Orders of Magnitude (The Genie and the Engineer Series Book 2) (37 page)

Now he was over the ocean, the Tasman Sea to be exact. And
in the distance to the north, he could see massive dark clouds clustered off
the east coast of Australia.

Ah, a really wicked looking storm! Yep, there were flashes
of lightning bolts too. Just look at the size of those thunderheads!

Another portal—

—and he was now into the middle of the storm, surrounded by
dark clouds, visibility reduced to mere hundreds of feet. He was still falling,
but now the air was bumpy, much colder and far more humid.

He stuck his arms out, attempting to glide through the air,
trying to put distance between himself and his last portal. Maybe, if the Oni
couldn’t see him—

Ice started forming on his arms, the air now even colder. He
concentrated on a spell to warm himself up.

A plasma bolt screamed past him and he instantly banked to
the right, as he opened a portal in front of himself. He shot through that one,
and in only a few seconds, another plasma bolt shot by, barely missing his
head.

Another portal, this time into the thick of the storm. Now the
rain was coming down in buckets, the drops pelting him like hordes of miniature
darts, stinging every inch of exposed skin. He whipped through the air, the
roar of a thunderbolt nearly deafening him. Visibility was almost impossible here,
the clouds and rain were so thick.

There! An Oni, flitting in and out of the clouds, and not
all that far away! Paul shot forth an arm, firing off a plasma bolt, then
dodged up and to one side as a return shot narrowly missed him.

More bolts, from different directions! He dipped and
swerved, darting this way and that, firing bolts of his own. He waved an arm,
to create another portal.

Then, as if a switch had been flipped, he was falling,
tumbling wildly. And the right side of his back felt as if it were on fire! He
had been hit! Somehow they had punched through his protective shield!

As he tumbled, out of the corner of his eye, he caught a
glimpse of an Oni flying on a parallel course downward, pacing him.

Paul was hurt and badly too. Falling as he was, fear and
despair gripped him. Was this how it was it going to end? Here, far out at sea,
where Capie would never know what had happened to him?

Through pain filled eyes, he saw three Oni now, closing in
on him, one of them pointing at him.

A bolt of lightning flashed through the clouds, the sound of
thunder again crashing through the air.

The lightning stirred an idea in the back of his mind. But he
was so incredibly tired and so weak! The idea danced just out of mental reach
and hovered there, taunting him.

Lightning. It had to do with lightning. Oh, right,
lightning. Yes, it followed paths of ionized air. Oxygen, to be exact. Ionized
oxygen.

Yes! Of course!
If he could…!

Falling. Falling. The storm battering him, sucking the life
out of him. Closing his eyes and concentrating hard, he waved an arm. “In the
name of NOAA, Angus MacGyver, and Thor, may a column of ionized oxygen
molecules form between the Oni and the top of the thunderhead above us.”

The nearest Oni stopped moving toward him, a puzzled look of
surprise on its face. The wind and the rain continued to pummel Paul but he
felt something else too, the tingling of his skin, as if a hundred armies of
ants was crawling across it.

Then a blindingly bright flash, as if the sun had gone nova,
and a crack of thunder so loud Paul felt as if his ears had been stabbed by ice
picks. He was left stunned senseless as he continued to plummet downward out of
control.

The light around him faded, the rain actually getting worse.
With an effort no worse than lifting a dozen concrete trucks—all of them full
too—Paul made himself shakily extend one arm and, with a spell, slow his rate
of descent.

It was working too, right up until he smacked headlong into
the surface of the ocean.

Downward he plunged, into the blackness of the cold watery
depths. The pressure on his ears and on his lungs swelled to intolerable
levels. He kicked futilely but without any discernable effect. He even lost his
sense of up or down!

Frantically, he grasped Hamadi’s talisman with one hand and,
with his waning strength, snapped forth a portal, linking the water in front of
him to a higher altitude, thirty feet over his head.

The water around him suddenly surged forth, gathering him in
its grasp, flushing him forward. And he broke free into the air, falling as he
went and landing, with a belly-flop, back on the ocean, just as a huge wave
broke over him.

Thrashing, he broke the surface again, spewing forth what
seemed like a ton of water before gasping wildly for breath.

Oh, he hurt! Every part of him hurt so much, like every
square inch was being constantly Tasered. The pain level was simply incredible!

It was all he could do, keeping his head above the constant
thrashing of the sea. Weakly, he tried to cast a spell for another portal, one
back to Kalgoorlie, but found it beyond his strength to do so. Puzzled,
exhausted and increasingly alarmed, he tried again, this time only as far as
the beach on Australia’s east coast, but was rewarded with only a few weak sparkles
of light. No portal formed.

As he feebly fought to stay on the ocean’s surface, the rain
lashing his face, he found it to be so tempting to just give in, to let himself
slide under the water, to reach outward for the calm of death. It would be so
easy to do! The pain would be gone and he could rest at last.

But then a mental image of Capie snapped in front of him and
he blinked several times, trying to get the water out of his eyes.

“Capie!” he gasped, reaching forth with one hand to touch
the hallucination. “Capie!”

She didn’t seem to hear him. Instead, she was looking off
into the distance and crying, her tears streaked across her face.

“Capie!” he croaked once more.

And then the image of his wife faded away.

He closed his eyes as another wave swept over him.

There were things to do. Somehow, he had to marshal his
magical powers and do them. He had to do it. No choice. Not really. No choice
at all.

It wasn’t a lack of power, he reminded himself dully. The
Earth provided the power. The very storm around him held enough power to send
him around the globe multiple times! It was his mind that was the problem, his
inability to concentrate, to focus the power correctly. He was so tired! And he
hurt so much! He just couldn’t formulate the right thoughts, the correct
images. They kept slipping away, like bubbles in a high wind or money in a room
full of poor relatives.

He couldn’t portal to Australia, no. It was too far for his
weakened condition.

“Merlin?” he croaked, just before another wave broke over
his head.

“Concentrate, my lad!” came Merlin’s calm loud voice over
the noise of the sea and the storm, though Paul could not see him. “There is
land only 23.456 miles to the southwest. You can make it that far! Keep your
head above water! That’s it! Now, put your heart and soul into it, my lad! Push!
Middleton Reef! Picture it! It ain’t much, but it’s the closest land around.
Focus!”

Reaching downward deep within himself, Paul tensed his body,
his back screaming in overwhelming pain. He shook his clenched fists at the
tempestuous sky and shrieked in anger and vexation.

Straining every muscle, he cast the spell, a portal opening
wide in response. His lips twitched in pain as it swept over him.

• • • •

The komatiite rock burst forth out of the ocean and sailed
through the air, to land gently at Capie’s feet.

“Done and done!” she said with hands on hips, staring down
at the rock in satisfaction. It was too hot to touch so she levitated it back
into the air, waist high.

“Hundred proof, Mom,” Daneel said, praising their work. “Three
of the components of the first chutzpah are now complete!”

Capie nodded with a smile. They still needed to lay hands on
a pallasite meteorite and convert it too. That could take a few days or so. Far
better than the several weeks’ worth of effort that Paul had invested back in
Chicago converting over the tantalum block! She felt really good about all the
improvements she had discovered to speed up the process. It would certainly
help things along when they were on Mars!

So, in a few days, after the pallasite conversion, they
could have the ceremony and create the most powerful talisman that any wizard
on Earth had ever seen. The first chutzpah. And, if Israel was still around at
that time, they would go to her defense, stopping this senseless war that
Errabêlu
was fostering.

She really wished Paul had picked a different name for the
super-talismans. It seemed so impertinent to call them that.

Examining the rock, she decided to take it to Paul and do a
little bit of well-deserved crowing. Perhaps she could convince him to take a
break and go out for lunch.

Smiling at the wild and rugged landscape around her, she
snapped her fingers, opening a portal back to the Staging Area and stepped
through—

—emerging next to the foot of the
Sirius Effort
, with
Daneel hot on her heels.

However, there was no sign of Paul.

“Where is he?” she muttered in frustration, noting in
irritation that his satellite phone was sitting on a nearby table. If he didn’t
have his phone with him, she couldn’t even call him.

“Offbeat, Mom. No Dad. Humph.” Daneel created a portal into
the ship, on Deck 6. “I’ll look for him on the inside.”

Capie blinked in confusion. Had Paul gone back to Esperance,
to the motel? Maybe he had already decided to go out for lunch? It was, after
all, just after noon.

But it wasn’t like him. He typically didn’t do lunch, at
least not without inviting her along.

For a few moments, she was tempted to start searching for
him, but then remembered the platinum chip implanted between his shoulder
blades.

“Now, how did that work again?” she muttered. Casting her
arms out wide, she created a display in front of her, like a radar screen,
superimposed on the map of Western Australia. “Let me see all sources of
platinum isotope 190, one gram in size, out to a radius of 800 miles.”

The screen was blank, except for herself. Capie blinked in
total surprise. Paul was not in Western Australia? Really? But then, where was
he?

Obviously, he was on an errand of some sort, she told
herself. He would be back. After all, the
Sirius Effort
was still here.
It was his brainchild, his latest project. He wouldn’t be far from it, not for
long. She would wait.

The Sound Cay

Middleton Reef

350 miles east of Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia

October

Saturday 1:14 p.m. AWST

P
aul
dropped heavily through his portal, collapsing clumsily on the rocky islet and
roughly scraping his arms and hands on its gritty surface. This was The Sound,
a very small island only 100 meters long and 70 wide in the center of Middleton
Reef, more or less east of Gold Coast, Australia.

He tried to push himself to his feet, but the tremors in his
arms and legs made it impossible to even achieve a sitting position. Instead,
he collapsed, his face in the gravel, his muscles unable to do more than twitch
uncontrollably.

For several minutes, he simply laid there, doing absolutely nothing.
Here, at Middleton Reef, the storm was much weaker, the rain less acute, the
wind less than gale force.

He needed help! Ah, but who? Not Capie, obviously. She was
somewhere 2,000 miles to the west of him. Much too far even for a microportal
in his weakened state. If not her, then who? He needed to find help and fast.

Not only was he exhausted and in deep pain, but he was
totally exasperated with how difficult it had been to lose his pursuers. It
shouldn’t have been all that hard! Especially with a full-fledged wizard’s
talisman, such as he wore now. His very first portal should have taken care of
that! How had they tracked him all the way to the Tasman Sea?

With another effort, one that Achilles himself might have
admired, Paul climbed to his knees and then into a sitting position, sweeping
his gaze around the dreary landscape.

The islet he was on was indeed small. He could see all of it
from where he sat. And low! He himself was only a foot or so above sea level.
If those black waves pounding the reef around the island were any higher, they could
sweep him off the rocks and into the ocean.

Low gray clouds raced over his head, seemingly just out of
reach, the wind whipping his hair in berserk surges. He had to find help soon!
So weak, he was!

And then, it came to him.

Daneel. He could reach Daneel and at a fraction of the power
it would take to try and reach Capie.

“Merlin?” he said, barely above a whisper.

“Here!” came the firm strong voice. Merlin appeared, floating
through the air, drawing closer to Paul. “Young man, you make me proud! That
portal, under those conditions! Stuff of legends, that one.”

“Thanks,” groaned Paul, shrugging half-heartedly. “How far
is the Australian coastline?”

“335 miles. Much too far for you to portal in your weakened
condition.”

Closing his eyes, Paul shook his head. “Any ships in the
area?”

“In this storm?” Merlin asked with a chuckle. “Not likely.
But there is Lord Howe Island, to our south, only 145 miles away. Still too far
for you, as worn out as you obvious are—”

“Only 145 miles?” asked Paul feebly as his head snapped up,
his eyes focused on infinity. “Perfect. There are probably several hotels
there. They’ll have WiFi available. And I can reach them with a microportal.”

He closed his eyes, uttering a silent spell, mentally
reaching out to form a WiFi link, scanning all the standard frequencies,
starting in the 5 GHz range first.

And found one.

Somehow, and only after four tries too, he managed to link
to the network and send out a ping to Daneel’s IP address. That would certainly
get the Scottie’s attention. He would, no doubt, try to answer the ping. Okay,
so Paul wasn’t in any position to receive anything, not even something as
simple as a network ping. But he could follow up the ping with a three-way TCP
handshake.

Logically, the next step would be to send a TCP data packet,
complete with an embedded message. However, the structure of TCP data packets
were beyond Paul’s current capability, with all their requirements for header
and port information and checksums. However, there wasn’t any real need for
that. Paul would just keep sending handshake messages, one right after the
other, until Daneel became curious enough to track them down.

And it shouldn’t take him long to track down the source IP
address to Lord Howe Island. The microportal would likely give Daneel a bit of
trouble to track, in order to pin down Paul’s exact location. Still, Paul felt
that the Scottie could do it. If might take a while but, in the meantime, Paul
could work on recovering his strength a little.

The best, most effective and natural method for such a
recovery was sleep. Climbing into a nice cozy soft bed, however, in his current
location was not an option. Moreover, even if he could, it would take too long.
Capie and Daneel were in danger and the sooner he got back to Kalgoorlie, the
sooner he could do something about it and the sooner he could get some rest!

Sleep was out. Was there another solution?

Yes, there was. A faster albeit more temporary solution, one
he could produce here, was to make a few body chemistry changes. The first such
change to make was to increase his levels of dopamine, a neurotransmitter in
the brain, linked to the brain’s reward and pleasure centers. The ability to
sleep was also impacted by dopamine levels. By increasing dopamine production
and release in his brain chemistry, Paul could directly improve his mental
fatigue factor.

Not for long. Perhaps a few minutes. If he were careful,
perhaps an hour or so.

For physical fatigue, the adrenal gland output increase of
adrenaline and cortisol would increasing his energy level and strength, while
lowering his level of pain, including that from his right side.

Closing his eyes, he concentrated on those changes and,
after a few minutes, felt better, enough so that he was able to climb to his
feet and then, with a wave of his hand, create an invisible umbrella over his
head. Oh, to be sure, he was nowhere near feeling ‘normal.’ Worse, the effect
would not last long. Nonetheless, his condition had distinctly improved!

A flash of light in the sky to the east drew his attention.
He magnified the image in that direction and was appalled, his face turning
ashen.

Two Oni.

Spinning to the right, he saw two more. As he spun around he
saw a total of twenty Oni scattered around all points of the compass, all of
them roughly two hundred feet away and all of them moving steadily in his
direction.

His heart began to beat rather rapidly, the palms of his
hands starting to itch and feel downright cold. It was impossible for them to
have tracked him here! Just impossible! But here they were.

Drawing heavily from inside himself, he snapped his fingers
to cast a portal at his feet, the end point 25,000 feet up but the only
response was a flash of light and a fizzling noise. No portal formed.

A short distance back to the east, he saw another portal
open and McDougall stepped through, grinning in triumph.

Paul lowered his arm in dismay. Okay, mystery now solved.
The Oni had trailed him here because a wizard had helped them do it. That had
never happened before, a wizard directing the hunt against him. Clearly, it was
far harder to throw a wizard off the track than just Oni. Evidently.

“Uncle Sam! Where art thou?”

“Here, Paul,” said the image, standing to his right.

“Okay, so what am I going to do now?! Whatever it is, it had
better be something really quick! What are my options? Not a vacuum
permittivity spell. The Oni are too scattered. There are too many of them for
that spell to work. I could never hit all of them simultaneously. Plus, it
probably wouldn’t even work against McDougall.”

Paul glanced back over at McDougall, still steadily levitating
in his direction. Only seconds were left to him.

A deuterium-fusion spell might work, but he would have to
create one really great big detonation, say the equal of a kiloton or so, that
might get them all. Of course, one that large, with him at practically ground
zero…

The 4D Man spell again? Sink into the Earth? No good, they’d
just track him and wait for him to come back up.

“Time,” Uncle Sam said to him with conviction. “You need
time on your side.”

The cryptic remark made Paul blink in surprise and bristle
in irritation. “Time? What…”

Time. There were no known ways to make it go faster but
there were two ways to slow it down. The first was through speed, accelerating
an object towards the speed of light. The second was the use of intense gravity
fields, like that of a black hole. For a moment, he wondered which principle
that the stasis field used, to slow the passage of time. That would be worth
experimenting with, assuming he survived long enough.

And then the idea came to him in a flash and he turned it
over in his mind, examining it carefully but hurriedly. After all, his life was
at stake here. A stasis field. Yes, that could work. And he already had
experience creating stasis spells, eight times, using Hamadi and those Oni as
his experimental subjects. And once more, to release Capie. This spell would be
different, of course, but only in application, not in theory.

The incense? Was that piece of it still in his wallet?

He frantically dug the wallet out of his rear pants pocket,
searching all of the small compartments inside and pulling out the one
remaining piece of incense, though it was sopping wet.

Yes! He was in business!

“Stop!” yelled McDougall at the advancing Oni, using an
amplification spell to make himself heard. “If he tries to escape, you can hurt
him but don’t kill him, understand?”

Paul focused on the small rope of incense, drying it out and
lighting one end of it with a spell, then watching it smolder.

McDougall grinned in triumph, continuing to approach Paul
through the air. “I don’t see my talisman but I do see another one. That’s the
first question you’re going to answer, pinhead! Who else’s talisman have you
stolen?”

But Paul extended his tired arms out to his sides. “In the
name of Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and Hugo Gernsback, may there be a shell
around me, a foot…no, make it two feet thick and let the interior of that shell
hold a special stasis field that slows the passage of time by two orders of
magnitude!”

A golden aurora formed around Paul, quickly assuming a
roughly egg-shaped appearance standing on its smaller end.

McDougall laughed and pointed derisively. From the outside
looking in, the stasis field had all the appearance of being solid, trapping
Paul in a conventional stasis field of his own creation.

“That’s not going to help him any,” the
Errabêlu
wizard roared in amusement, as he landed on the island a few feet from the
field. “Child’s play, getting that open.”

And then McDougall noticed a curious thing. Instead of being
frozen inside the field, Paul was still moving. Very slowly, to be sure. But
still moving. That wasn’t supposed to be possible inside a stasis field.

From Paul’s perspective, it was McDougall that was moving at
one hundredth speed, time inside the shell between the two of them slowed by a
factor of a hundred to one.

Paul gasped, struggling to stay conscious, to push the pain
away. He still had to act fast before McDougall figured it all out. Reaching
out with his powers, physically and mentally mustering everything he could, he
concentrated on a small puddle of water standing in a depression in the island’s
rocky surface a few yards to his right, outside the shell. With a spell, he
instigated deuterium fusion, with the equivalent energy release of a kiloton of
TNT.

However, the spell didn’t instantly trigger a detonation. It
too had to pass through the time dilation field. Paul estimated roughly six
more seconds for that to happen.

As it was, the stasis field was not going to be enough to
protect him from the blast, but only enough to delay the moment it could reach
him.

“Let the field be three feet thick and let its dilation
factor be increased two more orders of magnitude.”

The cavity of space he was standing in grew considerably
smaller. Hopefully, that would be enough. He wasn’t sure how much higher he
could crank the size of the field or further slow the passage of time.

The shock wave, which might occur 100 milliseconds after the
blast, would now take over 16 minutes to reach him. More than enough time to
outlast the explosion itself.

• • • •

Thoughtfully rubbing his chin with one hand, McDougall was
still studying the slowly moving figure of the rogue wizard inside the field,
trying to puzzle out what was going on.

“No matter,” he finally concluded coolly. “I’ll rip you out
of there like a rotten tooth.” And he waved a hand at the stasis field. But
then, just as he was casting the spell, there was a bubbling noise off to his
left. He blinked and started to turn in that direction—

• • • •

The one kiloton explosion vaporized the entire Middleton
Reef and threw tiny pebbles and dust in all directions as well as ten thousand
feet into the air. Even Paul’s stasis field was launched like a cannon ball in
a parabolic flight path, the outside of it being incrementally worn away by the
blast, layer by layer.

Inside the field, Paul watched as McDougall stood in front
of the field, to all intents and purposes, frozen in time. Paul glanced at his
watch. If he had caught McDougall off guard enough, then the explosion had
already happened, The Sound was gone and the stasis field he was in was on its
way high into the air, hurled there at fantastic speed.

None of which he could feel or see from inside the field
itself. So he didn’t know if his plan was working or not.

If it wasn’t working, then he should know soon. Time inside
his cocoon was the same as outside. So, in a minute or so at the most,
McDougall would pry open the field to get to him.