Sword of the Gods: The Chosen One (34 page)

And it's
no wonder; for even [Lucifer] himself

Is able to
take the form of an angel of light

2
Corinthians 11:14

Galactic Standard Date:  152,323.04 AE

Alpha Sector:  Command Carrier ‘
Eternal Light
’

Supreme Commander-General Jophiel

Jophiel

"Supreme
Commander-General?" Major Klik'rr, her Mantoid assistant and, quite
honestly, her right-hand man, called down into her quarters.  "You have an
alpha-priority-one message from the Prime Minister's office.  He needs to speak
to you."

Irritation flashed in
Jophiel's gut, though perhaps it was simply a post-partum hormone fluctuation? 
Her milk had come in and, unlike all the other children she'd birthed, refused
to dry up, leaving her breasts constantly swollen, leaking fluid, and
exacerbating her already irritable mood.

"Tell him I'm
indisposed," Jophiel snapped.  She cut off the communication far more
brusquely than was warranted.  She buried her nose back into her pile of
reports needing processing and was irritated when her comms pin beeped a few
seconds later.

"Sir?"
Klik'rrr asked.  "He insists it's urgent."

The signature she'd
been scrawling across the electronic tablet scrawled darker, the 'L' in
'Jophiel' looking more like a stab-wound than the end of Alliance cuneiform.

"Very well,"
Jophiel groused.  "Put him through."

She didn't even bother
to primp her hair or straighten out her everyday uniform as a tow-headed visage
materialized on her video monitor.

“What do you
want,
Prime Minister Lucifer?”  Jophiel schooled her face and voice to be devoid of
emotion.  Her fists clenched out of sight beneath the table so it wouldn't show
up on the two-way video monitor.

Lucifer was in his
stereotypical ‘politician pose,’ artfully arranged before the monitor to convey
sincerity and authority.  Raised from birth to speak on behalf of the Emperor,
every mannerism had been trained to get him whatever he desired.  Especially
his voice!  Lucifer dripped pleasantness, reasonableness, unrealized hopes and
desires. 

It was all a
gods-damned act!

“I've been getting
complaints about your goon squad harassing honest traders,” Lucifer's eerie
silver eyes glittered as he spoke with practiced smoothness.  “You must order
them to stop.”

“
Sata’an
traders,”
she retorted, resisting the urge to simply
believe
their highest-ranking
civilian authority and adopted son of their emperor/god.

“Under the treaty
signed by the Eternal Emperor himself between the Alliance and the Sata’an
Empire in 152,299,” Lucifer rattled off with a practiced tongue.  “Those
portions of the uncharted territories are considered neutral.  The traders have
as much of a right to be there as anybody else.”

“Not when they smuggle
counterfeit goods,” Jophiel said.  “And unload it on unwary settlers for their
entire year's harvest!”

“Caveat emptor, Jophie.” 
Lucifer dropped the act just for a moment to show the seething hatred she knew
lay within.  “You know how much the Emperor respects the right of free will. 
If the settlers wish to purchase those goods, who are
we
to contradict
them?”

“-I-
will,” she snapped.  “When the money they get from
selling those goods funds expansion of the Sata’anic war fleet!”

“You know the terms of
the free trade agreements the Alliance signed with the Sata'an Empire,” Lucifer
dripped reasonableness once more.  “All honest traders, no matter what their
species, have the right to sell any good to any other colony and neither the
Alliance nor the Empire will interfere.  If we intertwine their economy with
ours, they'll be too dependent upon us to go to war.”

“I don't see the
Sata’an Empire buying a whole lot of goods from Alliance planets,” Jophiel
said.  “Only hard-earned Alliance money flowing into Sata’anic coffers.”

“You don't need to
like it, Jophie.”  Lucifer gave her a lascivious grin he knew drove her
ballistic.  “You only need to enforce it.  I'll take this matter up with the
Emperor.”

“You do that,” she
hissed.  “Until then, if we think they are carrying contraband, we're going to
stop them.  Alliance or Sata’anic.”

“Oh … and Jophie …
congratulations on the new little bundle of joy.”  Lucifer purred with an
exaggerated false pleasantness, insincerity dripping from his voice as he
needled her with the veiled insult.  “You're a … prolific one … aren’t you?”

“Only with a worthy
mate!,”  She returned his jab with a verbal right hook.  “I only had
one
mating attempt that ever failed!”  She cut off the transmission before he had a
chance to retort. 

Her hands hurt. 
Looking down, she realized she'd dug her nails into her own palm and drawn
blood.  Lucifer might be an asshole, but he was the most exciting asshole she'd
ever fucked. 

She was
better
than
him!  She didn't lead her children's fathers on with promises she could never
keep.  She didn't pluck them fresh out of the academy, too young and naive to
understand the law of their people was written in stone, and insinuate their
liaison was special.  She didn't promise them she wished to continue their
relationship after the heat-cycle had passed, then 'sic her Chief of Staff on
them to tell them the man you had fallen hopelessly in love with kept a dozen
mares in the stable at all times and had no interest in an infertile female!

Damn him!  Damn him
and the only mating attempt which had ever failed!  But she'd had the last
laugh, because she'd gone on to birth twelve babies, while She-who-is had given
him
none!

She bent down to her
bottom drawer and pulled out the scrapbook she hid filled with photographs of
her twelve children and the twelve fathers who had helped her sire them.  All
happy and smiling.  All except for Uriel, whose little face was red from
crying. 

She hadn't contacted
Raphael directly since the day she'd gone into labor, unable to bear his
sorrowful expression as she'd cut out his heart and handed it back to him. 
She'd warned him!  She'd warned him that she only formed relations to fulfill
the Emperor's mandate that they fill the ranks of the armies.  She'd made him
sign the waiver.  She'd done her best to remain impartial.  To not get
attached.  It was the
law!

Her fingers traced the
sad little dimple on Uriel's cheek, so much like his father that it made her
heart ache.  Mikhail had filled her head with foolish, romantic notions.  It
had been
him
she'd first requested to sire this child, not Raphael.  The
Emperor wanted Mikhail to produce offspring and she knew the brooding Seraphim
harbored feelings for her, but it had not been enough to make him budge. 
Seraphim only took one mate for life, he'd quietly told her, and she was
incapable of giving him what he needed.  With a kiss upon her forehead, he'd told
her that she would always have a special place within his heart, and then asked
to be reassigned. 

Damn!  She
was
no better than Lucifer!  She'd only asked Raphael to sire this child because
she'd found herself smarting from Mikhail's rejection and wanted to hit him
where it hurt.  The joke had turned out to be on
her. 
The affable
Raphael, so very different from the dark, brooding Seraphim
,
had caught
her unawares.  In five meager days, he'd wiped all thoughts of Mikhail, her
cadet mating experience with Lucifer, and the eleven men she'd mated with
since
then, right out of her mind!

Poor little Uriel.  He
looked as unhappy as
she
felt.

~ * ~ * ~
* ~ * ~

April – 3,390 BC

Earth:  Village of Assur

Ninsianna

“Mother, hear my
prayer.” 

Ninsianna lit some
dried herbs and placed them in a small ceramic bowl on the alter she'd set up
in her room.  Like all Ubaid sleeping quarters, her bedroom was little more
than a loft tucked beneath the flat roof, just big enough for her to stand up
in and move from her bed to the door.  A raised wooden platform made of lashed
sticks served as her bed, with a thin woven pad filled with straw that had to
be replenished each season for a mattress. 
This
room sat directly above
the families tiny pantry, which helped protect their precious grain and dried
pulses from the scourge of mice who forever threatened to spoil their food, so
at least her parents had been able to separate the two bedrooms with a partial
mud brick wall instead of the woven reed mats
most
Ubaid used for
privacy.

Thank the goddess for
that! 
Her friends sometimes giggled about their parent's amorous nighttime
exploits, but Ninsianna had always been spared
that
indignation.  For
the most part.  Okay, not completely…

Her room was tiny, but
at least she had
her own bedroom, unlike most Ubaid children who piled
in with siblings and often even their parents into a single room, if they even
had a separate bedroom at all!  Many Ubaid houses consisted of just a single
multi-purpose room.  People would roll out their mats upon the floor at night
like puppies, and then tuck them away in the morning to eat and live.  Some of
her friends shared bedrooms with six or seven siblings, their rooms so cramped
there was no room to even turn over at night and adjust your blanket!  Her
parents had always regretted never giving her a brother or sister, but
Ninsianna was glad to be an only child.  The lack of privacy at the great sky
canoe had deprived her of one of her favorite pastimes.

“I'm sorry I couldn't
pray more formally to you at Mikhail’s sky canoe," Ninsianna prayed,
"but I brought back many interesting things to share with you.”

She lay pebbles,
twigs, and other items upon the tiny alter fastened to the eastern wall above
her bed, telling the goddess funny little stories about each item as though she
were a child relating how her day had gone.  She constantly spoke to She-who-is
as though she were a best friend walking at her side, but she was also mindful
to observe the more formal prayer rituals everybody else engaged in, just in
case.  The goddess had always been generous about granting her prayers, but she
knew better than to take her favored status for granted.  Tonight, she had a
new
prayer to ask. 

 “Thank you for
sending me your winged champion instead of forcing me to marry Jamin," she
said.  "I healed him as you asked.  But might I beg another indulgence?”

She reached into her
satchel and fished out a molted feather from Mikhail’s wing.  Rubbing it
against her lips, she lay it upon the altar right in front of the small,
rounded clay figurine seated upon a throne of two lions.  Unlike the lesser
gods of rain or beer, who could only be called upon for limited relief,
She-who-is ruled birth, creation, fertility, the crops, and victory in battle. 
Everything needed to shape the world around them and breath it into existence. 
In other words, She-who-is was the goddess of
life.

“I have feelings for
him,” Ninsianna said.  “I think perhaps he has feelings for me as well?  But he
is so … controlled … that it's hard to tell." 

She pictured how good
it felt whenever she gave him a hug, and how close he'd come to kissing her
tonight.  She formed the image of what she wanted in her mind as though it were
a painting and pictured physically placing it upon her alter along with her
other gifts.  She sensed by the sturdy thread of energy which connected her to
She-who-is that the goddess was listening tonight, and gave voice to her
heart's desire.

"If we are meant
to be together, could you please give us both a sign?  Oh … and soon, please. 
Thank you.  Good night.”

She snuffed out the
flickering tallow lamp, slipped out of her shawl, and slid beneath the covers. 
Her lumpy mattress didn't feel as good as the comfortable bunk she'd enjoyed
mere feet from the man who had grown to occupy such an important place in her
heart.  As she drifted off to sleep, She-who-is sent her another vision.