This is my ongoing scifi / fantasy / crime fiction serial. New chapter every week.
The Triverse is
Mid-Earth, an alternate 1980s London
Max-Earth, a vision of the 26th century
Palinor, where magic is real
Previously: A rogue AI megaship known as ‘Probably Better’ has transited through the portal to Palinor and has launched an attack using drone robots. A small team of rebels is trying to complete the original spell that opened the portals and caused this big mess in the first place…
Bruglia. Palinor.
3208. Brightsun.
Maxim had been born a weapon, with a clear affinity for wielding that was detected early on in his childhood. Fast-tracked into the university system, he terrified his classmates and teachers with bursts of raw, uncontrolled magic that left classrooms in flames and students in the hospital.
Most children tried each of the wielding disciplines, their particular aptitude often not emerging fully until their teenage years. Classes would be socially split along the usual, stereotyped lines: visualists were the vain and the lying, taking their cue from the Lord of Liars. Micrologists were the meek, the weak, the studious — he’d heard Lola use the word ‘nerd’. Physologists, like Yana, were the high achievers, the sports champions and scientists, and often behaved like they represented the God of Space and Time itself. Then there were the elementalists, with their fire and ice, the manipulation of liquids and gases and pressure. The useful idiots, value only in so much as they were able to power devices and machinery, to heat buildings and freeze food. In times of peace, they were the workers. In war, they were the infantry. There had never been any question over Maxim’s specialism.
Elementalists were often ridiculed for their wasteful use of magic, their abilities being energy-intensive, inefficient and definitely unsubtle. Maxim had a different problem, in that his channelling of energies was so optimised that the intensity of his wielding was on a different level entirely — confounding his teachers and terrifying his peers. A powerful physologist would be seen as gifted; an elementalist without limits was a threat.
Krystyan had been the first to believe. He’d never been afraid. If Maxim was a weapon, it was Krystyan who had pointed him at targets. The Owkehu had seen his potential, had embraced his abilities, and given him a place in the world.
There was no shortage of targets among the ruined campus of Fountain University. Fighting the Knights had been a challenge, as should be expected of the highest trained martial wielders on the continent. The destruction of the university’s portal station with the ship’s arrival had disrupted the Knights’ usual guard patterns, which had been painstakingly mapped ahead of time. So much effort put into avoiding conflict, with Maxim only there as backup in the event of something going wrong.
Something had gone wrong.
His left arm a flaming ball of magma, he plunged it into the faceplate of the nearest robot. The metal was resistant, clearly designed to withstand intense heat, but it didn’t stand a chance. Maxim maintained the pressure, increased the heat and felt the material begin to warp, liquefying beneath his fist. Ripping out the web of wires and circuits as he had done with the others, he kicked the robot away. It didn’t take them down, but they seemed reduced in their fighting ability — enough for one of the others to take them down more permanently. Even the Knights had sensibly turned their attention to the new arrivals, deciding they were a more potent danger.
Another robot came at him from behind, the crunching of ice under its feet clearly revealing its movements. Maxim was surrounded by a pocket of freezing cold, the air frigid and the ground covered in frost even in the baking afternoon sun. He reached out and grabbed at the robot with both hands, dropping the temperature yet further until its joints seized up. Maxim chopped at the robot’s torso and it shattered like glass, revealing a glowing orb in its chest. Smiling grimly, he reached inside and yanked out the orb. As the robot dropped to the floor, abruptly inert, Maxim realised that he was holding something far more powerful, far more volatile than he had expected. A power source, unlike anything he’d seen on Palinor: perhaps a blending of a spell with Max-Earth principles?
It was elemental, that much was certain. And as he held it, the energies flowing down his arm, it began to collapse in on itself. He had only a second to redirect the implosion, sending it out in a spiral from his position, each strand targeting a different robot. There was a chain reaction of sorts, each robot in the line exploding into pieces.
“Go for the chest,” he shouted, to anybody close enough to hear. “It’s their weak spot.”
Pylpo darted past, lithely avoiding the slicing arms of two pursuing robots that had evaded the blast wave. “Easy for you to say! These things have heavy armour!”
Even the Knights seemed unable to penetrate the exterior skin of the machines. Perhaps Slava would have more success, bypassing it altogether and taking them apart from the inside molecule by molecule, now that she knew what to target.
The problem wasn’t tactics. It was numbers. Despite an uneasy truce between them and the Knights, taking down the endless swarms of machines was a losing game. The robots didn’t get tired. Sooner or later they’d break through, or somebody would make a mistake.
Something shifted in the robots’ behaviour, giving Maxim only a matter of seconds to brace himself. Two dozen of them broke away from fighting the Knights and the other Owkehu, dropping from the rooftops and emerging from shattered windows. All of them moving towards him, surrounding him on all sides and pressing inwards.
His magic could penetrate their shells, but it took time and concentration. Taking them down one at a time was difficult but possible, relying on them being distracted by multiple opponents, but an entire cohort wasn’t a fight he could win. Clearly, they’d decided he was the primary threat on the battlefield. The robots were equipped with bladed and serrated limbs, perfectly capable of slicing him to pieces, and so he knelt, making himself as small as physically possible, and dropped the temperature as far as he could take it, while simultaneously pulling in moisture from anywhere he could find it: the air, the ground, even from the bodies of nearby fallen Knights. The water froze instantly, layer upon layer, a growing ball of stalactites extending out from his body, forming a thickening shield. Maxim was cocooned by a two-metre thick casing of ice, and it would take them a while to dig through.
It also put him out of the fight, which was presumably their intention.
“How’s it going, Yana?” Lola wished she could help, somehow share the load and help with the spell. That would have required understanding even half of what Yana was doing, and Lola’s comprehension of physology was as basic as it could be. The vaen’ka had given her the ability to wield, but she was far from being a scholar.
Yana’s expression made her regret even asking the question. “I’m looking for the remnants of Kaenamor’s spell,” she said, sat cross-legged on the floor with the journal on her lap. “Others have written about it, in relation to the portals. Especially around the inactive portal, the broken one. I’m still hoping that I don’t need a full amplification setup like he did.”
“Yeah, a collection of fragile mirrors isn’t really an option for us.” Lola glanced around the corner from their hiding spot, just in time to see a mob of robots clambering onto what looked like a solid block of ice in the middle of the courtyard.
“It helps that I know what I’m looking for, thanks to the book. And I understand the power draw, and how he did it. Theoretically, at least. Micro-wormholes along the path to the fuel stars.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
“It’s a crumpling of space-time,” Yana continued. “It’s how he pulled more energy than should have been possible. Kaenamor might not have even been aware of what he was doing.”
It was only a matter of time until the robots found them. “How long is it going to take?”
The wall behind them exploded into dust. A metal arm reached through the hole, took hold of the journal, and pulled it from Yana’s grasp. She cried out, jumped to her feet and pursued the robot through the gap in the wall, Lola not far behind.
Standing in the centre of what had been a study hall, the machine was flicking through the pages of the journal at an inhuman speed. It looked up at both of them, as Yana clenched her fist and with a telekinetic yank recovered the book. Lola already knew they were too late.
“A most interesting read,” the robot said, then it shuddered and remained fixed in place as if an off switch had been flicked. The sounds of fighting from outside diminished.
Yana looked at Lola, eyes wide. “What just happened?”
A horrible, clenching fear pulled at Lola, making it an effort to even remain standing.
“I think we just lost.”
Apologies for the lack of audio voiceover. I will try to sort that (and last week’s!) over the course of the weekend. Sorry if you’re waiting on it!
Meanwhile.
This week I thoroughly enjoyed this retrospective on the Playstation’s 1995 launch:
I’m a sucker for old magazines. I love the way they’re mini-time capsules not only for what they were about but also for their overall design. And 90s magazines were very 90s. Especially with games, magazines from the 80s and 90s are always fascinating because the journalists are still trying to figure out what this ‘gaming’ thing actually is. The dawn of a new artform is always exciting to witness.
Fast forward a few years and you get into a period of UK games journalism that produced a ridiculous number of extremely talented people, who have gone on to do all sorts of fascinating projects. Charlie Brooker of Black Mirror, Kieron Gillen of, well, all the comics, Tom Francis of Tactical Breach Wizards, Jim Rossignol of various digital and tabletop games. It seems sometimes that the need to figure out what games were inevitably led the writers of that era to then want to put their own stamp on things. Critics who weren’t satisfied to only be critics, but wanted to explore the form more directly.
A couple of months back I wrote about BookFunnel, and how it’s an effective way to find readers (and for readers to find books). You can see that post here:
How to find new readers with a BookFunnel group promo
The trap of Substack is to think that it should do all the hard work for you. When writers complain that they’re growing too slowly, or that Substack’s algorithm is broken, or that nobody sees their Notes or reads their newsletter — my question tends to be “what else are you doing?”
I’m taking part in another BookFunnel giveaway at the moment, so if you’re after some indie sci-fi and fantasy do check it out.
I’ll be reporting back on those BookFunnel results soon. Short version is that it still seems to be an effective way to promote indie fiction.
Oh, one last link. This is a thought-prompting piece to get your brain whirring for the weekend:
Author notes
Maxim has always been a bit of a background character. You may not have even clocked their existence, depending on how much attention you’ve been paying. They’re one of the Owkehu crew, but haven’t had a story focus. This seemed click as good an opportunity as any!
The juxtaposing of the Six Blades fight from a couple of weeks ago, where they had to work together to take down a single robot, with Maxim trashing them all by himself should tell you a lot about his power level. At all stages with this stuff, it’s a fiddly push-and-pull exchange, an ongoing game of rock-paper-scissors. Maxim is hugely powerful, to the point of being able to channel the energies from the robot’s power core, but he still can’t take down an entire swarm by himself.
It’s also an excuse to throw in a bit more detail on Palinese education, and Maxim’s background. At this late stage in the plot, it’s easy to forget about some of that additional flavour. There’s stuff in there about a sort of class hierarchy based around magic disciplines, and of the Palinese equivalent of jocks and nerds. I didn’t want to go too heavily down the Hogwarts houses for this: this is less about a posh, British boarding school experience and more about everyday social clumping.
Some of Yana’s dialogue in here is inspired by the clever people who offered to help me with some of the quirks of Kaenamor’s spell that I established back in the prologue in 2021. If you missed that whole escapade, I wrote about it here:
Verisimilitude, eh? Gotta love it.
We’re into part 5 of this particular storyline. You may have noticed it’s called ‘Gods and Robots’. There’s a little bit of lampshading going on in this chapter, with Maxim’s reminiscing: it’s where we get some mentions of the magic disciplines and their associated gods.
We’ve met them before, if you remember, back in ‘Zealots’ (August 2022):
(eww, AI illustration on that one — at some point I need to go back through the 2022 chapters and replace all of the images from my brief flirtation with Midjourney)
All that is to say that this story is about to go seriously off the rails.
See you next week!
In my previous, before retirement, experience I often used to ask people “what could possibly go wrong”, to reflect on risks. Maybe here it should be “what more could possible go wrong”. With the follow up of “what more yet could….” 😂
I really enjoyed the backstory here! Makes you understand & even appreciate how Maxim acts in the following fight scene.
Maybe it's the mentioning of education but I realised some aspects of Triverse remind me of Sergey Lukianenko's Night Watch book series, which I devoured as a teenager. There's magic, categorized in grades of power, but also bureaucracy & interpersonal relations complicating everything, even though the characters generally try to do what they believe is right (although everyone has their own definition of what that looks like). There's an ensemble cast & changing POV characters between books.