Wolf Who Rules

She called up an animation program and created a quick rough model of the dragon, using a ferret body, a male lion's head and a snake skin to cover the frame. Dragging the dragon model out onto the iboard, she let it gallop across the vast white. There had been a spell painted onto the dragon's hide. She wasn't sure what the spell did. Was it how the dragon raised its shield or was it how the oni were using to control it? It seemed to her that the wild waving of the mane might have triggered the spell-much like the domana hand gestures triggered their shields.

"What do you think?" She asked Pony. "How did it raise its shield?"

Pony put his hands to his head and wriggled his fingers. "It's mane."

Stormsong and the others that had been in the valley with her that morning nodded in agreement.

Okay, so the mane worked like domana fingers. She paused the dragon, added a "shield" effect to her model, and restarted the animation. "Next question is - does anything breach the shield?"

"Our shields do not stop light and air, because we must see and breathe," Pony said. "They also have a limit to the force they can absorb at one moment. They will take a hundred shots fired in a hundred heartbeats, but not a hundred fired in one heartbeat."

"So light and air." Tinker opened a window in the corner of the iboard and noted this.

"Spell arrows don't affect the dragon," Cloudwalker reminded her.

Tinker wrote: different frequency of light? And then thinking of Pony driving his sword point through the shield, she added, " Speed of kinetic weapon? "

"Pony, can I see your sword?"

He drew his sword and held it out to her to examine. "Careful, domi, it is very sharp."

She knew that the ejae had magically tempered ironwood blades, but she never examined them closely before. It was single length of rich cherry colored wood with a bone guard. The very tip came to a fine point. There was no sign of the spell that created the blade, which she supposed was necessary since the sekasha used their swords while shield spells were active. The surface area of the tip was smaller than a bullet; if they both struck at the same speed, the ejae would have a greater PSI. Pony's slow push through the dragon's shield meant that wasn't the factor.

She wasn't sure how they could use a "slow" weapon against the dragon. It would be unlikely that the beastie would ever standstill like that again. She considered a giant glue trap, sleep gas, and mega stun guns. They all had their drawbacks from "what do you use as bait?" to "would it do anything but just piss the dragon off?" That got her wondering about what would affect the dragon once they got past its shields. Where were its vital organs? Would poison necessarily kill it? Elves couldn't tolerate some of the food humans ate in abundance. The inverse could be true - what was poisonous for Elfhome creatures might not hurt the dragon.

Maybe the stupid dream was telling her that she needed to melt the dragon with a bucket of water. Waterjets had jet speeds around Mach 3 and could cut through several inches of steel. She didn't have any in her junkyard, but perhaps she could salvage one and modify it…

The sekasha's were rubbing off on her. She really liked the simple "hit it with a big gun" solution. Too bad they couldn't simply make the shield go away so "a big gun" was a safe bet.

Her stomach growled. She realized that she had spent hours in front of the iboard.

"What time is it?" Maybe she should take a break to eat the packed lunch.

"I'm not sure. That clock is broken." Stormsong pointed to an old alarm clock that Tinker had dismantling to use in a project.

We're murdered time, it's always six o'clock.

Wait - wasn't that a line from Alice in Wonderland? During the tea party, didn't they talk about time not working for them? She sorted through the things she brought from the enclave, found the book, and flipped through it. Under the drawing of the Mad Hatter, there was a footnote that caught her eye.

"Arthur Stanley Eddington, as well as less distinguished writers on relativity theory, have compared the Mad Tea Party, where it is always six o'clock, with that portion of De Sitter's model of the cosmos in which time stands eternally still. (See Chapter 10 of Eddington's Space Time and Gravitation.)"

"Oh shit." Tinker took out her datapad and pulled up her father's plans on the gate.

"Shit?" Pony asked.

"Excrement." Stormsong translated. "It's a curse."

"Shit," Pony echoed.

"That aside, what did you figure out?" Stormsong asked.

"I made a huge mistake in the variable for time on the gate equations. And if I did it - I bet the oni did too. These plans, as they stand - all the spaceships would have arrived at the same moment. That's why they collided."

"When did they go to?" Pony asked.

"I think - that they were held in time - until the gate was destroyed. They finished their journey - all five ships - three days ago."

"Your mother found herself in great danger and you're her only link to home," Stormsong murmured.