There had been a ripple, a sundering. Also, a taste of power. The memory of power was different, yet not so different. The fracture started him dreaming, made him remember the last time he was with a being and sampled otherness.
So many dead, but the deaths were not what hit him while he was under.
During his time with the Kinder Group, the Great War that eventually led to the birth of ITAN began and ended. Kinder was established before ITAN, and not all Kinder nations became members of ITAN.
The first true test of ITAN occurred when a UKSB traitor reported to the International Commission on Weapons and Defense that Solona had developed research bases to reverse engineer a canon harvested from a downed alien spacecraft. The UKSB kept the existence of the craft a national secret. The canon, it turned out, employed particle-antiparticle technology, which was unheard of among the advanced science and research centers of the world.
Confronted by a delegation of ITAN nations, the UKSB admitted recovering a craft of unknown, possible extraterrestrial origin but denied finding weaponry.
Brianovia, home to Kinder headquarters and an ITAN nation, proposed a mission to the Kinder member governments, but said nothing to the Commission. ITAN, the Brianovs suggested, was ineffective against the UKSB, its most stalwart member. The situation, Brianovia put forth, was intolerable. The UKSB and Brianovia shared a border.
Hephaestion was roused from a drug-induced slumber. The habitat supervisor at the time was a man named Himich. He had Hephaestion brought to the atrium on the main floor of the habitat. Himich and Hephaestion sat together looking at data, and at the sky. Spring came late that year, and summer didn't last. The sky, visible through broad panes of glass, was washed out. Himich settled on a bench next to Hephaestion, who turned to look at the doctor and mouthed, "Why was I wakened?"
Himich's thoughts began to drift, random yet relevant, as Himich sighed and handed over satellite images and photos of UKSB scientists and notables.
"Locate the research facilities and key personnel," Himich said. "Tell us what we are dealing with."
"How?"
"A walk has been authorized."
When Hephaestion's consciousness was within his body his awareness of others was limited to his surroundings. The life forms he touched had to be local, but if they were local he could find them even when they were merely discarnate energy sequences, astral projections.
When he disconnected from his body, when his heart stopped, he lacked recourse to his physical endowments but his sensory net became infinite. Without limitations imposed by flesh and blood, he could sense a life signature on the other side of the globe and reach out to it in the span of a single human heartbeat.
"You want me to die."
"You'll have to die to get the information we need. If we play video, can you be certain to identify the life force signature of these ministers?"
"That's not usually a problem."
"Do you anticipate problems?"
"If the United Kingdom of Solona and Burtisa has dealt ever with my kind, a scan with modified technology will detect a breach, and that may start the war you are trying to prevent."
"The UKSB has no understanding of you, your ability, or scans we use at Kinder to know when you are discarnate but present."
So you say. "Very well."
Himich said, "Do you want to know what it is the UKSB is developing that has put so many Kinder nations in jeopardy?"
"Do you want to tell me?"
"Ah, you have already mined the information from my conscious."
"More or less."
Hephaestion accepted a Vezdrin-potassium chloride cocktail and liberated his sensory apparatus. He located the UKSB research facilities. There were four. He spied on their security. He sought the leaders of the project.
He reported back to Kinder.
Brianovia laid its findings before the Commission.
The UKSB went to defense condition alpha, its pre-war posture.
Kinder and its multi-national administrators turned to Hephaestion: make the bases disappear.
Shortly after the incident, four Holland-Tchey carrier-class ships entered high orbit. The aliens announced their presence. Learning that their decades-old scout craft had suffered damage, crashed, and was looted, the aliens warned ITAN against pursuing their weapon technology. A treaty was proposed, and accepted. On the surface the treaty appeared useful. The Holland-Tchey provided technology in exchange for a base on the planet, so long as ITAN enforced a planet-wide ban on particle-antiparticle research and other home-grown weapons of mass destruction.
Among the Kinder nation administrators, it did not escape notice that Hephaestion was a weapon of mass destruction.
* * *
If the United Kingdom of Solona and Burtisa has dealt ever with my kind ...
The little girl from the airport, he was thinking about the little girl who flew from Prejli to Solona.
She would be twenty-four now.
Hadn't he resolved to wait, to watch for her? If she was like him, she would come into her power eventually, and when she did, he was sure that he would know it. Reasonably sure, anyway. Well, he'd met no one with the ability to see his aura in seven hundred years.
When Hephaestion touched humans with his power, after their minds and emotional centers came physical details, deficiencies, enhancements, anomalies.
Kinder claimed that two hundred and thirty-six affarites had existed since the beginning of recorded history. Hephaestion made two hundred and thirty-seven. There were other beings, other versions of spectacularly endowed life, but Kinder tended to the gilded.
A child's aural pattern might confound Hephaestion, but a man with the gilding-- no, never.
It wasn't, he realized, a girl's aura that had penetrated his sleep-state, causing the ruckus on the critical care unit. His memory of her, yes. But there was something before that, like a finger that grazed the toy blocks and made them all tumble.
It wasn't a woman's aura, either. Too bad. Hephaestion figured he wouldn't mind meeting that girl again, in spite of the fact that he had gone on to murder eight hundred of her countrymen.
The consciousness that leveraged wide his psyche bore the telepathic stamp of an affarite male, and it had died.
Hundreds of years had passed since the last affarite fell to ashes.
Did that matter? Certainly, but still ...
This one, the male, was not in ashes. In his case, the bonfire would have been relief, and release. Rather, the discarnate entity was in torment, its anguish engaging, raw and futile.
Its suffering couldn't be allowed to continue. There would be no peace otherwise. Hephaestion went to find him, reaching toward the note of anguish, seizing it like a cord and letting the cord draw him to a song of sorrow deeper and infinitely more wrenching than anything his half-human heart could withstand.
* * *
He expected the note to exist outside the corporeal world and it did. The note rang within the center of a spirit, and it was not doing well.
Hephaestion breached its shelter. The longer a spirit existed outside its flesh, the greater its need to construct the corporeal past. This spirit had made a sky, and part of a building in which to take shelter. Entering the spirit's construct was easy. The spirit did not know how to keep him out. Hephaestion stepped out of nothing, presumably the air, drawing around him an acceptable version of his physical form. He assessed.
White tile, metal walls, metal removable ceiling panels. Hephaestion looked about but did not try to understand. There had been trauma, physical and psychological. An arc of severe light hid the core of a young affarite, which had, typically, the appearance it maintained while it lived.
The other spoke first: "You can see me."
Hephaestion paused, and noticed the male was ashen, and naked. He cursed. Why was there never someone to speak adequately of what had occurred?
"Why do you keep yourself in distress? Get up."
The spirit stared up at him in puzzlement.
"I'm not going to do it for you," Hephaestion said.
"Are you sent by Our Lady?"
"Only a human would take me for an angel. Tell me, did she seem at all interested in helping you debase yourself last time you spoke to her?"
A perfectly reasonable question. "No."
"Are you going to get up?"
"I can't move."
Hephaestion glanced off, silent. The exchange had an echo of the distant past. He didn't like it. He extended his hand, or what the spirit would perceive as his hand, until there was a mingling of essence. Hephaestion stretched his power and leaped with the spirit into a corner of the planet that was not illusion.
"I see."
He had located the young man's corpse, which occupied a vault in a room much like the one the spirit had created within its soul.
A morgue.
"There I am," the spirit said, unnecessarily.
Hephaestion observed the cadaver of a young man, tall, fit, with a dusting of fine blond hair. The body was frozen. A cooler would have sufficed, but in this case a freezer had been used. Laboratories froze corpses marked for experimentation.
There was no apparent mechanism of death. Which was to be expected. There had been two deaths here, not one. Within days after the terminus the first death would have reversed itself. However, the modern world, more so than the older one, presented barriers to reanimation in its handling of dead people. The young man, healing, had died again in the cold. The freezer had trapped it. The spirit, which did not understand its freedom from the physical, wove its second death into its essence.
Hephaestion connected to the spirit, assisting the illusion of garments, body heat. The spirit accepted his help without showing interest in how he gave it. A bad sign. Hephaestion left the spirit, moving outside the morgue, tracing corridors, searching behind closed doors, even observing the security station. He moved eventually to the facility's exterior, turned around, and read the name of the building.
The Bhavaja Ministry of Science.
Bhavaja, he knew, was in Volodya on the Old Continent.
Hephaestion returned to the spirit's vicinity. "What is your name?"
"I have no name."
Gods. "You have a name. Do you want to wake up?"
"I am in a dream."
"Actually, you are in a nightmare. Do you want to be present as they open your chest, extract your organs, and place your parts in jars? Your eyes, your tongue, suspended in fluid while they try to understand why your flesh will not rot?"
The spirit prickled.
"What were you called, when you were alive?"
"I was called John Valten Manegold."
"Your surname is familiar to me. Why is--"
The spirit of John Valten Manegold showed alarm. At first, Hephaestion did not know why. Manegold focused beyond him, alert. And so Hephaestion turned. But he did not really turn. His senses repositioned.
She wasn't real. That was his first thought. Manegold had constructed her.
Of course that wasn't true. Her essence emanated a unique signature, a kind of warped but engaging whistle that struck through him with the efficacy of a blade.
Hephaestion registered her appearance, even though her appearance of all things mattered least, since she, too, was a spirit.
She was a brilliant echo stamped onto the pattern of a female, a floating luminous thing with tendrils as softly iridescent as sunlight on satin. Her features were for the most part indiscernible, but her form evinced the valleys and hills of breasts, hips, and thighs.
She lingered at the edge of the chamber until Hephaestion made the chamber, the morgue, and the world go away. The female thing held on, buoyed in the filament by what he knew not, facing what Hephaestion revealed of himself-- his essence without illusion.
She advanced, and burned through him. At some point before her essence sparated from his, she vanished.
Hephaestion gave the metaphysical equivalent of a shiver.
When he turned to seek Manegold, he was once again in the morgue construct, and the spirit of Manegold was slumped on the floor. "Who was that?"
"Who was what?"
"The woman?"
"What woman?"
Hephaestion sighed. "Listen to my thoughts. Listen."
Manegold was not listening.
Hephaestion hardened his will. "Listen to me."
Manegold’s spirit shifted toward him.
"I am going to leave this place, but you can follow me. Follow me. I will show you how. When next I come to this place, I will be in my flesh and have people with me who can move your body to a better place. Have you listened?"
Manegold indicated that he had.
"Do you understand?"
Manegold indicated that he did not.
Hephaestion cursed, softly. "Have you never wondered why you of all the children of the world carried the voice of the goddess? Have you never wondered why you could mindwalk, and heal, and run on ten days straight with no sleep? How old were you when you died?"
"Twenty-four."
"Did they kill you?"
"Yes."
"Was it because they found out what you were?"
"They were afraid of me."
Hephaestion scoffed. "They should have been. Have you read the Book of Kings?"
"Yes."
"That is what you are. You're not able to pass the gate, because you cannot be reborn. Your biology requires an additional step to make you dead enough to be dead. Otherwise, our kind heals of death. If you think that's wonderful, think again. The flesh heals, but the mind remembers everything. We die but do not rest. Such is the way of the gilded."
-- Next Chapter
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