A Creature of Smokeless Flame

by Margaret Ball

  A Creature of Smokeless Flame

  Applied Topology Book 5

  Margaret Ball

  Galway Publishing

  Copyright 2018 Margaret Ball

  Published by Galway Publishing

  ISBN Paperback: 978-1-947648-16-6

  ISBN eBook: 978-1-947648-17-3

  Printed in the United States of America

  Cover art: Cedar Sanderson

  Formatting: Polgarus Studio

  For Scot, my invaluable go-to guy for ballistics, urban warfare, and other military matters

  Table of Contents

  1. Black site

  2. American citizens on American soil

  3. Corralling cats

  4. A darkness in the air

  5. There are quite a lot of men I’m not married to

  6. The Rightly Guided

  7. A pessimistic culture

  8. A lovely place to set up a perimeter with trip wires

  9. A smokeless flame

  10. A friend and a djinn

  11. The Army of Peace

  12. Acting like newlyweds

  13. Child soldiers

  14. Thief-wiring

  15. A modification of fire

  16. Djinns, devils, and assault rifles

  17. Island of Shetani

  18. Master of the glass

  19. Classical methods

  20. Termination

  Excerpt: The Lake of the Dragon

  Also by Margaret Ball

  1. Black site

  At first sight, the room was grey, dingy, and unspeakably depressing. On a second look, it was worse. There were no windows, and a metal plate bolted over the small barred opening in the door prevented any possibility of getting a glimpse outside of the room, even the sight of what was probably an equally dim and dingy corridor. The plate and bolts were on the outside of the door, which would have prevented most people from trying to loosen them. I didn’t bother because I had little hope that the view on the other side of the door was any better.

  The air hissing through the ceiling vent was cold and smelled stale. This was the end of a long hot Texas July, a time when I am normally pro-air conditioning, but from where I was now – lying on a clammy cement floor – the coolness was decidedly unwelcome.

  Since I was already lying on my back and staring at the ceiling when I came to, I spent some time contemplating the ceiling air vent. It was about the size of half a sheet of typewriter paper. Even if I got the grille off I wouldn’t be able to fit through that opening, and Colton would have had to be fed through in pieces. I lay quietly and considered our other options. Besides the one that they were probably expecting, that is.

  Whoever “they” were.

  Colton had been working on a topological application that would demolish abandoned, ramshackle outbuildings for his father and other farmers, but I didn’t know how much control he had; he had taken his experiments out to a field of prickly pears off Highway 183, where there was plenty of room for error. In any case, I wasn’t sure it would be a good idea to use his application on the door of a cell that had no other outlet for the resulting blast. Then, too, Ben and Ingrid and I weren’t up to date on that project. Colton would have had to blow out his own cell door, then find each of us – and that was assuming we were all in the same building – and free us individually. Before any of the nice people who’d locked us up noticed any unusual goings-on.

  Fortunately, as researchers at the Center for Applied Topology we had one very obvious way of departing the scene. I just wasn’t sure it was time for us to use it yet. The way we’d been treated so far suggested that our captors had some serious misapprehensions about the limits of our abilities. It might not be wise to give them any more data than we absolutely had to.

  I’d been the last of the four of us to be captured. It had happened when I was leaving the office – this evening? Yesterday? After being drugged twice and having lost my watch, I wasn’t at all clear on the passage of time. I remembered making a gesture towards cleaning my desk – well, okay, piling the papers in neat stacks. The office had been very quiet, but I hadn’t thought much of that. Mathematicians aren’t very noisy, and it was late enough that our receptionist and the rest of the support staff had probably gone home. It had been quite a while since lunch; I thought I’d just check out the break room, in case there were any leftover doughnuts to help fuel my trip home. But when I walked the Möbius strip through the blank wall between the research division and the public side of the Center, there had been no one in the outer office but two strange men, and the double doorway to the stairs was wide open. We really need to replace that lock one of these days.

  One of the men grabbed me while the other slapped my arm with something sharp. Oh, hell. I’ve been sedated like that before. I don’t like it. I had just enough time to think Dammit, not again before I fell into darkness – not the clear darkness of the in-between, shot through with intersecting lines and spiraling shapes of brilliant color, but a cloudy and stifling darkness that suffocated thought.

  When I came to, there was something around my wrists and my arms ached from being forced into a strained position. I was in a dark place that roared and vibrated alternately; if it hadn’t been for the pain, I wouldn’t have been absolutely sure I was conscious and not having a nightmare. A couple of tugs convinced me that I wouldn’t be able to free my hands by any normal techniques. It was probably safer, just for the moment, to pretend I had no other options. I sat still and tried to feel out the darkness around me.

  After a few minutes I could sense other people. No, nothing paranormal about that; there were subtle shifts in the not-quite-total darkness, movements of the air from someone’s breathing, other tiny cues that we don’t normally rely on.

  “Thalia?”

  It was Ben’s voice, barely audible over the noise around us.

  “Ben! Are you all right?”

  “Sssh. Yes. All three of us are okay.”

  “Who else?”

  “Colton and Ingrid.”

  So, not Lensky. Of course not. He hadn’t even been in town.

  “Mr. M.?”

  “Haven’t seen him. You’ve been out the hell of a long time. What did they do to you?”

  “Drugged, I think.” That made me aware that my mouth was dry and my head was pounding; not things I really wanted to focus my attention on. Well, maybe they were; it was better than thinking about the strain on my arms and shoulders or the nauseating bouncing of the vehicle we seemed to be in. “You?”

  “Same, except it wore off faster.”

  I tried to focus. It wasn’t easy. “Well, I’m smaller than the rest of you. If they gave everybody a dose geared to people Colton’s size, I’m surprised I’m not dead. What happened to you guys?”

  Ben, Colton and Ingrid had stories almost identical to mine, except that Ben and Ingrid had been snatched when they left the building. Colton, like me, had been caught on his way to check out the doughnut tray. They had no idea what had happened to the support staff, and that was worrying them too. Ingrid, who was supposed to be marrying our computer expert Jimmy in six weeks, was being very carefully not hysterical in a very controlled tone of voice. As she said, we had to get ourselves out of this before we could do anything to help the others, so there was no point thinking about them right now.

  Her voice hardly even quavered when she said it, so we all emulated her stiff upper lip. Unfortunately, that didn’t help us come up with any creative ideas.

  We were, we thought, in the back of a windowless van that was on a highway. Probably not I-35, we didn’t hear that many trucks and semis blaring to right and left of us.

  We couldn’t use our best escape option w
hile cuffed to rails that seemed to have been bolted to the inside of the van. Colton tried to pull the rail on his side loose, but he couldn’t get enough leverage on it. And even if we had been able to get loose, I didn’t really want to try teleporting out of a speeding van. Too much chance of winding up smeared across our destination point.

  “We could try the way you got out of Balan’s trap in January?” Ben suggested tentatively.

  “Umm. That was rope I burned, that time.” And it hadn’t been a pleasant experience; my hands and wrists got burned too. This time could be even worse, because it felt like I was confined by plastic zip ties now. “I don’t specially want to melt plastic onto my skin. Anyway, I didn’t have to generate all the heat by myself; the carpet caught fire quite well. I don’t think there’s anything in here that we can burn.” Not to mention that while Riemann fire might free our hands, it wouldn’t solve the problem of teleporting while moving at high speed.

  “Nothing we can reach, anyway,” Colton said grimly, “and maybe it’s not such a good idea to demonstrate the Riemann technique to them if they don’t already know about it.”

  And there was something I should have thought about earlier. “They could have this van bugged. Was that why you were practically whispering, Ben?”

  There was a brief pause, then he said, “Yes. I thought we’d better not talk about anything they don’t need to know.”

  That pretty much restricted us to disjointed trivialities for the rest of the journey. I guessed that during the long silences my colleagues were doing the same thing I was: mentally running through the things we might be able to do to escape, or failing that, to give our attackers some grief.

  One very small bright spot did occur to me. “Colton, did they carry you down both flights of stairs?” Our offices were on the third floor of a Victorian mansion with no elevators.

  “Probably. Although having been out cold at the time, I don’t really know. Why?”

  “I’m just hoping they have permanent back injuries from trying to carry somebody your size.” Colton was an extremely large and athletic young man. He’d played football for his high school and could have gone through college on a football scholarship if he hadn’t developed an interest in mathematics and a corresponding distaste for repeated concussions.

  After another half hour of being shaken and stirred, I thought of something else. I just wasn’t sure how to convey it to the others without conveying the same information to our hypothetical listeners.

  “I expect it wouldn’t be a good idea for anybody to go to the office just now.”

  “Well, duh, Thalia,” Ingrid snapped. “I may not go there ever again. Thanks to the Center I have now been defecated on by grackles, shot at by terrorists, transported back…”

  “LA LA LA,” I singsonged to drown out what she was about to say. After a minute Colton joined in with his high school fight song and Ben contributed an off-key rendering of “The Eyes of Texas.” It’s hard to get that one wrong, but Ben is especially talented.

  “Very well,” Ingrid said when we ran out of breath. “I get the message. All the same, I don’t mind telling you that this time I am feeling permanently fed up with the Center for Applied Topology.”

  The residual drugs must still be dulling her mind; I couldn’t think of any other explanation for her saying “fed up” instead of “disenchanted” or “surfeited.” Well, that was another reason not to try anything now, when we desperately needed to be working with perfect clarity. Access to our stars would have come in handy, too. I could sense that mine were in the front righthand pocket of my jeans, like always, but that didn’t do me a lot of good right now; no contortion was going to get my fingers and that pocket together. I didn’t want to ask the others about theirs. The stars were something our captors wouldn’t have noticed, and I really didn’t want them to start thinking about invisible stuff we might have. Invisible to them, anyway.

  “I understand,” I said now to placate Ingrid. “I’m just thinking about the interesting times we’ve had, the places where we’ve all been together. Remember the giant water moccasin?”

  “You mean at—”

  This time Ben was the first one to start singing.

  “Yes, there,” I said when he stopped. “I wonder if we’ll ever be free to visit that place again. It was… really beautiful… apart from the snake. I bet it’s even beautiful in the dark.” And the water moccasin was dead now. Shot by our worst enemy, actually. One of several miscalculations he’d made.

  “Colton wasn’t with us then,” Ingrid said helpfully.

  “But he knows the place I mean, don’t you, Colton? It was where we went fishing in May.”

  There was no chance to escape, or even to make trouble, when the van finally stopped; the guys who’d snatched us came in through the back of the van and repeated the drug treatment. When I came to this time, I was on the floor of this dank gray room, looking up at a depressing bluish-tinted light fixture.

  On the good side, my hands weren’t tied, and there was a chair. After I had contemplated the bejesus out of that air vent in the ceiling, I got up and seated myself. Now, instead of having my whole body in contact with a cold concrete floor, it was just my butt on a cold metal chair. A slight improvement. I was stiff from lying on the cold floor and sore from being bounced around in the back of a van with my wrists cuffed. I did creak slightly on getting up, but I don’t think it would have been obvious to any observers. I’d grown up with two older brothers, both on the large side; they’d given me lots of good practice in not wincing when I got hurt. It had often stood me in good stead with Lensky, who tended to overreact when he found out I was even slightly injured.

  I had plenty of time to sit on the folding metal chair and contemplate the situation. There wasn’t anything to look at that could take my mind off it. There was a bucket in one corner, next to a bottle of water, but I didn’t want to think about what that implied. If I had to use that bucket in a room that as likely as not had hidden cameras, the light was damned well going to be off first; I could do that much small object manipulation without making it obvious there was anything paranormal going on. Let them try to get their twisted kicks out of watching my heat signature through night-vision lenses.

  The next phase started without warning: the door slammed open with so much force that it hit the wall with a loud clunk. If the demonstration of that much kinetic energy was meant to intimidate me, it was working. I hadn’t liked being manhandled by my kidnappers, and I liked even less being at close quarters with the man who swung the door shut behind him now. He was big like Colton, though much older: tall, stocky, with thinning brown hair and big meaty hands. I shivered involuntarily. It wasn’t just the size of him that frightened me; his eyes were worse. They looked like doorways into a chaotic, gray hell.

  “Where are they?” he demanded.

  “If you mean my friends, I’d like to know that too!”

  “Don’t worry about your friends. Worry about yourself.”

  Oh, I was already doing that.

  He prowled around the narrow room. I didn’t much like it when he was behind me; I could feel the short hairs on the back of my neck bristling. Too bad. There was only one chair in the room, I was seated in it, and I wasn’t going to give up that paper-thin symbol of superiority for anything short of actual violence. I did stick my hands in my jeans pockets. They’d taken everything away from me except the one thing, or properly speaking set of things, that I was most likely to need. That wouldn’t have been out of generosity, or even carelessness: like most people who can’t apply topology the way we do, they wouldn’t have been able to see that I had a pocketful of stars. Even Lensky had been known to refer to that collection as a handful of nothing.

  If the gray-eyed man got violent with me, though, he just might encounter the effects of those stars and the way they enhanced our other abilities. I thought wistfully of using Ben’s trick with Riemann surfaces to ignite his pants, but it wasn’t time to show m
y hand. Yet.

  “We’ve spent enough supporting you jokers,” he growled eventually, “it’s time you made yourselves useful.”

  Ah.

  That told me a lot. He must be a representative of the secretive three-letter agency that funded the Center for Applied Topology in the hope that our paranormal abilities would eventually develop into useful tools for them. In fact we’d already been quite useful to them, but I decided not to bring that up. I didn’t feel at all secure that the CIA was going to treat us any better than any other bunch of unaccountable bullies. The one thing about our captors’ identity that gave me hope was that this was Lensky’s agency. If anybody could find out what had happened to us and where we were being held, he could. If anybody would storm the gates of a CIA black site to free us, he would. And he’d succeed, too.

  “It might help,” I suggested mildly, “if you explained what it was you needed our help with.” Being polite about asking wouldn’t have hurt, either, but it seemed that bridge was already burned.

  “I told you. We want you to find them.”

  “Find who?”

  He stopped prowling and glared at me. “You’re supposed to have been told.”

  “Nobody has told me a damned thing.”

  He raised his hand in a threatening way and I said hurriedly, “Look, it’s not in my interest to lie to you about that. You can check up easily enough. I was unconscious when your goons threw me in here and you’re the first person who’s been here since I regained consciousness.”

  “Damned incompetents. They really didn’t brief you?”

  “No. Would you like to tell me what this is about?”

  “I… My…” He stopped, glanced up at a corner of the room, and started over. I’d had conversations with Lensky that went wrong in exactly that way. What was this guy not telling me? “The bombing,” he said eventually. “Last week. We have reason to believe that the bombers used paranormal means to effect their entrance and exit. You need to find out who they were and where they went.”