The past three and a half days had been excruciatingly long for all. Exhausted, depressed, and on the verge of mental breakdown, the small crew was growing sick of the confinement of the ship, and the relatively small space the twenty-six of them had been sharing since their departure. The living quarters would have seemed adequate in size for any human being, but the Kahnus were over five meters tall on average, dwarfing any man. For them, the individual sleeping compartments of the ship, most not exceeding six meters in height and ten in diameter, were desperately small. The Aruk they were in was a cargo and personnel transport, never meant to travel for more than a few days at a time. Accommodations did not include comfort for such short trips. Only the main control room and cargo bay were of significant size. But even there, when all twenty-six were gathered in the largest open space of their vessel, it still offered hardly any room to move around. But the most difficult thing to surmount had been the feeling of despair they had all felt by leaving their world to its tragic fate, losing everything and everyone they had ever known and loved. Their spirit was lower than ever, and now they were about to witness a sight none would ever be able to forget.
After informing the rest of the crew, Jorh and Mahhzee, along with all the other passengers, turned their attention to the rear window of the ship.
The first visible sign that the carnage had begun came from a flicker of light, far in the starry background. At first no brighter than a small speck in the night sky, it quickly grew in size and brightness, and within seconds became a blinding white and yellow light, as bright as the sun. Even from eighty million kilometers away, they could all visualize the mountains erupting, the icy crust melting, the valleys burning and the oceans boiling. The Kahnus communicated telepathically, and although none were trying to, their combined feelings were compiling on top of each other, causing each and every one of them to sense the entire group’s distress. All those they had ever known, their families, friends, loved ones, their homes, the Klomags... The destruction would be complete, they all knew it. For the next few minutes their pain was unbearable... Finally, after a gradual decrease in brightness, a gigantic ring of fire blasted its way across the galactic backdrop, and dissipated into the nothingness of empty space, blinding them all for several seconds.
Everyone remained totally silent and stoic, all eyes wide open, almost unable to accept the horrible reality. They had just watched in agony the destruction of their home planet, unable to do anything, left feeling completely powerless. Kahnu, their beautiful world, full of life, home to thousands of animal species, the grand Klomags, the Shirzu turners, the Tayags…their own Kahnu civilization... It was all gone, scattered into space, in one instant; forever.
As the true realization that none would ever again see their world or their loved ones finally hit them, one by one, they slowly collapsed to their knees in silent cries and moans, fraught, heartbroken, and feeling utterly defeated. Mahhzee, although as stricken as any of them by the tragedy, maybe even more so by the added sense of responsibility now weighing heavily on her, slowly turned her seat back in the forward position, and with great effort, tried to keep herself together, as she returned to the task at hand: Get the ship and its precious cargo safely to Kesra.
An hour later, only a distant smudge of reddish amber, glowing softly and unremarkably, remained where their planet once was. Lost in the crowded starry background that seemed to have already forgotten the incident, the dim glow would soon be hard to spot amid the other stars.
What none of them knew at the time was that the aftermaths of the destruction of their world would also have dire consequences elsewhere. As faith would have it, a few thousand years later, their erratic orbits eventually bringing them into the path of our own world’s gravitational pull, several asteroids, leftover debris from the Kahnu catastrophe, would crash on Earth, causing the ultimate demise of the dinosaurs, and changing the course of our planet’s natural evolution forever.
Most of the passengers had now made their way back to their sleeping quarters. Mahhzee, refocusing her attention on their destination, brought Kesra in view. The red planet had been in sight for a couple of days already, growing a bit more each hour. Now, its image took most of the forward view. They would be entering its thin atmosphere in less than two days.
“Jorh, I think I'm gonna go lay down if you don't mind. My eyes are killing me, and the rest of my body doesn't feel that much better.”
“Of course, Mahhzee. Go get some sleep, you deserve it. Goodnight!” he telepathically replied. Looking at his sister walk away, he couldn't help but turn his attention to Gahneo, who was already following her. He realized how different he felt about the two of them, now that they had been together for a few years already, and so much had changed for all of them. Gahneo was a good companion for her, and he was making her happy. That was all that mattered, really. He was glad they had each other. For a moment he thought of himself and Faylah, his lifelong love. She was gone. She had passed away almost two years earlier. A freak accident. She had fallen off the... He shook the image out of his head. After making sure everyone had left the room and the ship was still on course, Jorh left the main deck and made his way to the cargo bay.
The human observers and their three alien companions followed. The younger Jorh entered the large space. In its center, they all recognized the twenty-six hibernating capsules they were now familiar with. The alien checked a few controls and turned his attention to the Zarfha in the middle. He raised his arm and was about to communicate a telepathic command to the sphere when he heard something move in the far corner of the room. The sudden movement was so unexpected, Jorh almost tripped. Knowing everyone should have been back in their respective quarters by now, he finally spotted a dark figure in the shadows.
“Majhena? Is that you? What are you doing here in the dark? You should be in bed, young lady.”
“I'm not sleepy,” she replied. She was sitting in a fetal position in a corner of the room. Her arms wrapped around her legs, resting her chin on her knees, she was looking at him with a grumpy expression on her face, slowly rocking herself back and forth.
“You should still go back to your room. This is not a place for a young girl at night, alone.”
“I'm fine here!” she made a very faint grunt.
“Majhena? Are you OK?” He could sense she was not.
“I'm fine. I just want to be alone,” she replied telepathically.
And then, she started sobbing. Soon, her large purple eyes were crying. Her body, as with any Kahnu who was crying, tuned to a dark gray color. Majhena was now an orphan. Her parents had stayed on Kahnu. She was the only one of her family who had escaped the tragedy, purely by luck, after a set of circumstances had given him no choice but to take her with them, when they had found her hiding in the ship, the night of their departure.
Jorh approached the girl and sat right next to her on the floor. He reached over for her hand and said, “It's OK to be sad. It's normal to feel pain. You just lost your family, your home, and everyone you ever knew. It's OK to cry Majhena, I know I want to. Cry my child, you'll feel better.” Putting his arms around her, he pulled her to him and caressed her head, while she abandoned herself in her sorrow.
#
Thirty-six hours later, a blueish streak was scraping the top layer of the thin orange hued atmosphere of Kesra. The long line of light emblazed the cloudy haze over several kilometers, as the ship made its final descent. Entering the lower atmosphere at over 25,000 kilometers an hour, the ship would have been a spectacular scene to watch, had any life form been present on the ground below. But Kesra was, for the most part, a dead world already. Only a few species remained in crevices and underground water holes. But none of them possessed anymore intelligence than that of a starfish on Earth. And within the next few million years, most of them would also disappear. Water on Kesra, evaporating in the thin atmosphere, was slowly killing all life on the planet. Eventually, the once fertile planet would become a global desert, a
desolate world, known to man as Mars.
Mahhzee reduced the vessel’s speed to 1200 kilometers an hour within seconds. The resulting G-force felt by the crew members was negligible, thanks to the ship's Zarfha controlled artificial gravity field. It was capable of automatically compensating for any change in gravitational force almost instantaneously, allowing it to keep the gravity onboard relatively constant, no matter what the forces exerted on the outside were. This amazing technology was the creation of Jorh. His years spent on Zarfha gravitation engines had made him one of the most celebrated scientists in his field. They were now flying over a region of Kesra man would later call Valles Marineris, an unmistakable planetary feature the Kahnu people had visited many times before. The giant geological trench, over 4000 kilometers in length, and several kilometers deep in some areas, dwarfed most geological features on any world around the sun. The view was majestic. Giant red cliffs to their left were towering over the ship. Their colossal size was an amazing sight. Occasional coves and recesses seemed to invite the intruders to explore them. A desert of dried out river beds, rocky boulders, and flat, vegetationless terrains, made up most of the landscape below. Rocks littered the ground everywhere. Far in the distance, to the right, another cliff could be seen, just as gigantic in size, but hundreds of kilometers away, and stretching far beyond the horizon, where it faded away behind the hazy atmosphere. In the gigantic facade nearest them, smaller canyons branched out from time to time, but the travelers continued forward towards the center of the monumental decor. After a few hundred kilometers, they had come much closer to the cliff, and the speed of the ship was now barely eighty kilometers an hour. They had relied mostly on the Zarfha to bring them to the correct coordinates, but now everyone was paying attention to Mahhzee, who had once again taken over the ship's controls. They were searching the cliffs for the cavern entrance in the rock face, artificially carved by their people many years earlier.
“I think we're getting close,” said Donjeh. He was the only passenger who had actually been to the red planet before.
Steering with hands gestures, to face the vertical cliffs, she brought the ship down a few hundred meters above the floor of the canyon, waving commands to the spherical artificial brain of the Aruk. She slowed down the vessel, while pulling back on the nose to level up. Slowly descending vertically while maintaining the ship horizontally, Mahhzee was sweeping the face of the cliff in front of them.
“There! On the right!” Donjeh said telepathically, pointing in the direction of a small bulge on the rocky wall.
“I see it!” she replied.
Quickly moving the ship to face the location showed by Donjeh, Mahhzee turned the white vessel to face the dome shaped formation. Encased in the cliff's face, the spherical marker meant the entrance was nearby. After hovering around a tall chimney-like rock formation on the right of the marker, a large fissure revealed itself. At first seemingly too narrow to fit, Mahhzee slowly engaged the ship in the tight passage. It was an impressive canyon in its own right. The ship was now getting lower and had slowed down to a crawl. After a few minutes, they were hovering in front of a large gap in the cliff, about sixty meters above ground. It appeared to continue on into a cave-like passage, maybe only twice the girth of the ship. Slowly moving forward, Mahhzee maneuvered the Aruk toward the narrow mouth of the opening, and they entered the dark cavern. The glowing shell of the hovering transport was now illuminating the walls of the tunnel all around them. To everyone's surprise, like stars in the night sky, millions of quartz stones started sparkling, reflecting some of their light back to them. The corridor walls were surprisingly smooth and symmetrical, and many different tunnels branched out here and there, also quite even in their proportions, as if artificially made. In fact, some of them were.
Although the cave was natural in formation, the Kahnus had carved more tunnels into it, like a colony of termites would a beam of wood. Many years ago, when they had first visited the red planet, the council of Elders had agreed to allow a permanent station to be built on Kesra. After almost forty years, it now covered more than five times its original size in length, expanding through the belly of the cliff. Even after Kahnus had visited all the planets and moons of our solar system, and eventually moved on to other type of research, the laboratories and habitats on Kesra had stayed in use for many more years before they were abandoned. Many discoveries were made during those years. Coval salt was one of them; a white powdery substance that had become an important ingredient in their biogenetic Time-Frost hibernation technology. Many leaps were made thanks to research performed in those caverns, especially in the field of biology. The closing of the station, soon after the discovery of Varih-Aru, had been very difficult to accept for some. No one had been allowed back on Kesra since.
None of the passengers on this ship had ever been to the red planet, except for Serm's uncle, Donjeh. He was also the most renown researcher in Time-Frost technology, and one of the few who had fought to keep the laboratories on Kesra operational.
Kesra, the red world
Moving slowly towards the landing site to the left of the cave, Mahhzee aligned the ship and landed effortlessly, after a smooth vertical descent. They were finally there, on solid ground.
Once the back of the ship opened, the passengers started emerging from inside one by one, through the purple gas. They were all wearing a thin suit, providing them with the necessary shielding from the harmful chemical composition of the air, but also giving them the atmospheric pressure their bodies needed to compensate for Kesra's weak gravity. The gigantic cave housed an array of odd looking machines and Zarfha orbs, some serving a similar purpose as computers do on Earth. To the far right, several edifices, almost as tall as the cave itself, revealed the living quarters that would be their new home, at least for now.
The last ones to leave the ship, Jorh and Serm walked to an area of the cave where strange structures and other large objects were lined up in long row against the wall. Below the glassy transparent surface of a wide container, eleven Zarfha spheres were resting partially buried in the floor of the cave. After giving Serm several instructions, Jorh approached one of the machines and held his hands stretched out in front of him, his twelve fingers seemingly probing the air. Pulling out a black saucer shaped device out of a small container, Serm put the instrument on the glass surface just above the closest Zarfha, and raising his open hand above it, started tracing imaginary circles in the air. A column of white plasma slowly emerged from the black device, encircling it and rising towards Jorh’s hand. As if shaping it without touching it, both aliens guided the column upward with their hand movements, until it reached the roof of the cave. Then, releasing his invisible grip, Jorh clamped his hands together. A foggy white substance started flowing down, along the outside of the column, while the central pillar, staying in a relatively solid state, began changing colors and pulsing slowly up and down its entire length in waves of blueish-whites and purple-reds. A giant oval plate appeared on the wall of the cave, almost as if it had materialized out of the rock. Eleven red circles, evenly spaced in a row at the bottom of it, began fading in and out, in rhythm. In the middle of the giant oval shape, a big black triangle was slowly moving randomly, as if hovering in an imaginary soft wind. Blue lines soon emerged from it, one by one connecting to the red circles.
After confirming the Zarfhas were receiving the plasma, Jorh left Serm and walked to the living quarters. He was looking forward to taking his suit off. He walked into the dark entrance of the towering edifice and made his way several levels up. After the tight confinement of the ship, staying in an adequately sized space would be a welcome change. He had a few hours to kill while the spheres were charging. It was a great opportunity to rest. He approached a machine near the far wall, and after a few commands, walked to another room. Removing his gelatinous suit, he reached the hovering bed and gladly lied down.
A few doors down, Gahneo and Mahhzee were finally in their new habitat.
“I thin
k I'm gonna sleep for a week!” she said, removing her soft suit. The darkness was broken by a small Zarfha spinning slowly in the corner. The reddish glow caused everything to look rusted and old. The ceiling was about ten meters high. The room was circular, and dome shaped. Still small compared to a typical Klomag habitat, it was a great improvement over the tiny cabins of the ship, nonetheless. A corridor at the far end seemed to disappear further down to the right. As they walked on, the walls began to glow dimly. Now, two more doors could be seen on the left. There was an oval shaped screen, straight ahead of them, against the wall. Just below it, an orb was hovering silently, facing a comfortable looking chair.
Gahneo walked toward it and sat down. Mahhzee closed the entrance behind them, and from within the walls, a soft ambient light illuminated the room. There did not appear to be any windows. While Gahneo, waving his hand, made a portion of the wall disappear, offering a view of the large cave, Mahhzee made her way into an adjacent room, just to the left of him. The sleeping quarters were not the largest, but the three hover-beds in the middle looked comfortable and inviting. The Kahnu did not sleep lying down on a flat bed, as humans do. They slept on long hovering lounge seats, comparable to comfortable recliners, padded and molded to the body of the individual lying in it. Mahhzee waved at the wall and another oval window appeared, overlooking a portion of the cave outside. From her vantage point, she could see Serm walking out of the Aruk, pushing in front of him a large container she did not recognize. What puzzled her right away was the similarity in size and shape with a hibernating pod. “What reason could Serm possibly have to take a Time-Frost pod out of the ship?” She kept watching. Hovering in front of him, Serm guided the large capsule around the ship, and soon disappeared behind a rocky column at the back of the cave.
Kahnu (The Guardians of Tomorrow Book 1) Page 30