Knock on wood! Why scare yourself ahead of time?
Locomotive gained enough experience and decisiveness in dealing with “non-formals” (a vague term used in reports for any non-normal humans), and the bylaw mandating “gatherings of no more than three people” hadn’t been canceled yet. The authorities had not forgotten how badly such gatherings could end. It was enough to reinstate the licensing of public events, and NZAMIPS chambers would be full of the homegrown gurus. Someone worked hard feeding those psychos with appropriate information, motivating them, taking them under his control, but so far all his efforts came to naught. The inopportunely-appearing dark magician tamed the supernatural in the region, turning the bloody drama into a comic scene—an occasion for jokes. With perverted pleasure, Captain Baer crushed the results of someone’s long-term work with a steamroller of police forces.
A big prize wasn’t long in coming.
In the blue light of the balls mounted on portable tripods NZAMIPS experts dismantled the ruins of a brick outhouse. Soldiers in protective suits and masks cautiously stacked clear glass vials with glowing contents into sealed containers. Locomotive’s hair stood on end just from looking at them.
The dragon tears! The first batch in seven years. But experts claimed that the recipe for the cursed potion had been lost. Was the source an archeological excavation? Foreign intervention? Even the scent of this potion resulted in a state of euphoria for a commoner and summoned a desire to trust and obey, not thinking about the consequences and repenting for one’s deeds. Booze for killers! In the white mages the potion caused irreversible addiction; the dark reacted to its action much more simply—they just puked.
All the residents of that house would have to be investigated regarding their involvement in the sales of that stuff. The distributor of the poison escaped the interrogation: upon seeing the police, the psycho maniac blew himself up in the boiler room that had been converted into a warehouse. The poor fellow did not know the specifics of the building code. The main apartment building only lost its glass windows; in the outhouse, the roof got blown off and one of the outside walls destroyed. There were no casualties among the NZAMIPS team; two were wounded by fragments of the roof, but the suicidal maniac died on site.
The poison served him right! Surely, he was hooked on his own potion, and they wouldn’t get anything coherent out of him in the interrogation anyway.
“You are to be congratulated.”
Before turning around, Locomotive drove a smug grin off his face.
“Yes, sir! The operation went off almost flawlessly.”
Mr. Satal nodded gravely, looking over the luminous scattering: “This will make the capitol authorities fuss around. But they will start asking difficult questions.”
Locomotive shrugged indifferently: “I have requested forty-four times an increase in funding over the last ten years; I can show you a copy of each of them.”
The coordinator angrily shook his head: “I don’t give a shit about your papers! What will we do when inspectors arrive here? They can stick their noses anywhere, and I don’t even know what you and Larkes have done.”
For some reason, Locomotive didn’t think of that. It isn’t enough to be honest, you must look honest. Any normal organization inevitably accumulates a couple of episodes that appear ambiguously untrustworthy. As soon as the auditors dug out something like this, he could kiss his captaincy goodbye!
“I … will do the cleanup.”
Mr. Satal nodded with satisfaction: “I’m glad we understand each other!”
Captain Baer worked with superiors of a dark nature for years, but it was the first time that he was so frankly offered to commit fraud. He was almost ordered to…
“And one more thing,” the coordinator stopped halfway to his limousine, “I didn’t have time to go into the details of our main investigation.”
Locomotive snorted mentally. Indeed, he didn’t have time!
“There is an opinion that our mage developed an unconventional power channel. We are not talking about a wild Empowerment, but, perhaps, university instructors remember an unusual student. Let’s say, over the past seven years. I think it will be easier if you talk to them,” Mr. Satal concluded.
Naturally! All university instructors of dark magic were traditionally salaried NZAMIPS part-timers. An unconventional channel… And then Captain Baer thanked all the gods that the empath wasn’t anywhere near the coordinator. He knew one magician whose power channel was guaranteed to be nonstandard, and he knew him very closely…
“Clean up the tail, Mr. Satal? We will do that, sir!” Tail? What does that mean?
Chapter 14
For my next work day at BioKin I arrived ten minutes early just to watch the others coming. Bummer! All employees were already at their workstations (as far as I knew, because I wasn’t officially introduced), but they weren’t doing any work. They all were in a mourning mood, suffering in silence.
I wondered if someone died there.
Upon closer examination, I was the only one who dressed more or less decently, in the sense that I had neither trousers that were stretched at the knees with fringe around the lapels, nor pseudo-artistic patches on my shirt, nor a hairstyle as if I had run across a stray camel. Naturally, that put me in opposition to the team, and they immediately attempted to humiliate me: the red-haired secretary (Quarters’ relative) brought me utterly cold coffee. When I tossed a warming spell into the cup almost without looking, nobody else showed a desire to joke.
No one tried to make me a closer acquaintance, either. Well, I easily figured out who Johan was—the guy Quarters mentioned, because there was only one white mage among them. A guy in leather pants could pass for the alchemist Carl (with the last name of either Fartsing or Ferting) and a younger lad with bright red hair - for his assistant; a chubby little man, sitting closer to the coffeemaker, resembled an accountant. Boss Polak and his secretaries needed no introduction.
I could easily picture a white mage in depression here, but it remained a mystery what or who could have driven seven people into a stupor. If all my future employers are like these, I’d rather go back to the garage business to fix motorcycles. I’m sure that will be a very profitable business! But since I took money (and twice for the same job), decorum demanded that I help them. The Tangor are proud, and reputation can be lost only once.
Pretending to be an emotionally dull dark jerk, I went to the boss to find out if my previous day’s work was done correctly. They paid me for something, right? Mr. Polak looked at me painfully, but I was deaf to his suffering. I myself had to invent the next assignment: “Maybe I’d better learn design of a particular node and focus on it? Or work on the gas generator system as a whole?”
“I’m not sure if you will understand the scheme…”
I smiled politely: “Coupling alchemy with magic is my strong point!” It was true, at least for dark magic.
Once more he looked around the tables in confusion, and I finally grasped it: “Perhaps, your drawings are not systematized? I could do it. Orderliness helps a lot in work!”
He perked up a bit, nodded, and asked me to organize the documents in chronological order. Unfortunately, most of them had no dates, and, armed with archaeological methods, I had to arrange the papers in layers. Periodically, I tried to obtain advice from Polak, then from Carl, and soon they got fed up with me. Polak deserted first, followed by the rest; by lunch time, I was left alone in the office (except for the secretaries). Finally, that got me.
“Girls, what happened? Or have you been like this the whole time?”
Ron’s relative rolled her eyes, enjoying an opportunity to show her awareness: “They are in depression since yesterday!”
“Do not keep me in suspense! What happened yesterday?”
“A test at the sewage factory,” the brunette stepped in and sniffed. “Another one!”
It explained a bit of the situation.
“And how did it end?”
“As al
ways!”
That meant they failed it. I could have guessed that.
By the end of the day I managed to go through almost a third of the documents and get acquainted with the subject of the work. Polak was wrong when he said that I wouldn’t understand the scheme. Drawings are typically made according to the same set of standards; otherwise, manufacturers wouldn’t be able to use them. And it doesn’t matter what you put in the fermentation vat—beer or sewage; from the alchemical point of view, it is all the same, as soon as it is organic. As well as I understood it, they tried to design a complex nonlinear control mechanism as a set of perforated drums, to which the device was supposed to turn under a specific combination of input parameters (like through a set of locks). The idea was beautiful, but it did not work for some reason. I wasn’t sure that I could figure out why the design was failing. Two variants of different complexity were presented in the piles of papers, and, judging by the contents of the documents, both schemes of perforation were developed by the local white mage, Johan. I don’t mean that his schemes were wrong, but he was guided by the logic of the magical process, and the limitations of such an approach were seen very well in the design of my motorcycle. That gave me some hope that the problem could be solved…
Coming to work the next day, I caught Johan stiff drunk.
My coworkers pretended that it was nothing out of the ordinary. I tried not to pay attention to Johan, blend with the team, but it was beyond me. I decided they didn’t understand what was happening. Okay, as to the dark mages, there are few of us in Redstone, and the dark from the university do not talk much to the townsfolk. So the latter do not know what is normal for a dark. But the white ones are a different story. There ought to be as many of them as dirt here! Was I the only one who knew how Johan’s drinking would end?!
A white magician who goes on a drinking bout will usually not come out of it alive. Well, maybe he will, if you resort to involuntary hospitalization. Their psyche is considered to be fragile and not adapted to the ills of life. Once unable to cope with the nervous shock and falling into a chemical relaxant, a white will drown his mental anguish in wine again and again, and he will have less and less willpower to get out of it. But the physical condition of a white is directly related to the mental one…
Perhaps, the firm just wanted one of its developers to die? No, that was a bad joke on my part…
But I needed to save the man, no kidding!
Driving off the secretaries, I made killingly strong coffee and went to bring the guy, with a runny nose, to his senses; I took his hand and put the cup in. Regretfully, I had no egg yolks and pepper handy, but I threw so much lemon in the coffee that my eyes started watering.
“Have a sip, please! You have to drink it out.”
White mages respond to physical contact differently—a touch sets them on an intimate footing and makes willing to trust. Given that alcohol intoxication increases suggestibility, I hoped that he would do as I said.
“In one sip, opa!”
He gulped and painfully winced. A very good effect! I continued to hold his hand and looked him in the eye (it usually helps to be more persuasive): “Hey, buddy, you must go home! Rest well today, gather yourself up for tomorrow. Everything will be fine, I promise! We need your help. You will be okay! Do you want me to take you home?”
He shook his head drunkenly, stood up, and firmly went to the door; drunken whites first lose their brains before the rest of the body gets poisoned. I hoped that he would be able to pull himself together.
After Johan’s departure, the average mood in the office improved by two degrees. Probably, no one dared to start discussion of failure in the presence of that poor guy. After waiting for five minutes to make sure that Johan was gone, Polak loudly clapped his hands: “What do you think, guys, about a five-minute coffee break?”
Employees perked up, and their chairs began creaking. I nipped in the bud their attempts to sit on the drawings, so we all gathered around the secretaries’ table, ousting the unhappy girls. The table was quickly serviced with coffee, biscuits, and salted nuts, and even with a bottle of homemade liquor—which I generously poured into the coffee without delay.
“I cannot hide, my friends,” Polak began, “that the test results have been a big blow for us. But it’s not the end of the world. Who has ideas about the causes of the latest failure?”
Depressed silence reigned at the table.
“Come on, my friends, go ahead!”
“Magic cannot be coupled with alchemy,” Carl said gravely.
“Why is that?” A sip of liquor made me long for communion.
The alchemist glanced viciously at me: “Because those fields are unconnected!”
I pointedly raised my finger: “They interact through the material world! The main problem is to find the common ground, the points of contact.”
“Points? In the vat of shit?”
“What is wrong with the vat of shit from the alchemical point of view?”
“It does not work!”
I patted myself on the chest: “I have a patent for a device, in which a magical unit is built into an alchemical one, and it f*cking works! Although in the beginning, the conjunction was monstrous.” Should I actually show them my motorcycle?
But Carl did not want to listen to my success: “What do you think we ought to do?”
“Usually the problem can be solved by splitting the system into parts,” I shrugged.
At least, that worked for me once.
“Which parts?” Carl muttered angrily.
I shrugged again: “I’ll say when I have studied the process!”
“Carl,” Polak stood up for me, “let the boy learn the process in more detail!”
For the “boy” I would have beaten him in the face, but Mr. Polak was my boss. I had to smile.
The alchemist proudly turned his back on me. I couldn’t care less! Quarters’ relative poured liquor into my cup as a reward (the girls definitely did not like the alchemist). The conversation turned to non-serious topics: attending the spring festival and the company’s barbeque in the countryside. I watched, listened, and attempted to figure why Ron tried so hard to put me in this company. Kindergarten! I felt like I was among children!
“Why don’t you have a job as a magician?” the brunette cautiously got closer, thinking that two cups of liquor would have made me soft.
I feigned a warm, fatherly, and smug smile: “One does not interfere with the other, darling!”
She cutely pouted her lips and tried to take a seat on my lap.
The next day Mr. Polak sent me on a “business trip” to the client’s factory. Well, you could guess where to. I admit, only then did I realize what exactly caused such severe depression in the firm’s employees.
It is hard to give an adequate description of a sewage disposal factory. Not that I did not know before how sewage is treated, but little smelly tubes in the lab did not provide me with insight into the scale of the system that was capable of processing the wastes of the whole city. Dark magicians do not like such things, but I was personally impressed by the magnitude of it: rows of giant pumps, pipes of my height in diameter entangled in staircases, vats with spikes of thermometers, and a constantly dancing flame of emergency exhaust above the pipes (can you guess what gas was burning?).
I was not welcome there. I have to admit, I did not immediately realize why.
“What, BioKin again?” the manager grimaced.
“Yes,” I shyly confessed.
“In relation to what occurred three days ago?”
“Right.”
He did not want to deal with me and passed into the hands of the shift master.
“What are you there?” the worker squinted suspiciously.
It seemed to be unwise to introduce myself as a new employee in that situation.
“An independent auditor!” I arched my chest. “Investors want to know feasibility of the project.”
“This is long overdue… Of
fice rats!” the master expressively presented his point of view.
“Let’s do it like this: you’ll help me understand what’s going on, and those smarty pants will no longer disturb you.”
’Because they are about to be swept out with a dust broom,’ I added to myself.
We shook each other’s hands, and the staff became much kinder to me.
It quickly became clear that our office wanted to design a prototype of the control block for a fermentation vat, the main production unit of the factory. Every vat was fed with filtered and stirred sewage, and illuminating gas and a tarry substance—used as a raw material for all sorts of chemical products—were received as output. Oh, plus lots and lots of water. The essence of the problem was that the super proliferative bacteria, modified through white magic methods, were extremely sensitive to the composition of… hmm… culture medium. Much, much more sensitive than the unpretentious wild strains! As soon as the microscopic workers, invisible to the naked eye, got overheated or overcooled, they lost their activity, and the vat had to be stopped. And cleaned. My visit to the factory coincided precisely with the cleaning event, and I could tell you: a ghoul one hundred years old compared to that would be like a walking scented candle. The half-treated sewage had to be stored somewhere else for the cleaning of the fermentation vats, and that added flavor to the situation.
I could kill people guilty of triggering even one such event, but if BioKin was the cause of that at least twice… then the workers’ sincere hatred was understandable. I did not want any more visits to the sewage facility, but intuition told me that the solution of the design problem could only be found at the factory. There was something in the enhanced bacteria that turned their inoculation into quiet sabotage. If I wanted to work off Quarters’ money, I had to find that intangible factor.
Nothing distracts one better from evil thoughts than hard, creative work! The object of work in this case is irrelevant. In a few days, I totally forgot the events of the past few months, as though the whole saga about the Dark Knight had nothing to do with me.
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