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Ancient: Human Gods, #2
Ancient: Human Gods, #2
Ancient: Human Gods, #2
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Ancient: Human Gods, #2

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On the planet with the old twin Suns, Samarium, whose inhabitants have long forgotten their planetary origins, humankind faces its twilight years. Genetic mutation impedes evolution rather than refreshes it. 

Anchie Rantree carries rare DNA that has the potential to rejuvenate the gene pool and pull it back from the brink of viral suffocation. But he does not care to save the human race, or himself, not until he meets the profoundly flawed, famously successful, and painfully beautiful literary celebrity, Krisiana, who has succumbed to the deathly viral infection. 

Join Anchie and his friends, Mickey and Chadder, as they leave the familiarity of small-town life in search of a cure for the illness killing their friends and families. Join them as their futures lead them from their pasts into challenges they could not have dreamed about but must now surmount to survive.

The second installment in the Human Gods Series, Ancient asks if one man really can change the fate of an entire world. And what will happen if he can’t…


"A five-star novel that should be in your library! A good science fiction that grips you and entertains you throughout. Really enjoyed it."
Rabia Tanveer for Readers' Favorite.
 

LanguageEnglish
Release dateApr 14, 2018
ISBN9781386820857
Ancient: Human Gods, #2
Author

Joe Jeney

Joe has practiced law and worked professionally in legal education for many years. During his early working life, he worked in building, engineering, and agricultural fields. He has spent much of his life writing stories. Joe also writes under the pen name "JJ. Co."

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    Ancient - Joe Jeney

    Blood and Ruin

    HURRY, MS. LING CRIED, the woman in the red scarf.

    I’m hurrying, the taxi driver replied.

    Hover, she shouted. The driver bumped along too slowly for Ms. Ling. She collected her thoughts. Head to the southern expressway.

    The driver pushed across airport traffic and slid into the lane reserved for drop-offs and pickups, scattering people.

    Ms. Ling clamped herself into the back seat with sheer body pressure, gluing the child to her.

    The driver leaped back into the traffic lane ahead of the jam and raced to the expressway ramp. However, he avoided it. He swung the wheel to a laneway leading to Old Road, cutting through the last of the traffic jam by driving beneath the few hovercars motoring several lengths above them.

    Where are you taking me?

    The driver did not reply.

    Where are you taking me?

    The expressway’s a hunting ground. The driver seemed to reconsider his metaphor. Well, you know what I mean.

    She did. Twenty Blackshirt cars would surround them in minutes while they tried to escape along the wide-open spaces of an expressway.

    The driver cut through an underpass. He drove on the vehicle’s wheels rather than hovered. It was like riding along corrugated ruts. They hit every pothole along the neglected Old Road. When Ms. Ling turned to look through the back window, she saw debris and red dust fly from behind them. Gusts of wind quickly disseminated the dust tail.

    Hover, the woman in the red scarf repeated in a corrugated stammer.

    Would if I could, the driver said between lunges and twists at the steering wheel. Hovering is out. He caught her eye in the mirror and spelled it out. In need of repair. He added, Worked this morning when I set out.

    Ms. Ling pinned the child against her. All she said was, Fix it.

    No one to fix it, ma’am. Maybe your boy can learn the hovercar trade when he’s of age. He coughed into his fist.

    Hearing the driver cough, Ms. Ling removed her red scarf, which was the color of the red suns, and wrapped it around the child’s head, and twice around the child’s nose and mouth.

    The woman-without-the-red-scarf assessed the terrain they drove past, her clipped white-blonde hair standing out against the color of the scarf she had removed and wrapped around the child.

    Commercial interests had neglected ground roads since air cars became affordable for everyone a decade ago. Red dust now blanketed and controlled the environment. It enveloped and controlled the brownish-reddish factory buildings and downmarket apartment blocks that characterized the airport side of town. Red dust reddened rare pockets of thick green foliage. Bog holes turned blood red, filled continuously by the runoff from brief heavy rainstorms.

    She was thirty-two years old. She was tall, refined, pretty while composed, dowdy when she let her confidence slip. She was bossy always. While away from her native Askan, and while residing in Usayer, she concealed her dark skin with white body paint. She was an olive skin Askan woman.

    She squinted into the twin suns, estimating the time. She wore sunglasses. She ought not to have had to squint into the twin suns, as weak and distant as those old uncles were.

    Makeup is running, the driver said through the rearview mirror.

    The woman ran her fingers across her face.

    On the girl.

    Ms. Ling looked at the creamy stain seeping through the scarf that she had wrapped around the child’s face.

    I wouldn’t mind betting that the little thing is whiter beneath that gunk paint than the Usayan Queen. I must add that she’s the toughest little girl in boy’s clothes I ever saw, the driver said.

    Only a member of the Underground could know such things. Ms. Ling straightened herself and asked, Why not send a car that worked?

    The car worked fine when I left the garage this morning.

    Ms. Ling asked, Why are you smiling?

    Two things had not gone entirely to plan this morning, one being the car’s failed airworthiness, and the other, Doctor Webster’s being caught and possibly killed. The second fact raised issues of particular relevance to Ms. Ling, she being his wife, and now perhaps his widow.

    Without an answer forthcoming, Ms. Ling watched the road behind them again. Two Blackshirt cars chanced the bumpy road and pursued them terrestrially. She pulled the child to her. She could not see any hope while attempting an escape from Blackshirt technology in a poorly suspended, ground-hugging wreck.

    Then the driver threw on the vehicle’s handbrake. The car skidded and bumped into a ninety-degree turn, slowing just enough, and only just barely, and turning enough, and only just enough, to take a ninety-degree corner into a narrow roadway running between windowless and doorless contiguous factory units, each over fifty stories high.

    A trap, she thought. The driver delivered them to an inescapable position.

    She turned to watch her pursuers. They had not made the turn.

    Air pursuers, meanwhile, would take lifesaving minutes to descend the outside of the tall buildings.

    Ms. Ling turned back around to face the road ahead. She smoothed her hand across the child’s face, comforting her. She looked at the driver’s eyes in the rearview mirror. Then she froze as she looked through the front window. The car headed for a factory wall, a windowless and doorless edifice constructed of red concrete.

    She had not the time to scream, or flinch, as the vehicle impacted with it...

    ...and drove through an illuminated facade and into a dark recess beneath the building. The car skidded and ground to a halt on resin wheel rims without a shred of rubber remaining.

    Three men waited. One of them opened the cab’s rear door, telling Ms. Ling and the child to get out.

    Ms. Ling carried the child. The three men ushered her and the cab driver to a minibus painted in floral artwork. The pattern covered the windows also, preventing anyone outside from seeing inside the vehicle.

    Sitting up front with the cabbie, who now drove the people mover, Ms. Ling and the child buckled in.

    They followed the three men on their air scooters through the building until they emerged into the red light of day. The scooter riders drifted to disguised positions, providing a covert escort. The minibus and its occupants hovered back toward the airport to catch the circle expressway. They hovered like any other holidaymaker across town.

    They headed to Ms. Ling’s safe house in the fashionable middle suburb of Acre.

    MS. LING ARRIVED HOME with her ward, Evelyn, a few hours later. She bathed the child, fed her, and put her to bed upstairs in a secret compartment concealed in the first-floor ceiling void.

    The cab driver, Angry, and another member of the Underground, Terrence, took their positions within the concealed ceiling void, watching things through a peephole.

    The pressure off, Ms. Ling walked to the bookshelf and selected a book, which she opened. She glanced at a wedding snap hidden inside of her and Doctor Webster. It depicted the lovely bride, Ms. Ling, somewhat younger, laughing with the handsome groom, Doctor Webster, also somewhat younger.

    It had been wrong of him to return to Usayer. Likely he was dead. He could have escaped with the girl into the cities of Turanite. Ms. Ling should have met him there, in Turanite, and she should have brought the girl back to Usayer when things had settled down. She should have borne the risk, not him. He was too important to the movement.

    She replaced the picture and returned the book to its place anonymous among other books on her library shelf, sat down, and cried herself into a light sleep.

    A KNOCK LANDED AT THE door. Ms. Ling got up, walked to the door, and peered through the viewing-hole. Two uniformed police officers waited.

    Ms. Ling? one of them asked.

    She opened the door.

    The senior police officer, Denner, introduced himself and his younger companion, Juren, also a male, and formally confirmed Ms. Ling’s identity with her.

    Ms. Ling recognized Juren from Sports TV.

    Then two suited men arrived, both tall and fat.

    The older man was bald and in his sixties. He wore delicate, scholastic gold spectacles, and a better fitting suit. The younger man wore a cheap ill-fitting suit. The jacket gripped his shoulders. His trousers were too small for his fat thighs and rode up the inside of his legs. He thought he was a real dandy. Ms. Ling picked the second man for the henchman.

    Ms. Ling had never met them - these suited men - but she knew of them. A decade ago, as a twenty-year-old, she moved from Askan to Usayer to work at a research laboratory. The laboratory was real enough. It played a role in a global search for immune serum. It was also an Underground front. She ended up deciphering encoded messages delivered by Underground spies.

    At the age of twenty-two, she secretly married her boss, the distinguished Doctor Richard Webster, twelve years her senior.

    It was around this time that she learned about the bespectacled man and his companion now standing before her in her comfortable Acre home. They worked for Royal Intelligence. She would not have opened the door had she known they accompanied the uniformed officers.

    The professor, the older man of the two, looked around the room while he played with his cufflinks. He made eye contact with the uniformed police officers. He smiled at the younger officer, likely acknowledging his sporting talent and fame. He ignored his henchman, Mr. Pious. He cleared his throat as if to speak to Ms. Ling before he held off from saying anything. He looked around the room some more. Finally, he stared with narrow, hot eyes at her. He said, Webster.

    Doctor Webster was my employer until you imprisoned him six years ago.

    Why dramatize matters? The Crown required his services, nothing more. The professor continued, Are you still his secretary?

    Where is he?

    Answer my question, girly.

    What have you done to him?

    The ugly professor surveyed the bookshelf. He walked to it and removed the exact book with the photo of Ms. Ling and her husband in it. Tell me where the girl is.

    You imprisoned Doctor Webster in Turanite in a cloaked facility for six years, Ms. Ling said. I don’t know anything about a girl.

    The professor opened the book and studied the photograph. Was he tickling you?

    Ms. Ling did not reply.

    Was he tickling you...in the photo?

    Ms. Ling did not reply.

    Ah, the professor sighed, drawing his conclusions about the photograph. I’m married. I have two lovely children.

    What do you want?

    The girl.

    What girl?

    The one you collected at the airport earlier today.

    A rainstorm raced across Ms. Ling’s rooftop like a galloping beast. It left deep puddles outside.

    The professor directed the men to search the house.

    Mr. Pious, the junior henchman, stayed behind until his boss growled at him to search the house too. He walked hurt to another room on the same floor, not bothering to climb the stairs to the second level.

    The footsteps of the uniformed officers thudded overhead. Meanwhile, the professor sat on the nearby sofa. Ms. Ling remained standing at the front door, waiting and wishing for him to leave.

    The professor placed the book on the lampstand beside him but retained hold of the photograph. He removed his gun from his shoulder holster, which he had concealed beneath his jacket until now. He placed the gun on the lamp table, with the barrel pointing at Ms. Ling.

    Ms. Ling guessed that he wasn’t trying to get comfortable.

    In a low, slow voice, he ordered, Remove your jacket, blouse, and undergarments please.

    She removed her jacket, blouse, and undervest, and raised her eyes at the professor.

    Turn around, he ordered.

    She twisted at the waist.

    Her skin was dark where she had not painted herself.

    As she turned back around to meet his eyes, he made a point of looking at her naked breasts. She covered herself with her arms.

    Do Askan women have wings?

    She did not reply.

    Come here, he ordered.

    Go die.

    Come here.

    Go die.

    Dress, he said, looking away.

    She dressed.

    How long have you lived in Usayer?

    All my life, Ms. Ling lied.

    Why paint yourself?

    Bigotry, she replied coolly.

    You’re Askan?

    She did not answer, which answered him.

    Where is the girl? He stared meanly at her. We killed your husband.

    Blood thudded in her heart for several beats. She thought she might collapse. She thought about Angry, who had hidden in the ceiling void with the child cradled awkwardly beneath his legs. Terrance, the other Underground guard, hid in the void with him. Angry would be watching through the ceiling spy-hole. He had loaded his rifle with explosive resin bullets. He would have trained it at the professor’s head, wherever the professor walked or sat. Ms. Ling wanted him to shoot the professor and his men, now. Immediately. But he would not do so without a cause. The humiliation she suffered was not a cause.

    The uniformed officers returned to the front room announcing that they had not found anything that might lead them to suspect that the child was hiding here.

    The junior henchman, Mr. Pious, sauntered back also, mumbling much the same.

    The professor re-holstered his gun and looked at the photograph of the newlyweds. He raised it to Ms. Ling and smiled broadly. Newlyweds now newly-deads? He walked to Ms. Ling, over whom he towered, fat and sweaty, his nose arching beneath the fine scholastic eyeglasses.  He held out the photograph to Ms. Ling and pulled it back as she reached for it. He said, She’s sick, you know. Our Queen is ill. Does this not perturb you?

    Ms. Ling looked into the professor’s small eyes without expression or reply.

    I guess it does not concern someone of your race. He threw the photograph to the floor.

    The officers and the henchman, Mr. Pious, watched it skip and spin to rest on the bare floorboards.

    Very well. At your service, the professor said. He walked to the door and waited before adding, We’re watching. I’m sure you are aware.

    A cracking sound came from the ceiling.

    Ms. Ling tried not to look, and she succeeded brilliantly.

    The professor noticed her effort. So he looked up.

    Angry fired, missing his target as the ceiling gave.

    He fell through the ceiling, with Evelyn and Terrance falling with him.

    Ms. Ling heard the unmistakable snap of Angry’s arm, as it broke. Time slowed. He struggled uselessly for his rifle. She raced for Evelyn, the child.

    Mr. Pious calmly removed the rifle from Angry’s reach. Dust settled. He stamped on Angry’s broken arm. When Angry tried defending himself, Mr. Pious smashed the rifle butt into his head.

    Terrance backed away, hands up.

    Ms. Ling cradled Evelyn behind the sofa, shielding the child’s eyes and ears.

    The professor beckoned her to give up the child. She would not, so he nodded to Denner, who gently prised the child from Ms. Ling’s arms. The middle-aged uniformed officer cradled the frightened child as if she was his own and walked outside.

    The professor told Mr. Pious and Juren to leave. Then he shot Terrance through the head and killed him. He shot Angry in the chest. He turned the pistol on Ms. Ling and, aiming lower, shot her in her stomach.

    Quicker than justice, he said.

    ANGRY JUST LAY THERE.

    What seemed like a day, but was ten minutes later, Ms. Ling came round and surveyed the damaged front room of her home.

    The first thing she saw was Angry, just lying there. She uttered, Are you okay? Then she asked, Am I okay?

    She dragged herself to Terrance on her back. He was closer to her than was Angry. He was dead.

    Ms. Ling wondered if her husband, Doctor Webster was dead too, as the ugly professor claimed. Her daughter Evelyn was taken.

    Ms. Ling cried, My husband is dead. My child is dead.

    No, Terrance is dead, Angry said.

    Ms. Ling let her head roll back so that she could see Angry.

    Thanks for asking, Angry said.

    They were dying, she and Angry.

    Humanity was losing the battle.

    The reason for humanity losing the battle was such a significant problem in her life that she had commenced ignoring it several months earlier. But she couldn’t always ignore it, and when she couldn’t ignore it, it made her feel bad, so bad.

    The outside door sprang open. A man and woman entered, as it was meant to be. They came for Evelyn.

    Quickly these two Underground members assessed what happened.

    The woman said, We’re moving you.

    Where? Angry asked.

    Farther the better, the man said.

    He introduced himself as Andrew, unlikely his real name. Andrew was Askan like Ms. Ling, which was some relief to her. He did not introduce the other woman.

    Where is Michael Heart? Ms. Ling asked.

    You can’t see him now, Andrew said.

    Where is the doctor? she asked. She asked for her husband.

    You can’t see him now, he said.

    We have to go, the other woman said.

    Ms. Ling pushed aside the hands that reached to save her and thought awful thoughts. Her husband was dead, her child gone, and the good news about a cure for the plague came to nothing.

    She would have sacrificed anything or any loyalty to have her husband back. The hands that reached to save her now she wished would let her die.

    Nevertheless, they gripped her, and they held her. They carried her from her home and from her only photograph of her husband, which lay discarded on the floor where the professor had thrown it, in blood and ruin.

    Friends

    LIFE IS GOOD, MERCELÉ said. Our futures are ahead of us."

    Now you’re talking, Anchie replied. He flicked ash from his cigarette, hoping that his friend would not see his true feelings. His cigarette hand, his head, his shoulders, and even his hair drooped like a willow with too much weight in summer.

    The two boys were at a Friday night party. Tomorrow, Saturday, was another workday.

    They were apprentices at the Dapune resin factory, which supplied Dhaliahan manufacturers with manufacturing grade resin. The plant exported to a limited market too. It was the village’s primary industry.

    Mercelé was nineteen, and Anchie seventeen, almost eighteen.

    They had been childhood friends, though they had not been school friends. Each boy attended elementary school at opposite ends of the village. Then Mercelé left to finish his senior schooling at a fee college in the nearest city, Dreeaz. They came to know each other better at work.

    They sat on a small rise looking at the last of the setting second sun. The purple sky quickly colored with nighttime black. It was ten o’clock.

    They drank warm beer. The bottles were warmer than when they pulled them from ice twenty minutes ago. They sucked them slowly.

    The party continued in the abandoned farmhouse fifty meters behind them. Tall trees swayed in the breeze. It was hot, though cooler because night had arrived. Wheat crops rustled around them. Heaven could have been little songs playing in the breeze.

    Mercelé, six feet tall, brown skinned, brown-eyed, with white teeth and dirty blonde hair, blessed with good looks and natural grace, and with athleticism, but not big in brains, though not dumb either, sat swinging his legs in the small songs, the breeze. He smiled at his friend. He was about to speak, and Anchie was about to listen, but he sneezed. He sneezed again.

    So Anchie spoke. One sneeze can stop the world.

    Mercelé laughed too. He handed Anchie’s pendant back to him, which he had been folding over thoughtfully in his palm. He had told Anchie plenty times that he liked the feel of it, the weight of it. I’ve decided something, he said.

    What? Anchie asked in earnest.

    I’ve decided not to sneeze anymore.

    Both boys smiled and looked back to the horizon.

    What’s the world coming to, Mercelé asked, where a sneeze ends everything?

    The same world as always, Anchie replied. You leave cynicism to me.

    Anchie was too young for cynicism. But he reached for it like bread that sustained him.

    He wiped Mercelé’s sneeze spray from his pendant and put it back on. The only time he removed his pendant was when Mercelé asked for it. He lay back. He was slightly taller than his friend. He propped his hands behind his thick black hair and sighed.

    Over a few years, his body would thicken. His skin would thicken - as would Mercelé’s, but in a different way. Thick muscle would fill his arms and legs. His courser skin would express his new denser muscle in adult ways, and move with it, and flex with it. His face would lengthen, and lose its roundness, and his jaw would square. His dark hair would lose its downy softness and lengthen and strengthen. That was three or four years away. And when you saw him then, and if you hadn’t seen him for a while, you would struggle to recognize him as the boy that he had once been. For the time being, he remained a child, and he was a man, the man he would be.

    If you knew his mother, you would say that you saw her in him now, and not his father, if you knew him too. A few years later, you would say that you saw his father in him. And not so much his mother. Because that is the way it always is, with boys who grow to men.

    No one in the village, least of all Anchie, knew his birth parents. Anchie Rantree had been an import, a child import, and an illegal one at that. No one cared about the illegality of it. But family ancestry played a big part in the village. Without an ancestry, the chip on his shoulder grew bigger every day.

    The half-moon reflected from his face.

    Is life good for you? Mercelé asked him, interrupting his thoughts.

    Anchie smoked his cigarette, flicking ash, sucking beer.

    Mercelé wiped his nose, although his sneezing had stopped. Your family is well off...

    The Rantrees are well off. Well, they’re okay off; they’re merchants. What of it?

    Therefore Anchie Rantree is well off.

    Anchie remained dissatisfied. I mean what sort of name is that, Anchie? Anchie? It sounds like an itch or a disease.

    Ancienté. It means ancient, Mercelé reached for an imprecise etymology, it means...

    I know what it means. Everything is so much more ridiculous for it. I don’t even know my parents, let alone mythical ancient worlds. I go as far back as my birth and no farther. Even my birth is a mystery.

    You’re unfair to yourself and your parents.

    They’ve cared for me. I’ll give my folks that much. The Rantrees are wonderful people. But why name me Ancienté? Anchie?

    Would you prefer they named you Chrysler? Chrysler, a poor bakery boy, Mercelé smiled, whose pies really packed some steel?

    Anchie took even this point seriously. That’s another thing, what is steel? I mean, what is it? Not philosophically or spiritually or theoretically and all that crap. I mean, what the hell is steel? Why had the Prophet packed his pies with it when he was just a poor bakery boy?

    Anchie saw that he began irritating Mercelé, who a while ago suggested that they join the others in the party.

    His friend asked, What do you want?

    I want to move away from this town, Anchie grumbled again.

    To where, Dreeaz?

    Nah, another nation. Anchie flicked more cigarette ash.

    Sallan? Mercelé tested.

    Too flat.

    Usayer?

    Too big, Anchie reasoned.

    Askan?

    Maybe.

    Oppen, Turanite, Mexador? Mercelé burst.

    Hmm, too crazy.

    Which? Mercelé ended with asking.

    All of them, everywhere, Anchie finished smugly.

    Mercelé stood. Look, it’s steel. It’s yellow, that’s what. Steel is like hardened resins and ceramics, but...yellow. It’s hard stuff they made on the old planets.

    Earth, do you mean Earth? Anchie was surprised that his straight-laced friend would even hint at the taboo topic.

    Come on, Anchie, let’s drop it.

    Earth, Lanthanum, Cerium...is the Giving Bird real too?

    Mercelé did not reply.

    Anchie did not taunt him. He taunted the world, and could not do much damage. Deep down, he knew it. When loners challenge the world, they only hurt themselves. He shook his head, disappointed, and stood and joined his friend, Mercelé, who looked more tired than a nineteen-year-old at a Friday night party ought to look.

    Anchie placed his hand on Mercelé’s shoulder, and asked, Are you okay?

    What do you mean? Mercelé roused from a doze. His eyes were red-rimmed.

    Nothing. Let’s get back.

    They drained their bottles, carried them to a trashcan near the ice chest, and dropped them in with the rest of the trash. Anchie butted his cigarette in the ice chest, ensuring that he extinguished the ember. Fire in dry wheat spreads fast, intermittent rain or no intermittent rain. He flicked the wasted butt to the dirt before pulling another cigarette from the pack and lighting it. He drew two beers from ice and offered one to his friend.

    Mercelé wiped his nose again and shook his head in the negative. Anchie kept the beer for himself. Mercelé laughed and grabbed it from him. He left for the party.

    As he watched him leave for the farmhouse, Anchie suddenly experienced one of his mood changes. What did Mercelé mean

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