by S. W. Ahmed
Visibly shocked, Sharjam reluctantly bowed as well, and followed his brother.
Birshat came in front of Autamrin. “My Lord, allow me to go with them!” she begged.
“And me!” Kabur added.
“No, it is their fate to go alone. Your places are here with the rest of us.”
Birshat rushed out after the two brothers, who were just leaving the chamber. “Dumyan, wait!”
“What is it, my love?” Dumyan turned around to look at her.
“Remember that Wazilban may well have one of the copies of the Hidden Scripture. His scouts may also be looking for the Sign, trying to destroy it before we can find it.”
“I know, don’t worry. We will return, I promise, to lead you out of this cage.”
“I have full faith that you will.” She glanced at Sharjam for a second, and then looked back at Dumyan. “Please look after him. He is and always will be your younger brother.”
“And you take care of our Father. With the help of the Creator, the day shall come when he once again ascends the throne of the Dominion. Watch over the others as well, and yourself.”
Their hands touched. “Our love grows stronger by the day,” she whispered.
“And so it shall till our deaths.”
Trying to hide his sadness, he whisked his hand in front of his eyes, and a section of his robe magically covered his face. He then began walking up the tunnel, his brother following several steps behind.
Chapter 11
A blaring siren woke Marc up from his deep sleep. A quick look at his surroundings made him remember that it hadn’t all just been a dream. He really was in outer space, traveling aboard an alien ship.
“HoloMarc, are you there?” he called out groggily.
No answer. The eerie siren kept on wailing. It sounded like a bomber alarm, of the kind he had heard while watching old movies of World War II. Every few seconds, the ground was shaking.
“HoloMarc? What’s going on?”
But HoloMarc was nowhere to be found. Getting up, Marc quickly washed up and walked into the living room of his quarters. Through the windows, he looked out at the city inside the ship. The simulated sky was no longer a bright blue – it had turned dark. Orange lights were flashing everywhere on the tops and sides of the buildings, and Mendoken aliens were frantically flying around in their vehicles, rushing to get to their posts.
“What in heaven’s name is happening?” he wondered. He looked around the room, and noticed a door on the far wall. It had to be the main door to his quarters from the inside of the building. Next to the door, he found a small keypad. Assuming it was a communication device, he pressed what looked like the power knob. A small 3D screen sprang forth from the keypad, displaying the face of a Mendoken.
“Yes, Mr. Zemin?” a voice crackled through a speaker below the screen.
“Hildira?”
“Yes.” She seemed to be busy, and there was a lot of commotion behind her.
“What’s happening?”
“We are under attack.”
“Under attack! By whom?”
“Volonans, Mr. Zemin. Please stay in your quarters. I will contact you when this is over.”
“But…”
Too late, as Hildira had switched off the connection.
Marc was frightened. Perhaps the entire ship would blow up in one big explosion? He sat down on the couch, trying to prepare himself for that event. But he couldn’t stay still. Why were the Volonans attacking the ship, he wondered? There was only one way to find out.
He knew he couldn’t go out the way he had come in. There was no vehicle waiting outside the window to pick him up, and it was a sheer drop of 32 levels to the ground below. No, the only way out was through the front door.
He got up and began walking towards the door, but then stopped. Hildira had told him to stay put. Did he dare defy her instructions? He paced around the room for a while, wondering what to do. The ground still kept shaking periodically. Then a powerful tremor hit, causing him to lose his balance and fall onto the couch.
That did it. Taking a deep breath, he slid open the front door. A whiff of cold air hit his face, reminding him of the lower temperature across the rest of the ship. He went back into the suite to grab his sweater, and then stepped out through the door. It automatically slid shut behind him.
The corridor he had entered was shaped like a hollow tube with a flat floor. The siren was much louder here, and orange lights were flashing along the ceiling. He tiptoed down the long hallway, in the hopes of finding an elevator or staircase. Along the way, he noticed doors on both sides, probably leading to other residences. Luckily they were all closed and there was nobody in sight.
Suddenly he heard a door open. He instantly flattened himself against the wall, trying his best to hide. The last thing he wanted was to be reported for disobeying orders. Peering out, he saw a Mendoken enter the corridor. Much to his relief, the alien floated off in the opposite direction, eventually disappearing through what looked like an exit at the end of the hallway.
After waiting a few more seconds, he began moving forward again, following that Mendoken’s path. He reached the same exit at the end of the hallway, but what lay beyond didn’t seem particularly inviting. It looked like a staircase, but it had no stairs! Instead, it was a steep, smooth incline that spiraled down as far as he could see. How was he supposed to get down?
He turned to look back at the long corridor. Goodness, he didn’t even remember which door he had come out of! There was no turning back. Carefully, he set foot on the incline, trying to balance himself with his hands against the wall. But after a couple of steps, it became painfully clear that both the wall and the floor were almost frictionless. Before long, he had lost his balance completely, and was sliding down the incline on his back.
“Yaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh!” he yelled, helplessly accelerating down the slope.
The path twisted round and round for what felt like an eternity, and he kept getting bounced from one side to the other. Finally, it reached the bottom and leveled off. Due to the high speed he had reached, however, he continued to glide down the smooth path toward an exit door at the end. The door slid open automatically as he approached, causing him to slide through and be thrown out onto the pavement outside.
Bruised and shaken, he got up and looked around. He was outside the building, on the street. There were Mendoken aliens floating about in the distance, and vehicles zooming by above. But nobody seemed to notice him. Now the big question was how he was supposed to get to the control deck.
And there was the answer in front of him – one of those egg-shaped vehicles parked on the street, unattended. He walked over and entered the vehicle. Staring at the controls, he tried to remember how Hildira had operated them earlier. Noticing one button that was bigger than the others, he took a chance and pressed it. The interior immediately lit up, and the vehicle lifted off from the ground.
Next, a steering column detached itself from the dashboard, and moved automatically towards his hands. The column contained two separate wheels that could be pushed, pulled or rotated. After some trial and error that resulted in some very bumpy motions, he thought he had figured out how the wheels worked. Pulling them both back, he drove the vehicle up into the air, heading straight for the dark, virtual sky.
Marc’s nerves were on edge. It was the first time he had ever operated a flying machine of any kind, let alone one whose controls were not designed for humans and one that seemingly refused to travel at speeds below 90 mph. At that speed, not only would he have to avoid hitting all the other vehicles whizzing around, he would also have to figure out where he was going. Looking up, he saw a stream of vehicles making for one of the entrances in the simulated sky. All paths going upwards had to eventually lead to the control deck at the top of the ship, so he entered that stream, almost crashing into another vehicle in the process.
After passing through the entrance in the sky, he was back in one of those busy multi-lane tunne
ls. Everyone seemed to be driving even faster now, perhaps because of the calamity that had befallen the vessel. Several times he almost collided with other vehicles, especially when the entire ship shook during a tremor. But some unseen control system prevented the actual impact from occurring every time, either by pushing his vehicle to the side or forcing it to brake automatically.
It turned out that his intuition was correct. Eventually the tunnel did lead up into the control deck. Slowing down, he parked the vehicle at the lowest level. In one corner, he found an elevator and stepped onto it. Up he went, one level after the other. The place was a mess – Mendoken aliens were rushing around everywhere, frantically trying to operate different control stations. Looking out into space with the clear view that he now had, he could see why.
There was a massive ship out there. No, there were three of them, two behind and one above. Volonan ships, no doubt, since they didn’t look anything like the Mendoken vessel he was on. All three of them were identical – bright red in color, much flatter and wider than the Mendoken ship, and more rectangular in shape. Overhangs jutted downwards from the sides of the ships, from where barrages of shots were being fired at the Mendoken ship.
The Mendoken ship, in turn, was fleeing from these enemy ships, firing back at them and constantly maneuvering to avoid their shots. Every time its shields were hit, the entire vessel shook.
To the other side, he could see a field of rocks that the Mendoken ship was heading towards. He surmised it was an asteroid field, but was surprised at the amount of dust everywhere and the uneven sizes of the rocks. The rocks also seemed to be dispersing in different directions.
“Very strange asteroids,” he thought.
“Mr. Zemin, you should not be here,” a stern, robotic sounding voice suddenly said.
Marc turned to look at the Mendoken approaching him. He had been in such awe of the view outside that he hadn’t even noticed his arrival at the top level of the control deck.
“Well, ah, is Petrana here?” he asked.
“Yes, but you should not be, Mr. Zemin.”
“I want to find out what’s going on! Are those Volonan ships?”
“Yes, but please go back to your quarters.”
The alien moved closer, in an attempt to keep him from stepping off the elevator. But at that moment, another Mendoken came up from behind and communicated silently with the one blocking his way. Soon after, that Mendoken left, and the other one came forward to face him.
“Petrana?” He thought he recognized her slightly larger eye and paler skin, at least compared to all the other Mendoken he had seen so far. Not to mention the pink hat she was wearing.
“Yes, Marc,” she said, as calm as ever. “It is not safe for you to be here. We are in the middle of a battle.”
“I won’t get in your way, I promise! But I can’t just sit in my room and wait for my death.”
“Very well. Stay close to me, or others may try to send you back down.”
He sighed with relief, and followed her to her station. Commander Maginder could be seen in the distance, giving orders to the officers operating the weapons to evade fire from the enemy ships and to fire back in turn.
Petrana instructed Marc to sit in his seat. As soon as he did, a belt automatically slithered around his waist and secured him in place. She explained that they were leading the ship into the field of debris ahead, in an attempt to lose the Volonan pursuers between the huge rocks. Things would get real bumpy for a while, since such sudden movements were too fast for the vessel’s automatic anti-gravity stabilizers to effectively handle.
With that, she began operating some controls, alongside several other pilots who were already doing the same. They took the ship right into the debris field, skillfully coordinating their efforts as a team. The maneuvers were spotless, leaving Marc in amazement as to how a vessel of such huge proportions could be tossed around so easily. Gliding swiftly between the giant boulders, the ship didn’t touch a single one of them.
What was not as spotless was how he began feeling during the maneuvers. A lifelong victim of motion sickness, he felt a rising tide of nausea in his head and stomach. Holding on to the sides of the seat, he tried not to think about it and to focus his thoughts on what was happening outside instead.
He was glad to see that the Volonan ships were not following them into the field of debris. Their ships were just too wide to risk trying to navigate between the boulders. No matter how skilled their pilots were, making such an attempt would inevitably result in significant losses to the edges of their hulls.
After reaching a safe distance inside the field, the Mendoken ship slowed down and stopped. Marc could still see the Volonan ships, waiting at the edge of the field. Eventually they started moving away.
Then it happened – a thin blue circle began forming in front of each ship. The circles rapidly increased in thickness, becoming spheres that completely engulfed the ships. Tunnels that seemingly led into different dimensions appeared behind the spheres. Then, in one gigantic flash, the spheres catapulted into their respective tunnels. Soon after, the tunnel entrances disappeared into nothingness, leaving no visible trace behind.
The sirens finally stopped, and everybody on board the Mendoken ship slowed down the pace of their activities. Petrana moved away from the controls she was operating, and looked at Marc.
Marc was in shock. “Incredible!” he exclaimed, taking a while to find his voice. “It was just like my experiment with the pocket watch! The one I did in my lab!”
“Correct. Those were consars.”
They were obviously much larger consars than the one he had played with, but the mechanism did seem very similar.
“So let me guess,” he said, “you can’t trace the path the ships have taken?”
“No, not like we could with your clock. The Volonans have a way of concealing their trails.”
He looked out at the rocks surrounding the ship. “So is this an asteroid field?”
“No, this field of debris is all that is left of the planet Kerding in the Mendo-Bursal star system. It was inhabited by 3 billion Mendoken, and collections of different kinds of plants and animals. It was destroyed less than an hour ago by those Volonan warships. They did not leave any of the surrounding moons intact either.”
Marc’s mouth dropped open in horror. “3 billion Mendoken… dead?”
“Yes, Marc.”
3 billion lives, gone. Perished, in the blink of an eye. It was inconceivable! “Why… why did they do it?”
“There is no particular reason we can identify, other than the fact that we are at war. In addition, this system was an easy target because it was largely defenseless. Kerding was mainly a medical research planet, with many hospitals specialized in different kinds of illnesses. Mendoken from the furthest star systems used to come here for treatment. We never imagined that the Volona would stoop to this level, to attack such a target that had no military value. That was why it was unprotected.”
Marc’s face grew red in anger. “This is insane!” he cried. “It’s cold-blooded murder!”
Petrana didn’t answer.
“This doesn’t have anything to do with me, does it?”
“No, it is highly unlikely they would know about you so quickly.”
He pointed at the devastation outside. “How did they do it? Do they have planet destroyers too?”
“No, their weapons systems are different from ours. There are no separate planet destroyers. Each ship by itself only has limited firepower. However, three of them can combine their resources to generate a formidable weapon capable of destroying entire planets. In order to do so, they need to form a perfect triangle, spaced evenly apart from each other. When we arrived, they had already destroyed the planet and the moons. They tried to form a triangle again to destroy our ship, but our evasive maneuvers kept preventing them from doing so. Otherwise, this ship by itself would have been no match for that weapon.”
“How did we get here? Was thi
s star system on our flight path?”
“Not too far from it. We received a distress call from an outpost on the second moon around Kerding, reporting the sudden appearance of those Volonan ships. As usual, our surveillance network had not been able to spot their approach through consars. We immediately plotted an intercept path, but by the time we got here, it was too late.”
“Are there any survivors at all?
“None that we can locate.”
Marc realized he was in the midst of a tomb. All those rocks out there had until an hour ago been part of a world, a world that had housed an entire population. It reminded him of his own dream a couple of nights earlier, of Earth’s similar destruction.
In the distance, other Mendoken ships could be seen arriving. Alas, they were too late to save the lives of their kinfolk.
“Mr. Zemin, I did not expect you here at this time.”
Marc turned around to see Commander Maginder standing in front of him. “I know,” he said, “I just wanted to see what was happening.”
“Perhaps it was important for you to see for yourself what kind of enemy we are at war with,” Maginder said.
“I… I’m very sorry for the tremendous loss of life your people have just suffered.”
Maginder was silent for a few seconds. “Thank you, Mr. Zemin,” he finally said in his usual monotone. “The frequency of these attacks is increasing by the day. We need to quicken our pace to reach the Mendo-Zueger star system, so that you can show our engineers how to build the same consar travel capability that the Volona have. With our existing capabilities, all we can do in retaliation is to try to penetrate their space at our common border. And, given how heavily fortified their side of the border is, that is always a futile exercise.”
Maginder then motioned to Petrana and the other pilots to resume the voyage. They had lost 3 hours due to this whole debacle, and still had another 28 hours to go to reach their destination. The other ships that had arrived would take care of any necessary rescue or salvage operations here. Repairs to the hull of their own ship would have to occur en route.