The Rise Of The Three Crater Alliance

What Silver just said was reassuring. I had assumed that she would screw me over at some point, but now I could be certain that the betrayal would be further in the future.

I ejected a new uncharged, city battery setting on a pallet. I had worried that it might not fit within the lines of the left pentagram,... but it did. The city battery was still in its original wrapper. Why I had never used it before escaped me at that moment. "How many copies of this can you make?" Thankfully, she did not ask me what the device was.

"I can make 956 copies. The limiting factor is dysprosium-156," she said stumbling over the pronunciation. I wondered when she had modified the spell so that it would list the limiting factors based on the labels associated with each slot within the items box.

"Great. Make the copies," I said as casually as I could. She began the process of making the copies.

That many NEW city batteries... took my breath away.

The device strobed for a while and stopped. I sighed with relief. I had never expected to have this many of the things. I said, slowly, working my way through the problem, "The next part will be very tedious, but necessary... First put away the copying device." The device disappeared into an items box.

I ejected two comfy chairs six feet apart in the space where the copier had been. I ejected a daytable to my left, then I ejected the real part of one of the 27 other Pockets that I had. I ejected a fully charged city battery and had Q install it in the new Pocket. The city battery disappeared. Various pieces of equipment appeared from my Pocket and then disappeared into the other Pocket. What surprised me was that the new Pocket worked without any glitches even though it had been twenty years since I stole it. I did not want to think about that.

I motioned for her to sit in the far comfy chair. When she did, I sat in the remaining one.

"All right. We are going to carefully transfer all 956 of those devices from your items box to this Pocket." I motioned to the real part of the Pocket on the daytable. "Drop one of those boxes we just copied here between us and I will put it away in that Pocket. I call them city batteries." Now, what I expected was that she would get all huffy, but, instead, over the next hour, she did it my way. When the last one was installed in a rack in that Pocket, I stood up and said, "I need you to come up with a device to drive a spell to make this thing work." I ejected an electric generator about 20' tall to my right out in sun. I had stolen it from a hydroelectric dam that was about to be bombed.

It seemed like good idea at the time.

On a virtual blackboard, I showed a cutaway drawing of the electric generator. Beside it, I showed an animation of the thing at work. I pointed to the drive shaft in the animation and said, "This has to spin around to produce the form of power that I need to recharge those city batteries." I pointed to the turbine in the animation. "As I said, your magic is much more efficient than mine. Your mana stones are smaller than my city batteries. I suspect that your mana stones hold more mana than my city batteries hold electricity." In the animation, the water flowed in through a large intake pipe, turned the drive shaft and flowed out through another pipe. "Somehow you have to replace the water with... something... to cause this thing to do its job."

Silver wandered up to the generator and started examining it in detail. The wind ruffled her silver hair. She looked like she was caught in some slowly shambling dust devil aimlessly swirling around the huge device letting the breeze dictate her next move. She summoned a ladder in a few cases to examine something up high. Finally she summoned a divan and sat staring at the intake pipe down low.

I put a beach umbrella over her to give her shade. I moved the daytable with the real portion of my new Pocket close to the generator. I repositioned my virtual blackboard so that she could refer to it. She made another virtual blackboard. She did not write on it for quite a while.

Suddenly, she jumped up and started writing furiously. Just as in the process of making the copier, she made numerous notes, trying to figure out what to do. In this case, she pulled book after book from an items box trying to get a grip on the project.

She created yet another virtual blackboard. She started in on the design for the support for the spell chrystal that would be etched on glass. She scribbled some more on the third blackboard, then she started writing something entirely different on the fourth blackboard. She paused looking around.

She went back to the divan and sat there communing with what was on the blackboards. Absently, she asked, "Are we using seawater or river water?"

"I believe that we should be using the water we purified," I said, feeling my way. Somewhere in the last eight weeks, I had shown her how to clean sea water to the extent that it was the same as distilled. All the salt and other components were put aside, leaving a vast amount of pure water segregated in a huge room inside her items box.

"I was thinking that the water would flow from one items box to another," she said bemused.

"Why not create a separate room filled with pure water within your items box. Have the water exit through the intake pipe. You could then collect the water from the outtake pipe and put it back in the same room. In fact, you would be recycling the same water," I said, still not sure whether that scheme would work.

Silver from her divan considered everything on the blackboards for a while, then jumped up and made corrections in the second virtual blackboard. She made many changes to the design on the third blackboard and filled up the fourth blackboard with notations. She sat back down, looked at the blackboards, then consulted some more books from somewhere, looking back and forth from the books to the blackboards. She closed a final book, then arose and made a small correction to the design. She turned to me and said, "I need some more glass and silver wire." Instead, I ejected the finished design, setting onto the daytable. The design etched into the 1'X1' pane of glass was finely delineated by the silver. Each symbol the same as what was on the virtual blackboard. She asked crossly, "How did you get the design to be so accurate? I did not specify how big each part is."

I said gently, trying not to offend, "The spell chrystal has a certain size. The mana stone has a certain size. Using their measurements everything else can be deduced." I paused. "Your drawings are always to scale, so I do not have to work real hard to make things come out right."

Still miffed, she summoned the cabinets with the small spell chrystals and the cabinet with the large mana stones in them. She chose a lime colored spell chrystal, transferred the spell to it and set the spell chrystal in its place. She went to the large cabinet, chose a lime colored mana stone and set it in its place on the design on the glass pane. Then she enclosed each crystal in a silver mesh. When she was done, she set the real component of the items box on a pad made of silver that took up a goodly portion of the design.

She halted, like she had hit her nose on a plate glass door, complete with the expression of hurt and disbelief. Silver asked in a disgusted tone, "Is this monstrosity ready to go or do you have to do something to it?"

I read through a manual dealing with the electrical generator, then ejected two high amperage, high voltage specially coated wires. I created an arched stone opening into my new Pocket. I wandered in and began hooking the wire up to an assembly that loomed about fifty feet above me inside the Pocket. Silver followed me inside. Her eyes goggled when she saw that I had put all of the city batteries that she had created plus some additional depleted batteries into racks that seemed to stretch out to infinity.

"How long will it take to charge all of these... things?" she asked.

"As long as it takes... Silver, I need these things to power MY Pockets. In the past, charging even one of them was always a hassle for me... I would be in some country tasked with killing someone and I would have to surreptitiously steal enough power to recharge even ONE of them. In some cases, I would steal some money and pay for the thing to be recharged."

Over the next three hours we worked out how to make the generator work as it should. I mean, the turbine shaft had to turn at a certain speed to get optimum power output. That meant that the water had to flow in at a given speed. A base had to be added for the generator to set on in order to take care of vibrations. Even with the manual for the electric generator, we had to adjust the flow of water over and over again until everything seemed to be working efficiently.

How we avoided getting soaked, I just do not know.

To avoid problems with turbulence, we ended up making two rooms inside her items box... one room for input to the generator and one for output. Water would ooze from the output room to the input room at a slow enough rate to avoid problems. Then somehow the spell sped up the water so it entered the intake pipe at an optimal speed to get the maximum power from the turbine.

I set Q to watch over everything. I covered the entire assembly with a tarp and we went back inside the house. Q could not see inside the items box, but she could regulate the speed of the intake and outtake pipes.

The dinner this time was a French chicken entree that I had picked up in Mongolia. No, I never figured out why there was a French restaurant in Ulaanbaatar, but the management was willing to make me twenty servings of it for a reasonable price, so everything was good.

We ate in silence for a while, then I said quietly, "You are a very hard, very violent woman. I know that I have offended you. I also know that you have hesitated to cast some spell of obedience on me, because you have no clue as to what needs to be done. You are smart enough to know that you need my creativity to survive the upcoming travails.

"Silver, you have a bad case of narcissism. You honestly believe that the world is here to provide you with what you want, when you want it... That was the old world. This world could care less who you are.

"When you took on those giants a couple of months ago, you assumed that you could take them easily. That was not the case... For right now, please stay bought. I know how to assess risks in a world like this. You know how to assess risks in an organized community. I do not think that you have ever had to live in the wild, prepare your own meals, find drinkable water and search for shelter.

"Now... We need to move on. The next project is to find a location to live. Your idea of sitting on top of a power node has quite a few advantages.

"Now... what does it take to create the support design for the spell chrystal to find these power nodes? Can you use some sort of map to do it or will the spell only show the direction to the nodes?"

Silver froze with the fork halfway to her mouth. She blinked a few times then realized where the fork was and took the bite of food. She said, feeling her way forward, "To use a map, I would have to know where I was very exactly... The map would have to be very, very accurate... I could craft the spell to tell me where all the power nodes are... Hmmm... I suppose that I could even tell how powerful they are." She started mumbling to herself as she absently ate her dinner, totally in another world.

Finally she looked up and said, "Could you etch the map on a huge piece of glass?"

I said, trying to make out like it was nothing, "Sure. I think I have all the area of this continent and nearby islands mapped. Or rather I have a very good map of the continent, but have not gotten it to the detail that I want... What I mean is that I can etch a very accurate map onto a large piece of glass." A sudden idea hit me... Why did not I think of this before?... I displayed a virtual blackboard with the map of the continent we were on. I then showed a green dot. "We are here. North is at the top. The continent is about two thousand miles east to west and three thousand miles north to south. The ocean surrounds it. The continent is in the northern hemisphere." The dot was in the upper right hand corner of the map. "The ocean is three hundred miles east of here and two hundred miles north." I drew a line far to the south from one edge to the other. "We should be living below this latitude."

"Why?" she asked, very baffled, because the line I had just draw was over a thousand miles to the south.

"All the indications that I have determined make it clear that this planet will suffer a massive ice age in the next few years. Plus quite few volcanoes are erupting because of the interactions with its star.

"In short, the people on this island continent are facing an increase in apex predators dropped on them from gates. They have a plague spreading that is killing about eight out of ten people and the ones that are left are going to starve to death because of crop failures brought on by unseasonably cold weather." I had Q show the volcanoes as red dots. "These are the 451 active volcanoes on the continent proper." Almost all of them were above the line I had drawn. I moved the line another three hundred miles south to avoid those active volcanoes. "There should be more offshore and on the islands, but they do not really count at this moment." The area below the line was about two thousand miles east to west and fifteen hundred miles north to south... plus some big islands off to the west and south.

Silver ate for a while, then asked, "What happens to the people above that line?"

"Like I said, almost all of them die... either of the plague or starvation or being eaten by alien predators. As near as I can tell, the plague is slowly moving south from an origin in the north. None of the people living below that line have caught the disease. What I had planned was that I would move around the north and steal all the abandoned houses in all the villages above this line." I drew a line east to west to the north of our position. "Everything above this line will be under ice within about two hundred years. The ice will be about a mile thick."

She looked at me suspiciously and said with venom, "You can't possibly know that. You are not a seer."

"Ice ages are common on earth... at least for the last three million years." I changed the map to show the land would look like to an observer from orbit. "As you can see, the north coast has a LOT of high mountains. The mountains all have glaciers. The glaciers will grow to a depth of one mile and move south to the line I just drew or maybe lower. Everything north of that line will be destroyed by the grinding ice." I put a red dot on the map. "The plague started about here three months ago. I assume that someone who was infected came through a gate and made contact with a local village." I tinted the map red. "The disease has struck in these areas." The red went south past the latitude we were at. Not all the area was tinted red. Some pockets of no infection were shown up in the mountains and here and there... mostly where no main highways were shown. In truth, a highway in this era was not much more than a dirt rose that allowed two carts to pass each other, one going one way and the other

going the opposite direction.

"People are on the road fleeing the plague. Travel is so slow that it might be a year for the plague to reach the southern coast."

"Could you stop the spread?" she asked.

"Maybe... Humans have a tendency not to listen unless their lives are on the line. I could conceivably come in just after people in different locales started dying, but there is only one of me. I will think about the problem. Something may come to me directly... Right now, I need you to figure out where the power nodes are." She went back to another world in her mind.

--- === ---

The air was nippy on top of this peak. I had not sheared off the top. The mid-afternoon sun beat down on the plains below, but made little difference in the temperature here at 5000' above sea level. Rays of sun peeked through the clouds to shower the endless grass with a golden light and painted it a bright vivid green.

Silver stood up and dusted her hands. "Are you sure that you can tell how far this is from where we were?" The box she had just set on the ground was ornately carved. Inside was yet another pane of glass, albeit a small one. Why she surrounded it with some rocks to kind of hide it escaped me.

"Silver, we have put eight of those boxes on eight different peaks. You ask me the same question six times... I will give you the same answer: I can tell the distance with this device very accurately." I waved the transponder. I set a transmitter on top of the box. I tested that the transponder was in synch with the receiver back at our main base. "Come on. I have missed my lunch and it is making me cranky."

For some unknown reason, Silver was dressed in an outfit that could easily be mistaken for a jumpsuit. Except that instead of being a utilitarian gray, it was embroidered with an array of colors in intricate patterns.

She glided across the uneven ground and took her seat in the air car. I got in and we lifted off, heading back to our base where the house was. I refused to budge until all of the city batteries were charged.

Silver had arisen early and worked out what needed to be done. We had made nine devices from nine panes of glass. Eight of the nine devices went into boxes she produced from somewhere.

When we returned, I ejected two meals that I had picked up in Bangkok. The fact that steam was coming off the meal never ceased to amaze me. Pockets slowed time, thus entropy, to almost nothing. Silver was still miffed about something, so we ate in silence.