The Genie and the Engineer 3: Ravages of War Read online

  Published through Amazon.com, Inc.

  This is a work of fiction. The personalities, characters and people herein are purely products of the author’s overactive imagination which was ensnared in the grip of nightmares in the wee hours of the night. Any resemblance of the characters herein to real people, either living or dead, should be a cause of serious concern for their welfare and a critical indication of their need for immediate professional therapy. (Just those that are still breathing, of course.)

  Engineer – Wizard

  RAVAGES OF WAR

  October 2016 printing

  Text copyright © 2016 Glenn Michaels

  Cover Design by Katie Griffin

  All rights reserved

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights.

  Purchase only authorized editions.

  Works by Glenn Michaels

  The Engineer Wizard

  Orders of Magnitude

  Ravages of War

  Dedication:

  To the reader:

  Yep, this means you.

  Not the fellow behind you, peeking over your shoulder while you’re trying to read, the reprobate who’s chomping/masticating on that vile cholesterol-clogged meatball-parmesan sandwich. Definitely not him!

  But you. The enchanting, thoughtful, caring, well-mannered, scholarly, health-conscious bibliophile that you are.

  Kudos.

  Many thanks to you and your discerning perceptiveness for having read the two previous books in this series. Due to your support, I’ve now had the privilege of writing and publishing three books! That’s two more than I ever thought possible!

  Couldn’t have done it without you.

  Thanks for taking this journey with me. I’m ever so grateful. And I hope you’ve had as much fun during our travels as I have had.

  Glenn Michaels

  Author’s notes:

  Please note that this book, Engineer Wizard: Ravages of War, is the sequel to The Engineer Wizard and Orders of Magnitude. At this point, it really is necessary to have read the first two books before reading this one. Nothing will make much sense in this book unless you do.

  This book picks up where the last one left off and thus the first two books lay out much of the background needed to appreciate the nuances of events, plot, and characters of this one.

  In addition, there was a thoughtful and enterprising individual who sent me really nice emails and assisted by way of offering several useful suggestions. In return, I’ve named (with his permission, of course!) a character after him. In this particular case, the character is one of the good guys. Hopefully, my correspondent will approve of his name-sake’s role and conduct in the book.

  As before, with the first two books, there are quite a few sci-fi quotes, technical, scientific, and geographic references and historical figures. And more than a few references lifted straight out of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom series. Therefore, readers are encouraged to continue validating such information by way of their favorite web-search engine.

  One other noteworthy caution: like the first two books, this one is a blend of both urban fantasy and science-fiction. As such, it is betwixt and between, neither purely one nor the other. Please keep this in mind when delving into the pages herein.

  Contents

  SECTION I

  FIELD TRIP TO BARSOOM ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  SECTION II WAR FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  EPILOGUE

  SECTION I

  FIELD TRIP TO BARSOOM

  ONE

  Spacecraft Sirius Effort

  79.7 Million miles from Earth

  Friday 6:09 a.m. EST

  November

  The Sirius Effort heaved violently to port, a loud thundering roar ripping through the hull from stem to stern, the ship convulsing as if in agony. The whiplash of the vessel’s wild gyration hurled Paul shoulder-first against the titanium-plated bulkhead of the tiny lavatory, where he brutally rebounded, smashing his forehead into the edge of the medicine cabinet door. Unconscious, he fell heavily to the deck, the lurching of the ship rolling him up against the foot of the shower stall.

  To add insult to injury, the lights flickered twice and then died completely, plunging the ship into total darkness.

  The unexpected and violent motion of the ship hurled Capie out of a dinette chair on Deck 3, sending her flying across the small room and crashing solidly into the kitchenette counter at an awkward angle. Her left forearm snapped cleanly, both the radius and ulna bones. Screaming in agony, she suddenly found herself not only in the dark but in free fall as the ship’s ‘gravity’ unexpectedly and completely disappeared. With the ship both spinning and yawing, she realized that she was now being tossed head first in yet another direction. A quick flick of her right hand created a spell that brought her to a screeching halt. Another spell from her and the lights in the compartment came back up.

  “Help!” squealed a very high pitched female voice. “Me, help!”

  With a quick glance, Capie noted that Ariel-Leira, the mirror woman that they had picked up in Transylvania, was briskly spinning in midair, centered more or less over the small dining table.

  With the restoration of light in the compartment, Capie could now clearly see the awkward bend in her left arm, the unnatural way it curved outward. Horrified, she cast yet another spell, quelling the waves of pain. With great care, she gathered the limp and damaged limb with her right hand, pulling it close to her side and securing it in place with an additional spell, this one very carefully crafted to encapsulate the arm and protect it from further damage.

  “Paul!” she yelled near the top of her lungs, the sound echoing in the small space as she slowly revolved around her center of mass. “Paul! What happened?”

  “Me help, please!” cried a panicky Ariel-Leira again.

  “Mom?!” squawked Daneel 1. “Are you alright?” A metal framework—roughly sixteen inches cubed and sporting a motherboard with various add-on cards and a LCD monitor with small speakers duct taped to one side—shot up through the deck hatch from below. The Scottie swung in Capie’s direction, where she could see the concerned look of the A.I. on the monitor screen.

  “Just a broken arm and sixteen dozen bruises!” she snapped in reply with an aggravated tone. “Take care of her!” she added, pointing at the mirror.

  “Right, Mom!” Daneel 1’s screen image snapped his fingers and the mirror frame, with Ariel-Leira’s astonished face, swung smartly around and banged up against a bulkhead and, with two quick flash-arcs, was instantly spot welded into place.

  “I heard a thump from above!” Capie clamored, glancing over her shoulder and up through the deck hatch toward Deck 2. “And Paul doesn’t answer!”

  “I’ll check on him!” Daneel 1 assured her, soaring up through the hatch in the overhead and casting a spell for lights in the com
partment on Deck 2.

  He arrived just as Daneel 2, identical in appearance to his ‘brother,’ was dropping down from Deck 1, the cockpit. Daneel 2 was pilot on the current watch, where he had been using the chutzpah talisman to maintain the fusion process spell in the ship’s two engines, as well as keeping the vessel on course.

  Both Scotties spotted the unconscious form of Paul simultaneously, slowly tumbling in midair in the ship’s tiny head.

  “Dad!” they both shouted in surprise and alarm.

  “He’s got a scalp wound!” observed Daneel 1, worried that Paul, his father and creator, might be critically or even fatally wounded.

  “He’s bleeding badly too!” added Daneel 2, as he advanced closer to the drifting form. “I’ve got him! You take care of that head wound! See if you can stop the bleeding!”

  “What’s going on up there?!” Capie’s shout rang up from the deck below.

  “Dad’s hurt!’ Daneel 1 bellowed back at her. “We’re bringing him your direction so please stand clear!”

  “Paul!? Can you hear me?” Capie yelled all the louder, her voice shrilling in near panic.

  “He’s unconscious, Mom!” Daneel 2 shouted, as he used a magical spell to maneuver Paul’s limp form down head first through the deck hatch.

  “Quick! Bring him down to the bedroom, on the bed and let’s get him secured in place! Daneel 1! I need the first aid kit and, Daneel 2, get me some damp washcloths!” Capie nervously rubbed her right hand on her left sleeve. “And I’m going to need a doctor here too! Dr. Stephen Strange from Marvel Comics would be a good choice. Dr. Strange! Front and center, please!”

  Ω

  “He’s coming out of it now, Mom,” murmured a familiar male voice.

  “Yes, I see,” agreed a wonderfully seductive female voice.

  Paul smiled, enticed by the woman’s rich sexy modulation. He opened his eyes to find that it was his wife above him. And Daneel 1. Well, technically they were not above him, since he suddenly realized that they were all in zero-g.

  Hmm, zero-g meant the ship’s engines were not operating.

  It was very hard to think, his head hurt so much. The pounding in his skull was sort of a combination of having it squeezed in a vice while his forehead was being brutally worked over with a jack-hammer. A rather large and powerful jack-hammer at that.

  “What happened?” he muttered weakly, slowly reaching up with one hand in an effort to examine his head by touch.

  “None of that, now!” his wife reproached him sternly, pushing his hand away. “Don’t mess with my doctoring! Just lie still and be a good patient.”

  Paul blinked, noticing for the first time that his wife was not moving her left arm, which she seemed to be holding tightly up against her side.

  “Your arm,” he muttered again. “What’s wrong?”

  She pursed her lips and looked very annoyed. “Just a small fracture. I already have three spells working on it, knitting the bones together. Should be right as rain in a couple of days or so. I think.”

  “What’s wrong with the ship? How come we’re in zero-g?” Paul asked, only temporarily appeased with her answer about her physical condition. Under other circumstances, he would have been far more focused on her injuries but he knew that, with her magical powers, she wasn’t in any pain. A fractured bone was not really any more of a concern to them now than say a hangnail once had been, before they had acquired their powers.

  Capie sighed and glanced over at Daneel 1. “Remember, he’s resting. Don’t overtax him.”

  “Gotcha, Mom,” the Scottie replied. “Dad, I’m glad to see that you are awake now. We sort of need your help. We’ve, uh, got a problem with the engines.”

  Paul’s eyebrows furled. “What sort of problem?”

  Daneel 1’s image in his LCD screen looked down and shrugged. “It would seem that the port engine might have, uh, come from together. Sort of exploded, you might say. A rather robust explosion too. And, in the process, it took out most of the starboard engine as well. That’s why we don’t have weight right now. No engines for thrust. And we were tumbling too but Daneel 2 and I were able to fix that problem.”

  “I thought you said you tested the engines before we left Earth!” Capie snapped in a low voice in Paul’s direction.

  “I did test them!” Paul protested feebly before turning back to Daneel 1. “How long have I been out?”

  Daneel 1 sighed and cast a quick glance over at Capie. “A little over two hours. Mom didn’t want to disturb you while she was working on your head wound—”

  “I’ve been using a few spells on you,” Capie interrupted. “You are in much better condition now than earlier.” She glanced back over at Daneel 1. “Get to the point, please.”

  “Right,” Daneel 1 said, with a wince. “With the engines out—”

  “Wait a moment, Daneel,” Paul implored him, raising a hand gently into the air. “We were, what? 35 hours out from Mars?”

  “33 hours, 42 minutes and 18 seconds, when the explosion occurred, Dad,” Daneel 1 replied, knowing what was coming next.

  “And with the engines gone…oh churlish toad-spotted carbunkle!”

  Capie flinched backward with surprised shock on her face. “That was a Shakespearean insult, wasn’t it?”

  “I Googled it a while back after you told me your father used them,” Paul confirmed her guess with a restrained smirk, then turned his head back in Daneel’s direction. “You haven’t been able to decelerate the ship’s speed at all, have you?”

  “No,” Daneel 1 reluctantly admitted. “Daneel 2 and I’ve been working on it.”

  “Is it really that serious a problem?” Capie asked, frowning at the two of them. “There must be other ways to slow the ship.”

  Paul eyebrows furrowed in concentration, still battling the pounding headache. Taking a deep breath, he tried to explain the situation. “As you know, we accelerated away from Earth at 1 gee for almost 40 hours. That built up an enormous speed, over 3.1 million miles per hour. At midpoint, we flipped and started decelerating, also at 1 gee. In order to intercept Mars at the right place and the right speed, we needed to continue that deceleration. But without engines, we’ll miss the rendezvous with Mars and continue flying past the asteroids and the outer planets and out into interstellar space. Of course, we would be dead from lack of oxygen long before we get that far. Does that sound serious enough?”

  Capie winced as she gently massaged her upper left arm. “Yes, that’s pretty serious, all right.”

  Paul grimaced and stared at Daneel 1 through narrowed eyes. “Why didn’t you call up a super-intelligence to help you figure this out?”

  Daneel 1 rolled his eyes and frowned, not answering the question.

  Sighing dejectedly, Capie started rubbing her forehead instead of her arm.

  “Try it for yourself, Paul,” she urged him.

  He blinked for a few seconds, surprised by her response. Was this some sort of trick? But it wasn’t hard. After all, calling up a super-intelligence was the very first magical trick that he had ever successfully performed.

  “Okay, I will,” he grunted. “Okay, Merlin, front and center, please. We need you!”

  There was no response. Not even the small ball of holographic smoke that sometimes appeared first.

  Paul blinked several more times in complete confusion. “Merlin?”

  Nothing.

  “Uncle Sam?” Pause. “Captain Montgomery Scott?” Pause. “Star-Lord Peter Quill?”

  Nothing.

  “What’s going on, Paul?” his wife asked anxiously, gently rubbing her arm again, her face one of deep concern. “When I tried to call up a doctor for you, I got el zippo too.”

  “Same thing for Daneel 2 and myself,” Daneel 1 informed Paul.

  “Then apparently, we have to fix the ship on our own, without super-intelligence help,” Paul remonstrated, gritting his teeth. “Joy. Fun.”

  “But I don’t understand,” Capie said, thoroughly perplexed,
shaking her head from side to side. She reached out again with her right hand, this time creating a holographic image of a flower in mid-air. “Our powers still work! So why can’t we call on our expert advisors?”

  Paul rubbed the back of his neck with one hand. “We’ll have to figure it out later, CB. But right now, time is not on our side.”

  Daneel 1 sighed and then smiled bitterly. “Getting back to the problem with the ship, we tried tapping the solar sunlight, to use its energy to decelerate us—”

  Paul shook his head, grimacing and weakly waved his hand again. “That won’t work. There are two reasons that won’t work. Solar power was one of the ideas I looked into before building the Sirius Effort. A spacecraft driven by solar energy would be so much more efficient and cleaner than fusion power. But the energy density of sunlight is just not there. We would need to capture oodles of square kilometers of it. Too big a challenge for the four of us. Don’t get me wrong. It would help! But it’s not a viable solution to our current situation.”

  “That’s what we discovered as well,” the Scottie admitted with a brief frown. “Same thing with the solar magnetic field.”

  “The Daneels are such party poopers,” Capie mumbled with a smirk. “I suggested the Solar Clipper books by Nathan Lowell.”

  Paul’s frown instantly transformed into a grin. “With Ishmael Wang? Quarter Share and so on? Brilliant books. Are you suggesting solar sails?”

  “Are you going to shoot that idea down too?” Capie asked, abruptly apprehensive, eyeing her husband with a doubtful look. “The Daneels did.”

  Paul winced and gritted his teeth. “I, uh, did look at solar wind technology before building the Sirius Effort. The density of the solar wind is thin, only 7.1 protons per cubic centimeter. We would need a huge solar sail, larger than the island of Manhattan. Sorry, but also not practical in our situation.”