Chronicles of the Aeons War, page 33
part #3 of The Omniverse Series
“Come, sister Zaiola; please, sit down. We’ll have a coffee brought to you.”
“Thanks,” she said, uncertainly. She sat close to Reardon, an old friend and the only person in the room she knew.
“Brother Hiram has already spoken with you about reminding the Northerners and their Queen about us,” one of the women said, “You want to help us; but do you understand what’s at stake? Do you understand what it is we mean to do, and why? Do you understand what will happen when we do this; what the consequences will be for all involved?”
Zaiola stretched her neck and nodded. “A public blow must be made; a strike on the Temple in Landing. To remind the Queen her Domain lies farther than the borders of Terra Nova. It means violence, and it means injuries, maybe death – on both sides of the divide. It means innocents could be hurt. It means to do this, we risk becoming murderers; terrorists.”
“Killers – not murderers!” another man said, “In war there are always innocent casualties! It is why we have avoided war – and prepared for it – for all the years since the Schism. War is not murder. It is tragedy.”
“Some would not call this war,” the first woman cautioned, “Some would use the word Sister Zaiola used: terrorism.” She looked Zaiola in the eye, leaning forward across the table. “What about you, Pomeroy Zaiola?” she asked, “You, once called the Cinnamon Girl, for the color of your hair…and a certain film you did early in your career; you, an actress and celebrity, who has won so many laureates, who has spoken for many causes over the years, can you stand now for your name to become associated with terrorism? Not just in Landing, but perhaps even here, among the Children of Abraham?”
“I would have my name associated with whatever cause I believe in,” she said. “No matter how it might later be viewed. Also, you would use my name to recruit others for other action; you would have me rally those called to declare war on the Northerners over being abandoned in the Rescue…if you would use me to recruit others to fight and possibly to kill or even die…If you want me to do that for you, then you must ask of me the same thing you’d ask of them. I train for and go on the mission. Or else, my face and voice will not be yours to use. The choice is yours.”
“Wait,”
She only noticed the new speaker when he spoke. In spite of herself, Zaiola was afraid when she saw him. His hair was dark blonde and he was lean, his skin far paler than most…but his eyes…gold flecked with red, luminous…only the Erelim had such eyes; the Mark of Rejas which appeared in Nephilim as they reached the Third Age; always during the Third Age would the Erelim emerge among the Nephilim. Not always, not even often. But when they did emerge, they left behind everything they knew to join the cloistered, mysterious society in the Far South. Zaiola had never seen an Erelim before and felt afraid. He nodded at her, as if acknowledging her fear.
“Pomeroy Zaiola,” the Erelim said, “What are you looking for on this mission?”
“We were abandoned by them,” she said, “They offered us no aid. Millions died who might have been saved. Why didn’t She act sooner, if She is as powerful as all the texts and histories say? Why has She forsaken us? Because we have chosen to follow our Ways and not Hers?”
“You want revenge,” the Erelim said.
“No; I want answers. I know we can’t kill Her. But I would like to punish her, and to meet Her. I would like to make Her answer for what She failed to do. And yes, Blessed One, I would give my life to hear those answers.”
The Erelim smiled, though his eyes narrowed as he did. “You would die for those answers,” he said, “Would you kill for those answers?”
“I would hope to have to do neither,” she replied, “But if necessary, if it serves making Her in some small way accountable for leaving us behind, most importantly, if it helps my brothers and sisters in the Ways of Abraham, then yes.”
“That is the best answer I could hope for,” the Erelim said, “Brothers and sisters of this quorum, I support Pomeroy Zaiola’s petition. But I suggest that she makes herself available to speak on our behalf publicly as often as possible, while she is retrained to meet Sinai Militia Basic standards.”
“But, that will take months,” Pomeroy objected.
“No,” the Erelim replied, “As we don’t have months, it will not take months. You’ll wish you were dead before we’re through training you, but if you are with us, you will be called upon to do a great many things, Zaiola.”
She swallowed, considering the path ahead. Was this truly what she wanted? She stopped; it was pointless trying to find a counter-argument for everything, no matter how hard, no matter how horrible, that lay ahead of her. This wasn’t the road she wanted, but the road she felt God was calling her to travel…this was a duty to her people and to her spirit, broken by this alien attack on their home and the so-called Queen of Light and Sorrow’s abandonment of the Tribes of Abraham.
“All right,” Zaiola said, “When do we start?”
“Now,” the Erelim said, “Sister.”
♦♦♦
“Once we’re done licking our wounds and resettling our people, do we have a plan?” Fleetmistress Kaplan regarded the Grandmaster dubiously. He was pleased to see that she was as much a hard-ass in this time as she would be in the time he’d left behind.
“I’m going to teach you to fight the Zohor,” he said, “I’m going to teach you how to use time travel as a weapon against them.”
“Time travel?” the sneering accusation came from one of the Commanders of the Fleet, “Brothers and Sisters of the Suphia and the Phenex, Marshals and Fleetmasters, this so-called Grandmaster’s as mad as we feared the Queen, Herself to be! And if She’s keeping council with him, perhaps She is!”
The Grandmaster crossed his arms over his chest.
“I wouldn’t have believed it from your lips, Baxter Vincent,” he said, “In my time, you were the one who taught me how to use time travel against the Zohor.”
“So you say,” the younger Baxter said, approaching Grandmaster Benedict, “But you’ve come from nowhere and you claim command over both the Phenex and Suphia El-Ahur.”
“Is it proof of concept you want, Bax? Or proof that I’m who I say I am? You want to see time travel at work against those bastard machines, look no further than your own event cameras from the battle over Midian. Watch what the Ouroboros, and the ships I brought with me did, and how we did it. If you want me to prove myself to you, I’ll do whatever I can. But just remember: I answer to the Queen of Light and Sorrow, not to the Fleetmasters, not to the Marshalls of the Suphia El-Ahur, not to the Council. I swore my loyalty to the Shekhina Mehdi and my obedience to Her Commands just as all of you did so long ago on the slope of the Umbra beneath the Queen’s Keep. The difference may be that I swore my allegiance long after you did, but that’s the only difference. But She placed me in command; I didn’t put myself here. If you revere Her and follow Her will, you’ll let me do my job.”
Twelve
Legions of the Hope
The highest summit of the Umbra split open in a cave’s mouth which led circuitously back down into the Queen’s Keep, below. Jack Benedict, the Voyager, made his way from the Abrahamic Quarter of Olympus and up to the Queen’s Keep. He didn’t know what he’d expected to find; the Keep was deserted, Allison McQuire had long since abandoned this place. He followed the route from the back of the Keep up the cavern to this plateau. From here, a natural ledge allowed him to look out, down on the New City of Landing. He wondered if She’d ever come here to look out on Landing, before sealing Herself inside.
The landscape was changed drastically from what he remembered; fifteen hundred years – thirteen hundred some-odd, according to Midian’s new calendar – would do that, he knew; but the massive crater made by the Zohor super weapon was the most glaring. The crater had filled in partially with water from the diverted Acoma, becoming a lake with barren shores, marking the beginning of the New City of Landing. Used to picking out landmarks from high altitudes after years behind the stick, Benedict knew that the Zohor struck almost exactly where the old settlement would have been. Nothing from those first early days on Midian remained; history obliterated by an uncaring, unfeeling enemy that dealt only in death.
Landing spread out in ever-expanding, irregular crescents from Crater Lake; alternating rings of city and park, city and park. Residential areas were the closest to the impact site, the industrial sectors farthest out, with the skyport occupying the easternmost ring of the city, out towards Temple Hill. How long it had taken Landing to be rebuilt, he wondered. What had been the turnaround time to rebuild San Francisco after the Big Quake? Chicago after the fire? Hiroshima and Nagasaki had needed decades to recover after they’d been Nuked during War Two. New York had fared as well after War Three left Manhattan a radioactive ruin. Parts of Los Angeles still weren’t inhabitable when the Old Ship left Earth, but the old joke was that parts of Los Angeles hadn’t been liveable before War Three . Could the New City of Landing be only a few decades old? How long ago had the Zohor strike been for these people? For him?
The Midianites had neither the politics nor the economy of Old Earth; with that advantage alone, and aided by the technology they had harvested from the Worlds of the Lost League, Benedict couldn’t imagine how easy it must have been to rebuild Midian. But he couldn’t forget the exchange he’d seen aboard the shuttle from the Caliburn. There were obvious tensions between the so-called Five Nations; there was resentment towards the people of Terra Nova and especially Landing. The Terra Novans as they were called – as derisively as people had once used the term Americans or Europeans after that on Old Earth – had no doubt prospered the most quickly after the Attack. He hadn’t seen what had become of Tear or Sinai; but Zaiola had told him what they had been, what they were now. The Zohor had done this...and yet the so-called Queen of Light and Sorrow had let it all happen. Allison McQuire had not done anything to prevent the attack that ravaged their world. She’d once wrangled the energies from a toroidal black hole at the Ship’s core to save them from the Zohor...She’d healed the injured and dying after that same attack by a simple act of will...yet She had done nothing to prevent the Zohor from striking Midian. And now She was gone. Allison McQuire had vanished, and he knew wasn’t getting the whole story.
The sun was setting North; still unsettling to watch it curl down the horizon as Heruba appeared as if from a fog. Their parent world was several times the size of Jupiter; a colossal gas giant; a failed star that turned cold and cloudy instead of bursting into a fire of nuclear fusion. Heruba filled nearly half the nighttime sky at any given moment. Benedict remembered the early days of the settlement, only a few years ago for him. So many colonists had had nightmares because of the alien sky and the strange, tumbling celestial lords. There were all kinds of minor and major illnesses as the settlers first adjusted to life on Midian, all a result of subtle differences between Earth and Midian’s gravities, angles and planes of orbit, polar magnetic fields and tidal forces. Now, Benedict was sure, these problems were long forgotten by the Midianites: there was nothing about this place that could be new or alien to them; this had been their home for generations.
It soon turned dark as the sun that was Heket set, though “Dark” was relative when the night was lit by the luminous skin of Heruba’s storms. Benedict watched the city below begin to light up with a beauty no Earth architect could ever have imagined. The towers and podways lit up Landing’s nighttime cityscape, reminding him of sculptures of crystal and light he’d seen once in another life back on the Old Earth. He felt an odd mix of senses of failure and accomplishment. His trip back to the Hub aboard the Esperanza had failed, costing him the life of his crew – and the woman he loved. And yet, if not for that failure, none of these people would be alive, now. None of this would exist. He couldn’t guess what would have happened had he returned with another ship, rescued the castaways from the Settlement and continued on the Exodus. They may have found the Lost Races of the League of Worlds; they may have found only death at the hands of the Zohor, the Nimbus, or some cosmic event; they may have found nothing at all, and merely continued on deeper and deeper into the uncharted black, billions of light-years from their homeworld, Earth.
What haunted Benedict the most was that if his mission had succeeded, then Alina would still be alive. His only memory from...whatever had happened was waking up as he was being rushed to the stasis bay, and dropped into his pod, sirens blaring and smoke filling the air. Alina looked down on him, worried and heartbroken. She closed the lid of his stasis pod...and then he woke up in the medical bay aboard the Ouroboros. He wasn’t even afforded time to tell Alina he loved her before being sealed in for the next fifteen hundred years.
♦♦♦
Heihachi Daniel returned to the orbiting Ouroboros just before dusk. He was tired from the end of the battle, the transfer of Flag from Ouroboros to the Caliburn, the session before the Queen’s Council and the Council of Midian. As Baxter Vincent’s Second, it was his duty to be there with the Commodore at all times. He was on Gamma Shift on the Command Deck tonight. Acquilina’s schedule put her on Delta, supervising systems and power; at least they’d have some limited Bridge-time to share as their shifts overlapped. Daniel had been born on Bloom’s point; Midian had never felt like home to him. Though there were hostels for the El-Ahur across Olympus and Landing, he’d always felt more comfortable in the quarters he shared with Roshenko aboard the ship or back at Bloom’s Point. Planet-side felt wrong to him; unnatural. He felt no connection to the people of Midian other than the Racial Bond that united them against the Zohor; they faced extinction. Midian and Bloom’s Point were the only two places where the True Blood descendants of Humankind survived in the universe. The station was as near to invulnerable and impenetrable a fortress the El-Ahur could hope to have. Midian just felt…naked, vulnerable. He’d been part of the fleet fighting the Zohor when the Queen came down the Mountain. Baxter Vincent had been Commander and Heihachi was a Mission Specialist aboard the Queen’s Hope; back when there was a Queen’s Hope; though not destroyed in the initial attack, the Hope had been damaged beyond repair. Afterwards, when the Grandmaster first presented himself before Council, Bax had been there, of course; challenging the Grandmaster until he finally believed and respected Benedict Jack of the Future. Later, Baxter Vincent became Benedict’s Commodore aboard the Grandmaster’s ship, the Ouroboros. Heihachi had been hand-picked by the Grandmaster, as well. He’d served with Baxter Vincent aboard the ‘Boros ever since.
After his rotation ended, Heihachi ate a small meal alone, showered, and went through his evening’s exercise and meditations. Finally he went to bed. Sometime late at night, she woke him. His interlink said it was four in the morning; Aqualina would have just come off duty not that long ago. She woke him by reaching her Mind to his, and touching herself beside him. Half-awake, Heihachi felt it from her and it wasn’t long before he was touching himself; not long before, mind to mind, body to body, they were touching each other.
The sensations shared between them made them one, mind and body. There was a blending unique to the El-Ahur. They were a single bright star of physical and psychic passion. Their star was flaring towards nova when the alert klaxon sounded. Pulling out of each other was shocking, frustrating, almost painful. Jarred from their Shared experience and twofold denied release, they each felt both the others’ frustration and their own. Heihachi and ‘Lina dressed quickly, promising through one last mental caress to get back to the joining later.
The alert called all senior officers to the Command Deck. As Baxter Vincent was still planetside, Heihachi had just inherited command of the Ouroboros.
♦♦♦
“Situation?” he demanded, as he joined the ship’s staff on the bridge.
“Scout ship Kalenga reports multiple sensor contacts coming in from Heliopause,” tactical officer Lyrin Isaiah reported, “They’re keeping in Heket’s eclipse, moving at superluminal, two hours, twenty-eight minutes from Heruban periapsis.”
