Cults of the Dragon Gods Read online

  After completing their compulsory education, nearly three quarters of the country does little more than watch video streams, drink, and fuck. If it were not for computers and the technological infrastructure, America would have already collapsed under its own weight.

  *Brand, we're north of the city. I found a factory that is closed down. We're parked in one of the loading bays. They're roofed, so we are undercover from any aerial surveillance.*

  Dacbold's words break me out of my musing. Give me the address.

  As Dacbold gives me the address, I plug it into the the SUV's autopilot. We are only a few minutes away from his location.

  When the SUV pulls up to the abandoned factory's gate, I disable the autopilot and enter the grounds under manual control. Circling around the building, I find the loading dock, which has one of those steel frame and corrugated metal awnings covering it. I park on the passenger side of the van.

  The van sinks on its suspension, and the sliding side door opens to reveal Dacbold. Most modern Earth vehicles were never designed to carry passengers with the mass of a Dvergar.

  Exiting the SUV, I open the rear door and drag out Special Agent Jones.

  As I turn to the van, Dacbold's eyes widen and his jaw drops open slightly. "Clarence?"

  Very little surprises me anymore, but hearing Special Agent Jones' given name come out of Dacbold's mouth sends a jolt through me. "You know him?"

  Dacbold scratches his chin through his thick beard. "I spent thirty years in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. I was a combat engineer in Afghanistan. That fucking war that just wouldn't end. I ran into Clarence a few times over there. Damn, he looks good for his age."

  "How old is he?"

  Dacbold shrugs. "It has been over twenty-five years since I retired. He has to be in his sixties, maybe, over seventy, but he hardly looks any older than the last time I saw him."

  For the second time in less than a minute, I am rocked by surprise. Special Agent Jones looks like he would be at most in his early forties. He could easily pass for his early thirties. Yep, Special Agent Jones is definitely a freak.

  "Why did you put a slave collar on him?"

  "Look at the its pattern. The way that one is designed, it might keep him from following the orders of whoever put that plate in his head."

  "You really think I can figure that out just by looking at the pattern?" Dacbold stares at me with incredulity plastered all over his face.

  I would not say that I am surprised, but I find it odd that he would not be able to ascertain some basic properties of an item from its pattern. I know that most human Smiths in the Battleground of the Damned would have a hard time understanding and Item of Power from its pattern, but I thought that was just from lack of knowledge. Dacbold has been trained by Dvergar, he should be able to understand the pattern by looking at it. Is it really that hard to do?

  I do not bother to continue thinking about why Dacbold might be limited. "The spell patterns built into this collar block and restrict the transmission of most types of energy, this includes pure Mana and Psi. Set up whatever devices you have that might block control signals from reaching him.

  "Elan, ward him in any way that you can to block tracking and communications from reaching him."

  Elan stares at Special Agent Jones for a minute or so, and a frown turns the corners of her lips downward. Before casting her own wards, she undoes three of the wards that Angelique placed on him.

  Dacbold takes out four rods that are engraved with runes that I cannot read. "Let me know when you have cast all your wards. The energy shield that these create will block you from casting most ward type spells on him and block a lot of Psi abilities at the same time."

  A little less than four minutes later, Elan looks toward Dacbold, and her eyes narrow as she stares at the rods in his hands. "You can activate your Spirit poles."

  Dacbold has his back to me so I cannot see his eyes, but at Elan's words, his spine straightens slightly. He does not say anything to Elan, but he mutters incantations under his breath and traces several runes on each of the rods. As Dacbold finishes with each rod, it floats out of his hands and begins to circle around his head.

  Once all four rods or floating around Dacbold, he mutters another incantation and points toward Special Agent Jones. Following Dacbold's commands, the four rods begin orbiting around Special Agent Jones' recumbent body in an oval pattern.

  Dacbold watches the rods for a few moments. "Okay. We're good to go."

  "Follow me. I'm going to drive around randomly for a bit. Keep an eye out for anyone that seems to be tailing us. Once we can be fairly certain we're in the clear, we'll go back to our base."

  *

  Special Agent Jones is laying on a mattress set directly on the floor. His arms and legs are chained to two eyebolts, an inch thick, that are sunk into the floor, and the links of the chains are half an inch thick. I used the metal hafts of a couple pole arms, which were among the trash loot I acquired from the massacred Thuggies when I first returned to the Battleground of the Damned, to fashion the eyebolts. Since I do not have a proper forge on hand, the workmanship is extremely shoddy, but it is unlikely that Special Agent Jones will be able to break either the chains for the eyebolts. I suppose, it will have to do.

  In a matter of hours, the wounds that Special Agent Jones suffered of my hands have healed to a degree that should have taken days. Like me, he is another freak. Perhaps, I should not say that he is like me. After all, I am probably not of Earth origin.

  The Spirit poles, as Elan called them, are still circling around Special Agent Jones. While I do not know how effective they will be against the followers of Woden, they are completely effective in blocking my erratic Psi. With luck, Woden's bitch followers will never realize we are here before we leave.

  I almost sneer. I have absolutely no faith in luck.

  As the door of the room closes, it cuts off my view of Special Agent Jones. I turned to Dacbold, who is waiting for me in the hall. "How well do you know Special Agent Jones?"

  Dacbold scoffs. "Barely. He's one of those people that was sort of a shadow operative for Homeland Security. You could never tell what agency he really belonged to. His ID usually said FBI, but that never made sense for the kind of work you would do. His main job looked to be problem-solving, which in government parlance means killing people."

  "If you are in the Army Corps of Engineers, how did you come into contact with them?"

  "How much do you know about the war in Afghanistan?"

  I shrug and shake my head. "Only what they taught in high school and college social awareness classes."

  Dacbold looks incredulous. "Social awareness? Is that the bullshit name to replace the bullshit name social studies, which should really be history?"

  I can only shrug again. "I don't know. In college, there are some classes that were labeled as history, but they were all part of the social awareness degree program. They weren't something that you would take if it was not your major. As far as social studies goes, I can't remember ever hearing that term, at least not in regards to anything in school."

  "So what did they teach you about Afghanistan?"

  While I organize my thoughts, I do not say anything for a moment. "The short version would be that the xenophobic Republican government provoked and allowed a terrorist attack that was used as an excuse to start a war for the control of the Middle East oil supplies. The United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001, and the war continued for over sixty years."

  Dacbold holds up his hand and shakes his head. "It figures. It really fucking figures. They've been fucking with and fucking up education since before I started school. That's nothing but bullshit and lies. At that time, Afghanistan had absolutely no oil production, and even now, there are only a few minor oilfields inside their borders. It's safe to assume that you know something between jack and shit about what went on in Afghanistan.

  "Afghanistan is not what you could call a normal war. Most of the real fighting, t
he stuff that made a difference, was done by covert operators. The other part of the war that could be argued to have maybe made a difference, but really did not, was the attempts at nation-building. It failed in Iraq, and it failed even more miserably in Afghanistan. The Army Corps of Engineers was involved in a lot of it. We built roads, bridges, hospitals, schools, and anything else some idiot bureaucrat or politician thought might endear the locals to us. In the end, it was all a waste of time. When we got there, most of them hated our guts for being Americans and not licking the sweaty, sheep shit stained balls of their pedophile Prophet. When we left, it was no different.

  "There was a lot of corruption and bribery associated with the government at all levels. The people in control ranged from gutless pissant paper pushers to bullies to full out drug dealing warlords. When one of them became too much of a problem and politics made it impossible to deal with them overtly, someone like Clarence would show up, and the problems would disappear."

  I chuckle. Somehow, that type of work seems like a perfect fit for Special Agent Jones.

  "By the way, he absolutely hates being called Clarence." Dacbold smirks.

  I do not bother to stop myself from smiling. "I know. His partner Special Agent Jones, no relation, hated his name to. It was Wendell."

  Dacbold shakes his head slightly. "I never met that Special Agent Jones."

  It seems like none of what Dacbold could tell me matters. I was hoping that he might know something about Special Agent Jones there would help me understand why the man's life or death matters to me. I used to have a very clear understanding of what mattered to me and why it mattered, but after living as a Half-Dvergar for more than a decade and returning to my human body, I am having trouble understanding myself. I was being a fool to think that what someone else could tell me would help me to better understand myself.

  I realize I am frowning. "How long do you think it will be before you can move the patterning equipment?"

  Dacbold stares into space for a moment with a frown of his own. "I can be ready in a day or two. The big question is when your Wytch will be ready with the spells. There is just one problem, we won't be able to pack it in any sort of dimensional storage. That equipment has some strange properties that blocked my attempts to put one of the smaller pieces in a dimensional storage ring. I can't see any way around it, and your woman did not have any ideas either. We would have to move it to the rift by truck, but the biggest pieces are not going to fit on that freight elevator in the hospital."

  "What if I brought the Night Raven here? Would you be able to load it on the airship?"

  Dacbold shrugs. "I don't see any reason why not."

  "Okay. When Elan is ready, get that stuff packed for shipping. We'll bring the Night Raven here."

  "No problem." Dacbold walks off in the direction of the manufacturing facility. There is a spring in his step that I do not remember noticing before.

  I head in the direction of an office with one of the more powerful computer terminals. I need to check on the progress of some of the tasks I have set for Delphi to accomplish.

  *Valcrit, how much longer will it be before you're done with that piece of shit Turner?*

  Several minutes pass in silence. I could feel my whisper channel connect with Valcrit, so I am certain that he heard me. Even though I understand almost nothing about the techniques used in ripping apart a person's Mind, I would imagine that it is a delicate process, which requires a great deal of attention to detail.

  My apologies, Master. If I tried to answer you immediately, I might have damaged the chain of memories I was working with. It will take me another four to five days to finish. This man's Mind is far more complex and twisted that I anticipated. I am being forced to assimilate nearly his entire knowledge of medicine and genetics to be able to understand and unravel his memories properly. His pursuit of education and his research into genetics are all driven by his obsessive sexual desires for his sister and his hatred of his peers. It is an interesting experience to delve into the Mind of an individual like him. Valcrit's enthusiasm is perceptible in the whisper channel. He seems to be honestly enjoying the destruction of Dr. Turner's Mind.

  Let me know when you're done. I need the information he has relating to the Burning Medical Research Hospital. If you can collate everything relating to the hospital's physical layout in one place, that would be helpful.

  I have already done that. I can give you the Power crystal with the majority of the that information about the hospital, now. The slow part is trying to understand all the experiments he is involved in and organizing them in a comprehensible manner. There are so many things that he knows to be false, but he operates as though they are true. Trying to understand what is true knowledge and what is false knowledge and separate them is the most difficult part.

  What seems like a sigh of disgust comes through the whisper channel. If the Mind of this man is a good example of the people of this world, it is hard to understand how they can function. It is clear from the knowledge contained in his mind that he is of far above average intelligence, so it makes it hard to believe that the normal … cattle might be the best way to describe them … can still function with all the lies and deceptions they have to pretend our truths.

  I think that I know where Valcrit is coming from, but I am curious about his point of view. I'm not sure exactly what you are trying to say.

  For fifteen or twenty seconds, Valcrit does not say anything. While you were a gladiator and once you set yourself free, I watched you, Master. You have a hatred and disgust for anything that is not truth that borders on pathological. Pathological, that is such an interesting word. We do not have any word quite like it in the DokkAlfar language, but it is the perfect adjective to describe so much of our society. It is an even more apt description of this Earth. I would never have imagined that I would see a world so bent on self-destruction. This Dr. Turner full well understands that many of the papers he has published and the things he has ascribed to are lies, but because of this political correctness that your world operates on, he manipulates his data and distorts his findings to create lies to support the other lies he is pretending to be truths. The interesting part is the level of self-hatred that it has engendered within him, and how that self-hatred evolved into his violent serial rape of his sister. I do not know if it is ironic or not, but he sees his rape of his sister as protecting her.

  Okay. But what of the lies you are talking about?

  Valcrit laughs. Before the MMO Incident, as it is called, this Dr. Turner was involved in genetic research to extend the lifespan of human beings. Without intending to, he offended one of his superiors, who is considered to be an authority on genetics, by releasing a paper that unintentionally proved an accepted conclusion on the genetics of homosexuality was actually a lie. He was completely unaware of of the accepted theory he was disproving, but his superior, who was a homosexual and the originator of the theory, took it as a personal attack. While the research hospital where he was working was fully aware of his repeatedly raping his sister, they did not care because he was a talented researcher. His superior somehow acquired the information and used it to blackmail him. Dr. Turner was forced into recanting his conclusions and admitting to falsifying his research. The hospital allowed him to resign, but his superior spread the information about Dr. Turner falsifying his research through back channels. Afterwards, Dr. was unable to find any positions related to genetic research, and he became a hospital physician.

  I smile. I detest Dr. Turner, and learning about his suffering is a satisfying experience. So, how did he get his job where he is now? From what you said, he is involved in genetic research?

  Based on what is in Dr. Turner's memories, the people who control the Burning Medical Research Hospital are aware that he did not falsify his research. They do not seem to care about bowing to the tenets of political correctness. Their only interest is in his understanding of genetics. Most of the research being conducted in their hospital seems to b
e related to mixing human genetics with that of other species, primarily animals. From what Dr. Turner knows, the goal seems to be the development of physically superior humans, but he does not care what their goals are as long as he can continue his research into the human genome. He does not believe in anything. He only cares about acquiring more knowledge and raping his sister's clone.

  I break out laughing. Turner is such a fucked up piece of work. How did he get hooked up with the Burning Hospital in the first place?

  After his sister was placed in the Burning Medical Research Hospital, when she became a victim of the MMO Incident, he was approached by the hospital director, Henry Burning. The director was aware of Dr. Turner's research and laughed off the idea that he falsified his data. Dr. Turner did not even pretend to take time to think over the offer he was given before accepting it.

  I snort. Interesting, but irrelevant. Let me know when you're done with him.

  Of course, Master. Along with the hospital plans, you should probably take copies of the crystals with what I have unwound about those experiments.

  Okay. Give me both.

  Yes, Master.

  *** Southern California – Earth ***

  Return: Day 344

  August 7, 2078

  (Thorrin)

  After about six hours in a van, we were loaded onto a boat. The boat ride lasted about another hour, and we were blindfolded the entire time. As my blindfold is finally removed, I see a cell carved from out of bedrock. I assume we are underground, but I do not know if this is somewhere along the coast or if it is an island.

  Navarro's guards chain Pancho, the girl, and myself to the walls of our cell and tear off what little clothing we have left.