The Wizard That Wasn't (Mechanized Wizardry) Read Free Page B

defenses,” he said, “in advance of conventional support.  Would your masters consent to such an endeavor?”
    Lundin looked back at the young commander.  “If you say it’s necessary, Your Grace, to neutralize that wizard in time,” he replied quietly, “I’m sure you only have to give the order.”
    “Thrusting that far over the water?  Damned magical themselves, these Petronauts,” one of the officers said, shaking her head in amazement.
    “What I wouldn’t give for a hundred like them,” the balding man agreed.
    LaMontina chose his words with measured authority.  “I, for one, consider it a privilege to command these brave two, and their technicians.” he said, extending his ungloved hand across the table, a smile in his eyes.
    He clasped Lundin’s hand firmly.   Lundin basked in the glow of his leaderly approval.
    “You told him what ?”  Samanthi hissed, minutes later, giving Lundin a shove.
    Lundin folded his arms and leaned further back into the corner, away from the nearest black-and-gold officer.  “The truth,” he whispered defensively.  “Kelley and Mathias almost certainly have enough petrolatum to thrust across to the island.”
    “‘Almost certainly?’’ So, you admit there’s a chance they run out of ‘tum halfway to the island and just plunge into the water in full combat gear.  What about the chance archers take them out as they thrust?  Or once they reach land with no fuel?  Or once they reach the lake house?  Or that they die at the hands of the deadly wizard?  Any of these probabilities interest you, Horace?  Why don’t we run ‘em through the Abacus?”
    “You leave Abby out of this,” Lundin said, sulking.
    “You leave me out of this,” she retorted, flicking his ear. He yelped.  “You’re delivering the good news to Sir Kelley,”  Samanthi said.
    “I’d like to point out that you’re the senior tech.”
    “Right.  And as the senior tech, I’m officially letting you take the fall for your own flaming screw-up,” Samanthi Elena said, pulling her sandy hair back from her round face.  She tied it back and turned to the purring Abacus.  “Consider it training.  Put those there,” she said to a courier arriving with the latest supply figures from the quartermaster.  
    The courier saluted and set the shallow crate, overflowing with tan cards, on the carpeted floor of the pavilion.  The tan cards were dotted with shorthand and symbols in regular patterns, quick reports from officers across the camp on everything from the quantity of blackpowder remaining to the current condition of all the horses.  Lundin grabbed a stack of cards and fed them into the waiting slot of the Congregator, a hissing machine with ferocious metallic prongs jutting upwards and outwards, like tusks.  A column of blank pink cards was affixed to the side of the machine, contained by thin glass walls.  The tan cards Lundin fed with lazy familiarity into the top had symbols designed for human eyes.  The Congregator would translate them into the language the Abacus understood best—sequences of open holes and closed spaces.  The needle-thin punching teeth hidden inside the Congregator would punch out pink card after pink card and spit them along the horizontal prongs, where Lundin would retrieve them.  The pink cards, brimming with the same data in a new, Abacus-friendly format, would be fed into the great machine.  And the techs could perform any number of operations on the newly encoded dataset.  Once the process was complete, Abby would tell the Army the state of their inventory faster than a team of clerks ever could.
    On the other side of the Abacus, Samanthi grabbed a blank blue program card, several times larger than the tan data cards, and turned to the press.  Lundin shifted his weight, not eager to make the call to Sir Kelley.  “You know what?” he said instead.  “I’d love to see what Abby has to say about the odds of Kelley and Mathias taking out