The Chosen One

Chapter 8-1

Chapter 8

But you said in your heart,

I'll ascend to heaven;

I'll raise my throne above the stars of God,

And I'll sit on the mount of assembly

In the recesses of the north.

I'll ascend above the heights of the clouds;

I'll make myself like the Most High.

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Isaiah 14:13-14

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Galactic Standard Date: 152,323.02 AE

Haven-3: Alliance Hall of Parliament

Prime Minister Lucifer

LUCIFER

Haven-3 was the third planet in an artificially crafted solar system of one natural sun and two smaller artificial ones so the sun never set in the Alliance capital. Fairy tale spires twisted gracefully towards the sky, sleek, modern buildings of glass and steel and composite plastic so strong, not even an earthquake could shake them from their pillars. From her spaceport, traffic ebbed and flowed to every planet and solar system in the galaxy. At its center stood a massive building, round, so that no delegate ever sat closer to the empty throne than any other.

A tall, serpentine creature which vaguely resembled a dragon ascended the steps, leaning heavily upon his cane. The Speaker of the Commons was a Mu'aqqibat [28] dragon, not a real dragon, like Shay'tan was, but one of the species which preceded the formation of the Alliance. He stopped in front of the podium and fished out his spectacles before taking out his gavel.

"The Prime Minister will now address Parliament," he said in a formal voice.

Lucifer ascended the central platform, his niveous white wings draped artfully behind his back like the Eternal Emperor's mantle. Balcony after balcony cascaded upwards towards the dome; each delegate representing a homeworld in an empire which spanned almost half the galaxy. The delegates were as varied as the worlds they represented: mammals, insectoids, amphibians and other life forms. Each species had a homeworld where they'd evolved naturally under the protection of the Eternal Emperor until they'd achieved a level of sentience sufficient to earn membership in the Galactic Alliance. Each species had a voice to assert their rights; every species except for one…

His...

The delegates chattered, cutting deals as elected officials were wont to do.

"Didn't we already vote on this deal?" a delegate asked.

The Emperor vetoed it," the delegate next to him replied. "Stabbed his own son in the back."

"I'm not about to override the Eternal Emperor!" the first one said.

"Why not?" the second delegate said. "The sonofabitch abandoned us for two hundred years, and now he shows up and wants to be our god?"

Lucifer pressed his lips together, waiting for the General Assembly to quiet down.

The cacophony continued; a feeding frenzy of back-room deals; this vote for that one; cast your vote for this pet project and I'll release your bill from committee. Lucifer closed his eyes and focused on the flow of self-interest which, due to the gift of empathy bestowed upon him by a half-Seraphim mother, allowed him to visualize the delegate's desires.

Enhanced Angelic senses registered the sybaritic tickle of expensive aftershave, aged brandy, and the lingering scent of todóg. [29] The acoustics were such that the slightest whisper carried across the chamber. His eerie platinum eyes scanned the coliseum; perceptive, cynical, reflective as he put a name to the strongest of those desires and noted the places he might bring persuasion to bear. At last he signaled the Speaker to begin the show.

"In the name of the Eternal Emperor—" the tall, serpent-like Speaker pounded his gavel "—I hereby call this joint session of Parliament to order!"

The delegates stared down from their lofty balconies. Once already he'd passed this measure by the slenderest of margins. It had ignited such a firestorm that the Eternal Emperor himself had intervened to slap it down with a rare imperial veto.

Determination stiffened Lucifer's spine as he ruffled his snow white feathers. He turned his good side towards the cameras which broadcast these proceedings to every television network in the Alliance.

"Today I come to you not as the adopted son of the Eternal Emperor," Lucifer said, "a man who by virtue of an accident of fortune had a voice bestowed upon him because my father appointed me to represent your interests—" he lowered his wings into a gesture of humility "—but as an Angelic, a species whose only purpose is to lay down our lives to protect you, the naturally evolved races."

He moved to position himself before an enormous, golden Leonid [30] and an even burlier bay Centauri [31] who he'd appointed to stand guard just at the edge of the stage. He turned back to face the cameras which panned like greedy vulture's beaks to follow him, cognizant of the fact their refractive lenses would make it appear the two hybrids stood directly behind him.

"For as long as the Alliance has existed—" Lucifer spoke into the cameras "—the Emperor has relied upon the stick of military might to keep the Sata'an Empire in check."

He gestured towards the lion-man and half-horse-human hybrid.

"To achieve this end, he created four species of genetically engineered super-soldiers: the Angelic Air Force, Leonid Multi-Purpose Fighters, the Centauri Cavalry, and the Merfolk Navy." [32]

He made eye contact with the delegates he'd tagged earlier as impressionable, the ones who stared down from their lofty perches like the ascended beings who forever dabbled in the affairs of mortals. Sunlight streamed down from the atrium like an omen from She-Who-Is, creating a brilliant golden halo around his white-blonde hair and framing the perfection of his too-symmetrical features, reminding the delegates he was the adopted son of their emperor and god.

"For 150,000 years, our military superiority has kept an uneasy balance between the Sata'anic Empire and our own Galactic Alliance," he continued. "But now a new threat has dawned against our Alliance. Not the external threat of Shay’tan, but one of our own making."

He paused to make eye contact with a delegate to his left, and then to his right, before turning back to face the cameras. He lowered his voice as if he revealed a secret, just low enough to force the delegates to all lean forward to hear.

"The armies that defend us, ladies and gentlemen, are a dying species."

A gasp rippled through the assembly, to hear him speak their shame before the cameras, making it official, making their weakness real. The perpetual cacophony of self-interest began anew:

"My constituents were angry I voted to outsource our jobs."

"Who cares if the hybrids die?"

"What does that have to do with -me-?"

A feisty young Spiderid [33] Lord stood up, a freshman delegate who had not yet learned that when there were cameras present, it was always prudent to exercise restraint.

"YOUR race is dying!" the Spiderid shouted. "Our race is doing just fine!" He turned to the delegates on either side of him as they chortled back a snigger. "So tell Shay'tan he can take his trade deal and shove it up his scaly tail!"

The discord grew chaotic as Parliament twittered like magpies coveting a shiny golden trinket. Such forthrightness on the record was a political blunder, but the freshman lord voiced a sentiment which many not-so-secretly shared.

Lucifer's silver eyes bored into the Spiderid's compound ones as he brought both hands to his heart and allowed his expression to soften.

"Yes," Lucifer said gently. "My race is dying. My race, that protected your race until it evolved enough to join this Alliance, is dying."

He drew his hand into a fist and stared at it, as though he were making a decision. In the pause, the cameras shifted, zooming inwards, zooming outwards, placing the dispute between himself and the sentiment the Spiderid lord had dared voice into the public eye of a centillion television viewers.

"My race, which kicked Shay’tan off of your planet when he tried to annex it, and you came running to us for help, is DYING!"

He raised his voice into a shout as he shook his fist at the mouthy Spiderid lord.

"And now that millennia of constant warfare has reduced our numbers so low that we now have more pieces of equipment than hybrids in existence to man that equipment, my race is coming to your race to beg for help so we don't all go extinct!"

He slammed his fist onto the podium, his eerie silver eyes flashing in fury. The Spiderid delegate squirmed in his seat while the others who only moments before sniggered now glared at the young lord, publicly distancing themselves from the foolish upstart. Lucifer gave the mouthy Spiderid a smile that did not reach his eyes.

"It is good that the Spiderid species is thriving," Lucifer said. "It means the hybrids didn't sacrifice their lives in vain."

He stared up at the delegates perched upon their balconies like vultures.

"When the Emperor created us," he said, "he declared our sole purpose was to serve the naturally evolved species. We were denied Alliance citizenship because you feared we might abuse the genetic enhancements he grafted onto our DNA."

He gestured towards an empty seat, left ceremonially empty to commemorate a planet no longer with the Alliance.

"Once upon a time, the source race which spawned our species still walked among us. Because they saw us as their children, they made sure we hybrids didn't languish without a voice."

"But then, 74,000 years ago, an asteroid hit Nibiru. [34] And just like that—" he snapped his fingers "—all of humanity was destroyed."

He gave his deceased progenitors a moment of silence.

"When humans went extinct, they took with them the closest thing we hybrids had to a homeworld. They took away our voice. And they took with them the genetic diversity we needed to survive."

He spread his arms in the T-like posture of a victim strapped to a Tokoloshe [35] feeding pole. His wings drooped as though they were too heavy for him to lift. He bowed his head, a martyr offering himself as a sacrifice for the greater good.

"As the Alliance expanded, the galaxy looked to us to police their problems. So you took our species off of your homeworlds and put us into ships in space. "Then you declared hybrids have to serve 500 years in the military, not just 20 like the volunteers, because if we don't get killed in battle, we can live that long."

His voice rose in anger.

"But it didn't end there!" he shouted. "When hybrid birthrates dropped even further, you pulled our females off of your planets and made them start fighting, as well!"

He whirled to face the ancient races that had been in existence longer than there had been an Alliance, his wings flared like a raptor. Their base of power depended upon maintaining a slave army.

"And then six hundred years ago you told us it was forbidden to form relations for any reason except to begat offspring to perpetuate the glory of the Alliance!" he shouted. "Or even sire offspring with the same partner twice! Because we've become so inbred that genetic diversity is now an issue!"

He flapped his wings. His beautiful, white wings that meant his species could never have a voice because those wings had not evolved naturally onto his back.

"All because the genetic modifications the Emperor gave us to maintain these—" he yanked out a snowy white feather "—these wings. And the other genetic modifications which enslave our species to serve the rest of you are a recessive gene!"

He threw the feather into the air. A ray of sunlight caught it from the atrium above as though She-Who-Is herself wished to say, 'see!' The feather floated down in silence. Only the shuffling of feet and an occasional cough broke the silence in the great hall as the feather hit the ground.

"These improvements—" Lucifer flapped his wings "—require so much selective breeding to maintain that we've INBRED OURSELVES INTO EXTINCTION!"

He stepped over to an Electrophori [36] delegate and stared down the conservative religious leader from an ancient world of sentient eels which loathed all hybrids as 'manufactured abominations.'

"You can get married?" Lucifer shouted at him. "But we can’t? Because you need us to make lots of babies who have these for your enemies to shoot at without the inconvenience of voting rights?"

Lucifer flapped his wings again. The wind they made blew the delegate's paperwork off of his desk.