Chapter Five
Drowned Ambitions
Clark went down the stairs and out into the humid air of the city. Within an hour he reached the parking garage in a more influential area of the city. Minutes later he drove a Range Rover out and into the busy streets.
In another two hours he was driving eighty miles an hour along the dirt roads gripping the steering wheel hard and wondering how life could get so complicated and at the same time grateful that it had.
He drove all night and all the next day only stopping to refill the SUV out of the gas cans in the back. The third day the muddy dirt roads turned to goat paths.
Finding a safe looking spot he pulled the SUV off the road into a shallow wooded depression and covered it with a camo net. To complete the camouflage he broke off several native vegetation branches and placed them artfully on the netting. Satisfied he grabbed up his pack and started into the thick vegetation of the jungle.
His abilities, as a natural woodsman came out and the affectations of a city person quickly faded away. He glided swiftly over the uneven terrain swinging in and around the trees and obstacles of the forest.
He made barely a sound, as he slipped through the wilderness, clearly in his natural element. His long strides ate up distance that would have tested the endurance of the greatest of athletes and yet his passage forward was paved in quietness.
It paid to be quiet in the jungle, because there were still native people roaming the shadowed understory, who hunted their prey with the poisoned blow dart and they didn’t really care what they ate just so long as they ate.
Clark waded through several small streams running high with floodwater. His progress through the jungle was mostly uneventful, once a bushmaster snake had made a strike at him, only to find its head swiped off mid strike by the machete Clark held.
A jaguar gave up following the narrow game trail Clark traveled. He skirted around to the side giving space to a bigger predator than even he was. He rumbled bad naturedly, as Clark passed by, not happy with his self imposed subservience, but he wasn’t willing to press the issue either.
Nightfall fell and Clark confident that he was alone made a fire. He laid out his bedroll after dinner and starred into the small fire. Something he never did as it took night vision away temporarily. He wasn’t really staring at the fire in his mind’s eye though. He was seeing Evangelina’s black flashing eyes, her sensually long hair and tawny brown skin.
The memory of her wonderfully curvaceous body was a living torment. He groaned and turned over onto his back. Daydreaming like that wasn’t going to get him any rest. Still if he had to be kept awake he wouldn’t want it to be for any other reason.
Life had gotten complicated and he had bigger more important things to be thinking of, but all he could think of was the girl he’d left behind. He had never seen her smile. He wanted to see her smile and be the one that had made her full lips curl in happiness. He hoped she was safe and that she would use the money wisely.
Above all he prayed that she didn’t do anything intimate with any other man other than him for the rest of her life. He registered how far his thinking towards her had gone, but he didn’t question it. His mother would never approve of such a girl, but she was the one he wanted.
When he had seen her at the night club he’d been entranced by her like every other man in the place initially, but delving deeper he had determined her performance was entirely faked and it had intrigued him all the more. Over the last week he had unveiled another whole side to her.
He wished that she didn’t have the background material that she did, but he could wish the same concerning himself for that matter in all fairness. Troubled he slipped a book out of a pocket in the pack he carried. When he was in search of an answer sometimes opening the Bible helped find an answer to the problem at hand.
It was surprising how often he found an answer with this method. He opened it and began to read. He completed one segment of a story from the Old Testament, but there was nothing conclusive in terms of an answer to his question. He tried it again and landed in the New Testament and read. He almost missed it. Re-reading it he shook his head at the item of knowledge he had not picked up on before.
Closing God’s Word he stared up at the canopy above that blocked off the light of the stars and said, “Point taken.”
He went to sleep fully assured of the rightness of his actions and thoughts.
The terrain was more rugged and rocky the next day with less vegetation to slow him down. Clark had gained several thousand feet in elevation. He was getting close.
It was midday of the next day that he saw the tell tale remnants of the ruins that he was in search of. The dense growth of the forest disguised them well. There were no standing structures, just piles of hand worked stone here and there. These ruins dated back farther than any Inca ruins in the area.
In the humid air of the ancient place, overgrown by the forest, Clark took his pack off and pulled something out of an inner pocket of the pack. It looked as if he held a flat stone in his hands. It was three inches by five inches and two inches in depth.
One side of the object was covered in a scrollwork of tiny symbols intricately carved into the stone in a seemingly random pattern. The tablet was not made of stone; in fact nobody knew what it was made of. It was an element not on the periodic table charts. Even more odd was that it emitted a low level frequency of power.
The strange symbols on its front were also unrecognizable to any ancient symbols previously recorded. The device had been discovered over a year ago quite by accident. It was found of all places in a coal strip mine.
A pit loader operator had been inspecting his loader for hydraulic oil leaks when he happened to look down and see the tablet sticking out of the stony matrix of black rock on top of the coal seam. Yanking it free he realized something of the enormity of the find and reported it to his foreman. The company had an archaeologist come to examine it and he made the first discovery of the artifacts uniqueness, in that it emitted a power wave of some kind. Electrical or battery operated equipment malfunctioned, when in close proximity to the artifact, was another discovery made.
The local media got wind of the ‘alien’ device and soon it became a national news release. The scientific community stepped in and by the use of specially tuned sensors they searched for more of the unique power radiation let off by the artifact. Two more devices were found in close proximity to the first one. The government seized the devices declaring the situation and occurrence of the ‘alien’ devices to be too serious of a matter to be handled and studied by the private sector alone.
Amid a worldwide outcry the government, after a lengthy series of concession talks and agreements, agreed to release the artifacts to the broader scientific community with an agreement that any discoveries that were made were to be shared by all remaining world powers. One device went to the Northern European Coalition, another device went to the Asian Alliance and the last one went to the Southern Alliance of South America, based in Brazil.
During the initial testing of the one sent to Asia something triggered a reaction within the device to cause a subatomic explosion that not only destroyed the underground facility it was housed in, but sent shockwaves outward that measured a nine point five on the Richter scale and caused widespread destruction in the heavily populated area on the surface.
There were over seventy thousand casualties from the incident, with another two hundred thousand wounded. The city was almost virtually destroyed.
Work was temporarily halted on studying the remaining two devices, at least in the Southern Alliance it was. It was agreed that the artifact should be sent to a more remote area for testing. Which is when a group of underworld businessmen that headed up several multinational dummy corporations hatched a plan to steal the device from the Southern Alliance.
The device had already proven its ability for destructive capabilities, which alone was a marketable commodity. They could become insanely wealthy men if they could unlock the secrets of the device for their own benefit. The one problem that stood in their way to acquiring it was the heavy transport security, which is when Victor Uchenko came into the picture. Russian secret police ex-patriot now turned drug runner, arms dealer, human trafficker and general all around bad guy.
For an exorbitant fee he masterminded the hijack of the device and the slaughter of over three hundred security personnel. Realizing what he had he reneged on his agreed-upon fee and demanded a king’s ransom for the device.
The businessman balked at the sum of money and Victor put it up for sale on the black market. He’d gotten a buyer for it, only Clark tipped by off by some of his contacts, as to the devices whereabouts and armed with Evangelina’s knowledge of Victor’s mansion had stolen it first.
One test result the Asian lab had found before the accident was that the element of the tablet, while of primary mineral makeup, also had biological attributes.
There was a slight depression in one corner of the tablet and Clark was pretty sure that was the key to the device. Years before Clark had been in this area of the forest on a covert mission. He’d spent some time with a tribe of forest dwellers, who had nursed him back to health from an injury he had suffered during the mission. In particular the headman of the tribe and Clark had formed a close friendship.
The native people’s lack of written work was more than made up for by their oral history lessons passed down from father to son through the years. There oral traditions went all the way back to when their people had first come to these hot humid jungles.
They had not been the first to discover the land. There were bare traces left over of a people who had been here before them. It may have been traces of this earlier people’s advanced reasoning found in scattered ruins and on stones that had led to the early progression of the native peoples in the arts of math and science, as evidenced by the Mayans and the Incas.
Perhaps they had also learned their penchant for grisly sacrifice and blood offerings from the old ruins to. Clark had asked, if the people from before, had a name and the old man had been hesitant to say anything further, but after more pressing by Clark the old man had confessed that there had been a name, Orleanaki; or more properly translated as Orlandian.
The name had several meanings, but the most relevant was, ‘worshipers of the luminous star’. The natives knew them simply as the ‘bloody people’. Pulling his knife out Clark cut the pad of his thumb slightly and with blood welling out of the cut he pressed it to the shallow depression on the device.
The tablet scrollwork glowed green and the tablet began to thin out and increase in width and length. A screen formed as the intricate scrollwork stretched out to more recognizable configurations.
It was a language read by astronomy. Star constellations, whose vectored shapes formed a language, were lit up across the screen. It was Greek to Clark, but the language was partially understandable, because of the universal use of the common symbols used. Pulling and touching symbols on the screen suddenly revealed a matrix of colored lines, as several constellations lined up with each other and formed a three dimensional triangle in the shape of a pyramid.
Clark knew a moment of profound success. He had unlocked the device, without any expensive state of the art lab or army of scientists peering over his shoulder.
Clark watched as the entire jungle scene around him was illuminated by the multiplying rays of color that emanated out of the device. The out tracing laser lines of color began to reassemble the framework of buildings and structures that no longer existed in physical form. It was incredible!
No doubt in time an entire city framework would be revealed, but that was not what Clark was interested in. He looked at the screen before him as the shapes taking place around him were represented on the tablet as well.
Something different came up on the screen. Most of the lines were just green highlighted lines, but an area off to one side was showing up in solid green, an intact structure?
Clark with one finger turned the rendering 3D image on the screen from a top view to a crosscut view. The solid green parts of the emerging city grid were underground.
He double tapped on the area of solid green and there was a creaking of stone and a dark passageway opened up thirty feet away out of the ground. Clark let go of the tablet, which continued to float in space and approached the dark entrance.
Stairs led down into the darkness. He stepped onto them and rows of green panel lights came on illuminating the dissent into an eerie green hued darkness. After a momentary hesitation Clark descended into the darkened corridor.
Down he went into the ground in search of an answer that he almost hoped that he didn’t find, because if he did then somebody else might too and he couldn’t afford for that to happen.
The steps were slippery underfoot and he made his way down them carefully. In places the green lights flickered like they had a short of some kind in their wiring. This place had to be incredibly old and yet it was still functioning!
The stairs ended at a door. The door, with a creaky hiss, slid open and a room beyond was revealed. Clark stepped into it and the room came alive with lights and flashing icons. There was a fine layer of dust over everything and the evidence of the presence of water at some point.
Clark almost tripped and fell over something on the floor. It was a skeleton, a female skeleton. The face of the partially mummified skeleton was grotesquely twisted in an expression indicative that the last moments before death had been terrifying ones.
“Not my most flattering look I have to admit.”
Clark looked up quickly, as a holographic image of a woman appeared. Clark didn’t let on to it visibly, but he was shaken by her appearance. Her skin was literally red!
How that had been achieved he did not know or want to know. Her hair was bright green. Only her eyebrows were a normal shade of blackish brown. She had ruin tattoos it seemed everywhere. Everything was visible, as she was only dressed in a series of see-through gauzy veils of different shades of color.
She was certainly exotic, Clark thought, but he didn’t care for her modifications as a man. There was an aura of twistedness about her, as if everything good and wholesome had been thrown out the door and been replaced with every corrupting influence imaginable.
She reminded him of when one time in Africa he’d woken up from a night’s rest to find a cobra upraised off the ground. Its head had been flattened out with fangs bared, as it swayed back and forth slightly. He would’ve been dead, if one of his crew hadn’t poked it with a wire to distract it so he could move away.
Her eyes had the same black glassiness to them as the snake’s had. It didn’t help that during her very frank appraisal of him that her tongue snaked out repeatedly to moisten her lips.
“Well mankind hasn’t degraded in quality of form as much as I thought they would have. A pity that we can’t enjoy what each of us has to offer. It could take years. Years are probably a limited commodity for you though aren’t they? What is it like living only half a century or a century at best? Old and decrepit by the time you finally reach your last days. Hmmmm? Not so nice is it. There was a time when a hundred years was as if but a couple years and one still had hundreds of years yet to experience life. So sad that you won’t get to experience what real living is like.”
Her syrupy sweet words were ticking Clark off. He badly wanted to rattle the bag of bones at his feet, with his boot to remind her, of her own decrepit state, but he refrained rightly guessing what her reaction would be. She was a creature of pure vanity and could see nothing better than herself, even though in his opinion she could have been the opening act of a carnival freak show.
“Tell me young man why have you come here to my tomb, to disturb my peace as to what I can no longer enjoy?”
Deciding to both flatter her and still be truthful Clark said, “Knowledge. I’ve come to seek knowledge.”
“Oh, now that is a good reason. Maybe there’s hope for humanity yet. Knowledge will cure and provide anything one desires. Other than one’s own pleasure, knowledge is the only thing one should focus on actively pursuing in life. As I always say, ‘If one has a problem one just hasn’t learned enough knowledge yet.’”
Her sing song attitude abruptly darkened, as she gazed off to the side.
“If I had but enough knowledge I could’ve strengthened the force field enough to keep the water at bay!” She gestured with her hand indicating what Clark now realized was a huge room.
Most of the room was under water. Clark walked over to the edge of the water and gazed out upon the still waters covering the room. Clark could see that where he stood was the upraised end of what had once been a huge gallery that was now underwater.
“Behold knowledge senselessly destroyed all because a petty God didn’t care for us having fun! So He destroyed it all! He destroyed us with water! Water! Of all things water! Cold, depressing, rushing, choking water! I hate water!” She screamed towards the submerged room beyond, thoroughly lost in her remembered emotions of probably her death scene and her inability to stop the water despite all the powers at her disposal.
Smoothly Clark intoned into her remembered hysteria, “Surely with your advanced technology you could have left this planet and avoided the great flood?”
She turned to him and the clear light of craziness was in her face, “We could have! We could have joined our colonies in the stars, but we were deceived! Locked away here on Earth for hundreds of years, until the end of all as we knew it came by water!”
Clark asked, appearing the soul of consoling demeanor, “What could lock such a mighty and highly advanced people away from their destiny in the stars?”
She stormed back and forth in remembered fury and frustration, “They build a phase interrupter generator! How they advanced so fast in technology I do not know! We couldn’t penetrate the shielding of the complex where they had the phase interrupter no matter how hard we tried to! And we did try! We thought of everything and still nothing!”
“Who’s ‘they’?” Clark interjected softly.
“The Vallians!” She fairly spat the words out.
“The traitorous murdering self-righteous wretches is what they are. You know why I persist and other programs like me, preserving what knowledge and power that we can through the eons of time of the former greatness of the Orlandian Empire? So that we may have revenge! Sweet revenge on those who brought our ruin down upon us! We will rid the galaxy of them! Every last one of them will be hunted down and destroyed!”
“Where they a mightier nation than your people?” Clark asked.
“Mightier, hah! We ruled the entire world, even the fallen stars walked among our number! We were invincible! The Vallians were but seven tribes scattered out over the plains of bar-Seth. They kept to themselves, how were we to know that they were secretly plotting against us? They were great warriors, but how were we to know that they had advanced so quickly? It’s all because of that cursed Ta’lont! He helped them and gave them the secrets to destroy us! The traitorous wretch was supposed to have died! How he lingered on and managed to recover and turn on us is a mystery.”
“Your technology is so amazing I still don’t see how a single weapon could have overwhelmed you so?” Clark asked.
“It didn’t overwhelm us! We had full use of everything, except our energy particle beam technology. Without it we couldn’t form water vortex channel gates. The inability to do so effectively locked us here. If they had but met us in battle we would have crushed them several times over! Instead they left like thieves in the night.”
“They left? Were there ships immune to the interrupter signal?”
“No most of them had already left before they turned the device on. The rest left in some other way than water vortex travel. We do not know how, but we will learn of it!” She said fiercely and then something finally seemed to dawn on her and she turned back to Clark her countenance full of suspicion and Clark knew the game was up.
“So many questions and yet you seem to have an idea about what we’re talking about. You’ve been leading me on with your questions to find something out! How very clever of you.”
Her words may have been praising, but he didn’t doubt that she intended to kill him now in some way. The door behind him slammed shut. So that was the way of it.
“You’re going to tell me everything and I mean everything!” She said savagely.
Clark thought quickly, he’d managed to manipulate her once; perhaps he could do it again. He had to make her angry and he thought he knew just how to. His hand slipped to his left side pocket unobtrusively to rest on two canisters squeezed into his belt there.
He said, “You’re right I was leading you on with my questions and it was remarkably easy to I have to admit, which explains how my great ancestors duped you so easily.”
“What! Your ancestors! The Vallins all left! They…..”
She stopped and stared at him suddenly realizing, “You came back!”
“Yes, that’s right. Our memories of the past are somewhat sketchy. We’ve been embarked on so many grand challenges out there in the greater galaxy that we haven’t had time to tie up our loose strings so to speak. Having finished eliminating all of your star colonies we thought we would make a trip back to Earth. Sort of a sightseeing trip, while we were here we thought we would just put the rest of the last of your pathetic and ill-fated cult to eternal rest.”
She screamed in abject fury and brought her hands up and electric power shot out of them into Clark’s chest. It was like grabbing onto a high powered electric wire pasture fence and not letting go. Clark thought he felt his blood boiling, but he held on as through sheer force of effort he pulled the two canisters free of his belt.
“You will die Vallian, but not in this way. I want to see you suffer! To see you writhe on the floor in agony!”
The power binding Clark lessened as a second doorway on the other side of the platform opened. A writhing knot of tangled up snakes three feet high capsized over into the room.
“Our energy both attracts and aggravates them if we wish for it to. Right now you look like the best thing they’ve ever seen to sink their fangs into. I’ll drink in your agony and keep you alive while you feel every cell in your body die!”
Clark’s thumbs flipped the triggers on the canisters and with a superhuman effort against the immobilizing electric shock he tossed the canisters. One landed at snake girl’s feet and the other landed in the fast approaching swarm of venom dripping assassins.
“What is this?” Snake girl screamed out questioningly and the power grip on Clark lessened a little more and with a mighty push off of his powerful legs Clark catapulted over backwards to fall into the cold waters of the lower room level.
Barely two seconds after he sunk below the surface of the water, the platform above exploded into a searing white ball of light, as the phosphorus grenades exploded.
The room above was enveloped in a searing blast of heat so hot it could melt the hardest of steels known to man. Holding his breath Clark waited for a moment and then popped to the surface and pulled himself back up onto the upper platform.
Everything was charred black. Getting to his feet he stepped toward the still open doorway the snakes had fallen through. His boots kicked through piles of charred snake dust along the way. Snake girl still stood there, but there wasn’t much left intact of her holographic image. What was left was sporadically flickering.
Her voice was garbled as she said, “You’ve killed me!”
“You were dead a long time ago. You just didn’t know it and I didn’t kill you. You killed yourself. You had what, five hundred years, eight hundred years or more to repent and ask your Creator for forgiveness and all you did was increase in your excesses and rebellion so much so that God wiped out an entire planet just to purge the likes of you from it! You of all people call the people of today decrepit! They often make the right choices every day, something you utterly failed to do with much more time than they have! Who’s decrepit? The answer is we both are; only you’re more without excuse!”
Clark took a hunk of plastic explosive out of his left pocket and a timer out of his right pocket. She watched him closely, “Your weapons are too primitive for you to be who you claim to be. The last part was meant to lead me on to. You’re after the weapon! Why? Because it no longer casts out its disrupting beam and you want to find a way to reactivate it, because you want to chain us here once again! You are of Vallian blood, I can see that now, but obviously not all has gone well for the Vallians for you to have to employ such primitive devices to halt what is our destiny. Let me tell you something brave but misguided warrior, you may kill all trace of advanced technology in this place, but there are other places like this that still persist. We will attract Earth people not so zealous as you to our underground tombs and we will open the gates of our knowledge up to them. Knowledge is so corrupting isn’t it? In fact it has already begun! You’re too late to stop us and it is worse than you know. We know your ancestors returned many hundred years ago. When they came back to Earth we were able to pick up on their presence and monitor them. We tracked them when they left and we know where it was that they settled. We will give our knowledge to the people of this world and our ways of rebellion we will instill and encourage to grow within them just as before! We will tell them that the Vallians are there worst enemy and our new converts will destroy you and your people down to the last child! We will have our revenge! There is nothing you can do to stop our destiny!” She finished warbly.
Clark simply shook his head, “You talk too much, but thank you anyway for the heads up.”
He abruptly stuck a gob of C4 to the corner of the room’s main console and walked out not bothering to look back. With fingers that couldn’t touch matter but simply passed through it digitally she tried to halt the progression of the ticking red numbered countdown clock.
She screamed in frustration and fear as her physical form must have when she had died gasping for air during the great flood so long ago.
Clark pulled the tablet out of midair and quickly tapped a message out and sent it. All the tablet’s considerable power drained away in mere seconds as it sent a transmission into space. He hoped the message got there in time and then that someone would be there to read it, but he couldn’t worry about that now. He had a lot of work to do.
It would probably take the signal several months to reach his homeworld, if it reached it at all. It was safer to assume that the message didn’t reach his homeworld and that everything depended on him to keep the resurgent Orlandians from destroying his world. God help him!
He tossed the tablet towards the open hole in the ground and then grabbing his pack he ran.
Clark was well into the jungle when the C4 explosion ripped through the humid air. The aftermath explosions were worse than the first one and Clark tumbled to the ground at the shock of the secondary explosions.
After five minutes the explosions died down to muffled rumbles and Clark got up and moved swiftly down through the rain forest that had been shocked into silence from its usual daily uproar.