The Nemesis Origin

XVII

‘Repeat it to me, slowly.’

Yuri Polkov rested his chin on wiry hands that were interlocked before him as he looked up at the two men. Both of them were standing with their hands clasped before them, bulky muscles stretching the fabric of their cheap suits. Both were square headed, broad jawed former soldiers and if they’d had a brain cell between them they would not have known how to use it.

‘They slipped away from us,’ said the first man, Sergie, his head pulled down upon a thick neck as though he feared Yuri might throw something at it. ‘We did not dare follow them too closely. We can’t find them anywhere.’

Yuri looked away from the two men and out across the board open water to where the islands of the Phillipines crouched low against the horizon. The yacht upon which he sat was one of several owned by his company and berthed in Singapore, and had been diverted to the South China Sea as soon as Yuri’s jet had lifted off from O’Hare International in the United States. He had fervently hoped to have laid his hands upon Lucy Morgan and have brought her to the yacht by now, but instead he found himself baffled as to how easily Morgan had escaped.

‘She could not have known we had followed her here,’ Yuri pointed out to the two men standing before him. ‘And yet you managed to expose yourself and scare them away in the space of a single morning?’

The second man, Abram, shook his head. ‘They were already on their toes. They dove a site off the coast of Yonaguni but came under attack from gunmen. They fled, then boarded a freighter headed south, so we took passage on another vessel sailing the same route. But when we docked, they were nowhere to be seen. Either they got off before they left, or they got off before they docked again. I don’t know if something spooked them or not, but the guy who was with her looked sharp, like he might be ex-military.’

‘They were covering their tracks,’ Sergei added. ‘One of them might have contacts in the area.’

Yuri clenched his interwoven fingers in frustration. ‘Are you sure you saw them board this freighter?’

‘One hundred per cent,’ Abram nodded. ‘The vessel is still docked less than twenty miles from us. There are a lot of small fishing vessels out here. If Morgan or her companion knew local people, they could have left the freighter and found passage ashore. Smugglers use the technique regularly.’

Yuri leaned back in his seat folded his hands in his lap as he looked at the thugs before him. Hired by his son Vladimir, who lacked his father’s sense of decorum, both of the men were idiots for hire. If the man with Lucy Morgan was in any way familiar with either military life or the criminal underworld, he would have spotted Sergie and Abram for what they were from a hundred yards away. That could have been enough for him to take flight, especially if he was aware of the sensitive nature of what Lucy possessed.

‘Dismissed,’ Yuri uttered and waved the two men away.

Yuri listened to the sound of the water slapping against the yacht’s hull as he thought hard. He was not the only person pursuing what Lucy possessed, of that much he could be sure, and now he wondered who else might have entered the game at such a crucial juncture. The value of Lucy’s knowledge and of what she might find was almost incalculable, not something that could be measured in millions or even billions of dollars. It represented a paradigm shift in human nature, a turning point that would go down in history to be remembered for millennia, and Yuri Polkov was determined to be the man whose name would be associated with that turning point.

‘Vladimir!’

Yuri’s son strode out onto the deck from the yacht’s interior and moved to sit opposite his father. ‘Yes, papa?’

‘I want you to dismiss all of your thugs. Send them back to the Gulag or wherever they came from.’

‘But these men are loyal father, and will do…’

‘They are buffoons!’ Yuri snapped, barely able to contain his fury.

Vladimir ground his teeth in his jaw, and Yuri wondered what his son had promised those idiots of his in return for their work. Money? Drugs? More?

‘We must seek to locate Lucy Morgan once more, and this time we will face them ourselves.’

‘They’re as slippery as eels,’ Vladimir replied with visible distaste. ‘They will see us coming and flee long before…’

‘Ah, my son,’ Yuri murmured, ‘so often do you judge. Your distaste for Doctor Morgan is born of the fact that you were unable to persuade her to talk in Chicago, that your supposed charms had no effect on her. Your solution is anger and the threat of violence, yet that response is the very reason they flee us.’

‘We should have grabbed her when we had the chance and made her talk!’ Vladimir slammed his fist down on the table.

Yuri merely smiled and shook his head. ‘No, my son. We should have taken her to dinner and shared her fascination and her enthusiasm, encouraged her to share her secrets by choice, not by force. Then, and only then, would we have disposed of her.’

Vladimir smiled tightly. ‘It would help, papa, if I knew what we were looking for?’

Yuri sat back and exhaled softly as he glanced out over the oceans.

‘We seek the answer to a question about human history that nobody has been able to explain,’ he said. ‘The ancient ancestors of modern humans had existed in a hunter-gatherer state for hundreds of thousands of years. But suddenly mankind began building cities, forming agriculture and advanced technologies, and that growth blossomed simultaneously in widely separated geographical areas, from the Indus Valley to the Levant to the Americas.’

Vladimir leaned back in his seat, clearly disinterested but humoring his father’s obsession.

‘Surely that’s just natural growth after the end of the Ice Ages?’

‘There had been some developments, simple dwellings, domestication of animals and rudimentary agriculture. But then the people of the Indus valley began the construction of major cities around five thousand years ago. At the same time the Sumerians began to build cities in Mesopotamia, between the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers. There is no record of gradual development or progression because the cities sprang up almost instantaneously. Both civilizations supposedly independently invented the wheel and a script called cuneiform. The Indus valley script, known as Dravidian, hasn’t been fully deciphered even today.’

‘How big were these cities?’ Vladimir dutifully asked.

‘They were home to up to forty thousand people,’ Yuri replied. ‘They had domestic bathrooms, flushing toilets and drains built using burnt and glazed bricks. They had public basins with two layers of bricks with gypsum mortar and sealed by a layer of bitumen. The Mesopotamians built docks, seaworthy vessels for trade and developed extensive irrigation comparable to modern agriculture. The Egyptians rose at about the same time. Egypt’s first King, Menes, ruled some five thousand years ago in its capital Memphis, but the kingdom was ancient even then and had already developed its hieroglyphic script, again apparently out of nowhere.’

‘And you don’t think that this could have happened naturally?’ Vladimir asked.

‘It’s possible,’ Yuri conceded, ‘but it should have taken longer than it did, and it seems that the ancients suddenly acquired knowledge sufficiently advanced to still be used today.’

The Babylonians, Yuri explained, were descended from the Sumerians, and their mathematics was written using a sexagesimal numeral system: one which has as its base the number sixty. From this derived the modern day usage of sixty seconds in a minute, sixty minutes in an hour and three hundred and sixty degrees in a circle.

‘So what’s the issue here?’ Vladimir asked. ‘If this is all well known, why are we chasing Doctor Morgan half way around the globe?’

‘Because Lucy is on the trail of something far, far bigger,’ Yuri explained. ‘She may be on her way to finding fresh remains that contain not just proof of extra-terrestrial influence on both human development and even evolution, but that they left us a message in those remains.’

Vladimir stared at his father silently for a few moments. ‘A message?’

‘A message,’ Yuri repeated, ‘one that has long been rumoured through the religions of mankind, the divine word of gods. But we are now talking about real historical events that match the supposed myths of a thousand religions. We are familiar only with the religious histories that survive to this day, but they have existed in many differing forms for millennia. Oral tradition was the only way for ancient civilizations to record their past until scripts suddenly appeared simultaneously around the world: the Neolithic script, Indus script, Sumerian and Bronze Age phonetics all appear around six thousand years ago. In all of their creation myths, these early civilizations almost identically describe Gods who came down from the skies and passed to them great knowledge.’

Vladimir himself had read of the legends of the Sumerians, Egyptians, Amerindians and Japanese, describing such visitors as traveling in fiery chariots, flaming dragons or giant glowing birds that descended noisily from the sky. Encouraged by his father, he had been required to digest vast volumes of material that to him was being spouted by pseudo-scientists and fringe fanatics.

‘That’s crazy,’ Vladimir said. ‘Surely our ancestors would have recorded such things in greater detail?’

‘What makes you think that they didn’t?’ Yuri asked. ‘The fingerprints of such events are found in almost every religious text on Earth.’

‘Where?’ Vladimir uttered, baffled.

‘Ezekiel speaks of such events in the Bible,’ Yuri said. ‘And I looked, and, behold, a whirlwind came out of the north, a great cloud, and a fire infolding itself, and a brightness was about it, and out of the midst thereof as the color of amber, out of the midst of the fire.

Also out of the midst thereof came the likeness of four living creatures, and this was their appearance: they had the likeness of a man.’

‘I don’t suppose that a passage in the Bible is going to alter the future of humanity, papa,’ Vladimir smiled. ‘We all know that it’s not a historical document.’

‘True, but real historical documents and evidence?’ Yuri challenged. ‘NASA launched its Voyager space probes in the seventies with solid gold discs aboard, bearing greetings in fifty-five different languages. One of those was ancient Sumerian. Why would they include a script that is several thousand years old and no longer used by humanity?’

Vladimir rubbed his temples in a sign of weariness and Yuri fought to control the outrage surging through his veins. His son thought him a fool. Yet Yuri’s journey was the purest that he had ever conceived. For once, for the first time since his youth, Yuri was seeking a noble path, one that would secure his legacy for millennia to come. He would be ever remembered as the truth, the light, he who had heralded the new enlightenment.

‘Our purpose is the eradication of blind faith,’ Yuri said finally. ‘The exposure of the remains that Lucy Morgan discovered in Israel or similar artefacts will finally bring about an awakening among the so-called faithful. How many thousands of years have human beings murdered each other, oppressed each other, hounded and tortured and exiled each other on the basis of nothing more than blind faith?’

Yuri spat the word as though it tasted foul. Vladimir raised an eyebrow.

‘You can lead a horse to water…’ he replied.

‘Pah!’ Yuri snorted. ‘Faith is nothing. The very word describes an inability to trust one’s own beliefs, that faith is required. Around the world, Islamic militants murder school children for wanting to go to school, mutilate female genitalia, punish women for being raped and burn the flags of other nations in the name of faith. The Catholic Church opposes contraception and abortion, spreading lies and disinformation to do so, hoards a fortune worth hundreds of billions of dollars while lamenting poverty, and has routinely avoided prosecuting members of the church who have abused children in their care. What part of all that is the light or the truth? Religion, in all of its guises, is the darkness my son, it is the evil that it claims to stand against. Lucy’s work, properly exposed to the world, will crush religion in an instant.’

‘Or strengthen it,’ Vladimir murmured in reply. ‘What do you want me to do next?’

‘Have a little faith,’ Yuri replied with a cold smile. ‘Lucy Morgan first got into all of this while searching for alien remains in Israel, as you know. Israel is part of the Levant, the cradle of civilization. Twelve thousand years ago the Levant was a very different place, a lush and fertile land, and the Sumerian legends describe the origins of their civilization there through unusual means.’

‘Like the Bible?’ Vladimir asked.

‘Sumerian legends tell of a god named Oannes,’ Yuri explained. ‘Oannes rose out of the Persian Gulf in what is described as a diving suit, and is depicted as an amphibious being. Many legends in the region also state unequivocally that Oannes came from under the sea. Oannes is the culture bearer for the Sumerian civilization, who is said to have brought them the arts of writing, agriculture and tool making.’

‘And you think that perhaps Lucy, having seen the first set of remains she founds taken away from above the United States government, is now hot on the trail of something else?’

‘Yes,’ Yuri replied, ‘but more than that I think she was able to study the remains before the government took them away. I think that she discovered a link, a trail that may lead her to something more. The United States government presumably does not have that link or has not yet discovered it. Given Lucy Morgan’s tenacity and expertise in her field it would not surprise me if she had got the jump on the government.’

Vladimir frowned. ‘Then what do we have that makes this all worthwhile? Lucy Morgan may be following a wild-goose-chase, as I think the Americans call it?’

Yuri leaned down beneath is seat and lifted out what looked to Vladimir like a stone libation bowl, dirtied with age. Yuri set the bowl between them on the table.

‘This, my son, is the Fuenta Magna. It was found in 1958 near Lake Titicaca in Bolivia. As you can see it features beautifully engraved anthropomorphic characters and zoological motifs characteristic of the local culture.’

‘It’s lovely,’ Vladimir uttered without interest. ‘Make your point, papa.’

‘It is often referred to as the Rosetta Stone of the Americas, and is one of the most controversial artefacts in South America as it raises questions about whether there may have been a connection between the Sumerians and the ancient inhabitants of the Andes, located thousands of miles away. The reason for that are the inscriptions, here on the edge.’

Vladimir peered at the writing running around the rim of the bowl’s interior. ‘It looks a bit like hieroglyphics.’

‘They’re better than that,’ Yuri replied, ‘they’re in two different scripts. One is the ancient language of Pukhara, a forerunner of the Tiahuanaco civilization native to Bolivia and Peru. The other is proto-Sumerian, a culture that rose in the fertile crescent of Persia, thousands of miles away.’

Vladimir looked up at his father. ‘Could the Sumerians have sailed across the oceans and met the Pukhara?’

‘Their civilizations had only just managed to begin the rudimentary basics of agriculture, Vlad’,’ Yuri explained. ‘Sailing around the globe wasn’t just unlikely, but truly impossible.’

Vladimir shook his head. ‘I still don’t understand, papa. What if we do find these remains and we do understand the message that is within them? Why is it so important?’

Yuri sighed heavily as he realized the extent of his son’s incapacity to understand the importance of what he was pursuing.

‘Because it underlines more than just human evolution — it reveals the fact that our development as a species has been guided. We had help,’ he explained. ‘Because it brings to an end more than just religious conflict, the centuries and millennia of which have cost millions of lives for absolutely nothing. Because it could reveal not just that humanity’s development has been guided at some point in our past by intelligences not of this Earth, but that life at large in the universe is in fact guided, that we are not merely the product of natural processes but that the spread of life in the universe may in fact have been deliberately engineered, perhaps even by species that have long since passed into extinction. We are not pursuing just remains in a dusty desert, my son, we are pursuing the final chapter in our understanding of how we came to be here. We are seeking the actual origin of life in our universe, the true nature of God.’

Vladimir stared at his father as the depth of their quest began to finally sink in. The younger man glanced up at the skies as though searching the heavens, and as he did so Yuri too looked skyward at the light cumulus clouds drifting through the endless blue.

It was then that he saw the tiny speck of an aircraft climbing away from the nearby islands, and heard the sound of the engines as they passed overhead. He shielded his eyes with one hand and easily identified the shape of the aircraft, its distinctive fuselage and wide straight wings bright white as they reflected the sunlight flaring off the clouds beneath them.

The Catalina was heading south west, right out over the ocean. Although there were isolated islands in that direction the aircraft was still climbing, already through five thousand feet already. That put its likely destination is at least a hundred nautical miles away and probably more as it sought the colder high altitude air to cruise more efficiently.

Yuri lowered his hand as he watched the aircraft disappear above the cumulus clouds and spoke without looking at his son.

‘Contact our IT experts and have them access local flight plans filed from the islands. Find out if there are any Catalina recorded as being due to depart the island today.’

Vladimir craned his head back toward the faint noise of the passing aircraft.

‘You think they’re aboard?’

‘If I were looking to leave the area in a hurry and did not want to be traced, I would charter a private aircraft and make sure the pilot had not filed a flight plan. If we don’t find one…’

Vladimir nodded as he got out of his seat and hurried away.