Sword of the Gods: The Chosen One

by Anna Erishkigal

Galactic Standard Date: 152,323.02

  Command Carrier: 'Light Emerging'

  Colonel Raphael Israfa

  Raphael

  The sub-light impulse engines of the command carrier Light Emerging vibrated reassuringly through the deck as Raphael commiserated with his second-in-command. The sparsely decorated officer's lounge was where the higher-ranking members of his crew met to eat, play cards, and yes, get stinking drunk, away from the gossiping eyes of the enlisted men.

  “We all warned you this would happen.” Major Glicki tipped a slender, green antenna in his direction, the feathery green tip trembling with suppressed amusement. “The fact this was offspring number twelve she asked you to sire should have been warning enough, if the five-hundred page waiver didn't get that through your thick skull."

  Glicki lifted her glass and downed the fluorescent green liquor in a single gulp. Raphael followed her example, grimacing as the potent liquor burned its way into his gullet. Come morning, he knew he'd seriously regret the indulgence, but at the moment, all he cared to do was eliminate the ache which had taken up permanent residence in his chest. While most Mantoids could drink every species in the galaxy under the table, the Eternal Emperor had seen fit to bequeath upon the Angelic species a woefully low tolerance to alcohol.

  “I had hoped I would make a good enough impression that Jophiel would want to keep me around.” Raphael stared down into his now-empty glass. "She definitely seemed pleased with my performance during the … um … you know …"

  Raphael trailed off. He didn't wish to go into detail about just how many stops he'd pulled, or just how pleased Jophiel had appeared to be while he'd been servicing her.

  “The Emperor should have pulled other races into the military millennia ago,” Glicki said. “The price you've paid for being policemen for the entire galaxy is too high!"

  “Hey!" The alcohol caused Raphael to be uncharacteristically caustic. “I should be grateful. I’ve got command of my very own command carrier in the middle of east buttfuck!" His golden feathers rustled with irritation.

  “Shhhh….” Glicki hushed. Several lower-ranking officers leaned their way, pretending not to listen. Glicki leaned back, and then spoke louder than was necessary to be heard. “Jophiel doesn't promote people to positions they can't handle. She chose you because you were worthy of promotion, not the other way around.”

  “I think I liked Prime Minister Lucifer’s proposal better." A mischievous pucker appeared on Rapael's left cheek, making him look far younger than his 36 Galactic Standard cycles. “Keep the little woman confined to a homeworld, barefoot and pregnant, like Shay’tan does with the Sata’anic females."

  Glicki clicked her two furthest legs together; the sharp, disapproving crack communicating better than any words just what she thought of that proposal. In Mantoid culture, it was usually the larger, stronger females who typically went to war.

  Raphael scoffed at her expression of disbelief. "Hey! I'm not greedy. I don't need three wives. Just her.”

  “You saw how fast Jophiel shut down that cockamamie scheme!" Glicki whirred her under-wings in disgust. “It was the one time Jophiel ever defied the Emperor and skipped a mating cycle."

  “As Jophiel goes,” Raphael raised his glass to toast a common saying about their Supreme Commander-General, “so goes the hybrid fleet."

  “Here, here.” Glicki clinked Raphael’s glass before downing it. “Every female hybrid in the fleet refused to show up for their mating appointments until Parliament shot Lucifer down. Including Lucifer's!”

  “I think it was the only time the alpha-stud ever experienced a dry spell,” Raphael laughed. The Alliance Prime Minister was both an example, and a caricature, of what their species had devolved into. The brightest and most beautiful of all the Angelics, in his desperate attempt to perpetuate his own bloodline, had become a symbol of their pending extinction.

  “Jophiel showed him who was boss!” Glicki laughed. She leaned forward and whispered, “there's some sort of history between those two, if you ask me…”

  “You’ve been watching too many of those Mantoid soap operas again.” Raphael took another sip of the potent green beverage. “Though she sure has a way of sweet-talking others around to her way of thinking.”

  “Females are better commanders then men,” Glicki's heart-shaped head tilted to one side. “That’s why Mantoid females leave the males home to rear the mantids.”

  “And bite their heads off after mating with them.”

  Raphael kicked her hard exoskeleton under the table in a Mantoid gesture of joking.

  “Urban legend!" Glicki's under-wings hummed in a Mantoid laugh. “Our females haven't done that for millions of years." She held out her glass in a mock-toast. "Unlike Angelic females, who still regularly indulge in the practice."

  Glicki kicked Raphael right back.

  “Ouch!" Raphael protested. His smile, and his dimple, disappeared. He stared down into the potent green liquor which swirled at the bottom of his half-empty glass. “Though perhaps it's an apt description of the way I feel right now. Perform … and be cast aside. As far as the Emperor is concerned, all hybrids are expendable.”

  “Jophiel is the best commander the Alliance has ever had,” Glicki said. “And very beautiful. It's only natural that you're smitten with her.”

  Raphael toasted Glicki and downed the rest of his shot. Glicki immediately poured two more.

  “Unfortunately for our poor, beleaguered race,” Raphael's buff-gold wings drooped, “forcing hybrid females to join the military only made our numbers go down, not up. Our females can only conceive one offspring at a time and it takes our young many years to mature. It's too bad the Emperor didn't engineer us to lay eggs like your species does.”

  “Poor planning on his part, if you ask me!” Glicki said. “Probably why Shay’tan chose the Sata’anic lizards to be the basis of his armies. They possess all the benefits of humanoids, but none of the problems!”

  “At least the lizards get to see their own hatchlings,” Raphael said. “-If- Shay’tan lets them live long enough to be gifted a wife. Or three. Now there’s a temptation worth putting your rear-end in the line of fire to receive! A home. Three wives. And a few hundred hatchlings to perpetuate the glory of your name.”

  Glicki swirled her glass, her bright red compound eyes focused downwards on the swirl pattern.

  “The Eternal Emperor has done the best he could to solve a problem,” Glicki said. She downed another shot and poured herself another glass, her antenna tilted in a thoughtful angle. “You always speak fondly of your days being raised at a youth training academy?”

  “I didn't mind.” Raphael ruffled his feathers. “At least not until I went to basic training and they paired me with Mikhail. He was raised by a real family, you know? Even though he refused to speak of it, it always made me wonder…”

  “I know,” Glicki said. “And see what it got him? He refuses to let the shipboard Angelics even touch him, much less reproduce with one of them.”

  Raphael donned a mock emotionless expression as he mimicked his best friend. “Seraphim only take one mate for life!"

  They both laughed. Raphael's laughter died as that hollow, aching feeling in his chest reminded him of why he was here.

  “Personally, I think he has the right idea," he spoke more softly this time. "The older males say that’s the way it was for us until the Emperor made his ‘be fruitful and multiply’ decree to save our species from extinction.”

  Glicki touched his forearm with an armored limb.

  “At least one of your mating attempts is bearing fruit. I hear the number of younger hybrids who've been unable to produce even a single offspring is now up to eighty-nine percent."

  “Everything the Emperor tries has failed,” Raphael said miserably. “If the Emperor doesn’t pull a coinín out of a hat soon, within my lifetime our race will cease to exist!”

  “I hear the Leonids are fewer than 3,500 now,” Glicki said.
“And the Centauri aren't too far behind them. It's rumored that even if every single one of them were to start bearing offspring tomorrow, it'd still be too late.”

  “Three thousand, four hundred and sixty-two,” Raphael said. “They've become very secretive lately, refusing to deposit their cubs into the youth training academies. It's said they've been quietly getting married and rearing their cubs on board their ships in prides like their ancestors used to do."

  “If I was going to pass into the dark night,” Glicki said, “I would want to do it as a family, too. Who can blame them?”

  “The Emperor splices our genes together to make super-soldiers no fighting force could ever hope to defeat,” Raphael grumbled, “and then he inbred us right out of existence. We've been defeated … by our own genome!”

  “The Emperor needs to get your people off these damned ships,” Glicki leaned in and whispered, “and let you raise families naturally on a planet. Not make you engage in this ridiculous breeding program where every child needs a different father and gets shuffled off to a training academy so you can try again. If you ask me, that’s the problem. Sentient creatures aren’t meant to live that way.”

  “Mikhail’s people tried that,” Raphael said. “And look where it got them? The Emperor gave them their own planet, and then he disappeared for 200 years and did nothing to protect them."

  Raphael stared over Glicki's shoulder at one of the monitors that streamed live video footage of the launch bay. As he watched, a long, silver arrow of a ship glided into the flight hanger and, before it had even set down, an orange-jacketed flight-crew scurried out to refuel it so it could go right back out again to man the search grid. Jophiel had given him one week to search for Mikhail, and he'd sent every spare ship he had out to search for the last living full-blooded Seraphim; a man who had chosen to remain celibate rather than subject himself to the same heartbreak Raphael experienced right now.

  “In a few years I'll retire on a full pension and find a mate to hatch a clutch of mantids,” Glicki said. “It isn’t right … what the Emperor does to you. You should have the same rights as every other species in the Alliance. Not be ordered to bow down to the naturally evolved races simply because the Eternal Emperor tinkered with your DNA in one of his laboratories!”

  Every pair of eyes in the officer's lounge turned in their direction as all conversation stopped.

  "Lower your voice," Raphael hushed her. "The direction of this conversation is considered treason."

  Glick's wings buzzed an angry, warning sound. Mantoids were used to speaking their mind, and eighteen years' service had done little to temper Glicki's forthright nature.

  "For all the Emperor's talk about free will," Glicki said, "it goads me that hybrids are forbidden to even protest their fate!"

  "Free speech has no place in the military," Raphael said. "If it did, the chain of command would break down."

  "You mean your species would stop allowing yourselves to be used as cannon fodder," Glicki said with disgust. "You serve from birth until you're disgorged in a coffin."

  "Some of us survive to retire," Raphael said.

  "A lot of good that will do you in 500 years!" Glicki said. "By the time you get out, Jophiel will be too old to bear you another child."

  Raphael rubbed the center of his chest, his expression wistful as he remembered the feel of Jophiel's soft flesh yielding beneath his. She had not been the Supreme Commander-General the five days he'd been allowed to be near her. The way she'd risen up to meet him, her cries as he'd brought her to climax again and again, and the tears that had come into her eyes as they'd lain entangled together the last time they had made love had seemed too genuine to be faked. No matter how much it hurt now that she'd banished him to the opposite end of the galaxy, Raphael wouldn't give up that memory for anything in the universe.

  He sucked down the glass that Glicki had just refilled. It did little to alleviate his pain, but at least he could blame the fist which clenched at his heart on the burning sensation in his esophagus.

  “I really wish I hadn't given her my heart.”

  Glicki refilled both of their glasses. “Maybe Mikhail has the right idea?

  “I wish I had listened to him,” Raphael's speech slurred. “At least the part about keeping up my emotional guard. I should act like him and avoid all females!"

  “Jophiel has to set an example,” Glicki said. “Even if she wanted to form closer relations with you, she can’t. Every hybrid in the fleet would be behind her in a heartbeat.”

  “She doesn't care about me,” Raphael mumbled into his glass of liquor. “I'm nothing but another one of Hashem’s pawns."

  The room began to take on a distant, dream-like quality. The other officers in the room, the scent of food, even the burn of the liquor began to fade, until only Glicki, and the large-screen monitor which showed the scout ship in the launch bay take off again to resume its search for Mikhail, occupied his field of vision. It was a good thing his shift was done for the day because there was no way he could resume command of his ship. Raphael almost never imbibed … only after a call from Jophiel reminded him the ship he commanded was a consolation prize.

  “She calls you every week,” Glicki said gently. “Over matters some underling far beneath her could handle. I think the reason she sent you so far away is because she knows you would break down her resolve.”

  “Mmmmffff,” Raphael moaned. “You’ve been watching those Mantoid soap operas again." He went to grab at his glass and missed it, sending it clattering onto the table. "I think it's time to help me back to my quarters before I land face-down on the floor in front of my crew. The room is beginning to spin.”

  “Yes, Sir." Glicki said.

  Reminding him not to drag his primary feathers on the floor, she helped him back to his quarters to sleep it off.

  Chapter 18