Chapter Eleven
Packing Hot
Talaric stood in wide-eyed shock across from me shaking his head over and over, as he continued to look up and down me. I thought I cut a pretty cool picture myself.
My feet were encased in black leather military fatigue boots that my tan camo pants were tucked into. The handle of a long boot knife stuck prominently out of the top of my right boot. One of the machine pistols was strapped to my left hip, even as the right side of the belt was packed with extra clips of ammo.
My camo over shirt hung open revealing the heavy leather cartridge belt that was slung from my right shoulder across the front of my black T-shirt to where it rested against my left side. The belt was studded full of three and a half inch magnum shotgun shells for the pump shotgun that I held in my left hand with the barrel of the shotgun resting back against my shoulder.
My right hand rested on top of the other machine pistol that was held level to my right side by a sling overtop my shoulder. A purple and orange silk scarf was around my neck giving a hint of femininity to the outfit.
My long hair was swept back in a ponytail that was fed through the back of a camo baseball cap that Katie had given me. On both cheeks under my eyes was a black streak of paint to help deflect the brightness of the sun from my eyes.
I was packing heavy and I felt pretty good about it myself, but Talaric was trying to be a spoilsport and not let me go along with him and the others. I was giving him my most bewitching smile, even as the others campaigned on my behalf in order for me to accompany them on the mission.
“You did say that I was one of your crew now didn’t you Talaric?” I said soothingly.
Talaric swallowed and I knew I had won.
Katie, who was fairly encased in weapons herself, had a huge grin on her face as she elbowed Talaric in the stomach, “Come on big boy admit it, your babe’s hot, packing all that heat ain’t she!”
Talaric raised his arm, as if to cuff Katie for her impudence, but she had danced back out of the way giggling.
Talaric shook his head again and turned towards the door and said disgustedly, “Let’s get on with it, but so help me I’m holding you all responsible if anything happens to her!”
I turned to follow and saw Rafael give me a big thumbs up. I pulled him to me and squeezed him hard for a long moment.
I knelt down before him and gave him a serious mom look, “Promise me you’ll do everything that Eleanor says!” “Promise!”
I looked at him a little longer, suddenly unsure if I should go on the mission after all.
“Oh he’ll be fine! You go ahead and go have some fun, while me and Raffi man the fort.” Eleanor said.
I gave them both one last look, “Thank you Eleanor.”
“Not a problem, now you better run along before they leave you completely behind.” Eleanor said and I turned away.
I had to run for a while before I caught up with the group trekking out over the sand dunes. One good thing about being an exotic dancer was what great shape it kept you in. I was very grateful for that aspect of my former career right now.
Landing close to the target turned out to be more than a two-hour walk in the early morning heat of the Sahara. Katie looked like she was second-guessing about bringing so many weapons along.
We came to an exhausted stop on top of a tall sand dune. Sparky, dressed in casual gray with only a 9mm strapped to his hip, checked his calculations for the hundredth time. Shaking his head, as if not understanding he said.
“This is the place. We’re standing on the exact spot.”
“I don’t see any remnants of a city! I certainly don’t see a weapon Sparky!” Talaric commented in bad humor.
Sparky affronted to the implication that he had gotten something wrong shot back, “There was a flood don’t you know! Not to mention several thousand years have gone by. Those kind of changes tend to change things a bit!”
“Or maybe you were off in your calculations or perhaps the scale of the globe was wrong.” Talaric responded testily.
Equally testy Sparky shot back, “The scale was perfect and so were my calculations! I checked them twice!”
“While you two boy scouts stand there arguing, I’m going to sit down and take a load off my feet!” Katie said, as she stumbled away a few feet and plopped down onto her butt in the sand. Her face was flushed and she looked miserable from a combination of the heat and the heavy load she was carrying.
Titus and I screamed at the same moment, as we both saw the disappearing sand behind Katie.
“Katie!”
But it was too late; she was already falling over backwards into the abyss behind her, her scream trailing out in the wake of her fast descent into the unknown. All of us dove to the rim of the hole and peered down into the dark depths below, but it was an impossible to see anything with the brightness of the day behind us.
There was eerie silence, except for the sound of trickling stand.
Katie’s voice broke the silence suddenly, “Hey guys, you’re gonna want to come down and take a look at this. It’s pretty cool! I think you can slide down on the sand mound in here safely enough.”
I closed my eyes briefly in relief at hearing her voice and knowing that she was okay. Talaric was already lowering himself through the hole closely followed by Sparky. Titus dropped me down and then came through himself.
It was weird going down the sand that had collected over time forming a sort of stairwell ramp to the surface. It was sort of a half walk combination slide on your rear to go down into the dark interior space.
There was more light than I had thought down here. Most of it came from the surface opening, but some light was coming from what looked like wall sconces that were dimly glowing.
The place was massive!
We had come down several stories. The domed ceiling we had come through had become broken at some point by something. In time this whole place would fill with sand, but for now it was still spectacular to behold.
There were beautiful murals and artwork everywhere. I would liked to have seen this place when it had been full of life and not full of sand.
Sparky had been fiddling with a panel door. Something sparked and the doors creaked open part way. Sparky started to step through, when Talaric abruptly caught a hold of him and pulled him back.
“What’s wrong?” Sparky asked Talaric, who was shining a flash light along the floor of the room beyond.
“Nothing.” Talaric said as he stepped past the doorway and explained further for his hesitation to explore, “I’ve had bad luck with doors lately and what lays beyond them, excuse me if I seem a bit overly cautious. It’s just that you never know what you’re going to run into anymore.”
I half screamed and jumped backward, when Talaric’s flashlight beam landed on a smiling face.
“I couldn’t agree more with you son.” Came the deep reply, which sounded full of good humor.
Every flashlight focused on the man, who rose up out of a chair against the wall and was walking toward us. Talaric’s flashlight dropped to the floor, as the big man with features and a build so similar to his own came closer.
Talaric sounded choked up as he asked, “Father?” As if he didn’t believe what he was seeing.
The stranger’s big arms came out and encircled Talaric lifting him off the ground in a mighty bear hug that Talaric returned in equal measure.
“My son! Oh my son! How I have longed to feel your strength again! Zevin is my heart and Gavin is my faith, but you have always been my strength Talaric!”
I had never really seen Talaric cry outright, but now he was crying openly and so was the other man. The sight of it had tears pouring down my own face.
The emotion of the moment was simply so powerful that it was completely overpowering and the rest of us could do nothing more then stand in place, as we watched a one-of-a-kind reunion take place between a father and his son.
Talaric was the first to draw back, but only slightly, “What are you doing here? How did you get here?”
“One question at a time my boy. I brought someone with me that I know you’ll be anxious to see. As to why we’re here, well simply put we came to help you.”
“But surely you didn’t have to risk yourself! Our people need you so badly at home!”
“I’m not that crucial anymore and besides my children have been having all the fun as of late. It’s high time that I got back into the action.”
The two men jabbered back and forth, as they walked down what seemed like an endless dimly lit hallway, as we followed mutely from behind entirely forgotten it would seem.
The lights got brighter and soon we could clearly see. A pair of doors finally appeared and it looked, as if the long journey would soon be over.
The doors opened and two men, as big as Talaric and his father stepped aside holding the doors open. Were all the men of Talaric’s world so imposing?
I saw Katie’s tongue flicker out and moisten her lips, as she stared at the two men wide-eyed. She looked from one to the other and back again.
I sidled closer and leaned down to whisper into her ear, “You’d better settle for the black haired one. You’ll have a fight on your hands with Eleanor, if you go for the blond.”
She smiled and nodded slightly. “I liked him better anyway.” She said, as she gravitated slightly away toward the black haired man.
There were two more big men in the room and two women. One was older and the other much younger, but they were both so similar in appearance that they had to be a mother and her daughter.
They were both stunningly beautiful in a way that only redheads can be sometimes. Talaric left his father to walk toward the red haired woman with streaks of gray in her hair and fell to his knees before her burying his face against her middle, as she hugged his head fiercely to her.
This then had to be his mother and most likely his sister, who had come up to hug Talaric from behind. Eventually Talaric broke contact and what we had come here for became once again the purpose of the moment.
“How did you get here?” Talaric asked.
“Your brother Zevin and Ellanara have discovered a transportation device. It has a very limited range and basically this is the only planet close enough to go to by this means. This place is the only such place still linked to receive anyone. And before you ask, no we cannot go home from here the same way. The ability to link out of here was purposefully destroyed a long time ago according to Ellanara.” Roric said in answer to his son’s unasked question.
“So you’re stuck here like I am!” Talaric exclaimed.
“For now it would appear so, but don’t give up faith Talaric I’m sure that with all the bright minds gathered here and a little Divine providence, a solution to the problem at hand will be found. First off though, we need to protect our world from invasion. We’ll worry about getting home later.” Roric finished.
Talaric nodded, “We came here, because I found information dating back prior to the great flood on Earth of this place called bar-Seth, as being where our ancestors first originated from. It was also from where they left Earth supposedly. To keep an enemy of theirs at the time from leaving along with them and escaping the coming destruction of the Earth they built a weapon here that kept the enemy ships from being able to leave Earth and there enemies were destroyed in the flood along with the rest of humanity except for Noah’s family. My hope in finding this place was that I would be able to turn the weapon back on and stop the invasion of our world the same way that transportation through space was stopped before. Have you found any evidence of the weapon in the couple days you’ve been here?”
Roric inclined his head toward Ellanara, who was sitting with her back to a series of displays depicting shifting numbers in a variable number of configurations that looked unbelievably complex.
Sensing that she had the floor to speak she began, “First off, this is no longer bar-Seth.”
“But our map indicated that this was where it was located ancestrally?” Talaric said puzzled looking.
“Yes, for a long time it was, but it moved. You see bar-Seth isn’t a place, it’s a ship. A spaceship to be exact.”
She turned a dial beside her and one whole side of the room shifted apart to reveal a large bay window. As one, we all drifted toward the window that looked out upon a massive and truly epic scaled hanger bay.
Here and there it was filling up with sand, but enough was still visible of it to truly get a picture of how massive the bar-Seth had to of been.
“As you can obviously see it is no longer here. It and the weapon that you seek are the same. It’s really not that much of the weapon, but rather a simple ingenious idea, but one that came at great cost. The bar-Seth was our ancestor’s greatest technological achievement. They built it entirely underground in this facility, while appearing on the surface to the rest of the world to be technologically backward, when really they were light years ahead of everybody else. They knew they had to leave, but if they left so would the enemy and they couldn’t conscience that the corruption of the other peoples of the Earth would be allowed to expand into the universe, so they did the one thing that they could to keep them here. They sacrificed the bar-Seth. The Vallians left Earth quietly in low-key vessels like what you, Zevin and Larc came back to Earth in, without attracting to much attention to themselves. Those vessels were never intended to be much more than safety pods that docked directly into the bar-Seth. A select few of our ancestors remained in this facility to oversee the bar-Seth. Once the link had been established to another world they were given the go-ahead to complete the exodus and seal Earth off from the rest of the galaxy. Before they left through the link we came through, they turned the bar-Seth’s engines on and initiated the first step of water vortex travel to run perpetually. The bar-Seth’s constant signal lock essentially shut out the ability of any other ship to dial out, because of the overriding force of the signal. It took a massive amount of power to operate such a signal at a constant rate of high energy. Our ancestors built three huge thermal generators and tapped directly into the heat of the magma chamber that lies beneath this facility. The generators were able to sufficiently power the bar-Seth’s beaming array for years, until the flood came. The generators made more energy than was needed and the extra energy was diverted into the ship’s shield generator, which was expanded to protect the entire facility. The Orlandian’s were never able to break through it, but the flood waters did. Two of the generators are off-line and the third only puts out enough power to basically keep the lights dimly glowing.”
Sparky, enthralled along with the rest of us, of what had taken place in the past managed to get out a question, as he stared vacantly out at the empty hanger bay, “Where did it go?”
Ellanara paused for a moment and looked back at her screens, “That is something of a mystery. When our ancestors returned to Earth one of their primary objectives was to reclaim possession of the bar-Seth and use it to turn the tide of the war that they had lost in the galaxy that they had settled in after leaving Earth. But when they got here the bar-Seth was already gone. The log entries show that there was one link in occurrence by a single individual several years before the main contingent of our ancestors returned to Earth. The bar-Seth’s shield was able to protect the ship for the majority of the flood and when it failed the ship only received minor damage. After making minimal repairs the bar-Seth was launched on its maiden voyage and left the facility leaving no indication of where it went. However it did not leave Earth, because no vortex travel beam was initiated. Over a week later an individual reentered the facility and linked out purposefully destroying the ability to link out of this facility ever again.”
Talaric glanced from the empty hanger bay and back to Ellanara. “You think it was Tadias don’t you?”
Roric nodded slightly, “It fits with what we know of him. Not finding the bar-Seth here left our ancestors with no chance of returning to the fight, causing them to have to seek out another way, which is how our world came to be what it is today.”
Talaric nodded his head seeming to agree with what his father had just said. He glanced at his sister with a furrowed brow.
“I have a question. I also learned that Tadias was here before our ancestors left Earth the first time. Then there’s how long our ancestors were in a different galaxy before settling on our world, where he was reported to have lived at least another two hundred years. That would make him unbelievably old wouldn’t it?”
Ellanara’s expressive eyes flickered downward for a moment, as if she knew something more than she wanted to talk about.
Somewhat cautiously she volunteered, “He wasn’t technically alive in the traditional sense for long stretches of time, several times throughout the course of his life through a process called stasis.”
“How is that possible?”
“It is.” Her expression said that was all she was willing to say.
Talaric glanced from her to the empty hanger bay beyond the control room, “So we have a huge spaceship, which is also the weapon we need, hidden somewhere on Earth, presumably by our great ancestor, with no perceivable way to get back to our world or protect it from invasion. That’s a problem!”
Sparky looked, as if he was about to say something, when he was abruptly cut off by Titus, whose out of breath voice from the doorway behind us boomed out loudly. He had at some point left unnoticed by the rest of us. He was sweating profusely and clearly out of breath.
“That ain’t the only problem boss! You got a whole mess of un-cool types descending into this place like ticks on a hound dog!”
“How did they find us?” Katie exploded out with.
“Doesn’t matter right now! Katie, you, Titus and I will try to hold them off for a while. Sparky you help Ellanara in any way you can. Ellanara we can’t let them have this place! It still holds far too much information!” Talaric said roughly.
“Way ahead of you brother! See this diagram it’s the best way out of here.”
“I see it! We’ll rendezvous with you there!”
“You won’t have much time after I start the ball rolling!” Ellanara finished loudly, as Talaric headed for the door.
I started to follow, but Talaric gestured me back, “You stay here Eva and help protect my family!” And then he was gone.
I looked at the empty doorway in utter frustration at being left behind when I so badly wanted to help. I choked the bitter emotion of self worthlessness down and turned to glance at the schematics shown on one of the screens before turning to the four men and Talaric’s parents, “This way.” I said pointing down the long hallway different from the way we had come.
I had a picture graphic memory and I knew the way by heart already in my mind. I’d see them safely started on the way and then I was coming back whether macho boy liked it or not!