CHAPTER 92

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They grew older and the big house gained some life. Razmik was the first of the travellers to emerge from his quarters and, after speaking briefly with O’Connor, he excused himself to deal with business matters. He promised to share the full details of the events in Africa, but said that it would be best to wait for the others.

When Homer emerged Razmik told him that he could go outside. Razmik’s home was sited in the countryside, on a sprawling estate, and Homer could enjoy a fair degree of privacy. Razmik said that he had dismissed his guards for the time being to ensure that privacy. Considering who his guests were, security could not be a great concern.

By the time that Anna, the old housekeeper, had started preparing lunch, the others had emerged and gathered in a lavishly decorated living room. Anna was an unusual woman, she did not seem even slightly perturbed by Razmik’s guests, not even Homer seemed to draw more than the slightest of raised eyebrows from her.

Homer carried Stryker to join them. Stryker draped his arms around Homer’s neck and made ridiculous swooning noises in an excessively high-pitched imitation of a female voice. Even Homer laughed, his was a booming bass chuckle.

When they gathered there was a sense of reunion. Even Stryker and Slayer, who had not been with them from the beginning, seemed to feel a sense of comfort in having the group united again. Homer put Stryker down on a couch and then moved to crouch near the armchair where Ardia sat. Then they shared, first O’Connor and Stryker updating the others on their adventure, or misadventure, in Rome. Then the others shared their recent history. Razmik did most of the telling. Homer’s comments orbited his combat with the other Hybrids, his easy success with two and easy failure with Hercules. O’Connor could clearly see the burning desire in Homer to test himself again. Ardia remained silent through the telling. Only at the end, when Razmik spoke of the ruined settlement, did she speak up. When she did, she spoke with a crack in her voice, and tears stalking at the edges of her eyes.

‘The Crucible has to be destroyed,’ Ardia said. There was such a fierceness in the statement that none of the others even seemed to know how to respond, at first.

Eventually, O’Connor spoke. ‘Could we leverage it? If we can get our hands on it, could we use it against them? Draw them out, finally get an understanding of who we’re dealing with?’

Ardia shook her head vigorously. She said, ‘No. We don’t even know who they are. And we can’t take chances with it, whatever it is. You weren’t there, you didn’t see what happened to that settlement. That changed things.’

‘How so?’ Razmik spoke slowly.

‘It made all of this a lot bigger. It’s not just about my mother any more, or Homer’s father. This is bigger than that. Those monsters destroyed an entire little village. They killed people. Children.’

O’Connor was nodding along with her.

Stryker said, ‘And who did it? What are we dealing with?’

‘The hybrids,’ said Ardia.

‘Is that what we’re callin’ em?’ Stryker asked.

O’Connor said, ‘It seems as good a term as any. We don’t know what they’re really made up of, but they look like they’re part human, part something else.’

Homer said, ‘I feel human. More than part. These others though, they felt different. There’s more of the other side in them.’

‘Then who the hell are the other ones? The soldiers?’ asked Stryker.

Ardia shook her head. Razmik said, ‘I don’t know. But, it is very obvious that there are two other parties in this.’

Ardia said, ‘Troy and Zeus.’

‘But, which is which?’ said O’Connor. ‘Which of them sends hybrids, which of them sends lobotomized humans?’

Homer held up a hand to stop him. He said, ‘I don’t think it’s exclusive.’

The others were silent, they waited for Homer to expand on his statement. He seemed to pause and consider for a moment. When he spoke next, he spoke carefully, ‘I think that Hyperion is separate to the hybrids we met in Africa.’

‘So, you think he was with the same party that sent the soldiers?’ Razmik said. ‘You’ll need to explain.’

Homer said, ‘It is only a thought. I can’t know any better than the rest of you. Consider this, though. Hyperion was clothed, with human modesty. He appeared allied with the reptile creature, Prometheus. They extracted from Slayer the location of Metis. The other Hybrids, they were not clothed. They also felt… different to Hyperion. They felt more savage.’

‘That’s a little loose, big fella,’ Stryker said. ‘I’m not sure we can put them together like that. What if Hyperion and Prometheus are separate completely?’

Ardia said, ‘Another player, again? No, I think the odds of that are pretty low. It makes sense that either the hybrids or the soldiers are connected to Hyperion and Prometheus. That’s how they knew to come.’

‘So,’ said Razmik, ‘the question is who was with who, and which one is Troy and which one is Zeus.’

‘We don’t know anything about Zeus,’ said Ardia.

‘We don’t know anything about Troy, either,’ said Homer.

Ardia disagreed. She said, ‘That’s not entirely true. Werner told Stryker that Troy has been referenced since maybe the thirties. Troy is, or was, connected in some way with Ilya Ivanovich, the soviet scientist. Troy is connected with the place in Berlin. Metis called them both makers. Zeus is a total unknown, otherwise. We know enough to be able to assume that they’re enemies in some shape or form, maybe competitors. So we do know a little about Troy.’

‘Yes,’ said Slayer. ‘And we know more. Metis made it clear that the zombie faced soldiers were Troy’s people. She said Troy’s were worse for her than Zeus’s.’

Homer said, ‘Yes. When she spoke to me, she told me to kill the last of them. Then we do know, Zeus is the one associated with the other hybrids. Troy is the other one.’

‘What age would he have to be?’ O’Connor said.

Ardia said, ‘What?’

O’Connor said, ‘Think about it. Troy was doing work in the facility in Berlin, maybe he made Stryker what he is today-’

Stryker interrupted him, ‘Did a mighty fine job, too.’ There was humor on his face, but not in his eyes.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

‘Yes,’ resumed O’Connor, ‘a work of art. What I’m trying to get at is how old is he? I mean, if he was practicing complicated work in Berlin, what age was he then? He must have been, at the absolute minimum, in his twenties? I doubt someone that young could even really have the knowledge to do the kind of work that produced Stryker, so he was probably much older. That was more than eighty years ago. If he was, say thirty, which I think is probably low-balling it, then he’d be north of a hundred and ten years old now.’

There was silence.

Ardia said, ‘Even if he wasn’t… If he was only twenty, he’d be more than a hundred years old.’

‘So they’re not the same,’ said Stryker.

‘Or maybe, Troy is not a person,’ said Razmik. ‘It could be a group or an organization.’

‘I dunno,’ said Stryker. ‘The way Werner was talking, it sounded like he meant a guy.’

O’Connor said, ‘Then it can’t be the same person.’

‘Don’t be so sure,’ said Razmik.

‘What do you mean?’ O’Connor said.

Razmik gestured towards Homer and Ardia, then towards Stryker. He said, ‘There are more things happening right now than would seem ordinarily possible. Stryker is apparently in his, what, nineties?’

‘And I never felt better,’ Stryker said, gently patting his mosaic of bandages.

‘All we know for sure,’ said Ardia, ‘is that there’s two of them. They both have resources. They both want The Crucible. Right now, we need to know how to get it.’

With that said, she turned to Slayer.

CHAPTER 93

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An excerpt from the diary of Damien Slayer

They all looked at me then. They looked and waited.

This was a difficult moment for me. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I didn’t have reason to trust them. They had helped me with Metis, after all. And they had saved me from Prometheus. Metis had even as good as given me the go ahead to tell them.

The hard part was doing it. I had held the location of The Crucible as a secret for many years. It was, as far as I could imagine, a terrible secret to have to carry. Metis had imparted on me, not just The Crucible’s location, not just an ability to detect it, but a sense of how truly terrible it could be.

I gathered myself. I understood I had to do this, had to reveal this dark thing.

I said, ‘Metis told me about it, years ago, when I helped her move to her cave.’

Ardia stared at me and asked, ‘How did she know about it?’

I said, ‘It was her last act of defiance, I think. She had been some kind of a captive, of the one named Troy. Something happened, I don’t know what. It is so hard to try and assemble a story from Metis. She was a captive of his, then something disastrous happened to him. His base of operations was attacked, or destroyed. This is what afforded her the opportunity to escape. It also forced him to flee. For whatever reason, he felt he needed to hide The Crucible. When he had hidden it, Metis took the memory from him.’

‘She wiped his mind?’ Ardia asked.

‘Then he doesn’t have The Crucible. You can only take us to it, not to him?’ Homer said.

I looked from one of them to the other. I answered Ardia first, ‘I know no limit to Metis’s powers. Yes, she wiped it from his mind. I think she did it as a way of lashing out at him. I think she could have killed him, with her mind, but she seems unwilling to. Just like in Chad, she sent the hybrids away instead of killing them.’

‘Where is it?’ Abraham asked.

I did a double take when he spoke. I think it was the first he had spoken since we gathered in the living room. On reflection, he had been sitting there, brooding darkly for the duration. I should have been more aware of it, but things had been moving fast. I was distracted by the events, by the information, by my own injuries. Abraham had been sitting, a little way from everyone else, watching. Mainly watching Homer, with a veiled expression.

I said, ‘In a mountain, in the Javakheti mountains.’

‘In Georgia?’ Razmik asked.

‘We gotta go to the states now?’ Stryker asked, his face growing weary.

‘No,’ I explained. ‘Georgia, the country.

‘It’s only a few hours from here,’ said Razmik.

Abraham said, ‘That’s not very specific.’

I said, ‘It would be easier to show you. It’s hard to just describe it.’

Ardia looked at me and asked the question I’d been waiting for. ‘Why haven’t you ever gone there and gotten The Crucible yourself?’

I spread my hands. God knows, I had tried. But I’d never had the resources.

I said, ‘It’s pretty inaccessible. Troy hid The Crucible in a previous facility he’d used. This facility was carved into a cave system in one of the mountains. The problem is that the only accessible entrance is buried in an earth slide. The only other access is through an entrance far up one of the steep faces of the mountain. I’m not a mountain climber, and even if I was, I don’t think any normal human could make that climb.’

‘I can make any climb,’ Homer informed me. He wasn’t really bragging, it was a statement of fact, one that I believed. One I had to believe, because I was counting on it.

‘I’ll bet I can make it too,’ said Ardia.

That was another bet that I was willing to take.

CHAPTER 94

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MESSAGE 1 - SENDER: ANONYMOUS

Okay. Is this for real? Do you know who I am?

MESSAGE 2 - SENDER: ZEUS

Indeed it is. And, yes, I do know who you are. I was beginning to think that you weren’t going to take us up on our offer.

MESSAGE 3 - SENDER: ANONYMOUS

I’m still not sure that I am going to take you up on your offer. I have no reason to trust you. How can I know that you won’t stab me in the back somehow?

MESSAGE 4 - SENDER: ZEUS

I suppose you can’t really know for certain. Let me explain some things to you. I have not gotten as far as I have by breaching trusts. I’m sure you can imagine the network of cooperation I have at my disposal. I don’t possess such a network through betrayal. It is, in fact, quite the opposite. I have achieved much of what I have achieved by building trust.

Further to all of that, what reason would I have to lie to you? What advantage would there be for me in, as you said, stabbing you in the back. All I can achieve by doing that is alienating someone who could be a valuable asset.

Come now, you did not open this conversation if you did not have some plans, and something of value for me that would help realize those plans. There has been a development, I think. You must have found the communications chip days ago, after my agent gave it to you. The fact that you are contacting me now suggests to me that an opportunity is arising.

MESSAGE 5 - SENDER: ANONYMOUS

Yes. Something has developed. They are going to go get The Crucible. It’s just going to be Homer and Ardia, on their own. So there’s an opportunity to do what your “agent” said you could do. The problem is that I can’t be sure of any of this. I can’t be sure you won’t hurt her.

MESSAGE 6 - SENDER: ZEUS

Hurting her would completely defeat the purpose, would it not? Again, the fact that you are contacting me and the fact that it is true that you really can’t be sure of me, means you are probably willing to take some small risk with her. I have no interest in her. If I can get to them, on their own, then I can arrange to remove her without harm. I can remove Homer perfectly.

It is essential that I remove him. I think we are of one mind on this matter. My agent believes you desire her, and that you fear she has a growing desire for him. That must sicken you. I think we are of one mind on this matter. The very idea of that sickens me as well. The very idea of it. It is akin to bestiality in my mind.

MESSAGE 7 - SENDER: ANONYMOUS

I’m not sure the others see it that way, but it’s true. It’s sick. He’s not a human. I don’t think the others even see it happening, but I do. I’ve known her a long time, I know her well enough to see it.

MESSAGE 8 - SENDER: ZEUS

Then just tell me where they are going. Tell me where and I will remove him from your world forever. You won’t have to contend with him. You won’t have to contend with the possibility of that abominable union.

Imagine, if you don’t, you may have to see it becoming a reality. Think of it. Imagine it.

MESSAGE 9 - SENDER: ANONYMOUS

This was a mistake. I can’t do this.

MESSAGE 10 - SENDER: ZEUS

Wait. This is beyond essential to me. I need The Crucible. You need to believe me, I need it. And I need to remove Homer from her as well. You cannot know how genuinely it disturbs me to imagine what you think is going to happen. From my deepest heart, I need to stop it. And I need The Crucible. If you can help me with this then I will not only remove Homer, I will be in your debt. I will owe you a favor. One you can call in anytime. Money? A swift and terrible murder? Anything.

I promise you, I will keep her safe. This is your only chance.