Disorienting was too mild a word.
The wizard to her right touched something hanging on the wall that she knew, though could not see, was a four-leaf clover charm. “To a better test than the last one,” he muttered, and the part of her that was Peter supplied his name: Martinelli. Peter’s deputy.
“T-minus twenty seconds” echoed over a loudspeaker.
Ten seconds.
Five.
One.
She was dimly aware as the explosion went off—distant, but perfectly visible against the flat nothingness of the desert landscape—that Beatrix would have been appalled at its massive size. But she didn’t feel like Beatrix. She felt like Peter, and Peter was frustrated the blast hadn’t been bigger.
“Not good enough,” said an officer with cropped steel-gray hair—Mercer, the lieutenant general who visited Ellicott Mills.
“We ought to wait for the readings,” she said in Peter’s voice.
“I don’t need the readings to tell me this was not twice the explosive force of the last test,” Mercer said. “It looksmore or less the same, and yet it’s twice the fuel. This isn’t working, gentlemen. We need a completely different angle of attack, so get to it.”
The scene faded into another memory. A nondescript office. Martinelli, slouched in a chair. She handed him a sandwich and sat behind a battered desk.
“A ‘completely different angle,’” the wizard grumbled. “Five years of work, all for nothing.”
“Not necessarily,” she said, fingers tingling with the swooping rush of grasping at the solution to a tricky challenge.
“Oh, really? Planning to up the leaf count from a million to ten million?”
She shook her head. “No, Mercer’s right. No reason to dump more into the spell when we’ve clearly hit the point of diminishing returns.”
“Well? What, then?”
“Animals.”
Martinelli faltered. “Animals.Liveanimals.”
“Yes.”
“Seems a bit—barbaric.”
She snorted. “You do recall what Project 96 does?”
“Perhapsyoushould recall that animals aren’t a reliable fuel source, whippersnapper.”
“We’ll see.”
New memory. Back in the desert bunker, this time just with Martinelli. Between them, the transmitter, as unassuming as a plant stand. And behind them, a Holstein cow, chewing its cud.
“Be right back,” she said, a stone the size of her—his—palm in one hand and a red teleportation leaf in the other. She jumped to a point thirty miles out in the desert, set the white payload stone with its runic inscription down on the sand and returned to the bunker.
“Well—go ahead,” Martinelli said. “This is your blood sacrifice.”
She took her first good look at the animal. It looked back. She swallowed, feeling for the first time that what she was doing—her entire job—was distasteful. Necessary, but distasteful.
Taking a calming breath, she stepped alongside the cow, put both hands on its flank and said the words that would extract its animating force, its life energy, once the spellcasting sequence for the transmitter was complete. Still it looked at her, chewing its cud, its eyes big and brown.Necessary. She turned to the rune-inscribed transmitter and pressed her palms against it, casting the complex interplay of spells that led tofordest. Then she hit the timer and watched the requisite ninety seconds tick down. As it neared the end, she said, “T-minus three, two, one ...”
The blast that touched off in the distance was so tiny it would have been laughable, if not for the thought of what had fueled it.
Martinelli sighed. “Worth a try, I suppose.”
