Orders of Magnitude (The Genie and the Engineer Series Book 2)

by Glenn Michaels

  Capie could only shake her head and chuckle. So Daneel might be good in mathematics? And maybe physics too? With a growing grin, she glanced at the Scottie again. She could live with that.

  • • • •

  Paul pulled the drums of the lithium chlorate, one by one, through portals onto Deck 8 of the ship, then used a portal filter set to that chemical compound to funnel it into the fuel tank.

  Like any other engineer that had ever worked for a large company or the US Government, he had a schedule for the fueling and loading efforts, and that called for launch operations in one more week, on the next Saturday. Loading the lithium chlorate was only step one of the fueling process. Later, around Friday, he would load the heavy water into the tank as well to formulate the final fuel solution. His reason for loading the lithium compound now was to finish emptying Warehouse 13 and there really was no better place to put it.

  On Monday, he planned to take Capie to find a pallasite meteor. He had an idea where to find one and without too much effort, despite how rare that particular type of meteor was. By his calculations, she would be finished with the final conversions of the meteor by the end of the week. She really was doing a faster job at isotope conversions than he had ever thought possible.

  Tuesday through Thursday would be for final cargo loading and all the food as well as all the other supplies. They would likely finish ahead of schedule since Daneel was already working on that task. It really was a wonderful thing, having a Scottie finished and fully operational. The liberation of the Earth was now a huge step closer to reality. If there was time later in the week, they might try duplicating Daneel and seeing how that worked. Paul already had the hardware that was needed, including an upgraded CPU.

  By Saturday, they would have all the components for the chutzpah and could do the ceremony, creating the first one. Ah, the power it would give them! And with it, they could go to the Middle East and stop the senseless war that seemed to be coming.

  There were six more barrels of lithium chlorate to go when Merlin snapped into existence directly in front of him, startling Paul.

  The hologram hissed wildly, swinging both arms wide, knocking the hat off his head. “Intruder Alert! Intruder Alert! Three…no, four…nearby portals—”

  Suddenly panic stricken, Paul snapped a quick holographic display in midair to his left, looking around the outside of the ship. All he could see was one Oni and that one holding forth a gemstone, but that was more than enough. Somehow, he had been found!

  Icy fingers ran up and down his spine. There were so many critical items in the ship and also stored in the mine. He just couldn’t take many of them with him! Indeed, they might just be safer if he left them here!

  And then there was Capie and Daneel in Esperance. Were they safe or were they also in danger? He didn’t dare portal straight to their location to find out. That might just lead whatever wizard from Errabêlu that had found him straight to them.

  Unless they already had them…

  NO! He was wasting time! He forced himself to think clearly.

  For their sake, he needed to lead the Oni away from Australia, on as merry a chase as he could arrange. And as fast as possible.

  He snapped his fingers, creating a horizontal portal beneath his feet, dropping through it.

  • • • •

  McDougall stepped through the portal into the bright sunlight and froze.

  All around him was the typically dry desert of Western Australia, with very little in the way of vegetation in sight.

  However, directly in front of him, protruding nearly twenty feet into the air from out of an open mine pit, was the nose and forward section of what appeared to be a commercial airliner. Well, it somewhat resembled one of those, but the skin of this craft was now a solid shiny grey color with no windows or paint scheme of any kind. The only exceptions were the words ‘Sirius Effort’ painted near the nose. And the vehicle was positioned vertically, with the nose pointing straight up. Above the plane, a very large camo net hung from tall poles arranged around the open mine pit, obviously to hide the—whatever that thing was that was poking out of the ground—from aerial view.

  Aduir, with a gemstone extended in one hand, hissed in his direction. As McDougall regained his equilibrium, he stepped forward to the edge of the pit.

  “One portal,” growled Aduir, pointing at the strange craft. “Inside there, just now!”

  McDougall nodded with an evil grin. “Track him! I want Paul Armstead alive!”

  • • • •

  Emerging from his portal a hundred feet over the Great Australian Bight, 300 miles east of Esperance, Paul took a moment to cast a spell behind him, screwing with the energy signature of his portal, misdirecting it to a refuse reclamation site—the Waste-Away SA center in Adelaide—considerably farther to the east. Then he leveled out into the superhero flying position and created a tapered magical transparent shield in front of him, to act as a windbreaker. After which, he accelerated to a speed of 500 miles per hour. Even with the shield, he found it difficult to go any faster.

  They would be after him, he knew. Hopefully they would be misdirected by his false trail, but he shouldn’t depend on that. Best not to follow a straight path here, lest his pursuers portal ahead and intercept him.

  Veering first to the left and then off sharply to the right, he began zigzagging randomly, to make it harder to track him.

  He needed time to think. It was pointless to worry about how they had found him. That would be for later, if he got out of this situation. Better to figure out how to escape and how to get to Capie. As a precaution, he erected a protective shield tightly around himself, just in case the Oni started shooting at him.

  And just in the nick of time too. A thin lance of plasma shot past him on the right, close enough to frighten him and cause him to jink more to the left. With a few twitches of his nose, a rear-view display popped up in front of him, allowing him to see his pursuers.

  There were three Oni back there: one to port, one to starboard and the other directly behind him. And somehow, they were closing the gap. How they were doing it, with talismans that were supposedly inferior to the one he was wearing, Paul didn’t know. For whatever reason, his spell was apparently less efficient. Someday, he would have to figure out why. But not right now.

  He needed to slow them down.

  Zigging to port, he barely managed to avoid being hit by another plasma bolt, but now the Oni were closer, perhaps half a mile back.

  Dipping downward, Paul leveled out at wave-top level. Then, focusing into the rear-view display, he tried to cast his fusion spell, below and behind him.

  However, the water was moving too fast and the process of stripping the electrons from the hydrogen atoms took too long.

  Another blast of plasma sent a jet of steam practically into his face. If it were not for the screen in front of him, he would have been scalded.

  Reaching out with his powers, he created a magical net that ‘dragged’ through the top of the water, snagging heavy water molecules, accumulating them into a small mass moving at his same speed, albeit a hundred yards behind him. When he had the equivalent of a single drop of nearly pure heavy water, he ran the fusion spell—

  And a detonation the equivalent of a ton of TNT exploded behind him.

  More plasma blasts, one impacting with his screen, nearly caused him to hit the water. Instead, he began weaving back and forth even more wildly. Nearly frantic, he reached back and gathered more deuterium atoms, this time for a blast worth 10 tons of TNT.

  Detonating it.

  The blast wave picked him out of the air and hurled him tumbling forward, and he skipped like a stone across the wave-tops before plunging hard and deep into the water.

  For a few moments, he struggled to stay conscious. As he hovered on the edge of blackness, the intense need to breathe threatened to overwhelm him. Deep down, he knew that he could not give in or he would die then and there.

  He opened his eyes, t
he sting of the salt water burning them at first. There was enough light that he could see the ocean surface perhaps ten or so feet above him.

  A noise to his left drew his attention, as something large dropped into the water from above.

  An Oni.

  With a quick hand motion, Paul created a portal and swept it over himself—

  —dropping him onto the sandy beach of Yalata Land of South Australia.

  Gasping desperately, he took in deep breaths of air, as he struggled to regain some measure of strength. There would only be moments available to him, he knew, before the Oni tracked him here.

  Reaching out, he gathered more deuterium from the surf in front of him, concentrating it. Then, he reached out in the opposite direction, up to the top of the nearest sand dune, opening a portal there.

  The other end of which was straight up, 25,000 feet above him.

  Air and sand from all along the beach swirled in a sudden cyclone effect, screaming through the portal and into the rarefied heights in the atmosphere above him. With effort, he got to his feet, bracing himself against the sucking wind, then launched himself up into the maelstrom. At the last moment, he mentally reached back, triggering the deuterium behind him.

  The blast wave of 20 tons of TNT left a huge gaping hole in the beach and threw a mushroom cloud into the air nearly 3,500 feet up. Moreover, it broke windows in the small town of Yalata more than twenty miles to the east.

  The best benefit of it all was that two of the Oni that had been chasing Paul were almost instantly vaporized midway through their portals onto the beach.

  Paul was 25,000 feet above the Earth, high enough for him to see the curve of the Earth’s surface. Below him, he could see a large swath of beach, nearly 200 miles in each direction and he could also see nearly that far into the interior of Australia.

  According to what he had recently read on Wikipedia, 15,000 feet was as high as an unacclimated human could go without oxygen before collapsing into unconsciousness. Which was why Paul immediately cast a spell to reshuffle the air around him, pushing the nitrogen away and at least doubling the oxygen content of the air he was breathing. Even then, he could barely catch his breath.

  He was falling now, rapidly reaching terminal velocity, the wind pushing on his face and screaming in his ears.

  Another spell, this one to protect his face and reduce the noise of the wind considerably.

  Was he free of the Oni yet? More important, was there a wizard with them? And Capie and Daneel? Were they safe?

  His first question was answered only five seconds later, as another plasma blast shot past him, this one from above.

  A glance upward revealed four Oni scattered above him, all of them in free fall and all of them advancing on him.

  Paul glanced around the horizon. He couldn’t force his way through a portal back down to ground level due to the difference in air pressure at his current altitude. At least, not directly, he couldn’t.

  But there were other options.

  With a snap of his fingers, a portal appeared below him, directly in his flight path, and he sailed through—

  —and now he was three hundred miles further east, high above Port Augusta and also back up to 25,000 feet again, but still moving at terminal velocity. Knowing that the Oni would quickly track him once more, Paul reached below him and created another portal, this one taking him a thousand miles further east, for a third time back up to 25,000 feet.

  Now he was over the ocean, the Tasman Sea to be exact. And in the distance to the north, he could see massive dark clouds clustered off the east coast of Australia.

  Ah, a really wicked looking storm! Yep, there were flashes of lightning bolts too. Just look at the size of those thunderheads!

  Another portal—

  —and he was now into the middle of the storm, surrounded by dark clouds, visibility reduced to mere hundreds of feet. He was still falling, but now the air was bumpy, much colder and far more humid.

  He stuck his arms out, attempting to glide through the air, trying to put distance between himself and his last portal. Maybe, if the Oni couldn’t see him—

  Ice started forming on his arms, the air now even colder. He concentrated on a spell to warm himself up.

  A plasma bolt screamed past him and he instantly banked to the right, as he opened a portal in front of himself. He shot through that one, and in only a few seconds, another plasma bolt shot by, barely missing his head.

  Another portal, this time into the thick of the storm. Now the rain was coming down in buckets, the drops pelting him like hordes of miniature darts, stinging every inch of exposed skin. He whipped through the air, the roar of a thunderbolt nearly deafening him. Visibility was almost impossible here, the clouds and rain were so thick.

  There! An Oni, flitting in and out of the clouds, and not all that far away! Paul shot forth an arm, firing off a plasma bolt, then dodged up and to one side as a return shot narrowly missed him.

  More bolts, from different directions! He dipped and swerved, darting this way and that, firing bolts of his own. He waved an arm, to create another portal.

  Then, as if a switch had been flipped, he was falling, tumbling wildly. And the right side of his back felt as if it were on fire! He had been hit! Somehow they had punched through his protective shield!

  As he tumbled, out of the corner of his eye, he caught a glimpse of an Oni flying on a parallel course downward, pacing him.

  Paul was hurt and badly too. Falling as he was, fear and despair gripped him. Was this how it was it going to end? Here, far out at sea, where Capie would never know what had happened to him?

  Through pain filled eyes, he saw three Oni now, closing in on him, one of them pointing at him.

  A bolt of lightning flashed through the clouds, the sound of thunder again crashing through the air.

  The lightning stirred an idea in the back of his mind. But he was so incredibly tired and so weak! The idea danced just out of mental reach and hovered there, taunting him.

  Lightning. It had to do with lightning. Oh, right, lightning. Yes, it followed paths of ionized air. Oxygen, to be exact. Ionized oxygen.

  Yes! Of course! If he could…!

  Falling. Falling. The storm battering him, sucking the life out of him. Closing his eyes and concentrating hard, he waved an arm. “In the name of NOAA, Angus MacGyver, and Thor, may a column of ionized oxygen molecules form between the Oni and the top of the thunderhead above us.”

  The nearest Oni stopped moving toward him, a puzzled look of surprise on its face. The wind and the rain continued to pummel Paul but he felt something else too, the tingling of his skin, as if a hundred armies of ants was crawling across it.

  Then a blindingly bright flash, as if the sun had gone nova, and a crack of thunder so loud Paul felt as if his ears had been stabbed by ice picks. He was left stunned senseless as he continued to plummet downward out of control.

  The light around him faded, the rain actually getting worse. With an effort no worse than lifting a dozen concrete trucks—all of them full too—Paul made himself shakily extend one arm and, with a spell, slow his rate of descent.

  It was working too, right up until he smacked headlong into the surface of the ocean.

  Downward he plunged, into the blackness of the cold watery depths. The pressure on his ears and on his lungs swelled to intolerable levels. He kicked futilely but without any discernable effect. He even lost his sense of up or down!

  Frantically, he grasped Hamadi’s talisman with one hand and, with his waning strength, snapped forth a portal, linking the water in front of him to a higher altitude, thirty feet over his head.

  The water around him suddenly surged forth, gathering him in its grasp, flushing him forward. And he broke free into the air, falling as he went and landing, with a belly-flop, back on the ocean, just as a huge wave broke over him.

  Thrashing, he broke the surface again, spewing forth what seemed like a ton of water before gasping wildly for breath.
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  Oh, he hurt! Every part of him hurt so much, like every square inch was being constantly Tasered. The pain level was simply incredible!

  It was all he could do, keeping his head above the constant thrashing of the sea. Weakly, he tried to cast a spell for another portal, one back to Kalgoorlie, but found it beyond his strength to do so. Puzzled, exhausted and increasingly alarmed, he tried again, this time only as far as the beach on Australia’s east coast, but was rewarded with only a few weak sparkles of light. No portal formed.

  As he feebly fought to stay on the ocean’s surface, the rain lashing his face, he found it to be so tempting to just give in, to let himself slide under the water, to reach outward for the calm of death. It would be so easy to do! The pain would be gone and he could rest at last.

  But then a mental image of Capie snapped in front of him and he blinked several times, trying to get the water out of his eyes.

  “Capie!” he gasped, reaching forth with one hand to touch the hallucination. “Capie!”

  She didn’t seem to hear him. Instead, she was looking off into the distance and crying, her tears streaked across her face.

  “Capie!” he croaked once more.

  And then the image of his wife faded away.

  He closed his eyes as another wave swept over him.

  There were things to do. Somehow, he had to marshal his magical powers and do them. He had to do it. No choice. Not really. No choice at all.

  It wasn’t a lack of power, he reminded himself dully. The Earth provided the power. The very storm around him held enough power to send him around the globe multiple times! It was his mind that was the problem, his inability to concentrate, to focus the power correctly. He was so tired! And he hurt so much! He just couldn’t formulate the right thoughts, the correct images. They kept slipping away, like bubbles in a high wind or money in a room full of poor relatives.

  He couldn’t portal to Australia, no. It was too far for his weakened condition.

  “Merlin?” he croaked, just before another wave broke over his head.