Chapter 18

Finding the components and making the necessary modifications to their perception filters took just under two hours. A quick test had confirmed that Sara and Jessica seemed to be invisible to anyone but each other, but time and energy constraints had prevented any more extensive trials. By the time they returned to the nondescript warehouse, the Wirathian ornithopter carrying Michael and Lao was just about coming into land. That gave them only thirty minutes until whatever-it-was happened, but at least they should be able to co-ordinate their efforts.

While the Chetsuans were going to have to rely on their pseudo invisibility, Michael and Lao were armed with faked credentials to gain admittance.

For a supposedly decommissioned power plant, it was very much a hive of activity. The cavernous underground space was humming with power. Banks of lights flashed, screens displayed the current status of operations and apparently everything was condition green.

Security led Michael and Lao to a guide who introduced himself as Darragh, Operations Chief for the site and immediately dismissed the security guard.

“You’re early,” he accused them in a low voice, as soon as they were alone.

Michael and Lao had to school their expressions to avoid revealing their surprise. They hadn’t expected to be expected.

Lao dismissed the issue with a casual shrug. “Better early than late, am I right?” he remarked with a grin.

Darragh laughed. “Yes, that’s certainly true and it’s reassuring to have the evac vehicle waiting outside for when it all kicks off.”

That confirmed Michael’s fears. He could feel the presence of higher planar energy here, but not enough to indicate the proximity of the fragment they were looking for. Which begged two key questions: where was the power coming from, and what were they planning on doing with it that would require evacuation?

“Our friends in the North just wanted us to do a final check on everything before, as you say, it all kicks off down here,” Lao was saying. “You can understand that, can’t you, given how important this is?”

Darragh frowned. “I suspected it was something like that, but I assure you everything’s in order.”

“I’m sure it is,” Lao smoothed. “Look, the truth is, I really just wanted to see it for myself before…you know.”

The Chief smiled broadly. “Of course, of course,” he agreed, beaming with pride at whatever he believed he’d accomplished here. “Can’t say I blame you.”

“Well then,” Michael breezed, “since we are early, why don’t you show it to us? A quick tour of the highlights.”

Darragh readily agreed and led them out into the factory. Fortunately for Michael, the doors in the facility had been built tall and wide enough to accommodate the easy movement of equipment, so his stature wouldn’t be a problem as long as they stayed out of the smaller office spaces. Given that there were now less than twenty-five minutes until the shield activated, they were hardly likely to stop for a chat over a coffee.

Leading them around the factory floor, Darragh showed his visitors the electrical generation system. It had been well modified from the original design, to accommodate higher planar energy that would simply melt regular electrical cables like fuses.

He showed them circuit diagrams, explaining how his efficient leadership had overseen the connection of the plant to the entire Wirathian electrical grid ahead of schedule.

“That’s why they were able to bring the activation forward,” he announced, proudly.

That was further confirmation that it was something to do with the new barrier system. Besides the usual components of a power station – boilers, turbines and generators, spinning an enormous coil of wires within a circular arrangement of powerful magnets – there was another large device neither visitor could identify. It was a horizontally mounted metal cylinder, about fifty yards in length. Somehow, it seemed to be receiving higher planar energy that was being transmitted from somewhere else. Michael could feel it. But from where and for what purpose? The device looked familiar, somehow, but he couldn’t quite place it.

“It’s been a labour of love, this place,” Darragh admitted. “I’ve worked long hours, lost sleep over this. Lost weight, too. Although that’s probably no bad thing,” he quipped, patting his stomach.

Michael and Lao laughed, as their parts required, but nearly choked when Darragh sighed, “Almost a shame to blow it all up, really.”

That’s what that cylindrical device was, Michael realised with horror: it was like a shadow warrior’s beam cannon weapon, only a primitive version. That’s why it was so big. Primitive or not, the damage it could do, if powered by the unstable higher planar energy stored within a fragment of Kullos’ dimensional control device, would be devastating. What he couldn’t work out was what the weapon was supposed to fire at.

“Well, Michael,” Lao spoke up, “I think we’ve seen enough here to know everything’s on schedule, so maybe we should tell our friends, so they don’t worry,” he suggested.

“Good idea,” Michael agreed, fishing Jessica’s mobile phone out of his pocket.”

“Is that a portacom?” Darragh wondered, incredulously.

Lao, covering for Michael who was unfamiliar with the term, just laughed it off. “Retro design. My friend’s into old-fashioned tech like that.”

Unsurprisingly, Sara’s was the last number called, so he just pressed redial and seconds later it was ringing.

*****

Taking a deep breath, Sara and Jessica broke cover and hurried over to the warehouse. They quickly found a window large enough for them to squeeze through. Naturally, being the middle of winter, it was closed, but Jessica’s dragonclaw dagger soon sorted that out, finding its way into the tiniest crack and slicing through the reinforced steel bolts as if they were made of tissue paper.

They slipped in quietly and Sara pulled out her tracker, checking the sound was muted before activating it. They were invisible, not inaudible.

The warehouse appeared to be deserted. There were no lights on, but Chetsuans had excellent night vision, so it wasn’t too much of a hindrance. Rather more irritating was the lack of heating, which somehow managed to make it feel colder than outside. With a shiver, the sisters crept along the corridor in which they found themselves. A little further on, they found a door and opened it carefully. On the other side lay the main storage area and some metal steps leading up onto a gantry.

Automated systems were working on something that caused a faint, sinister hum, a somehow threatening vibration. It was coming from some kind of metal apparatus about the size of a major competition swimming pool, taking up half the floor space of this warehouse, but it was too difficult to tell what it might be from this angle.

Despite how pressed they were for time, Jessica dismissed her sister’s suggestion that they split up. She’d seen too many movies to think that was a good idea. They would stay together until they had a pressing reason to do otherwise.

Together, they decided on an aerial view. Now that their eyes had grown sufficiently accustomed to the darkness, they could, at last, make out the apparatus in detail. It was principally a vast horizontal cylinder, mounted on a platform about twenty feet high. Sara’s detector was telling her it was sending out a continuous, invisible beam of higher planar energy that simply disappeared less than twenty yards from one end of the device. Except that was impossible. Energy couldn’t just vanish like that.

“There’s something weird going on here, sis,” Jessica remarked.

Sara rolled her eyes. “What gave it away? The big metal thingy?”

She didn’t know what the device was called, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that it was some kind of enormous gun, or maybe ‘cannon’ would be a better word.

Jessica gave her sister a withering look. “I don’t mean the tech! I mean I sense…” she trailed off, waving a hand, vaguely.

“…A disturbance in the Force?” Sara suggested. She expected her sister to laugh at the reference, but she didn’t.

“Actually, all facetiousness aside, that’s not a bad description. It’s like there’s a gap in the fabric of reality just in front of that big cannon. That’s where the energy’s going.” She caught a flicker of something in the area where the energy was disappearing. “There!” she declared, pointing. “Look closely.”

Sara stared for a long moment, and nothing happened, but then she saw it: the flicker of a tiny blue light in midair.

“Wait,” she gasped, “that looks like—”

“—A Prismatic Sphere portal,” Jessica finished. It was so small, it could surely transport nothing bigger than a mouse. But she knew from the one Catriona had maintained while on Earth, a micro-portal was quite sufficient to simply transmit energy. That’s what this device was doing: it was sending energy elsewhere. From the consistent feel of nature through that portal, Jessica was willing to bet it was confined to Lavos.

“But where on this world could they be using this energy?” Sara knew the answer almost as soon as the question left her lips.

Both sisters answered together, “Wirathia!”

It seemed as if higher planar energy was being transmitted to the other side of the world.

Further along the gantry, the sisters found a display screen. A small light indicated that it was switched on but on standby. A simple tap on the screen would activate it. It would also light up like a beacon that would alert any security that might be monitoring, but they didn’t have any choice. They needed information fast and looking around quickly, they could see nothing else that was going to help them, so after an encouraging nod from Jessica, Sara touched the screen and quickly took in the information it displayed. On the screen, there was a diagrammatic representation of the system. It showed the huge cannon being fed power through cables from a box that contained something small. There was only one thing that small component could be: the fragment. Judging by the schematic, it was on a similar platform on the opposite side of the room.

Sara quickly flicked through the options on-screen to learn more. The first thing she found brought a momentary smile to her face, despite the situation: it was a simple clock, counting down the minutes and seconds.

“You were right, Jess,” she remarked, but rather than smile back, her sister frowned.

“Check your phone,” she insisted. “Don’t ask, just do it. Quick,” she insisted, cutting off any questions.

Sara handed Jessica her tracker, then with her now free hand, she opened the app that displayed the official countdown to the barrier activation. She held it up next to the monitor screen to show her sister: they didn’t match. The one on the warehouse screen was behind by three minutes and seven seconds.

“I knew it!” Jessica declared.

“Well, it’s odd,” Sara remarked, “but at least we’ve got a bit longer. That’s good news.”

Jessica shook her head, emphatically. “There’s been no delay, the barrier definitely goes up in twenty minutes. I don’t know what happens here three minutes after that, but I don’t believe it’s anything good. We should just grab the fragment and go.”

“Maybe,” her sister allowed, “but I’d rather know what we’re dealing with, if possible. Just give me one more minute. She continued flicking through various options on screen and froze as what she saw shocked her. “It’s a trap!” she gasped.

“What is?” Jessica asked, looking around, frantically.

Seeing her misunderstanding, her twin clarified, “Not here. Wirathia. They’re going to blow it up!”

“The power plant?”

Sara shook her head. “The continent.”

“What?” Jessica demanded horrified. “They can’t!”

“They can,” Sara insisted. “It’s all right here.”

The plan, she explained, was to get as many dragons as possible within Wirathian borders, which they had. According to the latest figures, there were more dragons than people, around thirty million. Given their already low numbers, that left fewer than a thousand individual dragons that hadn’t taken the bait. The energy being transmitted was building at the other end, ready to power a sustained barrier around Wirathia, as per the official countdown. The world would be watching on vidscreens everywhere, and it would appear to be a complete success…for about three minutes and seven seconds.

At that time, the system in Weslend would kick into high gear, shooting a massive surge of higher planar energy through the micro-portal to the other side. That surge would be transmitted throughout the entire Wirthian electrical grid. The whole continent would be ablaze with deadly beam cannon blasts shooting out from every city, every town, every single building with an electrical supply, ricocheting off the barrier. There would be fires, explosions, quakes, mass devastation, and that was only the beginning.

Ultimately, the power plant at the other end would be unable to cope with all that higher planar energy. So, in one final devastating blast, it would explode with enough force to wipe out virtually all life in Wirathia. In a little over twenty minutes, twenty-five million people and thirty million dragons would be wiped from the face of Lavos.

“The barrier isn’t there to protect the dragons,” Sara concluded. “It’s a trap to make sure they all die. Genocide.”

“They’re doing it again!” Jessica cried. “Daelen stopped them before, but thanks to the fragment coming here from Tempestria, they’ve found another way.”

With a determined look, Sara declared, “We’ve got to stop it.”

As they turned to walk away, however, lights suddenly flared on, and there came the sound of heavy footsteps pounding on the metal gantry. As Sara had feared, security had noticed the anomaly of a monitor turning itself on. Now they were running up the steps to investigate, guns at the ready. Before they could reach the top of the gantry, the two Chetsuans moved away as quietly as possible, praying their perception filters were working.

Indeed, the guards seemed unable to find them...until Sara’s phone rang. Jessica shut it off quickly, but it was too late. Guards immediately came running, and the sisters instinctively dived for cover.

“Hang on,” Jessica whispered. “Why are we hiding? We’re invisible.”

Sara shook her head. “We’re unnoticeable, not invisible, and only if we don’t attract attention.”

“Which we just did,” Jessica groaned. She made a snap decision. “Get the fragment,” she whispered. “I’ll distract that lot.”

Sara tried to protest, but Jessica just restored her perception filter to its previous settings, making her look Lavosian. Since that was what the guards would expect to see, they should have no reason to penetrate the disguise.

Taking a deep breath, she called out, “Alright, loves, I’m coming out.” Holding her hands up, she stepped from cover. “I’m unarmed,” she lied, once again relying on her sister’s technology to hide the dragonclaw daggers attached to her wrists. “Please don’t shoot me!”

Half a dozen guards had her surrounded in a heartbeat. One of them checked for weapons and confirmed that she had none, though they were suspicious about the tracker in her hand.

“Drop the device!” a guard ordered, and she complied a little more thoroughly than he intended, throwing it away from the gantry and letting it fall twenty feet to the ground where it smashed. If they knew she was tracking the fragment, things could go badly. Now she hoped they would just assume it was a portacom. That way she could act like this was a simple break-in, at least for the next twenty minutes.

Sara didn’t like this one bit, but nevertheless, she crept away from the scene, trusting in her sister’s ability to take care of herself. As soon as she was far enough away, she returned Michael’s call.

*****

Halfway around the world, just as Michael was about to try again, the phone rang.

“You’d better have a bloody good reason for ringing,” came Sara’s voice. She was whispering, but the anger behind her words was clear without her needing to shout. “Jessica’s been caught thanks to you.”

As Sara was speaking, Michael grew increasingly uneasy about the approaching security, escorting two individuals to Darragh.

Watching them move to one side to confer, Michael murmured, “Sorry, my dear, but if it’s any consolation, it looks like we’re about to be in the same boat here, so we’d best talk quickly.” He shared what he’d learned, but of course, that only confirmed what Sara already knew.

“Get to the fragment,” he advised, “and work out how to extract it, but don’t do anything else until we speak again. We need to be very careful about how we do this, or a lot of people are going to die – including us.”

“Alright,” Sara agreed, “but we’ve only got about seventeen minutes left. If I don’t hear from you in twelve, I’ll have to do what I think is best, so I have time to grab Jess and run. You got that? She’s my priority. If it comes down to it, I don’t care if this world blows itself up as long as I have my sister.”

“I know,” Michael assured her, kindly, “but it won’t come to that. Listen, I have to go,” he told her, as Darragh and his guards moved menacingly towards him and Lao, weapons primed and ready.

Through the phone, Sara heard someone shout, “Put the com down and your hands in the air!”

“Good luck,” she offered.

Sara wasn’t sure if Michael had heard her before he hung up, but she couldn’t worry about that. She just had to get to the fragment, rescue Jessica and despite her words to Michael, she did want to save the world and all those dragons in the process. She didn’t have time to worry about anything else. She just had to trust Michael and Lao to take care of their side on their own.