Johan Birch

When I was done with my inspection, Norman asked if he could approach some of the other high-end machine shops and offer them replacement parts for their tables. All of the work we were doing was internal to Birch America, and we were only running at sixty-five percent capacity. I told him to give it a shot.

I did remind him of something that Jason had learned from his father. There were certain machine parts that we could not export, the very designs regulated by international treaty. He was actually surprised that I knew about such things, and promised to check every order against the master lists before he even would consider making parts.

I was almost back to my helicopter when Marci and Grace popped into existence beside me. Grace immediately folded back out, leaving me alone with a scowling Marci. "Need a lift?" I asked.

"Sure."

I pulled open the door and gestured for her to get in. I got her squint look, and she started to climb in, but slipped on one of the footholds. I managed to catch her halfway, but her ass hit the ground anyway. I pulled her up, gestured to the cabin and this time offering my hand for assistance. She made it in, and I closed the door behind her.

After I climbed into the cabin on the other side, the pilot started the engine. This particular engine was much quieter than the engine that came with the helicopter. Marci was actually surprised when we lifted off the ground with hardly any warm-up and very little noise.

"You want to talk, talk."

"Did you find out what you needed to know?" Marci demanded.

"Actually, I did. Your third quarterly shows growth of a quarter percent. It's good, not great."

"We were going good until you came and bought Christian-Brooke Fabrication from underneath us!"

"Did you truly understand what was wrong with your scientific division?" Marci shook her head. "It was underfunded for the most part. All of the prototype projects were yielding positive results but with no immediate return. That division would have dropped the whole value of BSP ten percent by this time."

"How do you even know that? You have to put spies in there for what? Current events?"

"Precisely," I nodded. I held up the report. "Do you want some advice?"

Marci rolled her eyes. "Sure."

"Do a smart, short outdoor advertising campaign. Five, maybe six boards facing inward toward Silvertown. Remind women to check their nails, remind their significant others to take those women out to dinner at your restaurants."

"That's somewhat sexist." Marci panned.

"No, it's not," I countered. "Do you even know what that word means?"

Marci was getting ready to blurt out what was her patented, irritating line: I'M A MOTHERFUCKING GENIUS, and SHAME ON YOU FOR NOT KNOWING THAT!!!

But she didn't, she just turned and stared out the window. "Where are we going?"

"It's an agriculture project at the place somebody nicknamed 'Gravelton,'" I answered. "I can arrange for your transportation once I get done there, or you can call your travel agent."

"Who?" Marci asked, turning to face me.

"My wife, Petra, can't travel by folding, so her daughter Aysun rescues her from the effort it takes to create a portal. She lovingly calls Aysun her travel agent, because Aysun will drop her off then vanish again."

"Oh, that sounds funny when you say it like that," Marci said. "You know, having this little heart-to-heart with you is fun."

Don't hold your breath, Marci.I promised Petra that I wouldn't get involved with any of you.

***

I gave Marci my phone when we landed at the test site. She didn't call for a ride, saying she wanted to hang with me for the day. I refused her request, saying that everything we were doing was proprietary. She tried to argue that the reports I had gotten ahold of were secret documents, and I countered with the fact that she had practically handed them to me.

Marci gave a wary glance at the surrounding desert. She admitted that even though we had come in by helicopter, once she was on the ground it looked dangerous. I promised her that everything was okay and slipped out of the cabin. The pilot didn't start the rotor until I was a safe distance from the pad. He didn't want to sandblast his boss, and I didn't want to get sandblasted.

When I first started working as the boss, I was very pissed at my travel limitations. Birch America was scattered around the southern US, as well as interests in the northwestern US and southern Canada. I liked to drive, and I didn't mind being driven, but it took too damn long.

The idea for the battery-assisted helicopter was initially a random musing. If we could design semi trucks powered by electric motors and batteries, we could do a helicopter just as easily. Right? Not really. To make a helicopter battery-only would take a large amount of battery supply. The more mass, the less efficient they would be.

I ventured something else: If we had hybrid trucks we could have a hybrid helicopter too? There was a hand raised, but I told him to let me finish. Most of the energy a helicopter uses is the hover for take-offs and landings. If we used a motor-powered rotor to get the aircraft to altitude, then engage the turbines for straight-line flight, we could do it.

Their collective heads exploded. I told them to have an open discussion and give me the best scenario. A doctor on my right mentioned something about 'fawd,' and I stopped him to get clarification. He spelled it out for me, then I told him that I understood. FOD or Foreign Object Damage, was the bane of aircraft pilots everywhere. More than once Jaci Stone had watched soldiers 'de-FOD a tarmac' in preparation of taking a flight somewhere. The battery-powered takeoff and landing of the helicopter could reduce the possibility of FOD to the turbines at either end of the flight.

The consensus was that my helicopter idea was feasible and they could have drawings and test data by the end of the month and a prototype in three. I told them to run with it, I was tired of walking everywhere.

Marci was flying off in that first generation of helicopter, and the second generation was just around the corner. Since she had taken off in my ride, I'd have to drive to Jacer Semiconductor. First I would make my inspection of the fields and buildings that made up Gravelton.

The car, wonderfully tuned for desert driving, was a treat. Since it was completely electric, all I heard on the drive was tires on the pavement. I was parked beside one of the EV chargers and had hooked up the cable when Jericho, one of my assistants, came running around the corner. He started hyperventilating and apologizing for the fact that he wasn't there to hook up my car because he was on his lunch and begging me not to fire him. I chuckled and waved him down. It was okay, I told him, I had to eat every once in a while too.

A third of warehouse fourteen was now populated with etching tables. These devices etched solar cells into an aluminum plate doped with silicon and a few rare earth metals. Then a stainless divider was imprinted between the cells. When the plate was done, the energy emitter that changed the three-oh-six stainless to nine-nine-nine stainless was applied.

That emitter was the single most important technology I owned. If it were to fall into the wrong hands, any piece of stainless steel could be made indestructible. That would include everything from bullets to cars to tanks.

If someone or something would invade my warehouse, the etching team would 'pull the keys.' That would start a countdown to the destruction of the tables. The emitter would, of course, be the first thing to melt down. If those keys were not properly reinserted, boom! The keys were not labeled, only my engineers knew which key operated a specific machine. But any person trying to invade would have to get past the door first.

We had learned something from the vault doors that Grace and Aysun had cut through to get into Miranda's lab. Those doors were unlocked by presence. There were no biometrics or voice prints, it was just presence.

The normal people and magic users, all they had to do was think. Something, anything, and the machine measured that. For talent-negative people like myself and Gemma Margus, we just had to be ourselves. Any movement that we had done for the system before became our key. My favorite was stomping my feet to get sand out of the treads. Gemma's was to cross her arms and impatiently tap her finger.

I watched my crews with pride. Each table turned out two panels per hour, about fifteen per day, and I had twenty tables. For as much as I would have liked, we couldn't run the tables at night. Most of the table was twenty-four volts, but the etching lasers were four hundred and eighty volts. We couldn't easily duplicate that power requirement at night. It would be possible, if we had enough batteries, but most of that energy would go to waste. Plus, we could only make so many batteries. We needed those on other projects, like my helicopters. Yes, I wanted to be able to fly everywhere.

I made my way up to the front office, where Goldie Chase, the woman who was managing the company for me, was having her lunch. She assured me that she wasn't having any problems with equipment or staff, and I was going to take my leave when she asked me to close the door.

I closed the door and sat opposite her at the conference table. She admitted that she was having some problems with external forces. A man had approached her, asking for information about Jacer Semiconductor. Before she could call for help, one of my security teams had swooped in and convinced the man to go elsewhere.

I figured it was one of the Salucci boys getting antsy. What did they want with Hillary's company? Why were they going the wiseguy route?

Before I had the chance to fish my phone out of my pocket, it rang. Noel, the chief of detail gave me the tactical rundown of the event. She added that the man was Luca Salucci, and they had gps-tagged him for the hell of it.

My instructions were simple: In a couple days, snag the highest-ranking person they could find and ask them to meet. I needed to sit down with them and tell them to stay away, face-to-face.

Then I decided to go for a drive; somewhere, anywhere. Mika, a guard assigned to me from Birch America, delivered a BMW coupe to the front door of the main office building. When she got out, she pointed to a button on the dash and said that one worked. When I slipped inside, I saw the button was labeled 'Invisibility Field.'

That might be fun.

For some reason, my car ended up on The Fifteen, a long stretch of expressway that connects Las Vegas with Los Angeles. Mika's poke at the 'Invisibility Field' button was actually a joke, you weren't really invisible to people, just to technology. I hit the button and dropped the hammer. One kilometer passed, then two, then the nearly five hundred kilometers passed like the wind. Once I slowed back down, my mood went back to 'sucky.'

I didn't know where I wanted to go once I reached LA. The condos that Jaci had once owned had recently come up for sale, so Petra bought them for me. But I didn't feel like going to them right now, even though they were furnished. For some reason, someone had taken everything out of the condos, even the flower boxes. I obviously couldn't go to The Hills house, seeing those little munchkins would make me cry like a baby. That was if I made it as far as the house without being shredded by both magical and technological wardings.

After some random driving I took the exit to go to North Angeles. I stopped in front of Jaci Stone's house and walked up the driveway. The door was unlocked, and I went inside to take a look around. The furniture was gone, all of it. Not a dish remained in the cupboards, not even a crumb on the floor. I moseyed out to the garage and descended into the cavern. The god's tear was still there, whole, like nobody had ever touched it.

"It has always replenished itself," a woman's voice said from behind me. "Magic is always being used."

I turned to face her. "Why here, gaia? Is this just some supernatural septic tank where all the gold gets flushed into?"

Gaia giggled. "That works."

"What's wrong with my house?" I asked, not really expecting an answer.

"Your friends and family have decided to shed everything that reminds them of you."

Oh, that doesn't hurt.

"This house was supposed to go to Starr and Pete," I sighed.

"You don't want to know why I came here? That's usually the question my children ask when I come to them."

"Gaia, as much as I appreciate you looking me up? No, I don't want to know. There are some times, like right now, I wish Joshua would have let me go."

"You can't seriously mean that," gaia scoffed.

"Today started out 'eh' and migrated to 'sucky.'" I took a look around. The cavern itself was depressing me. "I'm going outside, you coming with?"

"We can talk about this later," gaia nodded.

"So it's important enough to come visit, but not important enough to blurt out?"

"Precisely. You'll come to figure it out, Johan."

I saw movement in the street after I exited the garage. There was what looked like a security team setting up, but outside the warding. "Who are you?" One of the women demanded.

"Johan Birch," I replied. "Are you guarding this house?"

She cocked her head at me. "I'm Shehzadi, this is my partner, Nadia."

"You didn't answer my question," I said.

"The house guards itself," Shehzadi blurted out. Her hand immediately went up to her mouth.

The clothing, just the way they wore their gear, told me something. They were well-equipped and that stance? They had military training. "Who do you work for?" I asked.

"Sir, please step onto the sidewalk," Nadia said.

The second I stepped through the warding, they pounced on me. I couldn't believe that these little pixies were trying to put a power hold on me. Then I felt it, they were using magic to try and bind me, not knowing I was nearly immune to it. I didn't want to hurt them, so I merely twisted my body which brushed them away. I saw them weighing the odds. I was a big bear, weighing more than both of them put together, a head taller, and magic didn't seem to work on me. I didn't get a chance to think about what they were going to try next because Calleigh popped into existence between them and me.

Calleigh had never come to my rescue before, it was always Aysun. "Calleigh?"

"Ooh, newbies," Calleigh giggled. She was just like Grace, always poking fun.

Aysun popped into existence next. Seeing as how Calleigh had Nadia and Shehzadi under control, she backed me up away from them "Father, what are you doing here? It is dangerous, and they'll catch onto you."

"This house doesn't belong to Jaci Stone anymore. They're selling it."

"What?" Aysun asked.

"Everything is gone," I whispered. "Just like the condo."

Calleigh joined me and Aysun. "Those girls belong to the four fifty-seven club."

"Hmm. I guess they managed to put themselves back together after all."

"The people who killed Jaci?" Aysun asked.

"A renegade killed Jaci," I sighed.

"Do you want the house, father?" Aysun asked.

"Sure. Who's our real estate guy?" I asked.

"Mom will have it for you before the end of day tomorrow," Aysun promised. "We need to drop a forgetfulness spell on those two."

"Make it so," I said. "Let me get a head start."

"Where are you going?" Calleigh asked.

"That little pad in the parking dazzle that Samantha gave to Jaci Stone," I answered. "The only place in the city that I can feel at home right now."

"I understand, father," Calleigh gave my shoulder a pat. "What I don't understand is how you broadcast to me."

"We'll figure that out later," I nodded. I got into my car, then took a long look at the two women who tried to jump me. The four fifty-seven club was raising itself from the ashes, and we needed more information on that.

***

Petra was at my little building the next morning. "You have this glorious condo, and you're sleeping in a shoebox," she teased.

"Sometimes it is the small places that make me feel better, my wife," I said. "Did Aysun tell you about my attackers?"

"Your attackers? Those little wannabes? You could have wadded them both into a ball and made a three-pointer!"

"In any case?" I got off the cot that suited me just fine. A billionaire and I slept on a surplus Army cot.

"Yes, they are four fifty-seven security. It appeared that they were watching the main entry point of the neighborhood warding when you went zooming through there. Since your Beemer hadn't been previously cataloged entering that neighborhood, they came for a look-see."

"Why were they there at all?" I asked.

"Manning the fort to see if Jaci Stone would make an appearance," Petra answered. "They won't remember you stopping in front of Jaci's house, Calleigh saw to that."

"Let's hope she did a good job, they were just newbies, but still wicca." I stripped out of the t-shirt and underwear and went into the bathroom. Petra followed, watching me as I took a piss and slipped into the tiny shower.

"She did," Petra finally said. "Why do you want Jaci Stone's house?"

"Because I don't want anybody but family to have it," I replied.

"How do you know it's for sale?"

"The house was empty, just like the condo. It was cleaned physically, and probably psychically. There were no memories left there, none at all. If I were a betting man..." Man. "I'd say the realtor just hasn't put the sign up yet."

"I wonder why they did that," Petra mused. When I stepped out of the cubicle, she eyed me hungrily. "Goddess. Would you even fit through those doorways?"

"We'll find out. Why did you have to make this body so big?"

Petra stepped forward and grabbed a fistful of my chest hair. It both hurt and felt good at the same time. "This body is yours. This is your hair," she grabbed a handful with her other hand. "This is who you would have been if you hadn't been subconsciously manipulating your DNA, one only has to look at any of Jaci's sons to see that."

Yes, Jaci's sons were big. Correy and Mathis were the only sons who knew that I really was their father. I had run into a few of my other sons in LA, and they didn't really look directly at me, but through me. It hurt. "Yes, I know."

"Johan, my husband, I will get that house for you. It will be yours." Petra let my chest hair go. "Anything you want."

"Thank you."

***

The helipad that I shared with Brookstone Pointe was ready to take on my helicopter. Only engineers observing the helicopter perform would know how special it was. The engine would shut off, and the motor engaged the rotor in style. I liked hearing those motors engage, and was happy that we managed to do it with almost pure ethanol. We would be 100% ethanol soon, we just had to get the process down. Making the process widely applied? That was a different problem.

I was in my office for all of an hour when I got a call on my cell. The Saluccis had grabbed Nora, but let her go after a few hours. She was given a message to bring back to me, she told me that they would like to negotiate a price for Jacer Semiconductor.

Shit.Damn.Fuck.

Petra wanted to come to the meeting and I told her no, I could protect myself. She offered a counter: Take a Revenger along with me, holding the awl out for me to make my 'call.' The man who showed up was not a Revenger whom I had seen before, he introduced himself as Shane. We followed an older Lincoln Town Car into a warehouse on the outskirts of Vegas, but the doors didn't close behind us.

Shane got out and opened the door for me. "You know the rules, sir. I cannot act unless they attack you first," he whispered.

I chuckled. "Hopefully the only thing that's going to be thrown around in here are insults."