Sword of the Gods: The Chosen One (88 page)

“No,” Lucifer sighed,
his expression wistful.  “I'll keep the appointment.  One little bun in the
oven is not enough.  It would be nice if I could find a mate who is fully
sentient
and
can also give my offspring wings.”

Zepar started
laughing, looking at him as though he were joking.

“What’s so funny?”
Lucifer asked.

“Sire ….” Zepar said,
holding his sides.  “You're too modest.  You have fourteen offspring on the
way, not one.  That's why we left your ship in the uncharted territories.  You
have an entire harem on board your ship.”

“Fourteen?”  Lucifer
sat down on the edge of his bed in shock.   Zepar’s laughter began to sound
further and further away.

“Yes, Sire,” Zepar
laughed as though he thought Lucifer was pulling his leg.  “And every single
human female you've gifted to an Alliance hybrid is pregnant, as well.  There
are over three hundred half-human, half-hybrid children waiting to be born. 
All because of
your
efforts.  And the Emperor doesn't have a
clue!"  Zepar shook his shoulder with glee.  "Sire!  You're a hero!”

“I'm a hero,” Lucifer
whispered.  “Yes.  Of course.  Let’s get to that Ministry of Education
appointment.”

The remainder of the
day, Lucifer cross-referenced his appointment calendar to figure out what in
Hades
he'd been up to, what legislation he'd introduced, who he'd spoken too, and
what they had spoken about.  Zepar had invented code words for the back-room
deals politicians often did to grease the wheels of government.  They didn't
write anything down that might be subpoenaed by a grand jury, but all
politicians were expected to keep an itinerary.  There were an awful lot of
‘fudge records’ lately.

Lucifer faked his way
through the Ministry of Education meeting.  The mating appointment was
pleasurable and vacuous.  He didn't even have to use his gift.  The female had
one prior successful mating and only mated with him in an effort to produce an
heir for the emperor's adopted son.  It wasn’t until he got to his father’s
birthday jubilee that a common thread began to dawn on him.  He'd never
experienced a blackout when he met with his father.

He passed through the
extensive security which had been at the Eternal Palace ever since his father
had gotten back from the highest ascended realms:  the body searches, the eye
scanner, the reaction time tests, and the infra-red.  Looking for something. 
What was his father looking for when he ran all those tests?  Dignitaries
swirled through the palace, all vying for a moment alone with the Eternal
Emperor.  Lucifer slipped through the line of well-wishers, anxious to throw
himself upon his father's mercy.  Whatever else was going on, his father was a
scientist.  He might be able to fix it.

“Father,” Lucifer
trembled as he stood before his father and prepared to throw his fate to his
mercy.  “Can I speak to you please?  Alone?”

“Not now.”  Hashem
nodded acknowledgement to the long line of well-wishers who were filing past.

“It’s really important,”
Lucifer begged him.  He trembled, and then did that thing that was forbidden
for mortal creatures to do.  He placed his hand upon the Emperor's forearm.

“I told you, Lucifer,”
Hashem swatted at Lucifer's hand the way one might swat at a fly.  “I don't
know how to fix you.”

“It’s not
that
problem.”  Lucifer kept his voice low so that the well-wishers wouldn't hear. 
“This is something else.  Father … please … I really need your help.”

He shouldn't be losing
time like this.  There was something
really
wrong with him.  Zepar was
taking advantage of his blackouts for some purpose he couldn't fathom.  There
was no way he was losing that much time without Zepar being aware of it.

“Your Majesty,” a
female voice said. 

The Emperor never even
made eye contact with Lucifer.  He turned, immediately, smiling towards the
source of the voice.  Lucifer's gaze followed that of his father, right into
the ice-cold stare of that Bitch, Jophiel, and her flavor-du-jour, father of
her latest offspring.  It seemed Lucifer was not the
only
one yearning
for something a little more meaningful!

“Jophiel!”  Hashem put
his arm around her and led her away from the well-wishers, turning his back on
Lucifer.  “When will you let this fine young man make an honest woman of you?”

“Shhhhh!!!” Jophiel's
cheeks flushed pink.  “We're trying to keep things low key.  You know what the
consequences are to the Alliance if we do that.”

Lucifer’s blood began
to boil.  Here he'd tried for 225 years to fulfill his father's wishes and
produce offspring, spending every available minute that he wasn't performing
the duties of Parliament attempting to ‘perform’ his duty to produce a lawful
heir, and now Hashem urged Jophiel, the only female Angelic who could
consistently produce offspring, to just take herself out of commission?

Memory of how many
times he'd pleaded with his father to pay attention to the problems of his
empire rankled him.  Hashem had skipped town and left Lucifer holding the bag. 
Then suddenly, after 200 years gone, his father had come back, taken one look
at Jophiel, and created a brand-new military position that was the social
equivalent of
his
position.  Hashem had been lavishing attention on the
icy Angelic female ever since.  All because of a freak resemblance to his
mother!  Just like that, he'd been replaced, 200 years of faithful service
running the Alliance in his father's absence just pushed aside and forgotten! 

Lucifer didn't even
bother to say goodbye.  Radioing Zepar, he ordered him to ready his needle. 
Blackouts or no blackouts, it was time to step up the pace and finish unrolling
his plan.

~ * ~ * ~
* ~ * ~

September – 3,390 BC

Earth:  Crash Site

Ninsianna

Ninsianna watched her
husband squat, wings dragging on the ground, as he fiddled with the underside
of a peculiar contraption built out of spare parts of his ship and the
spiderwebs he called
wires
with the handy little spear he called a
screwdriver.
 
Scrutinizing Mikhail do
anything
with the magical devices was always
curious, but these days, with the thoughts of She-who-is coming into her mind
so easily, her husband's tek-nol-o-gee had begun to take on the appearance of
something clunky and old-fashioned.

 “And what does that
wire thingy do?” Ninsianna pointed to the contraption he'd built at the end of
the long, thick ropes he
also
called wires.

“It's called an
antenna,” Mikhail glanced up, his expression one of quiet competence.  “It
takes the message and throws it across the sky so that somebody with a second
antenna can hear it.  It's kind of like playing catch.”

“Is it supposed to be
all twisted like that?”

“No.  I'm cobbling
something together and hoping it will work.”  He wiped the back of his hand across
his cheek and smeared it with the black substance he called 'grease.'  Minutes
turned into hours as he moved back and forth between the chunks of his sky
canoe he was tying together and the wires she knew would jolt you with
lightning, his focus single minded as he tried to make the technology work.

The goddess didn't
need tek-nol-o-gee to communicate over vast distances!  She just did it! 
Perhaps She-who-is might be willing to help?  Ninsianna closed her eyes and
focused inward, picking up the sturdy thread of energy that connected her to
the goddess.  Yes.  Last night's dream was
HER
will. 

Dividing her attention
between the material realms and the dreamtime as Papa had been training her to
do, she asked for information about the people Mikhail was trying to contact. 
Her attention was drawn to the sturdy thread which connected her husband
through the dreamtime to his friend.  Aha!  She followed the thread from her
solar plexus to him, and then a second thread connecting
him
to his
friend until at last she came to the other side.  Oh!  She could
see
his
friend Raphael! 

Ninsianna whispered
into Raphael's mind that Mikhail was trying to contact him, but without
shamanic training, Raphael thought he heard his
own
thoughts about his
missing friend.  Drat!  They would need to use Mikhail's tek-no-lo-gee after
all.  Ninsianna sought the best information available about how to help him do
just that and it was granted to her.

“Aim this … here,” she
walked over to the tripod he'd set up outside the ship and aimed it in a
different direction.

“But those are the
last known coordinates of the
Light Emerging
,” Mikhail said.  “I thought
you didn't understand antennae theory.”

“Raphael is in that
direction now,” she said.  “You must wait until I tell you to throw your
message or it won't make it.  There is  an object in the way.”

“I don't see
anything,” he said.  “It's a clear sky.”

“Not here … up there,”
she pointed towards the sky.  “A big rock.  It will move out of the way in a
little while.”

“Ninsianna…” Mikhail
realized she was in ‘that other place.’  “Don't go too far ... okay.  You scare
me when you do that.”

“I'm fine.”  She
focused on the thread connecting him to Raphael and used it to remote-view the
sky canoe her husband was trying to communicate with.  “Why do you have giant
insects on your ships?”

“You can see them?” he
asked.  “I keep getting images of them, but I can’t remember anything about
them except a name.  Glicki?  The memory is still buried.”

“All will be revealed
when She-who-is needs you to know,” Ninsianna gave him a cryptic smile.  She
journeyed further into the stream-of-consciousness of She-who-is and spoke
continuously about everything that she saw, but she was no longer aware of what
she said.

Mikhail said they
needed to send the message at nightfall … something about the sunlight
interfering with the signal and the planet aiming the signal in the wrong
direction.  Focusing on what that meant, images of solar dynamics jumped into
her mind, her blue planet one of many spinning around a sun.  Flares emanated
from the sunlight and interfered with the ‘subspace radio signals' Mikhail
spoke of.  It was so beautiful, all the pretty little stars and planets
rotating around one another like a child's mobile.  They would have a brief
window to throw the signal between the goddess' pretty little baubles so it
didn't bounce off of one of them before reaching the other side.

“It’s spooky when you
divide your consciousness like this,” Mikhail said.  He watched her as he wired
up the equipment on the tripod, not quite hiding his unease behind his stoic
mask.  She understood he didn't deliberately hide his feelings from her.  It
was simply habit. 

“It’s kind of spooky
when you enter the killing dance,” she said, not paying attention to what came
out her mouth.  “You enter the dreamtime when you do that, you know?  You just
don't realize it.  Raphael's coloring is gold … darker than the Evil One … but
he's good … I like him … he's a good friend.”

Mikhail scrutinized
her, the screwdriver paused in his hand.

“You can tell all that
just by … doing … whatever you’re doing?” he asked. 

Ninsianna understood
her husband was a creature of logic.  To him, the dreamtime was nothing but a
myth, a comforting place people went when they died.  It was curious, how
readily his people accepted having an immortal creature as their emperor, and
yet rejected the notion these creatures had powers beyond the technology they
created and their very long lives.  Ninsianna sought information to help him
understand the stream-of-consciousness she now swam through.

“There is a scientific
principal for the dreamtime,” some other consciousness spoke through her, not
her, or the goddess, another traveler perhaps?  “The subatomic particles that
make up the universe connect All-That-Is in a unified theory of physics.  Life
is consciousness solidified into physical form.  Consciousness is pure energy. 
Any two minds can connect across infinite time and space simply by joining
their neutrinos inside the time-space continuum…”