Chapter 72

My return to the keep and Oak Hall was welcomed by all except for Dindraine. The young elven girl greeted me with a glare of animosity that I couldn't blame her for. I felt the same way about myself.

Nimue did not however share that opinion and she did chide Dindraine for her behaviour. I said nothing about it in response. Instead I walked over to Nimue and took her into my arms and gently hugged her. My heart ached at seeing her once more. She was dressed simply in a warm woollen tunic and leather breeches and boots and without armour she looked frail. It was an image that I wasn't used to.

"I have missed you my little elf," I whispered into my mate's ear as I let my lips brush the side of her head.

"And whose fault is that my husband," Nimue replied sternly, pulling away from me as she spoke and then poking me in the chest. "No one made you leave your family behind."

"I had to," I muttered apologetically, "and you know that. I just couldn't risk anyone else getting injured."

Nimue didn't agree with me and she argued the point for a moment or two before others stepped in and silenced her. Asana and Samira came forward in an attempt to calm Nimue down while Elsa came to me. Quickly she greeted me with a smile and a kiss.

"Nothing has changed Charles," Elsa chuckled softly when we broke our embrace. "You think one thing and we think something else. Unfortunately for you, you've married some strong willed women. We're more than a match for you."

"You are indeed," I acknowledged with a sigh.

After that I greeted Asana and Samira while Caitlin and Felicity kept Nimue in check. Both of my princesses threw themselves at me and declared how much they had suffered with me being gone. The implication was obvious and I knew that eventually I would have to take them all to bed if only to get some rest for myself. In the meantime I let them press their lithe forms against me and I returned their kisses with equal enthusiasm.

My mates were not the only ones who had missed me. My friends were there waiting to greet me as well. Both Dork and Rory looked well and they both berated me for not taking them along with me. Dork was particularly incensed because he'd been able to view my little escapade in the village. The big guy grumbled that I got all the fun while he ended up babysitting a talking computer. He told me that my chopping off of the dead men's heads and my placing of them on spears, to him had been a stroke of genius. From the looks on the faces of Asana and Samira, I was certain that they thought differently.

I didn't stay in Oak Hall for very long. I did agree to one meeting with the council to tidy up some matters. Since one was a crypt for Kola and Goiania, I felt it behoved me to attend. Thankfully Elsa had matters in hand and the whole meeting only took a few hours. After that and a bath and something to eat, I had Hope teleport my party, this time comprised of Caitlin, Nimue, Felicity, Dork, and Rory to the complex on the other Earth. I wanted to see what Hope had come up with.

"Show me what you have please," I said to Hope once everyone was seated before the monitor in the bar in the complex on Hawaii. The screen while not as large as the one upstairs was still larger than any I had ever seen on my Earth and it was certainly large enough that my group of people could see it without any difficulty. As I settled in I grabbed a beer and took a sip.

"As you know Charles," Hope started, her voice taking on the lecturing quality of a headmistress, "I have been scanning my memory banks for any alternative Earth that met the criteria cited by you that could provide the medical services you desired for assisting your mate Nimue. This took me one day and forty-two minutes to complete. The result was negative and I was forced to dispatch several probes to alternate Earths that had not yet been explored by the people of this Earth. This took some time as the replication of probes required the acquisition of raw resources from several other alternate Earths before the process could begin. By the end of two weeks and four days and ten minutes, I had completed a search of sufficient alternative worlds so that I could report a positive match in my assignment. I immediately reported the match to Felicity who encouraged me to try and locate another Earth that offered you an easier option. I regret to report that to date I have not found another Earth that meets your current criteria. Since four weeks of searching have produced only one positive find, I insisted that Felicity broach the topic with you. I admit that there are hundreds of Earths with the medical capabilities and resources that you seek to employ, however all of them are inhabited and fully functioning and to some degree or other potentially hostile to all here. Even the one Earth that I have identified just meets your criteria. Thus I require that either you expand my search parameters or that you accept the Earth that I have identified."

"Thank you Hope," I said when the computer fell silent. "Do you have a video feed of the planet that you've identified?"

"Of course," Hope stated with a tone that told everyone that I had asked a stupid question. Naturally she had a video feed of the world and a whole lot more. I just asked her to show us what she had and then I sat back and drank my beer.

I'll skip most of the obvious stuff. The planet was an advanced Earth. Prior to the pandemic it had had a world population of just over ten billion inhabitants. That population was spread over all the continents including Antarctica. As with my Earth the bulk of the population had lived in Asia. Over six and a half billion men, women, and children had thrived in China, India, Indonesia, and all the other Asian states. It had been a vibrant growing world that was on the verge of reaching out into the stars. They had already started mining the asteroid belt and a couple of moons and other planets in the Solar System. That was now all over with. Since the pandemic they had a dead and/or undead population of slightly less than ten billion people. The disease that had ravaged their world had been very effective.

It quickly became apparent that the undead weren't really dead and that they weren't actually zombies by any frame of reference that I knew of. While Hope kept the focus of her report on the current situation on the Earth that she'd identified, she did provide us some background material on the outbreak of the pandemic that had run its course through the population of the other Earth. The fact was that none of the infected people were actually dead and none of them were reanimated corpses. They were however mindless, rabid humans who existed beyond what was considered being alive. They lived to feed on non-infected humans and that was it. Their bodies while not dead continued to function so long as it was reasonably intact.

That was the enlightening aspect of Hope's visual report. Much of the footage she showed us was live, taken by the probes that she'd sent to the Earth to investigate it. As we quickly learned the pandemic had begun over a year ago and it had spread rapidly throughout the world's population. Almost a billion people had been infected during the initial outbreak of the disease yet from the footage that she showed us it was clear that many of the walking dead were still shuffling about live and well. Oh most were thin as rails with their ribs showing against their taut flesh and a few showed signs of decay setting in, both those that had turned early were relatively intact. It was the ones that were infected by the first group that were in worse condition. They showed signs of having been attacked and injured. Gapping wounds were visible on some and on others they were in advance stages of decay. It became clear that the more injured the host had been at the time of the infection, the more rapidly they degraded. A few were grisly to look at and I found myself looking away when ever a zombie child was shown. It was a disgusting sight.

As with all good zombie stories there were survivors and Hope showed us footage of them either fleeing the multitude or attempting to resist them and just like every zombie movie that I had ever seen there was one particular band of stalwart survivors who were doing a better job at it than their fellow survivors. We got to see them in action as well. As we watched them engage the walking dead, I quickly realized that these living humans actually had a chance against their more numerical undead opponents. Unlike the movies and colloquial fiction of my Earth, a zombie didn't need to be shot in the head to dispatch it. A spear through the heart did the job just as well, although taking off a limb only slowed them down. You had to do major damage to their hearts, lungs, or brains to kill the walking dead instantly. It did help the survivors that the zombies were shufflers and they couldn't climb. If you were smart enough and careful enough you could wipe out the undead hordes with ease. The only thing going against the living humans of that world was the fact that the zombies never stopped to rest. They might be shufflers but they were constant shufflers and while the living humans need to stop to eat and sleep, the zombies did not.

"All right Hope," I said after watching the milling mass of zombies for a bit, "could you please show me this medical facility that you located for me."

"With pleasure Charles," Hope replied. A moment later the scene on the screen changed to a different location. Hope started with a panoramic aerial view of the area around the medical facility. As she showed it to us, Hope went on and described the facility and the city that supported it.

"My probe gathered significant electronic intelligence from the medical facility before it became isolated from the rest of the surviving infrastructure and population," Hope informed me, "and that intelligence showed that the process of growing a new limb for a patient was commonplace on that Earth. All archival medical information on the process and procedure has been transferred to a tablet for Felicity to review at her leisure. What is important to note is that the facility, while fully functioning as a regional medical centre, was primarily a research hospital. The primary role of the facility was to improve on the existing methodology and techniques that were employed up to the point where the pandemic broke out. Further electronic intelligence shows that the facility is currently staffed with a dozen trained medical personal, five support personnel, two administrative personnel, and twelve security personnel. There are also ten patients in the facility. The facility is secure and none of the occupants of the facility have been exposed to the virus. Their most significant logistical problem is food. At their current rate of consumption and at the current rate of spoilage, the facility will be out of food in a week."

"Could we take the medical information that is on the tablet," I asked interrupting Hope, "and employ it, say at an equivalent facility on another Earth that doesn't have a bunch of undead walking about, such as the Earth where Richard found the Sparrow Hawk on? With the right facilities could Felicity and her medical staff do the work without the assistance of the medical staff in that facility?"

"No Charles," Felicity said bluntly, "we couldn't do it with any guarantee of success. Their technology and techniques are beyond my medical expertise and if we did try it without trained and experience personnel it would probably result in Nimue experience severe pain and possibly further injury."

I sighed on hearing that and then nodded my understanding of the situations. Accepting the fact that we would have to go to this Earth I pushed on.

"What about the neighbouring town?" I asked changing the topic.

The aerial view shifted away from the medical facility at that point. The facility had lain on the outskirts of the local town. The facility had been surrounded on three sides by green-space and on one side by forested hills. The facility had included a small multi-story hospital building, an adjoining administrative building and a spacious parking lot. Anyone looking down on it could see where their force field reached. A ring of corpses lay about the building. Beyond that there were only a handful of zombies roaming about the surrounding landscape. Most of the zombies were packed into the streets of the local town.

Evanston was a typical purpose planned community. It was laid out on a grid pattern of streets and avenues. The main road went through the centre of town. One end led to the medical facility and the other lead to a near by highway. The other roads in the town crossed the main one at right angles. From the look of it the town held a population of roughly twenty thousand, a number that Hope confirmed in a much more precise manner. Of the residents most of them were milling about along the main street, shuffling about aimlessly. It wasn't the only place the zombies were, but it was essentially where most of them had gathered. To me it looked easy considering some of the horror movies I'd seen back on my Earth. At least I didn't have to deal with millions upon millions of the undead coming and more importantly, I knew how to deal with them.

"All right now," I said putting down my beer and speaking up once again. "Did you find what I asked you to look for Hope?"

"I did," Hope stated with confidence. "I first sent a probe to your Earth. That probe scanned your Earth's digital history and sent the records to me for analysis. I quickly identified several variants of the vehicle that you spoke to me about. From that knowledge I then cross-referenced what I knew you were looking for against my database. I quickly located several alternative Earths that have said vehicles in use. I can now either transport one to Game World for you or I can employ the electronic records I have and use a replicator to build one. If I do the later it will take longer as I will have to locate sufficient raw resources to complete the task. What do you think?"

As Hope spoke she flashed several photo images of flail tanks and armoured vehicles on her screen for me to look at. I quickly recognized the ones that I'd seen in museums that I had visited back on my Earth. There were a few of the vehicles mixed into the presentation that I didn't recognize at all but that really didn't matter. What mattered was that I could get what I needed for this operation.

"I actually want five of these vehicles," I told Hope after a moment or two of glancing at the examples that she was showing me. "What I'm planning to do with them will require that many. For expediency sake, I'd like you to just grab five of the same model from some other Earth. I'd still prefer that they be taken from a world where they won't be missed but if you can't do that I won't complain. What is important is that the vehicles must be able to carry a squad of armed men within them, something like the Merkava tank. I would also ask that you grab the most technically sound vehicles. We don't want them breaking down five minutes after we started using them or for them to run out of fuel."

"Understood Charles," Hope responded, "and where would you like them placed?"

"For right now I'd like you to put them on the beach by the resort," I told Hope. "I'm going to need to find crews for them once you've delivered them. Hopefully Elsa will have some heavy equipment operators or ex-tankers amongst the myriad of people that we gathered up just before pulling the plug on the network. If we do, it'll cut down the amount of time I'm going to need to take to put this mission together."

The questions started right after that. While Hope had shown images of flail tanks in action during our discussions, for those who had come from a non-industrial Earth or for those with no military or historical background, the purpose of the vehicles was a loss to them. I spent a quick fifteen to twenty minutes explaining the history of the vehicles to my mates and friends as they related to my Earth. I told them about a war where the enemy planted so many mines between them and my nation's forces that it was impossible to advance without taking massive casualties and that engineers on my Earth had come up with a solution. Naturally the solution was the flail tank. I then had Hope locate some video footage of a vehicle I knew as the Aardvark. The footage that I requested showed a prototype vehicle being tested in Malaysia. The operator of the test vehicle drove the Aardvark up to a grove of bamboo and then he activated the flail system. The drum and the weighted balls and chains attached to it started to spin at an incredible speed and when the operator had everything ready he advanced on the grove. In seconds he had shredded the grove completely. The sight of the destruction caused most of my party to gasp with surprise.

"And you are planning to use this vehicle against the people of the other Earth?" Dork asked in a low voice, his gaze still on the sight being displayed on the monitor.