“I do what I’m told, now stop right where you are,” Henry commanded.
Valnor paused his strides for the briefest of moments before continuing, “You always do what daddy commands? Sometimes you need to challenge authority, not blindly follow it. Do you really intend to kill one of your best friends tonight on daddy’s order?”
“Who said anything about killing,” Henry sighed before raising his arm to unleash a mind-scrambling gunshot. The bullet punched a harmless hole in the roof, but the concussion waves rattled between the stone walls of the tiny apartment and made Valnor stumble forward a few steps from the vertigo it induced.
While Valnor regained his balance and bearings, his apartment door burst open at the prompting of the two burly men who stood watch at the private meeting earlier. Behind them strode in Minister Walpole with Admiral Clinton and a few other cohorts in tow.
Valnor did not pause to think, he simply reacted to the situation. He yanked open the drawer of his side table and retrieved the pistol with his left hand while his right hand flung the emptied drawer at one of the hired thugs. The wooden projectile did no harm, but did buy him enough time to leap over his bed and come to a standstill in front of the window.
He gave a thought to jumping out the portal or turning the pistol on himself, but even in this circumstance, he would not bear the dishonor of suicide. There was no greater crime in the eyes of his people. Besides, he had a more elegant method in mind to avoid capture at the hands of these men.
The two bruisers prowled forward, but stopped five feet short when Valnor raised his pistol and pointed it at the one on the right. His eyes looked around the room to find Henry and lingered just long enough for Valnor to deliver his lazy salute and wink before kicking the hired muscle on his left between the legs. The rather ungentlemanly blow provoked an instinctive punch from the man that propelled Valnor off his feet and through the window.
Perhaps that wasn’t so elegant after all, Valnor thought as he fell head first toward the paved street below at terminal velocity.
Chapter 4: Need to Know Basis
“What the hell did you have me do?” Henry bellowed the instant he stepped foot into his father’s office. An hour earlier, he watched one of his best friends plummet to his death out a window rather than be taken in for questioning. He wanted answers and he would have them, now.
Admiral Clinton stepped into the room behind Henry with a purposeful calm that came from a lifetime of military service and discipline. Odd how that visible state of serenity radiated outward from the man to mute Henry’s agitated state somewhat. The admiral closed the door behind them, poured two glasses of brandy and handed the fuller of the two to Henry. “Mind your tone, young man.”
“My tone? Jesus Christ, are you serious?” Henry snapped, but ventured no further with it when he met the man’s scolding eyes that made it clear there would be no answers unless he showed his elder proper respect. That prompted Henry to take a long drink from his glass before continuing in a level voice. “We just killed a friend I’ve had for over twenty years.”
“A man you’ve known for twenty years died tonight,” the admiral amended. “He got himself killed, and believe me, he was not a friend.”
“You see that, that right there needs explaining,” Henry insisted with his now half-empty glass of brandy shaking with anger. “You elevated him to Grand Master of the lodge a few years back. He was more than a friend to all of us, he was a brother.”
“He was a plant, an agent. We were all but certain of that fact, and you proved it by intercepting those letters in his apartment. He was an informant who needed detaining. I only wish we had gotten a chance to question him,” Admiral Clinton lamented and took a shallow drink to drown that particular sorrow.
“It was gibberish scribbled on a page,” Henry countered. “The penmanship was written in code, or some language none of us understand. It could have been a shopping list or a love letter for all we know.”
“You don’t brandish a pistol or get yourself punched out of a window defending a love letter.”
“No, I suppose not,” Henry conceded with a nod of his head. “What is worth all of that then? What is it about the Freemasons that merits infiltration, spying, and ultimately dying over?”
“You’re not ready to know the answer to that question yet.”
“No, no you don’t! I am a grown man, and I took part in another man’s death at your behest this evening. You don’t get to dodge my questions by reciting that tired phrase anymore,” Henry demanded as he slammed his empty glass down on his father’s desk.
The admiral put down his own glass and struck a formal posture with hands clasped behind his back. He stared down his son until Henry was forced to look away in shame for his outburst before he spoke again. “There is a process to revealing the deeper secrets of the Freemasons to a select few members. I went through it, as did many others before me. Rest assured, my son, you are one of those few members who will know those secrets in due time.”
“When? How long?” Henry insisted.
“There is no specific timetable,” Admiral Clinton instructed. “However, if you continue doing as instructed and show faith in the judgment of your elders, then you’ll move that timetable along considerably faster.”
“You are asking me for blind faith,” Henry declared with revulsion bolstering his voice. “I do not give that, not even to the church. You are asking too much of me.”
“That request is nothing compared to what others sacrifice for our cause,” the admiral erupted with uncharacteristic fury. “Sir Robert Walpole gave up his position as Prime Minister in service to the Freemasons. For twenty-one years he ran and strengthened the British Empire undisputed, and he stepped away out of a greater sense of duty. Asking for your blind faith is nothing compared to his sacrifice.”
“What do you mean? What greater duty is there than serving one’s country?” Henry asked. “How does he serve Britain better by not being Prime Minister?”
“The mission of the Freemasons is bigger than one nation. Remember? We have lodges and marquee members dispersed throughout the European powers,” Henry’s father instructed. “All you need to know now, all you can know now, is that we are fighting a great evil that exists in the world. Things are starting to happen faster now, and we needed a great man to take charge of it all. Who better than Minister Walpole?”
“I had no idea.”
“Nor should you have at this point,” Admiral Clinton snapped.
Henry pondered his father’s meaning with that last statement and searched within himself to determine if he could accept it. He was not sure about the existence or validity of this greater duty. However, if it gained him the support of powerful men like Minister Walpole and his ilk, then he was willing to take a few things on faith…for now.
“How can I help?” Henry finally asked.
“You and I are going to the Americas. I’ve been appointed Governor of New York, and you will serve as my military liaison.”
“The Americas?” Henry asked with a sneer. “May I ask how the two of us going half a globe away from everything meaningful and important in this world, including this brewing confrontation you ask me to believe exists, is helpful?”
“If we are to stand any chance at all against the forces of evil right here, then we’ll need the resources from those vast continents over there to do it. Gold, iron, coal, fishing, lumber, and land enough to feed the globe are all there for the taking. We know it, and I fear our enemy knows it as well. This task is of the utmost importance to our cause. Are you with me?”
If great men believed in it, then having favor with those great men was worth enduring that new continent for a few years, Henry concluded. With his mind made up, he straightened his back and delivered a crisp reply. “Yes, sir, I am.”
Chapter 5: Time for a Revival
No Matter how many times he went through it, Valnor could never get used to the Nexus reanimation process. First, there was th
e mental aspect of it all. One moment his mind was scrambling to process an environment that raced past him as he plummeted toward the street from his apartment building window. Then in the blink of an eye, his world jumped from complete panic and chaos to absolute calm and quiet. The only experience mentally jarring enough to come close was snapping wide-awake from a particularly graphic dream sequence.
Then there was the physical aspect of the process. Valnor’s sense of sight was the first to return when a blinding light replaced the darkness of nothing. He moved his hands to cover his eyes, but they smacked into a wall of glass hovering mere inches above him. His eyes eventually adjusted to the lighting and he was able to make out the familiar face of Captain Hastelloy staring down at him through the glass barrier of the reanimation chamber.
Next, his sense of touch returned. The warm embrace of the oxygen-saturated air within the chamber welcomed him back to life, but Valnor knew that would not last long. He heard a loud click and knew it had jumped into a pool of ice water. It ignited a maelstrom of sensations. His senses of taste, smell, touch and hearing all came alive at once and sent his body instinctively into the fetal position.
Two sets of hands, hands that felt like they were drenched in flames against his cold skin, grabbed Valnor by the arms and lifted him out of the coffin like chamber and onto the cold metal floor. “Welcome back, Ensign.”
“You may rethink that pleasant greeting when you hear what I have to report,” Valnor said as the pain sensations dissipated to the point he could now perform a few deep knee bends to test his mobility and balance. Once satisfied with his coordination, Valnor made his way to a storage locker around the perimeter of the tiny room and found a set of clothes to wear.
“I figured as much. Premature returns to the Nexus chamber rarely bring with them good tidings. Was it the Freemasons?” Hastelloy asked.
“Yes indeed,” Valnor answered. He then spent the next several hours briefing the captain on what he just learned about the secret society.
“I’ve got to hand it to Juan, he’s almost as bad as the Alpha,” Hastelloy marveled. “The man’s life ended over two hundred years ago, yet despite that little inconvenience, he’s still found a way to strike at me from the grave.”
“How do you want to proceed?” Valnor asked while sitting across a table from his commanding officer.
Hastelloy said nothing for several minutes. Instead, he placed his elbows on the table, clasped his hands together and placed them under his chin to strike a contemplative pose. The only movement from that point on came from his eyes. They oscillated back and forth between looking toward the upper right and upper left corners of his head, indicating that both the creative and logical hemispheres of his mind were at work.
He watched the captain’s mouth open a few times as if to speak, but then closed again without a sound. Then Hastelloy’s eyes stopped moving and came to rest staring straight at Valnor. There was a confidence behind those eyes, assuring him that the captain had everything well in hand. The sly grin that followed only served to reinforce that conclusion.
Captain Hastelloy brought his two index fingers up to a point under his nose and then turned the arrow-like gesture toward his awaiting subordinate. “How would you proceed in this instance?”
Valnor was taken aback for a moment by the question. This is not how things worked. Captain Hastelloy often sought input from the crew, but the final course of action was devised by him and him alone. There were occasions, however, when the stakes were low, that he used the situation as an instructional opportunity. He never did this with the other crewmen though. It was always an exercise reserved exclusively for Valnor’s benefit.
He always chalked it up to the others being older and set in their ways and rolls, while Valnor’s youth made him a more malleable student. Still, a small part of him could not help but think that the captain saw something in Valnor, a potential that he did not even see in himself yet. Time would eventually tell, he supposed.
“My first instinct is to target the Freemasons,” Valnor answered after a few moments of contemplation, “but the question is which ones? All except a handful of members are good, charitable men. The 34th degree leaders are who we need to target, but we only know a few of their identities.”
“We could go after all of them by employing hired assassins,” Hastelloy suggested with doubt weighing down his words. Clearly, this was not his preferred approach, but he wanted to hear Valnor’s reasoning on the option.
“That would be too indiscriminate for my taste. Besides, their lodges are in dozens of countries all across the European continent. With the influence they wield over most monarchies, it would lead to an all-out war across the continent.”
“Not an entirely undesirable outcome,” Hastelloy observed. “Those monarchies would likely fall and give way to democratic republics, moving mankind forward in their social development. Not to mention the fact that wars usually bring with them a technological leap forward, particularly large scale conflicts like the one you envision happening.”
“It’s too soon,” Valnor countered and planted his index finger on the table between them for added emphasis. “Europe’s population only recently got back to pre-plague levels. Death on a large scale is the last thing we need.”
Hastelloy nodded his head in agreement with a hint of pride touching the corners of his lips. “What about isolating the conflict to Great Britain and only going after the Freemason lodges there? That seems to be where the leadership is centered. We could cut off the snake’s head and let the body wither away on its own.”
Valnor mulled the notion over for a moment, but in the end shook his head to disagree. “The Masons own the British Isles, and I mean that literally. Every scrap of land is owned by the aristocracy, and all of them belong to Freemason lodges. It would be a massive undertaking to wrest control away from that base of power. Besides, that would leave the British Empire bereft of any educated leadership in the end. Placing the most wide-spread and powerful nation on Earth in the hands of uneducated farmers and revolutionaries would end badly for all concerned.”
“You’ve said what not to do and justified the reasoning. That is useful, but now tell me what you would do,” Hastelloy ordered.
“A head on conflict with the Masons in England would be too time consuming and costly for us in the end. We need to come at them from the side,” Valnor offered.
“From where?”
“The new continents,” Valnor answered without hesitation. “The tiny British Isle commands vast tracts of land and resources far and wide across the globe. They control them for the moment at least, but that will not last. When those territories finally realize that Britain needs their tax dollars and resources far more than they need Britain’s corrupt politics and unnecessary bureaucracy, there will be revolutions.”
If we position ourselves to gain control and establish a new nation in the Americas, we will have secured an almost endless supply of resources to our cause,” Valnor continued. “At that point, our winning the long game against the Masons in England will be a certainty. It will allow us to dismantle their neutered organization without much fuss at that point.”
The captain nodded in agreement before pointing out and asking, “Spain, Portugal, France, the Dutch and England are all over there with ambitions to own the American continents and their rich resources. How do we gain control over all of that chaos?”
“The difficulty all those nations face in the New World is convincing their citizens that giving up everything they know to sail halfway around the world to an unknown, unsettled wilderness is a good idea,” Valnor explained. “That is a tough sell and as a result, not many people are making the risky voyage.”
“True, it takes men to conquer a new nation, especially one as vast as those two continents,” Hastelloy agreed. “How do you plan to get people loyal to your agenda over there then?”
“I don’t need to convince anyone to move, the Americas already have millions
of inhabitants waiting for someone to unify and lead them against our enemy. Tens of millions in fact,” Valnor amended.
“The natives,” Hastelloy announced with pride and a nod of approval.
“In general, they are fierce warriors and will be made all the more lethal by defending their homes from invaders,” Valnor explained.
“True, but there are hundreds of separate tribes spread across thousands of miles. It will be difficult work uniting them,” Hastelloy cautioned. “Not to mention, they fight with arrows and spears instead of guns and cannons. Even if you procure such weapons for them, they won’t know their capabilities or how to employ modern weapons effectively in battle. Their tactics will be severely lacking for some time.”
“We’ll have to align them with a major European power to begin with. That way they can get modern weapons, learn how to use them, and observe how they are best deployed in combat,” Valnor countered.
“The French will be your best bet,” the captain offered. “Tomal is rising through the military ranks in France and should be in a position to deliver weapons and manpower by the time you have things ready in the Americas.”
“What do you mean me?” Valnor asked as if he were bringing up an overly obvious point. “I’m the last one out of the Nexus chamber. I’ll be here for a good, long time while the rest of you get to play.”
“This is your plan, Ensign, and I want you to see it through.”
Valnor liked the plan, he even felt ownership in its creation, but for the life of him, he could not tell if it was his or Captain Hastelloy’s all along. Either way, he could not see how it was his to implement. “This plan requires action now, not ten or twenty years from now when I am relieved of watching over the Nexus chamber.”
Since Valnor was the last to exit the Nexus chamber, it was incumbent upon him to remain here as master of their tiny Egyptian farming village. Until another crewmember came out, it was his duty to watch over the Nexus. Though it lacked excitement, having a crewman perpetually stationed in the village was critical to their operations on this planet.
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