A Warrior's Return

by Guy Stanton III

  Even if I made it safely to the bottom I would surely perish from frostbite. I wasn’t ready when I was abruptly lifted off of my feet and hooked onto the little wheel contraption that someone had already snapped onto the old rusty cable. With a half choked off scream I started out over the edge as someone pushed me away with a hand to the small of my back.

  Oh God! Oh God please!

  I picked up speed and heard the grinding of the little breaks in the pulley contraption overhead, as it tried to slow me down as sparks kicked out into the night air.

  It was so cold and I was so going to die. I watched the ground looming up closer and closer and I had to close my eyes. I didn’t want to see my end come. It was bad enough that I was going to have to briefly feel it.

  Strong hands jerked me out of midair to an abrupt stop and I grudgingly opened my eyes, which was hard because it felt like my tears of fright had frozen my eyes shut.

  A blanket came out of somewhere and was wrapped around me. I clung to it, as I realized how bad my teeth were chattering. I was going to chip off all my teeth at the rate my jaw was hammering away.

  Suddenly I was in the front seat of an SUV with Katie across from me in the driver seat, “Oh you poor thing!” Katie exclaimed as she cranked up the heat.

  Oh blessed heat!

  “Thank you!” I managed to chatter out.

  After several long minutes the convoy of vehicles began to move down an old logging road. We were all going to get away. It was hard to imagine how that could happen, but it was.

  Dimly I heard Eleanor mutter from the backseat where she lay with her head on Talaric’s lap, “At least the ruddy landing gear deployed this time!”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Unveiled Evil

  I lay on my pile of blankets and literally stared up at the ceiling wishing for relief of some kind, anything to get free from my miserable condition.

  We were held up in an abandoned apartment building in a port city in southern Europe. We stayed low and kept to ourselves as the world outside went crazy.

  I had gotten sick on the journey here and after three days of intense high fever, of which I feared of becoming like my sister, it finally broke only to leave me with the worst cold of my life. I simply couldn’t breathe and snot was everywhere.

  There was no end of the wretched yellow stuff! It was in my head and in my chest and I despaired of ever feeling well again.

  It was morning. I had managed to make it through yet one more dark night. I heard a rustle by my side and I glanced over and saw that it was Talaric kneeling down beside me.

  He had been my one bright spot through this ordeal. He was just so wonderful! He had nursed me, fed me, even kept me warm at night. When he hadn’t been able to help his mother had been there. She was wonderful too.

  He had a syringe of some red looking substance in his hand. He pulled my arm out from under the blessed warmth of the blankets.

  I protested less out of the loss of heat in lieu of the fear of the needle in his hand, “Relax honey, you have a really bad sinus infection and you need this!”

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Something that will help, it’s an antibiotic. There rare these days as they mostly don’t work anymore. But I doubt you’ve ever had one before or at least not for a very long time and it will probably work just this once and see you back up on your feet in a few days.”

  “What did you have to do to get it?” I asked worriedly.

  “Don’t ask.” Was all he said, as he injected me gently with the contents of the syringe.

  “You shouldn’t risk yourself like this for me Talaric! You can’t……”

  His fingers over my lips stopped my worry filled words. His kind warm eyes stared down into mine, as I felt a connection deeper than anything physically possible form between us, “Yes I took a risk to get the medicine and I’d do it again in an instant if it meant that your heart will continue beating. What good is preserving my life without you by my side to enjoy every second of it with? Life without you would be a cold empty shell of an eternity of solitude filled with the responsibility to keep breathing until peace finally came in the form of the grave. I will always risk my life for you, of this you can be sure of Evangelina! Now you need to get your rest. I promise that you’ll be back up on your feet soon honey.”

  He leaned forward and kissed me on the forehead and then he was gone. I couldn’t help the tears that welled up or the deep sobs that escaped me. Why was I crying?

  I really needed to stop. I was half choking myself and making it harder to breathe than it already had been. Krista slipped in beside me and helped me turn over onto my stomach. She pulled my upper body up onto her lap.

  My face turned out to the side on top of one of her thighs, as her hands rubbed my back in a circular motion that helped me to breathe easier.

  “Cry all you want darling! I know I am!”

  I glanced up to see tears washing down her face and I didn’t even know why.

  “Do you know how much I have longed to see the tender and self-sacrificing heart of my firstborn son that he had as a child, but lost as a young man, only to come back out with the strength of a warrior behind it! Do you know how many countless hours I’ve prayed to God that I would see my firstborn son not only right with God, but also happy in life and fulfilling every goal a parent could ever have for their child? Thank you Evangelina! Thank you for being a part of the restoration of my son into the man that I always prayed that he would be!”

  She was thanking me!

  “But I’ve done nothing!” I choked out on a sob.

  “Oh yes you have my dear! God has brought my son around its true, but you have been a part of His Divine plan of restoration. You saw something in my son that inspired you to not only change from who you were, but also risk everything to pursue after him. You gave him the faithfulness of your heart and the promise of a lifetime of being able to rest in your arms. You gave him the chance to form a relationship based on trust and love, which has made him stronger and more complete as a man. Every man has the deep seated need for the companionship of a woman. It’s how they were created to be. I know my son’s heart is in good hands with you and I’m just so grateful to have you Evangelina!”

  I pushed my face deeper against her loving every moment of closeness and acceptance by her of me. She continued to comb her fingers through my hair and I quieted down, loving the caring touch of a mother.

  “When are you two planning on tying the knot?” Krista asked warmly.

  “I hope it’s soon! Everything’s just been so crazy!” I said.

  “I know. It’ll slow down though once we get back to Thunder Ridge. I think you’ll like it there. It’s a beautiful place. A place of security. Admittedly I’m like you in that I would prefer it to be a lot warmer, but perhaps that’s why we were gifted with such hot-blooded males, to keep us warm at night.”

  I really hadn’t planned on it, but I fell asleep listening to her talk of Talaric’s home and I dreamed of experiencing it with him.

  Several days passed by and Talaric had been right, I did feel much better and I was close to being fully recovered and grateful for it. We had been cooped up in the small series of rooms for ten days now while Sparky and Ellanara, who had commandeered one of the rooms worked around-the-clock trying to decipher the location of the ancient battleship with only the crystals and the map to go by.

  They accepted no interference from anyone and we left them alone for the most part, but I could tell that Talaric’s patience was wearing thin.

  The Europe outside was a different place. There was open dissension being shouted about and picket lines in the streets over a long list of crimes. Ellanara had wiped clean the memory databanks of the research facility under the chalet, except for key items of interest, which she phrased into news headline like stories and released to the world at large across the internet.

  The stories exposed a wide range of atrocities that the research-based facilit
y had been responsible for. The stories ranged from assassination plots to plotting and carrying out terrorist activities, even cyber crime.

  The worst offense outlined however, was the proof that the biological pacification drug AR 11, which had been used on rebellious citizens in Europe and in various places in the rest of the world had been an action with disastrous consequences. The residents of the cities that had been sprayed with the drug were rendered in a semi unconscious state for days. Only thirty percent affected by the drug managed to recover. The rest died as they simply lacked the ability to take care of themselves. They died wherever they sat staring vacantly out into space.

  Those that had survived were rendered infertile for life. The rebel movements were effectively pacified for forever and the dictatorial martial law governments ruled the day with little or no opposition to their centralized control over all sectors of life.

  There was also evidence that the facility had done contract research on the effective placement of tactical dirty bombs, which they had sold indirectly through a third-party loosely affiliated with the terrorist group that claimed responsibility for the destruction of the entire eastern seaboard of the United States.

  The attack on the US had led to retaliation by the US that left the entire Middle East a charred fallout zone were little had survived.

  The amount of destructive creativity that had issued forth from this facility in the shadows, had led to a public outcry worldwide for justice. The government of the European Coalition had no choice but to release the researchers and scientists to what remained of an equitable criminal justice system, with the clear implication by the people picketing in the streets that those involved be made to pay for their crimes with their lives.

  The tumult and unrest caused by the broad release of information had been a uniquely perfect way of providing a smokescreen for our escape. Ellanara hadn’t released everything though to the general public.

  She held back all of the information pertinent to what had aptly been named the Stargazer Project. It was a multinational joint venture on the most secret of levels. Most of the information in concern to it was not accessible as it was stored in off-line databanks. Ellanara had been able to find out some alarming things about the project though.

  The project had received a massive input of technology far beyond anything they had possessed before from an Orlandian source such as the one Talaric had encountered. There was a massive pooling of resources and man power with the purpose of adapting to the new technology and the construction of space craft. Worst of all was one of the heralded technologies given by the Orlandian system.

  It was a technology that they had worked on during their long absence from the land of the living. The technology was called Vapor Gate Points of Contact. It was a means of space travel, but it didn’t use water, instead it used electrolyzed gases in the atmosphere to form the gate channel.

  It had limitations to it, only small sized craft could be used and it still needed a planetary beacon array to lock on to. They could take off from anywhere on the surface of the planet though, as they employed a shifting trajectory analysis to estimate for variations from the older established water vortex channels.

  Travel was much faster through them as well and they could not be blocked by an active outgoing signal, no matter how powerful it may be.

  I had never seen Talaric so depressed as he was, when he had heard Ellanara say all of what she had revealed. Our focus previously had been to find the bar-Seth and reactivate the jamming sequence, but now that did us little good. It was no longer an effective means to keep the Orlandian plague bottled up on Earth.

  The enemies first objective was to destroy Talaric’s homeworld, which the Orlandian technological entities had assured their new found faithful was the limiting barrier to the peoples of Earth dominating the entire galaxy beyond.

  They had bought into the hate message entirely and had committed everything in a joint partnership that stretched across nations.

  Even as Ellanara’s words had seemed to crush both Talaric and his father, she had left them with a ray of hope. She had said then that if we could still find the bar-Seth and were able to reach Talaric’s world before the enemy did, then we would have a chance, if we could destroy all the beacon arrays. Without the beacon arrays the enemy craft would be unable to lock onto Talaric’s world.

  Reversely the people of Talaric’s world wouldn’t be able to leave their world in the absence of beacon arrays. Seizing the opportunity presented by even the slimmest of opportunities Sparky and Ellanara had worked around-the-clock day after day within their sequestered room, while the rest of us had tried to provide them with the long grocery list of items that they constantly demanded.

  I frankly was very curious as to what strange creation had occurred within the other room. Katie had tried to peek in once and the doors had slammed shut on her nose. Talaric’s frustration was such that he was ready to rip the door off its hinges.

  That afternoon the door opened and stayed open. Sparky and Ellanara stumbled out of the room looking like death warmed twice over. Talaric was on his feet instantly followed by the rest of us.

  “Have you found it?” Talaric asked with exuberance.

  Both members of the mad scientist duo gestured for us to enter the room. We filed dutifully into the strange looking room. Sparky took a moment to answer, as he cleaned his glasses.

  “Yes, I think we have.”

  This explained what had happened with all the metal roofing and aluminum tinfoil that we had been tasked with gathering. The walls, ceiling, and floor reflected the glowing holographic image of the Earth spinning on its axis slowly in scaled-down model.

  Complex mechanical contraptions in the ceiling and on the floor seemed to be the source of the image that seemed to hang in mid air. That explained all the power requirements. Six generators had been pounding away in the basement of the abandoned apartment complex for two days now.

  We circled around the spinning globe waiting to hear what had come of so much effort. Sparky glanced at Ellanara, “Would you like to explain it to them my dear?”

  “No, it was your discovery. You should have the honor.” Ellanara quickly said graciously. Sparky looked tired, but he was also beaming with pride.

  “Very well then, where to start. Ahhh yes. We tried to trace the signal emanating from the crystals, but it appears to be hopelessly scrambled. We both felt that there had to be something more to the map. We tried everything we could think of to unlock some hidden code within the map, but we came up with nothing time and time again, until I noticed something about the globe map that I hadn’t before. The surface of the globe wasn’t smooth, but instead it was faceted in a diagonal cross-section much the same as this giant cut diamond. I examined both further and discovered that they were identical only off in terms of scale from each other. Then I asked myself what about the two oblong crystals, they had to fit in somewhere. I thought about it and came up with this.”

  Ellanara pressed a button on a remote and the globe of the earth changed to the faceted outline of a diamond, similar to the one we had. The revolving images of both elongated crystals floated out from the central diamond.

  “I came up with this theory. The Earth is replaced as a neutron and the two crystals serve as electrons. Not only do the electrons spin around the neutron, but they spin in a geocentric orbit like this.”

  Ellanara hit another button and the elongated crystals vanished into fast swirling balls of color that rotated around the more slowly rotating neutron.

  “Behold you now have hydrogen, the first element on the periodic table. Add the planetary stresses experienced by Earth to it with the addition of gravitational pull by the sun, moon and the rotation on an axial alignment.”

  The orbit of the electrons was pulled wider slightly and everything was tilted over to the side in an approximation of a rotation around an invisible axis.

  “Now if we take lines off of the points of the crystals w
hich could be simulating the inner workings of an electron, you get this crazy array of lines, but if you eliminate all the lines except for those that intersect at the apex of the diagonal platelets on the globe diamond map you get only twelve lines, as these lines travel into the diamond they are repeatedly reflected off surfaces with the last step of redirection focusing all twelve lines into a single point on the outside of the diamond. Superimpose the globe overtop and this is what you see. The location of the bar-Seth, which I’m afraid dear Eva you are not going to like.” Sparky finished with in summary.

  I groaned at the spot indicated on the globe. It was Antarctica, the coldest place on Earth.

  “This is where it is Sparky?” Talaric asked somewhat skeptically.

  “We’re almost positive of it.”

  “But…but….this is bad Sparky! It’s probably encased in several hundred feet of ice!”

  “Not necessarily.” Ellanara replied calmly.

  “How is that?” Talaric asked.

  “Remember when we were in the bar-Seth’s hanger and I told you there were three thermal generators, but that only one of them was working.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well I wasn’t quite right at the time. I discovered the truth out later, when we were setting the place to blow up. The other two generators weren’t working, because they weren’t there. I also saw that the fallen power ratings coincided with Tadias’s visit to the facility.”

  Talaric looked at her steadily for a moment before responding, “So you think Tadias took the other two generators and erected a force field to keep the ship intact and perhaps even a clear space around it?”

  “It’s possible, in fact it’s extremely likely, as what other reason would he need so much power for. The one generator was weak by itself, because they were designed to help charge each other up. I think it’s safe to say that two of the generators could maintain a force field almost indefinitely, if they helped each other out and their power source remained constant.”