Children of the Sky (The Talari Subversion Book 1)

by Houston V. Grant

  They all laughed. My story sounded ridiculous.

  “Do you have a license to hunt lions?” he asked. “Lion hunting is illegal without a license. Or perhaps you were hunting rhinos? Perhaps you killed a rhino just over that hill.”

  We stood silent for several moments.

  “We can pay you,” I said. “We just want to go.”

  He snickered. “We will take your money. And your guns and whatever else we want. And we will leave you here for the vultures.”

  My bird had arrived. By the time they heard the footsteps and whirled it was too late. The terror bird crushed the first guy’s skull with one strike of its massive beak, then clawed the guts out of the second guy before the first one had stopped twitching. The other two ran, but didn’t get far. One tried shooting the bird, but he was too scared to aim straight and didn’t hit anything before it clawed him down. The last one collapsed to his knees in gibbering terror as the bird approached. He looked up just in time to see its head coming down at him. It was the last thing he ever saw.

  I was glad to be freed of the threat from the poachers, but I didn’t relish watching them be pecked and torn apart.

  Yaro cringed at the attacks, and as fearful as he’d been of the bird before, he was twice as fearful now. I couldn’t watch—just hearing the bird eat was disgusting. But it was the only way to be sure to get rid of the bodies. Fortunately, it ate quickly, and fifteen minutes later, not much was left. Through the link I could sense the bird’s pleasure. It had barely eaten in 6,000 years.

  Yaro looked equal parts fascinated and disgusted as he watched the bird clean its feathers after its meal. For a minute, I thought he was going to vomit, but he pulled himself together. All he said as he walked back to our truck was, “I am not digging another hole.”

  I was back in St. Louis two days later, and headed to Enlil through the Cahokia portal. I texted Luis, who promised to call ahead to let the Enlil know I was coming. He still wouldn’t tell me how he contacted them though. This is incredibly inefficient, I thought, as I headed out to the portal. I hoped the Enlil had found a better way to communicate or test our data in the time I was gone.

  Tati and Tashmit were waiting for me when I exited the portal. It was a warm night in Enlil.

  “Welcome back, Electric Man,” Tati said when she saw me.

  “Thank you,” I laughed. “Is that what you’re calling me now?”

  “That’s what we’re calling you,” Tashmit said. She walked up and kissed me like she’d missed me forever, then Tati did the same.

  “It is nice to see you,” Tati said, “but we’ve got things to do, so we should go.”

  During the transport back to base, Tati told me what she’d been doing since I’d been gone.

  “I made it to La Jolla in time to see my mom before she passed,” she said. “I wasn’t going to go talk to her or let her see me but when I got there, I couldn’t resist. I just wanted to let her know that I was ok. The nurses said she was lucid, just very frail and getting weaker. She knew me right away.”

  Her eyes teared up as she told me the story, and Tashmit reached out to hold her hand.

  “She recognized me right away and we both started crying and I just went and hugged her. She kept asking ‘how, how, how?’” Tati laughed bitterly. “I told her that I’d been taken by angels and that I’d been fine all these years. She asked if I was an angel.”

  She looked much more relaxed than she had the last time I’d seen her.

  “I’m glad you got to go see your mom,” I said.

  “I stayed with her all day. She wanted to call everyone to come see me, but I told her that I couldn’t let anyone else see me. But she was so happy. I was with her when she passed, and she was still smiling.”

  I reached over and hugged her again. “Are you ok?”

  She took a deep breath and exhaled fully. “Yes. I’m ok. I’m glad I got to go. I’ll see her again.”

  Tashmit rubbed Tati’s back and afer a few moments had passed, she gently steered the conversation.

  “Tati’s been here for almost an Enlil month while you were gone. We’ve been training together a lot. She’s pretty damn good at Kvona now.”

  “Is that right?” I said.

  “Yep,” Tati snapped back. “And other things.”

  She and Tashmit laughed together at that. I didn’t ask, but it was good to see her smile again.

  By then we were pulling into the vehicle bay. One of Beldran’s juniors was there to take the samples I’d collected. I handed them over and watched him hurry off, then turned to Tati and Tashmit.

  “I’m curious to see what you two have learned with all this training you’ve been doing.”

  They both smiled lasciviously which was exactly the reaction I was hoping for.

  “Let’s go,” Tashmit said and the three of us went back to her quarters.

  Tati was up early the next morning. She said she had something to take care of and left me and Tashmit to sleep in, but promised to join us for our afternoon briefing. When we gathered that afternoon, all the usual suspects were there, except for Tatiana. She’d hinted she might be late, so we started without her. Everyone gave me a quick round of congratulations on a successful mission, then we turned to the future.

  “We’ve analyzed the samples from the terror bird,” Beldran said. “DNA was as fresh as the day it was made. Everything about our theory seems to be right. The form message was there with the information we expected—where to find the next set of shims and biosim. There were some degraded base pairs in the section of the genome that was message-encoded and the whole message was truncated—the Talaris who wrote it seemed to be concerned that he’d been compromised—but I’ve had my top people working on it and we’re pretty sure we know where the next location is. I think the Talaris who encoded the bird didn’t hide his shims anywhere near it. He hid them together with the next biosim. Not sure what sense that made, but—”

  “That’s great,” I said. “Where is it?”

  “Let’s see if you can solve the riddle,” Beldran said. “I’ll give you three guesses. The message says the shims and biosim are to be found ‘wedged in the cloven hoof of the mountain king, where it rises alone from the plains.’”

  I thought about it for a few seconds, then decided I didn’t feel like playing.

  “Let’s get back to that,” I said. “I have other questions. How did that terror bird end up being a biosim? Those things have been extinct for over a million years.”

  “Yes, that was interesting, right? I had thought the ancients always used local species so they would blend in, but apparently not. I presume they got DNA from fossils and cloned it. That thing was pretty cool, huh?”

  “So am I going to encounter a dinosaur biosim somewhere?”

  “No, of course not. The DNA becomes too degraded after about ten million years. Even for us. You don’t have to worry about dinosaurs.”

  “But anything less than ten million years old is a fair possibility?”

  He just shrugged. “I mean, I guess. I wouldn’t worry about it. You said you did well at controlling it. That’s apparently the hardest part—developing that initial ability. But now that you’ve crossed that bridge, you shouldn’t have any more problems.”

  “That’s reassuring,” I said. “So let’s get to it. Where’s the next spot?”

  “You two are lucky,” Beldran said. “It’ll be a nice little vacation. According to the message from the terror bird, we believe the set of shims and the next biosim are together in Spain. ‘Wedged in the cloven hoof of the mountain king, where it rises alone from the plains.’”

  He looked at us expectantly, as if repeating the riddle would somehow make us recognize what the hell it meant. We looked at him blankly.

  “They’re on a mountain named Pedraforca,” he said with a shrug. “In Spain…just south of the Pyrenees.”

  I was impressed. “You guys solved that really quickly,” I said.

  “Well some
times we’re good at our jobs,” Beldran said with a grin.

  “You definitely are,” I said. “Which brings to mind another problem. This is too complex to keep going back and forth from Earth to here every time I need an answer or some help. We need a better connection.”

  “Great minds think alike,” Tashmit said. “We were thinking the same thing. And we’ve figured something out. You’re going to love this.”

  She handed me a small, flexible, rectangular object about the size of a credit card. “We call this a magic lamp,” she said. “Affix it to your caduceus and you’ll see why.”

  I fiddled with the thing for a while without figuring how to get it to attach. The Tkosi enjoyed watching me struggle.

  Tashmit finally showed me the trick to making it work. “If you touch it the right way, it wraps itself around the rod and grips it tight,” she said, with a perfectly neutral expression.

  “Sounds like someone I know,” I muttered under my breath.

  She smiled before she took the caduceus and card from me and made them fit together. “See?”

  Just as she said, the card became flexible like melted plastic and wrapped itself around the caduceus, blending in with the rod.

  I took it back from her and turned it around, trying to see a seam where the card fit together, but there was none. I channeled a little trickle into the rod, but if it was doing anything new, I couldn’t tell.

  “Ok, now what?” I asked.

  “It’s a magic lamp,” she said. “You know what to do with a magic lamp, don’t you?”

  I thought she might be pulling my leg, but I rubbed the caduceus with my thumb and a bluish light began to emanate, then quickly opened and condensed into an image of Tati’s smiling face. I was confused. “Where are you?” I asked

  “It really does work!” Tati beamed, not answering my question. “It’s like the Facetime thing!”

  Seeing how amazed Tati was by modern technology was always cute, but I was underwhelmed. I opened my mouth to say something, then stopped, looking for words that wouldn’t be offensive. “This is cool,” I finally said, “but it really is like Facetime. I can already videochat with my phone. I presume I don’t need cellular service or wi-fi for this though?”

  Tashmit just smiled. “Tati, where are you right now?”

  “I’m in another universe!” she sang. “Chilling by the pool in Miami. How’s everything in Enlil?”

  I was smiling now. This is what I wanted. “Everything in Enlil is pretty good,” I said. Tashmit put her hand on my shoulder and I could feel her affection just from that simple gesture.

  Beldran cleared his throat, interrupting our little moment.

  “The magic lamp works with the caduceus to establish a quantum entanglement field that lets us share data packets trans-universally. In lay terms, it lets us talk in real time between universes. You can scan organic material from the biosims with this too and send us the data. We can figure next steps immediately.”

  “Facetime, alien style,” I said, quoting Tati.

  “So we can talk to each other now,” Tati said. “What else does this thing do?” She looked great in the zebra-striped bikini she was wearing.

  “Here’s the really cool thing it does,” Beldran said. “Tatiana has a caduceus now too, that’s how you’re connecting with her. And like I said, this works via quantum entanglement. Because of their size and power limitations, the amount of data that the caduceus can transfer between each other is limited. But that capacity increases logarithmically in proportion to proximity, so when they’re close they can break down and reform atomic and subatomic particle matrices.”

  He grinned excitedly at this, clearly expecting me to know what the hell he was talking about. I didn’t.

  “Ok Beldran, I understood the words you said, but I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “It means that when you’re near to each other, you can use the caduceus to teleport to each other.”

  I remembered Kelel’s lesson that the messenger gods were all known to be able to step between the worlds of men and gods at a whim. This would make sense.

  “How close do we have to be?” I asked.

  “I’m not entirely sure,” he said. “Given the power output of the caduceus, I’d say within 5,000 miles.”

  I was floored. That was way better than what I was expecting to hear.

  I stayed in Enlil until the next morning then returned to Earth on the open window and was back in Miami by the evening.

  Tati came over, but we were both dead tired and tomorrow we would start on Mission #2. Sleep came easily.

  14

  Barcelona, Spain

  Pedraforca was a big tourist attraction—it was a favorite of hikers and climbers. It had such a distinctive appearance that they put it on the flag of Berguedà, the county in which it was located. I had some qualms about whether we’d be able to find and extract ancient alien tech from a place that saw so much traffic without drawing attention, but I was feeling good otherwise. And it certainly didn’t hurt that this hunt was going to take us through some of the most beautiful countryside in Spain.

  It was just past 8am when we landed, and not much was open in the city yet, so we checked into our hotel and set out to explore. We planned to stay in Barcelona for the day, to acclimate to the city and be sure no one was on our trail. If all was well, we’d head north into Catalonia in the morning. The plan was not to use any concealment on this trip to conserve energy in case of another emergency like we’d had in Pakistan.

  I couldn’t be certain, but I felt confident in our determination that the description was referencing Pedraforca. I repeated it in my head again: wedged in the cloven hoof of the mountain king, where it rises alone from the plains. I’d looked at pictures of Pedraforca a hundred times after Beldran’s briefing and the description made sense to me. Pedraforca was in northern Spain, south of the Pyrenees mountains, and just as the description said, it rose all alone from the plains. The mountain had two ridges that when seen from head-on looked like a goat’s cloven hoof. I assumed “mountain king” referred to a mountain goat, and we’d find our shims and our next biosim somewhere in between the ridges. We spent most of the day eating our way across the city and stayed out drinking in the Gothic Quarter until almost 3 a.m.

  The next morning we got up early to rent a car and hit the road. We drove up the coastal highway for a while, then turned inland where the coastline gave way to rolling hills and farmland. We entered Berguedà within a couple of hours, transitioning from the flat plains of the valley to the foothills of the Pyrenees. Looking at the landscape before us, I was reminded of a lyric I’d heard before—the rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain—though I couldn’t place what I knew it from. I asked Tati.

  “It’s from My Fair Lady,” she said as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.

  “Oh,” I said. “I don’t think I knew that. I’ve never seen it.”

  “You’ve never seen My Fair Lady?” she asked incredulously. “It’s a classic.”

  “No,” I said. “I’m not an actor. And I hate musicals. And I wasn’t alive yet when it was popular.”

  She smirked at me, but it was hard to stay annoyed in the presence of so much natural beauty. The landscape we were driving through was an idyllic pastoral scene if ever there was one. The mountain rose stony and resolute in the background under an iron gray sky and the land swept up to meet it. Colorful wildflowers spotted the grass in counterpoint and terracotta houses dotted the foothills, some of them bounded by stone retaining walls that looked to have been there for centuries.

  Pedraforca sat within a national park, and when we rolled up I greeted the gate guard in perfect Catalán. He was startled to be greeted in his native tongue by someone clearly not Catalonian, but his shocked expression quickly gave way to a big smile and he waved us in. We passed through the gates and continued upward as far as possible before parking. There were campsites and hikers all around and we found a like
ly spot among a group of campers and pitched our tent. Our tent was made for easy setup and we were done in less than twenty minutes.

  “When was the last time you hiked a mountain?” I asked Tati.

  “Let me think,” she said. “Umm… never.”

  “Well you’re in for an aerobic treat,” I said cheerily.

  We put on our packs and started up the trail, joining a slow but steady trickle of climbers making their way up. It was very steep and we walked quickly, but with moderate use of our bioenhancements and chumahai we were barely tired. We were easily the fastest people moving.

  Every so often, I would reach out with Electrosense. The mountain was full of life, but I wasn’t picking up a signal from a biosim. It didn’t bother me though—I remembered how long it had taken to find the biosim near Kilimanjaro and just kept climbing. Our destination was the high pass between the two ridges. In other words, we planned to wedge ourselves into the crook of the cloven hoof.

  Even with our chumahai it took us nearly an hour to reach the pass. As we got there, the land leveled out immediately. It was nice to be walking on flat ground again. The valley was rocky and arid and sparsely tufted with patches of grass that grew wherever there was a finger’s worth of soil. The peaks to each side and the valley stretching out before us gave me the impression of standing inside a bowl.

  I reached out again and got a flash of a biosim signal that disappeared as quickly as it had appeared.

  “It’s here,” I told Tati.

  “You felt it?” she asked. “What is it?”

  “Don’t know yet. I only felt it for a split second before it disappeared, but it was definitely a biosim. It’s further down the valley. And since I got just a flash of it, it must be on the move.”

  We watched the ridges as we walked, but other than birds and small rodents, I didn’t see any wildlife and my Electrosense confirmed the paucity of fauna in the area. For at least the twenty or thirty yards that I could sense, there wasn’t much.