Johan Birch

"Okay?" I half-asked, half-demanded.

"Now there are six of them and they're not aiming at the plane anymore," Petra shook her head.

"They are aiming at the air in front of us, creating turbulence," Aysun finished. "Nobody ever said that sorcerers were stupid."

"But why are they attacking in a pack?" Petra wondered aloud. "And it can't be novices up this high."

I had a flashback to when Jaci roasted six sorcerers in the desert. They had been attacking the fertilizer-enriched plants, not Jaci. "Nora?" I called out.

"Yes, Mister Birch?"

"We've started stage twelve, right?"

"I collected some samples, like the plan says..."

"And we have them aboard, right?"

Nora was getting ready to burst into tears. I went to her and folded her into a bear hug. "You were just right, baby," I whispered. "Gold Star. Okay?"

"Okay," she whispered back.

The plane rocked again, knocking me backwards and Nora with me. She giggled as she tried to free herself from my bear hug.

I sat up and looked at Aysun. "I guess we get to try Plan 'B' after all."

"Yeah, there's a problem with that, dad," Aysun sat on the couch beside me. "The tests were a success as far as taking animals through folds. They had to be in pressurized vehicles like this plane, but they survived. That means any normal human shouldn't have any trouble."

"So what's the problem?"

"The problem is you. With the very rare exceptions of you showing magic, you are talent-negative. If we try the fold, you could be left behind and fall to your death. Another scenario is that you anchor the fold, the plane disintegrates, and we all fall to our deaths."

The plane shuddered again, reminding us that we were about to get blown out of the sky anyway. "Plan B, Aysun. Pick a place, I've seen you fly over the Jacer Semiconductor complex, so let's go there."

"Okay," Aysun nodded.

"Gregory it's going to get really weird in five seconds!" I shouted.

"Sir!" He heard me.

"Go, Aysun."

Aysun reached up, touching the ceiling of the cabin. She closed her eyes, the shaking of the plane not bothering her, and she folded.

Our destination was sunny and bright as opposed to the darkness we had been flying through. There was a problem, we were less than five hundred meters above ground and still travelling at upper atmospheric speeds.

I felt Gregory climb and then bank to the left. From my flying lessons I knew he was trying to slow down without using the flaps. The plane shuddered again, but it wasn't turbulence, it was sorcerers; they had followed us through the fold. The combination of the banking and shuddering of the plane knocked Nora into my lap. I curled my arms around her to keep her steady in case there were any more surprises.

Aysun had disappeared. I gave Petra a questioning look and she inclined her head to the window. I muttered about how reckless that was, and she called me a hypocrite and reminded me that she was still debating my punishment for going up against three men armed with knives and a sword.

The plane reversed its bank, and I caught a glimpse of what was going on outside. Aysun had been joined by someone, and they were letting loose on a pair of sorcerers. Gregory leveled out the plane and hit the flaps. I didn't know where he was going to land, but it was better than staying in the sky.

We touched down, and then we lurched when he hit the emergency reverse controls for the engines. It probably stripped out the turbines, but it would be easier to get out if we were stopped. Petra vanished into a linear fold, probably by Aysun, giving me the sign to get off my ass and get outside.

The explosion in the front end of the plane forced me to go to the back exit. While the plane had been moving, the sorcerers couldn't throw anything but lightning at us. Now that we were still, they could and were throwing plasma balls at the plane.

I almost reached the rear exit before my world turned white.

***

Nora!

A reassuring hand on my shoulder. "Relax, Johan," Samantha said. "Your little playmate is okay."

"Where am I?" I couldn't see, but that was taking second place at the moment.

"You're at Birch Medical," she replied. "We've been putting you and Nora back together."

"How long has it been?" I asked.

"Sixty hours since the incident, give or take."

"You can't be doing human trials! That's..."

Samantha put her hand over my mouth. "Shut up and listen, Johan. You and Nora got blasted by plasma balls. You both were badly burned and your body wasn't accepting healer magic. We brought you both here and while the healer used magic on Nora, Gemma mimicked that and used her technology to heal you."

"Mmph!"

"What?" Samantha asked, taking her hand off my mouth. "Are you going to complain now?"

"Why can't I see?"

"Because Gemma only copied the skin repair. Your eyes are a different story because Nora wasn't blasted blind. If you want to complain about human trials, I'll go buy you a cane or get you a seeing-eye dog or something. I'm sure Nora would love to lead you around."

"Finish the trial," I agreed. "But don't use that device of Miranda's. I'd rather stay blind than to rob a healer of her energy."

"You're very nobile, but any energy you received would be freely given. I'm going to tell Gemma you are awake so she can take a look at you." I heard shuffling, and then heard Samantha exit.

Then there was a pitter-patter of feet and a tiny arm across my chest. "I'm glad you made it, Johan," Nora sighed. "They wouldn't tell me anything, I had to escape my cell."

I looped my arm around her. "I'm glad you made it, Kitten."

There was a slight tugging at my chest hair. "I'm glad they figured out how to get your chest hair to grow back. Missus Birch said you looked funny without your fur."

That got a chuckle out of me. "I'm glad they fixed it too, Nora. Did they hurt you?"

"Mister Birch, it was so hot..."

"Nora, let me tell the story," Petra said. "You can embellish later."

A little peck on my cheek. "See you later, even if you can't see me." Nora shuffled out of the room and the door closed behind her.

I heard Petra sit down and let out a sigh. "Mister Birch?" I heard a voice that sounded like Gemma's.

"Call me Johan, Doctor Margus," I said.

"Mister Birch, you had third-degree burns over forty percent of your body and second-degree burns over the remaining sixty percent. We had to stop the procedure several times to rehydrate you. The device used a lot of nutrients from your body, so you may still feel a little weak for ten days or so. Except for your eyes, we got the rest of you back together."

"So you put me back together in less than sixty hours?" I asked in disbelief

"More like fifty-five. It took some time to extricate you and your playmate from the wreckage."

Playmate! "Petra, you know how I feel about that!"

"Doctor?" Petra asked with that voice, the voice that inspired fear.

"Which word would you prefer I use?" Gemma asked.

"Companion!" Petra snapped. "Nora loves my husband more than life itself, you can't reduce that to some snide little word!"

"Yes, ma'am. Mister Birch, my apologies. In any case, it took some time to extricate you and your companion from the wreckage. You both were brought here across a linear fold in pressurized containers, which was impressive. Despite your qualms about human experimentation..."

"We will explain the scientific part later, Doctor Margus. Jaci Stone's son is preparing his report for you to analyze," Petra said.

"Then what was left of your bodies ended up in my lab. I'm glad that it worked, I just didn't expect that the science created by a madwoman would cause no pain. Thanks for giving me an insight on how to help...a lot more people."

"Is everything else okay, Doctor Margus?" Petra asked.

"I'll be ready to release Mister Birch in three days or less, maybe sooner if I can find a way to regenerate his eyes. Good day."

"What's the unembellished story, Petra?"

She laughed. "You know that Nora has a tendency to exaggerate."

I nodded. "Especially about me."

"Here's how it happened: When we came to a stop, Aysun, Landry and Peter Carpel whisked me and the pilots out. There were four other of Jaci's children trying to set up a blocking force so that you and Nora could escape."

I sighed. "I am so glad Karol stayed behind in Australia."

"So am I."

"What happened?"

"Ten of those bastards started throwing plasma balls at the plane. Four of them got intercepted, but those other six balls? Nora saved you both, goddess bless her little soul. She wasn't a guardian, but she fended off five of those balls and part of the sixth. Plasma, as you know, is plasma."

"Nora said it was hot."

"Like I said, she'd give up her life for you. As it turns out, she did give up her immortality for you."

"What?" I asked.

"That little spark in the body responsible for natural immortality? Hers is gone. Me and Samantha think that she sacrificed it to keep your soul from eclipsing before help arrived."

Somewhere in all the magic books I had read there was a mention of that power. "It's in one of the books," I said. "That power comes from the bond..."

"...of man and wife," Petra finished. "But I've asked Nora, more than once, if she wants to be a wife. She always refuses."

"Maybe she is a wife. The words cementing the bond are just words, but the spirit... Remember what you went through for me?"

"I agree. You can't see me, but I'm nodding."

"Sure."

"Tell me more," I ordered. "What's wrong with Samantha?"

"Samantha's cranky. I'll let her discuss her business with you. But there is one other thing, Harriet made an appointment to see you."

"An appointment?" I asked. "For when?"

There was a soft knock at the door. Of course it was now. "See you in a bit."

One set of feet went out, and another set came clacking in, the door closing behind her. "Hello, Harriet."

"Hey, Johan."

"Sad that you missed another chance to spin me around the wheel of time?"

"Nope, happy you survived. I came to my senses and realized that putting Jaci through that shit with Gabrielle again wasn't going to help any at all."

"So, why are you here? Why ask for an appointment?" I asked.

"Well, I had to be invited for the energy to properly align," Harriet answered.

The door to the room burst open. The kitten heels told me it was Gemma returning. "What are YOU doing here?"

"I came here to give Johan back his sight, and to show you that you're going the wrong way."

"You can't use magic to heal him!"

I didn't mind being talked about in the third person while I was present. I did it to my soul all the time.

"Take the bandages off him," Harriet ordered.

"You do it!"

"Just take off the fucking bandages you obstinate little twit," Harriet snapped.

"Hold still, sir," Gemma said. I heard a brush of metal-on-metal, then cold metal by my temple. There was a snip, then the bandage was gently pulled up and away. "There!"

A drop of liquid fell on my forehead. "What's that?" I asked.

"Psychic lubricant," Harriet replied. I felt a tap on my forehead, and then I could see, sortof. Everything seemed washed out, and I wasn't seeing stereo-optically. Harriet had opened my third eye.

"As you can see, Johan, I've opened your third eye. Everybody has one of these wonderful organs, even Doctor Margus over there. As her father Artemis would put it, it is 'supra-ocular enhancement.' It helps you see things that are right on the edges of normal vision, et cetera."

"We know what the third eye is, Harriet," Gemma panned.

"You should pay more attention to it, Doctor. I've healed Johan's eyes, good for me. But like the heart that has stopped, they need a frame of reference before they can start to see again."

I heard Gemma gasp. She evidently was learning something. "Okay."

Harriet tapped my forehead again, essentially poking at my third eye. The shock of that caused me to open my corporeal eyes, and I could see through them.

"Easy-peasy. Just remember this, Gemma, you can only heal eyes. You cannot give vision to a person who was born blind, as they have no frame of reference. My work here is done!"

Before I had a chance to thank Harriet, she had vanished. I turned to look at Gemma, and she was in shock. She started muttering to herself about how she was such a bitch and how she should have been recording everything. She walked across the room, actually running into the door before she opened it and left.

Petra came back into the room. She leaned over and gave me a kiss before she sat down again. "A little bit of drama there," I offered.

"I think that Gemma blames Harriet for Helena's death," Petra whispered.

"Oh. Why did Harriet even come here? Why now?"

"Well," Petra shrugged. "Harriet did say that we would call her a 'Temporal Mechanic,' right?"

"Something like that," I admitted.

"Maybe you were just due for a temporal oil change?" Petra volunteered. "I don't know. I'll bet that the so-called old Birch hags don't know, either. Harriet gave you your sight back, and she sent Gemma into a tizzy. All is right with the world, for the time being."

"Tell me about the place where we landed."

"The plane landed about ten kilometers north of our back access to Jacer on road 3536," Petra answered.

"What did the Air Force have to say about that?" We were over two hundred kilometers from Nellis AFB, but the government was fussy about their airspace in certain areas.

"The Nellis ATC called the heliport and asked if we were running aircraft tests. Of course we told them yes. We had come out of the fold at four hundred fifty knots and their radar got a hit off of the plane. Then they lost track of us again."

"But their radar can't see the Marble-3A aircraft, it has the RCS of a grass spider." I loved grass spiders, they were misunderstood by most people. The RCS, or Radar Cross Section, of my plane was very small, as it was the civilian equivalent of the same technology that the USAF used in their stealth fighters and stealth bombers.

"Birch Aerospace is writing the report about the radar stuff. Needless to say, a magician is writing that one, too much Supernatural Activity for a normal person to write that."

I chuckled at the phrase 'Supernatural Activity.' That was the catch-phrase for all the weird shit that normal people saw working for a company run by wicca.

"The thinking is that their radar got a hit off the disturbance caused by your plane and six sorcerers coming out of the fold. We don't know how they followed the plane, either."

"Anything else?"

"Stage twelve," Petra waved her hand and a leather binder appeared in it. She opened it for me, flipping past the cover pages to a picture.

It was a picture of green plants in broken trays surrounded by burnt pieces of..."Is this our plane?"

"Yes, it is. Those plants survived the crash, the plasma fire, and regular fire. No solution had been applied to them, they were just plants that Nora had bought from shops local to our hotel, or plucked from the public forests."

"Nora must have been heartbroken," I said. "These plants, they were what the sorcerers were after."

"No, I assured her that you had already promised her a Gold Star for following your plans. She cheered up right away," Petra soothed. "Erin is ecstatic. If we can get them to multiply in our faux dirt...we can grow anything on the red planet."

It all came back to our Mars project. Things were coming together, sometimes in leaps and bounds. Yes, Erin would be ecstatic about those plants, she would probably take to growing them herself.

"Petra, did Nellis send out an investigation team?"

"Yes, they did. Hillary told them that one of our aircraft had to make an emergency landing and then exploded. A team of four came out and poked through the wreckage and left. Oh."

"Oh?"

"The Air Force Captain heading the team hinted that we should make our own airstrip, so as not to tear up the state-owned roads when we crash our planes."

Make our own airstrip. Now I was excited.

"Find out what, if anything, we're allowed to build," I ordered. "Maybe we can find a use for all that junk asphalt after all."

"Yes, sir," Petra grinned.

***

Gemma was partially right, I didn't leave the hospital for almost a week. At the beginning it was hard to even go and take a piss. Nora did her damndest to try and help me, but I had nearly thirty kilograms on her so she had to call for help.

I was recovered enough to go to the premiere of Joseph's movie three months later. The popcorn thing was catching on, and over half the audience was chomping and crunching along with me.

But not Rowan. She was at the premiere with her adopted sister Tara Knight, and just couldn't understand Petra's and my animosity toward her. She was even more pouty when Tara asked me to speak to her in private.

"You seem to have a lot of issues with us," Tara said. "I can't understand why that is."

"You and Rowan, or your...club?"

"All of the above."

"Well, your history troubles me. I don't want to go into detail here, too many ears makes for good gossip."

Tara cocked her head at me. "Interesting idiom."

Oops.That is a reference Jaci would know, not Johan.

"Yes. Such is life in Hollywood, I suppose." She was pretty smart, but hopefully the cover would hold. "You could make an appointment at one of my offices."

"I have a SCIF at my house. You are coming to my afterparty?"

"Sure."

Petra was rather amused that Tara wanted some alone time with me, but gave me something to think about: Tara was single, but she was waiting for one specific man. That would be warning enough to not get further involved with her.

Once we arrived at her house Tara indicated that I should follow her to the privacy booth adjoining her office. It was pretty secure, I felt my phone buzz when the door to the booth closed. Whatever signals the threshold of the room was emitting had shut my phone completely off. "I'm impressed."

"You should be, it's one of my inventions," Tara said.

"I have already relinquished the patents you gave to what became Boulder, Limited and are paying you licensing fees on them, Tara."

"And I thank you for that. I don't know why you decided to be so nice, but thank you."

"Tara, you didn't ask me here to fuss over old business," I sighed.

"No, I want to talk about Jacer Semiconductor."

"Why choose now, today? I have offices, make an appointment. I thank you for providing for Hillary's security, and I actually am paying for that security out of my pocket, but the club in general needs to stay away."

"You have a hold over Hillary and I want to know what it is," Tara growled "Her solar technology can take us into a petroleum-absent future, and you are holding it for yourself!"

"That's because the third and fourth generations of the solar panel technology manufactured that complex are actually based on Birch America patents. Everything generation two and below is still useful and still more advanced than most other companies, and you have access to that."

"Why won't you let us license version three or four?" Tara demanded.

"That's a technical secret, Tara. Be happy with generation two."

"Why?"

"Those panels are under Birch patents!" I grumbled. "Nobody looks at them!" I went for the door on the booth. "Next time, make a fucking appointment."

Petra sensed that I was in a foul mood when I reappeared at the party. "I take it that your discussion didn't go well?"

"You are very observant, Missus Birch."

"Does something need to be done?" She asked. "A little cleaning?"

Petra was asking if I needed a forgetfulness spell put on Tara. "No, leave it alone."

"Let's join the party, Mister Birch." Petra latched her arm through mine. "Maybe we will have some fun tonight."