Just Cause Universe 2: The Archmage (33 page)

Per Homeland Security, detain Stratocaster for questioning. Be careful. --J.

Sally looked at Jason in dismay. “Why?” she asked him.

“How?” he muttered back.

Ace glanced around at the approaching Just Cause heroes. “Baby,” she said. “Tell the President you’ll talk to him later.”

“Ace, move away,” said Doublecharge softly.

Ace drew her gun and held it ready, but not pointing at anyone yet. “What is this?” she asked. “He’s not doing anything to anyone.”

“Mr. President, I’m going to have to call you back. We’ll do lunch,” said Stratocaster. His conjured office vanished into sweet-smelling smoke.

“Ace, put the gun down.” Doublecharge made no threatening moves, but Sally could tell she was moments away from unleashing a blast of lightning. Doublecharge wouldn’t hesitate to act if she felt it would be advantageous. “We’re not going to hurt him. We’ve been ordered to detain him. That’s all.”

Tears tracked down Ace’s cheeks and her gun wavered. “That’s how it always starts,” she whimpered. “Detained for questioning. I’ve seen it before. Military minds all think alike. Then you take him away and he disappears forever.”

“Babe,” said Stratocaster. “Look, I’m sure this is just a misunderstanding.”

“Look at her!” screamed Ace. “She’s ready to take you down right now!” She clenched her free hand on Stratocaster’s arm. “Please, just magic us away from here. Please, Will.”

Sally
, said Doublecharge’s voice in her head. Switchboard must have been facilitating telepathic communication.
Disarm her. Now.
 

Sally felt like she was being torn in two between her duty to Just Cause and her loyalty to Stratocaster and Ace. She wavered in indecision. Doublecharge turned her head slightly toward Sally and glared at her.

The world ground to a halt as Sally’s perceptions accelerated to maximum. She sprinted forward and thumbed on the safety of Ace’s pistol. Then she popped out the cartridge and slid the bullet from the chamber.

“Sally, what are you doing?”

Sally shrieked at the unexpected voice. She whirled around to see Stratocaster slide his arm out of Ace’s frozen grasp. His mohawk bobbed as he looked down at her.

“I’m… I’m making sure nobody gets hurt,” she said at last. “How can you see me when I’m moving this fast?”

“Magic,” he said with a smile. “Parahuman powers are nothing compared to the sum total of all the magical power in the world. I’ve stopped time for the moment.”

“You… stopped time?”

“Yep. It’s easier than trying to balance everything else out while we talk. This way we can take our time and not have to worry about my trigger-happy girlfriend here or your short-fused boss.” He nodded toward Doublecharge. “She’s a good person, and a strong leader, but I just don’t like her very much. I’d rather talk to you. I figure we’ve got a lot of history together.” He laughed at his own joke.

“Uh, okay,” hedged Sally. “What are we going to talk about?”

“The fate of the world.” Stratocaster gestured and a couple of couches materialized. “And my fate. Popcorn?” He offered her a bowl filled with the soft, buttery snack that hadn’t been there a moment ago.

“No thank you.”

“Suit yourself. It’s awfully good, though. Now, what’s this all about?” Stratocaster sat on a couch, put his feet up on the arm, and chewed contentedly on a mouthful of popcorn.

“Juice said we were to detain you on Homeland Security’s orders.”

“Why?”

“He didn’t say. He just told us to be careful. I don’t think he agrees with them.”

“Juice is a smart guy. He knows what’s at stake here.”

“Well, what
is
at stake?” Sally gave in and sat on the other couch.
 

Stratocaster shrugged. “I’m the Archmage now. Contained within me is the sum total of magical energy in the entire world. That’s a lot of power for one man. Look at what
Frazier
did, and he only had
most
of it. I’ve got it all.”
 

“So what are you going to do with it?”

Stratocaster chewed thoughtfully on more popcorn. “I could do a lot of things. Just about anything I put my mind to, really. You want me to feed the world? Make the deserts fertile? Piece of cake. Destroy all the nukes? Child’s play.” His face hardened. “I could turn every terrorist into a pillar of salt, or make Washington into a glass pancake so America could start over again.” His expression softened again. “I could bring Shannon back to life. It’s so easy once you understand the power.”

Sally’s breath caught in her throat. Shannon’s death still felt like an open wound on her psyche. She almost demanded Stratocaster bring her back right then, but somehow she knew that would only lead down the path that Doublecharge and everyone else feared. If he brought back one person to life, how could he say no to other requests?

A god can’t grant every prayer.

“A god?” said Stratocaster aloud. He must have read Sally’s thoughts. “Yes, I suppose that’s a fair assessment. The God of Magic. Sounds better than Archmage, don’t you think?”

Sally gasped; she didn’t know what to say.

“You’re right, of course,” said Stratocaster. “I really am dangerous with this kind of power. No wonder the government wants their hands on me.”

“They’re afraid of you,” said Sally. “And they’re jealous. They want that power for themselves. They want to control you.”

Stratocaster chuckled in a way that made her blood turn to ice water. “They might find that harder than they’d think.”

“They’d figure out a way. Maybe they’d hold Ace as a hostage or something.”

“There is no place they could hold her that I couldn’t find and rescue her.”

“Then they’d… I don’t know. I don’t think like they do, but I’m sure they’d figure something out. That’s what governments do, isn’t it?”

“Which leaves me with what as an option? Oh, I suppose I could leave.”

“Leave?”

“Leave the world. Take my ball and go home. Although I don’t know where
home
would be after that. Mars might be nice with a bit of atmosphere. Or Venus with some air conditioning. I could terraform either one. Only problem is it’s kind of a long ways away. I’d miss this place. Well, maybe not North Dakota so much, but you know what I mean.”
 

“Could you…” Sally swallowed, nervous. “Could you just let the power go?”

Stratocaster’s mouth closed with a snap. “Let it go?” he managed after recovering from wide-eyed surprise.

“Sure. Can you just release the power into the wild or something?”

“It’s not a wild animal, Sally. It’s magical energy.”

“Well, it had to come from somewhere, right? Where does magic come from?”

“Nobody really knows that. Even I don’t know that, and I know everything there is to be knowed about it.”

“If you… died… where would the power go?”

Stratocaster’s brow furrowed as he considered. “Without an individual for the power to travel to, I guess it would just spread out until someone came along who could draw it in.”

“What if there wasn’t anyone?”

“I suppose the world would just eventually absorb it all, but there’s no guarantee someone wouldn’t rise up again in another thousand years to do this once more.”

At last, Sally couldn’t resist her appetite any longer and reached for some popcorn. It was delicious. “I was thinking, what if you just went back in time, way back before people, and just let the magic go free? Can you do that?”

A look of wonder crossed over Stratocaster’s face. “Give away my power. Live a normal, mundane existence instead of being all-powerful. Tough choice.”

Sally nodded toward Ace, still frozen in the act of holding onto Stratocaster’s arm. “I think she’d rather be with Will the man instead of Will the mage.”

Stratocaster smiled. “That’s true. There might be something to that idea. Tell you what, Sally… Let’s talk it over with the rest of the team and see if they agree before this gets any uglier.”

“Are you sure?”

“No,” said Stratocaster. “But it’s got to be better than the alternative.”

“What’s the alternative?”

“I turn you all into woodchucks and be on my way.”

Chapter Twenty-One

“My vocation is more in composition really than anything else – building up harmonies using the guitar, orchestrating the guitar like an army, a guitar army.”

-
Jimmy Page
 

August, 2004

Rugby, North Dakota

“This is a bad idea,” said Doublecharge. “I’m not sure I can smooth this one over with Homeland Security. They’re sending someone to take charge.” She looked grimly at Sally. “I’m sure it’s Goodwin.”

Sally chewed on her knuckles and watched as Stratocaster directed his magic. She’d explained her idea to Juice and Doublecharge. Doublecharge had been against it; Just Cause had pushed Homeland Security about as far as it could and there would undoubtedly be consequences of their actions. Juice had once again overruled his second-in-command to give Stratocaster the go-ahead to try to dissipate his magical power. “
I won’t be party to what amounts to a witch hunt,
” said Juice. He said he would assume all responsibility for whatever happened, and had the Command Center log the order to proceed under his name. Whatever ramifications came from Just Cause disobeying Homeland Security’s directives would be on his head.

A great stage grew from the dusty plains of North Dakota at Stratocaster’s behest. As Sally watched, scaffolding unfolded out of itself to form an arch overhead. Lights sprouted from it like buds on a vine. Shadowy smoke formed into stacks of speakers. A riser at the stage’s rear bubbled into a massively complicated drum set.

As he’d explained it, Stratocaster was going to treat them all to one hell of a concert as part of his spell. Sally knew it was more than just that; he was such a showman, he couldn’t resist a performance like this.

In spite of his protests that it would be safe, National Guard troops formed a perimeter well back from Stratocaster’s stage. He may have wanted to play for an audience, but they’d have to watch him from at least a quarter mile away. To compensate for the distance, Stratocaster erected monstrous video screens and speaker stacks to carry images and sound to the audience. The word had gotten out and a steady stream of curious onlookers flowed into the area. It may not have been a 21
st
Century equivalent of Woodstock, but people anticipated the performance would be a strong final movement to the symphony of magic which had been the biggest event ever in the high plains.

Sally reached out and grabbed a Frisbee before it could smack into Jason. Like every other outdoor concert, people were throwing them around, batting beach balls, and cheering. She gaped in surprise to see the Just Cause logo on the Frisbee, which morphed into a likeness of her face before it dissolved into tendrils of sweet-smelling smoke that blew away on the late-afternoon breeze. “He’s really going all out with this,” she said.

“He’s wasting time and endangering people,” said Doublecharge. “I wish he’d hurry up and get it over with before Goodwin or whoever gets here.”

As she spoke, the stage lights dimmed. Sally hopped up and down a couple of times to try to see better. Jason laughed and lifted her up onto his shoulders. She curled up to nip his ear playfully and then toyed with his hair as the wail of a single guitar echoed across the plains under extreme amplification.

With a blast of sound, incendiaries went up on either side of the stage, shooting sparks and flames high into the air as the lights came up. Sally saw Stratocaster decked out in his finest rock garb: tight checkerboard pants tucked into Doc Martens; a sleeveless tank top with some incomprehensible symbol on it that constantly shifted and changed. His mohawk stretched to improbable heights and sparkled from base to tip. His guitar, a duplicate of the same one he’d built in the past with Nikola Tesla, hung low from its strap as he raised one hand in the traditional two-fingered rock salute.

“
Hello, Rugby!
” he called into the microphone.

The audience cheered. Sally felt herself swept up in the excitement and hooted right along with them.

Ill-defined, shadowy figures rounded out the band on the other instruments: drums, bass, rhythm guitar.

Stratocaster’s fingers danced across the strings with a flourish of notes which could have made eardrums bleed as far away as Fargo. “
Appreciate you all coming out tonight for this last stop on my farewell tour,
” he shouted. “
I’ve got a few tunes to play for you now
.” And with that, he launched into a fast-paced virtuoso performance which made Sally want to get up and dance.

The concert progressed for what felt like hours, but each tune was so amazing in its complexity and sheer musical power that the fans cheered and screamed their approval with each new number. One piece was so haunting and beautiful that tears ran unchecked down Sally’s face and she felt Jason’s chest hitching with sobs. Another had such a sensuous, driving beat that she was ready to let Jason take her right there amid the audience. She slipped off his shoulders, straddled his waist, and ground against him as they swayed to the beat. Tune after tune, each one a new sensory adventure in emotion.

During a slow ballad, a dark sedan nosed its way through the gathered crowd to stop by the Just Cause heroes. Three men in dark suits climbed out followed by a furious Christine Goodwin. “Jesus fucking Christ,” she said after surveying the audience enthralled by Stratocaster’s performance. “You men get to the stage and shut that shit down right now.”

The three agents disappeared into the audience.

Goodwin closed a hand around Doublecharge’s arm. “What the hell is going on here? I have an order straight from the Director to take Stratocaster into custody, and you’re having a goddamned concert. I will have your ass, Doublecharge. Yours, Juice’s, and everyone else’s on your team!”

Doublecharge glanced down at the woman’s hand on her arm. Electricity crackled between her eyes and at the ends of her fingers. “Take your hand off me.”