“Will do, Chuck,” Mike said. “And don’t worry about us. We’ve got transport waiting for us.”
Mike placed the bomb inside a plastic flight case and made sure it was clipped tightly shut. He handed it too Charlie with his left hand and extended his right. Charlie took it and shook it firmly. “I’ll miss you, you crazy old bastard,” Charlie said, trying to swallow the lump in his throat.
“And you too, you reckless fool. One of these days, you’ll get yourself killed.”
“One of these days. But not today.”
Chapter 31
AUGUSTUS PULLED the cannula from his body after the last of the root compound had flowed into his blood stream. With a sigh of satisfaction, he sat back on his human-leather recliner.
The cool white-blue lights of the mother ship made his skin look pale and diseased, but he knew he was never in better health. Every nerve tingled and every hair stood on end as the root compound did its magic in repairing any aging cells.
He took this shot a few days early having caught a bug from one of the cattle-scum down on the surface. Probably from Gregor, he thought. That reckless fool mixed with people without any concern for his health. Gregor was a walking, talking disease factory. Like they all were.
After all this time, human beings were still barely better than pigs and cows. Even the livestock had the same herding instinct as cows. Still, they made for a good nutritious food supply while the root took hold. And for now, the second crop appeared to be perfect. More perfect than many of the planets the croatoans had terraformed.
Though he had been in and out of stasis since his last day as Roman Emperor Valens. He wasn’t one to dwell much on the past. Especially given it was so long ago. But stasis within a croatoan pod had the effect of compressing time. That fateful day during the Battle of Adrianople, the ninth of August, 378 AD, was still clear. The Goths, led by the maggot, Fritigern, defeated his Roman army and set about the destruction of the Roman Empire as it was known. He, Emperor Valens would remove his habit and disappear into a village and escape as nothing more than a battle-wounded peasant.
For five long days he wandered through the woods of Thracia until he managed to seek voyage across to Greece.
Augustus closed his eyes, the fatigue of post-root injection making him tired. Though it was nothing like the fatigue of his escape; this was more of a spaced-out bliss. His body rejuvenating, growing young and vital again.
His senses sharpened during this state. The soft, cyclical vibrations of the mother ship’s engines synchronized with his heart beats so that he was one with the ship, a part of the larger system, a part of the Croatoan Empire.
An empire that made his Roman Empire look like a backwater village.
That revelation came to him within days of settling in Greece. The croatoans never did explain how they knew who he was, but one night, while he was working alone on a fishing jangada, hauling in the evening’s nets, he was approached on the beach. At first he thought he was sick, hallucinating.
The first impression he got of the croatoan was that of a large helmeted turtle, standing on two reverse-joined legs in a strange suit. The eyes were large and held intelligence within them, but the overriding feeling he got was that it was ancient.
For two weeks, the croatoan would visit him during the night, talking to him in broken Greek, but enough for Augustus, or Valens as he was then, to understand. The promises seemed unreal to begin with: eternity, a life without pain, which appealed greatly due to the wounds he suffered at the hands of the Goths.
Even back then, he required the wearing of a leather mask or a deep-brimmed hat to hide the disfigurement. When he saw the creature’s pod he knew the promises were real, that they had substance. He thought the Romans were advanced in their use of materials and technology, but the stasis pod, half-buried within a deep cave, told him that humanity hadn’t even started yet.
And then came the first taste of the root. Within the pod, a system of root compound within a slow-feed drip ensured that the aliens could live indefinitely once in a stasis mode. It was like a voluntary coma, but one that with some thought could be come out of at will, or at specified times.
For the first time in decades, he felt young and powerful again. The compound stitched his wounds, made him stronger. Even his thoughts sped up. It brought him out of the self-imposed prison where he’d placed himself and now he could see the world of opportunity in front of him. He had a chance to build a new empire, to rule again, but this time without the limits of humanity and politics.
Hagellen, the croatoan that approached Augustus, explained many historical incidents of how the aliens had intervened or taken candidates to work with them when the Earth’s conditions were right.
When Hagellen said that he’d be in stasis for more than fifteen hundred years, the period of time needed to make the Earth’s ecological balance suitable for growing the root, Augustus laughed, but Hagellen had shown him relics from the Egyptians and further back still.
It’d be like waking from a dream, Hagellen said. Within the stasis pod, the compound would keep him alive, compress time, so that when he woke and the croatoans rose from deep within the Earth, it would feel like no time at all.
And he was right.
Augustus sat up as the tingling sensation began to wear off. The compound was almost finished with him for this month. He shook his head. The memories of being Valens dissipated. It was always strange how this procedure would send him back to his former life. But despite the time-compression, it was a long a time ago. He wasn’t that cowardly emperor any longer.
He was Lord Augustus. Earth’s first post-alien leader. Or at least he soon would be.
“On screen,” he said, leaning his elbows against the glass desk in his office. They’d decorated it to look like a Roman court. This part of the ship, one of the lowest levels, was designed to support him as a human, but soon he wouldn’t need a special atmosphere to suit him. Soon, he’d have the procedure that would make him more croatoan than human, and he would take his rightful place at the top of Earth’s new hierarchy.
The wide screen, embedded into the curved white walls of his office, switched on, and glowed the familiar blue briefly before it patched into the communications network. Thousands of smaller squares in a grid showed him all the channels to the farms down on the surface.
“Message to all farms,” he said, and waited for each square to gain a white border to indicate the communication connection established. The screen beeped after a few moments, confirming the connection.
Within each square, he saw the faces of the farm workers looking at him expectantly, the requisite level of fear in their eyes. It made him smile beneath his mask. As Valens and now Augustus, he could always draw that level of fear from his fellow humans. Though he wasn’t so conceited to believe it was him directly.
No, it was his position. He always knew that. It was why he ducked out of the battle of Adrianople. It was clear the Goths would win. He’d seen the winds of change and knew the Roman’s time was up. He would no longer have the position to instill that fear so he left to cast fear upon the fish in Greece.
Some men would feel they took a step down, but not Augustus. Even back then, he knew the order of the things. Dominion over fish was no different than dominion over man.
“Farmhands, this is Lord Augustus; we’re coming to a new stage of our development and you are placed at the forefront of this transformation. Your actions next will determine not only your individual fate, but also the fate of humankind. Fear not, your action is a simple one. I want you all to activate the pressurization protocols on all breeding facilities. The time has come to seal those precious breeding units from the harm of the atmosphere.”