by Daniel Ruth
“We don’t use WMDs on civilian targets,” he replied in an offended tone.
“Unless they aren’t human.”
He was silent for a moment. Then he reluctantly nodded. “I’ll do my best to make sure the information reaches someone that can act rationally. I can spin this as finding a way to make contact with another human culture.”
“Anyway, I found Baron Samedi and his accomplish.”
“Really?” He grimaced before continuing, “They are probably out of any jurisdiction we had.”
“Probably,” I agreed. “Especially since the one who likely made that circle matrix we found is the acting principal of the academy I am infiltrating. The Baron is his assistant. Both of them were close associates with the council head.”
“This doesn’t sound promising for peaceful contact.”
“Well, the council head was also the principal of the academy. He vanished ten years ago so there’s a chance they weren’t under the demon lords direct command or were following his existing directions.”
“How could they not know he was a demon lord?” Conrad asked. “Aren’t they some sort of master wizards of some sort?”
“I don’t know. I am hoping that’s one of the things I’ll find as time goes on. They should have known something was up. Their plan broke every law of magic and common sense.”
“By the way, did you say you brought Beth with you? As in Jeremy’s sister?”
“Yes.”
“That seems an incredibly bad idea. Was Jeremy okay with this?”
“She kind of stowed away. Jeremy was kind of pissed when he found out we were all fooled by her.”
“How did she even get here?”
“She’s a smart little girl,” I hand waved, fortunately, Conrad had other things on this mind and didn’t follow up. “Once Jeremy calmed down he was okay with her going to the academy while she’s here.” Not like he had a choice, with a hydra blocking the way. “They call almost every night.”
“He didn’t mention anything.”
“I didn’t realize you kept in contact.”
“We don’t, really,” he acknowledged with a nod. “I thought he was waiting in town for your return. I heard he was helping with the reconstruction. I’ve been busy consulting with the President during his transition. To be honest, I would have liked to have you as a consultant here but what you’re doing is probably the most important thing going on now. Both for trying to figure out who to make contact with and finding out if or when Vatapi is coming back.”
I nodded in agreement. I thought it was pretty important too.
“I’ll keep you appraised. Well, assuming you can take my calls.”
“I will tell my technicians to give priority. Call me when you know something.”
I sat there for a few more hours, absorbing energy from the massive node. I called for food after another hour but they wouldn’t deliver to the area I was in. I had to stagger over to the edge of the park to pick up my ten pizzas.
A few dinosaurs wandered through the portal, however, my eager smile was replaced with chagrin when the cannons next to me fired as soon as they stepped through. There weren’t even ashes left. That sort of waste should be a crime.
Finally, I felt well enough to use my runed tooth to calve another shard off the main anchor piece. Once again I pushed the concept of ‘truth’ through the tooth and etched out the ‘Anchor’ rune onto the huge duracrete fragment. Again, I felt the feedback and resistance but pushed my concept onto the rune. The resistance suddenly gave way and a shard the size of my hand fell towards the ground. All the freshly gathered energy poured out of me again.
I put the shard in my pouch and sat down, once again greedily absorbing the ambient energy to replenish my magical reserves. I opened up another of the meat pizzas and while eating with one hand, opened up the second-semester spell book. The first spell was Mend Fabric. Somewhat useful but more for getting a grasp of the methodology of spellcasting, than its actual function. It was getting dark when I finished learning it.
By then, my energies were almost back to normal. I called a floater, which still was ridiculously expensive. This time Vivian was not waiting for me with her death truck. Mei wasn’t there either. There was a fully assembled rocket waiting for me in the living room.
It looked like a simple cylinder the width of my thigh, with guiding fins. I was a bit surprised. I had imagined something a bit more modern looking but considering how long this had been outlawed maybe I shouldn’t have been. The compartment in the body was easily large enough to fit the anchor shard. I slipped it in and closed it with a feeling of accomplishment. Then I called Beth on the holo-terminal since I had no idea how to program it.
“Hey Beth,” I started as her image appeared.
“Derek, I didn’t know you were going back so soon,” she looked puzzled. “At least you didn’t blow anything up this time.”
“I hadn’t really planned to come back so soon. It’s really tiring. But I had to do it anyway, so two birds, one stone.”
“Okay,” she said blankly.
“So the rocket is put together and I have put the cargo in. What’s next?”
“Mars or Pluto? It has plenty of fuel for either according to the status indicators.” She looked over at a set of floating indicators and tapped out a few commands.
“Let’s go with Mars. You’ll be able to tell me when it lands, right?”
“Sure. Not in real time, but it has a decent navigation protocol. A small delay won’t matter. Just take it out back and we’ll launch it.”
“And it won’t be detected?”
“It’s very tiny and low energy. There’s almost no chance of it being discovered unless someone told them it was coming and they were looking. Most of the sensors and satellites are the civilian grade that has been repurposed for the interdiction of earth.”
“Great,” I said as I gingerly tried to pick up the rocket. It didn’t budge. Frowning in confusion I looked at the fins to see if ‘The One’ had glued its feet to the floor. Nope. I moved it side to side and there was some slight give, but none when I tried to lift it.
I opened up the cargo hold and took out the shard. Looking at it I tossed it gently across the room. A few feet after it left my hand it froze in the air.
“What’s going on? Why is that shard floating in the air?”
“It’s not floating in the air,” I absently responded to Beth. “It’s simply a fixed point in reference to me. I had forgotten about this.”
“That’s absurd, the planet’s not stationary. It’s moving through space. Also, it would move with you when you walked.”
“Hmm,” I nodded at her comment. “Me or the primary anchor stone. You can’t analysis it too deeply. It has an anchor concept. If I tried hard enough I could probably redefine the common anchor. But I find its current conceptual framework suits my needs. Who knows how it would react if I changed something.”
“But...” Beth spluttered for a moment. “How are we going to send it to Mars if it thinks it’s a fixed point?”
“I have an idea,” I said as I turned and trotted downstairs. Unfortunately, my plans to expand the lab area had fallen through, due to time issues. But I still had ceramic plates, ingredients a few circles I was experimenting and several other items down there. The one I was interested was a few masonry jars. I took an empty one, and after I bit down on my hand with an elongated tooth, bled into it.
Running back up, I plucked the shard out of the air and put it into the jar, with the blood and sealed it. Then I put it into the rocket's cargo hold. With some trepidation, I tried to relocate it. It easily moved.
“That’s a relief,” Beth said.
“I was a bit worried,” I admitted. “Working with the definitions of concepts is sometimes an art form. Sometimes it’s just luck.”
I took the rocket out to the back yard and reconnected to Beth through my wrist terminal. “Anything else we need?”
“Not according
to my research,” she said, biting her lip nervously. “But I never did this before. Wow, it’s really foggy out. I can barely see you. Looks like there’s a storm on the way. Stand back a little.”
“Hold on, I’ll move it out of the fog,” I replied as I picked it up again and moved past the ward boundary.
“What’s going on, did a fog machine explode in the house?”
“I’ll tell you about it later. It’s kind of creepy.”
“Okay, beginning pre-check. Good, everything is green. Stand back, I am starting it up.”
I then backed up to the edge of the property line. A white flame suddenly rushed from the tailpipe, rapidly increasing in force. In seconds the entire rocket had shot up, leaving only a trail of light. When it was no more than a pinpoint, the light dimmed and started to fall back to earth.
“That doesn’t look good,” I said grimly.
“No, it’s okay,” Beth reassured me as she looked at a telemetry display. “That was the empty first stage module. The second and third stage are also chemical. They will drop off too. Once it gets a few hundred thousand kilometers out it will energize its fusion battery. It should be out of range of any sensors by then. Landing will be a bit tricky but it has another chemical stage to help when we have to eject the fusion battery.”
“As long as it gets to Mars, the shard itself is basically indestructible.”
“Yes, but if the jar breaks won’t it just hang there in space?”
I grimaced. “Yes, that wouldn’t be good. “Okay, so as long as it lands or at least hits the ground. Heck, even if it gets in the atmosphere I should be able to work with it.”
“So,” she began after a moment of silence. “If it is an immovable object in space and a planet runs into it while orbiting the sun... does that count as a meteor strike or a kinetic kill device?”
I winced at the thought. “Let’s not go there.”
“If we accidentally blow up Mars, I’m telling Jeremy.”
Well, that would certainly be embarrassingly hard to explain.
I didn’t see Vivian and her dump truck of doom the rest of that night. I would like to think it was because she had dealt with all the newly raised vampires. However, the more likely truth was that I didn’t stay long enough. As soon as I had enough energy, I shifted back to the academy room and collapsed on the couch in front of the fireplace.
I hadn’t remembered to call ahead but Beth was probably asleep in her room since she wasn’t studying by the fire. The shock of the transfer wasn’t really getting any better. While I lay, recovering from the trauma, I fell asleep.
The next day I stayed in. Beth was kind enough to order more food. Even though the energy level of the world was inordinately high and I wouldn’t normally feel hunger, I found that the dimension shifting through my anchor’s back door was enervating and I was feeling real hunger. Most times I enjoyed eating but the groggy, aching feeling that was persisting made it more of a chore than a delight.
So, I ate and studied. I got through the second and third spell in the book. Repair and Warm. Repair was a nice spell to seamlessly merge homogeneous materials that were once a single piece. It may not be immediately useful for repairing modern devices since that wasn’t where such breaks existed. Pottery, forged metal and cast iron or similar parts were the obvious target. I think that with a little work I might be able to stretch it to fix less homogeneous parts such as concrete, bricks, and dead wood. Circuit boards and chips may take a bit more work. Like most magic, it required fiddling with the concepts behind the magic. The academy delayed this understanding and redefining until graduation but most real mages knew how to do this fairly early in their career.
The Warm spell... well, it was a utility spell that would keep you from getting cold or freezing regardless of the outside temperature. I suppose I could stretch it to summon fire but since the concept of warmth and safety versus fire and destruction were so far apart it would be easier to use a separate spell. Fireball was in the fifth-semester book anyway.
Beth came in and dropped off my food but didn’t stay to talk. Stella never showed up. I could only assume that she was dealing with her newly acquired family.
Then it was night again and the time I had selected to explore the acting principal’s house.
Chapter 30
The first part of this plan was finding the key or whatever safe passage device the maids and repairmen used to walk around the council head’s house without bursting into ash or setting off alarms. Since I had previously scoped out the cleaning crew’s building, I simply waited for one of them to leave. Ten minutes later I took their shape and a blue version of their uniform and stepped inside.
“Evening Rogerio,” another gentleman waved in greeting. “Forget something?”
I gave an incoherent grunt and pretended to be annoyed and stomped past him. The majority of the area was taken by the laundry bins, out back were rows of carts containing the daily garbage, waiting to be hauled away. I simply stepped into each room for a minute to look around. Most rooms were unoccupied since it was the end of the day. Others that contained men or women, they looked up indifferently and then back at what they were doing. Only one room was different.
“Rogerio, what are you doing back? Your shift isn’t until tomorrow.” An elderly man sitting at a desk, looking up from stacks of paperwork. He looked like middle management. He frowned out me, “What happened to your uniform? Did you wash it with something else? It's blue, not gray.” He sighed in annoyance. “I’ll have another set for you in the morning but it will be deducted from your salary.”
I coughed and said something hoarsely and then coughed again. His eyes narrowed in disgust and he leaned back in his chair as if to avoid any diseases I might have. I held up a finger to wordlessly ask for a minute. I took a moment to inspect his aura. It was pleasantly bland. Just a normal, non-evil, non-insane and most importantly non-psionic human. Then I activated my psi blade from my finger and poke him in the forehead. Like Kingston and the hydra head, this version wasn’t intended to inflict damage but to harmlessly send the victim into week long coma. He would wake up in a week, with no memory of the events of the day.
He slumped over his desk, a tiny dot of blood on his forehead. I quickly turned and locked the door. That ability took a lot of energy; I certainly didn’t want to do it on every person in the building. I then reached down and put my fingers on both sides of the elderly man’s head and merged my thoughts into his. This was an arduous and draining ability where his memories became mine... and unfortunately, my memories became his. The memories completely fade in a few days unless they were vigorously reinforced. It was almost impossible to keep anything bit a vague feeling Deja Vue. It was these two abilities I had used to steal Kingston’s empire away from him.
After several minutes, I opened my eyes and blinked the dizziness and confusion away. A moment of thought and I dabbed the dot of blood from his forehead onto my finger and reached into a warded drawer. I could feel the tiny drop of blood hiss and bubble as the ward burned quickly through the stolen identity. However, it didn’t matter. For the moment, I knew everything this manager knew and that included which of the ceramic tags in the drawer corresponded to which off limits house. The blood drop burned away in seconds but I had already taken the council head’s ward key and closed the drawer.
I arranged the unconscious body in a slightly more realistic pose as if he had fallen asleep, rather than collapsed and stepped outside the office. Even fewer people greeted me as I left and no one else cared enough about my uniform’s odd shade to comment on it.
Now that I had the appropriate memories I shifted my appearance to one of the repairmen assigned to the house in question. Unfortunately, the uniform was still gray so it looked a bit odd except in low light. It wasn’t the repairman’s designated night but that just meant I wouldn’t run into him. At least not in the house. I did keep to the back ways to avoid running into to him on the academy grounds.
Withi
n minutes I was outside a large mansion. It was located on the edge of the campus and tall stone walls rose high around the generous lawn. The outside was painted blood red and inside the windows were lit with a sinister glow. None of the staff liked servicing this house, it always gave off a feeling of danger. The manager got frequent complaints about the ogre-sized gargoyles on the roof and the portraits inside that seemed to follow you with their eyes.
As a matter of fact, the manager knew there were reasons why magically sensitive people felt this way. The gargoyles were in fact part of the defense system. If the alarms were set off, they would indeed animate and tear apart any intruders. The painting hid wards inscribed on the wall, that would inflict fire and death upon those same intruders. I felt very fortunate to have a ward key.
On my way inside I still took the time to examine the gargoyles. Chances were that when I breached the inner defense I would have to deal with at least some of them. After all, the ward key I had was only intended for the common areas.
There were five gargoyles. From their auras, I would guess they were simply automatons, animated stone, rather than real demons. Likely imbued with physical strength and a handful of spells. Probably, with a common theme like fire offense or earth offensive spells. I couldn’t tell if they all had the same theme or each one was different. I shrugged, I would know soon enough.
I felt a spark of magic come from the house as I entered. The door unlocked at my touch and the ward key tingled in my grasp. Walking inside I found myself in a sumptuously decorated corridor. Vibrant scarlet carpets and gold framed painting hung from the walls.
The portraits depicted scenes of demons and torment. Somehow I felt that it wasn’t just the magical wards behind the paintings that gave the maids and repairmen the creeps. It also wasn’t very subtle if you were a demonic owner. Pushing aside one painting I examined the ward.
It was very similar to the ward I had seen in Baron Samedi’s lair. I was guessing it was done by the acting principal. Excellent work. I made note of the various techniques in my mind. I needed practice with wards that inflicted energy damage such as fire, ice, and death. The wards I had that damaged and expelled undead and demons worked on a completely different principle. I also liked how he included the exclusions. It didn’t really help me bypass anything but it was something to include in my own wards in the future.
