Tablet of Destinies (21 page)

Her spirit awoke to find she had been dreaming, or rather remembering her original outpouring into creation. She was afloat inside the devanic cocoon and it was this entity that had spoken to comfort her and awaken her from the sad, but poignant recollection.
If
you were with me,
Tory reasoned to the best of her ability
, at the time of my first outpouring
…
we are a twin soul.
Reflected in the inner walls of her etheric shell was a vague image of herself, little more than a shadow. But the energy centre in her chest was ablaze with activity. Behind her, in the relective surface, the radiant Deva nodded.

Beyond earthly love and time, there is a unity of spirit that we share for all existence, and nothing in creation or beyond can ever break the bond that we have.
The Deva passed a hand over his own brilliant heart chakra, whereupon a long golden thread sprang from Tory's heart centre and rose all the way to the crown of her head where it attached itself firmly. A bright, whirling helix of white energy passed up the golden thread and came to settle on her crown. This was the first and highest energy centre, or chakra, of her etheric nervous system.

The seven planes of existence (physical, astral, mental, causal, spiritual, monadic and God consciousness) are divided into two triads, higher and lower, with an intermediary plane dividing them. So, too, are the chakras of a human's etheric body divided into a higher and lower triad, connected via an intermediary energy centre, located where the heart would be found in the physical body.

The bright, whirling helix of white energy that now whirled over Tory's crown was the spirit atom or will aspect of the higher triad, known as the crown chakra. At the Deva's leave, a second helix, purple in colour, shot up the golden thread to settle on Tory's brow. This was the intuition atom, or wisdom aspect, known as the
third-eye chakra. The blue helix that followed attached itself to her throat chakra and was the mental atom or pure reason aspect of the soul-mind.

The lower triad was activated from the heart centre once the higher triad was in place. From the vortex of green energy whirling over her heart, another gold thread shot down to attach itself to where Tory's base chakra would soon be located.

A yellow helix positioned itself over her solar plexus. This was the mental molecule that was the seat of the intellect in the subtle body. This energy centre acted as a magnet for mental substance, and performed the huge task of preparing the blueprint for the mental, astral and etheric bodies that would be inhabited by the soul-mind. The second aspect of the lower triad was that of emotion and accompanied the astral atom's placement; this chakra centre was orange and was located near the spleen in the physical body. The physical atom or activity aspect manifested in the soul-mind last of all to complete the etheric nervous system. This chakra centre was deep red in colour and was akin to the root or base chakra located at the base of the spine.

Tory observed the changes taking place within her without fear or apprehension, for she trusted the celestial being implicitly.

Her complete chakra system was now in place and with energy centres whirling vigorously, her mental unit began to vibrate, drawing mental essence around herself with vibratory powers akin to her own.

The higher triad of atoms had no bodies attached to them, for they corresponded to realms of existence
beyond individualisation. The fourth or causal plane of existence was where the soul-mind emerged into individuality and this entity was called the causal body, although it consisted of spiritual essence only and lacked any real form.

Only the mental, astral and physical atoms attracted to them the substance of the planes to which they were akin, and created bodies to house the human soul-mind during its incarnation into the material world. These subtle bodies shaped the personality, intellect and ego of the physical being and kept it constantly connected to the higher realms of existence of which it was no longer aware.

There were three spiritual bodies that needed to be formed before a soul-mind could take on a physical persona: the mental body, the astral body and the etheric double. Tory's first undergarment of spiritual matter took the form of a web-like cloud, slightly less dense than the body of astral mist that followed. The essence that she attracted in these two instances was capable of reproducing a mental and astral body of exactly the same characteristics as those Tory had possessed before her misadventure.

Once the mental and astral substance moulded itself to suit her causal shadow, a network of shimmering thread sprang forth from all her chakras to spin a web around her subtle form. This intricate network, of delicate beauty, gave her an almost solid, glowing silver spiritual form. Tory's etheric double had returned.

As she admired her beauteous form in her reflection, her affectionate gaze drifted over to the Deva behind her.

His face suddenly inspired the memory of a different kind of love to the all-consuming dedication she felt for soul-source. This feeling had nothing to do with the greater scheme of things; it was an entirely selfish need to be desired by him, to be
in
volved with him on a physical basis. Tory's ego had come into play and her will to be close to this soul her being craved so desperately, was sufficient to commence her change back into the physical world.

C
row was in a foul mood by the time he made it back to the pirate ship ‘BIL-ME', which, contrary to the pun, simply meant ‘flying ship that burns rocks'. The vessel was a meteor cruncher, specifically designed for negotiating areas where there were concentrations of space debris. This was why Crow's brother, Hawk, had chosen to acquire this particular vessel, as systems full of space junk were about the best place for outlaws to hide out.

‘What the stuff are you doing back here?' The systems engineer removed his protective earmuffs, stunned to see their renegade munitions expert wandering through the engine room.

‘Things didn't quite go as planned,' Crow grumbled as he passed his younger crewmate.

‘Hawk is going to be
so
pissed that you came back,' the lad informed, with a hint of delight. ‘You might have been better off to stay where you were.'

‘Can it, Chook. Blood is thicker than politics,' Crow assured him confidently, as he approached the open hatch door that led to the crew quarters.

Chook's smile only broadened and with a shake of his head, he replaced his earmuffs and fired up his grinder.

As Chook was rarely so confident about anything, Crow had to figure his situation was precarious. His pace slowed and he decided to sidetrack to the kitchen to see if he couldn't get a bite to eat before his brother did a dance on his face. Crow felt he could defend himself against his younger, although larger brother, but he'd eat as a precaution, just in case things got out of hand at their happy family reunion.

‘Well, holy calamari, Crow, you have got balls of solid charichalum.' Seagull, the ship's aged and rather huge cook, chuckled to himself as Crow entered his domain.

Seagull wasn't a Falcon. He was a Delphinus, whom they'd found adrift in open space, so his name was a bit of a joke. As he claimed not to remember his own name, the nickname had stuck.

‘Anything to drink on this hunk of junk?' Crow ignored Seagull's taunt, as he checked the supply hatches.

‘Sure.' Seagull produced a flask from his stores. ‘I couldn't deny a dying man his last request.' The old cook held his sides, laughing, whereupon Crow snatched the alcohol from him.

‘Try not to give yourself a heart attack there, Pops,'
Crow advised, taking a swig from the flask and quickly spitting it out again. ‘This tastes like piss!'

‘Oh, sorry.' Seagull reached into his stores and pulled out another flask, identical to the first. ‘Here, try this.'

‘What was in that?' Crow asked as he exchanged his flask.

‘Piss,' advised Seagull, with a shrug. ‘That's the trouble with being the cook and the medical officer.'

‘Ugh!' Crow spat several times in disgust. ‘Whose piss? Don't answer that, I don't want to know.' He took a whiff of the contents of the flask that he now held in his hand to ensure it was alcohol, and then swallowed the entire contents. ‘Ahhh!' he sighed, feeling satisfied. He wiped his mouth clean with the back of his wrist.

‘If it isn't the prodigal prick.'

Crow was spun round one-eighty degrees to come face to face with his brother.

‘Welcome home,' Hawk leered, headbutting his brother in the nose and letting him slide to a seat where he could tower over him. ‘Where do you get off coming back here after you've given yourself up to the Pantheon, huh? Come to fetch us in for the Lord Nergal, have we?'

‘Hardly.' Crow struggled to recover from the blow and think. ‘Nergal tried to kill me … the scumsucker sent me on a suicide mission.'

‘Then how is it that you are still living and breathing?' Hawk grabbed his brother's throat, threatening to kill him, depending on the answer.

‘There was an escape pod on the ship he provided. I managed to get out before Nergal could detonate his explosive device.'

‘I'm sure the Lord didn't go to all that trouble just to get rid of you.' Hawk slammed his brother's head back into the metal headrest of the chair. ‘Who else was on board?'

Before Hawk got his answer, Crow managed to raised a leg and cast his brother off.

‘She was one of those immortal mutants,' Crow confessed before his brother recovered and took him back in hand. ‘The ex-Governess of Kila.'

‘You've been on Kila?' Seagull was interested to know, but Crow was not given a chance to respond as Hawk grabbed him up by his jacket.

‘You idiot! Her brother, the reigning Governor of Kila, has just declared war on the Pantheon.' He smacked Crow in the head in an attempt to knock some sense into him.

‘I know already!' Crow broke free once again. ‘That's where my pod landed, so I was on Kila when the Pantheon invaded, but by the time Nergal got there all the Chosen had fled. They abandoned their city
in fear
.' He emphasised his words, to get his point across.

Hawk smiled, and heartened by the news, he forgot all about beating up his brother. ‘Lahmu is very smart.'

‘Lahmu?' Crow was shocked to hear the name of the legend mentioned.

‘How do you figure that?' Seagull asked Hawk, ignoring their uninformed crewmate. ‘Looks like a clear-cut case of chickened out to me.'

‘That the Governor of Kila would put the plight of our kind, and that of all men, ahead of his own capital city and kindred, seems to me to confirm his true
commitment to the cause. He didn't even waste time or resources defending his city. He just went straight underground to concentrate on his attack.'

Hawk might have been younger than Crow, but this ship had been Hawk's acquisition. Unlike his brother, Hawk was a team player and had managed to assemble a small but specialised crew to aid him in his pirating endeavours. Crow usually only returned to the Bil-me when he was hard up and in trouble with the authorities.

‘So what makes you think the new Governor of Kila is Lahmu?' Crow asked, amused, until his two crewmates began looking at him like he had two heads.

‘Haven't you heard?' Hawk jeered in disbelief. ‘Before the last sitting of the Pantheon, in the Arena —'

‘The Governor of Kila tamed the Lahmuian?' Crow whimpered in dread, for he had clung to the legend all his life, as had all mortals born under Nefilim rule.

‘And you just left his sister for dead!' Hawk moved to have another swing at his brother, but Crow backed up and avoided him.

‘What else was I supposed to do? The bitch was throwing things at me!'

‘Oh, boo-hoo,' Hawk scoffed.

‘She was
unconscious
,' Crow added, and both Hawk and Seagull were stunned by this additional information. ‘And heavily sedated.'

Hawk held his head and slowly shook it. He considered how amazing this woman's abilities would have been when conscious, and the benefit she could have been to the cause. ‘I want you gone,' he decreed finally, looking to his brother in disgust.

‘How was I to know!' Crow whined. He had nowhere else to go.

Hawk scowled at his kin, and as accommodating as Hawk usually was, Crow was not going to get around him this time. ‘You were doing the work of the Pantheon, so whatever you were doing was bound to be contrary to our interests. You have two hours,' he warned. ‘If you're not off this ship by then I'll shoot you myself.' Hawk backed up, turned and left.

‘He's not serious,' Crow advised Seagull, who didn't seem to be so sure.

‘I hope you're right, man.' The cook went back to his food preparation. ‘I sure would hate to be scrubbing up your guts this evening.'

‘Any chance of a last feed?' Seagull nodded, and Crow took a seat to consider the options he didn't have. He resolved to try talking with Hawk in an hour or so when he had had a chance to cool down. Crow felt sure he could eventually convince his brother to change his ruling.

 

A small five-man team had been selected to accompany Brian to Nugia. Besides the Governor and Rhun, Rhun's firstborn son, Cadwell — Head of Deep Space Exploration — had also been selected, along with Cadwell's wife, Neriada, who was her husband's 2IC. Talynn, being their foremost munitions expert, was an essential team member, along with Thais, the Centaur. Thais was Head of the Mind Sciences, a Shaman, and not Homo sapien, and so he was being taken along to act as mediator for the new Governor if need be.

Noah was catching a ride as far as Nugia's moon, Caimah, and would be dropped off en route to pursue his own investigations. Although his wife would not be accompanying him as hoped, he figured her presence was by no means essential to his quest. What disappointed him most about her absence was that Rebecca refused to trust her own vision and inner voice, which had told her about this quest nearly a year ago now. He was with Brian as he said goodbye to his own wife, when one of the communications advisors approached the Governor to inform.

‘The slaughter of animals in the Great Northern Forest has slowed,' he announced to Brian, ‘as it would seem the enemy's stores of toxic gas have mysteriously disappeared.'

The news brought a smile to Brian's face and Noah's, too, as a round of applause broke out.

‘Rebecca,' the scholar uttered, proud of his wife's efforts. Perhaps she would be of greater good here on Kila after all.

‘There you are.'

Noah turned to find Rebecca suited up in space attire and lugging a case of equipment.

‘Thank goodness I caught you before you left,' she said, smiling broadly as she walked towards him.

‘But …' Noah grinned at her. He'd been so sure her decision not to come was irrevocable.

‘To protect our planet is one thing,' she explained, ‘but you are my home.' She dropped her luggage and embraced Noah, tears welling in her eyes. ‘You were right to be mad at me,' she whispered as she clung to her husband.

‘I could never be mad at you for doing what you believe is best,' Noah assured her, as he squeezed her tight, deeply relieved that she had changed her mind.

‘With you, I am at my best.' She loosened herself from the hug to look Noah in the eye. ‘Never let me forget that.'

‘Ditto,' he told her with all sincerity.

‘Let's get this circus on the road,' Brian advised one and all, having finished saying farewell to his better half.

The Governor's team gathered in a circle to teleport themselves to Kila's closest planet, from where they stood a good chance of launching their deep space vessel and escaping without being detected by the Pantheon. They could teleport themselves to the planned location safe in the knowledge that the way between Kila and its closest planet was free of anomaly.

The general rule of teleportation through space was that any location within the same star system was a safe destination. But if a traveller had to cross the anti-matter superhighway that existed between star systems, things got unpredictable. This was the reason why deep space travel was only truly safe via a wormhole, as it built a bridge of order through a region of chaos. These days, only etheric leakage into the wormholes caused a delay, but in the Nefilim's pioneering days of space travel, expeditions beyond their own system had resulted in hundreds of years of lost transit time. Some star fleets had never returned home.

Nefilim who tried to physically teleport themselves to known destinations beyond their system that did not have wormhole access, like Gaia, also had problems.
Some of these individuals had experienced loss of time, whilst others vanished completely and what had become of them could only be speculated upon. Like the Bermuda Triangle, or the Dragon's Triangle, on Gaia, it was most likely that those who vanished attempting teleportation beyond their own system didn't actually perish. It seemed likely that they might find themselves misplaced in time … in a past or future era so distant from home that they couldn't hope to make contact with those they'd left behind. Marduk had solved the problem of getting to Gaia with the construction of the Aten — a whole city that defied time and space by taking a shortcut through the ethers. The Aten had passed into the possession of Lord Gibal upon Lord Marduk's ascent back to the Logos, and it was now stationed on Gibal's beloved water planet of Lura.

 

Raven, the systems analyst and pilot of the Bil-me, was manning the control panels when he noticed a most unusual reading on one of the exterior scanning monitors.

‘Hawk, I'm registering a life reading outside the ship,' Raven advised the captain through the intercom. ‘I think you should get up here and take a look at this.'

It only took the captain moments to make an appearance on the flight deck. ‘Did I hear you right?' He leant over his pilot's shoulder to view the readouts himself.

‘Sure did.' Raven nodded emphatically. ‘The database is telling me the life reading is human.'

Raven was some years older than Hawk and, apart from Crow, was the longest serving member of Hawk's
crew. For ten years they'd been raiding Pantheon storage depots and wreaking havoc where they could.

Raven treated Hawk with a fatherly manner, and Raven was, without question, the pirate captain's most trusted friend.

‘Now how the hell could that be? Any human outside this ship would have to be dead, so why the hell are we registering a
life
reading?' Hawk grabbed a headseat to speak with his technician. ‘Chook, are you spacewalking at present?' Hawk thought he'd better check, because the lad was often outside for maintenance duties.

‘With all the activity out there this morning,' Chook replied, tickled by the thought, ‘I don't think so.'

‘How about Crow?' Hawk didn't bother inquiring about Seagull, as he was too old for such endeavours and never left the ship. In fact, the cook rarely left his kitchen.

‘I haven't seen him go past me,' Chook told his captain. Anyone wanting to reach the dock, or either of the other two hatches to the exterior, would have to go through his engine room.