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Save Point: Continuity Redoubt

Somewhere under Azatlan City

There is a flare of white light as the widening spread of missiles hurtles abruptly into the ground and explodes. The screen rapidly burns into maximum luminance and just as suddenly drops to black.

In the moment when everyone blinks, a deep sound like a rumble ripples past, and then a tiny displacement of motion, like a shockwave. The monitor trembles on its stand and gradually stills back to its original position, as they make the mental adjustment that this is not just something happening elsewhere, but somewhere up above their heads, right now.

They are spared the stereotype of flickering lights. Power here is fully self-contained.

"I got it," exclaims Sethkill. "The course data, the trajectory, all those numbers that were being displayed by the tracking system when it fell."

"How? You weren't connected, you barely even had time to glance at it."

"See these little gold flecks in my eyes? Proteomics. Yeah, I know it's a little pretentious and old-fashioned, like still wearing glasses to try and look intellectual, but the point is they have a small visual memory buffer. Enough to record all of this, and this is evidence."

"You sly dog," Cleo nudges him, to keep from tears or panic or anything else because out there, the greatest single city in the world has just been leveled. "Getting in good with Keselt by being all intellectual and old-school, right?"

"It made a series of course corrections before it split up, so each warhead wouldn't need to track individually. They were meant to make it look like it came from the Rama Empire, but it didn't. And the yields were designed to match the profile of a Ramanae weapon perfectly, but it wasn't detectable to any remote sensing system possible using current Azatlani technology. The only possible way for anybody to know the truth would be to capture a visual record, just like this, from practically inside the blast radius."

"Surely there are other survival shelters, though. Continuity of government redoubts, all that sort of thing. And the countermeasures..."

"They weren't in them. We're only in here now because someone decided to intervene. Even if someone else collected a record of the attack, how could they possibly get it to anyone who might be able to make a difference? But this is admissible, and I know exactly who to take it to. This was all engineered for a reason."

~*~

(Text missing)

~*~

"Right, you lucky people," Cleo declares, "I am going to cheer you up with a fashion show of my new accessories!" She ducks half behind the door of the otherwise unused female bathroom, with its downward-pointing-triangle bisected by a vertical line symbol that makes it abundantly clear even to the illiterate exactly who it's for. "Be patient, it takes a while to get into and out of some of this stuff."

Sethkill raids the vending machine for snacks by opening the front panel with the key he found and pulls out one of each item, purely for the sake of taste testing. There are colours in here he's sure have been banned back home, including several packs of crunchy things in a gaudy shade of orange, and a small box of biscuits with vividly iridescent icing in a deep blue that he seems to recall was accused of making small children high.

Thoughtfully, he noms one of each.

Terrowne gets in on the show by taking the leftovers, sharing them around. "The animal biscuits work faster if you mix them with the green soft-drink on the left," he suggests.

~*~

Cleo's first outfit is the quickest, since it's just her in some underwear, and she has a great deal of experience in shimmying in and out of that. This isn't quite your normal lingerie, however, given that it seems to have been selectively reinforced with small curved segments of pale metal, tawny but highly polished, as though it was part of some impracticable-but-sexy fantasy armour.

The scaled sections cover all protruding external curves, the heavy hang of her breasts and pussy and the outside of her hips, but they are clearly positioned inside small pockets designed to hold them in place. The edges that meet her skin and the internal padding are all made of some kind of soft red fabric that moulds to her shape with stunning effect and appears quite comfortable.

Just to show off, she pulls a few stripper-moves, flexing and spinning her way to a single-handed handstand with her legs spread wide for balance.

"Your old man has great taste when it comes to buying a kitten lingerie!" she exclaims, still upside down. "There were a whole range of sizes so I could pick something comfy!"

"What's with the little curved scales?" asks Terrowne.

"All part of the design. They made these as high end extreme sports and adventure gear. The scale pieces are interchangeable on various sorts of undergarments for both men and women. They're supposed to distribute weight, pressure and impact from the next layer up."

She falls, rolls out of the tumble and winds up standing next to them, turning the upper edge of her hip-line inside out so they can see a discreet designer tag and a suggestion of stray golden fur escaping from her gusset at the front. "See? They're quite pricey."

Terrowne enjoys the view. Cleo enjoys him looking. Raimius is used to it and has surely seen all of this before, many times over.

She adjusts the tuck of her new underwear beneath her tail and sashays away, swinging her hips and lioness tail-tuft swaying suggestively. "Back soon!"

~*~

The next layer up turns out to be a sheer dress of sorts, or something that could be mistaken for one under the right lighting. Actually it's all a single, millimeter thin piece of an infinitely smooth, glossy material resembling latex that has been printed rather than assembled.

This slick substance, well-known from its engineering applications, stretches outward effectively but puts up much greater resistance to short time-frame compressive motions, this meaning that it's highly resistant to stabbing motions or incoming bullets. It doesn't provide much protection in and of itself, but it keeps wounds from becoming penetrating and hard to heal. The stuff it's made of goes under the trademark 'nanosheathe' and is ideal for wearing underneath armour as an alternative to a conventional padded gambeson, because the perfectly smooth surface lets the external plates move about freely instead of digging into the skin.

Cleo's version seems to have been made initially as a purely transparent material, and has then had abstract patterns printed with fractal detail down to the last minutiae into the outer surface. Shades of black, silver and grey form what might be interleaved fern-fronds, or scaled claws and wings, or jagged storm clouds flowing across the exterior, leaving some bits teasingly translucent and others well hidden.

A pair of decalled coronae, for example, like the solar prominence around the edges of an eclipse, are probably meant to hide her nipples but in this case fail spectacularly to do so, as they become increasingly clear toward their centres. The line of symmetry along which the design runs, down her midriff and along her spine and back, is also transparent, showing off the matching patterns of paler fur that run along her body.

To accommodate her tail, a cut has been made up the back to roughly the correct height, with any imperfections accommodated by the fact that the whole thing stretches. It's a potential point of weakness or splitting for the otherwise seamless material, but there's really no other way to work it around her shape unless the back of the skirt was hiked up higher than her hips, a dangerously sexy arrangement that would significantly reduce the protective effect. As it is, the nanosheathe covers her out to just beyond the shoulders with very short sleeves, and down to mid-thigh.

Cleo displays this latest outfit by stretching significantly, putting her hands on her knees and then riding an unseen lover behind her, making the stray edges either side of her tail flap suggestively about. Then she straightens and twirls with one hand over her head, making a virtue of just how streamlined she is, before walking off again with one hand out behind her as though leading them on, or tugging on a drawn-out leash.

"Fashion shows have nothing on her," Terrowne concludes to Sethkill in a tone of slight awe as she disappears back behind the door.

~*~

They are kept waiting quite some time while she puts on the final layer, but it's time well spent. Sethkill discovers which snacks he likes best and are edible for him, and then lays claim to the entire supply. The shelter has a virtually unlimited supply of stored compact rations of every sort, meant to tide over a large number of personnel for years if necessary, but the vending machine and whatever may have been left in the fridge are the nearest things to fresh food down here, and were probably installed only to keep the old mans contractors and staff happy.

He searches around, notes dishes in the sink, finds a small coin under the cushions on one of the couches and waits, sipping on a strange-tasting drink.

~*~

Cleo appears again in splendor, this time wearing an entire set of matched armour which forces her into casual, yet deceptively powerful paths of movement. This is no impracticable fantasy set, but is clearly quite seriously intended. She's the colour of burnished bone.

Rather than being carved from it, the matching plates are all in fact grown from a bio-engineered material that is already familiar to Cleo, because it was her father who collected the samples that were first used to create it. The armour is made of leucrotta bone, the leucrotta being a legendary calcivorious beast with jaws hosting solid ridges of tooth-like grinding material rather than actual teeth, evolved to eat the left over bones and remains of carcasses after everything else has picked them clean. When a leucrotta itself dies, its fellow creatures eat it immediately.

Finding one was no small feat, but from the samples he collected derives a technique for growing bone independent of flesh. You can make it whatever shape you like, flat plates that are marrow on the inside and polished bone on the outside. They tend to take after the skeletal architecture they're derived from, developing swirls and knobbles, patterns of pale creamy brown or golden discoloration, to optimize the weight-carrying distribution of the structure and remove weight where it isn't needed, adding it where it is. Best of all they heal, growing back from chips and rips and full out breakage, as long as they are immersed in a suitable nutrient supply.

Cleo's armour of bone is a proper solid set of part plate, with all of the essential components that are needed to cover any possible weaknesses. A full cuirass covers her chest completely and quite economically, and she knows that if she wears it enough it will become less rounded and more form-fitting as it gradually adapts to her shape. At the moment its design is a sort of generic abs and spine layout, with a row of small square plates down the center of her back flanked by angled secondary bracers like overlapping shoulder-blades, and the same at the front, connected by rib-like spars around the edges. Over the breastplate, the additional width is spanned by a diamond-shaped structure resembling the skull-shape of the leucrotta itself, orbital arches rising out and around for added strength.

The bottom of the cuirass transitions directly into an armoured skirt, part of an ongoing growth process where smaller segments spawn at the base and gradually grow, rising slowly as they do so until the topmost sections fold outward to form a defensive rim just below the neck, eventually breaking (or being broken) off, helping to keep the suit fresh and ultimately remove any defects that may become ingrained in the plates (fragments from shattered blade tips, for example). It's a comprehensive organic solution, with pieces to cover the outside of her thighs, her crotch, and to drape over the basal part of her tail to keep it from getting chopped off anywhere high enough to present serious movement and regeneration difficulties.

The slowly growing and regrowing body section of the cuirass is linked to two similar structures in the form of a matched set of large bony shoulder plates, which embody the self-same design principle by growing out in a series of layers, the lowest and largest resembling a sort of spaulder or spauldron, the next up and slightly smaller one resembling its more sophisticated descendant the pauldron, and a couple more slender plates just coming in like hangnails to eventually replace the ones underneath.

"They called this a deltoid auxilury protector in the ADF," Cleo notes, rapping her knuckles on the lowest and thickest plate. "It was an add-on to the standard body armour, but they didn't want to sound old-fashioned by using the correct technical term for it."

She fiddles with the distribution of the plates and discovers something she hadn't noticed before. "Hey, check out the adjustable pauldrons!" she exclaims proudly, circling and checking herself out in the mirror as she tests the new feature. "You can raise them vertically for extra cover, or drop them down for better visibility!"

The raised bone plates make her look like a veritable tower of feline power, a mobile fortress able to shrug off hails of arrows or spears. She practices swinging and stabbing in various orientations and then sets them down to a jaunty one third, suitable for general use without too much loss of sight-line. "This is nice, it's really light!"

Given that she weighs just short of 200 kilograms, like a tiger or a lion in human form, her idea of light probably is not as much as most peoples, but full-plate for the same area of coverage would be insanely heavy. She could probably manage it, but it would use up all of her carrying capacity.

High tech composite armors would of course solve the problem, but ballistic ceramic doesn't heal itself from damage. For that you'd need a full out tactical nanosuit, which are notoriously tricky to maintain and repair, with a reputation both for going rampant and improvising their own unique design solutions to unexpected events. The leucrotta-bone suit is a thoughtful compromise.

The armour comes with shin-guards as well, designed to be strapped over combat boots or any other footwear that might be applicable, but they're separate to the main cuirass and not attached to it in the way that the other pieces are, simply because it wouldn't be practical. Instead, they're made from separated segments of the central cuirass, which have continued to grow after having been removed from the main body. The bracers are similar to the greaves, even down to including small built-in holes in the bone at the side of each plate, that create a small loop through which leather can easily be threaded to strap them to one or both sides of the outer arm.

This seems to be a deliberate design feature, in that if they are lost or destroyed it is possible to cultivate new replacement pieces by breaking off a segment and planting it in the right culture medium to grow a new one, as though it were a plant cutting of some sort (they probably thrive on blood and bone in a chalky soil). You couldn't regrow the whole armour from the stray pieces, so they're safe enough to lose, but as long as a decently sized section of the cuirass remains, the whole suit will eventually reconstruct itself, growing faster when separated from the rest or to accommodate damage done.

"Almost done," declares Cleo. "Now let me model my exciting new weapon!"

~*~

Everyone is already familiar with her original loadout, her sword and anonymised handgun, but when she comes out again she has something new strapped over her shoulder, an impressive looking compound bow and matching quiver full of arrows, with a cap that snaps closed to help protect them from the weather, or in case she needs to ford small rivers or something. The arrows are tightly slotted and there seem to be at least thirty of them, possibly more.

"Now this is magnificent," declares Cleo, drawing the bow under-armed from the middle of her back by unclipping it from the quiver, which holds it in place against her using some sort of quick-release mechanism. It's the quiver that is strapped to her, rather than the bow. Presumably, one could also do the reverse and attach the fully unstrapped quiver to the drawn bow, depending on personal preferences. "It's an Elder compound-bow, the most sophisticated hunting weapon you can buy which is completely silent and purely mechanical. I always wanted one of these, but the ADF issues a simpler standard-model compound bow for stealth missions which does work, well, perfectly adequately, and so I never really had an excuse to buy one, especially after I left. There's limited call for shooting things with arrows once you're out of the field."

She brandishes the bow to show to them, and it is indeed an impressive weapon. Small greased pulley wheels at the end of either limb support two runs of a wire cable made out of some sort of advanced tensile stranding able to support the enormous force they will be subjected to when the bow is fully drawn. Flared, curved guards to the outside front protect the mechanisms on either end, with an additional set of matching guards in front of the grip and belly covering everything except the nocking point. A small bar extends backward from just under the grip to the innermost wire, to help keep everything in line.

Visible inside the inner guards are two banded clusters of carbon fiber which resemble artificial muscle, seamlessly connecting the recessed grip to the main body and limbs of the bow. There are a number of small markings stenciled crisply in red on various parts of the mechanism, as though it is a military device requiring standard warnings of danger to casually placed fingertips.

~*~

While the bow and its arrows are completely artificial, the quiver seems to have been engineered using the same bio-organic approach as the leucrotta-bone armour. The functional material here seems to be some sort of heavy chitin, dull grey but with a peculiarly restrained iridescence that focuses around eye-like circular markings that appear on the flats of each overlapping segment.

Like the armour, the chitin of the quiver seems to grow out in a series of widening laminations from a solid piece at the base, each one becoming progressively longer and more hollow to create the perfect, wavily ruggedized storage space for arrows. A removable oval divider and spacer full of circular holes has been dropped in at the top to act as a separator for the arrows, and the cap that slots down over the top to cover the exposed arrows is made from the same material as the main quiver, only shorter.

Unlike the armour, it's difficult to tell whether the quiver is still alive in and of itself, or has simply been grown to a fixed size and then treated in some way to preserve it. What it would need for its continued growth is anyone's guess, but it would probably be the same sort of things used in most lacquers, such as ground up insect shells, natural resins, and so forth. She can always test various repair substances if it gets damaged.

The arrows it holds are simple lengths of perfectly black carbon steel, ending in a slender point (otherwise they wouldn't all fit so tightly together in the quiver). Where most arrows would be fletched at the upper ends with vanes made of feathers, these have smooth spiralling sequences of fine black wire filiaments protruding outward, able to freely intersect one another in this close confinement without any damage, apparently designed to make the arrows spin, stabilising their flight in the same manner as a fired bullet at the cost of a slight amount of power. Since this bow supports pull-strengths of greater than three times what any normal human could achieve with its standard equivalent, no matter how well engineered, any shot taken is going to be devastating anyway and it will probably make very little difference.

Cleo makes pulling the weapon look effortless, drawing it back with two fingers nocked around a purely imaginary arrow as she sights down in. "There's bound to be a small target range down here somewhere, if this was intended as a military continuity-of-government shelter," she muses. "We should probably go find it and get a bit of practice, so I can get my eye in."

~*~

(Text Missing)

~*~

Cleo, as something of a connoisseur of combat knives, is quite duly impressed with Terrownes when they finally get down to comparing gear. The blades are short, not that long, slender and precise, with a slight curve that makes them look most of all like gutting and skinning knives, scaled up for efficient lethality against a larger target. Both sides are smoothly sharpened to a thicker centre. She doesn't recognise the exact metal, but it has a flawless dull grey finish that doesn't shine or reflect, ground to precision smoothness.

The grips are narrow and have almost no guard on them, just enough to keep his hands from slipping forward onto the blades. "If you need to use the guard on a knife, you've already let them get too close," he comments. The handles are designed for a precise grip, between thumb and forefinger, like a paring or filleting knife. "You can flip them around and slide the handles into an additional fold built into the forearm bracers, to turn them both into hands-free hidden blades suitable for use as punch-daggers." He demonstrates. "I like to wear them at the outside of my wrists though, not under the palms like the real thing."

The matching pair of bigger swords, well, over-sized long-knives really, he wears strapped to his back for access over the shoulder. These blades are also curved, but with a peculiar shape like one half of a recurve bow, curving outward along the main cutting edge, then back and forward again to a pointed tip capable of great accuracy. The back of the blade is unsharpened and left thick to catch incoming blows, and sports a small hooked protrusion at the end of the secondary curve to intercept and yank the snagged weapons out of line, or out of their former wielders hands entirely. They're made of the same metal, but with the guards and grips scaled up to greater thickness to match the weight and size.

"I actually made them myself," he explains when the issue comes up. "You know that I used to make decorative jewellery and other small items as a handy way of paying for things, sort of as a hobby that I got into. It's interesting to fabricate all sorts of items using different techniques. Well, this is the same approach applied to weapons. Why beat on huge baulks of red-hot steel or cast elaborate diamond-shaped bars of bronze when there are so many better ways to do it, and so much more sophisticated materials to do it with?"

"Are you going to tell me the secret ingredient?" teases Cleo.

"Oh, all sorts of things. Powdered horn and bone, specific clay minerals, black ink, various other stuff. All finely ground and mixed with the stock feed for a industrial printer, laminated together, and then cooked for an extended period of time in a furnace to let the material grow and crystallize internally, self-ordering far more efficiently than any layered damascene blade. Basically it came down to what I had handy and what I could find on the internet."

"I'm surprised that they wouldn't suppress that sort of stuff."

"It's hard to keep that large a community of enthusiastic amateurs down. They'd already tried just about every possible additive and mixture under various conditions. I just combined their research and narrowed it down a bit based on what I had available."

Cleo find herself oddly impressed. This is a man who is all hidden depths, and by far more talented than you'd guess just by looking at him. In a way, he reminds her of her father, but just a little, in a good way. He probably doesn't believe in his own accomplishments when he finds himself talking about them later.

"Well, I think you did well. I've handled just about every combat knife the ADF ever issued and those little daggers of yours are positively wicked."

"That sword of yours is pretty fascinating too, all by itself."

"Oh, there's a whole story there."

~*~

(Text Missing)

~*~

The riding lizard is greyed bundles of synthetic muscle-fiber under streamlined light aluminium -magnesium plates, to keep the weight down and the efficiency up. It's not really very well armoured and is probably susceptible to both impacts and fire, but unlike most vehicles it can grow back, rebuilding the muscle fibres, and can be easily bashed back into shape with a hammer or indeed whatever's handy. The muzzle is eyeless, because it only needs to know the distance to its surroundings and a limited short-range ability to detect edible rocks.

"Does it have a manual?" asks Sethkill.

"Yes, but it's in Azatlani," concludes Cleo, flipping through the slender booklet. "Looks like I'm your tech support until you learn how to read it or memorize the contents." She holds it open sideways, then passes it to him. "At least the diagrams are pretty good."

~*~

(Text Missing)

~*~

"How did you do that?" exclaims Cleo, not startled or even alarmed so much as curious.

Let's go over there and ask him how he did that.

"It's a force field, obviously," explains Sethkill. "All those little zazzily bits around the edges, the little sparkles with the humming staticky sound, are where it's stopping the high-energy particles and dropping them back to normal speeds."

"But how?"

"It's not really a very impressive trick, I know," sighs Sethkill. "The knack to it is that you're supposed to pull it in and make it as small around you as possible, even better yet oval-shaped, to reduce the total surface area. If you can get it small enough it'll actually stop decent sized stuff with real mass, but I could never get the hang of it. When I make one it always comes out absurdly big and is only effective against tiny objects. I am resistant to nerf guns, confetti, small insects and low level radiation."

Cleo is impressed that he was able to translate something to Azatlani as 'nerf gun'. He must have seen the contents of a toy store window on the way in.

"But that's amazing," she counters with absolute certainty.

"It was kind of a big deal once, if you could do it properly, hundreds of years ago. But on my home world these days you can buy a technological version, a thing called an aegis shield, that runs off a handy wrist-worn power-supply. It maintains a precise hemispherical size and shape, stops just about everything imaginable, and requires zero concentration. Admittedly it only works for a few minutes at full power, but really that's all anyone needs. I would have bought one myself myself, but it's not like I could recharge it and so it would mostly be dead weight."

"I'm still impressed. You're just exactly what we needed at this precise moment."

"Yes, well, just try not to step in the dangerous toxic radioactive ash too much while you're climbing over the rubble. You'll have to wash it off completely with clean seawater when we reach what's left of the shoreline. Incidentally, I can only do this for a couple of hours at the most, even at this ineffective sort of output. It gives me a gradually worsening headache that makes me really bad company after that. Apparently, if I could do this long enough, I'd start to bleed from the ears."

"That is really kind of cool, actually."

"Yes, well, I would really rather not find out."

There is not much to say about the journey over the ash and the crumbled ruins of the smashed buildings of the Azatlani waterfront. The streets are still vaguely recognizable as lower channels running through the debris, but everything that could possibly burn has been flamed by the main compressive shockwave as it passed. It is necessary to climb over the last remnants of people and things, some of which collapse into dust when touched or otherwise disturbed. The drifting cloud of miscellaneous burnt particles, which includes all sorts of undesirable substances of which the very least is crematory ash, remains inert instead of radioactive as long as it stays inside Sethkill's self-centered bubble, but it isn't anything you'd want to breathe and so they wrap soaked towels from the continuity shelter around their faces, to be thrown away completely later.

The riding cat performs exactly as per spec, sneezing at the dust with its muzzle attachment on, also lined with a towel, as it climbs up the broken and exposed faces of buildings like a large snow leopard, holding onto the protruding edges of walls and floors with its claws. It can indeed hang on at angles up around seventy or seventy-five degrees to vertical, although during the brief and exciting moments where it does, bounding up sheer faces in sudden terrifying lunges, the main danger is to its riders rather than itself. Cleo has to lean all the way forward with the tight curve of her abdomen folded around and on top of the bronze pommel-grip that takes the place of reins, and Terrowne hangs onto her waist and grips at the back of the saddle with his knees.

The autonomous lizard that Sethkill has been provided with, false grey neuro-muscular bundles under a light shell of burnished plates, cannot match these excitements but is very much more his style, being fully under his control, and with quite intelligently thought-out behaviours. It adjusts each limb as it moves in a continuous last-second process right up until that claw hits the ground, then repeats the process, scanning its surroundings to try and work out the better path. He only needs to provide minimal intervention, pushing with his knees to indicate that it should go left or right, using the reins to point its blind muzzle at the things he thinks it might need to see to better determine their ultimate destination.

The lizard proceeds not so much slowly as with perfect caution, holding to the low path in and around the ruins. The riding cat is better suited to bounding over and around stuff to keep itself within the bubble as escort, and he doesn't have to concentrate too much with the lizard finding the path. It's almost, suspiciously, as if someone planned it.

Progress is slow, but the continuity shelter was relatively close to the waterfront, more so than one would really expect, in fact, given the dangers of flooding and cataclysmic waves. It seems the existing presence of government-backed excavations under the area, the facilities where the early research into genetics was done and similar, and the proximity of so many important and wealthy people in the area must have led to its placement in an area that would otherwise not have been considered, perhaps as a temporary staging point on the way to some vault far deeper and vaster, much further inland. How exactly it happened doesn't really matter, but there's only so much time before Sethkill tires and they need to reach the pickup point before then.

Mariel will be arriving at what used to be the end of the secondary wharf, a thin narrow structure built in earlier times, which now separates the container and tank farm of the docks proper from the more sheltered part of the harbour full of pleasure craft and small yachts owned by those self-same wealthy. Vessels of more recent make, heavy tankers and transports, never proceed outside Azatlani-controlled waters for fear of having their technology stolen by the competition, with the exception of a limited number of super-heavy corsairs and other fleet ships. All of these displace far too much water and would ground long before they made it to the end of the old wharf, but Mariels trade ship is much smaller and lighter, deliberately designed using the features of a last-generation sailing vessel, a clipper-style ship from which no useful advances can be stolen, able to travel back and forth beyond the outer sea-wall with impunity, and dock where its original once did in the distant past.

Unfortunately, as becomes apparent from the higher points on the heaps of rubble, the harbour itself has also been smashed. Bits of destroyed cargo containers lie around with the paint seared away in blistered bubbles from their outer surfaces. The fuel and other storage tanks have been sundered or exploded, with some parts still smoking. One of the newer tankers is sunken, broken in half, alongside the main main dock, and all of the small pleasure craft have been shattered into kindling by the blast wave. The secondary wharf was, it seems, too long and narrow to weather all this action and is quite gone, except for the occasional pillar sticking up out of water polluted by all manner of awful runoff, industrial lubricants and black ash washed from the skies by the rain.

The only upside is that what remains of the main wharf is wide and flat and doesn't have much left on it, like it was the outskirts of a bucket of building blocks dumped carelessly onto the floor, and then set on fire by a teenage arsonist in some mad attempt to disavow his childhood. Bits are missing and some of the end is gone, but enough of the surface has been scoured clear for them to make their way out to it. Huge cranes and lifters have been effortlessly twisted and buckled, then cast sideways out into the water by the force of the blast. Nothing is left of the few warehouses and sheds that used to be here.

Sethkill is starting to look a bit twitchy and rubbing behind his ears.

"She'll be here," Terrowne assures them. "Mariel has bigger and better balls than most of the guys I've ever met. If nothing else she'll come over just to take a look, once she gets inside the sea wall and sees what's happened. She'd never just run away, the way some people would."

So they wait.

"Also that ship of hers has a much smaller draft than anything else here," he adds, clearly trying to convince them to hold fast for a while longer. "There's a ton of debris floating around out there, but she can probably pick her way around most of it. It'll just take a while."

They continue to wait.

It's starting, in fact, to look like they may have to rush back to the shelter when the Vermillion Dragon and its ludicrous purple prow-marking of same finally hoves into view, taking a painfully long time to make its way toward them at a significantly reduced speed. Despite the deliberately low-tech design of her ship, Mariel does in fact have all the required toys to get where she's going, including basic range-finders and a side-scanning sonar that wouldn't really give away anything useful if captured. But tacking around various seen and unseen obstacles takes time, especially in a sailing vessel, like a yacht race in slow motion.

It looks like she's spotted them, because she sends out a small boat towards them as she plots her main approach. It has oars but doesn't use them, instead featuring a pedal-driven prop pushed by two of her sailors as a third operates the rudder. The prop is most probably only suitable for short dashes from ship to shore, but has come in useful here.

As soon as the sailors are ashore, Cleo ushers them quickly into the bubble, which is getting a bit crowded, and Sethkill is starting to look tense.

The sailors help them to locate a couple of tie-off points that are still intact and close enough to each other that it should be possible to force a reasonably swift docking without quite breaking anything. It's all a bit awkward since everyone has to try and stay inside the bubble as much as possible, which means trying to co-ordinate everything centrally like some sort of team-building game, only hopefully much more effectively.

Once Vermillion Dragon gets close enough, heavy hawser lines are thrown and they maneuver to catch them, looping them around the abraded metal curvatures of the two tie-off points and then running them to a position somewhere near the middle, so they can haul in on both lines at once. Sethkill gestures to the sailors to tie one around the neck and fore-body of the lizard automaton, while the other goes through the bronze loop of the pommel-grip on the riding cats saddle. By careful pulling, and repeated backing up and re-hitching of the lines to avoid leaving the volume of the bubble, they are able to pull the ship in reasonably close, so it bumps up against the edge of what's left of the wharf. It's no fine job, but it's good enough.

Despite its ancient design, Mariels ship has plenty of additional features that don't comprise a security threat, including loading doors to either side of the hull that fold down sideways to form a ramp onto the dock. This arrangement wouldn't be sound on a purely wooden ship, but the liberal steel reinforcement of the hull, not readily apparent from the outside, makes it workable.

Before they can risk going aboard, they have to clean up as much as possible, so they trek down the inclined surface where a slab of the wharf has been undermined and slopes downward into the sea. The water here is filthy, but it's all part of a process, one started by re-wetting the towels several times to clean off as much of the dust as possible, until this doesn't seem to be achieving anything more. Once they're out at sea in clean salt water, they'll have to take turns stripping off completely and trying to wash everything to avoid endangering the others on the ship.

The riding cat dabbles its paws in the dirty water and grunts in a significant, drawn-out manner that seems to indicate initial dissatisfaction with the cleaning process. Terrowne collects and then throws away their grimy towels, which land with a wet splat some distance away on the concrete of the wharf, and then they lead the mounts up the ramp and inside the cargo hold of the ship.

Two of the sailors dash out bravely and untie the ropes, while the third fastens a lighter line to the small boat, so they can pull it out behind the ship without having to raise it back aboard. Then everyone hauls ass back inside, to winch up the cargo hold door and start winding in the heavy docking hawsers. The ropes are made of much more modern materials than their design suggests, although nothing really advanced, which is to the great good fortune of all since they weigh very much less than their original counterparts.

Slowly, tacking around all the same obstacles again that it met on the way in, Vermillion Dragon sets out to sea again, away from the destroyed Azatlani coastline.

~*~

The small boat turns out to be handy for cleaning, as one at a time they slide down the line, strip off, and then swim in the sea to try and get rid of any remaining dust as much as possible. It only seems safe to do this once the vast sea wall has disappeared safely into the distance behind them, but Mariel keeps to her heading and sails onward even as they try to clean themselves up.

Mopping up the inky stained footprints they've left behind in the hold is easy enough, although it seems like a good idea to launch the mop overboard once this is done. How to clean the riding cat effectively seems like a more difficult proposition, until it sees Cleo swimming dressed only in her fur around the small boat and joyfully launches itself overboard, splashing about with her until it gets bored and then climbing up onto the boat to lick itself systematically with swipes of its huge tongue, laying all the fur down in the right direction.

The boat is not really rated for a giant riding cat. Getting the giant beast back onto the main deck eventually involves winching both it and the boat back up to the same level using a pair of davits, as it surveys the ocean territorially and then springs back aboard looking very proud of itself.

Naturally they have quite an audience. No self-respecting sailor is going to miss the chance to watch a hot naked feline girl, some strange wolfish creature with six nipples and a huge sheathed cock, and a giant cat big enough for two people to ride, all going for a swim together. Terrowne, as a mere human male, is considerably less interesting, and so he goes and does something useful instead, wiping down the riding lizard and trying to get all the grit from inside and under all of the thin plates that cover it. It's kind of like cleaning a car with four legs and and a muzzle, and another towel and the mop bucket are sacrificed to the ocean in the process.

Washing up everything takes hours and leaves them traced with a fine layer of salt, although once they're finally done and presumably safe to approach, Mariel shows herself at last, rolling out a huge transparent plastic barrel of fresh water. One last rinse, safely inside the ship, sees them all a little bedraggled but clean at last.

"So, uh, I see you survived getting nuked," is Mariels awkward conversational opener.

"Apparently it was a relatively clean device," replies Terrowne. "We're probably only about as hot as a microwave oven now. Or maybe a poorly made cellphone."

She hesitates, then gives him a hug, presumably her way of showing that she's not afraid. He hugs back, and they're both clearly relieved to see each other alive and well.