His voice drifted as a cloud of brownish-red gas hissed from the canister, passed in front of one of the screens, pulled itself together into a fist, and smashed into the face panel on Rahman’s suit.
The young sergeant gasped, tendrils of hydrogen and helium pouring into his throat and nose. The arm elongated, the gas formed a shoulder, neck, the outline of a face, and then smiled at the camera, Rahman’s corpse floating behind it.
The tanks exploded. Hundreds of gaseous beings swarmed the remaining team, tearing through their suits and bodies. Their miasmic forms changed dynamically, limbs without bodies, heads floating in shifting colours, anthropomorphic elements appearing and disappearing in a flurry of violence. More of the beings made their way into the ship’s filters, and soon Captain Wu began to feel light-headed from helium.
She scrambled for the hyper-space transmitter, ‘Kublai Khan to Earth! Kublai Khan to Earth!’
Major Perng’s familiar face appeared on the screen. ‘Captain Wu!’ He smiled, ‘Congratulations! We were expecting you to-’ His smile faded.
Wu looked behind her.
A tall, humanoid shape towered over her, its eyes an image of the Great Red Dot, its body the swirl of gases of the planet, and launched a fist into her throat.
She felt the oxygen sucked out of her, her lungs burning dry, held mid-air by the creature, and thought, Now, this is a story, and died.
Major Perng watched Wu’s body fall through the being as it marched towards the transmitter. It looked directly at him, its face firmed, forming features with a broad nose, thick lips, and almond shaped eyes. It grinned at Perng and said: ‘We were expecting you sooner.’
#
“One thing that worried me, was that all the books that I read about astronomy, whenever they mentioned the history of the subject, there was always one part missing. It was the participation of Africans in astronomy,” who said these words?’
Teacher Rakoteli pointed at the floating letters of blue-purple argon drawn against the yellow sky and the smouldering grounds of Fida. Impervious to the blinding gusts of superheated sulphur billowing through the children of her clan they shot their hands up to answer her question.
‘Thebe Medupe!’ a little girl answered, her hair glowing red and gold with neon while her body shifted in tones of brown dust broken by faint traces of water vapour.
‘Very good Seynabu,’ Rakoteli answered, though her eyes glowing a moment of purple reprove, her body and hair a uniform brown of dust held together with opaque traces of carbon, ‘but you spoke out of turn. No points for you.’
She pointed at a distracted young boy, dissolving into the storm and rebuilding himself of random elements billowed by the wind, a little lava mixed with greenish-blue gas mélanges.
‘Olumele!’ she snapped.
‘Yes, Teacher!’
‘Does what Thebe Medupe said matter anymore?’
‘No, Teacher!’
‘And why is that?’
‘Because,’ he said, dissolving completely, his voice floating over the class ‘now, we’re everywhere-’
‘Apparently, it still matters,’ a melodious baritone interrupted Olumele, who reappeared in a blast of nitrate. The voice came from a being of pure flame, emanating waves of intense cold, an ice cube dancing in his eyes.
He ran his hands through the boy’s flickering hair, the mix of gases crepitating to the flame, looking at Rakoteli who bowed her head. ‘Why humble yourself, Rakoteli?’ he asked. ‘You are Okyin Afi. Fida is yours to rule, I’m just a passer-by on your humid planet.’
‘You’re always welcome, Ogotemmeli,’ she said smiling. ‘Fida isn’t humid. Feel the static on the storm. Don’t you miss the tremor of wind on your ball of ice and flame?’ she teased, dismissing the giggling children who disappeared in puffs of vapour.
‘I wouldn’t have it any other way,’ he said, letting her wrap her gases around his ice-cold flame, freezing and melting over him. ‘The duality of Awukuda is the duality of life,’ he responded, laying a hand on her floating waist, absorbing some of the storm to sustain him on the planet.
‘Why are you here?’ she asked. ‘You seldom come anymore. Our drumbeats sound empty without your song.’
‘I’m sure others have come to perform here,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ she said, smiling faintly. ‘And you haven’t answered me.’
‘Ha! I wish it were to make children laugh and parents cry, but I’m on official duty.’ He’d missed Fida he realised. It was a world to his liking. Warm and angry. He had missed her too, fleeting though her form may be. ‘What Medupe said six hundred years ago, might still matter.’ He exhaled deeply, crystallising the air before him. ‘The Okyin Yaw has called all the High Griots to discuss the intrusion on Yawda.’
‘I know this.’ Rakoteli said, smiling faintly.
‘Yes. That’s why I waited for your High Griot to leave. I shouldn’t be here, but...’ he hesitated, they knew each other from old, and his heart didn’t lie. He was a storyteller, and he would tell her any tale she wished. ‘It’s one of my... instincts.’
‘The Xam you rant about?’ she laughed. ‘Ever since you’d trail your father peddling arcane tales, you’ve had these hunches. Well, out with it.’
Ogotemmeli smiled. Xam was always his burden. His and the other griots. ‘The Osrane are venturing into space.’
Rakoteli’s body shifted colours, gaining and losing elements—grey to green, to grey to blue, to a dark black, raging like the storm around them.
‘But the Benadan have deflected their probes for a century... No matter, they can’t harm us anymore,’ she said firmly, though betrayed by her shifting body.
‘Perhaps,’ he said, changing to warm ice, flames dancing in his eyes, soothing her with his heat. ‘We shall see what the Yawdan say.’
He turned back into flame. ‘I have to hurry. I’ll return on my way back to Awukuda, with stories for the children.’ The flame burned stronger, sucking all the cold into itself, shrunk to the size of a pebble dancing on the gales, and shot into space.
#
Where the hell do they land? Chief Technical Officer Kiania Hui Bon Hua-Figuerido thought, watching the black-breasted grouses fly by the windows of her company helithopter. The birds’ hazel wings blended with the dusty air swirling around the aircraft, the clouds filtering the sun’s bright rays to mud, only the vibrant red of the grouses’ combs marked them against the streaking particles.
The birds were from the forests of Upper Yangtze, but there were probably more trees and ponds in Beijing than anywhere in the Republic. It was hard to believe there were any left at all.
One of them slammed into her window, its face splattering against the glass. The darkened window reflected her slanted green eyes over her light-brown skin, and the bird’s blood seemed to stain her teeth. She looked a killer—she felt like one, even though she wasn’t, yet.
‘We’ll be landing in ten minutes, CTO, lots of dust in the air.’ The pilot’s voice rang through the speakers.
The thopter broke through the clouds and over Beijing.
Metal and concrete spurted from the soil. Buildings twisting and screeching like angry lianas, barring the earthy sunrays from the streets. Two-hundred and fifty million people living like roaches, and roaches living like kings. The avenues spreading from hundreds of circular plazas disappeared into a horizon barely a few blocks away.
She could see small parks, rare, tiny bursts of greenish-brown, with sickly veins of dark blue water, out of place in the ravenous beast of sewers and sweat.
The merger had gone ChinaCorp’s way, but she missed her home and the old Han Industries Headquarters in Rio, the city’s hills, and the headless Christ, his arms open over the industrial bay.
‘Landing, CTO.’
The thopter hovered above ChinaCorp HQ—three square miles of dragon-shaped spires and smooth, slanted, reflective walls; inviting the monster of the city to look itself in the eye—and landed on the central helipad, marked�
��國公司 of China Corporation in a cartouche.
A junior executive came to greet her as she stepped down from the machine to heavy gusts from the thopter’s wings. ‘CTO Figuerido!’ he screamed over the beating wings. ‘CEO Hans Chang would like to hear your report immediately! He’ll meet you in your lab!’
Kiania’s lab embarrassed her, but Chang walked in before she could clean off the dozens of vials and diagrams covering every unoccupied surface.
‘Always up to something, CTO.’
‘The war doesn’t wait, Sir.’
‘Never been righter, Kiania,’ he said heavily, looking around at the clutter. ‘Did your research dig out anything we can use? Fifty years, CTO. We can’t afford another loss. You know this better than most.’
Indeed, she thought.
‘So, what do you have for me?’
Kiania pressed a button on a console in front of her, opening a panel on a balcony overlooking a soccer field-sized glass box containing a large lump of gold under a thin cannon attached to the ceiling. She hit dials on the console, and the cannon shot a narrow beam of red matter into the metal.
‘See?’ she said, ‘When you ionise the beam, it vaporises the metal...’
The metal bubbled and exploded into small to microscopic particles, until it was undistinguishable from the air in the box.
‘Check the screen CEO. The gold is actually still there and when the beam vanishes...’
The beam snapped back, and the gold reformed itself.
‘That’s what we use for satellite mining. But now, if I modify the gravity pull by just this margin...’
She pushed a small button.
The beam hit the gold. The lump bubbled again, but as it exploded it shot up directly into the beam, the screen on the console registering no trace of Au in the box at all. Chang smiled.
‘I need a few more days to finish the prototype and work on the red matter. I need to enhance it, and-’
‘I think a field test is in order, don’t you?’ he asked rhetorically. ‘What would be your suggested target?’
‘Well. It’s something for your Chief Military Officers to decide, but Jīnxīng will be in closer orbit than it will be for two years. We should move fast, CEO.’
#
‘So? They’re sending their fleet to Fida?’ a voice boomed from a being of pure methane, icy smoke flowing down his neck in a boubou. ‘They have sent warships to every planet in the system for fifty years... Every year was another Yawda.’
‘It’s a very large fleet, Karamata,’ Djenaba, the Okyin Amene, interjected, interrupting her High Griot, her methane smoke body broken along her neck by icy ammonia forming intricate necklace patterns down to her waist. ‘Perhaps we should send troops to Fida.’
Sitting on the floor, Ogotemmeli watched the exchange silently. In the fifty years since the intrusion on Yawda, the Osrane had lost millions of lives, their best technology consistently overcome. Yet he felt the weariness brought on by Xam, the tug of the previous lives passed on to him, and the holes in his memory. Something was off, but he couldn’t name it.
He let his mind grow blank, looking at the palace Djenaba had called to life on the rings of Menmeneda, drawing together the dust and debris into a hut of blues and browns, colourful bits of stones forming each of the dignitaries’ home worlds spinning along the walls. A courtesy for visitors from non-gaseous worlds, even the ice giants of Yaada and Aabada appreciated it, looming over the room like massive pillars of living ice.
‘I agree with Kara,’ Abeba, the ruler of Yaada said proudly, her indigo head looming over the circle, delicate braids of methane hydrate reaching into it. ‘Rakoteli’s a relative on my mother’s side. If she needed our help, I’d have heard it first. She didn’t bother to send her High Griot, I wouldn’t worry.’
The attendees nodded, they would call on relatives first, but again Ogotemmeli had doubts.
‘What can the Osrane do to us that they haven’t done before?’ Tiwonge, the Okyin Bena and angry ruler of Benada, said dismissively. ‘ChinaCorp tried to kill us once and look at us now. They tried to drain Yawda and would probably do worse to the other worlds. Four hundred and fifty years. They’ll never learn. They can only make us even more powerful. If they attack Fida they’ll be crushed. We should let their wave smash and go on the offensive.’
‘They can always kill half of us again,’ Ogotemmeli heard himself say out loud. ‘Then half of what’s left.’
Tiwonge threw him a glare, her reddish, dusty skin pulling together into a rocky carapace.
Ishimwe, Awukuda’s Okyin Aku, laid an icy hand on the flame of his shoulder, melting and dousing each other in a blur. ‘You’re the oldest among us here, Ogotemmeli. Speak your mind.’
‘Easy to speak when Awukuda is too close to Akwesida for the Osrane to reach,’ the Okyin Bena snapped.
‘It’s interesting that since the conflict started the Akwesidan have not made their presence known.’ Ogotemmeli said. ‘They’ve... changed, since becoming pure energy. Perhaps there is something they see that we don’t.’
‘Further proof that we’ve nothing to fear,’ the Okyin Yaa said.
‘Or not,’ Ogotemmeli said and rose. ‘I’ll seek their council, with your permission.’
Ishimwe nodded. ‘You have mine,’ she said.
Djenaba nodded as well, while Abeba shook her braids, and said: ‘Why not? I trust my cousin. The Akwesidan advice couldn’t hurt.’
Tiwonge fumed.
‘I’ll return shortly. On my way, I can observe the Osrane fleet. If anything’s amiss I’ll contact the soldiers on Benada, with your permission Okyin Bena,’ said Ogotemmeli.
Tiwonge nodded grudgingly.
Ogotemmeli pushed his head to Okyin’s and vanished from the hut.
Ogotemmeli paddled his fishing boat of space dust along the solar winds. He liked the boat; the motion of the paddle soothed his mind. It was meant for the open seas, and there was no wider sea than this.
There was something horribly off about this war. The Osrane were foolish, but perhaps his people had been too, before the red matter had shot from the satellites and modified their ancestors’ cells. Perhaps when they were trapped in flesh, they’d had bigger dreams and smaller hearts.
And yet, here they were. The other planets owed Benada a debt for keeping the Osrane subtly at bay, but if they destroyed Earth, they would turn their backs on everything they’d stood for. They’d changed so much already.
There was a piece of his father that had been passed on to Ogotemmeli when he’d dissolved into the universe. His mother had followed soon after. He was the finger and she the string, and just as many times the opposite. Their atoms had needed each other. Perhaps he didn’t let himself get close to Rakoteli for that reason. Perhaps he was a coward.
Some of the memories must still be there, all those who’d died when the sky had burned red, those who’d been scorched into the ground. Xam.
He drifted closer to Earth’s moon. He was almost a hundred now, his cells wouldn’t last much longer, fifty years maybe, but the planet had decayed since he’d seen it as a child. The heavily colonised moon, with its protective iridescent dome, artificial lake, and intricately connected towers, shone in stark contrast with the scars seared into its mother planet. The large expanses of blue were gone, shrunk to gigantic lakes, barely visible through the brownish vortexes, open air mines, and tentacular stretches of urban metal.
They’d been wise to leave. There were other worlds out there.
Ogotemmeli felt a pang of sympathy at their mad rush to pillage the rest of the system. What would he do? But something was missing. Not the water, not the ice caps, not the... the Fleet!
He let the fishing boat dissolve, and melted, bouncing from atom to atom in a mad dash to Fida.
The last of ChinaCorp’s fleet appeared, but the battle already raged. A dozen battleships were falling from orbit towards Fida, burning against its outer atmosphere. Geysers of lava reached out of others, disaggre
gating and reforming in space dust. The Fidan army was fighting, but they weren’t winning.
Hundreds of battleships blasted red rays at the swarming darts of rock and gas, and every time they hit the Fidan, their particles stood apart, shrunk, and vanished.
The red matter? What have they built, they’re... killing them. In fifty years, his people hadn’t suffered a single casualty.
Five destroyers lay hidden in clusters of battleships. Ogotemmeli sensed a sharp increase in energy, and one of the destroyers fired. A thick ray of red matter shot towards Fida, boring through the golden atmosphere into the planetary core.
Ogotemmeli roared. Rakoteli! His voice echoed soundlessly, his cells burned with rage, and gathered space dust in thousand-mile towers.
ChinaCorp. Feel the bite of your dragons!
The towers turned into giant, winged snakes, their jaws growing and crashing into the ChinaCorp ships.
His own cells stretched and strained with effort. A few exploded. He gathered more space dust to compensate, welding random atoms into his own.
ChinaCorp ships exploded and went out. The Fidan warriors saw help and redoubled their efforts, slipping into engines, and draining them before melting the ships’ hulls.
Ogotemmeli took out dozens more. The serpentine shapes closing in on the four destroyers getting ready to fire. He cut through the first two, then the third, the battleships disappearing into the energy propelling his dragons.
The last destroyer fired.
The thick red ray connected with the first cracking the planet’s surface into ten thousand puzzle pieces momentarily glued together with magma like a purulent wound and, exploded.
The shockwave sent a ripple through the surrounding fleet, vaporising it instantaneously. Ogotemmeli dissolved, allowing the wave through him, the release of gravity replenishing him. He would feel the other Fidan doing the same soon and hear them laughing at the Osrane.
But the void was silent. Rakoteli’s voice was nowhere to be found, her students were gone. The daring little boy and peevish girl. They were gone. All of them.
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