“Hatrak?” Nopileos whispered, stunned. Something I him screamed for him to come back and stand by her, but another voice in him demanded that he focus his attention on Zhi: the warrior had ventured into the first waves and now stood, despite his water shyness, ankle-deep in the lake.
“Die, creature!” he cried, and raised his spear to throw.
Seven and twelve… seven and twelve… Protect me! Almost instinctively, Nopileos raised his claw and formed the sign that Hatrak had taught him some wozuras before. Zhi hesitated in surprise as the saurian held out the gesture; he paused only for a sezura, but that smallest moment was enough for Nopileos to fall backward into the water, and with a mighty push of his claws, leave the shore far behind. Zhi’s spear penetrated the surface of the water almost two lengths behind him and sank ineffectually to the lake bed. The last thing Nopileos noticed from above was the loud screech of the fighter planes landing on the shore, whose engines fell silent a moment a few sezuras later. He soon heard only the rhythmic gurgle of the water, with which he brought an ever greater distance between himself and the island with every stroke.
He had escaped Ghus-tan, Family Rhonkar, and the torture rock, and last but not least, the Patriarch of Chin, but he felt no triumph. His emotions were in a bright uproar, and his thoughts were dominated by something completely different.
Hatrak, he thought incessantly. Hatrak!
Chapter 21
You know, even Paranids know music. Pretty horrible music, really, but all the same! We were invited to a guest performance in the name of the Pontifex twice. You know, that would never happen with the Split. They hate music. Utterly! And that’s why I don’t trust them as far as I can throw them.
Debrona Tsielka,
Purrshinghedds (Guturra vocals)
Towards the end of the third tazura of flight, a messenger drone from Chin t’Thhg, the Patriarch, arrived. The content was just as brief as it was clear: Chin sent an escort to accompany the FL Raindragon from the edge of Split territory to Nif-Nakh. Uchan made the sign of “confirmed expectation” with three curved fingers. “One will want to come on board—what else would an escort do?! But I will not allow that.”
Elena nodded. “We can let them speak with Ghinn. They’ll respect her authority.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” Uchan answered doubtfully.
In the evening of the following tazura, the FL Raindragon transitioned from Teladi territory to Split-controlled space. Elena sat next to Uchan in the cockpit as the ship gently fell through the blue energy storm of the jumpgate. The Halmnan Aurora shimmed sensationally in the colors of the rainbow, yet it didn’t glitter brightly, it pulsed darkly and mystically. The central star systems of the Split lay in the middle of the thickest nebulae of the huge interstellar cloud of dust that in the distant future would condense into a cradle of new, young stars.
Elena checked the gravidar, whose display had been diverted to a large projection screen by Kalmanckalsaltt. The solar system didn’t show the signs of teaming traffic that was characteristic of the Teladi sectors traversed by the FL Raindragon over the past two tazuras. But it wasn’t dead, either: two dozen smaller and medium blips were tracking vectors that carried them from one jumpgate to the next, several stationary installations circled the four planets visible from this angle. After some mizuras, three points appeared on the monitor and approached the FL Raindragon in flat parabolas. At this point the optical telescope was already able to resolve the white triangles on the screen into detail: three destroyers were adjusting their speed with flaming reverse thrusters. Uchan was duly impressed. These battleships were fast and maneuverable, but they had only been used for a few mazuras. The Patriarch had sent the best that was available to welcome them!
The crafts formed an isosceles triangle with the FL Raindragon in the geometric center, and from then on always kept a distance of just a few thousand lengths. They never came closer and also didn’t try to make contact. Uchan felt an irrational desire to confuse the warship pilots by simply breaking out from their course, but he held back. He could do such a thing if he wasn’t on assignment and working for credits! Two further jumpgates and seven stazuras later, Nif-Nakh appeared as a tiny green point on the sensors. Ghinn t’Whht, who had stayed in her makeshift room almost the entire flight, came to the command center and took a position to the right of Uchan t’Scct. She held onto the back of the unoccupied navigator seat with both hands and preferred not to sit down. The Patriarch’s consort had wrapped herself in a splendidly glittering robe that fell smoothly from her and the whose wide hem was only a hand’s breadth above the floor. Her features were completely neutral, the corners of her mouth were semicircular and revealed no emotion at all. And yet, a wavefront of tension seemed to emanate from the tall woman. Elena’s gaze fell involuntarily to Ghin’s hands, their knuckles white from clinging to the back of the chair.
The Earth spacefarer unconsciously chewed on her lower lip. An idea had been working in the back of her mind since talking to the Split woman, leaving her conscience in no doubt: the Patriarch would have the woman executed after the birth of his son, she had no doubt. And she, Elena, would be responsible for it. Could she exchange Ghinn’s life for Nopileos’s? No! It was certain that her saurian friend would be against such a deal. But hadn’t Ghinn decided to return to Nif-Nakh on her own? Elena, sitting in the copilot’s seat to Urchan’s left, rose. Whatever happened, Ghin t’Whht could count on her help.
“It’s time to prepare the skimmer.”
Uchan looked over his shoulder and made a movement with his hand. “So be it.”
Kalmanckalsaltt, the silent Paranid, typed a few commands into the input area of his standing console, then wordlessly joined Elena.
In the narrow hangar of the FL Raindragon, a tiny dinghy which bore the name Dragon’s Son on the sides in Argono-Roman letters, crowded against a silver two-man glider with a dome roof and a small, hexagonal floating platform. As the bulkhead hissed to admit Elena and the Paranid into the hangar, they were first greeted by a barrage of startled clicks. Nola Hi had already arrived in the hangar in his environmental suit and anchored various equipment in the storage area of the floating platform with locking clips.
“Oh, the funny, hairy, and aesthetic star warrior from the mystical, arcane, and peaceful sector of the blue Earth! Welcome, Ele Na!” he shouted pipingly at the newcomers. “And the outcast of three-dimensionality, stinger in the countenance of Bashra, unholy of the Xaar, counterproductive blasphemer and commander of the Hatikvah Free League, Lord Captain Kalmanckalsaltt!” the Boron intoned in the enthusiastic inflection of a little girl who believes she has said something particularly clever.
The long, convoluted titles that Paranids were in the habit of giving themselves, demonstrated their penchant for cheap showmanship, but also spoke to the Boron sense of annoying finickiness and repetition of words. Ordinarily, unholy creatures were not allowed to place the titles of the Three-eyes in their mouths; however, because the two-eyedness of Kalmanckalsaltt made him unholy, this didn’t apply, and Nola Hi used the opportunity to demonstrate that he recalled the complete, intricate wording.
The Paranid acknowledge the salutary greeting with a sweeping upward movement of his head. The two good and one bad eye looked toward the ceiling in parallel.
Elena sighed. Sometimes, especially when he was scared, the Boron could be refreshingly brief. She hoped that Nola Hi would be in a constant state of anxiety during the coming stazuras. Paranids, on the other hand, were used to discarding their theatricality when a dangerous situation required it. And it would be dangerous, that much was sure.
“Everything ready?” she asked in lieu of a greeting. The Boron confirmed. The tracking devices had already been loaded with the CEO’s information. The floating platform could almost automatically locate the area over which the Nyana’s Fortune had most likely gone down. After that, a taster of Boron design would be used, an instrument that was capable of tracking the trail of any li
ving thing by its genetic signature—for up to two mazuras depending on the intervening weather conditions. The taster was programmed with the genetic fingerprint of Nopileos’s brother Sissandras: Teladi egg-brothers were genetically identical copies. If the device was programmed for one, it would track down the other as well.
“How long will we need to find the crashed yacht and the Teladi?” the Paranid wanted to know.
“At a guess, a few stazuras,” Elena butted in on the Boron to prevent him from giving his best, inflated sentence structure. At least, she hoped it wouldn’t take much longer. If it took much more time, she would have to come up with something to delay their departure from Nif-Nakh. On the other hand, if one gave belief to Ghinn’s words, the Patriarch would cause them time-consuming difficulties anyway.
“Uchan will drop the Raindragon down to about 19 lengths at a slightly excessive speed, then he will make a strong reverse thrust with the ion engines for one second. While this resembles the forceful landing of a hooligan, but that’s not terribly uncommon. At least for a Split.” Elena smiled. Not just Split, but also a certain Teladi preferred this type of landing. She continued, “The result is an electromagnetic impulse, which will mask the floating platform—if everything goes according to plan—and let it leave the ship unnoticed to reach the jungle near the landing field. At best, we’ll have two sezuras to do that. Maybe three, if the imaging devices of the Split have to recalibrate after the EMP.
“We are well acquainted with the details,” Kalmanckalsaltt commented on Elena’s commentary. “Let Uchan t’Scct know that he should go as close to the jungle as he can.”
“Uchan is just as familiar with the details,” Elena smiled. “Good luck. And be careful! And find Nopileos!”
“And above all, the data and information of the funny Ancient Ones!” added Nola hi. He climbed onto the floating platform, whose artificial gravity almost completely canceled out that of his environmental suit. The Boron presented a strange image: with his four main tentacles, he clung to the braces as if his life depended on it. In fact, the platform’s machines would cushion any acceleration perfectly. The Paranid took this circumstance into account: he gracefully boarded the small hexagon with a small step and held a dramatic pose like an oversized figurehead. Elena looked at her infobracelet. There were only a few minutes until the landing.
Nif-Nakh filled almost the entire cockpit window. Only at the edges could you still see a bit of black space, but no stars, because they were drowned out by the brightly shining planet. Festering Wound, that was the name of this world when translated into the trading language. The globe was covered over with a dark green coat of jungle, with only a few wisps of cloud covering the view. The two blood-red oceans, however, stood in stark contrast to the green of the world’s jungle: they looked like dangerous wounds that a predator had torn into an otherwise thriving organism. Nif-Nakh was world that was completely in its natural state. There were no settlements apart from the Patriarch’s country estate and seat of government, there were no settlements. No industry existed and therefore no infrastructure. For many decazuras already the Patriarchs of the Split had resided on this planet, and as different as they were from each other, none of them had ever attempted to urbanize Nif-Nakh. Somewhere in there, in their rough interior, the Split respected the powerful nativeness of this world, Elena recognized as she glanced over at Uchan from the corner of her eye. The pilot went about his task with the usual concentration, but his eyes shone as she had never seen from him before.
Now the FL Raindragon turned so that the universe and the gentle curve of the wide horizon were once more visible together. The ship wasn’t designed to land aerodynamically, and therefore had to expend large amounts of fuel to climb and descend vertically. Normally, craft of this size avoided planetary landings, most of them didn’t even have the capability to do so. The video screen that transmitted the downward-facing camera showed nothing but dense, dark green. Only when the ship passed through some thin veils of cloud and continued to descend were they able to make out the sprawling clearing far below, in which the Patriarch’s palace rose out of the red lawn of the clearing that stretched out in front of it. Elena’s hands snapped involuntarily to the back of the seat: the descent was way too fast for her taste! Already you could make out the enormous stone structure and the landing field in full detail. The ground raced up at them with a lunatic speed, it almost jumped in her face! Ghinn t’Whht, on the other hand, who sat at the navigator’s station at the request of Uchan, seemed calm, almost made of stone herself, as if none of this were happening. Elena released her fingers from the seat back. The overly speedy descent from the sky was part of the plan; she should trust that Uchan t’Scct knew exactly what he was doing!
The computer was instructed to catapult the floating platform with Kalmanckalsaltt and Nola Hi out of the hangar before the final ion boost. On the projection field which flickered a half height above the instruments, she saw the Boron, still crouched on the platform in the same cramped position as five mizuras before. The Paranid had closed the bulging helmet of his combat gear and looked like a gigantic insect that was ready to pounce, only with a fishbowl on his head.
Flames blazed outside the cockpit window. Elena winced and looked up. The landing field! Jungle! The palace! Another hundred meters. Sudden stop.
The downward motion echoed through her for a moment; she swallowed the slight sensation of nausea and concentrated on the picture she saw through the cockpit window. She knew the environment. She had already been here once. The memory came along with a swell of barely processed emotions. Somewhere in the ship’s fuselage, whining generators ran down. In the hangar sat a thin exhaust cloud. The floating platform was gone. The FL Raindragon landed!
Chapter 22
Wherever you go, oh colleague, Ianamus Zura will always remain with you!
Gonareos Ianusis Jolandalas IV,
Member of the Artist’s Guild
As dawn began to cast small, silver patterns on the water, the Teladi’s nictitating membranes and eyelids sunk and provided him a rest for a while. More awake than asleep, Nopileos had spent most of the previous night floating, with his eyes wide open and looking backwards on the lake.
He had watched the stars in their paths through the firmament, and ruminated over Ghus-tan and the Family Rhonkar. Also about Hatrak; he was almost ashamed that he was thinking more about the fate of the Split girl and her kin than about Elena’s. “The creature that drew the word of war across the sky,” they had called him. They had shown him respect, and that was much more than a Teladi could have ever expected from the Split. And yet, they would have killed him without batting an eyelid.
Nopileos was shaken from his thoughts as a powerful but cool wave struck his back. He blinked and opened his eyes. The sun stood as a small, bright disk on the horizon. One of those large fishes passed sluggishly beneath him, and he knew by now that they belonged to a kind of lungfish that had been released here long ago. The peaceful creatures always adapted to their environment: living in a small pond, they were only medium sized; here, in a massive lake, they grew to a size of over five Teladi lengths.
Yesterday evening, Nopileos had circled the island on which the village of Ghus-tan was located at a suitable distance. He only occasionally had to stretch his head out of the water to catch his breath and orient himself. From Hatrak’s stories, he knew exactly which way to go if he wanted to find his spaceship again. Strange, how apathetic he was to the Nyana’s Fortune by now—but no, he could never think that way, as long as there were friends who counted on him: Teladi, Borons, Argons. Elena Kho. And there was his still-to-be-founded non-profit organization! No. No chance he would give up! Nopileos straightened, sunk under the water, and thrust off powerfully with his spread swim webs.
The jungle had him again; crackling and rustling everywhere, screeching animal sounds from near and far, occasionally the calamitous trumpeting of a ghok. Nopileos shook off some reddish, translucent drops of water, cl
imbed the embankment that was overgrown with red grass, and plunged back into the oppressively hot jungle atmosphere of the young day. He swallowed a dull feeling in his stomach. Was that fear? Only a few lengths deep inside the jungle, which became more massive as the distance from the water increased, a colossal tree stretched up high. So huge was the giant that at its foot, the Teladi looked as inconspicuous as a tiny rodent. Nopileos stopped in front of the offshoots of an ancient, winding, aerial root. With his head all the way back, he looked up along the unusually smooth trunk until the view disappeared high in the beginning of the crown of leaves. Go around or climb the roots? He thought hard. Hissing softly, he decided on the latter and dug his claws resolutely into the tall tree rout, which rose in gnarls ahead of hi. He pulled himself up vehemently against it, slipped back a bit, reached for it, balanced himself over the highest point of the root, and finally slid down inelegantly on the other side.
“Straight ahead and no more detours!” cried Nopileos as he made his way through the thick scrub at the foot of the redwood tree. “No stops in clearings, and certainly no incidents with anything that glows more than I do! Tsh!”
So he put one clawed foot in front of the other, time after time, hiked laboriously through the undergrowth; where he couldn’t break though it, he stumbled with aching claws over roots which, hidden in the foliage, just seemed to wait for him; he climbed ponderously over tree trunks and even some large moraines that resembled the torture rock in Ghus-tan. He soon lost all sense of time; the dense foliage only here and there left a direct ray of light, not enough to deduce the time of day. At the very beginning, Nopileos had to wrestle each further step; later he fell into a trance, which made it difficult for him to interrupt the exhausting fight against the jungle at will. He didn’t stop until after an inestimable amount of time, as usual, darkness fell over the jungle.
Nopileos: A novel from the X-Universe: (X4: Foundations Edition 2018) (X Series) Page 18