Children of the Sky (The Talari Subversion Book 1)

by Houston V. Grant

  We emerged on the front porch of the Enlil safehouse in Virginia. The FedEx box was just a few feet away, leaned against the front door.

  18

  Shenandoah Valley, Virginia, United States

  Luis joined us and shared the most current information on the mission.

  “I come bearing gifts,” he said, handing me a small flexible disc about the size of a penny.

  “What’s this?” I asked

  “That, my friend, is an Enki electrofilm. A resistance-coded electrofilm.”

  “So you’ve confirmed that there is a resistance. How’d you get it?”

  “There was another border skirmish with the Enki. We recovered a destroyed vehicle with several bodies inside. One of the dead was an Enki officer, with an intact chumahai. We got it off of him.” Luis smiled approvingly.

  I was impressed, but I still had questions. “How do you know it’s real?”

  “Oh it’s real,” he said. “We didn’t even find it at first. Enlil electrofilms separate from the chumahai when you remove them. This one didn’t separate—it pooled with the chumahai and no one knew it was there. It wasn’t meant to be found. Seems they have better electrofilm tech than the Enlil. Beldran discovered it somehow, but he’d have to give you the details. I don’t remember everything he said.

  “The important part though is that we were able to access the stored information. The dead Enki had another electrofilm with a bunch of official military and government information coded with various Imperial ciphers. Requisition forms, orders, weather reports…shit like that. But this electrofilm—that we almost didn’t find—was encoded with a totally different cipher.

  Not only did we nearly not find the electrofilm itself, the encoded data was hidden so well we almost didn’t find it either. It was labeled ‘Holiday’—probably to make it look innocuous if anyone saw it. In any case, we’ve confirmed that the resistance uses electrofilms to identify and contact each other, and we have one now.”

  At his urging, I attached it to my chumahai.

  “The codes update automatically at a random interval,” Luis said. “So channel a little electricity through it to check from time to time for the new ones. They won’t update otherwise.”

  Tati furrowed her brow. “What do you mean by codes?” she asked.

  “You know, ‘the eagle flies at midnight….’.

  “How do we know it wasn’t a set up?”

  He shrugged. “We don’t think it was. We’ve confirmed the dead officer’s identity. He was one of the Emperor’s favored commanders, thought to be a hardcore loyalist. And his cause of death was the actual fight—he wasn’t already dead and then planted in the vehicle to fake it. This is the real deal.”

  Luis was right. This was the break we’d been waiting for.

  La Paz, Bolivia

  Two days later, the three of us were on a late morning flight from Miami to La Paz, on our way to Puma Punku, the location of the final biosim. It was just past 5 p.m. when we landed. Luis had spent a fair amount of time in all the major cities on the continent, including La Paz, and he found us an amazing restaurant for dinner. We sat together in the back where we could see the door.

  It was a pretty quiet night, and even though the weather was lovely, there weren’t a lot of people out. Around 9 p.m. the crowds started to thin out and Luis suggested that we be on our way.

  The city fell away quickly as we drove west on the F1 highway. Soon we were surrounded by empty desert filled with sleeping herds of llamas and alpacas. I reached out to sense for biosims, but didn’t find any. I assumed that they’d be found closer to the ruins anyway so I wasn’t surprised, but I kept checking throughout the drive. There was no light pollution on the plain we were crossing, and our altitude gave us an incredible view of the sky. I wondered how the people who lived here had reacted the first time an alien ship descended from the sky.

  Luis cut the lights for the last couple of miles, but the moon was high, so we could still see the road clearly. As we rounded a final turn, the complex came into full view. Even in scattered ruins it was an awesome sight. I’d read about Puma Punku, but seeing it in person was another thing entirely.

  Luis drove a little past the ruins before stopping.

  “Use this when you’re ready to come back,” he said, taking a small flip phone from his pocket. There’s one number saved in the contacts.”

  I suppressed my initial inclination to tell him we weren’t coming back and instead took the phone.

  “Thanks,” I said. “It might be a while.”

  Luis nodded as if he already knew, then reached out to shake our hands. “Good luck.”

  We got out and watched him drive away, quickly losing the car to darkness despite the moonlight.

  “Alright, let’s find us a biosim,” I said, reaching out again. I’d been feeling for them with no luck since La Paz, but this time the signal came back fast and strong.

  “Might this mission actually go according to plan?” Tati asked.

  “Don’t jinx it,” I said. I was already trying to establish the neural link. The practice I’d gotten grappling with the earlier biosims paid off. This one seemed to actively resist being linked, but I breezed past its defenses and linked to it in seconds. “Got it,” I said.

  “You’re on a roll.”

  I still worried she’d jinx us by talking too much, but it did feel like we were hitting a stride. I commanded the biosim to come to us. I could feel it out on the plains somewhere to the north, just a couple of miles away and coming closer. And, I realized with a start, there was a second one. I’d never linked to more than one at a time. Unsure what would happen, I reached out to the second biosim and with a little effort, I linked it too. The feeling was amazing. Linking to biosims let me feel their emotional state, which, with predators, made me feel like a predator. Linking two of them doubled the effect. I wasn’t sure what kind of animal it was, but they were definitely apex predators. They felt strong, fearless, and powerful. I felt it too. “They’re on their way,” I said. We can just sit here and wait.

  “Just like ordering a pizza.”

  It took almost twenty minutes for the biosims to arrive. I still wasn’t sure what kind of animal they’d be. I tried thinking of what predators existed in this part of the world and couldn’t come up with anything to narrow it down.

  When I could tell that they were only a few hundred yards away I started looking—trying to spot them as they approached. The moon had gone behind a thick bank of clouds and there was no other light on the plain, so everything was bathed in a uniform darkness. Even though I could feel the biosims approaching, I didn’t see them until they were just twenty or thirty yards away. Tati saw them at the same time I did.

  “What the hell is that?” she asked. “Please tell me those are your biosims.”

  “They are,” I confirmed. The approaching creatures were about three feet tall and carried their stout, barrel-shaped bodies on four legs. Even at a low trot, they seemed to flow across the ground—more like advancing shadows than animals. They were dark gray with black spots and big eyes set atop their wedge-shaped heads. Heavily muscled and smooth, they panted from the exertion of their run—wide, gaping mouths lined with rows of sharp teeth.

  I was surprised to see them and glad I got to put some of my Tkosi education to work. “These are ormri,” I said to Tati. “They’re from Tkosa. They were used in ancient times to guard palaces and VIPs on Earth. Good choice for a biosim.” The ormri stopped at my feet and sat back on their haunches. The black tongues lolling from the sides of their mouths softened the appearance of their mouths full of steak-knife teeth.

  Tati had backed away when they first showed up, but she was approaching them cautiously now. “Can I touch them?” she asked.

  “If you want to lose an arm,” I said.

  She looked at me skeptically, but stepped back anyway. “Are you kidding?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “You’re scared of cats but you want to pet the
se?”

  “That’s different,” she said. “Cats are sneaky. These things are too direct looking to be sneaky. I want to see what the skin feels like.”

  I commanded the biosims to remain still and nodded to Tati, who promptly started stroking one of the creatures on its head.

  “That’s so cool,” she said. “They look like they would be cold and clammy, but they’re furry.”

  I thought she was pulling my leg, but I tried petting the other one. She was absolutely right. Looking closely, I could see that they were in fact covered with superfine fur. The hairs didn’t lay down, they stood up straight, but they were very short and packed much more densely than any furred animal on Earth. Altogether, it gave them more of the appearance of a frog than a furry thing.

  We scanned the hair for DNA analysis and uploaded it to Beldran. He confirmed receipt almost immediately, and Tashmit came back with an answer just a few minutes later, although it apparently took nearly a week on Tkosa.

  “We’ve figured it out,” she said. “Whoever was responsible for hiding these shims was ballsy. He hid them under the floor of the Sun Palace. Archaeologists have gone over that site many times and never found them, so they’re hidden using something that only a Talaris could detect.”

  Beldran interrupted, “I think a better reading is that he hid them in the floor of the Sun Palace. As in, in the stone building material. I don’t think they’re buried in the ground.”

  “We’ve been going back and forth about that all week,” Tashmit said. “I won’t argue with Beldran. It’s certainly a plausible reading. You’ll have to figure that part out yourselves.”

  “Where is the Sun Palace?” Tatiana asked.

  We’d seen drawings that showed what Puma Punku looked like at the time of Enlil involvement, but I didn’t remember them well enough to use it now to find the remnants of the Sun Palace. Tashmit sent us a rendering of ancient Puma Punku overlaid with a recent photo. The Sun Palace had stood in the center of the city, at the western end of the east-west corridor that formed the main plaza. Nothing remained of the corridor or the surrounding buildings, and little remained of the Sun Palace. All that was there now were scattered blocks of stone that seemed to lack any organizing principle, although the precision of their form made it clear that they had once fit together. There would be no context clues to guide us.

  We studied the maps and then, accompanied by my biosim friends, went into the site. Even with the information we had, it was difficult to figure out exactly where the palace had stood. There was absolutely nothing there to indicate its original location. And the palace footprint would have been more than 50,000 square feet. Our shims could be buried anywhere in that space, or in any of these blocks scattered on the site. None of them were in their original positions anymore and their current location wasn’t necessarily indicative of where they’d been when the city was alive. A ten-ton gateway that had once stood at the entry to the city had been found at Lake Titicaca almost ten miles away.

  I started by using my caduceus to try to pick up any signals that might be from ancient devices, but there was nothing. Tati was looking intently at an upright row of the massive rectangles of solid granite that littered the area. They were at least ten feet to a side and must have weighed tons. Some stood upright, some had fallen over, but they’d clearly been connected in the past to form some kind of structure. The pieces were precisely machined to fit together along their edges, like a giant puzzle, and there were precise, perfectly linear grooves cut into them, spanning multiple blocks.

  “This was an energy conduit,” Tati said, tracing her finger along one of the grooves. It was about an eighth of an inch across and a quarter inch deep and ran along the entire length of the block to continue perfectly into the next block. “This shit is amazing.”

  I started to ask how she knew, but I began to sense the same thing. “There was some kind of reactor or something,” she said. “I don’t feel it anymore, but it was here.”

  “We’ll ask Tashmit later,” I said. “For now, we’ve got to find the shims.”

  One of the ormri made a whining sound that was remarkably similar to a dog. I found myself reacting the same way I would have if it had been a dog.

  “What is it, boy?” I asked, turning and petting its head. “Do you know something about shims?”

  It whined again.

  “Where are they?” I asked. “Can you take us?”

  It just looked at me with its big, froggy eyes.

  “Shim,” I repeated and it whined again.

  “It reacts to that word,” Tati said.

  “Yeah. It’s coded somehow.” I thought for a moment, then reached into my chumahai and pulled out one of the shims I already had. I held it out for the biosim to sniff, but instead, both ormri stood and growled menacingly. The ruffles on their throats rippled, heightening the menacing aspect.

  My heart rate shot up and instinctively I had my caduceus out. But I could still sense the ormri’s emotional state. They weren’t the least bit angry or alarmed. The reaction was just a display.

  Tati had backed away. “Nate, do something.”

  “I’ve got this,” I said. I recognized it now. This was a programmed reaction. The shims were hidden in such a way that only a Talaris could get to them. These biosims knew where the shims were hidden and were programmed to identify them by sight and sound. This was a programmed reaction to ensure that a non-Talaris couldn’t get these biosims to lead them to the shims. But I could. Showing them what I wanted was the first step. The ability to not be frightened by the display was step two. Through the neural link I commanded the ormri to lead me to the shims I was looking for. They stopped growling, turned together and trotted off. Step three complete.

  They led us to a spot on the edge of the site, went right up to one of the fallen blocks and sat atop it. Tati and I went over and examined the block. It looked like all the others. It was almost perfectly smooth, like polished marble, but the elements had worn it down a bit over time. The narrow channel that ran across the front of the block was maybe a quarter of an inch deep and an eighth wide. There were small sixteenth-inch diameter holes drilled into the channel at regular intervals. They were so perfectly cut and aligned that they looked to have been made with modern tools.

  We both looked the block over for signs of any cracks or cuts, but there were none. I used Electrosense to try to find any cracks, but nothing turned up that way either. Finally, frustrated, I ran a fine flow of electricity through the groove and into the holes. I felt something immediately. I tried a couple more times and on the third try, I felt like something was happening. I heard Tatiana whoop and I looked to see a narrow panel—about the size and shape of a couple of stacked bricks—emerge from the center of the block.

  We pulled it out and there they were. The last three shims. Now we had the complete set. We pulled them from the compartment and put it back in place. Even knowing exactly where it was, it was impossible to see once we’d replaced it. I grabbed Tati and hugged her. Now we just had to find the portal and go through.

  Once we calmed down a little, we called Tashmit via caduceus. She could tell from our smiles that the news was good.

  “Excellent work,” she said. “And I have some news for you. We’ve been analyzing the data from the ormri’s DNA. Same message as before, but the last part would send you to the next location, which in this case is the area in Colombia where Nate found the first portal, so we know for sure the circle is complete. But there was another part of the message. It was added in later—hastily and mostly degraded—but there was enough to figure it out. There is no more portal in Puma Punku. There was an attempt at sabotage way back when these biosims were coded and planted. Which means there is only one known location left with a potentially functional Enki portal.

  “Back to the forest where I first went through,” I said.

  “That’s right. I know it’s a departure from the plan, but you have to go back to the portal that brought you
here.”

  This was unexpected, but not particularly bad. We were both amped up and mentally prepared to go through now, but we’d have that energy again when we could actually make it happen. It just meant it would take an extra day or two before we could head through.

  “Get some rest, eat some good food, and I’ll call you back with instructions.”

  We called Luis back on the burner he’d given us and he was back in thirty minutes.

  We stayed with Luis that night and caught a puddle jumper up to Chocó the next morning. Our agent met us at the airport, as promised, and she had us on a river canoe in less than three hours. None of us spoke much as we went down river. Tati and I were both focused on the mission ahead and our boat driver fortunately wasn’t the chatty type. I rehearsed in my mind all the information I’d learned about Enki society and the intelligence the Enlil had put together about the resistance. I checked and re-checked my chumahai and caduceus, and practiced with all my bioelectric abilities.

  It wasn’t yet noon when we rounded a bend and pulled up onto the same bank where I’d landed with Luis in what seemed like a different lifetime. Our boat driver barely gave us enough time to get out and clear of the boat before he was turning around and speeding back the way he came.

  Without any gear other than the Enki uniforms we’d don over our chumahai, it was an easy hike back to the portal. The last time I made this hike, the threat of a jaguar had taken up space in the back of my mind. But with the ability to Electrosense, I wasn’t concerned about the animals in the jungle.

  We made good time and were standing outside the entrance to the ruins in just a couple of hours. No one had been here since we left—the concealing spike was still in place and everything appeared just as we’d left it. I led Tati inside. I could’ve made my way in the dark using just Electrosense, but Tati, understandably, wanted to see the ruins, so we used flashlights.