Orders of Magnitude (The Genie and the Engineer Series Book 2) (7 page)

On her side. Yes. She was definitely lying on her side. And
on the floor too, of all places. And there was more debris visible too. Why was
that? Where was she?

Voices. Well, one voice anyway, chattering like a conceited
magpie several yards away. Not Paul. Oh, yeah, Paul, right. She knew that name.
He was her husband, the sexy, lucky man. But the voice wasn’t his.

Slowly, she raised her head slightly.

In front of her were the backs of two people. Oh, wrong
again. One was an Oni. The other…

Her vision wasn’t quite clear. The other was wearing a
cloak. Humph. And in this weather too. And it was that person that was doing
all the talking. His words weren’t making any sense, because of all the bees
still buzzing around…she wished they would quit and go home for the night like all
good little bees should…

The memories of the events in the hospital started coming
back to her then, in fits and starts.

And some of the bees did quit and go home. She knew that
because she could suddenly hear what the man was saying.

“…when you showed up. This is going to take a bit of effort
to explain to the Normies, all this damage, but I’m sure Clarke can manage.”

A wizard. The man was a wizard. Nobody used the word Normie except
a wizard of
Errabêlu.

She raised her head a little higher and that was when she
saw Paul floating in midair in front of the man who was doing all of the talking.
And her husband wasn’t moving. And then she saw an object float through the
air, from Paul to the wizard.

Okay, Paul, the clod, had gotten himself captured. It was a
good thing that she was here. Why was it that even good men seemed to be so
helpless these days?

She stirred carefully, not wanting to attract the attention
of the wizard or the Oni. Especially not the Oni.

Her rifle. Where was that? Oh, too far away, on the other
side of that chunk of concrete. Ah, yeah, it didn’t have any BBs left anyway.
Too bad. But there was still her pistol. Reaching slowly, she confirmed that it
was still in her shoulder holster.

She unclipped it and slipped it out as quietly as possible.
Then pushing herself up on one elbow, she unsteadily took the safety off and
aimed the gun at the Oni. With that creature’s speed, it would be best to take the
Oni beast out first. Then the wizard.

Oh, and with Paul this close, it was best not to use full
power on the fusion spell. She would dial it back some, maybe halfway. She
wished she had done that with the Oni here in this corridor. Well, hindsight
and all that.

Squeezing the trigger, she fired twice at the Oni, at its
head and then its waist. Then she swung the gun, firing one shot at the wizard
that was turning in her direction.

The three explosions took out both the Oni and McDougall,
bowling them over and laying them out on the floor, cold. Both were bleeding. McDougall’s
right arm was twisted at an impossible angle.

The wizard’s spell released, Paul fell to the floor, but
part of the shockwave caught him too.

After the echoes of the blast faded away, he managed to get
to his feet, shaking his head to clear out the cobwebs. There, just on the
other side of the huge hole in the floor was his wife, propped up on one elbow,
smiling at him.

She raised her pistol to a vertical position and blew a
quick puff of air across the end of the barrel.

“‘This is where I start to have fun!’” he heard her enthusiastically
say, quoting from
Lara Croft, Tomb Raider
.

Bernard A. Mitchell Hospital

5841 S Maryland Ave.

Chicago, IL

June

Monday 9:45 p.m. CDT

I
n
one of the treatment rooms, Paul cleaned Capie’s cuts and abrasions with soap
and water, then applied Neosporin and bandages. Then it was Capie’s turn, and
she treated the second degree burn on Paul’s left leg with hydrocortisone
cream. Since both Paul and Capie were using magical spells to reduce the level
of pain they felt from their injuries, neither one of them was suffering very
much.

“Okay, I admit that it didn’t exactly go according to plan,”
Paul noted with a wry smile. “But we do have eight Oni and one wizard we can
now question about your father’s location.”

“We need to round them up first,” Capie added, smirking.
“They’re scattered all over the hospital.” She looked downward with a frown.
“We did a lot of damage to the hospital. I feel bad about that.”

“I’ll make sure that a few million dollars is donated by
anonymous contributors to compensate for all the damages,” Paul told her with a
reassuring smile. “Assuming, that is, if we live long enough. And, speaking of
which, if it hadn’t been for you…thanks, dear.” He leaned forward and gathered
her in his arms, hugging her tightly. “You saved my bacon and I love you dearly
for it, CB.”

She smiled. “I’ll just add it what you owe me, big boy.” And
she snuggled up against him, embracing him tightly and French kissed him so passionately
that the world around him faded away and all there was in that moment was her.

As they each returned to Earth, Capie sighed, touching her
forehead to his. “I married the best kisser ever.”

Reaching out tenderly, Paul caressed her cheek and pulled
back a little. “No good deed goes unpunished. Now we get to go interview our
prisoners.”

• • • •

“Come on, wake up,” the sarcastic voice of Kenneth McDougall
ordered. “You’ve had enough sleep.”

The Oni opened its eyes and struggled to a sitting position
in the soft chair it found itself in. It blinked, looking around without
comprehension. Its head hurt miserably.

“Where am I?” it said, slurring the words badly.

The image of McDougall stood over it, staring down with
disapproval. Something about the wizard didn’t look quite right. He seemed sort
of insubstantial somehow. But the light in the room was hurting the Oni’s eyes!

“You’ve had too much to drink, remember? As a reward for
capturing those two wizards, I let you and the others drink as much as you
wanted. And you downed five bottles! All by yourself. The good stuff too.”

“I did?” the Oni responded. “I don’t remember doing that.”

“Not surprising,” observed the image of McDougall dryly.
“I’m surprised you remember your own name.” The wizard leaned closer. “You do
remember your own name, don’t you?”

“Of course. Aduir. Yeah, that’s right. I’m pretty sure. Aduir
is my name.”

“Congratulations. And the others?”

Aduir swung around slowly (gee how that made the throbbing
worse!) looking at four other Oni all sitting in a comfortable looking room that
he couldn’t place. They too looked hung-over.

“Sure. Ovidius, Belibni, Zaidu, and Serakh. Uh, where are
Quique, Telal, and Kenzo?”

“They didn’t make it,” the image of McDougall replied.
“Those two rogue wizards killed them.”

“Wow,” Aduir responded, slurring the word. “Can we kill
those wizards? Please?”

“Maybe later,” came the answer. “Right now I want them taken
east. And I need one of you to take charge.”

Aduir looked really surprised at that. “You aren’t going?”

The image of McDougall pointed over to a corner. There, for
the first time, Aduir noticed the images of Paul and Capie lying on their
stomachs, hog-tied, their hands to their feet. They also appeared to be
unconscious.

“No, this is a simple transfer and I have other important
business to attend to. At least, it should be a simple transfer. But I need one
of you to take charge, the most sober of you. Which one will it be?”

Aduir started to pout. “I have seniority!”

McDougall raised his palm up to stop further argument. “Yeah,
normally. But the lot of you are really drunk right now—”

“I’m not,” volunteered Serakh. “I can do it.”

Aduir held both hands to its head. Oh, why did its skull
hurt so much? And why did it feel like everything was wrong here. Serakh never
volunteered for anything, the sloth.

“Tell you what,” McDougall was saying, his hands on his hips.
“I’ll give the job to the Oni that can remember where we took that old Normie,
the father of that woman over there. Professor Kingsley. Whoever can remember
that will be the one to take charge. And I’ll give him another bottle too!”

• • • •

“That was fairly clever,” Capie remarked, staring at all the
Oni bodies lying around her father’s living room. “The spells, the holograms
and such. And you didn’t have to use torture.”

Paul nodded grimly. “It helped that I ran them through a
portal that reduced their glutamate levels. That’s an excitatory
neurotransmitter in the brain. Reducing those levels makes a person sluggish,
slurs their speech and slows their thinking process.”

“Like they were drunk,” Capie said. “And then the spell you
cast to increase the electrical activity of their…what did you call it?”

“The Ventral Temental area of the brain,” Paul replied.
“It’s responsible for the brain’s reward mechanism, for love, drugs, sex and so
forth. With electrical stimulation, I made them more pliable than usual and
more motivated to overlook things that didn’t seem right. Normally, that
hologram of McDougall would not have fooled them. And the fact that none of
them had their talismans didn’t bother them either.”

“And then you used the vacuum permittivity spell to put them
back to sleep. I wish you could do spells like this all the time,” his wife said
wistfully. “It seems like a better way to fight than with BBs loaded with
deuterium and such.”

Paul produced a half-hearted shrug. “Like I said earlier, these
sorts of spells only work if you catch them off-guard. But enough discussion
for now. It’s late. We need to dump the Oni someplace where they will be safe
for at least several days, before we go rescue your father.”

“Someplace fast,” Capie urged.

“Agreed,” Paul said, waving a hand in the air and creating a
display linked to the internet. “Let’s see what Google suggests.”

• • • •

With Paul now using McDougall’s talisman, he was easily able
to portal the eight Oni (four of them badly injured) to a small speck of land
known as Halfmoon Island in Canada’s Georgian Bay at just a few minutes before
midnight, and under a waning gibbous moon. The island was only a little over
4,000 feet long, uninhabited, with no man-made artifacts, very little in the
way of vegetation and no rocks. Moreover, it was 7 miles from the next nearest
island, also uninhabited. Paul left the Oni four first aid kits, several cases
of Ramen noodles (the variety flavor packs) and a dozen packages of Girl Scout
Cookies (the Rah-Rah Raisin variety, of course). There was no need to leave
them drinkable water since Georgian Bay, at 5,792 square miles, was one of the
largest bodies of freshwater in the world.

McDougall was a different story. At Capie’s suggestion, they
left him in an even more remote location, a small nameless sandbar only 100
feet long and twenty feet wide, also out in the middle of the Georgian Bay. In McDougall’s
case, Paul provided the still unconscious wizard two boxes of dry unsalted crackers.
And no first aid kit, despite the wizard’s broken arm.

“That should hold them for a couple of days,” Paul mumbled
as he opened another portal, back to Wisconsin. “When we are done rescuing your
father, I’d like to come back and take them to a more permanent location, one
that will hold them for years, at least. But if for some reason we don’t get
back soon enough, well, Georgian Bay has a lot of boating and shipping. It
won’t take long and someone will spot them and pick them up.”

“Why don’t we take him with us?” proposed Capie, as she
rubbed one arm and followed Paul back through the portal to her father’s house.
“With him as a prisoner, couldn’t we do an exchange? From their point of view,
a Normie for a wizard should be a pretty good trade.”

“No,” Paul said with a vigorous shake of his head. “We don’t
know how to contact the wizard that is holding your father. And don’t forget
that these wizards
love
to bump each other off, as a means of getting
rid of the competition. The only person they want in exchange for your father
is me. And, if it comes to that, if I could get your father back safe and
sound, then I would make that trade.”

Capie took a deep breath. “No. You know that you can’t trust
them. They would take you and kill both of you.”

“Yes. I agree with you. That’s why we have to go rescue him.”

She grimaced, looking worn and tired. “When?”

Paul took another look at his watch. 12:31 a.m., CDT. It had
already been a very long day and there didn’t seem to be an end in sight. For a
moment, he toyed with the idea of calling it quits for a few hours, at least.
They could sleep and tackle the task of the rescue of her father in the
morning.

But a part of him acknowledged that, as good as a night’s
sleep might be, there were advantages in pressing forward now. In the morning,
the enemy would be rested too. Moreover, in the morning they would know about
the failed ambush at the hospital and that McDougall and eight Oni were
missing. This Clarke fellow that McDougall talked about would beef up security
at the place where Chris was being held or, worse, he would move Chris to a
completely different location.

No, it was best to go tonight, ASAP.

“Cast a spell on yourself, please,” he told Capie. “Keep
yourself frosty. We need to go after your father tonight.”

“I couldn’t agree more.”

“We need to get some night vision goggles and then reload our
airsoft weapons…”

• • • •

Aduir had enthusiastically revealed that the location
Errabêlu
was holding Capie’s father was at the Defense Intelligence Agency Headquarters
in Washington D.C on Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling, on the east bank of the
Potomac River.

From Chris Kingsley’s house, Paul and Capie portaled back
into Chicago and visited an all-night pawn shop, purchasing from an elderly
bald-headed clerk a used Yukon NVMT Head Mount and an Armasight Vega Gen 1+.
Both were night vision goggles with IR viewers.

Capie fingered hers dubiously. “Wouldn’t it just be easier to
cast a spell on our vision, rather than to wear these things?”

“For the vision part, yes,” Paul agreed, as he held open the
front door for her. “But these things have an IR illuminator built in. We could
do that with a magical spell too, but the energy used for the spell might be
detected. Better to use technology for this.”

Out in the parking lot, they left via portal, emerging into
a rain shower in the center of the Wheeling Island Racetrack in West Virginia.
Hurriedly, they took another portal from there to the fifth hole of the
Winchester Country Club in Winchester, Virginia. It was cooler there but also
drier. A third portal leap took them to Fort Washington Park, Maryland, right
in front of the White Battery emplacement, less than a hundred yards from the
Potomac River. With McDougall’s talisman, they could have portaled directly to Bolling
from Chicago. It was easily within range of the talisman’s capabilities, but
Paul wanted to sneak up to the base and do a bit of reconnaissance rather than
marching straight into the lion’s den. And he was still leery of using too much
energy near the enemy.

So rather than portaling the last twenty or so miles, Paul
chose to approach it in a much stealthier mode, the energy level involved a lot
lower.

They flew at 100 feet altitude, following the west bank of
the river, landing and taking up station at the eastern edge of the Ronald Reagan
Washington National Airport. Paul created a microportal at twenty miles
altitude over their heads, linking it to a holographic display in front of them,
and greatly magnifying the image of the Defense Intelligence Agency facilities
to see what they were up against. In the display, a great many city and street
lights cast illumination on the huge complex of buildings that made up the DIA
compound, containing more than 850,000 square feet of floor space, so said the
internet.

“According to Aduir,” Capie said, studying the displayed
image, “they are holding Dad in the Detention Center, which is in the rear of
this building over here on the first basement floor.”

Paul tried switching to an infrared view, but there was just
too much concrete and too many floors involved.

“There doesn’t appear to be any way to know how many people,
wizards, and Oni are over there,” he noted, rubbing the back of his neck. “Security
there should be minimal, at least in terms of Oni that might be present. And
there shouldn’t be any wizards. Probably. After all, we aren’t supposed to know
your father is here. On the other hand, there might be quite a few Normals
here, as part of the security staff.”

“That all seems reasonable. But it’s still just a guess,
right?” Capie asked sullenly.

Paul took a moment to study her. She was doing pretty well,
considering the circumstances. But it wasn’t going to last forever. They needed
to rescue her father just as soon as they could, before the stress load grew to
be too much for her.

“Cheer up, dear. They haven’t had him long. Less than ten
hours. They will want to question him, probably in the morning, to find out
what he knows. Then, tomorrow, when McDougall and his Oni don’t report in, they
will probably move your father and set up another trap for us, again using him
as bait.”