Land Of The Gods

by Abhishek .

  “This is Noah’s ark,” the soldier whispered loudly, almost feeling its ancient aura. “How did you find this? This is the greatest historical discovery of the ages!” He looked at me suspiciously, presumably because of my age.

  “Are you ready to tell me what you are doing with the Japanese?” I stood there, arms akimbo.

  “Let’s think about the matter at hand,” Daniel waved it away.

  Once inside the dark cockpit, I flicked on the engine and the ark rumbled thunderously. It shook under the pressure of the earth around it and stabilised once again, shaking away some of the rocks from its drill, a part of which was still plunged into the rock bed. The exposed part of the drill glistened like the snout of an underground beast.

  “What now? There isn’t any ocean underground for the ark to float on,” Daniel glared at me.

  “We don’t need an ocean. The drill in front will drill through the toughest rock.”

  “But this is Noah’s ark,” the soldier looked at me dubiously.

  “If something lives in water, it’s not necessarily a fish.”

  “But what are we supposed to do with this?” The soldier was losing his calm, waving around at the interior.

  “The Jargantaan base is underwater. If we drill towards it, we will eventually break out of the continental landmass and while underwater, we will smash into the base using the drill,” I smiled and pointed at the conical corkscrew in the anterior.

  “Are you out of your mind? Everybody will die!”

  “No! The base is a like the submerged portion of an iceberg. I’ve been thinking about it and I think I can make it! We can drill into the base so that we destroy the teleporter’s machinery and then extract our friends from there!”

  Daniel stared at the array of switches and gauges of the cockpit, contemplating the path of action.

  “I agree that it’s risky....”

  “More than just risky. It’s really like a shoot-the-person-to- save-him kind of rescue.”

  “I completely agree, but it’s the only way! We don’t have enough people to defeat the Jargantaans, and you’ve seen how advanced their warfare is. Nor do we have the time! We endanger many lives but in order to save the Earth and our comrades in such a narrow timeframe, we have to use brute force. Desperate times call for desperate measures!”

  “You can drive this thing? Properly?” he asked me, unsure.

  “Yes,” I lied. I had flown the craft for only one day, yet the fact that I could operate it was enough for now. My instinct told me that I would be able to pull it off and I resolved to cast all doubt to the back of my mind. This was the only way to protect the planet. If it didn’t work... my mind went blank as I faced the windshield and activated the drill.

  “I have a GPS,” Daniel said loudly over the shuddering noise of the powerful corkscrew. “The location of the citadel is here,” He showed me LCD display.

  I triggered the thrusters and the craft moved steadily into the sandstone, cutting it as if it were powder.

  “Turn to the right,” Daniel commanded and I obeyed.

  “A little to the left. That’s it. Now we are directly facing the citadel.”

  “Then off we go!” I said and turned the thrusters to full speed. The soldier widened his eyes just before he fell down and rolled back. I grabbed the control desk with my nails and avoided falling. The ark sliced through the underground stone and moved at blinding speeds through the subterranean darkness. We had no idea whether this would work out.

  The GPS lay on the floor. A rapidly moving arrow indicated our position with respect to the red dot of the citadel. From the distance, I predicted five minutes until impact.

  * * *

  Vivek’s story

  Alexandria, Egypt

  March 16, 2017, Thursday, 1110 hours EET

  Vivek tried to wriggle free of the heavy metal-like handcuffs, but he couldn’t even move his hands. The blue cuffs moulded themselves over his hands like a layer of hard solidified cement. Yet, the cell they were all locked into was a traditional iron- rod cell carved into the rocks. Vivek could see Kiyoshi sitting in his cell just opposite Vivek. The old man’s face was creased with mortification. In the dim light of the bulbs hanging from the jagged rocky ceiling, Kiyoshi looked even more wretched and withered with age. Vivek could understand the source of his embarrassment: a man living his last years in the glory of a dream that he believed would come true, but it never did. Vivek made eye contact with the old man who immediately cowered deeper into the shadows of his cell, just as his goal slipped away from his grasps after the outright humiliation in front of his countrymen. Vivek craned his neck to look left into the corridor of prison cells. Through the doorway, he could see the gigantic torus shaped teleporter lying horizontally, on top of a receptacle, surrounded my conduits and heavy, complex devices, displays and lever systems. The blue lights on the body of the torus and the wires running though it started to glow with an increasing intensity. In the span of a minute, the wide ribbed pipe would spew out enriched silicon and sand at enormous speeds and drain the earth of almost a fifth of its mass. The ground was already rumbling and that, Vivek knew, was the beginning of the end.

  * * *

  Mathias’s story

  Alexandria, Egypt

  March 16, 2017, Thursday, 1112 hours EET

  All of a sudden, the rumbling sound of the slicing rock amplified and the climax happened when the ark burst through the landmass into the murky waters of the Mediterranean, unscathed and still moving in its line of motion. The jolt again sent Daniel and me grabbing for handholds. Both of us got back up to see the windshield first slick with mud and then wiped completely clean by the water rushing past the glass at breakneck speeds.

  “You are sure we are headed the right way?” I asked him without moving my eyes from the greenish blue waters, a little scared that the ark would not hold and would get flooded up. “According to the GPS, we are,” he said, showing me his handheld display. The small distance left between us and the citadel was closing faster every second. I looked up and through the cloudy water emerged the submerged harbour. I angled the ark’s drill downwards, aiming for the bottom of the landmass where I knew was the teleporter. Both of us braced for an earth-shattering impact.

  * * *

  Vivek’s story

  Alexandria, Egypt

  March 16, 2017, Thursday, 1113 hours EET

  The lights on the body of the teleporter reached the pinnacle of their strength and Vivek noticed a slight distortion appearing over the teleporter. The machinery and devices beside it started to vibrate, emitting a deep drone that seemed to tear everyone apart. He looked at Lifana in the adjacent cell. Her brows were furled, concerned about the future the present would create. She was starting to doubt the action of the Asurian council, battling with the concept of saving her own civilisation by perishing another. Was this the right way? Migdur was standing behind the teleporter, looking around and barking orders frantically to his workers. The pipe over the teleporter began to bulge and contract with the weight of pressurised silicon. The resonation emitted by the teleporter suddenly became constant and an ebony sphere with swirling lights appeared at random and shrunk away into a space no one could see. The teleporter had charged up... and time had come to a stand still.

  The enriched silicon and sand however, had been bombarded with an anti-stasis concoction of particle beams. Even though every element, compound and the mixture of air stood still, the silicon was disgorged by the conduit straight into the void of the teleporter. Massive amounts of silicon. The Jargantaans had adjusted the speed to drain the planet of all the silicon in a day’s time, giving them enough time to escape through the same teleporter.

  In the next instant, a louder resonation drowned the teleporter’s and morphed into an explosion. Vivek fell down to the floor of his cell and grabbed the iron bars of the cell. Was this how the end of the world began? Where was his saviour? Would he also have to perish along with others? He looked at Lifan
a and the Technician, who were still impassive. They were Asurians and probably didn’t deserve a death like this, trapped in the world they were part destroying.

  Then, like a saviour angel, albeit quite destructive in its manner of entry, Noah’s ark burst through the rock along with a wave of seawater, tearing the pipe to pieces and landing on the other side of the cavern.

  Kapittel 65

  Daniel’s story

  Alexandria, Egypt

  March 16, 2017, Thursday, 1116 hours EET

  The metal and stone wall of the cavern was ripped to shreds by the spinning drill. Large chunks of stone, concrete and jagged metal flew everywhere but remained suspended in the air. As the ark breached the walls, its immense momentum launched it out into the air in a parabolic path. The large ark curved down towards the floor of the Jargantaan base, its drill met the thick conduit suspended over the teleporter: the pipe did not stand a chance. It tore like muslin cloth while the craft flew right over the teleporter and crashed on the other side of the cavern. The few Jargantaans who came in its way were sliced into countless pieces, their blood, a grim reminder of their existence, splattering everywhere—on the machines, apparatus and the frontal portion of the ark—and then getting covered by the broken rocks and dust to be gone forever.

  The drill plunged deep into the rocky floor and just as it was about to delve deeper into the earth, the machine calmed down. The drill remained wedged into the floor, leaving the rest of the craft jutting out at an angle, its rear end lifted almost fifteen feet off the ground. From a metal platform hugging the wall of the cavern a little below the first tier, five Jargantaans shot volleys of cold white orbs at the ark, freezing the strong wood before Migdur raised a clenched fist from the glass floor of the first tier. All the Jargantaans had their guns trained at the ark. Migdur scrutinised every portion of the craft.

  Suddenly, the stillness was broken by a hissing sound as the door at the back of the ark slid open.

  “I am unarmed!” announced a deep voice from inside while a set of arms slowly emerged from within. The Jargantaans shuffled a little on their feet edgily as many of them closed an eye and aimed their guns at a smaller target.

  After the arms came a bald head and then a face. Daniel looked at the teleporter which was still running, flummoxed. He still had his body from the neck downwards inside the ark, avoiding the influence of the stasis, barely feeling a paralysis in the upper ends of his hand.

  “Our entry seemed glorious... but I wonder why the teleporter hasn’t closed yet,” the soldier cocked his head, looking at the teleporter petulantly.

  “That’s because you missed the switch, baldie,” sniggered a Jargantaan soldier while jerking his chin at something to the right of the ark. Suddenly, a shadow fell across the alien’s face as he realised his folly after he received a smack on the head with the butt of another gun.

  The soldier turned and looked at the ‘switch’. It was about five feet tall and globed, looking like a gigantic egg set into the floor. It glowed an incandescent white with the smoothest surface the man had ever seen.

  “I see,” he said and in a fraction of a second, he whipped out two pistols and started shooting at the Jargantaans. Immediately, gunfire erupted and the cavern once again became a battleground with scores of white projectiles fired from one side and hard metal bullets from the other side, finding their way to their prey.

  In the midst of this confusion, Mathias hopped out of the ark and landed at the back of the teleporter, unaffected by the effects of temporal stasis except a slight breathing issue. He looked at the switch and instantly, visions of the poem in Mrs Dawson’s diary floated up in his head.

  The egg-shaped rock!

  Mathias knew exactly what to do. He ran to the rock and touched the impeccably slippery surface. Exerting as much force as he could, he tried turning the switch clockwise, but his efforts were in vain. He let go, breathing heavily before turning the other side. He shot a glance at the conduit which, although ripped, was still spewing out colossal quantities of silicon and sand, half of which was still falling into the teleporter at blurry speeds. Mathias realised in horror that even the quantity going through would be enough to reduce the mass of the planet significantly. He pushed again and this time, the egg budged. A little more strength and the switch swiveled slowly for a distance before coming to a stop.

  Suddenly, the rest of the sand fell on the cavern’s floor, creating a mountainous heap in no time before being stopped by the Jargantaans. The shards of rock and metal at the hole bored by the ark hurtled through the air, crashing everywhere and breaking several contraptions. The teleporter had been switched off, and the earth had been saved.

  In the prison cells, Kiyoshi stood up at the sound of a deafening explosion. He tried to get a glance at the source of all this noise, secretly thinking how he would seize any opportunity, should any opportunity arise.

  “That’s Mathias! That must be Mathias!” Vivek whispered loudly to Lifana who smiled back at him and look intently at the craft that, for others in the cells had appeared too quickly out of nowhere, but not for Lifana. She still gazed at the jagged pieces of metal that flew into the prison chambers, amazed to see the effects of stasis in another dimension which was not immune to it as Asurians were.

  “Daniel!” Hamasaki smiled with a twinkle in his eye as he gripped the bars of the cell tighter.

  “There he is!” Vivek exclaimed as both he and Lifana beamed with joy.

  No sooner had Mathias climbed the ark and balanced himself on the sloping surface of the back of the craft than a Jargantaan, taken aback at the sight of the staff and assuming it to be a potential weapon, squeezed down on the trigger in a moment of thoughtlessness and anxiety.

  In the next moment Mathias’s eyes widened as the projectile made its way to his chest, leaving a contrail of frozen particles behind it. At that instant, the staff glowed amber and his amulet glowed brightly before it seared through his shirt and released a beam of red light. The projectile melted away into nothingness while the beam struck the shooter. A cry pierced the air as the Jargantaan, now mortally wounded, felt the beam of light char through his chest, then his ribs, then his organs. The beam turned white and set the man ablaze, fire exploding out from every part of his body.

  All this while, Mathias did not move a muscle. In fact he stood still while his brain whirred. He looked at the amulet and felt full control of its mechanisms, even though he wasn’t aware of what exactly he controlled. He reminisced the first time when his amulet had done so, in Meerut. However, this time, it felt different. From the heat he felt from the staff, he deduced that the staff must be charging and concentrating the beam from his amulet into a shaft of deadly hot energy.

  The soldier stared at him in gaping wonder. He had led him to the fabled Noah’s ark and now blasted a cold Jargantaan alien to smithereens without batting an eyelid. For a second or two, the soldier wondered whether he should kneel down in front of the boy in humble prayer.

  Suddenly, all the Jargantaans holding their weapons started firing thousands of projectiles at the soldier and Mathias. In reply, Mathias’s amulet glowed even brighter and launched all encompassing beams of red light, melting the orbs and then targetting powerful beams of energy at every Jargantaan.

  As the battle between the hundreds of aliens and one amulet raged throughout the cavern, Mathias screamed at Daniel.

  “Try finding our friends and bring them to the ark!”

  Hitherto, Daniel had been staring at Mathias in unadulterated awe. He broke free from his trance and jumped down to the floor. Instead of solid ground, he landed awkwardly in waist-high water. The soldier looked up with a foreboding sense of dread and noticed the colossal hole in the cavern’s wall where the craft had entered. The seawater gushed through it with a volume and force that he had never before seen. He knew that soon, as large as the cavern was, the water would fill up the space. Not finding an escape route soon meant a watery grave for everyone.

  While
the soldier dived into the water to avoid being seen and swam away from the scene of battle, Mathias’s amulet exploded alien after alien and pulverised every white orb aimed at him. Although the amulet seemed to have a mind of its own, Mathias seemed to be consciously aware of its workings and occasionally controlled the beam to fall wherever he wanted it to. Mathias breathed heavily and marvelled at the power of the locket left behind by his parents. When all seemed lost, the faintest glimmer of hope had burgeoned, and Mathias knew that nothing could stop him from reaching Asr-Gawa and seeking out the answers lingering in his head.

  While the amulet burned the Jargantaans, he glanced at the hole the craft had bored. The hole vomited out humungous masses of aquamarine water. By now, the Jargantaans had to start swimming in neck deep water. Mathias knew that the shaft through which the Japanese had first entered was completely out of reach right at the top of the cavern.

  Suddenly, the ark creaked loudly and the anterior detached from the drill. The fuselage dropped into the water with a splash and bobbed up and down while Mathias fell on the roof of the craft, splayed out like a starfish. His amulet stopped firing beams of red and cooled down slightly as its owner was out of harm’s way, but it also remained warm, ready for any possible threat.

  While lying on the roof, Mathias noticed dozens of Jargantaans huddled together near a hole in the glass floor. Six aliens carried three sheets of thick metal while the rest of the Jargantaans rivetted and welded them together, sealing the hole in the floor. There was no opening left. This meant, as the following set of events ran in Mathias’s mind, that if this ground floor was flooded completely, it would be the end of them. The whole cavern would probably require half a day to fill but only this singular tier would take less than an hour at the rate at which the sea water was gushing in.