~ ~ ~
Two hours ago, Zoa's craft, a vessel known as RN-629, docked with a carrier-class warship called the Cyon. It was not told to Hephaestion that the Cyon was a warship. He saw its designation for himself. But even if he'd missed the resonance key for the Holland-Tchey written symbol, he had eyes.
The Cyon was a colossal destroyer that should not, by his world's standards, have been able to operate in gravity. Its hull was organic, dun and light gray with mysterious ribs of sky-blue. It possessed gun ports in plenty, particularly along its vast belly and the topside protrusion that resembled a ten-story tower. Missile tubes, port and starboard, were additional highlights, along with peripheral pods that might have been turrets for large caliber projectile weapons.
Along with the Holland-Tchey vessel's deadly features, there was amazing acceleration and deceleration capability, as well as inertial dampeners that graciously omitted the effects of such. Within an hour after receiving intelligence from the discarnate entity of John Manegold, the Cyon achieved a high-altitude pattern over the Republic of Talos, a chain of white beaches surrounded by a cerulean ocean one hundred and fifty kilometers off the coast of Tangalore.
Talos was considered part of the Oviasura Continent. Its government possessed an operating budget exceeding its needs, and with no economy to speak of, and banking laws that expressed wide tolerance for gains and privacy without concern for credit commission policy and taxation, the world accepted the tropical islands for what they were: a finance sanctuary for organized crime.
For this reason, ITAN working in concert with half a dozen non-aligned nations had imposed travel sanctions to Talos. Talos citizens traveling abroad were required to airbus to Grete or Orynero or some place equally remote (and expensive) in order to board flights to the rest of the world. Conversely, booking a flight to Talos, for someone not of Talosienne birth, led to an immediate and excruciating audit of one's finances, as well as the finances of one's business and private associates. Tourism in Talos was non-existent.
Talos's wireless banking transactions employed the best credit could buy, but it was not infallible. At least, not on the surface. ITAN suspected a sophisticated algorithm that used public communication to conduct covert transactions. The amount of data going into and out of Talos was massive, primarily because it was the southern hub for GateKeeper Global and no one knew how to untangle the tape surrounding the hundreds of private entities that owned either directly or through ghost corporations a slice of the hub. To jam electronic communication to Talos, situated in the world's mildest weather zone, would compromise the economies of several small nations and tank hundreds of GateKeeper-based enterprises. Redundancy through GateKeeper hubs would prevent total collapse, but by the time GateKeeper detected the failure and re-routed its data, the damage would be done. A realignment of GateKeeper's infrastructure was required, but it was problematic given the layered, secretive and global nature of the system.
Meanwhile, Talos thrived.
Manegold had expressed bewilderment that anyone in his family, besides him, would script code sophisticated enough to float credit undetected past the international credit commission into a Talos account. He supposed that was the issue, and wondered if he had written the code but wasn't told what it was for. Now, no one could get the funds out. Talos would release credit in the manner specified, but its functionaries no longer scripted the code for you, or told you how to make sure your credit arrived at its desired location without an intercept by the credit commission, or worse. Manegold expected to be coerced into doing the job, and said that he would try to hold out, but the pressure on him to cooperate was extreme.
Hephaestion, noting the wire of strain in Manegold's communication, did not argue. Nor did Zoa, whose colleagues thought that releasing the Talos funds was a good way to start a trace, since Manegold had yet to hold a single discussion about the module or the person or persons who had it. In addition, Manegold should have been able to locate his father, but couldn't.
The Holland-Tchey wanted to know more about "walking," which was a Kinder term for an affarite's ability to travel while the body was dormant.
Hephaestion explained. Communication aboard the Cyon was a mellifluous convergence of thought and emotion, quite unlike interchange with a human. Although the Holland-Tchey were intensely telepathic, Hephaestion's version of telepathy was as unique and refreshing to them as theirs was to him. Hephaestion had not learned to visit the minds of others with a rulebook. As a result, the quiet corridors of the warship became streams of information and, sometimes, polite emotion that resonated at a perfectly controlled pitch. Explaining the affarite method of reaching toward the call, another person's inner life, Hephaestion was surprised to feel a high note of interest pinging all over the ship. "Walking" was something the Holland-Tchey could not do, not without a computer. What did it mean, if Manegold was unable to locate his father? It meant Burgolt Manegold, a human, was either dead or impossibly but remarkably shielded.
Hephaestion chose the former.
That left the four Manegold sons (since the daughter was, presently, incarcerated in the UKSB) as actors or collaborators in the plot. Manegold wasn't ready to believe that his father was dead, and no matter. He at least knew, based on the possibility, how to bring future discussion with his siblings around to doomsday devices.
What had Manegold's sister, not too long ago, told Manegold about her father's way of thinking?
She'd said, "The end is the beginning, all that? Well, you and Sir can take it to hell with you and burn it when you get there. I’ll be ashes, but you believe what you want. Make the world over in fire? Oh Val, you poor bastard. Do you think when the world is on fire anyone will give a shit about beginning again? Begin with what? There’s nothing left, baby brother, when there’s nothing left."
There's nothing left, when there's nothing left.
Amen.
The Cyon was in position. Zoa, working through Hephaestion, decided upon a string of code that the ship's technicians could detect and track. Hephaestion communicated the code to Manegold, and there ensued a hiatus until Manegold woke inside his body, which was in the Guen Yun province of Hupei.
Guen Yun was a rural disaster, an economic orphan sustained by the credits of private investors who preferred to do business under the protection of anonymity. For a fee, the Republic of Hupei obliged. The Kinder operations team and John Manegold were in a recently-constructed bunker behind the Shuang dam that resembled, on scan, the innards of a massive water plant, of which Hupei had many.
The Holland-Tchey contact inside ITAN said the building plans and permits were filed by an entity called the EsterMANN Corporation. The company charter claimed the business performed ecological surveys to determine investment opportunities in countries with struggling economies. Nothing that explained the massive underground complex. Not on paper. In practice, however, the EsterMANN facility looked like long-term shelter against an environmental disaster. Interestingly, the complex filed its final inspection reports at the end of winter, just before Katherin Manegold, sister of John, was arrested and the site that she commanded, the Moukibi location, was raided.
* * *
-- Why do your memories taste so strangely before the years that were counted after the one you call god?
-- Not god, he corrected Zoa. They strolled the endless passages of her ship below the command and operations levels. The lower levels of their section were classified residential and service. There were no ports, and in these informal settings, no speech. The bulkheads resembled charcoal foam, soft to touch. The deck was a sort of rubber. Runners, ceiling, and bulkhead light panels dispensed cool but penetrating light. To escape the brightness, one had to retire to his quarters.
He was thinking about that, thinking about bed. He was growing lethargic.
Zoa noticed. She sang a note into the wall panel and turned her hand-held screen up so he could see it. The way to our quarters.
-- Come with me.
She inclined her head slightly, eyes down. Of course she would.
-- Will you sleep for very long?
-- About ten of my hours.
-- But you have not answered my query about your memories. I, we, have many questions.
Not about the content, he knew. Zoa's species was familiar, in some ways, with possessing intimate, sometimes hurtful knowledge of others' actions. He wasn't surprised. He, too, pulled from strangers fragments that the source of the information would not want known. He knew how to measure forbidden knowledge, when and when not to judge. Although there was some pretty heady material in his past, Zoa was asking about the underlying emotional note, and the difference in his mental and emotional state before and after the Enegris.
-- Ask what you want, he thought.
-- You had considerable ability before Year One of the Lady.
-- Yes.
-- But you had more after she arrived on the Old Continent.
Zoa was partially correct. The Enegris and the corresponding enhancement to his abilities began before the Lady landed on the Old Continent. One explanation was that she was born of a god and abandoned in the world as an infant, and that her birth sparked the surge. As she was a child somewhere on the Ovian Continent, he would have sensed her from the instant she drew breath, a powerful magnet drawing him westward. However, he resisted. Not everyone did. Still, he remembered waking after the long sleep one hour seven hundred and fifty some years ago knowing that his life, and the lives of others, had somehow altered. The air tasted-- sweeter. The sun was softer. He strolled into the warmth wanting to tell every face he saw that something important had occurred. At the same time, he began to feel weary, base, undefined. He didn't like the way he felt.
More importantly, in leaps and bounds, seemingly from one moment to the next, his power increased.
There was a price for that.
Eventually, he adjusted. Years went by. And he heard rumor. Finally, the Lady arrived on the Old Continent and took residence in the temple that Constantine had built for her.
-- Why did she travel over an ocean to the Old Continent?
-- To meet her acolyte.
-- Perhaps, but not the one you mean. If Constantine built her temple, then he and she were collaborators. She did not need to sail an ocean to enlist his aid. I believe she traveled to find you. Did you not say you were more powerful than the Parnasi?
The Parnasi. She had been into the archives, he recalled. She knew the history of his world.
-- In some ways. All right, in many ways.
-- She came to make you an ally, or to destroy you.
He was tired and close to his quarters but he stopped to look at Zoa, who stood looking patiently back. It would take his full concentration to communicate the response he wanted. He clasped his hands behind his back, closed his eyes. He wanted only mental imagery, and recollection of the past.
To give to the Lady motive, like alliance-seeking or the desire to confront an enemy, demonstrated incomprehension of the Lady's nature. He didn't mind Zoa's error: he'd never shown Zoa or any Holland-Tchey the Lady's essence.
Before her advent, the gilded ones-- affarites --sometimes called themselves light-bringers, truth-givers, the fire children of Affaraon.
In those days, an affarite would show the nature of god, a creator called Affaraon, to a less endowed person as a way of healing a mortal's inner life. Invariably, the god appeared as a female, entering the awareness of mortal and affarite initially as a child, then as an adult of striking beauty.
For the mortal, there was something deeply stirring, intimate, indeed desperate about the contact but the affarite took the god's presence for good or ill, like the beginning of another day or the sound of thunder. But some, like Hephaestion, learned to blot all evidence of the female deity, including an affarite's innate sense of her correcting influence, which flowed through the affarite along the internal pathways of the gilding.
Hephaestion did not merely reason away her existence; he supplanted the goddess with a tireless swell of dark, chaotic rage. He imbibed bitterness and returned the favor, enduring in a kind of black hell hundreds and hundreds of years, until he was, in all his incarnations, a scourge. He was the tremor on the plain that must be avoided, the demon at the head of an army of deconstructionists that must be engaged and stopped by the only power vital and substantial enough to make a stand.
She could not have, would not have sent Constantine Parnasus to kill Hephaestion. For one thing, death, to her, was not what it seemed to those with no understanding of the gates and what it was like to die and die again without anticipation of release. For another, she did not command women and men. She simply did not. The minds and souls of those who served her went where they willed-- he, Hephaestion, was proof of that. Lastly, he was, by her definition, already dead. If she said anything at all to Constantine, it was, Bring that shriveled thing to life, and return its soul to peace. But to imagine this was hubris; it was more likely she said nothing, sent no one.
Constantine mobilized his army because he had decided, correctly, only force of arms would check Hephaestion's march.
The Lady, though the centerpiece of their tale and the object over which he and Constantine contended, was especially and essentially neutral.
How was this communicated to Zoa? A demonstration was the only way, but it was impossible to show the nature of the Lady without revealing the goddess. So he opened a bridge within his mind and allowed Zoa to travel away with him from a place of beating hearts to an environ where passion had another purpose.
And when he let go, when he opened his eyes, Is that your god? Zoa asked.
-- I am not led to believe god can be defined simply, but if you like. I know that the Lady is of the goddess and I know she is flesh and can be touched. However the form and face that you see is the one you prefer to see. Her aspect is veiled even to my power. She will tell you god is a blade of grass, or a moving breeze. When you see the grass and the wind as I do, you cannot doubt her.
-- She commands an army.
-- Her protectorate is an indulgence, but not hers. She needs no protector.
-- How does she make people do what she wants?
-- People do as they please. She won't change that, interfere with one's choice, even to save another.
-- Could she be like you, only older?
-- I sensed her coming. She was seen, then, as a child. No, she is not older, not as you mean it. I have lived at least seven hundred years longer than she.
-- Does she regenerate?
-- If somehow she were to die, she would return.
-- Yet you are stronger.
-- I am stronger than I was before the Enegris. Before her advent. Stronger than I have ever been. But beside her, I am a child at school.
Zoa stared.
Hephaestion parted his lips, murmuring, "Oh, no." He had startled. With widening eyes, he considered what he had said. "I should have ..."
"Continue to your quarters," Zoa whispered. "I will speak to Her Excellence." She stepped back, but did not turn from him. "Is the Lady telepathic?"
"You haven't any idea."
Zoa nodded, accepting his response. "Does she use a protective shield as you do?"
"All that I am flows to and from her."
She nodded again. "I have never seen a wave pattern such as yours. I shield my thoughts and my emotions through technology. You do it through a biological component, emitting a controlled electromagnetic field that resonates so clearly and so powerfully that I believe you would have to be very far from me before I ceased to detect it. The Manegold, he too does this, though his field is much thinner and as such more difficult to detect. You, if you held Quiranium in your hands, I wonder-- I have begun to wonder --if I or any technology I have seen would detect it if you did not want us to."
He knew the answer and continued to hold her gaze.
"As I thought. I would sense you, but only you, and then only until you disabled my detection equipment."
"That is probably true."
"When you are older, will your wave pattern learn to shield itself? I ask because, Hephaestion, I have been to Amorium. I have been to Amorium. And detected nothing."
-- Next Chapter
1 comment:
hi, new to the site, thanks.
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