I woke sitting up, which is a first for me.  Perhaps I’m getting better at this whole versing thing after a mere four hundred years.  The shale ledge under my seat overlooked a drop down five hundred feet to a pine-forrested valley.

I looked about, seeing a scenic overlook in front of a pair of parted, two yard thick doors.  Several dozen people to the left of the door were trudging up hill on the blind side of the small mount on a narrow path cut out of the rock.  They looked geeky with white t-shirts, and out of shape enough to puff as they climbed a twenty degree grade.  Obviously the crowd was not the type to climb mountains in the late spring evening with crisp cool air enlivening the day.

Bouncing to my feet, I looked further, and saw a horde of sharp-edged mountains in the direction of sundown, and behind me, on the next mountain over, I could see what looked like a mountain top fortress of the modern sort.  That is, if you mean pre-stressed concrete, multiple small buildings, and high-speed firing autorifles on turrets as modern.

I wondered how I was going to slip out of what looked to be a military facility, but I didn’t think it would be very hard.  I was after all, the Ghost.  Or so some dead enemies had called me before I slipped up to them, and played two-finger tag on their skull with a revolver.  First, I thought, I’d slip to the opposite side, and over the back of this granite mount.

A flickering of light at the horizon, at sundown, made me grin.  A truly spectacular sundown is a joy to behold, and being a verser, I got to see some from worlds that made the Earth’s brilliance look mild, and demure.

But the light grew, and I heard running from the geeks as they charged up hill.  A gun roared behind me, and hundreds of tracers ripped the sky like shredding pillowcases overhead without hitting anything in the sky.  I backed up even as another gun, and another still, and one more in the fortress opened up.  Now, I could see detonations over the third line of mountains in front of me.

And then briliant flash wiped out most of the munitions, and I knew.  Nuclear war, and thankfully the Lekostian armor had a tiny trickle of juice to drop down a second eyelid, or I’d be blind. Another flash a little closer, and the strategy became obvious. The Enemy, whoever they were, was sending in small nukes to draw the teeth of the locals, and to burn through the local defenses.

I looked back at the fortress behind me as flaming tracers continued desperately slamming past overhead, and made a quick calculation even as I noted hundreds of soldiers rushing about its parapets trying to find their posts.  Another look back at the visibly getting closer kiloton sized flameballs, and I decided unless the invader used up all his nukes, the fortress was doomed.  Carpet bombing with nukes unfortunately works rather well.  It just doesn’t leave much behind.

The walls of Jericho were falling.

And without my TK, or great magic, although I tried, there was not much that I could do.  Nor was I certain that I should interfere.  After all, the locals could well be the latest line in a group of Communist genociders.  I did not know.  They might deserve a visit from Mr. Atom.

And then I heard yelling, but barely through the raucous racket.  All the geeks were inside, and one guy was in the doorway yelling at me.  He wanted me to come inside; I could tell from his waved arms.  I could hardly hear his voice over the thunderous booms that grew closer still.

Indeed, I planned to just wait out here until the nukes got me.  There seemed little point to my staying since I’d just get vaped in a second anyhow.  But, I saw the man in the open door was determined that I come, even if it meant waiting until a nuke fireball incinerated him.

So, to save him a few minutes of his life, I ran across the gravel paving, and darted into the door.  Inside, he and the others gathered in a group, and headed down a ramp lit by LED lights.  This car capable ramp I went down for the same reason I came inside.  My guide was not going to leave without me, he had determined.  But, he really, really wanted to get down deep, and so he occasionally tugged at my arm.

Three turns of the ramp, and floors below, with megatonnes of rock above us, I wondered if we would survive.  Probably not, I decided.  Those huge doors would take one close hit from a major bomb, or a direct hit from a kilotonne bomb, and then they’d be ripped off their carriages.  The next bomb would send a funnel of plasma into the mountain with a rock-hard pressure wave in front of it.  The ramp would funnel it down on us.

I turned back, and looked, expecting to see the air turn white as an overpressure ripple in the air zoomed toward me.  Instead, I saw the ramp lift itself up noiselessly to block the path, and another set of great doors slide into place.

My arm was jerked, and I spun around to follow the others through a doorway, and into a long seventy foot by forty foot room that had netted rubber mats an inch thick over the floor.  All the others were getting into doors on the right side of the room. 

Every four feet, there was a wide door, and most of them were going two by two into the doors.  Two would go in the first, and then two more in the second, and so on.  And it came to me, and I went in by myself.  By this time, I was bemused, and I did not want to bother the fellow with the green eyes, and pale blonde hair who had been so determined to help me, even if I didn’t need it.  It seemed appropriate to honor his efforts.

"Remember what we have fought for."  A microphoned voice boomed out as I walked into a circular metal room with a closed, ten foot tall freight elevator door on the far side of the room.  I heard a click from outside, and looked out my open door.

A picture was being illuminated by a movie camera on the far wall.  A twenty-five week old baby, or embryo to be technical, was moving about in the film.  The child looked beautiful.

"They wanted to kill. We wanted to save. Remember this."

And then I heard a click in the room I was in, and I looked about.  Nozzles were in the walls, and a picture of a cow was shown standing in the center of the room.

"Please make sure the cow is centered." The cartoon sign said.  "Make sure all humans are removed from room before activation."

The nozzles opened, and I lunged for the open door.

But not quick enough. Ice covered me, and then built up, and I felt  a radiation pass through my body, and lull it to sleep….to sleep…and the ice got thicker…and then I could see no more because of the clouds of fog in the air…and perhaps a second had passed…and I fell into slumber.

Time passed.  I was not sure how long.  An occasional errant thought breached my deep sleep, mostly of the child.

And then I heard a sharp, painful report.  A Bang!, and the ice fell away from me, and I felt like I fell forever before I hit the ground. Once there, I lay until I realized I was not breathing.

I tried to breathe, but my body had been shut down to nearly zero for so long that it resisted starting back up.  I reached inside myself even as black panic edged around the sides of my mind.  I really, really didn’t like suffocation as a way to go.  Rapidly searching, I flipped through the file structure of my brain, and found what I was looking for after some interminable time.

And thus I took a shuddering breath that jolted pain from my head to my toes.  Still, it felt wonderful, and I took another as the pain lessened.  Within five minutes, I was able to sit up.

Checking about, I found that I was in a room lit by the faintest of LED lights along the edge of the dust-draped warehouse.  In the center of the space, under the low-hung rockface of the ceiling were blocks of ice ten foot square all laid out in two neat rows.  The room was chilly enough to be a deep freeze, which was doubtless the point.

I saw crack lines in the ice, and each person stood firmly in the center of his or her huge block of ice that had been intended to cryofreeze cows.  So, if one wanted to revive them just crack the ice, and be hatched into a new and uncomfortable world.

On the wall, I saw a dirt-laden white paint on the dark gray rock forming a message from the unfortunate past to the uncertain future.

"When reviving the cryocases, have ready a defibrillator with a minimum of 400 watts of power for five minutes for each person.  This shock should be applied intermittently until the cryocase begins to breathe, or until its obvious they are dead."

I had melted slightly I decided, and since I was near the edge, my ice had cracked on its own.  Without my psi skills, I would have versed out to another universe since I had no one with a defibrillator standing by to give me a ’start-up shock’.

Looking around, I traced the power supply for the LED light to a small box of rusted metal.  It opened with a screech, and inside I saw a note on once white, and now brown and fragile as dandelion blossom gone to seed.

"This is a geothermal power system.  It provides one kilowatt hour.  It is a sealed ammonia vaporization to steam and condensation back to liquid system.  The rising steam in the buried column spins a small turbine to provide electricity."

Next to this, an atomic clock showed the time since frozen.

"Three hundred, fifty four years. Four months. Ten days.  Eleven hours, fourteen minutes, and thirty-two seconds."

This was a problem.  Cryonics, especially cruder lower tech versions have spoil-by dates much less than five hundred years.  Already, they had been in there longer than I liked, if I understood the procedure used to freeze us corectly.

I could check the freezer rooms for confirmation, but that information was not here.  It figured that they had moved the ice blocks down a tunnel or something in order to give us maximum protection.  Wandering around a bit more, I found the expected freight elevator, which despite a game attempt at starting it by hammering each of its twenty buttons did not even yield a flicker of interest.  It was very dead.

I walked back, and almost stumbled over a folder arranged on the floor five feet in front of my chunks of ice cube.  Shivering in the cold, I reached over and picked it up.  Its dark color blended well with the floor in the dim light, but still I was mad with myself for missing it.

And so, I flipped the cover open, and came to the first page….

Baron Coranado’s Story

Day One:

She-Who-Is-Gold, my wife and full partner in our researches, arrived with me, Baron Coranado, in World #312. As was our wont, we set up a defensible campsite, and then set out the recording instruments.

Gravity: 1.0072 Terran Prime

Oxygen-Nitrogen atmosphere.

Background radiation: 120 millirems.  This is not a problem for us as 1)higher than normal radiation, to a point, is beneficial to life and health. 2)We both have microfauna added to our stomachs and intestines that attach to and excrete radioactives.

The sunset is brilliant.  I begin to entertain the notion that someone has been naughty, and had a nuclear war here.

Day Two:

I test the local biases with Gold’s help.  First, we run my Guitar-strumming Robot Monkey through its paces.  It uses a wide variety of technologies to create different effects.  These range from clockwork movements to speech activated by computer chips, to a tachyon spray.  Its a completely trivial and frivolous device, except it offers an exceptionally quick and harmless way to test the technology level allowed by the reigning Powers in a new universe.

Based on the success of the laser c-chips, and the failure of the tachyon spray, we make our assessment.

She-Who-Is-Gold takes over then with my offering her gopher assistance to fetch and tote sacred waters, and the spirit pipe which I packed with tobacco cut with a golden knife.  After that, I erected the portable sweat lodge.

Meanwhile, She-Who-Is-Gold purified herself, which I enjoy watching, and will not say more other than to note that I have been married for centuries, and have quite enjoyed the experience.

She then begins to speak to her spirits, and to seek to test what is the magical level of this universe.  With her very careful and precise preparations, her amulets of protection, and the consideration of favorable and goodly spirits, this is not that dangerous.  Or so I keep telling myself.

She makes her assessment.

At this point, I begin with my somewhat meager psi skills.  I practise reading her surface thoughts with her, and then telepathy.  After that I move on to pushing soft fuzzballs around since thats safer than pushing something hard that may become a missile.  And then I try to start a fire with my mind.  This fails either due to my lack of skill, or to the bias of the world.

Assessment on a fifteen point scale:

Technology: 14

Magic: 2

Psionics: 3?

We spent the rest of the day gathering food, and making dinner.

Day Three:

She-Who-Is-Gold is engaging in botanical studies of the mutated cactuses, and I am digging around in the soil under the weeping Joshua trees.  The weeping seems to be a way to release radioactives in water form, but this mutation is another step downward as it makes the Joshua tree far less efficient at holding in water in a dessert environment.  However, better to throw up poisoned water, than to hold it down.

I find a number of curious insects, and conduct my dissection and genetic mapping studies.

Day Four: She-Who-Is-Gold launches the drone, and it circles slowly overhead, gaining altitude as the heat thermals lift it, and the sun’s rays give more power to its empty power cells via the solar cells that make up its wings.  The mapping project gives us a hundred mile circle in complete detail.

We consider moving to what looks to be a more favorable site.  However, there are humans living there in a palisade, and we don’t feel that we have exhausted the research possibilities of this site yet.

I take a rest and exercise day.  Its important as field researchers to maintain fitness, and combat skills.

Day Five:

We are startled by the appearance of a young girl, perhaps seventeen, clad in a torn linsey-woolsey dress who pleads with us in a dialect of English for help against her tormentors.  While we prepare the child food and water, I set up a recorder to preserve her words for linguistic analysis later.  She-Who-Is-Gold trades her outfits from one of her spares, and then avidly puts the dress in a safe box for later analysis.  The possibilities of DNA drift, mutation, and the probability that not only linen, but sheep, and human, and other food stuffs DNA will be on the dress leave her feeling quite light-headed.

Its not that we are monsters, but our primary concern was new knowledge, and we are skilled enough to take care of a human child on autopilot, as it were.