, but I could do a thin layer on the face of the hammer. That would be probably around twenty five million tons or so."
"Which gives an energy release of… nearly six megatons?" Taylor's voice was a squeak, as much as it could be at her current size. "Oh, my god. That's horrifying." The idea that she could, at least in theory, hit things hard enough to release as much energy as a fairly big nuke made her suddenly realize she needed to be extremely cautious how far she took it. "Could you actually do that?"
"I think so, yes," he mused. "It would take careful timing and considerable effort but I believe I could probably work out how to switch the mass on and off when required. There are some interesting possibilities there."
"Assuming I need to throw something into orbit, yes," she replied faintly. He snickered to himself while she tried to recover, which took a while.
"Let's not do that right now," she finally said, vanishing the hammer. "I'd want to be a lot further from civilization than we are now before I make a Hammer of Ultimate Destruction. Could we even survive using it?"
"Yes, although I think we'd probably get thrown quite a long way by the shockwave," the great demon thoughtfully replied. "At this size, at any rate. I would advise against such techniques when human sized, you get much tougher as you get bigger. I doubt it would actually kill you but you wouldn't enjoy the experience very much."
"Good advice," she remarked, shaking her head. "Anyway, this one is ruined now as well. Let's go and find something bigger."
She pushed off again, heading up the coast, leaving the remains of two small innocent islands gently slumping into the icy water behind her.
"Something just happened," Dragon's voice came suddenly, making Colin twitch despite himself because he was so involved in working some very complex calculations in his head, then checking the results with the computer. He looked over at the monitor.
"What is it?" he asked.
"A satellite picked up a thermal bloom consistent with a very large explosion off the south coast of Quebec, approximately in the area where our mystery object ended up." Colin watched the monitor as she put up a map showing the general location of the blast, then on another one, a thermal image that showed an expanding cloud of hot gas and shrapnel.
"Around here, in the general area of the Archipel de Sainte Marie, or perhaps a little further out from the coast. The satellite was almost on the horizon and descending so the angle was very bad, it makes localizing it any better difficult. But that said there is no cloud cover at all right now so the view was surprisingly good. Estimated yield was better than thirty tons TNT equivalent. No radiation signature, exotic particles, anything like that, just a massive blast of heat. It looks like a very big chemical explosion."
"A weapons test?" he asked, rubbing his chin as he examined the data, then played the video again, frame by frame. "It looks like a small point source, but that yield is extremely large for something like a torpedo."
"I would guess that to be the case but I can't say for sure," she admitted with a frown. "The next satellite to pass over close enough to see anything useful with the right instrumentation won't be for several hours. Whoever it is picked the location carefully, as well as the time, there are very few viable satellites due to overfly that area tonight."
"Implying a good knowledge of our surveillance capabilities, which is somewhat worrying," he noted. She nodded.
"That seems to be true. This is getting stranger by the minute."
He sighed minutely. "Oh well, there's not much we can do until you have the probe ready."
"It's got about an hour of work then some functional tests to do, but I'm going as fast as I can. As soon as it's working I'll load it onto a transonic transporter and send it there as fast as possible."
"All right, thank you for the status update."
"I'll be in touch soon, Colin," she smiled.
"Thank you, Dragon," he replied, a very small smile on his own lips, following which she disappeared and he resumed work.
"That looks suitable," the Varga commented, as Taylor fixed her gaze on another small island half a mile off shore, in rather deeper water than average around those parts. It was perhaps twice the size of the one she'd blown up with the hammer, rising almost vertically out of the water. Looking carefully at it she couldn't see any signs of life at all, it was just a black craggy rock.
"OK. What do I do?" she asked, stopping and allowing herself to sink to the bottom, which left her head out of the water but not much else.
"Just tell me, and I'll do the transformation into, as you once put it, a fully functional Varga. Then you can behold the power." The demon sniggered as she sighed.
"Idiot. Get on with it."
"As you wish."
A moment later, she found herself looking down on the island from a vantage point far above the water, abruptly enough that she blinked. A sensation of immense raw energy went through her, far more than she expected, as the Varga crowed triumphantly, "Finally!"
He sounded ecstatic.
"I've missed this, Brain," he added in a lower voice, still sounding very happy.
Taylor looked down, then around, more than a little surprised even though she knew what to expect. This was quite different from her normal transformation.
Raising her normal human hands in front of her normal human face she inspected them curiously, then raised the Varga hands, much lower down. It was an odd sensation. She turned her human head, then the huge reptilian one she was fused to between the eyes on top. Feeling around where her rear end was growing from the scales she looked down with interest, then wiggled her legs as much as she could. She was basically in a sitting down position with her knees drawn up a little, her legs from the ankle up coming out of the Varga's flesh but her feet below the surface.
She was wearing her Saurial costume, suitably modified, so modesty was satisfied, but it was quite peculiar being mostly human but stuck in place like this. Even so, she could still use the rest of the Varga's body as if it was her own, which of course, it actually was. Even moving her limbs independently, waving her hands while crossing the Varga arms across her chest, proved simple, no more difficult than dealing with the six limbed combat form which was really just a modification of this one.
The hardest thing to get used to was the very strange double-vision effect from basically having four eyes, two mounted considerably higher that the other two, which were vast by comparison.
"This is really weird," she complained, making her companion laugh.
Out loud, which was the first time she'd heard him speak with her own ears.
"it is very nice to meet you like this, finally, Brain," he rumbled in a sub-bass voice, using his mouth. She could feel it moving but she wasn't doing it.
"That's even weirder," she added, laughing herself.
The immense reptilian form below her moved without her willing it, making her yelp for a moment until she got used to it, shifting around in the water which was now only up to their ankles at most. She tilted their head and looked down with her human eyes, trying to work out how high she was.
"Good grief, we're huge!" she whispered in shock. "That's at least two hundred and fifty feet to the water, maybe even three hundred or more. How the hell long are we?" She looked over her shoulder, moving their tail around. "Five hundred feet at least. We're nearly as big as that tanker!"
"I am a little surprised myself, actually," the Varga noted. "This is definitely larger than even the Dark Varga, and quite a lot larger than the form my previous Brain enjoyed. The amount of energy I absorbed was more than I realized and we have access to all of it. Interesting."
"I like being able to talk to you out loud, Varga," she smiled. An immense scaled hand came into view, one finger extending while the others folded back, as the Varga reached up. She put her hand on the extreme tip of the fifteen foot long talon and stroked it. "I like having you in my head but I always wanted to meet you in the flesh. So to speak."
"It is nice to do the same," he laughed, the rumbles of his voice making the water below them ripple. "You are an exceptionally good Brain and a very good friend, Taylor Hebert."
She grinned. "That's the first time you've ever said my name, Varga."
"Protocols must be observed but exceptions can be made on occasion," he replied with a laugh in his voice. "Now, shall we experiment?"
"Lets," she giggled. Pointing with her human arm, she indicated the distant target. "You may fire when ready, Mr Varga."
"By your command," he snickered, then opened the enormous jaws widely. She felt them gape to the point that they could have easily swallowed a bus whole. A strange cold heat, a contradiction if ever she'd heard one, build up in their throat for a moment, then the Varga ROARED.
The sound was unbelievable, a deafening shriek like steam escaping from a boiler on a massive scale overlaid with a thrumming noise akin to a huge overloaded transformer. A barely visible beam of distortion was emitted in a straight line, right through the center of the small island they had marked down for an early grave.
It instantly vanished.
A huge semicircular gouge was cut into the water as far as she could see, the island at the near end of it disappearing right down to the sea bed and beyond. The Varga immediately stopped producing the Blast Voice effect, the gap in the water remaining for fractions of a second before with a roar of its own the sea flowed back to reclaim the briefly exposed land, the waters slamming together in a hundred yard tall linear spout down the middle of the beam path. Shock waves whooshed out to either side in a line, the one heading towards the coast reaching it under a second later and converting into a small tsunami which climbed the edge of the fifty foot cliff almost to the top.
When the echoes finally died away, there was dead silence for quite a while.
"Oops," the basso voice eventually said from below her, sounding embarrassed.
She stared at the place the island had been, then down at the surface her human body was sprouting from. "Oops?" she yelled, hitting him with a fist. "Oops!?" She punched the Varga's immense head once more, with no effect on either of them, but it made her feel better. "That's my line you ancient overgrown reptile! You're thousands of years old, you should know your own abilities by now. What the fuck was that? I thought we were going for low power to start with."
"I was," he said in a bemused voice. "I somehow neglected to adjust for the excess energy since I last did this. The restrictions that were unlocked by the greater power who merged us had a more profound effect than I expected."
"Oh." Taylor was quiet for a moment. "OK. I guess that excuses it. Can you perhaps compensate better on the next shot? We don't need to go full power like that right now."
The chuckles that shook their body made her wince a little. She had a feeling what he was going to say.
"Full power? That wasn't full power."
"Oh, hell," she sighed. She'd been right. "I have a horrible idea I'm going to regret asking, but on a scale of one to a hundred, where were you?"
An enormous hand came up and rocked from side to side for a moment. "Fifteen, maybe eighteen, or thereabouts?"
"Fuck."
They were both silent for a few seconds. "When they came up with the idea of an S class threat, the PRT didn't have a clue about demons, did they?"
"Most likely not," he replied with a small laugh. "Shall we try again?"
"Yes, but this time try to keep the power down to 'blow up rock' rather than 'vaporize small planet', will you?" she asked somewhat sarcastically. Their body shrugged slightly. "Thanks."
The Varga took charge, walking towards the next small island, while Taylor looked around. "It was such a pretty bay once," she lamented jokingly. "By the time we're done there won't be any islands left."
"They're trip hazards," he noted with a chuckle, stepping on a rock outcropping that stuck twenty feet out of the water, a nearly round low flat islet. There was a crunching sound and the thing crumbled under their weight. "And none too well made."
"I'm sure the Canadians will be grateful for us removing them in that case," she giggled. Pointing, she added, "Do that one over there."
"All right." Turning to the right the Varga aimed and repeated the process. The roar was somewhat quieter this time, the nearly invisible beam of annihilation spearing out and punching a neat round hole a hundred feet across through the center of the rocky island, which was about two hundred feet high and twice that across. Taylor smiled.
"That's more like it."
"Would you like a go?" he asked.
"Definitely." She grinned as he showed her the mental process for emitting the Blast Voice. She took command of their shared body and did as instructed, smiling when another hole appeared. Trying again she swept the beam sideways and erased everything above the waterline from existence in seconds. "That's unbelievable," she remarked. "And hardly any damage past it."
"You wouldn't want to be standing directly behind the target, but it looks like the effect only goes about a quarter of a mile beyond what we're aiming at," he agreed. "We should work on that, it might be needed one day and if we wipe out an entire town when we're aiming at a close target we're unlikely to be thanked for it."
"All too true," she sighed sadly, shaking their reptilian head. "People can be so ungrateful."
An hour later they'd blown holes of various sizes in a dozen small rock islands, managing to tweak the power output to the point only a hundred foot diameter zone was obliterated at minimum levels. Wading knee-deep in the eighty foot deep water they'd ended up in, she headed up the coast in a generally northward direction, looking for more targets.
"Hey, I have a couple of questions about this form," she began after they'd been moving for a few minutes.
"Go on," he replied.
"OK, in full Varga form, am I always going to be sat up here like this? Not that it doesn't give a good view, but it looks weird. People can see what I look like as well."
"We can apply the same sort of change to your human body as normal, Brain, so you can look like almost anything you wish. This is merely the default form, so to speak. In effect, the Varga body is your tail, just expanded out to the full size."
"Oh." She thought, then tried a change. Shortly she was sitting in place as Saurial. Taylor inspected herself with a grin. "Weird. But that's only part of the question."
"It is unusual, as in no previous brain has ever asked, but I think it's possible to absorb your human body fully into the Varga one. Let me think for a moment." He fell silent as she piloted their body steadily north, moving at an easy stride, which was at least fifty miles an hour due to the length of their legs. She needed a picture taken from a distance, but she thought from what she could see of them they looked very much like the movie Godzilla that she'd used as an example for her father, only larger. There were even spinal plates running down their back and tail, which looked pretty cool as far as she was concerned.
The Varga body was much more solidly built than her combat form one, so she suspected their weight was on the high side of the figure that her father had come up with during their experiments. The way the little islands they occasionally stepped on turned to gravel backed this up.
"Ah. I think I have it," the demon finally said, sounding pleased. "This should work." A sensation much like the one she was now very used to went through her human body and a second later she was only looking through one pair of eyes. Stopping mid stride, she blinked a few times, then ran her hands over her head, feeling only scales. "Good, it seems to have worked as I hoped. Interesting, I've never thought of doing that before."
His voice was back to a mental one, she noticed. 'Can you still take control?'
"If you let me, yes," he replied. She relaxed and allowed the Varga to drive for a while, which he immediately did. It was more than a little strange, stranger than sitting on top of a moving body, feeling what she thought of as her arms and legs moving without conscious input. That said it was weirdly relaxing.
'Cool. That brings to mind the second question, actually. Can you do this if we're not full size?'
He was silent for a few seconds before replying. "I'm not entirely certain what you mean, Brain."
'I mean, could you take control of my normal body? Or the Saurial or Raptaur ones?'
After a moment, he shrugged slightly. "I have to admit I don't know. I'm certain I couldn't force control, no, that is something the bargain will not allow. Whether a willing Brain could allow me to run the body, though, I have no idea. We would need to experiment." Falling silent for a second or two, he added, "Why do you ask?"
'I'm sort of feeling bad about you being trapped in here, with me doing everything. I know you're the body and I'm the brain but I thought you might like to do something yourself some time. Talk to Dad, have a nice meal, whatever. Go bowling, even.'
The Varga chuckled. "Demons are not known for their bowling skills. But it is an extremely generous offer. I will think about it. Thank you."
'We're stuck with each other for a very long time," she laughed. 'I think it's important that we each have fun in the process.'
"I'm actually having a lot of fun," he assured her. "You are, as I have said, a very good Brain and you have some fascinating problems and ideas."
'Thanks. Hey, let's try something more powerful. There's quite a big island over there on the right, let's see if we can cut it in half.' He looked towards the island in question, which was nearly a mile across, rising to perhaps two hundred feet in places, with a beach facing them, away from the mainland. It had obviously been inhabited at one point as there were a few outlines of ruined buildings but the tsunami from Newfoundland had wiped it clean down almost to bedrock.
"All right." Turning slightly, he stopped, then aimed. Their mouth opened to emit the raging beam of destruction. She watched with interest as a massive semicircular path a hundred yards or more wide was scoured out of the island, right down the middle, leaving a clear path that showed the mainland beyond. It filled with water in a rush of foam, leaving a channel that you could probably get a boat through with a little care.
'Wow.'
"Still not full power," he chuckled.
'Even more wow. I think we should probably not do anything much more spectacular, though, we're leaving some pretty amazing marks on the scenery as it is.'
"True. But there's no one around here to..." The Varga stopped mid word. He stared. So did she.
'Except that guy,' she commented weakly. 'Oh, shit.'
There was a tall man standing near the top of the blasted out channel gaping at it. He'd popped out of what they could now see was some sort of underground bunker or something like that near the highest point of the island, which the edge of the beam of destruction had neatly sliced in half. Wildly looking around the man seemed, not at all surprisingly, to be both horrified and furious.
'Uh oh,' Taylor muttered. 'I really hope no one was in the bit we vaporized.'
"That would be unfortunate." The Varga sounded guilty and worried. As they watched, a woman joined the man, who was wildly waving his arms and screaming with rage. "They don't look like they're mourning comrades, though, they just look extremely angry," he noted with slight hope in his voice.
'I think we should probably get out of here,' she said slowly, as the man ranted on. They could barely hear him against the light breeze, shouting about all the suits being gone and something about a laptop. 'He looks annoyed. I think he might be a Tinker or something. We must have blown up his lab. I really hope he's not a member of the Guild.'
He was now staring in their direction but she was fairly certain that he couldn't actually see them in the night, except possibly as a faint shadow. The Varga slowly backed away as nonchalantly as he could manage, hiding behind a smaller island to the east. He peeked over it, then asked, "What's that?"
'What?' she asked. He pointed, allowing her to work out what he was looking at.
High above, something with lights on was moving extremely quickly towards them from the west in a descending arc, aimed somewhere off to the south. It seemed to be going roughly in the direction they'd come from.
'Crap. I think that's an aircraft or something. Maybe someone detected our experiments,' she mumbled. 'They were kind of loud. I didn't think about that.'
"I believe your idea of leaving has merit," he remarked quietly, dropping back behind the island. They shrank back into the aquatic Kaiju form and slipped under the water, Taylor heading back to the south rapidly, although not at maximum speed yet. She swung out to the east to avoid the area they'd wrecked just in case someone was poking around there.
'Except for that last bit, it worked out pretty well,' she said with an internal smile. 'All in all it's been a good night so far.'
"I have to agree. And thank you again for allowing me out, while I enjoy working with you like this, it's nice to stretch sometimes," the Varga replied happily.
They swam on, passing to the east of the remains of Newfoundland and into deeper water, accelerating to flank speed in the process, both pleased with the outcome of the trip.