Annani
"Should I pour, Clan Mother?"
"No, thank you. I will pour it myself."
He bowed and retreated.
Alena reached for one of the cookies. "The Odus are all becoming more like Okidu."
"Do you mean more sentient?"
Alena chuckled. "No, more theatrical. They all act as if they are playing a part in a British drama about aristocrats. It's entertaining, but sometimes it gets annoying."
"I like it." Annani reached for the teapot. "Some old-world manners that have gone extinct but are still endearing." She poured a cup for Alena and handed it to her.
"I wouldn't call it endearing." Alena lifted the cup to her lips. "Creepy, is what you mean." She took a small sip and closed her eyes. "The tea is excellent. There is something to be said for biomechanical precision."
"Indeed." Annani sipped the tea. "Is Orion taking E.T. to Geraldine?"
"Of course. He's still afraid to be alone with the baby even though E.T. is almost ten months old. Geraldine loves having him over, so I don't say anything."
"Smart."
Alena smiled. "I don't know about that. She spoils him. The last time Orion took him there, she let E.T. eat an entire piece of chocolate cheesecake. He came home nearly comatose."
Annani frowned. "I thought that sugar made babies hyperactive."
"Not E.T." Alena took another sip and put her teacup down. "It affects him the opposite way. He turns sleepy."
"Interesting. Did any of your other children react that way?"
Alena shook her head. "As amazing as it sounds, each child was different.
Is different. It proved reincarnation to me long before I met David and learned the whole story about you and him meeting in one of his previous lives.
The proof was that no child arrived as a clean page.
They all came with a history. They couldn't remember it, of course, but it shaped the kind of people they were. "
Annani smiled. "I wonder who Evander Tellesious was in his previous life."
"A philosopher," Alena said. "I'm sure of that. Or a sloth. But since cross-species transmigration is not a thing, he's the first one."
"I do not appreciate my grandson being called a sloth even if he likes to nap a lot."
"I'm not complaining." Alena reached for the teapot and refilled her cup. "He's my easiest baby. He still takes two naps during the day, and he sleeps twelve hours every night."
"Kian was my easiest," Annani said. "By the way, he is stopping here on his way home. He has updates for me about the extraction mission."
Alena's hand paused with the cup a few inches from her mouth. "When?"
"Do you mean Kian coming over or the timing of the mission?"
"Both."
Annani looked out the window at the setting sun. "Kian will be here soon, and as for the mission, I assume that is what he is going to tell me."
Alena nodded. "It's about time. You've been waiting long enough."
"The last few weeks have been difficult. Every time I thought Khiann was about to return to me, something else went wrong."
Alena set her cup down.
"I'm still stunned from hearing the news about Losham's brothers. Was Kian involved in planning that?"
"Not as far as I know. I believe it was Losham's initiative, and the actual execution was handled by the enhanced soldiers."
"I think it changes the dynamics in ways that favor us," Alena said. "From what I heard, Losham is pragmatic. He's not going to embark on any wild rampages."
Annani refilled her cup and lifted the teapot to signal to Ogidu that he should brew some more.
"Losham is a very dangerous male, but luckily, he is under Toven's control for now. As long as that lasts, he is not going to do anything we do not want him to do."
"That is leverage we have never had before."
Ogidu collected the empty teapot in silence, bowed, and retreated.
"No, we have not," Annani said. "Even when we had Lokan as an informant, he had to be careful because he was operating against the Brotherhood.
He could not act openly, and there was a limit to what he could find out for us.
Losham is the one giving the orders, and now he has no serious opposition left.
Whatever Toven tells him to do, he will do, and his subordinates will carry it out without question, because he is now the only authority on the island. "
"Until the next contender emerges."
"Yes. The junior brothers will not be content forever.
One of them will eventually become ambitious enough to try something, and when that happens, we will have to decide what to do about it.
But for now, the leverage is real, and it gives me some much-needed peace of mind.
" Annani smiled. "Especially now that I will want to devote all of my time to Khiann. "
Thoughts of her mate had been her constant companion for fifty centuries. At first, it had been grief, then long centuries of hoping he would come back to her as a reincarnated soul, and then recently, the miracle of realizing that he might be alive and in stasis and return to her in the flesh.
Or whatever was left of it. Five thousand years in stasis didn't leave much behind, but the blueprint was there, and with proper care his body would know how to rebuild itself, and he would be whole again.
But would he?
Wonder had lost her memory after five thousand years of stasis.
Eventually the memories came back, but that was not guaranteed to happen.
Ell-rom, who had been in stasis longer, did not regain his memories.
After seventy centuries, give or take, in a ship that had been sabotaged into taking ten times longer than it should have to deliver him to Earth, he had lost his memories of his life on Anumati.
What he had recovered was through Morelle, who had not lost any of hers and remembered things for him.
Luckily for Ell-rom, he and his twin sister had been inseparable, and all their experiences had been collected together, so he could recover most of it from her tales.
The three of them had healed, each in his or her own way, but they did not emerge as the same people they had been before the stasis. Each of them had changed.
Wonder had been a shy and reserved girl when she had been Annani's best friend. Now she was a confident and assertive female.
Ell-rom was still searching for himself, conflicted between his gentle disposition and his Fate-given ability to kill at a distance.
His death-ray ability, as they were calling it.
The Fates had burdened him with a terrible gift, but they had also ensured that the deadly gift was bestowed on the kindest and gentlest soul so it would not be used for evil.
The Fates were smart.
What did the Fates have in store for Khiann?
Would she get back a man who looked like Khiann but who did not remember her or their love and who was fundamentally different than the man she had fallen in love with five thousand years ago?
She could deal with that, but what she could not deal with was the worst possibility imaginable, that Khiann would not survive the resurrection.
She did not know whether she could endure losing him a second time.
She had survived the first time because she had been young and she had a monumental mission to undertake and children to conceive and raise and a clan to build.
But now that the mission was largely accomplished, or at least on the right track, and the children were grown, she might not have the strength to continue.
She set the cup down carefully.
"You are quiet," Alena said.
"I am thinking about Khiann."
Alena reached across the small space between them and put her hand over Annani's. "You do not have to be brave about this. Not with me."
Annani's eyes filled, but she did not let the tears fall. She was the Clan Mother, and she did not let anyone see her cry.
"I am being brave because I do not know how else to be."
"It's okay to be afraid. You are not made of stone."
"I am afraid, very much so."
Ogidu returned with the teapot, put it down on the tray, and retreated to the kitchen.
His appearance had been a welcome respite that had put a pause on the emotional whirlwind that was threatening to swallow Annani.
When the doorbell rang announcing Kian, Ogidu rushed to the front door, and a moment later her son entered the sitting room.
"Good afternoon." Kian walked toward Annani, bent down, and kissed her cheek.
He kissed Alena's cheek next and lowered himself onto the couch beside Annani.
"Help yourself to some tea." Annani gestured toward the tray. "Ogidu made a fresh pot just minutes ago."
Kian poured himself a cup, took one sip, and set it down again.
"The mission is scheduled for Friday night, island time," he said. "Friday morning here."
Despite expecting the news, there was a sense of tightening in Annani's chest, but she forced the anxiety to loosen its grip so she could keep her composure in front of her children.
"That is sooner than I expected, although later than you originally planned."
Kian nodded. "We delayed the excavation efforts by compelling Losham to halt the night shifts.
The scientists and the others on the island needed more time to organize their end, and the team at Safe Harbor needed more time to test the equipment and run another simulation.
Being over-prepared is always better than being under-prepared.
That's why I added more Guardians and the two Odus to the team.
Okidu and Onidu will help the excavation go faster, and another team of Guardians will serve as backup on the submarine, ready to deploy in case things go south. "
"Wasn't the EMP the backup plan?" Alena asked.
"The EMP is the backup to the backup." He smiled.
"We have a submarine that's EMP-hardened, which means we can deploy the EMP without disabling our own means of escape.
Same goes for the diving equipment and communication devices.
We have eight inflatable waterproof casings for the chests, three extras in case some become defective. "
Kian paused as he sipped more tea.
"The EMP device is built into a delivery drone that can be launched from Safe Harbor and reach the island's airspace from above the radar threshold.
If we have to use it, the device will be detonated over the central ridge of the island.
The blast radius will cover both the military and the resort sides.
The ridge is the highest point on the island, and the EMP propagates radially.
Detonating at altitude gives us the widest coverage.
Deploying it from a lower altitude would mean a blast that hits a smaller area and might leave some of the island's electronics operational.
We don't want that. At least, not until our people have retrieved the chests and made their way off the island and far enough out that they are safe from pursuit. There is also the issue of the enhanced soldiers and the women they plan to rescue being able to leave the island. The EMP will disable the ships docked at the harbor, preventing their departure. We want to give them an opportunity to leave beforehand.”
Alena reached for another cookie. "But you are not going to use it unless you have to, right?"
"The whole operation is designed to avoid the EMP.
It's a contingency. If everything goes well, we go in stealthily, the cameras get looped, the alarms get bypassed, the chests come out through the cove and go straight to the submarine.
No one on the island will know we were there until the chests are missed, and by then we are long gone.
The soldiers help the scientists and the women they extract onto a supply ship, and they are gone as well. "
"You mentioned something about bombing the cross-island tunnel," Alena said. "Is that also still a contingency?"
"Yes. We have six assault drones with an EMP-hardened build that are configured to bomb the tunnel connecting the military and resort areas of the island.
If our Guardians face danger or an issue arises, we can delay reinforcements arriving from the military side.
Without access to the tunnel, it will take them quite a bit longer to get there. "
"So, it will not prevent them from reaching the resort side," Annani said. "It will only delay them?"
"Correct. But the delay should be enough to get our people and the chests out of there.
Once we are beyond the island's territorial waters and into the open ocean, we are clear.
They don't have a navy to chase us, and we'll be out of range of their weapons, if those are still functioning after the EMP is deployed. "
Annani did not like the idea of bombing tunnels and detonating EMP devices over the island where many innocent people lived, both the trafficked women in the brothel and the human laborers brought in for the construction work and the staff of the resort.
The contingencies might cause a lot of damage and harm, which everyone in the clan preferred to avoid.
But the safety of the Guardians and Khiann's retrieval took priority.
She set her cup down. "I would rather have our people home and bear the guilt over what the contingencies cost than to have our people lost and bear the guilt of not having done what was necessary to protect them."
"My thoughts exactly," Kian said. "I'm glad we are on the same page.
But just to ease your mind, according to Turner, most of the consumer electronics will likely remain physically intact but will be unusable for a time because the supporting infrastructure is down.
Most of the phones and communication devices will function once the towers are repaired.
And a small device like the transmitter we gave to the enhanced soldiers might not be affected at all. "
Annani let out a long breath.
"I worry that something will go wrong before Friday. Another collapse. Another explosion."
"The delays worked in our favor," Alena said. "The Fates have been merciful."
"That is what I have been telling myself."
"We should pray," Alena suggested.
Praying did not guarantee success, but it never hurt, and it provided solace.
"We should," Annani agreed.
Alena reached for her hand, and Annani took her son's hand on the other side. Kian's eyebrows rose because he was not the praying type, but he did not pull away.