by Vishal Ved
The siren at the gate of Calamus jostled everyone awake, including Ariet who was fast asleep in his pod. Above ground, the soldiers ran towards the gate to protect the entrance. The soldiers underground rushed to their aid, but suddenly their screams rent the air, when they discovered the ducts were completely blocked with imprenetable plants. The sound frightened the troops above the ground who had no idea why the rest of their soldiers were screaming inside.
With half the troops trapped underground, Calamus faced its biggest threat ever. Their biggest fear was that the Marcamaayu force would find its way down to the underground storeys after killing the upper half of their army. It was a totally unexpected and disastrous strike; For every previous strike, they had received prior warning from Kibesu and MOX had kept every available setek ready for the defense of Calamus.
Ariet heaved a sigh of relief at the sounds of confusion and panic in the corridor outside. It appeared that his plan was working. But the one thought haunting him was that if the battle ended today, he might never get another chance to know the complete truth of his planet. The sato couldn’t keep himself from thinking about the casket and that he only had less than a day to find out the rest of its contents.
Was it wise to risk going into Griex’s room again? What if he got caught? After a moment of indecision, Ariet decided to take the chance. Every adult was standing in front of the duct chamber, prepared to fight to their last breath, when Ariet slipped into Griex’s room. He was surprised to see that Griex was not in his chamber. Ariet found the casket lying in the same place beside the broken pod. He quickly took the casket under the lamp and opened it.
Keeping his ears peeled for the first sign of someone approaching, he flipped the sheets until he reached the point to which he had read the previous time.
But every coin has two sides and fugits were yet to address the bad side of this magnificent stone, which later poisoned their complete race and left the planet Santona to burn to death.
What had happened to the fugits of Santona? Now was his chance to find out. Ariet read on eagerly.
It was the hottest day on Santona, the likes of which nobody had ever witnessed. Everybody was clueless including the MOX council, who held an emergency meeting of all the twenty-three panel members. The meeting continued for more than two days and, at last, Hosen emerged from the chamber followed by the rest of council members. The duration of the meeting was an indication that the situation was severe, but waiting in front of the meeting chamber for two days, every scientist was hoping that the council would take care of everything like always.
‘We have a situation her,’ Hosen addressed the crowd of scientists. ‘You are all aware of the heat from the past two days and it will continue for three more days, but that’s not our biggest concern at present. The situation which I’m talking about is way bigger than this.’ Hosen sighed. ‘Our planet is in the direct path of a giant asteroid that will strike our planet in exactly sixty-two days. The impact has the potential to wipe out our entire race.’
Everybody’s mouth hung open. Terror flashed in their eyes as they searched Hosen’s face for any sign of a reprieve.
‘But we have a rescue plan.’ Hosen threw his hands up in the air as hails echoed in MOX campus. Everybody leapt up from their seats to pay close attention to his words.
‘As you all know that we have “Tihbmasu” all ready to fly. Everybody will be transferred to our neighbouring planet “Unam” for temporary shelter until the situation becomes normal on Santona.
Was Santona a different planet? Ariet was stunned at this possibility that he had never considered. The wailing of kiros reaching his ears, but he ignored it and continued.
‘But how are we going to make a shelter on the other planet big enough to accommodate us all so quickly?’ a senior researcher asked, as stunned as everybody else.
‘We’ve got it all figured out in the past two days. The Panel will never let the race of fugits go extinct. Just follow our guidelines and everybody will be safe.’ Hosen held his hands up again to quell the hailing crowd, and continued, ‘The first batch will fly tomorrow. It will comprise of the panel members, under whose guidance the shelters will be constructed. Anybody who wants to send their toddlers with us can hand them to us and we will take full care of them until you all arrive in subsequent flights.’
As Hosen finished another council member added, ‘All this is classified information until declared officially. We do not want all-out panic among the fugits. So please maintain highest confidentiality and help our planet survive through this tough time.’
The next morning, the star Manoca was spewing heat like a furnace over the planet. Public announcements ordered everyone to stay indoors for the next two days. The scientists gave their young children a last hug before handing them over to the panel, grateful that the Council considered the safety of the young and helpless their first priority.
To everyone’s surprise the Council came with their full families to the take-off site, but nobody raised any objection as their trust in them was complete.
Burning under the wrath of Manoca, the take-off site was surrounded by members of MOX who stood waving at the spinning Tihbmasu, until it disappeared completely. Some parents, who fainted in the extreme heat, were immediately sent for treatment.
The scorching heat continued unabated even after two days, baffling everyone. The power grid went up in flames, leaving everybody to smolder indoors. The scientists ran to the observatory in the evening when even the blanket of night brought no respite. There were no direct light rays from Manoca but the sky was still a strange shade of yellow.
At the observatory, they finally realised what was happening.
‘Manoca is exploding,’ the observatory official shrieked.
Others confirmed this. It was clear that the planet would be consumed in the wake of the exploding star within hours.
Hadn’t the Council known about this? Or had they intentionally betrayed everyone While making their escape? Ariet hands trembled as he flipped the sheet.
‘Council, please take care of our babies. Protect them and-’
The incomplete message from Santona was intercepted, millions of miles away, right after the refugees saw Santona turn into a yellow ball. Wet eyes, filled with shame, gazed upon their burning home from the windows of Tihbmasu.
Ariet wiped away his tears. Though he had never known his own parents, he could well understand the agony of the parents of Santona.
29.
The Five-Eyed Monster
The innocent toddlers had no idea what was going on; they were too young to understand that their home planet had burned up taking their parents with it. The threatening silence of space started eating into the patience of the council members when they could find no habitable planet even after two years of constant searching. One-third of toddlers stacked in semi-hibernation shelves died after dueso supply was reduced to draw out the remaining dueso for as long as possible. The rest struggled in the congested semi-hibernation chambers which ran out of space as they grew bigger. Dying on Santona would have been far easier than living on Tihbmasu for the council although they had reserved an adequate supply of food for their families.
Everybody had lost hope, except for their captain Hosen and his few supporters who believed in his determination and intelligence.
Hosen had been spending the past two years on the ship calculating trajectories to various approachable planets. But his efforts were largely in vain, until one day Hosen discovered a planet which was way larger than Santona. The pink planet was like a charged ball emitting splashes of light from its atmosphere, as though a gigantic thunderstorm was raging across the entire planet.
This planet was at first assumed to gaseous by many Council members due to its massive size, until Hosen calculated the density of the planet from its gravitational force and announced that the planet had a solid surface. The Council then analyzed the emitted radiation from the planet, which showed an abundance of
water on the planet.
Fifty-six moons of considerable size orbited the planet like children playing around a parent. It was the first planet ever discovered in the history of Santona to have more than eighteen moons.
‘Direct the ship towards the giant planet,’ Hosen commanded.
The ship was directed towards the colorful monster although its surface was not visible from space, thanks to its sparkling gaseous clouds. As Tihbmasu started descending into the planet’s atmosphere, everyone’s heart sank. The sparkling light turned more violent, and some fugits even suspected the clouds to contain abrasive chemicals which could destroy the ship and kill everyone. But they were well past the time of turning back.
Tihbmasu started spinning like a frisbee minimising the repulsion generated by its giant anti-gravity disc. When they finally emerged through, nearly four miles of thick, turbulent atmosphere, a vast unending ocean made its appearance, painted in shades of pink and purple from the reflection of its clouds. However, the excitement provoked by this sighting soon evaporated when it became apparent that the ocean had swallowed every landmass on the planet.
‘We haven’t observed the entire planet yet,’ Hosen said, trying to keep despair at bay. ‘This is only one side of the planet. Let’s take the ship around.’
The ship was flown laterally along the planet’s surface, without any objection, but also without much hope. The children, unaware of the stakes, watched the huge swirling currents in the oceans with open-mouthed delight, but the adults were as pale as dried leaves. If there was no landmass, and no vegetation to supply dueso, it meant doom for everyone on the ship.
‘There it is!’ shouted the children who were sitting close to the screen. ‘Land!’
Adults leapt to the front pushing the kids aside; a land mass was slowly getting revealed with every rotation of the ship. The yellow coast didn’t change its color which meant it was not just an arid coast, but a desert, lonely and useless to fugits. Riding the rollercoaster of hope and despair the adults stayed affixed to the screen until the whole landmass was revealed.
It was a large continent in the middle of the ocean, bigger than the largest continent on Santona. Only a sliver of it had vegetation near the shore line while the rest of the continent was covered by thirsty barren desert. But the sight of even that scarce vegetation was a sight for sore eyes. Forgetting the painful journey through cosmos, everybody on board the ship started to envision life on the new planet, while the toddlers of betrayed researchers laid unaware, unconscious in their hibernation chambers.
Tihbmasu was the first alien object to have reached the planet’s surface in many millennia. As the ship landed a mammoth creature came into the sight. A 5-eyed gigantic worm paused right in front of the ship, bristling on its numerous legs. The yellow monster had amazing patterns on its body and its spiky fur was thick and black. The ship’s occupants held their collective breath as the creature approached. It sniffed the outer body of the ship and then, to everybody’s relief, it crept away into the thick forest. But as the Council members were about to open the hatch of the ship, the ground reverberated with what sounded like an enormous army rushing towards them.
Was there any other advanced species living on the planet who had seen Tihbmasu’s descent? The ground huddled in fear as the nearby trees started to shake.
A herd of monster worms came out from the bushes and encircled the ship. Moving slowly around the ship like predators, the gigantic worms rubbed their face in the ground as though they were sniffing something. Suddenly all the worms started climbing one over another though their immense weight was crushing the ones at the bottom. The occupants watched in horror as the tower of worms rose to more than three times the height of Tihbmasu. Suddenly one of the worms at the bottom exploded with a splash of emerald-colored organic liquid. The liquid splattered all over the ship, covering the windows with a thick, green resin and blocking all view outside.
Then, one of the worms jumped on the ship’s top, crushing some hibernation chambers close to the ceiling. Those giants were way heavier than they looked, because the gravity of this new planet was much higher than on Santona. Not only the council family children, but even their parents started screaming, scared to death.
30.
The Beginning Of
Slavery On Tomarkus
‘Lift off, Lift off!’ Hosen shouted. The ship roared and the tower of worms fell apart as the monsters fled into the bushes. But the ship seemed unable to lift off. It hung in mid-air, and then suddenly everything went black. The Council members turned on emergency lamps and opened all the hibernation chambers so the sleeping children would not die of dueso deprivation. The orphaned children woke up from their two- year long slumber, huffing and choking, feeling weak and unusually heavy. The light inside was dim and the kids struggled to stand; for many, it was the first time they were standing on their feet.
The new alien planet greeted fugits with giant worms on their arrival, and hence it was named Tomarkus, which meant “The Land of Monsters”.
It took the council members two days to figure out an escape from the ship which was crushing them, the resin shrinking and squeezing the ship like it was prey trapped in a deadly spider’s web. The large anti-gravity stone disc which was the main engine of the ship, had broken into pieces, which Hosen distributed equally among all Council members, because, after all this stone was the reason, they were alive.
The Council started calling themselves MOX and Hosen became the president of MOX as he had played the most important role in saving the lives of Council families and the orphaned children. The Council families were assigned different tasks like hunting, fulfilment of water requirements and construction of homes.
Due to the immense workload, the abducted children were distributed among the Council families based on their labour requirements. Families used the innocent children, hardly more than four years old as laborers, and put them to work all day long.
Fighting against numerous beasts, non-stop sandstorms and high tides, it took the Council a long time to bring the planet under control and become its master like they had on their old planet Santona.
The journey from Santona to Tomarkus, hadn’t been easy for Council families, but the bad time for the abducted kids had only just started.
What happened to them? Was he an abducted child as well, wondered Ariet, and the wailing fugits in the corridor outside appeared to him like the killers of his parents.
Everything was rough and troublesome for almost thirty Tomarkus years, until one day MOX scientists accidentally discovered that there was another continent on Tomarkus, which was abundant with natural resources. The continent, covered in blue-green vegetation was a virgin beauty, unlike the desert continent whose vegetation had been destructed in building housing for Council families and workers.
MOX families decided to migrate to the new continent and start living a comfortable life. The idea sounded great but it would require a fleet of workers nearly ten times more than they currently had. Then the greed of MOX stepped up another level and they made a ten-year plan for the planet. The abstruse plan proposed to increase the worker count by thirty times within next five years, and totally separate workers from MOX families by the end of tenth year.
Up to that point, workers were both males and females, the children of the betrayed scientists of Santona, and while they were ploughed into work all day, the Council hadn’t thought about increasing the working population.
But, with a big future target before them, MOX estimated the land requirement for workers alone would be more than the available forested land on Tomarkus. MOX finally decided to build an underground mega-city beneath the desert close to an underground passing stream that could fulfil the water requirements of its inhabitants. The work continued in the nights while in the day, workers completed their routine jobs tirelessly. It didn’t take long to build the first few storeys under the desert.
Storeys in the new underground city were divided into
three levels—the first for infants, the second for adult males and the third for adult females.
By wrapping the bellies of kiro workers in hot wires, they were able to harvest nearly thirty-five babies a year from a single kiro. Nobody cared if their bellies were burnt or infected in the process, because once their fertility was exhausted their shattered bodies would be disposed of in the Panola river.
Finally, the day arrived when MOX migrated its families to the new continent Fetoildaan, while the workers remained in Hydus. Thousands of years passed and Hydus continued to grow underground, the number of storeys increasing every year, growing further and further away from the desert surface. The workers were given limited knowledge, just enough to enable them to perform their tasks efficiently without asking questions, and if anybody protested or looked like they would rebel, they were locked up in Carcerem.
The workers had unwittingly become slaves and MOX kept them labouring to serve their purposes, from toiling in their homes to becoming guinea pigs for biological research.
Ariet's face was wet with tears. He shut the casket abruptly. He felt every one of his old wounds had been abruptly reopened.
‘If MOX loses today, Hydus will remain a slave land forever,’ said a mournful voice from behind.
Ariet whirled around. It was Griex! Terrified that he would be caught at such a critical juncture, Ariet dropped the casket and dashed out of the chamber before Griex could react. He ran into the corridor and lost himself among the fugits trying to stop black soldiers from coming down, blood was dripping from their clothes, faces and bodies.
31.
Saving the Enemy
It was only after he had reached the safety of his room and calmed down a little that Griex’s words sank in. What had Griex meant? Ariet had been to slavery, and technically he didn’t even have parents because he was merely a laboratory-born child, so overall his life was as useless as that of the rodents in the forests. It made no difference to anyone whether he lived or died. MOX was responsible for his state and that of all his fellow-fugits in Hydus. MOX was responsible for all these years of torture it had inflicted upon them. So how could defeating MOX mean that the slaves would lose their only chance of freedom? It was the opposite that was true. Wasn’t it?
