Authors: Scott V. Duff
Ethan chuckled and started explaining while Peter began dragging us toward the registers. Jimmy and Byrnes met us a third of the way there with a cart of their own, including a twelve-inch stack of magazines. The Commander’s presence took another few minutes of explanation, but even with the store staff opening yet another register for us, we had plenty of time with three shopping carts of books, maps, and magazines to checkout.
~ ~ ~
“I can’t believe we’re sending sixty men on leave,” Velasquez said, shaking his head as he flipped through his notes.
“Don’t look at it as ‘leave,’ Ric,” Peter said. “Look at it as traveling to another duty station.”
“Can I have Rome, then?” he asked excitedly. “I’ve always wanted to go there.”
“A captain in the Army hasn’t made it to Rome yet?” Richard asked surprised. “Sacrilege!”
“When we get to international locations, we’ll see,” I said. “There’s always a real leave, too, ya know.” He smiled, returning to his notes.
“I think that’ll do it, Seth,” Peter said, standing up straight from the table. Richard and he stood over a large table covered in maps of the United States. “Once Kieran confirms they can fly without a problem, we should be able to hit every major metropolitan area in a day, including the larger military bases and the country within three days.”
Kieran, Ethan, and the two Guards shifted back into the room with us. “We don’t see any reason they shouldn’t fly,” Kieran announced simply. “The geas doesn’t appear to react at all to normal magic.”
“I’d love to know why,” Richard said. “Most confusing. Well, I must be off to dinner. Are you sure you won’t join us? I’m certain the brownies would love to have more people to cook for.” He had arranged dinner with the Fullers and my parents while we were away today, purely as a social occasion. Peter and I both felt that Darius and Sean could use some time away from us, so we resisted offers to join them. “No, thank you, Richard,” Kieran said grinning. “I’m having a hard enough time keeping him from work as it is.”
“Hey! I’m just standing here,” I objected halfheartedly. “I’m a pin-cushion if I move.” The six brownies surrounding me in an array of scaffolding giggled at me, continuing to pin, mark with chalk, and baste stitches into the third suit I’d been fitted for in the last forty minutes.
“Almost done with this one, Lord,” squeaked Zero, zooming up the steps of the scaffold.
“Take your time, Zero. This is the most still he’s been in weeks,” Ethan said.
We spoke briefly about plans for the next few days before Richard left with the Guards Kieran brought with him. Not really very in-depth planning considering they only covered Monday and one meeting on Wednesday in London, but last week we’d detailed even more and that got blown quickly enough.
A peal of pain followed by panic and fear rang through the geas suddenly and sharply. “Oww!” Velasquez cried out in pain, squeezing his eyes shut and gritting his teeth. The brownies felt it, too, pulling back from me immediately as I turned toward the gym to look at what had happened.
“Be right back,” I muttered and shifted out of the suit to the gym, wearing only my underwear now. The men parted naturally to let me through. Two men in light body armor knelt beside a third on the ground, badly hurt. He wore armor, too, but only partly and it was wrong. I studied the man for a moment while chaos reigned around me. Calls for medics, Byrnes, Velasquez, and the man guilty of the brutalization were rampant.
“Quiet!” I yelled as I knelt beside him, piecing together the circumstances through their memories. “First.” Jimmy stepped forward out of the cluster surrounding me. “You and Velasquez get Tank out of the barracks. Make sure he understands that he didn’t do anything wrong and he’s not in trouble.”
Jimmy disappeared through the confused men as I started working on healing Lt. Krichev’s several broken bones. The pain was effectively sublimated across all of the Garrison so in that, I was lucky. The armor was definitely an unexpected surprise that in Krichev’s case hadn’t been as effective as the two men now standing in front of us, confused by it. They didn’t know where it came from.
Several men had learned new tricks today. Tricks I hadn’t taught them and didn’t know they could do. For that matter, I didn’t know they could be done. Once I had all of Krichev’s bones in place again and re-knitting, I touched the hard, chitinous substance of the armor and pushed the energy back into his uniform. It softened slowly back into the normal silk, releasing Krichev from an effective body cast.
“Please, Lord Daybreak,” he started pleading immediately. “This wasn’t Tank’s fault! We were just practicing and things just got out of hand! He didn’t mean it, I swear! It was an accident.” He was nearly in tears. Sieczmanski, also known as ‘Tank,’ had been in tears, fearing he’d hurt his long-time friend and fellow Guard. It was obvious as Jimmy and Velasquez walked up with him.
“I know, I know, calm down, Lieutenant. I understand what happened,” I said sending calming waves through the geas to the entire Garrison. “You guys are just learning faster than I expected. You’re being eager little beavers and learning tricks that should take weeks to master. You, though, are being forced to slow down now. You’ve got a few days bed rest ahead of you and the hospital has its first patient.”
A pair of medics nervously stepped in on the other side of him with a stretcher. Using a Stone shield, I lifted him onto the stretcher and explained to them what was wrong and how to care for him. When I stood up, I had the two Guards in armor in front of me and Byrnes, Velasquez, and Tank on my right with Jimmy. Now I needed to explain to them and the rest of the Garrison what happened.
“Um, Seth?” Peter said before I could start. “Would you mind?” I turned to Peter to see him uncomfortably looking at the sea of blue uniforms.
“What?” I asked, not understanding him.
“Get dressed, oaf,” Ethan said, laughing. Looking down, I realized I was still in just my underwear. I didn’t understand what the problem was since half the gym wore shorts just as revealing. Maybe I was “jutting” too much for Peter’s sensibilities. Calling my mirror forward, I dressed myself in a simple working uniform and Peter relaxed.
“Kieran, I have to do a little work tonight,” I told him with a smile. “Should take less than an hour, if y’all want to see to supper.”
He narrowed his eyes at me suspiciously. “One hour and we come haul your skinny butt out of here, got it?”
“Yes, sir!” I said, grinning at him.
“He has one hour, Commanders,” Kieran called loudly, then my brothers shifted away from the Garrison.
“How do I enforce that?” Byrnes asked the empty space, chuckling.
The Palace pushed two sets of bleachers out slowly for me and Jimmy and I started directing everyone around, leaving the three principles on the floor with the Commanders. Most of the men were in the gym now having followed the shriek of panic and initial pain. Those that weren’t, I linked through the geas. There was still a residual anger at Tank, which he felt, but I’d deal with that quickly enough.
“First off, a number of you have learned a few new talents,” I said loudly, waving the Guards in armor to the center with me. “This is one of the more interesting ones: the armor. Does anyone see what it is?”
“It looks like their uniforms, Lord,” a voice called out.
“Yes, Cpl. Tate, that’s exactly what it is,” I agreed, identifying the voice from memory. A hum of startled comments rushed through the bleachers. “Alsooth, would you mind bringing me a few of the caps that go with the uniforms, please?”
Yes, Lord, on my way,
Alsooth sent across the geas from his office.
Byrnes and Velasquez stood with each Guard, closely examining the armor, poking, prodding, and tapping on it. Both men stood rock solid in place, ignoring their commanders as they watched me.
“It seems that they called on the geas in defense of their fellow Guardsmen,” I continued. “And formed the armor around their uniforms for protection, like the shell of a snail or the exoskeleton of some insects. It’s very reminiscent of my own armor, really, but not as strong. Gentlemen, would you please move around and demonstrate your flexibility while wearing it?”
They both moved with uncomfortable, stamping gaits and overcompensating arm swings to manage the elbow and shoulder plates. I was expecting them to clank at any minute. They must have forgotten they were just kneeling beside a man on the floor.
“Guys, I think you’re missing the point here,” I said grinning. “Walk normally, not like you’re trying to kill cockroaches on the ground.”
Alsooth trilled a laugh at my feet at the comment, watching them as they took my advice and walked more fluidly across the floor. After a moment, they were both turning and stretching through several ranges of movement, watching each other for breaks in the coverage. Byrnes and Velasquez watched closely, too, from as near as possible.
“Thank you, Alsooth,” I said, taking the four caps from him. I went to the armored Guards, currently covered from their necks down in shiny blue plates of solid bone-like substance. When I put a cap on the nearer one’s head, the chitinous material solidified around the back of his head and up his jaw, while the bill of the cap formed a much darker faceplate that completely covered his mouth and around to his ears. His eyes shone through the mask as two small dots of light. I did the same to the second man as the ‘Oohs’ ran through the bleachers.
“Yeah, tell me about it,” I said, standing back and looking at the two men. “This should scare the crap out of somebody.” A short laugh rolled through the room. They were an easy crowd. “Reasonably strong, it looks bullet-proof up to a point. With armor-piercing bullets or repeated fire, I wouldn’t bet on it and it’s not something I’m suggesting trying by any means. Quite frankly the only way to test it is to stand one of you in front of a gun and shoot. I’m not willing to do that. Ever. So, pulling the armor out is hereby limited to the training rooms you haven’t seen yet and necessity. And in here, everybody needs to settle down some.” The rush of disappointment was harsh on me, but I brushed it off.
“Commander Byrnes will announce the Armor Master by tomorrow,” I continued, unfazed. “Then you can begin training in earnest with more difficult tools like this armor and others. Please remember that safety is always the first concern. I won’t always be readily available or fast enough to stop someone from bleeding out on the floor.” Turning to the two armored forms, I asked them more quietly, “Neither of you knows how you did this, do you?”
“No, sir, not a clue,” a strangely muffled voice answered after quickly glancing at his partner. Grinning, I encapsulated them within the geas, pulling Jimmy, Byrnes, and Velasquez in with us. Then I showed them how to adjust the flow of the magic and form it through their uniforms to make and dissolve the armor. Breaking the bubble, I had them try to dissolve their own armor. A moment later, Sgt. Miller and Lt. Mankiewicz stood in front of me, shirtless and in workout shorts.
“Not even in a uniform,” I remarked. “Impressive.” Handing Byrnes and Velasquez the remaining caps, I turned back to the bleachers and said, “Lt. Krichev wasn’t able to manifest a full set of armor, but he was able to bring up armor at his break points. It was a reflex action that stopped me from having to re-break his bones so they’d set right, so that was a good thing. It just looked a lot worse than it was, which brings us to our second new talent. Tank?”
The man was built like a tank. Almost as wide as he was tall, the man was solid muscle and bone, an easy two ninety at five-foot-eight. It was hard to imagine the man moving fast enough to hurt anyone, or that anyone would dare try, short or not. Gordon might even think twice, and he was a stout man himself.
“You learned a new talent today, too, Tank, and you don’t realize it,” I told him but talking to everyone else at the same time. “When Krichev and you were practicing today, you both partitioned yourselves off from each other so that you’d get a realistic workout, right?”
“Yes, sir, like the Commander showed us,” he rumbled, his voice gravely from distress. Byrnes had worked with his group, showing them the same technique that I’d just used to separate them in the geas gestalt enough to concentrate past the background chatter effectively. I reached across the gym, pulled two practice staves from the wall and sent them flying to me, catching one in each hand.
“Was anyone watching them?” I asked the bleachers.
“I was,” MSgt. Sanchez said as he stood.
“And what did you see?”
“It was… nothing, really, sir,” Sanchez said, trying to convince himself more than me, I think. “It started out as a normal practice session with rods, a friendly competition. They weren’t really swinging at each other that hard, but as they got deeper into it, they started going faster and faster. Not nearly as fast as you and First got, but faster than I’ve seen anybody else get going. Then, bam, the rod was flying straight up, Tank was beating the hell out of him, and a God-awful screech went through my head. When I looked up, Krichev was on the ground and Tank was gone. That’s all I saw.”
“A reasonable third-party view of what happened,” I said, nodding at Sanchez. “Mostly because that’s exactly what happened. And just as many of you heard from Krichev himself, they let things get out of hand. No one was at fault here except perhaps me. The answer is, let’s leave the gym to physical fitness and therapy and leave battle training where it belongs.