“Looks good to me. And there was peace between their peoples with the breaking of the eggs.”
“What?” She laughed. She cut the finished omelet in two and slid the halves onto plates. The toaster beeped and she added the bread.
“Jam and hot sauce and stuff is there.” She pointed vaguely towards the refrigerator.
“This looks fine.” He stared at his plate.
“What’s wrong?”
He reached into his pocket and placed the ring on the counter before her. “We’re supposed to be in school, not here eating this and making war plans.”
“War plans?”
“What else do you want to call it? It’s clear Torben and his friends will take everything we have if they can get here. We have to stop them. It’s that simple.”
He began salting his omelet. After a few twists of the salt grinder, Charlotte began to shake her head. “You haven’t even tried it.”
He took a bite. It tasted salty. “It’s good. Thanks.”
“You’re saying we,” she said. “You understand what this means? I’m going back to Nurse Dreyfus’s Earth and finding her. Mimi took care of me for two years and is the closest thing I have to a mother now. That’s going to be dangerous.”
“You understand that could be a mistake. Torben was tough even after you poisoned him with food from our world. If he or the other warlords catch us, we’re dead.”
“I’m aware of that. But that’s the risk. I need to know what Mimi knows and what she was hoping to accomplish by returning home. Will you help?”
Brendan picked at his food. “What about the goons you hired? And all that cash?”
“Sperry from downstream Earth found them for me. With their help I was able to secure a…loan. I needed cash to purchase the drones; I couldn’t just steal them. It’s interesting that Sperry has so many contacts on every world we visit. Those guys were off-duty school security with some military background. They weren’t much use here and even moreso further upstream.”
“Will I?”
“You’ve been there and know what to expect. You know what can be done to help mitigate the effect of being upstream. We’re going to be sneaky, not stand and fight. That’s my plan if you’re in.”
Brendan nodded. “But we’re going to look for your father’s vault first if we can, aren’t we?”
Charlotte picked up the ring. “Yes. We might find something to even the odds. Or we might be able to keep anyone from crossing over by learning how to close the gates permanently.”
“Then I have some conditions. Since your father’s machine isn’t on, we have to try and find a gate to your world. But we don’t make a new one, is that clear?”
“We’ll have to search. There might not even be one. Torben’s method was crude but it taught me something.”
“Me too, ” he said, remembering how the gate had smelled. “But if we can find a door back to Not-Earth, we can take Brian back home and see if we can find our Poser and Paul. Only after we get them safe do we look for the vault. And then try and find Nurse Dreyfus.”
“It’s a mess. Maybe above our heads.”
“Then we better not go with an empty stomach.”
Brendan was just finishing his food when there came a loud knock at the door. Charlotte answered, and Tina pushed past her. She had a large backpack on.
“Did you think you were going to do this without me? So are we jumping worlds or what?”
The Vault of a Thousand Worlds
Supervillain High Book 3
by
Gerhard Gehrke
1. Planning Stage
Now that breakfast was over, the hunt for the gate to Not-Earth was on.
The three students of Dutchman Springs Academy stood around the granite-topped kitchen island in the headmaster’s spacious kitchen. The aroma of recently finished eggs filled the air, and the dirty pan was in the sink. Tina eyed Brendan’s cleaned plate and Charlotte’s half omelet, which was barely touched.
“Help yourself,” Charlotte said as she gathered her pack.
“This’ll do.” Tina grabbed an apple from a fruit bowl and started to head out.
“Hold up,” Brendan said. “Maybe we shouldn’t go so quickly.”
“What do you mean?” Tina asked. “We cut school. You guys ate. Let’s do this.”
“This might not be a quick trip. And we have to find the gate first, assuming it even exists.”
Tina looked perplexed. She paced around the large kitchen. “Well, I’m ready. Let me know when you get your luggage packed so we can start looking.” She took a bite.
“Let’s come up with a plan at least. We know of one gate here. We found one gate downstream.”
Charlotte took out her tablet. She tapped the screen and turned it in their direction. “Here’s a map of Dutchman Springs.” Brendan and Tina leaned over to look. Brendan found it impossible to ignore Tina’s loud chewing sounds. “And here’s the body shop where we found the downstream gate during our fight with Torben. So we start there and spiral out. That’s my suggestion. If a gate here was obvious, someone would have found it. It could be high in the air.”
“Or underground,” Tina said. “Or inside something.”
“Torben sniffed it out. The gate has a slight ozone smell. That’s something we could start with.”
Brendan zoomed out so he could see the larger surrounding area. “That would take a long time, and we might have to trudge over every inch of town. My nose isn’t that good, and unless we have an ozone detector at the ready, we need a better plan. Let’s narrow it down. Where’s Nurse Dreyfus’s house?”
Charlotte pointed. “It’s about a mile and a half that way.”
“And then let’s look at their relation to the admin building.”
Charlotte moved the map, found the academy, and measured.
“They’re in a direct line leading away from school,” she said. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
“If we think of these as holes or tears that resulted from your father’s machine, that narrows down where we should look. I’ll bet Los Angeles is further down the same line. Maybe the gates that formed here were close enough and stable. That’s why they’re open. Then the unstable energy resulted in the disaster.”
The Los Angeles earthquake had coincided with Charlotte’s father on Not-Earth turning on his machine for the first time. Brendan’s Earth had suffered the consequences, including a triggered earthquake that had killed one hundred thousand people. The rumors soon spread that the earthquake hadn’t been natural, but had been preceded by some sort of mysterious event. The Earth upstream from Charlotte’s had suffered worse, the cataclysm destroying much of civilization and opening holes to more Earths further up the line. The warlords had found these gates, and they became more powerful with each step downstream.
Charlotte circled an area on the screen with her finger, then captured the screen and sent it to Brendan’s and Tina’s phones. “If we split up, we cover more ground.”
“Let’s stick close together,” Brendan said. “Too many bad things happen when we lose sight of one another.”
Tina opened the fridge. She gathered some bread and began placing ingredients on it. She considered Charlotte’s partially nibbled omelet and then slid it onto the bread.
“Help yourself, why don’t you?” Charlotte said.
“Thanks,” Tina said, ignoring the sarcasm. “So who else knows what we’re about to do?”
“That depends on if you told anyone.”
“Me? You’re the one who hired henchmen to work with you with that bag of millions of dollars. Besides, who would I tell? Vlad is on my no-tell list ever since he let himself be bamboozled by Lucille. Everyone else I know isn’t capable of grasping the notion of magical gates between dimensions.”
“They’re not dimensions, they’re alternate Earths. And there was less than a hundred grand left in that bag.”
“Whatever.”
Brendan examined the map on hi
s phone. “This is still a big area to search. And if we find it, we then have to locate Brian and Paul. Having additional help wouldn’t be a horrible idea. But who else besides Vlad?”
Charlotte went upstairs and returned with a heavy-duty plastic box. Inside were three more of the little black drones.
Brendan grinned. Charlotte had used the little machines against him and Tina. He thought they all had been destroyed, but the thought of having more of the machines on their side gave him a thrill. “Where did you get those?”
“Sperry from downstream Earth got me a few more. I told him what I was doing. He understood and got with his contact in the military. I was actually hoping for another dozen. Three will do.”
“The army makes these things?”
“The army from downstream Earth does. Air force, actually.”
“I’ve taken one of those apart. They’re amazing. It seems downstream Earth isn’t necessarily weaker. These things are so advanced.”
“Downstream is just different.” Charlotte closed the case. “We’ll use these when needed. For now let’s get out there and see what we can see.”
2. Home Base
The early afternoon sun beat down hot on the three as they headed to the area of town marked on the map. Even in fall, the afternoons often hit eighty degrees. The neighborhood was in the older part of town where several smaller businesses were interspersed with the homes. An elementary school marked the center of their search area. Children were out on the playground and field. A police cruiser approached as they walked the perimeter of the school.
Brendan had Charlotte and Tina pause behind a parked van. “The cops might be idle enough to stop truants,” he said. The cop kept going.
“Best we avoid the elementary school grounds until later,” Charlotte said. “But it looks close to where a gate might be.”
The rest of the neighborhood was mostly flat, except for a semblance of a hill in a park.
“So what are supposed to do?” Tina asked. “Sniff the air? We’re going to look stupid, not that it’s ever stopped us before.”
“Let’s just see if we spot anything unusual,” Brendan said. “Maybe hanging in the air, like the one by the body shop? The distortion can be small but not impossible to see.”
“It’s probably a good thing they’re hard to see,” Charlotte said. “Otherwise more people would find them. But something must cause the distortion. We just haven’t studied it yet. Maybe it’s a difference in barimetric pressure or temperature.”
Tina shielded her eyes as she surveyed the sky above them. “It’s a bit hot to detect minor temperature differences. Maybe we need to get an infrared camera and do our search at night. It worked with finding your father’s gate.”
“Good idea,” Charlotte said.
Brendan headed off across a sandy patch inside the park. The small hill was mostly rock. One particular outcrop had a patch of vibrant green weeds with little yellow flowers. Charlotte and Tina caught up with him. Brendan pointed.
“Could be nothing,” he said. “But that’s the healthiest cluster of growth on this hill.”
Brendan climbed the rocks.
“Be careful,” Charlotte said.
A few feet above the weeds he saw a shimmer. The air nearby carried the slightest breeze, as if the gate was slowly pushing out cooler air. He reached up to touch it, disbelieving what he was seeing. His fingers felt a breeze. He flinched and withdrew his hand.
“This is it. It’s actually here. Found it!”
“Boost me up,” Tina said. “I’ll go in and take a look.”
“How about we come back with a stepladder,” Brendan said. “It’ll look weird, but that way we all can go.”
Charlotte picked up a small rock and tossed it into the distortion. It vanished. She got out one of the drones.
“You’ll lose it,” Brendan said.
“Maybe not. I won’t be able to give it orders once it goes through but I can drop in a simple program. If it doesn’t go to my Earth, then we need to know where it leads. The possibilities are endless and something truly awful could be on the other side.”
Brendan couldn’t argue with the logic. Tina looked disappointed at the delay.
The little black drone had no rotors and it made a buzzing sound as it took off. Charlotte tapped in some commands on her tablet, and the drone flew forward into the gate.
They waited.
Ten minutes later the drone dropped back down and landed on the rocks, only to slide down the hill. Brendan went after it. They all regrouped at a shaded picnic area nearby. Nearby, several mothers were watching their children frolic on a nearby playground, the children oblivious to the day’s heat. A pair of seniors walked past on the sidewalk, a trio of miniature pinschers pulling them along in a jerky motion of tugs and sudden stops.
Charlotte examined the returned drone. “It’s intact. I’ll upload its footage.”
Brendan shielded the tablet screen so they could see. Charlotte tapped play. The drone footage showed them its flight over the hill and up into the sky. There was no visible break when it passed through the gate. The vantage point rose up to an altitude where much of the town was visible. It looked like the Dutchman Springs that surrounded them.
“Did it miss the gate?” Tina asked. “Or is it all exactly the same?”
Brendan looked up at the sky. There were no clouds in sight. He pointed at the screen. “Weather’s a little different. It’s hazier.”
Charlotte nodded. “That’s because the Los Angeles on my world is intact. The population here has decreased because many people moved away from the area, so there are fewer cars on the roads. And your world reduced the traffic even more by building the hyperloop. You have more electric cars, too.”
“So our world is cooler than yours,” Tina said. “Except that you bombed ours.”
Charlotte’s jaw tightened. Brendan knew it was still a sensitive subject. Charlotte took responsibility for her father’s initial gate experiment, having corrected errors in his machine before he turned it on for its trial. The machine might never have worked but for her tinkering. But he couldn’t bring himself to comfort her. Her guilt hadn’t stopped her from building her own series of devices that allowed her access to instant gates to the downstream Earth.
“Any other differences?” Brendan asked. “Anything that pegs it as your Earth?”
Charlotte leaned close and studied the footage. She zoomed in on several businesses. Tina and Brendan squeezed in to see what she was seeing. Charlotte paused the screen.
“Is that where the Bean is supposed to be?” Brendan asked.
A shuttered flower shop was in the spot where their off-campus coffee hangout normally stood.
“That’s my world,” Charlotte said. “Unless there’s another Earth with the same shut-down shop.”
“We can grab one of these garbage cans and jump through the gate,” Tina said, pointing down towards the picnic tables.
“Too many people,” Brendan said.
“Bringing a ladder will be less conspicuous?”
“It’s less than ideal, but at least it will be more controlled when we go through. We’ll arrive at the same point above the hill and have to avoiding breaking a leg on the other side. Then once we’re across we’ll have options. If we can get to the headmaster’s office, we can switch his machine on and step back over.”
“If we can do this without attracting my dad’s attention,” Charlotte said, “that’s the way we should go. We have surprise on our side. But my dad will still want the ring. So we stay sneaky and go tonight.”
***
Brendan had texts from all three of his teachers from his afternoon classes. It was hard to vanish unnoticed when there were only twenty students in any class, and each teacher had at least one assistant to help spot any absence. Be easier to go unnoticed in a prison.
He didn’t have time to send replies. He headed to the electronics lab. Class had been over for an hour. He stepped through the d
oorway and saw Ms. Hayes was still there with a small group of students. He ducked back into the hallway.
“Mr. Garza?”
Busted. He entered the classroom.
“We missed you today, Mr. Garza. I’ve posted your assignment in your inbox.”
“Yeah, sorry. I got caught up with something.”
“As long as you’re well, that’s all that matters,” she said with a smile.
Seeing her here made him nervous. She was his favorite teacher, but the other her, the one on Torben’s upstream world, had betrayed them to save her daughter from the other warlords. This wasn’t the same person, but something about her now put him on edge. A rush of guilt in not having been able to help her prevented him from making eye contact.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
He realized he was staring at her chest. Perhaps she was used to it from her students, as quite a few other boys signed up for electronics once they saw the teacher. Brendan wanted to believe he was above such hormonal leering.
“I’m fine. I’m here to check on my projects and my assignments.”
Ms. Hayes nodded and went back to her group of students. It was an advanced junior-level class doing something with a magnetic field and a pan of water. Brendan was curious enough to watch them work, even though the math Ms. Hayes put up on her computer’s projection was beyond him. Anyone joining her class quickly learned that they had to keep up or switch back out to a less demanding elective.
Vlad sidled up next to him. The large boy leaned in close. “Where were you?”
“I had to meet Charlotte off school grounds.”
“Anything to share?”
Brendan led the way to their workbench out of earshot of the others. Vlad had already laid out tools and had his project underway. Brendan unlocked his drawer and took out the partially completed glove. He had started making his own gateway device by copying Charlotte’s design. But the project had stalled out, partially because of a lack of the brainpower boost he got from the upworld food and partially because he doubted the wisdom of risking the catastrophic side effects of opening gates to other Earths. Even though the intent behind making the glove was to be able to send non-natives back where they came from, the hazards were too big to ignore.
The Supervillain High Boxed Set: Books One - Three of the Supervillain High Series Page 44
