Chapter 26: Master Baiter (Patreon)

***2 months ago, on a microscopic level***

A glimmer of gold Myst manifested, seemingly from nothing. If one were capable of standing in the fifth dimension, they would have been able to perceive it’s movement through the fourth, from the moment Queen Mab made a statement in the present.

“The paragon of humanity will be delivered to me, and Jebediah Trapper will not realize until it has been done.”

the Myst exploded outward from her, shooting backward through the block universe, rapidly diminishing as it traveled along the fourth dimension, like a salmon dying as it swam upstream.

By the time it reached where it was going, it only had a microscopic amount of energy. Plenty to change the future.

It bound to a tiny fungus spore, protecting it, nurturing it, and changing it in subtle ways. The spore was buried by fallen leaves in the shade of a boulder, where the wind naturally piled up the detritus.

The spore spread its mycelium through the dead plant matter, carrying nutrients back to a central core, several egg-like structures that slowly grew as the days went by, until they were finally mature.

A cluster of stinkhorn mushrooms grew from the ground, shaded and hidden by the boulder, releasing the faint smell of carrion into the air around a corpse that had been pinned on the opposite side by of the rock by fairy lords mere hours into the fungus’s maturity.

The fungus bore silent witness as the subtly disfigured men stooped to pick up the squalling infant before silently vanishing into the woods, engulfed by the forest.

It did not know it had served the fairy queen’s purpose and literally thrown Jebediah Trapper off the scent. It simply released its spores and withered to nothing over the next few hours.

***Queen Mab***

I always did have a way with mushrooms, Mab thought, waving away her scrying as Jeb launched himself off on a fool’s errand for that petty mortal emperor.

She didn’t hold it against him. Like a dead-end job in food service, doing odd jobs for men in large chairs was just part of growing up…assuming you lived long enough.

Eventually her progeny would outgrow it as he came into his own. Assuming he survived.

He looks so much like him…it’s infuriating.

Mab reoriented her thoughts as her retainers phased into her bedroom, carrying the object of her heart’s desire.

“Oh, dear child,” She crooned, plucking the human spawn out of her retainer’s arms. “You’re safe now, don’t worry.”

Now, meaning in the present moment the girl is safe. In the future? Who knows.

“Did those mean, smelly undead hurt you?”

The one-year human old child looked her in the eye and opened her mouth.

“maaam aaa uuu ouu eeaauu ee too daaa paaa aaa maaa mamma, daaa wooo bee maa apaa.”

*Madam, if you would return me to the palace, and my mother, that would be much appreciated.

Mab blinked. I think I need to use more advanced tactics than expected. Still, no matter how bright a one-year old was, there was a dearth of experience.

“Casey, darling, I would return you to the palace, but it’s just so dangerous there, and I’m not even talking about the smelly women. I mean the emperor.”

“Da Empaaa? Haa reee maa ooriii”

*The Emperor? He reads me stories.

“I’m not denying that, but have you ever wondered what your mother’s job is? And why she does it?”

“saaataaa.”

*sometimes.

“Allow me to teach you,” Mab said with a carefully crafted smile. Thousands of test babies preferred ‘motherly, but not too manic’.

***Jebediah Trapper***

Going shopping for massive satellites in the bones of old labs was a sobering experience.

The temples to the pinnacle of human technology were abandoned, gathering rust and a thick layer of grime. Doors and cabinets were jimmied open by desperate looters, looking for anything that could help them survive the famine that had gripped the continent.

Jeb hefted a high tech battery that could power a house for a lifetime, then tossed it aside.

I think I’ve become numb to the coolness. He thought glancing around at the weathered industrial setting.

Robots, lasers, nuclear power, special solar panels and foil designed to ward off the intense radiation of the sun. All of it was the sort of thing he’d be drooling after when he was a kid.

Now…it was just a pile of junk. The infrastructure to make it cool no longer existed. There was no space programs, no cell phones or countries to spy on.

No astronauts.

Jeb’s gaze caught on a tank labeled O2. It was as tall as him, wired into a robotic oxy-acetelyne torch about the size of a volkswagon.

“Score.”

The tank was secured to the machine with some kind of proprietary nut, but Jeb simply grabbed the nut and yanked it out of the machine with overwhelming force. He picked up the tank with his Myst and sloshed it experimentally, feeling for the movement. There was definitely enough liquid oxygen to last someone a long-ass time.

Item acquired.

Although to be fair, there’s plenty of gear here to get the entertainment center working at the orphanage.

“Borg.”

“Eh?” Borg asked from across the room.

“Tell Eddie he needs to loot this place. It’s got a thousand things he could- HEY, GET OFF THAT!” Jeb shouted at Smartass, who was climbing on a pile of titanium scrap directly above some kind of grinding machine.

“Oh, come on, the power’s off. I’m sure it’s completely sa-AAAII!”

A pole loosened in Smartass’s grip, sending her tumbling down the pile, dozens of pieces of sharp titanium scrap metal falling down after her.

Her wing jammed itself into the grinder, preventing her from moving away as the pil of scrap collapsed down around her.

Jeb snapped his hand out, his body following his mind, which reached out and surrounded his familiar with a bubble of force.

Jeb held everything in place for a moment to make sure nothing else was going to happen, then he started carefully unburying Smartass and extracting her from the pile of scrap metal.

“God, how on Earth did anyone in your species ever survive to maturity?” Jeb asked aloud as he pulled her out. Was Mab just the luckiest being on the planet or was it just a numbers game?

Smartass was sitting on the bottom of the bubble of force, running her fingers over her wing, which had been crumpled up by the fall.

“I miss my wings.” She said, her face morose.

“You still have your wings.” Jeb said.

“They’re terrible now!” she said. “I can’t even fly. I tried to fly when I fell just now and it did nothing! I’m too fat and heavy and they’re not growing with me, like some kind of stunted limb!”

Crack.There was a soft crack, like someone had someone had broken a piece of peanut brittle in the distance.

The crumpled section of Smartass’s wing fell off.

Smartass’s jaw dropped, lips forming a big ‘O’, eyes popping out of her skull. Jeb couldn’t help but see the resemblance to a stunned chimpanzee.

Having known the fairy for a long time, Jeb decided to spare himself, and put his hands over his ears pre-emptively. The screaming was much more tolerable than it might have been otherwise.

“I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die!” Smartass shouted, trying to stem the bleeding from the veins in her wings by pinching them off.

“You’re not gonna die,” Jeb said, taking his hands off his ears once Smartass had finished hyperventilating, looking a little woozy. “Let me get a look at it.”

He pried Smartass’s unwilling fingers away from her wing-tip and really looked at it.

There was only a tiny bit of blood at the tip where the wing had broken away.

With a bit more study, Jeb figured out what was going on.

She’s losing her baby teeth. Jeb though, eyeballing the subtle line of dying tissue around the base of each of the wing. The veins leading to the wings had closed off already, it was only a matter of time before the wings fell out the rest of the way. There might be a little bit of blood and healing afterward, but it was all natural, and nothing to be worried about.

“You want the good news or the bad news?”

“Bad news,” she said, glancing over her shoulder at him.

“Your wings are gonna fall out.”

Smartass inhaled a sharp gasp.

“That’s terrible news! I need my wings!”

“I mean, if you have enough Myst, you can fly that way…”

“That’s for humans and other dumb plebians. I can’t believe I’m a land-bound dummy now. What did I do to deserve this!? It isn’t fair!”

“You want the good news?”

“How could there be ANY good news!?”

Jeb started to speak, but the fairy held up a finger.

“Give me another couple minutes to complain.”

Jeb returned to scanning the laboratory for a while as Smartass unleashed a torrent of creative cursing that skirted the edge of outright lies.

“Found a telescope that matches the specs Eddie sent, but it’s got a cracked lens, it’s missing some of the hardware it would need, and some of the wires have been cut for some reason. I think looters took a battery out of it, and they weren’t exactly experts.”

“Put it in the ‘maybe’ pile,” Jeb said, barely able to hear himself over the sound of Smartass’s bawling. Maybe Borg was just reading his lips, because the undead nodded and began dragging the humungous telescope into the pile of ‘possibles’.

After a couple minutes of wailing, Jeb had had enough.

“Do you want the good news or not?”

Smartass sniffled, wiping away a tear.

“Sure. I guess. But there’s nothing you could possibly say that would cheer me up.”

“There’s nothing wrong with you. Losing your wings seems to just be a part of maturing into your next life stage as a fairy. Like when kids lose their baby teeth.”

“So, what you’re saying is,” She sniffed away a bit of snot. “Me losing my wings means I’m better than all the other fairies with wings?”

Fairies grow with Impact and not time, objectively Smartass is measurably more powerful than a winged fairy so… “…sure.”

“Wow.” Smartass brightened. “Wow! I’m better than them! Whoo!” She stood up and pumped her fists in the air. “Eat that, Leaf-Burrito! I’m better than you!” Smartass began moonwalking across the dusty linoleum.

“I thought you said nothing I could say would cheer you up.”

“That was true when I said it!” Smartass said. “It’s no longer when I said it, is it?”

“That is a really short half-life for a fact.”

“Eh, emotions fluctuate really fast.”

“Yours do, anyway,” Jeb said as Smartass moonwalked around him.

“Hey Jeb! I got something here!” Borg called.

Jeb grunted, diverting his attention to the dilapidated door Borg was waving him from.

The undead cyborg was standing where a metal door had been previously, the advanced locking system long since defunct. He’d torn the door straight off it’s hinges, allowing him access to a part of the lab that hadn’t been looted yet.

Jeb carefully walked around the muppet-sized moonwalker so as not to trip on her dance moves and crush her.

Jeb crossed the manufacturing section of the laboratory until he passed through the oversized doors Borg had motioned him from.

“What do you think that is?” Borg asked when Jeb arrived, pointing at a wooden crate the size of a small bus resting on a defunct forklift the size God might use. On the side were the stamped the initials D.O.D. in massive black letters. Underneath that was an address in smaller stamped letters.

Vandenberg Space Force Base, California.

“Paydirt.”

Without a motion, Jeb reached out with his Myst and tore the pressboard sides of the box apart, leaving a massive cylindrical object strapped to a pallet and surrounded in hard foam.

“Hoolyyyy shiiit.” Borg said, walking around the satellite, drinking it in. “This was going to be the most advanced spy satellite in the U.S. arsenal until the Stitching ended the country.”

“Is that good?” Jeb asked. It sounded good.

“It’s nuanced.” Borg replied. “It’s powerful enough to see the chemical trail of a fart from a hundred miles in the sky.”

Yeah, that’s exactly what we need.

“It’s also a department of defence machine, so it’s loaded with anti-tampering software. Means altering its programming will be…how do you meatsacks put it…a bitch. This was designed to be controlled only by a specific console.”

“Ah, I see what you mean about nuance,” Jeb muttered. It was just a paperweight if they couldn’t actually use it.

“If this had been a science satellite, it would be easier to work with.”

“Can Eddie talk to it?” Jeb asked. The System was something that machines were never designed to resist. Eddie’s ability to directly connect to machines should allow them to bypass the console requirement.

Borg nodded in thought. “That might work.”

“Alright,” Jeb said, putting the massive slabs of pressboard back where they came from before picking up the box with his Myst. “Let’s throw this and all the possibles into one of the shipping containers in the cargo bay,” Jeb said.

“Do you really need all the batteries and solar panels?” Borg asked. “pretty sure this thing has an internal battery.” He rapped his knuckles on the crate.

“They aren’t making batteries and solar panels anymore, especially not space-grade ones. These are incredibly valuable now.”

“You just want movie night at the orphanage.”

Frikken Eddie refusing to share the electricity from his Myst generator.

“I got the whole setup!” Jeb cried. “A 75 inch TV looted from Wal-mart, a library of DVDs and games, A sweet sound bar I lifted from Best Buy, every brand of console…It just needs power! The children will love it! Think of the children!”

Borg raised a brow.

“Bah.”

They worked in silence for the next few minutes, loading everything of value into a big red shipping container, including spare lenses and hardware that Eddie might be able to use. If the defense satellite was unusable, maybe they could tear it’s guts out and replace them with something that worked better.

That would probably take too long, though. Jeb’s internal clock flared back to life. Casey the third was probably dead already, and if she wasn’t every second of delay was likely to be lethal.

Jeb put a lid on the twisting guilt in his gut and focused on work and joking around with Borg. He could process later, when his life and the lives of thousands of others didn’t hang in the balance.

***later****

*-Creak!*

The shipping container’s doors let out a screech as Eddie and Ron pried the massive doors apart. A thin beam of light fell onto the cargo, rapidly expanding as the steel panels moved out of the way on rusting hinges.

“Sweet Jesus!” Eddie shouted when his eyes adjusted.

“Yeah, survivors over the last year were looking for things like canned foods, more than advanced microprocessors and self-contained power systems,” Jeb said, arms crossed.

“This is a goddamn treasure trove.” Ron said, eyeballing the solar panels. “I was looking for a way to power my farm’s well that didn’t involve rotting meat.”

“Get your own civilian solar panels,” Jeb said. “There’s gotta be a thousand solar farms out there you could raid, no problem.”

“Fine.” Ron said, rolling his eyes.

“Yeah, we can definitely cobble something together with this,” Eddie said, climbing into the shipping container and laying his hands on the cracked telescope the size of a car before moving onto the various hardware, humming to himself excitedly.

“Actually, I was thinking you might not have to,” Jeb said, pointing to the crate in the back of the container.

Jeb removed the panels and Eddie fell to his knees at the sight of the fully constructed satellite, his eyes tearing up.

“Yeah,” He said with a strangled voice. “That’ll work.”

Jeb moved the satellite out into the yard and Eddie began to interface with it, a tell-tail spark of Myst travelling between his fingertips and the metal siding of the machine.

After a few minutes, Eddie cussed up a storm, turning to Jeb.

“Damnit, this isn’t gonna work,” the wispy-haired roboticist said, looking up at Jeb.

“How so?”

“I can get in and I can add the software that will allow it to perform spectroscopy and search for high concentrations of undead, but the damn thing’s protection is hard-wired into it. Every time I pull out, it shuts itself down, and I have to break in again. It’s not gonna work.”

“You mean it’s not gonna work…without you?”

Eddie blanched. “What are you saying?”

“You afraid of heights, Eddie?” Jeb asked, cocking a brow.

“Umm….”

***Eddie***

“Oh god, oh god, oh god.” Eddie said, clinging to Jeb’s side.

He’s trying to kill me. I swear to god, he’s trying to kill me!

“What’s the matter?” Jeb, the monster, asked. “I put a rug down on the bottom of our bubble specifically so you wouldn’t be able to see the ground. Jeb patted the woven mat on the bottom of the telekinetic bubble blocking the view.

“I can see the curvature of the earth!” Eddie shouted, pointing to the side, where the horizon had become a quaint notion.

“The curvature of Pharos,” Jeb corrected.

“This is insane!”

“Not insane, just a creative application of Myst.”

Jeb’s new watch, brought along specifically for this purpose, went off.

“Oop, half an hour, time to recharge the air. Don’t freak out.”

A pinhole opened in the bubble surrounding them, and he could immediately feel the drop in pressure. Eddie whined, squirming in place as his ears popped. If I die with my blood literally boiling in my body, I’m gonna haunt the shit out of you,

Then Jeb turned the handle on the massive oxygen tank, refilling the bubble with a burst of life-giving air. Immediately Eddie felt better. A moment later the pinhole closed, and the pressure stabilized.

Another two hours and four recharges went by before they were in low-Pharos orbit, approximately one hundred and twenty miles above the ground.

Meet Jeb, the human space-elevator.

They weren’t actually moving at the speed required for orbit, instead they were hovering over the De’naan Continent, the spy satellite pointed straight down.

Huh, there’s at least two other continents. Neat. I wonder what’s on them, Eddie thought idly as he booted up the laptop with shaking hands.

Eddie entered his password wrong twice before he got it, opening up the control setup for the satellite. He didn’t have time to make fancy buttons for everything, so he had to enter all the commands in DOS. Jeb’s eyes looked like they were swimming as the code swam by, and that amused Eddie enough to calm him down a bit.

“Alright, for those of you tuning at home, this is called spectroscopy, a branch of science that studies the interaction of light and matter. In this case, we’re measuring the specific wavelengths of light absorbed and reflected by the chemical cocktail given off by undead, known as ‘miasma.’ First we take a picture of the continent,” Eddie muttered, entering a short code and pressing ‘enter’

A visual of the land showed up on his monitor.

“Then we apply the formula to identify and magnify the visual stimulus of miasma.”

He entered another code, pressed enter, and a tracework of ugly bruised purple popped up, overlaid on top of the picture. It looked like the spreading of a bacteria colony on a petri dish.

At the center: a small town with such high concentration, nearly solid black. There couldn’t possibly be anyone living there anymore. There would have to be more undead than there had been original inhabitants.

In short…

“They’re massing there.” Jeb muttered. He glanced over his shoulder at the knot of green Myst. “You get all that?”

***Emperor Pikaku, Uniter of the Continent, Ruler of Mestikos, Level 327***

“Indeed I did,” Pikaku said, sliding a claw along the bottom of his beak as he watched his Seer’s scrying.

Pikaku motioned his secretary closer.

“Hire that man away from Mr. Trapper. Make it a sweet deal. Standing offer. Pay Jebediah a finder’s fee as well, to smooth things over.”

Never a bad time to scout for talent. That was the one area Pikaku could honestly consider himself his father’s equal.

“Sire.” The secretary nodded and moved away.

“What’s the name of that town?” He asked, glancing off to the side, where a bug-eyed assistant was fumbling through various maps of the country as quickly as he could.

“Unden Falls, sire. It’s a small town to the north of Mestikos.”

“Did anyone else notice what it’s directly on top of?” Pikaku asked.

“A tributary of the Sekver river,” his general said, nodding. “It feeds directly to the capital. The undead could, given enough numbers, poison our water, or ride the current to blitz us in a matter of hours, but if we tried to approach them, they would have days of advance notice. The sight lines from the town are excellent.”

“It seems we’ve discovered my father’s base of operations,” Pikaku said, clasping his fingers together to conceal the trembling of his fingers.

This was the moment of truth. A calculated gamble. If his father figured it out, it was all for naught. If he fell for it, they could salvage this situation and preserve the nation a while longer. Until the next crisis, anyway.

“Send everyone we have.”

“Excuse me sire?”

“You heard me.” Pikaku said. “Send every available Enforcer to that town by way of the other infected villages. Burn them to the ground, leave no place for the undead to hide. They must be stamped out with overwhelming force.”

“Very well, sire, I’ll arrange for Gamon and –“

“Everyone, including my bodyguards. Send the imperial guards as well. Everyone. I want to be the only one in the palace with a level higher than twenty. Understood?”

“But sire –“

Pikaku glanced over and met his general’s gaze.

The hardened warrior swallowed.

“E-everyone. I will see to it.”

“And make it fast. There’s no guarantee they’ll stay there once they realize they’ve been spotted.”

Pikaku caught the man as he was turning away. “Oh, and make absolutely sure no one sees you leave. We can’t afford to tip off the targets.”

His father had a knack for putting together tiny tidbits of information and finding weaknesses that were best kept hidden.

The general nodded in grim acknowledgement before he hustled out.

“You too,” Pikaku said to his bodyguards, waving them to follow the general.

Once everyone was gone, Pikaku sighed and leaned back in his throne.  The die had been cast. It was actually something of a weight off his chest.

Either it would work…or it wouldn’t. No longer was the burden of responsibility and decision making weighing down on his shoulder. Everything that followed was a consequence of their preparations.

Pikaku took a deep breath and reached under his throne. There was a hidden compartment placed there who knew how many generations ago, meant for weapons and secret documents, but for Pikaku, it was to hide his weaknesses.

He retrieved his one bit of nostalgia. An old candle made of crude tallow with a wick made of torn cloth. It was nearly identical to the one he and his father had improvised to keep their tent warm during their winter hunting trips.

Pikaku lit it and sat back in the throne, allowing the warmth of the flame to heat his fingers, the scent of tallow evoking a gentler time.

Pikaku sat, considering the candle, and life in general.

There was a non-sound from the left. A deadening of the air as something passed between him and the wall.

“I’m disappointed,” his father said, the flickering flame in his eyes manifesting in the darkness to Pikaku’s left. “Again, you expose your most valuable piece to chase a perceived benefit. I admit that your fancy human technique did locate my base, and in a matter of seconds, too, but you got too excited and overextended yourself. Again. Son, you’ve become predictable.”

“How did you know?” Pikaku asked, allowing the flames to curl around his talons, sending the heat back through his fingers.

“You spent hours crowing about the brilliance of this ‘spectroscopy’ plan, plenty of time to get ready to clone a scrying. And your Enforcers aren’t exactly subtle. It was easy to spot them leaving the palace in droves. Gods it was almost like you wanted me to come...”

His father turned and bolted for the door.

Pikaku lifted a talon.

“Boop.”