Chapter 21 – Rescue

Callum paced back and forth beside the campsite he’d set up near the Pacaya volcano in Guatemala, counting down the hours as his cane dug into the lose, rocky ground. He’d gotten a little sleep, somewhat further away from the actual lava flow than his staging point, but only a little bit. The anxiety was just too much for him to relax.

He ran over his supplies in the cave cache once again. Guns, his spatial grenade materials, and a number of boulders. None of which he wanted to use, but he had to be prepared. Food and drink and a medical kit, because there was no telling what shape either of them were going to be in afterward. He had his van parked near a hospital in Mexico, with the telepad relocated from his house to the cave.

There’d been no traces of supernatural activity at the trailer. That was good, since it was that as a bolthole or a random hotel, and Callum didn’t much trust hotels. The less he showed his face, the better.

Once he finished yet another inventory, he stopped to review the map he’d gotten of the BSE base. The problem was that Chester couldn’t guarantee where the portal anchor would be placed, or that Lucy was actually in one of the cells. He wanted to move as quickly as possible once he activated the portal, so he’d need to get himself oriented and figure out which building was which from his sensory sphere.

Undoubtedly they were waiting for him, but unless they had every square inch of the facility locked down and under surveillance, he was pretty sure that the activation wouldn’t be obvious. His major worry was that the portal anchor itself would be blocked, because even if Chester’s shifters got caught smuggling it in, having the anchor dumped in some lockbox wasn’t an issue. Even if it was somewhere offsite, he could just teleport the anchor back through the portal and do things the hard way.

Even though assaulting the BSE facility was in many ways incredibly stupid, he wasn’t going to just rush in, guns blazing. He had some idea of the capabilities normal mages possessed, and more importantly, what they didn’t possess. They couldn’t see through walls the way he could, and they couldn’t cast through walls the way he could. In a weird sort of way, their facility was more of an advantage for him than it was for them.

All that said, he couldn’t stand up to combat mages. At all. Which was why his plan was to simply not be exposed to combat mages, though of course no plan survived first contact with the enemy.

Callum gnawed on a stick of beef jerky and opened a portal through the connection in his implant to the area above his cave-cache. He could just see the bones of his bunker through the trees, but more importantly, his cell phone could get signal so long as it was high enough. He’d solved that problem by balancing it, along with a solar charger, in the canopy of a tree.

As with every time he’d checked it so far, there were no messages, so he snapped the portal shut and went back to pacing. He had too much nervous energy, though his knee was complaining about the uneven ground, cane or no cane. It was well past dawn in whatever time zone Guatemala counted for, but he had no idea what time it was in the Deep Wilds. For all he knew it was an eternal time like the Dragonlands and Night Lands, but there had to be some sort of standardized shifts. Probably. Hopefully.

Once again he snapped open a small portal to his cell phone, even though it’d been less than five minutes, but this time when he peered through the opening he saw it had a text notification. He reached through the portal and grabbed it, the few moments the old phone took to open up the text display seeming to take forever. It was from Chester.

Package should be delivered.

Callum didn’t like the qualifier, but it couldn’t be helped. He imagined that there was no actual communication between the facility and the outside, so the best Chester could do was verify that the person with the portal anchor had gone there. Possibly with some time buffer to account for getting it past security. Considering it was small and inactive, it was probably not too difficult for a shifter to keep it hidden. Or even for it to pass through in plain sight; he’d seen that shifters did have foci for one reason or another on occasion.

He set a timer for five minutes, just to give it a little more padding, and went and took care of his ablutions before the final checks. Callum doublechecked the body armor, even though it shouldn’t matter at all, finishing off the jerky and taking a few swallows of water. His hands felt sweaty, and the worm of fear gnawed at his gut, but he took a deep breath and watched the timer tick downward.

When the alarm rang, he silenced it instantly and teleported himself closer to the lava flow, where a portal anchor sat in the dewar. The vacuum bottle was, in hindsight, probably not even necessary, but it was still a hundred yards closer to the flow than he felt comfortable going himself. Mesmerizing as a lava river was, it was still twelve hundred degree rock.

Callum reached out and energized the portal anchor. It sprang up right away, and mana started flowing through. It was in a portal world. His perceptions flowed through, and he concentrated on feeling out exactly what was on the other side.

Given the separation between him and the anchor, he had approximately five hundred yards of range through the portal anchor, maybe a little more. The total distance of his perceptions had probably grown a touch, but he’d not done any specific tests for a while. That was still a large enough sphere to encompass a building, if not quite big enough for the entire campus that was supposed to be on the other side.

Chester’s agent had deposited the portal anchor in a utility closet, among a jumble of cleaning supplies. At least that’s what he assumed all the bottles of liquid were, among mops and brooms. The building itself seemed to be something like a barracks, with a number of rooms with bunk beds arranged around a central hall. Outside of the barracks, there was a thick, magically reinforced wall in one direction and what seemed like warehouses in the other.

There were three mages and six shifters within his sphere of perception; two of the mages and three of the shifters were in bunk beds, scattered throughout the barracks, the others were on the wall, where it turned into a dome overhead. He waited with bated breath to see if they noticed the portal focus, but none of them so much as twitched. Though it wasn’t like the portal itself was a particularly large or intense bit of magic, by anyone’s standards, so it wasn’t too unreasonable that they didn’t notice.

Callum looked at the map, figuring out where the anchor had ended up. The buildings weren’t even warded to speak of, just having some minor enchantments around the windows and doors. They didn’t look like the screens of wards, anyway, and the way the mana flowed through the structure was different, but he intended to avoid them anyway.

From the reference he had, the anchor had wound up on the north side of the compound. There was no gate leading in or out; they probably used magic for that. The warehouses and barracks were more or less as he had suspected; mostly empty at the moment, but he put that down to it being the off-season at the moment. Or maybe just during local day.

He wrapped his threads around the portal anchor, extending his vis out to the warehouse through the mana-saturated ground, and pushed. It wasn’t much of a jump, but with his range he really didn’t need too much to cover most of the rest of the facility. The perspective bubble on the end of the anchor shifted, and the portal bobbled. If he were cleaner with his threads, or used tubes instead, he could move without the portal destabilizing, but he was in a hurry so he had fix it by shoving more vis into it instead. It didn’t take much, but it was a concerning tradeoff when he knew he was relatively vis-limited.

The new location meant new buildings came into range. They were more central; the administration, the communal hall, the processing center. They were far more warded, and it took time for him to get through into the interiors. He cared little for what was stored in the warehouses, mostly normal supplies from what he could see, but even if there was any magic stuff there he couldn’t afford to raid it. Betraying his presence before it was absolutely necessary was a terrible idea.

That particular consideration was immediately tested when he brushed his perceptions through the administration area and found a case with a number of lumps that were very mana-dense. They seemed quite similar to mordite, so he could only guess they were silverite, harvested however and stored somewhere secure. It was annoying that he only ever ran across interesting things when he had more important issues at stake, because he didn’t dare touch the silverite no matter how much he wanted to.

In addition to the extra warding, there were a bunch of mages around and a number of them were using active vis senses. They were little feathery pulses drumming through the air or the ground, which Callum regarded with a lot more trepidation than the wards. Enchantment spellforms were limited, but he had no idea about direct magic scrutiny. Evading a security system was one thing; evading the naked eye was another.

Unlike the naked eye, he could actually see the use of the vis senses and where they were aimed. Some of them were just everywhere, others were focused, sweeping here and there, so there wasn’t really much space for him to run a thread that wouldn’t be observed. That said, he only needed a single, small thread to move the anchor from one place to another, and the anchor itself was a small thing.

The various sorts of warding seemed to block the active senses fairly well, and there were all kinds of enchantments active in the buildings he could sense. Were he to try something large and flashy, especially out in the open, it’d be noticed immediately, but he might well be able to hide most of his activity behind the existing enchantments.

There were lots of mights and maybes, but he couldn’t take forever to make a move. Just because nobody had noticed his portal yet didn’t mean they wouldn’t ever. The outflow of mana alone might alert someone if the portal stayed open long enough, and if a searcher got closer to where his anchor was hidden they might well find it.

His target, the cell block, was a little bit further along. If he could teleport the anchor to the full extent of his perceptions like he preferred, he’d already have it within range, but he was limited to sneaking about and hiding the anchor in storage drawers or other places that weren’t immediately visible. Even though he could loft the anchor with his gravitykinesis, he had to assume the moment any mage or even shifter laid eyes on it they’d sound the alarm.

Callum waited, counting the beat from the regular pulses of the ground-based active vis, and as soon as he had it down he shoved a vis thread out between one pulse and the next, running it to the plumbing gap behind a sink in the communal hall. The followup teleport was barely in time, and he paused, heart pounding even though all he’d done was a little bit of magic. The seconds stretched onward, but it didn’t seem like he’d been noticed.

He turned his attention to the actual cell block, because it was a painfully bright blaze in his perceptions. There wasn’t just warding — or rather, he wasn’t sure there was any warding at all. Instead there seemed to be some kind of mana overload, something that churned the ambient energy into a chaotic maelstrom. It reminded him a bit of what he’d seen in Las Vegas, but with a lot more power.

It was pretty clearly a defense aimed specifically at him. At this point his ability to bypass wards was no secret, and they probably even had some idea of exactly how he was managing it. Whatever was going on with the mana wouldn’t be any defense against a shifter or a vampire, but if he tried sending a vis thread in there it’d just get shredded.

The sheer amount of mana noise made it difficult for him to tell the details about things deeper in, but he could at least figure out where the walls and people were. Mages were, of course, obvious by their bubbles, which meant the one figure without the bubble was Lucy. Obviously he had to remove the jamming source, but he had to do so without risking Lucy. If they had been really smart, they’d have put it in the same room as her, as close as possible so he couldn’t smash it from range.

That was all assuming he was right in his conclusions. He wouldn’t put it past them to make the entire cell a complete honeypot and hold Lucy somewhere else. It wasn’t like Callum even knew what Lucy looked like, so a ringer was not out of the question. On the other hand, using that kind of bait was a risk in and of itself, and he was fairly sure they didn’t care too much about Lucy as such. They would have already wrung out whatever intelligence she had, considering their resources.

Still, the information that she was being held in this particular facility had come from Chester, not through some official source that would be very obviously trying to lure him into an ambush. If she wasn’t the one in the cell, there weren’t very many places in the facility where they could be hiding her. In fact, he’d already passed over most of them and hadn’t run across anyone else human without a bubble.

The presence of vampires and fae implied there were some of those feeder portals Callum had cribbed his designs for somewhere about, and he considered tracking them down first. He was sure that if he broke them, that’d send some of the personnel into a bit of a flurry, maybe even force some evacuations.

Despite the urgency he felt in the back of his head, he needed to be methodical. There was a mage in the room with maybe-Lucy, so whenever he made his move, he had to be quick. He could only imagine the mage was there to take her hostage if he managed to break in. Or maybe the moment things kicked off.

He took a moment to scrutinize everyone he could reach within his perceptive sphere. For the most part mage bubbles looked all the same to him, but a few people stood out. In near the jammer there was one mage that had a bubble that wasn’t just opaque, but almost reflective in how solid it was. A second mage of similar quality was in the admin building, along with a third whose bubble seemed like hammered iron. It wasn’t like he could sense through any of the bubbles to begin with, but most didn’t seem as substantial as those three.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

Callum was absolutely glad he wasn’t actually there. Those bubbles were intimidating even if, so far as he could tell, they had no idea he was there. Aside from the normal movements of people, mostly shifters walking from one place to another, there didn’t seem to be any real activity. Carefully, he made a mental note of where everything of even marginal sensitivity was placed. The teleport pads, ward boxes – there were only two of those, for admin and in-processing – the jammer, and the feeder portals. He found three different clusters of the last, so there might be more somewhere out of range, meaning that cutting them off entirely would be difficult.

The jammer would require a little bit more work than the rest, since he had to go through multiple walls – or a ceiling – and it was right near the cell. But everything else he could reach, and while it might not be all the infrastructure in the facility, it was a lot of it. What he wanted to do was smash the jammer, grab Lucy, and run, but there was no way to guarantee that would work and the cost of failure was too high. Better to spend a second and a bit sowing chaos and preventing reinforcements or communication, because once the element of surprise was lost he wouldn’t have much time or space to react. He ran through the actions he was planning over the next few seconds in his head several times to prepare, and make sure he covered all the contingencies.

With a limit of sixteen or so constructs, he felt comfortable targeting four things at a time. Two sets of portals and a high-powered directed gravity field. He picked his priorities, waited for a lull in the active sensory sweeps, and then spun up everything at once.

Basketball-sized portals opened up in the maintenance space for the teleporters, by the ward boxes, and one of the feeder portals. A gravity shear accelerated streams of scorching lava through the portals at something like one hundred fifty miles per hour, more or less obliterating the targets and making an absolute mess of everything around them. Despite not aiming at any people, he still saw some debris bounce off the shields of the mages monitoring the ward boxes, as the splash was somewhat more impressive than he’d expected.

Immediately he snapped the portals to his next set of targets, the remaining feeder portals and one of the warehouses since he had attention to spare. It took a moment of juggling to keep the lava from breaking his portals, but less than a second later another several hundred pounds of liquid rock smashed into and through walls and enchantments.

Mages started to move, and Callum focused on the jammer.

***

Taisen had mastered the art of waiting long ago, but neither of the Archmages showed much patience. Duvall, especially, clearly wanted to be elsewhere, though Taisen could hardly blame her. He knew a thing or two about having far too much work and far too little time to do it in. Hargrave showed a more ordinary impatience, frowning at whatever reports he’d brought with him.

It wouldn’t last forever. Even as important as Wells was, tying down two Archmages in addition to himself was an enormous expense. If the man didn’t make a move soon, or at all, all the preparations would be for nothing. From the way he read Wells’ history, though, a credible threat to the Harper girl would be good enough to force his hand.