Part 3 - Roots of the ET Mess
Continued from Part 2
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Despite the plasma drives, the Nibiru planetoid had picked up momentum as it swung around the sun and was on its way back out of the solar system. Work on the planetary drive was painfully slow, and with each day the energy demands increased as the distance between Nibiru and the sun increased. Most of the population had evacuated to Earth, but An, Nu, the technicians who were repairing the planetary drive, and a few other specialists remained on Nibiru with the Tablets of Destiny, which lately had been giving out hints that more of their people might have escaped their homeworlds' destruction than they thought. But where were they, and how had they managed to escape?
Nibiru's monopole transmitter swept an arc of space with a simple "ping" that should be recognized by any of their people's electronic data systems as an invitation to connect, and the telepathic adepts among the Anunaki spent hours reaching out in hope of finding friends, relatives, and neighbors given up for dead. And while Nibiru's plasma drives gulped all of the asteroid-ice the Magan-boats could bring to slow their exit from the heliosphere, the Tablets cryptically repeated the phrase giri kur, "unfamiliar path"....and a long string of gibberish sprinkled with a few familiar words like ekur (fortification or prison) and an assortment of references to reptiles and amphibians, which An speculated aloud might refer to the missing Oannes, but Nu silently wondered if the "Snake People" were going to return, and if so, how his brother would handle it.
The emotional distraction of the Tablets' oddly cryptic message wasn't helping the Anunaki mission on Earth, either, which was struggling with the logistics of simultaneously setting up facilities, adapting their physiology to earth conditions, training humans, finding and acquiring materials to repair the planetary drive, and looking for ways to rescue Nibiru before it escaped the solar system. Enki found himself shuttling back and forth between the mining operations in (what are now called) South Africa and Pakistan, the manufacturing facilities in India and China, and the airports/spaceports across the Middle East, in Turkey, Russia, South Africa, Pakistan, Burma, southwestern China, and Cambodia, struggling to keep them coordinated while he trained the very young men and women who had been prematurely put in charge of them. The idea of moving youngsters had seemed ideal since the optimism of youth would help insulate them from the trauma of losing everything they had known, but they hadn't counted on the harsher conditions on Earth, the growth of god-cults among the humans, the loss of Mars as a primary base, or the sabotage of the planetary drive that could lead to the loss of Nibiru. The time required to cope with the series of disasters had come directly out of the time that should have been spent training the young achievers and maturing them into proper leaders, and this deficit of guidance was definitely beginning to show.
Every time he visited one of the sites, Enki's concerns grew: Kur-Gal (South Africa) should have been able to supply all of the materials needed to repair the planetary drive, but the youngsters had formed cliques (guilds) and were competing as much as cooperating. It didn't help that Enlil had been down there organizing athletic competitions among them for his amusement. The airports/spaceports were suffering a similar effect: time and materials were being wasted on recreation, and again his half-brother had a hand in it, as he had taken a liking to aerial hunting. The farther-away outposts in India and China were faring much better; not only were they removed from the immediacy of Enlil's influence, the humans there naturally had evolved calmer dispositions and it had been easy to enhance their intelligence for the technical work they were employed to do...but the success of these outposts was dependent upon the supply chain and the mines. Enki wasn't entirely unsympathetic to the youngsters: he had definitely sowed his own wild oats when he had been on Earth previously with his uncle and the other Igigi, but that had been at a time when the mission could afford the luxury of some youthful indiscretions. The hard reality of their current situation wasn't going to afford these youngsters a similar opportunity.
The next time Anzu took shore leave from managing the magan-transports and overseeing the Mars salvage operation, Enki sat down with him and together they devised a plan to formalize the management of the airports/spaceports into a militaristic structure in the hope that discipline and structure would help channel the youthful enthusiasm into productive work and minimize Enlil's corrupting influence. Anzu then went from base to base, organizing and recruiting, building tactical "wings" and using structured instruction to impart at least some ethics and a sense of responsibility. This angered Enlil greatly, so he closed the spaceports under his direction (Nippur, Giza, Turkey, and Pakistan) to all but his own ships and started building his own "wings" out of the heavy-lifting bases in Turkey and Pakistan. Sin allied his bases in Iran and Burma with Nippur, but Inanna, Sin's daughter who was married to Enki's son Damuz (also known as Dumuzi or Tammuz), allied her bases in northwestern Iraq and Syria with Eridu and seized Enlil's base in Gaza in a bloodless coup, since her people outnumbered Enlil's in the command structure.
This further disruption angered An, who recalled all three of his sons to Nibiru but did not admit Inanna or Damuz to this meeting. Enlil and Sin were rebuked and ordered to reopen their bases and merge their wings into Anzu's. Inanna and Damuz were stripped of their positions on Earth and sent to the Moon to work with Nudimmud on creating an off-world command center for all flight and telemetry operations, and to prepare a data center there to receive a permanent installation of the Tablets of Destiny. This was in preparation for the likelihood that the repeated upheavals had made the repair schedule for the planetary drive impossible, and Nibiru would have to be written off as lost. An's new plan for the Anunaki was to dig in on Earth, Moon, Mars, and Saturn for a very long time until they could reorganize enough to recreate the planetary drive on a local planetoid and send out new Igigi missions to other star systems to identify and prepare their next home before they again would have to flee the phenomena that destroyed their homeworlds before it reached this solar system as well.
Back on Earth, Enlil and Sin went through the motions of complying with An's orders, but plotted secret violence. Damuz died under mysterious circumstances, and Sin, who had never liked Damuz, appeared to have been involved. Having lost both her husband and her relationship with her father, Inanna immediately retreated to the Moon to immerse her mourning in work.
The situation at Kur-Gal degenerated after the youngsters brought in a group of humans to perform manual labor but failed to see that these human brought with them a warlord mentality. This mentality combined with the previously seeded competitiveness in the young Anunaki minds, and the result was open mutiny and violent conflict between the labor guilds and the administrative/science guilds. Enki took his personal Erin guard down there to restore order and to reorganize the mining operation, and while he was gone, Enlil secretly seduced Enki's wife, Damkina. Enki returned to Eridu stressed and distracted, and did not notice the change in his relationship with his wife, since they had a long history of taking breaks from one another, so he took the fact that she had relocated her life laboratory and herself to a nearby settlement to be a practical matter, as the growth of human settlements around Eridu had encroached on her previous facility.
Enlil, in the meanwhile, was prospering wildly in Nippur; he and Sin had established trade routes for the humans to use as well, and this brought riches, slaves, and pleasures of the flesh aplenty. Bored, horny young Anunaki on leave frequented the string of pleasure-towns that had sprung up along these routes, and Anunaki-human hybrids began to appear in the wild, against specific orders not to mingle the genomes outside of scientifically-controlled experiments.
Eridu, on the other hand, was struggling. Drought, simooms, water pollution from Nippur and its settlements, and the diversion of trade traffic to Nippur were taking a toll on the first city of the Anunaki, and soon Enki found himself economically eclipsed by this half-brothers. His health mysteriously began to fail as well, as he began to suffer from severe headaches, his body swelled with retained fluids, he began to feel weak and tired all of the time, he couldn't eat without becoming sicker, and he began to have dizzy spells, almost to the point of fainting. When the life laboratory could find no cause, he turned to the few remaining Oannes with whom he had close ties of friendship in search of a cure, and they determined that he was slowly being poisoned with nitrites: a variety of salt peter was being introduced to his food. The Oannes purged the chemical from his bloodstream and sent him back to Eridu with instructions on how to complete the detox. Enki, however, had a bigger problem: someone close to him was trying to murder him, and he couldn't let anyone know he knew until he had proof of the identity of the guilty party. Under the guise of seeking economic advice to re-capitalize Eridu, Enki summoned his uncle Nudimmud to his assistance.
Next up...betrayal, a ghost from the past returns, and Enlil solves half of the Tablets of Destiny puzzle.
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