Another Word for Magic Read online

  Another Word for Magic

  Sixth book in the Family Law series

  Mackey Chandler

  Cover by Sarah Hoyt

  Chapter 1

  April woke up slowly. Normally, her eyes popped open and she was eager to get up. Today she still felt tired and a bit stiff, to the point she wondered if she was coming down with something. It had been years since she had even a cold.

  “What time is it, House?” she called at the ceiling.

  “Eleven o’clock and a tenth,” it replied.

  “Oh, Derf time,” April muttered, trying to remember their system.

  “Yes,” the house agreed, taking it for a question.

  “How many hours are there in a Derf day, House?” April asked.

  “Twenty.”

  OK, so it was early afternoon, April thought. She’d slept longer than expected. She knew exactly with what inflection Heather would say “You must have needed it.” She might be right too. She had been through a long rough day from which to recover.

  “Is Jeff Singh at home, House?”

  “I am blocked from discussing Jeff’s location, schedule, or history.”

  “Are you allowed to send him a message, House?” April inquired.

  “Yes, I am,” It agreed.

  “Then tell him I am awake if not actually up yet, House.”

  “We have not been introduced for me to be able to define ‘I’,” it informed her.

  April ground her teeth a little. There was nothing like dealing with an Artificial Stupid to irritate her. Even the top-end AI in a ship was so literal-minded it could reduce you to tears. An AI supposedly suitable for a house had the personality of a two-year-old. On the other hand, this was probably Jeff’s fault in granting his permissions, because he was paranoid. It tended to make for a paranoid machine too.

  “Just out of curiosity,” April asked, “Do you have my voice sample logged from yesterday, House?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “In those conversations did Jeff call me by name so that you could extrapolate that the voice sample you took matched my name?” April asked.

  “Your name was never spoken by Mr. Singh,” the house said. “Your name was mentioned by him to the hotel preceding your arrival, but Mr. Singh has blocked me from accepting identification directly or inferring second-order associations by event, proximity, or third-party testimony. I may only attach a name to your voice file by his direct order.”

  “I’ll ask him to do that, House. Please tell him that the guest, claiming to be April, informs him she is awake and contemplating getting up sometime today.”

  “Message sent,” the house informed her. It took the computer a full ten seconds to parse out her statement and decide it passed every test.

  She’d be even more irritated if it wasn’t for the fact AIs irked Jeff almost as much as they did her. For the first time, she considered that perhaps he brought some of that upon himself. In particular, she hated it even more when people used a cheap or free AI as an unannounced com answering avatar. If she called someone and found out several sentences into the conversation that it was just a message-taking program, she just disconnected. If they obnoxiously allowed the program to use their voice, she just deleted the contact. April had to admit that giving an AI any freedom to apply logic could come back on you in a nasty way. You had to worry about how they interfaced with other systems like the hotel and public com too. One way to deal with that was Jeff’s way, to lay narrow restrictions on them. Since that didn’t work very well with people, why should it with AIs? She still had no real solution at all, short of avoiding them at all.

  “Hello, guest claiming to be April,” Jeff’s voice teased her from the ceiling. “Do you have some mutually known fact or private event to verify your identity?”

  “You could march in here and see who is in your bed in about the time it took you to ask that. Or, you could check your guest registry and see how many other guests could be talking to you from your own bed through your insane, paranoid house computer, and identify me by process of elimination. At the moment I have as much or more reason to ask you to prove your identity. If you don’t introduce me to your house I’m going to go stay elsewhere.”

  “No need,” Jeff assured her. “Just a simple DNA scan will satisfy me.”

  “I could be a clone,” April warned him.

  “Aged the same?” Jeff said. “I can imagine the Chinese might try to do that. Though I think you’d be one of their last choices who to try it out on. I could write a nasty horror novel where an April clone turns on its creators by its devious nature, and escapes to meet its twin leaving terrible destruction behind.

  “I think I’d accept an April clone as functionally equivalent if we could do it,” Jeff said. “It might be handy to have two of you if one could be brought up to speed somehow.”

  “The maintenance would kill you,” April assured him.

  “You must be ready for lunch,” Jeff said.

  “That wasn’t what I had in mind, but you’re right, I’m hungry already. Did you make an appointment to speak with Lee while I slept? Do we have time for lunch before seeing her?”

  “I arranged for us all to have our luncheon together,” Jeff said. “She, the hotel kitchen, and I are all waiting in breathless anticipation for you to refresh yourself and join us. Your bag is beside the shower and when you arise. I will give word for Lee and breakfast to join us in a half-hour,” Jeff said. “Same table, same balcony as this morning. Do you think you can find it?”

  “Likely, but if you will introduce me, the house can give step-by-step directions.”

  “Oh, very well. House, the person I am speaking to is April Lewis. You may register that ID to her voiceprint and give her full administrative rights to the house.”

  “Noted.”

  “See, was that so hard?” April asked.

  “We’ll see who comes to lunch,” Jeff said darkly.

  “Or what,” April replied in the same ominous tone. “Conversation ended, House.”

  “Noted.”

  * * *

  Lunch might take a half-hour to arrive, but Lee was well ahead of it, sitting at the table with Jeff when April came out, clean and dressed in fresh things, but with her hair still wet.

  Something struck her as being off when she sat down. It was an odd déjà vu feeling that didn’t pass easily. Maybe because she was so tired when she’d eaten at the very same table. Her memory of it could be off slightly and unreal, like a dream.

  Lee was talking about the clan Mothers and it was apparent Jeff had already spoken to her about talking to them. Lee was insisting nothing replaced a face-to-face meeting.

  “If we talk to them on com, the First Mother will be on screen and the Second and Third Mum will at best be in a small corner window. You can’t gauge their reactions and you miss any byplay. You see nothing of the crowd that’s usually in the Great Hall. I’ve only been alerted before that something unusual was happening by the stir it created. Or in one case, by most of them running for the exits. It’s only an hour and a half across a narrow section of ocean from here to Fishtown, and another half hour by aircar to the Keep. It would take longer to lift to orbit and drop a shuttle directly to their lawn. I hate to land directly anyway. It doesn’t happen very often, so everybody stops working and gawks. The few times we’ve had to do it the Mothers have been very gracious about how disruptive it is, but I don’t like to impose.”

  Jeff was leaning back in his chair, neither frowning nor smiling, just listening with that serious look that said he wasn’t off thinking about three other things at the same time.

  That’s when it struck April what was off about the scene. Jeff was relaxed. There were only
a few people he genuinely relaxed around. With most others, he sat up straighter, kept his hands carefully controlled, and his face much more intense. That spoke more to his judgment of Lee’s character than anything he could have said.

  Resolving that anomaly, made April relax too. Lee looked at her oddly, aware something had changed. She didn’t have an extra century of experience from life extension like April and Jeff had. They were perceptive of little things even if they couldn’t always explain them. In recent years, others had found it almost impossible to tell a lie to them without displaying a bunch of little tells that betrayed them. Whatever had passed, the three were in the moment together now, very comfortable with each other.

  “So, Jeff has told you Home will be here tomorrow?” April asked.

  “He did! It seems unreal. I mean, I’ve been to Home so I have a clear mental picture of how big it is,” Lee said, gesturing expansively. “We saw how your ships could drag another vessel along when Gabriel volunteered to bring the Retribution back to Derfhome for us quickly. But I have a hard time grasping how you can do that to something so massive.”

  “It’s something we worked up to bit by bit,” April said, “and it is far from routine yet. It scared the snot out of me to do it with a hab full of people, but the Earthies didn’t give us the luxury of time to gain more experience at it. We had to move them or see them shredded by a gravel cloud launched from out-system. So, necessity prevailed.”

  “Do you blame us for precipitating this?” Lee worried. “It comes right after you openly allied yourself with us and issued an ultimatum to keep their hands off Derfhome.”

  “That may have been the tipping point,” April admitted, “but they have been chafing under the L1 restrictions for a long time. If it wasn’t you, there would have been another excuse. They are short-lifers and none of the people in charge now are the ones who accepted the L1 limit in the first place. They only stay at the peak of their careers a decade or two before they retire. People believe what they want and seem to assume they are much brighter and abler than everyone before them. Why, before starships they were just grunting savages, weren’t they? The previous administrations might as well have been the Persians for all it matters to people today. A hundred years or two thousand, what does it matter? It’s all the dead past.”

  “You sound bitter,” Lee said.

  “More angry,” April admitted. “All they have to do is leave us alone.”

  “I admit there were times I second-guessed our actions, accommodating them instead of saying no and fighting them,” Jeff said. “But the fact is that it bought us time. If they had attacked us the way they just did a year ago, they would have succeeded. We didn’t know we’d be able to move habs when we delayed but it worked to our advantage.”

  “They must be perplexed that Central doesn’t try to take over Home, or that we can ally with Fargone or Derfhome and not try to tell them how they must govern. Their entire history is one of pushing to destroy any other nation or system that isn’t their own. The countless lives and treasure they have wasted doing it just boggles my mind,” April said.

  “I experienced that the one time I went to Earth,” Lee reminded her. “I’m not a fan of Earth. The whole horrid experience turned me off planets. I took a break from exploring and sent my fleet off to do a loop without me. That is just for a time, to let me set up a replacement for the Earth Claims Commission. When they return, I’m going to go out again. If things change so that the new registry isn’t successful, I’ll go anyway. Even if I have to take a single ship and whoever will go with me.”

  “Huh, got a berth for me?” April asked.

  “Absolutely, you’d be an asset,” Lee said, and she wasn’t kidding at all.

  Jeff looked uncomfortable, but April said, “I’ll retain that option and consider it.”

  “Is it safe to fly Derf aircraft?” Jeff interjected. It dragged the conversation back to where she’d come in artlessly. April was sure Jeff wanted to kill this new idea. He got away with it too.

  “Derf tend to be very conservative about engineering,” Lee said. “They favor prop-driven planes for commercial, but they still push about point eight-five Mach. Derf just aren’t very big on hurrying. Most have four engines so you’d have to lose two of them to be in trouble. We can get a late flight over so we can talk to the Mothers before they hear about Home from somebody else. I’m not afraid to fly Derf planes. I’ve always wondered if you long-lived folks get extra cautious.”

  “Some few do,” Jeff admitted. “A few of our folks have moved off the Moon to our distant worlds just because they felt we were crazy to remain right by Earth where the they all seem determined to kill us.”

  “At least the ones in charge,” April agreed.

  “They’ll try it here, won’t they?” Lee asked.

  “Don’t worry, they aren’t going to have the capacity,” April said. “Heather intends to clear all of North America’s starbases of heavy ships. They will retreat home with the lesser vessels or the entire base will be removed, with casualties if necessary. I already removed every major USNA ship I could identify from Earth orbit. That’s why I slept until lunchtime. I was exhausted from that and came here with no break.”

  “I’ve been on Gabriel’s ship and seen the video of you turning them away from your own world, but are you certain they can be swept aside that easily?” Lee worried.

  “Not easily at all. I almost ran out of drones and would have had to call for help if I’d lost a few more. I had one ship in particular with a really smart skilled captain. He took out two of my drones. If half of them had been able to do that, I’d have been in trouble. Looking back on it, I lucked out. I can see several ways he might have suckered me into risking and losing my ship, not just a drone.”

  Jeff grimaced hard but didn’t complain about the loss of drones.

  “They messed up by issuing ultimatums. If they had just struck the habs with no warning, they would have caught us unprepared. If they hadn’t tried to betray us and look good to their public, we wouldn’t have had enough warning to put out deep watchers. If they had struck at us just a year ago, we wouldn’t have had any way to safely snatch the habs away. It’s terrifying to think what a close thing it was.”

  Jeff looked at April. “It’s exactly what we were talking about last night, how huge changes hinge on tiny changes that seem insignificant at the time. A collection of unlikely and unpredictable events can take your life off in unexpected directions.”

  “Well of course!” Lee said, and looked at him like he was daft.

  “Thank you, dear,” April said, and looked pleased.

  * * *

  On the Moon, the Sovereign of Central finished making her assignments and released her posse of volunteers to remove North America’s military presence from the heavens. She didn’t have enough ships or pilots to do it quickly. First of all because she wasn’t going to conscript anyone to fight for her or requisition their vessels. Indeed, if any presently in her hire wanted to opt-out, they were free to go. Welcome would be too strong a word. She would remember who volunteered and who didn’t support her. Those sworn to her she wouldn’t ask. That was an entirely different matter. Unfortunately, her very best pilots and ships were tied up removing the Home trio of habitats from danger. No help for that, she could make a start on it for now with volunteers and release weapons from her private stores to them.

  “Are you going to offer the North Americans an ultimatum or give them a formal declaration of war?” her court spoks and assistant Dakota asked.

  “Why?” Heather asked, eyebrows lifting in surprise. That didn’t even sound like Dakota’s normal way of thinking.

  “What would be the point of it? To try to form the public opinion that we are the reluctant combatants drawn in against our will? The North Americans already made a terrible tactical error trying that with us. I’m sure Home would be shredded and they would have already turned their attention to our destruction if they hadn’t engaged
in such silly posturing to claim a mantle of righteousness. Anyone whose opinion might be swayed is already either firmly under their influence or knows the whole sordid history of their serial oath-breaking beyond having their opinion managed. They should consider themselves lucky. We are only removing them from the stars and won’t drop a very big rock on Vancouver the next time this gang of criminals is in session.”

  “It scares me when you sound more like me than yourself,” Dakota said.

  That was interesting. Dakota might be mellowing slightly, Heather thought.

  * * *

  Jeff’s driver and bodyguard on loan from the Red Tree Mothers dropped them off at the port. Strangelove had a sour expression even Jeff could read on his Derf face. He didn’t however, try to renew his argument to accompany Jeff as his bodyguard. He at least had their assurance they would engage his protection as soon as they landed back in town.

  Space operations had a different building than commercial air so everything on this side of the port was new and interesting to them. Jeff’s interest was piqued that April hadn’t as much as blinked when his Derf bodyguard was introduced as Specialist Strangelove. Did she know the origins of the name or was she just deliberately being blasé? He wasn’t going to inquire until they had some privacy. April could still surprise him.

  Private aircraft were very rare and just operated directly from their owners’ hangars. The aircraft wasn’t as big as Jeff had assumed for a four-engine craft. He had a monster carrying three hundred or more pictured in his mind. He realized after thinking on it that a plane to haul three hundred Derf would be ridiculous. The plane had seating for thirty and there was no effort made to cram as many in as possible. Flying was still a luxury to Derf.

  There was no tunnel or skyway and they walked up mobile stairs built on a motorized cart. The steps were Derf-sized and a challenge. The seats were Derf-sized too but now had a center slot in the cushions that hid a latch point so two Humans could share a Derf seat. They did not, however, discount the fare for Humans sharing a seat.

  Boarding that way let Jeff look down the side of the aircraft. It wasn’t sundown yet and he had a good view. The engines had a complex fan inside a round intake so they were some sort of turbine. The engine seemed quite thin and long compared to the images he’d seen of Earth aircraft. The rear was not an exhaust nozzle but a complex six-bladed propeller with a curve to the thin scimitar blades that increased at the tips. The leading edges of both the wings and tail surfaces swept back sharply.