Chapter Eight #2
Clearly lots of beings from this realm had been to Earth in the past. She remembered Vorka telling her about many worlds that had been forbidden by the Tuatha De Danann, after violent beings like the Abnobians threatened to target them.
Vorka said these worlds were rubbed off the map before she was born the Map Keeper. But Camber could find Earth if she tried hard enough.
I’ll see how things pan out first before I give away my secrets.
Camber had hardly drifted off. Brogan was doing too much pacing. This was why wolves rarely left their planet for long. They got too claustrophobic.
“Hey, Wolf, come and lie down next to me.”
“Why?” Brogan said.
“Because you are wearing a hole on the floor and making it impossible to sleep.”
Brogan came over and placed a kit bag underneath her head. She turned one way, then the other, and started to turn a third time when Camber grabbed Brogan’s T-shirt. “If you turn one more time, Wolf, I’ll find a sleeping draught in my satchel and send you to sleep that way.”
“I need to run,” Brogan growled.
“We can’t do that at the moment. So let’s try to distract you.”
“In what way?”
“Tell me about wolves on your world, Earth. Your pack.”
Brogan ran her fingers through her hair. “Like I told you when we met, I come from the Irish Filtiaran pack, our nickname is the sea wolves, we live on the coast and love to swim and hunt.”
“I can’t imagine wolves liking to swim.”
Brogan was hit with the memories of the last time she went swimming with her family. “We live on the coast, and it’s just part of who we are. If my family could see me now, they’d never believe it was me. Flying around in space…”
Camber turned over on her side to look at Brogan. “I’m sure I would find your world out of the ordinary. Are you the only pack on Earth?”
“No, there’s the Scottish Wulvers, the English Ranwolves, the Welsh Blaidds, and the American Wolfgangs. There are others all over the world, but those are the ones who we know best. We do have other paranormals.”
“Paranormals?” Camber asked.
“It’s a word we use to distinguish between people like us. Like, from what I’ve seen so far in this place, having powers of some sort is more normal and out in the open. On my world it’s the other way around, and we keep our powers a secret. It would cause too many problems for us.”
“Strange. I’d like to see your world. Do you miss it?” Camber asked.
“Yes, I miss everything. I didn’t think I’d miss my family so quickly.”
“Why?”
“I’ve been living outside the pack on my own for years now, but I saw them just recently before all this happened and I was thrown into another realm. I wish I’d had more time with them.”
“Why have you been living on your own?” Camber asked.
Brogan didn’t want to get into that now. “That’s a story for another time, when we have time and are less stressed.”
“If you don’t work in your pack, what do you do?”
“I’m a tracker, but that’s just a side job. I paint, I’m an artist. That’s my passion.”
Camber’s eyes went wide. “A dominant wolf is an artist?”
“That surprises you? Art isn’t a dominant or submissive thing. It’s a way of expressing yourself, your emotions. I find it calms me down.”
Camber smiled. “You are a lot more than I first thought, Wolf.”
“I hope so. You thought I was sent to kill you or kidnap you,” Brogan said. “I still might.”
Camber looked deeply into Brogan’s eyes, the deep blue pools of a sea wolf, and shook her head. “No, you haven’t got it in you.”
Nothing was said between them for second after long second.
Camber was falling deeply into those wolf eyes until she finally got hold of herself.
She covered the awkwardness with a laugh.
“I promise you when we get to where we’re going, you’ll get to run with the wind in your fur.
In the meantime, if you need to shift, go ahead. ”
“I think I will. It would help,” Brogan said.
Camber turned over on her side to give Brogan her privacy. She heard Brogan dispense with her clothes, then heard a whine and the sound of paws on the metal floor.
Camber couldn’t sleep because she couldn’t relax for that long with another person around her.
It was a defensive mechanism that had been drilled into her as far back as she could remember, because it could save her life.
But if she pretended to sleep, it would let Brogan relax enough to pad around without feeling inhibited.
Camber did feel tired, and the soft whines coming from Brogan’s wolf were soothing in a strange kind of way. Her mind floated into nothingness.
Ninti could almost feel the tension around her laboratory as Davor made his way to her. Her younger scientists stood at attention at their stations.
She smiled as Davor entered.
“My dear Madam Ninti.” Davor took her hand and kissed it. “My dear. I hope I haven’t made your scientists too worried.”
Ninti leaned in to him and smiled, “Perhaps a little.”
She wasn’t expecting him today, and that made her a little worried.
“Would you mind if we had a quick meeting, my dear?”
“Of course, Davor.” She led the way to her office. “Perhaps I could offer you some Durian brandy?” Ninti said.
“That would be delightful, madam.”
“Please, sit down.” Ninti pointed to the soft but elegant couch.
“Thank you.”
Ninti took an elaborate twisted red bottle from her drinks tray. Durian brandy was so expensive and rare, only very few people had seen a bottle, far less tasted it. The bottle opened with a pop, and she poured out the drink into two miniature red crystal Durian flutes.
Ninti took the glasses over and handed one to Davor. He accepted his glass and said, “This is an excellent thousand year old bottle. You spoil me, madam.”
Davor held up his glass. “To the empire.”
Ninti mirrored his toast, while mentally she felt guilt and uneasiness. “The empire.”
Davor took his first sip and hummed in pleasure. “This is exemplary. Such a shame we were left with no choice but to destroy the Durians. Now all we have left is a small stock of this wonderful drink.”
Ninti mentally shivered. The choice was to give over their planet and their people, and worship them, or be destroyed. The Durians chose to die on their feet rather than serve the Abnobians on their knees.
A noble path, and one of the contributing factors to turning Ninti against her own people, and so she always kept a bottle of Durian brandy on her drinks table, to remind her of the noble stand the Durians made.
“What can I do for you, Davor?”
“I want an update on how your tests are going.”
“The genome tests are going slowly but in the right direction,” Ninti said.
He sighed. “Is there any resource that what help with your work?”
“Just time, I’m sorry to say. The resistance took great care to destroy every bit of research we had and corrupt the DNA fragments we had stored.”
The Abnobian warrior class had been their greatest achievement.
They’d manipulated the DNA of their own kind so they were the strongest warriors, masters in every weapon.
But there had been one warrior greater than all the rest, but she’d gone wrong and helped bring the empire down to its lowest ebb.
They had been rebuilding for generations.
Davor leaned forward. “You know what I want. The greatest warrior we ever produced, Commander Redu.”
“Kartog is on a mission right now to find some fragments of her DNA,” Ninti lied.
Finding the Map Keeper and keeping her safe was the thing that mattered at the moment. The commander’s time would come, but not now.
“When we have all the fragments, she can be reborn, eventually.”
“And we can make her life go right this time,” Davor said angrily.
That thought drove Ninti and Kartog to make sure that didn’t happen. “Indeed.”
Davor’s anger turned to smiles in an instant.
“The rest of the council don’t have the same drive as you and I, Ninti.
We are the only remnants of the first empire, the grand old days when everyone on that council made that kingdom with their own sweat and toil, and their ancestors’ sweat and toil.
” He took another sip of his drink. “They think controlling a number of planetary systems is success, when we know that is our species hardly getting off the ground.”
“That is true. But we must educate them if we want our council to be strong again. We know only anarchy lies without a twelve person council.”
Ninti wanted to remind Davor that while he was certainly the leader of the council, he couldn’t lead it like a dictator. It was tradition that the Abnobians led by the council of twelve, because as the saying on Abnobia went for millennia, Chaos reigns when gods come to blows.
“Of course, madam. I just wanted to emphasize that we are the heart and soul of that council, and we must keep pushing the council onward.”
Ninti had struggled over the years to follow her own morality while keeping her position on the council. Kartog had encouraged Ninti, when she felt at her lowest, when the guilt of her actions got too much to bear alone.
The resistance could have no greater asset than a god, sitting at the table of gods. So she kept going. If Davor knew what an influence Kartog was to her, he would have Kartog killed. Escheal were slaves to their masters, a higher class of slave than others, but a slave all the same.
But Kartog was no slave. She came from a long line of protectors on her home world, and Ninti knew Kartog would defend her to Ninti’s last breath. Not because of obligation or fear, but because she loved her, in the purest way anyone could love another.
Kartog opening her heart had been the greatest gift anyone could ever give her, and that had saved her soul.
“If you can be successful in your project,” Davor said, “and I get my hands on the Map Keeper, we will be unstoppable.”