Naturally, this aroused Karen’s curiosity. “What are you doing?”
He sighed, “I’m trying to see outside, sort of.”
She frowned. “You can do that?”
“Maybe. Let me have some peace and quiet. I have to focus,” he told her.
She did, and he turned his thoughts back inward, trying to quiet his mind. It was hard, but he had kept practicing over the past few weeks. After a minute or two, he began to see flashes of the dimensions closest to their own. As expected, they were filled with fire and smoke. The missile strike was over.
“Rextalyet, amyrtus,” he intoned, and the Fool’s Tesseract inverted itself.
From inside, it was difficult to tell whether anything had happened. It was still dark, except for the light from the ring hanging on his staff. There were no vibrations or sounds from the outside; absolutely nothing could enter.
“Did it work?” asked Gary.
Matt didn’t reply, instead focusing his senses on trying to see beyond once more. The visions he received were incomprehensible, consisting mainly of a brilliant white light. He gave up. “I think it was bad,” he said finally.
“What did you see?” prodded the android.
“Nothing but white light.”
The machine nodded. “That is bad.”
“What does it mean?” asked Karen, somewhat irritated with the cryptic remarks.
Gary tried to explain, “I believe it means a thermonuclear blast was initiated.”
Her blue skin paled. “They nuked us?”
Matt held up a hand. “No, that would be me.”
“That’s brilliant!” she exclaimed in sarcastic outrage. “You mean to tell me that we’re sitting at ground zero?”
Matthew nodded almost sheepishly. “Mm hmm.”
“We’re trapped,” she concluded. “Just a few feet away in every direction is a radioactive wasteland, or it will be once the blast fades away. I’ll have to teleport us somewhere else.”
“It isn’t as bad as that,” said Gary. “To the best of my knowledge, almost all the radioactivity that lingers after a nuclear explosion is from fissionable materials left over. Fusion bombs, or hydrogen bombs, produce much less radioactive fallout, and most of that is from the fissionable materials used to ignite the fusion reaction.”
“Get to the point, Dad,” said Karen impatiently.
He nodded. “This explosion, if it was a fusion explosion, is from the fusion of entirely non-radioactive materials. There couldn’t have been any fissionable materials to start with—just simple elements, oxygen, nitrogen, that sort of thing. The only radiation would be the initial gamma and x-ray bursts during the blast, as well as some neutrons. Those neutrons would be the only real problem; they would have made much of the material close to the blast radioactive. But beyond that, everything should be fine.”
Karen was shaking her head. “Except that everything nearby was destroyed by the blast, that sort of ‘fine’ you mean, right?” There was heavy sarcasm in her voice.
“Well, of course,” said Matthew, adding, “We’re also probably several dozen feet above where the ground used to be, since there’s almost certainly a large crater beneath us now.”
“So we should teleport,” said Karen, repeating her original suggestion.
Matthew agreed, “Just give me a second to set things up.” Reaching into his pack he pulled out a pair of enchanted rings. They were similar to the ones he had used before, but larger, each nearly two feet in diameter. He took the ring supplying their air off the hook on his staff and deactivated it, and then replaced it with one of the new larger rings.
“What’s that for?” asked Karen.
He smiled. “We can’t teleport the staff out—it’s connected to the enchantment that controls the Fool’s Tesseract. It has to be turned off before it can be moved. Once we get to our new location and wait a while, I’ll activate the second ring, creating a gate between the two. Then I can reach through, deactivate and collapse the staff, and pull it back. The only thing we’ll lose will be the ring on this end.”
“What about your hand?” she said pointedly. “Won’t it be exposed?”
Gary spoke up, “After a few hours the radiation exposure from just having his hand exposed for a few seconds should be fairly safe. Most of the radiation will be concentrated in the ground below and whatever solid materials are nearby. As I said before, there shouldn’t be much traditional fallout that accompanies normal nuclear blasts.”
“Alright, next question,” she said, without skipping a beat. “Where do we go?”
“Somewhere we can get coffee,” suggested Matthew with absolute seriousness. “I’ve been craving it since…” He let the words trail off as he realized he had brought up a painful memory for her.
Karen tried to keep the sadness from her voice as she finished his sentence: “Aunt Roberta’s. It might not be safe.”
“I’ll risk it if you will,” he replied.
The look in her eyes was answer enough.
Chapter 49
Karen took them directly to the bedroom that she and Matthew had shared during their stay with her aunt. Anywhere around the house was risky, since they didn’t know if a watch or guard had been left in or near the house, but she was prepared to whisk them away immediately if necessary.
They were there only a few seconds before they had the answer.
“Three in the front room,” announced Matthew, beating Karen to the punch.
“What should we do?” she responded.
Matt was feeling aggressive. The constant danger was beginning to affect his thinking, perhaps. He gave her a calm look that belied the recklessness that lay just beneath the surface. “Wait here a second.” Without giving his companions a chance to respond, he opened the door and marched down the hall to the front room.
One advantage that AI soldiers have over human ones, uploaded or organic, is a lack of surprise or hesitation. These units were no longer controlled by ordinary uploaded humans but by the machine intelligence of ANSIS. The moment he stepped into the room, they pivoted and raised their weapons to fire.
Their response was so quick that one actually managed a shot before Matt’s lightning ripped through the open space between them and fried all three of his mechanical opponents. His shield stopped the bullet.
As he stared at the smoking machines, he noted that while the front room was still extensively damaged from their previous battle, the bodies were gone, both Roberta’s and Annie’s. Someone had cleaned up. That was a relief… and a letdown. If they had been there, he and Karen could have made sure they were properly laid to rest.
Karen and Gary were right behind him. “What were you thinking?!” she exclaimed.
“Our position is definitely known at this point,” added Gary calmly.
Matt shrugged. “No help for it now.”
“We could have gone somewhere else,” said Karen. “Now we definitely have to.” She held out her hands for them to take, so she could teleport them again.
“Not yet,” said Matthew. “I came for coffee.” He headed into the kitchen.
“He’s mad,” observed Karen as they followed him.
She stopped complaining when she reached the kitchen table. Their coffee cups were still there, just as they had left them, moments before her aunt’s murder. Unbidden tears ran down her cheeks as she stared at them.
Matthew watched her for a moment, putting a hand on her shoulder. He had no idea what to say. Turning to Gary, he asked, “How long do we have?”
“Minutes at best.”
Wasting no time, he began rummaging in the cupboards, looking for the coffee. He wasn’t having much luck, but then Karen came over to lend a hand. “Let me,” she told him. “You don’t know canned beans from tuna.” She quickly located the coffee grounds and handed him the can. Then she pointed out the coffee pot and percolator. “You’ll need those to make them, but I don’t think we’ll have any electricity.”
“You just n
eed hot water, right?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
He took the glass coffee pot but left the maker on the counter. “I can provide the hot water,” he explained. Packing the pot and the grounds into his pack, he gave her a sad glance. “I guess we have to go.”
She nodded, but before she could do anything, he moved to the table and collected their mugs, all three, including Roberta’s delicate china cup. Karen’s face twisted as she struggled to keep the tears at bay.
“Mementos,” he told her.
As he was putting them in his pack, she grabbed another item and handed it to him. It was the water bottle Roberta had sprayed him with. The lump in her throat was too large for her to say anything, but he nodded and put it in as well. On impulse he hugged her, but he didn’t let it last long before he pushed her back. “Let’s go.”
***
They were back in the Grand Canyon, in North America. Thankfully, there were no guards left behind waiting for them there.
“Since they didn’t find your rings, I suspect that Karen’s teleportation doesn’t create enough magical ripples or whatever they detect for them to locate us as quickly as they do after your dimensional shifts,” posited Gary. “We can probably risk a half hour or more here.”
Matthew produced a large waterskin from his bag and proceeded to fill the coffee pot with it. Karen watched him incredulously. “You’re really serious about having coffee, now?”
“Mm hmm,” he replied. “There’s nothing else we can do while we wait.” Without a filter or other equipment, he was forced to simply measure out some of the coffee grounds in one hand and dump them into the water in the pot. Then he used his magic to heat the liquid until it was close to the boiling point. “How long do you think we should wait?” he asked Karen. The water had already turned a medium shade of brown.
“A few minutes I guess,” she answered. “I don’t like coffee, and even if I did I doubt I would have experimented with old-fashioned methods like boiling grounds.”
Following her advice, he waited a short time, during which he took the mugs they had rescued and rinsed them out with some more water from the waterskin. Once they were clean, he poured his makeshift coffee into two of them. He attempted to use his power to filter the grounds out as he poured, but he underestimated the difficulty. Both cups wound up with a significant amount of grounds settling to the bottom.
Karen eyed him dubiously, but then he handed her the china cup her aunt had last used. Raising his mug, he toasted, “To Roberta and Annie.”
She stared at the cup, touched, and then lifted it for a small sip. Despite the sentiment, the bitter liquid still made her grimace.
Matthew took a larger swallow and promptly burned his tongue. Blowing at his mug to cool it, he admitted, “It was better when she made it, but I still like it.”
“She used cream and sugar,” noted Karen. She forced herself to take another sip. “Do they have tea in your world?”
Matt grinned at her. “Talk to Gram’s mother when we get back. She’s a big believer in tea.”
“Which one was she?” asked Karen.
“Lady Hightower,” he said, supplying the name for her.
Her face lit up. “Oh yes, I remember her. Piercing blue eyes. If Gram is her son, though, why is he ‘Thornbear,’ but she’s ‘Lady Hightower’?”
“She inherited the title from her father,” explained Matt. “Since it’s the highest title she possesses, that’s what she’s called, until she hands it down to her son someday. Then he’ll be ‘Lord Hightower,’ even though his name is Thornbear. Also, it’s a nice touch, since it saves some confusion. Her mother-in-law is still called Lady Thornbear.”
“Sounds confusing.”
“We don’t have computers,” said Matthew, finishing his coffee. “So we spend our time sitting around thinking up complicated titles to amuse ourselves.” He cleaned his cup and then relieved Karen of hers, drinking the second half that she couldn’t finish.
Once everything was packed away again, they talked a while longer, until Gary warned them they should probably move again.
“How long before it’s safe to go back?” asked Matthew.
“Without fallout, the area around it is probably reasonably safe, other than fires and other follow-on events that occurred after the blast,” said Gary. “It won’t be safe to spend any significant amount of time in the quarter mile around the immediate blast for several years, though.”
“Years?” Matthew was shocked.
“That’s a lot better than the result after a normal atomic blast,” said the android. “The end result is we will have to circle around and come at the facility from another direction.”
“I need to reclaim the Fool’s Tesseract.”
“If that just requires you to stick your hand through the ring-gate for a moment, it will probably be safe by tomorrow. Today the area might be hot enough to scorch your hand for hours at least,” added the machine.
“I can protect my hand from heat,” said Matt.
“But does that protection include ionizing radiation?” asked Gary.
He answered with a blank stare.
“Exactly. You don’t know,” concluded the android. “Give it a day and it won’t be an issue.”
“Well, we can’t keep teleporting around every half hour,” put in Karen. “I’ll need to rest sometime.”
“Back to Lothion, then,” said Matthew finally. “We can rest properly there and come back tomorrow.”
With the decision made, they left only a minute later.
***
Matthew stood dripping on the shore. He was thoroughly soaked, from his wet hair to his squelching boots. Why does it always have to be the ocean?
This time they hadn’t had to travel, at least. Karen had teleported them to the coast they had first found after their last ocean arrival. Her preference would have been Castle Cameron, but Matthew didn’t want to traumatize his family with another leave taking, so they would be camping overnight in the wilderness.
He brought out his enchanted flying construct and they flew along the coast until they found a river. There they washed and dried themselves before settling in for a meal of dry bread and hard cheese.
Morning couldn’t come soon enough.
Chapter 50
The next day, they were back in Karen’s world.
They had landed in the ocean this time, so their first teleport was back to Karen’s home town. There they managed to rinse themselves off in a public fountain before having to take flight once more. ANSIS was becoming exceptionally good at pinpointing their location.
The next jump was to England. Karen took them to Tintagel in southeastern England, where they had shown up during their first visit there.
They spent a few minutes waiting while Gary used the better network connections there to update himself on the situation. It wasn’t good.
“It’s over,” he told them sadly.
“Define over,” said Karen tensely.
“I lost,” he answered. “What you see is all that’s left of me. I had to disconnect from the network abruptly. ANSIS controls everything now. My greater, super-intelligent self is no more, but that’s not the real tragedy. The CC centers were taken. Of the ten billion uploaded humans they held, there is nothing left, other than digital files and cold data.”
Karen sat down abruptly, though it was more of a controlled fall.
Matthew had a hard time wrapping his head around the number, and worse, he felt little sadness. Seeing Karen’s reaction told him it was a serious blow to her, but he couldn’t find the same emotion in himself. It was too foreign. He hadn’t known any of those people, and the idea of humans living in some digital computer world sounded like a fantasy.
Rationally, he knew it had been real, that they had been real, but it didn’t reach his heart or gut.
“What about the organics?” asked Karen. “The people like me?”
“I don’t know,” answered her virtual fath
er. “I had to disconnect before I could discover much. The entire network is hostile territory for me now.”
“Any news about the egg?” asked Matthew.
“No,” said Gary. “All I learned was that they’ve mobilized a significant military force to defend the facility. I think the Fool’s Tesseract has ANSIS spooked. After the blast, it’s just been sitting there, impervious to anything they throw at it. It must have them worried.”
“Time to reclaim it, then,” said Matt. Bringing out the ring-gate, he activated it and started to reach through it to grab hold of his staff. A sudden wicked thought occurred to him, though.
As the others were watching him, he pushed his arm through until it was almost to his shoulder, then he jerked suddenly and screamed, “It burns!”
Karen was so startled she yelped, and though Gary didn’t show it outwardly, he was somewhat frightened as well. They both glared when Matthew drew his arm back out and wiggled his fingers to show them it was unharmed, laughing all the while.
“That took ten years off my life, asshole!” Karen swore.
Gary added, “I didn’t find it amusing either.”
Matthew couldn’t stop laughing. When he finally collected himself and regained his composure, he apologized, “I’m sorry. Maybe it’s all the stress we’ve been under. I couldn’t help myself.”
“I’m starting to sympathize with your sisters,” complained Karen.
He grinned at her and reached into the ring-gate once more. He started to say the command to deactivate it, but a sudden flash of foresight stopped him. A shiver ran down his spine as he withdrew his arm. If he had deactivated the Fool’s Tesseract, he might have lost his hand and he would have been screaming for real.
“What now?” asked Karen.
“I can’t,” he told her. “I’ll be burned. There’s something extremely hot around it.”
“That shouldn’t be,” said the android. “Unless they’ve done something.”
“Well, we can’t tell from here,” Matt informed them. “Maybe we should teleport back to one of the areas we were yesterday, a mile or so away from the last place where we left the FT.”