[Original Novel] The Eternal Mysteries of Vril, Part 12

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Previous parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11}

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He patted the pistol, now sitting in his lap. I thought again about making a dive for it, but then what? I don’t know how to fly a fucking spaceship. “How does it fly, though?” Once again, he was only too glad to fill me in. What a natural fit the position of tour guide had been for him.

“Don’t trouble yourself with that overmuch. Sufficed to say it’s at least superficially reactionless, just like the EmDrive, although it operates on an altogether different principle. It’s actually dead simple to build one. That’s why it’s so zealously suppressed.”

Suppressed? He confirmed it. “Every major government knows about this technology. You can build a drive unit capable of lifting the typical suburban house out of less than a hundred bucks worth of parts. Can you imagine if blueprints leaked? If any old rando in a third would country could cobble together one of these in their backyard? Borders would become unenforceable.”

That made some sense of why I’d never heard anything about flying saucer battles in World War 2. “No small number of brilliant, well intentioned inventors have made the mistake of stumbling across the key principle by which this vessel flies, and trying to patent it” he added.

He didn’t specify what happened to them, but I could guess. “Of course the Vril-ya had us disseminate a wide variety of bogus blueprints and technical descriptions, advanced just far enough beyond our present understanding of physics to be seemingly plausible. That way it looks as if there’s no suppression going on, just a lot of crackpots patenting convoluted, unworkable nonsense.”

It was consistent with what I knew of these creatures. Deceit upon deceit. When I next peered out the porthole, I at first could not understand what I was seeing. Even having been warned, to actually look upon the Earth’s interior bordered on mind breaking.

I’d never seen anything like it. Not with my own eyes, anyway. It resembled something like science fiction illustrations I’d seen in books as a child, of massive space colonies intended to house millions of families.

An inside out Earth. That comes closest to capturing it. It was as if I was gazing upon Earth from a low orbit, except that its surface wrapped entirely around me on all sides. I could still see the thin haze of the atmosphere though, with puffy white clouds creeping slowly along the shimmering surface of an impossible ocean.

The water should fall inwards, towards the center. Yet it didn’t. For that matter, the center was itself an object of awe. Some manner of immense, spherical machine. Emitting light, but not so brightly that I couldn’t see the structure of it.

“That’s the black sun. It dims substantially to simulate nightfall” Neil commented. “Right now, we’re at the tail end of a sunset.” I tried to reply, but my jaw hung open. When at last I regained enough control of my senses to speak, all I could say was “This….this is real. Isn’t it. I’m really seeing this.”

He just laughed. The black sun looked to be held steady in the center of the massive intraplanetary cavity by long metal channels all the way to the inner surface. By squinting, I could just make out something like vertical trains traveling up and down these channels.

Space elevators. Or something very similar, certainly. Except instead of connecting the surface of Earth to space, it connected the surface of inner Earth to this…”black sun”. Some sort of artificial light source, and as I recalled, a reactor which supplies the power needed to synthesize Vril.

Even the greatest marvels of human engineering seemed as children’s sand castles next to this. My mind reeled at what humanity could accomplish if this technology weren’t under the exclusive control of those...beautiful monsters.

“Did you ever love me?” It must’ve caught Neil off guard, as he didn’t answer for most of a minute. “I had feelings for you. It’s impossible not to become attached.” The words he chose…”become attached”...did nothing to reassure me.

“So you love every girl you lure down here? Excuse me if I find that difficult to believe.” The scornful inflection did not escape his notice. When he responded, it was in a noticeably softer tone. “Look, I...You saw them. I shouldn’t have to explain it to you. Whatever I feel for you, I can’t disobey them. The mere thought of disappointing them nauseates me. My feelings for you are real. They’re just a fraction of the love I am helpless but to feel for the Vril-ya. The true masters of my heart, and yours too if you’re honest with yourself. If not now, then soon.”

The notion offended me. Yet I still couldn’t stop thinking about the encounter. If they had this same effect on the rest of humanity, they could conquer us without a single shot fired by either side. Forget fighting them, we’d instead be fighting each other over the closest vantage points from which to grovel.

“If you’re afraid of the experiments,” he continued, “don’t be. You’re probably picturing some grisly vivisectionist’s lab. Their medical practices, even where test animals are concerned, compare very favorably with-” Just then, the entire craft shuddered.

The lights flickered, then switched over to red emergency lighting. Neil was very still, until the second impact. “WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT!” he shouted. He stood, twisting frantically at the dials, jamming buttons, until the world abruptly spun around us both.

I don’t remember the last few seconds before we crashed. Only awakening with a wet, warm trickle of blood streaming down my forehead and a broken leg. Through intermittently flickering lights and the brief illumination of torn, sparking cables, I spotted Neil.

Twisted. Torn up, guts spilled out all over the aluminum wreckage which impaled him. I screamed. For how long, I don’t know. I passed out again for a short time. When my eyes next opened, dark silhouettes hovered over me.

I wanted to scream again, but found I was too weak to emit more than a gurgly whimper, coughing up blood in the process. “Do not struggle. We’re here to help.” The figure waved some sort of scepter over my body. I felt increasingly warm and rejuvenated.

The figures tensed at the sound of distant, incomprehensible shouting. “There’s no time, we have to move you. Try to remain silent.” When the figure lifted me, sharp pain shot up my leg. I cried out once, but was able to contain myself thereafter.

They were unbelievably fast. I thought I was delirious when I saw their wings unfold. Wind rushed by, tossing my hair in my face as the man holding me periodically turned to fire at our pursuers with a pistol identical to Neil’s.

The brief glimpse of the figures in hot pursuit revealed them to be Vril-ya. A pack of three arn, brandishing golden staffs. One pointed the staff in our direction, and I yelped as a spherical chunk of the ground beneath us vanished in a whisp of hot vapor.

The second blast annihilated one of my rescuers. There was no blood. He was just there one moment, gone the next. Had I blinked at the wrong moment, I would’ve missed it entirely. The remaining three, including the one bearing me aloft, swooped into the brick lined entrance of what looked to be a drainage tunnel.

Once shrouded in darkness, my rescuers immediately flattened themselves against the sides of the tunnel. One of the arn chasing us fired a blinding bolt of energy straight down the length of the tunnel, completely missing us.

When the one carrying me returned fire with a pistol similar to Neil’s, his aim was true. The arn his laser struck immediately burst into flames and fell apart. His cohorts huddled around his smoldering remains for a moment. Then, apparently having second thoughts about coming into the tunnel after us, they fled.

It all went by so fast. Like a fever dream. I passed out once more during the long trek down into darkness. Into the Earth, as before, but...from the other side. I regained consciousness in bed. Some sort of temple, by the looks of the pillar in each corner.

The walls were stone. The floor consisted of tessellated, interlocking metal panels. The woman next to me was nearly as incomparably gorgeous as the gy-ei I’d seen during the ceremony. Again, possessing remarkable beauty, but of an entirely different kind.

Her hair was long and dark. Her features closest to American Indians, though also vaguely Semitic. She studied me with her big, brown eyes. I sensed no hostility, but given Neil’s death and the circumstances of my rescue, my first inclination was to run.

No use. My leg no longer hurt. Moving it around revealed that somehow, it was no longer broken. But I remained too weak to get out of bed. The woman, clad in a beige wool tunic, skimmed a few inscriptions from a book with thin metal pages before gently waving a scepter over my body.

The warmth returned. The longer she persisted, the more energetic I felt. “What is that thing? Who are you people?” I managed to utter. She flipped through more of the whisper thin metal pages and did some reading before attempting a reply.

“We...are...the Vril-ya.” I peered incredulously at her. “You can’t be. You look nothing like them.” I had to rephrase it a few times before the meaning was understood. Soon, a man joined us. Clearly advanced in age, hair tinged with grey, but with an impressively youthful physique.

“You’ll have to pardon Drena. Her English is poor, but then she’s had little reason to practice it for many years. We are indeed the Vril-ya. Please, don’t hesitate to-” I interrupted, accusing him of deceit. I described the Vril-ya I’d seen during the ceremony.

There’s...much you don’t know. We are a divided people. I regret that your first impression of us was made by such…” He searched for words, eventually settling for “...was made by them.”

Them? Divided? He pulled back an ornate curtain to reveal a mural on the far wall. It depicted men and women who looked just like him. Same height and physique, same complexion, same hair. Even the same wings.

I eyeballed the wings on his back. The blond arn and gy-ei I saw during the ritual didn’t have any wings. As if to answer my unspoken questions, he removed them. Some sort of device, presumably for personal flight. “The wings are just radiator panels. The miniature drive units in these things produce a lot of waste heat.”

He set it down against the wall, then knelt at my side and took the metallic book from Drena. After flipping delicately through the pages, he arrived at the one he wanted, then showed it to me. It looked to be a map of the inner Earth.

He pointed out one continent in particular, presumably our current location. “Just as mankind is divided by nation, by race and culture, so are we. We have our own history of wars, our own great feats of international cooperation, and have undergone considerable change during the past century.”

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 13!}