As the ship approached their destination, the crew aboard the R4 couldn’t imagine anyone living on or in this place. Lucy sent out a sonar reading strong enough to penetrate the dense gaseous atmosphere and discovered that there was in fact a solid mass as large as Jupiter in the middle of the 5,000 mile thick layer of gas that surrounded the planet. No one could comprehend how anyone or anything survived in such a place, but it was obvious these reptilian life-forms were doing very well and were advanced enough of a civilization to be making trips to surrounding worlds to look for sources of food. Tala asked, “Commander Alkawara, just how many Beangagarrie live on your planet?” He and his navigator/science officer Angoona talked a few moments to be sure they could properly translate the request and turned to say, “We number our population at 140 billion in your numbering system. We have very few enemies on our planet to destroy our eggs and our females lay between 12 and 20 eggs per season. We also have long lives. That is why we have expanded to seek food sources on other worlds.”
Katelyn had returned and heard what had been said. She took another look through the window at the planet they were about to land on and hoped they were a friendly world, with 140 billion occupants it would not be a good place to have for enemies. With the assistance of the navigation officer, a course was plotted to the location of their space center, deep under the cloud of gas. As they entered the initial layers of the gas cover, Tala wondered if these creatures could see in the dark. The deeper they traveled into the gas the less the sun could penetrate the dense atmosphere. It was completely black by the time they were 10,000 feet in and they still had 4,558 miles to go before they reached the surface. Katelyn and Tala were beginning to get nervous. They could not even see the hull of the ship out the windshield and even their enhanced night vision showed nothing but a thick fog of gas. They switched to passive heat signature and IR visual and could begin to make out mountains and cities below. Then, something strange happened. The atmosphere actually thinned to a heavy damp fog closer to the surface and the rocky surface emitted a phosphorescent glow. Even without the light of the sun penetrating the gas covering above, there was still enough low level illumination coming off the planet surface to see clearly.
What they saw was amazing, gigantic domed cities, enclosed transportation tubes connecting the domes were large enough to put an eight lane freeway inside, and flying transports that looked like distorted flying balls moving about in the lower elevations. As they got closer to the ground, it was easy to see the occupants of the planet busily going about their daily activities. The R4 was too large to fit inside any of the large domes that functioned as the space center. They were directed to the largest dome and the crew from Beangagarrie prepared their vessel to be lowered into the dome covered landing area. Katelyn and Tala hovered above the opening and slowly lowered the damaged ship into the bay below. There had to be a half million excited residents on the ground to greet those they had assumed lost. The R4 remained in a hover above the dome while Tala, Katelyn, Bart, Brad and six Marines went to the tractor-beam elevator and followed behind the ship. When everyone was safely inside the dome, a massive air control system evacuated the smoky gasses that had drifted into the enclosure. The Marine commander inspected his atmosphere readings and although it was still not a friendly atmosphere, it at least was no longer corrosive inside the dome. Soon Alkawara and Angoona approached with a group of others. Although it was a strange smile, they were wearing smiles, or at least what appeared to be smiles, when they extended their hands to welcome the heroes of the day. These were not large people; they ranged in height from 5 foot to 6 foot and were very stoutly built. Tala and Katelyn couldn’t help but notice the high gravity readings; 5.6 g’s would require a great deal of strength in order to function and these creatures appeared to have no problems as she observed them scurrying about the inside of the dome, already preparing to make repairs on their precious ship.
The group from Verron was escorted from the dome into a smaller room that was obviously a briefing room of some sort. Those with them donned the small gas canisters and soon a whooshing sound indicated heavy air movement in the room. The Marine Commander determined it safe to remove their headgear and the faces of the rescuers were for the first time revealed to their grateful hosts. A smiling Supreme Leader of the Beangagarrie began by saying, “I would offer you some refreshment, but I understand from Commander Alkawara that your diet is much different than ours. So I will spare you the embarrassment of refusing our hospitality.” Tala realized that the reptile looking creatures were much more perceptive to how the humans thought than the humans were to how their mind worked. They were very perceptive people. One of the biggest questions they had on their mind and wasted no time to ask, came from Alkawara, when he asked, “After looking at your ship and the amazing things it can do, we now realize that what we thought was very advanced, is years behind what you have accomplished. What would we need to do to have you share this technology with us? It is obvious that our Jlkoora Chemical Reactors are inferior to what you have and what those who invaded us possessed. For the survival of our Nation, we need to be able to travel to other sources of food. In our ships, this requires years. After traveling across our entire galaxy in hours, it is obvious your people do not have these restrictions.”
Katelyn took charge at that moment as a representative of the Nation of Verron, saying, “My sister and I are members of our King’s Dragon Guard. We represent and speak for King Verron himself. My full name is Princess Katelyn Verron and my sister is Princess Tala Verron, we are both members of the Royal family. It is with this authority that I can promise you that if you are a peaceful people without intentions of invading other worlds and are willing to establish mutual trade and military agreements with Verron, we will share our technology with your planet. King Verron is working toward unifying the Nations of the Universe in order to stand against those who invaded your planet and others like them. He believes in peace through unified power and that no one Nation can stand alone. I will return to Verron to discuss your people with King Verron, I have no doubt that there will soon be a group of people from my home to come here to determine exactly what we can do that will be mutually beneficial to both Nations. From what I can see, I believe we have a lot to offer each other.”
The visitors from Verron were given a tour of the space facility and the nearby city. With 140 billion residents, it was even more chaotic than Xhondar I. The buildings weren’t the high-rise structures seen in the massive cities of their most populated ally. This place truly had a most unique architectural style. Throughout the city, the twenty to thirty-floor structures were the norm, but the dwellings surrounded deep pits 100 to 300 yards in diameter and extended under-ground for miles. Below was a maze of catwalks and elevators and literally millions of residential units, but the most unique feature was the fact that none of the guests had seen a single sharp edge or square corner anywhere, even in their ship designs. Everything was oval or round or curved in some way. The deep round pits were encircled with tall round buildings.
Many of the residents walked the streets, while both flying and ground transports moved about the city. In their brief 3 hour tour it was determined that these people were the most advanced chemists they had ever encountered. They generated electricity using chemical reactors, propelled their vehicles and even their flying craft and space ships with some form of chemical reaction. Building materials were either made of exiting rock and dirt from the planet surface or super-strong plastics like the stuff their spaceship was constructed of. Due to the corrosive environment, everything had to be chemically resistant to a wide range of chemicals. Just before they left the city, the small band of explorers were escorted into what passed for a local supermarket; the shelves were filled with plastic containers of a wide variety of fungus, but in the gourmet section was filled with the tasty treats harvested from the bug planet. Little balls of bug dung, bug larva, shed wings and bug legs, even entire bugs were displayed for the shopp
ers delight and for those who wanted theirs fresh; a big aquarium sized case was filled with a wide variety of live insects for their dining pleasure. Just when Katelyn was beginning to like these people, she had to visit the grocery store. Tala was having a blast at her sisters expense, making comments like, “We should buy a few pounds of bug larva and serve it up with the grubs and centipedes from Molnar. I bet these people would love it.” Bart actually thought it might be a good idea for a place to market products from Molnar and Tala soon agreed. Katelyn was just ready to get out of the store. Bart knew he was going to be in the dog house for a while, since he was having as much fun as Tala and Brad, all at Katelyn’s expense.
On their return to the ship, Tala asked if they might be able to see inside one of their deep pits that made up most of their city. Their guide obviously chose one at random that was the closest at hand and escorted them to an oval shaped elevator that was open on the side overlooking the pit. Tala felt like she was in the elevator at Peachtree Center Towers, except the view down didn’t appear to have a bottom. The deeper they went down, the thicker the fog became, until they barely could make out lights shining through the wall of deadly chemicals. When they exited to an open mezzanine that crossed the pit, the group became terrified at the view below. At the bottom of the pits was molten lava from the planets core. None of them could imagine that they had gone that deep, but being this close to the deadly flow of molten rock gave them the creeps. Angoona explained, telling them, “The pits are a source of heat we harness to heat our water for steam heat and to generate the reaction required to form our corrosive resistant building materials. It is also a source of the gasses in our planet’s atmosphere. Without the gas from our pits, we would all die.” Katelyn was reminded of her trips into the rain forests of South America and how Earth was dependent upon trees to produce the oxygen they required to breath, how odd that these people were in the same situation, dependent upon something that occurs in nature to supply life itself. Angoona explained some more, informing them, “The pits serve as a release valve for the molten heat. Before we built our pits, there were often eruptions that caused the surface to explode and the molten rock would poor out, sometimes forming large mountains. The pits were created thousands of years ago and eliminated the loss of life from the ground spewing up.”
Bart and Brad were impressed with the ingenuity of the entire process. He looked down one more time into the pit and observed hundreds of the lizard like people working below, only feet from the intense heat. It was obvious these creatures could endure more than just an acidic atmosphere; they could literally harvest the molten earth of their planet. As the group looked on, the workers would poor the molten rock into cooling molds to form large bricks, they recognized as the primary building blocks of the structures on the surface. They didn’t mine rocks from quarries, they molded them.
As they made their way to the surface, millions of curious faces appeared through windows of homes built into the side of the pit and from the pedestrians moving along the tangled maze of walkways. Children were everywhere. It was obvious from watching the children at play that these lizard-like people also possessed the climbing skills of a common gecko found in millions of homes. They raced along the sides of the steep walls and even underneath the walks, dangling upside down above the molten pits far below. Evidently the mothers of these rambunctious youths paid their activities no heed. It appeared to be a common, everyday activity on this world. The tour group exited on the opposite side of the pit from where they went down and continued in the direction of the space center and their ship. They were passing another work-station that had an open storefront appearance and stopped to watch a man mixing metals and chemicals in a large container and then pouring shiny liquid gold into small molds. That was when Brad began to notice that many of the people wore gold medallions and silver or gold buttons on their clothing. He walked over and made an indication to the storekeeper to let him look at what he had just made. The man reached for a tray of molded medallions in the shiniest gold any of the group had ever seen. He picked one up and passed it around for the others to look at. Bart asked, “Is this what I think it is?” Katelyn looked over his shoulder and answered for the others, saying, “Sure looks like it.” Tala, never one to be shy asked, “May we purchase one of these?” Alkawara reached over and took a handful of the molded objects and handed them to his guests. The shopkeeper made no effort to question what he had just done. Evidently, they were not considered an especially expensive item. Bart looked at Brad while holding one of the medallions and commented, “If this checks out to be what I believe it is then these people are more than chemists, they’re alchemist. Men have been trying to figure out how to do this for centuries.” Tala, half-jokingly and half seriously responded by saying, “Oh great; just what Papa Paul needs; more gold.”
When they returned to the dome where they had delivered the damaged ship, the group halted to be certain they were in the right place. Looking above they still saw their R4 right where they had left it, but inside the hanger was what appeared to be a completely repaired spaceship. At least the entire rear section of the ship that had been missing was once again in place. Tala asked, “Did you replace the damaged ship while we were gone?” Angoona gave his wise lipless smile and answered, “That is most definitely the same ship; the seams are still weaving themselves together.” Katelyn and Tala were the first to hurry to the side of the ship, with Brad, Bart and the Marines close behind. They stared in absolute awe and a great deal of confusion. The newly attached surface of the ship looked alive as it wove itself together with the damaged portion of the ship. With each passing moment of observation, the seam became more and more solid. Soon it would no doubt appear to have never been damaged. Tala summarized what they saw in few words, “This is absolutely amazing. I’ve never seen anything like this before.” Turning to Angoona, she asked, “Is this how you build everything here?”
He was a man of few words and answered, “Only our plastics and metals are capable of organic repair. Stone we mold, as you saw, from its molten state. However, we use an organic chemical that bonds stone to stone without seams and will do the same with metal to stone or plastic to stone. They quite literally become one. All our structures are seamless.” Katelyn and Tala smiled, with Katelyn saying what they both were thinking, “Papa Paul is gonna love this place.”
Their tour ended up lasting half a day and they actually hated to leave. Everywhere they went they were greeted warmly as the people who had rescued the men who had bravely tried to save their kidnapped citizens from the Volvs. Before activating the tractor-elevator back to the R4, Katelyn assured their hosts that an envoy of people from Verron would visit very soon; probably within a few days. They also told them that more than likely King Verron would be among those who came. As soon as they boarded the ship and prepared for departure, Bart and Brad asked simultaneously, “Lucy can you do a metal analysis on this ship?” Lucy was almost offended that they thought they needed to ask. She replied, “The repair shop on this ship is prepared to analyze and repair any sub-straight used on any known Universe. The metallurgical comparison analysis computer is in the second machine shop bay on the right down the center concourse. Place the object to be analyzed into the small window on the front and push the green button. I’m sure that it may be over your head to operate such a complicated machine, should I have a drone assist you?” Tala smiled at her future husband and informed him, “Sometimes Lucy can get a bit snippy when you ask stupid questions.” They all heard the response, “I am not programmed for snippy, but sarcasm is an entirely different matter. You must learn the difference before you begin to correct someone.” Now it was Brad’s turn to smile. The two men walked across the recovery bay as Tala and Katelyn navigated away from the planet below. They both normally enjoyed looking through the observation window while entering and exiting a planet, but here, there was little to see.
Just before they reached the large overhead door of the center corrid
or, they heard then turned to see, a small maintenance drone following them. Shaking their heads with a smile, they proceeded to the machine shop for the analysis, while being closely observed and given step-by-step instructions from the drone. In minutes the machine printed out a complete report; 24 karat gold, just as they had suspected. They couldn’t wait to see the look on Paul’s face when they told him.
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