by Jim C. Hines
I smiled and headed through another set of doors into a large, open space that smelled of hay, fur, and animal droppings. We’d converted most of the ground floor into a kennel for everything from rats to rabbits to monkeys, even a Galapagos turtle with a cracked shell who’d been shipped in two weeks ago from the Toronto zoo. And, of course, Vince’s favorite crow, Kerling.
Smudge smoked as we passed the rat cages. He didn’t mind the other animals, but I suspected the rats were close enough to his size for him to see them as potential competitors. Or maybe potential meals, though I couldn’t remember the last time he’d hunted anything bigger than a grasshopper. I really needed to get him out more while I was here. Parts of the desert were barren enough for him to roam and hunt without setting the land ablaze, and he needed the exercise.
I found Vince Hambrecht at a stainless steel table, next to a mobile desk with three computer monitors. He and an NIH doctor named Jeremy Dishaw were examining a six-foot-long boa constrictor. “Hi, Boss! How was D.C.?”
“Eventful.” Where Dr. Dishaw wore a shirt, tie, and lab coat, Vince was dressed in his favorite blue robe over a too-tight T-shirt. Knee-length shorts and Birkenstock sandals completed the image. The robe was part of his ongoing effort to cultivate a magical fashion style. An effort which had so far failed to take off. His attempt to grow a “wizardly” beard had been equally unsuccessful, resulting in thin, scraggly patches along his cheekbones and chin.
I looked past them at the snake. “How’s he—she?—doing?”
“He,” said Vince. “His name’s Olaf. He likes warm hugs. He came in with IBD eight days ago. That’s inclusion body disease. It’s like AIDS for snakes. He’s good as new, now. But Doctor Dipshit here wants to reinfect him to see if our cure created immunity.”
Dishaw glared at Vince. “You’ve proven you can cure the virus, so there should be no long-term risk to the animal, even if it’s still susceptible to IBD. We need to know how magic affects the immune system, both in the short and long term.”
“He also wants to feed Olaf some of our rats.”
Dishaw flushed. “You’ve done zero work to see how consuming magic will affect the food chain. What if it works like mercury poisoning, where the harm ends up concentrated in the apex predators?”
“That wasn’t in the original research plan,” I said mildly.
“Well, it should have been.” Dishaw gave the snake a fond pat on the head. “Don’t get me wrong, Isaac. What you’re doing here is amazing. But we’ve got to be certain it’s safe. A single unforeseen magical mutation could have serious consequences for the entire world.”
It sounded reasonable. It always did. “All our rats are part of other research projects. They’re not expendable. If you want to submit a modified proposal, I’ll be happy to take a look.”
“Bam!” Vince crowed. “Rats: 1. Doctor Dishaw: 0.”
“Knock it off,” I said. “He’s got a point about checking Olaf’s long-term immunity. If you want to make your case against reinfection, write it up and have it on my desk by the end of the week.”
Vince sagged. “Damn, Boss. See, this is why everyone likes it better when you’re away on your road trips.”
“Don’t call me boss. Also, staff meeting upstairs in the Wheeler room in thirty minutes.”
“That’s cold, Boss. What did we do to deserve that?”
“Keep it up, and I’ll make you sit through a PowerPoint presentation.”
He raised his hands in surrender. “Cruel and unusual punishment.”
I headed for the stairs and made my way to my office on the second floor. I doubted I’d ever get used to being the kind of guy who had his own office, or called staff meetings.
My office was nowhere near as impressive as Babs’, but that was how I liked it. Bookshelves lined the walls on either side. A large window behind my desk opened onto the New Millennium grounds, giving me a view of the warehouse and southern wall. I sat down and switched on the computer.
Our network ran on a customized operating system, a modified version of the Porters’ old network. I’d worked with Talulah to build an additional layer into the user interface for our team, a bit of magical blue text that appeared to float in front of the monitor. I pressed my fingers to the text and concentrated on the programs I needed.
The screen came to life, opening up my email, calendar, and a spreadsheet of current and closed research projects. I sent a note to Charles and Talulah about the meeting, then grabbed a LEGO DeLorean Lena had given me for Christmas and fiddled with the doors as I skimmed the latest updates.
Charles was still griping about wanting to do a book tour on New Millennium’s dime. He also wanted to upgrade his hearing, and had narrowed the possibilities down to four books. I skimmed his notes, but my mind was elsewhere. I ended up reading the same paragraph on selective frequency echolocation three times before giving up.
I cleared the screen and ran a search for the USCGC Kagan instead, then sat back to read.
The Kagan was a Coast Guard cutter, commissioned in 1989 and currently based off the U.S. East Coast. It was a hundred and ten feet long, with a crew of eighteen and a top speed of more than thirty knots. Armament included two fifty-caliber machine guns and one twenty-five millimeter chain gun.
There was nothing about its current mission, nor could I find any public details about the commander or crew. The ship hadn’t been in the news recently. None of the articles or information gave any hint why Deb’s pet terrorists might have been interested in hitting the Kagan, or why they’d changed their minds.
I was still poring over what I could find of the ship’s history when the computer made the whooshing sound of the TARDIS engines from Doctor Who, letting me know I was about to be late for my own staff meeting. I grabbed a book from my pocket, performed a quick spell, and hurried off.
The Wheeler room was one of the smaller conference rooms, with a narrow table and a dozen chairs, along with a whiteboard that doubled as a projector screen. An old-fashioned crystal ball mounted to the center of the table served as the equivalent of both speakerphone and video monitor, though I always had trouble keeping it attuned to our world. I could never eliminate the static and random images from the book we’d used to produce the crystals, and every once in a while a green-skinned warlock would pop up to threaten us all with doom and destruction until we recalibrated him out of existence.
Vince was leaning back in his chair, his feet crossed on the edge of the table. Talulah sat on the opposite side, flipping through a gaming magazine.
‹Welcome back,› said Talulah. She’d given herself a limited form of mind-speech shortly after joining up with New Millennium. I could see the text of her telepathic magic when she spoke, like ink hidden between layers of onion paper.
‹Thanks,› I said. Talulah was one of four people at New Millennium with a criminal record. Hers was a minor vandalism charge from when she was a teenager. Although, given her skill with technology, she could have easily erased more serious crimes from her records and none of us would know.
Talulah had grown up on a Choctaw reservation in Oklahoma. Her family had steered her toward gaming as a way to keep her out of trouble. It had worked a bit too well. In addition to competing in statewide and national gaming tournaments, she had her own YouTube channel, and had developed a following as a video game guru in the years before she was outed as a libriomancer.
There was an ongoing and vicious debate online as to whether her game run-throughs were magically assisted, but she swore she never used her powers while gaming. I’d been among the skeptics until I watched her beat the original Super Mario Brothers in under five minutes. ‹Did you make any progress on those gaming manuals?›
‹I think it’s a lost cause. Nobody reads the manuals these days. Everything’s online. And the manuals have some of the same limits as comic books: too many pictures, not enough active reading. It’s a shame. I wanted to see what a 1UP mushroom would do in the real world.›
&n
bsp; ‹Better than the fire-flower you were working on.›
‹Says the man with the flaming spider.›
I double-checked Smudge, but he was resting peacefully in his cage. ‹Where are you at with the IAS Project?›
‹Ready for a trial run. We’re just waiting for FCC approval.›
Natural disasters were one of Talulah’s obsessions. In addition to working to predict and detect them more quickly, she’d been developing a tool to give people as much advance warning as possible. Her proposed International Alert System was intended to broadcast to television, radio, cellphone, even things like hearing aids. An extra five minutes’ notice could save thousands of lives.
Before I could respond, Charles Brice strode into the room and took a seat at the far end of the table. “How long’s this gonna take, Isaac?”
When I’d first heard that a Nebula award-winning science fiction author would be joining my research team, I’d been ecstatic. That feeling lasted until approximately thirty seconds after meeting him in person.
Most libriomancers had an arrogant streak. Playing fast and loose with the laws of the universe had that effect. But Charles took it to an entirely new level.
Part of his problem was that he’d worked as a Porter researcher for twenty years, and wasn’t thrilled about having to report to an upstart half his age. I was pretty sure he thought he should have been put in charge of research at New Millennium. The fact that I had to supervise and sign off on his research was weird to me too, but he took it as a personal affront, and never passed up the chance to catch me in a mistake or undermine me in front of the team.
His wife and frequent co-author Jodi was far more pleasant. She had no magic of her own, but had been living on site with Charles for the past four months. The last I’d heard, she was close to finishing up a solo project about libriomancers fighting off a colony of mutant vampires from Venus.
Charles studied me through his mechanical eye, a black-glass-and-chrome bionic replacement with telescopic, X-ray, and infrared modes, as well as a laser capable of cutting through one-inch steel in twenty seconds. With magic out in the open, he’d begun harvesting body modifications from various science fiction novels. His eternal complaint—one of them, at least—was his inability to access tech from his own books.
The risk of stories infecting your mind and thoughts was exponentially higher when the libriomancer was also the author. Gutenberg was the only person I knew who had successfully performed libriomancy with his own work, and even then, the attempt ultimately killed him.
Charles drummed the metal fingers of his left hand on the desk. He’d also given himself the ability to sense magnetic fields, a sense of smell as powerful as that of a turkey vulture, and upgraded adrenal glands. “Well?” he said. “Are you going to tell us what this is about?”
I took off my jacket and set it over the crystal ball. “Talulah, we’ll need privacy, please. Magical and mundane.”
She cocked her head, but popped open her briefcase and brought out one of her books. She skimmed the pages and created a device that looked like a thick smartphone. “That will jam any listening devices.” A second book produced a small dagger, which she placed next to the jammer. “And that should disrupt magical spying.”
I opened Smudge’s cage and lifted him free. “I have a new research project for this team, one that takes precedence over your current work.”
Charles was the first to react, rising to his feet and placing both hands on the table. “That’s bullshit.”
“I’ve got a cat coming in tomorrow with FIV,” added Vince. “You expect me to just let him die?”
“I expect you to multitask. Talulah, I need you to find out everything you can about the USCGC Kagan. Crew details, mission logs, and a breakdown of its activities for the past year.”
‹What’s going on, Mister Vainio?›
‹I don’t know yet,› I answered. ‹Maybe nothing. I don’t want to prejudice your research with rumors.›
“Coast Guard?” asked Vince. “Are we doing military research now?”
Smudge crawled up my arm and settled onto my shoulder, cool and calm. “You’re helping me with a puzzle. The less you know, the easier it will be for you to plead ignorance if this goes badly.”
Charles huffed up like I’d slapped him in the face and pissed on his three-hundred dollar shoes. “If there ever comes a day when I deliberately embrace ignorance, I’ll have lived one day too long.”
Vince jerked his chin at Charles. “What he said.”
‹I agree.›
“Isaac was in Lansing,” said Vince. “Odds are this has something to do with the attack.”
Talulah nodded. “New Millennium has measures in place to protect our privacy. If he’s asking for additional shielding, it means he doesn’t trust those measures.”
“You think there’s a mole in New Millennium,” guessed Charles. “Do you believe we’re at risk of a similar attack here?”
“If that was the case, he’d have gone straight to Dr. Palmer.” Talulah shook her head. “You think she might be in on this?”
“I don’t know.” This kind of insight and intelligence was exactly why I’d wanted these three for my team, no matter how annoying some of them could be.
“If you’re so paranoid, why trust us?” asked Charles.
“I’m taking a chance,” I admitted. “But I’ve worked with you for close to a year now. I’ve seen your passion for your work, and for the things New Millennium could do. I don’t intend to let anyone corrupt or destroy what we’re doing here, and I don’t believe you would, either. I think I can trust you. Am I wrong?”
I looked at each of them until they answered out loud. The copy of The Goblin Wood I’d tucked into my pocket remained silent. They were telling the truth.
“Are any of you familiar with a group called Vanguard?” They looked at one another, shaking their heads. “They’ve been warning inhumans about police and government raids, helping to relocate them, and so on. The FBI believes they’re connected to these attacks. I don’t know if they’re directly involved, or if someone’s just recruiting extremists from the Vanguard pool.”
“I’ll ask around,” said Charles. “I have a lot of friends in the inhuman community. I’ve gone to them for research with my books.”
I looked across the table at Talulah. “Earlier today, I spoke with Babs about investigating these attacks. She got scared.”
“Scared?” Vince repeated. “Babs Palmer?”
“Scared of you?” Charles added, sounding equally incredulous.
I pushed my annoyance aside. “Not of me. Scared for me, maybe. Scared of what will happen if we dig into this.” I paused. “I can’t and won’t order any of you to do this. If you want out—”
“You’ve worked with Dr. Palmer,” said Talulah. “Do you believe she could have been involved with those attacks?”
“I believe she’s ambitious, arrogant, and potentially dangerous,” I said slowly. “I don’t think she’d help murder innocent people, but that’s not good enough. She’s one of the top people at New Millennium, and she’s in charge of security. If whoever’s behind this decides to target us next . . .”
Talulah’s brow was furrowed, and she kept chewing her lip. “I’ll do some digging.”
“All of the primary targets were people who’d spoken out against magic,” said Vince. “Coming after a group like New Millennium would be a complete one-eighty.”
“It could be about theft,” Talulah said. “Do you know how much people are paying for black market magic these days?”
“I’ll run an inventory check here in Research,” Vince offered. “Make sure none of our projects have gotten up and walked away.”
I stood up and looked at them each in turn. “If you find anything, tell me. That’s all. Do not talk to anyone else about this, and do not pull any lone-wolf spy crap. If you do, I’ll use you as my next test subject for the Gateway Project. If you’re lucky, I’ll send you somewh
ere on this planet.”
SECURITY COUNCIL VOTES NOT TO IMPOSE SANCTIONS AGAINST THE UNITED STATES
After expressing deep concerns regarding the magical research being conducted at the New Millennium center in Las Vegas, Nevada, the Russian Federation joined Jordan and Malaysia in calling for economic sanctions against the United States of America. The resolution was voted down 10-3, with China and Nigeria abstaining.
The representative of the Russian Federation said this resolution was an expression of international concerns over America’s alliance with the organization known as the Porters. They demanded regular U.N. inspections and the immediate cessation of all military research, despite the fact that New Millennium denies performing any sort of military work.
Today’s vote followed six months of angry negotiations. Proposals to build additional New Millennium centers in other member nations have been met with anger and threats.
The representative from France likened this time in history to the beginning of the nuclear age. “We have one opportunity to prevent a magical arms race, an escalation that could bring about a second Cold War. This is a time for unity.”
Following the vote, the representative from China reaffirmed his belief that all nations have the right to the benefits and advantages of magic.
The Security Council will be voting later this month on a resolution to establish an International Magical Regulatory Agency, similar in structure to the International Atomic Energy Agency.
“Change is a difficult, often violent process, both for individuals and for whole species. The more rapid the change, the uglier the conflict.”
“I can’t accept that violence is inevitable.”
“Look at the breakthroughs you’ve discovered in your libriomancy. How many of those discoveries were born from conflict and violence and desperation?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Technology advances more swiftly in times of war. Violence and change aren’t separate concepts, Isaac. All too often, they’re different facets of the same thing.”