Chapter 19

Michael ended the call and prepared to surrender, but Lao had other ideas.

“Make a wish!” he cried and threw something at Darragh’s feet.

It didn’t explode exactly, but it did flash brightly. Michael hastily closed his eyes, though not quite quickly enough to completely avoid being dazzled. He felt Lao’s hand on his arm, pulling him away from the scene and with slightly bleary eyes, he followed, dodging and weaving between plant and equipment as the guards fired their lasers blindly.

Lao pulled them both down behind some barrels, took out a gun of his own and began firing.

“Are your eyes OK?” he asked. “I was hoping you might have the custom of closing your eyes to make a wish on Tempestria.”

“We do,” Michael confirmed, blinking as his sight recovered. “I just didn’t cotton on quite quickly enough.” He glanced at the countdown on Jessica’s phone. As it gradually came into focus, he saw there were less than fourteen minutes until the barrier went up and they weren’t going to be able to do much about it stuck behind some barrels.

After a whole minute of firing, a laser bolt hit a control panel behind them. It was instantly destroyed and the lights flickered for a moment.

Michael glowered at his companion. “Do you really think firing energy weapons in this place is a good idea? We want to stop them blowing it up, not help them.”

“We have to defend ourselves!” Lao objected.

“Of course we do, and given that this lot are intent on wiping out all life on this continent, I have no compunction about killing every last one of them in defence of all those lives, but we’re not going to achieve anything like this.”

“What’s the alternative?”

“Lao,” Michael answered, patiently, “I think you’re forgetting who you’re talking to, and I think it’s time to show them, too.”

Deactivating his perception filter, he spun a shield of magic around himself and stepped out into the line of fire, in his full bony glory. Standing at seven feet, with dried translucent skin stretched like parchment over his massive frame, and a red, pointed wizard’s hat pushed onto a horned skull, he cut quite the imposing figure. Even terrifying to those who didn’t know him. Lao had managed to put that from his mind during their ‘holiday’ together, but seeing Michael’s true self once more was a stark reminder of the company he was keeping.

Michael summoned a swarm of deadly insects that buzzed all around him and ravens from the gates of hell (or at least native to one of the demonic realms, about two planes down). Then, for extra effect, he caused his red cloak to billow out around him as if in his own personal breeze. The young druidess, Catriona, always had a flair for the dramatic and he’d seen what an ally that had been for her in battle. Sometimes it even removed the need to fight altogether as her enemies recoiled from a simple trick of splitting light as if it were the deadliest thing in the world. Then again, he recalled, she had even wielded rainbows as a weapon, so who could blame them?

The guards froze at the sight, and Darragh himself looked as though he might faint.

“What— What the hell are you?” he stammered.

Putting on his deepest, most terrifying voice, he boomed, “I am the Angel of Vengeance and Death, and these,” he indicated the flies and the birds, “are my servants, set to drag you down to hell where I shall devour your souls for what you do here. There is a special place in the hells for those who commit genocide, where you shall be tortured for eternity!”

With that, he roared loud enough to wake the dead.

Darragh and his guards fled the scene in terror, chased all the way by Michael’s summonings.

Peering down, the demigod saw a wide-eyed Laoghaire still crouched down behind cover, his gun forgotten in his hand as he stared back, mouth gaping open.

“Too much?” Michael asked with a smirk.

Lao just shook his head and stood, trying to compose himself. “Well, it should free us up to act,” he conceded. “How long?” he asked, indicating the countdown.

Michael showed him. In twelve minutes, the barrier went up. In fifteen, it would be the beginning of the end for Wirathia.

Together they followed the signs to the main control room. The doorway was too small for Michael, so he simply burst through. His actions put a gaping hole in the ceiling and weakened it enough to cause a desk, papers and computer terminals to come crashing down, one of which narrowly missed the fire extinguisher on the wall. Of the three technicians in the room, one was buried, unmoving underneath. The second tried to run, but Michael struck him with his great warhammer, imprisoning the Lavosian in unbreakable petrified wood. The third froze in terror.

Ignoring all else, Lao unrolled his portacom and began trying to connect it to the power station’s computer system.

“I can hack in,” he told Michael, “but it’d save time if I had the access codes.”

Michael was about to threaten the third technician when there came the sound of a large ornithopter taking off.

“Well, it seems I don’t even need this,” he decided, putting his hammer away. “Sounds like you’ve been abandoned, so you can either help us or die. Unless you think you can travel about a hundred miles in twelve minutes on foot, in which case, by all means, start running.”

The technician nodded, not taking his eyes off Michael.

“Hey, focus!” Lao warned him, snapping his fingers in his face. “Don’t worry about my friend. Worry about kaboom.”

“I—I want to help!” he cried desperately.

“You mean you don’t want to die,” Lao translated. “How noble. Still, you can be as self-serving as you like as long as the rest of Wirathia gets to live, too. Access codes. Now.”

The technician told him, and Lao got to work, pausing only a moment to ask Michael to send the same codes to Sara. The two sites appeared to share a connected system over the GlobeNet, so with any luck, the same access codes would apply.

While Michael did that, Lao sent out a call to PDI and briefed them.

“Do you need us to send an extraction team?” his handler asked.

Lao glanced at the official countdown. “With ten minutes ‘til the barrier goes up?” he snorted. “Forget us, but you could send a team to our friends in Weslend. I’m sure they can take care of themselves, but they’re not nearly as scary as my friend here.

“No offence,” he added as an aside to Michael.

“None taken,” he replied.

“Understood,” came his handler’s voice. “Will do. Good luck.”

With that, the line went dead.

Turning to the technician, Lao commanded, “Come here and help. You know these systems better than I do. Let’s see how good you are at your job…and saving your own skin.”

The technician ran to the control console and began frantically pressing buttons. Michael was used to technology so sophisticated it made this look like a toy, but still, this toy was what he had to work with if he was going to save Wirathia. As they worked, the minutes ticked by…nine minutes…eight…

“I’m telling you it’s too late to stop it!” the technician wailed.

“It can’t be!” Lao shot back.

…seven…

“Dammit!” Lao swore. “Alright, Plan B: we sever all the connections beyond this facility, confine the explosion here.”

“But how will that help us?” the technician whined.

Lao chose not to waste his breath dignifying that with a response.

…six…

“Won’t help anyone much,” Michael warned him. “The connections aren’t even needed, really, except to disguise the source of the initial blast. Your people are underestimating the power of higher planar energy, especially the unstable kind in that fragment.”

“Well, it’s the best I can do, so I’m doing it!” Lao snapped back, inputting override codes and bypassing security that kept telling him he lacked the clearance to cut people off from vital energy.

“Of course, my boy. Quite right,” Michael agreed, placing an encouraging hand on his shoulder.

Remembering his last conversation with Sara, he realised he was in danger of missing her deadline. In less than one minute, if nothing had prevented her, she was going to extract the fragment.

Would that be such a bad thing, he wondered.

As he pulled out Jessica’s phone, however, he glanced out of the observation window and saw the blue flicker of the Prismatic Sphere. Turning back, he noticed a diagram of energy flow flash across the screen before him, along with numbers, measuring higher planar energy. The screen moved on, but he yelled at Lao to bring it back.

He fumbled with the controls, wasting crucial seconds.

“By the Angels!” Michael gasped when the screen finally flipped back. Finding Sara’s number, he frantically hit the call button.

…Four minutes and fifty-eight seconds. He prayed she wasn’t prompt, for if she was…

“She’s going to kill us all!”

*****

Sara made her way, quickly and silently across to the other side of the room where she found what looked like part of the hilt of a sword wired into the weapon system’s controls. The Chetsuan breathed a sigh of relief that the schematic was correct. With her tracker in bits, she would have had no way of finding the fragment if it hadn’t been there. She didn’t have time to search the place. Still, no point dwelling on what might have been. The fragment was here, that was all that mattered, and she had thirteen minutes to figure out how to extract it. She needed to focus on that.

Her dragonclaw daggers could cut through the casing in no time, but there was no point doing that until she knew what to do next. Beside the fragment housing was a control console with a monitor display, although just like the last one, it was on sleep mode having not been touched for a while. Now that the lights were on, however, she wasn’t going to attract attention by waking it.

She felt she was getting a handle on Lavosian technology by now, so she confidently navigated her way through the system, trying hard not to worry about her sister as the official countdown ticked down to twelve minutes.

*****

The security guards led Jessica to a small meeting room in one corner of the building. All the while, Jessica kept half an eye on her timepiece, trying to keep track of the countdown. She would co-operate for the moment, let her guards grow complacent, but she had already decided that in exactly seven minutes, she was going to escape. There were two guards on this side of the door and two more on the outside. They may have guns, she thought, as she sat in the chair that was offered, but she could have a dragonclaw dagger in each hand in a second and at close quarters, knives beat guns. Besides, she’d had time to strengthen her connection to nature in this world by now, and given this room, with tall standing plants in pots by the door and a jug of water on the table, she felt confident that she had enough resources for her fledgeling druid magic to work with.

A Lavosian woman entered the room, flanked by another pair of guards, sat down opposite Jessica, portacom propped up before her, and started recording.

“Now then,” she began, “I thought we could have a nice, civilised chat before I hand you over to the authorities.”

Jessica knew that was a lie. There was no way they would want Weslend law enforcement coming here and discovering that they were planning to commit genocide in just over ten minutes, but she played along.

“Aww, come on, love!” she protested. “There’s no need for the cops. I was just poking around. I didn’t mean any harm.”

“So, what exactly are you doing here?” the woman asked, then she seemed to think better of the question. “In fact, putting that to one side for the moment, why don’t you tell us your name?”

Whatever the Chetsuan told the Lavosian woman, she had no doubt she would look her up on the GlobeNet, so Jessica figured she might as well tell the truth, tie her up trying to find something that wasn’t there.

“Unusual name,” the woman remarked.

Jessica gave her a puzzled look. “Never understood complimenting someone’s name,” she remarked. “After all, I didn’t choose it, my parents did, so you’re really complimenting them, not me.”

“Well, I wasn’t really complimenting you at all,” the woman pointed out. “Just commenting.”

“Fair point,” Jessica allowed. “Just a bugbear of mine, you know? Anyway, what’s yours?”

“Breah,” she replied. “Now, back to what you’re doing here?”

“Like I said, I was just poking around.”

“You expect me to believe that out of all the warehouses in this district, you picked this one at random?”

Jessica shrugged. “Today, yeah.”

“Today?” Breah wondered.

“Look, it’s what I do, OK? I get bored and sneak into a warehouse. Poke around. I’ve done half of them in this area already. Today was just your turn. Call it a hobby.”

“If this is a hobby, how come your name isn’t on the Criminal Database?”

“Nobody ever caught me before,” she smirked. “Didn’t have your security. Speaking of which, why do you have so much?”

Judging by the clock on the wall, there were only nine minutes to go. The Chetsuan just needed to keep them talking for another four, and she was out of there.

“This is a restricted building,” Breah told her.

“Didn’t see any signs,” Jessica challenged, belligerently.

“That’s because it’s Top Secret and I think you know that from your ‘snooping’ in our computer system.”

Jessica nodded, thoughtfully. “Yeah, you’ve got a Top Secret warehouse that you can’t tell anyone is Top Secret because it’s Top Secret. I see your dilemma.”

“Now I have to decide what to do with you,” Breah considered.

“Because I’ve ‘seen too much’?” Jessica suggested. It was such a generic movie reference, she was willing to bet they used it on their vidcasts here, too. Judging by the flicker of a smile on Breah’s lips, she was right.

“Without being needlessly dramatic, yes,” she agreed.

“Well, you don’t need to worry, dearie. After all, what could I do in…” she glanced that the clock, “Just over seven minutes?”

“It’s what you do after those seven minutes that worries me, not what you might do to try and stop us before then. Nothing could do that now.”

Jessica burst out laughing. It helped waste a bit more time.

“I’m sorry,” she apologised, trying to catch her breath. “Did you really just say, ‘Nothing can stop us now’? Talk about cliché!”

“In this case, it’s true. We’ve accounted for every eventuality.”

“If you say so,” Jessica allowed, making a show of trying to calm down.

She wasted a bit more time pouring out a glass of water and putting the jug back down closer to her side of the table. They had no idea she was actually arming herself.

“Look, cards on the table.” She didn’t know if that was an expression here, but it didn’t matter. “I know what you’re trying to do – kill the dragons – and the truth is I’ve got no love for them myself. Because of dragons, I lost my home, my friends, my people. Almost everyone and everything I ever cared about.”

She saw Breah visibly relax at that. Good. They were down to less than six minutes. In thirty seconds, she’d make her move. She breathed deeply and closed her eyes for a moment, letting them believe she was thinking about what she’d lost. She wasn’t. She was thinking about what she still had: her sister. Time to rejoin her.

“So, you understand what we’re doing here, then?”

“Oh yeah, I understand perfectly, love.” Jessica opened her eyes and looked her interrogator straight in hers. “Just one question: When you say you’ve prepared for every eventuality, does that include aliens?”

Breah blinked. “I’m sorry?”

Jessica deactivated her perception filter, sitting there in all her purple glory.

“Heya, love!” she sang. “E.T.’s here!”

Five minutes to the barrier. Eight minutes to genocide.

With a glance behind her, the potted plants reached out to strangle the guards on the door. In the same, fluid movement Jessica sprang back from the table and smashed her glass of water. As the guards beside Breah levelled their guns, she asked nature very nicely to make the spilt water grow into an ice wall. Nature complied. The ice was a little thinner than she’d like, but it wasn’t bad for a first attempt. The guards’ lasers rebounded off the ice and ricocheted around their half of the room, shattering the window and causing the three Lavosians to dive for cover. Jessica recalled there were more guards outside the building, but she also remembered the weeds. Reaching out, then, she made them grow tall and thick around the perimeter. That should delay anyone trying to get in. Of course, it would also delay she and her sister getting out, but they’d cross that bridge when they came to it.

Hearing the commotion, the two guards in the corridor flung the door open and came rushing in, but before their guns could be of any use, they saw her conjure a pair of daggers out of thin air. They were the last things they ever saw, as they severed the arteries in their necks.

“What are you?” Breah demanded, “Some kind of witch?”

“That is a highly offensive term where I come from,” Jessica objected, snatching the jug of water from the table. “I’m a druid.” Seeing hairline cracks appear in her ice wall, she pulled a face. “Trainee,” she conceded.

“You said you understood!” Breah shot back, accusingly.

“Understood, yes,” the Chetsuan replied. “Agreed with, never. Not for a second.”

With that, she darted out of the door, slamming it behind her and, jug still in hand, poured some more water on the floor, growing another small ice wall to block them in.

An alarm sounded, echoing around the cavernous warehouse. Wasting not a moment more, she pictured the way back to her sister in her mind and sprinted that way, dagger in one hand, water in the other. Ready for anything.