Tales from the Magitech Lounge

by Saje Williams

  I followed her into the garage and leaned against the side of the van. “So?”

  “Magic can be used to trap a soul…you know that, right?”

  “Sure. Necromancy.”

  “Well, a powerful enough mage—and most human mages aren’t anywhere near this level of power—can weave a spell so complex, it can trap a soul forever. And I’m talking about the two main parts of the soul here. The oversoul and the ka. Everything that makes a person who he or she is. The spell traps both of them and becomes self-perpetuating. In other words, the sigil renews itself, drawing upon ambient mana to do so.

  “The power of the djinn is dictated by the number of threads initially used to create it. It takes around fifty to trap the souls, and if you create one with just that many, you end up with a creature that’s damn hard to kill, but one that doesn’t really have any magic. Every thread beyond that point added to the total gives the djinn permanent access to that mana and the ability to manipulate each of those additional threads at will.

  “I’m not completely sure, but I think Ranger’s pilot refused to go along with whatever it had in mind, so it killed him. He destroyed his body, but trapped his soul. And then deliberately re-created him as something entirely subject to its will. Part of the spell’s intent, if you get what I mean.”

  I was starting to and a wave of cold fear ran through my body. That was insane. “How can we stop him?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. My own magic is feeble next to his and I can’t afford to construct any spells he might see floating around me. One whiff of my newly restored self and there’s no telling what he might do.”

  “Why doesn’t Radiance just reach down and fuck him up?” I wondered. “It’s not as though a mageship doesn’t have the power to do it.”

  “Radiance is trying to keep a lid on Ranger. He’s lurking up there near the moon, monitoring what’s going on down here. As long as Ranger’s pinned down, we only have to deal with Sirius. If Radiance lets her attention waver for even a second, Ranger will take advantage of it and we’ll be in a world of hurt in a heartbeat.”

  I hadn’t noticed at first, but she used gender-specific pronouns for the mageships. Radiance was she and Ranger was he. I thought that was a bit odd, and said so.

  She flashed me that amazing smile once more, tinged this time with a hint of bitterness, and shrugged. “The ships are infused with some of the persona of their pilots. Therefore, in a way, they take on the gender identity of them. Radiance is female and Ranger is male.”

  “What about the others? Radiance told me that the rest of the ‘ships were in on this. She also told me that we’d be going to another Earth, not back in time.”

  Her innocent expression wasn’t fooling anyone, least of all me. “The others aren’t involved, are they?”

  Embarrassment flashed briefly across her face and she quickly shook her head. “Ranger went rogue and Radiance decided to follow him. Against the advice of her fellows.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “Is there no sense of community among the mageships? Any sense of obligation to one another?”

  “It’s complicated. The mageships believe that their primary duty is protecting the Confed from outside threats. The fact that one went rogue is of some concern, but it doesn’t change their first obligation. Losing one ‘ship weakened them and losing yet another as Radiance went in pursuit was a bit more than they were willing to tolerate.”

  “Which is the real reason Radiance didn’t want to go to the Confed itself for help. Chasing down Ranger could be, in fact, seen as dereliction of duty.”

  “I’m sorry she lied to you,” she said, actually sounding sincere about it. “I had to teach her deception. It doesn’t come natural for her. For any of them, actually. I just wonder where Ranger picked it up.”

  “You did a good job with that,” I said, not intending to be sarcastic. Sometimes deception is necessary, after all. A being unable to lie is at the mercy of those who have no such inability.

  I found myself wishing I’d met Dylan somewhere—anywhere—else. Someplace where our lives weren’t on the line. I’d have liked to have gotten to know her better. I knew now she was older than she looked. Mages tend to age slower than normals. She was probably my age, if not a little older. And she was the first woman I’d really felt something for in quite a long time, a hesitant attraction that I wasn’t sure I wanted to pay any attention to whatsoever.

  Beautiful, smart and dedicated. Okay, bound to a creature—for I do consider a mageship a living thing—that was entirely too comfortable with deception for my taste, but still… She was definitely the kind of woman I found attractive.

  Now I guess the question was whether I wanted to do anything about that attraction. Assuming Sirius didn’t catch on and blast us into our component atoms before I had the chance. If that isn’t screwed up, I don’t know what is.

  Not to mention that for anything to arise between us, the feeling had to be mutual, and I wasn’t sure about that at all. And this was definitely not the time to find out.

  “Someone’s coming,” she murmured. She grabbed the sleeve of my tee-shirt and pulled me along behind her and then dragged me through without another word. Once outside once more, blinking in the harsh light of the sun, she eased the door shut and glanced back at me. “I’m really hoping you have a plan.”

  I shrugged. “Kick his ass?”

  She rolled her eyes. “I hope that’s not what you consider a plan.”

  I grinned back at her. “I’m more the improvisational type.”

  “This is no time for improvisation, Jack.”

  “It’s always a time for improvisation. Plans can be disrupted, but if you’re playing it by ear, you can jump whichever way you need to at any given moment.”

  She shook her head at me, smiling grimly. “I’m not sure that’s the best option right now.”

  “It’s the only option we have. Unless you have a proposal of your own. Remember, I was thrown into this with no idea what I was getting into.”

  Dylan nodded. “I see your point.” Frowning, she glanced up at the door leading into the garage and then motioned for me to follow her. We crept along the wall and stepped quickly around the corner. “If we’re going to do something,” she said, “I want to do it soon. The longer we give him to recognize the changes in me, the more chance Sirius will do some checking and we’ll all be screwed.

  “I’ve got a couple questions. How many mages do you have with you?”

  “I don’t know. About ten. One of them is Hades, though, so he should count as at least three.”

  “More like five,” she said with a curt nod. “Hades, eh? I’d heard he’d been reformed. Do you have any way to communicate with your people?”

  I shook my head. “We’d had to modify our PCDs, and figured that Sirius might be able to detect the magic we had to use.” Then I paused. “I might have an idea. I don’t know if it’ll work, though. Is there a short message you’d like to convey?”

  “How resourceful are your people?”

  “You’re kidding, right? I’m assuming Radiance picked us for a reason.”

  “Fine. I want them to steal about twenty police cars and come up the drive like they’re planning on raiding the place at somewhere around midnight tonight.”

  I’d always thought the whole jaw-dropping thing was just an expression, until mine hit my chest. “What?”

  “It’ll provide a handy mundane distraction,” she explained. “We’re going to have to hit Sirius with all our magic at once, and it’s best if he doesn’t see it coming. There are no mages on this world, and while the cops don’t really pose much of a threat to him, they could interfere with his plans—whatever they are.”

  I caught the gist of her strategy. “I can’t guarantee this will work,” I told her. Then I faced the hill rising behind us and started to speak in normal tones. “Stormchild—I don’t know if you can hear me, but this is the only means of communication I could come
up with. I need you to pass the word…we need you folks to go out and steal a whole bunch of police cars and show up here around midnight. Make Sirius think the local authorities are raiding the place. We also need all the mages, including Rio, to launch a concerted attack on him when he’s most distracted by the apparent raid.” I took a deep breath. “If you can hear me, try to give me some sort of sign.”

  Dylan was looking at me with the oddest expression on her face. “Stormchild? He’s here?”

  I nodded. I must’ve looked puzzled because she laughed aloud. “Do you know how big a crush I used to have on him when I was a kid?”

  I laughed too. “Well, don’t let his girlfriend know. I’m pretty sure she’s the jealous type.”

  She flashed a quick grin. “Who’s his girlfriend?”

  “A vampire named Rio.”

  Dylan flushed white. “Oh,” was all she said.

  I took that to mean she’d heard of Rio. That was sure interesting, since I hadn’t myself until they’d first walked into the Lounge. Maybe she had more of a reputation in the mage community than I knew about.

  Possible, I suppose. I didn’t exactly have my ear to the ground in that world. I wondered what she knew that I didn’t.

  Episode III: Showdown

  Stormchild

  I lifted my head and then my hand to forestall Rio’s subsequent question. I listened to the wind for a moment, then turned and began gathering up the blanket and the remnants of my lunch. “We need to get the word out. Jack just sent me a message.”

  She stared at me for a long moment, beautiful brown eyes full of wonder. “A message?”

  “He spoke to me on the wind,” I told her, shaking my head. “And the wind found me and delivered his words. And before you ask, no, I didn’t know that was even possible. I’m surprised he guessed that it might work himself.”

  “Jack has unexplored depths,” was her only reply.

  I chuckled. God, I loved this woman. “I’ll say. He wants us to steal about twenty police cars.”

  She blinked at me, then broke into a wide grin. “That could be fun.”

  “My thoughts exactly. He wants you mages to come in while we’re using a threat of a police raid to distract them, use the opportunity to attack Sirius directly while he’s not paying attention.”

  She nodded. “We can do that.”

  “Great. I’ll leave that to you to arrange. I’ll work on the other end of things.”

  “Oh, no. If we’re going to steal cop cars, I want in on it.”

  Of course she did. Rio had never been real fond of the police. No more than I was, actually. “Brat.”

  “Always,” she shot back.

  “You know who’s not going to like this plan, don’t you?”

  We said it together. “Bigby.”

  Hades

  I stole a glance around the corner and shot Steph a wink. There was no way I was going to pass up the chance to steal a police car, even if I wasn’t going to be the one driving it up to the compound. I was even now wondering if I wanted to do it by stealth or just say the hell with it and raise a real ruckus. As long as our mageship was keeping Ranger occupied, I should be able to throw around as much magic as I wanted to without it being a major problem.

  And since the damned thing’s presence in this time and place—not to mention our own arrival—had probably already screwed up the timeline enough to spawn a new universe, no one was likely to dance on my tonsils if I decided to have a little fun with it. Besides, if I threw around enough power, the cops were less likely to try anything fancy and get themselves hurt in the process.

  I can be pretty damn scary if I want to.

  The police cars were lined up outside the station in a neat little row, parked with their ass ends nearest the large brick façade of the police station. A few officers were strolling along the walkway between the cars and the building, lost in conversation with one another, or deep within their own thoughts.

  Grinning at Steph, I proceeded to take my clothes off and pile them neatly on the side of a relatively clean trashcan near the edge of the alley. Steph stared at me in amazement and I laughed aloud. My tattoos, which covered something like eighty-five percent of my body, writhed and squirmed like a nest of silver serpents as I stepped from the alley into the full view of the station.

  A total of about fifty mana threads snapped out from my body. Every car in the lot started in unison, and, as the cops reacted, several other strands snatched them off their feet and dragged them toward me, legs kicking in a futile attempt to dislodge the snake-like coils enveloping them.

  “I hope you don’t mind,” I said in my most urbane tones and an affected British accent, “if we borrow your cars for a time, do you? I didn’t think so.”

  I let out a shrill whistle and the rest of the crew boiled out of the shadows.

  Steph walked up behind me, cradling my discarded clothing in one arm as she sealed the front doors of the station with a thread of her own. “You’re having way too much fun with this, Hades,” she said with a heavy sigh.

  “I know. I just couldn’t help myself. I haven’t been able to play bad guy for a while, and the weirdest thing is, this is a lot more fun when I know no one’s going to get hurt.”

  And it was true.

  I projected the cops through the wall of the police station, depositing them dazed but unharmed in a janitor’s closet while, one by one, the cars left the parking area and vanished into the night. I then turned my attention to completely sealing off the building—allowing not even radio waves or telephone signals through. They were going to have a quiet night, whether they liked it or not.

  “There’s only one problem with this,” Steph said, as I put my clothes back on.

  “What’s that?”

  “What about all the would-be victims that these cops aren’t going to be on the street to help tonight?”

  I hadn’t thought of that angle and I felt a brief surge of guilt I quickly suppressed. One way or another, something like this was necessary to prevent the spread of an even greater evil than the criminals on the street tonight could even imagine. I hoped not too many people were harmed, but there wasn’t one hell of a lot we could do about it anyway.

  As we prepared to leave, I was surprised by a couple of large figures striding from the umbras. It was Bigby and his girlfriend. I’d never warmed to the creature, but ever since they’d met they’d seemed inseparable. Good for them. Even man-eating dragons deserved a bit of love.

  “Good luck,” he told us in his rumbling voice.

  “What do you mean? Aren’t you coming?”

  “We’re going to stay behind and watch out for the citizens of this town,” Bigby said. “You’re leaving the people too vulnerable by doing this.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him, but he didn’t seem to notice. Or care if he did. “Go do what needs to be done, Hades. Kaleel and I will handle this end of things.”

  To be honest, I felt something akin to relief as Steph and I summoned a couple of windsprites and took to the air. At least someone would be looking out for the people we’d left in harm’s way with this night’s work.

  Vex

  “Do you even know how to drive one of these things?” Kate asked me as I sent the car careening into the street. She’d done some mojo on me that temporarily made me taller and able to actually reach the pedals and see over the steering wheel at the same time. I was as big as a human for the time being and I enjoyed the feeling immensely.

  “How hard can it be?” I asked her with a grin. I jerked the wheel to the left and winced as the passenger side mirror shattered against a parked car on her side of the street. “Okay. Harder than it looks, obviously. Don’t worry, I’ll get the hang of it.”

  She looked dubious, but didn’t say anything else until we’d managed to find and merge onto the highway. Ahead of me I could see the identical taillights of several other vehicles winding away into the distance like a huge, glowing snake.

  “What time
is it?” I asked her.

  She glanced at her PCD display. She wore hers in the form of a wristwatch, a wonderful piece of technological misdirection for this time and place. She looked human enough to pass as a human child, of course, which I did not though we both had started out as exactly that.

  I could have worn a PCD in the form of a hubcap strung around my neck and no one would have even noticed it. I’d remained hidden while nearly everyone else had blended with the human crowds as easily as they could at home.

  With a few exceptions, of course. Neither Hydra the troll nor his Abyssian lover could blend without magical modification, but that really didn’t make me feel any better. I could have done the same thing simply by asking Kate to arrange it, but somehow it seemed like a betrayal of what I was.

  All things being equal, I definitely preferred my life in the twenty-third century to even a few weeks in 1987.

  As, I imagined, did we all.

  Jack

  I suppose I should’ve expected something like this. It was a religious cult, after all. About ten o’clock, a bell began to ring. I’d been catching a few winks in the small room I’d been given on the second floor of the main house when it blasted me out of bed.

  I threw open the door to find Dylan waiting in the hall for me. “It’s time for services,” she told me. “He likes to do this every night about this time, get everyone together to explain to us the nature of the universe.”

  “Oh? What kind of crap does he say?”

  “Believe it or not, he tells us the truth, more or less. About the different universes, how they come into being and how there’s a terrible enemy out there. He’s not lying when he says we can’t trust this government either. We already know it’s been infiltrated by Cen operatives.”

  “What in the hell is he up to?” I asked her, lowering my voice and looking up and down the hall.

  “To tell you the truth, I’m not sure. But I’m willing to bet it’s nothing good.”

  ::Ranger is on the move! I’m going to be out of contact for a little while. Be careful!:: The broadcast from Radiance came through like a bullhorn next to my ear and judging by Dylan’s reaction, it struck her the same way.