The trip goes well.

The three of them travel to Wick, and a crewman of Ralph’s takes them by boat to Aberdeen. There they hitched a ride on a boat headed for London, and there they rented a decent sized boat to handle the trip to their house in Norway.

The trip there went smoothly, with only one visit by authorities to check paperwork. In the time they were in, organized government activity was getting less and less common.

Kira hid inside of a hold during the visit, and there were no problems with it. The inspector was not all that interested, and they had cargo and a matching manifest.

The took two days to get there, and didn’t have to push the boat very hard to get there in that time.

When they got close to Bergen, Kira took over driving the boat. The found the waterway that lead to them, and after taking a few forks on the waterway, they pulled up to a familiar place.

Unfortunately, it was not there. The entire area had burned while they were gone, their house had been destroyed by fire. Absent the boat house and dock, which had burned in large part, Ralph tied their boat off on a part of a wooden pylon which had survived.

John lead them back through the rubble, and to the foot of a mountain behind the house, and found that the outside entrance of his bunker had burned, but found the inner door, made of a lightweight alloy had survived.

The door, the frame and the locking mechanism were badly warped, and he had to pry it open, but found that what was inside had handled the winter quite well. At least the equipment not close to the door.

Some of his equipment had melted or been heavily damaged. Thankfully the fire had stayed outside of the door.

He had sealed the sensitive equipment inside of vacuum sealed plastic, and covered that with heavy tarps.

They also had seeds and other supplies that would come in handy. Tooling, some raw materials, and extra solar cells that would be useful. They had also stored their extra bio-diesel in underground tanks which had survived.

They filled the tank on their boat with the bio-diesel in their home tanks, got a night’s rest on the boat and headed back.

The mood was solemn. They did not know what had started the fire, or when it had happened. There was no sign of any effort to fight the fire, or that anyone had checked the site to see if there were survivors.

In fact as much as it had been designed to blend in and be hard to see from the water, and unconnected to a road or power, after the fire there was little proof any any structure had existed.

They didn’t talk about it, but everyone was thinking the same thing. Had they been there, they might have died. As fast as they healed, that fire had been hot to level the place as it did.

What if it happened in the winter when the waterway was locked in ice? There would have been no escape. The boat house on the water had burned down to the pylons at water level.

John imagined being trapped between the fire and the ice, but ice that would have been melting. There would have been truly nowhere to go.

There was no sex. On the way to Norway they did not have sex out of respect between Ralph and John, still unsure how all of this would work out.

On the way back there was no sex for a different reason, they were all considering their mortality. In an effort to be as safe and remote as possible, Kira and her father had very nearly died.

The trip back was slower, but they stayed well out away from shore, taking their time. They did not encounter any customers of port officials until they pulled back into London.

All three of them checked into a large room in an inn near the London docks, and they waited a few days for Ralph’s people to show up in a boat to collect them.

It was a calm few days, enjoying London, the local pubs and better food than they had on the trip.