Exodus (The Domus Series Book 2) Read online

  Exodus

  Spartan Kaayn

  [email protected]

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  An unjust peace is better than a just war.

  - Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Contents

  Jai and Ludvig

  Chapter 1: Comet Masaoka

  Chapter 2: Emergency

  Chapter 3: The Secret

  Chapter 4: First Contact: Before Time

  Chapter 5: Doomsday

  Chapter 6: Captured

  Chapter 7: Underground

  Chapter 8: Nuked

  Chapter 9: William of the Marquees of Montferrat

  Chapter 10: The Surrender

  Chapter 11: The Slave who was Once a General

  Chapter 12: Divide and Rule

  Chapter 13: The Librarian

  Chapter 14: Returning Home

  Chapter 15: The Plan

  Chapter 16: Grief

  Chapter 17: The Descent

  Chapter 18: The Man Who Fell from the Sky

  Chapter 19: Peace and Reconciliation

  Chapter 20: Beacon of Hope

  Chapter 21: Life Goes On

  Chapter 22: Underwater

  Chapter 23: Moving On

  Chapter 24: Leader of Men

  Chapter 25: The Devil

  Chapter 26: Wanted

  Chapter 27: A New Life

  Chapter 28: Counterattack

  Chapter 29: Lonely

  Chapter 30: The Journey

  Chapter 31: The Plan

  Chapter 32: The Solution

  Chapter 33: A Breath

  Chapter 34: Take a Deep Breath

  Chapter 35: Sweet Hiss

  Chapter 36: Panocide

  Chapter 37: The Aftermath

  Chapter 38: Domus

  Jai and Ludvig

  Sleep doesn’t come easy when you know not when or where you will wake up.

  There was white all around when Jai opened his eyes. He was startled and it brought back, to his tired and confused mind, the terror of his ‘white interruptions’. Panic set in immediately. It was like waking up into a nightmare rather than waking from one. For a moment he thought he was back in his prison cell, his white interruption, captive and paralyzed, bound to the bed.

  He moved his hand. He could do that. So, he was not paralyzed, not fully at least. But the movement hurt like hell. He winced and grimaced but managed to stifle the cry of anguish rising within him. He tried to remember what had happened.

  They had embarked on a journey to Greenland with Ludvig, to set off the nuke. Something had gone wrong, very wrong. The bomb did not go off as planned and Henna had rushed in. Henna was there, yes, she was the one who had triggered the nuke. Then, everything had gone white. He had not felt a thing. Was that the end?

  No, there was more.

  He had woken up in the white room and the old man in the ‘Bomb Squad suit’ had helped rescue him and Ludvig from there. They had climbed on the back of a big burly brown beast and had ridden away amidst intense fighting.

  The beast was Xaddon…no, not Xaddon. But it was like Xaddon, a tad smaller though.

  Wait, who was Xaddon?

  What had happened next?

  They had taken shelter within a forest, which had trees as high as the sky above, the canopy rising way above the clouds that had covered the night sky. The ground was covered with a green carpet of what looked like moss and felt soft and rubbery to touch. The beasts had ‘run’ through the shrubbery and the undergrowth to get them to a river.

  His head hurt like hell now and he raised his hands to his head. Why was his hand that strange color?

  Yes, he remembered that color. His hands and his entire body was a strange bronze color here, the color that he had first seen on himself during his white interruptions. It was the same of all the others too. Yes, he was on the new planet, the Nova they called it. He was on Nova and Nova was at war. His life on Earth was over. That life, the one on earth, was apparently an illusion, a trick being played on his mind during captivity on Nova.

  No, the bomb suit man had mentioned that Jai was real. He was real till he was not real anymore, till he was dead, dead the first time, flayed and skewered in Rashique bhai’s den. He woke up from that death and he was no longer Jai.

  No, he was Jai but with the consciousness of this thing from Nova inside him. That happened to him each time he died and got up.

  But, now all that was over. Finally over.

  He would never return to the streets of Mumbai, to the squalor and the filth of his previous life. That was some good news in that there would be no Mumbai underworld, no police hunting him down anymore. Yet the dread of this new place filled him with terror. Mumbai was hostile, but it was familiar territory, its streets were home to him. His life as a killer for hire in Mumbai meant that the city was at its heels before him. Mumbai had no power over him, prostrate to his wanton disregard for his own life.

  That was before he had met Henna.

  That had changed everything. He had, for the first time, something to live for and he had protected what he had with Henna. What that was, was perhaps more than love. It was a blinding, all-pervasive, all-consuming feeling that had enveloped all his waking senses. Then, all hell had broken loose and he had found immortality while on the run from the police and the underworld. His immortality and his white sojourns had started a roller-coaster ride that had ended here at Nova, a planet in a galaxy many light-years away from Earth.

  The good Professor Ananthakrishnan had explained it to him as best as he could. This was another place, far far away from Earth, in a different star system and in a different galaxy altogether. The Professor had mumbled that in fact it could be a different time or a different Universe altogether. He had asked him what that meant. The Professor had just shrugged his shoulders and replied

  ‘Better not go there. It’s something that you simply wouldn’t understand! With all my years of science and astronomy behind me, even I cannot claim to fully understand the true meaning of time or the seemingly real yet outlandish concept of Multiverses’ he had said that with a sense of regret without any hint of condescension, and Jai had left it at that.

  Henna had been the price for all the wrongs he had done in his last life. He had strapped himself to the bomb on the ice-sheet of Greenland, thinking that his love, Henna was secure in her future, guaranteed thus by Ludvig. Ludvig had promised that Henna would be relocated to Norway, into a new life, where all her needs would be taken care of, for the rest of her natural life.

  But that was not to be.

  ‘Oh God!’ he let out a cry of anguish as the images of the bomb going off in that little shack on Greenland ice played itself again in his head. Henna was standing right next to the bomb and had actually set it off by flipping a switch. He did not feel anything after that. It had been a blinding flash of white light and nothing else after that.

  ‘What had gone wrong? What was she doing, flipping the switch of that darned bomb?’ the tears flowed freely down his cheeks now.

  He looked around. He wasn’t alone in the room. Ludvig occupied a wooden chair at the foot of his bed. Well, not the Ludvig he had known back on Earth but the bronzed version of him here on Nova, whom he had first seen occupying the adjacent cot during his ‘white interruptions’.

  Ludvig stirred, Jai’s muffled cries reaching his half-asleep ears.

  ‘Hey! Good to see you come around. How are you feeling?’ he drew closer to Jai and continued

  ‘Hey! Are you crying?’

  ‘Henna’

  ‘Ah yes. I wanted to talk abo
ut that.’

  Jai looked at Ludvig, tears flowing down his cheek,

  ‘How did that happen to her? Why was she in the cabin?’

  Ludvig pulled his chair closer to Jai

  ‘Henna is an incredibly brave girl. Over there in the hut in Greenland, when all was set, Dan pulled the switch but there was a malfunction and the bomb did not go off. If you remember what the Professor had told us, there was only a narrow window of time to get the bomb going in order for us to make the trip back here. Once the remote malfunctioned, there was only one-way to do it – to set it off manually. When Dan hesitated to do what needed to be done, Henna jumped into the car, rode like the wind to our hut and set off the bomb manually. She did that for us, rather for you. She loves you that much buddy. You are a truly lucky guy.’

  Jai nodded his head, his tears still flowing down his face, then realized something

  ‘Hey! How do you know all that? How do you know that is what happened? You were also strapped on that chair with me and the bomb went off, bringing us here.’

  Ludvig leaned in closer

  ‘Glad you caught on to that because that is not the end of her story. Do you remember what happened after you were brought here?’

  Jai nodded,

  ‘I think so. We were rescued from the white room and then onto the river.’

  ‘What happened then? Do you remember the girl that jumped into that river, the attack that came thereafter?’

  Jai frowned and then a moment later, it dawned on him

  ‘Yes, I do. The jets crawled up onto us and then there was that deafening noise’

  ‘Well, there was that but before that, the old man from the white room rescued and revived that girl, moments before the jets sneaked up on us. When they did, everyone ran for cover, leaving the girl out there, in the open under the jets.’

  Jai listened in rapt attention. Ludvig continued

  ‘The jets positioned themselves over the girl, perhaps preparing to strike. Then something incredible happened. The jets were struck by…’ Ludvig paused, looking deep into Jai’s eyes and then continued, gesticulating an explosion with his hands,

  ‘…meteorites. BAM! BAM! Sky rocks from space flying for many many millennia in the sky and crashing on to Nova, right when and where it mattered. Isn’t that incredible? The jets just disintegrated in mid-air, right over that girl, blasted to nothingness, leaving the girl without a scratch on her body. But this tale of awesome coincidences doesn’t end there. The best part is yet to come.’

  Jai looked into Ludvig’s eyes, awestruck

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘After the attack, the girl by the river stirred into consciousness and…’ Ludvig kept his hands on Jai’s face and continued, ‘…asked for you by your name. She asked for Jai, and said that she was Henna! Bloody fucking miracle! Henna indeed!’

  Jai clasped his hands around Ludvig’s

  ‘What? How is that possible?’

  ‘The old man in the bomb suit had something to do with that. The way he explained it to me was that the blast in the cabin killed us all, the both of us strapped in our chairs and Henna, standing by the bomb. Our deaths on Earth had opened some sort of portal to deliver our consciousnesses out of there. But, instead of two, it picked up all three of the consciousnesses floating there. The old man put ours back in our bodies and still had enough to make up nearly a full consciousness. He held that unknown quantum of consciousness in some sort of a ‘consciousness cage’, bringing it along with him. The girl that jumped into the water, when they fished her out of the river, she was dead. The old man drained the third consciousness into her.’

  Jai listened without even blinking his eyes, his brain furiously trying to make sense of all this.

  ‘So, you say that Henna is here.’

  ‘Well, her consciousness is here, just like the both of us here’ he raised his hands to Jai’s face, showing the bronzed arm to Jai.

  ‘That means she is a bronzed new version of herself’ Jai’s tears had dried by now and there was a look of relief mixed with bewilderment on his face,

  ‘Why is all this happening? What exactly is going on here?’

  ‘A war is going on.’

  ‘What are we? Where are we? Who are fighting here?’

  ‘We are what we were before but slightly different – trans-humans. The people of this planet are descendants from our Earth back in our time. They left Earth many thousands of years ago to reach Nova, a habitable planet in the Mouse-tail galaxy, light years away from our galaxy. We set up home here and this planet changed us. Some of us evolved, adapted or trans-mutated to our present-bronzed forms on this planet.’

  ‘Who are we fighting against?’

  Ludvig laughed

  ‘Well, we are fighting against ourselves. There were a lot of us from Earth who refused to settle on Nova and continued on with their journey further into the farthest reaches of space. They have returned to Nova now, changed and trans-mutated into an evil marauding species, much different from us, intent on decimating and colonizing us.’

  ‘Oh…’ Jai could not think of anything else to say.

  ‘Well, Nova didn’t change all of us. Some remained unaffected, remaining the most human-like amongst us. They call themselves the Sterling-Humans or the Sterlings. We call them the white-demons and yes, we were at war with them too. A homegrown variant of civil-war that is currently on hold in face of a bigger threat from outside.’

  Jai held his head and collapsed on his bed, then turning to look at Ludvig

  ‘Where is Henna now?’

  ‘You were out cold for the past five days. Henna waited by you for three days. When you refused to come by, they moved her to a more secure base. She is safer there. She is a sort of celebrity here now. They are calling her ‘Skyball Lyra’ now’

  Jai’s face had aged in minutes, his forehead furrowed in wrinkles and the bronze appearing faded.

  Ludvig held Jai’s hands

  ‘Don’t worry, she is safe now. She did not want to leave your side. I persuaded her to go, promised her that I will look after you here.’

  Jai nodded his head and sighed, probably dazed by all the information that had had to process,

  ‘Why do they call her Lyra?’

  ‘Lyra was the name of the girl who jumped off that cliff. She had a pendant with that written on it.’

  Jai sighed,

  ‘What do they call us?’

  Ludvig looked up and his eyes went up in a smirk

  ‘Well, that’s interesting. They call us Jai and Ludvig.’

  ‘How is that possible?’

  Ludvig shrugged his shoulders,

  ‘Maybe a coincidence. I don’t know.’

  Jai looked unconvinced. Nevertheless, he could not think of anything to explain that. Moreover, he had a hundred other questions in his head,

  ‘Why did the humans leave Earth?’

  Ludvig looked at Jai and shook his head

  ‘Do you want to go there now? It’s a very long story, the story of humans fighting the odds and winning and yet ultimately losing the one thing that was dearest to them, their home, the Earth.’

  ‘Where did you find out about this? Took some lessons in history?’

  ‘Well you can say that. I did read about it but it was not a history book that I read. They call it ‘The Exodus Story’. No one knows much about the author and if it is all true, but it sure is an entertaining account of what happened all those years ago. He must have been on the ship that escaped Earth and probably had a ringside view of events as they happened or perhaps he researched the topic, met people who were in the thick of it and wrote a fictionalized account of events as they transpired. It is however, by far the most popular book on the topic. The elders discount it as pure fable but the masses love it here.’

  Ludvig got up from his chair, reaching a wooden cabinet on the wall to fish out a book.

  ‘Here you go. Since you have nothing better to do and need to rest here for a couple
more days, I would suggest you dig into it. I am sure you will not be disappointed. I will come back with something to eat. And hey! Don’t run away.’

  Jai smiled, accepting the book off Ludvig’s hands.

  The Exodus Story

  Chapter 1

  Comet Masaoka

  Bisei Space Guard Center,

  Japanese Space Guard Association

  Bisei, Tokyo, Japan

  31st Dec 2018

  The New Year crackers had just gone on, waking Hiroki Masaoka from a quick nap on his desk. Tonight he was all alone in the center. It was the same every holiday, always Hiroki taking the rap on such nights. It was actually expected of him and considered his duty, since he had no one to celebrate these holidays with. His parents lived far away from Tokyo, in Muroran, a hamlet in the Hokkaido Island. He had never been good with girls and at the age of thirty-one, was single, rotund, rather geeky and miserable, spending holidays with himself in the loneliness of the space center.

  A long line of computers flanked him on either side of his desk. Each computer cranked data around the clock. Their main job was to track known asteroid paths and to determine if something was amiss. The computers overlapped charts of sky digitally and saw movement among millions of dots in the night sky. The ones that did not move were the stars. The ones that moved relative to the stars were planets, satellites, comets and asteroids. These moving points were then referenced with known moving objects in the night sky. If something did not agree with the existing records, that meant an anomaly; this anomaly would then be studied exhaustively, before deciding that it was just that – an anomaly or an aberration, an oversight or the fancy of a zealous observer. Rarely, it would be jackpot –it could be a new asteroid or a newly discovered comet. The total resources devoted to this endeavor around the world were meager and the money had been dwindling of late. Hiroki did not understand that. But, the governments around the world considered it money well spent if it was on a high utility endeavor like a communications or a military satellite or a high visibility mission like the International Space Station or a Mars trip. Even astronomers were not too interested in taking up asteroid hunting. What they did not realize or rather realized and chose to ignore was that a rogue asteroid had Earth’s name written on it and it was hurtling through space towards it. It was imperative that they spot it before it became too late.