B00BKLL1XI EBOK (48 page)
Authors: Greg Fish
“So you’re going to do with humans what you did with the Children?”
“That’s the idea. I’ve dealt with this stuff before. I never had to force anyone. It’s just that there were always enough people to make the choice. Humans want to move forward. They always want more and they always want better. If we put it out there, most will want to take it. Hopefully, the Nation will have two home worlds in due time.”
“As simple as that, huh?”
“Yes. Nothing sinister needs to be involved. We didn’t exactly keep any of this a huge secret either.”
“So what will happen to us? To Steve and me that is.”
Ace shrugged.
“That depends,” he replied. “Whatever you want. If you want to join the Nation, you can do it. If you want to stay on Earth, go for it. Wherever you feel most welcome and wherever you like it more. You’ve already done more than enough as humans to leave a legacy. The rest is up to you.”
Christine looked out into the ocean. The slow, lazy waves rolled over each other as the tide was coming in. Overhead, a hypersonic jet screamed through the sky, heading for the other side of the world. On her right and left, towering skyscrapers built or modified by the Nation soared into the sky.
“I guess it’s one of those things I need to think about,” she said. “I’ll see you around.”
He silently nodded with a knowing expression on his face. She turned around and headed back into the city.
As she walked through the urban maze, she glanced at the giant holographic screens floating on the roofs of high rises and the sides of chrome and carbon spires. On one of the screens running a commercial for a documentary on interstellar wars, she noticed Ace’s face on a dark background. His eyes and the runes on his cheeks glowing with their usual, eerie radiance. They glowed like the searing eyes of the Reaper and the Dark Gods...
[ epilogue _ 000 ]
Somewhere in an unknown galaxy, millions upon millions of light years away from the Milky Way was a primeval world very similar to Earth. It had vast blue oceans, sweeping supercontinents, and long stretches of reddish deserts. Dense forests of blue-green vegetation snaked in valleys and spread along the vast beaches. Three beautiful, haunting moons loomed large in its sky along with a faint image of a nearby galaxy. Bizarre and amazing creatures lurked on the ground, swam in the oceans and flew from tree to tree.
Deep in the lush jungles of this world was a building older than some planets. Its enormous pillars and spires were made of a thick, dense rock as a single structure bonded to the soil on which it stood. Inside its cavernous halls, creatures clad in dark, flexible armor with glowing white eyes went about their daily tasks. Like all powerful, space faring civilizations they were mostly synthetic and had an unlimited lifespan. Some of them had lived long enough to see the birth and death of worlds with their own eyes. Standing twelve feet tall and with the round, streamlined shape of an armored centipede of the Earth’s Carboniferous period, they were an impressive sight.
They scuttled around on no less than twenty short, claw like limbs located at their tail ends. The rest of their bodies were upright, giving them an L-shaped profile. Their six arms, extremely long and multi-joined versions of their lower limbs with grasping digits easily manipulated books, scrolls and artifacts lined along the walls. Five streak-like white eyes arranged in a V pattern on the top of their upright body sections, glowed with an icy light.
One of these strange aliens made its way across the vast temple holding a small, cube-like device which shone with ever changing lines of swirling, slashing symbols. It made its way into a hall where statues of other alien life forms were lined up in a long procession on rectangular podiums. The podiums were half filled with a wild menagerie of otherworldly organisms. The alien proceeded to a particular section of the wall where the statues of a Shape Shifter, a Dark God and a Shadow Demon were placed in chronological order, cast out of a dense metal to be of similar size to each other. On the podium of the Dark God was a symbol resembling angled claw marks bisected by a swoosh and a curve.
Shaking its cube, it hummed and touched the statue of the Dark God. A narrow holographic window rose above the statue displaying the vital characteristics of the organism. With its nimble digits, the centipede-like alien changed an entry in the window by tapping on its cube. Scuttling over to the statue of a Shadow Demon, it summoned another holographic window and changed the same entry as it did for the Dark God. With a soft chime, the holograms faded and the symbol on the podium of the Dark God was filled in until the podium’s face was smooth. On the podium holding up a statue of a Shadow Demon, the same symbol that was on the Dark God’s platform was stamped in by an invisible force. It was the universal symbol for a Sentry.
The alien centipede shook its cube again, turned, and proceeded on its way to another vast chamber in the ancient Hall of Records...
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