Author’s note:
In 2013 I began the Galactic Missions series – a spin off of the Alien Characters series.
In 2014, with many hours of writing behind me, I decided that the sales just weren’t worth it, so I paused the series indefinitely.
I’d already begun John and the Ancient Earth Defenses, but I wasn’t entirely happy with the way Tiara and the Comet Apocalypse had turned out, and I was concerned the next one would be much the same. Barely any dialogue, lots of exposition, and way too much telling and not enough showing. I decided I wasn’t really cut out for writing chapter books for teens.
I had also packed so much ancient alien and channeled information into these books that the 4th one was likely to feel a bit sparse in comparison.
Still, there was some potential there, if just for the fact that the main character would end up in ancient Atlantis.
What you see below is as far as I got. Maybe I’ll get back to it in 2019. We’ll see.
John and the Ancient Earth Defenses
By Neil A. Hogan
Excerpt and Draft
Prologue
The skies darkened, then brightened again. John shaded his eyes as the pick axes swung staccato-like behind him, striking stone and hard earth.
He sensed that something had passed in front of the sun. He thought perhaps a bird but there was nothing he could see. He doubted the others would have noticed. He knew he was the most sensitive person here, even the sunlight drained him.
Why on Earth did he decide to be an archaeologist? He blamed the Indiana Jones movies. Though, that one with aliens in it…
“Mr Jones,” yelled a voice. “Mr Jones.”
John laughed. Someone had believed him when he had told them that was his name.
“Yes,” he called, seeing a dark skinned man in the distance, his shadow beginning to stretch along the hot earth. “We found something.”
“Really?” called John. “Again?”
John’s excellent eyesight could see the smile on the man’s face from a hundred feet away. He looked pretty happy. It must be something.
John quickly pulled out his electric skates and hummed across the excavation site over to where the man was standing. “What’s your name?” he asked.
“Ahmed,” he replied, then held up the item he had found.
John gasped.
Impossible.
He took it carefully from the man and turned it over. It definitely was what he thought it was. Aged, rotted in places, rusted in others but there was no mistaking it.
The site they were in was a hundred feet deep and a hundred feet wide. They were searching for evidence of a lost civilisation from 13,500 years ago. He had been expecting to find pottery, perhaps some carvings, or even some ancient gold jewellery.
He was not expecting electronic cables.
—
An alarm sounded in the secret underground base underneath the Northern Territory of Australia. Hazelnutcoffee unfurled his pocket screen and allowed it to automatically straighten out into a fifty inch clear monitor.
The screen fired its invisible drive and floated to position in front of him, then its image quickly zoomed into Syrrah, Iran where an archaelogical dig was taking place.
It was flashing red. He had no idea why and waited for the information to load.
The dig was one of the secret agreements made with the current regime and the Iranians had first say in whatever was found there.
Publicly this area was one of the most dangerous areas in the world with daily reports on the news of how dangerous it was, how war-like it was and how the regime would stop at nothing to take over the world.
In reality, of course, people were the same just about anywhere and, while there might be some extremists, most of the people were kind and friendly, just like everywhere else. The town of Syrra quickly warmed to their archaeological guests and enjoyed their appreciation for their culture and customs. They even joined in the celebration of Noorus in the city centre.
The details of the dig ran through Hazelnutcoffee’s 126 year old mind and quickly connected to information he had stored there decades ago.
He knew that the middle east was the release valve for negative energy on planet Earth. He also knew it had always been such. Ever since the Orion war millions of years ago. The entities had shifted from Orion to Maldek to Mars and then to Earth to continue their war, not just physically, but incarnationally as well. These years were the last years for the negative energy to be released through the Earth. With the addition of the extraterrestrial archetype to the Earth’s consciousness, the negative energy would soon dissipate and all would be calm for thousands of years.
He frowned. The information regarding the alarm was taking longer than he thought to appear.
He hoped it was not what he thought it was. That was the worst place for that information to be discovered.
Had John and his team found one of the pieces left over from the Orion war? Had they found a connection to the Ancient Earth Defenses?
The screen dissolved and showed a zoomed-in image of hands turning over an old electrical cable, but with markings and colourings that made it look quite alien, or at the very least, almost ancient Egyptian.
Hazelnutcoffee sighed. Knowing that they had indeed found a piece. A broken piece. He needed to call off the dig.
He reached for the screen to send a message and stopped.
He was getting a bit too old for this job.
It was time to let someone else do it.
To be continued, hopefully in 2019