by JB Penrose
Everyone laughed and congratulated the happy couple, but the excitement quickly dwindled to just standing around. Time was running out.
Andrew put his arm around his brother and hugged Peter again. Behind his back he reached into the sleeve pocket of his eco-suit and removed his rouleau. Parting, he placed it in his brother’s hands. “I want you to have this.”
“Don’t you want it? Do you need it?” Peter tried to give it back.
“I want you to have it.” Andrew turned his back to end the debate and joined his crewmates.
“Here, take mine too. I won’t need it.” James offered his own.
“Then take mine, as well.” John stepped forward to present his token.
Peter hesitated, his hands full, but the moment the two pearls touch the pieces fused seamlessly. He accepted John’s.
“Will you look at that?” John was amazed at the simplicity of the restoration. “I wonder if we could have put the tasht together long ago and had the power to return home. Not that it matters now.”
Rachel found it hard to hold her mother’s gaze, knowing it begged her to relent on her decision.
“I don’t know what to say.” She took her daughter’s hands.
“Say goodbye.” Rachel’s heart was breaking. “Because that’s what you’re supposed to do. You have a Light in the sky to investigate; the world is waiting for your report.”
There was no barometer for the range of emotions in the room. Not that she sensed them from the others – only that she felt every one of them herself. James and Mag’Dalyn stood alone from the others, unwilling or just unable to say goodbye. Tears swelled in her father’s eyes. “You’re sure you won’t come with us?”
“My work is here,” Rachel hugged him for the last time. “But now you must go. And don’t worry. I have a feeling we’ll meet again.” One last hug from each of them was all she could bear.
“You will always be in my heart, daughter.” When James kissed her cheek and she felt his tears.
“Peter, there’s no denying you always saw something special in Rachel.” Andrew embraced her fondly. He unfastened the control module from his belt and handed the electronic unit to Peter. “You’ll need this if you’re going to stay. There are some interesting features built into it, so look over the programming closely.”
“Thanks, I’m sure it will come in handy - whatever it does.”
“Here’s something else for you, Peter.” The small bag of coins jingled when James pulled it from the folds of his desert robe. “You can return them to Iscar if you ever see him again.”
“If we don’t find Iscar, I’m sure he’ll find us.” Peter said.
“You’d better be careful, brother. Iscar always worked with a plan and I doubt he has included you in it.” He punched his brother on the arm and grinned. “Be sure to give him my best!”
“You can bet on it,” Peter promised.
“Andrew’s right about Iscar. Watch your back.” John warned.
“We’ll be fine. No more good-byes,” Peter urged. “Hopefully, you’ll get back this way in the future.”
“You can bet on it,” Andrew assured him. “After we’ve seen about this Light source we may just turn around.”
“We’ll be here,” Rachel laughed. “But now you must leave or you’ll never get out of here. And please, go with God.”
“He’s the auto-pilot,” Andrew assured her.
“Then I guess this is it.” John rallied. “We wish you were coming with us, but we’re not finished here yet. You still have a jump to make before this marriage is official.” John and the crew laughed.
Once pledged, a couple placed their faith in Falian and made the lovers-leap off the mountain. The lighter gravity on Biatra-IV made for a soft landing, and if you were still holding hands when you landed the marriage would last forever. Tonight, Rachel’s faith couldn’t be stronger.
Peter nodded. “Are you ready?” he asked her.
“Oh! Wait a minute.” Her hand went to her hair and pulled out the comb. She tossed it to her mother. “Something borrowed.” Rachel blew a kiss to her parents. “I love you mother. I love you father. Our worlds are forever linked.” She grabbed Peter’s hand and together they jumped into the clouds.
She knew before she opened her eyes that they had re-generated into the pyramid chamber. Her knees buckled at the sensation and Peter held her tightly around her waist.
“Are you all right?”
She nodded, and straightened. Peter kissed their clasped hands. “All blessings be ours.”
“Amen to that,” Rachel agreed.
He led her to a close bench, and sitting, Peter opened the valise and removed the combined crystal globe. Peter took his own rouleau from a rough weave cloth and fused his piece with the larger globe. “Amazing,” he said as the two pieces blended together.
Rachel reached into the sleeve of her robe and brought out the rouleau her mother had given her. “Add this one, too,” she instructed him.
“Is this from Mags? Are you sure you don’t want to keep it for yourself?”
“No, I think the part belongs to the whole.” Rachel handed it to him. Peter kissed her fingertips before taking it, then fused her rouleau with the others and handed the nearly restored tasht to Rachel for inspection.
The lightness was a surprise for something now half the size of a small melon. “What is it made of?”
“A rare crystal mined only on the Plexus moons. When it’s cut and polished into a perfectly symmetrical globe it acts as a conduit for the magnetic energy that powers the light-drive propulsion.”
“Oh.” She was still confused.
“Each of us carried one, although your mother always said she carried something far more valuable. Her pregnancy was her greatest blessing, even if it only happened once. None of us were able to procreate here on Earth.”
But Rachel didn’t hear him. She was mesmerized by the activity forming inside the globe. Her fingertips tingled where it touched the cool translucent surface; cobalt bolts of lightening pulsated powerfully inside the iridescent globe.
“Do you see that?” Rachel handed the tasht back to Peter. “What’s happening to it?” The activity in the globe stopped.
“I saw it, but it’s never done that before. It must be activated by your touch.”
“John? I’m registering an imbalance of the resonate filters,” Andrew announced. “We can’t make an adjustment without lifting the shroud.”
“Did you hear that?” Peter recognized his brother’s voice. “I think the tasht is acting like a receiver.”
“We can’t leave the atmosphere without correcting the imbalance,” John complained. “I don’t really want to go visible. Someone is bound to notice.”
“There’s a resonator-imbalance they will have to correct before they can leave, and it means they’ll have to drop the shroud. Can you hear them talking?” Peter handed the tasht to Rachel. The lightening activity began immediately, but she couldn’t hear any conversations. She returned it, shaking her head.
“We’ve carried these pieces with us for two thousand years. I’m not surprised that we’ve imprinted on it so clearly.” Peter carefully wrapped the tasht and replaced it in his valise. “Let’s get a look at what’s going on.”
Rachel followed, and Peter programmed the elevator to the pyramid’s top level. The small command center was walled with vision screens connected to a console bank that housed similar circuitry panels to the Aurora. The ship hovered over the ancient city like a mirror, visible for a brief minute, and vibrated slightly enough to blur the picture.
Rachel suddenly stiffened, alert. “Danger!” At the same time, something loud and deep shook the earth around them. On screen, the sky lit with fire as part of the ship exploded. The floating debris confirmed a hit before the image on the screen went blank.
“What happened?” Rachel panicked. “Are they alright?”
Peter quickly extracted the tasht from its wrappings, and listened for
the sounds it carried to him.
“The missile didn’t hit anything vital,” Peter relayed the welcome news, “but it did enough damage that they can’t leave the atmosphere until it’s repaired.”
“Whoever is down there was already inside the perimeter defense, and they knew exactly where to find us.” James said.
“Any government agency would have sent more artillery than that, and something more updated.” John agreed. “That was a manual missile launcher.”
“Can you send a message through back through it?”
Peter concentrated a minute and then shook his head. “I don’t think so. This seems to only work one-way.”
“Anything more modern and we could override their target computers. Let’s get out of here and find a place to make some repairs.”
“Who ever shot at them had to have been here before the ship arrived, or the perimeter radar would have detected them. Unless they knew how to disable our radar.”
“What do you mean?”
“Only PROBE-Tech technology can hide from PROBE-Tech technology,” Peter explained. “Or Biatra-IV technology. Iscar is the only person who would know how to get past the Aurora’s radar. The bigger question is - what does he want?”
“You think it might be Iscar? Why would he want to shoot them down? Isn’t he a friend of yours?”
“He doesn’t seem to be a friend to any of us right now.” Peter programmed a last command on the console and packed the tasht.
“How are they going to get away?”
“The ship is already gone.” He was already at the elevator door. “We have to go, now! If Iscar throws up a sonar net we’ll be trapped here. And this is not how I wanted to meet up with him again.” Peter pressed her pace to the fullest. Each step through the halls echoed with urgency.
“You fly,” he instructed as soon as they entered the hangar. Peter programmed the overhead ceiling to open from the hand unit James had given him.
“Can you tell me what’s happening now?” She began the startup sequence before she was strapped into the pilot’s seat.
As soon as Peter was in his seat he pulled out the tasht. “They’ve already made it to water and now they’re trying to decide where to land for repairs,” Peter told her. “When Iscar finds we’re here, his next target will be us.”
“Maybe he wanted to launch with the rest of you?” She set their course westward.
“John’s never made a secret of his whereabouts, but Iscar hasn’t made contact with us since your abduction. I'm not inclined to believe he's had a change of heart. I do know if he gets to the control room before we get out of here, we’ll find out the hard way. He’s already fired on the Aurora.”
* * *
Zzzzzzing.
Iscar immediately recognized the whine of a stinger missile, and, from the dust he knew the source location was close. The explosion echoed through the stone alleys, amplified by every brick. Someone else had to have already been waiting for the Aurora before he arrived or the radar would have tipped the Aurora’s crew to the entry.
Shielding his eyes from the morning sun as well as the dust and smoke, he searched the sky for the Aurora. A portion of the ship’s exterior gridwork splintered apart and floated to the ground in large pieces. There would never be time enough for a second attack before the shroud could be deployed again. Only one person had enough information or desire to find the Aurora at the Immortal Valley. Iscar jumped from the doorway and rushed headlong into the dust.
He followed the smell of cigarettes and found Morrow behind a stone pillar with the launcher still smoking in his hands. An array of weapons was laid out on the rock ledge and he released an excited yelp as pieces of the Aurora showered down around him.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
“You were just going to let him get away,” Morrow turned, surprised by Iscar's approach. “If you had stopped Reider at the conference I wouldn’t be here chasing him now. I have people of my own to answer to, and President Wilson wants this launch stopped. Reider looks guilty enough to hang for treason.”
“John Reider will never hang.” Iscar kicked sand in Morrow's face. “Our plan cannot be set into action until he launches that ship. I told you to leave it to me.”
“Yeah, like I left the conference to you. They’re only moving it to another location. You didn’t stop anything from happening there, either.”
Before the last words were out of his mouth, Iscar grabbed a gun from the selection on the rock and pushed it into Morrow’s jugular, cocked and ready to fire. Frank Morrow was fast outliving his usefulness.
“I’m spending too much of my time cleaning up your mess. I told you killing Reider and Pierzon wouldn’t work. Why you won’t hold back and let me do what I said I would.”
“How do I know you were successful in planting that virus? The conference is still going to happen.”
“They can hold the conference wherever they want. By the time anyone tries to access the information they believe they’re getting, the virus I’ve planted in the system will have destroyed everything.” With a push, Iscar threw him aside.
Morrow spit the grains of sand from his dry mouth, and rolled toward his armaments quickly enough to dodge the sudden kick of Iscar’s boot. Iscar’s glare stopped him short of any plan to retaliate.
“Hey! Look at that.” As the small hoverjet rose from the Orygin’s pyramid, Morrow was reaching for a shoulder-mounted missile launcher. “No friend of Reider’s is a friend of mine.”
The scope centered on the smaller craft before Iscar pushed the barrel off its target. Morrow rolled in the sand to aim again. “What are you doing? We don’t want anyone else chasing the Aurora.”
“They aren’t chasing the Aurora. That – is the Spokesmon.” Iscar’s eyes followed the small ship’s direction across the horizon. The hovercraft was visible only for the length of time it took them to jet away.
“The Spokesmon is dead. You killed Nathan Young at the Conference.”
“That pretender was never the Spokesmon.” Iscar pointed to the hovercraft. “She is the One; I can sense her presence. I knew she would never launch with them.”
“She? The Spokesmon you’ve been talking about,” Frank spit on the ground, “is a woman?”
Iscar had the weapon from his hands before Morrow felt the barrel crash against his head. The force of the impact pushed his head against the rocks, and blood from his mouth dripped to the sand at his feet.
“You will live longer if you stop thinking for yourself and do what I tell you,” he informed Morrow coolly. “The Spokesmon is the one we serve. My army is Her army, and you,” his finger pointed to Morrow, “are part of Her army. Now, stop thinking on your own and do what I tell you. Where is your hoverjet?”
* * *
Rachel headed off in full speed, heedless of any restrictions. The panic of seeing the Aurora attacked kept her focused on their escape.
“I can use this to keep the blinders in place until we’re out of radar range,” Peter programmed something on the handset from Andrew. “It’s not a cloaking device, but it will skew Iscar's radar tracking. Just because he didn’t use a long range missile on the Aurora doesn’t mean he won’t aim one at us.”
“I still don’t understand why.”
“Andrew and John have known for a long time that Frank Morrow was working for someone else, but no one wanted to believe it was Iscar. Morrow and Iscar would seem to have different motives. Morrow always wanted the Aurora for himself and Iscar would want to see the ship and crew leaving Earth. Or so we thought.”
“Now he wants the ship to stay?”
“He disabled it well enough!” Peter reminded her. “And seeing our hoverjet leave the area, Iscar might realize that one of the original crew remains. He’ll be more unhappy when he discovers it’s me.”
“But why?”
“We have a long history, and little of it is friendly. The others may have forgiven his betrayal of Jesus, but I never could
.” Peter shook his head. ”Iscar makes decisions that only benefit him. And those are dangerous decisions to anyone else involved. Like Andrew said, we’ll have to watch our backs.”
They flew in silence for a while and used the time to collect their thoughts. Only the animation of landscape beneath them seemed to be moving. She knew Peter was concepting their next steps, but Rachel didn’t have any idea how to help. How ironic, she thought, to have all this supposed power and feel so powerless.
“What’s the Aurora doing?” she asked. Her real concern was for her parents.
“They’ve decided to land in the Grand Canyon,” Peter concentrated on the tasht, “and send someone to Donnally, maybe, for help. They’re already safely out of range,” he assured her. He smiled at the voices that came into his head.
“I’m so glad you thought to bring extra suits.” Peter clearly heard Dalyn’s voice.
“Or that you even thought to make them.” James sounded pleased. He imagined his friend dressed in the long-familiar, slick eco-suit of the Aurora’s crew.
“Well --” Andrew coughed. “Some people around here needed new ones.”
And James’ instant defense of his added weight, “Now wait a minute. I’m not the only one who’s changed a little around here.”
“No,” Mags answered. “But you changed a little more ‘around here’ than most of us.”
“I wouldn’t worry about them,” Peter told her. “Your parents are doing fine. They’re remembering what it was like to be traveling companions again.”
“What should we do?”
“You don’t have a plan?” he teased her.
“I’m better at making it up as I go along,” she pretended not to care.
Peter repacked the tasht and stretched out in the seat. “I thought we might catch a plane at Jerusalem International and get back to New Columbia, late tomorrow if all goes well,” Peter told her. “We’d better fly commercial this time. I’m sure Morrow is monitoring everything connected with PROBE-Tech. It will be easier to hide right under his nose.”
