Paranoid Mage

Callum had known for a while that he would have to deal with the Department of Acquisition. It was evil, but it was also a bureaucracy, where responsibility was mortgaged and amortized and smeared out over so many people that for any act it was hard to point a finger at who should be held to account. Beyond that, he had to worry about the limitations it had actually imposed, and whether he was ready to deal with the consequences of removing it.

Clearly he shouldn’t have hesitated. He’d refrained from acting because he was afraid of the consequences, and that had come with its own consequences. Evil and death, which had occurred specifically because somebody wanted to manipulate him.

He didn’t know if the reports represented actual deaths to try and draw him in, or just existed to create a paper trail, but he suspected the former. It wasn’t like the Department of Acquisition shied away from the deaths of ordinary people. Now he had to remove it regardless of the fallout, and he had to admit some part of him was relieved. He had never liked letting it go even if it seemed the best choice at the time.

“So,” he said as he took a seat in the war room, lacing his fingers together and leaning forward. Lucy drew scribbles on the whiteboard program displayed on the center monitor, glancing at him occasionally. “The question we have to deal with is how we’re going to approach this. The vampire nest has to go before she sends them on another errand, but that’s easy. Constance, though. She’s a mage, and not a weak one. I don’t think an RSJ to the head will work like with the others.”

He had put an anchor on top of the roof at GAR Paris and trailed the vampire with another one, and was monitoring with both anchors. Soon after Constance had taken the report from the vampire she’d left and gone across the street. She had a suite in a nearby building which probably was enormously expensive, but she might well have lived there since it was built. It was easy to forget mages could be old. Constance wasn’t even the only mage in the building, and it had glamour and warding layers around to keep it safe.

“You’re the only person I know who doesn’t call ‘em I-beams,” Lucy noted, then leaned back and pursed her lips. “Any other way to deal with this? I mean, we kinda set the policy to not mess with GAR too much just because of the chaos it’d cause.”

“What else are we going to do if she’s targeting me directly?” Callum demanded, though he pushed down his voice so he wasn’t actually yelling at Lucy. “You have to resolve problems, not just avoid them because you don’t want to deal with the work.”

“Okay, okay,” Lucy said, wiping the digital whiteboard clean. “So yeah, I-Beam wouldn’t work anyway since she’s a metal mage, though I can’t imagine she uses it to control anything other than paperclips.” She scribbled Constance’s name and aspect on the whiteboard. “So no direct approaches I guess. Teleportation?”

“Still not sure about the new cores, or about how she uses ‘ports,” Callum growled. “I’d love to watch for a few days but I don’t think we can spare the time.”

“I’ll put that down as a maybe,” Lucy decided. “What other indirect methods do we have?” She wrinkled her nose. “I honestly can’t tell if this is exciting or grim, contemplating this stuff.”

“Why not both?” Callum asked. “It’s not something anyone sane wants to do, but there’s also nothing more real than life and death.” He scowled and crossed his arms, staring at the whiteboard but not really seeing it. “One option is, assuming we can’t trick a teleport, to try and use a portal and hope that her shield doesn’t break it. Seems unlikely. It worked on Gayle but she was a healer with very little real experience.”

“Yeah, that seems iffy,” Lucy agreed.

“Massive brute force is out, I think. Setting off an explosion in an office building in the middle of Paris — no. I’d probably kill the janitors and not her, which I’m not willing to risk.” Callum scowled at Constance’s name on the board, jaws aching from his teeth being set. He had very little patience for dealing with Constance, and he had to get this done immediately. Before there were any more victims on his head. “So that leaves, hmm, poison maybe.”

“What, like, cyanide in her food?” Lucy asked skeptically. “That doesn’t seem like you, you know?”

“I know, but what can I do? But no, not food. For all I know GAR’s got poison testers or Constance has something on her person. I know I would, in her place. Some fae charm or another.” Callum shook his head. “I’m thinking maybe carbon monoxide, or possibly even something like argon. You can get the stuff from a distributor, and it really doesn’t take much.” He opened up his own laptop to find a place to buy from, since even if it was available it wasn’t exactly at the corner store.

“That’s pretty grim,” Lucy said. “Kinda weird that it seems worse than just using bullets, but I guess it makes sense.”

“I’ll have to run out and see about buying some cylinders before the shops close,” Callum said, cycling through the other drones until he found that was somewhat near a depot. Multitasking had become second nature to him after so much practice. “Do you think you can find out who she was talking to?”

“Maybe, but I doubt it,” Lucy said. “Those are just internal phones, nothing to track them. And all the coordination for this has been done completely outside email or anything on the servers.”

“So they know we’re listening in,” Callum concluded, starting up the drone and sending it toward the store he’d settled on.

“I guess so, dangit,” Lucy sighed. She almost habitually took over the piloting controls once the drone’s telemetry appeared on the monitors. “I haven’t seen anything weird from my server tap at all, though.”

“They don’t have to know exactly how it’s compromised to know it is,” Callum said. “They could just make assumptions and be careful. Which seems to have worked.”

“Boo. I guess they can’t always be stupid.”

“Not always,” Callum agreed, leaning down to give her a kiss. “Okay, I’m going to run and get some welding gas or whatever.”

“I don’t like this kind of purchase,” Lucy said uncertainly. “But I guess that’s how we have to do it. Hurry back.”

Callum took a moment to disguise himself before he teleported himself and the van to the vicinity of the store. He took a moment to check himself in the mirror one last time before he drove into the parking lot, to make sure he looked at least slightly different from Callum Wells. The square glasses and thick eyebrows and some gray worked into his hair pretty well obscured him, but it was still a possibility that some facial recognition program could find him. If he didn’t look or act like someone on a restricted list, it was less likely he’d be flagged.

He asked the man at the front desk about welding gas, and settled on a mixture of argon and carbon dioxide. The guy at the counter gave him a second and a third look, and Callum realized he was very obviously fuming. He stepped away from the counter and pretended to call someone, just to defuse the tension and give him a minute to get his expression under control.

After that they did end up selling him what he wanted, several cylinders of welding gas mixture, though it probably helped that the purchase was not a cheap one. Some employees wheeled out a dolly with the tanks and loaded it into the van after he handed over the cash. He simply drove off before turning onto a back road and teleporting back to the bunker. It had been one of the easiest bits of preparation he’d needed to do.

“So I was thinking, what about that Toblerone guy?” Lucy asked, when he slid back into his seat in the war room. “If he’s tattling on us we gotta do something about him, too.”

“Now, that is something we give to Chester,” Callum said. “I mean, we’ve got enough to do and being an informant is more of an American Alliance thing. Keep him up to date that Constance is on our list, too. I did promise to let him know when I was doing something important.”

“Great! I can just pack up that recording and sent it off now,” Lucy said. “What a jerk.” Callum snorted. He had no doubt that Chester would take his pound of flesh, but that was what Toclerane got for being a quisling.

“Well, he’ll get what’s coming to him,” he said. “I don’t have time for it anyway. Besides Constance and Toclerane, I’ve got to deal with the vampires, but that will probably have to wait until morning. Their morning.”

“Gonna be a long night, then,” Lucy noted. “And me without my soda.” Then she brightened. “Hey since I’m seeing Gayle regularly I can start eating sour candy again!” Callum just raised his eyebrows at her.

“Diet choices aside, we need to figure out what we’re going to be doing with the Department of Acquisition. Just taking out Constance is one thing, but there’s no point stopping there.” Callum settled in next to Lucy and tapped his fingers against the desk. “Maybe purge all their records, while we’re there. Remove all their infrastructure.”

“Won’t that just result in people running rampant?” Lucy asked doubtfully. She chewed her lip as she poked at her laptop.

“No matter what we do, that’s going to happen,” Callum said grimly. “They shouldn’t have legitimized and formalized murder in the first place, and the only way to fix it is to start from scratch. Which won’t happen unless they’re forced to.” Not that he thought merely damaging the department would be enough, but the alterative was trying to slaughter mages in job lots in an attempt to get rid of every employee of the Department of Acquisition. Which, however furious he was, he was not about to do.

“I guess there’s no way to make things better without making them worse?” Lucy asked, mostly rhetorically.

“I wish I knew one,” Callum said, clenching his hands into fists before forcing himself to relax. “But I have to deal with people trying to make me kill innocent people. Especially if they’re doing so by targeting other innocent people.” He looked at the image of the building from the camera, comparing it to what he could sense. The glamour obviously didn’t make the building invisible, but it did make it less interesting and made all the open windows look closed and the balconies look abandoned.

At that time of night the real version wasn’t much different. There were a few stationary bubbles that Callum presumed were people sleeping, and there was one where the person was clearly watching television. He couldn’t tell what Constance was up to, not through her bubble, but after moving around the suite a bit she entered the bedroom.

“Right,” Callum said, after waiting twenty minutes and seeing no shifting in the bubble. “Need to check the target and then we can start.” Since Constance was a metal mage, he had to be a lot more careful with his stuff than usual. All his enchantments were in metal, beside which the apartment was full of objects touched by liquid fae magic. There was no telling what kind of defenses were inside.

Instead he hovered the box just inside the wards but outside the window, and Lucy fiddled with the cameras. He hadn’t realized there were fancy filters on the camera boxes, like zoom and even night vision. It had to have been expensive but he’d left the construction of the things to Lucy and wasn’t auditing her purchases anyway. She knew what she was about.

“That’s Constance,” he said, setting his jaw.

“Yeah,” Lucy agreed without enthusiasm, comparing the image to the official photograph from the GAR database. His original idea had been to open a portal in a heater vent but he was stymied by the fact that the place was heated with magic rather than with any kind of central air. The building was far too old for the kind of ventilation he was used to.

The only entryway that was anywhere nearby was a window cracked in the bathroom that adjoined the bedroom. Which was less ideal but would still work, considering the quantity of containers he’d picked up. There wasn’t even any hiss, since it was just a portal, though he had to work hard to keep the magical construct from collapsing even using tubes rather than threads. Callum didn’t know how long it’d take, but it was a relatively small room and he had an awful lot of the inert gas, so it was only a matter of time.

***

Constance Earl sat bolt upright, heart pounding and gasping for breath. She felt awful, her head throbbing and her gut churning, and she threw aside the sheets and lurched for the balcony. The cold air seemed almost sweet as she stepped outside, clutching her nightgown around herself as she took deep breaths and tried to calm herself.

She did not consider herself prone to panic or anxiety, but things had been tense at work. There was just so much to do and important people who wanted results. It had seemed all under control, but perhaps the pressure was getting to her more than she thought.

Slowly her heart and breathing calmed, though her stomach was still making its protests known, and she grimaced. Clearly she shouldn’t have eaten so soon before bed. By the time she stepped back inside she was shivering so she touched her focus band, finding the heat focus to warm herself up as she went to the kitchen. Clearly she wouldn’t be getting any sleep for a while.

After rummaging a moment she found a fae good-health trinket in her collection and pressed it against her belly, letting it soothe her unsettled stomach. Then dressed herself and crossed the street back to GAR. The Guild itself never slept, though most of the night shift was taken care of by vampires. It was actually quite useful to have a labor force that preferred the late hours, though sometimes the vampires themselves disconcerted her. They weren’t human, and it showed now and again, enough to set her teeth on edge.

Not that she was going to discard a tool simply because it wasn’t perfect.

Constance decided it was all her hemming and hawing about work that had her upset. There were a number of decisions she hadn’t yet made, and the stress of dealing with Wells certainly didn’t help. Everyone knew that he was dangerous and that normal security didn’t do much to protect against him. Still, he’d only ever gone after people who threatened him directly. She didn’t want to have a low opinion of his intelligence, but it was obvious he didn’t have the resources or wherewithal to deal with multiple layers of indirection. But there was a reason she was using the vampires, for the gruntwork and paperwork both.

Like the vampires, Wells had been a tool, but sometimes a tool was just too dangerous. The more she reflected upon it, the more it was obvious Wells was just too much to keep around. Too dangerous, too inaccessible, too uncontrollable. Since he’d shown he could kill an Archmage, she’d been wary of dealing with him too much.

She settled into her office and decided she would push ahead on some of the things she had been sitting on, just to clear out some of what was weighing on her mind. It probably didn’t help her stress levels that she’d been hemming and hawing on some of the demands the fae allies of her backing Houses had made. Most specifically, a portal so they could sidestep the control at the primary one.

Of course, it had to be entirely off the books as, between Duvall and the Guild of Enchanting, portal frames were tracked fairly closely. She was pretty sure there were a few in the vaults, though, and maybe one or two could be creatively lost. Fortunately, the offering price was quite high, and some of the fae favors could be very well used by both her personal House and the main branch of the family.

She wrote out a few missives to start the gears going with her decisions. The Department of Acquisition did have the authority to use breacher portals every once in a while, so she could at least misplace one by having it brought to some convenient location for her allies to find. Beyond that would be hard to justify, so they’d have to make do with just the one. At least for now. For what they were offering, she would definitely try to get ahold of another.

While she was at it, she signed off on extra funding for some new defenses against The Ghost. The jammers were okay as far as it went, but the idea was to do more than simply block him off. Yet development of things took time and money, so anything that came out of the program would take a while. Money well spent, in her judgement.

Constance sent those out and then sorted through the paperwork that had arrived on her desk in her brief absence. Most of it was conventional enough, but there was a report that vastly eased her mind, though it was something that she hadn’t been thinking of at all. One of her informants had properly located the fae agent her backers were so interested in. Felicia Black was verified as being in Taisen’s employ, and in his facilities, which was not the best report but it fulfilled their request.

Actually getting to her would be more involved, but until and unless they specifically offered her payment for that, it wasn’t her worry. Constance still had no idea why they cared so much about, frankly, a low level agent, but fae were strange. It might just have been some vendetta that needed to be finished. So long as they paid for the service, she didn’t see the harm in it.

Once that was finished she was yawning, and she dropped it in the outbox before she headed back to her suite. Since there was just the issue of Wells left, she felt she could handle that much pressure. Having some actual accomplishment definitely made her feel better, and she was sure she would sleep well.

***

When Constance woke up in the middle of the assassination attempt, Callum almost recalled the anchor that instant. It was only when she ran out to the balcony, on the other side of the building from where he’d parked the box, that he decided they hadn’t been noticed. He didn’t know exactly what Constance thought was going on, but when she left for the GAR office, it seemed like they were pretty much done for the night.

“Well, that didn’t work,” Callum said. “I don’t know if she has any idea or not but it sure didn’t work.”

“I don’t know I have the stomach for this,” Lucy muttered. “Maybe we shouldn’t be going after Constance at all. Sure, she’s a bad person, but it just feels wrong to go after her right now.”

“Mmm.” Callum rubbed his temples. He’d been certain at first, but as the operation had gone on he’d been less and less sure of himself. “We have to, if for no other reason than she’s signing off on killing innocent children to frame people,” Callum replied. “Anyway, it’s not something to worry about right now. We’ll get some rest, I’ll see about dealing with the vampires before they kill anyone else, and we’ll rethink the approach.”

Despite what he said, he didn’t get much sleep. Lucy seemed disturbed too, clinging against him as if she were afraid that he would hare off somewhere in the middle of the night. Callum was feeling a little bit impaired by the time he dragged himself out of bed, but he still went down to the war room again as soon as he had showered. By that point the vampires had all returned to the downtown building they were using, one with more than the usual amount of warding.

They seemed to be fairly high up in GAR’s hierarchy, if the quality of their building was any indication. They even had a jammer, though it covered mostly the ward box rather than where the vampires actually dwelt. Unfortunately for them, they also didn’t have a dedicated mage. He wasn’t sure why; perhaps being in the middle of Paris or being one of GAR’s direct pets meant they didn’t need the extra protection. But it certainly made his life easier.

He took the trouble to move an anchor out into the middle of the ocean floor. Unlike some of the other nests he’d dealt with, the vampires didn’t seem to be part of a trafficking organization or other normal crime, so he could just make them disappear without getting law enforcement involved. Two of the vampires were actually still awake, but that was no real problem with his bane ammunition.

If anything he was a little surprised that the vampires hadn’t developed more defenses against him, especially since he’d seen other people using jammers more extensively than they were. Though maybe these vampires, being over in Europe rather than in the Americas and being so close to GAR, thought that they were protected enough. They weren’t.

Ten bodies went onto the sea floor and he left the human thralls to do whatever they would. He didn’t see any victims or even corpses, but he just assumed that was because such things had been cleaned up. He wasn’t sure how much vampires actually needed to eat, he was sure all the ones Earth-side were murderers.

By the time he had that wrapped up, Lucy was up and about and making breakfast. He had never asked her to do it, but she seemed to like it and he wasn’t about to turn down bacon and eggs. But he couldn’t really relax because the Constance issue loomed over them.

“I think I’ll have to use her office,” Callum said, musing over the plan from the previous night. “It’s got actual air vents and there’s a lot less fae nonsense in the GAR offices, weirdly enough. She must have a supplier.”

“I don’t know why, but it seems worse than a gun,” Lucy said unhappily. Callum started to reply, then stopped as she continued. “Callum, it just seems wrong.” That brought him up short, and made him look at it from another angle. The reason why The Ghost existed was because some things were just wrong, and Lucy saying that about his own plans was enough of a shock to make him stop and reassess.

“You know, you’re right,” he said. After getting some time and distance from the issue he didn’t like the idea of poisoning Constance either. Among other things, it had the same objection as explosives, where he couldn’t really guarantee the target. “That doesn’t seem right.”

“You were pretty angry last night,” Lucy said. “Maybe I should’ve said something then but now that I’ve slept on it I don’t think you should do it.”

“Yeah.” Callum sighed and rubbed his eyes. “I think it’s necessary to remove her, but in a way that’s more appropriate and doesn’t feel like nasty snake in the grass stuff.” It was easy, very easy to gas someone, but there was no such thing as a soldier who used poison. In some ways it hardly mattered how he did it, but in other ways it did.

He was already balancing a very tricky line by being willing to kill for his convictions, and some methods made it far easier to become more indiscriminate than others. He didn’t want to be the person, or be known as the person, who went around poisoning people because that was the mindset that led to acceptable casualties. That led to things like the Department of Acquisition.

“I suppose might be necessary,” Lucy said, though she wasn’t enthusiastic about it. “I mean, she is kind of awful. And it’s not like you can ask her to stop. But what are you going to do?”

“That’s the rub.” Callum drummed his fingers on the table as he thought. “What about the space stuff?”

“The space stuff?” Lucy sat back, visibly relaxing now that they’d discarded the gas idea. “Sure! Yeah! I know how to do that. Okay, what do we have ready to go?” She wiped bacon grease off her fingers and turned to her laptop.

“Two anchors,” Callum said. “I’ll put them back into orbit.” Lucy had done the math to get a pair of anchors orbiting rather far out, somewhere away from the usual satellites, and guided him into using the gravitykinesis coupled with the Alcubierre effect to make them stay there. Even if they didn’t have any permanent space presence yet, reproducing the exercise was easy enough.

“Right, so, there’s basically no speed limits in space,” Lucy began while he lofted their space drones high above the Earth.

“Maybe not, but there are time and reaction limits,” Callum said. “We can go pretty fast but not, you know, relativistic. At the same time, any portal I open is only going to exist for a fraction of a second so we have a fairly narrow window.”

“It doesn’t need to be that fast,” Lucy reassured him. “And the laser positioning can get things down to the microsecond. I’ll have to do some calculations but we can just have the orbits meet. Doesn’t have to be head on to have quite a bit of relative velocity.”

“Maybe we only need to go fast enough to have something, I dunno, punt her into another portal,” Callum said thoughtfully. “I don’t want to blow up a building, after all. And while I bet that any shield would disrupt my portals in an instant – heck, the atmosphere by itself probably would – that may be all that’s needed. It takes a finite amount of time for a portal to collapse.”

“So you could do it whenever and wherever. I mean, once we had the timing set up.”

“Yeah.” Callum nodded, feeling far better about this than the other plan. Lucy was right, and the Ghost wouldn’t use poison or other such underhanded things. He really didn’t want to get into the habit of just doing the most expedient thing. Besides, there were just so many ways that the poison attempt could fail that were out of his control. A portal to space, and one that only needed to last an instant, was something he could be confident about. “Thanks, Lucy. That works so much better. Let’s do it.”

“Aw yeah, space stuff,” Lucy said in singsong as she took another piece of bacon. There was some urgency, but only some. The disappearance of the nest would be reported soon enough, but in a strange way that wouldn’t mean much. The Ghost was well known to wipe out vampire nests, and that was just a matter of course. To be deplored by GAR, but nothing more than that.

At least that was the idea. GAR Paris hadn’t gone into lockdown yet, anyway. That might change over the next few minutes, but part of him couldn’t imagine that the disappearance of the vampires hadn’t been reported basically as soon as it had happened. Even if he’d used portal pairs to deal with the bullets and their mess, it wasn’t exactly silent on the far end.

He shifted most of his attention over to the space anchors as Lucy did calculations. The newest ones had, in addition to the cages that kept the mana in, projections on every face with stamped letters so he could orient himself. How Lucy determined the orientations relative to the surroundings he didn’t know, but there were quite a few sensors of various types on the newest models. It seemed if the big space agencies could do it, so could they.

“Okay, one-gravity acceleration in the direction of A for five, four, three, two, one. Now C for fifteen seconds. Fourteen…” Callum followed Lucy’s directions to get the two drones on intercepting vectors. He’d lost track of exactly how it was supposed to work after a minute, despite the advantages his spatial senses gave him. Orbits were weird.

In truth he probably could have done this same thing with the portal loop he’d used to take out Ravaeb, but that had so many issues that unless he was pressed for time it wasn’t something he wanted to repeat. It was an incredibly draining, one-shot weapon, and an imprecise one unless he used a space-based backstop instead of bombing someone. Using the space drones was something that he could try dozens of times a day.

He could have used a portal loop in space, too, but that required a constant effort and constant vis expenditure. The lack of any mana in space made doing anything there more difficult, as his vis wanted to diffuse out into the nothingness. They had practiced intersecting drones in space a few times before and while it was insanely fast, Lucy had some sort of laser communication thing that made the calculations very accurate indeed.

It was a bit of a kludge and while it was more finicky than a bullet to the brain, it packed enough punch to make a mage flinch. While he might have been violating the rule of keeping it simple, once things were lined up it was just a matter of opening portals at the right time. Newtonian mechanics would take care of everything else.

“Okay!” Lucy said, and tapped a rapidly ticking countdown timer to emphasize the display. “They’ll be basically on top of each other when that hits zero.”

“Right,” Callum said, and teleported a small boulder behind one of the anchors. Behind relative to the vector, at least. That was the projectile, since the drone would be absolutely smashed if he sent it through. They had more ready access to portal materials and money than before, but it’d do less than nothing and it was made of stuff that Constance’s magic could control.

The pair were closing at something like mach two, which was insanely fast but less than what he’d done with Ravaeb. Then he just needed to pay attention to the countdown timer, since it was tricky throwing a portal in front of something that would cross his perceptions in half a second.

While they were busy setting up their shot, someone had finally told GAR about the vampire raid. Or so Callum presumed, by the brief flurry of activity and a small posse of mages heading out of the office in that direction. The discovery didn’t result in a total lockdown or even a broader stir of panic, though most people in GAR had duties completely unrelated to what the vampires were up to.

Unfortunately he couldn’t put things on pause while he watched what happened. Not without missing their window, and it’d take a while set up another one — time he didn’t want to give her in case she would order some kind of reprisal. As the timer ticked toward zero there was someone else in Constance’s office, on the other side of her desk. A mage bubble of middling power, probably some functionary or another. There wasn’t anything he could do about that, though, and part of the point of his approach was that it wasn’t going to have much collateral.

He readjusted the drone leading the boulder at ten seconds, so it wouldn’t fly through the portal too, and then fixed his eyes on the timer as he snaked out tiny threads of vis. Lucy stayed silent, making sure not to distract him as the clock neared zero. Callum checked and rechecked his vis threads, heart suddenly hammering as the moment drew near, and he snapped open the portals.

Everything happened at once.

Magic blasted outward to destabilize the portals even as the air began to rush out into vacuum. A boulder traveling almost twice the speed of sound smashed through into the office and into Constance’s bubble behind the desk. Shields activated for both bubbles, and while Constance’s proved up to the task of withstanding the terrific impact, the boulder still accomplished its job in shoving her through the portal before it collapsed completely.

A shock wave blew through the building, bouncing off the other mage’s shields and blowing out windows in the office and down the hall. An expanding cloud of atmosphere spread out from the portal site out in deep space, as the projectile and fading mage bubble continued out beyond where he could sense. Callum pulled back the box and reset the two space drones to be near each other, only then remembering to breathe. Lucy looked at him inquiringly.

“It worked,” he reported, using the moments of confusion to teleport all the filing cabinets in Constance’s office out into space next to the drones. That was all he could manage before supernaturals started swarming the site, but it would have to do. “I’ll leave an anchor near that pack in Italy for a while but I doubt there will be any more trouble from that end. We can check out the papers I got later.”

“Glad it’s done,” Lucy said, not quite as jubilant as him. He nodded agreement.

“It feels kind of shaky though. We need to figure out a better way to do the same thing. Or just some way to consistently punch through mage bubbles.”

“If you can figure out that one, you’ll upend a few hundred years of magical weapons race,” Lucy said. “For anyone without a homebond, I think space is close enough.”

“You’re sure Constance didn’t have one?” Callum asked, though the sheer impact of the boulder had to have rung the shields like a bell. Combined with the lack of mana in space, he would bet most people wouldn’t manage in the thirty seconds or so they had. Though even if Constance did have one, it wouldn’t be as disastrous as with Fane.

“Everything I found was that she relied on fae stuff more,” Lucy said, sagging into her seat now that things were finished. “And there’s no fae mana in space.”

“In space, no fae can hear you scream,” Callum muttered. “Feels a little weird to have access to the immensity of the rest of the universe. I’m still surprised the portals even work without a connected mana field.”

“Well, it’s magic,” Lucy said.

“Sure. I almost wish that I could talk to Duvall about that,” Callum sighed. “I know it’s magic but I still can’t help but thinking of it like science.”

“At least it’s not as random as fae stuff,” Lucy observed.

“True,” Callum admitted, shaking his head at the memory of the horrible things Ravaeb had unleashed against them. “You know, it occurs to me this is the first time I’ve moved against GAR directly. Everything else has been, essentially, personal. But Constance had a specific role in GAR and that was the problem.”

“I’m glad we’re already in hiding,” Lucy said. “This is not going to go over well.”

“I’m not sure what else they can do,” Callum agreed. “But if there is something, we’re going to find out.”