Blood Betrayal Read online

  Dahk

  The God of Blood smiled; at least, he thought he smiled. It was always so hard to tell when one was nothing but a puddle of blood in a dark room that didn’t actually exist. Had he felt the need to take his human form, or rather his mental image of what he thought he used to look like, he could have also made his Vault appear as something physical, such as a room. A mirror in the room would have reflected his human appearance and tell him that he did in fact smile. As it was, he had only the feeling that used to accompany such an expression.

  As he thought on this, Dahk sighed; well, he thought he sighed.

  Sudden bright, white light obliterated the blackness that was existence within his Vault, and he looked around, squinting in the harsh fluorescent light at the lab around him. It interested him that his first subconscious inclination was to create a fairly typical and early twenty first century laboratory, clearly set up for both hematology and genetics simply based on the presence of a coagulation analyzer and a refrigerated centrifuge. He could have created anything, but he created this. And why such an ancient lab? he thought.

  What would the shrink say about that? he wondered, thinking of Doctor Paul Hingham. “Never mind, he wouldn’t say anything about it,” Dahk said aloud to no one except the empty lab.

  A woman in a white coat suddenly appeared, looking into a microscope, and she looked up from her work. She was perfect – not too tall, olive skinned with long dark hair restrained in a bun for lab work and very, very well proportioned. Did he have an assistant like her once? Or maybe a student? There was no doubt she was someone from the recesses of his mind, found in the distant past. Had he fucked her? Gotten head under the counter in the lab? God, he hoped so, but probably not. Doc was way too shy back in those days to even suggest a date to such a woman, much less proposition one like that. And too short; he was always too short.

  “I’m not sure there’s much of Paul left in that pyromaniac nut job,” Christina replied, mirroring his own thoughts. She asked, “Doc, would you come look at this for me?”

  He came out from behind one counter and started across the room, catching a hint of movement in the corner of his left eye. Turning, he beheld himself in a full-length mirror. Oh, there it is, he thought. Doc looked himself over and saw exactly what he expected. He wore a burgundy button-up, long sleeved shirt that was tucked into black jeans with a black belt. He looked a little pudgy, as always, and his burgundy shirt looked blood red in the fluorescent lights. He sighed as he ran his hand over his scalp, feeling the odd texture created by shaving one’s hair to three eighths of an inch with electric clippers.

  “You look fine,” Christina called from her place near the microscope perhaps fifteen feet away. “Will you please come over here?” He took one last look and turned back toward her. She watched him expectantly, standing about a foot away from the counter with both hands on its surface, just to the right of the microscope.

  Doc sighed again, for what reason he didn’t know, and walked the last few feet to where the counter ended, where he turned the corner and headed toward her and the microscope. He had to pass her in cramped quarters, stepping sideways and facing the counter. When he was immediately behind her, she pushed her rear end up against the front of his jeans. It was a nice, round and firm ass to be absolutely sure, even though her stereotypical lab coat obscured it.

  “Hey there, we have work to do,” Doc admonished, though his tone held no hint of reproach as his jeans tightened.

  “I know, but work should be fun,” she said back with a mischievous smile.

  He placed his right hand momentarily on her right hip, feeling the perfection of her figure as he moved past her to the microscope. An image flashed through his mind of Christina’s naked and perfect back straining in front of him as her face with its distinctly Italian or Greek bone structure turned upward to the sky in almost angry ecstasy. Maybe he did fuck her. Or maybe he’d just jerked off to the idea so many times that he thought it actually happened. In here, what is that? Mental masturbation? he thought, and he blurted a short laugh at the idea.

  “What?” she asked, suddenly cross.

  “Nothing, sorry,” Doc replied as he bent over to look into the microscope.

  “Is that what I think it is?” Christina asked, suddenly sounding like the all business lab assistant she was.

  Doc turned a ring on the right eyepiece of the microscope and almost whistled as he sucked air in through his teeth. “Yes,” he replied. “Yes, it is.”

  “Then it’s time for you to make a call, isn’t it? You’re going to be leaving me soon,” she concluded, and a horrifically sexy pout came across her full lips.

  Oh, those lips… “Yes, I’m afraid it is, but you’ll always be up here,” Doc replied, twice tapping the top of his skull.

  He moved from the microscope and passed behind her again, and he was mildly disappointed that she didn’t repeat her earlier maneuver. By the time he’d walked five feet to his computer terminal, Christina had disappeared, her words echoing in his mind the only sign that she had ever been in the lab with him at all.

  Doc tapped the screen to wake up the computer and accessed the communications network. He waited for the system to process his request and then struggled as the system asked for his access code. It amazed him that with everything he knew about genes and blood, plus his limited understanding of mathematics and other sciences, half the time he couldn’t remember a simple damn six digit number. Finally, it came to him, and when he touched the position of the first digit, a mini-screen opened with a numeric keypad. As he entered each digit, the cursor immediately moved to the next.

  “Accessing communications network,” a female voice precisely said from a speaker hidden somewhere on the side of the computer’s screen. “Ready.”

  “Admiral Zheng, this is Doctor Harold Brown. Please respond,” he said.

  He pressed a shortcut icon on the computer’s screen, and some ancient, single player card game popped up on the screen. After a minute or so, he reached to his right and pulled over a rolling chair with a flat, round cushion and no back. The cushion itself was a black synthetic material made to look like leather, and the frame and wheels seemed to be made of polished steel, though it was probably some metal with chrome plastic glued to it. Doc leaned his head heavily in his left palm while he dragged cards across the screen with his right index finger.

  The whole thing was stupid he knew. It wasn’t like he really sat on this damn rolling lab stool, playing an electronic card game while some comm message made its way to somewhere. The whole lab, Christina, the computer, all of it was a fabrication of a bored and a possibly broken mind, trying to put the non-physical into physical terms. It was all in his head, all in his Vault. He wondered if that’s what kept him sane, kept him grounded in what his existence really was, while his friends and colleagues had slowly lost themselves over the centuries. Millennia.

  After only seven minutes, the card game bored Doc to tears, and he yawned long and deep. He wondered at the likelihood of some other game being on the server, something substantially more violent and pulse quickening, but before he could check, a box popped up over his card game that said, “INCOMING COMMUNICATION.” With a very slight amount of hesitation, Doc tapped the box, and it widened to encompass the entire screen. A round face with yellow-brown skin, a full and neatly trimmed white beard and black, military cut hair appeared before him. Admiral Zheng’s black eyes, a very uncommon trait even among the Chinese, stared back at him. Combined with his emotionless face, they were cold, calculating, almost like a shark’s.

  “Admiral,” Doc nodded. “I didn’t expect a reply so quickly.”

  “I have been in a stationary orbit on the far side of Arcturus IV for some time,” the Iron Chinamen replied in impeccably precise English. “You look well, Doctor, for someone who does not have a body. What is that behind you?”

  “An old lab of mine, I think. This is all a residual mental image, I believe. Talking about looking well
, which one are you?”

  “Excuse me?” Zheng replied, but his face betrayed no expression despite the authority in his tone.

  “I only meant, are you the real Admiral Zheng?” Doc asked.

  “We’re all the real Admiral Zheng. I have gone to great risk to enter this planet’s orbit, Doctor. Why have you reached out to me?” Zheng asked. Again, his face showed nothing, but the man was not known for his patience.

  Doc leaned back with a smile and almost fell out of his chair, having forgotten that the stool had no back. He caught himself just in enough time to make the motion appear almost natural. “The mission’s complete, Admiral. There’s finally one who’ll do.”

  For the first time in his life, Doc saw something from the Admiral other than the blank, cold stare, and yet oddly enough, this great and sudden reaction was in fact nothing. Zheng’s face did not move a millimeter. He was so motionless, in fact, that Doc was afraid that the comm had failed completely. Just as he lifted a finger to check the connection, Admiral Zheng spoke, “You are sure?”

  “Absolutely, Admiral,” Doc answered with a slightly smug smile. “He’s seven years old, and he meets all the criteria we need.”

  “Very well. There are some final preparations to be made. I must leave. Expect my return in approximately five local years.”

  “That should be perfect,” Doc nodded. “The boy will be at or closer to adolescence at that point. I’ll make sure he’s well ready by then.”

  “Excellent work, Doctor,” the Admiral commended, and there might have been even the slightest hint of approval in his tone. “I hope you are ready to have a body again.”

  The Chronicler Paul Chen

  Through the station’s incredible computer and power resources, Chen saw everything that happened in or near Rumedia, and Dahk’s sudden activities were absolutely no exception. Chen was powerless to do anything to stop the gods’ attempt at communication; clearly they had their own access to the computer systems as well, which made sense as they were just as aware of everything that happened on Rumedia as was he. Chen observed the conversation as it passed through the system, and a sick feeling appeared in the pit of his stomach or, rather, his virtual stomach. As the two conversed, the sick feeling grew.

  What is he up to? Chen thought. Something’s not right.

  Chen looked into Dahk’s Vault and found his sight completely blocked off from the inside. He’d experienced that once or twice before in the past, usually with Garod or the elemental gods, but never Dahk. He stood in the dark wearing his deck fatigues, the mental image of his body whole and untouched from the Chronicler’s chair, before two huge and ornately carved double doors. They went as far upward as his eyes could see in the dim light, dim light that had no source, and each door had a large keyhole at eye level. Maybe carved was not the right word, as they appeared to be made of wrought and hammered iron.

  He pushed lightly on the right hand door, and it seemed as solid as anything he’d ever touched, showing no sign that it may give. He pushed on the left, harder, to the same effect. He rapped his fingers painfully on an iron relief of a European style dragon. The sound echoed through a great room that he could not see, but that was the only response Chen received. He turned his head and laid his left ear on the ice-cold iron, hoping to hear any sound from beyond the doors.

  “Go away,” something whispered.

  “Let me in, Dahk,” Chen called out, backing a few steps from the doors. With no answer after several minutes, he said, “What have you done? Let me in.”

  “He obviously doesn’t want to talk to you. Why don’t you leave him alone?” asked another voice from somewhere in the darkness behind Chen.

  Chen turned from the iron doors and stepped willfully away from the gloomy light, following the voice that he knew to be Garod’s. After just a few steps into the dark, he suddenly appeared into light again. A Caucasian man of about forty sat upon a throne of solid platinum. His black hair was peppered with gray, as was his neatly trimmed goatee, and he wore rich robes of silver silk. Torches burned brightly in stanchions of gold to either side of him.

  “Could we dispense with the aggrandizing trappings?” Chen asked him.

  “It is all I have left,” Garod responded, and he almost sounded depressed.

  “But it’s not real,” Chen argued, reinforcing the fact to himself as much as Garod, but he then shook his head. “It doesn’t matter anyway.”

  “What do you want from Dahk that you must bother him when he clearly does not want to speak with you?”

  “Doctor Harold Brown,” Chen said to emphasize the god’s real name, “has betrayed you and your fellow ‘gods’.”

  “Are you not late with this announcement? When we realized the wrongfulness of our doings here, we all swore not to directly interfere with the peoples of this world. Dahk betrayed that, but his betrayal has led to the destruction of the Others. Yes, it upset the balance here a bit, but the ends justify the means in this case.”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about,” Chen explained, and his brow furrowed a bit in confusion for just a moment. Then the realization struck him. “You don’t know, do you? Are you so caught up in your own self-pity, your own self-flagellation that you’re blind to what’s going on around you?”

  “Of what do you speak?”

  Chen turned to his left and motioned toward the expanse of blackness stretching into the darkness. From nowhere appeared a screen, not unlike an old twenty first century flat screen television, suspended in midair as if mounted at eye level to a wall that does not exist. He watched impassively as Brown’s communications with the Admiral played upon the screen, split in two with the Admiral’s face on one side and Brown’s on the other. Chen watched as Garod’s dark mood seems to deepen and darken.

  “What has he done?” the sullen god asked.

  “I don’t know, but I think the others need to know, too.”

  “What others?”

  “The other gods,” Chen replied, a tone of condescension arising in his voice from his host’s lack of understanding.

  “Why can’t you just leave everything be? Why is it so important that you must damage our calm here?”

  “Because it’s the right thing to do. Because the Admiral, and you people, have broken so many laws, both SACA’s and God’s.”

  “You speak of God?” Garod asked, a thunderous life returning to his voice, energy to his form. “You don’t even know if you believe in this God, this nebulous, omnipotent being you joined your precious Service to seek, and you ignore what sits before you. If it is God you seek, you need look no further!”

  “You are no God. You’re just a pathetic, broken old man, who won’t even use the power he does have to stop evil people from doing wrong. I don’t know why I bothered with you. You have no answers and no sense of justice. You’re nothing, a ghost in a machine.”

  As Chen spoke, he watched as Garod’s face drew red with fury, twisted and dark. He knew that a blow, a strike of some sort was coming any moment, and he was willing to accept whatever pain it entailed, for he had said only the truth. But none came. He found himself in absolute darkness, cast out from Garod’s Vault just as easily as he had come.

  He felt his corporeal body, sitting in its chair and attached to machines, muscles atrophied and withered from lack of use, but his residual mental image, what he had come to regard as his real self, sat in the captain’s chair of the Herbert Walker as he considered the situation. His real self? But it wasn’t real, just as Garod’s image of himself was not real. Was he growing as insane as the gods, lost in the fantasy world of the computer?

  We’re all the real Admiral Zheng. The words echoed in his mind, replaying with the exact tonality and cadence of the man known as the Iron Chinaman. He had known the Admiral was ancient in terms of the passage of time planet side. That happened with faster-than-light travel and the time dilation it caused. The man may be in space for a year, while seven passed on Arcturus, thirty on New Earth and a hund
red on Mars. But what if… There’s more than one? Cloning of human DNA for any other purpose than cellular research and testing had been ruled illegal by the SACA charter hundreds of Earth years ago, but, then again, Zheng had already violated so many laws and regulations.

  I hope you are ready to have a body again. Admiral Zheng’s final words carried tremendous weight when coupled with the implications of human cloning. Could he really pull Brown’s mind from this massive installation’s computers and restore it to a body? Was that how Zheng appeared to be ageless, even though he had been around since the beginning of SACA? And he was always wherever he needed to be whenever he was needed. My God, how many of him are there? Chen thought.

  Chen started to allow his consciousness to drift fully into Rumedia, again taking on the persona of the Chronicler. As he did so, he wondered precisely what plan Dahk and Zheng had for the son of Lord Dahken Cor Pelson.

  Part One

  King Rederick

  The ruler of Aquis, and de facto leader of the Shining West, sat at the desk in his chambers reading Menak’s dispatch for at least the tenth time in the last few weeks. He could nearly recite every word on the scroll by heart, not that he needed to, not that it would help. Immediately upon reading it, he had sent the messenger back to Menak’s lands requesting the Loszian make his way back to Byrverus at once. He finished reading the scroll again, and sat back in his chair to consider it carefully, not so much slouching as using the high, heavy wood back to support his wide and muscular frame. He rubbed at his eyes, which so often felt tired or burned when he closed them, and the palm of his hand made its way up his forehead to where his reddish hair had begun to recede a few years ago.

  As he thought about the word revolt, which Menak had used on the scroll several times, he stared across the oak desk, the same piece of furniture at which sat Queen Erella on many occasions. On the far side of it was a lower back chair made of the same oak and stained the same shade of medium brown. Though its workmanship matched his, its details were less ornate, simpler more utilitarian despite the rich, plush cushion in its seat, as if to hammer home that the person who sat in said chair was surely the servant and not the master.