Lucian: Dark God's Homecoming (The Above Book 1)

by Van Allen Plexico

  “My…”

  Her eyes widened momentarily, then she shook her head.

  “No. Not without the others.”

  The others. Of course. How could I ever have forgotten them?

  Through sheer effort, mainly.

  Reluctantly, I nodded. “…Right.”

  And so we ate and we drank and we rested until we felt as good as we could reasonably expect to feel, given the circumstances. And then I led her to the back of the cave, and found the spot where the layer between dimensions grew thinnest, and I exerted the small amount of Power necessary in that place to open a portal. Together we stepped through the blazing circle, emerging directly into my most secret location of all.

  “You’re kidding,” she said, upon seeing it.

  “Certainly not.”

  Evelyn looked around, her eyes quickly adjusting to the dim lighting. We stood in a small pool of light within a vast, gray room, extending perhaps fifty feet up and as many yards away from us in every direction. It was filled with row upon row of shelves. Those shelves were covered with every size and shape of box and crate and container imaginable. The musty smell of long-stored items in a long-sealed room washed over us both. Evelyn wrinkled her nose.

  “This is it?”

  She fixed me with a look that spoke of surprise, bewilderment, and no small amount of disappointment.

  I laughed softly, nodding.

  “This is it.”

  “You show me the wonders of the universe, building up to this grand finale—and it’s a warehouse?”

  I could not help but laugh again.

  Hands on hips, she waited.

  Finally, “I never said it was a ‘grand finale,’ as you say, and I promised you no spectacular vistas. But, if all is as it should be, this warehouse should contain something quite pleasing to the eyes.”

  She cocked her head at me, incredulous.

  I shrugged, adding, “To my eyes, anyway.”

  As I moved to the nearest shelf and studied the markings, getting my bearings, a light flickered our way from some distance down the aisle. Evelyn saw it first and motioned frantically at me. I whirled, just in time to see a man in gray moving through a more distant cone of illumination. He was coming toward us, his footsteps echoing off the crates and the walls, accelerating as he became aware of us.

  “Who’s there?” he cried. “Don’t move!”

  He drew a sidearm and halted a short distance away from us, studying us carefully. He was an old guy, white-haired and hunched over a bit. I had not realized I employed anyone of quite that vintage in a security capacity, but he appeared competent and alert enough. Then I recognized him, but realized it had been years—many years—since I had seen him last. I could not even remember his name.

  He gave both of us a perfunctory once-over, his expression wary and nervous, then moved his hand to activate his communication link.

  “Hello,” I said, moving quickly but casually toward him, directly under one of the cones of light shining down. Then, “Do you not recognize me?”

  His hand froze and he blinked, peering closer at me. Then he gasped, moved back a step, and said, “Lord Markos!”

  Smiling, I nodded, and clapped him warmly on the shoulder.

  His suspicious expression evaporated, and he grinned back at me.

  “I—I apologize for—“

  “No, no,” I said, stopping him. “You do your job well—” I squinted at his name badge. “—Tony. I was scarcely here a minute before you spotted me.”

  He swelled with pride and bowed slightly.

  “I heard some talk that you’d found a way to look young again,” he said, “but I didn’t believe…”

  “It’s true,” I said.

  He stared at me unabashedly, and shook his head in wonder. Then, with more formality, “My lord, we’ve been worried at your absence. You simply disappeared, and you’ve been gone for over two months.”

  So the many shifts among different planes high up in the Above had cost us more time, relative to this universe, than I had expected. Sighing, I nodded.

  “I was called away on urgent business,” I said.

  He nodded, an anxious and eager-to-please look on his face. I found I liked him a great deal. In fact, I—what?

  Ridiculous. He was a mortal. One of my former servants.

  Shaking my head to clear what must have been a touch of temporary insanity, I continued, “It was very secret business, I’m afraid. And I am in fact still in the process of dealing with it.”

  It galled me to have to treat so with a common guard, but I wanted what this warehouse contained, and the alternatives all seemed likely to result in greater delays.

  “It could not be helped,” I added.

  He nodded, taking it all in.

  “I’m just glad to see you’re all right,” he said after a moment’s silence. “No one was quite sure who should be in charge, and there have been some problems—”

  He looked past me at Evelyn, seeming to take full notice of her for the first time, and he stopped in mid-sentence. His smile evaporated. He narrowed his eyes as he stared at her. It took me a moment to figure out why, and then I realized—she was wearing her flight suit, her military uniform from the Terran Alliance Navy.

  Before he could act or speak, I cut him off.

  “Lieutenant Colicos here is with me. She is a liaison from the Alliance, working with me on some very sensitive matters.”

  “Ah.”

  He nodded slowly, his expression still conveying suspicion. Outworlders harbored enormous dislike and hostility toward Terrans, who likewise viewed them with contempt and scorn. That mutual animosity could be traced back to well before my time of exile. Indeed, it extended as far back as the earliest days of the Second Empire, when the earliest jump ships first ventured into the great dark unknown between the stars. At its heart, though, the animosity probably was driven by simple resentment and competition—motivations as old as life itself.

  “I appreciate your diligence, Tony,” I told him. “But I have a few items to collect here, and then we will be out of your way.”

  Turning back to me, his face warmed again, and he executed another little half-bow.

  “Of course, of course, sir. If I can be of any help—?”

  “No, no, we have it well in hand. You may continue your rounds.”

  “Yes. Thank you, sir.”

  Bowing to me again, then giving Evelyn a cursory and half-hearted one as well, he bustled away down the aisle.

  Evelyn watched him go, then chuckled.

  “Your security staff is quite impressive. I’ll have to tell the folks back home not to dare try an attack here—they wouldn’t stand a chance against Tony.”

  Groaning, I shook my head dismissively and set off down the aisle.

  “You were pleasant with him,” Evelyn noted as she followed after me.

  “Yes.”

  She stared at me, hands on hips, waiting for more.

  “He was once one of my soldiers. He has served me faithfully all his life.” I laughed. “He thinks he served my father, too.”

  Evelyn nodded, saying, “But he’s a mortal. Where was the contempt? The scorn?”

  I shrugged.

  “He served a different me than the one you first met. I was powerless, and had been so for a very long time. It was a lifetime ago.”

  “Lucian, it was two months ago. And only days ago, to you and me.”

  “Yes. As I said, a lifetime ago.”

  Evelyn continued to regard me for a few more seconds, her expression unreadable. Sighing, I moved on, following the rows of crates and boxes that lined the shelves and walls of the dingy storage building. I examined the markings on each item, working from memory. Very soon, I found what I was seeking: a set of crates, each approximately five feet long and three feet to a side. Unlatching the fastenings of the nearest one, I pulled the cover back, and smiled.

  Evelyn leaned over my shoulder and peered down into the crate. S
he found cold, deadly black metal there.

  “Guns?”

  “Oh, yes,” I breathed. “Oh, yes. Guns. Most definitely guns.”

  Her eyes widened, and I imagined she was thinking back to the recent events on my little desert island.

  “Oh. Guns.”

  “Lots of guns. Oh, yes.”

  “Arendal guns.”

  “Arendal guns, oh, yes.”

  I pulled the crate off the low shelf and let it drop the six inches down onto the floor, then rummaged through its contents, shoving the packing material aside, counting.

  “All here. Five rifles per crate. Five pistols as well. And… lots of crates.”

  I was surely grinning maniacally now. It is a wonder Evelyn did not flee from the sight of me.

  “Would you mind telling me,” she said, “how these came to be here? And, for that matter, where exactly we are?”

  “Mysentia,” I replied. “My old capital in the Outer Worlds.”

  She frowned.

  “Mysentia?”

  “And the guns came to be here, rather than with me in the Golden City,” I continued, ignoring her reaction, “because I was extremely foolish. After spending centuries accumulating these things and hiding them here, I got careless. The Fountain flowed again, the Power rushed through my veins and intoxicated me, and I raced back to the Golden City without bringing a single one of these beauties along with me.”

  I shrugged.

  “But I was excited. It had been so long—so many years—since I had last felt the Power surging through me, through the universe. I felt invulnerable, invincible. What need had I of any weapon? I was the only weapon I needed. And, besides, if I could sense the Power again, and access it, I assumed that meant all was forgiven, and I was being allowed to come home again.”

  I snorted.

  “Little did I dream no one else had been able to access the Power either, those past thousand years. Little did I guess I was essentially walking into a trap.”

  Evelyn was nodding.

  “I’d have to agree, that was pretty dumb,” she said.

  I let her comment pass without response or reaction—something that should have struck me at the time as noteworthy. But I pushed on to the conclusion of my thoughts.

  “And I wound up thrown in the dungeon because of it.”

  I tapped the crate and the guns.

  “But now… all that is behind me. For a thousand years I sat on this rock, and gathered this collection of cosmic firepower, with no way to get it or myself to the City. Now I have the means to travel there and the means to enforce my will when I arrive. The Golden City will open its gates to me once more, and Baranak will beg my forgiveness for daring to impugn my name, or—”

  The hand laid gently on my arm brought me up short, and I halted in mid-rant, mouth hanging open, and looked at Evelyn. She simply shook her head.

  “Settle down,” she said. “Get a grip.”

  My eyebrows were thunderclouds, my anger building unabated, until… it abated. Just like that. It was the strangest thing. I worked my jaw a few times, but could no longer work up the righteous indignation within which I had been reveling only moments earlier.

  “You simply want to get them to listen to you, to give you a fair chance to prove your innocence in the murders,” she said evenly. “And you want to help me find my friends and get us home. That’s what you want to do.”

  I stammered a few unintelligible words, then stopped trying to speak altogether. Leaning back against the wall, I ran my hand through my hair and stared at the floor, dumbstruck.

  This was simply unacceptable, if not utterly inconceivable. How dare she? I had carefully laid plans over ten centuries and, despite completely blowing it the first time, I intended to do things right this time. Who was this woman to stand in my way?

  “So,” she was saying, “what do we need to do with these weapons?”

  My anger, godlike and terrible, flared brighter within me, and my wrath grew to a terrifying and overwhelming pitch, and I said to her then: “Um… Help me find the forklift.”

  # # #

  Still in a daze, I roamed the aisles, alongside Evelyn. Soon enough, we found the forklift.

  It was actually a gravity-defying device that could hold quite a load of crates. We managed to secure ten of them on board before the stack grew unwieldy. That totaled fifty rifles, with an equal number of pistols. A nice start, I thought. And, given the drastic reduction in the—you’ll pardon the expression—manpower that Baranak would be able to bring to bear, quite possibly more than enough already.

  With a grim sense of satisfaction I had not felt in quite some time, I activated the controls and steered the hovering platform down the aisle and to the warehouse exit. Unlatching the door, I slid it upward, and Evelyn and I stepped out into darkness.

  Nighttime in Mysen City. For a place I had called home only days earlier, it could have been the far side of the galaxy to me. What a difference in outlook the Power made, as it moved through the body and energized the muscles and heightened the consciousness—and amplified ambitions.

  Evelyn walked alongside the forklift, clearly uncomfortable. I had found her an ill-fitting but nondescript gray coat within the warehouse, to cover her bright blue flight suit with its golden Terran Alliance markings and insignias. I hoped it would prevent any further incidents and forestall uncomfortable questions from any who happened by us. Evelyn, though, could not possibly have been happy to walk the streets of a world she considered distasteful at best and rebellious at worst.

  I looked at her then, studying her as her own attention was drawn to the darkened buildings and the few people moving about the streets. I had to admit I found her quite attractive. Though battered and bruised by all we had endured since our escape, she carried herself with a natural grace, an inner strength and beauty that radiated beyond the surface. And those eyes, blue to the point of luminosity, held a power of their own, subtle but distinct. Then I remembered my earlier admonition to myself about involvement with mortals, chuckled at the outrageousness of the thought that I should even need such a warning, and put the entire subject out of my mind.

  Soon enough, we reached our destination. A big, square building, windowless, it boasted another broad door like the one we had just exited. By habit, I started to reach out and touch the identification pad, then laughed and exerted a tiny fraction of the Power instead. The lock cycled and the door slid upward.

  We led the cargo lifter inside and I pulled the door closed behind us, then hit the lights. Evelyn gasped.

  The entire space of the building’s interior was hollow, and only one object sat within it: my personal spacecraft. About thirty-five meters long, and nearly as wide, it resembled a giant bird of prey, its forward cockpit section curving down, its metal wings spread in graceful, curving arcs. The overhead lights shone down, rippling over the slick, smooth surface.

  I stood back, admiring my favorite toy.

  “That’s… that’s… wow,” Evelyn stammered. “That’s beautiful.”

  Evelyn walked forward in a daze, reached out, and ran her hand along the synthetic resin and ceramic surface.

  “It looks like a Viggen-12, but there shouldn’t be any of those out here in the Outer Worlds.”

  She walked around the side, her eyes moving over the big, silvery bulk.

  “And it really isn’t even that, is it? It’s something new…”

  “Very new,” I said. “One of a kind. Based on the Viggen, yes, but heavily modified by the best engineers and designers to be found on Mysentia.”

  “You must have found some good ones,” she said, envy obvious in her voice.

  “It is quite remarkable what one can accomplish, given enough time and resources,” I replied.

  “And power,” she added.

  “I had no access to the Power during much of my exile.”

  “I didn’t mean that kind of power,” she said. “If you really were close to unifying the Outer Worlds, b
efore you abandoned it all to go running back to your City, you must have commanded a great deal of power and influence out here.”

  I shrugged, no longer terribly interested in discussing the political matters of this plane. When Mysentia had been my only home and refuge, I had devoted considerable effort to bettering its position and power. Yet, as concerned as I had become over the plight of the Outer Worlds at the hands of the Terran Alliance, it had all become much less important to me the moment the Power had returned. Surprisingly, I found I did still feel something of a slight attachment to and a concern for Mysentia, but I dismissed this as pure sentimentality manifesting itself upon my return. Casting such thoughts aside, I returned my attention to the huge gleaming vehicle in front of me.

  My beautiful spacecraft filled almost the entire available space, but, in truth, it did not seem terribly bulky. Indeed, it appeared sleek and streamlined and ready to hurl itself into the void of its own accord. Its smooth, blue-gray flank sparkled and rippled with a light that could not entirely be accounted for by reflection of the building’s own illumination. Even the four landing pads upon which it sat spoke more of sculpture than cold mechanics. How proud I was of it. To think I might have remained in the Golden City, had I been welcomed there, and never thought to revisit this grand machine again! Perhaps seeing it again represented something good to have come from my travails. I surely couldn’t think of anything else that had happened so far that fit that description.

  Recalling the security codes from my memory, I gestured with one hand and exerted a touch of the Power. The cargo hatch unlocked and slid open. Maneuvering the lifter around, I pushed it up into the cargo bay and closed the door.

  “This may seem like a dumb question, given that you’re loading your weapons onto a spacecraft, here,” Evelyn said, “but: We’re flying somewhere?”

  “Yes.”

  She bit her lip, thinking.

  “You don’t have an army to go with your guns. Planning on doing some recruiting?”

  “Soldiers are not all I need before I can assault the Golden City.”