It seemed as though the past couple of centuries had not completely eliminated these fools and their ilk from the human population. A pity, that. I loathe religious fanatics.
“You are being charged with a crime by the devil Deryk Shea—“ He said the name and spat on my carpet as if expectoration took the place of some insult too vile to speak. “—and will be appearing before a grand jury soon?”
“Yes,” I told him, my curiosity evaporating and being replaced with growing irritation. “And I’ll thank you not to spit on my carpet.”
“Need I remind you,” he said, jabbing the weapon at me once again, “who it is that holds the gun?”
The man was clearly a lunatic of some sort. I had to fight back the temptation to take the weapon from him and use it to permanently block his airway. Regardless, I’d had enough of him and his threats. “Need I remind you,” I shot back, “that I can tear your flesh from your bones and make you disappear as if you’d never been born?”
He seemed stunned by this statement, and, before he could decide what to do with the weapon in his hand, I reached out and plucked it away. I punched him once, lightly, catching him in the nerve cluster right under the sternum with the upraised knuckle of my forefinger.
He gasped for a few moments, trying unsuccessfully to make his lungs obey, then dropped into an unconscious pile of flesh and bones at my feet.
“I’d rather you not witness this,” I told Pepper, and locked her in the bathroom before returning to the unconscious intruder.
He’d piqued my curiosity. He’d wanted something in particular, and I thought it would be very interesting to find out what that something was. It was unfortunate that he probably wouldn’t want to cooperate, and that I’d be required to convince him that cooperation was in his best interest.
I glanced out the window. Dawn had fallen across the city, bathing it in an amber glow. That ruled out calling in one of the vampires to help me in my interrogation. That was unfortunate, I decided, since I didn’t want to do the man any lasting harm, and my interrogation techniques were rather primitive. I could make the man forget that I existed, but I couldn’t make him want to help me with my inquiries.
But I knew someone who could, I realized with a cold smile. I wrapped him up in a mana strand and called another, leaping between my apartment and the Lounge an instant later. I materialized in the Lounge itself, which was probably a mistake. I hadn’t considered that Kevin had probably installed several security features to prevent people from doing just that.
My spellbound tattoos deflected the first round of his ward’s counter-attack but the keening of the alarm was almost unbearable. I covered my ears and stumbled toward the stairs. I only made it halfway before Kevin and Boneyard materialized in my path. Looking peeved, Kevin gestured and the noise stopped.
“Good security,” I muttered, pulling my hands away from my ears.
“What the hell are you doing here, Hades?” he asked me suspiciously.
“I need your help, Kevin. Seriously. I didn’t know how to get in touch with you other than through Jack. So here I am.”
He frowned, then nodded. “Reasonable. What’s up?”
“You won’t believe this. I’ve got an armed assailant wrapped up in my apartment. I get the feeling he’s dangerous, and part of something much bigger. Only, I can’t get him to talk. Not without employing methods I would find much too crude. I’ve been around long enough to know that torture rarely works the way people think it does.”
“Take us there,” he said.
I whisked us back to my apartment to find my would-be assailant inching his way along the carpet toward the front door. He rolled over on his back and glared up at us as we stared down at him.
Kevin snickered. “He sure isn’t going anywhere fast, is he?”
I shook my head, reached down, and lifted the assailant from the floor. I then carried him across the room and dropped him into my solitary chair.
“You seriously need furniture,” Kevin remarked blandly. “Not a bad place, but empty as hell.”
“Can we concentrate on the matter at hand?” I asked irritably. “This guy ain’t getting any younger.”
Kevin smiled grimly. “I hope you know I’m not really comfortable doing this.”
I glanced over at him, a little puzzled by this confession. “Doing what? It’s not as though I expect you to boil his blood in his veins or anything.”
He looked disgusted at that. “Remind me to tell you why I’m a security mage rather than a physician sometime,” he said.
That sounded like an intriguing story and I resolved to ask him about it at another time.
Without another word, he scooped a strand out of the air and sent one end lancing into our captive’s brain. Within seconds the man was babbling like a brook, pouring out the whole hideous thing in a sudden burst of verbosity.
My blood ran cold as he revealed their plan. Apparently he and others like him were part of a separatist movement that wanted his home planet to cut ties with the Confederacy and were willing to do just about anything to accomplish this objective. Being relatively ignorant of magic, they assumed they’d be able to hold me hostage and force me to help them.
If I didn’t simply decide to join in because of my history with Deryk Shea and the other immortals.
They wanted to nuke the Confed courthouse and had the means to do so. They just needed someone powerful enough to breach the wards and get the weapon inside. The whole plot was insane, but that hadn’t stopped people like him before.
Apparently the issue was that the Confed Charter violated some of their planet’s religious principles, and even the lax enforcement of that Charter was more than certain fundamentalists among them could tolerate.
Colony worlds come under three headings: Frontier, Provisional, and Member. Frontier worlds had the strongest Confed presence, and the Confed governing body controlled the Departments of Planetary Security, Economic Development, Human Rights, Elections and Environmental Policy. The Confed itself ensured equal treatment of all citizens, community policing, and resource management. It also prevented exploitation of labor and election tampering by multi-world corporations and their representatives.
Once a colony had shown itself to be able to enact and maintain its own Charter, following Confed strictures, it rose to the status of Provisional World, and the Confed withdrew to oversee Planetary Security and Economic Development, while keeping a careful eye on the way the planetary government handled other affairs. Any subsequent evidence of election fraud or human rights abuses would result in the immediate withdrawal of Provisional rights and a return to Frontier status.
This had already happened to this fellow’s world. Colonized as it was by a more radical Shiite sect, it had shown itself unable to maintain adherence to the precepts of religious freedom and gender equality and had already lost its Provisional status two times. If it happened once more, the planet would be declared incorrigible and suffer the indignity of a forced immigration of a sizable non-Islamic population in order to diminish the influence of the religious leaders on the democratic process.
Suffice it to say the Confed wasn’t in the habit of screwing around.
The colonists, on the other hand, were pretty much sick of the whole situation. They wanted out from under the Confederation’s thumb, and were willing to do just about anything to achieve this end. One would-be colony had already slipped out of the Confed’s net, not through force, however, but through sheer obstinacy. The Confed maintained that an economic system that carefully balanced the precepts of socialism and capitalism—i.e. strongly regulated capitalism with a fully funded social safety net—was ultimately the most beneficial to all parties concerned, individual or corporate.
The Randites, a sect of fiscal conservatives with no overt religious affiliation, disagreeing with this policy, had applied for and received permission to settle on a particularly feral planet some two-hundred light years from Earth. From the moment their colony s
hip left Earth’s orbit, they’d made it abundantly clear that they neither wanted nor expected any further assistance from Earth or the Confederation. They would refuse all contact until they were able to engage the Confederation as a fully independent trading partner.
This was perfectly okay with the Confed. As long as the Randites didn’t expect any aid from the Confederation, they weren’t required to sign onto the Confederation Charter. Until such time as a representative of that world contacted the Confed, all member and provisional worlds had agreed to pretend the colony didn’t exist. The Confed had nothing against liberty. It simply refused to pay for someone else’s free ride.
Our captive’s bunch, on the other hand, wanted to force the Confed into granting them the same status, despite the fact that a considerable amount of the Confederation’s resources had already been used to perform some moderate terraforming procedures to aid in agricultural production. They’d also been forced to perform minor genetic adjustments on their livestock to protect them from a slightly elevated level of background radiation.
Their world belonged to the Confederation, whether they liked it or not.
He informed us that they also had a Plan “B” and, with great reluctance, explained the details of said plan. These bastards were smarter and trickier than I would have thought. If they couldn’t sneak a nuke in, they planned on kicking a satellite from orbit and sending it whizzing down on the Confed Courthouse with no one the wiser until it was too late.
Listening to him describe the plan in detail, I realized that it was, in fact, a very good Plan “B”. Intersecting the right satellite (one conveniently equipped with a stealth mode for planetary surveillance and low orbit maneuverability left over from the Cen War) with a small shielded drone at a specific time, they could send the thing rocketing into the atmosphere with all the finesse of a cue ball set to slice the eight ball into a side pocket.
Or so Kevin put it. I had to take his word for it, being more or less ignorant of the game of billiards and its variants.
“Our only chance,” he told me, after putting the would-be terrorist into a magical slumber, “is if there’s a mageship in-system able to intersect the drone.”
The whole notion of mageship still astounds me, and I’m not sure I can do the subject justice by trying to explain it. Imagine a huge, intelligent starship with the power to generate and manipulate mana as if it were a million sentient mages working independently of one another. Mageships were the flagships of the Confed fleet, twelve extremely powerful vessels programmed to work in partnership with a completely vetted human (or human-variant) mage.
They were a combination of magecraft and technology of the likes I’d never imagined, the brainchild of one of Deryk Shea’s former engineers, a man now known only as The Artificer. “Can you get us to Deryk Shea’s office?” he asked me.
I nodded slowly. He gave me the chance to retrieve Pepper from the bathroom. She wasn’t very pleased with me, I noted, as I bundled her into my arms and mentally prepped a spell by altering the configuration of one of my tattoos.
I cast us onto the mage-road and sent us northward, emerging from the highway of permanent intersecting transit tubes on the roof of the Adjuster’s Office building in Tacoma. Or, more precisely, on a man-made island in the center of Commencement Bay, some distance from the Port of Tacoma.
Another one of my tattoos rose to defend us from the warding spells as I punched through the roof to the offices directly below with another transit tube. This might not have been the most politic way to go about this, but it was certainly the most expedient. And, from what our captive had told us, speed was of the essence. We really had very little time to waste.
Kevin and I overran the security teams with a web of magical threads, not even bothering to craft whole spells. We used the magical equivalent of brute force to power our way past them to Deryk Shea’s office. When we burst through his door, he was on his feet and moving around his desk at almost vampiric speeds. He stopped suddenly when he recognized me and saw the dog in my arms. “Hades? What the hell are you doing? And what’s with the dog?”
“This is Pepper,” I told him. “She’s my dog. And I couldn’t leave her back at my apartment with a terrorist, whether he’s snoozing or not.” I quickly outlined the situation for him.
He listened somewhat skeptically at first, but, with a glance at Kevin as if for confirmation, he silenced me with a wave of his hand. “The longer you talk about it, the less time we have to get something done about it.”
We waited in silence as he walked back to his desk and activated what I assumed was his version of a PCD—over-powered though it was. Rather than taking up something the size of a twentieth century watch battery, it took up something the size of a desk drawer. Or so it appeared.
“We’re in luck,” he told us. “We’ve got a mageship just entering the system. It should be within range to detect a drone in orbit within half an hour.”
“Hopefully that’ll be in time,” I muttered. Even if it weren’t, there wasn’t much we could do about it. The terrorist had said he had a little while before they activated their Plan “B”, since they’d been hoping to use their nuke, which required my cooperation, or the cooperation of someone like me. I doubted they’d get any help from the magical community, especially since it sounded as though they’d hinged that whole plan on my participation, willing or otherwise. The way I calculated it out, we had just enough time for the mageship to arrive and do its work before the drone struck the satellite.
My calculations, unfortunately, were wrong. As the mageship was in-bound, it sent a message to Deryk that its scanners had picked up the drone hitting the satellite and sending it slamming into the outer atmosphere. It was already in descent. We’d run out of time.
“My god! We’ve got under half an hour to evacuate the courthouse.” Deryk ran for the hall. I grabbed his arm as he passed. “Evacuate the courthouse, Deryk, but I’ve got another way to handle this. There’s no telling how wide a swath of destruction this satellite will cause. Evacuate the courthouse and as much of the surrounding city as possible. In the meantime—” I grabbed a mana strand and snapped it into a transit tube aimed nearly a mile straight up—“I’m going to see if I can intercept it.”
“Hades, no!”
The words were like a whisper of wind as I leaped through this end of the transit tube. Then I was floating, buffeted by cold winds high in the atmosphere. Well, not flying, exactly, but falling…falling so far above the ground it was virtually indistinguishable from flying.
I wove a bubble around my face to cut wind shear to my eyes. It did me no good to be up here if I couldn’t keep my eyes open. Once I’d accomplished that, I scanned the outer reaches of the atmosphere, focusing on finding a flame trail as the satellite skipped across the outermost edge.
There! I spotted it, coming in at such speed I had to completely re-orient myself to its location several times before I was able to zero in on it. Switching to magesight, I wasn’t surprised to discover there were very few mana threads available up here. That didn’t matter. I reconfigured another tattoo and threw out an extra-large transit tube, ten miles long and with a mouth nearly a mile wide.
The sheer kinetic force of the falling satellite hitting the tube nearly shook it from my grasp before I could throw the other end back out into space. It writhed in my grip like an angry snake and I shrieked as the effort strained the muscles in my forearm and nearly tore my fingers apart.
One thing about transit tubes is that they don’t handle large amounts of energy real well. Typically mild kinetic forces such as a falling human body, an arrow, or even a bullet, had little effect on their integrity, but something like this hunk of steel and aluminum and who knows what else was a different matter entirely. I felt the satellite enter the transit tube, sensed a brief moment of its path through the tube, then nearly passed out when the massive influx of energy shredded the spell into fragments. I tumbled through the sky, barely conscious, as I str
uggled to see whether I’d managed to deflect the device to a point outside the atmosphere.
My last thought before unconsciousness was that I’d succeeded, but a lingering thread of doubt remained as blackness deep as space overtook me.
I survived. You might find that surprising, but, I assure you, you’ll understand quickly enough how that came to be. Falling such a distance would pulp even an immortal’s resilient body, and, had I struck the ground or the water of the Puget Sound, I would have been instantly destroyed.
But my last conscious act was to shape a thread into a wind-drag chute, similar to a parachute, and it was this nearly instinctive maneuver that saved my life in the end. The mageship arrived in orbit as I was still falling and, with one thread, snatched me out of the sky and deposited me back in Deryk’s office, at the same time informing him through some near-telepathic technological connection, that I’d eliminated the threat and was even now in dire need of medical attention.
The experience was not without its price. I am still weak, magically speaking, unable to handle more than a couple strands at one time without losing control of them. I’m hoping this fades, but, even if it doesn’t, I can live with it. I’d risked my life for the safety of others, and in so doing, I’d given Deryk Shea a reason to drop all the charges against me.
Interestingly enough, that hadn’t even entered my mind when I’d decided to do it. Near as I can tell, I hadn’t given a moment of thought to any of the possible repercussions. I’d acted on necessity, almost by reflex alone.
That evening I was welcomed back to the Lounge with a full-out celebration. They even managed to convince me to take the stage for a round of karaoke. Or, as I like to say with regards to my meager talent in that arena—“croakie.”
I have to add, it’s a bit unnerving to go from devil to saint in a matter of days. But, if any of you are ever afforded the opportunity, I highly recommend it. The benefits are well worth the risk.
Tales from the Magitech Lounge Page 7