They stepped into the archives and Anya began to talk, explaining each time period as they walked through the massive vault that stretched off into the distance. They walked back in time, as Antoine had done with his son Alex. However, Cash hadn’t had the upbringing the Nobles had had. They felt special, superior, from birth. They looked down on the world. They lived in a world separated by wealth and power, removed from the reality of life, with no comprehension of what real life was all about. Where Alex Noble’s journey through the history of the family had been reaffirmed in his superiority, Cash was sickened by it to his core. The Nobles, throughout history, had intervened, incited, controlled, profited.
As they walked back into the birth of the religions, Cash listened while Anya spoke, barely believing what he was hearing. His subconscious constantly reminded him that his family was still under her control, so he kept his thoughts to himself.
His subconscious was struggling to stop him from commenting after what Anya had just said.
“Our ancestors realized the power of belief and faith, the hope it gave the people and how it controlled the masses in a way that governments and rulers could not. It transcended borders, oceans.”
“So they took control of religions?”
“Took control?” Anya chuckled. “We created them! The Vatican holds one of our largest property portfolios. Its wealth is unimaginable and all thanks to faith - work ethic, moral code, belief. They all helped us sculpt the planet.”
“Wars, unrest, millions upon millions of dead as a result of religious conflict?” countered Cash.
“How else could we manage to control the people, seven billion now? Just fifty years ago, it was half that. In 1 AD, it was around one hundred million. We needed a new world and we needed to control those we created to make it.”
“But who are you to say they should be controlled?”
“We,” corrected Anya, not understanding the despair in Cash’s comments.
“Wait a minute, created?” asked Cash, realizing what she had said.
“We’ll come to that,” Anya said.
“No,” said Cash. “I think we should skip to that!”
“We can come back to the time the ancestors built the sites you were visiting.” Anya walked towards the tubes that Alex had been shown two weeks earlier.
Cash walked down the length of them, barely able to hold his bottom jaw from hitting the floor. Who are these people? he asked himself.
Anya led him to the last two tubes. “The final candidates,” she said.
Cash looked at her. “What?”
“Neanderthal or Homo Sapiens. They could have played about with the Neanderthals a little more, made them more like us but they were too strong and far more intelligent than had been planned.”
“So what…?” asked Cash
“We took action. We culled them in favor of the Homo Sapiens, they were a much better fit. They were like us, but their brain function and traits restricted just enough for us to exert the control we needed.”
Cash rubbed at his face, his eyes, trying to understand whether what he was hearing was seriously what Anya was saying. “You culled the Neanderthals? What, just wiped them out? How?”
“The same toxin we used in Papua New Guinea a few weeks ago. It alters the genetic code, the code that we designed.”
“Who are ‘we’?” asked Cash, beginning to lose it when she casually admitted the genocide of almost half a million people.
Anya was unperturbed. She was confident that Cash would soon understand. She opened the vault and led him into a corridor where papers lined the wall.
“In our ancestors’ own words,” she said.
Cash read the first paper:
Deep Space Mission – New Hope
Log entry 1
Mission Commander
It is with great sadness that I look back on the fading speck in the distance that we have called home since birth. We have said goodbye to parents and loved ones that many, or all of us, will never see again. Our only hope of seeing them again would be the failure of our mission, which would condemn our population to a certain death. Our planet is dying and with it our future.
“So the world is dying…but wait, you said ancestors, not family?” He stopped. “Oh my God,” said Cash. “We were able to do things in the past and lost…”
“Yes, but the fuel was the problem. It ran out very quickly once they landed here and there was no way to remake it. The technology didn’t exist.”
“Wh-what do you mean landed here?” asked Cash.
“It’s our world that’s dying, not this one,” Anya said. “Our world, it’s our population that we have worked tirelessly to save.”
“The planet that’s dying isn’t Earth?”
“No, it’s our home, our world that’s dying.”
“This is our home,” said Cash.
“It will be very soon. The transports will start soon. Our population will be coming to their new home, their new world. The world that we, the Noble family, were sent out to make for them.”
“What about the people here?” asked Cash.
Anya ignored his question. “We were entrusted with a great honor. The King himself chose our family to protect the future of our population. We have eighty years to transfer them here. Our world will be unlivable by the next cycle.”
“In 2,160 years,” mumbled Cash.
“Yes,” she smiled.
“But what about the population here?” he asked again.
“They were only created by us to make this world livable for our people. Without us, they wouldn’t even have been here.”
“But they are here, living breathing, beautiful people like Sophie and Kyle.”
“Kyle is one of us,” she said. “He has Noble genes.”
“He’s only twenty-five percent Noble,” said Cash bitterly.
“It doesn’t matter,” Anya said.
“If it doesn’t matter, why didn’t you want anything to do with me until now?”
“It was forbidden, but Blake made us aware of how the Noble gene overrides all others.”
“Blake, the old man who tried to kill his own family?”
“It’s in the archives,” she said. “It’s irrelevant, a hundred percent of me is in you.”
“And the other fifty percent of me is simple Homo Sapien, like my father, who was murdered.”
“He was a wonderful man,” Anya said.
“But was only here to save the population of a distant world that doesn’t need him anymore.”
Anya suddenly realized the time. “We need to go,” she said. “Wait here.”
She rushed to the end of the corridor and opened another vault door, returning shortly afterward with a large wheeled crate with a number of the coke bottle sized tubes.
“But what about the population here?” Cash asked yet again.
“We face a famine if we don’t take action,” Anya said defensively.
Cash could see he was getting somewhere. Where there had been no doubt, some existed. He didn’t want to push it too far, too quickly.
“So when does it start?”
“In approximately twenty hours,” she said, rushing towards the door. “We have a long flight ahead of us.”
“We?’ said Cash.
“All of us, Sophie and Kyle as well. You’re going to see the first transports lift off to our old world. And if we’re lucky, we may even, depending on the timing, welcome some transports to us.”
“So you’re sending empty spaceships out there?”
“Yes, we’ve got five here from when our ancestors first came. They can each carry thousands at a time.”
“Where are they?” asked Cash.
“You’ll see,” said Anya. “We’re going to see them rise back into the sky for the first time in a very long time.”
“How long?” asked Cash. He didn’t want to show interest. What they were doing was despicable. He had just discovered that aliens were real, that he was h
alf alien, and that the world was about to be invaded after being created by those same aliens thousands of years earlier.
Anya stopped rushing. “Let me think…the first mission was 200,000 years ago, then 70,000, 30,000, 10,000, and the last mission, during the last cycle, about two thousand years ago.”
“200,000 years and you think it’ll still fly?” said Cash.
“Of course, it was probably five times older than that when it left,” she said without a hint of sarcasm.
“How old are your people?” asked Cash, taking the crate from her and trying not to look at the archives as they rushed past them. How was he going to stop them? She had his family and they were about to be stuck on a flight for countless hours. He had to hope that Rigs was okay and had reached Travis Davies. He was their only hope. Cash was helpless while she had his family. Life had been far easier when he had only himself to worry about. And Rigs, he thought, although he could look after himself.
Chapter 74
Rigs was stuck in a tomb. Ironically, that’s exactly what everyone thought it was. However, Rigs had worked out that it was definitely not a tomb, which was obvious since the Nobles had gotten their hands on it. Cabling ran through and up into the ceiling area above him in the King’s Chamber. He had tried to get back into the Queen’s Chamber but it was locked tight.
Most worryingly, the cabling was shrouded in a metal casing, unlike any he had seen before, which suggested it was being protected from something. He thought back to whatever Anya Noble had put in the Queen’s Chamber. The equipment was also of an incredibly sturdy construction. He had a feeling that whenever it was switched on, he was unlikely to survive.
He climbed back up into the spaces above the King’s Chamber. Height was what he wanted. He remembered the stone that he had marked. Why would anyone have gone to that height to move a stone? It wasn’t just that there was no way it could have been moved, they’d have needed heavy equipment to move it and it would have been tight against the other stones. There had to be a mechanism, as there had been for Anya Noble, only she knew where it was and had the means to use it with her ring.
He reached the top space and was blocked by the pointed roof above him. There was nowhere to go. He lay back and tried to look for even the tiniest hint of a crack in the stonework. There was still almost half the height of the pyramid above the roof to look at. He crawled back down and looked at the cables. They went up into the ceiling above the King’s Chamber below, but they weren’t in any of the crawl spaces. Where did they go? They were obviously connecting to something else.
He covered every inch of the thirty-by-twenty chamber like his life depended on it, trying not to think that it actually did. He tried the small anti-chamber. Same result. He tried the Grand Gallery, even trying to move the silver hoops in an attempt to stop whatever the pyramid might do. They didn’t move. The cabling was impossible to uncouple, and its metal casing preventing any attempt to tamper with it.
Rigs lay down in the gully of the Grand Gallery and waited. He had little else to do.
Chapter 75
Travis Davies had spent the afternoon trying to call Cash and Rigs, although the chance of Rigs ever answering a call seemed remote. They hadn’t checked in since he knew their mission in Iran had been a success. The Iranians had been apoplectic ever since, in stark contrast to their restrained fury at the previously unsuccessful Israeli bombing.
After the first hour, he was furious. After the second, he thought they were inconsiderate. When it stretched to beyond three hours, he was worried, very worried. He had called everyone he knew, still nothing. The Israelis he spoke to denied any knowledge of even having been involved, although they were delighted with the result and thanking him if he were involved. Passport checks returned nothing. He was desperate and was going out of his mind with concern. He was about to call the President when he suddenly changed course and called Senator Noble instead.
The Senator promised to make some calls and get back to him.
He made one, to Conrad Noble, and discovered the truth. A truth that Travis Davies could never know. The woman was crazy. They were all crazy. Cash Harris wasn’t a Noble. He may have some Noble blood in him, but being a Noble was as much a state of mind as anything else. He had learned long ago that the Homo Sapiens were no better, no worse than those who had created them. Their traits and characteristics were the same. The Nobles lived and worked to a code, just like the overwhelming majority of the population. The Nobles’ belief that because two hundred thousand years earlier that they had altered a genetic code in an ape to create Man in their image made them better was a nonsense. Nobles weren’t any better, nor any more intelligent. But they all thought they were and they had knowledge and that knowledge was power. The Nobles had used that power to their maximum advantage throughout history, and Senator Albert ‘Bertie’ Noble had every intention of keeping the knowledge and the power exclusive. He had no qualms about wiping out half the population, or the whole population when the time came. At least he was doing it with a sound understanding, unlike his idiot family. What was she thinking? Telling Cash Harris the truth, was she mad?
He checked the time. If they accepted Cash Harris as a full Noble, they wouldn’t lift a finger to harm him. He was furious. The only person who could deal with it was him. No one outside the family could get anywhere near the launch site and the minute Cash Harris had the chance, he’d have Travis Davies, the CIA and the full force of the US military stopping them. What annoyed him even more was that he was genuinely fond of the boy and he was going to have to kill him.
He called his pilot to prep the plane and then called Travis Davies. He told him to stop hunting for the pair. Cash Harris and his sidekick hadn’t made it back. He fended off a torrent of questions with ‘that’s all they would tell me’ and ‘I’m sorry I can’t disclose who they were.’
Travis replaced the handset, almost numb. Cash and Rigs were a constant. When you needed them, they were there. He couldn’t believe it. He didn’t want to believe it but had to. He looked for Sophie Kramer’s number, picked up the phone and thought twice. He was in London, only fifty miles from Cambridge. She deserved more than a call. He called his security team, deciding he’d deliver the news personally.
An hour later he was consoling her mother at Sophie’s Cambridge home. Mrs. Kramer was frantic with worry, and had no idea where either her daughter or grandson were. The school had informed her Kyle had been collected earlier that day.
Travis made some calls. Nobody knew anything, he feared the worst.
Chapter 76
Sophie had thrown herself around him when he boarded the plane, whispering in his ear, “It’s another planet that’s dying. I think the Nobles are the guardians.”
“I’m not sure ‘guardians’ is the right word but yes, they are. But there’s more, much more.”
Anya left them to chat. She had work to do and disappeared after takeoff to her private office on the upper deck.
The second she disappeared, Cash scoped out the plane, ignoring Sophie’s inquisitive look. A security team was stationed outside the cockpit. Four were Secret Service types. They didn’t worry him. His biggest problem was the flight door. Even if he did overpower them, the door was the same as those fitted to commercial airliners, made from reinforced solid steel and opening outwards.
Cash found Sophie, made sure Kyle was happily out of earshot, and told her everything, giving her as much detail as had been given to him. She sat shocked, intrigued, disgusted but, as an astronomer, desperate to ask Anya a million questions while strangling her superior body to death.
“They’re aliens but they look like us,” she said, struggling to get her head around it.
“We look like them. They created us, well half of me,” he corrected.
After an hour, Anya joined them tentatively. “I understand this is a fairly major piece of news,” she said. She sat, joining them in a small lounge at the rear of the plane.
Sophie decided
to get the practicalities out of the way. “What’s the other planet like? What’s it called?”
“I’ve never been there. I’ve seen videos and images that are in the archives. It’s not dissimilar to here, although slightly larger and unsurprisingly, since we named this planet, it’s called Earth. We call this one New Earth.”
“And your people have been flying around the universe for a long time?”
“Our historical records go back over five million years.”
Sophie fired question after question. Anya took them all in stride, detailing as much as she knew about the universe. Much of the detail was lost on Cash as the conversation became more and more detailed about the universe, its size, movements, how it worked, whether they knew of its creation, what they thought and why. Cash could see Anya was enjoying the conversation but he wanted to revisit some far more important topics. He let them talk a while longer eventually, when Sophie never slowed her questions, he asked for a timeout.
“Sophie, would you mind giving me and my mother a few minutes?” he asked.
“Of course,” said Sophie. “I’m sorry I’ve rather taken over. You said you have videos?”
“In the archives, I’ll show them to you,” promised Anya.
“How are you going to do that?” asked Cash, as Sophie walked away to find Kyle.
“Do what?”
“Show her the videos, if she’s dead and you don’t need her any longer?”
“People like Sophie will be fine,” said Anya.
“Fine because she’s with me, fine because she’s Kyle’s mom or fine because she’s intelligent?”
“All of those things,” said Anya.
“So how many?”
“How many what?”
“How many need to die for you to bring your people to ‘New Earth’, the planet the humans prepared for you, unwittingly, and under the illusion that being born here means they belonged here.”
The God Complex: A Thriller Page 34