Primeval Origins: Light of Honor (Book 2 in the Primeval Origins Epic Saga)

by Brett Vonsik

  This is a work of fiction. The events and characters described herein are imaginary and are not intended to refer to specific places or living persons. The opinions expressed in this manuscript are solely the opinions of the author and do not represent the opinions or thoughts of the publisher. The author has represented and warranted full ownership and/or legal right to publish all the materials in this book.

  Primeval Origins

  Light of Honor

  All Rights Reserved.

  Copyright © 2016 Brett Vonsik

  v4.0

  Cover Art by Daniel Eskridge and Brett Vonsik

  This book may not be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in whole or in part by any means, including graphic, electronic, or mechanical without the express written consent of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Celestial Fury Publishing

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2015910844

  Web site with Primeval Origins Lexicon and Encyclopedia: www.primevalorigins.com

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  Table of Contents

  Prologue: Vanquisher

  Chapter 1: Dangerous Trails

  Chapter 2: The Last Stop

  Chapter 3: Treachery

  Chapter 4: Liberty’s End

  Chapter 5: Bitter Bonds

  Chapter 6: Road to Farratum

  Chapter 7: Fouling the Light

  Chapter 8: A Light in the Darkness

  Chapter 9: Farratum

  Chapter 10: Descent into Anguish

  Chapter 11: Questions Entangle

  Chapter 12: Newcomers

  Chapter 13: Subar

  Chapter 14: As an Ear and Eye

  Chapter 15: Voices in the Shadows

  Chapter 16: Masks of Corruption

  Chapter 17: Quandary

  Chapter 18: Unveiling

  Chapter 19: Assay

  Chapter 20: Revelations

  Chapter 21: The Pit

  Chapter 22: Through Another’s Eyes

  Chapter 23: Arena

  Chapter 24: Righteous Purpose

  Epilogue: Wind of the Ra’Sakti

  Primeval Origins

  By Brett Vonsik

  Paths of Anguish

  Light of Honor

  Morality . . . Creation’s precious gift to mortal life, alive within the Spark of Spirit; the bedrock sustaining fellowships, nourishing trust, and the principles of governance uplifting humanity from the beasts. For life, absent Morality, is existence as lowly animals driven in compelling purpose by the primal imperatives of survival, possession, and dominance, never heeding to ethical Principles, Virtues, and Righteousness.

  Honor wielded . . . the sword of Morality rejects corruption and tyranny, the immortal enemies of the Light. Honor shields the Light from the devourer of virtues and righteous deeds . . . temptation, as disease consumes mortal flesh, leaving what Light remains twisted and defiled; tis the Honor within Light, the authority of strength and courage to resist . . . fight . . . repel . . . and push back corruption of self and governance with piercing sight, able to see purposeful illusions of collective imperatives and deceptions that incrementally lay the nets of slavery and tyranny over the unaware.

  Morality absent Honor leads not to the benevolent nor the trusting nor the compassionate, but to selfishness, self-corruption, and the tyrannical heart, all acting in righteous guises and caring proclamations casting illusions to the unaware. Shadows of truth allowing lies to be embraced with nary a wary glance, and the immoral without merit; Morality without Honor dims the Light, defiling with a corrupting taint making the Light . . . selfish . . . dark . . . evil . . . unworthy in Judgment.

  Morality embraced in Honor . . . highly sought by Creation; for without both guiding the creature man, no trust can be given as no trust is earned; no agreements hold, no oaths bind, no laws stand, no governances endure, no civilizations survive. Free Will binds by mortal choices in each Light’s journey toward Righteousness or immorality. Creation’s purpose declared in Commandments fixing Righteousness from the immoral, sets the path to virtuous life, and measure affirming or denying each Light in Judgment.

  Endless are the canards and challenges to Morality and Honor . . . For the intent of the immoral, from lowliest governed to loftiest pronouncing rule, is redefinition of the high-sought bedrock. A redefinition born of self-weakness seeking securities, comforts, pleasures, and dominion over others, all with purpose satisfying selfish desires and wants cloaked as needs and rights; though none hold firm justifications in such ill-formed covets, only Creation’s standard endures weigh and measure as Morality embraced in Honor held firm within the Light is Creation’s vanguard against all that is foul, all that is evil in the cosmos.

  The Harbinger of Judgments

  Prologue

  Vanquisher

  The gray-colored, nonslip-coated deck under Nikki’s feet and the belly-high composite rail she tightly gripped rose and fell with the rolling swells of an anxious sea in the late afternoon’s fading orange-hued sky. The fresh-scented ocean spray periodically filled her nose as the ninety-meter exploration yacht cruised the unsettled Atlantic waters somewhere in the Caribbean. How fast . . . She guessed fifteen knots, maybe more? This was all new to her. The strangely configured yacht was stable and durable . . . built for research in the most hostile places around the globe, as she was told by one of the crew. It had few comforts one would consider luxury, though the ship’s stabilizers combined with its design kept the decks mostly level as the bow cut through the agitated sea kicked up by a retreating storm to the southwest. Nikki needed medication to keep herself upright and not lose her stomach despite the ship’s advanced features. The downside to the medication, when added to the unrelenting high-speed cruising of the past four days, allowed Nikki little sleep. She would have protested to the ship’s captain commanding their continuous high speeds causing an unrelenting pounding to the ship and crew . . . if it had not been needed to evade United Nations ships and aircraft hunting them. Nikki still had a difficult time believing the U.N. hunted them. She didn’t understand their motives if doing so, but the crew was convinced; so Nikki quietly endured. When she lay in her bunk resting, she did so in a semi-meditative way. She felt tired, fatigued . . . out of “go juice.” Though, as bad as Nikki felt, Anders looked worse standing next to her . . . pale-green skin color, bloodshot eyes, congestion sounding to be in his sinuses and upper chest. Fortunately, he wasn’t running a fever she knew of or Nikki would see him bunk-ridden. Anders insisted on “staying vertical,” as he put it . . . and not in his bunk, despite his walking around the ship sometimes as if drunk. He insisted on being awake for any new findings from the medical lab where their unconscious “friends” were being examined by Doctor Dunkle for the past four days.

  “You should be resting,” Nikki nagged at Shawn Anders again. He leaned into the safety rail of the starboard observation nest, a half-moon platform extending out from the bow side of starboard deck five. Anders, dressed in his now washed dark khaki field shirt and even darker pants and field boots, looked as if he was about to lose his dinner. Nikki cringed in sympathy.

  “I’m not going to be wrapped in a blanket when the most significant discovery made by mankind ever is meters away being examined,” Anders shot back defiantly and angrily. “I should be in there! And so should you! They won’t even give us PDAs or remote monitors to let us watch what they’re
doing. ‘Operational security,’ they say! ‘Anyone could listen in,’ they say! How is anyone to function beyond remote dig sites these days without PDAs or PIMs?”

  “The captain and crew treat us as if we’re in their way.” Nikki felt wounded at the thought of being considered so. She continued complaining, “Doctor Dunkle shoos me away when I get close to the med-lab. He says the sensors he’s using on them ‘go weird’ when I’m near.”

  “How can that be?” Anders asked skeptically, then stared at the passing wake below as if expecting something to emerge from the waves, or for him to give something back to the sea. He swallowed hard, then continued. “Us . . . in the way of the crew of the Wind Runner . . . as if they’re experts in the fields of paleontology and archeology? And what’s with naming this ship Wind Runner? It doesn’t even have sails!”

  Frustration and anger filled Nikki too at being treated as insignificant. After a few moments of stewing, she decided it wasn’t healthy or helpful to do so and thought on Ander’s last question, trivia . . . a distraction. It was a curiosity, the ship’s naming . . . and it nagged at her, and she didn’t know why. Then it came to her. An ancient name she learned from her dreams. “It means ‘Im’Kas.’”

  “What the hell does that mean?” Anders snapped back, then swallowed hard as he turned a slightly different shade of green.

  “It’s the name of a powerful warrior from a time long ago . . . creation myth stuff,” Nikki answered as if reciting an excerpt from a history book. “The language is Antaalin, a very ancient precursor to the Sumerian language of 3,000 BC, as well as several other lost languages, to us, even older than Sumerian.”

  “Never heard of it,” Anders barked. His mood was argumentative, but Nikki let it pass. “Where did you learn these unknown tidbits you keep zinging at me?”

  Nikki looked out over the roiling ocean with wave crest-to-trough heights of four- to six-feet while she searched her memory trying to think if she had read this particular “tidbit” anywhere. Nothing. “I don’t know how I know it. I just do.”

  “Are you making this stuff up . . . to keep me mentally occupied?” Anders asked with a hint of a smile.

  “No,” Nikki answered flatly, honestly. “I’ve told you I feel like I know them.”

  “Our friends in the medical lab?” Anders sought to confirm her meaning.

  “Yes,” Nikki replied a little cautiously. Anders was skeptical of her assertion that she knew them. “I told you I feel like I can sense . . . feel their moods, almost know their thoughts. It’s all confusing. I get flashes of things . . . sometimes I understand . . . Most other times, it’s confusing.”

  “Well, I don’t subscribe to telepathy or ESP,” Anders dismissively stated his position on the matter as he stood tall, then immediately went to hunching over the railing as he concentrated a little while on something unseen to Nikki.

  “I didn’t say . . .” Nikki didn’t get to finish her protest.

  The sky suddenly turned a shade darker as an electrical hum filled the air. Nikki and Anders looked around seeking to understand what had just happened. A deathly still quiet fell over the ship, except for the wind and that electrical hum. A crew member, the thick-bodied Cuban dressed in the crew uniform of light khaki pants and short-sleeved shirt, came bounding down the steps from the upper decks forward of their observation nest. He ran up to them with an air of urgency. Nikki wished she could remember his name as he approached.

  “You two need to be in the med-lab,” the Cuban demanded in his Spanish accent.

  “What’s happening?” Nikki asked.

  “No time to talk.” The Cuban was insistent. “Get going!”

  “But Doctor Dunkle doesn’t want me in the med-lab,” Nikki protested as the Cuban pushed them along aft past a set of stairs going to the deck above and into the protected corridor running the starboard side of the ship. They scurried along where the ship’s hull extended upward on their left and the transparent walls separating them from the inner ship on their right. To Nikki’s surprise, the walls were no longer transparent, allowing her to see into the forward crew lounge . . . All the walls were now a subdued gray metal texture.

  “Captain’s orders,” the Cuban announced as he insisted they keep moving. “The captain turned on the array covering the upper deck. In a couple of minutes we’ll all get cooked if we stay out here.”

  “What . . . cooked?” Anders managed to get the words out in between noxious belches.

  “How—” Nikki started to ask another question as the Cuban touched an access pad on the gray wall to the inner compartments, then pushed them through into the interior of the ship when the vacuum sealed pocket-door hissed, sliding open. The thick-bodied Cuban didn’t follow as the door slid closed, then hissed again before the vacuum seal was remade.

  “Damn pushy guy,” Anders complained with a hint of disdain.

  The room where they stood was the starboard-side vestibule of the forward crew lounge. The open space to their right faced the bow providing an open panoramic view through semitransparent exterior walls that many of the crew desired when not working. Nikki pondered at the surprises of this ship. There were more than a few. These exterior walls were possible with nanotechnology, as she was told, though Nikki wasn’t clear how the thing worked. The lounge was the only place on the ship Nikki knew of with better than Spartan-style seating, having large cushioned chairs and a couch with a low entertainment table, in addition to stools at several wall-mounted counters, and a kitchenette that was out of view. A large holowall projection system at the bow-side of the room displayed an empty image instead of the unsettling news of unrest and riots from around the world of the past few days. A hint of buttered popcorn lingered in the air, teasing Nikki’s nose. Her stomach grumbled as a spike of hunger struck her. Anders groaned as he swallowed hard and changed into another shade of pale-green. Nikki worried he would make a mess of things at any moment. She looked about the room for anything that might act as a bucket. There were several garbage baskets, if needed.

  Another pocket-door just to their left whooshed open, revealing the medical lab, or what some of the crew called “Sickbay.” The tall, dark-haired Doctor Dunkle, dressed in a white lab coat over khaki pants and a black button-down shirt, stood between two biobeds in the middle of the lab, both occupied by Nikki and Anders’s “friends.” Nikki gave the doctor a nervous smile. He returned a solemn look before motioning them to enter. The pocket-door whooshed closed once they stepped into the forbidden grounds of the lab. The lab had a distinct scent of cleanliness, to the point of sterile. Nikki welcomed the smell.

  Doctor Dunkle looked at the bio-readings of his two patients immediately upon Nikki and Anders’s entrance. Nikki felt the doctor considered his patients more specimens by the way he spoke of, poked, and prodded them. It unsettled and angered her. Some of that came out the last time Nikki and the doctor were in the lab together. She begrudgingly admitted to herself that her being forbidden from this place was due partly because of her protests. She sought to control her “p’s” and “q’s” now that she again tread in Doctor Dunkle’s domain.

  “Don’t move,” Doctor Dunkle demanded of Nikki with a finger of his left hand pointed directly at her. He almost ignored her otherwise while he silently monitored readings from both biobeds while wearing an intense expression. Only audio beeps of heartbeats filled the room.

  In addition to the slight rising and falling of the deck that Nikki had gotten used to and compensated for while walking and standing, the ship suddenly started listing right, causing Nikki to shift her weight to keep her balance. Glancing at Anders with concern for his condition, she found him with his hand against the wall on their left, near another pocket-door to the outside deck. He looked to need the wall to keep himself steady.

  “Use that medical waste can next to you, if you must.” Doctor Dunkle had no sympathy in his voice for Anders.

 
Nikki kept her eyes on Anders in case he needed help. Somehow, the man continued to defy his body’s urges. Before she knew what was happening, the doctor had stepped over to her, placing a biosensor on her forehead. Nikki jerked her head away from him as she stepped backward.

  “What are you doing?” Nikki demanded as she reached up to remove something stuck to her forehead.

  “Leave it,” the doctor demanded. “I need to see if you are interacting.”

  “What? Interacting? You’re making no sense,” Nikki protested.

  The doctor kept on with his intense scrutiny of numerous bio-readings from his two subjects on his handheld ePaper flexi-display. He absently spoke, “These two are full of surprises. Their blood types are unknown, but high in antibiotic properties. Subject Two has an immune system rivaling crocodilians. Subject One . . . well, he could be dunked in the worst bacteria festering swamp known, and I suspect he’d just walk out of it wanting nothing more than a good shower. Their tissue density is much higher than any of us . . . 36 percent for Subject Two and 48 percent for Subject One. They have additional muscle strands, tendons, and colored fibers throughout their bodies . . . as if out of control Morgellons cases.”

  “That’s not possible, unless . . .” Anders fought back being sick in midthought. “Unless they’ve been genetically modified . . . a lot.”

  Doctor Dunkle dismissively sniffed at Anders’s comment.

  “Isn’t Morgellons terribly painful?” Nikki asked.

  “Readings changed . . . Subject One’s Alpha is modulating . . . hypergamma waves, at 161 hertz, have spiked and remain elevated with modulation.” Doctor Dunkle talked more to himself as if taking notes than trying to explain what he was doing. “I’m detecting a new hypergamma wave pattern from Subject Three, Ms. Ricks . . . at an unsteady 161 hertz. Its low in amplitude, but confirmed present and . . . almost matching in wave pattern with Subject One’s pattern. Subject One’s lambda wave patterns detected as new, some . . . twenty-three minutes ago, is unchanged. The synchronized lambda patterns coming from an unknown source continue to grow in strength, but is not originating from Subject Three.”