His wings unfurled as the hallway opened up into the flight hanger that was normally filled with smaller ships, but was now filled with men. His men. No. Not his men. The Emperor's men. Not only had ships been redeployed with no apparent rhyme or reason, but crewmen within those ships had been partitioned, many shipped off to bolster the crews of ships left behind until, in some cases, only the ships themselves remained … all carrying commanders she was certain were loyal to her. All carrying crewmen she felt would be sympathetic to their mission. And all carrying the best, the brightest, the smartest this Alliance had to offer. All about to be briefed on the biggest manhunt in the history of the Galactic Alliance.
Raphael spied a lone shuttle left parked at the side of the massive room, next to the enormous observation window which could be opened to conduct scientific observations of the planet below. Beyond the window the gas giant they orbited had spun their fleet around to the dark side of the planet.
"I thought you cleared the hanger deck?"
"You've got to stand someplace," Glicki laughed. Her humming under-wings indicated she found this funny. "I knew there was no way in Hades you'd authorize me to set up a stage, so I left the shuttle for you to stand on once you realized how difficult it would be to address your men standing on the ground."
His men.
Nearly five thousand of them. An entire brigade. But of course! That's what a brigadier-general commanded. A brigade. Raphael gulped. The Emperor's promotion had come so unexpectedly, so easy, on the heels of his promotion to Colonel that it had not yet had time to sink in. Brigadier-general. And these were his men. His men. And now he had to explain to them why they'd all been yanked off of ships and missions and deposited in the middle of nowhere to answer to the Supreme-Commander General's lover.
The weight of the task he'd just been charged with pressed down upon his wings, real at last. He hesitated.
"C'mon," Glicki's gossamer under-wings hummed with reassurance. "This will be just like that movie I sent down for you to watch. The one where the Prime Minister makes a big speech about not going quietly into that dark night just before go they take on Shay'tan's armada? Stand tall. Make a speech. Then let's go hunt them down."
"This isn't one of your Mantoid soap operas," Raphael stared at the sheer number of faces standing before him. Five thousand men. 97 battleships. And hundreds of shuttles and fighter ships to support those ships. "This is real, Glicki. And it's all on me."
"You think you're the first guy who's ever realized he's bitten off more than he can chew?" Glicki tilted her heart-shaped head. Her mandibles spread wide in a smile. "What do I always tell you?"
"Fake it 'till you make it," Raphael's voice was barely audible over the ruckus of 5,000 men crammed into a hanger bay designed to hold no more than 1,000. His men.
"So there you have it."
Without giving him a chance to have second thoughts, she lifted her hard outer-wings to expose her softer flight ones and leaped into the air, her wings not quite giving her the true flight of an Angelic, but the combination of strong legs and gossamer wings allowed her species some semblance of flight … hop-flight … the reason their species had been tapped to fill in the gaps in Angelics ranks. She landed on top of the shuttlecraft she had parked there as a stage. A stage. He was about to give a speech that required him to stand on a stage.
Glicki tapped the comms pin on her breast pocket to queue up the PA system before he had a chance to faint and announced, “Attention!!! Brigadier-General Israfa is on the deck!”
The men snapped into crisp lines, a well-oiled machine that millennia of specialized training had turned into an army no force in the galaxy could defeat … not even Shay'tan. Ready or not, it was time for him to take up the mantle the Emperor had laid across his shoulders. Commander. Of an unrecognized, and unacknowledged, fifth branch of the military. Black ops. This convoy did not exist.
'Find me that Holy Grail so all Angelics can follow their heart…'
He had a mission to complete and he would do it. Swallowing his fear, he unfurled his wings the way he had often seen Jophiel do whenever she addressed the troops, not raptor-like the way the other generals did, but with the grace and strength of a swan. He was her man, which is why she had chosen him. Which is why she had chosen all of them. She trusted them. He would make sure they did not let her down.
Glicki's mandibles smiled wide as he landed, sensing the change in him. She handed him the tiny microphone to clip to his collar. Raphael stared at the briefing report he'd prepared full of dry data and facts, the kind of things intelligence operatives such as him drafted to pass up the chain of command. It was not the material of speeches. He realized he was inadequate to this task.
"What do I say?" Raphael asked. His golden eyebrows furrowed into a frown of worry.
"Say what is in your heart," Glicki said. With a reassuring hum of her under-wings, she attended to that portion of the presentation in which she was an expert, making sure the audio and visual support mechanisms were in place so that, when he needed to refer to it, she could queue up the images. Her addiction to the overly-dramatized Mantoid soap operas had caused her to order four enormous viewing screens be set up around the hanger bay so that all of the men could see the information simultaneously, so that no man in this room would leave with any doubt that Mikhail had found them. Humans…
“Good afternoon,” Raphael looked over the multi-force Air Expeditionary Wing. Almost five thousand men of every size, shape, color and planetary origin were assembled here on the flight deck, leaving only skeleton crews on each of the battle cruisers, destroyers, and other smaller ships which had been reassigned to his command.
“Earlier this week, many of you were yanked off of whatever mission you were doing and told to make all deliberate haste out into the middle of nowhere,” Raphael said. “Ninety-seven ships total. I suppose you’re wondering why you’ve been summoned here?”
A murmur went through the individual members of the flight wing which had just been put under his command.
“What I am about to show you is the most top-secret piece of intelligence the Alliance has discovered since the Second Galactic War,” Raphael said. "So top-secret that even your commanding officers don't know what we're about to embark upon. But you are all known to one another. I suspect by now that you have looked around to see who else has been summoned and it's beginning to dawn on you the nature of this mission?"
Intelligence agents from every branch of the military were represented here today, even the Mer-Levi, who viewed the transmission from their ships as the Light Emerging was not equipped with the proper aquatic environment to support their species. Glicki queued up smaller monitors that showed the faces of personnel too critical to leave their ships.
"Effective immediately," Raphael said. "This fleet will be operating on full radio silence. All transmissions between ships more than a half light-year away must be manually relayed via a series of shuttles which will stretch between ships. We will be fanning out and searching."
A groan went through the men. Radio silence was burdensome to a species used to being wired to the Alliance at large. Withdrawal of their information tethers often caused symptoms similar to detoxification from alcohol addiction. The 'official' rumor that had been leaked to these men was that they were going to hunt for pirates.
"Glicki?" Raphael said. "If you don't mind?"
Glicki queued up a map.
"We are in the Orion-Cygnus arm of the Milky Way," Raphael said. "It's a small, broken-off spiral arm that was created when this galaxy collided with a smaller one so far in the past not even Shay'tan was around to see it happen. It is not attached to either empire or any asset important enough to give the two great empires reason before now to even explore it. It is the dead remnant of a dead galaxy."
Glicki moved to the next slide, part of the briefing Raphael had prepared. It showed a search grid pattern where the fleet would spread out and systematically search up the spiral arm.
He looked across the sea of faces staring up at him, wondering why he had been placed in charge. Was it favoritism, as the rumors whispered, because their Supreme Commander-General had finally grown a heart? This briefing was boring. Cold. Dry. Sterile. It was as sterile as they were. Only he wasn't sterile. And neither was the woman he loved. And if they had their way, soon no hybrid would be told they could never marry because the fate of an empire depended upon it.
"Speak from your heart," Glicki mouthed the words.
Raphael untucked his wings from the tight dress wings formation, exposing the pale red striping which had carried the genes that had been passed along to his son.
"I had this briefing all prepared," Raphael held out his tablet with a sheepish grin. "But what I have to say cannot be put into words." He put his electronic tablet down on the table Glicki had set up to hold her electronics equipment and reached towards his men.
“There are no words to describe the miracle we just found," Raphael said. "So instead of talking, I’m just going to –show- you. Colonel Glicki?”
Glicki queued up the monitor that displayed four 50 foot high, 100 foot wide video projections against the walls. They played Mikhail’s truncated message and then froze the image at the end, waiting for the crew to recognize what they were looking at.
***
'Raphael … I’m alive … my ship is toast … the Sata’an have set up a large base on an M-class planet at these coordinates … Zulu three zero one eight crackle crackle…'
***
The olive-skinned female stood there in all of her golden-eyed beauty, this raven-haired goddess who had not only captivated his best friend's heart, and Raphael knew she had captured Mikhail's heart or he would not have put his arm around her, but was the hope for his species to avoid extinction.
He resisted the urge to speak, years of coaxing information out of others having taught him that people learn best when they figure things out for themselves. There was total silence while the crew tried to understand why a transmission about the Sata’an Empire setting up a base on an M-class planet in the middle of nowhere even mattered. Many were familiar with who Mikhail was and what kind of super-spook missions he was usually assigned to, so they knew if he was involved it must be important, but it eluded them.
Then, here and there, a few began to catch on.
“She doesn’t have any wings,” the whisper started to go through the crew.
“Can it be?”
“They died out 74,000 years ago…”
“They’re extinct.”
“That’s impossible.”
“What coordinates did he say?”
“Thank the gods! We’re all saved!”
“If Shay’tan has that planet, we’re all screwed.”
The crew started jabbering with one another as realization of what they were looking at sank in. He waited until the volume had reached a dull roar, and then queued up the PA system to finish his speech.
"We are here to search for a lost friend," Raphael said. "But this mission is about more than that. We are here to search for a colony of lost brothers. Humans. The root stock from which the armies which protect this Alliance have sprung."
The gravitational pull of the planet they orbited tugged the convoy towards the solar system's sun. The first golden rays of a sunrise appeared in the enormous viewing window behind him, streaming in the glass and highlighting his golden feathers so that it looked like a halo. The crew became so silent a pinfeather could drop.
“You are all intelligent men and women," Raphael said. "You don't need me to make a speech about what the significance of finding the hybrid root stock, alive and well, means for the Alliance."
He paused.
"Colonel Mannuki’ili has just found the godsdamned Holy Grail!!!”
Excitement exploded throughout the crew. Raphael glanced behind him at the rising sun highlighting his fleet. Proud vessels. Ninety-seven in total including his own. All symbols of the Eternal Emperor.
Light … Emerging.
“We don't know exactly where they are because the transmission was cut short, but now that we know a colony has survived, we will find them. I won't lie to you. This sector is huge."
Raphael gestured upwards, towards the ceiling of the command carrier they all stood in now.
"By some chance of fate, this ship was sanctified the 'Light Emerging' the day she was completed. Perhaps I am an unlikely commander, but one thing I can tell you from the deepest recesses of my heart is this."
He drew his fist to his heart. "We do not leave our men behind!"
He pointed to the image of Mikhail, his face smiling and happy, an expression he had caught on film just once.
"This man is my friend. My best friend. He was shot down on this unknown planet while on a mission. As you can see from his damaged ship and the primitive technology he is surrounded with, there should have been no way for him to get out a message. But he persevered."
"-We- shall persevere!"
Beyond the enormous viewing window lay the fleet lined up neatly in orbit, noses pointed away from the planet in a widening arc. The star which crept above the gas giant's horizon heaved itself to its midpoint, shooting rays of sunlight across the warships and reflecting that light into empty space as though they were extensions of the rising sun.
Light … Emerging.
"The Emperor has named this mission the search for the Holy Grail," Raphael's voice rose. "I shall send thee forth like arrows from a quiver to find our lost brothers. Because although some might say our god has abandoned us … we don't leave our men behind!"
He threw his arm into the air and shook his pointed finger at each of the battle groups assembled before him.
"We don't leave our brothers behind. We don't leave our people behind!"
Service men and women pulled off their hats and waved them in the air.
"We shall search until we find our lost brothers!" Raphael shouted towards the image of his friend and the woman on the screen. "We shall cast out Shay'tan from their world and lead them back into the light of god, so these lost brothers know that we have not abandoned them. We shall find this Holy Grail so we can cast out the darkness which has settled upon this Alliance and let the light of the Eternal Emperor shine once more!"
The men went wild. Raphael waited while they slapped each other on the back and cheered. Let them relish their high spirits. The area they were searching was huge and they might be at this for many years. He gave Glicki a relieved grin, exposing his dimple.
“Report back to your ships immediately,” Glicki called over the PA system. “We shall be departing into our grid-search patterns at oh-seven-hundred hours tomorrow morning. In the meantime, remember. Complete radio silence. You are all … dismissed.”
The crew shoved back to their transport shuttles, anxious to get started. It didn’t matter that only a small portion of the men who had been placed under his command were hybrids. The newer sentient races that had come into the fold to fill the shortfall were now a permanent part of the military landscape. There was nothing like fighting back-to-back in a trench under fire to make you realize the only thing that mattered was how brave you were. They were all in this fight together.
“That went well,” Glicki slapped him on the back with an armored hand as the transport shuttles cleared the ship and their own crew filtered back to their regular duties.
“Extremely well,” Raphael said. “Now all we have to do is find them.”
“Major Drulikk of the Emperor’s Elbow brought a care package from my mother,” Glicki said. “Would you like to get a few of the officers together for a little toast?”
“Indeed,” Raphael glanced at his watch. “Set it up. We’ll meet for an informal kickoff toast at nineteen-hundred hours. And pass word through the crew, they have permission to do so as well. To toast good luck in finding the Holy Grail. ”
�
�To finding the Holy Grail,” Glicki said.
“You’d better use small glasses,” Raphael added as they parted ways, remembering the last time Glicki had drunk him under the table. “It will help if we can see straight while we’re searching.”
Glicki whirred her wings in laughter. It was no secret most Angelics had zero tolerance for alcohol. Especially the potent kind fermented on her homeworld.
Glicki called into her comms pin to ask the officer's lounge staff to set out the really small shot glasses. Inspiring unemotional Angelics to adopt passionate ways was a favorite topic of the highly addictive Mantoid soap operas Glicki secretly watched. She was corrupting them. She’d sure as Hades done a good job of corrupting him.
Chapter 34
October - 3,390 BC
Earth: Halifian encampment
Jamin
The sky roiled with thin, murky clouds, baby shit yellow, the color of the desert. The occasional spark lit up the darkness building upon the horizon, warning of the sandstorm to come. Here and there, rays of sunlight shone through, as though the gods were giving him a baleful eye. The eagles circled the scrawny herd of goats and sheep, ever watchful for prey as he crested the hill and stared down at the assembly of tents.
Jamin eyed the sky with neither apprehension nor fear. The advent of the rainy season was always preceded by unsettled weather, false lightning and the promise of moisture which darkened the sky but never reached the ground unless it was in the form of destructive wet sand. Had he any common sense, he would wait for the sandstorm to pass, but after days of waiting, the three wheat-sheaths he'd left tied around a staff left along the path these people traveled this time of year to sneak to the river to water their herds had been answered by a single wheat-sheath and a broken arrowhead, cracked like a compass from left to right. One day, not three, travel northwest.
The weight of the barley he carried felt oddly reassuring. This mission was authorized by his father, the grain a gift, albeit a small one. He would not tell Marwan of the game the Ubaid now played, sending traders to spy upon their enemies. His father had no idea he contemplated a more permanent alliance with the tribe who had been the bane of their existence his entire life, having made it quite clear he would rather Jamin bugger a goat.
Sword of the Gods: Prince of Tyre (Sword of the Gods Saga) Page 35