Joachim Piccard (madwatchmaker) wrote in lightning_war, @ 2008-09-10 12:25:00 |
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Current mood: | geeky (and scared) |
Midday Tuesday 15 September 1942, at Kulkarni's Curry House in Londinium...
Eliot Gardiner was pleased to see that there wasn’t much damage to Kulkarni’s Curry House, and that it was even open for business. He was running a bit late, so he wasn’t surprised to see that Trevelyan was already there when he arrived. “Thanks for agreeing to meet with me. I’ve made some sketches of what I remember, but I could really use your help.”
Joachim Piccard smiled at him, took the drawings, and turned over his own diagrams. “Here,” he said. “This is what we did.” He looked closely at Eliot’s sketches and made a few corrections here and there, drawing in the lines of force as he remembered them.
Eliot looked at Trevelyan’s work, comparing it to what he’d already done, and nodded. He’d been close, but he’d missed some of the finer details…although Trevelyan didn’t understand the device as well as he did. “Amazing. I can see the similarities to Tesla’s Teleforce, though there are some differences. But from all we can tell, Tesla never got it to work.”
Joachim shrugged. “This isn’t Teleforce. I designed this to disrupt it.”
Eliot was impressed, if a bit confused. “You designed it? I thought you were making it up as we went along last night.”
“I did,” said Joachim. “Last night. Design on the fly is still design. This is the array we built using the earth-shaking device. It’s not Teleforce, but neither was what we were facing, precisely; it was an offensive adaptation of Teleforce.” He frowned.
“But you’d seen Teleforce before?” Eliot asked, still surprised that anyone else in the arcane world was working with Tesla’s writings.
“I used to know a woman who was interested in it,” said Joachim cautiously. He didn’t know how much it was safe to say about Sharolt, especially since he didn’t have any idea where her brother and his mercenaries had taken her, or what condition she was in. “She wrote to Tesla.”
Eliot nodded. “It’s a good thing for us that you recognised it. We were still thinking it had something to do with Tesla’s lightning generator.”
“Well, they’re all related,” said Joachim thoughtfully.
“They are?” Eliot asked, intrigued.
“Of course they are,” said Joachim. “No-one else could have come up with any of those ideas…they’re all clearly the product of an untrained magickal intelligence.” He shrugged. Not everyone could see patterns the way he did. He knew that. But he still couldn’t understand how they missed them, how even people he knew were brilliant were stupid about them, sometimes.
Eliot frowned. “Interesting. We hadn’t spotted those connections, and of course some of the designs are incomplete because Tesla didn’t account for the fact that he was using magick, which doesn’t help at all. Are you sure you don’t want to go to the Ministry? We could really use your help.”
Joachim sighed wearily. “In point of fact, I was travelling,” he said. “I’ve been trying to keep my head down for rather a while now. I want to work with you on this. I enjoyed it. But I want to make sure I get to go home to Viresh at the end of the day. Wherever home ends up being.”
“Have you been talking to Corinne? Because I promise, not every day ends with someone needing a healer,” said Eliot, smiling. “But seriously, I don’t think that’ll be a problem. We do sometimes have to put in long hours, but we don’t make a habit of it.”
Joachim laughed. “No, no, it’s not that…” He sighed, his expression wistful. They should probably have been gone already; there was no telling when someone was going to come after them. Impressment was often attempted when recruiting failed, after all, and Viresh had been missing from work for a while; he’d gone in that morning before dawn to get some of his things out of the office, and he still wasn’t back. Joachim was beginning to get worried about him.
“Seriously, if you’re interested, just let us know,” said Eliot. “Of course you would need clearance before we show you the lab, but I can promise that as soon as Philip sees your design he’s going to want to talk to you. He still doesn’t believe I needed all his crystals.”
“Well, clearance is rather the problem, now, isn’t it?” Joachim shrugged. “I don’t want anyone traipsing around in my mind. And I’m afraid I have a rather checkered past.”
Eliot frowned. “That would make things rather difficult.” He wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do; they had to have Joachim’s research. “I suppose we could hire you as a consultant. You don’t have any objection to turning this design over to the Ministry, do you?”
“Not in the least,” said Joachim, and then he sighed. “I don’t care what you give them, as long as it isn’t my name and address and nativity. Truth to tell, I do enjoy working with you—but I don’t want to be shanghaied off the streets.” He frowned. “And I’m not really sure you can promise I won’t be.”
“It would make things easier if you were to come in and talk to Kyteler,” Eliot admitted, wondering what in the world could be the problem.
“And what if he doesn’t like what he finds in my head?” Joachim asked quietly.
Eliot shrugged. “I really have no idea. I’m sorry. We’d love to see any research you’ve done, but we wouldn’t be able to share our results if you don’t have clearance.”
Joachim nodded. “They’re not going to give me clearance if they read my mind. But at least if they don’t, I’m walking around free without clearance, which is better than being locked up without clearance.” He shrugged. “I’m not eager to go back to the kind of working conditions I had to put up with where I was before.”
Eliot wondered what Joachim meant by that, but doubted that would be a productive line of questioning. He made a mental note to tell Kyteler about it later. “Well, I suppose there’s no harm in talking about what we did last night, since you know more about it than I do anyway. I’d got the impression Teleforce was defensive—how do you suppose it got turned into a weapon?”
Joachim leaned back. “Here’s the problem. Let’s assume I know. If I offer to tell you that I know, how am I to know that’s all the information that will be taken from me? If I tell you that I know, then obviously I must know more than that. What’s to stop them from going through everything in my mind? So, I can tell you how I suppose it was turned into a weapon; it was turned into a weapon, most likely, because the people who made it turn everything into weapons. And because it clearly didn’t work for them as a defensive device—or we wouldn’t be able to touch them.”
“I deserved that,” Eliot said good-naturedly. “All right, can you tell me what happened last night? I wasn’t sure if we just blocked the attack or actually reversed it.”
“We reversed it,” said Joachim. “I’d estimate we inflicted heavy casualties at the staging site. Possibly everyone around the originating device has been killed. Unfortunately, your enemies understand the value of redundancy, so there’s no guarantee that was the only such device they have. We reversed the polarity, sealed the gate and sent their attack back to them. It’ll probably work at least once more. But maybe not three times. You need someone who understands gating instinctively, instead of the usual Transportation and Logistics arithmancers who keep doing what all of the ones before them did because that’s what works.”
Eliot nodded. “With any luck, it’ll make them think twice before doing that again. Can it be used offensively as well as defensively?” He grinned, realising what he’d done. “Or is that another one of the questions you’d rather not answer?”
“I think the answer to that question is obvious,” said Joachim. “We defended ourselves the best way—with a good offence. What we did last night was entirely kitbashed out of available materials. But if you routinely used it offensively, you’d probably do considerable damage to the native land it would be drawing its power from, since you wouldn’t be powering it with sacrifices or other less pleasant methods. The design needs to be refined. I’ll willingly help, but as a free agent—and ideally it would be a good thing to have someone who understands gating harmonics and leys assisting us. I just hope you have someone like that.”
“You’re right, of course,” said Eliot, frowning at the memory of the earthquake, which was probably not the only thing Trevelyan was worried about. “Some things just aren’t worth the cost. At least when using it defensively it’s the enemy who has to pay it. I’m just wondering how difficult it would be to set up a defensive system that uses these devices—I noticed you had to do a fair amount of fine-tuning.”
“I don’t think it would be that difficult,” said Joachim. “I would have had to do less fine-tuning if you…if I had made my initial intentions more clear.”
“You can say it,” Eliot said agreeably; he heard far worse from Philip every day. “I jumped to conclusions and took us down the wrong path. Which just goes to show—this would be so much easier if we could work together without any restrictions.”
“Yes, but I’m not laying myself out as an open book for anyone to do as they please with,” said Joachim flatly.
“No, of course not. There’s got to be some kind of compromise we can reach, though,” Eliot said with a frown.
“I’m sure there is,” said Joachim. “I’d like to know what is…but I don’t. On top of the whole ‘this is fun, and I’d like to keep doing it’ aspect of things, I really don’t want the Axis to win. I know them rather better than you do, and it won’t be much of a world if they win.” He sighed. “It certainly won’t be safe for Viresh and me. Aside from the fact that we’re the same gender and different races, which is the exact opposite of what that regime wants, there are people on that side who’d quite like me dead.”
Eliot nodded. “I don’t know what you’ve been through, but I agree, and I’m sure Kyteler does too. Those things you’re worried about…you never voluntarily did anything to aid the enemy, did you?”
Joachim looked at him incredulously. Did he have to come right out and say that he would be a defector if he joined them? He couldn’t just say that he didn’t want anyone to find out that he’d murdered Raphael Trevelyan, but maybe he ought to prepare for that eventuality. How difficult would it be to make Trevelyan look like an Axis spy? Maybe Viresh would be able to help with that. “Maybe once I believed the things I’d been told all my life, growing up.”
Eliot sighed; it was becoming more and more clear that Trevelyan had a lot to hide and was determined to keep it hidden. How difficult would it be to convince Kyteler to leave that alone, since they needed him so badly? “I really wish I’d thought to bring someone who knows how to handle these things. If you were an artifice, I’d know what to do, but I don’t even know the right questions to ask. We need you, if only for what you did last night. If I can convince Kyteler to not look inside your head, would you be willing to talk to him? He’s the one who can make this decision. I can’t.”
“I’m willing to talk,” said Joachim. “But someplace I can get out of, not in his office with all of his guards around. You can tell him he can have all the scientific information he wants. I just want to keep my past to myself.”
Eliot nodded. “I’ll see what I can do.”
factbusters (Eliot Gardiner) and madwatchmaker