Jetta switched off the primary engine and turned on the gravitational inverters when her scopes tracked two ships heading her direction. When they fired on her assumed position she changed course, gliding along the landscape, using her previous momentum and the inverters’ anti-gravitational force to keep flying.
At any other time she would have found the landscape breathtaking. The Holy Cities were legendary, future and past fused in the sleek, chrome structures butting up against the white, hand-carved stone towers. The clouds hung low, swirling through the city and collecting at the base of the mountains jutting up from the south, reflecting the sunlight in soft blue and yellow tones.
Jetta swallowed the sour sting of acid at the back of her throat. She couldn’t believe she had hit her sister. They had wrestled, they had pushed each other—but she had never really hit her sister before. Not on purpose, at least. And to knock her unconscious—was she okay? Did she come around and hook onto the drifting medical frigate? When Jetta had done it, the plan seemed so clear and sure in her mind, but as she approached the coordinates Victor had transmitted, fear wormed its way into her chest, dissecting her rationale. She wanted to reach out for her sister, but she knew she couldn’t. She had struck out on this mission alone, and she would complete it alone.
Jetta managed to coast to Victor’s meeting spot without reengaging the engines, circling three times to check for any patrol ships or ground forces before landing. He had picked a spot away from the heart of the city on the grassy cliffs where a large pillared structure with huge marble archways protruded from the mountainside. Jetta had seen the building in photos of rare and unusual archeological sites but couldn’t remember what it was.
Keeping an eye on the building and on her instruments, Jetta stripped out of her pilot’s suit and donned a combat uniform she had found in one of the lockers on her fighter. She knew better than to keep open arms, so she stashed a handgun, knife, and two detonators in the folds of the suit. Victor would have her scanned, so she didn’t know how long that would last.
Jetta rechecked the readings; her bioscanners still hadn’t detected any Sentient life forms. She had expected a complement of soldiers to meet her there and immediately take her into custody. She re-ran the coordinates that Victor had sent on his last transmission to her, but her navigational system confirmed her location; she was only ten meters from the spot, and that would put her at the entrance to the building.
Jetta cautiously exited the hatch and took a visual and aural sweep of the area. Nothing unusual caught her eye, and all she could hear was the breeze ruffling the feather-leaf pines and the chirps of two warring Tomba squirrels. She minded her feet as she walked through the tall grass, careful not to step on any ground traps, but her other senses told her that Victor wasn’t interested in harming her—at least not yet.
She froze mid-step when she spied a spread of black, spiny-legged robotic sentinels perched in the trees and clinging underneath the overhanging lattice of the rooftops. Jue Hexron routinely used them to guard archeological sites, preventing looters and Jocks from stealing ancient treasures. At first Jetta wasn’t sure if she could pass. Sentinels were attuned to biochip readings, and she had yet to be refitted with a permanent chip. With Jue Hexron’s changing military presence, she wasn’t sure if the temporary biomarker with her old Alliance clearances would grant her passage. But the sentinels seemed to ignore her as she carefully made her way past, their mechanical eyes tracking her movement but making no motion to stop her.
Jetta tested the colossal wooden doors, and to her surprise, they opened easily, though not without groaning and creaking. The smell immediately hit her—dust and polishing oil, and some other kind of preservative that seemed to settle heavily in her lungs. It smelled old.
It was dark, but as soon as she took a few more steps into the building, electric lights, strung up on wires, snapped and crackled to life. Her gaze traced the wiring rigging the door and burrowing through the building’s stone structure when it snagged on the red eye of the spycam nestled atop a marble statue of a blind female beggar.
“Where are my aunt and uncle?” Jetta demanded.
The spycam winked at her and the lights dimmed. Then Victor appeared.
“Jetta Kyron. Alone, I see, and not looking too well. Where is your sister?”
“Where are my aunt and uncle?” Jetta asked again, squaring her shoulders. “You said they’d be here.”
Victor hadn’t needed guards because he wasn’t appearing in person. Out of the corner of her eye she could see the cameras filtering in his hologram. He appeared before her in gray tones, his glittering, diamond smile perfectly reimaged as he walked toward her.
He stopped a meter in front of her and leaned on his cane. “I thought I’d show you around first. Get you familiar with your roots before I took you to see them. They’re resting anyway; it’s been a very tough journey. Fiorah is not the galaxy’s most hospitable environment, and we won’t even get into the paperwork required to get them off-planet.”
Jetta let out a breath through gritted teeth. “I don’t have time for games, Victor. Take me to my aunt and uncle now.”
“Warchild, you have no patience. That has always been your undoing. You are much like your father.”
Jetta’s stomach knotted. She couldn’t sense Victor’s mind, but the tone of his voice told her he wasn’t lying.
“My father?”
When Victor smiled it looked strained, as if the corners of his mouth were pulled up by hooks. “A very handsome and intelligent man, I must say, not quite as brooding as you. You get that from your mother. But that’s another story for another time. Come, there is much to discuss.”
Before Jetta could say anything, a semioptic phantom of sound and light eclipsed her vision. The busy scene of colors and images passed by too quickly, sending waves of nausea through her belly.
What was that?
“Coming?” Victor said, turning back to see if she was following.
Jetta forgot herself for a moment as she leaned heavily on a dusty marble statue of a young child. What was she doing? What was she here for? Answers. She needed answers. Victor knew so much about her, and he had her aunt and uncle. But he also had something else she wanted. She had tasted his power, and he was no ordinary human. He was something beyond his flesh—something monstrous like her.
Jetta held onto her anger to anchor her words. “Why won’t you meet me in person? Why this charade?”
Victor fiddled with something off of the holographic projection feed, and another series of lights flickered on, illuminating the atrium piled high with artifacts and relics from centuries past.
“My first responsibility is my country, so I must stay close to my base of operations. Surely you can understand this, being the great commander that defeated the Motti.”
He was insulting her, testing her, but Jetta knew better than to give him what he wanted.
“Who are you really, and why have you brought me here?”
Victor chuckled and squeezed the handle of his cane. His gaze found an artifact, a clay man suspended on a wooden cross that hung from the ceiling. Jetta remembered seeing something similar in Jade’s hideout on Earth.
“I am a man who chose to upset God’s great plan.”
Jetta approached him cautiously, her eyes unfocused, watching for movement in the shadows. “It’s amazing that you would even speak of any God.”
Victor sighed. “So quick to judge. And yet you’re here. You think you’re here for your aunt and uncle. But isn’t there something else? You’ve sensed our kindred spirit, and you can’t deny the pull in your heart. You and I have heard the same call.”
Jetta stopped in her tracks. Pinpoints of light erupted across her visual field. She squeezed her eyes shut and clapped her hands over her ears as a blast of sound ripped them open from the inside out.
“Are you certain you’re alright?” Victor asked.
Jetta opened her eyes again. It had stopped as sud
denly as it started, and she was left clutching a wooden statue of a multi-armed animal with a long proboscis.
What is happening to me?
“I’m fine. Get on with it.”
“Very well then,” Victor said. He pointed to a massive sculpture of a meditating male human of Asian descent, his legs crossed and arms lying peacefully in his lap. “Do you know who this is?”
Jetta shook her head, still reeling from the sensory overload.
“How about him?” Victor said, pointing to the cross.
Jetta didn’t say anything as she collected herself, refastening her hair back behind her head.
“Do you know what this is?” Victor said, pointing to a book with an ancient symbol on it. Jetta had grafted some of Jaeia’s studies of Old Earth and recognized the symbol as middle-eastern in origin, but beyond that she had no clue.
He asked her to identify other things, but she couldn’t. Statues of what might have been deities, dust-covered books, writings engraved on stone—they were of terrestrial design, but she had no recollection of the specifics.
“These belong in a museum,” Jetta said. “Did you steal them?”
“No, I did not steal them. They were part of my own collection, acquired before the Last Great War. They are invaluable to some, a terrible reminder to others. For me they are merely ghosts of the past. Fools who didn’t know any better.”
Jetta walked over to a painting of a haloed man with a lamb in his arms and wiped the dust off its label. It was in English, a root language of the Starways, and she was able to sound out the words: “Jesus of Nazareth.”
Jesus Christ. A religious figure from Earth. Son of God. That was the man on the cross. She closed her eyes and dug into her gleaned knowledge and experience, sorting through the incidental memories she had picked up over the years. She could string the bits and pieces of knowledge into a cohesive body, but why hadn’t it surfaced before?
An unspoken resentment resurfaced: Because it’s all a bunch of gorsh-shit.
But she bit back her antipathy. She had always harbored fierce antireligious sentiments, and Victor’s apparent fascination only exacerbated her aversion.
“He claimed to be the son of God. What does he mean to you, Victor?” Jetta said.
Victor’s expression changed. “Follow me.”
Jetta followed him into another chamber. Instead of religious figures and symbols, it was filled with statues and portraits of men, most of whom she immediately recognized.
“Timur. Alexander the Great. Clovis of the Franks. Attila the Hun. The Black Prince. Adolf Hitler. Frederick the Great. Saladin. Lin Piao. William the Conqueror. Napoleon. Joan of Arc. Alaric the Goth.”
“You know great military leaders, but you don’t know religious figures.”
Jetta had studied Old Earth’s great military minds during her days with the Dominion Core Academy, but her knowledge of religion was limited and always had been, both by circumstance and purpose. There was no talk of God on Fiorah—unless it came from the apartment next to theirs, usually accompanied by the rhythmic banging of the bed against the wall. And after the fall of the Motti she had gone to great lengths to avoid what religious comforts were offered, because it seemed cheap to her after all the suffering she had seen and felt.
Her sister had a different take on it, of course. Jaeia had always been curious about the divine, but to Jetta, it was a waste of time. Praying to an idol would have never gotten Jahx back, and praying now wouldn’t get her aunt and uncle back—or help her. It was up to her to get things done right. Religion—Gods—God—was nothing but another untruth conjured by those seeking power.
“What’s it to you, Victor? I’m tired of this. I want my aunt and uncle, or I’m leaving,” she said.
“You’ll find that you’ll want to hear what I’m saying. You can leave anytime, of course, but your questions will not be answered. Who are you? Where do you come from? What is your destiny?”
Victor studied his ring for a moment, the one with the red bird of prey. “Since the dawn of man there have always been religious figures, prophets, messiahs—leaders, shaping and molding the course of human events. This is no different in the Starways. You and your siblings are unique, Jetta; you’re not like other military officers. You can sense it in your blood—you were meant for so much more than taking orders and maintaining the peace. You were meant to change the course of history.”
“I think defeating the Motti counted for something.”
Jetta didn’t like the way Victor cocked his head at her. “No, that’s not what I mean. I will show you.”
His holographic image stayed fixed, but his shadow jumped out at her. She yelped and raised her arms to protect her face. A slick chill ran down her spine, sending shivers down her limbs. It took her several seconds before she realized Victor was playing a video reel in the background.
“You really don’t look well,” he commented.
She hated the way he smiled at her, and her words did nothing to hide her humiliation. “I’m fine,” she snapped back.
“Good,” he said, his smile unchanged. “I don’t want my prize pupil falling ill.”
Victor turned and pointed his cane at the projection. “Look here—that was me in 2045, right before I discovered who I really was and what I was meant to do.” A man, not terribly younger but with less artificial skin, was shown making gestures at a complicated looking machine. The sound had been muted, and Victor narrated over it.
“From a very young age I was inventing things, and my latest work with high-tech detection equipment had landed me several government contracts. This here is a prototype for a transphasic modulator. This was my crown invention. It was thirty years in the making.”
Jetta tilted her head as she watched the younger Victor pop open a plate on the machine panel, exposing crisscrossing wires and ionic filters. “Impossible.”
“You think? See those spindle coils? In those days we used 120-10s. Lots of burnouts. I didn’t have the advantage of cellular bellicone skins back then—the stuff wouldn’t be discovered for another hundred and fifty years.”
Jetta hadn’t learned or grafted much about the wave-network, but she knew that the system operated by bending space-time, and the original models used transphasic modulators. It was rumored that it had originated on Earth, but that she was meeting its inventor was too much to believe.
“I was running it essentially ‘backwards’ then—I used a delayed feedback loop instead of the modern transitor gradient, but then again, my purpose was different. I was creating a different kind of hole in space-time—one that would allow my employers to spy on their enemies.”
Jetta watched the younger Victor show his calculations to the camera, explaining in detail the complex symbols and equations.
“My employers insisted on a live test run after I had just completed a thirty-hour stint; the Russians had just rearmed Moscow, and unrest was building on the borders. Exhausted, I didn’t pay close enough attention to my tertiary calibrations, and I misfired, blowing a hole in the ocean somewhere in the mid-Atlantic and burning out half of my tetrahydral gaskets. The second time I got it right, but only after some heavy explaining to my employers. Later, when I analyzed the recordings from the first firing, I detected something that shouldn’t have been—alien signals in the dead space during the space-time shift.”
“Dead space?”
“It’s a loose term we used centuries ago, meant to describe unseen dimensions.”
Something cold grazed her shoulder, and she tucked her arms to her chest as little bumps rose on her skin.
What’s happening to me?
Jetta looked around her, the statues and paintings collectively regarding her with flat, lifeless eyes.
“The transphasic modulator was supposed to allow the overlay of two separate points in space, but that day, because of my miscalculation, it appeared as though I had opened a door between our world and another.”
Voices, in chaotic chatter,
came from every direction. Jetta whipped her head around, but no one was there. She clapped her hands over her ears as the noise escalated, but to no avail. She looked up at Victor, who was smiling at her, his head tilted to the side, eyes hidden behind the reflection of his glasses.
“You are quite strange, Warchild.”
And then it stopped, leaving her breathless and increasingly confused. Something was happening to her.
I am going crazy—
(You are awakening.)
Victor continued on despite her confusion. “Anyway, it took me several months to translate what they whispered, but the more I studied their language, the more I realized its similarities to ancient terrestrial tongues. Do you know what they talked about? Us. The lowly human filth they preyed on, that they used for entertainment.”
Jetta scoffed. “You don’t expect me to believe this.”
Victor seemed unaffected by her skepticism. Instead, he appeared to study the statues and figures that surrounded them. “It’s a terrible thing to know that you were born a murderer, a cancer upon the world. I never had a choice. I was their vessel, planted on the Earth for one purpose. And for years I hated myself for it—for being a slave to their cause. But then I realized that knowing what I was gave me the power to change things.”
Jetta’s stomach dropped. Knowing what I was gave me the power to change things. Was that possible? Was there hope for someone like her?
“How come no one has ever spoken of these beings before?”
Victor smiled. “But they have. They call themselves Azerthenes, but they have many other names: angels, demons, Gods, God, spirits—and have been present in many Sentient history books, but most particularly in our history. They have influenced the tide of human events for their own purposes. Oftentimes they use people like myself to deliver their message, though normally they are unaware of their capacity.”
Jetta laughed. “You—a ‘prophet,’ akin to Christ. Or Hitler.”
“Yes—you’re finally catching on,” Victor said, approaching her. He tapped his cane on the ground and watched the video reel for a moment as the younger Victor demonstrated the power of his machine.
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