Surviving The Tempest: Tempest Tales

by Elsa, Sandra

  I backed across the room and drew my null field in tight.

  “I believe I’ll take your word that it functions as it should,” my father said. “This isn’t exactly the place to test the theory.” The laser remained in his hands, long beyond the time it dissipated if I was close, but it did dissipate. “Now if you’ll show me which sides did that...we can experiment.” The sides were marked with a series of dots and Harrison depressed the side with three dots and the side with two dots and once again the same pattern of weapons appeared. He handed the cube to my father, but when he depressed the same sides, a combination of bladed weapons and black powder weapons appeared. He handed it back to Harrison who recalled the lasers.

  I moved back across the room and he gave it to my father again with the same results. With a shake of his head Harrison grabbed it. The lasers didn’t appear for him either this time..

  “Come here, Frankie.” My father beckoned me closer. Lasers appeared on the walls. “Offhand I’d say Jordan tried hard to ingratiate himself without completely breaking the law. Laser weapons keyed only to the combination of you and Harrison. The woman who would most appreciate them, but would be least likely to break the law by possessing them because they don’t stick around very long at all as long as she’s near. How do you charge him for creating illegal weapons when the weapons fade in a few minutes even if handed off to someone who isn’t-- Do they know what makes my daughter special?” He nodded his head at our guests.

  “No. But I suppose if they’re even thinking about staying around they’ll need to know.”

  “Know what?” Greg leaned up as though anticipating the answer. I was pretty sure he’d got it the other night.

  My father and Harrison looked at me. I shrugged. “I get to know what their talent is first.”

  “Little of everything,” Greg volunteered immediately. “Or maybe not everything, but it’s what I do. My main talent is the ability to infuse spells on pendants and gems to make charms.”

  “I’m a construction specialist,” Nate said.

  Tony held up his hand. “Plant growth specialist.”

  “Same as your, Mom,” I said to Harrison. “I guess we can never have too many of those.”

  I turned around and said, “I’m a null.”

  “Knew it!” Greg said. “Pay up boys.

  “You knew that?” Harrison asked, while the others took out their cred chips.

  “OK, I suspected it. Your Dad took you marrying and defecting outside District Seven wayyy too smoothly for her to be as untalented as she appears to be.”

  “Smoothly? You think he took it well? He accepted the inevitable. Not gracefully and not without threats. If he’s still got it recorded, ask Jerry to show you the video from when he got the news that we married.”

  My father harrumphed. “What the cameras caught was Jordan calm and controlled for the public. You should have been there when your mother and I responded to his summons.” He nodded at Leo. “He was there.” Leo squirmed uneasily, but my father continued. “I suppose you’ve signed nondisclosure agreements though so I won’t ask you to back my word.”

  “Thank you,” Leo said. “And of course I’m obligated to set the record straight if you fabricate tales about my former employer.”

  I smiled at Leo, who had just volunteered to back my father‘s word as long as he didn‘t tell lies. Then I shifted my attention back to the crystal cube that had started this diversion in the conversation. “Anyway, so how do we bypass the problem of my nullfield dissolving magical matter? You made this thing, Dad. What’s its problem?”

  “Most likely it’s programmed only to show those weapons if the two of you are there. It only takes a hair or a skin cell to program a DNA lock. Jordan…or one of his people, put a lot of work in this to get all the weapon specs right. I could reprogram it, but nothing guarantees he hasn’t programmed it to wipe the drive if it gets tampered with.”

  “We already tampered with it once,” Harrison said. “We weren’t doubting that you checked for tags, but after finding the one on Mom, that nobody saw in thirty-three years, Frankie thought maybe she’d make sure nothing else was there.”

  “What was it?” my father asked. Not even doubting I’d found something he missed.

  I stood up. “I’m late. I’ll leave you two to talk shop.” I kissed Harrison. “Don’t be too late.”

  “Same for you. I’d hate for lightning to strike down my friends if they keep you out too late.”

  Leo sat beside me on the front seat, sliding over for Jerry to climb in beside him. The other three clambered in the rear seat and I backed out the driveway, turning toward the beach. After dropping them and Jerry off at the Jonah hotel, Leo and I drove down and parked in a lot near the pier. Paul stood at the head of the pier, talking to the keeper. He waved as we approached. “I was starting to worry something had happened to you.”

  “It’s Harrison’s fault. I kept telling him I needed to go, and he kept delaying me.”

  Paul grinned. “I don’t see any bruises, so I’m guessing you didn’t fight him too hard. If you were my wife, I’d make sure I claimed you before sending you off with two such devastatingly handsome men as myself and your friend the cat.”

  Out in the water, Poppy performed her dance of welcome, chirruping and leaping. I strode past Paul and dove in the water beside her. Paul was on the pier talking to Leo when I surfaced and placed my hand on Poppy‘s dorsal fin. He cupped his hands around his mouth and chirruped and clacked, staring out at the open water. In no time another dolphin appeared. I was reasonably sure it was Emmy.

  Leo climbed down and waited while Paul ordered the dolphin up next to the ladder. Then Leo threw his leg over Emmy’s back.

  Paul joined us and the dolphins carried us out toward the deep water. Nearly a mile from shore

  Paul shifted to his mer form then placed a hand on each of the dolphins’ dorsal fins. “We’re going down.” was the only warning he gave before the dolphins went underwater. Leo’s eyes widened, but his reaction was less panicked than mine had been. A moment to adjust to the concept of breathing underwater and he was once again, simply along for the ride.

  I wrapped my legs firmly around Poppy’s girth and gawked at the world around me. Multitudes of colorful fish swam through reefs of what I was pretty sure were coral built on top of building remnants. They came in sizes up to about two feet. I wondered about the lack of larger fish but quickly realized they needed to maintain the balance. Perhaps the larger fish found their way onto tourists’ hooks or restaurants’ tables.

  Most of the jobs, like crab and lobster farming, which the tourist brochures claimed were done by scuba divers were in fact being done by mer. Beds of kelp were being harvested.

  I’d seen numerous mer wearing two legs, on the boardwalk, and even several in Zurn’s earlier this morning. Even with Paul’s comments about overpopulation, I hadn’t been ready for the numbers swimming in front of me. Tail colors trended toward the blue-green spectrum with an occasional red, yellow or pink, standing out amongst the horde. Most of them turned to stare as we rode past.

  Paul continued on and the outer dome came into view, beyond the coral and kelp and rubble of bygone civilization. Oddly shaped lumps lined the inner wall of the dome, vaguely reminiscent of the photos we’d seen of the Mesa Verde cliff dweller caves we planned to hunt up out west.

  Poppy and Emmy swam up to a green hump. Paul waved us toward the open doorway. Leo and I swam through it. Emmy took off the moment Leo cleared her back. Poppy stayed near, hovering in the doorway. Paul gave us a few moments to examine his home. It was a single room. A hammock hung near the back. Weights kept it from floating and tangling. A table and chairs were bolted to the floor. I touched the shell of the house and it felt like the dome material. I stared at Paul and he said, “Just because we stopped constructing domes doesn’t mean the skill was lost.”

  “Then,” I opened my mouth to speak, forgetting we were underwater, snapping my jaw shut as fluid
rushed in my mouth. I didn’t choke and the fluid cleared out the moment I shut my mouth.

  “You can speak,” Paul said. “It’s still liquid. It rushes in to fill empty spaces but it won’t choke you. Just takes some getting used to and you don’t want to swallow with your mouth open. It’s still salt water.

  I nodded and tried again. “Then why didn’t we,” I sounded garbled to my own ears but Paul nodded and I continued, “alleviate overpopulation by creating new domes?”

  “Because the machines to make a dome on a grand scale were lost long before overpopulation became a problem.”

  “Then why not a series of smaller interconnected domes.”

  “It was proposed,” Leo said. He looked as uncomfortable as I felt when speaking. “Back in the time of President Johannes. There’s even a partially completed dome--” he stopped, closed his mouth and swallowed before finishing, “in what used to be Wisconsin. Halfway through construction it was decided that more housing wasn’t needed unless we could dome an area large enough to grow supplies to feed larger numbers of inhabitants.”

  “I’ve been in domes that were largely self-sufficient.” An indrawn breath, through my nostrils, which didn’t seem to be subjected to the influx of liquid, and I continued. “Granted they imported turkey, but that was about all they needed from outside.”

  “How did they do that,” Paul asked.

  “Rooftop gardens. Every home supplied some sort of resource.”

  “And who manufactured the fertilizer to keep the gardens productive?”

  “A lot of it was compost, which I hope will be sufficient for us once we’re up and running. Preparing the earth to sustain life is going to be the slowest part of this job.”

  “There’s also going to be a problem with holding what you prepare,” Leo said.

  Paul grinned at him. “You think so? You don’t know our Frankie very well then.”

  “Let me guess, trolls?”

  “They were discussed. Not right for the job though.” Paul winked at me. “Frankie doesn’t do anything by half-measures. Including distracting her husband with a whopper of a request she knew he wouldn’t be able to ignore.”

  “All right,” Leo said, “obviously I’m not supposed to know, and I can live with that. To tell the truth, I can’t believe I’m here.”

  “You’re here because Poppy approved you,” I said. “Which brings us back to the point of our being here.”

  “Yes,” Paul agreed. “Now that you’ve gotten beyond your hesitation about speaking underwater out of the way, Let’s start with--” He gave a series of high pitched whistles.

  Poppy peeked in the door and repeated the whistles.

  “That’s her name. Her signature.”

  We attempted the sound. Poppy corrected us--repeatedly. Once we got that right we moved on to basic words like, water, food, human, and more specifically, mage. The sounds were hard to emulate, at least to Poppy‘s exacting standards. By the time we left, she approved of our efforts on no more than ten words, but I understood quite a few more.

  Emmy returned to give Leo a ride to the surface, insisting we learn her name signature before she’d carry him. Once we had that down, the ride back to the pier was a breeze. Jerry, Greg, Nate, and, Tony were in the water, not a hundred feet from the pier. They waved, but stopped as Paul followed us up the ladder. Poppy did a side-flip and Emmy disappeared, Then Poppy dove underwater and swam out of sight.

  Chapter 34

  Paul wrapped an arm around my shoulders. “I don’t think your friends care for me being here.”

  “They’re Harrison’s friends and you’re naked, with your arm around his wife. The only one who‘s seen you up close before is Jerry, on the night Harrison and I got shot.”

  “Did you tell them about--” he looked over at Leo. “About what Poppy told you?”

  “Leo knows. Kinda had to explain if I was going to ask him about his father and his very existence as a crossbreed. The others don’t know.”

  “OK so that’s our little secret. Well introduce me. If they’re still here, I suppose they’ll be traveling with us tomorrow.”

  “That’s the plan.”

  We stopped beside the keeper while Paul slid into some shorts, then went to face the curious crowd. I stopped in front of Jerry. “I believe you remember Paul. Paul, Jerry.” Then one by one I pointed out the other’s and gave their names.

  “Does Harrison know Paul,” Greg asked. I liked him more every time he opened his mouth. I preferred blunt honesty to beating around the bush.

  “As a matter of fact, Harrison is hanging out with Paul’s fiancée, Jesse, this afternoon.”

  “And does he always, umm…let it all hang out.”

  “He spends a lot of time in the water. As you plainly saw, the keeper on the pier finds it not at all unusual.”

  “I’d like to see him wrap an arm around you with Harrison nearby.”

  “He’s done it. He’s even hugged Harrison and you’ll probably get to see it tomorrow unless he’s more afraid of his fiancée then he is of my husband.”

  “You’re probably the only woman I’d dare to hug around her, because Poppy has explained to her that you love your husband beyond any chance you’d stray. Plus, she saw Harrison kill a dozen people. She knows I’m not all stupid.”

  “So what do you spend so much time in the water doing?” Jerry asked.

  “We farm kelp, and lobsters, crabs. Maintain the coral reef.”

  “So basically an underwater park ranger.”

  “Underwater agricultural specialist,” Paul clarified. “Although I suppose ranger works, we do cull the wildlife if it grows too large.”

  “And you’re talent has something to do with staying underwater without scuba gear?”

  “Among other things,” Paul admitted.

  “And you were teaching Frankie a new language?”

  “Nope. I’m just the translator, and that’s enough about that. I‘m pretty easy to get along with, but I‘m not going to satisfy your curiosity.”

  “Fair enough. So what’s the plan for the rest of the afternoon, Frankie?”

  “I’m going to lay here, soak up some sun, and get to know you guys.”

  #

  When the sun sank we called it a day and crossed the district to stop at a hardware store to pick up supplies for Nate to create a beehive. Back at the house he called up some designs from the net and proceeded to create a hive. Watching him work was fascinating. He held two plastiboards together and the seam melded into one solid piece without benefit of any tools. He added the other two sides then went to work on the interior. In view of the fact that our flowers were not yet numerous, nor our vegetables flowering and ready to produce we, opted to make the hive only one box high.

  Harrison and my father showed up just before midnight carrying a metal container filled with buzzing insects.

  “Fish?” I asked.

  “About two dozen freshwater minnows in the car. Jesse took the saltwater fish. They were going to round up some more mature fish and crabs.”

  “You made bees and minnows both in a day?” I asked with a nod toward the container.

  “Hardly any mass, and they’re just grown, not manipulated. Lizzie makes some things much easier too.”

  “Lizzie?” Greg asked.

  “A new acquaintance. One you won’t be meeting,” Harrison said.

  Oddly, Greg, who thought I should answer all kind of questions, backed off and let it alone. Maybe he just knew Harrison well enough to recognize the tone of finality in his statement. Whereas I had been reasonably forthcoming about myself and our plans most of the afternoon, only coming close to resorting to threats to get him to back down once or twice.

  “Well cool,” I said. “If we’d gone shopping we could plan for a longer trip. Make sure the hive gets established.”

  “We can shop in the morning,” he said. “We’ll stay at least a week. Give these guys a feel for what they’re in for if they decide to join
up permanently. We can’t keep everybody here if they decide they want to return to their old lives.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” I said.

  The others echoed my agreement.

  “Now I’m going to bed. I have one project to research before we head out there tomorrow.”

  My father volunteered to drive the others back to the hotel. Harrison told his friends good-night and followed me into the bedroom. “What are we researching?”

  “I want to bind them the way Herm bound you. We’ve shared entirely too much. I don’t want any of them deciding it’s more than they want to take on and run back to District Seven talking about what we’re doing. I don’t think it would be unreasonable to ask them to sign in blood.”

  “No. Not unreasonable at all. We can buy supplies tomorrow and they can all sign or stay here.”

  I managed to find the answer in a book entitled, “Pagan Answers To The Modern Mage”. The herbal recipe and the ritual sounded much like that which Herm had employed. I saved the book to my handheld and decided it would be worthy of further reading before I allowed Harrison to distract me. Early the next morning we tried to sneak out of the house alone.

  Leo sleeping in the living room made that next to impossible. He rolled off the couch completely dressed before we made it past him. “Going somewhere?”

  “Shopping.”

  “Mind if I go?” Didn’t look like he was actually asking, as he tucked his shirt in and fell in step behind us. “I need clothes. Something besides a swimsuit.”

  I shrugged. “Don’t know why you’d ever want to wear anything different. All the girls on the beach ogle you when you wear it.”

  “Not all of them,” he said with precious little modesty. “You don’t.”

  “I look.”

  “But you don’t ogle.”

  “No sense drooling over a good-looking bod when I already own the best.”

  “Be that as it may, I can hardly run a business in a swimsuit.”