Chapter 133

  When Michael entered the little room they had reserved for their meeting with the OA scientist, he didn’t think he’d see the man in worse shape than how he had left him after his rampage a few days earlier. After the incident with the chest resulted in several casualties, Michael had visited a few people—namely the general and Dr Kavanaugh, and had worked off his stress using them as target dummies to channel his misplaced rage.

  The action had resulted in the general’s death, and in Kavanaugh becoming little more than a glorified tool for him and Candle Light. Only later did Michael learn of Travis’ manipulation, and by then it was too late to make amends and mend bridges. Now, seeing what was left of the man stand before him like a leaf shook by a strong wind, Michael realized that perhaps he had overdone it with the intimidation. Meanwhile, the death of the general ought to have caused ripples, and Michael had an inkling that retribution was coming soon.

  “Good day, Doctor,” he said, greeting the man with a strained smile.

  The man looked at him and somehow managed to pale ever further, to the point where Michael thought he might need medical attention if his blood kept leaving the important parts of his body to rush who knows where, presumably far away from Michael.

  “H-hello,” the man blurted out.

  “Michael!” snorted Travis, “look what you did to the poor man. He’s barely better than a zombie!”

  Michael frowned, “you’re having way too much fun with this, Travis. Way too much.”

  The man scoffed, but said nothing after a particularly deathly glare was sent his way. Even though one could argue that Travis had only withheld some information because of its dubious source, and the man had certainly tried to argue the case in his favor, the attempt at deception with manipulative goals was so blatant that even someone as shameless as Travis was forced to drop the matter, swallow the loss and admit defeat.

  “You said you have something for us, doctor?” asked Michael, cutting the tense moment short. “Something good enough that you thought you could barter it with the Silver tier, of all things?”

  The man nodded his head furiously, scurrying to the far end of the room to retrieve something from a leather case he had brought with him. His movement were like those of a rodent, Michael thought, a far cry from the man he had met when he had gone to the OA’s headquarters.

  Kavanaugh retrieved a small stack of papers, gave it to Michael, stopped for a moment as if to consider whether he should have given them to Travis first, and then thought better of it and scurried to the far end of the room.

  Michael leafed through the haphazardly stacked papers. There were ink stains, wrinkles and creases in the paper, but he paid them all no mind. All of his attention was focused on the contents of the many papers: diagrams, schematics, equations and text so tightly written it might as well be considered a cypher.

  “What is this?” Travis took the first few sheets as soon as Michael handed them to him, rushing to read what had engrossed his boss so much. He also took pictures, immediately forwarded to the Icarus AI system to digest. The machine was getting better at understanding magic, but it was still unable to actually do anything with its knowledge.

  “Dwarven script…” Michael muttered, while Travis kept leafing through what he was given with an increasingly satisfied expression on his face.

  “The shield dome schematics,” Travis nodded to himself as he kept reading, “just what we needed. Isn’t that right, Michael?”

  Michael didn’t answer at first, instead keeping his head buried in the papers after he had somehow made his way to a chair by the table that Travis could swear had not been there when the had entered the room.

  Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.

  After a moment, Michael realized he had been spoken to and lifted his head up. “That’s right,” he said. “Almost deserves a reward.”

  “Almost indeed,” echoed Travis. “But you didn’t come all this way just to give us some little schematics, did you? Or did you think these would be enough to lift you up to Silver and let you go, just like that?” he said, waving the precious diagrams in the man’s face like they were just some random scrap paper.

  The doctor shrunk away from the man’s face, who had gotten dangerously close to his. “W-what do you mean?”

  Michael frowned. The whole conversation was beginning to sound like something Carmela might have said to Josh rather than something he wanted to be a part of. In fact, he better cut Travis short, he thought.

  “I mean,” Travis said before Michael could interject, pacing around the room. What he said next piqued his interest: “some sources of mine talk about changes in the OA’s hierarchy. You wouldn’t happen to have heard about it, have you?”

  “Yes!” the man was suddenly animated. “Something is going on inside the OA, inside the whole government even. I don’t know the details, but people are talking about a leadership change coming; together with more federal funding. A full militarization, bringing the OA under the governmental umbrella to keep an eye on us.”

  He took a breath, “they want to put some rather scary men in charge. Scarier than you, I’d wager.”

  The man jolted as Travis suddenly banged his fist on the table with enough force to rattle the room.

  “Travis!” roared Michael. “Enough games.”

  The man in question looked at him in the eye, “when did this rat think he could grow a spine, eh?” he turned to Kavanaugh, “you say there are scary men up top, but we are right here! Don’t think for a moment that you can hide behind your new bosses. You can’t. He marked you, isn’t that right, Michael?”

  Michael sighed, “please continue, doctor. You were saying?”

  The man gulped. “The general is gone. Transferred, they say, but I know better. He’s dead, and if someone can get to him, then they can get to anyone of us.”

  Michael and Travis shared a meaningful look, one that also told Travis to stay silent.

  “We can protect you. By granting you the power of Silver, for instance, and the ability to hide such power so that you won’t get caught and cut open.”

  “That’s enough, Travis. Before we proceed, Kavanaugh, where the fuck did the OA get their hands on this technology? Are you sure this is what they were using to create the dome?”

  The air was suddenly heavy.

  Kavanaugh was looking equal parts frightened and confused. “What do you mean?” he asked, voice small and pathetic like that of an evil man who knew he had found people far worse than he could have ever been.

  “This is dwarven circuitry!” roared Michael, then toned it down when he realized that he was acting just like he didn’t want Travis to act. “How did the OA get it? Do they have dungeons?”

  “Dungeons?”

  Travis shook his head, “he doesn’t know what they are, Michael.” Then he turned to Kavanaugh. “How long has the OA had this tech?”

  “Years,” said the man, looking at the ground and struggling not to fidget with his sweaty hands, “but they only managed to condense enough magic to make it work in the last year or so. I was part of the team tasked with finding an alternate source of it. That’s why we were watching you.”

  “Alright,” nodded Michael. “You won’t have to worry about petty things such as this once we make you a Silver.

  ***

  “Do you know the new leadership?” Michael asked Travis after they left, leaving Kavanaugh alone with an instance of Icarus.

  After the initial shock had worn off, and Kavanaugh realized that with an AI such as Icarus there would be nowhere on the planet where he could hide should he try anything funny such as lying to the AI itself, he had been instructed to talk to the machine about all the minutiae neither Travis nor Michael had time to hear about. The AI had listened in on the earlier conversation, and would be using it to start asking questions.

  Interestingly, the doctor seemed more at ease talking to Icarus than he had been with Michael and Travis in the room. Too bad he had no idea his instructor for reaching Silver would be Johanne, or he wouldn’t be so relaxed. She was still a False Silver despite her best efforts at integrating elements into her aura, and she would use the time spent tutoring the man to try and come up with insights on the elements to make the last step into True Silver.

  “I have a hunch and some scattered information,” said Travis.

  “It’s like there are two opposing forces pulling the strings at the same time, am I on the right track?”

  Travis took a deep breath. Far away, wispy clouds were gathering as the day drew to an end, their milky whiteness replaced by oranges, reds and violets.

  “More than just two forces, Michael. It goes all up to the white house. There’s us, there’s the agencies—with the president weak as he is, they have a lot of sway—then there’s the lobbies and there is at least one other major player. Whoever is behind this, they are going to become a huge thorn in our side, and they are not the only one. We might have to shift gears, go into battle mode.”

  “Aren’t we always in battle mode?” wondered Michael.

  At the horizon, the clouds rumbled.