Wine of the Gods 05: Spy Wars (6 page)

It didn't matter. All that mattered was the power running through them, leaping and diving wildly as it circled.
Stronger than the sum of their abilities. It was beautiful.

"Humph.
Egto and Ajha trade places."

They all startled, as
Kael's voice interrupted their communion. The power they'd raised escaped . . . and was sucked away by the Action leader. The aide sniggered.

Ajha and
Egto swapped, and they grasped hands again.

This time the power ran faster, more level. Built up stronger.

For a moment; then it snapped. They staggered apart. Ajha tripped and thumped down on his butt, reeling like a drunk, weak from exertion.

The Action leader contained the energy, put her hand out to touch the hull, and let it all drain away, absorbed into the vast ocean without a ripple.
"Not a bad start. We'll have almost a month to practice before we reach our goal." Kael turned and walked away.

They practiced every day, after that.

They didn't ask, and no one bothered to tell the Info team what was in the cold crates. Perhaps they thought it was obvious.

Perhaps they were right.

Ajha eyed them, and wondered when his job had slid from hunting down information to delivering disinformation.

I'd better remember that the
natives are the enemy. Even Auralia. We call them an ally, but they are just a tool. We will conquer the natives, and then the whole planet will be subsumed into the Empire. Then we can get rid of the corruption, the criminality, and violence in the street. Install modern water and sewage treatment plants.
Then
I can start sympathizing with them. For now, I need to remember what the other Action Leader said. They are just animals.

None the less,
he couldn't help but wonder who had been murdered for this bit of misdirection.

Late Winter
1361

Asia

Oscar strolled into the mess area, got a soda and sat close enough to hear the Earther scientists talking over their lunches. He could hold a
spell of unnoticeablity for maybe two hours at a time, now. But an illusion to make himself look just like one of these fellows was dead easy, took no ongoing effort and only unraveled after five or six hours. They had to be positively anal about where the men they imitated were, and were careful to choose only the unattached. But the sodas made up for it. The rest of the food was awful. Both here, in the Earther's "science camp" and ten miles north in the "gate camp." Guessing from the chit chat he'd overheard, the transdimensional gate interfered with a bunch of the delicate instruments they used here, hence the separate camp. The relative paucity of soldiers here made spying on their scientists much easier.

". . . latest triangulation is still showing their Discordia Gate at the Solti's Palace. I don't
understand vhy it's so active. Vhat are they doing down there that they couldn't do up in Fascia?"

Oscar perked right up. They thought these mysterious Oners' Gate was right at the palace? Not that that exactly pinned it down, but it was a lot easier to search a large palace complex than to search one of the largest cities in the World, including the palace complex. He and Bran hadn't accomplished anything in their one brief tour of the southern city. He nudged them a little, mentally. :: Where in Fascia is the Gate?::

"Oh, I heard through channels that the Oners have built an actual Embassy building in Fascia. That's why the Gate indices changed."

"
Da, you gloated about your information channels last week, remember? You ought to have shared that intercept immediately, not hoarded it until you could lay it out at the meeting."

"Oh, yeah, like you haven't . . . "

Oscar finished his drink and sauntered back outside, ducked around a corner and carefully reached to divert light around himself, let it join up on the other side of himself—so to speak, with light coming from all directions. It was one of the most complex spells he'd ever learned, and he could only hold it for a few minutes at a time. Long enough to get a slight rise of land between himself and the Earther's camp. Then he let it go and covered himself with an overall illusion of grass. Much easier. He loped west, the ground climbing, and cut north when he was well clear of the camp. They were careful to never take the same route, never wear away a path the Earther's might decide to follow. Fortunately the early melt and thick dry grass under the mostly melted crust made hiding tracks easy. He hunched into his heavy coat—the wind was still chilly—and stepped from grass tussock to tussock.

After two months of intensive magic lesson in Ash, he and Bran had been placed under Lieutenant Lebonift's command, and sent to practice their magic spying on the Earthers
.

The Western base was well concealed in a small knot of shallow caves in the side of a deep gully through the native limestone. The overlying layer of harder stone gave them enough of an overhang to come and go from 'room' to 'room' unobserved from above.
They could move along the various stream beds, occasionally crossing to another, and get to the maze of tunnels under the Earther's camp at the gate. The Auld Wulf swapped out rotating groups of fifty soldiers every month. Their thankless job was to keep an eye on the two camps, warn the King if there was any sign of a military buildup, and follow anyone who went anywhere. That last was mostly wistful thinking, given the speed of the Earther's vehicles.

"Hey Invisible Boy. Anything new?" Captain Kendel was both competent and casual, and didn't resent a pair of
lieutenants that were independent of his command.

"I think they're getting bored down in the science camp. Grumpy. Once the scientists found the
Oner Gate indications it's been all details and minutiae. Neither of those two Colonels wants to be the first to pull out so they write reams of reports that probably mean nothing what-so-ever." Oscar shrugged. "I get tempted to liven things up for them. Apparently they can tell when there's a witch or wizard in the vicinity, but not a mage."

"Huh. Handy." Kendel looked around as a patrol meandered down the little gully toward them. "They aren't due back yet."

"Doesn't look like an emergency, though." Oscar walked out with the Captain, and frowned at the soldiers' guileless smiles. "Or maybe it is." He trotted up the rough staircase to their room. "Bran, rise and shine. Come show off your superior education."

Bran rolled out of bed and reached for his clothes. "What's up?"

"A patrol's back early and looking a bit off. Come look them over."

He stepped out at Kendel's yelp. "What do you mean you just felt like going home?"

Bran shoved his feet into his boots and followed Oscar out, buttoning his shirt. "Oh yeah, someone fiddled them good." Bran pulled out a knife and nicked his left arm. Dipped his right fingers in the blood and started writing on air. He ended by snapping his bloody fingers in the patrol leader's face.

The man blinked, then paled as his jaw dropped. He looked around frantically. "There were about two dozen of them, coming up from the south. They had the weirdest clothes, they changed color according
to what was around them. We just watched them, but when they got close enough, they knew we were there. The officer, this woman . . . " He shook his head and looked around. "She told us we were happy little soldiers, to forget we had seen them and just take our time and go on home. What the hell!"

The rest of the group was chiming in as Bran snapped his fingers at them.

Oscar tapped Kendel's shoulder. "Magicians of some sort, we'll go check them out. Find out how far away they were when detected, and figure out some more remote spots to watch from. I have a nasty suspicion we're about to witness our first encounter between Oners and Earthers."

They grabbed their packs and a day's worth of field rations and marched.

Oscar couldn't keep a smirk off his face. "What a shame Lefty is off reporting to Rufi. We'll just have to use our initiative."

Br
an grinned. "Yeah, initiative. Fortunately it's what we're best at."

They headed due east until they cut the mystery troops' trail.

"Must be headed for the Earther's Gate Camp. They've already passed up the Science Camp." Bran murmured.

They both put on illusions of dried grass and snow, pulled in their auras and loped up the trail of trampled grass.

The strangers were scoping out the Gate Camp. Four of them with some large crates were well to the rear, the others were spread out. Looking at their clumping, Oscar diagnosed four teams of four, a junior officer for each two teams, and the tall spare woman with the hawk nose as the commander. She had a female aide, a bug-eyed young woman with a metal case instead of a weapon. As the light dimmed, he brought up his light wrap spell again and eased in closer. Watched where he put his feet and tried to think like a hummock of grass. And sat down to listen as the teams all pulled back and reported.

The commander paced, radiating energy and aggression.
"We'll attack an hour after full dark. We'll kill a couple of guards, women if they are available, draw them out for a fire fight. The noodles can leave those bodies halfway between here and the Camp, then get out of here. We'll draw back more slowly, then cut and run as if three fatalities intimidated us."

The four men who'd been to the rear all twi
tched at the "noodles" comment.

The aide shifted uncertainly. "What if that native patrol is caught? You zapped them pretty hard."

"All the better for us, they'll execute them for killing the guards. We've all heard how Earth loves to make an example of resisters, to cow the rest of the natives."

Oscar and Bran withdrew to beyond a ridge and let
all the spells go.

"Oh my aching head. I hate
spells like that. Well, actually I love them, but oh my aching head." Bran flopped onto his back. "So. Our goal is to de-escalate the fight between the Oners and the Earthers, so we don't get squashed flat in the middle of their war. If we warn the Camp about the Oners, that isn't going to happen, is it?"

"No. But I didn't like that part about killing guards. We don't need the blame for that either." Oscar pondered the possibilities. "Those Oners seem to be sorta magical, but they really depend on their machines. Do you think we can fool them with illusions?"

"Remove the guards ourselves? Stun them? Then we'd have to have some really solid illusions, or maybe just an implanted memory. How many ways to take out guards are there? Knives and broken necks are the most common, and we both know what those feel like."

Oscar winced. "Yeah. We'll need to substitute grass lands for the desert and these guards instead of those smelly bandits. Yeah. We can make the memories, but what about implanting them? They'll have shields, won't they?"

"Oscar, didn't you get a reading on them? They are covered solid down south, and are wide open in the north. Or in Nil's terms, we can get through easy if we stick to the high frequencies."

"Oh, good." Oscar
peeked over the low roll of the ridge. "They're settling down for dinner. The commander said something about the noodles could drop the bodies . . . have they got some dead bodies in those boxes? And are the noodles the men that were with the boxes? And could noodles translate as anything but an insult?"

"Could mean something else in another language. They had pretty strong accents, but they were mostly speaki
ng English, a few Arabish words and sentences stuck together funny. Worse than the Auralians. Huh. I can see us being able to understand the Earthers, if our ancestors came from there, but shouldn't these guys speak some weird foreign language?"

Oscar shrugged. "I'm going to ponder these Gates and Worlds in depth, someday when I'm really bored. Figure out how they fit in with all my history lessons. Right now, I'm going to sleep. Kick me in a couple of hours."

The Gate Camp guards had fallen into routines, and gotten a bit lazy. Three pairs of soldiers strolled circuits around the camp, two pairs of men, one pair of women.

"Where's the fun in that?" Bran breathed, as they started shadowing the women.

"Maybe they let th
e other guards catch up to them? I'll take the tall one." Oscar closed his eyes and pictured the woman in place of that bandit he'd killed . . . and the smell of grass, her perfume, blood. Better keep that smell separate, in case the Oner was a neck breaker . . . The feel of the knife across the throat, then the blood, the body's struggles so quickly stilled. He shuddered at how easy it was to remember. And neck breaking, that quick leveraged jerk . . . all right. He was ready, and he could see with his inner vision, the odd high frequency spots of the attackers, closing in on the camp. The two forward men lay in wait just off the track the guards had worn in the grass. Two of the men walked by unmolested, then the women. The Oners came up behind them and Oscar reached into the mind of the one closing in on 'his' soldier. He sank right in, feeling the man, wearing him like a suit. They grabbed the woman, left hand over the mouth, right hand with the knife . . . they stopped then. Threw a stun spell on the woman and let her fall. They drove the false memory deep as they crouched to wipe their clean knife on her uniform, sheathed it, and stepped over the body for the next phase of the attack. Oscar pulled loose from the mental contact, and curled in the grass fighting dry heaves. Bran walked over and thumped him. "You aren't supposed to go that deep, twit."

Oscar took a couple of carefully controlled breaths. "Your lady guard all right?"

"Just fine. Let's back out of here, now." They slipped into their unnoticeable spells and jogged away.

The noodles were tipping three bodies out of their boxes. Oscar got close enough to feel the cold from the open container. Had they frozen the bodies to keep them from decaying? He got a good look at each man. They were all in Western uniforms, showing a bit of wear, no one he kne
w. Little holes in the uniforms, not a lot of blood, as if they'd died quickly.

::
What the heck? Stiletto? Arrows with a simple point? Bran, do you have any idea what sort of wounds those 'guns' of theirs make? ::

:: No idea. But I'll bet you're onto something. They'd have to use a
gun, if they want to fool the Earthers. ::

As the noodles withdrew, Oscar
searched the bodies and removed the few papers on the corpses. Then he galloped after Bran, getting over a roll in the terrain so he could let the spell go before his head exploded. The alarm sounded below; the Oners charged out of the large central building and through the lighted area with swords raised. The first troops out ducked away, pulling pistols. The Oners got around the corner of a building and ran. Some soldiers blocked them and fell quickly, without a hand touching them. Then the Oners were racing into the dark with only a few flashes of light, and some triplet bangs from the long guns pursuing them. The Earthers wisely decided not to chase the attackers out into the dark hills, at least on foot. Engines were starting back in the camp.

Oscar and Bran hid up on the hill until they were satisfied the Earthers had suffered no casualties apart from the stunnings,
and had decided against any pursuit at all. Then they headed south to pick up the trail of the Oners. It was time to collect some information on the other side of this three way confrontation.