Orders of Magnitude (The Genie and the Engineer Series Book 2) (3 page)

Capie smiled. “You must have been proud of him.”

“Very,” Paul replied.

“But…oh! I think I see. Did he use a lot of profanity?”

Paul snorted and gave a short nod. “Much worse than any
drunken sailor on leave. I once calculated that he had used the entire family’s
allotment of profanity for the next 3.45 generations. The
extended
family’s allotment, that is.”

She chuckled. “You sound like Spock when you say that.”

“That’s a really nice compliment, thanks.”

“What about your mother? Did she use profanity too?”

“No, never. And since Dad was always gone on deployment
somewhere and since Mom was the one who raised me…”

“You learned not to cuss either,” she finished for him.
“Bravo for good parents. Dad has never cussed either. He says it’s a sign of a weak
vocabulary. He uses the Shakespeare insult generator instead.”

“What did you call it? The what?” Paul asked, craning his
neck for a better look at her face. “Is that a joke?”

“Nope. Google it sometime. Dad gets a real kick out of using
it…” and her voice trailed off, a shiver running up her spine.

The way she said those last few words…

“Is there a problem?” Paul quietly asked, raising his
eyebrows.

“I’m not sure.” She drew her mouth into a straight line.
“Paul, why did you pick the Osthoff? Don’t get me wrong, I love it here. It’s a
fabulous place for a honeymoon but with your magical powers—”

“We could have gone to Paris or Rome or some other better
known honeymoon location?”

“Exactly. Is this about Dad? Did you want to stay close to
him in case something happened?”

Paul nodded in swift agreement. “Very much so, yes. I’m very
worried about your father.”

“Do you think he’s in trouble? Really in trouble? I mean…would
the wizards of
Errabêlu
actually kidnap him in exchange for you? Maybe
even…you know…?”

Paul gritted his teeth before replying. “I’m not going to lie
to you, honey, nor will I sugarcoat it. Yes, to all of those questions. The
only thing I don’t know is what we can do about it.”

“There are two of us now,” she pointed out.

“But neither one of us has a talisman,” Paul reminded her.
“And you are brand new at this game.”

She nodded sadly. “And we won’t know if and when it happens
either. It might already be happening, right now at this very minute.”

Paul felt a shiver go up his spine. “That’s not quite true.
I, uh, set up an alarm system, of sorts. We should have some warning, if
Errabêlu
shows up to abduct your father.”

“Oh?” Capie gave him a suspicious look. “Is there something
you haven’t told me yet?”

Paul grinned shyly. “You could say that.” And so he told her
that, during their confrontation with her father, Christopher Kingsley, in the
Adler Planetarium, that Paul had set her father’s smart phone to call a certain
number at the press of a single button and that Jaret had inserted a spell into
Chris’s mind, to urge him to push that button if the professor felt threatened.

He held up the burner phone for her to see. “And there has
been no such phone call.”

Capie mulled that over for a minute while staring at the
fire. “I suppose I should be mad at you for casting spells on Dad that way. If
you could do that, why couldn’t you have cast a spell on him to make him want
to come with us?”

Paul produced a wintry smile, remembering a similar such request
he had made of the ex-genie Jaret concerning Paul’s stepson Douglas. Jaret had
indicated that only a total replacement of Doug’s personality would have
satisfied the intended goal. “‘The Force can have a strong influence on the
weak-minded’, huh?” he said, quoting Obi-wan Kenobi from
Star Wars
.
“Sorry, but magic doesn’t work quite that way. Brainwashing is not an option. A
simple unconscious action, yes, like pushing a button, but nothing much more
complicated than that. And it’s a really good thing, too. Otherwise, the
wizards of
Errabêlu
would be even more invincible than they are now.”

Capie took a deep breath. “There’s got to be something we
can do.”

“Let’s call for a little super-intelligent help here.” Paul raised
a hand—

“Wait a minute, Paul,” Capie said, interrupting him. “Let me
try.”

He gave her a small bow. “Of course.”

She sat up on the sofa and raised both hands into the air.
“In the name of Leanansidhe, Nac Mac Feegle and the tooth fairy, may there be a
virtual reality hologram of a super-intelligence in the image of Titania, Queen
of the Fairies.”

A small ball of light appeared in midair, growing swiftly in
size until it became the image of a mature woman with long brown hair, blue
eyes, with graceful facial features and wearing a long white silky dress.

Paul cocked an eyebrow. “The tooth fairy I know, but the
others?”

Capie winked at him. “You really need to catch up on your
fantasy. Leanansidhe is from
The Dresden Files
by Jim Butcher. You’d
like those books since they’re all about a private investigator and wizard who
lives in Chicago
—
”

“Ouch!” said Paul with a wince.

“And Nac Mac Feegle are a type of fairy folk from Terry
Pratchett’s
Discworld
novels. And Titania here is the Queen of the
Fairies. She was first mentioned in a Shakespearean play,
A Midsummer
Night’s Dream
but has shown up in a bunch of other books, TV shows, comics
and even video games.”

Paul’s eyebrows rose. “I’m impressed.”

“You should be, mortal,” said Titania in a soprano voice. “My,
my, you two. Bored with your honeymoon already?” she asked with a smirk.

Capie frowned. “But the name ‘Titania’ seems inappropriate.
A nickname, perhaps. We could try Nia—”

“Don’t you dare!” hissed the hologram.

“Tiana.”

“Over my dead body!”

Capie smiled. “How about Tia.”

The specter huffed but gave no other reply.

“Right,” Capie said. “Tia it is then. Tia, we are worried
about my father. Do we have any way to protect him, to keep him safe?”

Tia’s eyes narrowed in thought. “That’s a good question.
Let’s see. I can only think of three possibilities that might work.”

Capie blinked her eyes in surprise. “Three? Really? What are
they?”

The hologram tugged a little on the end of one braid of
brown hair. “You could kidnap him yourself and take him someplace where he
would be safe.”

Capie shuddered, looking away from Tia and at the fire
instead. “Not my first choice, no. He would be absolutely livid with us if we
did that. What’s the next choice?”

“Give him magical powers and let him defend himself,” Tia
declared.

“That’s not too good either,” Paul noted with a frown. “That
would make him even more of a target for
Errabêlu
, equal to capturing
and killing us. What’s the third option?”

Tia shrugged half-heartedly. “Trick him. In today’s
language, run a confidence game on him. Make him think that going with you is his
only option and that it’s his idea.”

“But how…” Capie started to say then gasped. “You mean, use
our magic to scare him?”

Paul grunted and then chuckled grimly. “Of course. If we
could show him how much danger he is in….” Then he looked at Capie sharply. “It
could work, in theory. We could use disguise and holographic spells, make us
look like Ruggiero and a couple of Oni. Then we kidnap him, threaten him, and
scare the pants off of him.”

“But not actually hurt him,” Capie said, her tone hard.

Paul gave her an assenting nod. “No, of course we wouldn’t
hurt him. Since he would be held as a kidnap victim there is no need to do
anything harmful to him. But we could have our ‘Ruggiero’ hologram tell him
that as soon as they have their hands on you and me, that all three of us would
be executed.”

Briefly looking at the floor, Capie rubbed her forehead with
one hand. “I’m really not very crazy about this idea. It seems…underhanded and dishonest.”
But then she reluctantly nodded. “If he even suspects it is us—”

“If I may?” interrupted Tia. “I suggest that you run test
simulations. Create holographic characters, one of them just like your father,
and use magic to run them through the possibilities. Right now, neither one of
you is good at deception. Practice a little.”

Paul stood up and walked over to the fireplace, watching the
flames as they did their dance. “Speaking of practice, Capie needs to work on
honing all of her magical skills a little more, especially portal spells.
Before
we try anything on her father.”

Capie raised her eyebrows and offered a sour look. “Slave
driver!”

“And as long as we are going to Chicago,” Paul countered, turning
back around to face her, “we need to recover some stuff from there anyway, like
the computer, the emerald and my old gold band.”

“And my belongings?” asked Capie as she stood and moved into
Paul’s arms. “By the way, you never told me where you put the things from my
house. Where are they?”

“Reasonably safe,” Paul said with a glance upward at the
ceiling.

“Define ‘reasonably’,” Capie said, her jaw set in sudden
suspicion.

“Well, five miles west of your house, there’s a certain
government facility—”

“Fermi Labs. They have a particle accelerator…” And then her
eyes opened wide in shock and she pulled back away from Paul. “You didn’t!
Please tell me that you didn’t put my things in there!”

“They shut down the accelerator in 2011—”

“All of my things, the jewelry, the stuffed animals, my
vase, my china, the candelabra,—”

Paul put one hand on her shoulder. “Dear—”

“It will all glow in the dark now!”

“It’s fine, dear! I promise, there’s no radiation where I
put it. But it might be discovered by maintenance workers in a few days, so yes;
we do need to retrieve it all before that happens.”

She squinted at him through narrowed eyes. “If there’s even
a single item that is even partially radioactive—”

“I promise you, dear, it’s all fine!”

She grunted and folded her arms across her chest.

“I think we should concentrate on your father first,” Paul
quickly added. “Afterwards, we can get your items, and then we can swing by my
old place and pick up my stuff from that small cave under Bauer Road. The
computer isn’t safe there for very long either, due to possible water damage.”

But Capie was still giving him a fierce scowl.

Paul gulped and rubbed his hands together. “So, let’s get
Uncle Sam in here. We need his strategic skills and we need a plan, if our con
job on your father is going to have any chance of success.”

• • • •

In the seven months since Jaret, the ex-genie, had given
Paul his powers, the electrical engineer had learned a great deal about their
use. Magic was just as prevalent in the physical universe as magnetic fields,
gravity, or electromagnetic radiation. Moreover, magic could be tapped directly
by the human mind, employing energy from any number of sources to perform
whatever spell the user might create.

The limiting factor was the human mind’s ability to draw on
sufficient amounts of energy. Without external aid, this imposed a cap of about
ten joules on any spell. To utilize more power an amplifier was required.

All the elements in the periodic table had a magical
quotient, the ability to funnel and amplify energy for magical spells. The rarer
the element, the higher the magical quotient. Thus a homogeneous object such as
Capie’s gold wrist band or Paul’s tantalum block could serve as a portable
amplifier, an amulet, to magnify the power of a spell.

One of Paul’s discoveries in experimenting with his powers,
was that rare isotopes possessed higher magical quotients than the more common
ones. Thus, tantalum 181, which already had a higher magical quotient than that
of gold, was not as powerful as tantalum 180m, the far rarer isotope.

Through a magical synthesis of rare materials of two or more
groups (precious metals, precious gems, basal rocks, and meteorites) into a
talisman, even greater amounts of power could be funneled into and controlled
by a spell. Unfortunately, the creation of a such a talisman could be detected
anywhere on Earth, which was why Paul could not afford to create one just yet,
lest the evil wizards of
Errabêlu
track his location.

• • • •

The newlyweds spent Sunday evening and then Monday morning
in conference with Tia, Merlin, and Uncle Sam, diligently endeavoring to
develop a workable plan to snatch Capie’s father and then scare him within an
inch of his life. Each of the ideas for their duplicitous plot was tested in an
evolving tenth-scale holographic simulation they were running in the center of
the living room. At the same time, Capie was doing her best to practice her
magical spells, and was achieving decent progress in the effort.

“By far, the principle problem,” Uncle Sam was saying to the
group scattered around the living room, “is that Professor Kingsley is certain
to be under constant scrutiny by at least one Oni and probably more. They will
be conducting such a ‘stake-out’ in hopes that they can capture you, Paul, or
failing that, to capture you, Capie.”

Paul tugged an earlobe thoughtfully. “That’s why you’ve
proposed this particular plan. It’s not fast; it will take more than half a day
or so, just to put everything into place.”

“Exactly. Now, as you travel around southern Wisconsin and the
northern Illinois area,” Uncle Sam interposed, “you must keep magical energy
levels low, but especially near Chris Kingsley’s home and the Observatory, as
well as the two homes you both formerly lived in. Any one of them or all of them
might be watched.”

“During the summer months, Dad usually works until ten or
eleven at night,” Capie informed the group. “He oversees the telescope schedule
and the graduate students. In other words, he’ll be at his house right now,
getting ready to leave and, after 3 p.m., at work until late tonight.”