Chapter Four — Fire-starting
The war was big and old, something Isaac knew intellectually, but the feedback from his talent crystallized that into something concrete. An ancient locomotive, seized and rusty, that his power was oiling and polishing in a bid to convince it to move once again. It was such an enormous thing that simply trying to brute-force change might not properly work — if esoteric conceptual manipulation could be considered brute force. His initial efforts seemed to have little effect, just trying to affect the war entire.
Fortunately, he’d had time to think and practice. Not that there was anything fancy about his approach, since it was just a modified version of what he’d done with physical inertia when he needed some more oomph. Breaking it up into different pieces and applying his power to each of them.
So it wasn’t merely the war itself that he was making less resistance to change, but also the concepts of the stalemate, of status quo, and anything else he could think of that would have an effect. Even things that weren’t directly related, like the emotional temperature of the moon, though the actual success he had in affecting things varied. The demuto signaled when he’d latched onto something of substance, which meant he could just try whatever popped into his head – or Sarah suggested – and check it off as valid or not.
“Maybe territory?” Sarah hazarded. The two of them had been shown to a small suite after the altercation in the war room, something obviously converted over to handle Shay and Astoria given the difference in architecture and rune placement. Even on the moon, renovations had a distinct look about them.
“I mean, it’s not really a territorial thing, though,” Isaac said, writing it down despite his doubts. They’d had a little bit of discussion before coming to the moon, but it was too abstract for them to really grapple with before they’d arrived. “I honestly thought it was near side and far side from what I heard about it growing up, though.”
“It’s only not a territory thing if we believe Lia and her granddad,” Sarah pointed out. “I mean, I don’t think she’s lying to us, but that’s exactly the sort of excuse that you’d hear from the side that has the most to lose if they were to give territory.”
“So, need to talk to someone on the other side before I try adjusting that,” Isaac concluded. “Which might not make Lia happy, but that’s not why we’re here, so.” He shrugged and made another note. “I really wish I could alter the runes. Given that it’s all about rune differences, that’d be a great way to resolve the civil war without any bloodshed.” It was a pointless complaint, but it really frustrated him since he had thought it was such a good idea at first.
It had occurred to him to do for everyone what he’d done for Sarah, and make it easier for people to change their minds about runes. Pick a side, and make it harder to go one way than the other. But that was the way the Tyrant would do it, and he wasn’t like that. He didn’t want to control minds for many, many reasons, nor could he reach so many people at once with so fine a control. He wasn’t tempted by the idea and found it more a passing thought, easily rejected.
“If it were easy, it’d be done already,” Sarah said, kicking her feet idly as she lounged crossways on a moonie-size couch. The gravity was so low it actually bounced her into the air, which Isaac found more than a little adorable. “Or maybe a rune change is the reason the split happened in the first place?”
“Could be,” Isaac admitted, tapping his pencil on his notebook. He was glad that they weren’t even trying to resolve things in the conventional, diplomatic way. Not only was he completely unqualified for it, but it wasn’t clear it was even possible. At least, with words alone.
In a way, their theorizing was less about finding something specific to do as it was to distract him from the reality of what his power application was actually doing. The confrontation in the war room was a concrete demonstration of the effects, and what kind of chaos might be happening elsewhere because he dared place his finger on the weighing scale of reality. Causing the kind of problems that he’d sworn he would try to prevent.
If it weren’t for the fact that the civil war was already a mess, he would not be bold enough to try. People would probably die because of him, but people were already dying because of the war. Even when he was a kid he could look up at the dark or crescent moon and see flashes – not all the time, but occasionally – of the conflict going hot. Something powerful enough to see from earth wasn’t just pretty lights.
No matter what happened, he’d be blamed for all the ills that occurred once he began changing things, and while that was fair, ending the war was still something that had to be done. Or rather, it didn’t have to be, but it should be, and he was one of the few people with the ability to do it. While he still didn’t consider himself a hero, he couldn’t help think of his discussions with Zys when it came to such things.
Use you power, put your mark in every place your heart tells you — or else you will be less. It was a very ikiski way of putting it, but it still stuck in his head. Isaac dropped his pencil to rub at his temples, before discarding the useless woolgathering. He’d already thought it over and made his decision, so all that remained was to actually do the job.
“In the same vein of not making Lia happy, we are going to need a contact for the royalist-only places so we can intervene there,” Isaac said after a moment. “And I don’t think that finding some random guy is going to work.”
“Shouldn’t Lia’s granddad know someone like him on the opposite side? Not wanting to win the war, just stopping it?” Sarah suggested.
“Definitely worth an ask,” Isaac agreed. “But a thought occurred to me. Doesn’t Mechaniacal have a property on the moon?”
Sarah levered herself up from her sitting position to look at him, the movement actually flipping her head over heels in the low gravity and making her grab at the couch to try and right herself. Isaac half-rose to try to help her, but the flailing tangle of limbs turned to smoke and flowed back to the couch as Sarah sat primly, like nothing happened. Isaac couldn’t help but grin at the sight before joining her on the couch; Sarah had definitely gotten into the habit of casual power use, instead of just reserving it for combat. Or crowds.
“Are you seriously considering approaching him?” Sarah asked, her smoke mask firmly back in place. “I mean, even assuming we can find him, I would have thought that the one interaction was enough.”
“He was less bad than I thought,” Isaac said. “Terrifying, sure, but not unreasonable, to the point where I kind of get where he’s coming from. If anything, I figure he’d appreciate knowing that I’m messing around in his back yard.”
“Sure, but what if he tells us to stop? Better to beg forgiveness than to ask permission, and all that,” Sarah pointed out.
“Then we have some tough decisions to make,” Isaac admitted. “But that all assumes we can find and get to Mechaniacal’s place. Unless they have teleporters on the moon, we’re limited to raptor-speed.”
“We’ve never seen how fast they can go, though.” Sarah grinned in a rare moment of expressiveness, bouncing in place and once again sending herself into the air. A quick ripple of smoke brought her back down to the couch. “Which we’re going to need to know if we’re going to be helping anyone and not just holing up here.”
“Speaking of which.” Isaac checked the time, having sprung for an actual watch now that he had some income, one of the fancy models featuring multiple adjustable dials. Moon time was confusing but he was pretty sure he’d set up the accessory correctly. “We’ve probably waited long enough. I refuse to believe that nothing else is happening, not when I can feel things shifting against my talent.”
“I’m surprised you’re willing to be so suspicious of Lia,” Sarah prodded, scooping up her notebook and a smaller-model dictaphone. “Given that you worked with her.”
“Well, this is personal, and people can make bad decisions when it’s personal,” Isaac replied. “I mean, look at me with Glorybeam and Blacktime. So I’d be surprised if she were…” He paused, chewing over his words. “Objective? Unbiased? Advocating against her own interests, anyway.”
“Now that sounds like what you’d learn in a gang,” Sarah said. “But phrased more like Mom would say it.”
“Foster care was a little bit that,” Isaac admitted. “Now don’t get me wrong, Dolores did her absolute best, but when you have a bunch of kids with limited resources and not enough supervision, some of these things just pop up.”
“Huh,” Sarah said, squinting at him a moment. “I think that explains some things.” He was going to ask what she meant before she flipped her hand in the direction of the door. “Lia incoming.”
Isaac paused, turning to look in that direction before Lia walked in the door. He gave it at least a fifty percent chance she had been listening in thanks to her runes, though it wasn’t like he and Sarah had been trying to hide their conversation. Amusingly, Lia didn’t seem to have quite readjusted to the low gravity, still bouncing a bit rather than sliding like most moonies did.
“Our contacts in the city of Senliera have requested help,” Lia said without preamble. “Meister Calochon has agreed to scribe speed runes on our mounts to ensure we can travel there in a reasonable amount of time.”
“Great,” Isaac said, more than a little eager to be off. He felt it’d be far too easy to get stuck in the high perspective, the Tyrant’s viewpoint, completely disconnected from what he was doing. Whether or not he could keep himself linked to the war without engaging, he needed to see and hear things for himself just to know what was going on and what he was doing.
A thought sent through the bracelet called Shay from the makeshift stables, the raptor opening the door – something she’d gotten very good at – and padding in with a questioning rumble. Isaac replied with the thought of going out flying again, and she chirped cheerfully, bouncing over with a front flip to land next to him. Clearly, she enjoyed the acrobatics possible in the low gravity.
Astoria wasn’t far behind, with Lia’s raptor bringing up the rear. Through the translator rune he’d finally gotten the name of Norastra for Lia’s mount, but it was purely through the rune so of course he hadn’t known it before. While Astoria was just as exuberant as Shay, Norastra seemed as subdued as Lia was. For some reason that seemed appropriate, but he sure wasn’t going to comment.
Meister Calochon strode in only a few moments later. The old moonie might have walked with a little bit of a shuffle to his sliding steps, but he still had a serious amount of power. Isaac didn’t need to be able to use runes to tell that much. Calochon conjured three identical, complex sigils from nothingness, the figures shining in the air for a moment before etching themselves very discreetly onto a small portion of the raptor’s barding. The translator told Isaac that the meaning of the runes was something like celerity, efficiency, endurance, so calling it a speed rune was reductive. It was a travel rune, all-inclusive.
“Alright, Shay, let’s see how this works.” Isaac hopped up onto the saddle with one bound, grabbing onto a handy projection to keep from overshooting, while Sarah just turned to smoke and appeared atop Astoria. Lia mounted up last, after seeing Meister Calochon off, then led them outside through a door that was similar to the beaded-curtain effect from the teleporter. It seemed everything on the moon was a rune projection of some sort; he had yet to see any mechanical devices at all. Even wheels.
Isaac patted Shay’s neck, and the raptor crouched before leaping into the air, the crystalline panels extending fully as she lowered her head. Instead of the playful glide from before, this was the mode for serious speed, with the crystaltech barding shifting to form a small windshield as Isaac crouched behind it. A series of rising tones came from Norastra, mimicked a half-second later by Shay and Astoria, before the raptor suddenly shot forward.
With a thrum, Shay followed, the world actually blurring in a powerful surge of speed. On the ground, Shay could match highway speeds, but in the air she had to be going at least two or three hundred miles per hour. The roar of the wind faded as the barding adjusted to the speed, blue energy coating the sapphire wing panels and leaving a pair of colored contrails behind him. Ahead of him, he could glimpse that Shay’s helmet had extended down to cover her eyes and nose.
“This is a heck of a ride,” he said, keying a channel to Sarah through the barding. Astoria appeared to his right, matching pace with Shay.
“Yeah! Probably won’t ever get to do something like this on Earth,” Sarah said. Given the number of hazards between cities, he was compelled to agree. The dinos might be fast, but they’d still be swatted out of the sky by the living hurricanes or nightmare tears that made the skies so dangerous.
“Activating the runes.” Lia’s voice cut through on a different channel, and Isaac tightened his grip despite the crystaltech protections. A moment later they suddenly were going even faster, not quite supersonic but more than fast enough to render any attempt to understand nearby landscape impossible. They were forced to rise higher in the sky just to avoid accidentally slamming against any stray hill or peak, cutting through the wind currents as if they weren’t there at all.
A rolling cloudbank, more of a looming foggy wall than a proper floating cloud that Isaac was used to, seemed to appear from nowhere before it flashed past them in a moment of blurry dampness and then they were out the other side. Glancing back, he could see roiling holes where they’d punched through, the wake from their passage pulling out long tendrils of cloudstuff, trying in vain to catch up with them. He caught the sight of a perfectly circular lake glinting in the sun, with pale pastel coral towers and what seemed to be a sprawling park on an island in the middle, before it flashed past and was behind them.
It was a shame they were there on business, because Isaac would have loved to see more of what the moon had to offer. To wander through some of the streets and parks and just take in the sights. He couldn’t help but think of the Deep Kingdoms, and how they’d had a similarly restricted view of things, though they weren’t yet on the run. They were restricted mostly by having real work to do, but since they weren’t in hiding, it might be possible to clear out a few moments here and there to enjoy the local color.
Shay’s glee at their speed bled over the bracelet connection, as well as impressions of how the raptor was navigating. Mostly it seemed to be directions from Norastra, who was presumably getting them from Lia. Isaac did have a map of the moon packed away in his saddlebags, but it was a lot easier to just follow someone who knew the terrain.
Once or twice Lia guided them around a flying lunarian, there and gone, flashing past in an instant. Isaac knew that Moonblast could fly, and quite quickly at that given that she visited the Five City Alliance on a regular basis, but clearly nobody else was up to the task of intercepting or pursuing three raptors zipping along at something near the speed of sound. At those speeds, it only took minutes to reach their destination, bypassing settlements, highways, lakes, and mountain ranges to fetch up at a true city, something large enough to hold tens of thousands of moonies instead of the small town they’d been at before.
Isaac could practically feel whatever damping field it was keeping him from being thrown from the saddle as Shay slowed down to wing down toward the city at a more reasonable speed. Able to finally rise from his crouched position, he saw a spread of towers in soft blues and purples, spindly things that seemed like they’d fall over in a stiff breeze and joined together by spindly skyways. Highways in the sky that curved and split, ramps rising up and down to create a filigreed lattice between colored buildings.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t something they could just sit back and enjoy, because flashes of light and plumes of smoke interrupted the picturesque look of the city. If it were Star City, he would have called it a super-fight, but the moon wasn’t like Earth, and a conflict of that magnitude was far more serious. As Shay dove closer, he got a glimpse of people running for cover, hiding from the sudden flashpoint.
In that moment, what he was doing crossed from a known abstraction to a concrete reality, hitting him in the gut with the knowledge that he’d be dealing with a civil war, in all its horrors, until it was ended. Brother against brother, parent against child, the terrible dense nightmare of urban combat made even worse by spellcasting and ancient artifacts. Nothing worse than what had been going on for ages, perhaps, but he had chosen to enter it and so he had chosen to take responsibility for this mess.
A mess that he was going to have to clean up.
He held tight to Shay’s saddle as they dived down toward the city, reaching out with his power to try and latch onto the firefight. They would have to get involved, but that was an inevitability. They were there, and a trio of flying strangers was hardly subtle. Someone was going to take a potshot at them, if nothing else. This was going to be what he did for the next few days or maybe even weeks, cleaning up after himself.
Isaac set his jaw and plunged into the firefight.
***
Professor Mechaniacal hummed along with the theme tune to the new, animated adaptation of Dirk Noire, Private Eye, keeping half an eye on the television as he assembled a brand new Frank the Bartender — a joke from a prior universe, the reference sadly lost in this one. He did so enjoy his Old Fashioneds, but there were some new drinks that had appeared in the past few decades and it would be just wrong if Frank didn’t know how to make them. Also, his former bartender-bot was more or less attached to Point Archimedes, which he had temporarily sent several dozen degrees out of phase with the material universe until he decided what to do with it.
It was hard to drink dimensionally-altered liquor. He’d tried. The 307 Ale was interesting, but a bit much for a casual sip. One hundred fifty three and one-half percent alcohol required either a particular frame of mind or something really worth celebrating.
More immediately relevant, he was going to start distilling spirits out of his lunar wine, and that needed special handling. It actually required runic containment to store and process properly, something about the magic influencing the fermentation and aging process in a delightful puzzle that he was going to enjoy working through.
The soft chime of an alert sounded from elsewhere in his mansion — notification only, not urgent. Most of the lunar structure remained unaltered, stylish as it was, with the majority of his new equipment being relegated to basements and subbasements dug into the regolith. Still being dug, in fact, with some equipment borrowed from his tower, but he had put in a sub-ether relay tower for close communication with Earth. And television and radio, plus a projector for movies during the long lunar night. The sensor suite was almost an afterthought, but as important as it ever was.
He finished assembling the hand servos, wiping oil from his fingers with a rag before closing the chassis and taking the short walk to the display alcove. The alert there showed that something had – just barely – tripped the probability manipulation alarm. Such things were always difficult to measure, though he had refined his design after study of Hartson’s powers.
Whatever was causing it was minor and subtle, though that was no indicator of being weak when it came to reality alteration. Unfortunately, many things could trip such an alert — certain lunarian magic, a few types of artifice he was aware of and surely many he wasn’t, even the passage of extradimensional beings. The last was normally very uncommon, but did become more likely in the space between crystal spheres, and the moon’s protections from such influence were not as robust as Earth’s.
He turned a few dials and depressed a few buttons, looking for a greater insight, but his sensors were not, unfortunately, omniscient and could only detect the influence as existing. Small as it was, Mechaniacal thought it prudent to activate some of his defenses just in case. There were, after all, plenty of people who held a grudge with him for one reason or another, and such an influence could be an early warning sign.
Certain engines buried deep in the subbasement spooled to life, lovingly crafted cogs rotating as they woke hidden mechanisms around his estate. At the same time, a hatch opened and released a few score drones that were customized for the moon. He had always found repulsors rather gauche and much preferred the mechanical simplicity of skyhooks, but those took a bit more work to implement in lunar space.
A smaller hatch elsewhere on the property released an entirely different kind of drone, one that mimicked a native pollinator. Something between a bat and a butterfly, far slower but infinitely more stealthy, the mechanical biomimicry at a level where most people wouldn’t even notice that the blood was based on oil rather than maer.
The overt drones had surveillance and defense, and served their purpose, but more than that they provided any potential adversary with exactly what they expected to see. If his classic spherical drones were missing, of course anyone trying to infiltrate would be suspicious, but with overt surveillance it was far less likely anyone would notice the covert version.
Rotating a wheel-lock, he opened up the sensor tank and stepped inside, perusing surveillance that went both deep and wide. Not that he had the entire moon or, for that matter, the Earth seeded with observation devices. That was unnecessary, and would be exhausting besides. Rather, he had a few strategically placed listening posts here and there, and relied on something that was almost scrying to warn him of any true trouble spots — reality itself.
Mechaniacal was, after all, a traveler of both time and dimensions.
There were no precise metaphors for how a timeline worked, though some had likened it to a boiling river, others to a scavenging hawk, and still others to a thinking being. For himself, he saw it as a great mining machine, working away at the coal face of the future. There was a great froth of possibilities around it, chewing away at unrealized reality to turn it into the present, and while this could not predict any single event, there was still an impression of trajectory and position. Some parts of the coal face were richer, others poorer, and some places were so far away that they would never be reached.
That was about where the metaphor broke down, however, since there were the shadow realities to consider. Static reflection of paths not taken, they were constant companions no matter how the timeline twisted and turned; sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, bound in orbit around their parent. It was not uncommon for the mining machine to trend in the direction of one or the other as circumstances changed, but when the trajectory shifted to clearly aim at one it was cause for at least moderate concern.
Not more than that, though. He wasn’t going to make that mistake twice; as he had so often ruminated, he was as much a piece as a player and overreaction could cause fairly catastrophic spirals. If he reacted every time a super contemplated an intrusive thought, he could force that thought into reality. Action was what mattered, not probability.
“Looks like the civil war is heating up, then,” he muttered to himself as he examined the zvinth-dimensional display. There was movement toward the shadow reality with the ruined moon, shattered and flaming, its crystal sphere cracked and off-kilter. A terrible thing, really, but Mechaniacal doubted it would ever truly come to pass. Not since Moonblast had gone to Earth — something he would have liked to take credit for, but it was truly not his doing at all. Other people were, in fact, entirely capable of exercising good judgement.
The probability shift was clearly related to the drift of future events, but whether as cause, effect, or something so deeply entrained that it was pointless to differentiate between the two. Yet, anyway. Fortunately he didn’t need to know such things in order to react to them, so he entered a series of commands on a keypad to activate certain defenses.
Regolith rumbled briefly as turrets rose from the ground — not simply around his manor, but also around the nearby town that the former prison was attached to. It wouldn’t do to just protect himself, though he was aware that the civil war made even simple defense complicated. Nonlethal was preferred since he’d likely be targeting people inside the town, people he knew, but it was difficult when lunarians were so physically frail while having potent magical defenses.
It was a fun challenge, but also a necessary one. He’d personally seen lunarians beaten to death by a crowd of their fellows when emotions ran hot, which was something he’d prefer to avoid in the place where he got most of his local supplies. Not that he could do anything about the actual basis of the strife, not without something extraordinarily tiresome like conquering the moon himself.
For now, Mechaniacal was content to let things play out as they would. After the reinforcement to the Orrery, he was confident there wouldn’t be anything that rose to the level of world-threatening. Not without counter-forces, at least.
With any luck, nothing would interrupt his retirement.
***
Ichabod frowned at his electrostatic canvas, not entirely pleased with the rendition he’d made of the palace in the distance. Part of it was simply his lack of practice, but mixing colors that actually captured the subtle variations of color used by lunar architecture was a challenge unto itself. He was having better luck painting on lunarian-sourced canvas, which was dark rather than light. Even lunarian books had black pages, made from some native plant, to contrast the inherent silver that any proper rune took on.
“End of record three, side A. To continue, please turn the disc over now.” Ike’s microvinyl recorder clicked and whirred as it automatically changed sides, but he was only half-listening to the mystery to begin with. The Case of the Drowned Gill-Man was set in the Sunken City, and it didn’t take more than a couple chapters to realize the author had never actually been there, so he could take it only so seriously.
His contemplations were interrupted by a warbling siren in the distance. By reflex, his hands went to certain controls on his chair, but of course they weren’t his sirens and he wasn’t anywhere he could do anything about it. Instead he took a moment to sort through his memories of what the various alerts actually meant to figure out whether he should be concerned.
Not a citywide evacuation alarm, but not an individual alert like the equivalent to an ambulance or fire truck. After a moment he placed it as one of the tones relating to the civil war, which was a little concerning since he was stuck on the moon barring a serious issue. But on the other hand, maybe it was a surprise that there hadn’t been anything like it in the past few days — as much as Aristarchus Island was at a far remove from anywhere contentious, nobody on the moon was totally uninvolved.
Ichabod had certain protections, of course, and the villa had its own defenses, but it was unlikely that the war would actually reach him directly. Still, it was irksome. Of course his vacation would be interrupted by someone else’s problems, that was just the way the world worked.
His fingers moved to a different set of controls on his chair and hovered there indecisively. With Machine Head’s comms, he could technically reach out to Earth, but it was really meant for emergencies only. Something that happened all the time and really was unlikely to affect him directly was not, in fact, an emergency. It was an expected side-effect of where he was, so after a moment he withdrew his hand and went back to trying to focus on his painting.
It wouldn’t be a vacation if he interrupted it for every minor incident. He just hoped that the minor incidents wouldn’t turn into major ones.