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

by Helge T. Kautz

  “I demand the shutdown of the artificial gravity field that prevents our launch,” Elena replied. “Ghinn t’Whht and Uchan t’Scct will be handed over to the Interplanetary Court as soon as we are back on on Argon Prime.” She was serious about that, even though she knew that at least Uchan would interpret it as a cover story. The two renegades waited in silence for the officer’s answer.

  “We have the authority to use any means of force,” said the Split on the screen, with an unmoved mien. “We will board the ship in two stazuras from now, should Ghinn t’Whht be on board. If she is in our custody by then, we will switch off the field.” The picture went out, and after a few fractions of a sezura, the onboard computer faded out the residual black rectangle.

  “Is there anything new from Kalmanckalsaltt and Nola Hi?” Elena asked, not wanting to go further into this discussion. The more she thought about the situation, the more her rage seethed. Uchan t’Scct answered her question in the negative with a gesture that Elena did not know the meeting of.

  “They have only been underway for two stazuras. The area to search through is very large,” the pilot answered curtly. “That will take some time.” He paused, then added, “We can burn the boarding party with our engines, even if we can’t take off. That’ll give us some additional time.”

  “Murder may be an incidental matter for you, but it isn’t for me! As long as I’m paying for this mission, no one will be burned. Do we understand each other?” Elena glared at the Split through the narrow slits of her almond-shaped eyes.

  Uchan immediately jumped into combat position and growled in a rage. “The creature has no orders to give me aboard my own ship!”

  Elena also went into defensive position. Of course she hadn’t the slightest chance in a fight against a full-grown Split. Only Paranids were superior to the warriors from Hodie in melee combat, but humans were always inferior. Ghinn looked from one to the other with interest. Whom she preferred, she didn’t let show on the outside, but there could actually be no doubt about that. Even before one of the adversaries could attack, the ship shuddered and a sound like a painfully deep ringing of a bell echoed loudly through the structure of the craft.

  Now Ghinn grabbed both parties. “Uchan t’Scct, disengage from Elena t’Kho immediately! This fight is dishonorable and pointless. Let it be, I command it!”

  Astonished, Elena turned her head to stare at the Split woman. Uchan, also astonished to be restrained by the Patriarch’s former partner, suddenly calmed down. A new bell peal rang the craft.

  “What is that?” Elena inquired with a queasy feeling. She checked the controls, but everything looked normal.

  “They’re preparing a hull welder,” Uchan explained. “They’ll use it to cut big holes in the Raindragon and work their way to the command center. The usual way a Split enters a ship.”

  “That’s not good,” Elena gulped.

  Uchan looked at her sardonically and folder his hands in a complicated gesture. “It’s good. On the other side of the hull welders.” He reached for the controls. “But I will not allow my ship to be damaged!”

  In the meantime, the exterior cameras showed a trio of Split who were mounting the hull welder to the side wall with four magnetic clamps. Elena, seated on the copilot’s chair, looked at Uchan in alarm. What did he intend to do? Activating the shields wouldn’t help. The distance between the shields and the hull was several meters.

  “I’ll fire up the drive. Don’t worry” the Split added grimly as he saw the astronaut’s flaring eyes. “Only a quick burst. That’ll be a warning to them.” Before Elena could comment, Uchan gave the onboard computer some commands in Split language, and activated the sequence. Somewhere in the belly of the ship it hissed, then the drive rumbled at the lowest power setting. The ship didn’t even move a centimeter, but the video field showed how the Split occupied with the breaching device stopped and hastily retreated. The hull welder, already firmly mounted, stuck to the side like a tick. “And now the shield!” Uchan triumphed. An imperceptible flash revealed that the energy field had been erected around the ship.

  “Uchan, look,” Ghin spoke up from the navigator seat. She pointed to the gravidar and remote sensors. The computer automatically blanked Nif-Nakh’s mass and showed what was happening in the vicinity of the planet. Several blips waited on the border of space above the coordinates where the FL Raindragon lay.

  “So we won’t leave Nif-Nakh without a fight. Very good!” Uchan formed the sign of anticipation. Ghinn, too, nodded with the corners of her mouth raised.

  Elena shook her head and stared out the cockpit window, which stood about fifteen meters from the ground. Night descended swiftly over the landing field and the palace shone brightly in the light of several blood-red spotlights.

  “Strange that she…” she started as a white illuminated fireball blossomed on the edge of her field of vision. From one horizon to the next stretched an unbearable, wan brightness that even crept through her tightly pressed eyelids. The glass of the cockpit pane reacted far too sluggishly, but eventually it darkened enough that Elena and the two Split could open their eyes again. For sezuras, white shadows danced over Elena’s retinas and she could only dimly see the cockpit.

  “The palace’s main reactor blew up!” she heard Ghinn croak. If she could see anything again!

  “The gravity field has collapsed!” Uchan shouted. Elena narrowed her eyes to slits and recognized the stooping pilots in strange poses. “We have to launch immediately!”

  “Without the others?” Elena pointed out. She waved a hand in front of her face as though to dispel the featureless fog over her retinas. Her eyesight slowly returned.

  “The Raindragon must be off the ground,” Uchan snapped, “before the auxiliary reactor kicks in!”

  Elena peered through the still darkened cockpit window carefully. A terrible mushroom cloud whorled around the explosion site that lay five miles from the FL Raindragon, in the middle of the jungle. The spotlights that had previously lit the palace had gone out. “When will that be?” she asked and turned to Uchan when no answer came.

  Ghinn answered in Uchan’s place. “Not at all. The main and auxiliary reactors are housed in a single power station block. It will be at least one quazura before the secondary unit starts up.

  “What are the ships in orbit doing?” Elena suddenly remembered what had appeared on the gravidar only a few sezuras ago.

  “Two in landing approach, two holding their position,” Ghinn replied. “They will want to play it safe—that’s how they’ll catch us, in any case.”

  Chapter 24

  Few places are safer than this ship.

  Doesn’t it look like an egg?

  Dolamilas Sidelosis Yayandas V,

  Designer of the Nyana’s Fortune

  “Nipoleos!”

  A ghostly whisper penetrated his dreams. Nobody called him that except for Inanias, whose sense of irony was multiply disproportionate for a Teladi onboard computer. But the ship lay in ruins, and with it Inanias.

  “Oh Captain Nipoleos!” the toneless voice whispered again.

  Once, in better times, Nopileos mispronounced the computer’s name: “Inanisas.” When he noticed that the ship’s brain had jumped on it, he had made a joke of deliberately calling it the wrong name from time to time; then Inanias got used to calling him “Nipoleos” in return. Nopileos’s scaly fin swelled in the equivalent of a broad grin in his light sleep. Imposing images of the yacht, towering high in the shipyard, floated through his head. The manager of the Department of Small Vehicles and Transporters…

  “Captain Isemados Sibasomos Nopileos IV!”

  …bearing the name Asalajas Hominides Alindreos, was immensely proud of the beautiful yacht. At that time you had… Nopileos blinked and opened an eye. Dark night dominated the glade that smelled like a blazing inferno. Too bad, the dream had really been too nice! He willed his nictitating membrane to glide over his eye when a face whisper stopped him.

  “Wake up, o
h Captain Nipoleos!”

  Was he hallucinating? Or was there really a thin little voice rustling through the darkness? He straightened up.

  “Inanias?” he called softly into the darkness. Again, a whisper seemed to answer, but it disappeared under the rustling of claws on the ground. Nopileos lay his head against the cool outer shell of the wreckage. He nearly pulled away, so uncomfortable was the soot against his cheek. But then he heard a voice from far off creeping through the battered metal of the ship’s body.

  “I’m pleased to finally, finally hear you, Captain Nopileos! I would like to be able to see you, too, but my sensors are damaged. There is an emergency.”

  Nopileos swallowed. “Inanias, is that you?” he asked in an uncertain voice. His hearts were beating in his throat.

  “It’s me!” came the whispered confirmation.

  “Can you… can you speak a little louder, Inanias?”

  The onboard computer declined. “All audio circuits are defective. I am resonating the ship’s hull through a subsystem of the atmosphere exchanger over which I still have control. Likewise, I only perceive sound waves via the vibrations of the outer hull. But that’s pretty good.”

  Nopileos had to think for a moment before he understood what the onboard computer was talking about.

  “Are you uninjured, oh Captain?” Inanias finally asked, to break the silence. Nopileos affirmed this and ignored the scratches and scars in his armor. Instead, he asked without any hope if Inanias could get the ship ready to launch.

  “Unfortunately not, oh colleague Captain,” the computer said with physically noticeable regret in the only temporarily modulated whispered voice. “Nyana’s Fortune will never again rise to the stars.”

  “Really? Ohg!” Nopileos hissed, sad at heart. “Can no one do anything? A shipyard?”

  Inanias also denied this. “No, the ship is irreparably destroyed, that even the best shipyard cannot fix it. Essentially only flight recorders and databanks are still intact. You must retrieve them and place them into Teladi claws.”

  The databanks, but of course! They were filled to the limits of their capacity with the undeciphered information of the Ancient Ones, which had been transmitted to him so long ago by the envoy of the Sohnen. These data were the most valuable assets that the Community of Planets possessed! But whatever Inanias imagined salvaging to be, there was something else that needed clarifying first.

  “Inanisas,” Nopileos hissed, unconsciously using the mixed up name, “how did starwarrior Elena and her friends fare?”

  “The AP Rhonda Crave with Major Elena Kho aboard, as well as the ship controlled by Captain Kyle-William Brennan, escaped Cho t’Nnt’s attack and were able to climb to orbit without being bothered by other interceptors. More can I unfortunately not say, since my full processing capabilities at that time were occupied by other things.

  Nopileos guessed what these “other things” were: Inanias had hauled him out of the Nyana’s Fortune with the escape pod at the right moment and then immediately tried to bring the ship down as undamaged as possible. Regardless of the wreck’s desolate state, the computer had performed a reasonable miracle: in reality, the yacht shouldn’t have a single bolt left! A wave of relief swept across Nopileos at the thought that nothing had happened to Elena. A delicate flame of hope flared up iside him; if the starwarrior had made it, he would do the same!

  Later, Inanias cleared up to Nopileos what had happened at the crash site in the wozuras since the ship’s crash: pretty soon after the fall, Split had come to inspect the glowing-hot wreckage from a proper distance. Inanias couldn’t say with any certainty what the Patriarch’s henchmen had done, since his entire perception was confined to the improvised microphone from the hull. In any case, they waited until the outer hull cooled down. After that, noises had penetrated to Inanias which led him to the conclusion that the Split were thoroughly combing the debris filed, and also subjected the shattered fuselage, as far as it was accessible, to intensive investigation. No one had discovered that the onboard computer was still functioning and listening the entire time; it also appeared that the Patriarch did not know about the important data in the ship’s memory banks, otherwise the wreck would have been completely dismantled. After somewhat more than two tazuras, the Split had left in three small ships with screeching engines, and Inanias had heard no other intelligent creatures since then until Nopileos’s arrival at the crash site.

  Nopileos leaned his back against the side of the ship. The moons hung over the clearing like two drops of lead, making even the burned and battered ship glisten palely in a few paces. Meanwhile, the Teladi felt Inanias’s voice more than he heard it. He didn’t have to keep pressing his head against the metal to hear the soundless vibrations. The onboard computer had used the past wozuras to forge a plan. Technically speaking, he had already developed this plan within the first sezuras after impact, as soon as the damage reports from his systems made unequivocally clear that the Nyana would never again ascend from the surface of this planet. After that, he had replayed the plan in deeper and deeper iterating, fractal variations. After a fairly long processing time, he found that there were too many unknowns in the equations. Fundamentally, there was nothing for him to do but hope for Nopileos’s appearance, give him the plan, and trust that he would work it out. The proposal was simple enough that Nopileos intuitively agreed immediately.

  The saurian descendant hung eight lengths up on the soot-blackened outer hull of the spacecraft wreckage, and climbed sporadically along some of its numerous warps and cracks. His silhouette stood out lost and alone against the ship, which even in the rigors of death was still imposing. Teladi might be superior swimmers and divers, and after many eons of development they were reasonably tolerant on land. But climbing was definitely not one of the things their short legs were built for! Nopileos had already struggled to cross the wooden roots of the redwood trees, in which he had at least been able to dig in his claws. How much more difficult was it to climb up here, where he could only rely on the edges and protrusions in the artificial metal of the ship’s side! Nowhere to anchor his claws, and everywhere the humidity of the last weeks turned the soot that covered the hull into a slippery layer of grease.

  The onboard computer’s control of the ship was limited to only a few systems; in addition, Inanias was operating on the energy from just one remaining power cell. The computer was therefore not in the position to open even one of the three passenger locks of the shattered wreck. Of course, there were many cracks in the ruined body of the yacht through which Nopileos could have found a way in; however none of the ones that required no climbing provided a passable way to the magazine of messenger drones. He was therefore left with no choice except to climb to the gaping wound left by one of the missing ion engines halfway between the ground and the highest point of the ship’s body.

  Inanias’s plan was for Nopileos to retrieve one of the drones from the magazine, manually program them with a message, and then send them straight to the CEO. In just a few sezuras, the drone would not be able to traced back to its launch site owing to its extreme acceleration, and there would be no way to stop it; the probability that the Patriarch would notice the launch of a single drone on the far side of the planet was practically nil. Only two things remained for Nopileos to do after a successful launch: on the one hand, he had to try to reach the food supplies in the Nyana’s Fortune’s storage rooms, and on the other hand, he could only wait for the CEO to come for him. How long that would take, he didn’t dare imagine; there were first of all enormous diplomatic hurdles to overcome, especially since the Company management wasn’t allowed to inform the Patriarch that he was alive and lingered there. At least not if you didn’t want to endanger your life.

  “I hope I’m worth enough credits to you, dear grandfather Isemadossss!” Nopileos hissed tensely, as his right clawed foot slipped repeatedly and he was only able to catch the weight of his body with difficulty.

  “Pay attention!” Inanias whispered t
hrough the ship’s hull, but Nopileos only snorted instead of an answer. What did this infernal machine of a computer think he was doing here—taking a stroll?

  Nopileos paused briefly and stared below. Vertigo was just as alien to Teladi as space- or sea-sickness, but the ground seemed to jump up at him nevertheless. He closed his eyes tightly, counted to nine, and looked along the wall until his eyes met the royal blue sky. Only a few more lengths separated him from the gaping wound of the engine mount.

  “You can do it!” he said, to give himself courage. With a straddling step that no one had ever seen a Teladi perform, he bridged the gap to the next firm spot, carefully tightened his arms and finally his clawed feet, his body always pressed tightly against the slippery wall. If he stretched, he could almost reach the smooth edge of the opening that the engine had left behind. The artificial metal grew to a thickness of six fists at this spot, while in other places the hull was often only a fist thick. In the half-light of the gaping hole, Nopileos spotted several massive supply lines and supports that were cut through as though with a surgical scalpel. That looked far too smooth; there were hardly any rugged corners or edges.

  “Tshhhh!” Now he knew it: this must be the opening where that one ion engine had been by overlapping shields in the collision with Cho’s interceptor! That explained the smooth, precise cuts! The Teladi eventually managed to pull himself up to the hole in the side wall. He peered in, but could see little more than a tangled mess of destroyed, technical guts.

  “Well then!” Inanias whispered on Nopileos’s scaly armor through the ship’s hull. It tickled a little; up here, the ship’s hull resonated more than it did below. “Now get in, Captain Nopileos!”

  “Of course,” he tensely hissed. “What else?” With further, laborious stretching exercises, with a clawed foot he gripped the edge of the opening he had already been holding onto with trembling, clawed hands for a minute. A jerk later, the stocky body of the Teladi rolled over the edge; his claws reached out into emptiness and found a hold nowhere. Snarling and flailing his arms, Nopileos plunged into the darkness of the ship’s fuselage until his claws caught hold of something he couldn’t see. His movement was halted with a painful tearing in his wrists; at the same time he sensed that he wouldn’t have fallen any further: his bare clawed feet touched something soft and yielding that felt like a giant wad of finger-thick cables. He carefully opened his claws and plopped down into the tangle of cables below him.