Sorry – late again ….. busy start to the week

At that moment, it occurred to Andrew where he knew the name Wolfgang Oldham from. It was in his grandmother’s journal. Then the girl returned, and if he thought she was tall, the man who came with a was even taller.

“Hi. I’m Xen Wolfson from the Department of Interdimensional Security and Cooperation, Disco for short. Destiny tells me you’ve had problems with an invasion from one of the Japanese worlds from the Alliance, yes?”

“Yes, Tier Four Tomkya out of Tier Three Natori. Tomkya thought they could just move in and take over after the Plague hit their own world, and then later, Natori joined them when their Tier 2 was rendered incommunicado, and they were suffering from both the plague and the zivvy dissolver. We destroyed one gate early, leaving them with only one working gate. This limited the number of troops they could push through, and in any case, Tomkya didn’t have that large a population to start with. I gather the Japanese worlds are a lot harsher with local inhabitants when they take over?”

“Yes. Not that the Germans or the Russians are that much better, but we generally didn’t slaughter them completely, as happened on a lot of the Japanese worlds.” Roland answered when Andrew looked in his direction.

“Anyway, we killed a lot of them, thousands and thousands. They were using office workers and gardeners on the front lines as their losses mounted. It didn’t help that our mentalists were generally better than theirs once they got a bit of experience.”

“Destiny said you had mentalists, and I can tell you’re quite powerful.”

“Yes. There was a lot of genetic engineering going on before our nuclear war. In fact, some historians blame genetic engineering for the war. The first strike on American territory was at the Transworld travel complex, where they were using the tellies to power the first interdimensional gates. There are no surviving records of how far they got. In fact, there are very few records at all, but my grandmother left a journal where she mentioned a few details about what was happening when the war started. She had been injured and was in a hospital just far enough from the complex that she survived the nuclear strike.”

He saw the tall man and the girl following his account closely.

“That was about eight hundred years ago. My grandmother made her way through various countries and parts of the world until she finished up in Ostraya. She apparently died when I was young. I say apparently because she had faked her own death on numerous occasions over the centuries. In her journal, she mentions Wolfgang Oldham as being one of the other tellies working with the early transdimensional gates. Yes, I thought you would find that interesting.”

“This is another Earthbook world, Uncle Xen,” Destiny said, looking all excited.

Uncle Xen was looking thoughtful. “Do you know what your grandmother’s original name was?”

“AnnaKarina.”

“Oh, shit. Another one.” Uncle Xen said, looking alarmed.

“Have you heard of the Russian super soldiers?”