by Booth, John
The guard stopped speaking as I turned back to the second attacker. It was hard to stop myself from tearing him to pieces. Tendrils of magic reached out for him and I struggled to pull them back. I stripped the man’s weapons and electronics from his body with a wave of the hand. His torso twitched violently as I wasn’t very gentle about it.
He floated from the ground in a vertical position so I could look him in the eyes. The moaning stopped and he looked at me with cold eyes. If he had any fear, it didn’t show.
“You just killed a man I liked a great deal.”
He spat at me. It was converted to steam before it travelled two inches. Some of the superheated gas flew back in his face and he flinched.
“Who are you?”
He said something in a language I couldn’t understand and though it pained me to do it, I put a finger to his forehead and learnt his language. What he had said was a string of numbers.
“Who ordered you to kill me?” I asked in his language and his eyes widened as he took in what I’d done when I touched his head.
“My number is 4125690. My rank is Weapons Specialist First Class.”
“Not interested. No one has declared war and I acknowledge no treaty between your people and mine. You’re just a killer, not a soldier.”
“My number is 4125690. My rank is Weapons Specialist First Class.”
That did it. My anger took control.
“Then let’s go and have it out with your commanding officers.”
His image bounced across the hopscotch court in my head and his body followed it, as did I a second later.
21. The Fedre
Searchlights pointed at me from all directions and for a few seconds I was blind. My shield was battered by hundreds of bullets, many exploding as they hit. Putting filters over my eyes reduced the glare, but smoke and explosions surrounded me so things weren’t much better. I switched to magical sight and was astounded to find I was in a room the size of a football field. The ceiling was a hundred yards above me, and that’s where the searchlights were mounted. They were electronically controlled and I pushed them aside, destroying their motors.
Most of the guns firing at me were also remotely controlled. I squeezed their barrels creating backfires that silenced them. A squad of about fifty men were firing heavier weaponry, the same launchers as the soldiers had used on Salice. Ignoring the continuing barrage, I took the time to examine them. They were actually energy weapons. The tubes generated a ball of plasma as a projectile. I didn’t want to kill the men holding the launchers so I tried melting their weapon’s electronics. The room became eerily silent as the last of the weapons died.
As the smoke drifted away, I saw what was left of the man I had hopped here. He had been cut to pieces by guns in the ceiling. Ricocheting blast from the energy weapons had set his clothing on fire and there was a smell of roasted meat wafting across the room. It was a smell I was encountering far too often these days.
The leader of the squad shouted orders at his men and they took the guns from their belts. Angry that another man was dead for no reason, I melted the weapons in their hands. Men screamed in agony, because when I say melted I did it the hard way with heat.
“Take me to your leader,” I ordered the man leading the squad. Even though he’d been wearing gloves, his right hand was badly burned. But I’d used magic in my order and he staggered towards an exit, ignoring the pain in his hand.
Machine gun fire ripped into him as he stepped through the door. It seemed these people did not take prisoners or for that matter ask questions before they killed. As I entered the corridor, a barrage of grenades bounced towards me. I channeled their blast back at the throwers and the way was clear. It was difficult to avoid body parts on the floor. I gave my shoes extra grip to avoid slipping in the blood.
The way was clear, though the corridor pulsed with green light and a warning klaxon blared out unabated. What looked like lift doors came into view. The words ‘Lock Down’ flashed above them in the language I’d learned from the soldier. This was becoming tiresome. Checking my energy reserves, I found them hardly touched. I had so much magic now it was difficult to quantify in words. The words I was probably looking for were ‘more than enough’.
Forcing the doors open, I looked up and then down the shaft. It seemed to go in both directions as far as the eye could see. And my eyes could see a long way. This was not good. People in charge were usually found at the top of a building, but that was civilian thinking. A soldier would probably see the deepest bunker as the safest place for High Command. Stepping into the shaft, I allowed myself to drop.
Half an hour later I touched bottom and discovered I was wrong. The basement was filled with heavy machinery, not High Command. I hopped back to where I dropped into the shaft. The klaxons were silent, only the green lights still flashed and there was absolutely no one in sight. Stepping back into the shaft I shot upwards, hoping I was closer to the top than the bottom.
A hundred floors or so up, I approached the lift. Cutting a hole through its bottom, I flew in and found the lift doors open. A sign said ‘Command Floor’ so I figured I must have arrived. There were no flashing green lights, so maybe they had cancelled the alert.
The corridor went straight out from the lift to a pair of plain metal doors. When I approached, the doors slid open silently to reveal a small square room. On the other side white plastic curtaining obscured whatever was behind it.
“Come into my parlor, said the spider to the fly,” I whispered. This room had trap written all over it in big letters. On the other hand, the only way I was going to get anywhere was to enter it. Weighing up the evidence before me, particularly the soldiers inability to do anything about my magic, I decided to spring it. Taking a deep breath, I stepped into the room with my shield operating at maximum power.
The doors slid shut behind me and I felt an unexpected drain on the shield. The more magic I poured into it, the more vanished. There was no immediate danger because my reserves of magic were phenomenal.
Looking inside myself revealed something strange. Absolutely no magic was flowing in to replenish my reserves. But magic permeated the multiverse. How could there be a place where magic wasn’t?
The plastic curtain rolled up into the ceiling. Behind it was a thick transparent wall and behind the wall, three men in very grand military uniforms were looking at me with something akin to contempt.
I tried to smash the glass, but my magic vanished before it reached it. The man in the center of the group laughed.
“The faster you use your magic, the sooner you will die. But don’t let me stop you.”
Now that was information I could use. I pulled back my shield to a low level of protection and felt the drain on me drop dramatically.
He nodded as he looked at something I couldn’t see. “You are brighter than most of your kind who end up here. It will do you no good though. Your death is inevitable.”
Time to extract some more information, if he would let me. I couldn’t see that I was in any danger. All they had done was neutralize my attack. “Why did you send your men against me? I pose no threat to technology based worlds.”
“The Fedre are soldiers. Your crimes or otherwise are no concern of ours. You are arrogant to believe we might care. The trouble with all wizards is that you think you can resolve everything with the snap of your fingers. Look how easy it was to lure you into a trap.”
I tried to hop to the other side of the screen. As I suspected, it didn’t work. This was something like the magic the Knights of Justice had used to block my powers, though it didn’t feel like they were using any kind of magic.
Their leader had some kind of monitor on me because he laughed again. “Hopping won’t work. You’re trapped like a fly in amber. Our generator suck the magic out of space itself and it is absorbing yours every time you use it. He pointed to the walls of the room and I noticed there were arrays of small round holes in them. “Guns. When you are weak enough we will shoot
you and there will be one less wizard in the universe to bother the rest of us.”
“When I escape I shall punish the Fedre for this.”
He stopped laughing and his eyes stared at me with pure hatred. “You are not the first to say that, nor will you be the last. Wizards can hardly carry more than a rucksack through hop space and yet your arrogance is breathtaking. I have a thousand space ships ready to launch on this base, any three of which could destroy a planet and eliminate an entire civilization. And you are trying to threaten me?”
“Last chance, whatever your name is. Let me go and we can call it even. Otherwise I shall destroy this base and all your ships.”
Okay, I didn’t have a clue how to escape from the trap I’d walked into. On the other hand, I didn’t want my last words to be, ‘pretty please, let me go and I promise to be a very good boy from now on.’
“General Siago Mantoyot. When I come back to watch you die you may beg me to let you go. Make sure you get my name right when you beg.”
Damn, he was going to give me the chance to plead later, and I just might if things didn’t go well. I could die here.
The General walked away and the two men flanking him moved closer together. I couldn’t see what they were looking at, but as a fan of science fiction, I suspected they had projected information I couldn’t see. I sat cross legged on the floor, dropped my shield to the lowest I felt comfortable with and closed my eyes.
The Fedre were not gods, nor were they infallible. I regularly transported Mr. Griffith’s bus through Hop Space fully laden with people or goods. I could only do it if the bus was in motion, but it was something I knew about magic that they didn’t.
I opened my eyes and used my magical sight to view the room beyond in close up. Two soldiers at the far end of the room carried those rocket launcher things. They stood at attention like bookends protecting the men in front of the transparent panel.
It struck me that I was using magic sight beyond the confines of the trap. How was that possible? I used the sight again, this time to look for traces of magic. There was none inside this room, but in the room beyond there was a mist of magic, thinnest nearest to me, but getting close to normal levels where the two soldiers stood.
Magic permeates the multiverse. Some of us can absorb that magic and then use it to make things that are real, like heat, electricity, and the manipulation of matter. They called people who could do that, wizards. I had proved against the Knights that I could extrude pure magic from my body and use it to destroy their anti-magic swords and amour.
I tried to create a sword out of pure magic and the magic whipped away from me as though by a hurricane. One of the two officers smirked at me and waved his finger as if I was being a naughty child.
When I fought the Braton, I had controlled magic beyond my body, magic I was no longer touching that had already passed through their shields.
That was a revelation. I could control magic outside me. Not the magic in my reserves; the pure stuff out there drifting in the world. Of course, it was diffuse and weak, but I could control it and that was how my magic sight worked. About the only place I could ever have worked that out was in a room devoid of magic. After all, you don’t really think about the air you breathe until it’s taken away.
Opening my eyes, I used the magic in the room beyond to form into what amounted to a mirror, a reflection of the officers and the transparent wall as it appeared through magic sight.
From their side, many displays were visible. The words were in mirror writing and I did a complicated shift of vision so I could read them. I was spilling a lot of magic, my mind still trying to send my magic out, but then I still held an enormous amount in reserve.
There was nothing I could see that I could use. I shifted the mirror to look at what was on the right side of the wall. Their room was a lot bigger than mine in that direction. There were physical controls on the wall. Focusing in, I was able to read a sign saying ‘Generator Controls’. There were hundreds of them.
One thing I’ve learned from watching films is that there is always an emergency cut-off if a device gets out of control. You see them in schools and factories, so they must exist everywhere. I looked for a large control, like a big red lever or button and spotted nothing. The mirror resolution wasn’t good enough to read the labels on the controls. There was very little magic near the wall to help.
‘Flashing green lights.’ These people used green the way Earth uses red. That was a bit strange. Salice also used red for danger as it was the color of blood and fire. But maybe I should look for green. I went back to the mirror and saw the big green button immediately. It stood out like a sore thumb now I knew what to look for.
Okay, I had an escape plan. Switch the machine off and then do my wizard thing. That General was going to be very sorry. There was only one fly left in the ointment. How the heck was I going to press the button?
The magic available outside was far too weak to affect anything physical. Even if I had the power to throw something at the switch from a location where there was more magic, what were my chances of actually hitting it? So close to zero it wasn’t worth considering.
What could I do with almost no power? Apart from look at things, there wasn’t much else. I stared through the wall in frustration. If I could collect the power to take one of the guards’ launcher things off them I could shoot it, but I didn’t have the power to press the fire button, let alone pick it up and aim it.
Getting to my feet, I banged on the wall getting everyone’s attention. The two guards lifted their launchers and pointed them at me. I’d just remembered the one thing a wizard could do that required almost no power.
“Shoot the large green button.” I commanded the guard on the right. He was nearest. I had already gathered what magic I could find out there around his head.
I hoped there would be enough.
22. Insanity
The soldier did as I commanded him. As he changed the aim of his weapon to the button, his colleague shouted something at him and the two officers turned round. The flash of his weapon was followed by an almighty explosion that flung us off our feet and cracked the thick transparent wall in front of me. Magic flowed into the room and I hopped through the wall into chaos and slaughter.
The two officers had been killed by the blast; no living creature could survive the contortions their bodies were in. The soldiers were either unconscious or dead and I cared little for which one it was. They were no longer an obstacle in achieving my goal. There was a gaping hole where the control wall had been, revealing the outlines of what looked like a giant electric motor. Electricity sparked across its surface in mini lightning bolts. Thick cables wrapped an inner core of gleaming metal that stuck out east and west.
Looking at the core, I converted its metal from solid to liquid and then let it change back to metal a few moments later. If the Fedre ever managed to rebuild this particular machine it would be a miracle of the first order.
The flashing green lights had returned along with the scream of klaxons. I stepped over the soldier who saved me to reach the door beyond. When it didn’t open I broke it in two and stepped into a hail of machine gun fire.
Giving the shield a property akin to rubber, the shells fired at me were flung back at my attackers with identical, but reversed velocities. Screams followed as many hit those that fired. My anger threatened to overwhelm me as I stepped over dead and dying to walk up the hundred foot wide metal stairs in front of me. They ended at an enormous viewing platform. The General was there waiting for me, standing with his hands clasped behind his back, staring at me with infinite contempt. That fed the anger inside me. I wanted vengeance and I wanted him to plead for his life on his knees.
The soldiers at his side aimed their launchers at me. I threw them forward with a wave of my hand and they fell from the platform. Stepping forward, I watched them scream as they fell.
That was when I discovered we were on a spaceship, or perhaps it was a space statio
n. The viewing platform opened onto space. Arms a mile wide spread out from the buildings base like the spokes of a wheel. Where we stood was the top of the hub of that wheel.
Spaceships miles across dwarfed the spokes they were tethered too. The falling men passed through some kind of force field and their screams died. I watched their death rattles as the vacuum of space took them.
“General Siago Mantoyot, I have come to destroy your base, as you said earlier, with a click of my fingers. Is there anywhere in particular you would like me to start?”
If the General knew he was defeated, he gave no sign. In fact, he laughed and infuriated me further.
“The Fedre hold fourteen thousand worlds together. Prevent them from destroying each other by creating law and generating order. This base is beyond the power of any wizard to destroy, but even if you could we have more than one base. We are the police force for over fourteen thousand worlds and are not easily frightened.”
I looked down and focused my magic into a molecular blade and cut through one of the spokes below. That one act used up more magic than I used in my final fight with Bronwyn, but I still had plenty in reserve.
For long moments it looked as though I had done nothing. My enhanced sight showed vast discharges of oxygen and broken metal, but nothing else. Then ever so slowly the severed spoke and the ships tethered to it began to drift in slow motion towards the spoke to the left.
The General’s composure fell away as he saw what I had accomplished and he gasped in horror.
“There are two million people in that module alone. The deaths of all those men, women and children will be on your hands.”
I ought to have been bothered by that. Killing people was something I despised. But all I wanted to do at that moment was to bring this man to his knees and hear him beg for mercy. To give apologies for killing a man I was proud to call my friend. A part of my mind fretted at me and I silenced it before it made me think again. There was still a question I wanted an answer to.
