Dragon's Teeth

by Mercedes Lackey

  The reply I’d gotten was not anything like I wanted. I’d intended it as an opening. I got dissed. “Fine, whatever.”

  Well one of the advantages of being Overwatch is they can’t turn you off. Not without taking out the earpiece, and he didn’t dare, not on a job. “Hey. Look I’m not trying to blow smoke up your ass here. Yeah, things can get nasty, yeah, there’s a price, and yeah, there is a quantum uncertainty thing going on, but a properly trained mage has the equivalent of a PhD in Nuclear Physics. Sure, the odds of turning on a linear accelerator and blowing up the universe are there, but they’re pretty small. Most of the time. A trained mage knows the risks and the costs and knows when to back down on the bad ones. Unless, of course, you’re trying to prevent the blowing up of the universe, in which case, the risk you take is probably worth it.”

  The anger in his voice was very real. “And what gives you the right, any of you, to mess with shit like that?”

  Where the hell had that come from? I was just as angry, how dared he? What did he know? And how about all those perfectly ordinary people out there who took horrible risks using nothing more but their hands and their brains? Or all the metas who took risks that always endangered the innocent? Wasn’t that why ECHO had the DCOs in the first place? “What gives you metas the right to do what you do? And you—what about you? You weren’t exactly fighting the good fight until you got dragooned into ECHO.”

  His voice dripped with contempt, as if I was some stupid teenager who’d been playing games with the DoD computers in Iron Mountain. “Christ, get some perspective, lady. I’ll admit I’ve never been a boy scout, but I wasn’t messing with primal forces. You want to argue the relative morality of what I did with trying to control the fabric of reality? Good luck.”

  The arrogant, judgemental son of a—oh he’d pushed my buttons but good. “Arthur C. Clarke: ‘Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ From where I sit there are plenty of people besides mages messing with the fabric of reality. Including plenty of metas.”

  He had an answer for that, too. “So? I’m hardly defending any of those douchebags. Magic, science, anything and anyone with the audacity to mess with crap on that scale is an asshole.”

  I’d snorted my own contempt. “So you’d prefer it if everyone went back to living in caves? You can’t pick and choose.”

  Now his voice just dripped scorn. “You’re big with the absolutes, aren’t you? Someone who invents the wheel? Good job. Someone who tries to ignite a new sun in Kansas? Douchebag.”

  So who had died and appointed him Lord High Everything Else? “Look, brainiac, on some level everyone with strong enough willpower messes with the fabric of reality. That’s what luck is! You want something bad enough, if there’s not enough force opposing you, by damn, you get it! That’s why one of the Prime Laws is ‘Be careful what you wish for’! Even YOU. Bet you have done just that, and gotten it. Bet you any amount of money you have.”

  Evidently I had pushed one of his buttons right back. If words were weapons, he’d skewered me with them then. “Right, ’cause you know so much about me! Victoria Victrix, the lady with ALL the answers! Tell me you’ve got it all down, that you have it all figured out, that you knew what would happen to Herbert!”

  I froze. The hurt—it felt like a heart attack for a minute. Finally I managed to say something. “Transmitting your requested info. Overwatch out.”

  I still heard him, of course, heard the sudden guilt, the contrition, the instant before I shut the comm down. “Shit . . . Victrix! I’m sorry dammit!”

  But it was too late.

  So now it was two days later, and I was settling in with the closest thing I could get to Tim Horton’s coffee (dark roast, pinch of salt on the grounds, double cream, double sugar) and wondering if I could stand to listen to his voice. If he’d skewer me again. Of course I was feeling much, much better now, since Herb was back. In fact, the now-little Elemental was perched on one of the desks, watching the monitors curiously.

  Bella had been all over me to kiss and make up. I guess she’d been at him . . . more directly, because when I put on the headset and opened the feed the first thing I heard was, “Word to the wise—when Bella knocks on your door, get ready to duck, she’s got a mean suckerpunch. Ow.”

  I couldn’t help it. I felt a smirk coming on. “Jaw hurt?” I asked sweetly.

  “Would that make you happy?” His tone was quite neutral.

  Honesty, or not? I opted for prevarication. “Yes and no. I’d be lying if I gave an unqualified no. But hey, schadenfreude. You have a solo job. I’m supposed to inform you because you haven’t been checking your email, phone or PDA. There. You’ve been informed. You’re also on Overwatch at Bell’s insistence.”

  “Thanks.” A very long pause. “Victrix?”

  I was bringing up my camera feeds. And I was not at all inclined to be anything other than chill and civil. “Yes, Red Djinni?”

  “I really am sorry.”

  I don’t often explode. That’s Bella’s thing. I’m usually . . . ok; face it I am usually huddling in a corner shaking in every limb rather than dealing with anger and confrontation. But this time I exploded. “You’re an unmitigated cream-faced spleeny unwashed bugbear. A pustulant boor. A ham-handed, toad-spotted malcontent. A beslubbering, pickle-brained pigeon egg. A lumpish folly-fallen apple-john. A qualling ill-breeding malcontent. A clouted common-kissing wagtail. A . . . ” I groped for words. They weren’t there. “Damn. I’m running out of Shakespearian insults.”

  “S’ok. Thanks for putting in the effort.” That kind of floored me. What the hell did that mean?

  Well at least I wouldn’t have to talk to him for long. “We’re supposed to keep radio silence on this one. We only break it if you’re in too deep to get out alone.” Or alive, but he would know that was what I meant.

  “No constant Overwatch?” He sounded surprised.

  Well of course I could. But . . . him and magic. Again. “Nothing you’d accept.”

  Then he floored me a second time. “What about a magic line?”

  The hell? I nearly inhaled my coffee. “I thought you were against me messing with the fabric of the universe.”

  “I think the universe will hold up to one arcane phone call.” When he said that, I almost went to the window to see if there were pigs flying in attack formation over the Varsity.

  OK. OK. Let’s make this the littlest and least intrusive thing I could. “Safest and smallest would be a light charm to link the PDAs and text.” Why text? Cause the spell to make what appeared on his screen also appear on mine was . . . well it was easy, small, and used less magic than lighting a candle.

  Which, by the way, is the single most cliched way to show you are a mage in the entire universe. So don’t do it, OK? Just don’t. It only impresses the rubes. It makes the rest of us sigh and roll our eyes.

  I couldn’t read his voice, but his words were clear enough. “All right, make it happen.”

  I did. A few moments later I was typing. Testing.

  Agh! My testicles! This is what passes for Djinni humor.

  OK, it was funny.

  Dr. Ruth has a pill for that, I replied. You want 2027 West Catalpa. Surveillance. Possible Doppelganger sighting. Definite explosives, hence radio silence. They know there’s a bomb maker in there and they know he’s using a radio transmitter to detonate, but they don’t know what freqs he has his detonators set for. I can’t find out magically because I don’t know who he is, I don’t have anything of his to use as a target. And I can’t find out by computer because I don’t know his IP address and there’s nothing around there I can hack to find it. Which makes the technomancy out on both counts. I was babbling, overexplaining. Why was I doing this? What about this man made me double-think myself, made me think I had to explain anything to him? I couldn’t help it. It was like scratching at a scab. Rules. There are rules to this magic stuff. Lots of rules. Unless, of course, you don’t mind killing and hurting a lot o
f people, including random strangers and yourself.

  His reply was . . . well . . . right on. Christ, even texting you talk a lot. Alright, objective?

  That was simpler, and required no overexplanation. Determine if DG is in there or not. If not, get Bomb Boy out without him setting off anything. If so, let me know and wait for backup.

  K. I should be at destination in 15 minutes.

  Now . . . let me get this straight, here. When I say I have the magic equivalent of a Ph.D. in Astrophysics, I am not kidding. Yes, there are instinctive mages. And some of them, a very few, are very good. Those few are the equivalent of natural athletes, or people who sing opera well with no training. The rest? They’re like every yahoo who says, “Hold my beer” and thinks he can drive like Mario Andretti or Paul Newman. Not. Gonna. Happen. Oh, they can get where they are going, most of the time, but there’s a lot of flailing and flogging and very often, very, very often, there is collateral damage.

  And yes, there are the old “Fam-Trad” mages, trained in the traditional manner, by a family or coven member. Things mostly work. They mostly never stray out of the family recipe book. They honestly do not know what they are working with, in the same sense that people drive cars every day and have no idea of the mechanics and physics of an internal combustion engine.

  Then there are the people like me, trained in very small, very special schools. I won’t tell you where. I will tell you that every day from the time I was seven years old, I went to the regular P.S. 17 grade school, then came home, and spent another four hours in a very different school far, far from my home. It was not Hogwarts, let me tell you. It was more like Kiddie CalTech. I did that every day of my life, including weekends, right up to college. And then I went to college. That college, one that was in a university but . . . and I’ll tell you what it is. Merlin College, Oxford University. Good luck finding it. You can look at Magdalene College in the north corner of First Court by the Chapel all you like; if you aren’t in Merlin College, you’ll never see the door.

  So, yeah, it was like that. I did this because my parents determined that I had a double dose of the family knack for the power, and knew it was either train me early and hard, or burn it out before I killed someone. Now, don’t get me wrong; I wanted this. There were very few times I rebelled, and the rebellion never lasted more than a day or two. You know how prodigies always are, math, science, letters, dance, music—it’s not our parents driving us into it, it’s us, charging in on our own, sometimes against the will of our parents. You punish us by taking away the music, the math books, the magic.

  It was in high school that this magic school figured out I was one rara avis indeed, a technomage, as well as a geomancer. In short, I could magic machines, the more complicated and computerized the better. I had an affinity for them. Most mages . . . don’t. Catastrophically don’t. Some I know can’t even live in a place with electricity without starting electrical fires. The fact that I could use them the way most mages use an atheme and chants blew people out of the water. Now, actually I had known this for some time, I just figured it was no big deal, everyone else could too, and eventually we’d get to technomancy in the classes. When I realized that no, I was the only one and they realized what I could do—well—let’s just say I ended up with a bit of an ego which bit me in the ass . . . but that’s another story.

  This only intensified my education. I’m a math whiz. And I do technomancy. Which means I can make shit up and know it’s going to work. Or to be precise, I know the exact odds of getting it to work. I can improvise way outside of the normal things that modern mages do—substituting components and the like. If I don’t have what I need for a spell, since I know the math and can deconstruct the original, I can make up a whole new spell on the spot that will use what I’ve got. I can, and do, run calculus in my head, though I always double check on the computer. This is because, at its root, magic is the ability to move energy in a way that gets things done that you want to get done. The tool for moving it is your will, reinforced by the energies of the stuff you use to make up the spell. Usually mathemagical diagrams in my case; I don’t need to use many components these days. That magical energy is all around you; conventional science just hasn’t discovered it yet. The energy you use to move that energy comes from inside you.

  Yes, if you’ve made the intuitive leap already, I’ll confirm it for you. Luck is magic. Energy responding to will, changing reality to suit you.

  But there’s always a price. Always a price. Part of my price to become the technomancer that I am was to have a mere sliver of a childhood. I understood, bone deep, very early in my life, that I was potentially juggling with nuclear bombs. I also understood, bone deep, what the consequences of failure were, because my parents took me on a visit to a ward full of people who had slipped while juggling.

  Trust me, you never want to go there.

  This is why, when I do the things that have less-than-perfect odds, they’re set up so I am the meat-shield between catastrophe and anyone else around.

  There is no free lunch. Most of the time, the price is sheer, physical exhaustion. Sometimes you end up with a higher price than that. I did once. That is why I am a mass of aching, burning scarred tissue from my collarbone to my soles. Yet another story.

  But I can no more give it up than I can give up breathing. It’s me. It defines me. I need it like I need air. I never realized how much until ECHO came knocking on my door post-Invasion, and I built Overwatch, and was operating at the height of my powers again.

  I say, without false modesty, I am a Robert Oppenheimer of magic. And just as he, I understand the math, and the consequences of not understanding the math completely. He did not embark on the creation of the A-bomb in a spirit of anything other than full understanding of the consequences of failure. I do not embark on spellcasting in a spirit of anything other than a righteous dread of what might go wrong. Ever.

  So this is why I see red—pun not intended—when the Djinni acts as if I was some street witch trying to hex her boyfriend’s ex with a supermarket spellbook.

  Then we get into the fact that not only am I an exquisitely trained mage, I am a mage steeped in magical ethics until it oozes from every pore. Ethical magic is hard. You can do nothing without consent. You clean every speck up after yourself. You think, a lot, about all the possible ramifications that your alteration to the universe might have.

  But I digress.

  While I was thinking this over, my screen lit up. Reading me, Overwatch?

  That’s a roger. Something occurred to me. I knew he had headed out without a lot of warning, and that he’d be there a while. Jeet yet? Yontoo?

  Mwha?

  That’s southern for, “Did you eat yet? Want to?” I glanced at Herb, who was peering at the screen in a way that suggested he was very eager. He had come back to me, just hours after Red’s words had sent me reeling. He was a mere pebble of what he once was, but he had clung to life. He was still with us and he liked Djinni, and . . . well, if Djinni was feeling guilt or remorse over what he thought had happened to Herb, it wasn’t fair to let him continue to feel bad.

  Herb is an interesting barometer for bullshit. I have no idea how he does it, but he always knows if somebody is a basically good guy hiding behind the facade of an asshat, or scumbag hiding behind the mask of someone you can trust. He’s never been wrong. Not even when I thought he was.

  And he liked Djinni. Go figure.

  Yeah, I suppose I could do with something to munch on, why?

  You’re likely going to be there a while. I’ve mapped you in the alley and it’s not paved. Which meant, of course, that Herb could sneak in through the ground after I gave him a magical shortcut to a spot I knew nearby.

  I think sending some Chinese delivery my way might be counter-productive to the nature of this stake-out.

  I had something more discreet in mind. Provided you’re good with a little visitor of the arcane kind. Herb was jumping up and down and clapping his hands. />
  Chinese . . . elves? I took that as a yes. I went to the kitchen and packed up a small, hardened “lunchbox” of mil-spec steel. It was going to have to survive being hauled behind Herb through the dirt. Coffee in a thermos and a sandwich Bella brought me from the deli. She thinks I don’t eat enough. I used a little magic to make it hot and fresh—“go back to the way you were an hour and a half ago” basically. Reverse entropy. Normally I’d use the microwave, but I think Djinni’s taste buds are better than mine.

  I gave the box to Herb. I had little arcane “landing zones” plotted all over the city these days, in case I needed to send someone—or something—there in a hurry. Without a landing pad, whatever you apport has 85% odds of ending up a smear on the ground. Or worse, embedded in the ground. Herb and the lunch were small, it wouldn’t take much out of me. Even better, Herb was magic in nature. Magic critters are easier to apport. He stepped into the diagram I drew on the counter with the box strapped to his back like a backpack. I’d ask Djinni to bring him home, later, unless he wanted me to apport him back, or to take the long way back. Sometimes he does. I think he’s exploring Atlanta underground. Literally underground.

  I ran through the math, sketched more diagrams in the air, said the right sounds, and with a pop of displaced air, he was gone.

  I went back to the keyboard. OK, you hearing something nearby that sounds like digging? Check there.

  You’re not sending gnomes at me, are ya?

  What do you think I am, a travel agency? Naw, just a Philly cheesesteak and some coffee.

  That works. There was another long pause. I wondered what he was thinking as Herb pushed the box up out of the ground. Finally: What the hell is that?

  Take a good look. I know it looks like a walking lunchbucket, look who’s carrying it.

  Another long pause, and I swear to you, the text looked angry. That’s messed up, Victrix. Herb was your friend, wasn’t he? What is this? Some animated chew-toy look-alike?