by J. Benjamin
Val wondered what life would be like for them now. She had been a complete unknown before the Minerva Starscraper crisis. Now she was an interplanetary celebrity. She wouldn’t be able to go most places without being recognized. This was part of the reason she decided to be near Ty’s family in the African countryside. Anonymity was what she craved more of.
“This is the boarding call for Beyond Spacelines, New Tokyo to Nairobi,” a man shouted from their gate. “We will be boarding shortly, starting with rows twenty-five and up.”
“That’s us,” Ty said. They stood from their seats and proceeded to the gate.
“Hey, when we get back to Earth, how would you feel about taking a honeymoon?” Val said.
“I’d love that,” Ty smiled. “Where were you thinking?”
“Well, I kind of want to do Thailand. Thoughts?”
“Thailand is nice,” Ty said. “I want to do Madagascar.”
“Can we fit both in?” Val asked.
“We’ll discuss it,” Ty said. Val knew that was code for ‘we’re going to Madagascar, but nice try.’
They stepped to the back of the queue that formed at their gate and waited patiently. Val noticed a lot of people were putting their fingers up to their ears, as if receiving phone calls at the same time.
“What’s the commotion about?” Ty asked.
The green caption which read NAIROBI turned to yellow with the accompanying text DELAYED. In fact, as Val looked around, all flights were now marked as delayed. Then armed soldiers stormed the spaceport, their guns drawn in a defensive posture.
“What the Hell is going on here?” Val wondered. All the flight statuses quickly changed from yellow to red, CANCELLED. A woman’s voice filled the entire spaceport over intercom.
“May I have your attention please? At this time, New Tokyo Spaceport is on full lockdown. All flights are cancelled until further notice. Please remain calm and proceed away from the gates in an orderly fashion.
“The fuck?” Ty said. “Lockdown?”
Several people held their fingers to their ears, to talk to those who weren’t there. First there were voices of concern. Then, there were loud gasps. A gut-wrenching silence filled the air as every face turned to a BREAKING NEWS bulletin across the large jumbotron hologram hanging over the main terminal.
“Can you turn that up?” A man shouted to the gate staff. Veronica Rios, the main anchor for United California News, spoke.
“For those of you just tuning in, we have late-breaking and very disturbing developments. The Olympus Mons Large Array reporting unusual activity in the rings of Saturn. While details of the activity remain unknown, the Martian Government issued a Solar-wide Level 5 Threat Alert to all colonies and planets. At this time, the United Nations has extended an immediate grounding of all space-bound travel until further notice.”
“Saturn?” Ty said in disbelief. “What could possibly be going on there?”
Before Val could answer, an incoming call alert lit up the corner of her smart lens.
“One sec Ty, I gotta take this.” She moved to a quieter corner. “Thomas, what the Hell is going on?”
“Val. Take Ty and go straight to the Kantei now. Do not stop. Do not talk to anyone. ASAP.”
“Thomas, what’s going on?” Val asked nervously.
“I’ll explain when you get here. Right now, we’re in a state of emergency and—” Thomas was abruptly drowned out by a deafening chorus of gasps and screams. Val quickly turned to see what everyone was reacting to.
Every hologram in the spaceport and the massive jumbotron overlooking the terminal showed the same image. It was Saturn. A blast, large enough to ignite an entire planet, had forcefully ripped through Saturn’s rings, blanketing the gas giant in waves of surface impacts and sending the former remains of the ice rings in all directions.
Chapter 50
Edie awoke to the worst headache of her entire life. If Edie didn’t know better, she’d say she had a concussion. She awoke on her back without the slightest clue where she was. The ground was soft, like dirt.
The Hypernova sat lifeless, silent, and dark. Edie was no longer inside it. She laid five feet away from it. She turned to the sound of groaning, and saw Alex by her side.
“Edie,” Alex said. “What happened?”
The air was crisp and cool, and the ground was warm. Edie didn’t remember landing on a planet. But there the stars were, covering the horizon as far as the eye could see. No light pollution.
Did they get out of the nebula? She couldn’t feel any mental connections, not to Alex and certainly not to Agamemnon. Then it all came back to her, the image of those green lasers slicing through the host ship like katanas. Agamemnon was dead, killed right before their eyes. Then there was a starship, which looked like a chrome sphere with panels like a metal turtle shell.
“Where are we?” Alex wondered.
“Come.” She hopped off the ground and lifted him up. She scanned the horizon. This place was dark.
“You hear that?” Alex said. “Buzzing noises.”
Edie could hear sounds. They were the sounds of life. At first, it sounded like crickets on Earth or insects crawling about on the ground. Something was off. The buzzing and hissing gave off the false impression of Earth-based life.
“I don’t think that sound is of anything from our world,” Edie said. The buzzing continued, accompanied by a soft flowing sound. Alex led the way, crawling away from the Hypernova. Edie followed him to a stream of water passing by their spacecraft.
“I think I know what was chirping.” Alex said.
“What is it?” Edie asked. She ran to where Alex stood and followed his finger. “Whoa!”
In the stream, two fish-like creatures small enough to fit in the palm of a hand, floated nonchalantly. Their skin was slimy. They had no eyes, at least not where one would expect to see eyes. What Edie assumed to be their jaw, looked strong enough to bite through flesh. Their squid-like tentacles, Edie imagined, could propel them with ease.
“What the Hell?” Edie said.
“It looks like a blob fish,” Alex said. “It has little stalks on the sides, like a snail.”
The creatures indeed had tiny stalks popping out the sides of their slimy, grotesque-looking bodies.
“You think that’s their eyes?” Alex wondered.
Edie crept down to get a closer look. “Hello there little fellas,” she said. Nervously, she held her right index up to one of the blobs.
The fish creature lifted half of its body out of the water toward Edie’s finger. At least she knew it could sense her presence. Even more impressive, its stalks reacted to her finger, slowly curving inward toward it. Edie moved her finger around in the air. Lo and behold, the stalks remained trained in whichever direction she moved.
“Check it out,” Edie said excitedly. “These things can see me. I think you were right.” Edie heard the sounds of faint whistles from behind. “Alex, you hear that?”
Alex didn’t respond. She turned to see him looking up. Edie followed his gaze. High above, were five beings.
They were tall and nearly humanoid. They had what appeared to be two arms on both sides of their torsos, with seven-digit hands. Their heads were flat, elongated, and closer to that of a bird. Except they had no eyes. No distinguishable ears or noses. Where one would expect to find a mouth, was instead a thin bill-like cone. They did not appear to have legs.
The feature that most impressed Edie were the ribbons that trailed behind them. Edie thought of the elusive lion-fish back on Earth. Heavenly, she thought was perhaps the best term to describe these creatures. From below, the glowing white beings looked like angels from another dimension.
“You think it was them? You think they killed Agamemnon?” Alex asked. Edie was surprised she hadn’t considered such an obvious question herself. Did these harmless-looking things in the sky bring down the Yonapi host? Their guide across the universe?
Their whistling intensified. One of the angels slowly
descended from above. Another one followed behind.
The first angel levitated just inches off the ground. Edie examined the impressive creature. Unlike the Yonapi, it was a species that could roam both the land and sky. Compared to the brutish and machine-like A’biran, it was elegant, with its slender frame. Of everything alien Edie had seen, this was as close as any species had ever been to having human-like qualities.
The flying lion-fish angel floated closer to her. As its face came into focus, Edie was perplexed not by its distinctive features, but rather lack thereof. There were no eyes to look into. As far as Edie could tell, no mouth.
Still, Edie knew it was looking directly at her. She turned to Alex, and he stared petrified as the space angel approached Edie.
“Hello,” Edie said nervously. “What happened back there? Did you kill the Aquarians?”
“I don’t think she, or he, or whatever, knows what the Aquarians are Edie,” Alex reminded her.
“Yonapi,” Edie said. “Did you kill the Yonapi.”
The creature made a sound that reminded Edie of a crying dolphin.
Edie flinched. “Did it? Did it?”
“Yes, I think it just spoke,” Alex said.
“Yonapi! You know who they are? Yo-na-pi. Yo-na-pi,” she said phonetically.
It spoke again. This time making more sounds than the first. Edie couldn’t believe it. Edie was surprised to find that, having grown so accustomed to telepathy, hearing an alien speak was more frightening to her.
Edie composed herself. “Who are you? Can you read my mind? Can you understand what I am saying?”
At first, the alien said nothing. Its “faceless face” continued to stare into Edie’s gaze. Then, it uttered more dolphin noises. Without warning, Edie saw a quick flash of bright red. It came and went like a pulse. The alien continued making more noises and then a second pulse, a third. Edie realized it was talking to her both audibly and mentally.
She was convinced these were the aliens responsible for their current situation. The pulses continued until Edie opened her eyes and saw she was no longer standing with the lion-fish angel.
The pulses of red were now all she saw. At first, Edie thought it was stimuli from her brain being broken into telepathically. Then she realized the red was the horizon before her.
She stood on a sprawling planet with a sky made of blood. Beneath the red heavens, or possibly Hell, in this case, rivers of black liquid criss-crossed through fields of orange and blue flora.
She was not convinced the sky was naturally red. Something caused it to look like that. Last time Edie had seen skies so red was during the Great Colorado Fire of 2068. Edie considered that fire was potentially the cause of the red sky.
There was a cool feeling at Edie’s feet. In fact, it wasn’t just her feet but also her arms and head. She was in water, possibly submerged with most of her body under the surface.
Edie wondered why was she able to see so much at once. It wasn’t just the sky, but the flow of the river she stood in. Edie processed a level of awareness greater than any she’d ever experienced.
Edie was no longer in her human body. She was experiencing life in the form of another being.
She tried to move, but that was not necessary. Her body was already moving for her. Edie tried to swerve left. Nothing happened. Edie tried to slow down. Again, nothing happened. Indeed, Edie didn’t have any control. She was a spectator in another creature’s mind.
Edie’s alien body swam furiously through the stream until it poured into a lake. She heard noises and knew she wasn’t alone. There were more creatures like her waiting for her arrival. That is, they were creatures like the one she currently occupied.
A gathering of more than two dozen congregated at the center of the lake. How did she not put two and two together before? The slimy bodies, the amphibious habitat, the ability to see in all directions? She was a blob-fish. The alien blob-fish she’d just encountered before meeting the lion-fish angels.
They buzzed like crickets. Edie couldn’t pretend to understand what they were saying or to know if the buzzing was actual communication and not just alien guttural sounds. As she looked closer at her blob-fish brethren, she noticed another body feature of theirs that she’d not observed earlier. Atop the heads of each of the creatures was a dark blue head-plume, very similar to that on the head of a quail. The blob-fish seemed transfixed by the quills on their heads. One by one, the creatures interlinked the quills.
The last thing Edie wanted to witness today was an alien mating ritual. But as Edie watched the strange phenomena unfold, she started to get the feeling that wasn’t what was taking place. In fact, Edie could sense what was happening through the quill on her own head.
The blob-fish weren’t mating. They were transferring high amounts of energy from deep within their bodies to a common fixed point. She knew because the alien she watched from the inside was engaging with the others. Pulses of energy potent enough to kill any other living organism flowed through the bill on her head and united with the others.
The ground started vibrating. The blob-fish formed a flotilla with their bodies and braced themselves.
Tremors quickly turned to violent shakes. Yet, the blob-fish remained undeterred. They continued focusing their energy toward the quills.
The ground stopped shaking and a vast shadow eclipsed the light that had previously hung over the horizon.
A deafening siren roared across the planet as though nuclear war were imminent. A frightening chorus of deathly pink and fuchsia blinded Edie and all in sight, as a Yonapi starship larger than any she had ever seen, dominated the atmosphere like a demonic zeppelin from Hell.
The Yonapi mantle fumed white smoke from its ridges. Edie didn’t have to make any logical leaps to know that these Yonapi were hostile and setting their sights on all living things below. Now it was obvious why the sky was red like an inferno.
The blob-fish kept at it. The intensity of their efforts created energy waves that set off Edie’s quill like an Olympic torch. All of the blob-fishes’ quills now glowed with white-hot ferocity. Despite staring an imminent extinction-level-event head-on, their efforts raced toward an epic showdown.
Just as Edie awaited the inevitable death strike of the Yonapi, the Yonapi vessel erupted in a brilliant display. It fell to the planet as exploded chunks of dead alien ship like candy from a piñata.
At first, Edie couldn’t see past the painted sky of falling eggshells, dead Yonapi workers, and a collapsed fusion core. Then, a second starship triumphantly flew through the remains of the defeated Yonapi ship. Edie knew this ship from the oval shape and metal surface that resembled a chrome-plated turtle shell. The same ship that killed Agamemnon. Like the hand of God, it crept defiantly over the entire horizon.
Not to be outdone though, ten new Yonapi warships quickly warped into the planet’s orbit to confront the behemoth. They were no match. One by one, the turtle shell starship quickly dispatched many of the Yonapi hostiles with the same green laser beams that had carved up Agamemnon. Nevertheless, the Yonapi continued focusing on the starship.
Edie was so transfixed by what was happening in the sky, she almost missed what was unfolding on the ground around her. The blob-fish created a powerful yet stable energy field. It focused on a common point, where Edie could feel the folds of space starting to collapse.
As the blob-fish continued to strengthen their energy field, Edie heard dolphin cries. It was the space angels! Edie knew that no matter what the Yonapi did, they were too late to stop what was happening.
The energy field fully collapsed, and a hole ripped open in the fabric of spacetime itself. A wormhole awakened at the heart of the lake. In one fell swoop, Edie felt the powerful gravitational forces yank her into the wormhole along with the rest of the blob-fish. Right as she fell into the event horizon, she caught one last glimpse of the sky above. Two dozen more Yonapi warships warped into orbit.
Edie opened her eyes to see she was still on a lake and w
ith all her fellow blob-fish. Except this was a new lake in a different place. It wasn’t the moss on the edges of the lake and the streams branching off from the lake that confirmed to Edie where they emerged. Rather, it was the lion-fish angels floating in the air above her.
The Yonapi ships that Edie had seen from the planet’s surface were now closer than ever. Green lasers continued to fend them off. Then, the ships disappeared, and the sky quickly turned pitch black.
Edie reemerged where she had been before the vision, in her human body. Alex still looked at her, petrified. The lion-fish space angel floated a few paces back.
“Oh wow,” Edie said.
“Edie, what’s going on?” Alex demanded, holding her in his arms. His panicked expression suggested to Edie that only she had seen the vision. She calmly pulled herself up, and they stood to face the lion-fish beings.
“We’re inside a ship,” she replied to Alex. “The one that killed Agamemnon. This is it. We’re inside it. This place looks like a planet surface at night. But this is the ship.”
“How can you be sure?” Alex asked.
“Because those things just told me!” Edie said, pointing to the space angels. “Those blob-fish are more powerful than you think. The Aquarians, or Yonapi, tried to exterminate them. These things, up here, saved them. I saw their home world, Alex. The home world of the little ones. Holy shit. The Yonapi lit it up like a jack-o-lantern. It was horrifying!”
“But why would the Yonapi do that?” Alex wondered. “Aren’t they supposed to be benevolent? Wouldn’t the Yonapi be the ones trying to preserve them?”
A loud clank caught them off guard. Then, another clank quickly followed, and then another. Each sound drew closer.
“Who are you?” Edie demanded, but was knocked to the ground by a creature that landed mere feet from where she stood. She fell flat on her ass. Edie looked up to see the culprit.
