Paranoid mage, p.19
Paranoid Mage, page 19
part #1 of Paranoid Mage Series
Now that he had the glamour done, he needed to go check out the other pair of targets. With obfuscation in place he could teleport or use gravitykinesis without normal people noticing. Not that he was good enough to kinesis himself without exceeding discomfort, but it had occurred to him that he could just ride his motorcycle. If he divided up his spatial bubble and gave just the motorcycle enough negative gravity, it should be able to lift his weight just fine, and then he could spatially drag them both.
Assuming he could hold the spatial construct that long. A motorcycle with a rider didn’t take up nearly as much volume as a car, but it was still considerably more than what he moved around for his usual tasks. Though the real question was how fast he could go. It was moving space, not moving through space, so in theory there was no upper limit. Hell, it wasn’t far from an Alcubierre drive, so if he was really good he could exceed the speed of light, though he very much doubted that would be true in practice.
He changed from his suit into more motorcycle-appropriate attire, happy that the helmet obscured his identity, and tucked the glamour focus plate into the inside pocket of his leather jacket. The whole getup made him feel a little bit ridiculous and very much like he was experiencing a midlife crisis, but it worked. Besides, if he did take a spill he really did not want to tear off a few layers of skin, even if he could theoretically get Gayle to heal him up again.
After driving sufficiently far away from the motorhome, Callum pulled off the road into a field and pushed mana into the glamour focus. Attaching the resulting bubble of obfuscation to himself, he molded it so it fit just him and the motorcycle, then tried his gravitykinesis idea, giving extra negative gravity to just the motorcycle body. Inevitably, he overshot the first time, the bike jerking upward and making him drop the magic as he clutched his groin.
The next time he was far more careful, the bike wobbling a bit as it rose into the air with him aboard, rising until he turned the reverse gravity back down. It was pretty obviously unstable, and if he wanted to make a habit of it he’d need something he could dangle from, but at least for testing it seemed to work. It also drained him a lot more rapidly than he liked, but that might not matter, depending on how fast he could go. Plus, he could store some vis in the brass he’d gotten, just in case.
With the gravity doing its job and letting him float, he tried dragging the space forward and things got very weird. There was no sense of movement, but things blurred. The slightest twitch of his manual control sent the landscape careening about, which just made things even worse and he found himself pressed into the ground in short order. Fortunately, because he wasn’t actually moving, it wasn’t like he actually crashed, more like he just lay down in an awkward position.
Scrambling to his feet, he looked around and had no idea where he was. He powered on his phone long enough to get coordinates and found that in about thirty seconds of so-called flight he’d managed about one hundred miles. Which was damn good, but it was not at all sustainable or controllable. He was one hundred miles east northeast, when he had intended to go due north.
The good part was that moving space meant that the residue given off by the glamour didn’t leave a two-hundred-mile long track smeared behind him. It stayed contained in the area around him, since technically he’d never left it. Callum righted his bike and tried again, this time being far, far, far more careful about how he applied his vectors.
It became obvious what had happened when he tried barely moving himself the next time. He wasn’t moving, space was, so when he tried to move space relative to himself, the frames of reference added up. His moving self moved himself more, and his velocity relative to the real world compounded at absurd speeds. For better or worse, that also meant that if he dropped the space drag everything stopped instantly, so there didn’t seem to be any middle ground between insane acceleration and nothing.
Kind of terrifying when one potential option was accelerating into space.
Still, if he kept things low he could just take short jaunts of a few seconds even if he did move very, very fast. Which fit the vis cost anyway. Going that fast absolutely decimated his energy stores, so it wasn’t like he could actually reach infinite speed before he ran out of juice, but it was a very uncomfortable method of transportation regardless.
Callum compromised by dragging himself for five or six seconds at a time before stopping to reorient himself and sometimes teleport himself down to the ground. It definitely wasn’t fun, but it was far faster than driving. The only trouble was that it was very easy to get lost, considering the lack of landmarks and the fact that he wasn’t following the roads. Still and all, he turned five hours of travel into one, which absolutely wasn’t worth complaining about.
The next address on his list was in the middle of a decent-sized town, a motel like the one in Winut. There was no handy café across the way, though, and while he could probably find the hideouts of the local shifters if he looked, that wasn’t his aim. The dossier said that the mage protecting the location had fire and water talents, and it did not escape his notice that the motel lawn sprinklers had absolutely soaked the surrounding grounds.
Like the earth mage, the water-fire mage had some form of shield up, which made him wonder why the air mage hadn’t. Possibly the air mage had been less competent, or maybe the only reason those mages were shielding themselves was because of what happened in Winut. It was hardly a secret in the supernatural community.
Either way, he needed the ability to take out the mage and then the vampires that were sleeping in the motel beds. Vamps sleeping on beds like normal people amused him, for some reason, but it did make it harder to see what his targets were, since there were some ordinary humans mixed in. Still, he managed to square his count with the number on his list, as well as sketch out the layout and take a few other notes, before driving onward.
The last place on the list actually did have a mage, in contradiction to the information he’d been given. It made him glad he’d taken the time to survey of his own accord, because being unprepared for an active defense would be bad. From what he could see it was another earth mage, which made him wonder exactly how rare something like spatial was. He’d only seen elemental and healing, not gravity or metal or time or light or shadow or whatever else was out there.
The primer had mentioned a number of those, but only in the vaguest terms. Lacking any kind of census data meant that there was nothing to tell him if rare meant one in fifty, or one in fifty million. It was just another thing to take a note on, sigh, and move on with what he needed to do. Like shopping.
He had a few ideas on how to approach the issues he’d seen, but dealing with the shielded mages was going to be the hardest part. From Arcane Defenses he’d gathered that he’d need damn good magic to punch through a shield that way, but since he didn’t have any offensive spatial spells that was fine. The sticking point was that the appropriate elements and their opposites tended to be fairly ineffective.
If he wanted to kill an earth mage, he couldn’t throw a rock at them, even one going very fast. Even a bullet might not quite work, as earth was related to metal. That said, he didn’t really want to use guns for these if he couldn’t get the portal right up close like last time, since he didn’t trust himself not to miss and he’d only have one shot.
According to the timeline Chester had provided, he had three days before things became really critical, which was rushing a bit, but with enough work he could get things done. The major issue was transporting his materials to the towns and caching them somewhere, since he wanted to move as quickly as he could on the day of.
A few visits to a number of hardware stores, scrapyards, and lumber yards netted him everything he needed. That, and some browsing of the internet to make sure he had his facts and figures right. Then it was just heads-down, manual labor for the most part. There was some testing involved, just to make sure he had everything right, but eventually he had it all ready.
Chapter 13 – Execution
Callum knew that however the attacks turned out, he would have to be very mobile afterward, and preferably not even in the same state. His gravitykinesis helped with that, especially since he’d made himself a really stupid looking flying chair to use instead of his motorcycle. He’d taken an ordinary office chair and bolted on a vertical metal frame to make a sort of shelf above his head. The shelf just had some bags of concrete for mass, so when he used it for lift the chair would just hang straight down.
He used it to ferry components out to each area ahead of time, caching the small things inside utility spaces and the big things he just put caution tape on. Nobody really questioned why a big piece of wooden piling was lying around if it had caution tape on it. Besides, putting them next to telephone poles made them look semi-official.
Callum was pretty sure he could have tried glamouring them but he was risking enough by using teleportation to move them into position near the targets. A thousand yards or so away, sure, but that might well be dangerously close if he wanted to remain unobserved. He had basically one data point for how far a real mage could sense, and he didn’t thing Gayle was a good example, so the best he could do was err on the side of caution and hope. Just that much sucked up another of his days, and he had to crash early from simple exhaustion.
Part of the reason he was working himself so hard was to avoid thinking too much about what he was doing. Taking out vampires who had murdered people and who had kidnapped a kid in a fit of passion was one thing, but a cold assassination was something else. Not something that he would have considered in his old life.
He was lying in bed worrying it over in his mind when he suddenly sat upright and fumbled for his laptop. All that planning and he hadn’t bothered to check whether all the vampires had actually been doing anything untoward. After seeing one, Callum had just taken it for granted that all the vampires Chester had steered him to were murderers, rather than a political annoyance.
It was a thought that had come far, far too late, but after a few minutes of sleuthing he found that he hadn’t made a horrible mistake. The other towns also had recent murders or missing persons, and given the population in each that was exceedingly unlikely. Especially since in all the cases there were no details or suspects, just a rote article from a disinterested reporter.
That relieved his mind enough that he could finally sleep.
In the morning he drove to his staging area, a camp site off in the middle of nowhere, screened by trees. Hopefully it wouldn’t matter where he started from, but just in case he had the remainder of his gold and cash and guns bundled up and cached at the bottom of a nearby lake, wrapped in plastic and duct tape.
He teleported his stupid transportation chair outside of the motorhome, swearing to himself that he’d come up with something less awful-looking or at least learn to properly smooth out the gravity, and settled in with a map and a GPS-enabled burner phone. He was going to be traveling very fast and the GPS would reflect that, and he didn’t want anything of his associated with the locations, but he still hated to have to spend the money. Especially since it was separate from the one he was using to communicate with Chester; he’d have to throw away two phones at the end of it, which meant he’d be out of magical phones for a while.
Even though he’d be using the glamour focus, he took the time to dress himself differently, apply some fake tattoos, and don a hairpiece in order to look different. Callum found it amusing how much time he was spending on makeup as a middle-aged man, solely so he looked different than he did. Then he was off, moving in thirty-second jaunts in the direction of the first town.
He picked the one without a mage because that was the safest for ensuring his plan really did work as intended. He decided to bring along a shotgun with a bunch of mordite ammunition just in case, since it was always good to have extra options when things went badly, but he hoped it wouldn’t be necessary. Callum still didn’t know how active vampires could be during the day, since all the lore about them was mostly invented, and he didn’t want to tangle with one even if it was sleepy.
The cache of materials was still in the duct he’d put it in before, and a quick teleport moved it all into the garage he was using as a staging point. The occupant was gone for work, or so Callum assumed, and he didn’t want to set things up in the open. Even if there wasn’t much to set up, it would look pretty weird to any passers-by. The preparations consisted of eight steel plates, which he put on top of wire holders to raise them off the ground.
Steel plates with cakes of densely-packed thermite on top of each.
His way of thinking was that if a point-blank shotgun round worked on a supernatural, so would that. Especially since he could deliver it directly to them. It also solved his problem of needing to jump portals around and rely on his gun not to jam. Igniting thermite was a little tricky but the internet was full of wonders and had multiple designs using wires and electricity so he could do it all simultaneously.
The stuff had not even been that hard to make, especially since he could just rent some equipment for the day to help with the metal powder. It probably wasn’t as good as real commercial stuff, but he didn’t want to buy that. He didn’t know if he could buy that, and he wasn’t interested in stealing anything. Robbing the vamps was one thing, but hurting ordinary folks by taking their stuff was not in his nature.
Callum reached out to find all his targets, shaping a teleport field around each of the plates and their payloads and threading a vis strand through the static ward so he had a connection. It was quite a strain, holding eight inputs and eight outputs, but after all the practice he’d put himself through it wasn’t unreasonable.
He touched the ignition wire to the terminals of the car battery that he’d brought with him, and the thermite popped and began to fizz with sparks as burning magnesium started the process. That was his cue to teleport them directly atop the sleeping vampire’s faces, thermite-cake-side down.
The steel plate was mostly just there in case he was too slow with the teleport but also because he wanted something to help contain all the heat and sparks and redirect them to where they’d do the most good. Which was to say, directly into the vampire’s faces. Burning thermite acted quickly, so Callum wasn’t actually sure if the vamps had time to scream or make any real sign before it did its work.
Fire alarms started going off, the sprinkler system kicked in, and people started running around, but it was far too late for that. A pile of thermite to the face was as effective as Callum could have ever hoped, but he was glad he didn’t have to see it with his actual eyes. Or smell it.
Like the first time, there were some bags of cash and containers of gold, and he grabbed those. He didn’t bother with the electronics or the guns, though he wouldn’t have said no to more special ammunition, but a few thousand dollars and a few kilograms of gold didn’t really take up that much space. He did consider stealing the ward, too, but he didn’t have any confidence in being able to shut it down, so he left it be. After one last quick pass to make sure he hadn’t missed something incredibly important, he distributed a bunch of his ball bearings to purge the indications of his teleports and started to tidy up.
Callum teleported the wire racks into some restaurant’s dumpster and added a cleanup bead, then picked up the car battery with one hand and his loot with the other. He wasn’t sure that the thralls would be able to find his trail without supernatural aid, but they were probably calling in that aid already so he didn’t want to stick around, and simply teleported himself back to his conveyance.
The glamour residue would indicate a mage had been there, but that was probably okay because literally all of them used glamours. It wasn’t even his own vis, it was mana, so there was nothing identifying on it. He still would have preferred to clean it up, but his vortex enchantments only worked on his own vis so he just let it be. A few seconds later, he was miles away, and he took the opportunity to turn on his phone and text the number Chester had given him. Just three words, letting him know that the nest was destroyed, then he turned it off again.
That one had been easy. The other three would be more difficult, because there were mages involved. Mages with shields up, and he had no idea how robust those shields were. That was, frankly, where the whole thing could fall apart. A mage might well be able to track him, though he doubted any of them could move as fast as he could with his weird spatial dragging technique.
There were also more targets in general. More vampires, who had to be killed after the mage, and that meant they might have time to realize what was going on. The thermite-to-the-face technique wouldn’t work all that well if they were up and moving about, especially if they were moving supernaturally fast. Callum’s own reflexes were not good enough to keep up with that kind of speed.
That was really what he was counting on when it came to the other mages. They were still human, still squishy, and still slow, relatively speaking. He was pretty sure they were counting on their wards to warn them of what was going on, and the ones he’d seen so far he could bypass. While he was far more uncomfortable with killing humans as opposed to vampires, they were actively helping the vampires murder people. The GAR-sanctioned mages were presumably mercenaries or otherwise willing, but the thralls might be just protection detail and under some kind of coercion, so at least in this case he could probably ignore them.
Although Callum could make do without a vantage point as such, height made his plan easier, so he’d perched himself on top of a water tower near the theatre. The big cylinder had a flat top that shielded him from casual observation, and there was enough room there to set out his plates of thermite.
He’d practiced, and holding twelve entry and exit points was too much, so he was going to have to work in sets of six. It shouldn’t make a difference, because really, he had gotten quite fast at teleporting, but every second counted. The big wooden piling rested just beyond the thermite plates, and in theory he could try and get that going at the same time, but in practice he could only strain his multitasking so far.
