Chapter 5

The renegades of the commune had a fallback place prepared for an emergency haven and with a minimum of drama we had everyone relocated there by that late afternoon. There were beds and plenty of canned food and even some medical supplies and enough other mundane stuff that the group of nearly fifty refugees might require for holding out, quiet and hidden for the next week or two. I had a thought or two about getting them moved out right away elsewhere else for better long-term safety but this notion would take some time, and this did seem a pretty safe and secure place to hunker down for awhile and wait.

Miranda had placed Alice's battered remains next to Thad as he now rested at the shelter and she wanted me to examine them with an eye to fixing his faux daughter back to operational health right away, but I had other priorities, which didn't include repairing his armored battle suit either. Fun stuff for quiet playtime later, but I still had other outside threats that I needed to immediately deal with. Pauline and her husband were now back safe with their young son and now Jake was preparing to take us to visit the glass factory. We were waiting for the cover of darkness, so that I could pay a nocturnal visit to the site after most of the workers had gone home, and this gave me the better part of an hour still to spare.

I risked making a phone call to Dixie from the now mostly abandoned artist commune building. A few of the renegades 'normal' friends and relatives had stayed to keep up the appearance that everything was happening as normal there. The odds were that everyone would be safe again there after this evening, assuming I handled the last group of FBI and FBMR agents at the factory. Regardless, I was definitely going to be late for our scheduled dinner meeting with Stan at Dixie's, and wanted them to know it and not worry about our absense. Dealing with the makers of these magical glass plasma tubes was far more important and urgent. Besides, I now had another concern for our friendly cook ... and his apparently vast network of smuggler friends.

"Dixie, this is Zak. We're fine but have been held up by a few new friends with that little problem Stan told us about, that's all fixed, but we're now running late but should be back in town to see you hopefully before midnight for a badly overdue supper, but we might miss that late bus."

"Late? You'll definitely have to catch tomorrow's then, the bus on our street stops running at nine. Besides, Stan hasn't arrived yet from his meeting, so we'll all be fine with a meeting for a late supper then. Not like him to miss lunch and dinner both though. Tell me about your new friends."

'They sort of need to take a bus trip too, but preferably they want a rental one for about a group of forty or fifty, not to mention quite a lot of boxes of bibles. They're part of a church group that wants to go to some revival jamboree south of Charleston ... maybe your friends can find them a cheap charter or might know of any good hotels and places to visit in the area! They're very anxious to get going, full of the spirit of the lord to spread the word of the Lord out to the remotest mountain-folk, but the jamboree isn't for a few weeks, so they could wait for the right sort of deal."

"A bus charter to West Virginia ... I can probably recommend a friend to help get them there, but not sure about the price being right, short notice and all. Might take a few calls ... see you hopefully then later tonight for a late supper!"

That was about as open as we could dare be talking across a public phone line. Sure, the calls were all probably being recorded and some random lines picked for supervision by some bored very low-level government pismire in a dark basement, but our words seemed innocent enough not to attract attention. The renegades needed to get out of town, soon-ish, within a week anyway ... and the notion of getting this rather skilled group of young Arc-Tec wizardlings smuggled safely home across the border to Texas strongly appealed to me. The idea of a supposed church group driving south for a religious convention, as a cover story seemed safe enough and the passengers would be unlikely to be hassled much at state crossing borders. It also sounded like Dixie knew a guy that could scrounge up a bus ... but probably at an expensive price. Well, I still had some Texas silver in my money belt and that might be just enough to get them there and smuggled across the southern border into the Commonwealth and then to the CSA and finally then Texas.

In one of Thaddeus's chests I'd also found a decent bit of USA money, just paper money but it would still be useful. I was pretty sure that he'd want to contribute to the cause as well, for he and his protégés to reach true freedom ... now that their nemesis was dead. Since he wasn't in any sort of mental condition to give his consent, I made an executive decision for him and donated the lot into the growing 'get out of Dodge' general escape fund. He'd undoubtedly thank us all appropriately later.

I hoped that Dixie understood that by south of Charleston, I meant getting them across the Commonwealth border into Virginia and then into CSA South Carolina or even Tennessee, and not actually remain in West Virginia. I knew that the GWA had several big consulate offices in the region that occasionally smuggled renegade wizards from the USA into Texas, and safety. This wasn't going to be a safe or easy trip for them, but it was the best plan I could think of for getting all the renegades home (my home) to safety.

Now if I didn't settle this matter with the glass factory, creating Arc-Tec tubes for Deseret war weapons, then none of us would be enjoying any sort of safety anywhere at all!

The so-called glass factory looked exceedingly unremarkable, as well that it should. Located right in the heart of the industrial district the factory had been producing very ordinary everyday glass bakeware and tableware for the better part of a century. I'd never heard of their operating name, but Jake was told that it was a mostly regional brand anyway, their products mostly retailed in the 'value' fringes of the marketplace anyway, a weak sister to Corning and Anchor's better product lines. In other words they normally made cheap crap and for them to get involved in specialized Arc-Tec at all pretty much indicated that this was likely a very limited special project with a very specialized staff involving a lot of trial and error, probably mostly the latter ... and very likely punching way above their magical weight class right from the very start.

The renegades had found out about the Arc-Tec glass tubing quite accidentally. One of their commune members had a father working the night shift in the mundane bakeware facility and he stumbled (literally) across of box of them outside of the 'Special Projects' building, destined for later re-melting and reuse. Apparently, the production of these tubes was tricky and incurred an extremely high failure rate during casting. Anyway, this first box of eight tubes was taken home with him for his son and his magical friends to play with and it didn't take long before the military applications of the rejected product were noticed. Even without The Mole's immediate help, the renegade kids were a bright lot and had made a few weapons of their own with these flawed materials.

Main manufacturing was a grouping of three semi-connected large brick facilities with huge smoke belching chimneys but Jake identified for us a further outbuilding behind and just to right as being our planned destination, the Special Projects and Testing facility. He'd been here very late at night once or twice before helping to forage for other discarded useful materials. He also pointed out that security had recently been upgraded significantly around the plant, enough so that the renegades had stopped scavenging here several weeks ago.

I didn't need Sean's helpful hint either that already we had unfriendly eyes upon us. A pair of FBI snipers was on the rooftop of the main factory building at both the southeast and southwest corners, to watch over the gated access to the facility by the entry guardhouse and the city roadway beyond. The high fencing and miles of security wire on top looked recently updated, which more than suggested that facilities within had something worth guarding. We were in the employee parking lot just outside the security gate and right from moment we drove up I could feel unfriendly eyes accessing us.

We'd left Trixie behind near the art school to watch over the above ground entrance leading directly down to our temporary refugee camp. Tonight, my worse sort of imagined nightmare was for one group of bad guys to go hunting after the renegades tonight at the same time that I was off here. We told her to stay put, hidden and invisible, guarding over this supposedly hidden access. She could have been very useful here right now, but this wasn't actually that much of a problem. Besides, I had a new trick that I wanted to try out.

"Solid silver ammo, Sean? Or just that cheap adulterated silver-coated lead crap again?"

"The crap," he giggled, "barely thick enough to not rub itself off in the rifle barrel when fired. They're watching you now, fingers slowly moving to squeeze their triggers, the poor fools. They're warning the others on the radio now and comparing the scope image of you to the police station photo of you that they'd been given. There's more than enough of a likeness, especially since your friend parked us directly under the only working streetlight for blocks! Yes, now they've confirmed that you are you and they're waiting for the authorization to fire."

"I wanted them to see me. I want all of the rats together in one place, now, so I don't have to spend the whole night chasing them down one at a time. I'm getting really tired of all of this shit ... very tired and I want to get this all over with and have a nice quiet dinner and eight or twelve peaceful hours of sleep afterwards. I'm going to start walking towards the gate, let me know when they start squeezing triggers." I didn't have to wait more than a few steps for that to happen.

First, I reinforced my air shields, just in case my ambitions were bigger than my technical skills. Then I began to concentrate on the air around me, sensing anything and everything within my path ... like fired crappy silver-coated ammo speeding my direction. Bullets (even silver ones) follow the laws of physics and travel at an arc rather than a flat straight trajectory, influenced by projectile speed, air density, humidity and not insignificantly the laws of gravity, all perfectly normal. Now add the magical theory of reverse parabolic trajectory to this!

In pure magical terms, all projectiles leave a wake behind them, marking their passage. Usually in the air but it can be very effective in water too. With preparation a good air or water magician can sense that wake, and with surprising little magic effort, reverse that projectile around and send it exactly back upon its original path. Well, almost exactly. Again projectile air speed, density, gravity, etc. continue to exert their own effects on the returning projectile. The net result is that the projectile (or bullet) will return to its original firing position, give or take a foot or so of vertical displacement. In other words, the bullet (if reversed exactly) will probably strike the shooter instead about six inches or so exactly below the rifle barrel, assuming no minor horizontal displacement occurs due to the effects of wind.

Another example of pure children's playground magic! We used to line up in the schoolyard and practice this using big rubber balls as kids, then later in high school with smaller faster stuff like baseballs and tennis balls. It was a very good exercise for kids to practice precise control over air magic, which in those days I had almost none. I could barely handle the big slow and easy rubber balls! Now, I was thinking I could be a bit more confident.

I could have cheated and flipped open my uncle's railroad watch and fired up its short time dilation charm to help with the process, but I wanted to try this the hard way. I wanted to learn how to do this technique, handling this kind of assassination threat in real time, with as little advance warning as possible. It was a scary sort of trial and error experiment, but I'd recently review the magical theory of it with Miranda during one of our textbook skull sessions and I wanted to see now just how hard and fast I could handle reverse magic now.

This was probably pretty darned foolish; Not one air wizard in a hundred could return speeding bullets, but I'd been doing the nearly impossible for months now and was running out of ways to surprise myself.

The trick was just like I thought, keeping acute awareness of the air and everything in it around me. First for just a matter of feet or a yard or two, not unlike a shield, but expanding outwards beyond these for first a few yards, and then a dozen more, sensing without eyes or active thought every wind-blown leaf, bit of chimney ash or even specs of suspended dust. I could feel them all, stronger and more precisely with growing effort and concentration (and not a small amount of air ley fueled power).

When the bullets arrived, a scant moment apart and upon identical trajectories towards my forehead, it took the barest thrust of air to stop them in mid-flight and then reverse their paths back to the shooters. Both rounds struck into the prone chests of the snipers, a bare two inches below the smoking barrels of their rifles. The wounds were equally lethal and I could almost sense, if not quite either hear the weapons falling to the roof of the building from the lifeless grasp of the shooters.

I kept the air screen up for another full minute, even after Sean had notified me that both shooters had been taken care of. The rooftops were now cleared of danger. I wanted flex my magical muscles just a bit and see how long I could hold this reversal field. The strain was quickly too much, but I thought I could improve this with a bit more practice. I made a mental note to start practicing with Miranda, beginning with simple big and slow objects, but her air talents were rather minimal. Still, with practice, this was just the sort of simple in theory but hard in practice skill that could save your life at times, like tonight. The more I thought about it now, the less sure I wanted Miranda with me going into the Special Projects factory for the big showdown.

"Miranda, won't you just please stay here in the car with Jake?" I enquired as she got out from her side of the car to come join me.

"You're still mad at me because I couldn't find the air ley for you earlier today!" She snapped.

"Alright ... can you find this air ley for me now? I'll wait." No, she couldn't. Miranda kicked the road in exasperation. It was a fairly weak one, but even as an adept I could have found it. Miranda was either extremely weak with air or perhaps her magical skills had been shorted out by her exposure to the massive spirit fountain in the rail yard. Either way, she wasn't going to be of much practical assistance to me right now. Worse, I'd have to be extra cautious so that I could ensure her safety.

On the other hand, there are few worse things than arguing with a teenager logically when she's throwing a complete emotional temper tantrum! This was taking time that I didn't want to give our enemies to have, so I gave in.

"Stay close. I mean close, like nose right into my back and standing on my shadow nearly right on top of me, and if Sean or I says run – run, no arguing, no looking back until your ass is back inside of this car! Agreed?" It wasn't a question and she nodded, still rather sulking badly.

The old guard at the locked security gate gave me very little trouble.

"There's about to be a really big fire ... you'd better warn everyone in the factory to get away to safety, and fast!" I gave him a strong Charm push to encourage him to get his elderly ass into motion and without a look backwards at us he shuffled off to the main factory to set off the main fire alarms there. Knowing these Cleveland wizards and their Deseret friends, they weren't going to be overly concerned about collateral damage.

The plant-wide emergency alarm went off right about the time I stepped into the already opened steel shutter doors of the Special Projects factory building and nearly at once, a rather different set of alarms started going off in my own head.

"Miranda, can you sense that huge ambient magical fire source?"

"Sort of ... there's something big there in front of us but I can't attach to it."

"You wouldn't really want to. That's a direct fixed locus to the elemental plane of fire. Not a safe or smart thing to do, in fact, it's a pretty farking stupid thing to do in the first place! You stay right here and try not to look at it even if it looks at you, and don't connect to it. Remember how to do that aversion field exercise we've been practising? Do it ... or else start running back to the car now and tell Jake to get your asses a few city blocks away from this soon to be burning nightmare. Your choice ... but I'm going to have to deal with a few rather major problems I hadn't quite planned for.

I'd been in this sort of mess before. My ass dealing with huge magical locus's (or is the plural locii?) to unnatural places chock full of nasty unnatural things that all (or mostly) want to suck our souls out and nom-nom them with chocolate sprinkles. There are ways to utilize elemental energies relatively safely, but within very minor and environmentally secure and very limited magical workings ... which this was definitely not! This locus was massive, excessively so ... and only nominally barricaded at this mortal end against visitor encroachment.

The fact that I could already see or sense a half dozen fairly major fire elementals performing some sort of tasks near the glass casting forges near the locus showed that this inter-dimensional breech was rather more enormous and unwisely insecure than I'd even guessed at first. The fire lords were starting to notice my arrival and then began queuing up in front of the massive furnace locus to await some sort of instructions from their masters, or in this case, their mistress ... a rather imposing older gal in bright red robes that just screamed out 'look at me, I'm a fire mage!' She seemed to be the local head witch ... and if she was the one responsible for the fire locus, along with all of the summoned major fire elementals, then she was going to be a rather significant threat all by herself, even without her cast of flunkies.

I was impressed ... the entire gang seemed to be present, all sixteen or eighteen of them. Good, it might be an interesting fight then and I just might not have to go hunting for any stay-at-homes later then either. I wanted, hoped that I'd catch all of the leadership here so that I could deal with them all at once, but when after performing a quick nose count of the opposition it seemed that I was facing a rather embarrassment of riches. It was going to be, as they say in the military, a very target-rich environment.

The array of wizards and sorceresses lining up in a semi-circle in front of the locus ought to have been bowel voiding impressive. They certainly had brought out everyone left from the local FBMR field office, including the head witch and a dozen or her staff ... and all dressed up in their formal combat robes too. Their friends were all decked out in their finest as well! I quickly counted another four magicians in bright azure blue robes; French wizards from across the river, undoubtedly the middlemen receiving the fabricated Arc-Tec tubes to pass onwards west to their Deseret allies. Speaking of which, the three Deseret wizards in their black robes were doing their best to look menacing, but just from a glance, I thought these guys looked to be low-level talent from the French side of the border as well. Strictly jobbers just following orders. They had the decency to start looking nervous when I smiled at them.

As for the five FBI guys in dark suits bearing guns, standing a respectable distance behind the magicians, they were strictly the comic relief portion of the evening's entertainment. They couldn't even annoy me ... and they probably already knew it.

Rule Number One when you're badly outnumbered is never, ever, to show fear of any kind, or the slightest hint of intimidation. Just smile and think wickedly appalling thoughts. Having a plan to deal with them all is really good too!

For starters, I decided that it might help simplify things if I cleared off a part of the battlefield and started removing a few of the minor auxiliary pieces first. Beginning with the local air witch I'd warned off last night. She was standing in front right next to her boss in red, trying hard to look like she wasn't already pissing her panties. She could tell that I'd already marked her presence and I wagged my finger at her in disappointment.

"Bad girl! I spanked your bottom last night and warned you what would happen if you crossed my path again! Well, now you're about to become someone else's problem ... go ahead, she's all yours Hanu'um!" I called out.

I'd begun sensing an opening air-gateway almost from the moment my eyes spotted the air witch, and at my command, a vaporous apparition of a hand appeared directly over her. In an instant, the vengeful sylph-lord had seized his hand around her waist and with a loud laugh she was yanked out of our world and into his ... undoubtedly forever. I thought I saw his smiling face wink at me for an instant before his portal closed shut behind them. I was sure that the great Hanu'um would remember my pledge and return for his plaything, assuming she ever dared to interfere with me again. She was already regretting her decision not to keep running far, far away from me – for the rest of her natural life, if necessary. Well ... she was now someone else's problem.

My off-hand casual summoning of a major sylph-lord to remove one of their numbers certainly had its effect. Even the local FBMR boss witch lost her composure for a brief moment or two. Her summoned underlings, the fire elementals, were now more than a bit concerned and seemed increasingly hesitant about how to deal with me. She ordered them to attack me, twice ... but they barely shuffled towards me at little better than a slither.