“Still think we should wait,” Zea hissed.
“I normally agree with Zea,” Paula spoke up, “but they are going to come look at the repairs for our ship in an hour. No one is going to be on board, and that could mean nothing, or it could mean that they raise an alarm.”
“Yes,” Elana said. “It will look suspicious when there isn’t anyone onboard.
“We are going to try it,” I said. “Kasta, just order her to take you to the castle, and Eve will help with the rest.”
“Fuck yeah,” the android said, and then we changed direction so that we headed toward the hovercraft.
The Jotnar woman was sitting uneasily in her chair staring at the carrier, and she didn’t even notice us approach until we were all getting into the vehicle. She twisted her body around and barked at us, but then Kasta said something in a growling voice.
The driver shook her head urgently and then pointed at the carrier, but Kasta just repeated her words and shrugged as if she didn’t give two fucks about the woman’s objection. Then the woman shook her head, sighed, and pushed the button to activate the lift on the hovercraft.
I tried not to smile when the Jotnar woman turned around and began to drive away from the carrier. The speedometer on the dashboard moved up to sixty kilometers an hour, and the wind began to pull at our hair. This was much faster than walking, and she was going to take us right to the castle. King Uffe might not actually be inside at the moment, but it would be a good place to start our search.
Then the driver’s dashboard radio beeped, and I felt Zea tense in the seat next to me.
Fortunately, Kasta was sitting right next to the driver, and before the Jotnar woman could grab it, my wife snatched the receiver off the mount and brought it up to her face. The driver began to object, but Kasta hissed at her and raised her finger as if to tell her to wait a moment.
The wind passing over our heads prevented me from hearing more than a whisper of what Kasta heard, but I also couldn’t understand more than one out of every ten words the voice on the other end said. Kasta replied through the receiver, and I guessed she said “I don’t care. Get another car. My officers aren’t walking across the harbor,” and then she hung up the radio on the dashboard, looked at the pilot, growled a few words, and then leaned back more into her seat. The driver’s face was white, but she nodded before focusing on the path that cut through the various landing pads.
No one spoke for the five minutes it took for us to weave through the harbor. We passed three other hovercrafts while we drove, but other than the second one who had a driver that shook his fist at us, they paid us no mind.
Then we pulled away from the docking pads and turned onto what could only be called a highway. There were hundreds of hovercraft, repair trucks, and motorcycles speeding up and down the four lanes. Our driver didn’t seem impressed by the swarm of activity, so we all did our best to keep our eyes forward and our faces “Nordar Grumpy.”
The roads split up ahead of us, and the driver took the right offramp as a schooner class passenger vessel drifted over our heads. The ramp raised up off the ground so that it looked like we would almost touch the bottom hulls of the passing craft, but then it evened out and passed through an energy barrier.
We were in a tunnel now, and our driver increased her speed up to a hundred kilometers per hour. The speed made the lights on the sides of the wall change into hyphenated dashes of an amber color, and Kasta’s long blonde hair blew back in my face.
A bit of the tension in my shoulders melted away as we sped down the tunnel. Yeah, we were deeper in the battle fortress now, and the chances of us escaping were now next to nothing, but we were now a few steps closer to our goal.
The tunnel opened up into a city filled with buildings that stretched up from the base of the fortress to connect to the ceiling. Countless roads formed a complicated weave of traffic on the ground and up on elevated freeways. For a few moments, I was reminded of the dense cityscape on Trappist - 1e. The Jotnar city looked a bit like the city inside of the Odin Geirr, but the Vaish buildings were shorter, painted, cleaner, and there were parks of green trees and grass sporadically placed throughout the intersections. The Jotnar design was plain, drab, and somewhat depressing. They had no style, and the people moved down the streets with frowns plastered on their dour faces.
“And I thought the Vaish were grumpy,” Zea whispered in my ear when we stopped at an intersection so that a group of uniformed men and women could cross.
“The Vaish are grumpy.” Aasne was sitting behind us, and she leaned forward to whisper to us so that the driver couldn’t hear.
The intersection lights changed, and our hovercraft slid forward. I had thought that the city would only consist of the first cluster of buildings which I saw when we first exited the tunnel, but then there was a space of open construction that we drove through for another five minutes before coming to another cluster of massive buildings. I marveled again at how tall the buildings were, and then I noticed that there was a train running along the ceiling. It made sense to have some sort of mass transit in such a large fortress, but then I realized that this place was larger than Queen’s Hat.
At the end of the second city, the driver pulled a right onto another highway and then pushed the hovercraft up to a hundred kilometers an hour again. We only traveled that speed for a minute or so, and then I saw the top spires of what must have been King Uffe’s castle.
The Vaish castle was made out of mirrored metal. It looked like a work of art and was surrounded by hundreds of beautiful willow, maple, and oak trees. This Jotnar castle couldn’t have been any different if they tried, so I guessed that the design must have been purposely built with that difference in mind.
It was a squat structure that looked like something out of an old dark ages painting. The stones were carved out of a rough looking granite which seemed to absorb the lights of the station like a black hole would. It was probably three hundred meters wide at the front and twenty meters tall. The roof of the castle was molded and shaped to appear like a mob of wolves snarling at an invisible enemy descending from the sky. Massive stone wolves stood, crouched, and leapt on the various ramparts and shelves of the castle, and their shapes cast dark shadows down on the gardens surrounding the fortress.
The gardens were surprisingly lush given the way the rest of the fortress was organized. Large pine trees dotted the street up to the fortress, and a field of green grass replaced the metal floor. A few wooden gazebos dotted the landscape, and I saw groups of Jotnar people sitting around picnic tables while their children ran and played across the grass.
Then I saw the security gate once we turned the corner to access the main road into the castle.
It wasn’t much more than a checkpoint with a small building with a single motorized arm for a gate. There was way more security around the Vaish castle, and I knew we were eventually going to encounter guards, but I had hoped that we would be able to get up to the door of the castle before having to bluff our way through the soldiers.
The driver of our hovercraft pulled up to the gate and then leaned over to the guard. The man was wearing heavy armor with a decoration of wolves, and he had the kind of face that looked as if it had been carved into a suspicious frown. He asked a question of the driver, and his eyes seemed to narrow when she responded with a shrug.