Chapter 22: Scenic Byways

The mechanism that my gift uses to make one facet seem more 'noticeable' than another is a mystery I"m not sure I'll ever solve, but its one I keep coming back to. If there really are an infinite number of facets out there, then perhaps they come to me randomly, or fate again is playing a part. Having felt the guiding hand of fate in my life before, I was certainly not ready to rule it out.

Today's noticeable new facet I was going to label 'Autumn'. We arrived in a forest awash in the falling red and gold foliage of Autumn. A quick scan of the area nearby revealed only wilderness.

"Its beautiful here!" Ginny said. We enjoyed the view for a few minutes and then began taking readings.

"We have a standard readings across the board. No anomalies in background radiation levels and no sign of activity in the electromagnetic spectrum" Con said.

I sent my senses out further, towards San Francisco Bay to the west. My senses were telling me something didn't seem right there, but I felt no human presence anywhere.

"Hang on." I said, and jumped us to the top of a small hill in the middle of what would have been downtown San Francisco back on Earth.

We could all see it from here. We were looking at the overgrown and ancient ruins of a city. We walked around for a little while, scraping away the overgrowth to examine some of the rubble.

"If this was caused by war, it wasn't nuclear." Con said, "Or else it was an incredibly long time ago. There is absolutely no change in background radiation levels."

"Time for a Long Ear?" I asked. I got a nod from Con, and jumped one of the little blue/black balls from their bin in the Hall on Obsidian and handed it to him.

Con fiddled with it briefly and turned it loose. Its little anti-gravity drive shot it straight up. It reached the mesosphere 30 minutes later and hovered there, 60 kilometers above our heads. All three of us activated our suit's comm functions and tapped into the Ear's feed. The Ear's were limited, carrying only electromagnetic and gravitic sensors, but for spotting signs of technological civilizations they were pretty handy.

Our displays were clean. Nothing was putting out anything in the electromagnetic spectrum from anywhere on this side of the planet. The Ear was finding no Gravitic signatures either. My senses kept telling me there was something different here, but I couldn't place it.

"Lets go check out the focus." I said.

With a quick nod from my teammates, I jumped us there.

Unlike the lush green grotto we were familiar with in Meadow, Taluat and Earth, the focus here was a scrub covered draw, surrounded by low rocky hills. At the point of the focus itself we saw a single huge, maple tree, decked out in the same splendid fall colors we had seen previously. The ground beneath the maple's wide spread boughs was littered with a soft rustling nest of fallen leaves and lovely winged maple seeds.

"Hang on while I check something." I said.

I lifted myself into the air and sent myself east and south, looking for signs of what would have been Chocowinity Bay back on Earth. When I didn't see water right away I lifted myself a couple hundred feet higher, until I did see a glimmer of water in the distance. A quick swoop that direction confirmed that the ocean was indeed there, but that Chocowinity Bay, and apparently all of Pamlico Sound were dry ground. I quickly 'flew' back to Ginny and Con.

"It looks like either sea levels are considerably lower, or the landmass in this area is higher than we've seen elsewhere. The nearby sound is all dry ground."

"Do we have everything we need here?" Ginny asked. Con and I both nodded and Ginny jumped us to the Hall in Obsidian. Of course she was doing it by tapping into my gift through our link, just as Dare used to do, but it was cool anyway.

In the Hall, we all got busy. Con quickly dumped the telemetry and spectral sensor data captured by his suit as well as the Long Ear's feed into a storage unit. Ginny did the same with our suit's combined medical telemetry feeds. While they were doing that I 'burned' 4 new jump bracelets with the new facet locked into them, and then 4 spares.

With everyone ready to go I jumped us back to Level One on Meadow. Ginny and Con dropped their data modules into the feeder for our central data storage and I opened an unused storage bin and dropped in the eight bracelets. I coded the bin to display the 'Autumn' identifier I"d picked.

We took the elevator up to the main floor and headed for the dining room. Team One was there and already eating. We quickly joined them.

"How was Pearl?" Ginny asked Alicia. Pearl was the designation I'd given to the facet they'd been exploring the past couple of days.

"Yucky!" Alicia said with a grimace.

"I believe the official phrase we decided to use was 'benign tragedy.' Arden said. "The pearly white coat on everything was a petrified coating of ash from a series of volcanic events. Probably one of those 'super volcano' scenarios that scientists on Earth have been suggesting occurred in places like Yellowstone Park or Long Valley, California."

"We think we're seeing the result of multiple events, with one location setting off the next in a chain reaction of volcanic events. The event in Pearl's equivalent of the Valles Caldera in New Mexico set off an event in the Long Valley, California equivalent, which set off the truly big one in Pearl's Yellowstone." Fred added.

"The ash from the last one at least was very hot when it hit the ground, and the falling particles fused themselves into that lustrous pearly coat that caught your eye." Chet continued.

"The pearly coating only covers North and Central America, and not even all of that." Alicia added. "the New England area and Eastern Canada are pretty much untouched by the ash fall, and so is Central America past about where Mexico City would be."

"Wow!" I responded. "What kind of follow up are you going to recommend?"

Everyone looked to Arden when I asked. I was not surprised to see the rest of his team already beginning to defer to his leadership. He had taken to the new team concept like a duck to water.

"We detected an incredible amount of ongoing seismic activity while we were there." Arden concluded. "We think this facet is extremely unstable geologically, and we are going to recommend that the planetary survey either be skipped, or be conducted from orbit."

"How was your morning?" Alicia asked us.

"We've got a prime candidate for you guys." Ginny said. "Designation Autumn. Ancient ruins all over the place. Our Long Ear didn't find any signs of current civilization, but we all know better than jumping to conclusions where that is concerned, don't we?"

"Plus something there makes me twitchy." I added. "That's not in the report, but I felt something there that I couldn't identify."

"Okay! Make a note to pack the big guns and a Ouija Board! When we schedule that one!" Fred joked.

While we finished our lunches we chatted with the four team mates, mostly about what we were going to be doing for Thanksgiving and Christmas. In the middle of the conversation, Team Two arrived. That instantly diverted the conversation to details of their explorations of a facet I had designated 'Cloudburst'.

"We found those trace indications your Long Ear was picking up." Pete said. "We do have a technologically advanced civilization on Cloudburst."

"But you are all going to love this!" Mike added. "They're aquatic! Sea bottom dwellers it looks like!"

Chaos bomb time! The din was just dying down when Chet amped it back up.

"Geez! That's gotta be every marine biologists dream discovery! I bet Pete must have orgasmed on the spot!"

With lunch over for us, we took off. We had six new facets 'in the can' still waiting for an initial visit by one of the teams. Ginny and I had an appointment with her nutritionist, and we were also planning a little fusion work this evening to continue scraping away at Ginny's 'Light-Sense'. Con said he was anxious to get back to work in the Hall pursuing something he'd thought of while working on the new Mark III version of our suits.

We went up to our room and had a quick shower, with fondling. The nutritionist we were seeing was in Stockton and a bit of a ditz, so we usually kept it short. We were in the Obsidian Research facility, out the door and on the road in Ginny's GTO within five minutes. We were planning on selling my GTO when the baby arrived. I'd asked Grandpa Bill if he wanted it back, but he said no, the sentimental attachment had been to the original GTO he'd had all those years ago.

Five minutes outside of Stockton, I realized we were being followed.

"Ginny, we've got someone following us." I said. We usually avoided linking while one of us was driving, just to be safe. "Just keep going, I"ll try to get a mental peek."

I sent my thoughts back along the road behind us until I found the car that had tripped my alarm. There were two men in the front seat. I slipped lightly into the thoughts of the passenger. He was watching the rear end of our car off in the distance and thinking about having a GTO of his own. The driver's surface thoughts were equally as uninformative. I switched back to the passenger and slid in a little deeper.

The passenger was Special Agent Neil Foster. The driver was his partner, Special Agent Wayne Shipley. Both men were currently part of a team who had been assigned to surreptitiously provide protection to me personally, and by extension my wife and unborn child. This was exactly how Agent Foster thought of it. He was not privy to the details surrounding the creation of the team protecting me, but he had the impression that it was due to a request from our congressional delegation. I slipped out of their thoughts and smiled at Ginny.

<We have FBI agents assigned to protect us.> I thought to her.

<Reasons?>

<Our congressmen in Washington don't want anything to happen to us while we're still making them money. At least that is the agent's assumption.>

We finished our ride into Stockton, saw the dietary ditz, and headed back. Now that I was aware and looking, I spotted the agent's car within minutes of leaving her office. I had spent a few minutes, while I was pretending to listen to the nutritionist, building a couple bundles of consciousness which I planted in our protector's thoughts. I knew from agent Foster's thoughts that there were four others on the team, and that they all rotated their duties every three days, so I'd have a chance to plant bundles in all of them eventually.

As soon as we got back to the office at Obsidian I called Tony Herrera, our senior security guy. He came up with Sylvia Porter, who was also on our security team.

"I brought Sylvia along, if you guys don't mind."

We didn't mind at all.