156 The First Wasp

Days since last Beast Tide: 28. Current Kill Count: 875 (34 since yesterday).

***

"Careful, now! Careful!" Arnold beckoned slowly.

Mindy slowly eased magic drive forward, carefully regulating a steady, small flow of mana. Bit by bit, she drifted toward him.

They were testing the half-built prototype of the new Wasp fighter while waiting for the docks to load Fire Copper and Flaming Bronze onto the Red Fang. It was a tense day for Mindy; that batch would be the last batch she needed before she'd be able to afford the second-hand Sky Galleon she'd targeted and still have money left over to buy metals from Kara-Goth to trade. In order to keep her mind off the tension, and her teeth off her fingernails, Mindy went over to find Arnold to distract herself and eventually ended up testing the much smaller airship.

The Wasp had three main sections, a forward pilot's station, a central power unit, and a rear gunner's station. By right, the corvette should be crewed by three people, preferably five or six. But Mindy was directly controlling the engine with her magic. Such raw control bypassed all the maneuvering systems and only allowed for the most simple directional movements. While not a good idea for actual flight, for the purposes of their current test, it was sufficient.

"Looking good!" Arnold said. "Take it straight up and down, now…"

Mindy hesitated, then threw caution to the wind and sent in a burst of power to the engines.

The Wasp shot upwards. The ground fell away beneath her. Mindy had a queer feeling, like she'd left her stomach somewhere far below down there, and that she wasn't actually entirely here, up in the air, in this skeletal ten meter airship...

And then she let it drop. Rapidly, without anything to slow it down, like a rock, falling straight out of the sky…

Actually, no, even half-built, lacking its forward and aft gas envelopes, the Wasp already contained a fair amount of helium in its central segment. The lighter-than-air gasses drastically reduced the drop speed of the Wasp, even without power in the engines. In fact, the drop rate of the Wasp, unpowered, was less like a rock and more like… a twig, maybe?

After all, lacking half its frame, the current combined weight of this prototype wasn't as heavy as the final Wasp models were supposed to be.

That didn't stop Arnold from yelping and freaking out when Mindy made their prototype do the twenty foot hop. The poor guy practically fell over and dropped half his instruments, nearly tripping over his…

POW! Something sparked and burst near to Mindy. With a jump, Mindy reacted instinctively, her magic seizing control of the engine rather than gently manipulating it. With brute force, she brought all movement of the prototype to a full stop, not even dropping another inch toward the ground.

It would have been impossible if she'd been piloting a Galleon, or even a Frigate. But the corvette was just small enough, the structure was just bare enough that she actually managed to bring it to a stop the way she might put her feet down from a carriage to bring it to a stop. It was still a very bad idea; the strain nearly made her blank out, and the drain on her personal mana was frightening, to say the least… but she actually managed it.

"That was dangerous!" Arnold shouted. "What were you thinking?!"

Mindy wasn't entirely certain as to which of her little stunts he was referring to, didn't suppose it mattered. Her brain felt like it had been stretched and then wrung dry all in a matter of moments, and there was a sudden, deep weariness in her very bones.

Letting out a groan, she admitted, "That really was a bad idea."

"You think?!" Arnold shot back.

"But at least now we know it can be done." Mindy offered weakly.

"You did NOT have to do it like that!" Arnold barked. "There's such a thing as safety precautions! And more importantly, you could have TOLD ME FIRST!"

Mindy didn't answer. She just held her head and groaned.

"I think that's enough for today." Arnold said tartly. "Next time… don't SCARE me like that!"

"S… sorry…" Mindy rubbed her forehead. "I… I'm going to find something to eat."

It was early for lunch, still about half an hour before noon, but Arnold simply nodded. "You do that. I'll try and see what went pop just now. The Wasp is supposed to be able to make high speed maneuvers all the time. We can't have things going 'pow' every time it tries to dodge something."

"Do you think… maybe…" Mindy hesitated. "It might be ready for action tonight?"

"Tonight?" Arnold frowned. "You mean, the Beast Wave? I don't think it's necessary. Last time, with two Sky Fortresses firing on the Wave all the way from goodness-knows-where, there were only a handful of Wilds to deal with. Our guys managed it without a single death, only a few injuries. Even George got off with barely a few bruises and he was on the front lines."

"Can it?" Mindy pressed.

Arnold groaned. "You know I can't rush it, George's got me swamped with so many projects…"

"Can it be ready or not?" Mindy wouldn't drop the question.

At last, Arnold sighed. "It's in no shape for dogfights, but if it's just to provide fire support from above… yes, it can. But be careful."

"Sure, sure…" Mindy said, and immediately got to work preparing it for battle.

***

Meanwhile, far to the south, the Sky Fortresses were spying out the next Beast Wave.

"Horse-type Wilds?" Damien Vin scratched his head. "A whole herd, no less…"

Whoever was gathering these Wilds for the Waves, they were getting lazy. Rather than going for a variety, the wave-callers were now targeting whole groups.

Either that, or they found a way to affect entire groups at once.

"Can we catch them?" one of the students asked eagerly. "Horses are good, right? Everyone likes to use horses…"

"Err… I'm not entirely sure. I mean, these are Wilds too, you know…" Damien mentioned.

"But what if we could catch them, even tame them…? They can communicate psionically! We'd have horses we could TALK to!"

"Err, catching them isn't the hard part. We have a big pit, after all. But taming them…? I don't know." Damien scratched his head. "Wouldn't we be offending some Lord of the Wilds terribly? Would it be considered slavery if we treated Wilds horses like normal horses? Aren't we trying to free slaves rather than practice enslavement?"

His students looked back at him blankly. One of them ventured to respond. "You ask us, but who do we ask?"

He ended up asking another young man about this very issue. This, however, required the use of a comms crystal.

***

"Horses?" George repeated, speculating. "Well, now, that's… different."

It really was. Horses represented a whole lot of opportunities in regular society. It was, at the very least, risky to bring a wolfcat into a normal city elsewhere in the world. But horses? You could bring them into any town, any city, anywhere in the world, and nobody would be especially worried. So long as they looked and behaved like regular horses, nobody would even question them around.

Would it really make a difference? George believed it would. Even in the most normal beast-of-labor situations, a horse that could understand your thoughts made the work a whole lot easier. Better yet, a horse that could explain his needs and wants would be much easier to take care of. Also, they'd be a lot more adaptable, much more capable, able to do things which required finesse that non-psionic horses simply would never even dream of doing.

George once heard Markus say that a well-trained warhorse was one of the most powerful weapons a legionnaire could bring to the field. Now, he begged to differ. Compared to a well-trained warhorse, a Psionic horse had far more potential.

"Don't kill them!" George decided at once. "Let's try to capture them alive!"