Chapter 1

The Wizard Khurick Atorn has another bad portal trip. He had just picked himself up off the ground after arriving in his new world. He would find out later he was on the planet Menone. He realized his God still supported him. He has a new mission here. His new world has a fledgling aviation industry. This includes specialized hot air balloons with steam propulsion.

He had just left several families behind him on Chaos. He loved every one of his women, his sons and daughters. However, his God takes precedence over all other things. Loditte had always moved him on when he wanted or needed Khurick someplace else. For pay, Khurick received great powers and excellent longevity.

Loditte obviously had a ‘new’ plan for Khurick. He had been a troubleshooter on his home world, Rukac, and then other worlds; the last world was Planet Chaos. He was most likely going to be a troubleshooter here, wherever ‘here’ may be.

The planet Chaos, where he had been for the last 16 years, ad been a complete mess. It was a world stuck in the dark ages. His home planet, Rukac, was, and probably still is, a very advanced civilization blessed by the 13 gods.

He knew this was not either Rukac, Chaos, or any other planet he had visited for that matter. The orange-like appearance of the sun and the turquoise sky gave it away. He also felt heavier than usual now. He put his forefinger and thumb close to each other and tested it for power. He watched the sparks travel between the two appendages. He still had his core and some power, although he felt it was still weak from the transition to here.

He could port a short distance even now. He did need a destination, though. Without a destination in mind, he had no idea where he could go. Transferring that way was how you could find yourself locked inside a tree or mountain. He was someplace in the country and not on a road or even a game trail.

Khurick felt oddly compelled to head due East, so he began using his legs to move that way.

He’d had a similar experience when he’d arrived on planet Chaos. He had already figured out that during this traveling time for him. Khurick could re-acclimatize. He could mentally adjust to a new world.

He knew he would miss his four families on Chaos. At 153 years old, he was not new to losing families as he moved along through life. Ordinary people came and went through his life. At least he knew his Chaosian women were well set up and stable where they were.

He walked for three days and was looking forward to meeting new people and seeing new things and vistas. He saw a dark line to the East. As he got closer the next several hours, he decided it was a line of tall, old-growth trees. As he got nearer, he kept thinking they were taller and taller.

Raey

Raey Irnie had worked hard the past two days disposing of all the Kozza bodies and their garbage over the cliff. She had been captured by a band of Kozza bandits. Her ship had been stopped, and she was kidnapped from her small airship over a year ago. She had just happily murdered every one of the psychopathic rapist scum.

They had captured her specifically to replace their old engineer. There were 51 bandits and 12 Kozza whores that had lived here in this small pirate enclave.

She thought of them more as bandits. That’s because the term pirate bestowed a certain cache hinting at some warped form of respect. At least pirates had a few rules and morals. The Kozza bandits in question had none at all. They were half-men, a lower form of life.

To make it worse, these bandits come from halfway around the world, and they are entirely different than any people she has ever met. She could not begin to comprehend their culture. They were so fucked up she could barely do the things they wanted that were within her abilities.

Raey had recently decided to murder them all. She had been at wit’s end for months. Several times the little bandits had attempted to rape her. It was a hellish existence for her. The attempted rapes never went well for them or for her.

Raey had been taught self-defense, and they were forbidden by their boss, the use of weapons on her. They really needed her. She was their one and only engineer; she had been vital to their very existence.

Raey gave as good as she got in the fights. She must have smelled like sex candy to the Kozza as they repeatedly tried to assault her sexually. Every time they attacked her, it left everyone bruised and battered for days.

The ignominy was that every time they took their clothes off, she could not help herself. Raey would burst out laughing. She laughed and pointed at their little Peters; Raey is over two meters tall. She’s not fat, but she’s much more fit than the little red-furred Kozza. The Kozza men were about 1.4 meters tall and weighed around half what she weighed.

They were cruel and nasty little shits, more monkey than man. Her laughter brought out the savagery in them, and the fight would be on. They were so proud of their little Peters.

Her size and other differences made her very exotic to the half-men. They all wanted to climb on top of her and spurt themselves into her. She doubted they were close enough, humanly, to even create a baby.

Unfortunately, she could not stop herself laughing at their Peter size. That always resulted in a giant free-for-all. No single Kozza was able to subdue her, so it ended up as a great battle. Raey against five or more of the horny little half-men with their little Peters sticking out. It would be funny if she didn’t get roughed up every time.

They dare not kill her, as she was their only airship’s engineer and blacksmith. The Kozza are dumb as rocks. They are barely capable of maintaining their crude, primitive way of living.

She’d assembled the steam engine that powered the extraordinary new airship. She built the engineering portion of it and kept things running for them. She also learned from them how to construct their Kozza style of airship hulls. They used a grass they called cane for the hulls.

Above their enclave and across a hundred meters of giant trees was a massive stand of cane.

They built a new rounded shape for the hull from cane. Being dumb as rocks, they were savants when it came to building hulls. They were known for building ocean-going ships from cane.

Raey had added her own brilliant addition to the double-ended round hull. Most flying vessels used two round balloons for lift. One cigar-shaped balloon would be faster than having the conventional two balloons that are round and fat.

a Cigar-shaped balloon made controlling it easier. Controlling the fore and aft ballasting will be simplified. It also meant it only required one heat source to inflate it. Her airship design was much more capable of flying in rough winds, too.

The Kozza have a different way of making ship hulls. They were a race of excellent sailors. If they could do one thing, it was to sail waterborne ships and build them. They had stolen an airship somewhere and adapted its parts to their cane-based hull design.

They built hulls using the grass called cane. When the cane was cut and dried out, it was exceptionally lightweight and super strong. It was more than strong enough to build truly marvelous ship hulls.

They had begun by building the typical human sausage shaped hull with the two hot air balloons to lift the airship. They substituted cane for wood. They’d used the boilers, propeller, and other ship parts from their stolen airship. They had completed their small airship before she’d even arrived here.

It was a better hull design than the human constructed ship, she had to admit. Using cane rather than wood planks like humans did was tricky. Yet, the results of using cane showed it may have fantastic promise.

They needed her to build them a newer, larger, and faster airship. To create an actual pirate ship to outshine all other airships. Their small size airship had been a good experiment. Unfortunately, it could not store enough water or fuel for the steam boilers and have much space for cargo, too.

They had constructed the new hull from the unique grass cane they coveted so much. The cane was tied together with specially made lashings.

The lashings were made from the same grass that provided the strong cane used for the hull. Making the lashings was one of their biggest secrets. Special tools and chemicals were used to make the lashings. Once tied to the cane frame structural parts of the hull, they became chemically bonded. When completely finished, it became one big unified hull. It was so tough she knew only an explosion or a fire could destroy it.

Soaked in a compound, they make themselves. The green lashings and cane together created an almost indestructible airship. The lashings once cured, took all the individual parts and turned it into one solid thing, it was monocoque.

Some of the Kozza secrets were in how they harvested the tall grass, and when.

The new, larger airship used the cane to build a second, larger, more rounded sausage-like form. This form was for a single giant hot air balloon. One long balloon would replace the twin balloons. It was purpose-built to sit above the hull; it replaced the twin balloons. It cut down on drag both in the hull and from the more rounded shape of the balloon.

The new single balloon was assembled using a lattice of split cane. A silk cloth was stitched over the form. It was then treated so it did not leak air. It was stronger and more streamlined than two round balloons.

The village that the Kozza lived in was made of round grass huts that had canvas covers over them. Only Raey’s home was different. She lived in a cavern. The cavern was more than a home. It housed her forge and engineering tools and supplies. The Kozza almost never went into the cave. They were afraid of it for some reason.

She looked out at the airship that she had designed and had built with the Kozza. It was a completely new concept. They had tested the airship the previous day. It had worked better than expected. The Kozza was soon getting prepared to go out raiding. She had no more use for them. Her airship was finished, and she was ready to steal it. She could not allow them to raid her own people using it. That was a grave consideration.

That’s when she’d decided to poison them. She had slipped into the cooking hut and put the sweet-tasting powdered flux she had mixed into the stew. Used as a welding flux, she knew it was also a tasteless poison. Later, a slattern brought a bowl of poisoned stew for her. She ignored it.

Raey enjoyed listening to their moans and cries as they got sick and barfed everywhere. Later on, they crapped themselves and died very painfully. It took her two days to pitch their bodies all over the cliff and clean the place up. Then she threw away the residue and garbage left behind by the fifty-plus half-ling animals.

The Kozza are animals; they are one step sideways from a chimpanzee. How she hated looking at their flat faces and bad teeth. Their body odor and the smell of their breath would be in her mind for the rest of her life.

She had been a little hasty. She had been dead set on killing them all, but she could not stand them a moment longer.

She had not considered one problem, she could not fly the new airship by herself alone. Ultimately, that mattered little. She was not going to sit by and let them kill and rape her kind indiscriminately. She was also not putting up with one more bout of them manhandling her body.

Raey sat and sobbed as she thought about her immediate future. What was she going to do marooned here and alone? She started thinking about building a small cutter using their cane-building technique.

It came down to one person not being able to control the airship alone.

Khurick

Khurick had been picking his way through tall grass that resembled cornstalks. They were almost 5 meters tall and dry. Each stalk has a fan shaped bloom at the very top containing countless flowers with pollen. He was making slow headway through the stuff. It was pretty noisy, and there was a steady shower of pollen falling on him as he jostled his way through the cane.

This was making him feel uneasy. He had one of his wands in his right hand. This was in case he came upon a great cat or wolf or whatever other dreadful creature exists here. He knew nothing about this world or its dangers. He could be plucked from the ground by a giant flying reptile or pulled down into a monster spider nest. He did not know it, but that last thought was closer to the truth than he realized. At least on Chaos, he had a relative expectation of safety.

What was making him more nervous, was he had his senses extended out as far as he could. He could sure have used his familiar Sally here. She had been with him nine years before she went out one day and just didn’t come back again. He wished for another avian familiar. It didn’t have to be a crow, but Sally was the best familiar he had had.

Eventually, he came to the end of the tall grass. He performed a spell to rid himself of the pollen and dust from the field. The field ended at the start of the great forest he had seen.

He thought, ‘Oh great, now I get bears and goblins to worry about.’ He could see the forest was a stand of woods on the East side of the tall grass. He saw it stopped only a hundred meters away. He headed for the lightest part and approached the thin edge of the forest carefully. It was lucky he did. It ended in a small rocky ledge. He was on the precipice of a vast drop-off. He was looking down over the lip of a huge canyon.

He looked up and down the canyon. Off to the North, he detected an odd sight. There was a shelf sticking out near the top. There were two artificial things that could only be ships. They are parked there. They were complex looking but he figured they were some type of crude flying vehicles. They were resting in cradles.

He did not get near enough for a good look; he was losing the light. The trees were too crowded to pitch his large tent on. He laid out a waterproof linen ground cloth between trees and started a mattress filling with air.

He pulled out a couple of travel crackers and cheese for his evening meal. He pulled out a wineskin with his own rosé wine from Chaos inside the bottle. He had a tasty, if sparse, evening meal before setting his wards for the night. Then he pulled out a wool blanket and lay down.

He woke to the sound of songbirds. He hoped they were not vampire blood suckers and laughed to himself. He made a cup of black tea and munched on a nice pear. He tossed the pear core into the woods. Then he put his things away and restarted his travels North around the canyon rim.

Sometime later, he was close enough to get a better look at the balloon air vessels. The ship’s hull on the larger ship looked constructed of the cornstalk things. The cornstalk things he saw in the field immediately west of the trees. The other smaller ship has two small, saggy balloons. That one looked sad.

The bigger ship had a hull made of that grass. They were evidently tied together in some way to make the different parts of the ship. It had a balloon above it that was longer than the ship’s hull. He saw what looked to be three small cannons on each side of the ship.

‘What have I stumbled upon?’ I walked back and forth a couple times. I did not see any movement, and it was getting close to noon now. I did find a rope ladder down from here. It was hidden in some bushes. I sat for a couple hours and did not see a soul. It must be abandoned.

I started down on the ladder. It was a long slog down the less-than-well-made rope ladder. The rungs were made from stalks of corn-like grass. Surprisingly, they held my weight just fine.

When I got off, I started poking my head in each hut I passed. Nobody was home; they each held an ungodly stink. At the southern end of the camp, I saw a dark maw; it was the mouth of a cave. As I got closer, I sensed someone was inside.

“Hello, is anyone home?”

I had my small wand in my hand, just in case, and I had conjured a shield as well.

Raey

Raey was in the back of the cave. She had removed a copper valve several days before from the big ship. She was using it as an example to make a new valve from bronze. Copper was simply not suitable for this purpose. After many heating and cooling cycles, copper would begin to crack and then fail when you least wanted it to.

The Kozza had stolen an old ship, and she had been remodeling its parts and reinstalling them for some time. This particular valve controlled the hot air coming from the lift heater to the balloon. She hoped this was the final piece of the puzzle. The boiler, steam engine, and lift heater she was modifying were from the smaller stolen ship.

Raey hoped she could rebuild enough of the smaller ship to be able to single-hand it.

Her other, newly rebuilt ship was outside, looking quite sad. She had no idea what to do with it.

Raey had removed all the hardware from the Kozzas’ original stolen ship. The hull had been taken apart by them, and the wood was stored in the cave on the side. They could take things apart well enough. Putting machinery together was beyond their feeble brains.

She continued using the emery paper on the valve shaft handle. It had corroded some, and she wanted it to open and close freely and easily when the wheel was turned.

She was going over the Kozzas’ recent history.

The Kozza came eastwards to Dobraz by sailing here in a sailing ship. They had crashed on rocks and stumbled ashore. The group had stolen their first airship, not knowing how to sail it. They had kept the existing engineer captive for months after murdering the crew. Then, later, one of the manic Kozza killed the engineer in one of their psycho rages. The Kozza were good at having their sudden rages.

That’s why they had to capture her. They were cunning thieves and were good at fabricating the grass parts of the new ship. They are utter dolts when it comes to building or operating steam and machinery. They had killed the original engineer, after all. They needed a new engineer.

Raey heard someone speak but had no idea what they said. Her heart jumped into her throat, and she was instantly alert and frightened. It was a male voice.

She headed for the entrance when it darkened, and a large man was standing there near the cave mouth. Thankfully, he looked entirely human. She realized he was a hunk, even if his head was hairless and bald. His clothing was tailored and made of fine cloth.