Thaumatology 09 - Dragonfall Read online

  ‘He seems to be surviving the experience.’

  ‘Wait until the adrenaline wears off. You ready for yours tomorrow.’

  Cheryl smiled. ‘A walk in the park. You?’

  Ceri smiled back. ‘I think I can wow them enough. Assuming no one blows me up before Thursday.’

  Kennington

  Lily tapped Ceri’s shoulder, drawing her attention to the TV. The presenter was reading from a sheet of paper rather than the teleprompter, which seemed odd.

  ‘Macbay was traveling from the Metropolitan University campus at Holloway to the American Embassy when his vehicle was attacked. Police have stated that he escaped without injury, but one of his Secret Service bodyguards was injured. Witnesses reported gunfire, possibly a sniper. Once again, this just in, Barclay Macbay, scientific advisor to the US President was attacked tonight by an unknown assailant.’

  ‘Crap,’ Ceri said. She started to stand, but Michael was already handing her the phone.

  ‘Mayhew.’ The analyst’s voice sounded stressed even over the phone connection.

  ‘It’s Ceri. How’s Macbay?’

  ‘Lucky. They used a fifty-calibre rifle with anti-armour rounds. Explosive incendiaries. Luckily he had good bodyguards. One of them bundled him out of the burning car, he was burned doing it. They used deflection spells to screen him while they got him to cover.’

  Ceri frowned. ‘Where did they get their hands on that kind of armament?’

  ‘There are only a couple of possible sources. We’ve got people chasing them down now. If I could get back to it…’

  ‘Right,’ Ceri said. ‘Good luck with that.’ She hung up the connection. ‘The roof is off limits without me there to provide cover.’

  ‘High powered rifle?’ Michael asked.

  ‘Fifty-cal anti-tank rifle.’

  His brows knitted and he tapped his chin thoughtfully; it made him look older. ‘Anita mentioned that kind of thing. They’re easily accurate enough that they could fire from the tower blocks. I doubt anywhere else would have a good enough view of the house.’

  Everyone was silent for a second and then Cheryl said, ‘You don’t think they’d be that predictable, do you?’

  ‘We can always hope they are,’ Ceri replied.

  July 11th

  Ceri swept high in the air over Kennington park, black wings carrying her out over the trees before she curved back in a wide loop heading for the nearby tower blocks. It would be dawn soon, but for now she was a black bird swooping through the dark sky and she was pretty sure her opponent, if there was one, would not notice her. If they did, all they were likely to see was a raven.

  Twill had woken them when she sensed someone on the grounds, but the wards had not triggered, indicating that the intruder’s intent was not so dangerous. This time, instead of going out to immediately to check on things, Ceri had gone out alone, transforming in the second kitchen and hopping around to the back of the house, out of sight of the tower blocks before taking to the air. She had seen someone in dark clothes heading for the station, but had ignored them. If they were right, there was easier prey to be had.

  Swinging around the buildings, she came at the two blocks of flats from the opposite side. Sure enough, on the building closest to High Towers, a man was lying with his eye pressed to some form of night vision scope attached to a huge rifle. Beside him a woman knelt with her eye to a telescope. They had all the gear; there was even an anemometer to measure the wind speed attached to some form of computer. Ceri landed on the opposite side of the roof, unnoticed.

  ‘They should have been out by now,’ the woman said. The accent sounded like New York somewhere; northern rather than southern anyway.

  ‘Give them a couple of minutes.’ He had a weird twang to his voice; not southern, but not anything she recognised, even from movies.

  ‘The hit on Macbay was reported in the news. They may be expecting this.’

  ‘There’s a light on in the kitchen. We’ll give them ten more minutes.’

  Ceri half-walked, half hopped to where she had some cover behind the roof’s access structure and reversed her shape shift. Up this high the wind was cold against her bare skin, especially this close to dawn. She looked around the corner of the building, checking the couple for any signs of magic. Considering their world view it seemed unlikely, but you could never be sure without looking.

  ‘I don’t like it,’ the spotter said. She sounded nervous. ‘Put a couple of rounds in through the kitchen windows. Maybe we can burn the place down.’

  The sniper shifted his aim. Ceri was fairly sure of the structural wards, but there was no sense in testing them. Summoning up her power, she stepped around the little, brick hut and raised her hand. The woman keeled over backwards and the man sagged against his rifle. A second later the woman was snoring.

  Grinning, Ceri made the connection to Lily. ‘Get Mayhew over here,’ she thought. ‘I’ve got two people she’ll be dying to talk to.’

  Holloway

  ‘I understand you arrested a couple of my wayward countrymen last night, Doctor Brent?’ The speaker was clearly American, just from the accent which she had been assured belonged to the Bronx. Ceri was not entirely sure where the Bronx was, but she thought it was in New York or Chicago because Barclay Macbay sounded like a gangster. If he were a gangster he would have been one of the ones who wore a smart suit with two-tone shoes, even though the shoes he was actually wearing were just black. He was a slightly younger Carter; charming, attractive in an “aging well” way. There was some silver at his temples, but his body suggested regular workouts; Ceri would have bet he boxed at the local gym.

  ‘Probably the same ones who tried to shoot you yesterday,’ Ceri replied. ‘How’s your guard?’

  ‘Second degree burns to the left shoulder and arm, third degree to the legs. I’m assured he’ll pull through without too much trouble. Thank you for asking.’ They were walking between lectures, probably to the same one since Ceri was heading for Cheryl’s presentation. She was a little surprised the two agents trailing along behind them had allowed Macbay to speak to her. ‘You’re going to Doctor Tennant’s lecture?’ he asked, confirming her suspicion.

  ‘Yes, I know it all anyway, but they haven’t scheduled anything else in my field so I’m lending moral support.’

  Macbay nodded. ‘This one and yours tomorrow are two of the main reasons I’m here. Would you mind if we sat together?’

  The request came out of the blue and Ceri startled a little. ‘No, of course not. I’ll introduce you to Ed. He’s a thaumatology professor from Aberystwyth. Oh, speaking of Wales, how are the President and First Lady?’ It was not that big a leap, Eleanor Wilson, nee Hughes, had Welsh ancestry.

  ‘Well. Mrs Wilson in particular said that I should pass on their regards if we met. The President said I should say that “Katarina was proving a most useful contact.” He’s keeping it moderately quiet at the moment, but he’s initiated talks with the Nations. We may well get to go ahead with that power generation plan.’

  Ceri smiled. ‘Wait until you hear what Cheryl has to say.’ They walked into the auditorium and Ceri spotted Ed near the front waving at her. ‘Ed’s saved me a seat. I suspect we may be able to persuade someone to move for you.’

  As it turned out, there was no need since Ed had managed to fend all-comers away from three seats on the front row. ‘Professor Ed Perry,’ Ceri said as the two men reached for each other’s hands, ‘this is Doctor Barclay Macbay, scientific advisor to the President of the United States. And now you can tell me how you knew to save three seats.’

  Ed smiled at her and sank into a chair on one side of the trio of empty ones. ‘You’re an attractive young woman, Ceri. You were bound to have picked up someone.’

  Ceri slipped into the middle seat. ‘I do not go around picking up random men.’ Macbay sat down beside her wearing an amused grin; his guards watched from the doorway.

  ‘Of course not,’ Ed replied. ‘Why would you restrict your
self to men?’ Ceri opened her mouth to deny his assertion, but he stopped with a raised hand and stated that, ‘Cheryl’s beginning. Hush now.’

  Cheryl’s presentation was in two parts. She spent the first forty minutes going over the design and use of the transducer system she had designed. She showed how the carefully arranged panels of silver-iron could be used to turn thaumic energy into electricity. She even put in a bit toward the end about using them in a circular configuration to maximise the output before moving on.

  You could just tell that everyone was waiting for the second part. There was a tension in the room which grew as she began to finish her talk on the generator. Cheryl looked around at the array of expectant faces and smiled before pressing a button to change the slide on the screen behind her. The new image showed a mass of particle tracks, several of them highlighted in brighter colours.

  ‘This data was collected during the same experiment as the one in which we found solid evidence of the Null Thaumiton.’ Cheryl paused for just the right amount of time before adding, ‘This trail is not, however, a T-Null.’ She switched slides again, this time showing a bank of calculations. ‘What we have here is a fermion with a mass of one-hundred and fifty-one point three TeV. It decayed into a positive and negative thaumiton, and a photon, after three hundred milliseconds. As my colleague, Doctor Brent, put it when I showed her the data, I thought this was a thaumino. Continued analysis has so far only confirmed this suspicion and I’m privileged to be able to give you a first look at the data from MIT’s large collider which has been provided by Doctor Macbay.’

  There was a general murmur of sound from the audience as the next set of slides were clicked through. They ended in another set of equations.

  ‘MIT have confirmed the mass to within three per cent,’ Cheryl said, ‘and we now have some solid figures to punch into the Super-magic Field Theorem equations.’ She flicked on the slide to show a graph. ‘The resulting predictions of thaumic field levels based on variation in the Super-magic field fit levels observed in nature to within zero point zero five per cent.

  ‘Aside from this rather startling indication that we have a good theory and experimental evidence that it fits with the observed energy of the thaumino, we also have some additional, more qualitative, evidence which fits the theory. Doctor Brent was able to observe the T-Null interaction at the edge of a null-magic zone and I did some analysis of what she saw there.’ A new slide went up with some more calculations on it. ‘Right at the edge there was a thin layer of higher thaumic energy. Putting the estimated boundary conditions into the theoretical equations gives us just that kind of result. At the boundary layer, which is about one tenth of a millimetre thick, the calculated energy release raises the level to just over one thaum. We’re hoping that this figure can be confirmed by careful analysis at some point in the future, though the narrowness of the field will require new instrumentation to allow accurate measurements.’

  Cheryl clicked her control button once more and “Questions…” appeared on the screen. Dozens of hands went up and Cheryl smiled. ‘I can see we’re not going to have time for all these. My contact information is in the conference guide if you want to email me questions after. Let me see…’ She pointed at one of the people on the front row.

  ‘Maureen Orson, Newcastle University. You used an artificial ley line to feed into your generator in Holland. How was that created?’

  ‘You’ll want to attend Doctor Brent’s lecture tomorrow. She’ll be going over the process she used to create the tunnel. Make sure you’re well rested, it’s pretty advanced thaumatology.’ She gave Ceri a glance as she said it and Ceri tried her best to shrink out of sight.

  ‘Ben Waterman, MagiTech,’ the next questioner introduced himself. ‘You say that you have observations from a null-magic zone…’

  Cheryl held up her hand. ‘Yes, we have, but I can’t discuss it much. The information is classified, I’m afraid. I can say that the zone was not in Britain. One more…’

  ‘Chelsea Hanford, MIT. Do you think there’s anything else left to discover now that you’ve found the thaumino, Doctor?’

  Cheryl laughed. ‘I hope so. If there isn’t we’re out of a job. Since we’ve found the thaumino, Super-symmetry suggests that there should be analogous heavy versions of the T-Plus and T-Minus bosons. I think the large collider at MIT is going to be the best chance we have of confirming their existence. Those of us without big toys like those will just have to concentrate on working out where they might be and what they might do.

  ‘All right, that’s all we have time for now. Please come to Doctor Brent’s lecture tomorrow. I'm assured that it’s going to be spectacular. Ceri is a practitioner as well as a very good thaumatologist and her presentation is going to be quite unique.’

  People began to get up, but Macbay turned to Ceri. ‘Unique?’

  ‘Yeah, almost unique. You’ll have to come tomorrow and see.’

  ‘Oh, I intend to.’

  Kennington

  ‘No werewolf or succubus tonight?’ Mayhew looked rather relieved about it as she sat in the lounge with Ceri and Cheryl occupying the two wing-backs.

  ‘Lily’s at work,’ Ceri told her, ‘and I sent Michael with her since Cheryl and I are quite safe in here.’

  Mayhew nodded. ‘The two Scientists you apprehended yesterday have given us nothing aside from a mild headache. We confirmed that the rifle was the one used in the attack on Macbay. Fingerprint evidence suggests the sniper was the same man. You made the Secret Service happy.’

  Ceri chuckled. ‘I do that a lot.’

  ‘I read the report on your trip to America. Anyway, we traced our captives’ entry into the country. The sniper came over here two months ago, the spotter three weeks later. We’ve been over all the other passengers on the ships they used and cleared them all. Most have returned to the US.’

  ‘So they’ve been transporting people in for months,’ Cheryl concluded. ‘Never more than one or two at a time. You have no way to find the sniper’s colleagues by following his movements.’

  Mayhew nodded, her expression sour. ‘We did track down their arms supplier. Unfortunately all that got us was a list of what they bought. Just the one rifle, ten pistols, a crate of grenades… and ten pounds of plasticised RDX.’

  ‘They’re building a bomb,’ Ceri stated.

  ‘We’re sweeping the two university sites, and we’ll do the same every day that’s left.’

  ‘The Green Room,’ Cheryl said. ‘The conference dinner is going to be held at the Green Room. Everyone under one roof on Thursday night.’

  ‘Yes, it does seem like a good target. We’ll be checking the building before the event.’

  ‘Cater has pretty good wards on his clubs,’ Ceri said. ‘I can’t believe someone could get a bomb in there.’

  ‘There are ways,’ Mayhew replied. Ceri raised an eyebrow at her. ‘Okay… your wards here work by intention, right? Someone intending to do harm is pushed away?’

  ‘Basically. I can instruct them to allow or deny access to specific individuals regardless, but yes.’

  ‘So, if someone walked in here with a bomb they didn’t know about…’

  Ceri’s brow knitted. ‘That could work. Magic would be detected and blocked, but something mundane could get through.’

  ‘Exactly. These people have a lot of disadvantages without magic. You took two of them out really easily because they simply didn’t know you were coming. But they have some advantages as well. People tend to think of magic as the big danger and protect against it, especially if they’re supernaturals. The government thinks the same way to some extent. They put a huge amount of research into combatting supernatural threats because they aren’t as well understood. Ten pounds of plastic explosive though. It’ll make a big dent in your day.’

  ‘There’s a cheerful thought,’ Cheryl said. ‘I’m going to sleep so well tonight.’

  Holloway, July 12th

  Ceri stood behind the lectern in the lec
ture theatre she had been assigned and waited patiently for the noise to die away. There were a lot of people there. A lot. A year ago she would have been nervous as hell. A year ago she had been nervous and that was after spending hours and hours going over her presentation and making sure everything was perfect. Now she was just going to wing the whole thing and she felt… She narrowed her eyes; they were not calming down quickly enough for her taste. She moved, pulling herself up straight and doing nothing more than calling upon her inner dominatrix. Dressing in a pencil skirt, silk blouse, and heels had clearly been a good move this morning since the room fell into sudden silence as soon as she shifted.

  ‘Thank you all for coming,’ she began. ‘My name is Ceridwyn Brent and I am a Doctor of Thaumatology at LMU. I work with Doctor Cheryl Tennant, currently producing practical applications of her work on the Null Thaumiton. This spring we created a generator system which involved transferring thaumic energy from Hamburg, on the German Rift, to Groningen, in the Dutch Territories, where it was converted to electricity. Yesterday, Doctor Tennant went over the transducer, today I will be explaining the energy transfer system, a sub-membrane tunnel or “artificial ley line.”’

  Ceri allowed the muttering which followed to die away again. Until she had done it, no one had acknowledged the ability to create a ley line. She had seen it done at Stonehenge, probably using demonic magic, but the people who had done it were not about to explain their method.

  ‘Before we start on the actual thaumatology behind the tunnel,’ Ceri went on, her firm voice cutting through the last of the noise, ‘I need to go over some processes and notations which I’ve created specifically for manipulating sub-membrane systems. The structures we are creating operate in six dimensions and I’ve found it useful to create some symbology which identifies common transformations and manipulations.

  ‘The first of these,’ she turned, waving an arm over her head to produce a large, silver glyph which hung in the air above the stage, ‘is this one.’ She had to raise her voice a little to be heard over the sudden chatter. ‘I pronounce it “Opari,” but you’re welcome to make up your own words too.’ She decided to plough on since the audience was amazed at a simple magic trick, but she set her voice a little more sternly and the noise died away again quickly. A twist of her hand, unnecessary, but somehow appropriate, and the glyph shrank and shifted off to one side, while on the other side of the stage a long and complex series of equations began to transcribe themselves into the air. ‘Opari can be transliterated into this field complex transform and it’s used in…’