Science and Sorcery

by Christopher Nuttall

  “Unlikely,” the President said. “She presumably knows her own limits.”

  Matt wasn't so sure of that. Golem had implied that the Thirteen hadn't recognised any limits in their quest for godhood, even though they’d had to know that they’d need vast supplies of mana to become gods. After all, the original gods had died out thousands of years before the Thirteen had made their own bid for power. One of the research group had wondered if mana pervaded the universe and the Thirteen had intended to drain it from outer space – he’d written a book about something similar – but there seemed to be no way to know. NASA’s first experiments with mana-powered spacecraft hadn't worked very well.

  “Let's hope so,” he said.

  The President smiled, weakly. “What do I tell the world?”

  “The truth,” Caitlyn said. “We may not be the only ones to have a member of the Thirteen pop up in their territory. Golem pretty much implied that their prison cells could be opened at any place of power – and it might be somewhere important to us, rather than to the ancient world. Arlington wasn't anywhere important back then...”

  “No,” the President agreed.

  “I was thinking about the Nazi death camps, or Stalingrad, or Mecca, or...anywhere where there is a great deal of emotional energy invested by the local population,” Caitlyn admitted. “All of them will have to be secured at once...”

  “Except for the minor detail that we can't secure them,” the President pointed out. “The guards at Arlington couldn't stop Jackson from releasing the Queen of Nightmares, could they?”

  “We can give them copies of the Niven’s Wheel,” Caitlyn said. “It might help weaken the local mana field. That should make it much harder for any other moron like Jackson to summon them. Coming to think of it, we should tell the world what happened to him. His patron murdered him as soon as he had outlived his usefulness.”

  The President sighed. “Do whatever it takes to stop her,” he ordered. He looked down at his desk, shaking his head. “Because after what happened today we might no longer have much of a country left tomorrow.”

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Washington DC, USA

  Day 36

  “It is required of every man,” the treacherous ghost said, “that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellowmen, and travel far and wide; and if that spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so after death.”

  Calvin barely heard him. The other ghosts shouldn't have been able to hurt him, but they’d reached into his soul – or whatever was keeping him as a ghost – and torn through it, leaving him feeling shredded into thousands of pieces. It had felt like hours of torture before he’d finally been left alone to pull himself back together, only to discover that the other ghosts were waiting to do it again, and again. The world he now inhabited, a translucent inversion of the living world, had nowhere to hide. They could find him anywhere to dish out more justice.

  “You’re not helping,” he said, or thought. He couldn't tell if the ghosts really talked, or if they had some form of telepathy. Certainly they’d managed to slam their contempt into his mind with savage force. They’d died in the service of his country; he’d betrayed it. That point, too, had been hammered home time and time again. “Why am I here?”

  “I told you,” the ghost said. “You have unfinished business.”

  Calvin scowled. “I know who you are,” he said. “Why are you here?”

  “I made mistakes,” the ghost of Benedict Arnold admitted. “That’s why I’m here.”

  He walked closer to Calvin, looking down at his insubstantial form. “I went too far out of my angry and misplaced pride,” he said. “So did you. I’ve been here ever since I died, waiting for a chance at redemption. That’s why you’re here too.”

  Calvin nodded. “And the others?”

  “They’re here because they volunteered,” Arnold said. “Not that it really matters. They cannot really affect the living world, even when the living are charged with mana.”

  “I remember,” Calvin said. “How do you know about mana?”

  “You see things a little more clearly when you’re a ghost,” Arnold said. He looked straight at Calvin, as if he were trying to tell him something very important. “And you still have some links to the living world.”

  “Mindy,” Calvin said. Now Arnold had mentioned it, he saw a link between his insubstantial body and his sister’s living soul. He could follow it...and it wouldn't take any time at all. A ghost could move with the speed of thought. “I can go to Mindy.”

  “Indeed you can,” Arnold said. “And you may even be able to help her.”

  Calvin nodded, and then hesitated. “Were you really condemned to this for betraying the country?”

  Arnold grimaced. “In terms you will understand,” he said, “I was condemned to this for being a selfish asshole. I had far more options than you, young man. It would have been easy to walk away and let the revolution succeed or fail without me. Instead...”

  He shook his head. “Go to your sister,” he ordered. “And see if you can find some way to redeem yourself.”

  ***

  “...UN Security Council will be meeting in emergency session tomorrow morning, following the latest reports from Washington,” the newsreader said. “FEMA has reported that upwards of five thousand American citizens have been confirmed dead, with thousands more badly wounded in the chaos. The President has promised to address the nation on the subject of the disaster in Washington tomorrow afternoon, following the UNSC meeting, but sources within the White House confirm that the disaster in Washington was linked to the incident in New York and Calvin Jackson, the fugitive black magician.”

  “You shouldn't be watching that, young lady,” Miss Reynolds said. “It's only going to worry you.”

  “Adults,” Mindy said, rolling her eyes. They never seemed to take children seriously, even when the children had grown up overnight. “I was there when it happened.”

  She still remembered the moment when she’d sensed Harrow throwing a spell at her, a second before Calvin had put himself in its path and burned to a crisp. Mindy had been unable to do anything, even move, before her brother had lost his life. They said that he was a monster, they said that he was a traitor, but he was still her bigger brother and he’d saved her life at the cost of his own.

  And then Harrow had vanished, taking with her the influence that Mindy had barely noticed, until it was gone. Mindy wasn't sure what it all meant, but she knew that it wasn't something good. Harrow’s eyes had spoken of dark intentions and a certain eerie pleasure at using her magic for the first time in thousands of years. And she’d influenced Mindy’s bigger brother, just like the evil stepmother in a story Mindy had read a year ago. At least there didn't seem to be any icky adult stuff involved. That would have really sucked.

  She turned back to the television, hoping that Miss Reynolds would take the hint. The teacher and magician wasn’t a bad person – and she was teaching Mindy magic – but she seemed to have the same mental problems other adults did when it came to young children. Mindy might have been eight – although she was nearly nine – yet she was much older inside. She was certainly a lot more mature than some of the older girls she’d known at school.

  “The official spokesmen for the House of Saud has stated today that there are no truth in the rumours about the fate of a number of religious policemen on the streets of Mecca,” a different announcer said. “According to a number of internet bloggers, the religious policemen have been castrated and then murdered, for no apparent reason. The House of Saud, however, categorically denies the rumours. The religious policemen have simply resigned from duty and gone to live elsewhere. A source within the Kingdom who insisted on remaining unnamed stated that the rumours were spread by Zionist agents, intent on destabilising the Kingdom.”

  “Enough,” Miss Reynolds said, firmly. “Are you sure you don’t want to see your parents again?”

  Mindy nodded. Her one mee
ting with them after Calvin’s death had been heartbreaking. They’d looked at her as though she was a monster, a changeling in their nest. Mindy understood, she really understood, so why did it hurt so much? They’d rejected her after years of leaving her to practically raise herself. The only time she’d ever really been able to spend with her mother had been on the weekends – and there had been times when her mother had worked then, too.

  “I understand,” Miss Reynolds said. “Maybe it’s time for you to go to bed.”

  Mindy scowled, but stood up and headed for the bathroom. The military had given her a VIP suite after the last one had been destroyed, complete with its own bathroom and shower. They’d even produced some clothes for her, although whoever had done the shopping either didn't know very much about little girls or didn't care. The nightgown they’d given her was frilly, with pictures of cartoon animals. Mindy hated cartoon animals. On the other hand, it was of better quality than the clothes her mother had picked for both Calvin and herself. They just hadn't had the money to be fashionable.

  She washed, she dressed, and walked out of the bathroom to see Calvin sitting on her bed.

  Any normal girl would have screamed. But Mindy wasn't normal. There were quite a few ghosts on the military base, walking around following people who were utterly unaware of their presence. Some of them seemed to be rather less aware of their own existence as ghosts than others; one of them, she’d seen, just seemed to be doing endless push-ups outside the buildings. He had to have been doing them for years.

  “Calvin,” she said. After everything he'd done, he was still her brother. “I...”

  She reached out for him, feeling hot tears trickling down her cheeks, and felt nothing, not even an icy cold. Her body passed through him and fell on the bed. Calvin stood up, walking through her body as if it wasn't there, and looked down at her as she rolled over. His translucent face looked twisted, and bitter.

  “She tricked me,” he said, and then hesitated. “No, I tricked myself. I let myself believe in what she told me.”

  Mindy honestly didn't know what to say. Most of the books she’d read about ghosts had them as friendly or implacably hostile. She’d only ever read one book when a girl’s best friend, who’d died in a car crash, had come back to haunt the earth. The storyline had been rather childish and she couldn't remember how it ended.

  “I have to help you,” Calvin said. “I need you to tell them what happened to me, and what she has in mind.”

  Mindy blinked. “She? You mean...”

  “Don’t say her name,” Calvin said, very quickly. “You will only attract her attention.”

  “All right,” Mindy said. She put her hands on her hips, as her mother had done in happier times, when all they’d had to worry about had been the kids staying out too late. “And now I think you’d better tell me what happened.”

  Calvin shuddered. “You sound an awful lot like mom,” he said.

  Mindy giggled.

  Her brother scowled at her. “Just listen, all right? I don't think anyone else can hear me.”

  ***

  “The levels of mana went off the scale in Washington,” Jorlem said, as Caitlyn peered down at his latest gadget. “We’re going to need bigger scales.”

  Caitlyn didn't smile at the weak joke. “Have you had any luck in tracking her?”

  “I'm afraid she’s doing something to make it hard for the remote viewers to find her,” Jorlem said. “It doesn't really help that we don’t have much to use as a compass.”

  Caitlyn scowled. Of all the people who had seen Harrow, only Misty and Mindy were magicians – and one of them was busy taking care of the other. That left the remote viewers working from hastily-drawn sketches and notes, rather than memories or photographs. Typically, the entire security network at Arlington had failed when Harrow started to return to the mortal world. None of the final images it had recorded had made any sense.

  Remote viewing – what Calvin had used, it seemed, to spy on girls – followed its own rules. A remote viewer could spy on a person he knew with great success, but it didn't seem to work so well with photographs, either of people or places. At least some of their defences had worked against Harrow, thankfully. The protections they’d given the President had saved him from the worst of the storm that had broken over Washington. But if they couldn't follow Harrow, they wouldn't be able to begin to stop her.

  “I’ll ask Misty to come help you when she’s finished putting Mindy to bed,” Caitlyn said. Calvin’s sister bothered her – and not just because she was taking everything she'd experienced in the last few days in stride. She was young, too young to have a proper moral compass, and had effective control of a deadly weapon. Calvin had proven just how dangerous uncontrolled magic could be. “What else have you produced?”

  Jorlem smiled and picked up a small spinning top. “Niven’s Wheel, Mark II,” he informed her. “There's a whole machine shop on the base and a factory for making children’s toys not far away, so we should be able to start mass production fairly soon. Like the Mark I, it soaks up mana, with a bit more tolerance for excessive energy. And it's shielded, so when the wheel shatters it should be safely confined inside the casing.”

  Caitlyn scowled. “Should?”

  “If it goes wrong, the entire Mark II will disintegrate,” he said. “That would be very bad for anyone standing nearby.”

  He snorted. “We actually have one that is designed to serve as a shrapnel grenade, of sorts,” he added. “Push it against her wards, let it drain the local mana and then when the mana runs out, it explodes and throws shrapnel at the bitch. Do you think that it would kill her?”

  “It would certainly force her to waste energy defending herself,” Caitlyn agreed. “What else do you have?”

  “This is something else we created, although it’s still an experiment,” Jorlem admitted, putting down the spinning top and picking up a bullet. “We put together a very basic gun that works using mana to fire bullets. There’s a kinetic spell on the barrel that imparts a great deal of velocity when the trigger is pulled. The user could put anything in the barrel and it would serve as a bullet. And, for our next trick...”

  He held the bullet up in front of her face. “This bullet carries its own charm,” he added. “When it hits a ward, it starts trying to suck out and absorb mana from the ward, weakening it. Golem suspects that a complex ward would probably be safe from being knocked down by this trick, but it should give her yet another thing to worry about. The real problem is mass-producing these things; we can have the runes carved onto the bullets in a factory, but charging them requires a magician.”

  Caitlyn nodded. Even with several new magicians popping up in the aftermath of Washington, the Mage Force had far too few magicians to get anything done. And not all of the magicians liked the thought of military discipline. Calvin hadn't been the only social outcast to discover that he had magic powers, although as far as they could tell he was the only one who had been corrupted by Harrow. But there might be hundreds more out there.

  “This is something different,” Jorlem said, as they walked into the next room. “One of my researchers came up with an idea for using mana as a power source. Basically, we create a flywheel power generation system using a charmed wheel to suck in mana. At least in theory, we should be able to use it to power a car, or a city, or...”

  His grin widened. “I’ve been doing a great deal of thinking about what will happen if the mana level keeps rising,” he said. “Quite apart from people turning other people into frogs, we might see some really nasty creatures making their appearance. The old gods, for example. If we could keep draining the mana at a controlled rate, we might be able to put that day off for a very long time.”

  “Clever,” Caitlyn agreed. “What can we do with this?”

  “Power things,” Jorlem said. “As far as we can tell, it’s a completely clean power source. If we set up a charmed flywheel on the base, we should be able to absorb enough mana to power all of our
requirements – and keep a lid on the amount of mana available to everyone else.”

  “Stopping mages from getting too far out of control,” Caitlyn said.

  “Precisely,” Jorlem said. “In fact, we are working on a Mark III Wheel that should be able to keep an area very low in mana, more or less permanently as long as the Wheel is in operation. But a flywheel system might also supply our requirements as well as simply preventing others from using mana.”

  “Good,” Caitlyn said. She held up a hand before he could bury her in technical details. “Do you have any idea how we can use what we know against her?”

  “We’ve been thinking about that,” Jorlem said. “She’s very much a primitive, at least from our point of view. One thought involved taking away her oxygen and seeing if that killed her. Or maybe using poison gas.”