Orders of Magnitude (The Genie and the Engineer Series Book 2) (28 page)

Two of the Oni woke up but Paul simply put them back to
sleep with another vacuum permittivity spell.

A check on Daneel revealed that the Scottie was not doing
well at all. Paul was very worried about him. On his monitor screen, Daneel was
laying on the ‘floor’ of a dark gray walled but empty room, breathing fitfully.
No amount of calling to him would produce a response.

Not good. Paul had already relieved the Scottie of the need
to generate his own electricity. There was no mistaking the fact that Daneel’s
condition was getting worse.

In an effort to help, Paul spent a few minutes in Daneel’s
virtual reality, studying the flow of information and the colored streams of
the subroutines in operation. And though he could see the deterioration of the
software’s performance, he was not able to trace the cause, let alone do
anything about it.

• • • •

Emerging from virtual reality, Paul knelt beside Daneel,
holding the metal frame close to his body.

“Hold on, Daneel! Hold in there, Son. Just a few more hours
and I can get you back home and link you to a high-speed network where we can
off-load your programming. We can find and fix the problem then. Just hang on, Son,
please!”

A sudden sharp coughing fit drew Paul’s immediate attention.
He could see in the LCD monitor that Daneel was even more distressed than
before. The image of the young man was on his hands and knees, coughing and
wheezing painfully.

“Daneel! What’s wrong?” Paul shouted, his eyes wide in
concern.

“Can’t…
wheeze
…
cough
…cascade…
wheeze
…errors…
cough
…so
sorry, Dad…
cough
…
wheeze
…”

And then, without any further warning than that, the screen
went blank, followed two seconds later with a Blue Screen of Death listing
several error codes. Even that screen quickly disappeared as the computer
totally died.

Frozen in disbelief and horror, Paul could only stare at the
display. Bitterness and anguish welled up inside his heart and he softly began
to cry, bringing the now quiet hardware tight up against his chest again.

It just couldn’t be. No, not now!

He cried virulent tears.

For several minutes, he floundered in disbelief and pain.
This was not supposed to happen! They had Capie now. The death of Daneel…it
wasn’t supposed to happen!

Gradually, the awareness of his situation returned. Around
him, the heavy fall of rain continued, the sound of it hitting the ground and
the trees a grim and desolate reminder of the brevity of life and of the pain
and suffering that seemed to fill so much of it. A peal of thunder rolled
through the air, accentuating the pain of grief in Paul’s heart.

He looked around at the soaked and dreary landscape. The
gloom of death.

“Ah, Daneel!” he cried, shedding even more bitter tears.

Near an entrance to Priest’s Grotto

Korolivka

Lviv Oblast

Ukraine

September

Saturday 6:04 a.m. EEST

T
hey
could not stay here. They were not safe.
Capie
was not safe. He must go
on; must move her, take care of her. Daneel’s death…(
sniff
)…his death
could not and must not be in vain. The Scottie had made the supreme sacrifice.
It made no difference that the young man was made of silicon chips, copper, and
a host of other metals. He had been just as human as any other boy—his son.

Getting to his feet, Paul set the hardware down. He must
force himself to put the mourning off until later, when there would be time to
do so properly and in greater depth.

With a heavy heart, his soul screaming in despair, he opened
a new portal, this one to a dirt farm road alongside an open field of winter
wheat, one hundred miles to the east of Korolivka. He levitated the Oni one at
a time and floated them through. Next came Capie, Hamadi, the mirror and
Daneel, followed by himself.

He worked the same pattern with the next three portals,
gradually turning southward but keeping a respectful distance from Chisinau,
the capital city of Moldova.

The latest portal left him on a white sandy beach on a spit
of land jutting out into the Black Sea, forty miles east of the city of Odessa,
Ukraine. The weather here was not any better than in Romania, with low gray
clouds racing through the air and rain falling in bucket lots on a wild
white-capped sea the color of night.

With a heavy heart, Paul cast his next portal spell, this
one 172 miles to the southeast, to the rock summit of a mountain along the
southwestern tip of Crimea. And with great weariness of spirit, he pushed
everyone and everything through to the zenith of that mountain.

From the top of this crest, he could see all the mountains
to the north and east of him, including Mount Ayya to the northwest. And,
despite the inclement weather, he could see a very long way out into the Black
Sea.

Gloomy rainy weather.

Sighing, he sat down on the wet rock and removed his shoes
and socks.

Right now, his challenge was how to move all his passengers
to Australia. Well, not all of it, not exactly. He really didn’t want to haul
Hamadi and his Oni all the way to Kalgoorlie. There was no place there to keep
them. Instead, it made a great deal more sense to drop them off someplace along
the way, a safe place, one just like he had chosen for McDougall and his Oni. A
nice small desert island. And he knew just the spot too.

When moving McDougall, Paul had pretty much faced the same
problem, namely transporting a great deal of mass over a long distance.

Paul was strongly considering the use of a similar method in
this situation as well. He opened a link to Google Maps, studying the geography
involved. Within a half hour of surfing the net, he had made his selections and
closed the web link.

He stood, placing one bare foot squarely on the coarse cold
stone of the massive rock formation beneath him. With that connection made, he
waved a portal into existence, to the summit of Fisht Mountain, in the extreme
western portion of the Caucasus Mountains in southwestern Russia. He leaned
forward, through the portal, planting his other foot on the even colder rock of
Fisht and made a connection with that foot, forming a second portal, this one
to the monolith of Savandurga in Southern India. He brought this portal in
close enough for him to reach through so that he could physically touch that
mountain with his right hand. Using that connection, he formed a third portal,
leading from Savandurga to Mount Sinaburg on the northwestern tip of Sumatra in
Indonesia. This portal too, he brought forward, close enough that he could
reach it with his left hand, forming a fourth portal, connecting Sinaburg to
Cartier Island, a distance of just over 2,000 miles. Together, all four portals
connected end-to-end spanned nearly 7,000 miles. In one fell swoop, he was
moving more mass a greater distance than he had ever accomplished before.

With a nod of Paul’s head, the first Oni body moved forward,
on its journey to the tiny island of Cartier. That island, a mere one acre spit
of pure sand in the middle of the Timor Sea, lay 181 miles from Australia and
119 miles from Pulau Rote, the nearest inhabited island in Indonesia. Paul had
no doubt that Hamadi and his brood would be safe enough on Cartier for a while,
at least until he could deal with them on a more permanent basis.

He kept all their talismans, of course.

When the last of them had moved through, Paul broke the
spell for the fourth portal and reached into his shirt pocket where he withdrew
a mechanical pencil and his small notepad. Tearing forth one of its small
sheets with one spell, he used another to hold the paper steady. Slowly, with
cramped fingers and straining eyes, he wrote:

Hamadi, old friend!

I was here and you were not. Now you are here and I am
not!

But I will be back, I swear, later today, if things work
out.

You are many miles from any other human or any shelter.

You can stay on the island and be safe. Or walk into the
ocean and drown.

I care not which.

Paul Armstead

Grinning at his own cleverness, he reached forward to
recreate the fourth portal, then sent the note flying through the air to stuff
itself into Hamadi’s unconscious hand.

Mission accomplished, he backed away, closing each portal in
turn until he was fully back on Crimea.

 Rubbing his hands vigorously together, he turned toward the
mirror.

Ariel-Leira had been silent for the whole trip, ever since
the mirror had been pulled from the night carriage. Several times, Paul had
noticed that she was jumping for joy, pointing to a great variety of things
and, apparently, giggling like a school girl at all of the sights. Things that
Paul took for granted seemed to amaze and delight her.

On second thought, Paul realized that if he had spent a few
hundred years in a castle trapped in the same room and hanging from the same
wall, he might get a little excited too, when he was finally freed of the
place.

“Alright, Ariel-Leira, it is time to give me the details of
how to get my wife out of stasis,” he told her firmly, his mouth set in a grim
line as he sat down to put his socks and shoes back on.

“Wizard, yes! Right I was, to trust you,” she crowed, her
eyes streaming tears of joy. “Free at last, I am of that accursed castle! Seen
things I have now, that I’ve never known! Clouds, rain, ocean, mountains—yes,
yes, impatient you are, I know. Secrets of stasis containment I now share.
Tibet, you must go to. Rare incense, for the spell you must use. Details are
these…”

• • • •

Never in Paul’s wildest imagination would he have expected
to need incense—and a rare special type at that—in conjunction with a spell to
release Capie from the stasis field. Why the burning of incense was important
was a total mystery to him. Science and technology just didn’t need or use such
a process! He really was going to have to spend some time someday investigating
more of the obscure details in how and why magic worked!

That was for later, however. If incense from Tibet was what
he needed to get Capie out of stasis, then incense from Tibet was what he was
going to get.

Using the serial linking portal spell again, Paul pushed
Capie, the mirror, Daneel, the Oni talismans and last of all, himself from
Crimea through another portal on Mount Fisht to a mountain valley in the Karakoram
Mountains not far from K2 (the second tallest mountain on Earth) in the
Himalayan Mountains.

From there, it was a fairly short 300 mile portal hop to the
small village of Rutog, in the far western portion of Tibet, a tiny town of
only 1,000 or so people.

He left Capie and everything else on a relatively trifling
mountain summit just north of town and then portaled down to the main
thoroughfare. According to the mirror woman, this was the most likely place to
find and purchase the rare Tibetan rope incense he would require for the spell.
After checking two small stores on the major roads in town without finding what
he needed, he asked a local for help. The old woman, dressed in a faded scarf,
brown shawl, and flowered cotton skirt, directed him to a small
hole-in-the-wall shop down a short, dirty and cramped alleyway. The shop owner
in the place, an old stooped man of indeterminate age, waved at one of the
shop’s many dusty, cluttered shelves where Paul, after a minute’s search, found
two small jars of the incense he had been looking for.

As long as he was here, Paul thought it prudent to buy all
that they had in stock. Oh, and too, he also searched for, found and bought a
dozen candles and eight censers. The store owner himself bagged everything up for
him, grinning at the obvious American customer that had been so successfully
and outrageously overcharged.

Practically giddy with success and humming a nameless tune,
Paul left the shop, ducking deeper into the alley, stepping through a portal
back to the mountain.

With the small bag of supplies now in hand, he had the means
to revive Capie as well as to deal with Hamadi and his brood on a long-term
basis.

• • • •

It was nearly nine p.m., AWDT when Paul opened a set of
serial portals from near the K2 Mountain, creating a conduit through Savandurga
and Mount Sinaburg again to the small sandy island of Cartier. With a jerk of
his head, he cast a spell sending Capie through first.

And was shocked when her stasis field was physically
attacked, the container field violently shoved hard to one side!

With a fast spell, he flung a blindingly bright white light
through the portals, followed by an intense vacuum permittivity spell.

A snap of his fingers brought up a display window in front
of him, providing a remote view of Cartier Island just past the end of the last
portal.

And he frowned. Somehow, in the few hours that they had been
on the island, his prisoners had freed themselves of the bands around their
wrists and ankles and had been lying in wait for Paul’s return. In the
darkness, the Oni had apparently jumped the gun and attacked the first thing
through—Capie’s stasis field—instead of biding their time and waiting to attack
Paul. All around Capie’s stasis field, Paul could see the unconscious forms of
Oni (and Hamadi too) lying strewn around in various haphazard positions.

Served them right!

When he had Daneel, the mirror, and his Tibetan supplies
through and on the island, he closed the portals behind him and next cast a
spell for a scattered set of fifty bright work lights, all set ten feet in the
air, pointed downward. With the small island now bathed in white light, Paul
clapped and rubbed his hands together. With a scowl, he cast a spell raising
the mirror five feet into the air and locking it into a hover position.
Ariel-Leira watched him with an amused smile.

“Now,” Paul said, with a quiet grim smile. “It’s time to see
if I can master the art of creating stasis fields. Let’s start with getting the
candles in the censers. Then you can tell me what comes next.”