The Fire and the Storm - Metric Pro Edition: Fiction, Dragons, Elves, Unicorns, Magic (96 page)

“Very.”
Val agreed. 
“I can handle it, but I’d never do a long mission in void without having a void craft along.  This would make me crazy after a while, I think.  It would make anyone catastrophically agoraphobic eventually.  Not to mention that if our spells failed we’d be dead in seconds, and we’re a very long way from any kind of help.”

“We should get started.”
Talia prompted. 
“And by the way, what will we do with the energy you’re collecting with your huge collection fields?  It’ll be too much to hold and too much to store.”

“We should also consider that if we succeed in englobing the sun with a dense collection field, we’ll cut Kellaran off from the Source.”
Alilia cautioned.
  “No sorcerers could cast, and wizard’s power would soon start to diminish as well, as ‘the heat of the stone’ is released and not replenished.  I don’t suppose it could affect anyone except Glup if we cut off warlocks’ power, but we might want to warn him in case he’s in the middle of something dangerous.”

“There’s also the development of forty-four young warlocks in the wombs of The Volunteers, inside the time-bubble.”
Mark pointed out. 
“It probably wouldn’t affect them any to be cut off from warlocks’ power, but I don’t want to take a chance.

“We’ll limit trying to cast collection fields to the half of the sun opposite Kellaran.  If we can cast them around half of it, we should be able to make a pretty good judgment of whether we could do it around the whole thing.

“As to what we’ll do with the power we’ll get, we could just cast it as light or heat or some other energy directed out into the void away from Kellaran, but that seems a waste, and I worry that we’ll attract attention.  We have enough visitors from the void already, and a beam of that power would be detectable many star systems away.”

“We can just cast it over a very, very large area,”
Val suggested,
“So the intensity of it won’t be noticeable against the glare of the sun behind it, should anyone in that direction happen to be looking.  In fact, after we’ve captured the energy with our collection fields, we should cast it again as energy of as similar a nature to what we captured as we can, so it all just looks the same.”

“Good thinking.”
Mark nodded. 
“So let’s work on that for a second first; and try to cast wizards’ power as the Source, and do the same for warlocks power.”

“It should be no harder than transmuting the Source to wizards’ power, which is easy now that we figured it out.”
Fire opined.

“I have a good astronomers’ spell that we can use to analyze what we’re casting.”
Povon volunteered.

“Let’s start with me first.”
Val volunteered. 
“I’ll start with the Source.”

All of them followed what she was doing and checked on her as she cast an invisible energy on the opposite side of them from the sun, and directing it away from them.

Povon cast her Spectrum Analyzer out beyond Val’s spell in the path of the energy she was casting, and cast another copy of the Spectrum Analyzer close to Val herself.

Val modified her spell with some input from everyone else, until Povon declared; 
“That’s it.  You’re casting the Source, well enough that a unicorn would be sustained by it and could utilize it.  You’re losing about a third in the three stages of transmutation; from Source to raw wizards’ power as would radiate from wizard’s rock, from raw wizards’ power to wizard magic, and from magic back to the Source again.”

“Yah, most of the loss is heat.”
Val nodded with her eyes closed. 
“I don’t know what’s happening to the rest of it, but give me a moment.”

Povon waited while Val modified what she was doing again, then announced; 
“All right, you’ve got the efficiency loss down to just less than a fifth.”

“That’s the best I can do that way without a lot of work.”
Val stated. 
“And I don’t think I can make it much better anyway.

“All right, I’ll start expanding my collection field, and I’ll expend the area of my Source-shine spell to match it.”

After a few seconds she let Fire and Six take over the concentration on her Source-shine spell, and soon after that Karz cast to vent most of the heat that was building up in her body before her Healing was triggered.

After half a minute she was done. 
“All right, about seventy thousand square kilometers.  Enough to cover most of Debivin.  That’s all I can cover with a collection field for the Source, and I think I’m losing collection efficiency around the edges. I don’t know why, but that’s all I can do.

“I’ll try it with a warlock collection field now.  I should be able to get a lot better efficiency because it’s only two transmutations; wizard’s source to magic and back.”

“You’re right, you’re only losing a bit more than a tenth.”
Povon reported.

“But less of that is heat, so more of it is our unknown loss.”
Val noted, and prepared to expand the field.
  “All right, here goes.”

A minute later they had the result.

“About a tenth bigger, that’s it.”
she noted. 
“It sure is a lot more power though.  And both sources are a lot stronger out here in the void.  It seems the air around Kellaran blocks about a quarter of it.”

“I’ll give it a try, then Fire and Six.  Then we’ll move closer to the sun.”
Mark told them as he cast.

“About two hundred and thirty-five thousand square kilometers.”
he noted twelve seconds later. 
“Which makes sense, since I’m bigger and more mature than you, so you’ll probably catch up to that when you’re grown.”

“Or it’s due to you being a full-blood warlock, and we’re only half, so we won’t.”
Val countered.

“I hope not.”
Mark laughed. 
“I’d hate to think of my descendents being diminished in power by half with every generation.  I think  warlocks breed true no matter what, like Longstrider males other than me.”

“It’s either that or development or both, since we already know that magic capability has little or nothing to do with physical size.”
Fire pointed out. 
“Six must weigh twice me now, and he has twice my strength, but my power matches his and Val’s pretty closely.

“Watch.”

She did what Val had done, and was a bit less capable than her half-sister as a wizard, and a bit more as a warlock.

“See, there you are.”
she concluded with satisfaction.

“I’m trying something else.”
Mark said as he cast.
  “First I’m going to make my collection field so dense that almost no warlock source power gets through it, like I did with the Source and the heat when I blocked Zarkog.  Then I’ll expand that to as much area as I can.  Measure my output versus my last attempt.  Make sure you kids stay in front of me so you don’t get blocked.”

He cast, concentrated, and went as far as he could.

Povon gave the result. 
“You only covered about an eightieth of the area, but your power output was almost the same, just a bit less.”

“Ah, good to know.”
Mark nodded.
  “Shall we move in?”

“How far?”
Povon asked.

“Rather than a certain distance or a portion of the distance to the sun, I’d like to move in enough that the intensity of the sunlight is exactly twice what it is here.  But I don’t know how to do the calculation.”
Mark admitted.

“Like this;”
Povon said, and demonstrated both the calculation and the group Translocation.

They repeated all the experiments, then moved in again, then again.  At each stage their ability to cast collection fields was the same, but where the sun’s intensity was eight times as much as where they’d started they found that venting heat from their bodies and brains was becoming a serious issue.  They also found that maintaining such big collection fields and casting such incredibly powerful spells was starting to wear on their concentration.

They made one more jump inward and found that the sun’s power at sixteen times it’s intensity in the void above Kellaran was all they could process, and the maximum size of their collection fields was reduced.

“All right, that gives us our maximum power collecting and casting capabilities.”
Mark stated with satisfaction. 
“Now let’s go back to where we started and try it with all four of us co-operating to cast one big collection field at a time.”

They did so, and when the four of them were expanding the three children’s collection fields for Source power for their wizardry, they did the same for Talia, Alilia, and the three dragons.  They found that such co-operation increased their total power to more than the total of their individual abilities.

“Now I want to try it with automated spells.”
Val stated. 
“Let’s go back to the beginning.”

She initiated and guided their jump herself.

“Now, I’m going to make both my collection fields as big as I can, and use all that power to cast self-replicating copies of the sourceshine spell, each with it’s own warlock collection field.  And I’ll make them self-directed spells under my guidance, so I can tell all the collecting fields to do something else, rather than just the sourceshine spell.”

She cast until there were one hundred and fifty thousand of them, and had to stop.

“All right, that’s about as many of those as I can do.  It covers just less than eight billion square kilometers.  More than enough to englobe Kellaran and a sizable volume of void around it, but a lot less than the surface of the sun.  I can’t make each one with the same size and efficiency as I can do myself, but it’s not bad.

“In order to be able to change what they do, I have to keep a constant minor Link to them, if I want them to be secure.  If I tell them to only change function when they recognize my psionic aura and I give a specific code or something, someone could copy that and take control of them away from me.  This way I know instantly if any of them are altered or controlled by anyone else in any way, but the minor links to them I need is limited in number by my subconscious attention span.  You multiply this amount of power by about sixteen, and you get the absolute maximum amount of magic power I could wield as if it was my own.

“If I want to cast them so they’re unalterable I could keep casting them until I had to stop from lack of sleep, and with Alertness spells that could be a long time.  They’d have fail-safes so they’d just dissipate if anyone tried to alter them.  That’s what I did with the Work spell and the Healing, they can only do what they were made to do, and if someone tries to alter them they’ll be gone, but other than that they’ll keep multiplying until everything they were made to accomplish is done, or infinity, whichever comes first.

“We have to make sure any spells like that have a finite task, like healing or educating everyone on Kellaran.  If you made them with a potentially infinite task, like just making these sunshine spells, they really would keep multiplying until they were using every bit of power available from the sun.

“We can give them a limited but still complex task, like killing every demon from our sun to halfway to the next closest one in every direction with our most efficient attack spells, and they will.  They’ll keep going until all the demons are dead, or they’re using all the sun’s power, or until the demons find a way to counter or alter that particular spell.  That’s the problem with completely independent automated spells; they lack flexibility.  If the demons find a way to crack their protections, they’re gone, and if the demons find a way to counter them then they’re just wasting some of our sun’s energy for nothing, except maybe distracting the demons a bit.”

“All right, let’s pool all our power and our will and see how much of the ones you have now we can do all together.” Mark instructed.  “That way we know how much total power we can generate together.”

A few minutes later, they had their answer.

“All right, we command the power of about twenty-eight billion square kilometers of source at this distance, times sixteen for maximum intensity closer to the sun.  Still less than one one-thousandths of covering the surface of the sun, and far less than that at the distance from the sun of maximum usable intensity.  We were still a very long way away from the sun at sixteen times normal sunlight intensity, which would make for a very big globe.  We’re still only capable of using a very tiny fraction of the sun’s output of magic.

“But still, that’s the equivalent of a normal-density power field at the distance of the sun from Kellaran with an area of about four hundred and fifty-six billion square kilometers.  That is an absolutely colossal amount of power we have at our complete disposal, not to mention how many single-purpose independent spells of maximum power the four of us could cast in any given amount of time.

“Now it seems to me that the most efficient attack we could use with that power is Fire’s modification of Tithian’s Sun-Gate spell.  We’ll add functions to identify the best places to cast a Gate to the sun on the demons or on their craft, and how big it needs to be to destroy them.  If they can get it directly on the demons’ bodies on their most vulnerable place, I don’t think the Gates would have to be very big at all.

“If the spells are independent the demons might crack the spells’ protections and disable them, but I don’t think there’s much that’ll counter a Gate to the sun.  They might find a way to Shield against a tiny one that would otherwise kill them, so we’ll have the spell just keep expanding the Gate over their surface until they’re covered and consumed, if necessary.  And if we keep them under our guidance so they can’t be disabled they should be completely effective, period.