Star Angel: Prophecy

by David G. McDaniel

  But, in typical Willet fashion he found the humor in it, joking that he’d been in two too many alien spaceship crashes—two was enough—then, at length, the emotions of their escape passed, they found a random phone and, after an uneventful day as the sun set, made the call. Now it was a matter of waiting.

  Being a fugitive from the Kel made it more sensible to actually be among people, not hiding in the woods. The Kel scans were more likely to find them among the trees, unique and humanoid and alone, than among the crowds of the small town where they blended in. They tried to clean up as much as possible but still bore the marks of their escape; torn clothes, a few injuries for Willet. No one said anything—it was the middle of an alien invasion, after all—and Zac had the feeling no one would sell them out. They were all in this together, humans every one, and if the odd pair in the corner of the diner had been up to something then, well, the rest simply didn’t want to know. He found it mildly interesting, and telling, how amazingly calm they all seemed after the shock of what must’ve amounted to a tactical nuke strike not far from town. Surely the Kel blast lit the sky last night, rumbling the air and all else. Yet, to a person, they were simply going about the day.

  “Don’t worry,” Willet joked, taking another bite of cold pancakes. “I won’t tell Jess.”

  Zac remembered they were talking about the flirty waitress and tried to smile. He appreciated the fact that Willet supported him in the idea that all was fine and that Jess was back safe on Anitra. He took another sip of coffee.

  Kel overflights had diminished. For a while the craft had hummed over town, and with the passage of every one Zac cringed. Now it appeared they were done, and while he was sure more efforts were coming he had a feeling there were far more concerns the limited Kel forces needed to see to, and so held out hope that if this human resistance network could do as they said, he and Willet might actually be able to get far enough away to slip into a new existence and make new plans.

  “She’s changed,” said Willet, looking more serious than he had a moment before.

  Zac set down his cup. “Jessica?”

  Willet finished chewing and swallowed.

  “I didn’t see all of what happened,” he said, “but somehow, in the house, she fought her way up the steps against a bunch of Kel. With just a sword.”

  Jess hadn’t shown her powers to Willet like she did Zac. Consequently Zac knew what she could do. Or, at least, had an idea. He’d seen her move a desk and a chair with her mind, then take down a squad of armored and armed Kel soldiers with nothing but a sword and that same mental attack. What had Willet seen?

  “Before that she attacked a dozen Kel,” he looked over Zac’s head into space, trying to make sense of it all. “I mean, she ran out of the house and was on that landing craft before you.” He brought his gaze back to the realm of the table. “She attacked a dozen Kel with nothing but that sword and that fancy armor. Where’d she learn to do that?” It was as if Willet didn’t really expect an answer. “Maybe the armor kept her from getting killed? But then, how’d she kill them?” He sat there across from Zac, working to piece it together. “Then in the house … One of them was cut in half! You saw it.” Zac had. “And her eyes. I’m telling you, wherever she was, wherever she went …

  “She’s changed.”

  Zac nodded. “I think …” he paused, not sure how much to reveal, unsure even how much he really knew. Less like she’s changed, he thought, more like she’s gone back to whoever she was. Like she remembered something.

  Lots of things.

  His head was banging again.

  “Yeah,” he agreed. “She’s changed.”

  **

  “It looks like she’s just sleeping.” Egg stood next to her father, looking down on the resting Jessica. The angel lay on a comfortable bed under light sheets, stripped of the strange armor she’d been wearing, soft brown hair pooled around her head like a halo, expression serene. Her skin was tan, more so than when Egg last saw her—a time that seemed so long ago. She was leaner, but otherwise the same, and Egg remembered her vividly, back when Jess left them to travel in hiding across the sea, to the Venatres, setting in motion the incredible events that led directly to the truce and the new age, followed by an alliance between Venatres and Dominion. It was thanks to those events Jess could even be laying here openly, in a Dominion hospital, being tended by the finest doctors in the land. No longer was she their Most Wanted.

  Now she was a hero.

  Darvon stroked her hair. He and Egg had been keeping vigil since she fell from the sky. After all this time, no one knowing anything about where she was or what she was up to—even her closest friends had lost her—she popped suddenly into the sky over Osaka with the Icon, wearing strange, ultra-advanced armor, falling from a thousand feet in the air and …

  Lived.

  She lived. Hardly injured, even. Remarkable. The doctors, the specialists—no one could make sense of it. They knew the height of the Icon release point. Her condition could not be attributed to the armor or any other freak factors. Jess should’ve been broken, if not wholly then at least a few bones, but instead she was barely bruised. Unconscious, but unscathed.

  It was amazing to think how much she might’ve been through.

  Here she was, Jessica, a girl Egg’s own age, yet she was on another plane altogether. A warrior like no other. Egg knew of Jessica’s adventures on Anitra, and a bit of what she’d done on Earth, but what else had she been up to? Where did she go? Egg could not wait to talk to her. And suddenly, looking at her lying there, Egg wanted to be like her. A warrior. Somehow, through fate or divine intervention or some other force, she’d ended up in the presence of the angel, now several times, and was she ignoring her own destiny? Were these signs she should be heeding? She wanted to do something about it. She wanted to be as strong.

  Tentatively she reached and stroked Jessica’s hair, just like her father was doing. Soft and brown, a perfect frame for her angelic features. A gentleness that hid raw power. Power that could be felt, even in her unconscious state.

  Warrior.

  And her eyes!

  During one of the doctor visits, while checking her vitals and condition and whatever doctors did—Jess checked out by all tests; it wasn’t a coma, they said, not by the usual definition; she just wasn’t waking up—during one of those checks Egg saw her eyes as they pulled open her lids to examine them …

  Incredible.

  If the rest of her had changed, her eyes were entirely transformed.

  She now had the eyes of a cat.

  It wasn’t temporary, they said, or anything caused by the fall. Egg asked and the doctors were just as perplexed.

  How much different was she? How much had she changed? When she woke up … would she be a whole new person? Had her attitude shifted? Her personality? All Egg knew was that it gave her a tingle to be standing in her presence. Jess had stories. Of this Egg was certain.

  Amazing stories.

  She could not wait to hear them.

  CHAPTER 11: THE EVIL QUEEN

  Kang was inconsolable. Like a child, convinced Horus hadn’t been killed, so fixated on that imagined revenge that he simply could not be mollified. Cee wished she could just throttle him.

  Horus had to be dead. Either way, she was done chasing that lead, furious that it had been botched so badly and in a hurry to just wash her hands of the whole debacle and move on.

  Far more promising possibilities waited.

  Her bishop had joined them and together with he and Kang and a handful of her elite Kel guard they made their way down into the Bok catacombs beneath the old human temple. Cee knew some of the human gods, from cursory reviews of their culture, and this temple was in honor of one belonging to the Christian faith. This whole area, this Istanbul, had been a center of controversy throughout human history, a crossroads of conflicting beliefs that were nevertheless so similar, one set of dogma to the next, that Cee found it hard to understand how any distinction had ever be
en drawn. But it had. Bloody distinctions, and the human past was littered with wars in their cause.

  She followed as Kang led them further into the dark, deeper into the torch-lit dungeon. The entrance to the labyrinth began near the temple, then descended and wound around, stretching on for quite some way, a distance that seemed much further than the actual perimeter of the structure overhead. Up above her personal landing craft, a corvette nearly as big as the temple itself, squatted blatantly among the low, declining buildings of that area. In fact there hadn’t been much room to land, and at least one of those buildings had collapsed at their arrival. Certainly nothing covert about this, she was painfully aware, either there on the ground or when viewed from above. Voltan knew exactly where she was. What he did not know—and what he must never know—was why she was there. Her story was thin, that she was meeting agents of the Bok, but that veneer of truth had mountains of significance behind it. To cover her tracks she’d made known her hunt to root out elements of the Prophecy, easier to say that than more complicated fabrications, her goal to expose and destroy it. It was clear Voltan believed that focus to be misplaced. It wasn’t central to what they were doing, of course, at least not in his eyes, and whether or not that old mythology existed on this human world mattered little, if at all. Cee was sure he suspected her of other motives—he had to recognize her deeply hidden fascination—but at that point she found it hard to care. Soon enough her ascension would be solidified, in ways Voltan would never expect.

  “Welcome,” a voice spoke from the semi-darkness ahead. A human male, audibly speaking English behind the translated Kel from one of the wands.

  “I’m Hansel,” the man continued as he came into sight. Cee recognized him from other meetings with the Bok; some kind of major domo or commando captain or both; their top lackey, and Kang snorted as the man met them and led the rest of the way. Moments later they were gathering in a torch-lit room barely large enough for all of them, waiting as Hansel palmed open a modern metal door and went through. Beyond that door and down a metal hall they entered what had to be the Bok archives. Lorenzo was waiting. Hansel handed him the translator wand.

  “My queen,” he said into the device in greeting, the computerized translation repeating in Kel. “Welcome.”

  Cee swept all the way into the room. “So this is what remains,” she scrutinized the shelves lining the perimeter, finding nothing but books and other records. “This is all that was brought by your founders? No weapons, no means for dominating the weaker humans of that time?” She turned to him. “The Earth should have been an easy conquest a thousand years ago. Even for a small number of you. You could’ve ruled without question.”

  Lorenzo conceded the point. “As I understand it, our purpose was to make a haven, not to conquer or rule by force. An unfortunate decision and one made by the priestess. A fatal mistake, no doubt. It has led to our demise over time.”

  Cee could tell Lorenzo’s goal was to remind her he was different. She went over to one of the shelves; reached and took down a dusty tome.

  “Tell me more of the one you believe is the harbinger,” she said, opening the book carefully and turning a few pages. It was an old volume, printed on paper available at the time, diagrams and lettering in the ancient Kel—easy enough to decipher. The thing to find out was if anything useful existed in this modernized tomb. Surely something of value must be among the many relics.

  There was a brief silence, no answer forthcoming, and she looked up from the book. “The prophet,” she clarified. “The herald. The one you believe has come.”

  Lorenzo shrugged. “We can’t be certain,” he said, continuing to maintain a respectful familiarity. Then: “It is only that too many elements of the Prophecy add up.” He was sly, this one. At each point where Cee felt to put him in his place, where he neared the point she must demand respect, he self-corrected and assumed just the right tone of deference. As if he’d already figured out how to stay right at the edge, maintaining his proper role within the hierarchy yet ready to encroach as far as he dared. “She matches too closely,” he said. “Her actions have involved her too deeply in our affairs.”

  Cee wrinkled her nose, as if in response to the dust in the book. She closed it. “And so where is she now? You claimed you know where she is.”

  “Gone. She went to another world. We know only that.”

  Slowly Cee put the tome back on the shelf.

  “Which world?”

  Lorenzo averted his eyes a little, respectfully. “As I said before, we had in our possession one of the transit devices. She attacked one of our strongholds—”

  “Attacked? Alone?” That was unbelievable. Lorenzo had never indicated she attacked them. Was she truly …

  “Not alone. With the superhuman.”

  Kang, expectedly, bristled. Though it was exceedingly subtle this time. Cee noticed; Lorenzo, if he did, chose not to react.

  “The two were working together?” Cee queried. An interesting twist, if so.

  Again Lorenzo gave a slight nod. “Yes. They attacked us, she took the device and used it to escape. At that point she was lost to us. However,” and he gestured around the room, “information on that world should exist. This is how I believe we can find her. We’ve lost much of our ability to understand what we possess. Again, a fatal mistake, made by my ancestors, but I’m convinced with your understanding the location of that world can be divined from these archives.”

  Cee walked around the room. Ran a finger along the spine of one of the larger books. “Did you yourself ever use the device? The one she stole?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what was this other world like?” The thought of yet more worlds to bring into the Kel empire was as intriguing as everything else. This was indeed a treasure trove in which she stood.

  “Remarkably not unlike this one.” Lorenzo fell into what was surely an unintended, yet quite genuine, state of marvel. “Sun, gravity, air ... all more or less the same. It was beautiful. A raw world, clean air, no technology.”

  “Intelligent life?”

  “Humans. Like us. Exactly like us, which I found curious.”

  Cee held in place, rolling this over in her mind. All around her in that small room were potential clues. And if the world Lorenzo described had humans, then it was likely also part of the ancient Kel Combine, a series of worlds ruled by the Kel a thousand years ago. Long ago, before any of that, an even more ancient race had seeded humans among the stars, according to what they knew, though no Kel had ever been found on any other world. The Kel were apparently unique, and the prevailing theory was that humans were created by an ancient race of forbearers from the genetic stock of Cee’s world; mongrels, lesser versions of the majestic Kel.

  But all that was millennia ago, many millennia, a dim history filled with speculation and lack of real evidence. All Cee knew for certain was that there had once been worlds beneath Kel rule, and this world Lorenzo spoke of could very well have been one of them.

  “No technology.” She turned to Kang. “It seems unlikely he’s speaking of your world.”

  Kang, in turn, gazed levelly at Lorenzo. “You met the humans there?”

  “I met a few,” said Lorenzo. Cee appreciated his composure. He went on: “They were not a lost tribe. I never traveled the world but I’m convinced the people I met were not unique. The whole world lacked advanced knowledge. It was more of a moon, in truth, orbiting a blue gas giant.”

  Kang shook his head. “That is not Anitra.”

  Perhaps, Cee thought, looking around the room more closely, there was info within this small space on all the old worlds of the Combine, including Kang’s world, Anitra, which was no doubt among them at that time. A thrill ran through her and she suppressed it.

  She looked directly at Lorenzo. “What else?”

  “All our secrets are here.”

  “Tell me more of what you know of the herald.” She hated to give that such importance, but the herald was the centerpiece of the
Prophecy. If she was truly among them, somewhere, then she was the real prize. Everything hinged on her. Everything led to her. If Cee could get to her …

  “She appears completely normal,” said Lorenzo. “By all indications a simple girl. Nothing unusual about her. It was only after she got involved that she began to blaze a path of disruption. She’s an American, from the city of Boise. Her—”

  Cee stopped him. Looked to Kang. “Boise. That’s the location of the incident, is it not?”

  All at once Lorenzo was curious.

  Kang snorted: “Yes. That’s where Horus was.”

  “Do you have anything else?” Cee addressed Lorenzo. “Anything on where she lived?”

  Lorenzo bumbled for the first time, at a loss. “Here? Nothing here—wait.” He motioned one of the few who had accompanied him, went to a computer in a nook at the far wall and engaged it. “On this, I think.” He clicked around the screen and Cee came closer. Lorenzo found what he was looking for. “Ah. Yes. Here.” And he turned to show them. Cee stepped forward, Kang crowding uncomfortably near. On the screen was an overhead picture of some houses.

  “That’s it,” Cee pointed, recognizing the same views they’d just been monitoring as the crisis unfolded.

  Her bishop looked in from the side, nodding. “And we have evidence one of the transit devices may have been used, right in that area.”

  “It’s her,” said Cee. “It has to be.” Something was happening there. The superhuman, Horus, just flew out of there; someone transited from there using one of the devices—likely as not the girl herself. Grudgingly Cee breathed a sigh of relief that her orders to annihilate the city had not been executed.