"You know how sometimes just before the Emperor appears you get that feeling?" Kunopegos said. "Like … I don't know … as if you were standing next to FTL drives?"
"I know the feeling," Jophiel said.
"It was like that," Kunopegos said. "Only bigger."
"Bigger?"
"Much bigger," Kunopegos whispered ominously.
Jophiel's skin began to crawl. "You knew there was no way a tiny human could birth a Centauri colt. Why didn't you tell Lucifer no?"
"I wanted to," Kunopegos said. He glanced down at the sleeping foal. "But then Lucifer offered me the one thing I wanted more than anything in the world. And in that moment, Sir? Well…"
His brown eyes filled once more with tears.
"I wanted it so bad it didn't matter if it killed her," Kunopegos whispered. "All I cared about was getting my filly." He bowed his head and kissed the tiny bundle which he cradled to his heart. "But you wouldn't know anything about that, would you, Sir? You, who She-who-is has blessed every single time you asked her for a child."
"How dare you!"
Jophiel whirled, using the shelter of her wings to hide her clenched fists until the shaking subsided. She realized her hand had instinctively drifted down to cover her womb, the womb Raphael had been unable to fill. The womb Lucifer had been unable to fill.
Inconclusive…
How many times had she begged them to re-run the tests when it had been Lucifer she'd tried to begat offspring with, praying they had run it wrong, praying that if she conceived, Lucifer would allow her to see him again? She hadn't been the Supreme Commander-General then, but a nameless, faceless cadet. When she'd finally gotten her death-blood, she had cried as though she'd been mourning a death. Her recent failure with Raphael? This time she was determined to accept her failure with dignity. Unlike her failure with Lucifer, at least she had Uriel to seal their union.
The Centauri stallion grew quiet, focused on the child he had given up everything to sire. How many times in his 500+ year lifespan had Kunopegos gone through what she had gone through, hoping, praying, only to have his hopes dashed again and again. She, at least, had gone on to bear twelve babies before the next time She-who-is rejected her.
She turned back to finish her interrogation.
"You said the next time you saw Lucifer he didn't know what you were talking about?" Jophiel said.
"It was an act," Kunopegos snorted.
"Are you certain?"
Kunopegos hesitated. His nostrils flared, wide, oxygen-inhaling sensory organs on a broad, brown face. She knew he inhaled her scent, assessing whether she was being facetious.
"No," Kunopegos finally said. He turned and moved back in the other direction, continuing his gentle, rocking pace. "If I hadn't been so angry at him, I probably would have dragged him to sick bay. The guy looked like he'd been chewed up and shat out by a Leonid."
Jophiel remembered how pale Lucifer had looked the day the Emperor had barred him from entering the Garden. Was it possible Lucifer had been possessed by … no! Like Kunopegos said, that was crazy talk. And in any event, Lucifer was dead. Nothing Kunopegos said was of any use to the Eternal Emperor.
"Thank you, General." Jophiel tucked her wings against her back into an Angelic's normal, resting position. "As you were."
Kunopegos continued his gentle pace, his attention already turned back to his foal and not the busted-down private who wasn't any longer his Supreme Commander-General. She'd learned no actionable intelligence here, only disturbing self-revelations. Even she, the most stalwart defender of the Eternal Emperor, would sell her soul to the devil if the price was right.
~ * ~ * ~
Chapter 19
Galactic Standard Date: 152,323.11 AE
Earth Orbit: Prince of Tyre
Special Agent Eligor
Eligor
The impulse engines of the Prince of Tyre rumbled reassuringly against his backside, unlike the undercarriage of the diplomatic shuttle which had, inexplicably, come back from Lucifer's latest 'adventure' with a spear, of all things, embedded in its anterior camera. Eligor had been around Lucifer long enough to see pretty much everything that was weird, debauch, or just plain loopy, but … a spear?
"Damantia," Eligor hissed as a shard of glass dropped out of the shattered lens and scratched his face. "What in Hades were you doing down there?"
A wrench clattered onto the deck. "Did you say something, Eligor?"
"Did it sound like I was talking to you?" Eligor snapped.
Lerajie was his fellow crewman, sidekick, and sometimes, well, not really, well, okay, maybe sometimes he thought of the man as a friend. He glanced out from the discomfort of the undercarriage just in time to see Lerajie's sienna speckled, off-white wings droop. His gut twinged with a rare pang of guilt. Aw, man! Why did the do-gooder always need to be so damned sensitive?
He pried at the mangled aluminum with a screwdriver until his guilt got the better of him. Okay, maybe not guilt, per se … he was an asshole and he knew it, but sometimes it was just plain prudent to get along with the guy you'd been paired with to do grunt work because you never knew when you might need someone to watch your back. Especially in this line of work.
"What I meant to say," Eligor backpedalled on his earlier sniping, "was that whoever took out the camera must have known what they were doing. Had they just been a little bit stronger, not only would this weapon have taken out the optics, but also punctured one of the few weak spots in the hull."
"Oh?" Lerajie's wings perked up, his long primary feathers and ankles the only part of him Eligor could see. His face peeked beneath the shuttle. "Do you think you could save that spearhead? I'd like to compare it to the historical database of artifacts from Nibiru."
"We're not even certain these are those humans," Eligor grumbled.
Lerajie shot him a grin and, for once, kept his mouth shut. Eligor grabbed the broken-off spear with both hands and yanked it with all of his might. What other humans would they be?
"So why didn't Lucifer take you with him this time?" Lerajie asked. "I thought he trusted you?"
Eligor focused on working the spearhead back and forth, trying to ease it out of the metal. The only sounds were his own grunts of exertion as Lerajie uncharacteristically denied him the distraction of his incessant chattering. The silence grew so uncomfortable that Eligor finally felt compelled to answer.
"Beats me," Eligor grumbled, doing his best to mask his own feelings of betrayal at being ditched. "When it comes to the puppet prince, who knows? One minute he's thumbing his nose at the old man, blowing the Alliance all to shit, and then the next thing you know he goes all loopy on you, either drinking himself into a stupor, or…"
"The evil twin appears," Lerajie whispered conspiratorially. The do-gooder gave him a wink.
"Knock it off," Eligor growled. "Before somebody else overhears you."
Stupid kid! Didn't he realize his increasingly undisguised criticisms would get him 'disappeared?' As it was, he suspected the only reason Zepar hadn't shuttled the loud mouth off to points unknown, buried in the bottom of some swamp world, was because he had been working for the dynamic duo for so long that Zepar was at a loss about how to replace him if they got rid of the closest thing he had to a friend.
Only now, after giving Eligor a peek into the inner circle, all of a sudden he found himself back on the outside looking in.
"What about the pregnant woman Lucifer took from the planet?" Lerajie asked, his voice low this time, as if even he, dimwit, understood that talk of this topic would get them into trouble.
"What about her?" Eligor asked.
"Have you seen her?"
Eligor cursed as a few more splinters of glass fell out of the damaged optical lens, nearly landing in his eye. He picked out the tiny shards and resumed his repairs, pretending he hadn't heard him.
"Well?" Lerajie refused to drop it.
Eligor glanced up. Lerajie had rammed his back and wings under the shuttle, his face filled
with concern and perhaps a bit of guilt?
"I don't know who she is," Eligor finally said. "The only time he let me go down to the planet he was so enthralled with some pompous little prick who tried to stab him that it was as if he forgot I was even there."
"Why didn’t you just kill him?" Lerajie asked.
An odd jumble of emotions rumbled through Eligor's gut before he realized Lerajie was talking about the little chieftain, as Lucifer called the man, and not Lucifer himself. Why didn't you just kill the little chieftain who snuck a knife into the meeting? Lerajie didn't need to know that Eligor had been thinking the very same thought.
Eligor shrugged. "You know the puppet prince. Likes to keep everybody dancing on a string."
He grabbed the spearhead and, ramming the largest screwdriver he could find up into the mangled camera, yanked at the sucker until, with a groan of metal, at last he extricated it from the casing. He glanced at the rock, nothing but a sharpened stone, and slid it with disgust across the floor to Lerajie who grabbed it as though he had just been given a prize.
"This is amazing!" Lerajie weighed the spearhead in his hand. "Whoever threw this must have had one hell of a throwing arm, not to mention unbelievably good aim. This thing must weigh three kilos!"
"Yeah, whatever," Eligor grumbled.
He removed the shattered camera casing, as well as the hull plating that'd been pierced, and screwed in the new replacement plate without the camera. They didn't have a spare camera this far from home. Next on his agenda would be to stop down in the machine shop and hand off the shattered equipment to someone who could rebuild the thing.
Lerajie wandered off into a long, babbling happy-place about primitive weaponry, his area of expertise until his disagreement with the powers-that-be had landed him banished on Lucifer's crew. Eligor finished the repair, ignoring his sidekick's chatter.
"What do you think he's doing to the woman now?" Lerajie asked.
"What do you think?" Eligor suppressed his pang of guilt. They all knew what Lucifer did with the poor, unfortunate females he 'gifted' with his offspring. It was just … why target one who was already pregnant?
Lerajie continued his cheerful chatter, lauding whichever human had thrown the spear on their clever construction of a weapon, how finely the stone had been chipped, and other erudite things Eligor didn't give a rat's ass about. Lerajie wasn't the one stuck repairing the damage from whichever clever moncaí had thrown the spear. He was.
His comms pin crackled.
"Yes, Sir?" he answered the call.
"Report to my office immediately," Zepar's insidious voice crackled out of the communications device. "I have an important task for you."
Suppressing a groan, Eligor spread the last of the hull sealant around the edge of the brand-new plating, then slid out from underneath the shuttle on the wheeled dolly. Lerajie gave him a hands-up, still clutching the spearhead like his favorite new toy, and gave him an evil grin.
"Which one do you think it will be today?" Lerajie asked. "The good twin? Or the evil one?"
Eligor shot him an icy stare.
"What?" Lerajie asked.
"Remind me to never tell you anything in confidence again!" Eligor grabbed back the spearhead. He flapped his wings to shake the glass shards and chips of metal out of his feathers before making his way down to Zepar's private office. He composed his expression into his usual one of bored disinterest before knocking twice.
"Enter!" Zepar's voice filtered through the door. Eligor stepped through, careful to keep his wings in his usual fuck-you-I-ain't-your-bitch slump.
"Sir," Eligor gave him a lackadaisical salute.
The dirty-winged Angelic who'd been the bane of Eligor's existence looked up from the contraption he was working on. Eligor feigned indifference while that part of his brain trained to stay alert to details which might save his ass later calculated the beginnings of some sort of robotic arm. What the fuck was Zepar building now?
"You were told to come right away," Zepar glowered at him. Most people thought of Lucifer's Chief of Staff as an obsequious fuck, but Eligor knew better, especially now that Zepar had dropped the act around him.
Eligor flopped the spearhead onto Zepar's desk, next to a robotic hand which had to be three times the size of an Angelic’s. "You asked me to pull this out of the belly of the shuttle. You really want me to leave her with her guts all exposed?"
Zepar's otherwise unremarkable blue eyes hardened into an expression that reminded him of a Sata'anic lizard. Zepar kept him around because, despite his attitude, he was always frustratingly right about shit. Given how close Lucifer had cut it to the wire giving the bug-out command to get the fuck out of Shay'tan's ambush, they were all still a little jumpy.
Fuck that'd been a close call!!!
Zepar flared his nostrils like a bull that had decided not to charge. Tensions were high on the ship even though Lucifer had delivered on his promise to get them to Earth. Nobody knew where they were or how the fuck the Prince of Tyre had leaped from the Alliance into unknown Sata'anic territory. All the star charts were w-a-y off. And worse, they were orbiting a planet protected by a Sata'anic battle cruiser, with none other than Ba'al Zebub following Lucifer around like his new favorite lap dog. Fuck shit had gotten weird around here!
"I need a favor," Zepar said.
Eligor straightened up, but he refused to give Zepar the satisfaction of dress wings. It did not behoove him to piss off Zepar, the biggest puppet-master of them all…
"What do you need," Eligor asked.
"You … saw things down on the planet," Zepar said. His eyes narrowed into slits as he studied Eligor's reaction.
"Sir," Eligor said noncommittally aloud. What went through his mind was a different story.
'Lizards on the planet like fleas … some shit's going down with Ba'al Zebub turning on his master … Lucifer's got some big motherfucking plan to steal the planet right out from under the old dragon's nose … just like he stole the Alliance out from under Hashem…'
Eligor filled his mind with the thoughts he suspected Zepar wanted to hear, careful to keep the knowledge he knew the asshole could read his mind out of his forebrain so Zepar didn't know he knew.
Zepar grunted with satisfaction and relaxed. Mind intrusion … over. Oh, fuck, thank you Shemijaza for teaching me how -not- to be your son's puppetmaster's bitch!
Zepar settled back in his chair, his wings now relaxed.
"Out of all the crewmen on this ship," Zepar said, "you have been here the longest."
"I'm grateful you let me stay on, Sir," Eligor chose his words carefully, "after Hashem blew up Tyre."
"I didn't have to do that, you know," Zepar gave him a coy look. "You were sent to take the Prime Minister away from his immortal father and bring him back to his biological one. Under the laws of the Alliance, your allegiance to the Third Empire meant you were a traitor."
'I was young, I was stupid, I was misguided, I'm sure grateful to you, Sir, for giving me a chance to prove I was reformed,' Eligor filled his mind with suck-up thoughts.
"And you were a spy sent by Hashem to recoup the command codes to the planetary defenses of Tyre," Eligor said evenly, careful to keep his expression neutral.
"You turned me in." Zepar gave him a smirk which was a little too self-satisfactory, though Eligor couldn't figure out why.
"I did," Eligor said carefully. "That was my job."
"Do you know what Chemosh did to those he captured?" Zepar asked.
"No," Eligor said. " I was just some snot-nosed pilot who found you hiding in the shuttle they sent to retrieve Asherah."
Zepar's smirk turned malicious.
"But you admired Chemosh, didn't you Eligor?"
"Sir," Eligor shifted uncomfortably. It wasn't Shemijaza's creepy second-in-command he'd been hoping would reward him for a job well-done, but Shemijaza himself.
"No matter," Zepar said, unexpectedly dropping his game of cat-and-mouse. "You've never been one to ask too many que
stions, and for that reason, you've always been a valuable member of this crew."
"Yes, Sir," Eligor waited. Speech. Zepar was about to give him another one of his infamous speeches. He was surprised when, instead, Zepar slid the spearhead back to him.
"So what did you think of Earth?"
"Not what I expected, Sir," Eligor said.
"What did you expect?"
Eligor picked up the spearhead. He wasn't there when this thing had been embedded in the belly of the shuttle, but he'd seen how quick that dark-skinned bastard had yanked a knife out of nowhere and lunged straight for Lucifer's heart. Fuck! He'd known Lucifer had some weird mojo, able to read people's minds and shit, but the angry young chieftain hadn't stopped simply because Lucifer had whispered what the guy wanted to hear into the dude's mind. No way! That guy had been Hades-bent on carving out Lucifer's heart and Lucifer had somehow made him freeze without even laying a hand on him.
Zepar closed his eyes and scented the air, almost like he was a Sata'anic lizard. His smirk turned malicious.
"Lucifer's real father could do things like that," Zepar said softly, forgetting for a moment he was trying to pretend he couldn't read Eligor's mind. "Couldn't he?"
"So we all heard," Eligor said. "I didn't ever see it for myself."
"Shemijaza was more than he pretended to be," Zepar said. "But then he lost that power. Threw it all away to get back his wife and son."
Zepar studied him like a serpent waiting to swallow a mouse alive. Eligor was tough, good in a fight, pragmatic, ruthless when he needed to be and sensible when he didn't. Zepar, though? For a guy that did his best to pretend to be a weasely little nobody, the guy had always creeped him out. How different he had turned out to be from the terrified computer-geek he'd found hiding in Asherah's shuttle, trying to hack into Tyre's planetary defense system.
So if he had turned the creepy nerd in to Chemosh and nobody had been there to bring down the planetary defense system, how the fuck had Hashem ended up breaching Shemijaza's defenses?
Sword of the Gods: Agents of Ki (Sword of the Gods Saga) Page 20