CHUCK VS. THE MAGNARUNE
By Stephen Tannhauser
Description: In another world where magic has become a science and technology of its own, a flunked-out journeyman sorcerer in a dead-end job with no prospects and no hope accidentally winds up the inheritor of a power that could change the fate of humanity . . . .
Notes: In the original episode, the character who gives Casey his mission to track down the Intersect was played by Wendy Makkena rather than Bonita Friedericy, and identified only as the "National Intelligence Director". However, as she was never identified by name in the episode and never appeared again, I am choosing to put that down to normal pilot-episode wobbles, simplify the story and assume that Beckman was Casey's boss from the beginning. Sorry, Wendy!
Disclaimer: CHUCK and all associated characters and images are owned by NBC, Josh Schwartz and Chris Fedak. The dialogue and plot of this story is largely adapted from the pilot episode "Chuck vs. the Intersect" by Josh Schwartz and Chris Fedak. No ownership of these elements is claimed by the author.
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ECHO PARK ESTATES, CASTILLO DES ANGELES, PROVINCE OF CALIFORNIA
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2007, 7:15 A.M. PST
"Chuuuuuuucccckkk . . . ? Chuuuuuuuucccckkk . . . ?" Morgan's voice sounded like it was being poured through cooling treacle. Chuck blinked himself awake, feeling like he'd been rolled up, wrung out and flung back damp on the floor. Above him, Morgan's face blurred in and out, doubling up with odd images: was that the Pontifex? The Pyramids?
"Morgan?" he mumbled.
"Yeah, man, yeah, it's me." Morgan hauled Chuck to his feet, bracing him as he swayed. "What happened?"
"I was gonna ask you the same question." Chuck rubbed the back of his head, which didn't make it hurt any less than the front but gave him the illusion of doing something. He glanced at his cogitator, vaguely recollecting that he'd wanted to check something before going to bed, but the glamour-stage was empty and the power-rune on the core unit wasn't glowing. "Did you spike the punch last night?"
Morgan scoffed in outrage as he helped Chuck make his way to the shower. "Something goes wrong, you blame me. After all these years, where's the trust? —Yes I did."
7:22 A.M.
A cheap ceramic-shelled aethervox was stuck to the shower-wall so those in a hurry could check traffic or news while getting ready. Chuck thumbed it on and hurriedly turned the water to the hottest he could stand, then scrolled to his conduit of choice. A voice came over the speakers as he relaxed gratefully into the pounding, steaming jets. "The 101 is clear at Universal City," said the CJ, "watch out for delays near Burbank Aerodrome, security's checking all vehicles—"
(An airship coming in to land—a cherry pie—a towering downtown hotel—a screaming face—a rising fireball in the dark)
—Chuck blinked, shook his head and stared. What the—? He glanced back at the aethervox, but the CJ was only cheerfully burbling on about a fender-bender on the Santa Ana. Christ. Maybe he'd hit his head harder than he thought. The ache that the shower had begun to soothe away was back now, just as fierce. He thought about asking Ellie what to do and then decided against it; she'd only drag him to Westside Medical along with her, and he couldn't afford another day off. Harry Tang would be as like as not to dock his pay.
7:45 A.M.
"So this morning I'm playing C-Cube," Morgan chattered as they crossed the street, "and I'm like, dude, just let me get the sniper wand, I'll take care of it; the guy won't give me the sniper wand, can you believe it? I made him eat a shard orb. Course, he'll probably call a wardragon down on me next time I link in, but—"
"Morgan—Morgan? Morgan-Morgan-Morgan." Chuck held up his hands. "As much as I'd love to talk glames with you right now, I've got a really splitting headache, and I . . . ." He paused, then dug the silver, quartz-gemmed command ring out of his pocket and tossed it to Morgan. "In fact, you know what? Can you do me a favour? Do you mind driving?"
Morgan stared awestruck at the ring in his hand, then looked at Chuck. "Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa," he breathed. "Are you being serious? You're gonna let me drive?"
Chuck frowned at him and jabbed a thumb at the red-and-white Goonivator. "'Sa company chariot, Morgan. It's not that big a deal."
"It's not just a company chariot, hokeh? A hoopty's a hoopty, homeboy." Morgan took in the four-seater motivator with a blissful look. "I mean, this baby's sitting on silver! . . . Or—alchemioak, I guess."
"Well, do us both a favour and stay off the 5," said Chuck, going round to the passenger side—it didn't really much matter which side you drove from, all the control rested in the ring, but the safety mirrors had all been oriented towards the front left seat, like everybody on this side of the Atlantean Ocean did. It was an absurdly huge grudge between the Britannian Kingdoms and the Imperium's biggest colony nation that they still disagreed over that. "Because the cops are in a phased . . . deployment . . . ."
He trailed off, realizing that Morgan was staring at him with not much less confusion than he felt himself. Where had that come from?
"Hokeh, uh, well . . . thanks for the tip, Ponch," said Morgan. He got into the 'vator, and Chuck hurriedly joined him, both doors slamming shut. Morgan rubbed his hands gleefully. "Oh, man, I'm gonna give these babies a workout! You've got your crystals all charged up, right?"
"Been sitting all night, man," Chuck confirmed, resting his elbow on the passenger-side windowsill and covering his eyes with one hand. A small motivator like this could get enough refreshment for its crystals off the ambient aether if it got six to eight hours down time, as long as nobody had cast any major free workings nearby in that time and it wasn't driven too fast or far. On the other hand . . . .
Chuck opened his mouth to caution Morgan about speed, but he was too late. Morgan donned the command ring, gestured as if snapping reins, and the 'vator's aetherlings came to life, seeming to erupt out of the vehicle's front bumper in a gush of coruscating reddish-gold light and then coalescing into a pair of massive, spectral horses. The phantom beasts reared and snorted, hooves striking illusionary sparks off the macadam-paved street, and the aethyric power lines stretching back from them to the chariot flashed and glowed.
"Morgan—Morgan-Morgan, go easy buddy, not so faaaaaassssttt—" Chuck's yell was lost in the screech of the chariot's tires and the hammering roar of solidified aether striking the road as the Goonivator peeled out.
MYLORE, BURBANK, CALIFORNIA
9:32 A.M. PST
"Fellow Rune Goons," said Chuck to his white-tunicked team as they gathered at the service counter, looking each of them in the eye one by one to impress them with his seriousness: the small Hindic Lester; the balding, dissipated-looking Jeff; and the diminuitive Anna, perched on the counter with her dark Han eyes elaborately made up and her black skirt hiked disquietingly high. "Today is going to be a very bad day. We've got a new cognodaemon on our hands; they're calling this one the 'Irene Demova'—yes, yes," he said in response to Lester's lascivious snigger, "it is named after the Serbian pornoglam star; lonely dude call volume will be high. This is a nasty one, kids. It's a matrix killer."
Chuck hoisted a laptop cogitator up to the countertop; he'd put this one aside for his demonstration, as it was an extremely old model that nobody was going to sell at this point, and had carefully broken the internal output runes to make sure nothing could get broadcast out once it connected to the Aethernet. "Last night, the showcase version of our Prism Express laptop was fried when someone, excuse me," he glared over his shoulder at Morgan, standing by the wall of home optistages, who scuffed his feet and looked sheepish, "decided to visit Demoiselle Demova's ae-Realm. Anna, close the eyes? This is what happens." His fingers flew on the laptop's runeboard.
Atop the laptop's display stage, a glamour materialized of a lovely young woman in a scanty outfit, writhing sexily around and sucking on strawberries as she pouted with full red lips at the viewers. Input boxes framed her image, showing where the viewer could enter ae-banking ID runes. "Food is sexy?" the girl cooed in a heavy accent. "Am I sexy? Am I . . . seeeexxx-aaayyy . . . ." The voice ratcheted downwards into a basso slur; the image of the woman froze, flickered, flashed, then melted in a most disturbing fashion before blinking out entirely. With audible cracks and pops, the crystals inside the laptop burst; smoke drifted out through the cooling vents. Anna raised her eyebrows and made an impressed moue with her lips.
Chuck gave Morgan a glare. Morgan shrugged defensively. "Sorry, Chuck," he said. "She drives me crazy. But that's love." Over his shoulder, he triggered the activation rune for the optistages; the Wall came alive with a local news broadcast.
Chuck sighed heavily. "Ladies and gentlemen, if you'll please just ignore dirty Uncle Morgan, I think that everything . . . will . . . be . . . ."
He trailed off. On the stages behind Morgan, an imperious white-haired man in a military uniform was marching down a corridor, surrounded by mantled officials. ". . . to arrive in Castillo des Angeles later today," said the newscrier, "to deliver a speech before the Pacifican Security League tomorrow evening . . . ."
Images flashed before Chuck's eyes, wrenching, agonizing, too fast this time to see, and he blinked. " . . . normal," he finished, feeling half-drugged.
". . . The general has drawn fire for his criticism . . . General Stanfield, the former Allied commander of NATO—"
"He's already here," said Chuck, without intending to. "He landed last night."
"Who's already here, Chuckles?" asked Anna, her eyebrows lifted.
". . . trying to stop tomorrow night's speech from happening . . . ."
Chuck turned. The name trembled on his lips—General Horace R. Stanfield—along with an array of information he had no idea how he knew, but knew he did know, with the same certainty with which he knew how to restore a mis-scribed or burnt-out rune: namedate, rank, career history, covert operations he'd led (what?!), and a classified ae-missive that confirmed Stanfield would be landing at the Burbank aerodrome hours ahead of his public schedule, on a stealthed airship—wait. The cops on the 5 this morning, the security checks at the aerodrome: that was about Stanfield, of course it was! He knew it! Except . . . .
. . . he still had no idea how. He wasn't a transcognitive. He'd never even heard of a transcog talent which worked like this, or any scrying-spell that could pull this much knowledge out of the aether at once in such a completely organized way—nor had he cast any such spell today, whether by runic inscription or somatic concentration ritual. What was happening to him?
"I don't . . . know," he finally said.
WASHINGTON E.S.C.—DIRECTORATE OF VICEREGAL INTELLIGENCE
11:57 P.M. EST (8:57 P.M. PST)
Casey watched as Langston Graham paged through the hardcopy images of Bryce Larkin. The alchemically treated paper was expensive to produce, but guaranteed that the images couldn't be scried remotely or re-imaged via glamour—in an age when matrix memory wards lasted only so long as the next generation of rogue cleavers hadn't broken them yet, many a security and intelligence agency had taken to keeping vital records on aetherstat paper only, as a guarantee of secrecy that only physical, personal theft—or betrayal—could overcome. These images had clearly been copied from a closed-cycle security imager in CIA headquarters; Bryce was walking down a tiled hall in the fine woolen mantle, cambric tunic, silk cravat, cotton breeches and leather shoes of business attire, a far cry from the ragged, wounded man Casey had seen bleeding out at his feet.
"Bryce Larkin was one of the Council's agents, Graham. One of your agents," said Brigadier General Diane Beckman. The red-haired woman wore a blue Aeroforce full-cloak and was half the size of the towering, black-skinned man glaring at her, but met his gaze with equal presence.
"And it was VSA's job to find him—and to question him, not to kill him," Graham shot back. "Thanks to Rambo here," he jerked his head at Casey, "we've got nothing."
"No, you got a dead CIA agent," Casey growled. "It's a gold star in my book."
"If this gets out . . . ." muttered Beckman.
"It won't," said Casey flatly.
"Nobody asked you!" Graham snapped.
"Actually, they did," said Beckman. "Major Casey is heading up this investigation." Casey saw the sour twinge of Graham's reaction, and smirked at the other man. God, he hated CIA wraiths. Sure, he killed people too, but at least he used his own name when he did it, and he never spent days or weeks worming his way into his targets' lives first only to betray them.
He looked around at the shadowed, charred wreckage of the elaboratory. Larkin had sure done a number on this place. Which, come to think of it, was a bit strange; Casey despised the Council for Imperial Acuity, but they did pride themselves on leaving as little trace of their work as possible. This kind of devastation was not their style. Whatever Larkin's reason for wiping this place off the map it must have been pretty damn good. "So, what was Bryce after, hmm?" he asked. "What did this super-cogitator do?"
"What did it do?" repeated Beckman. "Well, it did . . . ." She sighed. "Everything."
Casey frowned. The general took a deep breath. "You know that after 9-11 the VSA and the CIA were told to play nice, share their intel? But the problem is that we still had to maintain clearance levels and source confidentiality. Well, this was the solution our A.T. boffins finally came up with." She gestured at the burnt-out, blackened shell of the mainframe, in the centre of the lab. "A single cogitator, with one of the largest matrix crystals ever cultivated, with carefully controlled security access for its users but total internal coordination."
"Every scrap of lore both agencies had went into this matrix," said Graham. "The cogitator mined for patterns in the chatter. Saw things no human analyst could; found things where no single person could be cleared to search."
"And all of it was encoded in glamour-images, using the same memory-association techniques that eidetic savants use. This matrix was damn near as complex as the brain itself." Beckman hesitated a moment. "Some of our crafters started muttering that they saw signs of it 'waking up'; that we might have an honest-to-God, self-aware Aethyric Intelligence on our hands, something far more than just another construct or aetherling." Graham rolled his eyes; Casey felt sour—he agreed that the idea was ridiculous but hated agreeing with the CIA on anything. "They called it the Magnarune."
Casey scowled. "And somehow all this got away from you via a single rune-tablet?"
Graham shrugged. "That was the other point of the Magnarune: its portability. The entire matrix could be recursively collapsed into a dossier any commercial tablet could carry, if we needed to get field support to an agent, or had to relocate in an emergency and destroy the primary matrix."
Casey raised an eyebrow. "Mm. Guess it was too much to expect the boffins to think about someone just up and stealing it. But hey, who'd expect a CIA agent to go rogue?"
Graham's only response to the jab was to narrow his eyes. Beckman glared at Casey, which irked him—he knew she didn't think much more of the CIA than he did. Still, he supposed she didn't have his luxury of keeping the wraiths at arm's length. "Whoever got Larkin's ae-missive got our secrets," she told the major. "Your job is to find those secrets and recover them, Casey. Whatever it takes."
Casey shrugged. "I found this on Larkin," he said, holding up the burnt-out tablet. "The matrix crystal's fried. Your rune do that?"
Graham nodded. "Part of the Magnarune's structural definition. Whenever it transfers from one physical substrate to another, it triggers a destructive feedback loop that burns out the previous matrix; it's a safeguard against duplication."
"And tracking. Again, good idea, as long as you don't lose it," said Casey. "But for what it's worth, the loop didn't fry everything. Our guys did manage to pick up a trace signature from the transmission. Pinpointed the receiving AP address to within a few blocks."
"Where?" said Beckman.
"Castillo des Angeles," said Casey. "Which is perfect. I've been feeling a little pasty."
MYLORE, BURBANK, CALIFORNIA
2:21 P.M., PST
"Stop the presses, who is that?" Morgan murmured, in his best Jack-Nicholson-as-the-Joker voice—which wasn't particularly good, but then neither was Chuck's.
Chuck didn't bother to look up from his order folder, only keeping the teleson jammed between shoulder and ear. Morgan drooled over every halfway decent-looking girl who came into the MyLore, though unlike Lester or Jeff he could usually manage not to come off too sleazily when he did. "Vicki Vale," he rapped back to Morgan, keeping up the Prince tune. God, how long was the supply depot going to keep him on hold? "Vicki Vale! A-Vic, a-Vicki Vale, vickety-vickety-vickety-Vic, a-Vicki Vale—"
A figure moved in his peripheral vision. He glanced up, then did a double-take and dropped the teleson receiver, which hit the floor with a clatter of polyhide on tile.
Across from him stood quite possibly the most beautiful girl . . . no, woman . . . Chuck had ever seen, let alone met, in his life. In a half second he took in every feature: long wavy golden hair, flawlessly creamy skin, bright ice-blue eyes, a wide and full-lipped mouth, brilliant white teeth, and a tall elegant body that somehow managed to be both athletically toned and mouth-wateringly voluptuous, even under the relatively plain brown leather jerkin and blue workman's breeches. And something else made all that gorgeousness even more stunning: She was actually smiling at him—and not just with the impersonal reflex smile of someone in a worried rush to get some vital device fixed, or the manic grins of the girls at Ellie's party last night, but a warm, friendly expression focused directly on him. As if he, Stanford washout Chuck Bartowski, was the single most important person in her world. In the world. Any world.
"I hope I'm not interrupting," said the blonde goddess, sounding amused.
Interrup—? Oh. "No!" Chuck said hurriedly, putting his folder down. "No, not at all—that, uh, that's from Batman."
"Because that makes it better," said the woman drily. Yet somehow even that didn't sting—as if her raised eyebrow was an invitation to share the joke, rather than an attempt to make him the butt of it. Chuck found himself laughing, both abashed and relieved and strangely delighted. Not only supernaturally gorgeous, but with exactly the kind of dry, clever wit he liked? The kind absolutely none of the girls at Ellie's party last night had had? Something had to be wrong here. If real women like this even truly existed in the world, they didn't walk into a suburban MyLore on a Tuesday afternoon.
"Hi," said Morgan, injecting himself into the conversation, and for an instant Chuck despised his best friend. "I'm Morgan. This is, uh, this is Chuck."
"Wow," said the woman, still sounding perfectly at ease, as if meeting a Rune Goon and a floor assistant was literally the only thing she'd planned to do today. "I didn't think people still named their kids 'Chuck'. Or 'Morgan', for that matter."
"Well, my parents were sadists," said Chuck. "And carnival freaks found him in a dumpster."
"But they raised me as one of their own," said Morgan in a wistful voice.
The woman cocked her head, as if she wasn't quite sure whether to take this seriously or not. Chuck decided he'd better get things back on track. "So, uh, how can I help you . . . ?"
"Sarah," the woman helpfully filled in. "I'm here about this." She put a rune-tablet on the counter, its polyhide back plate removed, then laid a power crystal beside it. "I opened it up to change the powerstone the other day and now it won't turn on. Did I get the wrong brand, or damage the internal runes, or . . . ?"
Chuck barely restrained a gleeful grin. This was a particularly obscure issue unique to this model of tablet, one which had defeated much better crafters than himself and which would probably have kept the average Rune Goon busy for fifteen to twenty minutes checking every other possibility. Fortunately, Chuck had been told about this in one of the ae-salons he liked to frequent on the Aethernet, and knew exactly how to fix it. He couldn't have thought of a better way to look impressive if he'd tried.
"Oh, yeah, the Intellicell," he said, managing to sound incredibly casual, as if he saw this problem every day. "Yeah, absolutely. No, it's not actually a runic problem; this model has a little screw that can come loose if it's dropped, right in the back here—" He pulled his smallest screwdriver from his pocket and found the screw in question; as he expected, it had come out just a smidge, not enough to be obviously visible but enough to prevent the power crystal from seating properly. "Just give it a couple of quick turns, and . . . ." He slotted the power crystal back in, snapped the polyhide cover closed, then tapped the activation rune; the tablet's display plate came alive. "There you go, good as new. No problem."
"Wow." Sarah sounded sincerely impressed. "You geeks are good."
To his acute humiliation Chuck actually found himself blushing. Sarah hadn't taken her eyes off him at all; the eye contact was almost too intense. Wait a moment. Was she flirting with him? "Well, I'd say 'goons', rather than geeks," he babbled, "probably more—"
"Yeah, no big deal, it's just, well—" added Morgan.
"—the whole 'Rune Goon' work thing, obviously—"
"Excuse me! Excuse me!" Chuck had never wanted so badly to kill a customer in his life, but the panic in the voice cut through his annoyance despite himself. The man hurrying up to the counter was a middle-aged brown-haired fellow, with a little girl in tow who was wearing a pink leotard, a fluffy tutu and pointe slippers. "I have an emergency, I don't know what I did wrong, but—" He held up a handheld imager. "I shot the entire recital, but now it won't play back."
"Ho-keh, all right, well . . . ." Chuck took the imager and popped open the memory-crystal hatch. "Let's just take a look and—you don't have a crystal in here."
The man stared at Chuck, bewildered. "No, I do, of course I do! I mean it wouldn't work at all without a crystal, right?" He tapped the hatch at the imager's base, and Chuck groaned as he realized the man's mistake. God, how did people like this get through the day? With a sigh he turned the imager over and pointed at the word POWER engraved on the polyhide; from Morgan came a muttered, "Oh boy," as he too realized what had happened.
"You had a power crystal," Chuck explained to the man, and showed him the empty slot. "You still need a memory crystal for the glamour-images to actually be stored and played back."
The man looked positively sick. "Oh no. Oh, her mom's going to kill me."
And she frickin' well should, Chuck thought, somewhat uncharitably; he tried to cut most people slack, but there was a certain level of technical idiocy he just didn't have much patience for. Then his eyes fell on the little girl, and he softened. The man's discomfiture he could live with, but that look of disappointment—and even more so, its total lack of surprise, as if this was just another in a long line of paternal screwups—was too heart-wrenching to ignore. Unfortunately there was absolutely nothing he could do. A botched or accidentally dispelled recording he might have been able to retrieve from the memory matrix, with enough time, but it would take a professional forensic glamourist—which Chuck most certainly was not—to psychometrically reconstitute an entire performance once it was over.
On the other hand, Chuck thought abruptly, they really didn't need the entire performance, did they? There might be a way to do this . . . if he was willing to risk brushing off not only the most gorgeous woman in the world but one who actually seemed to enjoy talking to him. He glanced at Sarah, who gave him her incredible smile again. Chuck hesitated. Was that smile saying I'd really rather you pay attention to me, or Go ahead, do what you need to do . . . ?
The ballerina sighed. Chuck bit his lip, then made up his mind. "Morgan, I need the Wall."
"It's yours," said Morgan simply.
Ten minutes later, everything was ready. The man's imager—newly purchased memory crystal now seated securely where it should be—was set up on a tripod before the Wall, and was broadcasting to all the stages simultaneously; Jeff and Lester, for once with a commendable lack of sleaziness, had outdone themselves linking everything up. Anna had taken over operating the imager, and was adjusting its focus with a sharp eye. Chuck hurried up with a copy of the music that the ballerina had told him her recital had used and slotted the crystal into a sonovox unit connected to the home-theatre setup. Amazingly, Sarah had stuck around throughout the entire process, leaning on the Rune Goon service desk and watching with what looked like great interest. A small crowd of shoppers and other staff had gathered as well in obvious curiosity; standing on the empty carpet Morgan had cleared for her, the ballerina shifted nervously as she glanced at them.
Chuck knelt down next to her. "Ready?" he murmured. The ballerina flushed and looked down at her feet. Chuck frowned. "What's wrong?"
"I'm usually in the back row," the girl confessed.
"Why?!"
"I'm too tall. I block the other ballerinas."
Well, that experience Chuck could sympathize with. He'd been stuck in the back of every class glamour since his eleventh name-day. "Can I tell you a secret? But you can't tell the other girls." He beckoned her close, leaned in and murmured, "Real ballerinas . . . are tall."
Despite herself, the ballerina smiled. Chuck gave her a thumbs-up and retreated out of the imager's pickup, then signaled Anna and tapped the "play" rune on the sonovox. Orchestral music swelled out of the speakers; glamour-images of the ballerina appeared on every stage behind her, suddenly creating an entire crowd of fellow-dancers. The ballerina gulped, but stepped forward and, with a decisive nod, launched into her routine.
Hey, she isn't bad! Chuck grinned, watching the girl's confidence grow step by step until she was leaping, pliéing and pirouetting with as much passion as any professional trouper. At Lester's low-voiced direction, Anna was tweaking the imager's broadcast delay, keeping the girl's glamour-images just a little off-sync from her to make it look more like a real, living crowd. With a final triumphant pirouette, the girl flung her arms up and held her pose as the music finished. The audience burst into applause. Clapping delightedly along with them, Chuck glanced at Anna and got a thumbs-up of confirmation. The father would be going home with a recording of his daughter's performance after all.
He patiently endured the father's blubbery thanks, wanting nothing more now than to get back to Sarah, though the enthusiastic hug from the little girl warmed his heart enough that it was almost worth it. At last, everything had been settled, and he turned around. Had Sarah left? No! She was still there at the counter, waiting, smiling, and—
A round, bald, glaring Oriental face suddenly interposed itself in his vision. "Chuck," the man snapped.
Chuck's smile crumpled. "Hi, Harry," he said, with an effort. "Look, we'll be back up and running in five minutes . . . ."
"Five minutes?" Harry Tang repeated, as if Chuck had suggested something so ridiculous it was actually infuriating. "Do you know what five minutes means in MyLore sovereigns?"
"I didn't realize we had our own currency," said Chuck. Harry didn't smile. "Listen, I'm sorry about all the commotion, but, see, there was this ballerina, her father made a mistake—"
"We are not stockboys any more, Chuck!" Harry shouted. "We are leaders. MyLore leaders. Or at least, we're supposed to be." He stepped past Chuck, holding his gaze with a sneer. "And you wonder why Big Mike wants me for assistant manager."
That hit Chuck harder than he'd expected. He blinked. "There's an open position? Big Mike didn't tell me about that . . . ."
"And why should he?" said Harry disdainfully. "He knows you won't leave the company of your fellow Goons. You should thank him, Chuck. He was trying to spare you the inevitable pain of defeat." With a snort, Harry marched off.
Chuck had to take a moment to recover himself. In itself Tang's scorn didn't bother him—well, much—but the thought that Big Mike, who Chuck had always thought had at least a modicum of respect for him, hadn't even bothered telling him about the opening was surprisingly painful. Yet . . . could Chuck really blame him? He hadn't exactly been beating down any doors with his ambition and initiative, the past few years. Suddenly feeling a lot less happy about things, he turned back towards the Rune Goon counter.
The only person standing there was Morgan. Sarah was gone.
Chuck sighed. Of course she was. He hadn't really thought someone like her could be interested in him, had he? There wasn't that much magic in the world, however gifted a runecrafting prodigy you might once have been . . . and why was Morgan grinning like a lunatic?
"Chuck, dude," Morgan whispered gleefully, holding up a small cream-coloured rectangle of pasteboard. "She left you her card! Yes!"
Slowly, half feeling like if he shifted his weight too fast a trapdoor might open under him, Chuck smiled.
ECHO PARK, CALIFORNIA
11:43 P.M., PST
Unfortunately, the card turned out to be the high point of that day.
As Chuck had anticipated, the majority of the clients had been people incensed about their cogitators getting fried by the Demova daemon. What he hadn't anticipated was that so many of those clients wouldn't themselves be the lonely dudes he'd predicted, but the wives, bonamours and parents of those dudes, who'd had no idea what kinds of ae-Realms their loved ones (some of those latter being alarmingly young) were touring with the family cogitator. Unsurprisingly, most of them were utterly infuriated, not just at finding out about it like this, but at being told that if they hadn't been careful to make and regularly update a full backup crystal (which, of course, far too many of them had never bothered to), only a little of the matrix's original content was likely to be retrievable, and only after a lot of time and sovereigns. And of those angry customers, dishearteningly few ever said anything like, I'm sorry, I know this isn't your fault. Big Mike had wound up keeping the store open an extra hour simply to handle the rush. By the time Mike had finally shooed away the last client and locked the doors, Chuck was feeling like a damp dishrag, and rather bleak about his own supposed competence. Being a Rune Goon wasn't a demanding job, and the feeling of having failed even at that wasn't a fun one.
He made the mistake of letting his gloominess answer for him, when Morgan pressed him about the card. "Why wouldn't I call her?" Chuck grumbled. "Oh, I don't know—did you see her?" She had probably had several date requests before she'd even made her way home, he thought glumly. Whatever crazy whim of momentary idleness might, very briefly, have made her think Chuck could be more than just a friendly helpful Rune Goon, there was no chance she would still be available and interested by now.
"Yes!" said Morgan, as they rounded the courtyard fountain and headed for the door of Chuck's apartment. "Oh, man, yes! That's why I'm going to repeat the question: Why? Wouldn't? You? Call this? Girl?"
"Because I live on the prime material plane, Morgan!" Chuck snapped. "And why are you following me home, anyway?"
"Oh, come on—we're buddies!" Morgan looked offended. "We're going to do . . . friend things, and, and . . . ." A sheepish expression came over his face. "And I need to use your cogitator, 'cause mine's still acting up on me."
Chuck snickered. "Irene Demova," he said, not making it a question.
"Ah," said Morgan wistfully. "So beautiful, and so deadly."
"Yeah," they said together, in the universal rueful commiseration of dude for dude over women, even glamoured ones. Chuck felt slightly better despite himself, listening with half an ear to Morgan's chatter as he dug out his key and unlocked the door. Maybe he would call Sarah; all she could say was "no," and he'd certainly heard that before and more rudely. Not tonight, though. Tomorrow.
"You know, you got to understand," rambled Morgan as Chuck swung the door open, hit the light rune with a muttered command and they stepped into the vestibule, "this is what I've been telling people for I don't know how long—"
They froze. The door swung closed behind them. Standing in the hallway, the black-clad, masked and hooded figure holding Chuck's cogitator stared back.
Chuck boggled. Was this an actual ninja? It couldn't be, the Nihonjin government had formally outlawed and destroyed the order over a century ago, but there had always been rumours—He came to his senses with a jolt. "Please," he managed. "Not the cogitator."
Carefully, for all the world as if responding to his fear, the black figure put the cogitator down on the floor. Then, with a muttered, "Hai!" it took up a martial arts pose and waited. Chuck's mouth hung open. Was this guy actually expecting them to attack him? Nuh-uh, no way, Momma Bartowski didn't raise no fools—well, technically it had been Ellie who'd done most of that raising but the principle still applied—
Morgan grabbed a plate off a nearby bookshelf and flung it at the ninja. With a perfectly timed wrist-flick, the ninja parried it; the plate whipped back through the air and shattered on Chuck's breastbone. "Agghh!" he yelped. Not paying attention, Morgan grabbed a heavy wax candle from the same shelf and hurled that; the ninja parried the candle as well and this time managed to send it right into Chuck's groin. Chuck made a strangled sound and doubled over, then froze again as Morgan, who had grabbed a small blue vase and tried to wave it as a weapon, wound up smashing the ceramic over Chuck's head. The world blurred in and out.
"Come on, Chuck, do something!" Morgan shouted.
Chuck spared a second to send the fiercest glare he could at his friend, but the other man was too focused on the ninja to see it. As the agony in his head and his abused crotch ebbed, Chuck managed to lurch towards the ninja. "Look," he stammered, "just, just please—whoa!"
The ninja tossed his own cogitator at him. Reflexively, Chuck caught it. The ninja's foot scythed out in a spinning back kick, knocking Chuck's feet out from under him; Chuck flung the computer into the air as his whole body spun sideways, but before he could begin falling the ninja completed the whipcrack-fast turn and slammed his boot roundhouse style straight into Chuck's chest, sending him flying backwards to crash into the wall and then down upon the wooden bookcase, which collapsed underneath him. As if the whole move had been choreographed for weeks, the ninja caught Chuck's cogitator before it could hit the floor, twirled about with an almost feminine grace and placed it neatly on a shoulder-high shelf on the wall behind him. Then he spun back and took up the martial arts pose again.
"That's my friend!" howled Morgan, with a fury Chuck hadn't heard since their schoolyard days fighting bullies. He looked around, grabbed one of Awesome's golf clubs from his bag by the door, and lunged at the ninja with a wavering yell. For half a second Chuck felt a flicker of hope. Ninja or not, you couldn't just ignore three pounds of hardened steel coming at your head—
—or apparently you did, it transpired. The ninja yanked the golf club effortlessly out of Morgan's hands and sent it whickering around Morgan's head in a flashing display of speed and precision. Morgan gawped, then held up his hands feebly. "Okay, look," he managed, "he's not that good of a friend—"
The ninja whacked Morgan across the face with the club, sending him flailing across the room to collapse onto Chuck's prone body in a position that would have looked awfully strange to anyone coming upon them unexpectedly. But Chuck hurt too much to feel any awkwardness, and fear was finally beginning to make its way through the stunned disbelief. Oh, God, this guy could kill them effortlessly, and was probably going to do just that any second now—of all the unbelievable ways to die—
Behind the ninja, the shelf on which he'd placed the cogitator suddenly broke, sending the whole unit crashing down to the hardwood floor where it burst on impact. Metal plates spun away; fragments of blackened, scorched crystal flew everywhere. The ninja whipped around and froze, staring at it, apparently as surprised as Chuck and Morgan had been barely a minute ago. Morgan turned his head, dumbly, looking equally flummoxed.
"Morgan . . ." Chuck managed in a rattle. ". . . didn't you hang that shelf?"
Without a word or sound, the ninja leapt over Chuck's and Morgan's prone bodies, disappearing out the door into the night.
11:44 P.M., PST
The black-clad figure had left the low-slung black chariot parked on the street outside the apartment complex; it was closer than one would normally leave an exit vehicle, but parking too far away and walking up would have looked suspicious in this environment, and it took only seconds to sprint to the chariot. The figure activated the chariot's command ring even as it dove into the driver's seat; the aetherlings that sprang to life were stealthed to be no more than a shimmer in the air, and were as silent as a breath of wind. With only the barest thrum of vibration and the whirr of silenced tires, the chariot sped away down the street as the invisible aetherlings pulled it along at speeds that would give most drivers heart attacks.
The figure stripped off the black hood. Golden, wavy hair spilled out. Sarah glared at the street in frustration. "Dammit," she growled.