“You've been pushing yourself too hard,” Zepar placed a sympathetic hand upon his shoulder. “Would you like me to cancel your twelve-thirty mating appointment so you have time to take a nap? The only reason I scheduled it was to create a smokescreen. It will look odd if you suddenly lose all interest in females. You do have your reputation to maintain, Sire.”
“No,” Lucifer sighed, his expression wistful. “I'll keep the appointment. One little bun in the oven is not enough. It would be nice if I could find a mate who is fully sentient and can also give my offspring wings.”
Zepar started laughing, looking at him as though he were joking.
“What’s so funny?” Lucifer asked.
“Sire ….” Zepar said, holding his sides. “You're too modest. You have fourteen offspring on the way, not one. That's why we left your ship in the uncharted territories. You have an entire harem on board your ship.”
“Fourteen?" Lucifer sat down on the edge of his bed in shock. Zepar’s laughter began to sound further and further away.
“Yes, Sire,” Zepar laughed as though he thought Lucifer was pulling his leg. “And every single human female you've gifted to an Alliance hybrid is pregnant, as well. There are over three hundred half-human, half-hybrid children waiting to be born. All because of your efforts. And the Emperor doesn't have a clue!" Zepar shook his shoulder with glee. "Sire! You're a hero!”
“I'm a hero,” Lucifer whispered. He rustled his white feathers. “Yes. Of course. Let’s get to that Ministry of Education appointment.”
The remainder of the day, Lucifer cross-referenced his appointment calendar to figure out what in Hades he'd been up to, what legislation he'd introduced, who he'd spoken too, and what they had spoken about. Zepar had invented code words for the back-room deals politicians often did to grease the wheels of government. They didn't write anything down that might be subpoenaed by a grand jury, but all politicians were expected to keep an itinerary. There were an awful lot of ‘fudge records’ lately.
Lucifer faked his way through the Ministry of Education meeting. The mating appointment was pleasurable and vacuous. He didn't even have to use his gift. The female had one prior successful mating and only mated with him in an effort to produce an heir for the emperor's adopted son. It wasn’t until he got to his father’s birthday jubilee that a common thread began to dawn on him. He'd never experienced a blackout when he met with his father.
He passed through the extensive security which had been at the Eternal Palace ever since his father had gotten back from the highest ascended realms: the body searches, the eye scanner, the reaction time tests, and the infra-red. Looking for something. What was his father looking for when he ran all those tests? Dignitaries swirled through the palace, all vying for a moment alone with the Eternal Emperor. Lucifer slipped through the line of well-wishers, anxious to throw himself upon his father's mercy. Whatever else was going on, his father was a scientist. He might be able to fix it.
“Father,” Lucifer trembled as he stood before the Eternal Emperor and prepared to throw his fate to his mercy. “Can I speak to you please? Alone?”
“Not now." Hashem nodded acknowledgement to the long line of well-wishers who were filing past.
“It’s really important,” Lucifer begged him. He trembled, and then did that thing that was forbidden for mortal creatures to do. He placed his hand upon the Emperor's forearm.
“I told you, Lucifer,” Hashem swatted at Lucifer's hand the way one might swat at a fly. “I don't know how to fix you.”
“It’s not that problem." Lucifer kept his voice low so that the well-wishers wouldn't hear. “This is something else. Father … please … I really need your help.”
He shouldn't be losing time like this. There was something really wrong with him, and Zepar was taking advantage of his blackouts for some purpose he couldn't fathom. There was no way he was losing that much time without Zepar being aware of it.
“Your Majesty,” a female voice said.
The Emperor never even made eye contact with Lucifer. He turned, smiling towards the source of the voice. Lucifer's gaze followed that of his father, right into the ice-cold stare of that Bitch, Jophiel, and her flavor-du-jour, Raphael, father of her latest offspring. It seemed Lucifer was not the only one yearning for something a little more meaningful!
“Jophiel!" Hashem put his arm around her and led her away from the well-wishers, turning his back on Lucifer. “When will you let this fine young man make an honest woman of you?”
“Shhhhh!!!” Jophiel's cheeks flushed pink. “We're trying to keep things low key. You know what the consequences are to the Alliance if we do that.”
Lucifer’s blood began to boil. Here he'd tried for 225 years to fulfill his father's wishes and produce offspring, spending every available minute that he wasn't performing the duties of Parliament attempting to ‘perform’ his duty to produce a lawful heir, and now Hashem urged Jophiel, the only female Angelic who could consistently produce offspring, to just take herself out of commission?
Memory of how many times he'd pleaded with his father to pay attention to the problems of his empire rankled him. Hashem had skipped town and left Lucifer holding the bag. Then suddenly, after 200 years gone, his father had come back, taken one look at Jophiel, and created a brand-new military position that was the social equivalent of his position. Hashem had been lavishing attention on the icy Angelic female ever since. All because of a freak resemblance to his mother! Just like that, he'd been replaced, 200 years of faithful service running the Alliance in his father's absence just pushed aside and forgotten!
Lucifer didn't even bother to say goodbye. Radioing Zepar, he ordered him to ready his needle. Blackouts or no blackouts, it was time to step up the pace and finish unrolling his plan.
Chapter 108
September – 3,390 BC
Earth: Crash Site
Ninsianna
Ninsianna watched her husband squat, wings dragging on the ground, as he fiddled with the underside of a peculiar contraption built out of spare parts of his ship and the spiderwebs he called wires with the handy little spear he called a screwdriver. Scrutinizing Mikhail do anything with the magical devices was always curious, but these days, with the thoughts of She-who-is coming into her mind so easily, her husband's tek-nol-o-gee had begun to take on the appearance of something clunky and old-fashioned.
“And what does that wire thingy do?” Ninsianna pointed to the contraption he'd built at the end of the long, thick ropes he also called wires.
“It's called an antenna,” Mikhail glanced up, his expression one of quiet competence. “It takes the message and throws it across the sky so that somebody with a second antenna can hear it. It's kind of like playing catch.”
“Is it supposed to be all twisted like that?”
“No. I'm cobbling something together and hoping it will work." He wiped the back of his hand across his cheek and smeared it with the black substance he called 'grease.' Minutes turned into hours as he moved back and forth between the chunks of his sky canoe he was tying together and the wires she knew would jolt you with lightning, his focus single minded as he tried to make the technology work.
The goddess didn't need tek-nol-o-gee to communicate over vast distances! She just did it! Perhaps She-who-is might be willing to help? Ninsianna closed her eyes and focused inward, picking up the sturdy thread of energy that connected her to the goddess. Yes. Last night's dream was HER will.
Dividing her attention between the material realms and the dreamtime as Papa had been training her to do, she asked for information about the people Mikhail was trying to contact. Her attention was drawn to the sturdy thread which connected her husband through the dreamtime to his friend. Aha! She followed the thread from her solar plexus to him, and then a second thread connecting him to his friend until at last she came to the other side. Oh! She could see his friend Raphael!
Ninsianna whispered into Raphael's mind that Mikhail was trying to contact him, but
without shamanic training, Raphael thought he heard his own thoughts about his missing friend. Drat! They would need to use Mikhail's tek-no-lo-gee after all. Ninsianna sought the best information available about how to help him do just that and it was granted to her.
“Aim this … here,” she walked over to the tripod he'd set up outside the ship and aimed it in a different direction.
“But those are the last known coordinates of the Light Emerging,” Mikhail said. “I thought you didn't understand antennae theory.”
“Raphael is in that direction now,” she said. “You must wait until I tell you to throw your message or it won't make it. There is an object in the way.”
“I don't see anything,” he said. “It's a clear sky.”
“Not here … up there,” she pointed towards the sky. “A big rock. It will move out of the way in a little while.”
“Ninsianna…” Mikhail realized she was in ‘that other place.' “Don't go too far ... okay. You scare me when you do that.”
“I'm fine." She focused on the thread connecting him to Raphael and used it to remote-view the sky canoe her husband was trying to communicate with. “Why do you have giant insects on your ships?”
“You can see them?” he asked. “I keep getting images of them, but I can’t remember anything about them except a name. Glicki? The memory is still buried.”
“All will be revealed when She-who-is needs you to know,” Ninsianna gave him a cryptic smile. She journeyed further into the stream-of-consciousness of She-who-is and spoke continuously about everything that she saw, but she was no longer aware of what she said.
Mikhail said they needed to send the message at nightfall … something about the sunlight interfering with the signal and the planet aiming the signal in the wrong direction. Focusing on what that meant, images of solar dynamics jumped into her mind, her blue planet one of many spinning around a sun. Flares emanated from the sunlight and interfered with the ‘subspace radio signals' Mikhail spoke of. It was so beautiful, all the pretty little stars and planets rotating around one another like a child's mobile. They would have a brief window to throw the signal between the goddess' pretty little baubles so it didn't bounce off of one of them before reaching the other side.
“It’s spooky when you divide your consciousness like this,” Mikhail said. He watched her as he wired up the equipment on the tripod, not quite hiding his unease behind his stoic mask. She understood he didn't deliberately hide his feelings from her. It was simply habit.
“It’s kind of spooky when you enter the killing dance,” she said, not paying attention to what came out her mouth. “You enter the dreamtime when you do that, you know? You just don't realize it. Raphael's coloring is gold … darker than the Evil One … but he's good … I like him … he's a good friend.”
Mikhail scrutinized her, the screwdriver paused in his hand.
“You can tell all that just by … doing … whatever you’re doing?” he asked.
Ninsianna understood her husband was a creature of logic. To him, the dreamtime was nothing but a myth, a comforting place people went when they died. It was curious, how readily his people accepted having an immortal creature as their emperor, and yet rejected the notion these creatures had powers beyond the tek-no-lo-gee they created and their very long lives. Ninsianna sought information to help him understand the stream-of-consciousness she now swam through.
“There is a scientific principal for the dreamtime,” some other consciousness spoke through her, not her, or the goddess, another traveler perhaps? “The subatomic particles that make up the universe connect All-That-Is in a unified theory of physics. Life is consciousness solidified into physical form. Consciousness is pure energy. Any two minds can connect across infinite time and space simply by joining their neutrinos inside the time-space continuum…”
“Ninsianna?” She felt Mikhail take her hand. “Are you still in there? Honey … come back. Please…”
“You'll only have point zero two three seconds to send your data burst before you run out of power." Whatever old god had decided to gift her with his knowledge spoke directly through her. “You'll need to record your message and compress it into an encoded data stream no larger than one point two three gigabytes of data or it will fail.”
“I computed one point seven two gigabytes,” Mikhail said.
“Your computations are wrong.”
“Ninsianna … please thank whoever is helping us and come back,” Mikhail put his arm around her shoulder and led her inside the ship. “The antenna is all set. Let’s record our message, but I would rather have you here when I do it than somebody I don't know.”
“Jophiel is the white queen. She named the baby Uriel. Raphael is the father. He is the other white knight. You didn't tell me that she asked you to father one of her offspring. She-who-is was very upset when you refused. Hashem told them they may marry. The white queen is torn. The Alliance will fracture.”
Ninsianna rattled off meaningless facts as though she were one of these com-pu-ter-minds Mikhail explained had once run his ship, devoid of all human emotion.
“Ninsianna,” he put his hand on her cheek in the gesture she often used to communicate with him when he needed physical contact. “Come back. You said you would always come back to me.”
Ninsianna let go of the stream of consciousness she'd been following and followed his voice.
“Hey,” she registered his look of concern. “Why so glum?”
“You scare me when you do that." His expression was serious. His expression was always serious, but it was more serious than usual.
“Do what?” She knew what she knew while she was in the stream-of-consciousness of She-who-is, but the moment she came back into the real world, everything started to fade. Papa said there used to be an entire temple devoted to listening to the last chosen priestess of She-who-is. People would come from miles around just to listen. She wished somebody would do that for her.
“You never remember what you say while you’re in there,” Mikhail said. “You were quoting the quantum theory behind the dreamtime.”
“The what?” She didn't have any idea what he said. “You’ve got a message to record. Let’s do it, okay?”
“According to your friend,” he said, “I have to record a shorter message. I won’t have time to formally introduce you. Will you stand at my side while I record it? Raphael can figure it out any missing information from the image.”
“What friend?”
“Never mind,” he kissed her cheek. “I'll record it and use that machine over there to make the message smaller. Then we'll send it out and hope for the best. Either way, at least I can say I tried to complete my mission. If they never come for me, I'm perfectly okay with that." He wrapped his arms around her and kissed the top of her head. She knew part of him hoped they would never come for him, but a larger part felt duty-bound to finish whatever mission he'd started. It was what made him who he was.
“Where do I stand?" She'd never been part of a message before. Would it hurt? She moved in closer to his side.
“Right where you belong." He aimed the camera to show the cracked hull of his ship. Placing his bow and arrows and a spear within view of the camera, he grinned like a cat that had just swallowed a big, fat robin. Every aspect of his physiology, his arm possessively thrown around her shoulders, the way he tugged her close just before he hit the ‘record’ button, all shouted ‘mine!’
“Ready? Three … two … one … Raphael … my ship is toast … the Sata’an have set up a base on an M-class planet at these coordinates ... Zulu three zero one eight five two nine … meet Ninsianna, my wife … end transmission.”
“Now what?" That was painless.
“I'm running it through the data compression sequence right now,” he said. “And … it’s ready. Ninsianna … is that asteroid out of the path so I can send the transmission?”
“The what?”
“Can you go to that ‘other place’ just for a second an
d tell me when it's okay to hit this button?” Mikhail was not a superstitious person, but even he'd been forced to acknowledge that her visions were highly accurate.
Ninsianna shifted focus back down into the thread and immediately recalled the information she'd stored there. “Not … yet … not … yet … wait … w-a-i-t … NOW!”
Mikhail hit the button. A small hum went through the ship as he channeled the subspace message from the console, down the wire, and outside to the antenna. A few milliseconds before he'd computed the magic would run out, the lights shut off and the hum stopped. The entity in the dreamtime had been correct. His computations had been off.
“The magic lanterns are gone…” Ninsianna said mournfully. She'd rather liked the magic lights.
“We'll just have to think of other things to do in the dark,” Mikhail gave her a most uncharacteristic grin. He pulled her close, signaling a desire to engage in his new favorite activity to perform in the dark. She'd brought tallow lamps to light their way.
“Do you think we could feel our way back to the sleeping quarters?” she asked. “I'm suddenly very sleepy. I told Mama we might not be back tonight. They won't be worried about us."
One of the unpleasant side effects of too much travel in the dreamtime was how heavy everything felt once she came back. It felt as though she were forcing her body to move through water, her mind to see through a heavy fog, whenever she came back from a shamanic journey. She missed the heady buzz she experienced whenever she tapped into the stream-of-consciousness of She-who-is. But not for Mikhail and the threat to her people, she would just assume let go of the heavy shell which weighed her down like an anchor and join her beloved goddess as her grandfather had once done when he'd finished existing here.
Sword of the Gods: The Chosen One (Sword of the Gods Saga) Page 55