Chapter 31 #2
“Not good enough,” said an officer with cropped steel-gray hair—Mercer, the lieutenant general who visited Ellicott Mills.
“We ought to wait for the readings,” she said in Peter’s voice.
“I don’t need the readings to tell me this was not twice the explosive force of the last test,” Mercer said. “It looks more or less the same, and yet it’s twice the fuel. This isn’t working, gentlemen. We need a completely different angle of attack, so get to it.”
The scene faded into another memory. A nondescript office. Martinelli, slouched in a chair. She handed him a sandwich and sat behind a battered desk.
“A ‘completely different angle,’” the wizard grumbled. “Five years of work, all for nothing.”
“Not necessarily,” she said, fingers tingling with the swooping rush of grasping at the solution to a tricky challenge.
“Oh, really? Planning to up the leaf count from a million to ten million?”
She shook her head. “No, Mercer’s right. No reason to dump more into the spell when we’ve clearly hit the point of diminishing returns.”
“Well? What, then?”
“Animals.”
Martinelli faltered. “Animals. Live animals.”
“Yes.”
“Seems a bit—barbaric.”
She snorted. “You do recall what Project 96 does?”
“Perhaps you should recall that animals aren’t a reliable fuel source, whippersnapper.”
“We’ll see.”
New memory. Back in the desert bunker, this time just with Martinelli. Between them, the transmitter, as unassuming as a plant stand. And behind them, a Holstein cow, chewing its cud.
“Be right back,” she said, a stone the size of her—his—palm in one hand and a red teleportation leaf in the other. She jumped to a point thirty miles out in the desert, set the white payload stone with its runic inscription down on the sand and returned to the bunker.
“Well—go ahead,” Martinelli said. “This is your blood sacrifice.”
She took her first good look at the animal. It looked back. She swallowed, feeling for the first time that what she was doing—her entire job—was distasteful. Necessary, but distasteful.
Taking a calming breath, she stepped alongside the cow, put both hands on its flank and said the words that would extract its animating force, its life energy, once the spellcasting sequence for the transmitter was complete.
Still it looked at her, chewing its cud, its eyes big and brown.
Necessary. She turned to the rune-inscribed transmitter and pressed her palms against it, casting the complex interplay of spells that led to fordēst. Then she hit the timer and watched the requisite ninety seconds tick down.
As it neared the end, she said, “T-minus three, two, one ...”
The blast that touched off in the distance was so tiny it would have been laughable, if not for the thought of what had fueled it.
Martinelli sighed. “Worth a try, I suppose.”
But she wasn’t put off. This was merely a baseline. No one had bothered with animals for decades, which meant no researcher had spent much time trying to overcome the difficulties. Opportunity awaited.
“Don’t give up so easily, or I’ll reconsider what I said about ‘perfectly acceptable.’” She grinned at him. “Let’s see about the readings.”
That was when they realized the cow was still alive. It tried to lift its head as they walked over, but the effort proved too much. The sound that escaped from its throat could only be classified as keening, all the more wrenching for its low volume.
She crouched beside it, acid eating its way up her esophagus. The cow struggled harder, to little effect, as she drew a rune in charcoal over its wildly beating heart.
“I’m sorry,” she murmured, laying a hand on its flank. “èower byre geendian.”
Its desperate movements stopped. It stared up at her with glassy eyes, dead.
Memories came faster and faster now. Trying different animals, demarcation stones, multiple runes, new spellwords. Explosion after explosion. Bigger, louder, less laughable.
“Holy—” Martinelli yelped, shielding his eyes. “That’s got to be the equivalent of a hundred thousand leaves! A single fucking pig!”
More experiments. Two pigs at once. Three. Five. Ten. A veritable barnyard of doomed animals, first snuffling, then squealing, then silent. So much death, she hardly noticed it anymore.
“I think we’ve hit the ceiling,” she said at fifteen pigs. “The increase in the readings really hasn’t budged since ten.”
Martinelli waved this away. “Still twice the kick we were getting from leaves. Let’s see Mercer poo-poo that.”
“Mm,” she said, looking at the still animals inside the demarcation circle. Noticing them.
“Time to tell him, don’t you think?”
She sighed.
Martinelli cocked his head at her. “What?”
“The implications worry me.”
“What implications?”
“Of animals as fuel.” She thought but did not add particularly of intelligent animals as fuel.
Her deputy let out a disbelieving laugh. “Now you’re having second thoughts?”
“I know, I know.”
“Well … what do you want to do?”
As she hesitated, all the reasons to press on presented themselves in a neat line. Mercer demanded results. The country needed a deterrent. She could get a promotion.
And really, what choice did she have?
A later explosion. More dead pigs, this time out of sight in the control room at the other end of the building. Mercer shaking their hands. “Good work. Fascinating stuff—I really would have thought larger animals would produce more fuel.” Then: “You ought to try primates.”
Back in the bunker with Martinelli and a gaggle of others, their faces full of anticipation. KABOOM. One chimpanzee—far more effective than any of the animals they’d tried before.
She felt sick.
An office. Mercer, sitting behind a desk. “You’ve hit the ceiling on chimps?”
“Three, sir. Even so, they produce the largest blast radius. It’s up to a quarter-mile. Shall we call this a wrap?”
Mercer looked amused. “Eager to move on to something else?”
“Yes, sir.” She stepped closer to the desk. “I’d like you to transfer me out of weapons development.”
“To what?”
“Missile defense. Biodefense. Anything focused on saving lives instead of ending them.”
“Never underestimate the lifesaving power of a fearsome weapon.” Mercer tapped his desk. “It heads off a lot of stupid wars by making your enemies think twice.”
“Yes, but eventually, someone will decide to use it. Sir.”
Mercer considered her. “You’re very good at this work, you know.”
She could barely get her answer out. “I can’t keep doing it.”
“How much time have you spent trying to find a way around the ceiling we keep hitting with every fuel source?”
“On and off for the last year.”
“Give it six more months. Then I’ll see to that transfer.”
“Yes, sir,” she said reluctantly. “Thank you.”
Several more memories of tests—of death—unspooled around her. She had a hard, cold feeling in her stomach, as if the payload stone were lodged there.
Then she woke up one Saturday and realized she’d left her wallet at the office. She went to retrieve it and found a test in progress—one she hadn’t scheduled. The door to the viewing room was locked.
The explosion sounded tremendous.
On instinct, she ran to a bathroom, cast the invisibility spell and retraced her steps in time to see the occupants of the bunker file out: Mercer with an Army officer she didn’t know and—she almost gasped. The vice president of the United States.
“—a workable solution,” the Army man said.
Mercer rubbed the back of his neck, frowning, eyes on Vice President Draden. “Sir ...”
“Yes?”
“I respectfully suggest you reconsider.”
“We need this,” Draden said. “The president has made it very clear that Project 96 is his top priority.”
“But the implications—and not just for weapons—”
“Canada is working on its own weapons,” the vice president murmured. “So are the Germans and the Japanese. Their research is quite advanced. We can’t afford to pussyfoot around, General.”
“How soon can you get Blackwell working on refining this?” the Army man asked.
“It’ll have to be someone else,” Mercer said. “He’s burnt out.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” The Army man again. “What’s wrong with him?”
“Lost his nerve during the animal trials.”
The vice president’s snort was just like hers, many memories ago. “Did he somehow miss what the weapon does?”
Mercer sighed and followed in the officials’ wake as they walked off down the hallway. “If he ever finds out about this, he’ll be ...”
She couldn’t hear the rest. She stood for a horrible, disjointed moment, brain buzzing, heart thudding.
Then she strode the other direction through empty corridors toward the control room, where technicians did the spellwork during official trials.
She arrived just in time to see the windowless door open.
Two grim-faced wizards Peter had never seen before trudged out, rolling a gurney between them.
Something was on it—something covered with a sheet.
One of the men shook his head. “Why exactly did the test subject have to be conscious?”
“Drugs in the system might interfere with the effect,” the other said.
She crept along behind them, looking for an opening. What was under the sheet? Too big to be a chimpanzee. Possibly an orangutan, if the Army had procured an especially large one. But she suspected otherwise with a horror that made it hard to breathe.
The wizards slowed as they neared a door. Here was her chance. As the gurney lurched to a halt, she flipped one end of the sheet up, enough to get a glimpse.
Two very obviously human feet came into view before the sheet fluttered back into place.
Her fault. Hers.
“Who’s the poor sap?” the first wizard said, fumbling in his pockets.
“Some typic on death row.”
The man extracted a leaf. “If this isn’t cruel and fucking unusual punishment, I don’t know what is. Onirnan.”
The door opened. They pushed the gurney and its terrible contents away, leaving her on the other side, shattered.
A new batch of memories ran past at a quick clip.
Reading classified reports on weapons manufacturing in antagonistic countries.
Finding nothing to suggest projects of similar destructive power were underway.
Staging what looked like a terminal mishap for the Project 96 transmitter.
Making a new one with interwoven spells that would eventually wear off, reducing its blast radius.
Tracking down any documents that specified how the weapon was constructed and replacing them with altered versions.
Spiriting the original transmitter out of the complex.
Coming across the report of female magic use, absolutely by accident.
She was right in the middle of that memory when it went foggy and she sat up in Peter’s bed, awake, Beatrix again. All the emotions she would have felt had she seen those events as herself battered her simultaneously.
“Oh,” she moaned, wrapping her arms around her stomach.
Peter launched himself toward the adjoining bathroom and retched over the toilet. When she thought she could stand without ending up in the same position, she walked over on shaking legs, found a cup balanced on the sink and filled it with water.
“Here,” she said, holding it out to him.
He took a sip and leaned his head against the wall, eyes squeezed shut. “I thought it would be slightly less awful a second time, but I was wrong.”
She bit her lip, working up the courage to ask a question to which she really didn’t want to know the answer. “Is an explosion powered by a human life so much bigger than the ones with chimpanzees?”
“Yes. I tracked down the readings.” He swallowed. “Instead of a quarter-mile radius, it’s a mile and a half.”
“God Almighty,” she whispered, sitting next to him. “That’s enough to destroy all of Ellicott Mills and everything around it.”
“Or the downtown of a major city. Or the core of a nation’s capital.”
“You’re trying to find—what, some defense against it?”
“Trying. Failing.”
“Let me help you.”
“You are helping.” He opened his eyes and looked at her. “You’re giving me time.”
“No, I mean—hands-on. You’re used to working with a partner. Perhaps explaining your ideas will make you think of something helpful.”
As he hesitated, she added: “Please—I must do something. I know you understand.”
“Yes.” He shifted, and the movement brought their shoulders into contact. “Thank you.”
“You’ll need to go back to sleeping at night,” she said, looking at her hands.
“I suppose so.”
It felt as if he wanted to add, or ask, something important. But perhaps she’d misread him, for the next words out of his mouth were, “But not tonight.”
Seconds ticked by. Then it came—abrupt and bitter: “Have I cured you of your feelings for me?”
He was lightly pressed against perhaps one square inch of her body, fully clothed. It seemed to reverberate through every part of her.
“No,” she admitted.
“Well, that settles it.” He sighed. “Must be the Vow.”