Chapter 14 – Annoyances

Callum couldn’t make a proper nexus with only two portal anchor pairs. There had to be a dedicated link between the cave-cache and where he put anchors that he was actually using, so the incident with the hacked anchor cut his links from three to one. Better than none, but he was very seriously considering recycling the teleportation pad into a portal anchor. They were just that useful.

The longer chain also meant he had to constrict his maximum perception distance, so he could have his maximum at the destination and not uselessly at the bottom of the ocean where he’d put the beginnings of his nexus. At least he’d already been practicing that, so it wasn’t as difficult as it might have been, but there was nothing like necessity to spur practice and repetition.

“We really need more enchanting materials, big man,” Lucy said, despite the fact that she was playing with the glass tiles. Not that she was wrong. The tiles were great, but they couldn’t act like anchors.

“I still have to recycle the pair that we had to break, but yes. We do,” Callum agreed.

“So how are we gonna get it?” Lucy leaned back in the couch and yawned. They were both low on sleep after the scare with the portal anchor and the subsequent scramble to minimize any further risk. It actually made him feel better that it wasn’t perfect, because it had seemed too good before. “We can’t put it off, ‘cause we need that flexibility.”

“Well, we could try going to the Night Lands again,” Callum said. “I’ve been once so I kinda know what I’m looking for, and I imagine the drone will work just as well over there as here.”

“Okay sure,” Lucy said. “But what about Fane’s stuff? I know he’s got to have a bunch.”

“I don’t think it’s right to just take from the House coffers,” Callum said with a frown. “That’s not just Archmage Fane’s wealth, it’s— oh, wait, the lab.”

“Yeah, the lab too. But like, might as well take House Fane’s stuff,” Lucy said, opening a soda with the characteristic pop-hiss of an aluminum can. “Not like they deserve it, is it?”

“That’s the kind of thinking that leads down a bad road, I think,” Callum said. “I mean, that’s money not just for people like Fane himself, but the janitors, the help, the children, all of that. You know?”

“I guess,” Lucy said, not entirely convinced but ceding the point with a shrug. “So, the lab. We definitely don’t want people reusing some of that stuff anyway right?”

“Very much,” Callum agreed. “And that is completely on Archmage Fane. I guess there’s some argument that it should be left as evidence, but I don’t think mages care much about evidence that way do they?”

“What, like police procedural stuff? Nah.”

“Right,” Callum said. “Not sure about trying it now, though. We just got hacked by Duvall; what if she’s still there?”

“She just got you ‘cause you didn’t clean up, and you’ll clean up this time. I mean, if she’s still there you’ll know before she can do anything right? Your long range radar and all that.”

“Yeah, but I don’t like taking the chance.”

“But as far as they know, you don’t have any more business there,” Lucy argued. “And now that we’ve told people about that lab someone is going to get to it, sooner or later. So there’s no reason to lay in wait for you, that’s just paranoia talking, but if we wait it’ll be crawling with mages and even more risky.”

“Hm.” Callum considered it, and had to grant the point. “Alright, we’ll have to see if there are people there already, but if not we can loot it. I should have thought of that when we found that damn place but I was just too disturbed.”

“Yeah seriously.” Lucy’s nose wrinkled and she shuddered. “I don’t know if I’m looking forward to tearing that stuff apart or don’t want to even touch it.”

“Hopefully the former, because we might have lot of it to do. So long as I can get stuff by teleports. I’m sure as heck not sending either of us over there to start unscrewing things,” Callum cautioned her.

“Yeah, I’m on board with that,” Lucy said. “Creepy place in the middle of a bunch of House Fane people? That’s just straight up horror movie stuff.”

“It is,” Callum agreed, and reached through his linked portals to start moving the drone. He was glad they had the more powerful repeater, since it was going through more links even if the ocean-bottom portal nexus was just two anchors in a block of steel instead of one.

Even with the Alcubierre style movement it took time to move the drone all the way around the world to China. He could only go in short jaunts with a fairly rough idea of where he’d land, and they had to home in on the target more or less manually. The two of them ended up watching some streaming movie for most of it, since there wasn’t anything that required much brainpower.

They approached the House with rather more care than the first time, with Lucy landing the drone well outside the perimeter and Callum moving it in with teleports. This time, though, he was more careful. He’d gone back to his old standby of ball bearings, since they were cheap and he didn’t actually care if they knew that he’d been there. Only that they couldn’t actually trace his vis.

Something that had obviously become critical. Archmage Fane could kill anything his vis touched, so other Archmages probably had similar talents. Like Duvall and her ability to compromise his anchors. So he needed to make sure there were no traces of his magic anywhere, or as close to that as possible.

He left a little trail of ball bearings as he teleported his way in past the wards and smaller buildings, back to where the lab was. For some reason he’d expected to have to wait for people to clear out, even if it was late evening over in China, but it was deserted. It didn’t look like anyone had even gone down there, and Callum realized that he hadn’t exactly shown where it was. The entrance was deep inside Fane’s house anyway, and that seemed to be off limits for everyone, at least so far.

Which gave him space to ransack the lab. Despite Lucy’s arguments, he was worried that Duvall might reappear at any moment, and there was no telling what she could do if she were prepared and found an active portal of his. So even if it was deserted he had to be as fast as possible. If it weren’t for the fact that they really needed the portal materials he probably still wouldn’t.

There was a lot of enchanted stuff there, though much of it was just part of the room. Anything that was mounted in furniture or appliances was pretty much off-limits, unless he could teleport out screws and such to free it from the mountings. Which he could probably do given time, but he didn’t have that time.

The ward box was an obvious target, since he and Lucy had already disassembled those and found that they were mostly recyclable. But the wards dropping would probably draw attention, so that would have to go last. Instead he focused on the strongest, most mana-dense and highest-purity signatures in the tools that lined the shelves and counters of the lab.

He had no idea what most of them did and really didn’t want to. They probably were dangerous to activate, so he was hardly going to play with them himself, though he could just transcribe them later on. The richest strike seemed to be a set of sealed chambers, each of them maybe a foot in diameter, each with a sphere hanging from the ceiling. The spheres were solid chunks of metal and glass and, most importantly, nearly pure enchanting material along with energy-charged crystals. The way the chambers were arranged and furnished reminded him of incubators, with the enchanted sphere as the lightbulb, but they were thankfully empty so he had no idea what they might be for.

Each sphere was secured to the ceiling with ordinary chains and charged with one of the vis or mana crystals, which was something he was very much looking forward to getting his hands on. Since there were no screws or other complicated mounting means he simply teleported them off their chains and into a distant corner of the cave-cache.

He would have preferred moving it further, but with only one anchor he didn’t have the options. The enchantments were active and he did not want to deal with whatever effects the thing created. The best he could do was put it somewhere he could see that the magic didn’t overlap anything he cared about.

The tools from the shelves went to a different corner, and then he put together a water grenade to take out the ward box and the associated feeder portals. Trying to shift that while the enchantment was active would be impossible, or at least inadvisable, considering all the spell forms around it. Before he actually deployed it, he made sure he had lots of the vis cleanup beads around, since he had to assume someone would notice and investigate such a big change. There was no way he wanted another portal hack.

While he’d tested the slightly improved grenades before, seeing the damage they did to a real object was sobering. Instead of just bending the trays out of shape he actually blew the side out of the ward box and sent it ricocheting off the wall. Callum winced at that, making a mental note to dial down the amount of compression he was using. He just wanted stuff disabled, not destroyed.

Even with the debris it only took a few moments to scoop up the ward box and scatter a number of cleanup beads across the area to make sure there was nothing left of his vis. Then he put several more on the roof where the drone was before recalling it back to the cave-cache and closing the portal.

“That didn’t take long,” Lucy observed. He’d kept up a running commentary because she could hardly see what he was doing, and it surprisingly helped clarify his thoughts to actually say what he intended to do. It was only while talking about it that he realized it would be incredibly stupid to teleport out the screws holding the incubator enchantment spheres in place instead of just separating the links of the chain holding them up, for example. He just found it far too easy to get fixated on a particular solution.

“Yeah?”

“Man, I know that you do all the planning ahead of time normally but it took like five minutes. You’re quick.”

“Not when it counts,” Callum said with a grin, and Lucy laughed and blushed.

“You got me there, big man,” she said.

Since they’d already had experience with breaking down enchanted goods, it wasn’t really a difficult process to start tearing stuff apart. Which was for the best, because he was barely paying attention, his senses focused on the incubator enchantments as they ran down. Something that took longer than it should have because of the ambient mana in the cave-cache. It would have taken far longer if he hadn’t been able to disconnect the crystals fueling them.

“You awake there, big man?” Lucy said, startling him.

“Yeah, I’m just keeping an eye on these things,” he told her. “They’re about out of juice but I don’t trust ‘em.”

“I wouldn’t trust anything from Fane’s dungeon either,” Lucy said.

“So while we’re waiting, what exactly are these?” Callum asked Lucy, putting the crystals on the table. Each of them was about the size of a grape, with six sides and flat ends, and looked like polished quartz. Certainly they didn’t stand out very much to the naked eye, but he could feel the enormous amount of mana inside. Which was odd, since he would have thought that would have ended up in some kind of enchantment instead of just being a magical capacitor.

“All I know is that the Guild of Enchanting makes them,” Lucy said. “They’re not, like, dug out of the ground or anything.”

“Huh,” Callum said, examining the crystals. Experimentally, he poked his vis into it and tried to siphon out some of the mana, finding it to be as easy as pouring water out of a glass. The same went for pushing mana into it, though that was harder simply by virtue of his lack of control over ambient mana. Vis didn’t seem to want to stick at first, but once he emptied it out completely – bringing it below the ambient even in Texas – it accepted his vis.

“Seems like it holds a lot,” Callum said, as he tried to fill it up. “Either that or I don’t have much endurance.”

“I’m certainly not looking to complain, big man,” Lucy winked at him. He winked back. “Seriously though, I haven’t really heard of any other mages running out of vis, not like you do. Guessing it’s part of your whole general thing.” She waved vaguely in his direction.

“I’d have to ask that Archmage about it,” Callum said with a sigh. That certainly wasn’t going to happen anytime soon. Maybe ever. The man had seemed neutral enough but there was a big gap between neutral and trusted.

“Something to put on the list,” Lucy said. “I remember seeing something about the thaum capacity of mages a while back, so I can probably find it again.”

“I hope so,” he agreed. “I wish GAR digitized more records.”

“You and me both, big man.”

It wasn’t the most cheerful of notes to start work on, but at least with the recycling they could make visible progress. Callum did end up transcribing the enchantments on the incubators – or whatever they actually were – on the off chance they weren’t something horrific. It might well be something that Fane had created and was unique to the lab, and Callum wasn’t quite ready to destroy an enchantment that he didn’t understand.

Stolen novel; please report.

Lucy even took pictures, just in case, before they started tearing the thing apart. Each of the incubators supplied enough nearly-pure mordite to make a portal anchor pair, which was the largest influx of material yet. The rest of the stuff was rather less pure, less potent, and could be relegated to things like their own set of wards. They even had enough that Lucy could start on proper integration between metal enchants and the obsidian tiles.

That meant another go-round with the local metal shops. Callum really wanted a CNC machine, but they were hilariously expensive as well as bulky, and there wasn’t any point in making that kind of investment until they were fully moved into the bunker and had a shed or something. Lucy’s new 3D printer, even if it was one of the miniature ones, took up enough space as it was.

There was only one change made to the base anchor design, and that was to make it so the core, the bit that had to be cut in half, wasn’t permanently fixed in place. Instead of being a solid, integral piece inside of a metal shell, it was held together with little locking pins. Considering the amount of prototyping they were doing, setting it up so he could move the core to some other sort of projection enchantment only made sense. It made the anchors slightly larger, but they didn’t need to be implantable like his gut portal.

“So how exactly are we going to do this nexus?” Lucy asked from her armchair in the rear of the van. Until they had more options for their nexus, Callum wasn’t comfortable hanging around the same spot too long. He didn’t entirely trust that their location, at least in general, hadn’t been compromised when the portal had been accessed. So they were in the van, and Lucy very reasonably didn’t want to hang around in a bare, boring rear compartment.

They’d furnished the back of the vehicle with some chairs and desks bolted to the floor, and Lucy had even put up a few posters of some bands she liked. It was not and never would be a place to live, but it was at least more welcoming than before. Hopefully it wouldn’t be necessary for very long, assuming there was no sign of anyone snooping around any of their holdings.

They’d stopped for lunch on the way to the metal shop they’d sent their designs to, because there had been a problem with the order. The shop didn’t want to ship to a PO Box, and under the circumstances it was faster to just pick it up rather than try to convince some underling to send it anyway.

That time the business was actually in Colorado rather than Texas, so the van pulled double duty. He rarely actually drove any real distance, simply using the drone to teleport the van to some handy spot near his destination and arriving in the van to keep up the façade of normalcy. It also gave Lucy the opportunity to do some wardriving and catch up on whatever she was involved in from the internet security side of things.

“Well, we have to have a way to defend against it getting compromised. I have to assume that eventually someone might stumble across an active anchor no matter how careful I am. If not the nexus itself. So, bottom of the ocean for now, but a water mage wouldn’t have any trouble with that I imagine.”

“Yeah okay, so why not put it in one of those underwater vent things? Smokers, I think?” Lucy said, and Callum pursed his lips in consideration but she wasn’t done. “Wait, you’re looking into making new portal world portals so what about in a completely different portal world! Oh, even better! Put it on the moon!”

“The moon.” Callum raised his eyebrows at Lucy.

“Sure! I mean, portals don’t care how far away something is right?”

“I suppose not,” Callum said slowly. “But getting to the moon is not easy, even when you have spatial abilities.”