Once I had given my orders to both of them, I left to take care of other business that day. Namely, the timeline for the dispersion and movement of the fleet in orbit as they prepared to leave and begin reaching for another world. We had killed the Queen on Obelisk nearly two years ago and I had spent the rest of the time cleaning up the Horde and planning the next planet that they would all be going to. As the Admiral technically in charge of this fleet, it fell to me to make sure all the minute details were taken care of before they set out.

After I'd finished with the fleet's preparations, the projected date and time for their departure was settled and I left them all in the hands of Principaility Chen and left him to work out how to take back the chosen planet and begin to build a new Nephilim colony on it. Already, the other planets were all reporting that they had successfully taken out the Queens on the worlds they'd been sent to and I hoped they would all keep the momentum of their conquest from dying. I hadn't expected any of them to find and kill a Queen until after the fifth year. That all of them were confirming the death of the current Horde Queens and the lack of successors was very good in my opinion.

"Rickshaw, someone has requested to speak to you," Cai told me, interrupting my paperwork. A welcome interruption.

"Who is it?" I asked.

"Your great-nephew," he answered.

"Send him in," I sighed. I didn't know this man or his father; the fact that I was in at least one of his father's baby pictures didn't mean that I knew him.

The door opened and the young man in question walked in and paused when he saw me.

"Please, sit," I motioned to the chair in front of my desk and he moved to sit there before speaking.

"Thank you sir, for agreeing to see me," he began. "I wanted to discuss our relationship."

"You're my nephew," I told him. "That means that you can look back in your family tree and find my sister. That doesn't mean that we know one another."

"Precisely," he said. "I was hoping that you would allow the connection between us to remain a secret while I'm here. I realize that I'll likely be here for several years if not decades, but I don't want people to think that I'm here because of that connection. I was asked here to study the linguistic and archeological signifigance of the relic and that is why I accepted the invitation. Most of xeno-linguistics is frowned on as a joke field since the Cybers automatically translate anything said for us and the other alien races can read it out to us, the opprotunity to study the language of a dead civilization is something I'm excited to begin work on."

"You are aware that the relic in question is capable of translating itself into our own language?" I asked him.

"I am, sir," he said, nodding. "I also have high hopes that we might find other artifacts from this civilization, perhaps on their home planet, and having a working cipher of the language that isn't given to us will allow us so much more insight into how they thought and lived. The grammar they use will help to determine the baseline intelligence of the people who might have left the artifacts behind. The spelling will speak to any changes in sentence structure and education of those people and it will also allow us to trace where certain words in their language may have come from. My dissertation was on the fact that the word 'gin-thi'rmp' was rooted in the combination of two words 'gin-rp' and 'tha'ne' in the Tar-en-fil language."

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As he spoke the young man became more and more animated and made more motions with his hands as he explained the differences in the words and languages he had studied his whole life. I tried not to yawn at the jargon and other terms that I didn't understand. Finally, he stopped to catch his breath and I spoke before he could continue.

"I can keep our family relationship hidden," I told him. "Do you have a preference for your name? Sanders can stay, but I don't think Rickshaw can. Last I knew, it was widely considered a name with bad luck since I was exiled from Earth."

"Alan," he told me. "Everyone calls me that anyway. Rickshaw was my father and I hated being called Junior, so we stuck with my middle name."

"Alright," I said. "Cai make sure that in all documents and databases, public and private, that Rickshaw Alan Sanders, Junior is changed to Alan Sanders."

"Done," he said to me.

"It's done," I told Alan.

"Just like that?" he asked skeptically.

"I am the Demigod overseeing the entirety of the Nephilim Army," I pointed out. "If something I wanted done didn't happen, someone's ass would be under my boot soon enough."

"That sounds like a bad thing," he said.

"It might be, but I see it as a perk of my position and I strive not to abuse it," I agreed. "Besides, Cai's pretty much hard-wired into all the files in the Nephilim database. If he doesn't have a hand that can get in it, then someone's hiding something from me and I need to bring the hammer down anyways."

"I guess when you put it like that it makes sense," he said. "It just sounds to me like my brother and I were right in all our assumptions of you."

"What assumptions?" I asked.

"My little brother is really proud to have you in the family tree," Alan explained. "He says that you're the greatest hero to have ever come out of humanity and that we should be proud to show off our connection to you. Even read your book cover to cover and says that you're exactly what we need leading the fight for us. A hard-ass, no-nonsense, badass fighter that eats danger for breakfast."

"My book?" I asked. I hadn't written a book.

"Rise of the Nephilim Demigod," Alan said. "I've got a copy here somewhere, he insisted that I have you sign it and send it back to him, but I wasn't going to do that. Did you not write it?"

"I didn't," I told him. "What's it like?"

"It's advertised as an autobiography and it's written from your point of view," he explained. "I think it paints you as some sort of crazy narcissicist with a god-complex that should be in a mental ward, but that's just what I think after reading it."

"I think the jury's still out on crazy," I told him, "but I'm no narcissicist and I definitely don't have a god-complex. My shrink can attest to all that."

"You have a psychologist?" he asked as though surprised at the idea.

"Of course," I told him. "I spend more time in dangerous combat situations than most people think. All Nephilim do. I mandated that all Nephilim are to speak to someone after either fifteen years of fighting or reaching Wing. I'm beyond that time limit and that rank, so if I didn't speak to someone then that would paint a hypocritical picture of me."

"Wow, that actually changes a lot," he said. "Could you sign my brother's book? And maybe annotate and fact-check all the parts of it? It would drive him nuts to have that and to learn that you're nothing like the book says you are."

"I'll pass," I told him. "That book was probably written to drag my name through the mud and make people think twice about joining the Nephilim. Like exiling me from Earth and all the planets we gave them wasn't enough."

"You're exiled from more than just Earth?" Alan asked.

"Every one that we turned over to Earth and her governing bodies," I said. "Now, I think we're done here, and I have other work to do. If there's nothing else, then thank you for coming to see me about this, and thank you for agreeing to work with the Nephilim Army on our project."

"Oh, yes, of course," he said taking my hand and shaking it. "It was a bigger honor meeting you, and more enlightening, than I'd thought."

After the door had closed, I sighed and buried my head in my hands. Why couldn't I be left alone to deal with all these problems without someone trying to make me look worse?