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

by Helge T. Kautz

  “Help!” Nopileos cried, thrusting the blade in the direction the the animal, which was completely unfazed. Instead, it came a bit closer, as if it wanted to sniff at every inch of the saurian descendant. Only with considerable delay did Nopileos realize that the beast had neither nose or mouth, much less teeth. The semitransparent gelatinous mass of the head glowed from within and sat on a long, flexible neck, and bore nothing more than six eyes on curiously short stalks.

  “That’s—you… you can’t even… can’t bite?” an unbelieving Nopileos stammered, and lowered the multi-function tool. As if to answer, the animal bent back its long neck. Through the opening in the tend wall Nopileos caught a glimpse of the rest of its stocky body, which arched back as well. He saw tremendous veined wings as well as an enormously long, serrated tail that wound around the main body of the tent and was just about to push forward through the shredded wall into the tent’s interior. With bulging eyes, Nopileos looked down at the tip of that tail, which flickered back and forth beneath its head. At the extreme end of the thick, snake-like extremity, a sharp-fanged mouth opened. A triumphant trumpet rang as foul, poisonous stench spread out.

  Then the feeding tail snaked at the still-motionless Teladi with grinding jaws.

  Chapter 4

  Deep inside, behind the wall of darkness, under the lake of tar, there you’ll find the sunlit day, the butterfly under blue skies.

  Carta Frends,

  Argonian Historian, 172-214

  Four tazuras later, the ship’s oppressive narrowness and the unfamiliar silence began to slowly grate on Elena’s nerves. Even so the onboard computer’s databank was almost inexhaustible and offered enormous insights into the culture and history of the Community of Planets; for the first time in a long time, Elena also found sufficient leisure to sort through and read through the material without interruption. Nevertheless, the feeling of restlessness and unfulfillment rose the longer she killed time alone. Even her attempts to find balance through meditation missed the mark. Only the exercises with the tiny training device that folded out of the wall in the corridor to the payload bay created temporary relief. Therefore, from the second tazura of flight on, she trained for a stazura or two multiple times a day, usually with an empty or dogged expression. Only after the final gate transit, when Niji announced that the AP Nikkonofune would reach the destination planet of Hewa in less than eight stazuras, did Elena think of the idea to use the ship’s databank to inform herself about the Hatikvah Free League. This oversight annoyed her, as she was not usually known to be inadequately prepared. Why she had skipped her flight destination during her forays through the archives of the onboard computer was incomprehensible to her.

  It was even more surprising because the League was a fascinating chapter in the Community of Planet’s history that demonstrated the fundamental peacefulness of the Argon. For a long time, the Hatikvah Free League was little more than a loose union of three remote planetary systems somewhere between Herron’s Nebula and Atreus’ Clouds. A quarter of a million Argons and just as many members of other species breathed, worked, and lived here in remarkably peaceful community. In fact, the Hatikvah Free League had hardly been visited by Xenon raids or confronted by other armed hostilities for several decazuras. Some thought that this had to do with the sheer unimportance of these three sparsely populated systems; others argued that the Free League more or less obtained this security at the cost of the Argon and Boron. But the League’s status as an independent confederacy which elected its own government and politically was not a part of either the Community of Planets or any other organization of the six species was undisputed. The Hatikvah Free League was considered a neutral state, and as such the allied forces of the recent Xenon Conflict had generously given then one of the “new sectors.” Hatikvah’s Faith was baptized by this section of space. It included two solar systems, one of which harbored a fertile water planet, while the other was a binary system with no fewer than eighteen cold gas giants.

  The founding of the League was due to circumstances that often lead to bloody battles over ownership claims on the old Earth. Not so here. A long time ago, a freethinker named Christiane Hatikvah had a wonderful vision—she saw all peoples coexisting: living and working together with equal rights. Her small commune Ai—Love—on the once nameless world she named Hewa—peace—quickly became a village, soon an entire city. Outcasts, the persecuted, defectors, and dissenters were received with open arms, and no one was turned away. Naysayers prophesied a short life for the newly emerging community: criminals and rebels of all peoples would find fertile ground here, and seed it with malice. But they would be proven wrong. Although loafers, smugglers, and pirates occasionally sailed under the Free League’s flag, within a few decazuras the small confederacy had developed into an oasis of calm in a tumultuous universe. As the young Community of Planets partially convened in 452, zuran time, for the first Interplanetary Conference on Security and Cooperation in Space, they chose the League’s capital, Ai, as the conference venue. Since that first conference 95 jazuras earlier, all regular and special sessions had been held in this city, which matured into a metropolis. Hewa was the name of the planet, Peace. But if peace was usually the reason for a conference of peoples, it was unfortunately not always the outcome…

  Elena looked up from the data panel. Far out in space, a light blue speck glowed in the faint halo of its atmosphere; Hewa was coming up quickly. The astronaut from Earth held her thumb at arm’s length and closed one eye. The planet disappeared, but its bright glow formed a strange halo around her thumb. She shook her head. The people of Earth might have been a few steps ahead of their brothers and sisters in the Community technologically, but ethically they definitely stood behind the Argon.

  One stazura later, Niji turned the AP Nikkonofune by means of the attitude control system so that her main drive pointed in the direction of flight and gave reverse thrust. Elena flipped off the database projection and checked the instruments. Everything looked calm. She got up to exercise for a while and then shower. Later, when Hewa had grown into a large, blue-white ball that took up the entire bow window, it filled her with an exhilaration like nothing she’d felt for a long time. All the instability of the last few tazuras faded from her like the echo of a bad dream. She didn’t know what she expected, but—like everything since her arrival in the Community—it would be fantastic and exciting. That, she didn’t doubt.

  As the AP Nikkonofune made its landing approach, Elena saw the gigantic tower of the Conference Center standing many kilometers away. As she knew from the archives, it had been erected specially for the ICSCS thirty-five years ago. It measured over four hundred meters in diameter, reached one-half kilometer under the ground, and yet stretched twice that distance into the sky. The colossus was completely covered with large tiles of black marble, in which were set thousands of panoramic windows all around. Each of these windows possessed an automatic sun shade in a different color of the Boron color space; when Niji had the AP Nikkonofune circle the tower in a wide holding pattern, Elena’s eyes beheld a magnificent, hypnotic play of colors as many of the shades had descended due to the start of midtazura. Finally, flight control granted the AP Nikkonofune landing clearance, and the onboard computer brought the small M4/Buster down at the top of the huge roof of the conference building.

  Since the official meeting with the Senator for Defense, Henna Steen-Hilmarson, and the Argonian delegation had only been announced for some stazuras, Elena availed herself of the opportunity to wander a bit through the streets of Ai beforehand. She was surprised to find that from the foot of the tower she could hear absolutely nothing of the heavy traffic from the airfield above. And yet, although it was located a good way out of Ai, the giant cylinder completely dominated the city’s image. You could see it from any point in the street, at any time; it floated over the rooftops and, it seemed to Elena, even dominated the hearts and minds of the locals. Eventually, her infobracelet reminded her of the upcoming meeting. She went back a
nd sought out the premises of the Argonian representation on the 187th floor.

  The corpulent senator with the pink hairbun was already waiting for Elena. “The Three-eyes have changed the protocol of their data-octahedrons,” she revealed as she lead Elena into the small conference room where the Argonian delegation’s briefing was being held. “Some are speculating that the security flaw of the previous generation of octahedrons was purely intentional.”

  “Are you saying that we do not have any information at all about the actual reason for this conference?” Elena inquired. She was surprised to note that the Argonian delegation consisted of only the Defense Senator and two Argons, whom she did not know.

  “Little. We assume this is going to be an amicable reorganization of the territorial divisions. Whatever the Three-eyes mean by ‘amicable,’ that is. And above all else, an unspecified form of preemptive defense against the scattered Xenon collectives.”

  “That seems quite reasonable,” Elena said, as she did not immediately realize what the senator wanted.

  Steen-Hilmarson slowly shook her head. “You have perhaps not been in the Community long enough to notice, Major Kho. But every time the Pontifex Maximus Paranidia undertakes something that goes beyond local trade deals, what results is something that runs counter to human thinking. Something that is contradictory, illogical, or otherwise incompatible with rational thought.”

  “Perhaps non-human beings are fundamentally different,” Elena reflected. “What Split, Boron, and Teladi do doesn’t always make sense to me, Madam Senator.”

  “Oh, please,” the senator sighed with a tortured smile. “Just call me Henna. ‘Madam Senator’ is impossible to hear over and over, and my surname isn’t manageable either. And you don’t need to sit, we’ll be off at any moment. We should slowly make our way to the plenary hall.”

  Chapter 5

  Fear, garish gray and bright black; when the helpers no longer scattered the threats. We tasted the full horror of what we did. The intention alone was mottled pink; the deed paled in the moment of flesh.

  Olla Go,

  Philosopher and Court Jester to Kingdom End

  The Three-eyes had bestowed upon the convention the nebulous title of “Geometric Expediency in the Context of Collective Salvation,” which led to unruly remarks from some of the Split representatives, subdued laughter from the Argons, and from the Teladi, as usual, induced no particular reaction. In the Borons’ extensive environmental area, the designation provided restrained amusement, but then again, the amphibious creatures in any case found practically anything and everything amusing. And of course that also applied to Bala Gi, who was waiting for the inaugural address. The Minister of Ethics and Foreign Affairs of the Queendom of Boron sucked deeply of the equatorially-warm wet of the conference center, with tremulous gills. The liquid spilled sharp and living through nostrils and gills; it seethed with the flavors, memories, and the very life of the many beloved diplomats who had swum through it over the course of time. Up front on the youngest buds of her tasters, even the distant presence of the princess prickled, funny and complex. Lar Menelaus’s last visit to Ai was at least seven equatorial streams back, and yet her joyful pheromones still dominated the taste of the wet. Oh! The minister opened her pupils so wide that the surroundings blended into one whirling patch of color. She clicked bemusedly. Once again, she thought in ‘equatorial streams’ instead of ‘jazuras!’ And of course this slip-up spread through the wet as a diffuse cloud of thought. Why did the hairy and scaly air-snufflers make things so difficult for themselves? Three current changes on Nishala roughly corresponded to a Teladian jazura, or about one and one-third of a standard Argonian year. Bala Gi held that it was all a big, funny mess. Perhaps it had come time again to propose a more meaningful, quantum-fluctuation-based timekeeping system to the ICSCS. But the complacent, scaly cheapskates would inevitably bristle at the idea once again. They had used the Community to press their funny zura calendar system on the Tasters, and would defend it to the last claw. It was, after all, the only overreaching success those green, bargaining lizards had ever been able to achieve, disregarding financial ones.

  Bala Gi’s attendant, the scientific ethicist Nola Hi, pushed an amused barrage through his rostrum. The small compression wave caused the minister’s gills to vibrate. She refocused her eyes and looked into large, questioning, saucer-shaped eyes. Naturally, her pheromone cloud told Nola Hi that she was amused with herself and that it had something to do with time and the Teladi. After all, time was a prominent taste, one of the nine-hundred-eleven fundamental types, even!

  “Minister, I wonder and am curious,” the pale-blue ethicist clicked, as his tasters rippled in an invisible current, “whether Somancklitansvt will come to the true reason for this meeting.”

  Somancklitansvt was the head of the delegation of Pontifex Maximus Paranidia; he bore a particularly long and unctuous title, but unholy beings—that is, everybody but the Paranid themselves—were not allowed to address him by it. Therefore, they made an effort to address him by his larval name, which usually worked. Since time immemorial, the Three-eyes were embarrassingly careful to save face. But Somancklitansvt must know that there would be trouble and loss of face as soon as he came to his main concern. Because as far as the Queendom’s intelligence services had been able to ascertain, the Paranids were concerned with securing their last star system against the Xenon, for which they sought both moral and military support.

  “That, he should and must, certainly and without fail,” Bala Gi replied to her advisor’s question. “Senator Henna Steen-Hilmarson of the Argon Federation is slowly becoming impatient, and the Defense Specialitist of the Profit Guild, Thi t’Ggt, has already announced his departure. He is quite indignant.”

  “You can not blame and resent him for that, even though he is nonetheless a Split! And there he comes, and already is!” answered Nola Hi. The last part did not refer to Thi, but to the Reverend Somancklitansvt, who at that moment appeared on the speaking platform in the middle of the plenary hall. The representatives’ seats and benches were grouped around the stage and the Borons’ environmental area was formed by a nearly invisible force field that compensated for optical distortions.

  The other governments had also sent as few representatives as the Queendom. A mere two saurians in the milky-green uniform of the Teladi, more or less bored, stared at the middle of the hall. The portly Senator Steen-Hilmarson and her two diplomatic attendants whispered openly to starwarrior Ele Na, who had been called at the last minute to participate in the conference as a non-voting representative of sector Earth. The Goner cult’s non-voting observer spoke unashamedly with the two members of the Free League, and a half-dozen members of the press shifted uneasily back and forth on the upper benches of the spectator area. The Patriarch of Chin had sent seven representatives all the same, who were hunkered at their desks with their usual sullen faces to the right of the three times three times three dignitaries of the Paranids.

  The imbalance between the numbers of the Three-eyes and those of the other envoys seemed amusing, but it appeared that Somancklitansvt either did not perceive the excitement of the Argons and Borons, or else he completely ignored it. The Paranid waved his wide, diamond-and-nividium-studded cloak in a dramatic gesture. A cone of light lanced down from far above, and illuminated the bony figure like a magician at a gala performance. Somancklitansvt spread his arms wide and stretched them toward the audience.

  “Allies, holy and unholy!” he intoned in unaccented trading language. “It was not long ago since tremendous fleets of the machine-creatures swept through the Godrealm and all other star systems. They brought senseless destruction and immeasurable financial losses. But then Three-Dimensionality sent us a sign: out of nowhere came a ship from the distance; bearing weapons and technologies that until then were alien to Us. Behold!”

  The beam of light that illuminated the Paranid faded to a dim glow and the hall’s lights went completely out. A swirling holosphere above
the head of the Three-eye grew to a considerable size. In it, a myriad of stars glittered against a velvety background; a dirty-brown gas planet with ocher-colored swirls hovered in the center of the sphere and filled two quarters of the image. From the direction of the representatives of the Patriarch of Chin came a few exclamations in Split language that supported Bala Gi’s guess: this was the gas giant Gho-Czman in Split territory. But of course Somancklitansvt was not talking about the planet.

  The camera slowly zoomed in on a tiny spaceship that passed the gas planet at mid-range. It was the very ship in which the human, Kyle-William Brennan, had invaded the Community of Planets. His arrival had triggered a frenzied snipe hunt across the entire breadth of the Community. Everyone wanted to be the first to get their grips on the shuttle with the unprecedented technology: Brennan’s ship possessed the so-called gateless jumpdrive, thus the ability to arrive at any point in space from any other point in space in no time, without having to use the ancient jumpgates! But the shuttle named USC X was just a tiny prototype ship and its jumpdrive was destroyed.