Chapter 1

The following characters appear in the first few chapters:

Margaret Kathleen O’Connell, the Ninth

Margie K, the last O’Connell remaining in the Reality of Less Magic, 5’-3’’ tall, 120 pounds, 36DD-24-36, 20 years old, long flaming red hair, sparkling green eyes, a sprinkling of freckles and very cute. She is the current Grand Senior Master of Clan O’Connell.

Celeste

Margie’s apprentice, 5’-1’’ tall, 105 pounds, 34C-22-34, 16 years old, strawberry blonde hair, gray eyes. She is not an O’Connell but has a large fine partly trained Talent.

Death came seeking me on a fine spring morning in early April of 2508. It was not unexpected. The government’s negotiators had been here yesterday with their questions, deals, demands, and treachery. I had, of course, turned them down and sent them on their way.

“You will join the government and do as we tell you or else!” they had threatened in pompous indignant voices before I transferred them, their security thugs, and their vehicles to one of the remaining glaciers in northern Canada. They were fortunate that was all I did to them.

The three Army flying attack vehicles came out of the east and the rising sun early this morning. Did they really think they could sneak up on me that way, or was it just the military mind at work, I wondered on sensing their approach?

The vehicles were somewhat like the pictures of old helicopters that I had seen in the library, but without the large rotor on top and the small one in the rear. These used repellors to both keep them airborne and to move them forward. They were large armed and armored vehicles that carried two pilots, a Wizard of at least Third Level to handle the spells and Magic, and an ordnance officer to handle the guns and rockets they were armed with. There was also a crew chief and a mechanic included in the crew. Each ship also carried a squad of soldiers which consisted of two teams of five men each plus an officer and a sergeant for a total of 12 men.

The three ships were flying at five hundred feet above the ground and at three hundred miles an hour as they approached my house and property in a small valley in the area formerly known as Tennessee, where we were currently residing.

They were three miles from our small house when they began firing their weapons. The rockets were the first to be fired. They were followed by the large caliber automatic weapons the ships carried. Their Magic was the last weapon used, and several Magic beams were aimed at our house from each vehicle.

I waited patiently until the Magic was used, and then simply stopped time before transferring to have a look at the destruction that they had launched. It was easy to see each of the three separate bundles of destruction with time stopped. I then simply transferred each vehicle to a location a hundred feet in front of the bundle of destruction that it had launched before returning to my front porch and casting the spell to create a heavily reinforced spherical Defensive Shell that covered the house, its gardens, and the remainder of the property. I then added my strongest wards, polarized the shell and turned it silver before casting the spell for a large silvered parabolic shell that was aimed up toward space on top of the defensive shell. Satisfied that all was as I wanted it to be, I restored time to its normal flow.

I don’t believe that those in the vehicles ever realized that they had been relocated before the destruction that they had unleashed tore their vehicles apart, and they fell out of the sky to crash in flaming ruin well short of my defensive shell.

Celeste, my Apprentice, emerged from the house when she heard the noise from the explosions and the crashes.

“What happened, Master?” she asked in fright.

“Nothing that you need to concern yourself about, my Dear,” I told her. “Go back inside and start breakfast, I’ll join you shortly.”

A short time later, some fourteen hundred miles away in a command post buried deep underground in the Rocky Mountains, the Commander of the Army units involved in the attack was being briefed by the duty officer, a Lieutenant Colonel, on the failure and destruction of the units sent to eliminate the O’Connell woman.

“Sir, Special Unit Seven has been wiped out!” the duty officer told his Commander over the communication net.

“What the hell do you mean wiped out? They’re some of our best troops!” the Commander demanded.

“We have been monitoring their operation by satellite. They had started their assault and fired their initial bursts to clear the way for them to land, when suddenly they disappeared from view for a few thousandths of a second before reappearing directly in front of their own ordnance and Magic beams. They were blown out of the sky and crashed well short of their objective. There were no survivors!” the duty officer informed him in a voice full of dismay.

“But how could they possibly get in front of their own ordnance?” the Commander demanded loudly in an upset voice.

“We don’t know, sir. We’ve replayed the video of the accident at ultra-slow speed and can’t see or tell anything. What are your orders?” the duty officer asked.

“I’ll join you in just a minute, I want to see this video. I’ll be dammed if I’ll lose a unit to some puffed up Wizard,” the General told him angrily, as he rose from his desk and headed for the operations center, but even after viewing the recording twice at ultra-slow speed, neither he, nor any of his staff could discern how the accident happened.

“There will be no more playing nice with that O’Connell woman. To hell with the politicians, too! What satellites do we have in position to deal with this situation?” the General demanded.

“We still have the satellite that we were using to observe the operation with. It’s one with the new defensive lasers, sir,” the duty officer informed him.

“Fire up those lasers and burn her out,” the General ordered before departing. Of course, they had no real idea of just who they were dealing with, but the satellite mentioned had a set of lasers capable of instantly melting a hole through an inch of steel plate at a thousand miles. It required ten minutes for the duty crew to charge the lasers up for use.

“Are you still locked on the target?” the duty officer asked the technician in charge of firing the lasers when they were ready.

“Locked on target and ready to fire, sir,” the technician answered reaching for the firing button.

“Fire lasers!” the Colonel told him, before the technician added, “That place has been easy to keep in sight as shiny as it is.” He had depressed the firing button while saying this, and the Colonel didn’t have time to try to stop him before the lasers on the satellite fired.

I was sure that the government, and especially the Army, wouldn’t give up this easily, and that was why I had created the Defensive Shell and the parabola to guard my property, and also why I had polarized and silvered them. The reply, to the destruction of the flying vehicles, wasn’t long in coming, and I was still at breakfast and hadn’t finished my tea yet when there was a very intense flash of light even through the heavy silvering and polarizing of the defensive shell.

“What was that?” Celeste asked in fear.

“That was the government aggravating me again,” I told her calmly. “Study your lessons while I deal with this new problem.”

Once outside, I transferred up to the parabola to inspect the sky. There was a new and very bright object overhead that had been the satellite they had used. After creating an airtight prolate Defensive Shell around myself and adding my strongest wards, I transferred to the location of the now burned out and useless satellite. It was still quite hot from the reflected blast of its own laser system that had destroyed it, but I was able to detect the still active laser communication link to the headquarters controlling it. I transferred to the source of the laser communication link and collapsed the prolate Defensive Shell, but retained my strongest wards around me.

I found myself in a portion of the Rocky Mountains that the glaciers had retreated from some time ago. There were many communication antennas and laser communication devices where I appeared, and I could also hear the sounds of truck engines and men’s voices a short distance away below me on the mountain.

Being careful, I reached out with my Magic senses, and shortly I was rewarded with the detection of other Magic sources inside the mountain. I transferred to an area near the Magic sources (soldiers) who I had detected, but not among them or too close to them. I found myself in a tunnel complex with many rooms off to each side of its corridors. I cast an invisibility spell around myself and kept a tight rein on my Talent so that the others wouldn’t detect my presence. I then set off to explore the tunnel complex, and quickly located their command center. From all of the activity there, it was easy to tell that it was the correct one.

During this time there had been pandemonium in the command center.

“Don’t fire!” the Colonel had screamed at the technician, but was too late, as he had already pushed the ‘fire’ button before turning to look up at the now very upset officer.

“Why did you shout ‘Don’t Fire’, sir?” the technician asked naively, but it was already apparent that there was trouble, as every warning light in the system lit up.

“What’s happening?” the Colonel demanded. The technicians were already feverishly checking the system, but stopped after a short time.

“We lost the satellite!” the chief technician answered in amazement.

“What? How could that happen?” the firing technician asked in shock.

“Weren’t you ever told in training to never fire on something that is very reflective? It reflected our beams right back to the satellite and fried it, you idiot!” the enraged Colonel screamed, but managed to regain his calm somewhat on realizing just how much trouble they were all in.

“We need to get eyes back on that area. What’s available?” he demanded of the chief technician.

“There’s a weather satellite near there. We can hijack it for a bit to see what’s going on in that area,” the chief technician told him after studying his board for a time.

“Do it!” the Colonel told him. “The General is going to come unhinged when he learns that we fried that satellite. It won’t be quite as bad if we can tell him that we destroyed the target,” he finished.

“It’ll take me a few minutes, sir,” the chief technician told him, as he worked at his board. It took more than a few minutes, and the Colonel was pacing back and forth trying to figure out how to tell the General what had happened in the meantime. The chief technician finally pulled the image they wanted from the weather satellite, but they were all disappointed when they saw the image on his screen.

“It’s ... it’s still there!” the shocked chief technician said.

“What do you mean ‘still there’? It can’t be!!” the Colonel replied in a frantic voice.

“Nevertheless, it’s still there and doesn’t appear to have been affected at all, sir,” the chief technician told him in awe. That was when the General reappeared.

“What’s the situation with that woman?” he demanded sharply. The Lieutenant Colonel was a bit green when he turned to face the General.

“We lost the satellite and the target is still there and appears to be unharmed, sir,” the Colonel told him and waited for the explosion that he knew was coming.

“Lost the satellite!!” the General screamed in rage. “Do you have any idea what those things cost? They’re a billion dollars apiece. Losing a couple of squads and three vehicles is one thing, but an ENTIRE SATELLITE? How the hell could you lose the satellite, you idiot?” he finished in a scream.

“The target turned reflective just before we fired on it, and it appears that it reflected all of the laser’s light right back to it,” the Colonel told him in defense, altering the facts just a bit to save his ass. He knew that if anyone ever got a look at the video that his ass was grass, and they would send him to prison forever, if they didn’t just kill him, but he didn’t plan on allowing anyone to see that video. As it turned out, it really didn’t matter.