Tales from the Multiverse

by Pam Uphoff

  Hellie started sorting through the bags, and Damien downloaded the recordings from his body cam.

  “Murder Chicken? Did you get anything but feathers?”

  “No. The T-Rex showed up about then.” Damien found some pix of the critter recovering from the stun and biting his boots, teeth leaving score marks.

  The assistants all fell silent. The head guy sort of poked at the picture. “Isn’t that close to the reconstructions of . . .”

  Hellie handed the bag to him. “See if you can find any DNA to confirm that.”

  Damien spotted the last bag. “And this was probably left behind by the T-Rex that tried to eat us a couple of hours ago.”

  The lab guy bounced back in, grinning. “First quick chromosome count looks good! Our first definite sample of a Tyrannosaur chick.”

  “Ty . . . It was much too little to be a Ty . . . and it was covered with feathers.”

  Hellie snickered. “For heat retention while they’re small. Wanna bet the T-Rex who was chasing you was rescuing her chick?”

  Damien sighed. “I need to find a less exciting line of work.”

  Interlude

  “ . . . assisted the repair to the security door. No indication of dinosaur incursions into the Maze. And since Earth doesn’t give a damn about us anymore, don’t bother classifying this report.”

  “I utterly and categorically refuse to believe anyone is collecting dinosaur DNA on horseback.” Peter crossed his arms and glared at the giggling Fyor.

  “Well, that’s what everybody says. But he says he’s actually only gone to four Dinosaur Worlds. That most of his work is on much more ordinary worlds.”

  “Huh. As if. I mean horseback? Come on!”

  Fyor gave him a toothy grin. “I dare you to come meet some of the horses they have around here. Right after work.”

  He eyed her cautiously. But all these reports, the genetically engineered people are the heroes. For that alone, I want to believe.

  Wait . . . “Horses? What’s so special about their horses? They didn’t genetically engineer their horses, did they?”

  “Yep. And they obviously understand everything you say to them. Some people say they have telepathy.”

  ***

  The big chestnut dropped his head and looked him over.

  :: You glow like you've never been trained. ::

  Oh. My. God.

  Peter swallowed. Tried to get his voice to work, and managed a whisper. "We only learn to shield our thoughts. I shouldn't be able to hear anyone . . . let alone a horse."

  Fire snickered—so did the horse.

  "You don't have to say it out loud, Peter."

  "That's illegal . . . where I come from . . . I can't . . . I can't . . ." He turned to run . . . turned back . . ."Pleased to have met you, Pyrite."

  Then he turned and fled.

  But after a long night filled with nightmares and loss . . . he got up and returned to Disco.

  Fire eyed him, sniffed. And held up a folder. "I think this is a report on an accidental first contact, from the point of view of the other world."

  Peter took the pages. "Detecting dimensional activity in a close book—whatever that is, don't type that—we moved in to check for criminal activity. This led to the discovery of the Combat Gang planning a cross dimensional raid. This report is from an FBI agent on the intended victim World."

  Fire grinned. "Keep going. This should be good."

  Rain of Fire

  Chapter One

  Inspector Cliff 'Fatty' Marsden watched the video recordings sharply. "I don't see how they faked it, and the guards who show up right there are quite certain that the part they saw matches the recordings." He sighed and restarted the file again. "And none of them got into the building with false credentials. I just refuse to believe they fell out of nowhere."

  The scene started out static and unmoving. The Lincoln Bedroom. The Lincoln Bedroom. And suddenly six men falling out of nowhere in the middle of a brawl. Or a damn good imitation of one. Five to one, with the one holding up his end of the fight nicely. He watched again the man in the blue shirt being flung into the brown shirt who had gotten clear and pulled a gun. The gun going off as they fell. Another man curling up around his crotch and fumbling as he pulled a knife out of his boot. The Secret Service bursting in the door yelling and being ignored. The man in the black pants and white shirt finally going down with the big man's hands around his neck as the Servicemen fanned out.

  The man with the gun shoved out from under the man he'd shot and raised his gun again. Last move of his life.

  The white shirt breaking the grip of the big strangler who promptly head butted his nose. Then the Secret Service was all over them.

  EMTs pronounced two men dead on the scene. The other four were wrestled out and separated. The unconscious white shirt received medical care for his broken nose and concussion, after being stripped and thoroughly searched. The other three were also stripped and searched, their various bruises examined and pronounced non-life threatening.

  "And now they are all mine?" Fatty sighed again. "Have they figured out how to communicate with any of them?"

  "Nope, but I think they understand us. And they look ready to jump their jailers first chance. White shirt has regained consciousness, sorta freaked at waking up with IV and restraints. He's sedated, but did sort of slur out something vaguely English. 'Guard the gate. There's more of them.' He was drifting and didn't seemed to follow questions." Tiny Talbot had been on duty, and been on site with the first FBI responders for hours.

  "Well, let's let the others stew and see if white shirt will talk without sedation." Fatty sighed. It was his day off. Two weeks before he retired. Surely they could have let someone else deal with strange people who fell out of thin air into the White House.

  At Saint David's he recognized most of the Secret Service people sprinkled all over, and Captain Davies, his Secret Service counterpart in what would be a multi-department investigation.

  "How's Sleeping Beauty?"

  "Still sedated." Davies led them to what would have been an ordinary hospital room if it had had a window.

  The man in the bed was very tall, head way up at one end and feet damn near hanging over the end. Brown hair, longer than business standard, too short to be a hippy, too even to be a few missed haircuts. Muscular but not bulky. No fat. Large hands with long fingers, strong.

  "Pity I'm not Sherlock Holmes." Fatty took one of the limp hands and turned it over. "I could tell you his profession from his calluses."

  Davies chuckled. "Martial arts, swords, shovels. According to the experts."

  "What did they have to say about his clothes?"

  "Their preliminary report is incomplete due to their inability to identify the fibers of his pants and socks. His shirt and umm, athletic support of some odd sort are cotton. No labels, or signs that labels were removed. A lot of hand work in the buttonholes and collar. He wore low boots with wear patterns and microscopic particles that indicate that he rides horses and has been around livestock of various sorts."

  "Hmph. And freaked when he woke up restrained. Well, knocked out in a fight . . . well, let's see what we've got." Fatty looked over at the nurse who had been standing quietly on the far side of the bed. "Does he need the IV for anything beyond the sedatives? Let's remove it and the restraints. See if we can get some sense out of him."

  Davies raised an eyebrow. "Sure about the restraints?"

  "I'm a touch claustrophobic. Waking up restrained could easily trigger a panic attack in me. Let's just see what happens."

  The first thing that happened was the man rolling over and curling up a bit, sleepily pulling the sheet up and reaching for more. The hand paused and the eyes blinked open. Very dark eyes, but blue. He rolled to his back and sat up scanning the room. "Oh. Damn." The tone of voice was more exasperated than even irritated. He eyed the trio sitting silently observing. "Tay dint get away, did tay?" Then a frown. "Do ya spick Anglish?" The last part was careful
ly enunciated.

  Fatty nodded. "We speak English. What is your name?"

  "Sen Wulfson. Captin Sen Wulfson, uv hees majesty's miltry intel davison." He paused and bit a lip. "Kingdom uv de West, Unaverse uv Comet Fall."

  "Universe?" Fatty sighed. "Couldn't you have waited two weeks? So I could retire in peace and you could be someone else's headache?"

  That brought a genuine grin. "Sirry. Bad timing. Do ya know what I'm talking aboot? Do ya hiv dimensional trivil? Hiv ya had many thefts like tis?"

  Davies shifted then. "No. No dimensional travel. No thefts through dimensional travel. Stop bullshitting us, son. How did you get into the White House?"

  Wulfson blinked at Davies. "De White House? Prezident uv de United States? Tat White House?"

  "Yeah. That White House."

  The young man looked quite taken aback. "Wut year is tis?"

  "2252. June fourth, to be specific. Now are you going to try time travel?"

  Wulfson shook his head. "No. No time travel. T’year is all roit. I forgot 'bout differential time velocities. Good ting. I dunno how t’time travel, would have a problem gitten back. How old is t’building? Mist be more ten a tousand?"

  "No. Just under five hundred years old. It's the third oldest government building in the US that is still in use." Davies was studying the man carefully.

  Fatty sighed. "Since there's no time travel involved, merely dimensional travel, I assume you won't have any trouble getting home?"

  Wulfson hesitated. "Will, maybe a bit. But if I don't shew up, they'll coom looking fur me inna year. And they’re good at it."

  "They? Who are they?"

  "The . . . " He frowned at them again. "Can you see tis?" He held out his empty hand.

  "Your empty hand?"

  "Hmm. Hokay. We duh, do, stuff really small. Nanometer scale. People who can’t see it call it magic. Tant, though."

  "Right, really small stuff that could pass for magic."

  "Yah, and dimensional stuff. People call uz wizards, witches, an mages. Tant really. But they wull look for me."

  "I see. So, what were you doing in the White House?"

  "I was arresting tives. Got into a fight, an fell trew a gate. I spec t’was for ter next job." He frowned and rubbed his arms as if cold. "Haven't heard of sassins in t’gang any mo, just tives."

  Fatty scratched his chin. "You were trying to arrest some thieves, got into a fight, and fell through a gate. Which might have been . . . put there for their next job. Their next theft. And you haven't heard of any assassins in the gang. Any more."

  "Right."

  "The five men you were fighting with. Do they speak English?"

  "Of sum sort, at least sum of them. I have a tune of experience with other dialects. But if ya spick slow in clear, they will probably understand. Ta ones tat spick greek unnerstand some Anglish."

  "Greek? Slow and clear. Thank you. We'll be back to talk with you some more."

  "Right."

  Fatty locked the door behind them, then joined Davies and Talbot at the screen. Wulfson didn't try the door right away. He prowled the room, checking all cupboards and drawers, and contemplated the bathroom for a moment. He turned faucets off and on and flushed the toilet, nodding in satisfaction before peeing in the toilet and flushing it again. Then he tried light switches, experimented with the bed controls, and finally tried the door knob.

  He nodded to himself, turned off most of the lights, climbed into bed and apparently fell asleep immediately.

  "Either he has a clear conscience or no conscience at all." Talbot said. "And usually the ones with a clear conscience worry about having done something accidentally."

  "Then again, he's got a concussion."

  "That could do it as well, I suppose." Talbot sniffed. "Scrambled his brains properly. Dimensional travel? Huh."

  ***

  Fast Frankie, whose real name Marsden could never remember, had gone through the recording pixel by pixel. Then apparently he'd gone through the prior twenty-four hours and then the subsequent recordings.

  "If you had film I wouldn't have this problem, you know?"

  "Sorry. We're just too modern."

  "It could be an error in doctoring the record, or it could be something edge on to the camera, so thin the resolution isn't high enough to resolve it. So, figuring out the doctoring is someone else's job. I'm going to ignore that possibility and pretend we had aliens drop in through a wormhole or something." He brought up a series of still pictures. A man appearing back first, falling out of nowhere. "If we back up by one one-hundredths of a second and look at that place at high resolution, we see a fuzzy dark line right were he's going to fall out of nowhere. We keep going back. The line was there for about twelve minutes. It first appeared as a bright line, then it dimmed and shrank, then expanded, still dark, and the man fell out of nowhere, followed by five more. Secret Service piles in. Dark line is still there. Paramedics, coroner, FBI, Marines, who knows? Everyone goes away. Dark line is still there. I checked today's records. It is still there. I want to go look at it, in person and with lots of equipment."

  The Director nodded. "Marsden? You've got one of them talking?"

  "The one in the white shirt getting strangled, there at the end sort of speaks English. Horrible accent. Sen or Zen Wulfson or perhaps Wolfson. He says some of the others also speak varieties of English and if we'll keep it simple and clear we ought to be understood by them. The rest apparently speak something derived from Greek. Maybe." Marsden shrugged. "They're still pretty tight lipped, even with a Greek professor chattering at them. So what I would like to do is get a physicist in to talk to Mr. Wolfson. Alternately, he seems to think this Gate is still there, in the Lincoln bedroom. He has offered to show it to me. Says it'll be 'locked' but that he ought to be able to get it open."

  He cleared his throat. "It’s all a matter of balancing him escaping in transit vs. the thin possibility something weird is going on. I wondered though, about having him under observation by someone who's a good body reader. He might give away how they actually got in, subconsciously."

  The Director frowned over that one. "Taking him out might also make him a target for the other side." He jerked his chin at a still of the falling men on the wall. "I don't see a purpose for that. There aren't many reasons to get into the White House that aren't better served by stealth. That doesn't mean there isn't a purpose. Let's play along and see if we can tell where he's trying to lead us. Franks, you go do your thing, then stay and watch and record as they bring this Wolfson in."

  Chapter Two

  It wasn't until Wolfson stood up next to the huge marine they handcuffed him to that Marsden realized how tall he really was. He topped Private Hansen by two inches, and made him look squat and over muscled. Hansen didn't look intimidated.

  "I've got a brother bigger than you and I beat him up regularly."

  Wolfson's mouth twitched in amusement. "I have a seester littler than you and she beats me oop regular."

  "That kind of fails as a bragging threat." Marsden noted that the man's accent was fading rapidly.

  "Ah. I suppose I should add, doon do anything to me that will anger her?"

  Hansen snorted. "Right. C'mon, sonny."

  Xen matched his speed and stride as they took him down to the basement and out through the loading dock. He'd been given bright orange pants and shirt, short in the leg and middle. Short sleeved. Flip flops that he occasionally tripped on. He watched everything, openly looking around.

  "Ever been here before?" Marsden asked.

  "Not un this World. Thur's some intresting parallels with other Worlds, though. I've been to seven Washingtons."

  "Uh Huh." Marsden sat back. They were expected and passed through the gate quickly. Wolfson's eyes roved the grounds, the approach, the east entrance and the route they were taking through the building.

  Frankie had several cases of equipment outside the door, and ducked back inside as they approached.

  Wolfson, looked slowly
and carefully around the room, frowning. He moved to another position and looked again.

  "Don't you remember where you came in?" Marsden asked.

  "Not well, I was in the middle of a brawl. I remember hitting the bed and then the floor." He frowned at bed and floor, then looked up. "Ah. Interesting way to conceal something. It's not even locked, just an illusion across it." He kicked off his flip flops and climbed up on the bed to look at the bare ceiling. He raised his left arm . . . "Umm, Could you raise your arm a bit? I need my left up here, tanks. Tere we go. Old Gods, no wonder we fell trough.

  “Must be a very close World, tat's a corridor, not a gate." He snapped his fingers and colors bloomed on the ceiling.

  It was square, about four feet across. It was like looking through an open window into another room, but with a funhouse twist. The floor was to the left, ceiling to the right. A dimly lit warehouse.

  Hansen grabbed Wolfson and pulled him away.

  "Don't worry Hansen, I wouldn't dream of going anywhere witout you. You'll need a ladder, Inspector. One tat stands up on its own, you can't leave something sticking trough." Wolfson was calling the last back over his shoulder as Hansen hauled him out of the room.

  Marsden stepped up on the bed himself and poked at the picture. His hand went right through it, and for a second he thought he was going to get sucked through entirely. He jerked his hand back.

  "Gah, don't use your hand!" Frankie handed him a pointer and pulled over two of his cases, then set a chair on them. With his head near the ceiling he coached Marsden through any number of poking things through and throwing things. Some fell back through, but many fell to the floor of the warehouse.

  Ladders appeared, and lots of Secret Service people and finally a squad of what was probably the deadliest Special Forces soldiers handy. Marsden decided it wasn't fair for them to have all the fun, and climbed the rest of the way up the ladder, ducking until he couldn't avoid touching the picture, then straightening and falling clumsily to the warehouse floor. He scrambled away from the glowing picture on the wall, vertigo making in its vertical orientation.