B00BKLL1XI EBOK, page 22
After a dramatic pause, she would add,
“And we have the current progressive government headed by the Nation’s slave, Howard Grey, letting them get away with it, buying a bullshit speech that Thomas Nelson concocted at the last second so he could cover Ace’s hide.”
Ace retaliated immediately with an e-mail to every wire service. In this e-mail he called her a lunatic who was trying to make a name for herself with slander, libel, and making claims for which she had no proof. He highlighted that her story didn’t match with many official records and damage assessments of the battle and that to truly and added that to honestly believe what was coming out of her mouth, she would have to be an escaped mental patient.
“Apparently, she thinks that representatives of the Nation think like she does; assuming that any disagreement, any critique is a valid excuse to denigrate, deport or even murder someone,” read his retort. “Let’s not forget that this woman advocated that every person who has a favorable view of the Nation should be deported to deep space so only her likeminded friends would populate Earth.”
After reading Ace’s reply, Gene placed a call to his media agent who promptly started apologizing for the incident.
“Fire the bitch,” roared Gene and slammed the phone into a wall, bright red from anger.
Even with the glory hound he so despised blacklisted from mainstream news and TV, Gene’s chances didn’t look good. Tina’s troops did too good of a job fanning the flames and turning the vast majority of the public against the neo-traditionalists. Polls indicated that he was looking at a progressive sweep of the Council. Even small fry traditionalists on city boards would be punished. He played with fire and now, his clients faced the Nation’s wrath.
Watching the latest news in the living room of his Diplomat’s Lane mansion, Nelson checked the poll numbers heading into the week of the elections. After adding up the numbers district by district on his computer, he leaned back, satisfied at the map he generated.
“Check and mate,” he sighed with relief. Phase two was drawing to a successful close and all he had to do now was sit back and wait for all the Nation’s work on Earth to finish paying its dividends.
[ chapter _ 026 ]
As one would expect from the image put out by the Shadow Nation, the nameless capital city on its home world was dark and scary. This city wasn’t a bustling center of trade. Actually, the nameless city was an academic hub and a macabre showpiece for curious sentient races. Built among the ruins of a lost civilization which thrived on this planet over a million years ago, the nameless city looked like a giant, spiny crypt rising out of the ground from the desert paths leading to it.
The world of Abydos itself was an eerie place. Wrapped in a shroud of dark green and gray gases, it was locked in perpetual twilight. A massive moon almost a third of the planet’s size loomed in the sky, basking the vast deserts and mountain ranges in cold light barely reflected by the dark surface. Shallow oceans glowed green in the cold, gray light of the moon. Like the oceans of infant Earth, they were rich with iron and without oxygen in the atmosphere, they were to remain green until they froze after the death of the planet’s star. To the native microbes of Abydos, oxygen was a deadly toxin, rusting their microscopic bodies from the inside out and shattering their genetic structures.
Any city built on this dark, silent world had to be equally eerie to perpetuate the Nation’s image as a horde of almost supernatural and bloodthirsty demons. This is why at the main path into the city, two giant, obsidian statues of a male and a female Shadow Demon rose nearly a hundred feet into the air. Both demons held translucent, dark swords decorated with red runes. They pointed their swords down at whoever or whatever wanted to come into the city, each standing on a mound of bones and skulls belonging to mutilated alien creatures. It was a crude and effective reminder for any alien visitor that violence was the trademark of this dark empire.
The nameless city which lay beyond the statues was arranged to resemble five pentagrams with interconnected beams. Each beam was actually a wide road made of decorative, red gravel which seemed to ooze like blood around the jagged walls of the vast temple complexes and claw-shaped spires that curved in upon them. Like all of the Nation’s buildings, they were designed to look as if they were about to lurch down and crush those who gazed at them from the red roads. Protruding from the red gravel at regular intervals were black, reflective statues of alien monsters, each statue as big as a house.
Temples were the predominant structures of the city. Inside, they housed countless scrolls, statues, precious works of alien artistry and perhaps even more importantly, works of alien science. The residents of these temples were lifelong scholars who spent centuries with the growing libraries of the Nation. A few of those scholars were born on Earth and as humans spent countless hours lamenting the fact that as much as they wanted to study and read for all eternity and grasp even the slightest bit of the infinite knowledge of the universe, their lives would end before they could get to their 20,000th book.
Ace and the other founders of the Nation changed all of that and allowed them to spend infinity absorbed in the vast libraries of alien empires which collapsed eons ago and of those still alive. No subject was taboo, no scroll was ever hidden from prying eyes, no research was considered too arcane. Despite its gruesome reputation for brutality, the Shadow Nation was a dominion of scholars who valued knowledge above all. In fact, knowledge was seen as sacred.
Apart from the freedom to have sex at their pleasure and to visit any alien world they choose at their desire, the life of a scholar could be described as monastic. There was a precise, mechanical routine to the scholars’ days and three times a day, the red gravel streets would fill with male and female cyborgs covered in jet black, hooded robes tied with spiral, decorative ropes at the waist, their red and blue eyes glowing with a piercing light from the darkness under their hoods.
The scholars allowed themselves only one distinction. The ropes trying their waist could be either red, white or silver, indicating how much the scholar has learned and accomplished throughout his or her studies. In the evening, as they rested in their temples from a day full of reading alien scrolls and writing new books for future students of the Nation, the scholars would cast off their robes, indulging in their arcane rituals sky clad. Over the centuries, they attuned the delicate aesthetics of the Nation’s secretive religions which worshipped the enigmatic creatures of extraterrestrial legends.
Past the alleys of temples occupied by scholars stood the biggest temple of them all, as imposing as a city block of high rises. Flanked on three sides by claw-like spires, the great obsidian cube housed the ruling body of the Shadow Nation, the High Command.
The Temple of the Shades was built after the wars which lead to the Shadow Nation’s wealth and prosperity were over. It was a tribute to the Nation’s odd blend of cutting edge technology and imitation of the primeval past. However, the imposing structure looked far older than a thousand years because of its unique architectural style which made it seem as if it sprouted out of the ground, pushed to the desert floor by a volcanic eruption eons ago and solidified into a blocky, jagged shape of raw obsidian.
It’s walls added to the intimidating and macabre grandeur. Because they didn’t lean towards each other as they went higher, the giant walls created an optical illusion of an immense slab of rock leaning towards all those who approached it, ready to topple over and smash those who dared to come too close.
Inside, the temple was filled with cavernous chambers bathed by a warm, soft, soothing light which shone on ancient relics and unique works of art ranging from alien and cyborg books to giant paintings of worlds no human eye had ever seen. Dozens of bedrooms and ten huge dining rooms were spread among the twelve floors of the temple. All of the rooms were warm and inviting although most could be turned into a bunker or a prison cell at the press of a hidden button.
But perhaps the coziest of all rooms was the chamber which was host to countless meetings of the High Command over the centuries, a circular room decorated by statues of bizarre alien deities and relics of the creatures who once ruled this world. These otherworldly items which were sparsely and tastefully placed around the walls, helped to set the tone for the Commanders’ meetings.
They met over meals and during sexual communions and they did it for a reason. All life needed food and all life needed sex. As those desires were satiated, the common bond between all cyborgs was clear and a calm, honest discussion without the burdens of age, rank and politics was achieved. Matters of life, death, future and past were discussed with the kind of honesty that politicians on Earth would call suicide and avoid at all costs.
Commanders were always equally divided by gender, a religious consideration to ensure the equality of the sexes. Women played a very special role in the Nation. There were far more of them than the males and they were still the only ones able to bear offspring. Given roles as commanders, scholars, priestesses, and military officers, women were spared from becoming nothing more than a sophisticated uterus. Ace simply couldn’t allow a gender conflict in such a small group during the first years of the Nation and thus allowed women to do what they wished with their lives, silencing his instincts to protect them.
The High Command promoted completely new ideas of sex and intimacy over the centuries, drawing on ancient human history and a wide variety of carnal knowledge assembled through the ages. They needed a society in which sex wouldn’t be a right or a duty or even a privilege, but a favorite pastime and the apex of emotion between the sexes. Homosexuality and bisexuality weren’t touched by the hands off ruling body and the phenomena were not dwelled on or scrutinized. The Nation wanted no part in regulating its citizens’ private lives after demystifying sex and creating a casual atmosphere about all sexual matters, believing they had done more than enough.
Focusing their energies on military concerns and regulating trade, the High Command built the Nation’s impressive armies and kept an eye on the economy, catching criminals and spies before handing them over to a judicial system independent of the Command.
On this day, five Commanders discussed recent events on Earth over lunch. All five of them looked young, but their synthetic faces, immune to the ravages of time, hid the fact that the youngest person sitting at the table, Sophia, celebrated her thousandth birthday just a few days ago. She and the man sitting across from her, Shohei, were born just as the Children of the Stars were being created on far off worlds. The other members of the group, Alice, Sergio, and Eric, could still remember Ace as a human.
“Now I know why we fired Mai,” Alice was saying with a sigh. “I bet you the Dark Gods paid her to do it.”
“Probably,” agreed Shohei as he took a bit of his grilled fish.
“Ace tells me we won’t have to worry about her anymore,” said Sergio. “It’s his ex, so we should just let him handle it his way. What I want to talk about is how Nelson pulled a fast one on Earth.”
“He turned a complete and total cluster fuck into a way to get rid of that Newman character,” nodded Eric with admiration. “We need him on the High Command after Aari retires and I’m even prepared to make a special amendment to let Children be on the Command.”
“He has to win the election first,” noted Alice.
“Oh he’ll win,” winked Eric plunging a fork into his salad. “His win in a general election would integrate the Children and the Nation into a single governing entity over the next few centuries. We’d have a much stronger, more unified governing system that way.”
“But we can’t do that yet,” chimed in Sophia. “It looks like we’ll be heading for a war with the Dark Gods and it may be a bad idea to flaunt the integration of the Children into the Nation. Mai wasn’t just out there for revenge on Ace. She was out there because Dark Gods in a tactical center on their home world decided that they couldn’t let us work with Earth. They wanted to cut us off from humans and a potential addition to our population, not to mention steady sources of food for the next few million years. Hence the 11th hour attack.”
“If I know Ace,” said Alice, “and I know him pretty well, he’s probably planning to just go for it.”
“Right now?” wondered Sophia. “He’d just go for it right now?”
“It was bound to happen anyway. The Dark Gods replaced some ancient Sentries. And if we go look at the ruins that we preserved in the catacombs under the main temples, we’ll see that once upon a time the Sentries that used to live here sent another alien species into exile. And if we exile the Dark Gods... You know the rest.”
“Ah, the circle of life,” chuckled Sergio. “Then we go to another galaxy and play with the big boys there and so on and so forth. Or... Maybe we can change the dynamic if we become the hyper-power of the galaxy?”
“We can think about it later,” replied Alice. “An if isn’t a when so we shouldn’t get too far ahead of ourselves. Right now, is there so much as a sliver of a chance that we can overpower the Dark Gods? I’m sure someone must’ve ran it through a simulator.”
Shohei put down his fork and brought up a holographic screen of various charts, numbers and diagrams. Alice reached out, grabbed it as if the screen was a piece of glass and carefully examined it.
“Thanks Shohei,” she said.
“No problem,” he nodded.
“All right, so let’s see,” hummed Alice studying the charts. “Now if I read this right, the simulator shows that we have a good chance of a draw, but not so much of a win with a straightforward military campaign using our current fleet.”
“That’s what the data suggests,” confirmed Shohei.
Alice turned the holographic screen off with a wave of her hand, her lips pursed and her brows narrowed in deep thought. A stillness settled over the chamber for a long, tense minute until Sophia spoke.
“Maybe we don’t actually have to fight,” she mused. “Maybe we could make a deal to keep sharing power. It worked, didn’t it? There are tensions in any power sharing arrangement, so if we just iron out the dilemma with Earth, we could stabilize the situation. I’m not sure the just because other Sentries were overthrowing each other for the last ten million years that we should do the same.”
Sergio shook his head in disagreement.
“Actually Sophia, that ten million year pattern is the reason why we have to go to war with them,” he declared. “If we let the attack on Earth slide, they’ll see it as a sign of weakness, a lack of intelligence gathering capability or a lack of a will to fight or even as just plain fear. They’re expecting an overthrow and they’re worried that their civilization is living in its twilight years. Any weakness on our side would encourage them to attack, to get us before we get too powerful or too big for them. This is what it’s all about. They hit the million year as a Sentry mark and they’re looking to reassert themselves.”
“Are they really that paranoid?”
“They have good reason. Just like Alice was saying, go ask one of our scholars about the artifacts in the catacombs. There are almost ten million years of history there showing Sentry after Sentry getting exiled.”
“And as one of the Sentry-killers, the Dark Gods know very well that one day it could be their turn too, just like mobsters who killed competitors to get ahead know how easy it is for someone to get rid of them,” added Eric. “They’re worried that we’ll be the next Sentry-killers and in due time, they could be right.”
“And then what?” sighed Sophia. “We’re going to watch potential new superpowers who might want to go after us, start paranoid wars, face our eventual twilight and go into exile from this galaxy to find a new place to call home?”
The other Commanders were silent, their faces indicating a very grim, but necessary agreement with her assessment. As they reached ever closer to the level of the Dark Gods, they started to believe that some natural law punished any species that started living outside of concepts like age and time, and plotted conquests of entire galaxies. Just like the human intellect realized the mortality of the flesh, their minds realized the imminent twilight of their power in the future. To them, it wasn’t a question of if but a question of when and how, just like it was for the Dark Gods. The war with the Rexx and their use of a traitor to attack the Earth were the first stages of panic, a set of pre-emptive strikes.
“Either way,” finally said Sergio, “we’re looking at timescales of absolutely ridiculous magnitudes. Let’s focus on what’s going on in the galaxy right now, not what might happen in a million years.”
With a nod, everyone agreed to put away the depressing view of their distant future and focus on the present. After all, they still had to make it to the distant future and right now, it seemed that the path to it was blocked by the Dark Gods.
[ chapter _ 027 ]
When Ace and Dot entered their favorite nightclub, cheers, applause, offers for drinks and compliments drowning in the noise greeted the cyborgs. They were the returning war heroes, defenders of Earth, and celebrities. Even the ultra-rich and ridiculously famous who made up the club’s regulars applauded with sincere admiration. Ace raised his hands in the air as if surrendering to the crowd. Dot bashfully tried to wave off the applause. Finally, as they were seated by the owners in the VIP lounge, the cheers and applause died down.
The nightclub itself wasn’t much different from nightclubs of the past. It was huge, tiered into two levels around the dance floor which was surrounded by tables and curved couches. Colors emitted by the many holographic projectors danced on the translucent glass walls to a funky electronic tune which made Dot’s foot shake to its rhythm.
