Knock on wood! Why scare yourself ahead of time?
Locomotive gained enough experience and decisiveness in dealing with “non-formals” (a vague term used in reports for any non-normal humans), and the bylaw mandating “gatherings of no more than three people” hadn’t been canceled yet. The authorities had not forgotten how badly such gatherings could end. It was enough to reinstate the licensing of public events, and NZAMIPS chambers would be full of the homegrown gurus. Someone worked hard feeding those psychos with appropriate information, motivating them, taking them under his control, but so far all his efforts came to naught. The inopportunely-appearing dark magician tamed the supernatural in the region, turning the bloody drama into a comic scene—an occasion for jokes. With perverted pleasure, Captain Baer crushed the results of someone’s long-term work with a steamroller of police forces.
A big prize wasn’t long in coming.
In the blue light of the balls mounted on portable tripods NZAMIPS experts dismantled the ruins of a brick outhouse. Soldiers in protective suits and masks cautiously stacked clear glass vials with glowing contents into sealed containers. Locomotive’s hair stood on end just from looking at them.
The dragon tears! The first batch in seven years. But experts claimed that the recipe for the cursed potion had been lost. Was the source an archeological excavation? Foreign intervention? Even the scent of this potion resulted in a state of euphoria for a commoner and summoned a desire to trust and obey, not thinking about the consequences and repenting for one’s deeds. Booze for killers! In the white mages the potion caused irreversible addiction; the dark reacted to its action much more simply—they just puked.
All the residents of that house would have to be investigated regarding their involvement in the sales of that stuff. The distributor of the poison escaped the interrogation: upon seeing the police, the psycho maniac blew himself up in the boiler room that had been converted into a warehouse. The poor fellow did not know the specifics of the building code. The main apartment building only lost its glass windows; in the outhouse, the roof got blown off and one of the outside walls destroyed. There were no casualties among the NZAMIPS team; two were wounded by fragments of the roof, but the suicidal maniac died on site.
The poison served him right! Surely, he was hooked on his own potion, and they wouldn’t get anything coherent out of him in the interrogation anyway.
“You are to be congratulated.”
Before turning around, Locomotive drove a smug grin off his face.
“Yes, sir! The operation went off almost flawlessly.”
Mr. Satal nodded gravely, looking over the luminous scattering: “This will make the capitol authorities fuss around. But they will start asking difficult questions.”
Locomotive shrugged indifferently: “I have requested forty-four times an increase in funding over the last ten years; I can show you a copy of each of them.”
The coordinator angrily shook his head: “I don’t give a shit about your papers! What will we do when inspectors arrive here? They can stick their noses anywhere, and I don’t even know what you and Larkes have done.”
For some reason, Locomotive didn’t think of that. It isn’t enough to be honest, you must look honest. Any normal organization inevitably accumulates a couple of episodes that appear ambiguously untrustworthy. As soon as the auditors dug out something like this, he could kiss his captaincy goodbye!
“I … will do the cleanup.”
Mr. Satal nodded with satisfaction: “I’m glad we understand each other!”
Captain Baer worked with superiors of a dark nature for years, but it was the first time that he was so frankly offered to commit fraud. He was almost ordered to…
“And one more thing,” the coordinator stopped halfway to his limousine, “I didn’t have time to go into the details of our main investigation.”
Locomotive snorted mentally. Indeed, he didn’t have time!
“There is an opinion that our mage developed an unconventional power channel. We are not talking about a wild Empowerment, but, perhaps, university instructors remember an unusual student. Let’s say, over the past seven years. I think it will be easier if you talk to them,” Mr. Satal concluded.
Naturally! All university instructors of dark magic were traditionally salaried NZAMIPS part-timers. An unconventional channel… And then Captain Baer thanked all the gods that the empath wasn’t anywhere near the coordinator. He knew one magician whose power channel was guaranteed to be nonstandard, and he knew him very closely…
“Clean up the tail, Mr. Satal? We will do that, sir!” Tail? What does that mean?
Chapter 14
For my next work day at BioKin I arrived ten minutes early just to watch the others coming. Bummer! All employees were already at their workstations (as far as I knew, because I wasn’t officially introduced), but they weren’t doing any work. They all were in a mourning mood, suffering in silence.
I wondered if someone died there.
Upon closer examination, I was the only one who dressed more or less decently, in the sense that I had neither trousers that were stretched at the knees with fringe around the lapels, nor pseudo-artistic patches on my shirt, nor a hairstyle as if I had run across a stray camel. Naturally, that put me in opposition to the team, and they immediately attempted to humiliate me: the red-haired secretary (Quarters’ relative) brought me utterly cold coffee. When I tossed a warming spell into the cup almost without looking, nobody else showed a desire to joke.
No one tried to make me a closer acquaintance, either. Well, I easily figured out who Johan was—the guy Quarters mentioned, because there was only one white mage among them. A guy in leather pants could pass for the alchemist Carl (with the last name of either Fartsing or Ferting) and a younger lad with bright red hair - for his assistant; a chubby little man, sitting closer to the coffeemaker, resembled an accountant. Boss Polak and his secretaries needed no introduction.
I could easily picture a white mage in depression here, but it remained a mystery what or who could have driven seven people into a stupor. If all my future employers are like these, I’d rather go back to the garage business to fix motorcycles. I’m sure that will be a very profitable business! But since I took money (and twice for the same job), decorum demanded that I help them. The Tangor are proud, and reputation can be lost only once.
Pretending to be an emotionally dull dark jerk, I went to the boss to find out if my previous day’s work was done correctly. They paid me for something, right? Mr. Polak looked at me painfully, but I was deaf to his suffering. I myself had to invent the next assignment: “Maybe I’d better learn design of a particular node and focus on it? Or work on the gas generator system as a whole?”
“I’m not sure if you will understand the scheme…”
I smiled politely: “Coupling alchemy with magic is my strong point!” It was true, at least for dark magic.
Once more he looked around the tables in confusion, and I finally grasped it: “Perhaps, your drawings are not systematized? I could do it. Orderliness helps a lot in work!”
He perked up a bit, nodded, and asked me to organize the documents in chronological order. Unfortunately, most of them had no dates, and, armed with archaeological methods, I had to arrange the papers in layers. Periodically, I tried to obtain advice from Polak, then from Carl, and soon they got fed up with me. Polak deserted first, followed by the rest; by lunch time, I was left alone in the office (except for the secretaries). Finally, that got me.