by Garon Whited
“Eh,” I replied, around a mouthful of vat-grown beef. We experimented with eating the local elephants—Elephas Apocalypticus? What’s the taxonomy of elephants, anyway?—but they’re unpleasantly tough and tend to be somewhat bland. Neither of which is entirely a bad thing, considering my teeth and taste buds, but hunting them is more effort than it’s worth.
“I take it they’re not helpful?” she pressed.
“Not knowingly. They think they’re in a hospital somewhere and being held incommunicado. A couple of them think we’re the Feds. Another is convinced I’m an army colonel. I have no idea why. But they assume I know things or don’t know things based on their perception of their circumstances. When I get them to talking and distract them from their situation, they let things slip.”
“Such as?”
Between bites, I explained about the Salvatore putting them on our scent.
“As far as I can tell,” I finished, “our captives aren’t even doing it for the money. It’s more a public service for these guys.”
“What do they call themselves?”
“I didn’t get a formal group affiliation, I’m afraid. They’re keeping their mouths shut about the larger organizational details. It’s a religiously-motivated group, that’s all I know.”
“We should push them. It’s easier to categorize who’s trying to kill you if they have names.”
“If you say so.”
“I’ll call them the Templars,” she decided, licking mustard off one finger, “until we find out their name, if they have one.”
“Why Templars?”
“It’s a holy order of knights on a crusade.”
“You do know the Templars are an actual organization in most Earth-analogue worlds, right? These guys may have absolutely nothing to do with them.”
“So? What do you want me to call them? Religious Nut Vampire Hunters? ReNVaH, for short?” she asked. I shuddered. Horrible acronym. Horrible.
“I was thinking of them as the Interfaith Order of Anti-Vampire Zealots.”
“IOAVZ?”
“Yeah, it’s not an improvement,” I agreed.
“What do we call them, then?”
“If I have a choice, I’ll take the Templars, please,” I agreed. I finished what was in front of me and Diogenes switched plates. It helps to have a computer-controlled tabletop full of micromotors to slide things around. “What have you been up to while I’ve been inattentive?”
“You’re not inattentive,” she corrected. “You’re busy or distracted, and with good reason.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
“Good boy. I’ve been double-checking some of our assumptions and practicing being a wizard.”
“Oh? You have my interest. What assumptions?”
“You know how we assumed our stuff was probably burned up in the wreckage of a car?”
“It seems the most likely scenario.”
“I had Diogenes ping my communications bracelet. The gate connected.”
“Hmm. That could mean the micro-gate ring survived.”
“Yes, but the electronics in the bracelet still work. I also cast a scrying spell through the gate.”
“That’s tricky. Good job.”
“I had a good teacher.”
“And talent. What did you see?”
“There’s a big table with most of our anachronistic equipment on it. One guy, the oldest one, had my amulet inside some sort of diagram carved into a tabletop—professionally, permanently carved, not just scratched into the wood. Quality work. I didn’t recognize the symbols, but my amulet was coruscating in all sorts of pretty colors.”
“Could be a magical detection spell or enchanted item, checking for charms and the like. Definitely Lorenzo’s friends, not the Templars. I wonder what they made of your amulet?”
“He didn’t seem pleased, if that’s what you’re wondering. Two others were in the room with him and they found your saber more interesting. They kept whittling at a piece of steel and checking the edge.”
I sighed. Never leave toys behind. It’s a rule. Whether the locals figure it out or not, once in a while it can drive them a bit squirrely. Some build pyramids, some rant about aliens, some invent government conspiracies. Sometimes all three.
“Okay. Finish lunch and we’ll give them a call.”
“We’ll what?”
It’s so adorable that I can still surprise her.
The key to interuniversal communications is a gate. The ones in the phones are tiny things, little rings of metal—kind of like the washers that go with nuts and bolts, but miniscule. They’re only big enough to provide a locus and allow laser communication. Diogenes makes them out of thin films of iridium and orichalcum. I believe the technique is a form of 3-D printing using laser vapor deposition, but I have enough to do keeping up with my own magical research. I can’t keep up with the relentless sprint of technological advancement, too.
After he prints the things, I enchant them. The artificial crystals inside the phone are also magical capacitors, enabling the micro-gate to connect to its dedicated twin in Apocalyptica. There’s also a tiny little electromagical transformer, in case the local magical environment is too weak to charge the crystals through the power-collection spell on the phone case. It’s possible to completely recharge the phone simply by plugging it in.
Once the gate opens, the phone communicates via laser link and the gate itself is powered from the Apocalyptica side.
But the gates are still, fundamentally, holes.
So, with an opening less than a millimeter in diameter, what can you do? It’s inside a casing, so simply looking through it doesn’t do much. In theory, I can cast a scrying spell through the gate, but it’s complicated to operate beyond the immediate area of the gate, itself. Gates seem to cause some interference in the spatial coordinate system, so scrying farther from the gate tends to introduce a visual wobble and mess up the focus. But I can also direct other spells through the gate, the most obviously lethal of which is a modernized matter-conversion spell.
I’m resisting the temptation.
On the other hand, how about something more local and tactical? There are any number of unpleasant chemicals we could pipe through the opening. One of my favorites is called, somewhat innocuously, FOOF. It stands for dioxygen difluoride, and I heard of it when a friend of mine was studying for his Ph.D. in chemistry. He was paging through a journal, reading an article and swearing constantly.
I’ve used cryogenic oxygen and magically-heated steel to create explosions. FOOF doesn’t need magic to set it off. It needs magic to keep it from setting everything else off. It’s like an oxidizer, but to such a degree that oxygen and ozone huddle in the most distant corner, gibbering in terror and clinging to each other.
Let me put it this way. The only way to store FOOF is to freeze it solid—about ninety degrees Kelvin. That is, to store it you need to freeze it to about negative one-eighty-five Celsius… or within ninety degrees of absolute zero.
Even then, while somewhat calmer, it’s far from tamed.
No, a better way to put this. FOOF can set ice on fire. Yes, that’s what I said. Ice—frozen water—comes in contact with FOOF at cryogenic temperatures, and ignites. Don’t melt the ice in advance. The stuff turns liquid water into a explosive.
I’m not kidding. Google it.
So, if I can lay a spell on a quantity of this stuff to keep it from reacting immediately, we should be able to put a high-pressure jet of it—like a water knife, only with FOOF—through the gate and cut through the phone’s interior mechanisms and casing. This should spray it all over the place before I release the spell keeping it from explosively igniting everything. Including the phone, the people, the brick walls, the concrete floor, and anything else—make that “everything else”—it touches.
I asked Diogenes about it. The drawback is the spell research and the manufacturing time. It’ll take me a while to work out a stabilizing spell, and until we have one, sto
ring the stuff is dangerous.
I used understatement for effect. “Dangerous.” Ha.
At any rate, we don’t want to even start making it until I’ve got my end covered. Oh, well. I kind of liked the idea.
On the other hand, there are a variety of nerve gases we could substitute. Odorless, colorless, and piped in relatively gently, an invisible cloud of death could waft from the phone, dropping people in their tracks. Some of them are even unstable, breaking down over time into non-lethal products! As a bonus, it won’t harm our equipment. We can recover everything instead of making all-new ones.
Again, manufacturing was the bottleneck. We haven’t had a reason to make nerve gas. Diogenes has directed-energy weapons for his robots and, if worse comes to worst, he’s got Mary and myself. We do have tons of insecticide, though, because I insisted.
If I haven’t explained, don’t ask. That particular grade of nightmare fuel is another reason I don’t sleep.
So, the basic plan was to pipe in something lethal and kill everyone involved.
At least, it was my plan until Diogenes pointed out his eavesdropping indicated at least one voice calling for “Dad.”
Everyone assumes the parents are the ones who save the life of a child. It struck me, at that moment, how we never know, never understand, how many times a small thing can have far-reaching consequences. A young boy came looking for his father and was sternly told, “You’re sick, young man! You go straight back to bed and don’t you get out of it again! No, you come with me and I’ll put you to bed.”
The kid shot down my plan to nerve gas the whole house.
Instead of sending through something horrible and deadly, I decided to talk.
Diogenes connected the call in the media room. Somewhere, in another world, my phone rang.
Over there, it’s 1969. There is no such thing as a mobile phone. A walkie-talkie? Sure. But not a phone.
We waited for eight rings before someone answered.
“Hello?”
“Hello, and good afternoon! I’m the owner of the phone you’re holding and I’d like it back, please.”
There was some muffled conversation along the lines of “It’s the guy! It’s his telephone! I know it’s impossible, but it’s a telephone! He wants it back!”
“I’m sorry,” the man on the other end finally said, “but I don’t think that’s possible.”
I called up a list and scanned down it quickly. There were only ten to choose from.
“Number Eight: Thou shalt not steal.”
“I beg your pardon?” he asked, shocked.
“Eighth commandment. You’ve stolen my stuff. Are you sure you don’t want to give it back? I’ll forgive you.”
“If we’re going to trade sins, how about the one about killing?” he countered.
“Just because I do something wrong doesn’t mean you should. You’re the one who’s supposed to be a paragon of virtue.”
“You’re not the one to lecture on morality!”
“You want to go there? How about coveting someone else’s wife? You guys stole her from me and I came to get her. You weren’t being nice to her, either.”
There was a muffled, whispered conversation. I couldn’t make it out, but it sounded tense.
“Look, we know what you are, Clyde.”
I bit back a snap answer.
These guys were professionals. How do I know that? Normal people don’t routinely bust into motel rooms to kidnap and interrogate someone. Or have loaded revolvers with silver bullets in the glove box. Or special tanks for holding and transporting vampires. So, they’re not the local PTA with a grudge. They’ve done this sort of thing before and they think of themselves as professionals.
And, against the local vampires, no doubt they are. They probably know the rules about vampire physiology, ecology, and termination better than most vampires do. They know you don’t stake it, fill its mouth with salt, sew it shut, and bury it at a crossroads. Amateurs like Salvatore do that. These guys should know you behead it, burn it, expose it to sunlight, or drown it in holy water, with options on crucifixion for borderline cases.
So if I argue from the standpoint of a powerful being, they’ll hear a typical vampire being egotistical with the mortals. They won’t understand the level of awful involved, nor would they believe it without proof. Even then, they might simply regard me as the biggest tiger of their big-game career.
Okay. Skip that.
“Look,” I said, calmly and reasonably, “I don’t want to fight over this. I don’t even want to stop you from killing vampires. I’m totally okay with it. I’d rather you did it to other vampires, but I can understand you’re upset with me, personally. All I want to accomplish is retrieving my stuff. That’s it. That’s what I want. Now, what do you want? You’re obviously not going to simply hand it over because it’s the right thing to do. So, what will it take? The way I see it, you’ve stolen my stuff and the best I can hope for is you’ll ransom it back to me. What do you want in order to give me what I want?”
“Uh… can I call you back?”
“I suppose so, but you may get my secretary. I’m a busy man.”
“I’ll risk it.” There was a click as he closed the cigarette case. This didn’t turn off the phone, however, and Diogenes stepped up the gain on the microphone, scrubbing static and ambient sounds out to clean up the voices in the conversation.
“What do you think?”
“I think this is ridiculous.”
“How?”
“Look at this stuff! I’m tempted to say it’s black magic, but how would we know? Every spell I know goes nutty when we try to analyze ’em! And this thing like a telephone… yeah, there’s magic there, but it’s also some sort of electrical package. None of it reacts to holy water or a cross.”
“Neither did they! And they were moving around during the day!”
“That was wild, man, wild. A mess and a half.”
“Clam up. Look, this stuff, this… this shirt will stop a stake.”
“It stops bullets!”
“I said to zip it. If vampires are starting to wear armor, we’re going to have problems.”
“I’m more worried about the sword. I mean, watch it cut!” Clinking noise.
“I’m more worried about the jewelry.”
“The jewelry?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, I’ll bite. Why?”
“We peeled the things off them, right? They’re not just pendants or whatever. They were hung around the neck, yeah, but I think it’s just a safety chain, or a lanyard. They were stuck on, practically glued to their skin, right? Which tells me they’re important, somehow.”
“They’re valuable.”
“So why wear them? No, the thing that bothers me most is the colors of their magic. These amulets have spells, lots of spells, and I can’t even begin to tell you what they might do. They don’t look like ancient artifacts, either. The metalwork is too smooth, and it’s not worn away at all. These things are modern.”
I made a note of that voice. He was uncomfortably smart.
“So, he knows a mage?”
“I don’t know, and I’d like to. What do you boys think?”
“I’m reluctant to part with the armor.”
“The underwear of invulnerability?”
“Can it, Carl. I just like the idea of it. How many times have we been stabbed, clawed, cut, or shot in this business?”
“Well, there was the time—”
“It was rhetorical, you idiot, not a request for a list!”
“I agree. We should at least find out where he gets this stuff. If it’s for sale, we could use it. Can you imagine how easy it would be to carve a werewolf into chunks with a sword like this?”
“It’ll just grow everything back at the next full moon.”
“Not if it doesn’t get away. It’ll be hard to run with no legs!”
“I’d rather not get too close.”
“And when it jumps yo
u, you’ll be glad you’re wearing this armor, won’t you?”
“You might have a point.”
“Age and experience, boys; age and experience.”
“So, do we keep the stuff?”
“He’s asking what we want for it, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“We could double-cross him. If he wants it all back, it must be hard to come by. So we get him to tell us where he got it. Maybe we can get in touch with his supplier. Then we set up a meet or a drop to give him the goods and let him open a box full of kerosene and dynamite.”
“Sounds like a plan to me.”
“I’m in. Dibs on the pistols.”
“It’s settled. We want to know his supplier. In exchange, we give it all back. Let’s work out where to do the drop so we can plan the explosion.”
“The old amusement park?”
“Probably. There’s no one there to get hurt. We’ll let him pick where in the park, so he feels more comfortable.”
“Okay. Call him back.”
“I’ll try.”
A few moments of fumbling with the case, a few repeated “Hello? Hello? Anybody there?” moments, and a deliberate delay on my part…
“Hello?”
“Ah! Is it you?”
“I hope so. If I’m not me, then whoever is will be in for a shock.”
“Uh… right. So, here’s the deal: we want to be put in touch with your supplier.”
“Supplier of what? Diamonds?”
“Diamonds?”
“Sure. I have to show a profit somewhere. People don’t line up to volunteer to give blood. I have to pay them. It gets expensive.”
“You buy blood from people?”
“Of course! What kind of fiend do you take me for? Besides, I need the money to pay for my vampire-hunting hobby.”
“Explain that,” he snapped.
“I don’t much like other vampires. Rude, violent, and potentially horribly infectious. Most other breeds seem to be soulless monsters. Can’t stand them, myself. That’s why I wear the armor and carry a sword. What did you think I used the stuff for? Humans? Even if I did hunt humans, they wouldn’t call for extreme measures. But the more violent and dangerous of the vampire breeds call for preparation.”