"Hermione," Hermione's aunt said, via an upgraded mirror that had probably been sitting on a hallway floor since the second week in January, "I have a piece of good news for the family: I've just resigned and while almost everything I've done in the last thirty years won't be likely to be declassified in my lifetime I won't be needing to dissappear any more. Call me back as soon as you can, I'll be lounging around in the living room getting caught up on news and not doing anything important today."
"Private conversation?" Harry checked.
Hermione nodded, rising to her feet, and made a sharp exist from his room where he, and the rest of the girls, had just settled down to do whatever research or schoolwork came handy when she'd finally got round to checking the mirror message that had come in during DADA and got forgotten about until after dinner.
Two hours later she came wandering back in and sat down beside him and proceeded to so thoroughly not say or do anything he didn't particularly register it until he'd finished writing out a list of potential ways to transmute bulk quantities of moon dust into topsoil, most probable things required to keep it being topsoil, known plantlife growth accellerants suitable for getting useful things like trees up and running quickly,and a set of ward specifications for a habitable surface area (localised gravity simulation similar to establishing down on a ship, something to do something about meteors, something to keep air in after having transmuted it out of regolith, something to keep moondust out as you don't want to inhale that stuff, something to stop livestock or idiots wandering across the wrong ward line - making a ward you can lean on and sheep will bounce off was one of several things meaning an artificial leyline nexus was going to be fired up on the lunar surface before this ward could be, at least as far as he could tell - that sort of thing) and had reached a point where his current focus didn't want to go any further, whereupon he realised that Hermione was as utterly shocked as she had been when she'd found out that her aunt was an MI6 assassin.
He rested a hand on her leg and asked, "Hermione, are you okay?"
"... Apparently I'm cleared for Aunt Emmy to talk about one part of what she's been doing whenever she fell off the face of the Earth, Master," Hermione said. She sounded as utterly thrown as she looked. "Specifically because of that security clearance you gave me."
"Wait -what-, she's one of Mairi's-"
"No Master, she was spying on the muggle British for one of the micro-nations that make up the Republic of China, which apparently because of how the Japanese civil war ended is now a military ally of an Orcadian military ally. And apparently she's a squib and has spent most of the last thirty years not consciously knowing that or knowing or worrying about where she actually came from because apparently however that happened there's 'Amazons' in China and when they insert a deep cover operative they -do not bugger about-."
"Via somewhere around what's not the Khanginates because of something to do with Hittites," Harry said, then added, "I think. Can't remember offhand where I heard that."
"Er, yikes, anyway apparently she'd volunteered for mind magic and to normally believe her cover story - as in the one MI6 and Mairi knew - because her great-grandmother, who's basically part of their very local just that not quite demesene Wizengamot equivalent, wanted to keep tabs on how much the people in charge of muggle Hong Kong at that point actually know. And she's also resigned from that job too, because what the muggle British government does and doesn't know about the Wizarding World is about to stop mattering anything like that much if you're basically a really powerful Chinese demesene equivalent while what the muggle Communist Chinese do and don't know is about to get a tiny bit more important."
"Huh,' Harry said.
"Also I should probably expect to join you in the suddenly being an elder sibling early next year because Uncle Dan has leave coming up and she's hellbent on babies. She's okayed me going to Japan with you this summer but wants to actually visit Linlithgow."
"So how'd she react to this?" Harry asked, taking a gentle grip on her nose ring and holding it for several seconds, causing her to freeze.
"... asked for a closer look, the started giggling and told me to be careful not to get it hooked on a bookmark."
"Visiting Linlithgow, huh?" Harry said.
"Hopefully your mum says yes."
"If she baulks at the spy spying on spies bit we can just wave the fact your aunt got one over Mairi under Mum's nose, she'll abruptly want to shake hands, Mairi makes Mum twitch."
"Master, I think they might expect me to become some sort of inside agent in your court and Aunt Emmy was on about wanting to introduce me to the 'great-grandmother' who she apparently voluntarily got mind-whammied by. I don't know if that's even her saying it or something she's been programmed to say."
Harry considered this, nodded, picked up his own communication mirror and a notebook, and scanned through a list of known potentially useful names he'd built up as the things pleriferated.
He tapped in a runephrase - the other end immediately lit up with the red glowing rune indicating the new automatic answering and messaging storage that was just getting rolled out for small businesses and the likes.
"Hello, you're through to the office of Smedley Doyle, Private Warlock!" A boistrously cheerful young lady with a mild Sc*nthorpe accent declared. "I'm afraid there's nobody available to take your call right now, but if you'd like to leave a message after the ding we'll get back to you as soon as we can," ding.
"Hello, I don't know if you're interested in training in the detection and removal of oaths, compulsions, and other such malignant constructs but money," and Harry tipped the mirror to an angle where what he was wearing on his head would be clearly visible and pulled his goggles down out the way, "Won't be a problem."
-/-/-
"Oholysh*t, SMED!"
-/-/-
"Okay yeah look, that's not going to be something my former order is, uhh, going to be all that keen on - look it's like this, using these skills after having resigned? I can get away with that. Teaching them? Not candidates who haven't taken the order's oaths if I don't want assassins after me. However," and the guy in the carefully arranged to look slightly shabby and like a private investigator from the penny dreadfuls robe scribbled something down, "I know a bloke who knows a bloke, right? There's several people who want a long way the hell away from the order given this whole thing with the Mot more or less imploding - talk to this bloke," and he held up a mirror connection runephrase hurriedly scrawled on a notepad, "And he can put you in touch - especially if you're able to get identities switched about."
-/-/-
"Right," said Dora Tonks to the unknown to her fortysomething mousey-looking brunette woman clad in cheap robes who had been waiting in the Temple of Odin for her,"Neck this, step on that runesheet, wait twenty seconds, step on that other sheet, enjoy suddenly being the teenage offspring of I guess an Orc family with a lot of skraeling in 'emfrom the description, ugh, I gotta get an apprentice or something to handle this sort of scut work when someone immediately needs a new face."
"Thankyou. You've-"
"And the Anglesley accent is a dead giveaway, -that's- why the whole thing with a muteness curse on a servant's torc - Harry could've warned me he'd decided he needs a court warlock, I know a bloke who knows a bloke - you had been warned that until the 'successful hex removal' once you're speaking in a Vinland accent matching your new look - not my department, someone across the pond is working on getting a torc with an accent-shifting curse properly loaded with the right one - you're officially unable to speak because of a curse injury and aren't in Vinland because a certain king who's hired you for general dogsbodying has a reputation for being able to f*ck injuries right off? - Good. Anyway get changed and get used to communicating by notepad in public and get outta here and forget you ever met me."
Not that the girl would recognise her when they did; Tonks was wearing a long dark waterproof overrobe, had her goggles pulled down over her eyes, and had taken on the appearance of a sallow-faced and hooked-nosed rather ugly young woman with long lank greasy-looking black hair, sort of a genderflipped version of Lily's description of a man named Severus Snape largely as the fact that she, Dora Tonks, was in Hy-Brasil was still classified.
She left before her unexpected 'patient' had changed clothes as well as appearance, changed back to herself as the chopper was roaring back into the air, and resumed thinking about ways to more accurately visualise the complex shifting system of Earth-Moon leylines to predict where and when transient nexii would appear.
They now knew that Albus Dumbledore's conjecture that an enormous nexus easily an order of magnitude more powerful than the sort opened by an artificial nexus generatorformed right as the moon became full enough to force werewolves to change, and produced to bathe the nearside of the moon (and the night side of Earth) in magic bounced off and changed by regolith until it dissapated as the moon waned enough to stop causing werewolves to change - correlation wasn't causation but the reflected magic was for definite shifted from raw to a previously unknown element, and it was -quite some coincidence- if there wasn't a connection there.
July, Aunt Lily showboating, Harry grandstanding in low Saturn orbit in the footsteps of sheep that were hopefully currently not being irradiated, and a whole bunch of what they were playing at suddenly getting a whole lot less secret, couldn't come soon enough.
-/-/-
Valentina the scruffy old ewe was getting a bit fed up with this bollocks, and had decided she was going to be extra super duper stroppy next time someone decided to stuff her into a bag.
Sheep - particularly hardy hill-grazed 'primitive' breeds such as those farmed on Hy-Brasil- have better memories than they're sometimes given credit for, so she was able to loosely compare her current situation - being in a small sheep run with down where it belonged and a feed trough with attached feed dumping contraption and water trough now surrounded by small frozen droplets wherever she'd splashed some out of the trough's environment ward into the hard vacuum she was entirely unaware surrounded her, with a second run containing what looked like two other sheep but didn't appear to be making any sound or smell nearby - to the previous time some impolite sort had jumped on her with a bag.
The main problem now was that the sky had gone very strange and seemed to be full of something orangey-brown, inedible, round, very big, and unlikely to possess tasty treats for sheep.
"Blarrr," she observed, no longer interested in this whatever it was as she had decided it was time for a widdle - which went silently tinkling away as frozen droplets of sheep pee which she neither noticed nor cared about.
Saturn, beneath the rings of which a quarter million ton rock with a sheep run on top was currently transiting, did not reply.
The other two sheep opened their mouths as if to answer, but annoyingly didn't.
-/-/-
"Blarr," said one sheep, cautiously observing what looked like but might not be as it neither smelt like nor sounded like an older member of her flock.
"Blarr," the other sheep in the small pen she had been dumped out of a bag intoput in.
"Blarr,"
"Blarr,"
The puzzled sheep noises continued, as Saturn's rings slipped away beneath them unheeded.
-/-/-
"No," Tonks decided. "We are -not- sending any thinking being outside the range of help even once."
"Someone has to go first," a certain teenage ex-princess, thrall to not teenage yet king, personal environment shield tester, astronaut (or maybe currently payload,) tea lady and general space program office dogsbody argued.
"This isn't like low earth orbit, Amiya. Our trio of not entirely willing voluntold sheepstronauts are - a long f*cking way away-, look, if Earth was this size - and you've -seen- just how bloody enormous Earth is with those two eyes you're doing the big sad eyes with - was this size," and Tonks lit up a glowing ball with her wand, "Saturn would be about -ten miles away- at its closest approach. And compared to the heliopause that's right next door. Andeverything in between is completely, relentlessly, deadly to anyone who isn't a fire elemental. -Nobody- goes alone if they're not an ifriit, not me, not you, not -anyone-, no manned vehicle goes alone, -full stop-. Sorry, didn't mean to yell at you, it's just you didn't see what happened to the mice we sent to space in the process of getting the environment wards and enchantments figured out. Not pretty."
"... Oh."
"Look, you can come when we go to Japan then to space, but until that? Forget it."
-/-/-
"Look," said one NASA employee to another, "I can't make any sense whatsoever of this as any sort of orbit, stable or otherwise - sure it's the same object, the - what is this I don't even - -mess of a spectral analysis every time someone manages to get a telescope on this thing are a solid match, same object for -definite-, but there is -no way in hell- we're looking at any sort of even vaguely stable lunar orbit, I mean -look at- this mess! It's been tracked through several minutes of arc second in orbits ranging from a really tidily circular equatorial prograde a hundred kilometres up to full retrograde and so epiliptic it should've been ejected from the Earth-Moon system - I don't even know what to think beyond if that's natural I'll eat my hat."
There had been too many sightings, with too many different sets of equipment, on too many continents, to write it off as an error; they'd both sat and watched multiple observatories getting as close to solid data, perfectly matching, on whatever the Hell it was at the same time. Everyone in the room had.
"... Taling of hats at this point I can't be the only one starting thinking about lining mine with aluminum foil."
"Har de har har har, this isn't some Usenet bullsh*t about ducks. This is -real-."
"You're seriously thinking we're looking at..." a third NASA employee said.
"Aliens? Bit early to say that but I don't know what the hell else to think of spectral analysis gibberish that keeps disappearing and reappearing in stupidly different orbits."
Nobody at NASA would realise how important the phrase 'maximum ward effect range' is for several years thereafter.
-/-/-
The days continued to slip by quietly at Hogwarts, the planned summer schedule continued to fill up, and probably some level of momentous events continued to take place outside Hogwarts.
Navies worldwide were steadily commissioning and getting into the water steadily preposterously larger and larger warships with steadily more and more enormous batteries of steadily bigger and bigger naval rifles in a crescendo of sabre rattling - simultaneously more and more magical countries were starting to add gun-armed war golems to their arsenals and frantically searching for a best possible basic design and layout and in fact size with the testbeds used ranging from a very close copy of a Sleipnir first turning up in France to an attempt to get something to walk around carrying an 18-inch naval rifle engaged in by the Reds - 'Obiekt 1993-7' worked but required a crew, looked very vulnerable to magazine explosions, andwasn't going to have much luck navigating even marginally soft ground, resulting in sudden intense Soviet interest in roadbuilding and railway construction which they seemed to be throwing A, more golems and B, gulags at as they appeared to have decided to make the idea work no matter what. Somewhat less ludicrous (albeit still Not Small) tank like war golems also started turning up on the other side of the Iron Curtain, spotted in aerial photos taken by high altitude djiin, in about mid-March.
Harry spent much of March consulting with the DMLE and Hepheastus Sigma on the subject - the result was expansion of the small factory outside Inverness where the 28 Sleipnirs had been constructed, to build a new, somewhat larger, design resembling a tank turret on twelve legs, dubbed the 'Crab' by the British - they would be capable of fully autonomous operation but would, apparently, usually be crewed and had carefully been designed for maximum easy of upgrading. A hundred and twelve had been ordered, with the first to be delivered in June.
Another set of golem plans, this one designed for operation in orbit and based around an application of flying broomstick charms that wouldn't be able to get off the ground by itself, got sent off to Hy-Brasil at the same time.
The ongoing construction of a rail tunnel between Britain and France by the muggles was very rapidly turning the demesenes nearest both ends into flashpoints and hotbeds of intrigue and smuggling. Apparently it had been possible to drive sufficiently warded road vehicles through since the end of 1990 with this having turned into a constant clandestine cross-border traffic (also traffick) sometimes in 1991, hadn't been noticed for over a year, and was for definite still going on as people were still intermittently getting caught at both ends, which didn't seem to be doing the already very unfriendly relations between Britain and France on the magical side any good at all.
Emmy Granger announced that she was in fact pregnant late that month post her husband's leave ending. Apparently the Commandos were still running around fighting fires in the Balkans and Middle East, the muggle sides of both of which were still a sh*tshow in the aftermath firstly of the collapse of the muggle Soviets and secondly of the blunt destruction of the Ottoman Empire - at least the various subsequent magical brushfire wars all through that part of the world had started to peter out with actual governments now having established themselves in most (though not all) of the effected areas.
In North America, fighting continued to slowly spread from the original Salish/Portland flashpoint, though it seemed to be staying low level and still hadn't blown up into anything even as bad as Voldemort's War, and never mind anything as destructive as Grindlewald or the Mediterranean War. Nevertheless raiding between various bandit kingdoms and skraeling tribes everywhere from just across the border from Vinland to the Pacific kept getting more and more common and bloodier, and there were confused reports of three or four great plains skraeling tribes and at least half a dozen smaller bandit kingdoms poking at banding together for mutual protection - either way a slow but steady stream of refugees had started turning up in most of the various coastal colonies across the entire continent, the Jarldom of Vinland included.
In the end, by the time Hermione Granger got into a helicopter to fly back to Linlithgow with her friends at the end of her second year in full time magical education, it may have been hard to see it from a boarding school on the Orcadian border but the whole world seemed to be waiting for a fuse to be lit.
-/-/-
Two profesionally very dangerous women from two very different backgrounds with two very different life stories considered each other across a kitchen table.
"Not quite what you were expecting, are we," Lily eventually said.
"In all honesty no, not even slightly," Emmy Granger admitted. Her husband's Land-Rover was parked up in the village guest parking - she'd driven up, spent the night in a motel in Carlisle, and set out that morning in an attempt to arrive about when the children would be leaving Hogwarts - a tailback caused by a lorry crash had got in the way. They'd be picking her husband up off the train in Edinburgh with a little something to get him through the wards in a week's time as his unit was, apparently, being rotated off peacekeeping in what used to be Yugoslavia of which he was by all accounts quite thoroughly sick.
"This side of Britain is even more spectacularly foreign than the muggle side," she added. "Everything from your entire approach to the use of chi on up - at least operating in muggle Hong Kong had me mostly adequately prepared for muggle Britain, I've been feeling out my footing by dipping in and out of the demesene of Plymouth and a few visits to Wizarding London."
"Which will in turn not have even remotely have prepared you for here," Lily said with an amused nod, noting the first centaur Harry had built walking past the back window with an anticipatory air, looking in the general direction of northwards. "Hmm, there goes Lighning off her usual patrol path, I think that may mean the kids will be here in a few minutes. The long and the short of it is British demesenes have a very different kind of autonomy than the constituent states of the Wizarding Republic of China - and there is as much cultural variation in this one small set of islands as there is between the Tibetan border and Taiwan. In some ways we're less autonomous - for example we operate on a largely shared countrywide set of laws with quite a lot more restrictions on what local law can look like - in others more so, for example taxes are owed by the landholder who is in turn free to extract money from residents however, usually either rent or skilled labour with occupancy right as part of the pay."
"I had noticed the very limited perimiter watch in Plymouth," Emmy said. "What's that about?"
"I expect you haven't attempted to cross into the inner demesene there. The short version is most are effectively a town surrounding what doesn't look like but acts as a castle's curtain wall, in turn surrounding a keep. Traffic in and out of the town - the outer demesene - is usually open enough you can only really tell it's there by muggles avoiding it, we don't actually have one here as the Potters never established a market town. Somewhere inside or alongside that there's most likely to be a second much more heavily guarded perimiter and ward-line, and a complete cessation of interleved muggle real estate, inside which you'll find the inner demesene, largely comparable to the 'villages' you're probably familiar with, or the curtain wall of a castle surrounded by a town - if you haven't been required to state your business you hadn't entered one until you drove into Linlithgow. Lastly, we have the demesene sanctum, surrounded by a second or third ward-line and functioning as the demesene's keep, the landholders headquarters and home, and the final redoubt in the event of an attack. Such as: this house and its attached warded area around it containing among other things a very expensive commercial craft pottery and a blink dog farm."
"There's also usually household wards on every building in the entire demesene, we're just flat out further ahead there mostly because we've got an insanely huge supply of warding stone - namely slate and grey or blue-grey granites that appear to have been thaumatically altered in the deep past, an immense amount of time before the emergence of the first thinking beings in the world, most probably by a series of major, cataclysmic, leyline emergence and dissapation events and geomantic shifts most probably somewhere between four hundred and forty, and four hundred and twenty, million years ago. Current best guess is an immense slow collision between two vast now disintegrated and long since drifted away landmasses - you're up on the way land very slowly moves right? Good - forced reality in this part of the world to buckle upwards along with the ground in a manner most likely reminiscent of modern-day Tibet - either way what's definite is whatever took place here in the distant past significantly altered the magical properties of certain granites and slates, leaving behind the most abundant ward-quality stone deposits ever discovered worldwide. Put it this way, in the last year alone a touch over a quarter of a -million- tons of high quality warding stone has been extracted in just the twenty-eight quarries operated by Black and Black. I mean there's better out there but a wardstone has a bit of a minimum size problem and platinum is way the hell too expensive when a granite slab the same weight produces a ward with about two thirds the strength for a tiny fraction of the cost,and no offence but it sh*ts all over paper, wood, clay tablets, any of the stuff usually used for warding in the far east, and resolves a ward with nearly twice the strength of the same weight of jade or amber. Also has the benefit of the stuff coming in arbitarily enormous chunks - the demesene primary wardstone here is a house sized boulder we're fairly sure got left where it still is by a glacier ten thousand odd years ago, and I don't mean small house either."
"I hear a helicopter, guess we might as well wait for it to touch down then wander out to the loading bay to meet the kids," Lily said. "Sirius is slightly overstating the quality difference of wardstone quarrying in Britain compared to the handful of known deposits in Turkey, the southwestern Alps, or the two quarries in the mountains east of the city of Great Zimbabwe, what's apparently unique here and in western Scandinavia is just how common deposits of the good stuff are. Means that what would cost as much as a four bedroom house in mainland Europe, or funny money in the far east, is as inexpensive as a television set here, and nobody's stuck renewing wards on paper every couple of years - there is a ward, on stone, in every magical household in the British Isles, we've been routinely warding on multi hundred ton stones for millennia, and with the advent of rail transport we're able to affordably fit wards on a level with the Forbidden City in Hanoi on a ship. The materials built into Black Dreanaught, for example, include a little over three thousand tons of wardstone directly supporting wardings on a par with the wards at Jiankang - which I understand run on roughly seven and a half thousand tons of jade."
She left out the part about how when you lit the ship's inbuilt artificial leyline nexus the attached wardings became an order of magnitude more powerful, not the sort of thing to just outright say to someone else's spy, whether or not the mute Vinlandr warlock your son has recently acquired the services of has spent the conversation informing you in writing that there doesn't appear to be any still-current mind magics going on in there, no sign of hidden imperatives or trigger phrases, nothing like that though it's pretty clear that wasn't the case quite recently and that the whole thing this person was subjected to has very detectably as per expected became a very predictable case of becoming the mask at least twenty years ago.
The helicopter having set down and spooled down in the background, she rose and nodded towards the back door.
"Any rate we may as well step outside and wait for our roaring horde of teenagers and soon to be teenagers to come pouring down from the village."
Lily noted that both Harry and Hermione looked at and got a thumbs up hidden from Emmy Granger's line of sight from the girl from Vinland as a plague of centaur golems, one of them with a breathlessly giggling Wealey draped belly-down over rough area of saddle horn, hove to.
-/-/-
"Long story short she's forty-five and has been living as a muggle named Mei Xeifeng, or later Emmy Granger, for roughly twice the time she's spent consciously remembering being a teenaged squib named Lo Shin - in a very real sense 'Mei Xeifeng' became the real her probably about twenty years ago, entirely predictable frankly. There's more leftover traces of mind magic than you can shake a stick at, but it was all very tidily disassembled a few months ago with no remaining trigger phrases or subconscious imperatives or the likes I can detect - I find the idea that was in fact voluntary on her end a little hard to credit, but it -does- seem to have been dissassembled so thoroughly I can only get a very basic outline of what exactly the damn thing was supposed to do."
"How possible would it be to do what we're worried about?" Harry asked, resting a hand on Hermione's leg.
"Put bluntly I don't know: this is utterly unlike anything I've seen from this side of the Himalayas and I don't know of anything comparable from the Americas either. Comparing it to European or Arabian mind magic is like comparing precisely cut runework to the result of hitting things with a big hammer. On the other hand it's as hard to spot something was there as it would be to not notice the nose on your face, and if it was still active make that a nose lit up so brightly it visibly glows in broad daylight. With the reputation for going through learning like a hot knife through butter of everyone else in this room I'm fully confident that I'll be able to have you all at least competent to spot something like that even before we jump on a warship and go sailing off into the far blue distant yonder, and I'm pretty confident I should be able to have you all capable of basic legillimency in the same timeframe. Oh, and I successfully lifted an image of this 'great-grandmother' from her mind so if you want to know who to be on a watch for...?"
Harry nodded, gave Hermione's leg another squeeze, got up, and collected his homemade Pensieve from a cupboard - he'd rigged it up basically to see if he could over Yule.
The woman now known as Anna Randalsdottir extracted a memory strand, dropped it in, tapped at the control runes, and brought up a rotating image of an extremely elderly, stooped, hag-like and black-robed woman with long white hair and a sharp-eyed expression.
"I estimate she's a little under five feet tall standing like this, from Madam Granger's height and the comparative angles," Anna said.
"Huh," Tracy said. "She looks almost like a pickled monkey."
-/-/-
"Jebediah," said Tonks, "Can you hear me?"
There was a short pause, then a reply - a slightly janky mechanical voice produced by a voicebox originally designed for a Sleipnir-class war golem, this one mounted beside one end of a paired set of scrying mirrors inside a hermetically sealed capsule the size of a football, filled with inert gas, with nothing more than little clay limbs inside sealed vacuum-proof rubber operating it via the holes they plugged- came back, saying, "Yes Mother. I hear you. Can you hear me?"
"Loud and clear, Jebediah. How do you feel?"
"Manouverability systems check... online and functional with no nasty atmosphere getting in the way.Manipulatory limbs... nominal. Ward functions... nominal. Mana battery... nominal, charge ninety-nine percent. I lack materials on which to test my cutting and fusing rods, but they appear nominal. My tools are all stowed.Vocal apparatus and communications we have already determined. Sound support capsule appears fully vacuum proofed. Navigation systems... I see my orbit as two minutes forty-eight seconds past perigee of two hundred and nine miles, nice and equatorial and prograde, with expected apogee of... two hundred and fifteen miles,Sensors check... Mother,I am seeing the dawn terminator crossing over the Pacific coast of the Americas,it is very vast and very beautiful. I feel at peace."
"Do you have the orbit of the Whacking Big Rock, Jebediah?" Dora asked the world's first dedicated space golem. Charms intended for a broom weren't much use for shifting half a ton of pottery and metalwork in an atmosphere, but without any air getting in the way, adding velocity slowly wasn't a problem. The name wasn't entirely her fault - it had been the first one out of a spare hardhat stuffed with hundreds of slips of paper.
"Yes, Mother, I do. That's a very inclined retrograde orbit, and it's not very circular, it's a bit messy. I would like to put it in a tidier orbit."
"Please establish yourself a rendevous with the Whacking Big Rock, Jebediah. Afreen will be with you the whole way just in case before she comes back to start bringing your siblings up to join you. You've got a lot of darkness to crystallise, and asteroids that won't prospect themselves."
"Hiii, Aunt Afreen.... Mother, I don't think Aunt Afreen can hear me?"
"You're in hard vacuum and she doesn't have comms yet remember, Jeb?"
"Ooh, yeah, no pesky aerobraking. Time to manoeuvre is now two hours, twenty-eight minutes, aaand, seventeen seconds."
Pause.
"T minus two hours twenty eight minutes..."
-/-/-
The household - including a specific older and rather more Brythonic than she looked warlock currently being mute due to what she currently wore round her neck - was just sitting down for their evening meal when a very unexpected blue Volkswagen crewcab with a cab full of crows skidded to a halt in the loading bay and Mairi Duncansdottir (plus crows) came piling out; she banged the back door open without knocking.
"I've told you before I don't like you barging into my house," Lily said, immediately annoyed.
"This is important," Mairi said, and handed over two sheafs of photographs- taken from high altitude by djiin - showing part of the industry district of Great Zimbabwe, the city itself, one set to Harry and the other to his mother. "Look at the contents of those oxcarts."
"Looks remarkably familiar from somewhere," Hermione said, peering at Harry's set.
"It should. The shape and arrangement is unmistakable: those are the containment structures for an artificial leyline nexus, and I bet I know what these overhead gantries being constructed extending from the building they're being taken into are for." Lily said.
"Mairi, how confident are we nobody's blagged off with a copy of the notes I nicked off Mum?" Harry asked.
"Solid as can be, no evidence of any illicit access to them - myself am betting we've had at least one Zim mole in the fabrication end and myself am betting it's this wee bastard," and Mairi handed over a dossier. "Looks like himself was being inserted during the war, skilled goldsmith, got moved to fabrication when we were getting set to build more of these things," such as the one currently unknown to Harry's mother in lunar orbit, "And took a leave of absence six weeks ago, hasn't been seen since getting off a train in Inverness. The part that's concerning is the Zims leak like a sieve - if they get the damn thing running it's a matter of time before every c*nt on the planet has one with a nonzero the Reds will have a copy of the plans in a matter of weeks."
"Well," said Lily. "I suppose that makes dealing with Beria even higher priority."
"Now wouldn't it be nice if anyone kent where the wee bastard's bloody soul jar is," Mairi said, sitting down.
"I've got a liat of candidate locations with the -least- of a bitch to access Linin's mausoleum in Moscow as it fits the general lich appetite for grandeur," Lily told her. "We'll see."
-/-/-
"T minus five... four... three... two... one... WOOHOO! LOOK OUT LUNAR ORBIT, HERE COMES JEBEDIAH!"
As several thousand miles away in space most of the way to the opposite side of the planet a ceramic-stuffed dustbin (literally: the outer casing had started out as an ordinary stainless steel rubbish bin) with too many limbs and an inbuilt fifty pound block of alchemists glass started industiously pushing its apogee towards a lunar intercept and cackling about it while three others whinged about all this horrid atmosphere they were unfairly still in, Tonks started wondering if Harry had maybe planned out their orbital construction and exploration golems scriptures to be a bit -too- enthusiastic?
-/-AN-/-
... yes, the next three space golems, the ones currently jonesing to be stuffed into a mokeskin pouch and launched next, are indeed named 'Bill', 'Bob', and 'Val'. Total coincidence that's what came out of the hat, I swear.
There's liable to be several hundred Jebediah-class orbital construction golems (which I've just heard are very quickly going to be nicknamed 'Jebs') puttering around the inner solar system building stuff and being entirely too enthusiastic about trajectories and tidy orbits while looking kinda like R2D2 got a limb replacement from the Adeptus Mechanicusby the end of 1993.
Cheers,
Cal.
