Hello again you lovely people! Since I posted the last chapter, I've also heard from Roger, and Dan, and Jon H, and Sky. Thanks for writing in! It's your encouragement that make this work worth it. For those of you who haven't written, I'm still happy to have you here! Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoy this chapter!
If you're younger than 18 or find these kinds of stories offensive, please close up now and have a great day! If you are of legal age and are interested, by all means keep going. I'll be glad to have you along for the journey. Please donate to Nifty. This is a great resource for great stories and a useful outlet to authors like me and readers like you.
39
Explaining the Mission
We returned to the conference room where Neb laid out the mission and the reason for it. The brothers took the news of the world ending pretty hard. Cy sagged and seemed to age as worry lines creased his forehead and grew from the corners of his tight-lipped mouth. Vulp threw a meaty arm over Cy's shoulders in a gesture of comfort. A few tears slid down Cy's cheeks. Vulp saw the question on our faces and explained. "Got kids." He announced.
"Four." Cy's thick, trembling voice added. He took a phone from his pocket and brought up an image. He barely looked at it when he dropped the phone from his hands and broke down completely. Vulp got him up and led him, sobbing, from the room.
I picked the phone up to look at the image. Cy must have taken the picture because he wasn't in it. The setting was a park, in a meadow at the edge of a line of maple trees. A buxom woman in an orange sun dress sat under a tree, trying to keep the attention of a two-year-old girl with little success. Three others, two boys and a girl aged between four and ten, frolicked in the bright sunshine with a barking black and white dog and a frisbee. It was hard to tell who was chasing who, but they were all having fun. The woman and the children had identical coloring; bright blond, healthy tan skin, and blue eyes.
"No wonder he's crying." I showed the image around. "Look what he's got to lose."
"What a happy family." Shawn said with a pang of jealousy. I felt the same. Neither of us ever had a day like the one in the picture.
Bem took the phone and looked at the screen until it went dark. He ran his fingers across the blackness. "This is why we have to win. No matter what the cost. It's not for us or the money. We have to win for these kids and all the other ones like them." He put the phone in his pocket. "I'll go check on them."
The door closed behind him, leaving me staring at where he'd been. "Am I the only one who didn't see that coming?" I asked.
Neb leaned back, dangling an arm over the back of the chair. She crossed her legs at the knee and bounced her left foot in the air. "It's easy to forget that he's not just a walking sex drive, that there's a real feeling person in there. I wonder who he saw in that picture. Maybe his mother and siblings...maybe he saw the family he wishes he had. I don't know, but whatever it was, for him to react like that, it was serious."
I closed my eyes to think. Seeing the muscle man break down, and then Bem's emotional message of determination, brought the true meaning of what we were doing right up in front of my face. Ars had said the world was going to end unless we did something to stop it. It sounded bizarre to me and therefore, unreal enough that it was difficult to take him seriously. Through all the work we'd been doing, I felt like we were going camping and playing king of the hill. The idea that the fate of the world rested on our shoulders was crazy. The idea that we might all die, and die within a couple weeks, was even crazier. Except, it wasn't.
I wonder how a soldier feels before a battle.' I thought. How did those poor bastards that landed on D-Day ever leave the boats? Was that as unreal to them as this is for me?'
The room door opened. I opened my eyes with it. A sobered Bem, a shaky Cy, and a stoic Vulp reentered the room. They returned to their seats. The brothers sank into their chairs in the same way; right hand over the left, palms down and beefy forearms resting on the edge of the table with their elbows as far apart as they could get. Both bald heads hung down in a posture of defeat. Cy heaved a breath, then another. He dragged his head up and turned his attention to Neb. "What do you need us to do?" He asked, no longer shaky. Vulp's head raised and looked in the same direction.
Neb laid out her overwhelming force' plan and how I fit into it. Cy, also a telekinetic, was dubious. "I don't understand this elevator' thing you do. You lift a solid object with people on it?"
"I solidify my magic into an object."
Cy brushed his right fingers quickly over his shirtfront like he was sweeping dust away. He finished and examined the shirt. There wasn't anything there before or after the brushing. "Not possible." He said with what I took to be a challenge in his voice. "No one has that much power."
I built a lid-less box around Cy and challenged him back. "See for yourself. You're surrounded by the impossible."
He reached out, flattening his hands against the inside of the box. He stood and felt for the top. I didn't raise the sides. I wanted him to feel the solid edges of my power. His hands ran around the top and felt the outside of the box as far down as he could reach. He threw a few tentative punches. "How long can you keep this up?"
"As long as you need me to."
"How's your control?" Cy pressed me. "Can you maintain this power and do other things? How much concentration does it cost you?"
I called a solar system of nuts from my pocket and swirled them around. I emptied most of the bag until I had a great cloud of nuts swarming around the room. To drive my point home a little harder, I used my white magic to vaporize a half dozen, then condensed the cloud into a line and marched most of the nuts back to the bag. I kept a small cloud next to my head. We were an hour removed from lunch and I needed my automatic feeding system in place. I crunched a nut. "I can climb a mountain, eat, and put as many platforms in the air as you could find a use for. I can keep them up for as long as you need to use them. The most weight I ever lifted and held was...was..."
I faked groping in my memory for the number and looked to Neb to fill in the blank. "Nine-hundred-and-twelve tons." She added.
I wanted her to say it so they would believe it. Even then, Cy needed some convincing. "Tons?" he asked, his voice as incredulous as his squinting expression made him look.
"Yeah." I nodded and ate another nut.
"Let's see, that's almost," he lowered his eyes while he did some math in his head, "two-million pounds."
Neb took the wall screen controller from her shirt pocket and activated the display. She ran through some pictures I didn't know she'd taken. The first several were a series of me and the dead poplar tree. The photos showed the entire process from me wrenching it out of the ground to how it ended up as firewood. The next several were of me gathering stone slabs in the quarry. The last were of the quarry before and after I used my white magic to destroy the cliff side and fill the void with rock.
Cy's expression was a slack-jawed blank as he watched the photos flick across the screen. Neb finished the slide show and turned the screen back into a wall. "If you've got him," Cy jerked a thumb at me, "why do you need us?"
Neb explained. "Church is here to destroy whatever is stealing the magic. Our job is to keep him alive long enough to do his job. We clear the way."
Cy ran a flat palm over his head like he was smoothing hair he didn't have. "Sure...clear the way. What if," he tried to move toward the model, but my magic stopped him. He rapped his knuckles against it and I released him. It seemed his amazement at my power took a back seat to the puzzle of the mission. He cupped his chin in his hand as he scrutinized the model. "What about caves or fortifications? If what you said is true, they've had plenty of time to reinforce whatever nature gave them or carve out whatever they wanted. There could be a warren of tunnels and rooms, traps...all kinds of nastiness waiting for us."
"Suggestions?" She asked.
"Pumpkins." The quiet brother offered.
"That's an idea." Cy gripped his chin and leaned down to look hard at the model. "Drop a couple on top, down vents maybe. A couple high explosive PKNs and a couple anti-personnel PKNs; the concussion would be enough to at least disorient. Add an incendiary and job done."
I knocked on the table to get Cy's attention. "What's a pumpkin?"
He stood at ease as he explained. "A PKN, known informally as a pumpkin, is a pyro-kinetic-neutralizer. It's a big grenade, the size of a medium-large pumpkin, with a knub on one end that looks like a stem. The knub is a trigger guard. You unscrew the guard, press a button, and drop or roll the thing away from you. Five seconds later, an explosion equivalent to six sticks of TNT will let your enemies know you mean business."
Cy held his hands out, palms toward each other to approximate the size of a PKN. "That yield is for the high explosive code 105 version. The 107s are anti-personnel. Basically, a high explosive PKN wrapped in a jacket of ball bearings that become shrapnel. The last, the 109, is an incendiary weapon. It's a high explosive wrapped in a jacket of white phosphorous. The explosion ignites the phosphorous and spreads it. It will burn anything it touches and will do so relentlessly. It cannot be extinguished by regular means."
He turned back to the model. "I would say no more than two of each would do the job nicely." Waves of anxiety rolled off Shawn. Cy had been explaining instruments of death and that wasn't sitting well with him. Neb's words about him being the least willing echoed in my head. I was pretty far outside my comfort zone, but Shawn was several miles out of his. I didn't know if addressing it would make things better or worse, so I hedged on the side of caution and kept my mouth shut.
Vulp raised a concern with no extra words. "After..." he waved his right hand in the air in a circular motion that seemed to encompass all the actions of the team, "you do what?" He asked me.
It was one of those questions that brought me up short. The reality of the situation was, I had no idea. No one seemed to know what I was supposed to do. All the efforts had been focused on getting me and my magic to the top of the mountain. Once I was there, the plan seemed to devolve into a blank line. My brain made fun, because it didn't know what else to do. `Step one, get Church up the mountain, step two, _____, step three, celebrate victory.'
Neb, ever prepared Neb, came to my rescue with logic and reason and faith and bullshit. "The prophecy says Church will save us. Actually, it says a `powerful and compassionate man will defeat the ancient evil.' We're in a situation where we don't know the question, but we know the answer is Church's magic." She held her hand up to preemptively silence the objections of the Dux brothers. "I know what you're thinking. You want more information. So do I, but we have no place to get it. We have to take a large portion of this mission on faith, that once we do our job, whatever Church's job is will present itself."
Cy ran his hand over his skull again and shook his round head. "Like the last boss in a video game?" He asked.
Neb nodded but didn't say anything.
The brothers looked at each other and seemed to have a silent dialogue. They turned back to Neb with their answer. Cy continued as the spokesman. "We trust you, Warrant Officer Torolus. What do you need from us?"
Neb thanked them for their support and took up her remote control again. She used it to bring up images of our first skirmish, seemingly taken from the perspective of the enemy, and explained her strategy in greater detail.
We spent the afternoon planning and going over each of our abilities, our strengths, and our weaknesses. It was decided the following day would be a regular training day and the next, a Saturday, would be another skirmish.