Son of Tesla

SON OF TESLA: Chapter 9

PETAR ROLLED OFF THE Koschei and spent a few moments gasping for air. On his back on the carpet, he dropped his head and rolled his eyes up and saw the inverted image of Jem carrying his mother and sister out of the living room. The older woman was still alive, although she was leaving a trail of blood behind them. He'd have to get her to a hospital.

The trio was moving only slightly faster than chilled caramel, so Petar gave himself some time to catch his breath and check himself for wounds. The light-deflector field had held longer than Petar had dared hope, but he was still disappointed to see it go. Fermion rifles weren't kind to quantum splitters. Or anything, for that matter.

On the drive down from upstate, he'd patched his shoulder where the Koscheis had hit it in the CIA building, but he'd just taken three more shots here in the Parsons' living room. The first had hit him in the exact same spot as the one he'd received knocking Brodham out of the way, right on his left shoulder. That had smarted.

The second fermion bolt had seared across his right cheek. Petar could handle a quantum shock more than probably anyone else on this planet, but a few inches to the left and it still would have been a fatal hit.

The third had torn directly through his lower abdomen.

When a fermion bolt strikes matter, it subdues its properties at the quantum level. According to particle physics, only one fermion can occupy a particular quantum state at any given time. The first fermion rifle Nikola Tesla built had been designed to sense the types of fermions in their path, then imitate them in a quantum instant before impact. The result? Whatever the bolt hit simply winked out of existence.

That was an issue: Nikola had been trying to subdue the Volosian natives, not erase them.

So the fermion rifles got an overhaul. Massively increased energy propellants. No more quantum imitation. In fact, Petar's father had reversed the sensors to ensure that the fermion bolts were different from what they were striking. Not much. A half-integer spin in either direction. But enough to avoid...unwanted fluctuations.

The final result was an instantaneous burst of energy, almost indistinguishable from the way a lead bullet would rend its target, followed by a slow decay of the matter struck. The wound would refuse to heal. Weeks, sometimes months later, the cells would break down into a mush. In a person, in anything organic, it would spread like a cancer. If untreated, the wound from a fermion bolt to the fingertip could destroy a person within half a year.

Petar had ways to treat a fermion shock. This planet didn't.

If his father invaded, the world would be caught with its pants so far down its ankles it'd only be able to see Tesla coming if it looked between its knees.

The abdominal hit had to be taken care of first. Petar gauged that he'd already lost a pint of blood from the gaping wound. He wiggled his fingers and a green light streaked from the inside of his right elbow down to his wrist. A thin, white fluid oozed from the tip of his index finger. He lifted his shirt up at an angle past FIRST ASSEMBLY CHRIS- and ran the index finger along the edges of the wound. It was about the width of a peach, the edges scorched black. With a thin line of the white fluid spread across the whole rim, Petar clenched a roll of belly flesh in his hand and squeezed the top of the hole against the bottom.

He laid his head back and ground his teeth. The pain was excrutiating, but he could feel it working. The nanobots in the fluid were stitching together the wound and excreting a boson film that would negate the after-effects of the fermions.

After a mental count of thirty, Petar released the skin on his stomach and checked to make sure the seal was tight, then repeated the process on his shoulder. Finally, a touch along the scatch on his cheek. The wound had barely released a drop of blood, but that didn't matter – it could still haunt him the rest of his life.