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

by Helge T. Kautz

  A murmur went through the ranks of the assembled villagers. A Teladi wanted to fight against the most dangerous of all creatures on this planet and survived? It sounded so unbelievable, but the chemical burns on the lizard’s hexagonal scale armor spoke in plain language!

  Nopileos hesitated for a fraction of a sezura. In fact, he had taken to his claws and fled from the beast! But did he have to divulge that? They seemingly wanted to hear something different. “Oh yes, worthy Split!” he replied quickly. “I faced the creature with a knife in my claws after it surprised me in my sleep. It is terrible! Its blood shines in the night, and it burns like liquid fire!”

  “Oh, yes. But if you catch it in a glass container, after a half-tazura it darkens and produces an ink as black as death.,” the old man said casually. He turned to Rhonkar and Aqhn. “Lord, the creature undoubtedly speaks the truth. Her injuries verify that.”

  Rhonkar nodded. Because there were no longer ghoks on the island for many jazuras—he had had them systematically eradicated himself—the saurian had obviously come from the mainland. And whatever she did on Nif-Nakh, she did it with her bare hands and no equipment, otherwise the ghok would not have hurt her so badly. The head of the Family formed the sign of conditional acceptance with all six fingers of his right hand. Many of his subjects did the same. The complicated gesture spread rapidly across the circle of Split; even Hatrak, Rhonkar’s daughter, who a night earlier had wanted Nopileos to suffer, raised her hand.

  “Keep going, Golan,” Rhonkar prompted the old man.

  “Yes, lord. Saurian woman, tell us what led you here. Begin with the gate transit that led you to this star system.

  “Yes, worthy Split-san…”

  “And keep it short, CEO’s granddaughter, because we do not have as much patience with you as the ghok!”

  “Yes indeed! So…”

  “And do not forget the crash of your spaceship!”

  “No. But—from where—why… Tshhhh?”

  The villager elder looked triumphantly at Nopileos. “From you yourself, in this moment, talkative lizard creature. Do you understand?”

  In the following inzura, Nopileos gave the astonished Split an account of the history of his being there. Initially, he intended to follow the instructions of the village elder and recount it only briefly and concisely, but the many questions from the Family head, Golan and Aqhn, quickly diverted his intentions. When he got to the point where he was describing the crash of the Nyana’s Fortune with the interceptor of Cho t’Nnt, the Special Plenipotentiary of the Patriarch, he hesitated. Had he been babbling? Wouldn’t his openness put him into a position he couldn’t talk himself out of? On the other hand, these Split were opponents of the Patriarch, so shouldn’t they rejoice that he had put a warrior close to the Patriarch of all Split out of commission?

  “Teladi, did I mention the small limits of our patience?” Golan t’Vllt urged when Nopiloes stopped talking.

  “Oh yes, worthy Split!” Nopileos hastened to say. “Very clearly, even!” Well, immediately after my arrival in Nif-Nakh’s orbit, it turned out that my friend Elena Kho and her egg-brother Kyle-William Brennan along with his followers were in mortal danger. A—“

  “Wait!” Rhonkar cried in between. “Brennan and t’Kho, these are the strangers who came to the Community of Planets with a jumpship, is that correct?”

  “Yes, oh colleague, Rhonkar!”

  Gilha and Throw, who had been quiet throughout the interview, frowned when they heard the Teladi call their lord “colleague,” but they restrained themselves. Rhonkar, however did not respond to this highly inappropriate address.

  “Amazing,” mumbled the bald-headed Split instead. “Continue.”

  Nopileos waggled his ears. “In any case, Cho t’Nnt fired at Brennan’s or Elena’s ship. That’s why I instructed my onboard computer to ram his interceptor. Cho burned up, and I crashed with my ship.”

  Again a soft whisper rose among those present, and this time it lasted for a long time. An older split, who was familiar to Nopileos, stepped out of the circle, turned his face to the head of the Family, and knelt down.

  “You rammed him?” Rhonkar inquired in disbelief. “Zhi t’Nnt, rise and come to me,” he commanded the kneeling warrior.

  “I had to, because my ship possessed… no weapons! Not even an asteroid laser!”

  Aqhn t’Frrt, Rhonkar’s consort, approached the moraine and looked up. “Teladi, either you are completely crazy or you possess more courage than any other lizard before you. Cho t’Nnt was one of ours.”

  “That—I didn’t know that!” Nopileos stuttered in horror. The long-haired Split woman nodded at the Teladi and honored him with a gesture of appreciation.

  “Come down from the torture rock and face Zhi t’Nnt, the father of the Split you killed,” Rhonkar demanded.

  Nopileos’s forehead ridges lost their color and his knees went weak. Egg salad! Could he have known? Did it really have to be? He had no desire at all to face Cho t’Nnt’s father! He squatted down, steadied himself with both claws, and then slid down the smooth stone. Then he waddled toward Rhonkar.

  The Split turned to the assembled villagers and dismissed them to perform their daily tasks. “You are now in possession of all the information that I have. But now I must make a decision—alone.” The assembly broke up quickly. Nopileos saw only contented faces.

  Chapter 13

  Many sextillions of cycles after the Initialization, the total number of CONDITIONS is decreasing for the first time, while the sum of the traceable CAUSAL FACTORS is exceeding the bandwidth of the processing window.

  TF/CPU 10 d0 ef aa,

  appraisal

  Slowly and quietly, almost stealthily, a huge shadow slid in front of the disk of a once pinhead-sized sun in sector Atreus’ Clouds. Its cylindrical shape, which widened toward the stern, revealed that it was not an asteroid or any other natural phenomenon. The outer hull was made out of a texture that reflected only little light, and although it was a very distinctly a ship or other machine, the electromagnetic spectrum remained almost entirely calm. The massive object fell through space without power and outwardly nearly inactively. A good dozen other ships moved on parallel trajectories; they were much smaller, but outwardly just as inactive as the large cylinder they accompanied.

  Elena recognized the dark ship immediately. Her first, instinctive impulse after it appeared as a washed-out speck on the gravidar—and shortly thereafter as a featureless silhouette in the far visual range, was escape. For many centuries, the people of Earth were conditioned for fear and, if possible, immediate escape at the first sight of Terraformers, although the last confrontation between the machines and Earth was already well over half a millennium ago. The astronaut managed to suppress her flight reflex only with difficulty, and kept the AP Nikkonofune on the estimated course. Not only did Elena know what the cylinder was for, she had already seen it once! Because it was like that CPU ship presented by Reverend Somancklitansvt during the ICSCS conference on Hewa. Elena reviewed the instruments with flying hands. That the Paranid and Split were amassing a fleet and this would still take some weeks was known to her. But where were the look-outs? One would assume that the There-eyed would constantly monitor their discovered CPU ship that they intended to destroy! But the gravidar displayed nothing more than the masses of two planets, the nearest of which was more than twelve astronomical units distant from the AP Nikkonofune. No ships, no installations, nothing at all in the bleak emptiness of the outer regions of this solar system, except for the CPU ship itself and its companions! Were there any still any of these ancient Terraformer mindships anywhere else?

  The titanic cylinder of the CPU ship could now be seen with the naked eye; it stood out like a fat, black grub against the colored nebulae of this space sector. From Niji’s data tables, Elena knew that the Terraformer had a length of 850 meters and an average diameter of 165 meters. Despite the aid of the electronic visual enhancements, at the distance of under three kilom
eters, details of the Xenon hull could not quite be made out. Elena told Niji to match the AP Nikkonofune’s flight vector so that the small M4/Buster remained immobile relative to the giant. In fact, both the cylinder and Elena’s ship, at fifteen percent of the speed of light, would meet at the farmost jumpgate and would reach it in a few stazuras.

  What the machines expected of her, Elena didn’t know. The throng of black escort ships still remained completely inactive. Occasionally there was the lick of a blue flame, here and there, from a reaction control thruster, but none of the warships made a move to break course. Elena’s heart was in her throat as she scanned the outer wall of the CPU ship with the onboard telescope and stopped on the massive symbol of the Terraformer fleet, whose gnawed, blackened outlines bore witness to a volatile history. The hull of the cylinder ship was very worn in general: it was covered over and over by a veneer that made it rough and uneven: it exhibited craters, irregularities, and differences in structural composition as though it had been patched and repaired. Those that were like sandpaper must consist of millions of micrometeorite impact craters, so tiny that they inevitably remained below the maximum resolution of the telescope. This Terraformer had to already been in space for a long, very long time, possibly a hundred or more jazuras! Elena deactivated the visual enhancements and switched off the onboard telescope’s controls with a finger movement. The virtual control panel disappeared and made room for the real ship controls again.

  Since the CPU ship’s escort ships showed no signs of hostile behavior although they had been able to follow the course of the AP Nikkonofune for at least an hour, Elena decided to slowly pick up speed and move closer to the colossus. Her palms sweated slightly; a quality that she had never noticed before. Nervousness was also buzzing in her stomach and in her chest, but the naked fear of the machines had subsided for the most part. Elena wiped her palms on her overalls and grabbed the steering controls. Of course, Niji would be better able to control the AP Nikkonofune in an emergency than she could. But she needed the feeling of security that immediate control that only manual flight control could now provide.

  At a distance of only one and a half kilometers, Elena let Niji report the dimensions of the Terraformer again. The CPU ship looked so incomprehensibly immense that the human senses automatically sought to scale it down, especially since the darkness and harsh contrasts in the vacuum of space made estimation difficult anyway. But the values were right: 850 by 165 meters. Almost at a walking pace, the AP Nikkonofune passed the cordon formed by the black escort ships. The Xenon fighters almost disappeared against the huge body of the Terraformer, appearing like a thin swarm of mosquitoes in orbit around a stranded blue whale. Elena put her head back; the black cylinder overwhelmed everything, already filling her entire field of view, from top to bottom and left to right. Never again in human history had such massive structures been built in space. Maybe some day they’d be forced to see it so they could begin again.

  Abruptly, glittering white strings of light flared up on the cratered landscape of the hull, entwined around the hull in spiral shapes. Elena cringed at that, but so far she still mastered the urge to transmit that impulse to the controls. Seen from close up, the lights did not consist of chains, but individual points of light, each a minimum of ten meters apart from the nearest other. They were real, physical lights, not landing path holograms, as were common in the Community of Planets. In a moment Elena knew that this was a request from the CPU ship: this way! With sweaty palms, she guided the AP Nikkonofune forward alongside the front wall of the rotating cylinder until she reached the large, 165-meter-wide front surface. The area was subdivided into eight huge segments, which at that moment were flipping outward, straightening up, and opening up to outer space. Weak lights glowed in the interior, while at the same time the white light chain on the outer hull went out.

  Elena hesitated. She was not known for being fearful, but she was now shaking all over. Up until now, even dying hadn’t scared her. No, it was the presence of an ancient, archetypical human enemy that made her shiver inside. But she knew herself well enough to know that there was nothing now that could distract her from her purpose. So why postpone it? Courageously she steered the AP Nikkonofune into the maw of the colossus. Behind the small M4/Buster, the eight door segments snapped shut again. An orange light on the instrument console flashed dully.

  “Niji?”

  “A standard landing protocol has been transmitted to me, Major Kho. It complies with protocol revision 18, which has been outdated in some extent since jazura 4, zuran time.”

  “But you can land the Nikkonofune here all the same?”

  “Yes, Major Kho, hoever, the M4 does not support the replenishment of supplies according to revision 18.”

  Elena said nothing and looked intently out of the cockpit. The inner walls slowly rotated around the tiny Argon ship, which had not yet adapted to the revolution. Usually the rotation compensation in space stations was carried out by a counter-rotating landing carousel, but there didn’t seem to be one here. Instead, Niji used the attitude control jets to adjust the movement. Almost immediately the environment gained two new subject qualities for Elena: up and down.

  Rectangular lights, mounted in long rows on the ceiling and floor, flared like giant neon lights. Some of the five-meter-long and one-meter-wide light elements flickered nervously, others started up to immediately go out again; some remained dark in the first place. Despite the shifting light conditions, Elena now saw more than before: to the left and right sides, extending along the inner walls of the landing corridor were rows of bulges, each equipped with a long, mechanical gripper arm that closely resembled a loader crane for microgravity environments. Loading bays for small spaceships! But for what kind of ship the bays were intended, Elena could not imagine; despite all their elegance, the usual Xenon battleships were far too big for these mechanisms. Not even the CPU ship’s escort ships would fit in here! As far as Elena could see, not a single bay was occupied by a ship. Between and next to the parking bays ran metal rails that stretched to the end of the landing tunnel. Elena couldn’t initially make sense of these small tracks; as the AP Nikkonofune approached the end of the tunnel, she saw dozens of big machines huddled together on the rails, crowded together like dark pearls on a string. That had to be maintenance and supply robots for landed ships! But they were inactive, and that probably for a very long time.

  Two pale blue gas streams hissed past the cockpit window and stopped the forward movement of the AP Nikkonofune. On the left, one of the long gripping arms began to move. Jerkily at first, as if driven by a seized-up motor, it moved toward the AP Nikkonofune. Elena’s hands tightened on the controls, ready to immediately get distance between her ship and the apparently damaged gripper. But before it could come to a collision, the movements of the mechanical gripper arm balanced out halfway. Elena eased her grip on the steering controls, but didn’t let go. The load gripper anchored itself with a distinct “clunk” above and below the fuselage of the Argon ship and in a few sezuras had pulled it into one of the landing bays. Outside, something buzzed with the sound of a drive chain, a metallic scraping sound drove into the side of the AP Nikkonofune, then all activity ceased.

  “And now what?” Elena asked in the resulting silence. “Niji? What does the landing protocol say?”

  “A docking tunnel was anchored to the AP Nikkonofune’s port lock, Major Kho. Revision 18 prescribes the setup of a human-friendly gravity and atmosphere as the end of the immediate landing procedure.”

  “But that didn’t happen, right?”

  “On the contrary, Major Kho, the values are positive.”

  “That means I can breath out there?” Elena asked, shocked. It didn’t make sense to her that a fully automatic Terraformer ship, a Xenon, was carrying life-support systems. Niji confirmed.

  Elena wiped her hands on her overalls. The strategy of the Xenon was slowly becoming apparent to her. The machines merely presented information; they left her with the sol
e decision of what to do with it. She hadn’t needed to follow the coordinates that lead into Atreus’ Clouds. And she hadn’t needed to steer the AP Nikkonofune through the cordon of Xenon fighters into the Terraformer. Likewise, she would be free to leave the ship or stay aboard. As unreal as it seemed, the machines had apparently and voluntarily renounced violence and coercion of any kind.

  A mizura later, Elena stood in the open lock. Despite the apparent atmosphere, she had put on a space suit for safety’s sake. But the membrane that could be unfolded into a helmet remained rolled up in the neck of the suit. In the event of danger it would automatically unfold within picosezuras, thereby protecting Elena from an explosive decompression. She stepped out and took a careful breath. The air was cool and fresh, not stale and stuffy as she had expected. Still, it tasted somehow different from the ever-uniform standard atmosphere created by the atmospheric exchangers of the Nikkonofune and all the other ships and stations of the Community of Planets that were built for humans. Elena looked around. The corridor she was in was little more than a two meter high and wide with a grate for a floor and—partially defective—lighting elements on the ceiling. On the inside-facing side of the corridor, repeated every 15 meters, was a passageway that lead to an empty parking bay. As she walked down the corridor, Elena counted twenty-five of them. Because there were, as she knew, two strands of bays on each side of the landing tunnel, it followed that the Terraformer featured at least 100 small spaceships. But what kind, and where were they? Elena’s boots rattled loudly on the grate as she walked on.

  At the end of the round passage, she expected an unadorned elevator, whose doors raised with a hiss as she approached it. This time there was no hesitation. She stepped in and immediately felt the elevator accelerate upwards and immediately stop again. The doors open and she stepped out.