Death by Chocolate (8 page)

Not on Guber's watch, anyway.

At the half-hour mark, the first batch of carob-tainted chocolate set off the alarms on the
testing machine.

After three hours, nearly three hundred pounds and sixteen different levels of
contamination by carob had been identified.

At the six-hour mark, all the bells and whistles and flashing lights had gone off and all
the different messages Guber had programmed into the data display screen had been used. There
was nothing more to see. His gizmo was working exactly as he had planned.

It was getting boring, quite frankly.

After an exhausting double shift of work, Guber watched Kevyn's cousins leave, one by
one, and decided to be the hero this time around. After the third cousin popped back to his own
enclave, he turned to his best pal and threatened to be the evil Faerie godfather for Kevyn and
Sophie's first child if his old friend didn't go home to his wife for at least a couple hours.

"Yeah, domesticated and hog-tied and tied to the wifey's apron strings," Guber muttered,
when Kevyn didn't even pretend to argue with him. He waited a good five minutes after his
advocate popped out, then he let himself relax and grin.

He was definitely jealous. If Kevyn wasn't his absolutely best pal in five different
worlds, he knew he might have been tempted to throw a few monkey wrenches into the
mix--keep his friend working late or interfere when Sophie tried to make contact.

Funny thing was, every time he got an image of Kevyn going home to Sophie after a
hard day in the advocate's robes, the picture morphed into Guber trucking down a yellow brick
road where Epsi waited at the end. To make the image even better, she sat on top of a glass hill,
holding the world's biggest goblet of diet cherry cola out to him in silent invitation, with a
mischievous grin on those gorgeous lips of hers.

Okay, so he was mixing images from several different faerie tales, but he doubted
anyone bored enough to monitor his thoughts would be irritated or offended.

The upshot of his noble gesture was that Guber was entirely alone when the last lab
technician rolled out the airlock doors and popped his life-support system bubble to leave for the
night--and a newcomer who had to be an Eraser rolled in through the airlock door.

"Man, how are you guys going to take over the multi-verses, when you don't pay
attention to details?" Guber groused softly.

Case in point: the lab coat on this newcomer was lavender shading toward rose. And the
life support bubble wrapped around him had a bluish sparkle in its sheen, when the bubbles
Guber created were peacock green.

"But we do," said a raspy, tending-toward-adolescent voice from behind him.

Guber ducked and rolled, and then called up the battery of self-defense spells he had
kept tucked into a side pocket of reality. Being semi-sentient, they were permanently activated
and raring for the chance to incinerate someone or something.

In retrospect, he realized he should have done that in reverse order--activate, then
evade.

A flash in several dozen nearly invisible colors three-quarters blinded him and stunned
all his other senses. Guber felt like he was drowning. His eyes nearly popped out of his skull as
air pressure all around him fluctuated wildly. Sounds warped toward both ends of the scale, and
time itself stretched like taffy in the middle of a vicious pulling party.

The initial attack was strong enough to shatter his life support bubble.

Chocolate fog
was his first thought. Then a nasty chuckle bubbled out of
him--which wasn't good, because clean air was in short supply--when his second thought was
Carob
.

Then it was a little hard to think for a few seconds as his self-defense auto-bots went
into annihilation mode. The nice thing about creating spells that were semi-sentient was that they
were fiercely loyal, and they got highly infuriated when their originator was damaged or even
made slightly uncomfortable. Guber hadn't figured out yet if they thought of him as "Daddy," or
if they had reasoned out that if he was destroyed, they ceased to exist.

And if they
had
reasoned that out, he might need to do some revisions to his
auto-bot defense spells. Why? Because every science fiction book he had ever read warned that
when computers or anything that was semi-automatic started to think, they soon evolved to the
point where they considered themselves superior to the Humans--or in this case, the slightly
rebellious, tinkering Fae--who had created them.

But that was a consideration to leave for later. Right now, he had to follow up on that
brilliant-yet-nasty thought that had tapped him on the shoulder, but that he hadn't quite turned
around to look square in the eyes yet.

His senses started to clear up and settle back to normal levels as he propelled himself
away from the zone of
batter-to-a-pulp-but-not-quite-before-subduing-the-enemy-and-alerting-the-proper-authorities.
His self-defense auto-bot spells were only dealing with the two Erasers
who had snuck up behind him. There was a third, and were probably more, sneaking through the warehouse.

The carob-contaminated chocolate had been sorted and stored by the ratio of
carob-to-chocolate in each contaminated item. Some of the lab technicians working with Guber
had nearly wept when they found the best quality of dark chocolate intermixed with carob. It was like
dribbling mud into a bottle of five hundred-year-old brandy to give it body and texture. Right
now, Guber was willing to bet that his attackers would only see chocolate in front of them and
not realize they were walking into the equivalent of a poison ivy bath, until it was too late.

He had to work more on instinct than sight, trusting that he had his bearings straight
while his physical eyes and sense of direction were still clearing up. Guber reached with his
magic for the tank of carob-laced chocolate syrup and sent a streamer of it toward a patch of
warmth on the other side of that literal forest of chocolate trees, bushes, and flowerpots, liberally
interspersed with a menagerie of chocolate statues of birds, deer, unicorns, hydra--whoever sent
that one needed some serious psychological therapy--cats, and of course, the requisite hordes of
chocolate bunnies. After all, Administrator Queen Mellisande had been elected just at the start of
what was the Easter shopping season on Earth, and procuring chocolate bunnies was easier than
breathing.

Guber made a mental note to test all the bunnies in the morning--if he survived until
morning--because they definitely had come from Human factories. Why hadn't he thought of that
before?

Forget asking about what you didn't think of
, he scolded himself as he grasped
fist-sized boulders of contaminated chocolate using magical streamers, and flung them like
pebbles in multiple slingshots at his invisible enemies.
Just think, period!

Squawks and sounds of slipping and banging into heavy objects, and then the thuds of
other heavy objects falling, and causing other, less heavy objects to fall in succession, gave
Guber a better idea of where his enemies were. And gave him a good idea there were at least six
more. Well, that was more like it. At least eight Erasers had been sent after him. He would have
been insulted if they had only sent two or three.

Which meant that next time, they would send more, because he was proving right here
just how strong and talented he was, and how good at multi-tasking. That was a sign of strong
royal talent. Which gave him an even bigger shot at the throne, if it was ever re-established.
Which it wouldn't be, if he had anything to do with it.

He briefly wondered if exposure to the carob in the air was causing brain damage.
Maybe his particular allergic reaction was scattergun thinking. He would have to check into
that.

Later!

Now he could see them--seven dark brown, stumbling figures emerging from the falling
aisles of stored chocolate in all their weird and wonderful shapes. Guber semi-melted the
chocolate he flung at them, aiming at their faces now that he could see them.

To a man--or a woman, in the case of two of them, he found out later--they all licked
their lips as they cleaned their faces. He shot more warmed, adulterated chocolate at them, taking
his ammunition from the seventy-five percent carob bin, and made facial masks. Just like he
thought, and like he would do if someone insisted on slapping soft chocolate practically into his
mouth, they all ate some of it.

Several--and he made mental/magical note of which ones--reacted to the taste, showing
some shock. That marked them as more sensitive and alert than the others, and probably the
brains of the operation.

Then someone screamed and started clawing at his face. Guber nodded in somber
satisfaction and finally pulled the alarm that would bring in the Council's security forces. A
moment later, he called for the medical team that had been on hand to take care of any industrial
accidents during that day's work.

The medics arrived before the security forces, and they had all nine Erasers subdued and
spluttering in the decontamination showers. At the same time, they started administering
Benadryl intravenously to three who had puffed up like Violet Beauregard in both Willy Wonka
movies.

Kevyn and two of his advocate cousins showed up about five minutes later. He thought
of administering a genetics tracking test to the ones who showed the most violent reactions to
carob.

It was like frosting on the cake for Guber, when one Eraser learned he had ninety-four
percent royal blood. His anguish turned to terror when he looked around and saw four of his
cohorts giving him that easily interpreted look:
You swore to destroy all claimants to the
throne. Do your duty, starting with yourself.

"The problem with those one-track minds of theirs is that they realize one big glitch--if
they start with themselves in purifying the gene pool," Kevyn said with a smirk, "they won't be
able to continue with anyone else." He settled back in the lounge set aside for the testing team
and raised a half-empty beaker of diet cherry cola in toast to Guber. "Have you ever thought of
going into security systems for a living? You're a one-man destruction zone."

"Thought about it. Then I realized I was basically lazy, and fighting for my life is too
much work." Guber was surprised to see that the level of celebratory liquid in his beaker was
only down about two swallows. "It'd make a great video game, though," he offered, more to
distract himself than Kevyn.

He couldn't evade the thought that had just occurred to him: Epsi had a large percentage
of purple blood, too. Not as strong as his, but enough to make her a target. What if some Erasers
had managed to infiltrate themselves into the detention dimension where she was staying until
the investigation cleared her of suspicion?

"How soon until we meet up with Epsi again?" he asked, in as casual a manner as he
could manage.

Then he realized that was a mistake, because he had never mastered the art of fake
casualness in anything. Kevyn sat up straight in his thick, puffy-cushioned lounging chair, put
his beaker down on a side table that materialized about half a second before he let go of his
drink, and narrowed his eyes at Guber.

"So that's what it is," his friend muttered. "I was wondering."

"Wondering what?" He winced when his voice cracked.

"Don't worry. My folks thought of the danger to the purple-bloods under sequestering
right after the Heredity group made contact with you. They have round-the-clock monitoring."
He chuckled when Guber relaxed and sank back in his chair--and guzzled half his beaker of diet
cherry cola without thinking. "You and Epsi aren't exactly two of a kind."

"Yeah, well, you know what they say about--" Guber choked when he realized he had
been about to say "in-breeding." Which meant he had been thinking about breeding. And all the
preliminaries. Including dating and courtship and commitment.

Yeah, but this is Epsi you're talking about here,
that usually-silent voice of
common sense whispered in the back of his mind.
You really like her. She's an uber-cool
chick.

Yeah, but this is the Epsi you haven't talked to in decades, and you only realized
today she was a cool chick. Don't rush into things,
another voice whispered back, from
another portion of his mind.

Guber decided he had too many voices back there. It was time to evict some of them.
But which ones?

Later!

"Speaking of too much work, I'm thinking we need to set up a better line of defense for
anybody with more than forty percent purple blood," he said, sitting up again. He tossed his
beaker of diet cherry cola into the air and it winked out before it splattered. "I'm thinking we
shouldn't incinerate that carob-tainted chocolate when we find it."

"You're not suggesting we store it, are you? It'll end up being more of a problem than
nuclear waste back in the Human dimensions," Kevyn retorted, frowning.

"Not store it. Use it. Like for self-defense." He grinned, replaying in his mind the
streamers of carob-tainted chocolate he had shot almost directly into the mouths of his attackers.
Eventually, criminals would catch on that there was something wrong with that chocolate, but
until that happened, their automatic reaction would be to eat some of it. Between their varied
allergic reactions and the effects of really strong Benadryl, they wouldn't have a chance.

* * * *

When she finally went to bed, Epsi slept for more than a day. She found three messages
from Guber waiting, encased in delayed-message globes hovering over her bed when she woke
up. The first reported on the testing that had begun on the warehouse of chocolate gifts. Epsi felt
something go warm and gooey inside her when he said several times he wished she could be
there to see his gizmo working. She told herself not to dither over whether he wanted her there
because he wanted her to be proud of him, or if he just thought she should be there since she had
been instrumental in the genesis of the gizmo. Trying to decipher how Guber felt and thought
would give her a headache, and she didn't need any more right now, thanks very much.