Prologue

Lady Atlantia Jupiter, commander of the Seventh Order of mech knights, grinned as she felt the thrust and roar of the engines of the transport mech beneath the pilot seat. It was time to hunt ghosts.

    As she reached her cruising altitude, she opened the comms link to her passenger. “Are you okay back there?”

    “I’m fine,” her passenger replied, his voice slightly hoarse. “I’m sorry to put you through all of this.”

    Atlantia’s grin widened. “No apologies necessary, Professor Pierre. You’ve saved me from a boring day of endless paperwork! I’m just happy to have an excuse to go flying in a mech again. Do you have any idea of how dull it is to be the commander of an order of magical knights during peacetime?”

    “Should you really be saying that out loud?”

    Atlantia laughed. “After everything I’ve done to defeat the Holy Legion, I think the General Staff will let me grouse about being office-bound with paperwork after the war. Besides, I’ve never cared that much about decorum. Drives the higher-ups crazy sometimes.”

    “Look, this is important,” Professor Pierre stressed. “I wouldn’t have reached out unless it was absolutely necessary. The entire fate of the world could be at stake here.”

    Atlantia spotted a familiar field, just outside of a small village.

    “Give me a moment,” Atlantia said. “We’re taking a quick break to stretch our legs.”

    She could hear Professor Pierre’s groan on the other side of the comms. She chuckled. “Professor, I read your briefing, and your file. I understand the stakes.”

    There was no reply. Atlantia shook her head, a smile on her face. She set the mech down, the touchdown almost imperceptible in the cockpit. Her smile widened. She hadn’t lost her touch.

    She unbuckled her harness and stepped into the back. A tall, stout man in his early forties, his face framed by dark hair and a bushy moustache, stared at her. She unbuckled his harness, and then opened the hatch. The fragrance of the meadow wafted in.

    “Let’s take a walk, Professor Pierre.”

    Professor Pierre rose and followed her.

    “I understand that your work must be long and taxing,” he said, “but please understand, I have been trying to get people to take me seriously about this for months. I was one of the people brought in for...” His voice dropped to a whisper. “...Project Aquila.”

    Atlantia gave him a kind smile. “We’re the only ones in this meadow, Professor. You don’t need to whisper.”

    “The point is...the point is that the Cranston Energy she uses...generates, even...is amazing. Based on your briefing, it can quite literally rewrite the entire world into something else.”

    Atlantia surveyed the meadow. The rolling fields were pocked with craters. “That was the impression I got when she appeared in my office and told me all about it, yes. I think she called it an ‘information stream’, however.”

    “But, its levels are rising, across the entire world,” Professor Pierre said. “And there are no indications that the accumulation is stopping. If anything, it looks like it is accelerating. It’s only a matter of time before it reaches a critical mass, and then...”

    Atlantia sighed and turned to face him. “Professor, I am taking you seriously. I wouldn’t have given you a minute of my time if I wasn’t. But, I’ve been in enough battles and desperate situations to know when minutes can make the difference between success and disaster, and this isn’t one of them. Based on your report, we are months away from understanding this, much less avoiding it. Even if this ‘Cranston Energy’ is going to rewrite the world into a wasteland tomorrow, a delay of an hour here is not going to make a difference. I like to get to know the people I’m going to be working with. This is my method. I’m afraid you’re just going to have to indulge me.”

    Professor Pierre frowned. “So, why are we here?”

    Atlantia shrugged. “A whim. An opportunity to talk in pleasant surroundings before we get to work. You should meet Aquila Agawa one of these days, Professor. She’s quite pleasant, and she vacations here every year. She’s quite a good friend.”

    Professor Pierre sighed. “There’s also the ghosts. We’re positive they’re connected somehow to the Cranston Energy.”

    “Yes, these apparitions,” Atlantia said. “Appearing all over the place, as you wrote in your report.”

    “Appearing all over the world,” Professor Pierre declared. “There was one reported just yesterday in the middle of Lamarck.”

    Atlantia grinned. “Bet that gave them a shock.”

    “Please!” Professor Pierre cried. “Please tell me that I’m not wasting my time here! I’m trying to save the world. I would think that you, of all people, would understand that.”

    Atlantia took a deep breath. “Do you know where we are, Professor?”

    Professor Pierre shook his head.

    “This is the site of the most desperate day in the war against the Holy Legion,” Atlantia explained. “Nothing could stop them, and as far as we knew, this was going to be our last stand. It was just a handful of us between them and the capital, and they had a superweapon – one that would crack open the earth and create a supervolcano eruption.”

    “‘Holy Legion’ doesn’t sound like a very apt name for them,” Professor Pierre said.

    Atlantia nodded. “There was nothing holy about them. They wanted to sacrifice the entire world to their dark god. But, this was where it turned. This was where I realized that I loved Hercules, as I watched him nearly die in battle. Of course, that was all part of my story. The work of a ‘god of creation’, as Aquila would say, giving me a revelation at the most dramatic possible moment. It would be two years before he gave Hercules one of his own.”

    Professor Pierre frowned. “I still sometimes have trouble with that part of the briefing...that the god who created us wasn’t some divine being but a novelist, just like all of the authors we have here.”

    Mechs rumbled in the distance, the roar of their engines strangely muted.

    Atlantia blinked. “I didn’t think there was anybody else scheduled to be on our flight path this afternoon.” Then the first pair of mechs roared over head, others coming up behind them.

    Atlantia’s eyes widened. There was no mistaking what she was seeing – one of the lead mechs was hers. She glanced at the others – it was the Seventh and Eighth Orders, every single one of them...including the ones who had fallen.

    “I don’t need to tell you how desperate this day is,” she heard her own voice echo out from the mech loudspeaker. “Today is either our finest hour, or the end of the world – and we will not let it be the end of the world! Even if it takes all of our lives to do it, we will destroy the Vulcan Machine!”

    “No turning back, no surrender!” she heard Hercules’ voice echo out from his mech. “We will do our best, and never stop until the Vulcan Machine is destroyed, or the world ends!”

    A blue glow surrounded the mechs as their magical shields energized to full power. In the distance on the other side, she saw the approaching black, spiked mechs of the Holy Legion, the massive carriage of the Vulcan Machine behind them escorted by five of their elite guard.

    “This would be one of those apparitions of yours, I take it,” Atlantia breathed.

    Slack jawed, Professor Pierre nodded. “I never thought I would see one in person.”

    Missiles screamed overhead as the battle began. Three of the Seventh Order mechs crashed to the ground and exploded right in front of her, shrapnel flying towards her. By reflex, Atlantia recoiled and raised her hands to shield her head, knowing that it was already too late.

    Nothing struck her. The world went silent. She blinked and straightened up. She and Professor Pierre were standing alone in an empty field, the ground pock-marked by craters long since covered by grass.

    “I guess we don’t have to go all the way to that site of yours to take readings,” Atlantia said.

    Professor Pierre was already headed back to the transport mech. “I’m getting my instruments.”

    She watched Professor Pierre come back and wander around the field, taking readings with a small handheld device, and then placing it on the ground so that he could writing down the measurements.

    “Is there no easier way to do this?” Atlantia asked.

    “There would be, if I could get funding,” Professor Pierre replied. “There are so many readings I could be taking, but that requires other equipment, and...and nobody wants to fund this.”

    Atlantia blinked. “Wait a minute – I thought you were receiving funding.”

    “I’m using what little I can scrounge from the funding for Project Aquila,” Professor Pierre stated. “As I said, Cranston Energy is going to change our world into...something...and possibly erase all of us in the process and replace us with something else. And everybody stops listening as soon as I tell them it’s somehow related to the apparitions.” He sighed. “It has been very frustrating.”

    Atlantia pursed her lips. “Well, Professor Pierre, you can stop worrying. I’ll talk to whoever I have to, and I’ll get you all the funding you need. I’ll bring you to the Seventh Order headquarters and bring your project under our discretionary funding, if that’s what it takes.”

    “I’ll need help too,” Professor Pierre declared. “And I’m not sure my grad students will do the trick. I have to admit...I think I’m in way over my head here. And this is urgent.”

    Atlantia smiled, an image of a certain light blue haired woman with a popped collar and the power to rewrite reality flashing through her mind. “I think I know just the person,” she said. “But she’s on another world, and she doesn’t come back for her vacation for another six months.”

    Professor Pierre blinked. “Are you talking about Aquila Agawa?”

    Atlantia nodded. “So, I guess one of your first jobs is to figure out how to reach her...”