S. Stirling: Shadows of Falling Night

“ Tzze-mogh ,” he murmured, snarling at the feel of icy knives sliding through his head.

A sense of wrongness . Bane, of paths tending black, of complex parts breaking, rupturing, wearing, grinding, on down to the bubbling chaotic foam that underlay everything…

Harvey came back to himself with a jerk, panting and sweating and staggering two steps before he went down on one knee, resting his weight on a hand braced against his thigh. He fumbled in a pocket, took out a plastic bottle of a sports-energy drink and gulped it, and waited until the shivering and headache dulled a little. Then he walked over to the abandoned truck and gave it a once-over, careful to avoid touching the still-hot metal. Two fuel lines in the nearly-new engine had come undone, flooding the hot parts with sprays of mixed gasoline and air. The doors were all still shut, and it was unlikely that anyone making a fast exit would have bothered to close them.

Aha, he thought. The doors jammed at the same time. Secondary effect tacked onto the big one. Charming. Real Council-type curse, high-level adepts working there with rivers of blood to power ’em.

The front passenger-side window had been broken out; kicked out, probably; it was much harder to jam a boot or bugger up the effect of a straight-up impact. There were tracks on that side of the vehicle. Two people, one much bigger than the other, both wearing hiking boots. That was about as much as he could make out without showing a light. A little way away he found a bootlace, which had apparently split all the way up when someone tried to tighten it. That was even more unlikely than the engine failure, just the sort of combination of immense power and skill with petty vindictiveness you’d expect.

The term of art was probability cascade , a directed aetheric structure like an immaterial sensor-effector mechanism; sort of like a Power-driven edition of Murphy’s Law dropped on your head, only for real, and something only the most powerful adepts could do on this scale. It worked right down to the zipper jamming on your dick when you went to take a leak afterwards.

There was an interesting pattern to the damage in the rear trunk of the light vehicle, too. The panels were bowed outward in a flower-petal pattern studded with small holes, as if there had been an explosion and high-velocity debris. Contrary to Hollywood, cars very rarely blew even when they burned. That required an extremely precise fuel-air mixture. The fire had probably gone up very fast, with a roar and a flash and the speed of passage driving the flames back towards the windscreen even before it hit the fuel tank, then a rupture and spill and the whole thing burning, but it hadn’t gone kaboom.

Now, certain other things did react to heat that way…he focused for a moment to make sure there weren’t any live rounds still waiting to cook off like those last few popcorn kernels, then wrapped a handkerchief around his hand and reached carefully through. Even in the dim light the little brass shape was definitely a round of ammunition that had blown itself into shreds. From the damage to the trunk, someone had had a couple of boxes of mike-nine back there when their transport did its Mr. Crispy and tried to reduce them to long-pig chitterlings.

“Well, sheee-it,” he said, and went back to his own vehicle. “Could have been worse. Whoever made it out could have just spontaneously caught on fire themselves.”

The metal of his truck felt solid, in a way that went beyond the physical. Adrienne Brézé had made a very bad mistake when she didn’t kill a physicist named Peter Boase. She’d been sent to Los Alamos by the Council to end researches which had come uncomfortably close to the truth of why the world was sliding down into a pit of seething chaos ruled by hatred and cruelty. On a whim she’d decided to take the young scientist along as a toy and keep him with her other lucies on her Californian estate to destroy at leisure and milk for useful data in the process.

Peter had escaped…sorta. He’d certainly beaten the feeding addiction, and the truck contained the first fruits of his investigations at the secret labs of the Brotherhood. Adrienne had probably made a mistake there, however clever it looked in the short run.

And then there’s the nuke, Harvey thought.

He’d engineered that himself, diverting a little extra stolen plutonium. The Brotherhood used the stuff in hits, putting chunks in with a dead Shadowspawn master to make sure their final resting place was really restful and completely final. He’d simply liberated a few extra kilos, let some jihadi lunatics think they were buying it from him and then dropped back in later to collect the weapon. When that was over, all was quiet at Casa Jihad until the neighbors noticed a stink really bad even by the standards of a Veracruz slum. The Mexican cops had probably written it off as another of the innumerable gangland killings.

A nuke by itself wasn’t very useful; brute-force engineering rarely worked against adepts. The explosion would cut across too many world-lines, rippling back in time through the possible paths to resonate with those who were threatened by it, if they had the Power. Anyone with the right genes blueprinting their neural circuitry would sense it and just avoid the location without thinking about it; those with the training as well would probably be able to make a good guess at what was making their hair crawl. The chance of taking a whole slew of powerful Shadowspawn adepts by surprise that way were somewhere between zip and nada. That was the drawback of fighting people with turbocharged luck.

What encased the bomb was a…field…that turned aside the Power. That blocked all traces of what it shielded from the whole web of possibilities, regardless of how strong they were. Peter Boase had gotten his start by investigating why silver baffled the Power, but unlike the traditional silver sheathing this didn’t shout its presence either. It just…wasn’t present unless you could eyeball it.

When he tried to focus the Power on the truck himself, it was just there , without the fuzz of world-lines everything else had. He couldn’t see its past, or its potential futures, or anything that it affected. It was as if around it the world was the deterministic set of blind billiard-balls that Newton had imagined, rather than the will-driven sea of ultimately arbitrary malleability that it really was.

The problem right now was that while a seer couldn’t locate the bomb, or even trace it back from the impact it would make on the world, ordinary logic and evidence worked just fine. And while the Power couldn’t see the area inside the shield, as far as he knew there was nothing to stop a Wreaking from affecting it. Someone was using the shotgun principle, and ready to spend a lot of the Power on it. Luckily it had been a truck-break-down curse, not a nuke-go-off one.

Harvey had just enough of the nocturnis genes to Wreak consciously and to give him consistently useful hunches; not nearly enough to nightwalk or even feed on blood, which meant that everything came out of his own reserves. That made him a Chihuahua to the wolf of a real high-blood, though a Chihuahua to a mouse against human norms. Smarts and subtlety could substitute for raw power to an extent, though.

“All right,” he muttered to himself. “It’s a generalized curse. Someone knew, or more likely suspected, I was in X number of square miles, and put a vehicle-heading-east-go-wrong Wreaking on the area since they couldn’t pick me up specifically. Heap big mojo, probably wrecked dozens of trucks even here in East Bumfuche. And maybe some donkey-powered stuff. Hell, I may have brought the Council and the Brotherhood together on somethin’…but they don’t know , not the specifics, or most of ’em don’t, or they’d be doing more. Am I using Adrienne, or she me? We’ll see about that at the end of the day. After which the secret part is moot.”