The Opening (The Universal Portals Book 1)

by J. Blanes

  “Nothing happened for two weeks. After that, they released me on the planet, warning me to stay away from other species, as most of them were dangerous…”

  “Did you ever enter a stinky room to cross a portal?” Dylan interrupted. She had been with the Pakma for weeks and sent to another planet. He found it odd that she never mentioned the traumatic experience.

  “The first time I heard about portals was with you, and the same with the stinky room,” Iris replied.

  Dylan gave Blip a furious look. “You’d better explain this, or I’ll disconnect your tail from your body,” he said menacingly.

  Blip stayed calm, because he had an excuse for that. “The Pakma are one of the few civilizations that have achieved complete protection for their ships. They, and anyone inside their ships, are immune to portals. The Tolok, as many others, are well behind them on this matter.”

  Dylan narrowed his eyes in doubt. “If you’re lying to us…”

  Blip interrupted him. “I’m not lying, so keep the threats to yourself.”

  “OK, that’s enough,” Keira stopped them. “I trust Blip, so let Iris finish her story.”

  Iris was amused by the behavior of her rescuers. It was good to be among people again. “As I was saying,” she said, “they released me on the planet. They had prepared some kind of house out of stones, the one you found, and abandoned me there. That night I felt desperate and alone, and cried all night. I even thought about killing myself, but they had told me that some day they would come for me again, and I clung to that thought. It probably saved my life. And they didn’t lie to me, as here you are.”

  “And that’s it?” Keira asked with disappointment in her voice. “I mean, you don’t know anything about your mission?”

  “Me? No, I hoped you would tell me about it,” Iris replied, confused.

  “Well, the fact is that we were abducted, too,” Dylan explained to her. “And this blue banana here knows nothing or doesn’t want to tell us about it.”

  “I know nothing!” Blip complained.

  “So, what do we do?” Iris asked.

  “We’re on our way to the next portal,” Blip said. “This one will take us home, I mean, my home. The Tolok are waiting for us there.”

  “And why aren’t they here with us?” Iris asked the obvious question.

  “Well, I’m here,” Blip said, a little hurt.

  “I mean, why not a Tolok in person?” Iris insisted.

  “The truth is…” Blip started talking, but he stopped.

  “What?” Keira asked firmly.

  “The truth is that the Tolok classified your trip as a high risk, and they didn’t want to come themselves in person,” Blip confessed.

  “Are you kidding me?” Dylan snapped. “Why is it high risk? Do they fear Humans, too?”

  Blip shook his head frantically. “No, it’s not that. They never told me the reason, but I know the Tolok only fear one thing: the Tukma.”

  “The Tukma? Who the hell are the Tukma?” Dylan demanded.

  “Monsters,” Blip replied briefly. “Killers. Demons. The scourge of this galaxy.”

  Albert stared fixedly at Blip. “Are you implying that the Tukma want us dead?”

  “I don’t know,” Blip said truthfully. “I’m just saying that the Tolok’s only fear is a confrontation with the Tukma. Look, this trip is not dangerous in itself; it’s everyday stuff for the Tolok. Why would they classify it as high risk? Because they know something about it that we don’t, something they fear. And what do they fear the most? The Tukma. Draw your own conclusions.”

  “And why didn’t you tell us before?” Dylan insisted.

  “Because I’m not sure,” Blip replied. “It’s only a theory. I came up with it a few days ago.”

  “It doesn’t matter now,” Keira interrupted the discussion. “We’re almost at the end of the trip, and the Tukma aren’t here. It’s pointless to argue about it. Blip must have been wrong.”

  “Yes, what a shock,” Dylan agreed.

  A silence took over the kitchen, as everyone had something to think. Mirby, who until now had been lying on the table, found the mood too boring and started to bother Blip again, sliding him from one side to the table to the other, catching him at the last moment with her tails. “Hey!” Blip complained unconvincingly. In fact, he was amused and enjoying it, although he would never admit it.

  “Be careful,” Iris warned her. “Remember, he’s not a toy.”

  This scene prompted Keira to ask Iris again about her pet. “How did you find Mirby?” she asked curiously.

  “Mirby and I share a long history together,” Iris said. “The first time I saw her, I thought she was a little bear, you know. She was far away, and I only saw her body because some rocks hid her tails. I found amusing that a cute bear lived on that inhospitable planet, and I found myself looking for her each time I ventured outside. Weeks passed, and I never saw her again. I started to think that I had dreamed it, until one day a—”

  All of a sudden the lights went off, interrupting Iris. Everything went dark, with the exception of the blue lights glowing on the floor.

  “What’s going on?” Albert asked Blip.

  Blip was shivering, and his face was frozen in an expression of fear. He was biting his hands as if he had nails on them. “Oh, no! I was right!” he exclaimed in a trembling voice.

  “Tell us! What’s happening?” Albert insisted.

  The ship shook once brutally, sending them violently out of their chairs, followed by a loud explosion that left their ears ringing.

  “The Tukma! The Tukma have found us! We’re dead!” Blip’s terrified scream filled their hearts with fear.

  He hadn’t been wrong after all.

  TWENTY ONE

  Their senses slowly returned to normal. After some time, the dim lights glowing on the floor started to fulfill their mission, and their eyes were able to gradually transform shadows into shapes, and shapes into defined things. The ringing inside their ears also receded and faded into silence.

  Keira was the first to get up and look around. The kitchen scene felt absurd, with the table and chairs anchored firmly to the floor, standing as if nothing had happened, while their occupants lay scattered through the floor, ejected from their seats, bewildered and scared. One by one, the others got on their feet, trying to remain calm despite Blip’s last words. Explosions could still be heard in the distance, but the ship remained steady, allowing them to sit down again around the table.

  “Is everyone OK?” Keira asked with concern on her voice. Iris seemed to have born the worst of it, with a contusion on her head, but she dismissed it as a minor nuisance.

  “Blip, first of all, don’t you dare to faint on us now,” Keira threatened, knowing his tendency to escape danger by pretending to pass out. “And tell us what’s happening. Why are the lights out?”

  “The ship redirected all resources to the outer shield and the engine to speed up to maximum,” Blip explained in a trembling voice, in rhythm with the shaking of his body.

  “What can we do?” Albert questioned. “We—” The clanking of metal resonated across the halls, interrupting him and making them aware that the fight was far from over. “We can’t wait here doing nothing,” he went on. “Can we fight back?”

  Blip shook his head. “We can’t. This ship has no weapons and the invisibility technology doesn’t work in a ship so big; the shields are our only protection.”

  “What if we cross the portal?” It was Dylan’s turn to ask.

  “Too far away, the Tukma won’t let us near it,” Blip replied. “And even if we could reach it and cross it, the Tukma would follow us to the end. We’re their prey, and they never let prey escape. I told you before, we’re dead,” he added dejectedly.

  Keira would not hear of it, not yet. “What about the shields? Aren’t they going
to resist until we reach the portal?”

  “The shields are at ninety percent already,” Blip remarked. “And this is only the spearhead of their attack—fast ships with minimal offensive power. When the big ones come, everything will be lost. A single shot from one of them is enough to destroy this ship, shields or not.”

  They looked at each other in silence mulling over Blip’s words, nobody daring to say what was on their minds. Could this possibly be their end? Would they die here, far from home and their families?

  “We should go fetch our helmets,” Albert proposed, interrupting the unnerving silence. “For protection and just in case there’s a leakage.” The idea was welcomed wholeheartedly. Anything was better than sitting there doing nothing.

  They rushed to the small ship, with Dylan staying behind to help Albert, as he still had trouble walking with his hurting leg. The corridors to the hangar amplified the sounds of the explosions and the metallic clanks of the ship’s suffering. They entered the enormous hangar where the small ship was parked, and Dylan could see his friends from a distance. He had always believed that they would be able to go back home, one way or another, and a feeling of frustration and anger filled his heart. He looked at the small ship in the hangar corner as an idea occurred to him. It was not a perfect plan, but it could save their lives.

  The Tukma admiral received the last report from his captain. The witnesses on the planet had been wiped out as ordered, and they were on their way to cross the portal and join the fleet in pursuit of their target. A complete success on his first mission, in addition to the important information he had gathered on the planet, would go a long way in solidifying his newly appointed position. His leader, Preto’or, would surely appreciate his efforts and bestow him with honors. Power and honor, the most-sought-after prizes for any Tukma, were now at his own reach. The admiral couldn’t be more pleased.

  The admiral’s battleship and its escort ships crossed the portal into the star system where the rest of the fleet was already after their target, and news of the hunt arrived fast.

  “The attack has already started with our arrow ships,” the captain informed the admiral. The Tukma arrow ships were their smallest and fastest warships, used to harass and slow down their targets while the bigger, slower ships approached. “We identified our target ship as a Tolok merchant ship. It has no military capabilities, and it’s unable to retaliate. They won’t be able to reach the portal on time. It will be within reach of two of our cruisers sooner than that.”

  “A merchant ship? Not even a cruiser?” the admiral asked with incredulity.

  “A merchant ship,” the captain repeated firmly.

  “Fools, they wanted it to go unnoticed, even by us,” the admiral mumbled.

  “What?” the captain asked, not having clearly heard the admiral comment.

  “Nothing. Tell the cruisers to destroy the target as soon as it is within their reach,” the admiral ordered. “No survivors.”

  “Yes, Admiral.” The captain saluted and abandoned the chamber.

  Iris was concerned about Mirby. There were no helmets that suited her, and she would have to survive without one. They tried to put a suit on her, but the suit didn’t recognize her as a valid wearer, and pressing the shrinking button failed to work. And without the suit, the helmet didn’t work either. Blip shrugged when asked for help; he simply couldn’t do anything about it.

  Dylan took this opportunity to announce his plan. “Perhaps Mirby won’t need the helmet after all,” he suggested.

  Everybody looked in his direction. “What do you mean?” Iris asked, intrigued.

  “We abandon the big ship,” Dylan proposed. “On this one. I know it’s not perfect, but at least we’ll be alive. We can use the invisibility to go undetected.”

  “But we won’t be able to cross the portal on that ship,” Keira argued. “We’ll be stranded in this star system forever.”

  “We’ll just have to wait until the Tolok rescue us,” Dylan replied confidently.

  At first glance, it didn’t seem such a bad idea, using the small ship to evade the Tukma attack and then wait for the Tolok, but Blip had another concerns in his mind. “There are two problems with your plan,” he said. “One, the Tukma will surely sweep the area looking for survivors after they have destroyed the ship, and they will find us in no time, even with the invisibility active. And two, when the Tolok find out that the ship has been destroyed by the Tukma, they won’t bother looking for us. They know that the Tukma don’t leave any survivors.”

  “Can’t you communicate our plan to them? Tell them to look for us anyway?” Dylan asked.

  Blip shook his head. “The message will be intercepted by the Tukma.”

  “What if we hide on a planet and wait until the Tukma have gone to send the message?” Albert proposed.

  Blip rejected that idea, too. “We need the big ship to make contact across interstellar distances. The equipment needed for the communication cannot be installed on this ship, at least not in the time frame we have.”

  “But we could hide on a planet,” Albert insisted.

  “There are no planets nearby, only…” At this moment, another big explosion drowned Blip’s words and reminded them of the little time they had left.

  “Only what?” Albert urged.

  “There’s an asteroid field, but it’s too dangerous—” Blip stopped talking, as if someone had interrupted him.

  “What’s going on?” Albert asked.

  Blip stirred, uncomfortable. “Nothing, it’s just that…”

  “Blip doesn’t want to tell us that the ship just told him that it will approach the asteroid field,” Iris interjected, “so we can use it to hide from the Tukma.”

  “How…how do you know?” Blip asked, puzzled.

  Iris smiled at him. “I can hear and understand radio communications, too, remember?”

  “So, the big ship heard us and thinks it’s a good plan?” Albert asked fascinated.

  Iris nodded. “That’s what it seems.”

  “But we’re approaching the asteroid field too fast,” Blip complained. “I can’t control this ship at this speed. One little mistake and we’ll crash against one of the asteroids. And there’s also the issue of the rescue.”

  “We’ll think about the rescue later,” Albert said firmly. “How are the shields?”

  “Thirty percent,” Blip replied with concern.

  Albert turned around, facing the others. “Anyone against abandoning the ship?”

  Nobody spoke.

  The Tukma cruiser had its target in sight. Despite being twenty times bigger than its target, it was faster, too, and the distance between them diminished by the second. Once it was within reach of their weapons, a single shot from one of their front laser cannons would be enough to blast the Tolok ship to pieces.

  The door to the small ship’s secure room closed, but Dylan found it too oppressive and asked Blip to slide open the front wall so all of them could see the control room and the big front window from their seats. Blip complied, and the partition wall disappeared. They could see Blip, plugged into the small column rising in the middle of the control room, and the hangar beyond the window.

  The attack had intensified in the last minutes, and the ship shook violently with each explosion. Some fires started to appear, too. The shields were almost depleted, and it was a matter of minutes, maybe seconds, before the Tukma blew them up.

  Instead of bringing the small ship to the surface for takeoff, a process that would take too much time, the ship opened a long tunnel from the hangar into space. It was two miles long, enough for the small ship to blast off at a speed fast enough to escape detection.

  “Brace yourselves; this will be uncomfortable,” Blip warned them as he accelerated the ship at maximum, crushing everybody against their seats. Iris, still weak from her struggling years on the plan
et, couldn’t stand the pressure and passed out.

  It took the small ship less than a minute to travel the entire length of the tunnel, emerging toward the colossal Tukma cruiser that was following them and forcing Blip to veer sharply to the right to avoid a direct collision with it.

  “Oh, my God! Look at that!” Dylan exclaimed in awe, staring at the cruiser through the front window. All disappointment he had with the Tolok’s boring ships vanished in an instant. The Tukma could be killers, but no one could deny their ships were really cool, and big. “It’s bigger than a planet,” he exaggerated.

  “It’s a cruiser,” Blip informed them, “a deadly machine, but not their biggest.”

  The small ship seemed like a grain of sand in a windshield compared to that monster cruiser. Blip had stopped the engines to avoid detection, and as they traveled along its length, they contemplated in silence, fear, and admiration the engineering marvel that was a Tukma warship. It was not dark, like the Tolok ship, but light gray, with many undulating features, devoid of sharp corners and straight lines. To Dylan, it seemed like the dragon skin he had seen in a game he’d played at Albert’s farm. He crossed his fingers, hoping that this dragon would remain asleep and pay no attention to them. It took several minutes to cover the ship’s length, and they sighed in relief when the window showed black space again.

  “Fire!” the captain of the Tukma cruiser ordered, and a laser pulse launched from the main front cannon began its deadly course. It hit its target less than a second later, instantly transforming the dark Tolok ship into an immense ball of fire.

  The shockwave affected minimally the Tukma ships, but to the small ship captained by Blip, it was as if a tsunami had captured them, shaking and rolling over the ship and making it spin like a small toy until Blip finally managed to regain control of it again. Dizzy and confused, all of them took their helmets off, coughing and vomiting uncontrollably, except for Iris, who was still unconscious, and Mirby, who seemed not to be affected at all.