“The Vor-Earth portal opens in a secluded forest in Albania, a hundred miles from its border with Greece. When I arrived, I went directly to an underground stronghold nearby, built by those of my kind who had visited thousands of years ago.
“The stronghold contained rudimentary equipment they were able to construct, which took many decades considering there were no advanced components to be found on the planet. And a storehouse of gold coins that were worth many millions of your dollars. After the portal vanished, those stranded here knew that those back on Vor were aware of the stronghold. They left as much gold as they could there in the hope that eventually the portal would reappear, and gold would still be of value if future Vorians ever came through.”
Vega looked troubled. “But that wasn’t all,” he continued. “I also found historical records, detailing everything that had happened after they were cut off from the home planet.”
“So what you just told me was part of this record,” said Anna.
“Exactly. And much more. The Tarts wanted to wipe humanity from the Earth. But, as you already know, my people saw yours as a possible salvation, our only hope to end an endless stalemate. Not that we would have tolerated what the Tarts were trying to do under any circumstances,” he added.
Anna studied him, but her instincts continued to suggest that he was being truthful. “So you and the Tarts had a minor . . . disagreement,” she said. “They wanted to kill us all. And you were desperate to save us for your own ends.”
“For your ends as well,” said Vega defensively. “But, yes, the situation was untenable. Unsurprisingly, a war broke out between my people and the Tarts for supremacy here on Earth. Which wouldn’t be assured until one side had wiped out the other. Fortunately, the Tartarian portal also disappeared after a number of years, leaving both sides more or less even, at about twelve hundred strong. But both sides had their people, and forces, spread out across the globe. All were well hidden, and well protected. Very difficult to root out.
“So a multigenerational chess game ensued, each side trying to identify and kill members of the other. Both sides setting traps. Both sides ranging across the globe, with the Tarts using humans as guinea pigs along the way, trying to discover the most efficient means of eradication. And the Vors doing whatever they could to stop them.
“Both sides also had offspring as quickly as they could,” continued Vega, “to shore up their numbers. Offspring that would later join the battle as they came of age.”
Anna was mesmerized by this tale of a history completely unknown to humankind.
“If not for my ancestors,” said Vega, “I have no doubt that the Tarts would have eventually succeeded in driving your kind into extinction.”
“Ah . . . thanks,” said Anna tentatively. Somehow, this didn’t seem to convey the proper level of appreciation. A smile crept across her face. “Thanks . . . a lot,” she added in amusement, knowing this didn’t cut it either. “So I assume this means that you won the war, right?”
“Yes. The entries I read made it clear. My ancestors were certain they had found and eliminated the very last of the Tarts. And along the way, they were also able to confirm our theory about the clairvoyant potential of the human subconscious.”
“How?”
“They managed to find several human intuitives, precognitives, over the centuries, including a few women who became famous throughout the ancient world as so-called Oracles of Delphi.”
“Amazing,” whispered Anna in awe. The insights Vega continued to give her into ancient history were truly extraordinary. “So what happened after your people had finally eliminated the Tarts?”
“Not much. The war had taken too heavy of a toll on our side, as well. It lasted for almost five hundred years, and when it ended, only fifty-seven of my people were left alive. These managed to survive for a few generations, but the hardships of the planet took them faster than they could reproduce. Finally, about twenty-two hundred of your years ago, the last Vor on the planet made his last entry into the log in Albania.”
“I’m so sorry,” whispered Anna.
Vega nodded. “Thanks,” he said. “It was a very long time ago. I’m just glad they left records behind, so their sacrifice will be remembered.”
“But now you and the Tarts are here again,” said Anna.
“Yes. The portals to Earth decided to reappear for both sides, within a few years of each other. And this, after thousands of years of dormancy.”
“The Gatekeepers must have enjoyed the skirmishes between you and the Tarts enough to want a sequel,” noted Anna. “Vors versus Tarts, part two.”
“Apparently so,” said Vega miserably. “Although I wasn’t even aware the Tarts were here until the scene at my hotel. Seems too coincidental that both sides should converge on you, Anna. There must be a reason for it.”
He paused in thought. “I know from my people’s log entries that the Tarts of old had learned we were searching for a special human to be our salvation. Since our portal disappeared before theirs, they could still report back to their home planet for many years. So the Tarts here now must surely know how important we believe your species to be. But the logs also indicate they thought we were crazy, and had no interest in finding an Oracle of their own.”
“They’d still want to stop you from finding one,” pointed out Anna. “Just in case you were right, and they were wrong.”
“Good point,” acknowledged Vega.
“Hold on,” said Anna, feeling like she suddenly had an itch she couldn’t scratch. Her hidden mind was telling her she needed to pause and ponder all that had been said. It was too much to take in. One once-in-a-generation revelation after another.
She made her mind blank, so her conscious wouldn’t interfere with her intuition. Suddenly, right on cue, a question popped into her mind, whispered to her by her subconscious, which had picked up on something that she had not.
“Do you have an image of the light-amplifying devices that your ancestors used here?” she asked Vega.
The alien looked understandably confused. “Why?”
“I have no idea,” admitted Anna. “But I never argue with my instincts.”
Vega nodded thoughtfully. “I’ve long since scanned the records I found in the stronghold into my phone,” he said, “and then into the cloud. My people were never able to reinvent a computer or digital camera, but all of us are natural-born artists, able to faithfully recreate anything we see. And these external light generators were depicted in any number of records painted over the centuries. I’ll call one up.”
He manipulated DeShawn Young’s phone to connect with his own account in the cloud, entered a password, and in less than a minute was able to find what Anna was asking for.
The detective took one look and gasped. “Holy shit!” she said in disbelief, now understanding just what it was that her subconscious had pieced together.
A chill shot up her spine. “You have to be kidding me!”
31
“What is it?” said Vega. “What are you seeing?”
Anna’s eyes were as big as saucers and her mouth hung open. “Your illumination devices sat on Vor heads like a hat,” she said excitedly. “But slightly elevated, shining a blindingly bright light around their faces and surroundings at all times.”
“Correct,” said Vega, having no idea where she was headed. “Powered by solar cells many times more powerful than you have yet developed. So well built they lasted the full five hundred years my predecessors were here. The Vorians stayed isolated, avoiding humans whenever possible. So they weren’t worried about being seen with the device. If this happened, and they were attacked because of it, they could easily defend themselves. Their superior knowledge allowed them to forge weapons that were ahead of their time.”
“That’s great,” said Anna dismissively. “But here’s the thing. Your device is basically a glorified miner’s hardhat with more lighting attached. A thoroughly unremarkable technology for a species with you
r capabilities. But to a human at this time, it would be astonishing. Nothing short of a miracle.”
“Okay,” said Vega. “And this caused you to get all excited because . . . ?”
“Because if you use your imagination,” she said with a smile, “this device looks like something our ancestors might have given a very special name to.” She paused for effect. “They might have called it a halo.”
Vega paused for a moment before finally showing his first signs of comprehension. “I see,” he said slowly. “And this is something from your Bible, isn’t it?”
“I’m not sure it was actually mentioned in the Bible,” said Anna. “I’m not an expert. But I know for sure it’s something indelibly carved into the human historical consciousness. Into our mythology. Our very psyches.”
The detective paused. “Any guess as to what else is part of our mythology?” she asked excitedly.
Vega shook his head no.
Anna arched an eyebrow. “Harsh-looking, scary men with shining red eyes and black blood. In fact, there’s another very good way to describe these laser eyes of theirs.”
“How?”
“A lot of us might call them demon eyes.”
Vega continued to look more confused than enlightened.
“Don’t you get it?” said Anna excitedly. “The Tarts and their less-than-stealthy implants must have been the genesis of demon legends thousands of years ago. Or, at the very least, solidified and defined legends that already existed at the time. And the Vors were the genesis of the angel legends. Unbelievable!” she finished.
Her eyes widened yet again. “And I just figured out what I was smelling at the hotel and in the car,” she said in dismay. “Sulfur! Get it?”
Vega shook his head no.
“Sulfur. In ancient lore, this is the smell of a demon. It fits perfectly.” She paused, her mood still electric. “Wait a minute!” she added, as another subconscious-inspired question came to her mind. “Hand me DeShawn’s phone.”
As soon as she had the device she called up a search bar and typed in Tartar in Greek mythology.
Her heart skipped a beat as she read from the first few results. “Nothing comes up with Tartar,” she whispered to Vega. “It gets corrected to Tartarus. But can there be any doubt that Tartarus is a derivation of Tartar? Let me read an entry.
“In Greek mythology,” she began. “Tartarus is both a deity and a place in the underworld. While better known Hades was the place of the dead, Zeus sentenced titans and other beings who were threats to the gods to Tartarus instead. Also known as the abyss, Tartarus was located well below Hades. As far below this region of the underworld as Earth was below Heaven. According to Plato’s Gorgias, written in 400 BCE, ‘Tartarus is the place where souls are judged after death and where the wicked received divine punishment.’”
Anna beamed. “It all hangs together,” she said in wonder. “Your five-hundred-year war with the Tarts didn’t go unnoticed. The Greeks somehow learned the name of the Tarts’ place of origin and decided it was the ultimate hell, the ultimate home of the damned.”
She paused. “Later, halos and red eyes would become part of human lore, as would an epic struggle between angels and demons. With the angels, on the whole, looking out for mankind. And the demons trying to destroy us.”
Anna shook her head in disbelief. As though the existence of aliens wasn’t a big enough reveal for one day. Or maybe a galaxy-wide war that was raging at the heart of the Milky Way. Or perhaps an enigmatic superintelligence, which might just be mythical, but which was likely to exist and possess cruel or incomprehensible motives.
And now this. An explanation for some of the most persistent and important mythology in human history.
“Why didn’t the Tarts develop stealth implants?” asked Anna.
“When we were first trapped here, our . . . halos weren’t exactly stealthy either. But because humanity was so important to us, we spent centuries improving this technology back on Vor, so we could blend in if the portal ever did reappear.
“The Tarts didn’t care about blending in. They were here to destroy you anyway, so if someone did happen to notice their gleaming red eyes, they were only too happy to kill them. But they didn’t count on how quickly your technology and population would grow since their last visit. So now they do have to be more careful. It was an important miscalculation on their part.”
Anna’s mind suddenly urged her to ask another question. Apparently, it wasn’t finished making connections. “How did the Tarts plan to destroy humanity?” she said.
“They were working on super-virulent diseases,” replied her alien companion. “We made disrupting this work our top priority. Fortunately, they were only moderately skilled at genetic engineering. Their real strength, as I mentioned, is chemistry. They were also able to create a drug that allowed them to turn a human being into their unwilling, unwitting puppet.”
Anna felt her heart stop in its tracks. Her intuition had been right again.
Could what Vega had just described be anything other than actual demonic possession?
Could this really get any wilder?
Her mind had been utterly blown ten revelations ago. And now this. Demonic possession wasn’t just a crazy myth, after all. Instead, it was scary real.
And these insidious aliens were doing it yet again.
“Tell me more about this drug,” said Anna.
“In their language they called it Human Control Serum, or HCS. Our records indicate it was exceedingly difficult for them to make. And impossible to store. So they had to use it sparingly. I looked into the chemical composition of the drug myself a few years ago, and it appears to be a distant relative of your drug, scopolamine. Scopolamine is thought to make human beings suggestible. HCS makes them programmable. So they’ll do whatever the Tarts tell them to do. Even to the point of ignoring self-preservation.”
Anna nodded. This explained a lot. Why alarm bells had rung so loudly when it had come to Foria, and why her instincts had suspected this drug was also linked to people taking uncharacteristic, unexplainable actions. Seemingly against their will.
Because these actions had been against their will. They were marching to the Tarts’ drummer.
“How easy would it be for them to improve this, ah, possession drug—HCS?” she asked Vega.
“In what way?”
“To make it easier to mass produce.”
“Impossible. Not with the equipment available here. Probably not even with their own equipment. It’s slow and painstaking to synthesize, and they can’t change that.”
Anna considered. Foria was a drug that could be mass produced. So Foria wasn’t the possession drug. It was an animal of a different stripe.
But whatever Foria turned out to be, it was bound to be ugly. Her intuition and conscious minds both suggested that the Tarts had developed a mass producible, highly addictive drug that could be turned lethal in some way at the time of their choosing. A means to achieve their goal of the complete eradication of Earth’s human population. Or at least a strong beginning, cutting the population down to size for additional attempts to come.
Anna quickly explained her thinking to Vega, including a suspicion that had come to her that the Tartarian creator of Foria, Shane Frey, had used some of his precious possession drug to get Detective Rick Bunson to help frame her.
She couldn’t understand why Bunson would lie the way he had. Until now. The devil had made him do it. Almost literally.
“We’re very lucky this Human Control Serum is so hard to make,” said Anna. “We’d never have stood a chance.”
“According to the records,” said Vega, “despite a limited supply of HCS, the humans the Tarts did take control of caused my ancestors a lot of trouble during the war. But we were lucky again. HCS is nearly impossible to make, but the antidote is fairly straightforward if you have the right chemical ingredients. To be honest, if both of these things weren’t the case, we wouldn’t be standing here talking, becaus
e the Tarts would have won our war and driven humanity into extinction.”
“Can the antidote be given before the HCS,” asked Anna, “like a vaccine? To inoculate top people so they can never be susceptible?”
Vega shook his head. “I’m afraid not,” he replied. “It has to be given after the HCS is present. It neutralizes the effects of the drug on the brain. And if another dose of HCS is given, even after a person is cured, he’ll become the Tart’s unwilling slave for a second time.”
“But the cure is permanent unless someone is hit with HCS again.”
“Yes.”
Anna considered. “And did your kind come up with any drugs to mess with our minds?” she asked, knowing her subconscious had assisted with the question.
“We didn’t during our first visit. But we have one now,” he admitted. “We perfected it over many years on Vor once the portal disappeared. We still had precise computer simulations of your minds. It’s a memory erasure drug. Fairly straightforward to make, and very precise. We thought it important to maintain our anonymity here on Earth.”
“So if you were discovered, you could use the drug to excise human memories of this discovery?”
“Exactly.”
“Have you used it yet?”
“No. We made a batch, just in case, but we haven’t needed it yet.”
Anna’s intuition told her that he was telling the truth, so she decided to drop it for now. She made a mental note to consider the implications of this further when she had more time.
They continued their discussion for another ten minutes, and it became clear how events had unfolded as they had. Especially how Anna had become central to both alien species. It was still somewhat coincidental, but not nearly as much as they had thought before.
First, it wasn’t all that surprising that representatives of both alien species had ended up in LA. It was one of the most famous cities of all, and the second largest city within what was still the predominate superpower in the world. If the Tarts wanted to initiate the spread of a highly addictive drug, LA was surely one of the cities they would choose to begin with.
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