Sword of the Gods: The Chosen One (16 page)

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Galactic Standard Date:  152,323.02

Command Carrier: 
'Light Emerging'

Colonel Raphael Israfa

Raphael

 “We all warned you
this would happen,” Major Glicki said.  “The fact this was offspring number
twelve
she asked you to sire should have been warning enough, if the five-hundred page
waiver didn't get that through your thick skull.” 

Glicki had been friends
with both Raphael and Mikhail since they'd all gone through basic training
together.  On duty, his hard-working Mantoid first officer was formal and
carried out his orders without question.  Once off duty, however, Glicki spoke
her mind.  Since her hard, green exoskeleton made facial expressions difficult,
Mantoid expressions of feeling were usually delivered via the position of their
head and limbs, whirring underlings, a slap to their shells, or in Glicki's
case, her biting wit.  They met now in the officer's lounge, a sparsely
decorated but comfortable dining room where any officer above the rank of
Lieutenant was allowed to gather to eat, play cards, or pass time away from the
scrutiny of the enlisted members of their crew.

“I had hoped I would
make a good enough impression that she would keep me around,” Raphael slurred. 
Angelics had a woefully low tolerance to alcohol, unlike Mantoids, who could
drink most other species under the table.  Unfortunately, the  potent green
liquor did
little
to alleviate the ache which had taken up permanent
residence in his heart.  He stared down into his glass.  “She definitely seemed
pleased with my performance during the … um … you know …” 

Raphael trailed off. 
He didn't wish to go into detail about just how many stops he'd pulled, or just
how pleased Jophiel had appeared to be while he'd been servicing her.  Glicki
was partially responsible for his ‘command performance.’  She'd forwarded racy
‘chick flicks’ to his office to educate him about what females
really
wanted before his first ever mating appointment so he would perform well.

“The Emperor should
have pulled other races into the military millennia ago,” Glicki said. “It’s
not fair the burden fell to the hybrids while the rest of us sat on the
sidelines.  The price you've paid for being policemen for the entire galaxy is
too high!” 

“Hey!”  The alcohol
caused Raphael to be uncharacteristically caustic.  “I should be grateful. 
I’ve got command of my very own command carrier in the middle of east
buttfuck!”  His golden feathers rustled with irritation.

“Shhhh….” Glicki
hushed.  Several lower-ranking officers leaned their way, pretending not to
listen.  “Jophiel doesn't promote people to positions they can't handle.  She
chose you
because
you were worthy of promotion, not the other way
around.”

“I think I liked Prime
Minister Lucifer’s proposal better.”  A dimple appeared on one cheek as he gave
Glicki an evil grin.  “Keep the little woman confined to a homeworld, barefoot
and pregnant, like Shay’tan does with the Sata’an females."  He scoffed at
the expression of disbelief his female first officer gave him.  "Hey!  I'm
not greedy.  I don't need three wives.  Just her.”

“You saw how fast
Jophiel shut down
that
cockamamie scheme!”  Glicki whirred her
under-wings in disgust.  “It was the one time Jophiel defied the Emperor and
skipped a mating cycle.”  She knew Raphael well enough to know that he was
joking.

“As Jophiel goes,”
Raphael raised his glass to toast a common saying about their Supreme
Commander-General, “so goes the hybrid fleet.” 

“Here, here,” Glicki
clinked Raphael’s glass before downing it.  “Every female hybrid in the fleet
refused to show up for their mating appointments until Parliament shot Lucifer
down.  Including Lucifer's!”

“I think it was the
only time the alpha-stud ever experienced a dry spell,” Raphael laughed.  The
Alliance Prime Minister was both an example, and a caricature, of what their
species had devolved into.  The brightest and most beautiful of all the Angelics,
in his desperate attempt to perpetuate his own bloodline, had become a symbol
of their pending extinction.

“Jophiel showed
him
who was boss!” Glicki laughed.  “There's some sort of history between those
two, if you ask me…”

“You’ve been watching
too many of those Mantoid soap operas again,” Raphael slurred, taking another
sip of the potent green beverage.  “Though she sure has a way of sweet-talking
others around to
her
way of thinking.”

“Females are better
commanders then men,” Glicki's heart-shaped head tilted to one side.  “That’s
why Mantoid females join the military and leave the males home to rear the
mantids.”

“And bite their heads
off after mating with them.” Raphael kicked her hard exoskeleton under the
table in a Mantoid gesture of joking.

“Urban legend!” 
Glicki's under-wings hummed in a Mantoid laugh.  “Our females haven't done that
for millions of years.  Unlike Angelic females, who still regularly indulge in
the practice.” 

Glicki kicked Raphael
right back.

“Ouch!”  Raphael
protested the insinuation that Jophiel had bitten his head off after mating
with him, not the kick.  “Though perhaps it's an apt description of the way I
feel right now.  Perform … and be cast aside.  As far as the Emperor is
concerned, we are all expendable.”

“Jophiel is the best
commander the Alliance has ever had,” Glicki said.  “And very beautiful.  It's
only natural that you're smitten with her.”

“I hate to admit it,”
Raphael said, “but border skirmishes
are
down since Jophiel got put in
charge.  She is good at what she does.”

“At least I have never
heard Jophiel called ‘
the Destroyer
.’”  Glicki referred to the general
who headed up their own branch of the military.  “But she doesn't take any
shit, either.  Females have three times the number of connections between the
two hemispheres of the brain, you know?  It helps us think of other solutions
to problems besides blowing things up.”

Raphael toasted Glicki
and downed the entire shot.  Glicki immediately poured two more.  In Mantoid
culture, it was the larger, stronger females who usually served in the
military.  Glicki’s attitude about their Supreme Commander-General was not any
form of feminism, but simply Mantoid ideals about the proper scheme of things.

“Unfortunately for our
poor, beleaguered race,” Raphael said, “forcing hybrid females to join the
military only made our numbers go down, not up.  Our females can only conceive
one offspring at a time and it takes our young many years to mature.  It's too
bad the Emperor didn't engineer us to lay eggs like
your
species does.”

“Poor planning on his
part, if you ask me!” Glicki said.  “Probably why Shay’tan chose the Sata’anic
lizards to be the basis of his armies.  They possess all the benefits of
humanoids, but none of the problems!”

“At least the lizards
get to see their own hatchlings,” Raphael said.  “
-If-
Shay’tan lets
them live long enough to be gifted a wife.  Or three.  Now
there’s
a
temptation worth putting your rear-end in the line of fire to receive!  A
home.  Three wives.  And a few hundred hatchlings to perpetuate the glory of
your name.”

“The Eternal Emperor
has done the best he could to solve a problem,” Glicki said.  She downed
another shot.  “You always speak fondly of your days being raised at a youth
training academy?”

“I didn't mind,”
Raphael shrugged.  “At least not until I went to basic training and they paired
me with Mikhail.  He was raised by a real family, you know?  It made me
wonder…”

“I know,” Glicki
said.  “And see what it got him?  He refuses to let the shipboard Angelics even
touch him, much less reproduce with one of them.”

“Seraphim only take
one mate for life!”  Raphael donned a mock emotionless expression as he
mimicked his best friend.  He laughed, then frowned.  “Personally, I think he
has the right idea.  The older males say that’s the way it was for
us
until the Emperor made his ‘be fruitful and multiply’ decree to save our
species from extinction.”

“At least one of your
mating attempts is bearing fruit.”  Glicki  touched his forearm with an armored
limb.  “I hear the number of hybrids who have been unable to produce even a
single offspring is now up to eighty-nine percent.” 

“Everything the
Emperor tries has failed,” Raphael said miserably.  “It’s too bad artificial
insemination doesn't work with our species.  If he doesn’t pull a rabbit out of
a hat soon, our race will cease to exist!”

“I hear the Leonids
are fewer than 3,500 now,” Glicki said.  “And the Centauri aren't too far
behind them.  It's rumored that even if every single one of them were to start
bearing offspring tomorrow, it's still too late.”

“3,462,” Raphael
said.  “They've become very secretive lately, refusing to deposit their cubs
into the training academies.  It's said they've been secretly getting married
and rearing their cubs on board their ships with them in warrior prides.  Like
their ancestors used to do."

“If I was going to
pass into the dark night,” Glicki said, “I would want to do it as a family,
too.  Who can blame them?”

“The Emperor splices
our genes together to make super-soldiers no fighting force could ever hope to
defeat,” Raphael said, “and then he inbred and used us for cannon fodder for so
many generations that we bred ourselves out of existence.  We’ve gone from millions
of each
type
of hybrid, to less than thirty thousand combined.”

“The Emperor needs to
get your people off these damned ships,” Glicki leaned in and whispered, “and
let you raise families naturally on a planet.  Like he does with his precious
seed races.  Not make you engage in this ridiculous breeding program where
every child needs a different father and gets shuffled off to a training
academy so you can try again the next breeding cycle.  If you ask me,
that’s
the problem.  Sentient creatures aren’t meant to live that way.”

“Mikhail’s people
tried that,” Raphael said.  “And look where it got them?  The Emperor gave them
their own planet, and then he disappeared for 200 years and did nothing to
protect them.” 

Raphael stared over
Glicki's shoulder at one of the monitors that streamed live video footage of
the launch bay.  As he watched, another squadron of scout ships finished
refueling and took off again.  Jophie had given him one week.  Every spare ship
he had
right now was out searching for the last living full-blooded
Seraphim.  A man who had chosen to remain celibate rather than subject himself
to the same heartbreak Raphael experienced right now.

“In a few years I'll
retire on a full pension and find a mate to hatch a clutch of mantids,” Glicki
said.  “It isn’t right … what the Emperor does to you.  I don't care
what
the
old races say that were around when your species was created.  You should have
the
same
rights as every other species in the Alliance.  Not be ordered
to bow down to the naturally evolved races simply because She-who-is was the
one to tinker with our DNA through evolution instead of the Eternal Emperor in
one of his laboratories!”

The direction of this
conversation was considered treason.  For all the Emperor's talk about free speech
and free will, those rights had no place in the military, which had its own
separate system of justice.  With hybrids forced into service at birth and only
disgorged either in a coffin, or at an advanced age, his species didn't even
possess a legitimate voice with which to complain. 

Glicki, on the other
hand, would be free to speak her mind once she retired in three years.  It was
ironic that only the ‘bugs’ so many hybrid generals had initially fought to
exclude from the military now spoke on the their behalf while the rest of the
Alliance was oblivious to how precarious the situation had become for the
armies who defended them.

“For all the misery I
feel now,” Raphael sighed, “I wouldn't give up the five days I had with Jophiel
for anything.  She was …”