Unidentified Funny Objects 2 (13 page)

I let a disapproving silence rest between us. Don seemed unfazed by it. “I appreciate your interest in maximizing our productivity, but I really need you to be more aggressive in your management of the inventory initiatives. Those will do a lot more for the bottom line than any plan you have for reducing forms we have to fill out which we don’t own anyway.”

He shrugged. “Whatever you say.”

“I’ll want a status from you at the end of the week,” I said. “Thanks, Don.”

“You’re welcome,” he said and strolled out.

Office productivity projects. Right. I believed that one. I needed to know exactly what Don was using all his spare time on. I pulled the wide-brimmed coffee mug from the bookshelf, the one with the company logo embossed on it, and blew the dust from inside. I was only halfway through my morning coffee, but speed was of the essence. If Don got back before I could fix the eye on him I’d lose any chances of riding him past his cube wards. I dumped my four dollar latte into the scrying mug and cast the spell.

There was Don, taking the long way back so he could scope out both break rooms. I watched him snitch a pecan brownie from the plate the office assistant had brought before meandering back toward my group. There was the door… damn, the phoenix hadn’t done enough damage to the thing. It should have been crispy and instead it was only singed at the top. A few curlicues of smoke rose from one of the vines, fortunately missing the sensors on the ceiling. Mountain Dew was vile stuff. I would have half expected it to fuel the fire, not put it out.

The vines parted for Don and I leaned toward the mug.

And then… I saw my face. Somehow he’d managed wards that could detect pre-existing spells and block their effects on their targets. No employee should have that much mana. You could win the Employee of the Year award and still not have the mana store to finesse wards like that. If I had any doubts that Don was up to no good they’d vanished with his image in my mug.

I went to the break room for a cheap refill, leaving the company mug behind. Scrying always dropped things to room temperature and changed them just a little; it made for nasty coffee and unpleasant water. It also defizzed soda. For once, though, I didn’t begrudge the mug the cost.

Don had a deadline. I didn’t expect him to meet it… which meant I had to lay some very important groundwork. Four days was cutting it fine, but Giselle was known for her quick turnarounds.

It was time for me to send a meeting request to my director.

“JIN, JIN. GOOD TO see you as always. What can I do for you?”

She was smiling—that was good. That meant I hadn’t flubbed my offering to her administrative assistant. I could never remember which chocolate generated more mana for James, white or milk. He was also picky about incense.

“Thanks for seeing me,” I said. Giselle was a busy woman and preferred straight talk. I got to the point. “I’d like to request additional mana.”

“Your mana allotment did get to you this pay period, didn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said.

She picked up a pen and turned it in her hands. “Should I ask?”

Better to just tell her now. “I have an employee to deal with. He has mana he shouldn’t while doing less work than he should be.”

“What’s your plan?”

It didn’t seem a good idea to admit I didn’t have one yet. I improvised. “My first meeting with him wasn’t productive. I gave him a deadline to meet. If he doesn’t, I want to get into his office and see if I can’t find a mana stream.”

One of her brows lifted. “A mana stream. You think he’s double-dipping?”

“I can’t be sure until I look,” I said, “but if he’s not doing the work, he’s got to be getting the stores from somewhere.”

She looked more interested—not good. I liked Giselle but I preferred her benign neglect, since she had a tendency to become incendiary when drawn out. Literally. “Just how much mana does he have that he shouldn’t?”

“His cube has a door made out of tentacular vines,” I said.

She put the pen down. “I’ll give you a week’s worth of mana. If it turns out you don’t need it I’ll want it returned.”

I said thank you and withdrew, not altogether liking the twinkle of interest in her eyes. Yet another reason to hope Don got his act together. I should be so lucky.

“…AND I’LL HAVE A talk with him,” I said.

“You’d better!” my guest said as he stood. “If you people aren’t going to take this initiative seriously we’re going to have to take it up the chain. This is important business, though you wouldn’t know it the way Don’s treating it.”

“I’ll take care of it,” I said, again.

My visitor wasn’t appeased, but was also too busy to hang around. I was glad to see his back; the director of business operations from the Field department wasn’t a man I wanted angry with me, and definitely not someone I wanted talking to Giselle. Friday had come and gone and Don had defied me and the people angry with him were finally coming straight to my office instead of trusting that their emails and phone calls would reach me.

Candace was waiting for me outside.

“Do I even want to know?” I asked.

“I hope so,” she said. “Jin, I’m mana-less, and so is everyone else.”

“I’m hoping this is a joke,” I said.

She handed me her employee ID card, the one you swipe to get through security checks. I turned it in my fingers. It didn’t fizzle, it didn’t jump and it certainly didn’t sing. When I shook it, there wasn’t even enough left over in it to rattle. “What the hell?”

“All of us are empty,” she said. “There’s not a drop left between the group of us to cool a can of Coke. And that’s not all. It didn’t just drain away—it was taken.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “Don has something to do with it.”

“Come look,” Candace said.

I followed her, wondering what horrors I would find. I didn’t have to finish the walk to see. The door of thorns had become a tower of thorns. I stood at the base of this monstrosity and said, “Is your cube in there?”

“I assume,” Candace said. “I rescued my computer and set up in the conference room, along with Luis and Marcy.”

Don’s fortress of thorns spanned a four-cube block and met the lowered ceiling. He’d been artistic, I had to give him that—the fabric panels typically used for cube walls were still part of his cube-fortress, they were just connected by dense meshes of vine and leaf. Philodendron leaves, of course, since nothing else grew this far from a window. Ivy maybe.

There was no door into this domain. I wondered how he got in.

“Well then,” I said. I sighed. “Let’s meet in the conference room.”

“I’ll round up the rest,” Candace said.

“WE WANT TO HELP,” Prandesh said. A row of grim faces trained gazes on me from around the conference room table. Three computers were scattered on the sideboard, so poorly fueled they needed wall cables to pull data from the network. The muffins I’d hastily procured from the cafeteria in the main building had barely been touched: never a good sign.

“I appreciate that,” I said, hands flat on the table. “But you have work to do.”

“Yeah, and we can’t do it,” Candace said. “Don’s stolen all our power! Have you ever tried to work the old-fashioned way? You can’t get anything done.”

“It can’t be that bad to work without magic,” I said. “The computers can still get on the network.”

“The only reason we found those cables is because Don isn’t managing his excess inventory project,” Luis said. “I remember what it was like to work without magic, Jin. It’s not pretty and it’s not productive. You want us to move forward, our best bet is to help you take care of the Don situation.”

“Don’s not a situation anymore,” Candace said. “He’s a challenge.”

“Definitely a challenge,” Marcy said.

I sighed. “All right. I was planning to infiltrate his cubicle fortress alone, but if you feel that strongly about backing me up you can come. We’ll make a quest of it.”

“All right!”

“We’re behind you all the way!”

“Let’s meet at the fortress around four forty-five,” I said. “That should give him time to clear out, assuming he’s cutting out early.”

“I’d be shocked if he’s even showing up at all,” Candace muttered.

Me too. In fact, I was counting on it.

FIFTEEN MINUTES BEFORE CLOSE-OF-BUSINESS I arrived at the door to Don’s fortress to find my group awaiting me, each armed and armored. The weapons were eclectic. Luis had a T-square half his size that he claimed had been with him since his student days in engineering, and from the nicks and scuffs on the thing I believed it. Candace’s laser pointer was probably the deadliest of the bunch; it was CFO Manning’s preferred weapon in arcane duels and I’d seen him cut most of the top officers’ shields into ribbons with it. But the assortment was good, from Marcy’s telephone cord whip to the variety of cable-crimpers and punch-down tools on Mike’s belt.

I’d brought an old standby.

“Is that a magic wand?” Marcy asked.

I grinned and turned the transparent wand upside down so she could watch the colored glitter in it flow to the opposite end. A child’s toy, properly enchanted, served just as well as a more obvious object as long as you believed. I was good at believing, and better at enchantment. My pockets were always filled with small and seemingly innocuous objects.

“Now to pick the lock,” I said, turning to the seething mass of vines. “Watch my back.”

“On it, Boss.”

I approached the vines with my wand outstretched, side-stepping so as to give them as little of me to attack head-on as possible. The wand’s repulsion spell gave the tentacles in front of me pause, but my back prickled when I realized just how deep the layer of plant protection went. I wasn’t more than two steps in when I heard the hiss of the laser pointer searing off a vine, then the thwack-whack of Luis’s T-square going into action.

Finding the “door” to the cubicle took me a nerve-wracking few minutes as the vines bounced off my shields. I could fortify them with the extra mana Giselle had passed me but I didn’t want to use it so soon. Who knew what Don had set up inside the fortress? I hunkered down to examine the lock, then whipped out my case of computer tools. As leaves and thorns rained down around me beneath the furious blows of my group, I tried screwdriver after screwdriver in search of the proper length and size and magical resonance. None of my normal tools worked.

But that’s why I carried my “special.” I hadn’t needed to use the long T-15 Torx screwdriver since I’d ditched my ancient SE/30, but that lovingly maintained tool had so often appeared on the scene whenever someone finally gave up on getting to the impossibly distant case screws that it had acquired some of the power of miracles. When I slotted it into Don’s lock, the door gave and the tentacles withdrew to a safe distance.

“Wow,” Candace said, her voice shaken. Plant ichor stained her company polo sap green. “Is it safe to go in?”

“No,” I said, putting my set of picks away. “But we’re going in anyway. Be on your toes, people.”

We filed into Don’s fortress, weapons at the ready. The rustling I thought I heard resolved into a slow ticking.

“Watch out!” I said, and we threw ourselves to the ground as a volley of mechanical pencils thunked into the opposite wall.

“Hey, those could have hurt us!” Marcy said, indignant.

Prandesh rose to his feet and tiptoed to the opposite wall. He pushed his glasses down his nose and squinted. “They’re mana suckers,” he said, pulling one free. “Looks like the standard spell. Trigger, action, fuel source, and fuel shunt.”

“Give me that,” I said, suddenly suspicious. Prandesh handed it to me and I started taking the spell apart. What I wanted to know I found out soon enough. “The fuel shunt leads to the fortress,” I said. “He’s got lines into the thing.”

“I can’t imagine him doing it any other way,” Candace said. “You’d need a constant mana stream to keep this thing operational.”

“I mean direct lines,” I said. “No firewalls.”

Silence. Then, “That’s stupid,” Mike said. “Who’d allow unprotected mana streams into a continuous enchantment?”

“Someone sloppy,” I said. “Someone who makes mistakes.” I looked around for the first time: the four-cubicle space was now a vine-encircled courtyard leading to an antechamber for a stairwell, a black, unlit stairwell. I sighed and pushed myself up. “Let’s hope he keeps making mistakes.”

“He can’t possibly work up there,” Candace said.

“Like a kid with a treehouse,” Luis said.

I shook my wand until it started glowing, then headed up the stairs. They were sticky.

“Enchantment?” Prandesh wondered. “Or did he just not clean up after a spill?”

“This isn’t a single spill,” Marcy said. “Yuck.”

“Stop!” I said. Beneath the arcane light of my plastic wand glowed a trip-wire. “He’s got a trap set up here. Anyone good with fiber optics?”

“Let me up,” Marcy said. “I did a stint managing the new fiber ring installs beneath the campus.”

We pressed ourselves flat to the walls so she could advance and study the light. After a moment, she said, “If we interrupt it, it will definitely go off. But I also get the feeling that if we cancel it, it’ll still trigger.”

“So what do you suggest?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Back up.” We shuffled backward. She stood a few steps down and whipped it with her spiral phone cord.

“Protect Jin!” Candace shouted. She knocked me down, and several more bodies piled on me before I could even assess the result of Marcy’s act. I should have seen it coming, really—Marcy had an impulsive streak. A real go-getter, Marcy, but nothing scares her and she sometimes overestimates her abilities. I wondered wryly if I should mention this in her performance review.

Crushed beneath three people, two of whom stunk of plant ichor, I reflected that this was not how I’d planned to spend my Tuesday evening. Then again, anything was better than rush hour traffic.

One by one, my people slid off me. “Everyone intact?” Candace asked.

“Yeah. Damn, though! I’m almost sucked dry!” Mike said. “That was actually pretty clever.”

I sat up. The stairs were covered in a river of gleaming paper clips. As I watched, the mana they’d drawn off my group sank into the stairs.