Sword of the Gods: Agents of Ki (Sword of the Gods Saga) (31 page)

Galactic Standard Date:  152,323.11 AE

Earth Orbit: Prince of Tyre

Special Agent Eligor

Eligor

The impulse engines of the
Prince of Tyre
rumbled reassuringly against his backside, unlike the undercarriage of the diplomatic shuttle which had, inexplicably, come back from Lucifer's latest 'adventure' with a spear, of all things, embedded in its anterior camera. Eligor had been around Lucifer long enough to see pretty much everything that was weird, debauch, or just plain loopy, but … a
spear?

"
Damantia
," Eligor hissed as a shard of glass dropped out of the shattered lens and scratched his face. "What in
Hades
were you doing down there?"

A wrench clattered onto the deck. "Did you say something, Eligor?"

"Did it
sound
like I was talking to you?" Eligor snapped.

Lerajie was his fellow crewman, sidekick, and sometimes, well, not really, well, okay, maybe
sometimes
he thought of the man as a friend. He glanced out from the discomfort of the undercarriage just in time to see Lerajie's sienna speckled, off-white wings droop. His gut twinged with a rare pang of guilt. Aw, man! Why did the do-gooder always need to be so damned sensitive?

He pried at the mangled aluminum with a screwdriver until his guilt got the better of him. Okay, maybe not
guilt,
per se … he was an asshole and he knew it, but sometimes it was just plain prudent to
get along
with the guy you'd been paired with to do grunt work because you never knew when you might need someone to watch your back. Especially in
this
line of work.

"What I meant to say," Eligor backpedalled on his earlier sniping, "was that whoever took out the camera must have known what they were doing. Had they just been a little bit stronger, not only would this weapon have taken out the optics, but also punctured one of the few weak spots in the hull."

"Oh?" Lerajie's wings perked up, his long primary feathers and ankles the only part of him Eligor could see. His face peeked beneath the shuttle. "Do you think you could save that spearhead? I'd like to compare it to the historical database of artifacts from Nibiru."

"We're not even certain these are
those
humans," Eligor grumbled.

Lerajie shot him a grin and, for once, kept his mouth shut. Eligor grabbed the broken-off spear with both hands and yanked it with all of his might. What other humans
would
they be?

"So why didn't Lucifer take you with him this time?" Lerajie asked. "I thought he trusted you?"

Eligor focused on working the spearhead back and forth, trying to ease it out of the metal. The only sounds were his own grunts of exertion as Lerajie uncharacteristically denied him the distraction of his incessant chattering. The silence grew so uncomfortable that Eligor finally felt compelled to answer.

"Beats me," Eligor grumbled, doing his best to mask his own feelings of betrayal at being ditched. "When it comes to the puppet prince, who knows? One minute he's thumbing his nose at the old man, blowing the Alliance all to shit, and then the next thing you know he goes all loopy on you, either drinking himself into a stupor, or…"

"The evil twin appears," Lerajie whispered conspiratorially. The do-gooder gave him a wink.

"Knock it off," Eligor growled. "Before somebody else overhears you."

Stupid kid! Didn't he realize his increasingly undisguised criticisms would get him 'disappeared?' As it was, he suspected the only reason Zepar hadn't shuttled the loud mouth off to points unknown, buried in the bottom of some swamp world, was because
he
had been working for the dynamic duo for so long that Zepar was at a loss about how to replace him if they got rid of the closest thing he had to a friend.

Only now, after giving Eligor a peek into the inner circle, all of a sudden he found himself back on the outside looking in.

"What about the pregnant woman Lucifer took from the planet?" Lerajie asked, his voice low this time, as if even
he,
dimwit, understood that talk of this topic would get them into trouble.

"What about her?" Eligor asked.

"Have you seen her?"

Eligor cursed as a few more splinters of glass fell out of the damaged optical lens, nearly landing in his eye. He picked out the tiny shards and resumed his repairs, pretending he hadn't heard him.

"Well?" Lerajie refused to drop it.

Eligor glanced up. Lerajie had rammed his back and wings under the shuttle, his face filled with concern and perhaps a bit of guilt?

"I don't know who she is," Eligor finally said. "The only time he let me go down to the planet he was so enthralled with some pompous little prick who tried to stab him that it was as if he forgot I was even there."

"Why didn’t you just kill him?" Lerajie asked.

An odd jumble of emotions rumbled through Eligor's gut before he realized Lerajie was talking about the little chieftain, as Lucifer called the man, and not Lucifer himself. Why didn't you just kill the little chieftain who snuck a knife into the meeting? Lerajie didn't need to know that Eligor had been thinking the very same thought.

Eligor shrugged. "You know the puppet prince. Likes to keep everybody dancing on a string."

He grabbed the spearhead and, ramming the largest screwdriver he could find up into the mangled camera, yanked at the sucker until, with a groan of metal, at last he extricated it from the casing. He glanced at the rock, nothing but a sharpened stone, and slid it with disgust across the floor to Lerajie who grabbed it as though he had just been given a prize.

"This is amazing!" Lerajie weighed the spearhead in his hand. "Whoever threw this must have had one hell of a throwing arm, not to mention unbelievably good aim. This thing must weigh three kilos!"

"Yeah, whatever," Eligor grumbled.

He removed the shattered camera casing, as well as the hull plating that'd been pierced, and screwed in the new replacement plate without the camera. They didn't
have
a spare camera this far from home. Next on his agenda would be to stop down in the machine shop and hand off the shattered equipment to someone who could rebuild the thing.

Lerajie wandered off into a long, babbling happy-place about primitive weaponry, his area of expertise until his disagreement with the powers-that-be had landed him banished on Lucifer's crew. Eligor finished the repair, ignoring his sidekick's chatter.

"What do you think he's doing to the woman now?" Lerajie asked.

"What do you
think
?" Eligor suppressed his pang of guilt. They all
knew
what Lucifer did with the poor, unfortunate females he 'gifted' with his offspring. It was just … why target one who was already pregnant?

Lerajie continued his cheerful chatter, lauding whichever human had thrown the spear on their clever construction of a weapon, how finely the stone had been chipped, and other erudite things Eligor didn't give a rat's ass about. Lerajie
wasn't the one stuck repairing the damage from whichever clever
moncaí
had thrown the spear.
He
was.

His comms pin crackled.

"Yes, Sir?" he answered the call.

"Report to my office immediately," Zepar's insidious voice crackled out of the communications device. "I have an important task for you."

Suppressing a groan, Eligor spread the last of the hull sealant around the edge of the brand-new plating, then slid out from underneath the shuttle on the wheeled dolly. Lerajie gave him a hands-up, still clutching the spearhead like his favorite new toy, and gave him an evil grin.

"Which one do you think it will be today?" Lerajie asked. "The good twin? Or the evil one?"

Eligor shot him an icy stare.

"What?" Lerajie asked.

"Remind me to never tell you anything in confidence again!" Eligor grabbed back the spearhead. He flapped his wings to shake the glass shards and chips of metal out of his feathers before making his way down to Zepar's private office. He composed his expression into his usual one of bored disinterest before knocking twice.

"Enter!" Zepar's voice filtered through the door. Eligor stepped through, careful to keep his wings in his usual fuck-you-I-ain't-your-bitch slump.

"Sir," Eligor gave him a lackadaisical salute.

The dirty-winged Angelic who'd been the bane of Eligor's existence looked up from the contraption he was working on. Eligor feigned indifference while that part of his brain trained to stay alert to details which might save his ass later calculated the beginnings of some sort of robotic arm. What the fuck was Zepar building now?

"You were told to come right away," Zepar glowered at him. Most people thought of Lucifer's Chief of Staff as an obsequious fuck, but Eligor knew better, especially now that Zepar had dropped the act around him.

Eligor flopped the spearhead onto Zepar's desk, next to a robotic hand which had to be three times the size of an Angelic’s. "You asked me to pull this out of the belly of the shuttle. You really want me to leave her with her guts all exposed?"

Zepar's otherwise unremarkable blue eyes hardened into an expression that reminded him of a Sata'anic lizard. Zepar kept him around because, despite his attitude, he was always frustratingly right about shit. Given how close Lucifer had cut it to the wire giving the bug-out command to get the fuck out of Shay'tan's ambush, they were
all
still a little jumpy.

Fuck that'd been a close call!!!

Zepar flared his nostrils like a bull that had decided
not
to charge. Tensions were high on the ship even though Lucifer had delivered on his promise to get them to Earth. Nobody knew where they were or how the fuck the
Prince of Tyre
had leaped from the Alliance into unknown Sata'anic territory. All the star charts were
w-a-y
off. And worse, they were orbiting a planet protected by a Sata'anic battle cruiser, with none other than Ba'al Zebub following Lucifer around like his new favorite lap dog.
Fuck
shit had gotten weird around here!

"I need a favor," Zepar said.

Eligor straightened up, but he
refused
to give Zepar the satisfaction of dress wings. It did not behoove him to piss off Zepar, the biggest puppet-master of them all…

"What do you need," Eligor asked.

"You …
saw
things down on the planet," Zepar said. His eyes narrowed into slits as he studied Eligor's reaction.

"Sir," Eligor said noncommittally aloud. What went through his mind was a different story.

'Lizards on the planet like fleas … some shit's going down with Ba'al Zebub turning on his master … Lucifer's got some big motherfucking plan to steal the planet right out from under the old dragon's nose … just like he stole the Alliance out from under Hashem…'

Eligor filled his mind with the thoughts he suspected Zepar wanted to hear, careful to keep the knowledge he
knew
the asshole could read his mind
out
of his forebrain so Zepar didn't know he knew.

Zepar grunted with satisfaction and relaxed. Mind intrusion … over. Oh, fuck, thank you Shemijaza for teaching me how -not- to be your son's puppetmaster's bitch!

Zepar settled back in his chair, his wings now relaxed.

"Out of all the crewmen on this ship," Zepar said, "you have been here the longest."

"I'm grateful you let me stay on, Sir," Eligor chose his words carefully, "after Hashem blew up
Tyre.
"

"I didn't have to do that, you know," Zepar gave him a coy look. "You were sent to take the Prime Minister
away
from his immortal father and bring him back to his biological one. Under the laws of the Alliance, your allegiance to the Third Empire meant you were a traitor."

'I was young, I was stupid, I was misguided, I'm sure grateful to you, Sir, for giving me a chance to prove I was reformed,' Eligor filled his mind with suck-up thoughts.

"And
you
were a spy sent by Hashem to recoup the command codes to the planetary defenses of Tyre," Eligor said evenly, careful to keep his expression neutral.

"
You
turned me in." Zepar gave him a smirk which was a little too self-satisfactory, though Eligor couldn't figure out why.

"I did," Eligor said carefully. "That was my job."

"Do you know what Chemosh
did
to those he captured?" Zepar asked.

"No," Eligor said. " I was just some snot-nosed pilot who found
you
hiding in the shuttle they sent to retrieve Asherah."

Zepar's smirk turned malicious.

"But you admired Chemosh, didn't you Eligor?"