Part 71: INTERLUDE: LARTHOP

It was not as easy as she said it was and it took him quite a while to get the hang of this dangerous four wheeled contraption that kept bouncing like an unruly beast of burden over the uneven ground.

It didn’t help that she made fun of him and told him that it would take Terran kids a few minutes to learn how to drive one of these. He asked her why the most advanced civilization in the Galaxy was not able to produce something more civilized and perhaps robotic and fully automatic. The Union had so many technical marvels after all.

Her answer was that Terrans did not want things like that automated and loved to drive themselves.

While he was thinking about the crazy and barbaric Terrans, who by all natural means should not even be one of the most powerful members of that cursed Union, he did not even notice the passage or the effects of a trans-dimensional trip, shortcutting 90,000 light years to a 4 hour motorcycle ride through a bat infested cave. He had seen the swarms of bats stuck to the ceiling band their nervous movements, but they had passed underneath before any of them decided to attack.

They emerged through a similar gate into the open and Larthop could feel that they were no longer on Wichita planet and had indeed traveled to another world.

Here on the other side of the cave tunnel also was a collection of prefab buildings, but none of the security measures of the entrance.

She stopped her bike and said. “Here we switch to a flier. There is an ocean between us and the continent where the Cave of Things is located.”

He wanted to say something when he saw a huge gray monstrosity coming up a narrow path.

He could feel the monsters mind and knew it was not an animal but an intelligent being. “What is that?”

Cherubim answered.”This is a Huffh, and the owners of this world. They are also real Terrans so shield your mind when you think negative things about Earthers. They are gentle for the most part but like all true Earthers they do have a violent temper. This one is coming to the station most likely for medical attention. I don’t see any other Huffh which would mean a funeral procession,”

He followed her to an open flyer while he kept looking over his shoulder at the approaching giant.” The more you talk the less you make sense. How can these be Earthers?”

She activated the flier and he climbed in. Two humans and a Petharian in Uniforms of the medical branch of the science corps stepped out of one of the prefab buildings and greeted the Huffh. One of the humans waved to them as the mysterious woman steered the flier into the sky.

He leaned back into the seat and asked her. “Isn’t it treason what you are doing. What would happen if that robot did make a report?”

“Treason against whom I would ask.”

“The Union of course, the government you are protecting and if the legends are true you doing it for millennia.”

“I think it won’t hurt to let you know a few things. I was not chosen by the Guardian, and act long before Stahl or Mc Elligott or some of the others.

I was chosen by someone else to be the eyes and the ears of Earth and by identifying any potential danger, exposing any enemy as early as possible. This is the reason I still exist and this is all I am loyal too. I am loyal to the Union as long as Earth is part of the Union, but I am loyal to Earth and Humankind first. Chances are Earth will be Terra and a Union member for the foreseeable future.”

She pointed at him. “You are not interested in the Union, you care not about Saresii. You hold no allegiance to the Kermac or anyone else. You seek to resurrect a power so immense, all else does not matter. Union, Kermac, Saresii, Earth and the rest of the Galaxy means nothing compared to that power. This is what this quest of yours is all about, is it not?”

There was no sense of denying anything. “Yes that is what consumes me to the last fiber of my being. The Church of Darkness is nothing more than a vehicle to get me where I need to go. You know it all.”

He spoke with such intensity and conviction; finally talk to someone who already knew. Was that her true motivation; was she after the same thing? No other explanation was possible in his mind. She had admitted to him that she had studied the same things and she it seemed she was indeed an immortal and on this quest much longer than him. Maybe she knew how he could get out of the control of the Brotherhood. He needed to learn all she knew.

Cherubim stared at him from beneath a simple face that was most certainly another disguise.”Some of my immortal friends, chief among them the Narth Supreme put their hope and trust in a simple boy from a cold planet, I don’t.”

She fell silent as she pointed the nose of the fast flier downward pointing it to a single mountain, most likely an old volcano sticking out of the surrounding forest covered landscape.

She landed on a narrow rock ledge from where short but steep path led to another cave entrance. Larthop held his breath, he knew without a doubt this was the Cave of Things. He had the wafer thin disk he had found underneath the mountains of Koken with him in a hard shell case. He it like a purse strapped to his body. Following an impulse he took out the disk and it no longer showed a star map as it had before, it showed an image of this very mountain and illuminated the path to the cave entrance, the very path that was now before him.

This time he was leading the way, Cherubim the Terran enigma was right behind him. He had only eyes for what was ahead, that the woman had pulled her blaster and was aiming it at his back, he did not notice. She said to him while they climbed the path.” We have little time. A fleet of military ships and freighters of the Science Department are almost here. They went the long way because no one knows how secure and stable the trans-dimensional tunnel is and they bringing big equipment too. Lots of scientists, Xeno Tech experts and a load of Security.”

Larthop only listened with one ear as he reached the cave entrance and without pausing went straight in, holding the dinner plate sized disk with both hands before him, almost as if he was carrying a religious symbol.

The cave they had entered was clearly made by someone or something; the walls of this perfectly hemispherical hall were lined with a smooth gray material. Red colored light illuminated the place but neither of them could really say were the light source would have been.

The cave was empty except for a pedestal made of the same gray material in the center of this cavern that measured perhaps 100 meters across. A narrow ring of white light lit up as they went closer to the pedestal, centering on that dais at about eighty meters.