Thirty Nine
The new ship was ready when I awoke the next morning.
I'd had it created in the sea nearest the slaver king's palace, and holding far enough underwater to not be seen. I took the girls and the mages with me, and we checked it out. It was a space ship, having a bridge and engine room as any would, but it also wasn’t.
It was not much more than a large modern building laid out on along the ground instead of up, with no windows. It was based on army barracks, modified for family use, so extended families were each allocated to one. Those without families were grouped up for a barracks. Each person had their own sleeping alcove, arranged like bunk beds three high.
On the lowest deck, which resembled an open field, complete with dig-able dirt, and grass, were areas for each families' livestock. The deck above was storage areas for belongings, and the one above that was for specific buildings and structures which might be too difficult to reproduce when they arrived at where they ended up. Taking everyone's house was going too far. But with examples of the typical house structures, mages would be able to rehouse everyone in a reasonable timescale. At least, I hoped they would.
The ship already had food stocks, and wood for cooking fires. I'd used my knowledge of where else in the world food basics existed, and included the food as part of fitting out after the main construction was done.
After an hour checking the ship over, the others spread out to cover an area of the ship, waiting for the first arrivals.
I moved to the entrance of the slaver king's palace, and walked in past the guards which were now there. No-one tried to stop me, but I felt their gaze as they followed me in. The king was on his throne, and smiled as he saw me approaching.
"So, you've come to erect my wall?"
"I have."
"I expected you to refuse."
"I know. But there really is no reason to refuse you."
His grin grew wider, and he clapped loudly.
An older woman entered, carrying a large crystal ball. Behind her was an old man. The two stopped at a table, and the woman seated herself, while the man stood next to her. The king rose, and waved me over there.
"When you're ready," said the king, to me, smirking now.
He thought he'd won something, but this wasn’t going his way, even though he didn’t know it yet.
I closed my eyes to give him the impression I was concentrating, sought out all the people I’d already tagged, and put walls around them. Most of them were not moving around, and the few who were quickly bounced off it, and stopped moving.
For the first time, I opened up mind speak with all those who'd just fallen over.
"Please do not be alarmed. Magic is being used to protect you. Please stay where you are. Scratch your nose if you heard this."
All of them scratched their nose, although most of them still looked alarmed. Now came the hard part.
I picked a mage couple, the mage in a mage compound, and the other with their kids in the slave hostage room they lived in, added in all their belongings, and prepared to move them. I opened mind speak to each of them.
"Please do not be alarmed. You are about to be moved to safety using magic. Where you're going will be very strange, but someone will be there shortly to help you adjust. Please stay still."
They all looked alarmed, but they all stilled. I moved them to one of the barracks on the ship, and their belongings into a storage area. Jen was there to greet them, and I looked in just long enough to ensure they were alright, and listening to what she was saying. I dropped the walls around where they'd been.
Now I needed to step it up another level. The message was recorded into magic, and the steps were repeated with another magic couple. My tagging had an order to it, and the magic had the intent established to work the list automatically. Group up, gather belongings, move, drop walls. Repeat. But I had to adjust the order slightly, so the two here would be last.
It was going to be too fast for the others to keep up, but the moves were being done systematically, so no group was left without being greeted for more than a few minutes. Time was important here, since at some point people vanishing was going to be noticed, and in any case, I suspected the executions were already planned for as soon as the kingdom protection wall was up.
I monitored the moves for nearly a minute, and brought my awareness back to the throne room. Still with eyes closed, I looked around. The king was getting impatient. The Oracle and the mage were calm, and looking at me.
The wall to keep the kingdom isolated wasn’t particularly hard to erect, but it was long, running from the sea through the center of the killing fields, from each end, through an area of foot hills around the mountain areas. This left the kingdom with some major forest areas.
My eyes opened, I looked at the king, and nodded.
"Check," he commanded.
The man closed his eyes, and I heard him pass a message to test the wall to someone on one of the beaches. The ball lit up, showing the person walking forward, until this person bounced off the wall, and fell down. Just to add to it, I picked up a tree trunk not far away, on the other side of the wall, and threw it into it. The trunk bounced off.
I looked over at the king, and he nodded. The mage repeated this with someone on the other beach, and we repeated the test. This went on for some time, with people spread all along the boundary of the kingdom, although several people ended up on the wrong side and had to be turned around, and later moved onto the correct side.
While all this was going on, I was monitoring the movement of people, which proceeded at a manageable pace. The magic came to an end as the oracle and mage were leaving the room, but the king caught sight of them vanishing before they left.
He eyes went to me, anger on his face.
"What have you done?"
Forty
It's an interesting experience standing there, while large men beat on you with an assortment of melee weapons.
I let them do their worse for a while, watching the king go slowly purple at their inability to kill me. As it slowly became boring, I increased the bounce nature of the wall around me, and men started flying around the room after whatever weapon they struck my wall with made contact.
The king made no effort to call anyone off, and slowly the number of armsmen began to increase, as flunkeys called them in.
Finally, I walked over to the throne the king was once again sitting on, and threw everyone still on their feet to the walls, and held them there. I looked the king in the eyes.
"I'm not here to fight with you. If you really want a fight, it will be a quick death. You got what you really wanted, which was mages removed from your kingdom, and other mages prevented from entering. Be thankful I didn't kill you in the process. I haven’t always been this charitable."
I waited for him to say something, but he didn’t.
"Think about how you want to see a more permanent solution to the problems this world faces. I'll be calling a meeting of leaders soon. I suggest you be ready to talk amiably, because some of them will be mages, and as a non-mage, you will be under my protection for the meeting. Pray I decide to keep protecting you for the whole meeting."
"You wouldn't dare…"
"Yes I would. I've killed leaders already, including the king of my own people. Don't make me angry. It's way too easy for me to kill you if you make me angry."
He frowned at me. The men against the walls flew across the room to smash into the opposite wall, and all of them ended out cold on the floor. The frown became worry.
"Be a leader, not a bully. Come to the meeting with positive ideas for solving problems, and be part of the solution, not one of the problems."
I could see the lack of understanding in his eyes, shook my head, and jumped to the bridge of the ship.
"How are we doing?" I asked Tasha, with mind-speak.
"Shit! Don't do that!"
"Do what?"
"Speak in my mind."
"Why not.
"YOU'RE TOO BLOODY LOUD!"
Oops. I made a change in the intent to always be soft in each mind hearing me, without being lost in their own mental voices.
"This better?"
"Yes. Where are you?"
"On the bridge."
"Well get down here and help."
I was about to move myself again, when a metal scream cut through my head. It sounded like the Oracle, so I moved to her clearing instead.
She was curled up on the ground next to her skrying platter, which was not showing anything. The water was rippling though, as if someone was banging the stump.
"Sorry," I said to Tasha. "Problem with the Oracle to deal with. Back when I can."
"Excuses, excuses."
But she sounded like she was kidding. I hoped.
I moved the Oracle into a chair, and waited for her to come around. The water calmed immediately, but it took her a few minutes to open her eyes again.
"Are you okay?" I asked her.
"So much destruction," she muttered, and promptly passed out again.
I sat myself, and waited for her to come out of whatever funk she was in. While I waited, I wondered if I'd asked to look at events she had no hope of understanding, and it was impacting on some sort of primal fear.
Finally, she came around again, and this time sat up straight. I put a drink in her hand, and she emptied it. The water bottle vanished as she dropped it. Her eyes fixed on mine.
"What did you see?"
"The world ended in ice."
"Show me."
She hesitated, and instead of getting up fully, I flopped back into the chair.
"What?"
"Did you cause it?"
"Probably. But I didn’t mean to."
"Is this why you came back?"
"Partly. I thought what I’d done might have destroyed the civilization I was sent to, so I came back to stop it happening. But I also wanted to understand something else, which I found doesn’t exist yet."
"I've never seen such devastation before. Not even when a volcano erupts. Did you know you caused volcanos to erupt?"
"I don’t know what happened at all. That’s why I asked you."
"Will happen."
"Has happened for me, will happen for you."
"And you as well. You are here now, and this is the future we're talking about."
Time travel does your head in.
"Show me."
Forty One
The surface of the hills behind the castle began to boil, throwing rocks and dust into the air.
I could see the skrying was happening much faster than normal time, as explosions came in groups much closer together than had originally happened. Each new explosion blasted more into the air, and even with all the dust, I watched that area of the hills visibly shrink.
Suddenly there was an explosion bigger than any before it, and it was no longer possible to see what was happening. Probably a nuke. What I feared had been sent back. Another even larger explosion, followed by a third.
Boiling's continued to happen, and the view was pulled back, where I could now see the castle in ruins, with barely the foundation stones remaining. All the villages in a large radius around the hills were gone. No surprise there. They were all in the blast radius of nukes designed for killing spaceships.
The view pulled out again. Every structure on the entire land mass had vanished.
"What's causing the damage so far away?"
"Earthquakes."
Damn. I'd never considered the shock effect nukes would have on the land outside the blast radius. The view moved again, and now I could see ripples crossing the oceans, from a starting point where all the explosions were happening.
Before the first of them hit an island quite a distance away, its top exploded. Ash and smoke were thrown out, with lava starting down the sides. The huge waves smashed against the shores of the island, mostly turning to steam on contact with lava, and heated rocks crashing down.
In another direction, a second volcano erupted. The skies darkened as dust from all the explosions started mingling with smoke, ash, and dust from the volcanos.
At last, the explosions ceased, but the view in the skrying pool continued. The sky stayed dark. Rain turned to snow. Everything turned white. The water on land began to freeze, followed by the water around the land, and in what I guessed was only a few months, only the tropical areas of the planet were not frozen.
The skrying ended.
I stood there looking into the water. Never for a moment had I imagined this level of destruction from what had been to my younger self, something I did without thought.
"What happened to the people?" I asked her, when I could pull my gaze away.
"As far as I can tell, there were none." I nodded. She still sounded shaky. It answered more than a few mental questions I had. "Not that many animals from here either. I saw more on other islands. I never knew the planet was so large. And I also don’t know how I saw all of that, so far into the future."
"We all do extraordinary things when we have to. Can you do split screen?"
"What?"
"Divide the water into halves, and show a different image in each."
"Why would you want to?"
"I want to see the hills before it all began, and the same image of the hills after it all stopped."
"I can try."
She concentrated on the water, and it split apart, leaving a dry line in the middle. I smiled at how literal she'd taken me. On the left, the hills as they were now. She frowned, and it took longer for the image of after to appear on the right. She stepped back, letting me stand over the images.
Even with the snow cover, the image on the right didn’t quite show what I remembered from only days before. But the difference was very easily put down to cumulative erosion over the next few thousand years. All the same, the two images were dramatically different, and much more so than I’d thought they'd be.
"You can let them go now."
The line in the middle vanished with the images.
"What did all that?" she asked me.
"Trust me, you don’t want to know. And you shouldn’t know. Never speak of any of this again, to anyone."
"But why not?"
"Knowledge a thing is possible, is enough to prompt some people to try to do it. Even if it doesn’t happen for a thousand years, it would be thousands of years too early, and probably destroy the future I know. I won't let that happen."
Her face looked scared for a moment.
"I promise I'll never speak of it anyone."
I hoped she'd keep it. Not doing so was a complication I didn’t want to have to deal with. But there was one thing.
"Can you remember and reproduce a single image?"
"Which one?"
I told her.
Forty Two
I spent the rest of the day on a remote beach, lying there on the sand listening to whale song, and wondering how a frozen world was going to affect them.
Obviously they survived, but at what cost? What else was I going to cause? How many extinct species I never knew about?
All those superhero stories I’d read and watched as a teenager? They all had it wrong. It wasn't about power fighting power, and who was more overpowered than another. It wasn’t about saving people, because hey I'm a hero, and saving people is what I do. They all ignored the destruction their fights caused, and the lives lost. Do it my way or we fight. Sorry the damn building fell on you, but hey, we need to fight in the middle of cities where the destruction is major, and it's not a concern you happened to be there at the time. Hey this is entertainment, but it shouldn’t be. On one hand, heroes choose who to help. On the other, people die because they were not helped, or as a consequence of helping someone else. It's all wrong.
I mean, give it a couple of years and it's all rebuilt, and people either forget, or hold a grudge. Then do it all again. Another city, same shit!
These things have to be fought? Right? Wel
l do they? Fighting always has consequences. Do you accept them all in writing before going at it? No. You just go at it, and forget the little guy the building drops on. Forget his kids with no father, and the family with no income.
Having power carries real responsibility. And only you are responsible.
In my case, bad guys are throwing missiles at me, vanish them. What could possibly go wrong?
Oh yeah, a world died. My world died. Or it soon will.
I know it's going to happen, I can't stop it, and it's all on me.
No-one told me. Yeah, the ignorance defense. And how well would that go down in my own court?
I'd killed tyrants, people who murdered, and stopped those trying to control from a position of their strength, and thought I was doing right. And yet, the blink of an eye from me without a moments thought, and a world freezes.
Just who was the real monster?
Judge Thorn, you are accused of planet killing. How do you plead? Guilty. Mitigating circumstances? The planet will be habitable again in a few thousand years, give or take who knows how many centuries. Mitigation refused.
Judge Thorn, you are accused of losing three civilizations. How do you plead? Guilty. Point of order milord. The first one was caused by someone else from the future. We don’t know that for sure. The Oracle said so. Oh, well then, it must be true. By the way, she's in the cell next to you.
Judge …
"THORN!"
I snapped out of it, realizing I’d been asleep, and the sun had already gone down in this part of the world.
"Yes my dear?"
"We're finished on the ship. We want home. Now."
I moved them all home.
"Thanks. Where are you?"
"On a beach."
"That's not helpful."
No, none of it was helpful. None of it even made any sense.
"It's the best I can do right now."
"Are you drunk?"
Now there was an idea I should have thought of. But no, a drunk me would only make things far, far, worse.
"No."
"Come home then. There's things to talk about."
Tomorrow's Spacemage Page 12
