Agent Shield and Spaceman

“Do not worry,” said Necropolis. He was sitting at one of the pews, his legs kicked up on the headrest in front of him. There was a hymn book flopped over one knee and Nikolas was smiling. “What we need to do is not complicated.” “Are we talking about the ten-hour long ceremony with an entire freight car of exotic compounds and rare animal parts, and enough priests for a baseball game? That ceremony? The Gemini program seems somewhat less complicated.” “Reasonably complicated, is how I’d describe it.” “Then what are you talking about?” “The ceremony is window-dressing. I need the priests and their descendants to keep this place sacred and unmolested, and they need something to believe in. We both get something. “No, Spaceman, what I was referring to was your part in all of this. All you have to do is survive. After that your life will become as complicated or as simple as your will dictates.” “I don’t buy that either.” It was late in the day, and the change had begun for Necropolis. Hi...

Spaceman entered the final double doors having a pretty good idea what he’d find. He was completely wrong. The room was smaller for one thing. A man like Necropolis, who had impressed Spaceman with the grandeur and indefatigable determination of his ideas, seemed the type to go for a palatial pent-house. Not so. The room was large, but not impressively. It was also unusually stark, the burnished steel walls of the rest of the station left unadorned. A single desk occupied the far wall, noticeably turned away from the small port-hole like window on the opposite side of the room. Aside from a few books, the only other object of note was a small wooden chest. And, of course, Necropolis. The change he had noticed on the tarmac had reached some kind of apotheosis within his quarters. He had become a shriveled prune, his skin stretched tight across his nearly bald scalp, puckered into myriad wrinkles and folds around his mouth. His body had collapsed into itself, nearly l...

The young man was born in Dymi, a small village on the northern coast of the Peloponnesus. The village had seen its share of history down through the millennia but the young man considered it a relatively uneventful, drowsy corner of the world. He was born into a fisherman’s family and expected to join the fleet by his sixteenth year. Secretly, he thought he might have enjoyed that fate. His name was Nikolas and what he formerly wanted is of little concern to this story. One warm June morning Nikolas walked from his house to the coast. He had vague plans to meet up with friends there but if they hadn’t woken yet he would take a swim and find something else to occupy his time. He encountered a pleasant lemony fragrance on the air and took a detour through a olive grove to see if the linden trees had bloomed. The fragrance, however, led him from orchard to a lonely tree clutching the edge of an eroded cliff. The Adriatic Sea thundered below and Nikolas sat down to watch it. He ...