CHAPTER 117: Flight

Minerva McGonagall sat on a broom high over Britain, occasionally checking her watch. How had Alastor talked her into this? Oh right. She was the transfiguration expert, and if you were going to thoroughly break the rules of transfiguration it would benefit to be the expert. Besides, she was lighter, and that made it easier. Still, there was something not quite sane about sitting on a broom so high that she could see the thin blue line of earth in a hastily obtained diving pressure suit, breathing via a bubble-head charm, and trusting to a watch and a sheet of paper worked out by a muggle. Arithmancy was a thing, but whoever heard of a muggle doing it? She had scarcely believed it when she heard they had a machine for doing this stuff. For all the preparations and careful planning, this seemed to her to be about the second-most Gryffindor thing she had ever done.

Some time before, she realized that Alastor had realized very quickly that Michael had not been joking when he said that pursued to the ends of the earth was not a problem. Of course all they had she do was ask Petuna to spare themselves many minutes of trouble, but nobody thought of that. The problem with apparation was you couldn't use it to get where you've never been, but there was a little bit of a cheat to that. If you knew there was an open space on the other side, apprating through a door wasn't that hard.

The spells required were agumenti, frigidero, transfiguration, colloportus, and alhomara. To save her magic, Alastor prepared her the ice cubes and stuffed them into her pouch, as well as transfigured and locked in place the mounting points and the car battery on the end of her broom. Yeah sure the lighting could be done with more magic, but she was pushing it as it was and any tiny bit of safeguard would be really nice here. There were way too many ways this could go wrong already.

Michael had with some trouble worked out a flight plan for intercepting the space station. Once there, Minerva would proceed to the exact center and prepare a portkey. They would from that point portkey back and forth to resupply at will, and use the unreachable vantage point of the space station as a base to which to retreat, rest, heal, and plan. War was upon them, and some of them knew what to expect. A plan of this design would have normally drawn a Dreadful grade in transfiguration class if any student had proposed anything like this long chain of spells, but there was no obvious simplifications, and war breeds desperate measures.

On second thought, the Dreadful grade might be a little high. This reads more like one of the papers that Minerva graded every year where she would have to council the writer to give up free transfiguration and only use established charms. At least she had got rid of the helmet that the diving pressure suit goes with. It was awkward and limited her vision too much. Instead she had to deal with the blue edge of the bubble-head charm being a little too close to the blue of the earth for comfort. There was nothing for it so on she went.

Minerva withdrew ice cubes from her pouch one by one, transfigured them into triplets of connected solid fuel rockets, and put them back. It's kind of a trick to transfigure one ice cube into three rockets, but this would reduce the total magic load by reducing the number of locking charms required.

Minerva locked the last triplet of rockets into place and checked her watch. Less than two minutes to go. Not bad at all. She carefully cast a low power protego, careful to use as little magic as possible. Even with their careful conservation, she really didn't have enough for contingencies, and a lack of contingencies here meant that one thing wrong was a more sure death that facing the Dark Lord. She watched her watch tick to the appointed time and pressed the switch. There was a pillar of white fire.

It seemed to her too soon the fire went out, and she saw she was moving faster than a broom had ever gone. There was little time for reflection, though. Quickly she unlocked the rockets, took two more triplets from her pouch, locked them in place, and checked her watch. This time she only had to wait five seconds for the appointed time.

Over and over again she repeated the steps. After the ninth, she saw that she had forty minutes to wait rather than a few seconds. She realized she hadn't cast transfiguration for long enough on the last pair of triplets, and hastily sustained the transfiguration. There were a few more ice cubes not yet transfigured in her pouch for "course corrections" as Michael had put it, but how she was going to use them she had no idea. There was no way she could do the math in her head, and she couldn't use a quill here.

Minerva dismissed the protego and allowed herself to relax and look around. The sun rose swiftly, and the stars disappeared from her sight. While she was looking over her shoulder, the space station rose into the sunlight. Shining in the light of the sun, the solar panels that powered the space station were unmistakable. To her the scene was surreal. She had no idea of the what must be magnificent speed at which she was traveling but the space station seemed to be moving slowly, almost imperceptibly towards her but not straight towards her. Having come this far, she finally trusted the numbers.

The space station drifted to one side. When it seemed to her it was almost sideways compared to the direction she was traveling it was time. She ignited the rockets. When the fire stopped she saw it was just hanging there a little more than a mile away from her. Such an aim was very good, you could say that magic was involved; but Minerva was slightly annoyed. She remembered not to try to fly her broom (nobody knew what the rules might be) but only point it whichever direction she wanted to go.

In a flash Minerva understood what to do with the extra ice cubes. Each one could be transfigured into a small rocket to close the distance, and forty minutes had been plenty of time to recharge her magic. Only a few minutes later she was really close to the space station, but only after passing by it did she remember to use another rocket in the opposite direction to stop. Another try brought her near it and drifting along it at a slow speed. One apparation later she was inside.

The first thing she noticed was the whiteness of the interior, followed by the magnificent cleanness that muggles didn't typically have. It looked very much like somebody had been using scourgify all over the place. Yet despite all that there was a ridiculous amount of clutter on all sides so that she could not determine which was the floor. It was all very unusual for she had never seen anything like this kind of pressed for space design.

Her arrival did not go unnoticed. "Who are you?"

While Minerva was flying, Alastor finally got around to asking Michael a question that had been in the back of his mind for quite some time now.

"What is vulcan that your son would be surprised at its very existence or possibly thinks we would not believe in its existence and important enough to warrant mention in a compressed tactical message?"

Michael smiled and said "We have them!"

In a moment, he continued "I know not how he could have learned such a thing, but I know the source from which he draws. Vulcan is the name for a race in an old science fiction telly show, but if he now believes Vulcan now exists and saw fit to tell us, I know what power that implies. It is well we are going to the ISS. If you don't know it, than neither does the Dark Lord and it shall yet be his undoing."

And Michael seemed to laugh. "Too long have our worlds been apart. By might and industry and the fusion of magic and science we ought to have set sail for the stars by now. What we shall do to prepare to meet the Dark Lord shall be marvelous to behold!"

Alastor's mood was much more solemn. "A power the Dark Lord knows not. It was said that Harry would posess some such power. I begin to understand."