“They’re what?” Ditta Borman whispered, shaken. These creatures were uglier and more menacing than anything she had ever seen, including the centennial kaspandara she had once encountered deep in the ocean of a Boron-settled planet.
“Kha'ak,” the boy repeated patiently. “They eat from the inside through the guts and jump from one to the next, becoming bigger and bigger from the flesh of their victims, and sometimes their eyes or fingers grow out of their backs!”
“Who told you such a thing?” the pilot asked with a disgusted expression, without averting her gaze from the swarming mass of pseudo-insects which repelled her, but simultaneously fascinated her.
Siobhan, who had decided to ignore the boy’s story, confirmed with the computer that there were no decipherable audio signals. There were probably several subchannels, but just as before, the onboard computer was finding this a hard nut to crack.
“The children of the Split are told that by their parents if they don’t behave. If you aren’t good, you get a Kha'ak and they eat your guts!”
“Educationally invaluable as always,” Borman said ironically. “Typical Split.”
“Yadmanthrat,” murmured Jahn Seldon.
“Direct hit! That means direct hit!” Ion triumphed.
Seldon nodded. “Very good.”
“Why direct hit?” Siobhan wanted to know, surprised.
“The Y word of the Split. Everything is always yadmanthrat,” the pilot answered. “And the beasts there are really, yadmanthrat unsightly.”
Siobhan shook her head imperceptibly and focused back to the data from the onboard computer. As if it mattered how handsome or ugly someone found the Kha'ak—the newly discovered species, she corrected herself in her head.
It slowly began to emerge that the radio sources all transmitted approximately the same thing: jumbled, remote, insectoid creatures performing silent, inexplicable tail dances and similar rituals, but otherwise carrying no tools or pursuing any other identifiable tasks. Gradually, it managed to ascertain the positions of the transmitters. Most of them were not in the big ship that fell through space in front of the AP Providence, but in other places of this star system with its three suns.
“Maybe these aren’t the builders of the alien ships,” Zakk Folkna speculated after an inzura of waiting. “Maybe they just keep beaming us a picture of their, their… main food source. And that’s just Kha'ak. For us it’s argnus.”
“Thank you, Zakk,” Siobhan replied sarcastically. “That’s exactly what it’ll be.”
“Just a starting point,” the engineer muttered meekly.
Ditta Borman suddenly snorted loudly. “Very good, really very good!” she gasped. Her laughter was contagious, so the whole crew soon joined in. “I don’t want to know what they’ll choose as their side dish,” the pilot chuckled.
“Split children!” Ion cried.
“Goner boys!” Ninu countered and winked.
“Ha, ha,” Ion said. “Blond poison!”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Ninu wondered.
“Just calm down, please,” Major Seldon called, whose face had been serious for several sezuras. A couple gasped laughs later, and there was silence again—apart from the working noise of the converter.
“What’s going on?”
“Something landed on the hull,” Seldon claimed. He called up information with flying hands.
“Through the shield?” Bormon doubted. “You must be wrong, Jahn.”
“The shields are down! When the shelling stopped, the automatic systems shut them down.” The pilot instructed the onboard computer to reactivate the defense shield immediately.
“The field effect generators are unfortunately damaged,” the computer replied with genuine regret in his evenly modulated voice. “One severe exception…” He continued, but the rest was lost in the swirl of voices.
Siobhan remembered the additional hull cameras that were mounted after the regretful experience with the supernova and the camera drones. In a few words, she instructed the computer to look for any irregularities on the hull. One was found almost immediately. Then a second. A third. More of them.
A total of nineteen Kha'aks perched on AP Providence’s hull. That proved that the insectoids’ video transmissions actually showed the crews of the foreign ships. But what wasn’t clear was what they were doing there. The computer denied the question of whether they were trying to weld themselves into the ship. But they were doing something there!
“They live in vacuum! Look!” Ion was the first to notice the obvious: the insect-like birds apparently didn’t wear any protective gear! How they got onto the ship’s hull and how they clung to it so as not to drift off due to weightlessness, remained in question. The light flickered; from somewhere came the whining sound of a generator shutting down.
“The jump unit? Siobhan hastily flung herself into the seat of her science station. “Still charging,” she said with relief. But how long before this generator would also fail? She made a decision. “Commander Borman. Computer, activate the jump unit and align it to the default coordinates.”
Ditta Borman nodded as if she had already thought it out herself. Zakk Folkna didn’t object.
“Dr. Norman, I must advise that the jump unit is not yet ready. The ship will not reach the destination coordinates,” the computer warned in its neutral voice.
Siobhan nodded grimly. “That’s clear to me. Execute my order anyway.”
The computer was silent for a moment, which Siobhan used to chase Ion and Ninu back into their cabin. She saw the unmistakable fear in the Goner’s pale face. After the onboard computer had obtained authorization from the scientists and the pilots, it started the countdown at minus four mizuras, but Siobhan interrupted it. “Minus zero. Activate the jump unit immediately,” she demanded. The computer obeyed.
Empty space. Scattered stars, separated from one another by endless emptiness, scattered sparsely over the lonely darkness. Far away, a glittering spiral nebula, as beautiful as life itself. A milky way.
“Where… where are we?” Commander Borman stuttered uncertainly.
“A sun on the edge of nothingness,” Siobhan whispered devoutly. “A very old sun!”
The ancient star glimmered darkly in the center of this lost island of life. How long did it take it to break away from the galaxy it once belonged to? This time around, the partial jump drive had carried the AP Providence far, far further than any ship ever had. “Look, the jumpgate!” The pilot put the picture of the image from the rear-facing cameras on the console.
It was old, very old. Not just hundreds of millions of jazuras had gnawed at it, but thousands: a billion jazuras or more! The gate was damaged, covered with small and medium craters, as if it hadn’t been maintained and cared for since time out of thought. It had a different shape than the jump gates known in the Community of Planets: the outriggers broad and flat, the arch not round but slightly elliptical. And it tumbled. Without exception, all known jumpgates aligned their passage axes on the ecliptic of the star system in which their were located. Not this one. It tumbled sluggishly around several axes like a bracelet that was made to spin on black marble. Something must have brought it an angular momentum that could not be compensated. Maybe, Siobhan thought, the gate’s maintenance machines had been down for some time. “A forgotten jumpgate,” she realized breathlessly. When that sun left the galaxy, it was given up and no longer maintained.”
“Must’ve been a damned long time ago,” Seldon managed with a husky voice. He had long since instructed the computer to record precisely everything.
“The Kha'ak?” Folkna interjected. He cleared his throat.
“What? A moment.” Seldon checked the controls.
“They’re gone. All nineteen. The shield generators work again.”
“We are too far away,” Zakk Folkna spoke these sentences with such serenity that at first nobody paid any attention to him. It was only after a mizura that Siobhan asked, as if in a trance, what he
implied by that.
“The only gate we can detect with our jump unit is that one there. All others are too far for our instruments.”
Seldon and Borman looked at him like two ghosts. They heard and understood his words. Alone, they wished that they didn’t understand him, that he had never said those words.
“We cannot leave here,” Siobhan finally stated. Deep silence. After a while, she cleared her throat. “We cannot use the jump unit because we cannot target, right. But perhaps there’s still another way! We came out of this jumpgate, which means it still works in this direction. But we don’t know where it leads, if it is still connected to a remote site. Maybe it leads further out into the void, maybe to the other end of the universe, or perhaps back to the galaxy that this sun belonged to long ago. With some luck, it’s the same as ours.”
“Or into the nothingness of hyperspace,” Zakk Folkna whispered almost inaudibly. The engineer knew the theories developed by Siobhan almost as well as she did.
Siobhan thought of Ninu and Ion, who were not yet aware of recent events. She activated the intercom and called the two Gonor into the cockpit.
“We have to try it, and right now,” said the boy. His eyes were wide with worry. “The Community of Planets is counting on us, we have to leave no stone unturned.”
Ninu nodded. “Ion’s right. Time is short. We have to try it, no matter the cost!” But fear was written on her face.
A few minutes later, the AP Providence took off and headed for the center of the ancient, tumbling jumpgate. The ship disappeared in a blue-violet ray storm. The lost star system on the edge of the empty wasteland between the galaxies was again undisturbed from its eons-old, forlorn death paralysis.
Chapter 41
Elena Kho is the only human I appreciate and respect. I have seen her blood, and she mine; we are friend-foes. And so I will gladly see her die one day!
Ghinn t’Whht
In the end it was a lot more trouble to get the nutrient bars out of the dingy than Elena had anticipated, because the city was a long march on foot from the landing field. For a short time she considered trying her own hand at the dinghy’s Teladi flight controls, but she quickly abandoned that idea. Her hands barely fit into the control shafts, they were so big in comparison to the saurians’, and if one did not know exactly what the fingers were feeling inside the shafts, it would be more dangerous than useful to work the controls randomly.
Elena waited in the barge until well past midnight, and tried to snooze a little, which she managed to do poorly rather than properly. Early in the full morning, she marched towards the city and reached it after two stazuras. The hospital was quickly located. The Split woman surprised Elena by thanking her handsomely for the effort. “I would not have done that for you, t’Kho,” Ghinn added.
Elena gave a tired shrug of her shoulders. “That’s why I have friends, and you do not,” she replied, and left without another word. She was exhausted and depressed. As she slowly traversed the city, searching for the Aesthetic Supervisor’s office, her thoughts returned to Kyle Brennan, whom she was worried about. She wouldn’t be able to find out about his well-being for quite a long time. But what, she wondered all at once, would she report to her superiors on earth, assuming they ever made it back to the blue planet? But Earth was so far away, farther away than the stars, and that sometimes scared her. Maybe neither she nor Brennan would ever be able to return to the blue planet. I hope you’re doing well, Kyle!
When a diffuse, glowing shadow fell on her, she looked up. A whirring half-black, half-white glider hissed over her head and noisily sat on the floor a few steps in front of her. Before she recognized the glider as Jolandalas’s, the cockpit opened and Nopileos jumped out.
“Sister!” she cried. “Where do you want to go?”
Elena looked around. While lost in thought, she had already walked a long way past the office of the Aesthetic Supervisor. She pointed over her shoulders with her index finger. “Actually, there.”
“The Conductor would be happy to meet with us again,” Nopileos said. Jolandalas also got out of the glider. Sezuras later, the cockpit closed and the vehicle floated off, unmanned. Jolandalas didn’t even glance after it.
“You talked with him?”
“We went to the barge, but you weren’t there,” Nopileos explained.
She nodded. “Yes. Right.”
“Oh, Elena, I now know what we can do to make the Conductor understand our request and lend us support!” Hurriedly, Nopileos gushed out what she had learned from Nopileos.
Elena’s gaze became more and more skeptical the longer she listened. “A highly technical society built around pure aesthetics? That sounds a bit far-fetched to me.”
“No, Elena, because the beauty of the universe is motivation, not an obstacle.” Nopileos’s tone was so enthusiastic that the astronaut had to smile.
“You talked a lot with him, hm?” Nopileos quickly glanced sideways at Jolandalas, who was watching the course of the discussion.
“Yes, and I have already seen much of Ianamus Zura with open eyes,” she added. “It’s true, Elena!”
“Let’s suppose it’s true. Then what would we say to the Conductor?”
“Tell him it’s the starting point. The grandeur of the emergence of new consciousness.”
“Using the example of Eve 2092, you mean? The Xenon?”
“Tsh! Right! And the miraculous plan of the Boron to give protection to a new species. Just like you told me onboard the Raindragon.”
“Just like I told you?”
“Maybe a tiny bit more elegant, sister, just a little bit!” Nopileos’s scaly fin rose. At the time, Elena had in fact used words that were quite sober, and in no way exuberant. The main thing was that she understood what was important. And she obviously did. Nopileos now knew Elena well enough to know when she was joking.
“And that’s what Jolandalas said?” Elena was still not fully convinced.
“But of course!” Nopileos squeaked.
Elena shook her head. It sounded pretty strange. It didn’t seem sensible not to describe an urgent matter in a concise and sensible way, but instead give it an aesthetic dimension. But if that was what was required, then she shouldn’t leave it untried. “Okay,” she decided. “But where did I leave my dictionary: Boron for Beginners?”
Conductor Cokadrareos again greeted them with a friendly greeting, if this time more seriously. Today, the head of the Aesthetic Supervisor didn’t wear a kilt, but a gray suit. Beneath his open jacket, his bare scale armor looked out. “I’m extremely sorry that we had to interrupt our meeting so abruptly yesterday. Something unheard of happened. I… it is my duty… shhh!” The conductor visibly struggled for words, then he continued: “The rays of the young stars flatter the cradle of life, but this gift is a voluntary one. Any sun would like to give so much more, blinking out from behind the multitude of its egg-sisters, and it lasts only for the slightest moment in the maelstrom of the galaxy. Suddenly shimmering as the brightest star, as a blazing torch in the midst of the wan cosmos, already there to see from afar, crying “here I am” with glittering rays of light.”
The Conductor paused. Suddenly he looked very, very sad. “I’m in mourning,” he hissed softly. “A messenger yesterday brought the government of Ianamus Zura the news that a sun that long has lived in our night sky, has ended its life cycle in the territory of the Community of Planets as a supernova.”
Elena opened her mouth in shock to say something, but immediately closed it again because she couldn’t find any words. A horrible deafness spread violently through her. Nopileos also shuffled around on their sitting bench. “Which—which one?”the astronaut finally managed to stammer. “Which Sun and who is, how many… was it, was it inhabited?”
The leader of the Aesthetic Supervisor apologetically raised the palms of his hands upward. “Unfortunately, oh my friends, much is still unknown to me. But the star bore the name Black Hole Sun.”
“I don’t know what
to say,” Elena whispered. A sun, an entire star system, so many lives! “Was there no warning? Sunspots, flares, coronal expansion?”
The Conductor raised his upturned claws, as if to reaffirm that he had no further information. “You would certainly like to return to your planetary community, right, Ms. Kho?”
Elena pressed her fists against her eyes and took a few deep breaths. She felt miserable. “No,” she finally whispered. “Please, dear Conductor, I don’t wish to make excessive demands on your patience, but I need an hour’s break to collect myself.” At this juncture she was definitely unable to talk about the aesthetics of her mission. “A quazura’s break,” the astronaut corrected.
“But of course,” the Conductor said. “Okay, then, in one quazura!”
After the agreed upon break, Elena had gathered herself again, for the most part. Nopileos had assured her that Black Hole Sun hadn’t had any planets inside its habitable zone, and numbered among the newly developments along the edge of the Community. Even so, there were presumably some just recently built industrial complexes that burned up in the firestorm of the nova, and maybe survey ships and prospectors who routinely passed the star system as they made their way through the sectors.
“Nopileos.” Elena sat on the floor with bent knees in the antechamber, her Teladi friend knelt on the sitting bench. “I’m…” She hesitated, but then decided to explain her line of thought out loud and continued: “…I’m not known to get my priorities mixed up, but right now I’m confused. Emotionally out of touch, so to speak. Look, our task is, is… unrelated to this event. We won’t help anyone if we give up now, right? Isn’t that how it is?”
“Sister, neither Paranids nor Split will let themselves be talked out of their plans. If we don’t do what needs to be done, the disaster will only get bigger.”
Nopileos: A novel from the X-Universe: (X4: Foundations Edition 2018) (X Series) Page 34
