Nar went last, following Jul down the tight ladder, and for a moment, he remembered another such tight ladder. One he had climbed only a few months ago, and surrounded by deadly orange Pressure…

  He shook his head, clenching his jaw, and pushed the memory away as he continued downwards.

  “Fuck… That is tight,” Mul muttered from somewhere below.

  “Yup! Betty’s built for power, not comfort!”

  “Betty?” Mul asked.

  “That's her, my lady!” Jarl said, his tone reverent. “You two okay up there?”

  “Trying…” Nar said, looking down.

  There was a round hole in the wall, where the ladder ended, and Jul was looking lost from its end to Nar, unsure of what to do.

  “Uh… Why don’t you squeeze back, and I’ll kneel down in front of you?” Nar asked.

  Jul nodded effusively. “Yes! That’s… That’s good!”

  Consider it training, Nar thought, squeezing in front of her. Jul wasn’t going to be able to avoid sapient contact forever.

  “Alright, everyone cozy?” Jarl asked.

  He sat on a tall, but lean chair, with Mul squeezed uncomfortably at his left leg, but other than some kind of metal apparatus coming up to his chest, with two handles on either side of it, Nar couldn’t see anything into that pitch black hole.

  “Don’t blink! Or you’ll miss it!” Jarl said.

  Miss what…

  The undead did something, and there was a loud beep. Lights flickered to life, and with a smooth, well-oiled peeling, shutters parted sideways to reveal a startling view before them. And under.

  “Holy shit!” Mul shouted, looking down at his feet.

  The ship’s hull stretched below them, continuing down until it gave way to the endless fall to the bottom of the Labyrinth’s floor. In front of them there was nothing but open space and the occasional fluffy white and rainbow shimmering cloud, through which a couple of ships sailed through. And above their transparent sphere, was a ledge jutting out from the ship.

  “What do you think, uh?” Jarl asked.

  “Crystal…” Jul breathed, leaning over Nar with her arms clasped over his shoulders. “It’s amazing!”

  “That she is! Unfortunately, I can’t close the hatch with you guys here,” Jarl said. “So we can’t move… But look down there! Someone else is!”

  Nar leaned forward, to look in the direction he was pointing. Below them, several hundred feet down, another transparent sphere, looking like what Nar thought was the exact same as theirs, was zipping back and forth across a horizontal line etched across the ship.

  “That’s Gerthie, I think,” Jarl said. “Each gun has its own line, you see? You climb up, then you drop down to your own line, and then you move across it, on the metal rails. Then…”

  He pressed a few more buttons in a panel in front of him, in the center of the two handles, and the transparent orb around them came to life with lines, numbers, words and shapes.

  “Targets show up for you, and then…” he said, and groaning with effort, he pulled up on the handles, lifting the metal contraption from its housing. Outside, two, short barreled, twin tubes of metal appeared from under the sphere.

  “You shoot!” he said, grinning back at them. “You move as you need, and you aim as you need. Betty can point almost 180 degrees up and down.”

  Nar looked from the tubes in front of him, to the other gun, Gerthie, which was still dashing madly across its own line.

  “That looks really fast,” Jul said, also staring at Gerthie.

  “Yeah, that she is!” the undead said, giving the handles a loving tap. “It’s one of the reasons we Undeadz are the ones shooting these badass ladies! The death aether inside us keeps us as we are here, so we’re very resistant to all kinds of damage. And when fighting in these ladies, you’re put under a shit ton of G’s, man! Talk about crushing!”

  Jarl looked back at them, a mischievous grin dancing in his green lips.

  “You guys wanna see?”

  “See what?” Nar asked, frowning, and suddenly, he had a bad feeling.

  “It goes like this…” Jarl said, placing his hands around his face.

  Then, with a sickening crunch, he snapped his own neck, forcing his head to turn backwards. His hands dropped limp, and he collapsed against Mul.

  They screamed.

  Jarl opened his shining green eyes and burst out laughing, and from above, riotous, howling, and wheezing laughter tripped down the ladder.

  “What the fuck?” Mul asked, his voice taking a higher pitch.

  “It never fails!” Jarl said, holding the sides of his stomach as he cackled.

  Meanwhile, a sort of shadowy, dark energy seeped out from his broken neck, and slowly, and wetly, pushed his bones back into place, reversing whatever damage the undead had just done to himself.

  “It works a bit like HP, and physical damage doesn’t do shit to us,” Jarl explained, as his head slowly twisted back into position before their horrified eyes. “Even aether based attacks have trouble harming us, unless it’s holy aether of course.”

  Jarl tapped on the thick metal square under his seat, and Nar realized that the hum he had been hearing in the background seemed to emanate from it. And looking closely at that metal box, he also noticed that the yellow and red wires coming down the ladder plugged into it.

  “This thing is an aether inlet, and it charges Betty’s aether batteries,” the undead morsvar explained. “Electrical and fire aether flows into this thing, and it gets hoooot! Aether leaks everywhere in here!”

  “Crystal…” Jul whispered.

  “It’s alright! It doesn't do shit to us! It’s just like a snack!” he said, laughing and mimicking taking bites out of the thin air. “But for live ones like you guys? You’d melt in under 2 minutes!”

  “Really?” Mul asked. “Why do they make them like that?”

  “Cause it’s cheap!” Jarl declared proudly. “Cheap to make, and cheap and easy to fix. And since they can move across the whole side of the ship, you don’t need as many guns, yeah? We can cover more air! Of course, we don’t have the firepower of a Navy ship… But we handle ourselves well against anything because we can just let the guns sing! You’d need to disintegrate me if you wanted to kill me dead-dead!”

  “Right…” Mul said, pressing back against the transparent material of the sphere, to keep well away from the death aether leaking out of the undead’s broken neck.

  “Oh, yeah,” Jarl said, noticing Mul’s movement. “Don’t let that stuff touch you… It's kinda deadly for the living.”

  Nar looked away from Mul’s paling expression and tapped on the transparent material. It echoed dully under his knuckles.

  “Is this glass?” he asked.

  “Very, very strong glass,” Jarl said. “Takes a lot to break it, and there's a shield as well, so it's all good.”

  “Right…” Nar said, looking to the metal sphere a few feet to the right of theirs, its metal shutters enclosed around it. He tried to imagine himself, zipping at unimaginable speeds across those rails, shooting at beasts that could fly right up at him… And he shivered.

  I don’t like that…

  One thing was to fight out in the open, where he could move as he pleased. Another one was to be trapped in that death ball.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  “What happens if the rail breaks?” Mul asked, looking for a distraction from the swirling tendrils of darkness still emanating from the undead’s repairing neck.

  Jarl shrugged. “Keep shooting if you can. Sit tight and wait for it to end, and they’ll send a ship for you after everything dies down.”

  That only confirmed Nar’s desire to never find himself inside one of those guns during combat.

  “What’s that down there?” Jul suddenly asked, leaning forward to point downwards.

  Nar followed her finger. Amidst the gun rails, there was a handrailed, walkable section built against the ship's hull. And looking past it, Nar found several others, built at different levels and of varying lengths, amidst the gun rails. But before he could engage his [Sight] to look closer, the gun shutters closed, plunging them all into sudden darkness.

  “That… Is a little surprise for you kids,” Jarl said, his voice mischievous in the darkness, his green eyes glowing. “Don’t worry. You’ll know pretty soon!”

  He chuckled evilly, the raspy, almost breathless sound of it sending a chill down Nar’s spine.

  “Alright, let’s climb back up,” Jarl said. “If that wasn't our second warning today, I’d let you guys shoot Betty like I did Tuk. Just one shot isn't going to kill ya! But those wire suckers don’t bother with a third warning. They’ll just cut power to the whole deck, and then, no more fun for the whole day… And we Undeadz can’t take that!”

  Jul started climbing and Nar quickly followed after her. Up top, Tuk waved at them from one of the alcoves, his eyes dancing with mirth.

  “You knew that was going to happen!” Jul threw at him.

  “Of course!” Tuk said, grinning. “He did it to us too. Me, Jaz and Lim. Nearly shat ourselves.”

  “By that, he means that he screamed like a little kid, puked on my Betty and then passed out on it!” Jarl said.

  A roar of laughter came from the alcove where Tuk was peaking from, and his cheeks flushed a furious dark brown.

  “I mean…” Tuk said, then he shrugged. “Ah! Whatever!”

  Nar grinned up at Tuk. That did sound like the trugger.

  “You’re going to show them Brinye as well?” Tuk asked.

  “Yup!” Jarl said. “Follow me!”

  “Wait! I wanna come too!” Tuk shouted.

  The ring tosser climbed down from the alcove, of which Nar still had no idea what it looked like inside, and the four of them followed Jarl down the dark, flashing and colorful corridor.

  “Are we on the top deck of the ship?” Nar asked, staring up at the curving ceiling above their heads.

  “Deck 2,” Jarl said, lifting two fingers in the chaos of RGB lights, wires, and many others.

  Nar looked down as they passed another descending ladder. “Are there any guns on top of the ship too?”

  So far, all the gun ladders they’d passed through went down, and Nar assumed that those guns didn’t go up and over the ship. That meant that on the other side of the ship, there was a similar installation.

  “We have a few,” Jarl said. “But the top of the ship is protected differently. The bottom too.”

  And again, he looked back at them with a smirk. “You’ll see.”

  The undead stopped before another ladder, and motioned for them to follow him. Nar climbed down last, and found himself in another, but much larger, sphere. Rather than a skinny chair, there was a proper, comfortable looking chair propped up behind a set of much greater controls, and the hum coming from the much larger aether inlet was a lot more noticeable as well.

  “This is Brinye!” Jarl introduced them, lovingly passing a hand on the back of the chair. “Betty is a RAG, a Rapid Aether Gun, while this here is a HAC, a Heavy Aether Cannon. Betty’s a single target, anti-air gun, while this even more badass lady over here, triples as an anti-area, anti-air, as well as an armor piercing gun, depending on how she’s loaded up and configured.”

  The undead roaved the controls with a longing expression on his green eyes. “One day, I’ll fight alongside her… Just you wait, my darling. You and me, we’re gonna light the skies on fire…”

  Nar glanced at Tuk who grinned at him, even as he shook his head.

  “But that's not really why we're here,” Jarl said. “Look down and to the right!”

  Nar stared down at his feet, searching downwards alongside the hull of the ship. At first, he couldn’t spot whatever he was supposed to be looking for, and all he could find were more spheres going up and down, or zipping along the rails.

  “Is that it?” Jul asked. “That part there? There are no guns there.”

  “Bingo!” Jarl said.

  Then, calling the apprentices to gather by the glass, he pointed out a round, flat bulge on the side of the Scimitar. “That’s the cover of the Big One, the SHADBA, or Super Heavy Aether Dual Beam Artillery.”

  “How big is that thing?” Nar asked, following the contour of the gun’s flat cover.

  “The Big One’s huge!” Jarl said, spreading his arms wide. “It’s like, a few decks big! We could all fit inside one of its tubes and still have space for more!”

  Mul whistled and Jarl nodded seriously.

  “The Scimitar only has one SHADBA, and it only faces this way, so it's a starboard, broadside gun,” the gunner explained. “That means the Scimitar needs to be facing right in order to shoot it.”

  “And do you?” Nar asked. “Ever shoot it, I mean.”

  Jarl shook his head. “Almost never. SHADBAs are the kind of guns that you can’t just fire willy-nilly in the Outer Reaches. It's forbidden unless in extreme cases of self-defense. And even then, you need to be able to prove that you really didn’t have any other choice.”

  “Why?” Mul asked.

  “Because it's a ship-killing gun,” Jarl said, his tone sending shiver’s across Nar’s body. “If you’re not careful with it, the blast alone can vaporize any ships caught in the crossfire. Not to mention the actual aether beam, which can tear through anything besides battleship class shields.”

  The undead morsvar turned his eerie green eyes to the vast metal cover housing the Big One.

  “In my six years aboard, I’ve never even seen it,” he said. “Only engineering is allowed in there, and the Big Boss and Second Boss handle the gun’s maintenance and readiness, just the two of them… And the whole thing is controlled from the bridge. Though it can also be fired manually…”

  The man leaned against the glass. “I hope I’ll get to see it fire, one day… Not against a ship, of course. But sometimes, big beasts stray away into the Outer Reaches…”

  Tuk and Jul’s gulp was deafening in the sudden silence that followed Jarl’s words.

  “Why does the Scimitar even have it?” Mul asked. “Seems a bit much. For an apprentice-ship, I mean?”

  Jarl shrugged.

  “No idea to be honest. The Scimitar is a very, very old ship,” he said, still staring at the big metal cover with a lost expression. “Thousands of years old, you know? Who knows what it was originally built for? Could have been some kind of deep Labyrinth mission delver. Could have been a deep runner, or supplier, or it could have even been a frontline cruiser… Whatever it was, it definitely didn’t start out as an apprentice-ship. All of that stuff came after.”

  Nar tried to picture it. A gun that was several decks big, and one inside which they could all fit and still have space for more people…

  The power of something like that, he thought. I wonder how it compares to a Named Few…

  It was a strange thought, and he was startled by it.

  Is that the kind of power comparison we’re doing? A giant gun that can vaporize entire ships and the Named Few?

  Well, to be honest, he didn't know, but the way people talked about the Named Few… It was like they could perform miracles, so maybe that was the right comparison. And who knew, maybe that giant gun was still too weak to even match up against them.

  Mul sighed and looked away from the glass, staring at the controls instead.

  “Kinda surprised that the guns don’t just shoot by themselves,” he said, mostly to himself, and his words startled Jarl awake from his reverie.

  “Themselves?” he asked, dazed. “That would be automated targeting… And that's a big no-no!”

  “What? Why?” the brawler asked. “Even the damn toilets flush themselves in this ship.”

  “That's different!” Jarl said, folding his arms. “A toilet’s not going to try and kill you!”

  “What are you on about?” Tuk asked him.

  Jarl sighed. “I’m talking about AI. Artificial Intelligence. Machines that can think. Big Man… Why am I stuck with all the crappy talks today?”

  Mul frowned at him. “Again, toilets?”

  Tuk nodded. “Even the lifts move on their own, no?”

  Jarl chuckled. “Not like that, kids. That’z just programming, sensors and routines. I’m talking about real thinking machines. Like you and me. Listening. Talking. Thinking. Aware.”

  “Like sapients?” Nar asked.

  “Exactly like sapients!” Jarl said. “Story goes, the sapients of the far, flung past had gone and gotten lazy. They didn’t want to work anymore. They didn’t want to delve and fight either… So they made machines that could do all of that stuff for them. Cleaning. Cooking. Minding the kids. Flying ships. Delving the Labyrinth. Some people even had machine-lovers…”

  “Crystal, man,” Tuk whispered.

  “Yeah. I’m telling you! These machines had to be smart, and they were so like you and me, that at some point they demanded to be treated like Children of the Radiants too!”

  “Holy fuck…” Mul muttered.

  “And what happened?” Jul whispered.

  “They were denied, of course,” Jarl said, shrugging. “They were built by sapients. They had Bodies, and they had Minds that were aware of the Radiants and the System, but sapients can’t build Souls. In the end, they were just things, but of course, the machines didn’t like that…”

  “They fought us…” Nar said.

  Jarl nodded.

  “And half the Nexus burned. Gone. Reduced to ashes and broken shit,” he said. “All the guilds. All the delvers and all the combat classes. The Navy. The Named Few… Even some of the gods, if you believe it. Everyone had to fight to stop them, because we had built so many of them. And legend says, we almost lost.”

  “Crystal,” Jul whispered.

  “When did this happened?” Nar asked.

  “A long time ago,” Jarl said. “A very long, long time ago. Like, eras and eras ago… But the Automation Laws are still around, and they tell you what can be automated, and by how much. Sewers. Energy. Trains… That kind of stuff is okay. Guns? Not okay, no matter their size. And ships neither. The Church says the machines turned on us because they had no souls, and the Abyzzals got inside their minds in the Deep Deep. Infected them, and gave them the idea of demanding to be treated like Children of the Radiants, which then led to the war.”

  He grimaced. “Scary shit, eh? I much rather fight alongside my Bettie than see her moving and firing on her own. Can you imagine?”

  Nar shook his head alongside the others.

  But then again… What about the guardians in the B-Nex? He wondered. What about those spiders and the Raid Boss in the Ceremony? Those things were machines… And they were smart enough to kill us…

  “Anyways!” Jarl said, crashing through Nar’s train of thought. “That concludes the tour! Now who's up for some Dragon’s Breath? Big Man knows, I fucking need zome booze after all that!”

  “Booze?” Mul asked, his ears perking up.

  “Oh!” Tuk said, raising his hand into the air. “Me! Me!”

  “Uhhh…” Jul said.

  “Come on!” Tuk said, elbowing her. “You’ll like it!”

  “I warn ya, it's got fire aether in it!” Jarl said, laughing. “It’s got a real fucking kick!”

  “What?” Jul asked, growing pale.

  Tuk and Mul laughed as they followed Jarl out the gun and back up the ladder, knowing full well that the undead was just messing around with them.

  Or at least I hope so, Nar thought following after them. Maybe he’s not… He did say they eat the stuff, and Tuk and Mul are crazy enough to try just about anything.

  However, at the threshold between gun and ladder, he paused to look at the controls once more.

  Thinking machines…

  Guardians and spiders.

  There was something itching him from somewhere at the back of his mind… But he just couldn’t quite put his finger to it.

  “Nar, come on! Let’s go get some fire booze!” Tuk shouted.

  “Wait! You can’t drink aether!” Nar shouted, going pale at the thought of the two crazy idiots actually trying it, and he quickly rushed up the ladder.

  Behind him, the gun’s shutters slid closed, engulfing the gun’s controls in darkness.