Arthur shot him a confused look. This was not the idle conversation or threat he had expected.
“I have three years left in my term, and thirty years of politics to undo. You’ve given me a chance to do that, so I wanted to thank you.”
“Beg your pardon, given you a chance to do what?”
Ken grinned. “Make some changes. It’s fairly obvious to me now that our troops should not be anywhere but home. We’re not defending ourselves anymore, we’re acting like the damned school bully, so I’m going to bring them home. The economy? It’s time to get the damned bankers out of our politics. There are a raft of what the common man would probably see as common sense changes that I would like to make.
“Now, parliament might override me at every turn, but I’m damned well going to make sure they pay for it if they do. I’m just sick and tired of the lies and deals and money that has taken over every bloody decision this government makes.”
“Mr. Prime...Ken, why tell me this?”
Ken smiled at him. “Because I wanted to get it off my chest and frankly besides my wife I think you’re the only person on the planet I could tell.”
Arthur considered him carefully. He seemed sincere, yet this was what a politician was good at: faking sincerity. “I hope you’ll forgive me for taking this with a certain amount of salt,” he tried to say with a smile.
“I would expect nothing less,” Ken replied, smiling himself. “I imagine you’ve seen an awful lot of lying politicians over the years who would have sworn on their hearts they were telling the truth.”
Arthur chuckled. Indeed he had.
“Would I be able to ask one favour?”
“Of course.”
“If I needed to contact you, personally, is there some way I might go about that?”
Arthur was surprised. John had been right, the bugger, and had made Arthur set up a free email account that he could use for only the Prime Minister should the need arise. He never thought he would actually use it.
“Well, I just happen to have an email address for that purpose.”
***
John loved looking up at the new sky.
From his perch in Hawaii, the planet Hermes, to which Earth was now a moon, took up half the horizon. And it was a spectacular sight. Larger than Jupiter by half, but so close to Earth that two stretched out hands could not cover it. Even through the atmosphere he could make out detail in the surface of Hermes that he had never imagined on a gas giant.
Swirls of colors, orange and red, yellow and white, it was a maelstrom of clouds and energy. The surface was frequently lit by lightning, evidence of the electric potential of this new neighbor.
But it was not all good.
The consequences of the new arrangement of the planets were widespread, and he had expected many of them. Astronomers were upset, for now they had another, rather larger, planet blocking their view of the stars. Some were tickled at having a gas giant so close by, and were urging NASA and ESA to start sending probes, but most were angry. A few had even doubted the reality of the threat that had forced them to bring the planet into the Sol system. Thankfully they were in the minority.
He’d expected more problems from the changes to daylight; with a massive planet in the way, the amount of daylight reaching the Earth should have been cut almost in half, but so far it wasn’t as bad as he expected. Even when the sun was behind Hermes, there was enough solar energy being bounced around it that Earth wasn’t in total darkness, and plant life appeared to have managed just fine.
The tides were completely screwed up, and that was causing problems for beaches and coastlines around the world. New beaches were forming and others were being sunk. Earth’s moon, which many were now simply calling Luna to avoid confusion over the fact that Earth itself was now a moon, was still around, but it’s effects were equal parts amplified and subdued by the presence of Hermes.
One unintended consequence was weather. It had actually calmed down. There had been more storms, but they were small and weak. Not a single hurricane or typhoon had appeared, and temperatures at the equator had begun to fall and temperatures at the poles had begun to increase. There were going to be problems with coastlines if that trend continued.
Even the crust had seemed subdued. The frequency of earthquakes had actually increased, but the magnitude had fallen through the floor. Where Earth regularly felt six pointers somewhere, there hadn’t been a single quake that registered over two on the richter scale. John didn’t know exactly what it meant, but the Key seemed to indicate it was a good thing. A lot of small quakes was always better than a few big ones, and the presence of Hermes seemed to smooth things out.
Politics was another matter.
Arthur had met with the English Prime Minister. That was the first time they’d been invited to speak with a world leader. It was encouraging, but John remained hesitant. He didn’t think tigers would change their stripes overnight. But he was hopeful.
He himself had a meeting scheduled with the President of the United States, another charismatic politician, but Pan’s Key had revealed that he was not the saint he made himself out to be. He was going to be a bigger challenge.
In ten years the Sirians would arrive. That was the big thing. In reality knew they could arrive at any time they liked; they after all had teleportation, but for some reason he couldn’t quite understand why they had chosen to take the slow road. They said there was a consequence for every technology. That worried him.
John didn’t need the Key for teleportation, none of them did. Well, not for themselves anyways. Teleporting a planet was another matter entirely. But he wondered what the consequence of all their teleportation was.
Rising from his reverie, John realized the hour. It was time to get Zack from school.
But, John decided, if there was a consequence to teleportation, maybe this one time he would try something else. Something he hadn’t thought to try before. Something he had dreamed of since he was a child.
He flew.
Entropy in Ascendance
Knowledge truly was a dangerous thing.
As Pan dug more deeply into what the Key of Knowledge had shown him, it became more obvious that society was little more than a shell game. It had been pushed and pulled, lied to and manipulated, and engineered for misery. That was the bottom line. The more pain and suffering the better.
Even monetary systems had been designed to keep every single country and it’s citizens in debt. Beholden to whom? He could trace the money now, see the threads connecting the players, and he wanted nothing more than to reach out and cut those threads. Permanently.
But he knew he was not all-powerful, even with the Keys on his side. There were still forces acting against them that were immensely capable, who were absolutely ruthless in their endeavors. How do you fight a psychopath without becoming one?
You didn’t, and Pan was beginning to understand that. A ruthless enemy demanded a ruthless response.
And they were going to get one.
He now knew that many of the UFO reports over the centuries were Draconian, either directly or from their biological robots commonly known as the Greys. And he now knew where they were.
And who was on them.
They were going to pay.
***
His name was Marcus. He had another name as well, but had long forgotten it, remembering his identification of 115911025892 instead.
And he hated Earth. Rather, he hated humans. Disgusting, pink fleshy bags of bones. They couldn’t even feed themselves for the first year of life. They were weak, pathetic. Only their brains had permitted them to survive, giving them a small measure of protection against the cosmos. But even the ones that had been recruited were nothing but playthings for Draconian purposes.
Their energy was more fulfilling than any he had tasted, however, and that made it worth the trouble. It was intoxicating, and there was just so damned much of it on this planet now. It was glorious.
Marcus wa
s good at creating the perfect environment for harvesting it. For five thousand years as he measured it, he had been one of three individuals traveling backwards and forwards in time, arranging, planning, setting up humanity for the time when they would be under total subjugation, when they would be mere slaves to the whim of the Draconian race.
It took his computer enhanced brain to remember all of the changes he was making, to remember the individuals he had corrupted and controlled through the ages. He had purposefully created the impression in humanity that his own race did not really exist except in nightmares and legends. Which was wonderful, because that meant when he fed, the nightmare was an explosion of energy he delighted in. And he looked forward to the time when his race would have a seemingly unlimited feeding frenzy.
That had been the plan anyways.
He had seen the future, he had been there. Humanity had already been enslaved, put into camps even, bred like rabbits and forced into squalor and more misery than they could have imagined. It was done. And it was delicious.
Then all of history was jolted, the future undone. The plans up until the twenty first century were still intact, so something then had caused all of this chaos. He knew it was the Keys, he knew it was John and Pan Syker, and this Jessica Walker.
It was enough to make him very, very angry, and he tried to check it. It only made him hungrier.
Marcus laid back in his couch, watching the Earth below from his ship, and considered his reflection in the glass for a moment. He was a spectacular being. He knew it. The humans thought he resembled a walking crocodile, but he thought the resemblance no more than like a human to a monkey.
He was powerful. His rough skin could tear apart a human with barely an effort, his tail could break their bones, and his bite could...well, by that time a human was long gone and the physical feeding was over.
Even amongst his own people he was magnificent, which was why he had led them all these years.
There were some events in history he had never been able to manipulate, however, events that were seemingly protected by the universe. It frustrated him, knowing there were things he could neither see nor affect. He was a God to these puny earthlings, yet even he was limited.
And his limits had been thrown into sharp contrast.
He looked at the planet Hermes, as the humans called it. A gas giant planet stolen from the Orion nebula. It was the wrench in his plans, the catalyst for change. The very sight of the planet renewed his anger.
But he could no more remove the planet than punish those responsible. At least not in the present. Something had to be done. Marcus only needed to find the right time, and the presence of Hermes told him what that time would be.
***
President Peter McNally watched the video, not sure whether to believe it or not. It could have been just some cheap...or expensive...special effects, after all.
But if it was real...in a few short years a space craft dozens of miles long would be parked in orbit around the Earth. There would be no hiding it, since anybody with a set of eyeballs would be able to see it. Probably even in broad daylight. Of course, after seeing a new planet in the sky, seeing a space craft might seem anticlimactic to the general public.
The craft itself was unlike anything he had ever seen, or imagined. It wasn’t just a straight tube, it was...he didn’t know what it was, but it looked almost organic. One thing was sure, the video did not present the scale of the thing.
“Ten years?” he asked.
John Syker nodded, appearing uncomfortable in one of the several chairs in the Oval Office. The three other men in the room shuffled uncomfortably as well, but Peter suspected they were more worried about the incoming aliens than the seating arrangement.
Well, at least he wouldn’t have to worry about re-election by then. “So what should we do?”
“Nothing.”
Peter shot the former policeman a confused look.
John grinned, then continued. “They’re not here to influence us in any way. They’re not coming to take over. They have asked for a small island, something uninhabited, where they can land and enjoy life on a planetary surface.”
“So why come?”
“They are coming to balance the playing field. For too long another race has been pulling the strings of our society, and they would like to see that dance end.”
“And how do they suppose to do that?”
“They will make public every secret deal that the Draconians make.” More grumbling, but this one was understandable. This was how the world worked, how things got done. How was anything supposed to happen if every little manipulation was brought out in public? It was ridiculous and naive.
“Aren’t we entitled to our privacy?” Peter asked, a little angered at the slight against their freedom being presented.
“Yes, Mr. President, we are. Humanity is. And they will not interfere in the decisions of humans in any way. But they will interfere in the interactions of Draconians. It is their view that any human interacting with a Draconian can only be doing it for one reason, and since they consider that to be harmful to the long term prospects of the human race, they intend to expose those connections.”
John looked around. He did not appear to be a fool. “Look,” he said, “I’m telling you this as a courtesy. It’s not my decision, I have nothing to do with it. They simply asked me to pass it along, what you do with that information is up to you.
“You have spent trillions of dollars on building armaments for battles engineered by players behind the scenes for their own purposes. They know this, and you know it. In fact they know it in far more detail than you do, I can guarantee.
“You now have the resources to change the prospects of mankind in incredible ways, but instead for the last hundred years the government has chosen to play puppet to the Draconians pulling the strings through people such as the Rothschilds and Bushes, just to throw a couple of the many names out there. You, Mr. President, if you will pardon me saying so, have been a puppet your entire career. That is why you are the President. They permitted it because they knew you would do what they wanted you to do.
“That freedom is coming to an end. Is that the kind of freedom you are concerned with protecting? What does the protection of wealth have to do with life, liberty and happiness?”
Peter didn’t like this John Syker. He didn’t think it was likely that these Draconians were pulling the strings, as John had put it, but there were certainly powerful people who had guided his own career. “So what do you suggest we do?”
John stood. “You can do whatever you want. The Sirians are not suggesting anything. I, however, would suggest that you cut those strings before the public finds out and lynches you, but that’s just my opinion. I don’t want a revolution in this country, since usually that means we just replace one dictator for another. And we’ve been on the brink of revolution for a few years now. To my mind, Mr. President, you have one opportunity to get this right. What you do with that is entirely up to you. Good day.”
And in a blink he was gone. Peter jumped. Damn these people, flitting in and out like that. None of his people had been able to figure out a way to stop it either. Incompetence could be very widespread sometimes.
He looked at the other gentlemen in the room. “Well, it looks like we might have a problem. Thoughts?”
His Secretary of Defense took an expected stance. “I don’t think we should let these people dictate policy to us, personally.”
“And what if they show the American people that our policy is being dictated by aliens?”
“Hah, with what proof! Besides, even if they do we can spin it to our benefit I’m sure.”
He was right. The American government were masters of spin. Peter turned to his Secretary of State. “Frank?”
Frank took his time answering. That was good, he was thinking about it, not just knee-jerking like the man seated next to him. “The way I see it we have two choices. One, we ignore the whole thing, and whe
n the aliens arrive, if they attempt to expose whoever’s in power at the time, then they can worry about it.”
“Okay, we’ll be long out of power by then, that makes sense.”
“Or two, we can do the other thing.”
“Which is?”
“Come clean. Peter, you know what the public thinks of the last few presidents? With the exception of Obama, they are generally reviled. There are probably just as many people out there who would simply punch them as shake their hand.”
“What’s your point?”
“It boils down to what you want as your legacy. I’m afraid you don’t have Obama’s charisma, so the odds are you won’t fare as well in retirement as he did.”
“So you think I should do what John says, to protect my reputation.”
“No, I think it goes further than that. It’s not just your reputation we’re talking about here, it’s the future. If you do nothing, the next president will be the one that will be remembered because he greeted the aliens. You’ll be forgotten, a footnote in history. On the other hand, if you make efforts to not only clean things up, but maybe even set yourself up to be the ambassador to the aliens when they do arrive...”
Damn, it was a good point. Tantalizing even. He had a lot of favors to protect, but this was potentially a bigger benefit.
He’d have to give this some serious thought.
***
Pan decided it was time to do some interference. Little things at first, see what came of it. Start with a small fish.
They Key had shown him an opportunity, a terrorist who was about to detonate a bomb under his jacket in a crowded market in Hebron.
And of course the market was packed with people, Jews Christians, and Muslims alike, though he had to admit they were mostly Jewish. Both sides would have to be taught this lesson, since one was just as vicious as the other.
Pan walked up to the apparently calm terrorist and put his hand on the terrorist’s shoulder. “I would not do this if I were you,” he said in Arabic. The terrorist shot him a glare, fear of discovery in his eyes.
Entropy Risen (The Syker Key Book 3) Page 2