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

by Helge T. Kautz

  “Tsh!” Nopileos said. Except for nails and eyes, everything was usually either green or else brown on his people. Sure, in varying shades, but always in these basic colors, even the scaly fin. The Teladi individual on the video field, however, shined in the brightest colors of the Teladi color spectrum. Nopileos didn’t know what to think or feel; he was as confused as ever. Before he could speak, Elena made an advance.

  “Hajime mashite Elena Kho desu,” she said amiably. The Teladi’s muzzle almost fell out of the projection as he came closer to the camera. He hissed a few sentences and disappeared. Immediately after, a second, similarly colorful Teladi appeared in front of the imaging optics.

  “What did he say?” Elena said as she looked at Nopileos.

  Nopileos looked back with large eyes. “I’m not sure,” he stuttered. “That is a very old dialect, I think.” The realization that there was a dialect in the very own language of his people surprised him. Teladi already knew the most important words immediately after hatching. Sure, the larger part of the vocabulary came later, but ability and language as such were already inborn for each Teladi. For all intents and purposes, dialects weren’t possible!

  The second saurian also began to hiss and at the same time did something with his claws outside of the imaging area. A warning signal flashed on the flashed and Elena leaned over to read it. A coordinate sequence had been transmitted to the computer, but it seemed garbled. The onboard brain of the barge, which had an even lower Logic Level than Mark, the computer of Elena’s old ship the USC Getsu Fune, was unable to interpret the data correctly. Elena wanted to show it to Nopileos, but something strange had happened: The young Teladi’s tall, flat forehead ridges formed a slight bulge, a type of furrow. Just like the furrow in a human’s brow. Elena had never seen such a thing in a Teladi. She inquired anxiously about her saurian friend’s well-being.

  “All the best, oh star warrior,” he replied with an an absent expression on his face. “I think he said: lay down and eat up.”

  “And that means as much as…?”

  “I don’t know, Elena.” Nopileos hesitated. “But I know his name. His name is Liimitis Owumelohes Petulenas IX. I understood that much. It’s just the same as eggspeak, only completely different.

  Elena shook her head. “Sounds like a normal name for a Teladi to me.” Nopileos had to admit that she was right. “Well, yes. But have you seen him?”

  Elena laughed softly. “I think he finds us just as strange as we find him.” She waved to the second Teladi. Nopileos started to say something, but he stopped when the saurian began to speak again. Elena flinched, because this time the colorful Teladi displayed an aggressiveness that reminded her of a snake pit full of vipers. That sounded more like contemporary Teladian!

  “We should pay tribute to the beauty of the universe or turn back,” Nopileos translated. “Strange accent, but I halfway understand him now. Just the meaning…” The Teladi snorted indignantly. “Elena, what does that mean?”

  The astronaut was just as much at a loss as her saurian friend. She shrugged. “Ghinn, any idea?” Since her fit of rage some time ago, the Split woman had behaved in silence.

  “Someone’s been crossing Teladi creatures with Boron creatures,” the Patriarch’s wife sneered.

  Nopileos looked at Ghinn with an open muzzle, then pulled his claws out of the control shafts and turned his palms up, fingers spread. “They wish to come aboard,” he announced, ignoring Ghinn’s comment. “They will decide after that whether we get clearance to land.”

  Elena shook her head. “Did you tell him how little space we have in here?”

  Nopileos wagged his stubby ears: no. Elena didn’t ask further. That probably meant they wouldn’t let them land if they didn’t cooperate. Maybe it would give Ghinn dumb ideas if they said it out loud. “Good,” she therefore said. “It’s going to be tight, but if they don’t send more than one or two people at the same time, it’ll work out somehow.

  “Here they come!”

  The silhouette of a ship peeled off from the planet directly ahead, which had grown to the size of a soccer ball in the meantime. The craft was about one and a half times the size of a typical destroyer. Its shape corresponded with that of a teardrop that was carefully flattened underneath, with broad, laterally arranged superstructures, and a few spiky antennae or sensors sticking out. Two powerful, rounded engine cases sprang out of the back end of the teardrop, breaking its symmetry. Along its sides nestled several rows of irregularly shaped windows or portholes, which were obviously raised and protruded slightly beyond the hull of the ship. The vehicle looked like it was grown biologically, but according to the barge’s long-range sensors, it was not. Not at all organic, however, was the color scheme of the spacecraft: dazzling, glaring yellow formed the basic color of the ship’s hull, flat, serpentine lines of clear blue, green, and red ran along, becoming narrower, tapering backwards from the wide fore of the teardrop where they entwined with one another artistically.

  When Nopileos saw the magnificent space ship, something clicked inside him. Immediately the flowing sculptures in the displays of the Teladi shopkeepers in the trading station High Finance sprang into his mind. The artwork had fascinated him in unexplainable ways from the first moment, and he noted the name of the artist which was engraved on the foot of the sculpture in Old Teladian hieroglyphics: Ianusis Gonareos Ianusis VIII. The ship was not really similar to the sculpture, but the philosophy which had been the inspiration for the lines corresponded with the sculpture to a very high degree. Anyone could see that!

  After some time, the colorful spaceship moved alongside the barge and a universal docking tunnel made its way to the outer hull of the ship. Only around half a length of the tunnel’s contact area was smaller than the flank of the barge, so the mechanism felt around on the hull with a scraping sound until it found a suitable position and finally locked itself in place with dry clack.

  Nopileos opened the bulkhead, secured the controls and onboard computer against unauthorized use, and then peeled himself from his seat. He threw Elena a help-seeking look. The astronaut rose from her bucket seat with some effort and followed the Teladi, ducking over.

  They came in pairs. “Profit!” Elena greeted the saurians, but before she could say anything further, she was forced to looked the colorful Teladi up and down with her mouth wide open. The blue muzzle of the one Teladi seemed familiar: yes, right! That was the one with the red argnu patches and the rainbow-colored head fin! His torso was unclothed, but he wore a wide legging that left his clawed feet bare. It was dyed in pale Teladi green and had a row of beige letters that ran from top to bottom. The claws, usually glossy black, each shined in a different screaming, gaudy color.

  “They’re all painted up!” Elena exclaimed.

  “Shhhh!” Nopileos motioned for her to stay silent and offered the two newcomers a sincere welcome that was adequately answered. “They want to have a little look around,” Nopileos translated.

  “Make to clear to them that we are fleeing from pirates and need help,” Elena ordered. They acknowledged this. By now the two garish Teladi had stepped closer. While Nopileos tried, hissing and growling, to explain the situation, they looked around carefully, touched, sniffed at, and pointed slender, colored devices at various parts of the interior equipment.

  “And?” Elana pushed, as the Teladi with the royal blue muzzle gave a growl.

  “If I understood that correctly,” said Nopileos, who was terribly upset, “They would like to see the cockpit and the cargo hold.”

  “Cargo hold?” Elena wondered. Of course she hadn’t had time to familiarize herself with the barge before escaping from the slave ship, but she couldn’t believe that the small dinghy had a cargo hold. Nopileos translated, and the two Teladi answered that they could search the entire “aesthetic construct” alone.

  “With ‘aesthetic construct’ they don’t mean our knobby little ship, do they?”

  “Yes, yes,” Nopileos countered, following E
lena’s lead and squeezing against the wall in the narrow tween deck while the two Teladi curiously examined all accessible parts of the barge. “But did you see, oh sister? Did you? Tsh!”

  “What?”

  “They are, they are…” Nopileos’s forehead ridges were completely pale.

  “Males!” Nopileos blurted out.

  Chapter 32

  Einstein may have been a famous Argon from the founding of the Community. But I only reluctantly allow myself to be compared with him—I’m obviously prettier than him!

  Dr. Siobhan Inja Norman,

  ArgoNet::ScienceView, 8/504 Edition

  Even though Ruuf Vondran’s death wasn’t meaningless to Siobhan, it struck a far lesser chord with her than the other collaborators on the project and the senior staff of the Goner. While some secretly resented the lack of compassion, Noah Gaffelt and his spokesperson, Lynda North, went with the tacit assumption that as a long-lived person, she had a different attitude toward life and death anyway. That was only partially true, because lar Asaneus’s death had struck very close to Siobhan, even though she had only met the Boron two wozuras before.

  Four tazuras after the disaster, Siobhan was appointed as successor to Dr. Vondran by the Argon government and on the recommendations of Senator Gunnar and Dr. Folkna, and with it, as leader of Project Providence. Colonel Ban Danna seemed to be the only one who wasn’t satisfied with this decision; Siobhan would have wagered that Danna preferred to see Dr. Folkna as successor. But the Colonel remained silent, and when Siobhan began to make sensational achievements a few tazuras after her appointment, his hostility crumbled and lost some of its sharpness.

  The investigation of the accident left no doubt that the jump unit had been activated by outside influence. With the help of the sector military surveillance’s log files, encrypted signals were found at precisely the time of the accident, on frequencies that were usually only used by the Xenon. A team of cryptologists at the Polytechnic Institute on Desolum IV succeeded in deciphering these signals. They unequivocally provided jump coordinates, series of parameters, as well as long, complicated command sequences that encoded formulas from singularity physics—all the same as the jump unit needed to operate, but so far had not been adequately researched and understood with the required precision.

  Two weeks after the accident in the security lab, Siobhan, Dr. Folkna, Colonel Danna on behalf of Senator Gunnar, and Ninu Gardna the assistant to Noah Gaffelt met for a briefing that the Colonel called a council of war. Ban Danna still didn’t feel one hundred percent comfortable in the presence of the blue-haired scientist. He still didn’t like her very well, but knew himself well enough to slowly begin to guess why. In any case, he knew by now that she was no double agent. Immediately after the accident, he had heavily assumed that she was responsible for the sudden activation of the jump unit. When the log files came in with the radio-transmitted command sequences of the Xenon and proved that this wasn’t the case, he congratulated himself on keeping his mouth shut at the right moment at least once.

  “My congratulations on your success,” Danna said without looking directly at Siobhan. The Argon realized how much the intelligence agent had to pull himself together to look at least halfway peaceful. Inwardly she had to laugh. Danna nodded at Ninu Gardna and continued. “Miss Gardna, any chance that the Supreme Guardian might still attend the meeting?”

  Ninu shook her head. “He and Lynda North are currently in Port Thornton.”

  “That’s where I’m from, damn it,” Danna muttered. “When I wanted to go, a squad of maintenance robots were just swapping out the locking wings of the docking tunnel. Four stazuras before launch clearance, can you imagine that? I was outraged! All right.” Danna cleared his throat and for the first time looked directly into Siobhan’s eyes. “Get going, Dr. Norman. We all know the basics, so you can keep it short.”

  Siobhan nodded. “All right. Basically, our results are double-edged. Encouraging, because we know pretty exactly how to activate the jump unit. The NQG invariance isn’t solved, but we can put the jump unit into operation.”

  Ninu Garnda, whose light-blonde hair fell in a tied braid over her chest on a coarse-knit sweater, seemed confused. “That’s pretty nice, but the jump unit went up in smoke. Right?”

  “There’s a reproduction, Ninu!” Zakk Folkna reported. “Of course we subjected the original unit to a nanoscan before we took it apart.”

  The Goner was taken aback. “I didn’t know that!”

  “Yes, and Colonel Danna was kind enough to organize a suitable test ship for us to install the jump unit in the next tazuras.”

  “You’re welcome, but no reason to throw yourself around my neck.” Danna dampened the scientists’ cheer. “Dr. Norman, you spoke of concerning results.”

  “Right. You see, the jump unit was built by scientists from”—she hesitated—“Earth. By those who had a damaged Xenon jumpship as a model. And now the unit reacted to the radio sequences of the Xenon…”

  “We’re still researching their exact contents,” Danna interjected.

  “That’s how it is. But what can we conclude from that?” Siobhan looked around. Before anyone could say anything, she continued speaking. “The engineers apparently rebuilt the radio control without knowing!”

  “Then our jump unit has it, too,” Ninu said, perceptively. “Or doesn’t it?”

  Zakk Folkna nodded. “Possibly, which is why we’ve integrated a jammer as a precaution, blocking the Xenon frequencies.”

  “That works?” Danna asked skeptically.

  “We think so. But ultimately, only test flights can settle that.”

  “When do you begin that, Dr. Folkna? Dr. Norman?”

  “As soon as the new jump unit is installed in the AP Providence—the test ship. In two or three tazuras.”

  Danna nodded in satisfaction and pressed a few switches embedded in the black conference table in front of him. “Good. The sooner the better. I called this meeting a council of war, and not without reason. Look here.”

  A holosphere flared up, in which a giant, black cylinder rolled slowly over a background peppered with stars. “I received this from the Defense Senator on his return journey from Hewa. There, a few weeks ago, the forty-sixth special session of the ICSCS took place.

  “What is that? It looks Xenon,” Ninu wanted to know. Neither Siobhan nor Zakk Folkna knew Xenon ships or installations from their own experience, but the Goner had encountered the black ships several times on her travels on the AP Aladna Hill.

  Ban Danna stood up and stood so close to the holosphere that his head protruded into the offshoots of a projected nebula. “This is a Xenon CPU ship. We do not know where it is, but the Paranid do know. And we have information about it that the Three-eyes do not.”

  “From the book of truth, in which Noah Gaffelt imparted a lot of insight to us.”—Danna nodded to Ninu—“It turns out that there were originally thirty-two CPU ships in this area of the universe, and the Paranid take it for granted that only one unit still exists. Their coalition with the Split has disintegrated—so they’ve formed an independent fleet that’s already underway to eliminate this last CPU ship.”

  There was a long pause while both the scientists and Ninu looked at the intelligence agent with questioning expressions.

  “But they’d be doing us a big favor! Argon Prime isn’t involved in this campaign?” Ninu asked after a while.

  “No. Personally, I’m sorry about that, too. But the Ministry of Defense believes that the risk is too high because there could actually be more CPU ships.”

  “Who cares?” Zakk Flkna asked. “Where is the problem?”

  “That’s what I’m telling you, Doctor. The problem is that the Xenon might not only be able to influence the jump unit, but also have access to as many of our computer systems and other technical equipment as they like. So many that we can only protect a fraction with jammers. We don’t want to provoke them until that’s more clear.”

  “Nonsense
. Who says that?” the lanky scientist seemed downright outraged.

  “That’s in the preliminary report that Dr. Norman submitted to the government and me.”

  The AP Providence stood out as a fast-as-an-arrow, slender wedge against the star-wrought background of the universe. The unmanned test ship was accompanied by a swarm of small camera drones that would track it until the jump unit was activated, caching not only images, but also transmitted data. More slowly, almost sluggishly, followed the huge shadow of the Argon One, the flagship of the Argon Federation. Normally the capital ship defended the Federation’s internal sectors against unwanted intruders, but in times of relative peace it was occasionally assigned to other tasks. While it was clear that peace would not last much longer, the High Command of the Armed Forces had nevertheless agreed to deploy the flagship as a mobile command center for the jump tests. Even Brennan’s unsuccessful jump attempts with the X-Shuttle had emanated from the Argon One; that alone showed how much importance was attached to the success of the project.

  “One mizura until we reach the entry point,” the science station’s computer announced, followed afterward by a similar message from the Argon One’s bridge computer.

  Siobhan constantly tracked the vital values from the jump unit on a monitor field while a military pilot monitored the AP Providence’s autopilot on a remote control console. Major Jahn Seldon was the pilot’s name, and he, like his senior commander Ditta Borman, had been permanently assigned to Siobhan and Project Providence. To the right of Siobhan was Colonel Ban Danna, who commanded the Argon One whenever civil interests or military intelligence affairs were involved. “If I can help you, Dr. Norman,” he said jovially, “then let me know.”