Nopileos: A novel from the X-Universe: (X4: Foundations Edition 2018) (X Series)

by Helge T. Kautz

  A point of light raced towards the originating coordinates, drawing white streaks along behind it. Whatever it was, it was going to smash into the AP Nikkonofune at any moment!

  “Niji, evasive maneuvers!” she shouted, and grabbed the flight controls at the same time. At that moment, the blip on the gravidar reached the AP Nikkonofune’s position and jerked to a sudden stop. Then the onboard computer reacted.

  “There is no apparent danger at this time. Whom or what should I evade?”

  Elena stared at the pale dot, which according to the display had paused not 500 meters away relative to the AP Nikkonofune. As she peered out of the cockpit window, she discovered nothing unusual, other than the exception of the slowly approaching stargate. “Something was hurled at us like a rocket. According to gravidar it’s beside us now. Don’t you see it?”

  “I am sorry, Major Kho. No sensor data exist about that.”

  Shaking her head, Elena triggered a recalibration of the gravidar, and when the display returned after a few sezuras, the shadowy object had disappeared.

  “Strange,” she mumbled. The M4 was old, but had just been completely refurbished by technicians. She didn’t quite believe that the gravitational radar system was already suffering from glitches. But that had to be the case. Slightly disturbed, Elena leaned back in the pilot’s chair and watched as the jumpgate to Red Light drew ever nearer, until its dimensional anchors finally reached for the AP Nikkonofune and pulled the ship through the event horizon of the artificial singularity.

  Chapter 3

  My queendom for a messenger drone!

  Isemados Sibasomos Nopileos IV

  The ground beneath his bare claws felt pleasantly soft, evoking a shiver of strange sensations and timeless memories he had not experienced before. Nopileos waded the last few steps through the shore’s mud and fully enjoyed the alien air, that still carried something strangely familiar. Perhaps it was what Inanamus Zura, the once-lost homeworld of the Teladi would taste like. A way back appeared only recently, discovered by the starwarrior Elena—his dear friend! No longer had any Teladi claw stood on this fabled planet for over 300 suns! But he, Isemados Sibasomos Nopileos IV, the grandson of the CEO, would visit it, and there create the first non-profit organization of his race.

  In the middle of these upbeat thoughts, Nopileos shook the rust-red water from him and looked around carefully. The trees stood closely packed and had very slender and flexible trunks that a human could probably reach around with both arms and touch his fingers. The trees’ bark was smooth and had no branches or twigs below their crowns, perhaps fifteen Teladian lengths high. The foliage-bearing treetops were rocked by a rising and falling wind, and rustled softly. The canopy of leaves was thick, but not so impenetrable that single rays of light didn’t reach the ground from time to time; occasionally you could see the dark-blue sky flash through. At ground level, there were all kinds of wild undergrowth: thick-leaved ferns, flowering shrubs, and others with dark yellow berries—and of course the gnarled roots of the redwood trees. Grasses, lichen, or mosses were completely absent. The floor itself was covered with a fresh layer of leaves, under which could be found a layer of decaying leaves, as Nopileos determined when he scraped aside some of the green, fallen leaves with a claw.

  A first glance also showed no animals; but on closer inspection a countless number of segmented insects, camouflaged creatures with many tongues, and other creatures that were difficult to classify all crawled about in the foliage, boring into the fern leaves or lived out their existence stuck to the smooth tree trunks. Occasionally, fist-sized tufts of fur scurried through the foliage on many legs, and there also appeared to be much life in the treetops above, because sometimes there was a loud flutter which suggested winged creatures. A ceaseless cacophony of crashing and breaking branches filled the primordial jungle: rustling foliage, scurrying steps, whimpering animal sounds. There was also a long, drawn-out lament that echoed irregularly through the rows of trees, like the melancholy call of a birthing nitsu. Nopileos shuddered in disgust. He had a natural revulsion for nitsus; these nasty creatures had already driven whole departments of Teladi to the brink of financial ruin! But of course there couldn’t be any nitsus here on Nif-Nakh.

  He took one last look at the blood-red lake he’d crept ashore from just moments ago. Far back, almost on the other side, he could dimly see the floating outline of the elevator door. He hoped it would soon head for the the shore and catch on an embankment, so that it wouldn’t be seen by any scouts flying over the pond. Nopileos didn’t spare any thought for the escape pod itself; that lay deep under the murky water and wouldn’t be discovered unless someone was explicitly looking for it. Well. If he wanted to reach his ship in the next stazuras, he should start without delay. He broke off in the direction of the smoke trail he had kept in his mind.

  The jungle was dense, but not impenetrable. At first, Nopileos tried to move carefully and as silently as possible through the undergrowth. Soon, however, he realized that this was entirely pointless, but also completely impossible: he was Teladi! Teladi were reasonably elegant swimmers, but not elegant runners—certainly not through an untamed jungle! From that moment on, he crashed through the bushes and stomped more or less indiscriminately over ferns whenever they crossed his path and looked the least bit surmountable. When his backpack caught in a bush with yellow berries, he tugged violently at it, growling strange Teladi curses until the bag reluctantly jerked free. The sudden giving way made him lose his footing and he dropped to the ground. The moldy foliage under him smelled strange but was soft, so he didn’t hurt himself, but a cluster of berries that had hooked on the backpack was crushed beneath him. The dark yellow mush gave off a pungently sweet smell, until Nopileos wiped it off with his bare claws. He rose to his knees, then straightened up to continue on his way.

  After just a few steps, he heard a loud buzzing sound closing in from behind. Nopileos turned and watched in amazement as a nearly transparent, palm-sized creature with six wings landed on the remains of the crushed berries. It stayed there for a while; it gently fluttered with its barely visible wings, and did nothing else. After a few sezuras, however, it stirred, and lowered its elongated abdomen, from which a whitish stinger or proboscis sparkled, into the yellow-green mass of crushed berries. Nopileos watched with fascination as the yellow berry juice flowed through the sucking stinger and up into the animal’s translucent body, making it a bit less see-through. Notably, a small portion of the juice even flowed into the fine veins in its wings. Nopileos raised his claws and turned his palms upward, so that the splayed swimwebs became visible. Whatever! He turned his back on the large insect and set off again.

  The forest was quite uniform, in principle. Nothing changed between one step and the hundredth. He was therefore surprised when after after an uneventful march of a few inzuras, he pushed aside a pair of half-high bushes and unexpectedly found himself standing in a clearing. It was a small one, about the size of a square Teladian length, but nonetheless wide enough that he could set up his tent here with ease. But fortunately that would not be necessary; he was certainly in the immediate vicinity of the Nyana’s Fortune now! And yet, this place was strange: no trees grew on its entire surface, instead there were some splintered tree stumps scattered around the ground, that must have burned for some time. A handful of old trunks were strewn on the ground like angrily broken matches. Red mosses and mushrooms covered them and they were rotten through and through. The washed out smell of old fire that lingered over the small clearing mingled with the damp molds, and added to it something indefinable, sharp that made Nopileos wrinkle his nostrils. The Teladi could make neither rhyme nor reason out of this unnatural gap in the forest. He pondered whether a lighting bolt might’ve struck the ground, but he ended his thoughts without a conclusion when his stomach called with sudden vehemence. Carefully, he removed his backpack and picked out a protein wonton from the 200 pack.

  As he stowed the pack away again, a deep rumbling arose in the
distance that made his stubby ears twitch. He hastily swung the emergency equipment on his back and rose to his feet, worried. The loud noise approached from the left and suddenly grew to hurricane levels with the shriek of unleashed forces and displaced air! Nopileos’s head ridges went white as for one fear-filled moment a shadow crossed over the clearing, with a metallic light in the center that caught his eye. His inner eyelids winced. A Split scout ship flying just over the jungle canopy! The ship had purposefully raced over that clear spot in the woods as though the pilot had seen him!

  Nopileos leaped and dove aside into the bushes. If the Split had really discovered him, it was of course too late for that! But the noise of the turbo jet engines already grew more distant, and the craft made no attempt to return. Surely it was going far too fast for the pilot to have seen him, even if he had really looked. The saurian hatchling chewed nervously on the wonton while the engine’s rumbling faded off in the distance, became a whisper, and finally died away.

  “Nothing happened,” Nopileos reassured himself, then resumed his path with uncertain strides. The flight path of the scout ship corresponded pretty closely with his his hike through the jungle. There could be no doubt as to what that meant!

  A soft whirring from behind to his right made him look around. One of those palm-sized, almost see-through dragonflies hung on the side of his backpack and used its suction stinger to see if it could find the drying remains of the crushed berries.

  “Hsssh! Get away!” Nopileos cried and made a waving gesture towards the insect. The animal was not scared off, but buzzed briefly with its wings and gave him an unimpressed stare with several stalked eyes.

  “Oh fine,” he said after a while. “You seem to be harmless, so stay there a few mizuras—but keep quiet. And above all, don’t talk to the driver while he’s driving!” He hissed in amusement at his own joke and turned his concentration back to the undergrowth that lay before him.

  Much later on, the daylight gradually began to fade, then quickly died away. Nopileos wasn’t sure how much time had passed since his departure, but it was probably more than two or three stazuras. He was getting sick of marching. It was finally dawning on him that the Nyana’s Fortune had gone down farther away than he hoped. He would probably have to spend the night here, even if he was uncomfortable with the idea of struggling for another tazura in the jungle. Nopileos sighed. He was starving and tired! He longed for a scale-scraper, a warm meal, and a clean, hard sleeping bench. Something inside him demanded to know if it made any sense to keep going, but he quickly silenced that tiny voice of doubt. Activating the tracking device so the Split could find him was no alternative! He’d sooner wither and die of third.

  It now became completely dark. Nopileos noticed with astonishment that the dragonfly that hadn’t moved from his backpack now spread a diffuse, green, phosphorescent halo around him. It also appeared that most other insects in the jungle, which were only visible in the day after close inspection, glowed at night. The darker it became, the more points of light whirred through the night and crawled around on the ground and plants. Even the background noise changed bit by bit. It became calmer, and the lonely Teladi’s footsteps seemed to grow louder and linger for longer.

  Somewhere in the distance rang a strange, throaty trumpet sound: long-drawn out and yearning, with a blood-curdling inquiring tone. Nopileos jumped when the call was answered by a similar, but much closer one. He forced himself to stay calm and trudged on, more and more quickly, through the dark undergrowth. Suddenly he was back in a small clearing like the one he had stumbled over a few stazuras ago. The similarity was so great that he first worried that he had gone in a circle. But there were fewer fallen trunks on the ground, and the poisonous smell of burning didn’t sting so strongly in his nostrils. Nopileos looked up. As unusually clear and blue as the sky over Nif-Nakh was during the day, it appeared so velvety and impressive at night. Three moons illuminated the clearing: two as waxing or waning sickles, one as a full, pale disk.

  Slowly—very slowly—he calmed down. His body ached from the strain of the long march. Teladi were simply not made for such a thing! It was time for him to rest for today. Tomorrow he would cover the rest of the way to his Nyana’s Fortune. He fumbled the piezo tent as well as the water condenser out of his backpack, the two heaviest yet at the same time most useful items in the emergency pack. He carefully placed the compact tent roll next to him on the ground, in order to put the condenser into operation. Not that he had ever run into the embarrassment of using one before, but the principle was simple enough, and the operation was hatchling’s play. Depending on the local prevailing relative humidity, the device’s reservoir, which resembled a dark-gray thermos, would fill to the brim with drinking water in a few stazuras.

  Nopileos wiggled his ears in satisfaction and took the piezo tent in his claws. He looked around and found a comparatively flat place after a brief search. A quick investigation found a few smaller stones, a couple branches, and the decaying body of a small, multi-legged biting insect. He pushed the stones and branches aside, but with disgust he picked the dead animal up with the tips of his claws and threw it far into the dark forest, where it landed with a dull thud and kicked up a cloud of glowing nocturnal insects. Then he felt around with a clawed toe for the tent’s activator, pressed it in hard, and placed the vibrating bundle in the middle of the newly cleared area. With a low-frequency hum, the piezo tent began its work. The unfolding roll first sought its orientation, aligning its footprint with gravity. After the floor had rolled out and an immense number of small anchor fibers, the so-called “tent roots,” had grown into the ground, a weak, electrical tension began to creep through the struts of the tents. The tiny, high-performance cells delivered enough power to make the amorphous braces of unbreakable-but-lightweight memory material “recall” their constructed form in next to no time. In the end, the tent walls stretched and a few sezuras later there stood a fully built, egg-shaped dome tent in the clearing, one and a half lengths high and large enough to accommodate two or three Teladi. At least, Nopileos thought, if they liked each other a lot. In any case, he was completely alone, and somehow the shape of the tent reminded him a little of his beautiful spaceship. Nopileos hissed softly. He picked up the backpack from the ground, crawled through the front flap of the tent, carefully closed it behind him, and settled down in the middle of the spacious interior. The floor of the tent was too soft for his taste thanks to the foliage that lay under the tent; like all Teladi he preferred firm sitting and sleeping benches out of ceramic or hard plastic. But well, it wouldn’t be forever, and in a pinch he could endure quite well here. He took another protein wonton from the emergency equipment, slipped the lump between his teeth, and lay down on his back, chewing. With eyes wide open, he stared at the dome of the piezo tent, which was so tall that he could stand completely erect in the middle of the shelter. After a few sezuras, he heard a muffled hum and a washed-out, bright green spot of light approached from outside the tent wall. The dragonfly! Nopileos watched the glow of the animal, which settled down for a while right at the top of the dome roof. Why it would do so was beyond the power of his imagination. It probably just had its own incomprehensible dragonfly reasons! Nopileos hissed in amusement and swallowed the rest of the wonton. Strange. The fluorescent glow wasn’t static, but pulsed softly, as if it mirrored the animal’s breath rate. Sometimes it shined a little brighter, sometimes a little darker—the rhythm was fascinating, almost hypnotic…

  Nopileos started. It took him a moment before he knew where he was again. Something lay in the air. His short, stubby ears strained painfully; they had fully straightened and stood far from his skull. The dragonfly’s shimmering light outside the dome top was missing. It was darker now than ever. Obviously the brightest of the three moons had set again. Suddenly branches cracked in front of the tent. Not quietly and timidly, as if by a sneaking intruder who only made noises accidentally. No—loud, energetic, almost even brutal!

  Nopileos cowered in
horror. Should he go out and have a look? Before he could even answer the question, that scale-bristling, plaintive, inquiring trumpet that he had already heard several times between nightfall and moonrise called out. A terrible foreboding came over him. What if this call was answered? He flinched as breaking wood cracked loudly outside. Something tremendous pounded through the undergrowth with brute force. It sniffed for a moment, sucked in air, paused for a moment, then made the loudest and most blood-curdling blare of trumpets Nopileos had ever heard.

  "Iiaaaassssshhhhhh!" he shouted, and jumped up. His skull touched the roof of the tent and slightly bulged the elastic wall outward. With dilated pupils and blanched head ridges, he instinctively ducked and staggered backward to the opposite tent wall, where he slipped and fell painfully to the butt of his tail. A greenish glow wafted from the right through the darkness and the fabric of the tent. There was a silhouette, though diffused and surrounded by a faded halo, but even the sheer size of the approaching glow made it clear the it wasn’t the glowing insects of the bushes or the dragonflies that were approaching, but their big egg-brother. Nopileos looked around in a hurry. He absolutely had to get out of here! Hastily, he slipped to the entrance on all fours, got up on his knees, and tried to open the flap with shaking claws. It was getting brighter as the beast continued to advance with another trumpet blast. When the flap finally stood a little bit open, Nopileos caught a short glimpse of the strangely illuminated jungle floor. Then something intensely fluorescent whisked past the opening, which was maybe some kind of tail, paw, or other extremity; Nopileos wasn’t able to tell.

  The tent wall jumped forward with a lurch and struck the Teladi, who wasn’t prepared for it, in the face with great force. He was thrown inward, fell on his back, and kicked frantically with his clawed feet to pull away from where the tent’s wall began to bulge inward. The fluorescent beast outside cast everything in an unreal light that was almost as bright as day as it tried to enter the tent with coughing snorts and agitated trumpet blasts. The elastic material was surely enormously strong, but it wouldn’t be able to withstand the animal’s efforts for long. The first tent roots came out of the ground with an appreciable jerk. The Teladi was given a good shake as the roof was pressed down under the weight of the beast, which set the whole otherwise very stable construction in motion. His claw touched the strap of the backpack lying next to him. A thought ran through his mind: the multi-function tool in the equipment! Without thinking further, he pulled the emergency pack up to him, rummaged through it, panting, until he found the tool and with feverish movements flipped open the knife. Never before had he needed to defend himself in such a way or manner! Something came through the tent wall with a ripping noise and shredded a hole over a length long, into loose-hanging strips. With an inarticulate hiss, Nopileos straightened halfway, shakily holding the blade in front of him, pointed at the gaping opening. The drooping scraps of the tent wall were carelessly swept aside, then a green, phosphorescent something into the flattened tent and stared at the frightened Teladi almost indifferently with many dark, stalked eyes.