Dragon Eyes began this bold science fiction adventure. Then Sibyls’ Orb dragged you inexorably into the beating heart of this mystical walk on the wild side of science fiction. But now, this twisted tale of mystical intrigue will weave your mind forever into The Ojunta Stone.
It all began forty years ago, during the Anoza Rebellion, when the rebels abandoned an anoza science officer and his team on the human world, Galatea. To their horror, they discovered the unspeakable evil that had been done there by their own people, anoza. But evil begets evil. Before the day was done, the rebels had killed one of their own and left the rest to die. So it was, in his despair, that the Ojunta Stone found him. So it was, that the science officer, a good man, became ensnared in the ancient evil… consumed by it.
Forty years later, on a distant anoza world, a meeting was held of Council of the Crescent Moon in the Temple of Shem Kazat. Seven times they circled the sacred fire. Incense rose unto the heavens. When the power of them was full, within the Sibyl’s Orb, only a brief vision was seen to give Toron, the smallest of clues, to hunt down this ancient evil. But the vision was of a time and place forty years in the past. How could that possibly help him now?
Toron had survived the Anoza Rebellion’s best attempt to kill him, but this time he found himself wound full-up into the same intrigues with a new face. This time, he faced an even more cunning opponent who had cheated death and hid amongst his people for the past forty years.
But Captain Chon Ko Gonin and the crew of the Green Jinn had already unknowingly joined this quest. They thought they were hunting down a pair of criminals guilty of the most unspeakable war crimes, but quickly found themselves embroiled by the same ancient evil of the Ojunta Stone.
This time, only the Dragon Warrior could save them, but to do that, he must first find the Alchemist of the Cozmos to discover the secret of the stone. Then, he must find a golden butterfly and a silver dragonfly. But Ojunta was not about to be so easily defeated.
No matter what the outcome, you will be left to ask yourself; Is this magic or is this science? After all, quantum physics is not exactly what any sane person would call ‘logical’ now; right? So, you had better be prepared as The Ojunta Stone pushes that thought to its limits and severely tests the boundaries of belief. After all, this is science fiction, not fantasy… or is it?
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Ojunta Stone on Amazon as a Kindle or Paperback
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- Amazon Kindle
- Print Length: 174 pages
- Publisher: Five Moons Publications; 2 edition (July 8, 2020)
- Publication Date: July 8, 2020
- Sold by: Amazon.com Services LLC
- Language: English
- ASIN: B08CNFR2F2
- 6×9 Amazon Paperback
- Series: Tails of the Green Jinn (Book 3)
- Paperback: 212 pages
- Publisher: Independently published (July 10, 2020)
- Language: English
- ISBN-13: 979-8665307008
- ASIN: B08CPB7NVW
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SAMPLE CHAPTERS
Prologue
A science team from the Anoza Rebel Battleship Kip’nari’aptu walked out of a quantum portal onto the surface of a planet that the humans called ‘Galatea.’ They had been told that they were to run a preliminary survey. Galatea was a planet of incredible beauty. It had been very lovingly developed for human habitation by Cain, the CEO of the evil human Syndicate, for his own personal use. So, the buildings were all made of the most beautiful blocks of Galatea’s finest granite. All of the human buildings and structures flowed along the natural curves of the landscape. As beautiful as they were, though, they were still not as beautiful as the magnificent Anoza stone buildings the science team was used to. They had not been lovingly constructed and decorated by skilled Anoza artisan craftsmen. Even so, they were still very nice.
The science team approached a magnificently appointed stone archway that opened into a magnificent garden beyond, but when they passed through it, they came upon a scene they never expected. There were dead humans left laying where they had been shot, in now dried pools of their own blood. The stench of death hit them like a cold, hard slap in the face. The science officers were horrified.
“Shades of Hades!” Kiiori, one of science technicians, exclaimed.
“How could this be?” Shemet asked Piatu Tahrek, the Chief Science Officer.
Piatu was at once infuriated and disgusted. “This is not what we were told,” he agreed.
“They told us that they had relocated all of these evil humans!” Ninla reminded the group. “That was an outright lie, and this is the indisputable evidence of it!”
“This is nothing short of a crime,” Shemet gave voice to the opinion of all. This was wrong by everything that every Anoza had been taught from birth.
Just as wrong, ten minutes later, a tough squad of Anoza elite troopers arrived unannounced through another quantum portal. No one had said anything to Chief Science Officer Piatu Tahrek about any troops. He approached their squad leader and took him aside.
“What is the meaning of this? We were told that all of the humans here were relocated!” Piatu said privately but firmly to him.
“Each of them chose their own fate,” the stone-faced squad leader growled back at him. “They could have either gone quietly or die. These humans did not choose wisely.”
“None of them were armed! And some of them were shot in the back!” Piatu responded.
“They were nothing but evil human scum,” the squad leader answered him dismissively.
“But we are Anoza!” Piatu insisted. “We are better than this! What happened here is a crime by any Anoza standard!”
“High Commander Kim Dakara thought that you would react this way. Today, you have not chosen wisely.” Without so much as another word, the squad leader pulled out his pulse pistol and shot Piatu!
~~~
“He shot Piatu in cold blood!” Dorian told his daughter some forty years later with the same look of shock and horror on his face as the day that it had happened. “He killed Piatu without a moment’s hesitation or a second thought.”
Ixianne was aghast at what her father had just told her. It took her a few seconds to recover enough for her to ask him, “So, what did you do?”
“Do? Do? I was just young science officer. What could I possibly do against battle-hardened elite troops?” It took Dorian several seconds to compose himself enough to continue.
~~~
The commando squad leader turned to face the rest of the science team. He could see the look of shock and horror on their faces. They were frozen with fear.
“This day, you have all chosen your fates,” he growled at them. “By order of High Commander Kim Dakara, you will be left here to live out your days.” And, with that said, a quantum portal formed behind the troops. They all streamed back through it while two of them leveled their weapons at the science team to ensure that none of them dared to move. The last two men backed through the portal after all the others. It dissolved moments later.
Dorian was the first member of the science team to recover enough to run over to Piatu. But despite all of their best efforts to save him, Piatu died. The whole time, Lalu tried desperately to contact their ship for help. No one answered her. Then, as she watched in dismay, the quantum-com network disconnected from them altogether. They were being deliberately abandoned here and cut off from all communications.
“Now what will we do?” Kiiori asked.
Dorian had been second in command. Now the burden of command was his.
“Our first order of business here is to survive,” Dorian told her. “Everyone, scan the local area. See what we can find to help us.”
“There are human androids all self-stored in a building over there,” Massimo reported as he pointed to it. Shemet found a number of fully orbital transports all docked to the main building’s entry wing. Lalu found stores of human food and water while Ninla scanned and mapped the habitable buildings before them. They had come prepared for nothing more than a simple science mission. Instead, this became a mission of survival.
While the rest of them went into a beautifully appointed building to make it their impromptu headquarters, Dorian and Massimo organized the androids to remove all of the dead humans and Piatu. The bodies were all taken to a flat, barren spot outside of the compound and laid out in proper Anoza fashion. The bodies were all wrapped in white cotton sheets and set upon a stack of natural wood. No formal words were spoken as the funeral pyre was set ablaze. They all just stood there respectfully in stunned silence and watched until the fire was only a few burning embers. Day one was the worst. It was the pit of despair.
Kiiori did the best she could to cook proper Anoza meals with the human ingredients at hand and spices that she could only smell and do her best with. She loved cooking and so found this to be a pleasing challenge for her culinary skills. The next morning found her teaching the android cook to make typical Anoza flatbreads. The spices were not exactly correct but very close, to everyone else’s great relief.
On the second day, Massimo found the human quantum-com units that had all been left behind when the anoza troops had forced the humans to move in such a big hurry.
“What can we do with this?” Massimo asked Dorian.
“We can monitor the human communications,” Dorian decided, “and see what happens.”
“Why? What are you thinking?”
“We have no idea what the future will bring,” Dorian decided, “but at least it is a tie to the outside and a hope for rescue.” Everyone else agreed with Dorian and so they made a schedule to share the monitoring task.
Massimo returned all of the androids to their previously assigned tasks. The androids would tend to the farms and see to the maintenance of the buildings and equipment. They would run and maintain the crude fusion reactors that powered all of this. So, survival here would be easy and maybe even pleasant with the androids doing all of the work. The anoza science crew settled in and listened to reports of the war from the humans’ perspective over the quantum-com.
~~~
“In the end, you were rescued by the People’s Fleet, though,” Ixianne repeated what her father had told her and her mother long ago.
“Yes, but only after they defeated Kim Dakara and his rebels.” Dorian, like so many of his fellow crewmen, were not Rebels. They were caught up in the middle of the Rebellion and swept along in it like a leaf in a hurricane.
“But there is more to this story,” Ixianne told her father after several seconds of silence.
“You are so much like your mother.”
“I watched her read the expressions on your face a thousand times,” she confessed, but pressed on, “Well?”
“You know me. I am naturally curious. I could not just sit there. While we waited for the war to end, I went exploring.”
“And what did you find?”
“These humans were indeed evil and clever beyond what you would expect. Even so, Anoza technology is a million years more advanced than theirs. I found their secrets, but needless to say, I kept that information to myself. After the war, I went back.”
“You found the evil human’s hidden gold?”
“There was a lot more than just gold,” Dorian agreed. “There were diamonds and platinum.”
“But didn’t that belong to the humans?” Ixianne reasoned.
“Not so. The evil humans stole it from other humans, but then they killed everyone. So, now there is no one left alive for me to return it to.”
“If it does not belong to the humans, then does it not belong to the People’s Fleet?”
“It would have had they found it, but they did not. I found it.” At least, that was Dorian’s rationalization for doing what he did. “I left it right where it was. I made no effort to hide it any more than the humans had. Had the People’s Fleet found it, it would have belonged to them, but they never even looked for it.”
“If what you did was legal, then why did you hide it for more than forty years, even to this day?” Ixianne once more questioned his logic.
“First and foremost, when I found it, I was not exactly a member of the People’s Fleet. Even though that was not by my own choice, officially, I was still a member of the Rebels. That fact alone took months for the People’s Fleet to confirm that I was hijacked along with many others. Even so, you know what would have happened had I told them what I found? They would have confiscated it.”
“But then you could have claimed it as legally yours,” she reasoned.
“Yes, I most certainly could have done that, but then it would have been tied up in the People’s Courts for many years while its caretakers would have squandered it while they dragged out the proceedings for as long as they possibly could. They would have done everything they could to drive me broke in legal fees while they used up even more of my fortune. In the end, they would have left me with nothing, even had I won my claim.”
“Oh. Yes, indeed,” Ixianne had to agree. He was right. That is exactly what would have happened.
“After the war, I went back. I told everyone that I made a little money and invested it wisely and that I did do, but I have much more than any of them would ever suspect. That is what makes this all possible. Other than that, I live the life of an honest man of means,” Dorian explained to his daughter. “You know that I pay my taxes honestly and give generously to those in need. I have secretly made my fellow science teammates financially comfortable for the rest of their lives.”
Ixianne may not have been completely comfortable with her father’s moral position on this, but now she had to see where this conversation was going.
“So now you are telling me,” she replied.
“You know where I do business, but I need you to take the next step. I need you to learn the secrets. You will carry on after me. You will know the secrets as well as I do.”
“Okay. I will learn your secrets,” she agreed with reservations that she kept to herself.
Chapter 1: It all started with a vision.
On a distant world, a wood fire burned in the pit at the center of Shem Kazat, a very ancient Anoza Temple, as five moons rose into the crisp, clear night sky above. A man in formal robes threw a small handful of incense into the fire. The smoke of it went up into the heavens. The smell of it filled the air as the Council of the Crescent Moon once more met in their formal robes.
Three times did they circle the fire counterclockwise to begin this before a quantum portal opened. Through it, stepped Destiny and Phoebe. Cozmo followed them carrying the Sibyl’s Orb in its pouch. He stepped aside as Destiny and Phoebe joined the Council to circle the fire now four times clockwise. And so, the circle was complete.
“The Stones of Ojunta stole a secret,” Toron said in a loud voice. “The secret has a place.”
One of the other robed members threw a handful of powdered incense on the fire. The council waited until the smell of it was full to proceed.
“Cozmo, come forth,” Phoebe commanded.
Cozmo came forward holding the Orb out to her. She carefully removed it from its pouch and set it onto an invisible force field that held it suspended in the air before her. Then she placed her hands upon the Orb and closed her eyes. All of the others joined hands in a circle with Phoebe in their center. The Sibyl’s Orb sparkled with the power of it until its shimmering light filled them all.
A world beyond beauty appeared, full of peace and bliss. Wisps of high clouds highlighted a magnificent deep blue sky. Multicolored birds’ songs could be heard. This world was lush and fruitful wherever you looked. Beautiful buildings with once magnificent courtyards had once been home to humans here, but no more. The buildings were in disrepair, and its gardens had all gone wild.
Only one structure stood out. It stood alone, remote from all the others, at the very edge of an open desert. However, its gardens all were well kept and manicured. Even the desert dared not encroach upon its space. Its stone structure had withstood the test of time. Its pathways were all swept and clean, its lawns all perfectly trimmed and edged. And yet, it was empty… save for its android caretakers.
The sight of it filled Destiny with fear, but she would not give in. She fought back against the ancient evil that was trying to cloak itself in her fear. The entire Council became her strength and filled her with their peace.
And so, a vision of the past appeared. It was a man, a human. He was smiling and cordial, but in him dwelt great evil. He spoke words that were unimportant but put his hand on the wall and spoke to it. Stars appeared. The man pointed to some of them as he spoke, but then that vision faded.
Suddenly another face appeared… an Anoza face… and he wore the uniform of the Anoza People’s Fleet. But then the vision ended as quickly has it had appeared.
The Sibyl’s Orb went quiet and no longer filled them with its power and light. The members all released each other’s hands and took a deep breath of the crisp, fresh air to clear their minds.
“I must tell Dallas Blake right away,” Toron told the group, but he knew full well that the ball was in his court on this one. The man he saw was anoza, not human. He wore the uniform of the Anoza People’s Fleet. Toron sent the images of the man from his anoza version of a mindlink to his official private server on Akkad.
~~~
The next morning, Toron crossed the quantum portal from his home directly to his office on Akkad. Unlike human governments, Anoza government ran like a well-oiled machine on its own. So, there was a whole list of messages waiting for him, but none of them was urgent. Being a member of the High Council gave him secure access to any information that he needed. He entered the picture of the anoza man’s face into the system and requested an identity.
While he waited for a reply, he looked at several of the messages, thinking that his request would take a while. Instead, his virtual display suddenly came up with a secondary request for his personal identity.
“This is highly irregular,” he mumbled but let his camera scan his retinas.
The security screen was suddenly replaced by a woman’s face, live and in 3-D. She was as surprised to see him, as he was to find her on his display. She was even more surprised to read who he was in a banner at the bottom of her display. Toron was equally surprised to see the woman identified as Liilu Nirba, Chief Investigator, People’s Secret Service.
“High Council, how may I be of service?” she asked him.
“I need to discuss this matter with you personally, not over a network 3-D display. Where is your office?”
She sent him a map file to her office.
~~~
When the High Council’s image dissolved, Liilu was sincerely puzzled. What interest could High Council Toron possibly have in her current case? This case was nothing like any other that she had ever investigated, and now it was taking yet another unexpected turn.
Toron’s passing through security in the Secret Service building quickly brought out the Director. She was as surprised at this visit as Liilu had been. Now Toron had to be careful, or she would interpose herself into this. He didn’t want that.
“Director Jarinatu,” he greeted her. “So nice to see you.” He stopped to formally greet her.
“How can I be of service?” she asked him.
“I urgently need some very sensitive intel directly from one of your people,” he told her quietly.
“Who?” She asked him quietly.
“Chief Investigator, Liilu Nirba,” he whispered to her.
She turned and led him directly to Liilu Nirba’s office. The door opened as they approached.
“Thank you,” Toron told Director Jarinatu. She stopped at the door. He continued on into the office. To Director Jarinatu’s surprise, the door closed behind him. Liilu saw the door close behind him and the look on Director Jarinatu’s face as it did. Now she was even more intrigued as to what this was all about.
“Your system identified this man,” Toron said to Liilu as he put the 3-D picture up on her display.
“Yes,” she replied after several pointed seconds. “That is Dorian Calisiian, but that is an old picture of him.” She put a recent 3-D photo up next to his image for comparison. “Your picture of him is forty years old, when he was a science officer in the People’s Fleet.”
“Yes,” Toron agreed with her. “That is exactly correct. Why are you investigating him?”
“Twenty years ago, Sumai Raktiash, the Chief Investigator before me, found a pattern of money developing that exactly matched how the Rebellion’s conspirators moved their money. We were at first very alarmed. Had the Rebellion not been totally defeated? Then, we found that he exchanged gold and diamonds that were strangely radioactive for the money. It all emitted exotic quantum Xi particles. Sumai was then even more concerned, but Dorian Calisiian only made very few very brief surprise appearances, and never in the same place twice. So, it was incredibly difficult to track down with limited resources.”
“For many years did Sumai hunt this man down. He was very elusive. Dorian Calisiian has some very nice homes on seven different planets but was never to be found in any of them. Then Sumai retired. When he did, he left the case to me. I found that Dorian Calisiian had a wife and daughter. They could easily be found in any one of these homes and moved around as frequently as it served their purposes. Even so, we could never find Dorian Calisiian coming or going.”
“Back when I first took on this case, Dorian Calisiian was using different dealers to exchange his gold, diamonds, and platinum every time. So, it was not possible for us to catch him in the exchange. As the years passed, though, he became less cautious.”
“Then, one of our agents spotted him going into one of the dealers one day two years ago. The agent used that opportunity to set a swarm of micro-drones to follow him. That is how I found his private network of rings,” she explained to Toron. Anoza called quantum portals ‘rings’ because that is what the Anoza versions looked like – a thick, gray metal ring large enough for you to walk through.
“So, he eluded you by moving across his own private rings?”
“Yes, he did. So, I solved that. My micro-drones tagged his rings. When we thought that we had found them all, my own ring technicians secretly bugged them. Now I can sit in my office and track Dorian Calisiian from planet to planet.”
“But you have not yet arrested him,” Toron concluded.
“No. I have not,” she admitted.
“And why would that be?”
“It’s a very complicated legal issue, actually. Dorian Calisiian did not turn out to be a rebel nor was he a terrorist. In fact, he honestly declares his income and pays his taxes. For all of the work that we have put into this case, as far as we can tell, there appears to be no crime.”
“But he has unregistered private rings,” Toron reasoned.
“That he does, but that is a minor infraction,” she replied. “He will pay the fines and disappear once more. But then he will be wise to us, and I will never find him again.”
“There is something we are missing,” Toron told her. “When I saw him, he was dressed in a People’s Fleet uniform.”
“You saw him?” Liilu asked.
“Yes, I saw him as he was forty years ago when he was but a young officer in the People’s Fleet,” Toron told her only what she needed to know. “Bring up his Fleet service record.”
Liilu had been over all of this long ago. Sumai Raktiash had gone over all of this long before her. She didn’t exactly see the point, but Toron was High Council. Who was she to question the High Council? She and Toron did not have to look at Dorian’s service record very long to discover…
“He was left marooned on the human planet, Galatea, by Kim Dakara during the rebellion! That is where he found the source of his ill-gotten gains… while he was an officer in the People’s Fleet.”
“But at the time, he was a rebel,” Liilu reasoned.
“Not by his own testimony,” Toron countered. “According to his official review at the time, he swore that he was never a rebel, but hijacked. It was so affirmed by the Fleet Review Board.”
“But when he was rescued, he brought nothing of any note with him,” Liilu replied.
“Oh, yes he did. He secretly brought back the knowledge of where the valuables were hidden. It was his duty to disclose that information to the People’s Fleet. That fortune was all stolen from humans by the Syndicate. It rightfully belonged to the humans, not to Dorian Calisiian,” Toron stated his understanding of the law. “After his rescue, he served out his term in the People’s Fleet. From there you lost him.”
“Yes, we did,” Liilu agreed after looking at the records from Sumai. The light was coming on for her. “But I have no record of my swarm ever following him through a portal to any human planet… but he has not made any large sales of valuables since I tagged him, either. On the other hand, he seems to be overdue for one. He should have made one by now, but has not.”
Toron called Director Jarinatu to join him in Liilu’s office. She arrived so quickly that she had to have been waiting nearby.
“You will put whatever resources onto Chief Inspector Liilu Nirba’s case that she needs. She has my full confidence. I do not want her interfered with in any way. I want her in full control of this matter. She will communicate directly with me. Am I clearly understood?” he asked her.
“Yes, High Council. It will be so,” she answered, but he could hear some equivocation in her response.
He smiled at her. “Good. That is why I brought this matter to you. I must also tell you that this whole project is Special Access Only. I am to be your only contact. When it has concluded, I will be putting commendations in the personnel files for each of you.”
Now that brought a smile to Director Jarinatu’s face.
Double Dragon Publishing originally published this novel until 7/7/2020 when they closed business.
- Paperback
- ISBN-10: 1728950864
- ISBN-13: 978-1728950860
- Kindle Version
- Publisher: Double Dragon eBooks (September 11, 2018)
- Publication Date: September 11, 2018
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services LLC
- Language: English
- ASIN: B07H8JFXYN
- Ojunta Stone at Double Dragon Publishing