“Maybe I should just follow you,” Nopileos whispered hoarsely. “Could be you know what’s up.”
On a break after a long march, the Teladi overcame the oppressive premonition that he would also have to spend this night in the jungle. And the next, and the next after… So long that either a jungle dragon or these larvae caught him, or he died of thirst. Nopileos was near to giving up but a thought made him endure: meaning! Everything that had happened must have had a meaning! He looked down at himself. There were the holes made by the insect larvae, but the other injuries had slowly faded and the affected scales were nearly back to a healthy color. He hadn’t survived all of that just to perish and die on this insignificant jungle planet! What about the planet Ianamus Zura and his non-profit organization? Was Elena still alive and well? No, he didn’t want to die here! So many suns were still in front of him, all the adventures that were still left to be experienced!
“Profit, no!” he hissed determinedly, and his voice echoed far through the jungle. A squeaking ball of fur erupted at his feet in a swirl of leaves and disappeared with a rustling in the nearest bushes. Nopileos sniffed the air as he got underway again, always behind the dragonfly.
Later, as he had fallen into a mindless routine, the daylight began to fade. He didn’t notice it until the buzzing dragonfly, which sometimes hurried on ahead, sometimes lingered, developed a pale, barely-visible halo. Fear crept over him, but he bravely overrode it. If he just avoided the clearings, perhaps no jungle dragon would cross his path? One thing was as clear as his reflection in a brand new spacecraft: he would not be allowed to stop, settle down, and sleep, no matter how long the night lasted. He remembered the vile larvae of the last dark period all too well.
Night broke quickly over the jungle. It was pitch black at first, but his sensitive eyes could see many details in the remaining light now that he was not panicked. Later, as the moons rose, it became somewhat brighter. The lively daytime sounds of the jungle faded little by little, and the rustling of foliage and the occasional cracking of branches echoed far and eerily through the dense rows of trees. All around him, glowing night insects awoke. Nopileos quickened his pace as some of them slowly floated down from above, hanging from threads that occasionally shimmered in the weak, fluorescent light.
All of a sudden a yearning trumpet sounded loudly through the forest and drove terror into the horrified Teladi’s forehead ridges; he began to tremble, but he continued his march with determination. The answer to the fanfare came from close range; it was no less yearning and powerful than the original call. Somewhere across to the right, not too far from Nopileos, a green light gleamed through the forest, just visible from the corner of his eye. Didn’t it also smell like burning? He tried to concentrate on something else. He had learned a song from Elena on one of their shared adventures, an ancient lullaby from her home planet, that was so beautiful that the Argon sang it in the Community of Planets for many hundreds of years. Alone, to hear the reassuring sound of his own voice, he began to recite the first couple of verses of the piece as far as he could remember. But Teladian voices didn’t lend themselves to singing! After some growled attempts at reconstructing the melody of the Stardust Symphony, he gave it up.
He was hungry! But there was nothing to eat. He probably couldn’t digest anything that grew and lived in the jungle anyway. It was a truism that any species could only safely enjoy what sprouted naturally on their respective home planet or what they artificially created specifically for their own needs. All attempts to eat something else usually ended in moderate to severe cases of poisoning, as the organism couldn’t do anything useful with the alien proteins and absorbed them incorrectly.
The Teladi was torn away from the steady routine of his footsteps and momentarily pushed his hunger-fueled deliberations aside. Something had changed! He stopped and instinctively raised his snout to take in the scent with wide nostrils. It smelled different than before! The dull forest smell revealed a new place, and it was not the smell of a smoldering fire! His saurian nose twitched as a fresh breeze drew by. Where was the dragonfly? He looked around, but couldn’t spot the animal anywhere. It was no matter, the refreshing breeze came unmistakably from ahead and became more intense as he headed in that direction. His steps became faster and faster; fatigue, fear, and hunger were all but forgotten. Finally, he broke through the last bush and pushed aside one last fern frond.
Nopileos stepped out into an open area that was not a clearing, but the bank of a huge lake whose calm waves gently lapped against an embankment that seemed artificial at first sight. As Nopileos approached the water, he saw that the embankment was made from several strata of eroded but naturally grown shale rock that stretched several Teladian lengths from the shore to the water. Over the lake calmly stood two pale moons, one of them as a full disc, the other waning. For a moment he wondered how this effect was achieved and whether or not the third satellite would also appear during the night. But then he discovered the dragonfly sitting on on of the tree trunks jetting out from the shore and dipping its sucking stinger into the water. What a great idea! Nopileos was not just hungry, but also extremely thirsty! Although… He could not recognize the color of the water at night, but all the bodies of waters on Nif-Nakh were red, even the oceans. This lake was definitely many times larger than the one he’d crash landed in two tazuras ago, but would make no difference in regard to its color. Water was the same everywhere, but the red suspended material, whether organic or mineral, could be poisonous to a Teladi. But without the condenser, he had no real choice than to see what happened. So he went down to the shore, waded into the water up to his neck, and took a cautious sip. The water tasted bitter, but not unpleasant. For safety’s sake, he wanted to drink only a little, just enough to assuage his thirst. Gurgling, he let the cool liquid, which also numbed hunger a bit, run down his throat. He looked up. In the space of the few mizuras since he spotted the lake, the two moons had moved a considerable distance, both at different speeds, but without changing their full or waning status. Odd.
Oh, and there—his eyes straining to try to penetrate the dimly moonlit night—somewhere ahead, far out on the lake, near the nightly horizon, he spotted dark contours that blocked the actual horizon. Could that actually be an island?
Nopileos slipped onto his back and rocked gently with the little waves to watch the moons in their paths. The water felt pleasantly cool on his scales. The hunger vanished. The overused limbs didn’t hurt anymore…
… suddenly it was pitch black. The moons had set. He opened his eyes wide. Even the dragonfly appeared to have taken off. He couldn’t find its pulsing light anywhere. He had fallen asleep for some time, rocked to sleep by the calming motion of the water. Before Nopileos was fully awake yet, bursting noises sounded out. Something crashed loudly and with brute force through the border of the jungle, which ended only a few lengths from the lake’s shore. The Teladi suppressed a frightened sound as the landscape was bathed in a sickly green light. One of the massive jungle dragons had apparently lowered itself to the banks from the air only a moment ago, and now used its bent feeding tail to pull on a thin tree trunk which shook and cracked in an alarming fashion. Another trunk had already been knocked over by the animal. The beast glowed supernaturally and attacked the jungle with a fury as if it wanted to plow down the entire forest.
Out on the water, the terrified Teladi, with his head now just sticking out of the water as far as his eyes, had not yet been noticed by the animal. Nopileos didn’t feel the slightest need to draw attention. He made a cautious turn to retreat farther out onto the lake, but something streaked past just under his body and washed him in a brief but powerful underwater wave. “Yellow salamander pie—” the startled Teladi cursed, pausing in the middle of the word. The half-finished curse carried audibly, far across the lake.
Chapter 7
If truth be a crimson cloud, who is able to bend it?
Lar Menelaus,
Ambassador of the Queendom
&nb
sp; When the AP Nikkonofune lifted off from the airfield on the ICSCS tower to make its way to Seizewell, Elena couldn’t shake off the feeling that she had missed something important. The conference had ended without Somancklitansvt responding to the Boron objection, and nobody—not even Senator Steen-Hilmarson—seemed to see a reason to ask for a debriefing. If you looked at it carefully, the entire extraordinary meeting had been nothing but a farce that was intended to prevent a possible, future loss of face for the Pontifex. But what role did the Boron play in this story? The aquatic creatures had been genuinely indignant over Somancklitansvt’s proposal; to Elena that was beyond question. She was almost certain that something fundamental, but very subtle, must have escaped her. Perhaps she simply lacked the deeper background knowledge about the relationships in the Community of Planets.
The last layers of the atmosphere flickered past the cockpit and the sky first turned dark blue, then black. Stars appeared and grew into wonderful, alien constellations. On the gravidar, a tiny, washed-out spot appeared, which held parallel to the AP Nikkonofune.
Elena sighed. “Niji, that shadow blip is back again on the gravidar. Can you identify it? Is there a malfunction?” The onboard computer responded in the negative to both. “All right. Then recalibrate the gravidar.” Niji did as he was told, and the ghostly signal disappeared. “We’ll just have to live with this disruption, eh, Niji?”
“I can ascertain no disruption, Major Kho,” the onboard computer insisted. Elena shook her head and remained silent.
The next three tazuras were completely uneventful, and the Earth astronaut felt into a dull, bleak rut which greatly affected her mood. It wasn’t until the fourth tazura that the temporary end of her lonely journey became apparent. Elena didn’t even want to think about having to go all the way back to Argon Prime.
“Gate transit in six minutes,” Niji’s friendly voice pressed into her musings. Diffuse light shimmered through her eyelids. She blinked and slid down to the floor from her narrow but comfortable upper bunk, where she grabbed her USC flight jumpsuit.
“Well finally,” she murmured in the narrow passage to the cockpit, but then fell silent again as she sat down in the pilot’s chair. For Kyle, extended, lonely flights through outer space might be ideal; she, on the other hand, did not have the psychic constitution to withstand this burden over long periods of time.
Teladi Gain was the solar system that the AP Nikkonofune was about to leave. Elena remembered selling the coordinates of Ianamus Zura to a pretty confused but extremely ecstatic Teladi at the local trading station some time back. He had, without any effort on her part, raised his offer from the original five credits to 5,000, and with that, of course, had won the contract. Elena smiled. At the time there had been no means of reaching the legend-shrouded birth planet of the Teladi. Since then, however, the jumpgate routes had mysteriously changed, and suddenly the path to the homeworld of the saurian beings—believed lost for hundreds of jazuras—was open again, which, understandably enough, had caused the Teladi a great deal of excitement.
Elena checked all the important instruments with a routine glance, and looked at the rapidly approaching jumpgate. Visible only as a small hoop in the far distance, bathed in a sea of stars, it grew ever larger, until it finally filled almost the entire field of view, majestic and timeless. No one knew who was responsible for the construction of the stargates. All that was certain was that some of them were already several million jazuras old, and yet others only a few hundred. At the time, humankind itself had built only two jumpgates before discovering that the known galaxy was simply teeming with alien jumpgates; after that, further building of their own gates was halted, and the already existing, extraterrestrial ones were used.
The gate’s dimensional anchors captured the AP Nikkonofune. Blue sparkles began to twitch over the cantilevers on either side of the gate. They appeared to be electrical discharges, but were actually energy phenomena in the realm of singularity physics. The sparkles developed into branching sparks and finally into blue-white flashes that slowly built up into an energetic maelstrom in the middle of the jumpgate. In contrast to the Earth’s jumpdrive, the use of which was always associated with a certain dizziness, Elena felt no physical effect as her ship reached and broke through the artificial black hole’s rotating event horizon. The passage itself only took up a few picosezuras and could not be perceived by living beings due to its unprecedented briefness. But that certainly didn’t prevent the Three-eyes from absolutely insisting that they were capable of doing so.
The effects immediately before and after the space jump required a few sezuras, then left the spacecraft in the area of effect of the jumpfield, which immediately collapsed in upon itself. The procedure was always the same, each time equally reliable, always fascinating and dizzying at the same time. After a few moments, the gravidar finished its internal recalibrations and indicated the conditions of the space sector which had long been named “Seizewell.” Seizewell was commonly known as the home system of the Teladi. Only the fewest residents knew, however, that Seizewell was at best the saurians’ second home, and it would remain that way forever.
The gravidar identified two of the three jumpgates in the sector; the third was currently behind the sun from Elena’s position and was not visible to the naked eye or by gravidar. Only a handful of the many stations that made their way around the central star or its planets, according to the database, could be seen from here. Elena’s goal was located on one of these few, so Niji had the AP Nikkonofune set course for the station which bore the name Highest Price. As the ship picked up speed, a viewfield lit up above the console. The image of a green-scaled Teladi in the uniform of the Teladi merchant marines became visible. He possessed a pair of unusually piercing, orange-colored eyes, which by their color suggested middle age.
“This is Iomelaris Mohandeles Disamolos IX, Sector Control of Seizewell. Identify yourself, Argon.” Disamolos spoke in that sharp, aggressive tone that the lizards adopted when they used the trade language of the Community.
“Free ship AP Nikkonofune, I am Elena Kho, major of the USC, sector Earth. The CEO is expecting me.” She almost added “I hope, at least,” but refrained at the last moment. Only a few Teladi possessed a sense of irony. With a finger movement, Elena ordered Niji, her onboard computer, to transmit her authorization code to the control ship.
The Teladi briefly focused his attention on something outside the camera’s field of view, then said with a hissing accent, “Very good, Elenalassss Kho, you’re already exssspected.” Follow my ssssship!”
“Is there a craft anywhere near here? Elena asked the onboard computer as she snapped away the video image of the Teladi with her thumb and forefinger.
“Hai, yes sir, there is, Major Kho,” Niji answered eagerly. “I have located the source of the signal, and I am already following the Teladi ship.” Without being asked, the computer projected an orientation guide onto the cockpit screen, so that with its help Elena could finally recognize a point far ahead no bigger than the stars. At this distance, the Teladi shuttle distinguished itself from the background stars only through its nonlinear motion. However, within the following mizuras Niji brought the AP Nikkonofune closer to the alien spaceship until the tiny point finally took shape for Elena. Nevertheless, the onboard computer kept such a large distance from the Teladi cruiser that Elena could not make out details at any point in time.
The video screen reappeared something over twenty mizuras later and showed Disamolos’s waxy, saurian snout. “Oh valuable Elena Kho, we are going back to our sentry point and wish you good profits along your way!”
“Profit! And thank you!” Elena replied. The picture went out. The engines of the Teladi ship flared visibly as the spacecraft reversed and moved away. Not far ahead, the sluggish Ferris wheel of the Teladi trading post was already emerging against the flaming solar disk. Shortly thereafter, the station’s space traffic control signaled the AP Nikkonofune and assigned a landing corridor and a permanent l
anding bay—of course with especially favorable prices, as Elena was ultimately there by invitation of Company management.
The interior of the landing area that lead up many ship lengths was lit in the usual pale, bright green light which the saurians felt was distinctive. Elena waited for the landing carousel to push her ship to its designated final position and the supply cables were connected. She rose from the pilot’s chair and cast a curious glance around her: the landing deck was completely occupied. There were several of the strangely shaped, almost flightless-looking, Boron-type shuttles, an Argon minishuttle of an unknown class, as well as—Elena’s breath caught in shock.
There outside stood the Nyana’s Fortune!
Nopileos’s spaceship, gleaming silver-green, egg-shaped and in its full height of 25 meters! Elena opened her eyes wide and swallowed hard; she only closed her mouth again after a few sezuras. A strange feeling took over her and made her feel hot. Suddenly she was in a hurry to get into the airlock. The glass landing tunnel lift that took her to the top of the landing area couldn’t move fast enough for her. In her hurried run, she almost fell into the transparent gangway, where her gaze extended almost 100 meters down to the parked shuttles. Two more transparent bulkheads… she saw a couple blurry figures waiting for her behind them. The last door opened.
Elena jumped out into the trading station’s corridor. A young, slightly plump Argon with a green bun smiled at her and two lizards hissed, probably kindly, in greeting. One of them was old and red-eyed—certainly CEO Isemados. But Elena only had eyes for the smaller of the two Teladi. His almost cateye-yellow irises and the still rather narrow hexagons of his pale green scale armor betrayed that he was still very young. The Argon with the bun said something and held out a hand toward Elena to greet her, but the spacefarer from Earth ignored her.
Nopileos: A novel from the X-Universe: (X4: Foundations Edition 2018) (X Series) Page 6