Times Like These Page 6

  Steve walked off with Tisha as the doctor pocketed his card.

  "I can hear the gears turning, Tisha," Steve said.

  "Well, I am thinking. What are we going to do with all these experienced veterans once they've been infected?"

  "Part of that will depend on them, part of it will depend on what they're doing now, and part of it will depend on what I decide."

  "Only part?" Tisha laughed.

  "Okay, a big part," Steve admitted. "As much as I'm sure there are a lot of people who'd want to send them to the front, I think it might be time to start up some sort of 'home guard' for the DC area. This city is a target, and a big one. We put them in a reserve unit or something like that, and have them on duty once or twice a week."

  "Sounds reasonable."

  "Yeah, and I'll need some bodies to replace all the people I'll be drafting to start the new shop here," Steve added with a grin.

  "Better hope Sean doesn't find out!"

  "Oh, I don't think he wants a job here, so I'm not worried. Now, let's gather up our mindrers and head over to see Kensington."

  "What do we need to see him for?"

  "I promised Sean I'd see if I couldn't get him to lean on the FBI to go after the west coast ALS folks."

  "They're still a problem?" Tisha asked, a little surprised.

  "I think Sean's worried they might become one again. They've caused him trouble twice now, and I honestly think he wants them all dead at this point."

  "Sounds like the First is rubbing off on him."

  Steve nodded and then sighed after a moment. "We've changed. All of us. We've changed a lot more than I think any of us ever expected. All I ever wanted was to have a chain of auto repair stores across the country."

  "And now?" Tisha asked.

  "Now I want to run it. I see all these idiots doing stupid shit, ruining people's lives, and not paying attention, and I know I can do better."

  Tisha laughed. "I've heard that song sung before."

  "Yeah, but I have something the others didn't have."

  "Oh?"

  "I have Sean to keep me honest. He's my best friend; there's no way he'll let me mess it all up."

  #

  Sean sat down in his makeshift workshop. Things here were still a mess, and he had no idea when he'd be able to clean it all up. He thought about his workshop in the basement of the building he owned in Sparks; maybe he could use that one for now? At least it wasn't a mess.

  He'd given Estrella her collar back; he hadn't been able to combine the lycan collar enchantments with it, he just didn't have the time right now to figure out the best way to do it. It was one of those things that would definitely be a major undertaking. He had tarred it, figuring he could make a couple of copies, but the amount of energy that would take was somewhere on the order of 'stupendous'. It was an order of magnitude harder than even the silver tag.

  He'd wondered about that at first, but the truth was, his father's spell was in some ways simpler than one making someone appear to disappear.

  Plus his father's tag was made by a genius, plain and simple. The invisibility enchantment on the collar was just the reworking of an existing series of spells. The enchanter who had created it hadn't done anything to make it more efficient. Sean suspected he was going to have to do that himself, which would mean learning the faerie method of enchanting even more thoroughly than he already had.

  Again, a project for when the war was over.

  He went through the memories he'd gotten from the demon lord next. There weren't many of them left; perhaps if he'd spent more time concentrating on them he'd have remembered more of them, but he'd been in the middle of combat at the time and was just a bit distracted.

  What did stick out was the magic missile spell. It was one he was already interested in, and had archived a copy out of his defensive shield framework. So his mind hadn't had any problems grabbing onto that bit of knowledge.

  As he'd thought before, the spell's simple appearance was deceptive. As he got farther down into it, it became and more complicated. In some ways, it was constructed much like the way he had been using his magic—lots of 'library' type modules at the bottom that were all linked together to form the larger spell.

  And that's where it got strange.

  Because all of the 'library-like' structures were there; even though the majority of each library wasn't being used, it was all still there, all of it, including all sorts of interesting abilities and tricks. It was like a first-year programming student writing 'hello world' and then linking into every stinking library on the machine when they went to compile it. It was definitely overkill, and Sean could easily rewrite the spell into a much more compact, and therefore less energy consuming, format.

  But...but because the spell had all these extra libraries linked into it, it inadvertently picked up a lot of little things from them. Almost like inheritance properties. Like, its ability to home in on electric fields was an error state that was accidentally linked in, and it switched to when it couldn't find any kind of life force.

  It couldn't be shielded against, because it was constantly running through so many states as its 'program' ran that no shield could block against it; it just changed properties too often. Sean's had only worked because it absorbed the spell's energy instead of trying to stop it, and unlike the really nasty spells that had been thrown at him when he was retreating with Estrella that time, it wasn't powerful enough to blow his shield down by overwhelming the draining process.

  Sean sat there and considered that. If he grabbed all those libraries and put them into his own 'library', he could then link them into a new shield spell. That made him wonder if could he get the same effect the magic missile had? Would the shield keep shifting its properties fast enough that any one type of attack, or perhaps even a varying attack like the missile, wouldn't be able to get through?

  Could he then absorb spells like that powerful attack he'd been hit with before? And if so, what would he have to do to manage all the energy?

  Then there was the 'mana shield' he'd been thinking of. If he ever went back to the blockhouse, he was going to need it; with the main gateway now open all the time, getting near it would overload him. Possibly burn him out or kill him. It might do the same to any other magic user who was with him, too. So it was going to have to be an enchantment he could place on an object, not just cast into his framework.

  Pondering that question, he opened up his classroom and went inside. Bringing up his magic emulator, he loaded the missile spell into it. He'd start by pulling out all the libraries and organizing them so he could use them. Once he got that done, he'd start on the mana shield. That should be an easy task—some sort of self-powering loop to divert the energy away from the magic user. Maybe there was something in one of the new libraries he could use to burn it off by using it against itself...

  When the little alarm clock spell went off, Sean leaned back, exhausted. Eight hours had gone by. Eight hours! He'd worked through lunch, and probably into dinner. He was a bit surprised none of the girls had come to disturb him. The mana shield had proven more difficult at first than he'd thought it would, but only because there was so much he had to learn in the new libraries. He'd had to write descriptions for each of them and document what was in them. That had taken him a lot more time than he'd realized, and there were still a few left he needed to categorize.

  But he'd definitely found what he was looking for. It wasn't a shield so much as an insulator. He'd taken a lesson from the mind protection spell he'd come up with so long ago—if it couldn't touch you, it wouldn't know you were there. So the mana shield, simply put, insulated your body from all mana, powering itself off the mana it was blocking out.

  Of course this led to problems with controlling it, especially once your own mana ran out, as you wouldn't be able to generate any more with the shield in place. That led to him having to install a failsafe on the program, which would allow it to be turned off with a verbal command and a gesture. Once
he had that added in, he realized he could add a 'tap' to the enchantment to allow a controlled amount of mana through the shield to the user. After he'd coded that piece, he went back and redid it, giving the user the ability to adjust the flow.

  The spell took more energy than he would have preferred; those extra libraries were energy hogs. Another project for after the war would be to create a new set of libraries from the old ones that were smaller and more focused.

  Then he quickly built the spell up into an enchantment, and after checking it on his emulator, he tarred it up and checked his clock. Another hour had gone by! He'd look into the other shield spell later. Closing down his classroom, he opened his eyes and looked around his shop. It was late, he could tell, because it had gotten dark outside and no one had turned on a light.

  He recognized a couple of werewolves from his security detail playing spades over by the door.

  "Where's Cali?" Sean asked.

  "Oh! Hi, Sean!" Jordan said, setting down his cards. "Roxy came and got her and left us to watch over you. She said she wanted Cali's help with checking over the new weapons."

  "Didn't they tell you to wake me for dinner?"

  Jordan looked a little embarrassed. "Roxy said not to bother you, and honestly? I'm not so sure I wanted to be the one to disturb you when you're in that magic trance thing."

  Sean nodded slowly as he stretched. He couldn't exactly blame them.

  Standing up, he went over to the door, opened it, and looked outside. There weren't a lot of lights on, but since all lycans had excellent night vision, it wasn't exactly necessary.

  There were a lot of aircraft sitting out on the flight line, all their helicopters and a number of large cargo planes. Mostly C-130s but there was even a C-17 there as well!

  "What's with the large cargo jet?" Sean asked as his guards got up to follow him.

  "Artillery," Jordan said. "Chad ordered a bunch to be installed around here. I think if you listen hard enough you can hear him, Maitland, Roxy, Bill, Daelyn, and some arty guy arguing over where to put it."

  Sean laughed at that. "Well, I'm sure they don't need me putting my two cents in. Let's go see if we can get the folks over at the mess to feed us. I'm starving!"

  Territories

  "We're up to six million lycans," Sean told Estrella as they lay in bed together the next morning, enjoying the afterglow of some very satisfying sex.

  "Already?"

  "At the rate we're going, I suspect it'll be ten million by the end of the month."

  "That just seems...well, strange."

  "Why's that?"

  "Because all these years, dad told everyone 'no infecting'. He laid down the law on that I don't know how long ago."

  "Probably when he decided he didn't want to be king of the world anymore."

  "You may be right. So where are you going to open up this portal? Here?"

  Sean shook his head. "I have no idea how long it'll stay open and what kind of control I'll have over it. I want to put it someplace safe."

  "Put it in the dwarven town, then."

  Sean shook his head. "No. I don't think I want to put it someplace where it's under someone else's control. I've been thinking our bunker."

  "We have a bunker?"

  Sean nodded. "It's north of here, at the south end of Reno. Just where the hills start. We may have to abandon it, though, when we pull out of Reno. Are djevels any good at finding things underground?"

  "Digging isn't exactly their strong suit. Hell, just getting them to hoe a furrow in the ground was a major undertaking. Is it shielded from magic?"

  Sean nodded.

  "There you go. They'll never find it unless someone leads them to it."

  "Well, let's go grab a car and drive up there."

  "What, now?" Estrella asked, looking down at her sweaty and mussed body.

  "Okay, after we shower."

  "And grab a bite to eat."

  "And grab a bite to eat," Sean said with a sigh.

  "Who do you want to bring along?"

  Sean almost said 'nobody', but after thinking about it a minute, he changed his mind.

  "Jo."

  "Why her?"

  "Because she warded the place originally, so she can check the wards."

  "Aren't you worried about finding someone else in there?"

  "We keep a small squad of troops there at all times. It's one of the few safe houses we have that our core people know about."

  "You know Cali and the others will be mad if you sneak out without them."

  "We're messing with lion magic. I'm probably going to have everyone evacuate the place just in case something goes wrong."

  "What could possibly go wrong?"

  "Oh, I don't know, Mom and Dad spanking our asses?"

  Estrella laughed, and then thought about it a second. "Yeah, better to evacuate everyone first. Wouldn't want anyone to see that happening!"

  §

  "Hi, Mom! Hi, Dad!" Sean said, grinning as he popped into the lion realm.

  "Let me guess, you want to know what I had to do with the French attacking Berlin," the First said with a heavy sigh.

  Estrella had shown up at that moment as well and was stretching a bit.

  "Umm, actually, no. Why would you think that?"

  "Because it's the middle of the day? Normally you only show up now if there's a problem, or if you're mad about something."

  Sean considered that and nodded slowly. "Yeah, I guess that's been true more often than not of late. But that's not why we're here today."

  "Oh?" the First said, looking curious.

  "Buuuut, as long as you offered," Sean said with a smirk, " what did you have to do with the French nuking Berlin?"

  "The French have gotten very paranoid about being invaded from the east, and given recent history, one can hardly blame them. We've been keeping them advised of the situation in Berlin, and we advised them that now was the best time to strike."

  "So you actually did have a plan for this, Father?" Estrella asked.

  The First nodded. "The French government is used to dealing with magic users. It didn't take a lot of effort to set up yesterday's events.

  "So, why are the two of you here?"

  Sean looked around for Keairra and waved her over.

  "Well, it's like this," Sean said with a grin...

  "We want you all to come back to Earth." Estrella smiled.

  "What?" Keairra said walking up to them. "Even if we had enough pregnant lionesses, nine months plus at least a dozen years?" She laughed. "I don't think so."

  Sean held up a hand. "I'll be right back."

  The First blinked as Sean disappeared. "What is he up to?"

  "Oh, you'll find out very shortly!" Estrella grinned.

  Just then they all felt it, a large drain on their lion energy pool.

  "He didn't!" the First said, standing up on all four feet.

  "Is that a gateway?" Keairra said as a six-foot diameter disk suddenly formed nearby.

  "Sure looks like one!" Kearu said, padding over.

  "Stay away from that!" the First growled just as Sean reappeared.

  "Taa-daa!" Sean said, looking around and then pointing at the gateway.

  "What did you do?" the First growled in an ominous voice.

  "I opened a portal from that underground shelter we were using to here! What do you think?" Sean said, still smiling. "This way everyone here can go back to Earth, and we don't have to wait for you to be reborn again!"

  Keairra looked at Sean in shock. "You can do that?"

  "Apparently," Sean said with a nod. "When Dad here got kicked out of my head, my stats spell locked onto all the abilities he'd left in my head, I guess. Or maybe it was there all the time and I just missed it? In either case, opening up the gateway takes a lot of power."

  "That was what we felt!" Howart said, padding around the gateway.

  "Yeah. Apparently it's the same ability we use to project here, but it costs a hell of a lot more to open an actu
al physical gate."

  Sean noticed then that the First was still growling, if only softly.

  "What's wrong, Father?" Sean asked, coming over and dropping to his knees in front of the First to put his head on the same level.

  "Why didn't you ask me about this?"

  "Did you know I could do it?" Sean asked.

  "Actually, no, I didn't."

  "Because you would have told me not to, and then we would have had a big fight when I did it anyway," Sean admitted.

  "Oh, we're still going to have a big fight."

  "Why?"

  "Because we're dead! We can't go through that thing!"

  "How do you know?"

  "Because nothing is ever that simple!" the First said with a loud growl.

  "Well, maybe this is!" Sean growled back. "Besides, this was hardly simple!"

  "Sean!"

  "I did this because I need you, Dad. Not here, but on Earth, with the rest of us! Because I need everybody here! I'm tired of doing all this by myself! Just me! This is the big fight, the fight that will determine the fate of the world, and dammit! I want you with me! Not sitting up here!"

  "Sean..."

  "I'll check it out."

  Sean and the First looked to find Sampson was standing by the gate.

  "No! I forbid it!" the First growled.

  "Uh-huh. Right, grandfather!" Sampson laughed and made a rude gesture. "Like I'm going to start listening to you all of a sudden after all these years!"

  With that, Sampson stepped through.

  And disappeared.

  "Is he?" someone muttered.

  "He doesn’t feel dead," Keairra muttered.

  Several seconds went by, then Sampson came back out. "Well? What are you waiting for?"

  "It works?" Howart asked.

  "Course it works!"

  Sampson turned and went back through, with Howart hot on his heals.

  "Don't everyone rush!" Estrella called. "It's not a big room, and we'll have to figure out where to put everybody!"

  "Sean..." the First started, his voice a cross between a growl and an exasperated sigh.

  Keairra put her hand on the First's head, stopping him. "Leave it, Dear."