Dmitri set them up in a room with two queen beds. After a few hours of sleep, Shep awoke to the sound of a conversation coming from Dmitri’s room across the hall. He recognized his host’s voice, but the words exchanged with his valet in a foreign tongue gave no hint of the nature of their tête-à-tête. It had ended with Anton scrambling around the residence before leaving completely.
That was when Shep had looked over at Hector and saw him paler than a ghost, shaking through a cold sweat. He had spent a good part of the night sitting by his bedside, talking, trying to bring comfort and distraction to his ailing friend.
As morning approached, Hector finally lapsed again into sleep. Shep wasn’t quite sure what time it was when a light rap on the door awoke him. Dmitri entered with Shep’s permission and looked sympathetically down on the slow, rhythmic rise and fall of Hector’s chest.
“Why don’t you come out for tea? Let him sleep.”
A cup of tea, though not Shep’s usual drink of choice, sounded refreshing at the moment. With a yawn and stretch, he followed Dmitri to a kitchen basked in the orange-yellow glow of early morning sunlight. Dmitri silently fetched a tea pot, a cup, the sugar bowl and a spoon, and set them all down on the table.
“Not much else here,” he commented as he opened the refrigerator and looked in. “I do have some oatmeal in the pantry that should be good, but no fresh milk I’m afraid. I could call down to my guards and see if they could bring something up from their stores if you’d prefer.”
“This is fine.” Shep’s words were as short as his attention span. Lack of sleep … no, lack of alcohol, and a healthy supply of international travel were taking their toll on his good manners. “Did you already eat?”
Dmitri poured hot water from the tea kettle over a bowl of oats and set it before Shep. “Yes, while you slept.”
The spoon hung in the air as Shep eyed up the mobster. “Don’t you sleep at all?”
“Only recreationally. I don’t like to waste my time. Especially these days. But I’m glad you were able to get a little rest.”
Kronastia looked sincere too. Shep sucked down a mouthful of oatmeal and set the spoon on the edge of the bowl. “You’re nothing like I expected you to be.”
The smile that crossed over Dmitri’s face was one of pure amusement. “Now, Doctor, what did you expect? A burly, sweaty Russian, balding, with a vodka gut and thick, sausage fingers? Someone who would shoot you as well as look at you? A hostile, hardened criminal?”
Almost shamefully, Shep confirmed that that was exactly what he had expected.
“Then, yes, I can see why you’re surprised,” Dmitri said with a chuckle. His smile only enhanced his youthful appearance, reminding Shep of the mismatch between his looks and his history. “Truth is, Dr. Smyth, I’m not even Russian.”
“No?”
He shook his head. “Basing myself there suits my current needs, gives me access to many resources and people that make seeing out my primary responsibility easier. Victoria does the same thing, in her own special way.”
“Primary purpose?” Shep’s hands tried to clear the sleep from his eyes. “And that would be ...”
“Surely you’ve studied Egyptian mythology during your archaeological career?”
Shep nodded.
Dmitri leaned in over the table conspiratorially. “What if I told you some of the myths are true?”
If Dmitri was expecting to get a rise out of him with the baiting inquiry, it wasn’t working. “It wouldn’t surprise me that there’s some level of fact behind it. Most myths are reflective of a truth that simply cannot be rationalized by the contemporary men in the period they are created.”
“You are, indeed, very wise, Doctor. But what if I told you that Victoria Kent’s role in Egypt’s mythology is only rivaled by her role in its history? What if I told you that for much of the classical periods, Victoria was the power behind the throne, as it were?”
“Ah, now I remember!” Shep exclaimed, taking the last bite of oatmeal before folding his arms over his chest and leaning back. “Your story about how she’s some sort of real life Xena, Warrior Princess. Not still trying to pull that one over, are you?”
Dmitri scoffed. “Hardly. What she is ... Or rather, who she is, is something much more devastating and real. You see, Victoria is Sekhmet.”
“Sekhmet?” Shep looked at him incredulously. “The lion-headed goddess?”
“The lion part is more symbolic, but yes.”
“The Lady of the Flame? The Eye of Ra? The Drinker of Blood?”
“Yes, yes, and no,” Dmitri confirmed. “She doesn’t drink blood so much as spill it. She’s the most impressive warrior I’ve ever seen, on this planet or any other.”
“Or ‘any other’?” Shep repeated. Dmitri Kronastia was looking crazier by the second. “And you’ve seen how many, precisely?”
“Three. Four if you include my own.”
Taking a sip of his tea, Shep decided that it was probably a good idea to humor the Russian mob boss in his lunacy. “You don’t say?”
Dmitri picked up on the patronizing. He crossed his arms over his chest, echoing Shep’s stance. “Do you know that you’re the first person I’ve actually ever volunteered the truth to, outside of a trusted servant here and there? I know it will sound crazy. How Victoria has a whole contingency behind her who hang on her every word is beyond me. Guess it takes all types.” He shrugged, then narrowed his eyes. “What if I could offer you proof?”
“Proof of what? You haven’t really said anything yet, other than instigate you’re an alien.”
“We’re all aliens, only some of us were actually born here.” Dmitri leaned forward and reached his hands across the table, his palms open, inviting Shep to place his hands into his. Glancing warily at the expectant gaze now focused on him, Shep moved closer, but kept his hands on the edge of the table.
“Go on, Shep. Nothing to be scared of,” Dmitri tried to assure him. “There’s a good chance this won’t work anyway. I usually can’t mindspeak to humans, and few do I deign to touch to even make the attempt. However, something tells me this will work with you.”
The lilt of his voice spoke more to a mystery still concealed, but now was not the time to inquire. “Mindspeak? What’s that?”
Dmitri’s patience grew thin. “Just give me your damn hands, Shep. If you get scared, just pull back. Luckily you’re one of the few men alive who can probably follow the conversation.”
First one finger, then another, and finally Shep’s two hands slid over Dmitri’s as his grasp tightened to a firm hold.
Nothing. While Dmitri closed his eyes in concentration, Shep rolled his in disbelief.
“Am I missing something, because I’m not—”
“Shhhh.” The Guardian inhaled a steady draw, pulling both the oxygen and Shep’s mind in.
-Ψ-
He was walking in long, purposeful strides up a dimly lit corridor. The walls, floor and ceiling above him appeared as a jigsaw of perfectly fitted stone edifices, a work of pure masonry expertise, beyond artful in their arrangement.
The end of the corridor opened into a chamber where, on a chaise carved of wood and laced with reeds and linen, sat a woman who resembled Victoria. Despite a similar physiognomy, from the caramel-pecan tendrils of hair arranged atop her head in Hellenistic style, to the green-blue twinkle of her feline eyes, the striking female owned a different demeanor than the one of which Shep was familiar. Cockiness and confidence removed, the whole of her being was consumed by grief. The biblical phrase, “a gnashing of teeth,” came to mind.
A booming voice echoed in his ears, and Shep realized both that it was Dmitri’s, though without its Russian drawl, and that it sounded very nearby. Too nearby. In fact, it sounded like Shep himself were speaking with Dmitri’s voice in perfec
tly accentuated Egyptian.
“Tlalli, we must speak.”
Victoria took note of the presence of another, uncurling herself from the folded position in which she had been sitting. Her clothes were a fine, sheer linen, thin enough in their weave that Shep could make out the peaks of her breast through the material.
“Mur-sha’ht,” she spoke through her sobs and tears, a title that meant master, “I am your servant.”
Shep continued to feel as though he were speaking through Dmitri. Indeed, he realized that he must also be seeing through his eyes. “You’ve brought this on yourself, you know. I warned you never to attempt to bond another. You yourself are but an Altunai proxy. The bond you offered the queen was weak, unstable. If Isis were to learn of this transgression … We are not men, and we must stay separate of these petty political affairs. It is not your place to interfere, only to observe. We must rise above and leave them to their own struggles.”
Victoria murmured, “They call me goddess, build temples to honor Sekhmet, and plead for my intervention. Why should I withhold, when it is within my power to give aid?”
As she continued, her voice took on an air of reproach. “I only attempted to bond her because I wanted to save her from the pain. Octavian would have dragged her in chains through the streets of Rome. I had to know she would survive.”
Shep watched his hands—or rather, Dmitri’s hands—reach out and yank Victoria to her feet. He felt the crush of her body against his, and his lips brushed over hers. “Don’t force me to be your enemy. I care for you too much. Let it end with Cleopatra. Do not set up another to be mine enemy.”
-Ψ-
Next thing Shep knew, he was on the floor, his head spinning and his mouth dry. A pulse, he thought his own now, drummed in his ears. As his eyes focused, Kronastia came into focus, hovering over him.
“Are you okay?”
He nodded and accepted an outstretched hand. Dmitri braced Shep under the arm and lowered him back to sit at the table.
“Mindspeak, huh?” Shep asked through heavy breaths. “More like ... mindfuck.”
Dmitri slumped into the other chair. Even he seemed out of joint. “Apologies. It’s been a long time since I shared my memories with another; I’ve forgotten how overwhelming the experience can be the first time. But surely you can see the truth now?”
“Sure,” Shep gasped, waving his hand dismissively. “Victoria, Sekhmet. What does that make you?”
“Not human.”
Shep looked at him confusedly. It would have been a preposterous suggestion ten minutes before, when he knew there was no such thing as gods and goddesses. Now, he recognized it as undeniable truth.
“You are an alien.”
“More important than that, Shep, I am Altunai.”
Chapter 17
For the next half hour, Shep sat in stunned silence as Dmitri Kronastia peeled open his brain, scooped the whole thing out into a blender, and hit liquefy.
Plato hadn’t been making things up. Only, the name was actually Altunatus and it hadn’t been a lost ancient civilization, but another world that existed tangentially to Earth. The Altunai seeded planets with human life—the formula for creation of a lower genetic version of themselves, mastered after eons of experimentation. The Altunai established two operational bases: one in the Nile River Valley, and the other in the jungles of the Yucatan Peninsula. At each location, mentors fostered knowledge, teaching the masses the skills they would need to develop art, government, farming, trade, and, yes, war. When the two civilizations were far enough along to fend for themselves, the period of isolation was initiated. Thirteen baktuns long, or five thousand, one hundred twenty-five circles of Earth around its sun.
“But, how did you, the Altunai ... How did you get here?”
Dmitri seemed relieved by the question. He smiled as he sought to address Shep’s curiosity. “We have instruments that can detect life signatures on distant planets. The animals, the plants … those were all here before. Well, most of them, anyway. We’re not really sure how the platypus migrated from our world, but that’s another story. We can travel through manipulations of energy, not unlike some of your science fiction stories. But, of course, there’s a catch.”
“Black out period for your frequent beamer miles?” Shep joked.
“Something like that. Once we identify a planet that has the necessary elements to maintain life, we have to dock it. It’s like building a bridge; once you throw the initial tie line across, you have to build another side back against the opposite shore’s foundation. In short, one Altunai must stay behind, a sort of homing beacon. I was assigned to be Earth’s dock.”
That explained Dmitri’s role. “And Victoria?”
“Well, she’s what we call a Vessel,” he answered. “She has two purposes. First, the Vessel acts as a sort of data recorder. Victoria was born human in the Olmec Empire. When she told you she was originally from the Veracruz area, that wasn’t a lie.”
“How did you know that she told me that?”
“Security camera, Shep,” Dmitri reminded him. “They probably shouldn’t have been in the hurricane shelters where people were sleeping, but one of my security team seems to have had an unhealthy obsession with Victoria.”
“Yeah, but she also told me she was twenty-something years old, so I wouldn’t credit her with being completely honest.” Sure, women tended to low-ball their actual age, but the difference of a few thousand years was nothing to sneeze at.
“I doubt she actually lied to you,” Dmitri countered. “She has a tendency to let others create their own truths, and then just plays along accordingly.”
Thinking back, Shep realized that she hadn’t actually said what age she was, only concurred with his guess. He grimaced and felt silly at the oversight.
Dmitri read Shep’s thoughts as clear as day. “Don’t worry, she’s gotten the better of far wiser men than you.”
He sighed. “So, data recorder. Go on.”
“She’s meant to be some sort of a dipstick. She lets us measure humanity’s progress from the point the isolation began until it ended. To ensure her survival, she must bond with an Altunai. That is, through a bodily fluid exchange, we infect the vessel with just enough of our advanced DNA to allow them to live as long as we do and be impervious to illness and injuries. The bonding also imbues them with many of our abilities: control over the elements, telepathy—”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Shep demanded, holding his hand out in the accompanying gesture. “You mean to tell me you can read minds?”
“For a man who just accused me of mindfucking him, you sound oddly surprised.” A frustrated gnashing of teeth preceded Dmitri’s answer. “For the moment, my abilities are severely hampered. You see, the Altunai’s powers depend on the energy of our home planet. But Earth’s energy is different than that on Altunatus. It’s like traveling between countries having different standards of electric current. The Vessel also is, for lack of a better term, my converter plug.”
“So, if you have Victoria nearby ...” Shep’s voice trailed off.
“Yes, you put it all together very quickly. I can see why she credited you so much; you really seem attuned to the truth when it’s presented to you. Most humans would just dismiss this as a bunch of rubbish and write me off as some eccentric or loony.”
It was a curious thing, Shep thought. In any other situation, he was certain he’d be included among “most humans”. Despite years of disciplined training and practice in not attributing relation to causation, something about this explanation just seemed logical to him. The certainty of it was almost primal.
“Okay, answer me this, though,” Shep uttered. “You say Victoria is Sekhmet, and that she was born in the Olmec Empire. How does an Olmec in the ancient world go from the Yucatan to Egypt and back again?”
&
nbsp; “Getting back to the Americas was one of her finer moments. She convinced some Vikings to set out to the new world and traveled over land from where they landed in modern day Canada. The ‘to Egypt’ part was easy enough: she teleported. With me, no less. Our gateway to Altunatus is in Egypt, and Isis and Ra—you should understand, of course, Shep, that most of the gods of the Egyptian pantheon are, in fact, Altunai—they wanted to inspect her before departing.”
“And she met their expectations, I take it?”
Again, a curious look overcame Dmitri. He seemed slightly peeved at the inquiry. “Yes, Ra’s particularly.”
Understanding filled Shep. He cocked his head and smiled knowingly. “That’s jealousy written all over your face.”
In an almost blinding show of speed, Dmitri rose from the table and began pacing nervously the length of the room. He ran his fingers through his ebony locks, pulling in frustration.
Shep gave a low whistle. “Wow, you must really love the girl to still be so upset over it after all this time.”
Dmitri stopped short and eyed Shep warily. “You have no idea.”
“Is that why we’re chasing her?”
He shook his head again. “Unfortunately not. You see, the end of the isolation period is coming. The Altunai will be returning, and Victoria must be there to open the gate.”
Shep’s eyebrows slanted. “I thought you said you were the beacon. Why does she need to be there?”
“I’m just the hinges of the door, but Victoria’s its key. This,” he took the amulet from his pocket and dangled it out in front of him, “isn’t some random stone. It’s a piece of Altunatus, a chip from the planet’s core. It boosts both her Earth-based strength, and my connection with Altunatus, creates a bridge that the folks back home can latch unto and create an energy stream with the same signature. After that, to use a comparison you might understand, the Vessel’s memory is downloaded by the queen. If humanity is judged defective, they will funnel enough energy through Victoria to destroy humanity, and her in the process. If they believe humanity has established itself to their liking, the Vessel is destroyed. Altunai do not like loose ends, and a being capable of pulling power from both planets is considered a flappy, limp end.”
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