Just Cause Universe 2: The Archmage (17 page)

Sally climbed up to the driver’s box where Shannon held the reins with white-knuckled hands. “Where’d you get the wagon?”

“From a boy at the edge of town.”

“With what? Juice has all the money.”

“I, uh, made a
deal
.”

“What
kind
of deal?” shouted Juice over the din of the horses and the clatter of the wagon.

Shannon blushed. “I showed him my tits.”

There was a brief pause, followed by a snort of amusement from Ace. The others quickly followed suit and soon chuckles and guffaws competed against the noise of the team. “Well, he
was
cute.” Shannon giggled.

A bullet cracked into the tailgate of the wagon, followed immediately by the sound of the gunshot, which quelled their humor.

“Everybody get down,” said Juice.

“They’re going to catch us,” said Will as he flung himself to the floorboards. Another bullet whistled over their heads.

“Then let’s give them something to think about. Ace?”

“About goddamn time.” She raised her rifle to her shoulder.

“Try not to kill anybody,” said Juice. He lifted his own pistol in as steady a grip as he could given the bouncing of the wagon.

“Hey,” called Sally. “We’re going
away
from the train!”

“It’ll catch up with us eventually,” said Shannon. She shrieked as the wagon bounced over a small hillock like a speed bump and nearly threw everyone out of it.

Juice and Ace fired at the approaching Bass gang. They hit nothing but made the horsemen duck down along the backs of their mounts as they returned fire. One bullet splintered a sideboard; the others missed.

Ace snarled something in Hebrew as her rifle jammed. She dropped it and crouched down next to Will. He passed her his pistol. “Here,” he said. “You’ll get more use out of it than I will.”

“
Ow, dammit!
” Juice yelped as a bullet ricocheted off his wrist. His pistol went flying off into the dust of their wake. “We’re running out of guns!”

“Sally, get my pistol,” called Shannon over the thundering of the horses’ hooves.

Sally reached into her friend’s belt, withdrew the pistol, and pointed it uncertainly towards the Bass gang. She slipped into accelerated perceptions, sort of aimed, closed her eyes, and pulled the trigger. The kick of the gun wasn’t as bad as she expected but she still almost lost hold of it. As she opened her eyes, she saw Hank flying backwards off his horse, a look of surprise on his face and a hole in his shirt by the shoulder.

“
Nice
shot.” Ace sounded impressed.

Sam and Joe slowed up their horses, evidently deciding that the pursuit of their lost thirty-five hundred dollars wasn’t quite worth their lives; their quarry wasn’t quite as helpless as they’d thought.

Shannon kept the team going at a good clip for awhile longer to put some respectable distance between themselves and the Bass gang. Eventually they saw the plume of coal smoke approaching from the west as the train drew near. Sally wasn’t sure if it was going to stop as they waved it down, but the engineer tipped his hat to them and they heard the squeaking of brakes from the coaches.

As the train ground to a halt, a boy in his early teens, barefoot, and wearing a straw hat over a goofy grin jumped off one of the cars.

“Oh, Jesus.” Shannon looked like she wanted to sink right through the wagon and hide in the ground. “This is
his
wagon.”

Juice smiled. “Then it’s only right we give it back to him. Plus some extra for the damage to it.”

“So
pay
him already!” pleaded Shannon.

“We’ll probably need all our cash money. You might need to use your
other
currency.”

Shannon’s jaw dropped as the others burst out laughing.

Chapter Ten

“Ere many generations pass, our machinery will be driven by a power obtainable at any point in the universe. This idea is not novel…We find it in the delightful myth of Antheus, who derives power from the earth; we find it among the subtle speculations of one of your splendid mathematicians…Throughout space there is energy. Is this energy static or kinetic? If static our hopes are in vain; if kinetic – and this we know it is, for certain – then it is a mere question of time when men will succeed in attaching their machinery to the very wheelwork of nature.”

-
Nikola Tesla addressing the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, 1891
 

September, 1876

Graz, Austria

Once the displaced heroes reached Chicago, it felt more like a vacation than survival, despite the stockyard stench that carried for miles outside of the town. While the train was on a maintenance layover, they bought luggage, new clothes,
real
food, and hot baths all around. Juice and Will sprung for shaves. If Will had retained his purple mohawk, it might have garnered them a lot of curious and unwelcome attention, but he’d taken a knife to it shortly after they left Laramie. Sally, Shannon, and Ace spent a lot of time fussing with the ridiculous women’s fashions of the day: corsets, bustles, and petticoats. Sally was convinced that all the layers represented a form of medieval torture. Juice and Will were only slightly less uncomfortable in their stiffly-starched collars and layered vests and jackets, although Juice found himself a bowler hat that he said he really liked.

From Chicago, they took a train to Boston, where they booked passage on a steamship to Marseilles. Sally was terribly seasick for the first two days on board. The others were as sympathetic as they could be and brought her tea and crackers to settle her stomach. By the third day, she felt well enough to actually leave her berth and get up on the deck. As long as she didn’t look down at the waves lapping against the side of the ship, the sea air did wonders for her demeanor and she was able to keep a couple meals down.

“Ugh,” she said one night as she looked at her ribs in the mirror. “I’ve really lost weight.”

“You know, there are women who’d
kill
to be able to say that,” said Shannon as she idly turned pages in a catalog of the latest French fashions. “I don’t think I’ve looked this
svelte
since my sophomore year.”

“
Svelte
?” Sally laughed. “I can’t even claim to be svelte. I’m too damn skinny. It’s my metabolism. I eat like a horse and I can’t gain anything. Between camp food and being seasick I bet I’ve lost ten pounds since we got here. And I didn’t have that much to spare in the first place.”

“Yeah, you look like you could use a milkshake or two. Or six.”

The girls giggled at that.

“Don’t worry. French food is all cream and butter and bread. You’ll gain some weight back. I’m counting on you.”

“Counting on me? For what?”

Shannon winked. “To eat my leftovers. I
don’t
want
to gain any weight back.”

The rest of the seagoing voyage passed pleasantly. Sally spent as much time on the deck as she could, and wished she could get away with wearing much less clothing than current decorum permitted. She and Shannon grew practically inseparable. They made a special effort to include the standoffish Ace in their various Girls’ Night functions. Unfortunately for their efforts, the Israeli woman didn’t have much of a knack for social graces and seemed content to talk quietly with Juice and Will.
Especially
Will. Shannon suggested there might be some romantic sparks developing there.

Marseilles was as cosmopolitan a city as they’d seen. Will spent some time in the telegraph office to try to track down their objective. He found Tesla at the Austria Polytechnic institute, and so the team booked rail passage to the hamlet of Graz. The journey took them through Switzerland and the scenic Alps and as the leaves were turning, they arrived at their final destination. It took them less than a day to find Tesla and after his final class of the day had completed, he met with them.

Nikola Tesla, only a year or two older than Sally and Shannon, was a slender, intense man with dark hair and a narrow mustache. He spoke English, to their great relief. He listened intently as Will spoke to him about magic, identified himself as a fellow mage, and didn’t bat an eye at the outlandish tale of time travel.

“Of course it would be possible. You’re here, are you not?” he said. “We are all time travelers, but most of us only move through it at a constant rate in a single direction.”

“What we really need is a way to get back to our own time.” Juice spun his bowler around a finger, a habit he’d developed since Boston.

“I see,” said Tesla. “I’d suspect you all were perhaps insane, except for
this
man clearly knows about the mystical arts.” He nodded his head toward Will, who bowed in respect. “But I’m only a dabbler. My knowledge of magic is far less than my understanding of electricity. And of that, I am still but a student. I’m not sure why you’ve chosen to come to me for help.”

“It’s because of how you integrate magic and technology,” explained Will. “With your skills, you could possibly help me reproduce the instrument I need to work my own magic.”

“Integrate magic and technology?” Tesla’s eyebrows raised and he chewed on a pencil in thought. “What a fascinating idea. I’ve never considered it but now that you mention it, it seems so logical.”

“We didn’t just change the future, did we?” asked Shannon.

Sally shrugged. “How do we know we weren’t the ones to give him the idea in the first place?”

“And you believe that you have the skill to effect a transport through time, once you’ve built your… instrument?” asked Tesla.

Will shrugged. “I hope so. Time travel is pretty new to me. I’m not sure how it works.”

“I suspect you’d need some sort of anchor. Something that exists now
and
in your future.”

“Like a building?” asked Shannon.

“Perhaps. Or an object. It should be a place or object with which you are very familiar. Magic is not an exact science, but I believe it would be fatal for you to materialize within solid matter.”

Sally felt her heart start to race as an unpleasant idea popped into her head.

“That would tend to leave out most locations,” said Juice. “How could we be certain we wouldn’t appear in the same space as innocents?”

“Ideally,” said Tesla, smoothing down his tightly-trimmed mustache, “you’d want to appear in a place devoid of people. You would also have to correct for the motion of the Earth through space as well. Certainly it will not be in this precise location in your future. But as you say, certainty is a problem. That’s always been a problem with magic. It’s one of the reasons I enjoy the study of electricity.”

“What…” Sally’s mouth had grown bone dry. “What if there was something that we
knew
passed through time from now until our own future? Something I
knew where it was?”

“Huh?” Will’s eyes widened as he tried to make sense of her statement.

Sally closed her eyes and spoke quickly. “Last month when I found those bones there was a horseshoe with them, and it looks exactly like one of mine right down to the chips and scars.”

There was a long pause as everyone stared at her. “You, uh, want to run that past us one more time?” said Juice. “At a speed a little more… human?”

“Yeah,” said Will. “You sounded like Alvin and the Chipmunks.”

Sally explained herself once more, and all her fears came out as she talked. She felt terrified that she’d found her own bones and that she was going to die here in the past. The others listened intently.

“No
wonder
you’ve seemed out of sorts recently,” said Juice. “Sally, I
promise
you we’re not going to let you die here in the past. But it sounds like this horseshoe might be the very key we need. You say you left it in your suite?”

“Yes.” Sally sniffled. She was nearly convinced that she wouldn’t be making the return journey. But if it meant the others would return safely, well, that’s what heroes were supposed to do: sacrifice for the greater good.

“And you know your suite very well. It’s very unlikely that someone else would be in it. That’s as safe an entry point as any I can think of,” said Juice.

“I agree,” said Will. “Now it’s just a matter of getting there. Mr. Tesla?”

“Please. Call me Nikola,” said the young man.

“
Nikola
, then. We’re going to need the help of a luthier, some tools, and all your electrical knowledge. We’re going to build me a new electric guitar.”

“Fascinating. How does one electrify a guitar?”

“To amplify the sound,” said Will. “I’m no scientist, but I know the basics of how to put one together. I’ll leave the specific details up to you.” He grabbed for some paper and fumbled with an inkwell and quill. “Um…” He looked at the others. “This is going to take awhile. You guys might want to find us a place to stay or something.”

In fact, it took just under two weeks to complete the guitar. Tesla still had coursework to maintain and Will wasn’t the best engineer, but with the help of the guitar maker, who didn’t even
pretend
to understand what they were trying to accomplish, a solid hardwood body was shaped, with a neck, bridge, fretboard, tuners, and thin-gauge strings installed. Once the body was completed, Will did his best to explain the nature of electronic amplification to Tesla.

The young electrical engineer spent two sleepless nights mumbling to himself and drawing sketch after sketch of designs for the pickups which would detect and amplify the vibrations of the steel strings, which they’d had to have specially manufactured as the luthier normally strung his instruments with animal intestines and silk. Eventually, he decided upon one that he felt would function the best. He and Will built the devices and attached them to the guitar. Instead of trying to build an on board amplifier, Tesla dug deep into his magical tomes and came up with an enchantment that achieved an auditory effect which Will claimed in amazement was a close approximation of something called a
Marshall stack
.