Wood Sprites

What didn’t make sense was that he was also funneling massive amounts of food, medicine, and weapons to a tiny island in the South China Sea. While Google Maps showed only a sparsely inhabited circle of land, redirected military satellites revealed a beehive of activity. Cargo ships sat at a big dock that nearly dwarfed the island while shipping containers were unloaded via cranes. According to the manifest of one ship pulling away from the dock, it was leaving empty. Material was flowing in but nothing was being shipped out. Where was it all going? Onihida? A quick check confirmed that the island was directly below the hyperphase gate in geostationary orbit. Apparently the same effect that caused Pittsburgh to shift universes to Elfhome also made this island go to Onihida. During Shutdown, everything that had been stockpiled would have been loaded onto boats on Onihida.

Ming’s people had created an army of monsters on Onihida to invade Elfhome, but they were going to be armed with weapons from Earth. While the domana

-caste could go toe-to-toe with tanks, they were few and far between. Most elves had nothing more sophisticated than bows and arrows. What elves survived the slaughter, Ming was going to enslave.

So how could Louise throw this operation into mayhem? What she really wanted to do was bomb it out of existence. She eyed the port with its growing stockpile. Ironically, bombs were currently being off-loaded. Specifically, ammo for a shoulder-launched multipurpose assault weapon. A fire would work well enough, if she could cause one big enough. What did she have to work with? Four ships, all with diesel engines, mostly controlled by computers. Several container cranes that appeared about fifteen stories tall — also computer controlled. An entire shipyard filled with chemicals and fuel. She should be able to create a small disaster that would lead to something bigger.

Technically, she’d only promised Aunt Kitty that they would try to be good. Aunt Kitty had tacked on the “don’t blow anything up” afterwards, so that really didn’t count. And “be good” was subjective. Stopping an invasion was being good — wasn’t it?

Louise focused on one of the ships that had a ridiculous amount of ammonium nitrate fertilizer. What was Ming going to do with that much? The volume nearly guaranteed that the blast would reach munitions. How to ignite it? She ran through the manifest to see what else was on the ship. At the center of the ship was a shipping container filled with potassium. She had no idea what idiots would ship potassium on a boat when the material exploded on contact with water. But there it was, all but gift-wrapped. She merely had to release the shipping container while it was nine stories up. Gravity and the ocean would take care of the rest.

She felt like a stage manager again as she reached out and took hold of the various computers on the other side of the world. The curtain was about to rise on a new act. Cue the war drums. Bring up the lights. Set the actors into motion.

* * *

Annoyingly, she lost control of the distant computers immediately after the first explosion. She took it as a good sign, but it was annoying that she couldn’t be sure that the entire daisy chain of explosions would actually reach the munitions.

Hopefully it would draw Ming’s attention and resources to the other side of the planet. It was a big flashy disaster to draw his attention from the more quiet attacks that she had planned. Now to start the more local damage.

She did a quick search and found a Canadian website that worked with governments of certain countries to set up shell corporations. She wanted the companies she used to be as legal as possible to make it harder for Ming to take back his money, just in case he ever managed to track it all down. For a small fee for each transaction, the Canadian legal firm created dozens of shell companies scattered around the world. Another small fee, and she had a matching number of perfectly legal Singapore bank accounts, owned by the companies in such privacy-minded countries as Belize and Malta. It took her less than a half hour. It was a lot easier to set up bank accounts when you weren’t concerned about breaking the law. If she were caught, being taken away from her guardian would be the least of her worries.

The offshore accounts set up, she turned her attention to the massive sprawl of Ming’s holdings. He kept them isolated from each other to make it harder for anyone to realize the extent of his wealth. Hopefully, it would also make it harder for Ming to realize someone was systematically cleaning them all out. Still, once he noticed, every transfer increased the likelihood of him intercepting her. How long before the explosion distracted him?