Aurona, page 61
“Wow! A lottta wotta, huh?”
“Yes,” Duron chuckled. “A lot of water. And for that very reason, a great debate arose: while Zeran had abundant seas, Aurona was mostly desert. After lengthy discussions, they decided that it was in our planet’s best interest to drain Zeran’s water and fill our own oceans. They pumped it through processing plants to remove all the salt. Then…,” he paused, his voice swelling with pride, “they transported the entire ocean.”
Adam let out a low whistle. “Whooee! How’d you guys manage to do pull that off? It must’ve been a huge project!”
Duron was on a roll now, positively beaming. “Yes, yes, it was! After removing the salt through micro-osmotic filters, breaking the hydrogen and oxygen’s molecular bonds and isolating the two resulting gasses, they devised a unique and economical way to transport it. Reducing the volume under tremendous pressure and ultra low temperature, they formed small, solid pellets. Long chains of space barges transported them down to Aurona where they were reassembled back into fresh water. As it poured into our vast reservoirs, they mixed the salt back into it once again. It took hundreds of years to supplement our existing oceans and achieve the resulting greening of our planet.”
“Wow! What an incredible feat,” Adam exclaimed. “But … what about Zeran?”
Duron lowered his eyes. “Ah, yes: the small planet. This is very hard to say, Adam. Before the, ah, final parting, we were left with a small, silica-based sphere, a dried husk of its former self.”
The crew suddenly caught their breath in alarm. Adam’s eyes narrowed. “Come again? This story’s startin’ to have an awfully familiar ring to it….”
“How could that be possible?” Duron tilted his big head, puzzled. “I am positive we have not revealed any of Zeran’s secrets to you!”
Adam glanced at his crew. Everyone’s hands were spinning impatiently, making hurrying motions. He turned to Duron, his hands repeating the same gesture.
“Well, it appears that I really need to finish this story, and quickly!” Totally bewildered, Duron paused to gather his thoughts. “And so I will, in all honesty.” He tuned to the assembly. “Ah, there was a dark side, a very dark side. As Adam knows, we had planned to blast the small planet out of orbit, but as we were completing the construction of our big guns, a far bigger problem had been developing….”
This story was starting to hit really close to home. The crew began to murmur, their eyes questioning. Adam subtly laid a finger across his lips to silence them.
“A group of shell creatures had discovered a gravesite containing some of our early workers….” The old Bandor paused, shuddering visibly. “And-and they ate the remains! It seems that by simply ingesting this decaying Bandor flesh and thus the elements of our Rasheen, their genetic codes quickly became unraveled: they evolved and started to grow at an exponential rate! Why, they were even developing a form of intelligence, just like our Razahs and Spyrins!”
There was absolutely no doubt now. As the crew stared at Duron open-mouthed and dumbfounded, the old Bandor turned quickly to his young protegé: Adam was shaking his head and sputtering, trying to form his jumbled thoughts into words. Like a concerned parent, the old Bandor laid a slender palm on his arm. “What is it, my son?”
“It-it just can’t be,” Adam stumbled, searching for the words. “I-I don’t know how to tell you this, or how it’s even possible….”
The Elders leaned toward him in alarm, sensing his emotional distress.
Adam blurted it out. “We were there!!”
Duron couldn’t understand. “Yes, Adam? Where?”
“We were all on Zeran! We know where your third moon is!”
It was the Bandors turn to be shocked. Their eyes widened, pondering the impossibility, the tremendous odds of these young humans ever coming across their hurtling, arid white sphere. Suddenly, Adam’s words and powerful mind-pictures burst into their minds, flowing like a raging torrent. They were helpless, and could do nothing but close their eyes to watch and listen as he babbled.
“Zeran’s still alive! It’s been caught in orbit inside a small solar system, halfway to the Earth. I called it the ‘Obelisk Planet’ because of the enormous shell monsters: they’ve gotten to be over a thousand feet high, guys, and they dig wide swaths through a white crystal surface to feed on millions of these, ah, seaweed-like fronds. And intelligence? That’s an understatement! The oldest and biggest obelisks jammed my starship’s controls by either telepathy or telekinesis or both and pulled us toward Zeran to force us to crash! Yes, guys, they wanted the starship to break up so they could … eat us!”
The crew was nodding vehemently in affirmation.
“They didn’t count on the planet’s soft surface, though; the starship just cut into it like butter and got buried. Honestly, guys, the ecosystem has evolved far beyond your wildest imaginations. I saw this crackling aura of electricity reaching out like tentacles for thousands of miles into space! Wait, wait, here’s how we got away….”
As he beamed out a particularly vivid string of mind pictures, his grandfather and the Elders marveled at his sparkling ingenuity and creative problem solving, using only the materials at hand.
“That’s how I finally figured out how to use the wind itself to uncover the starship,” he concluded. “Oh, and by the way,” he added, “when it rose out of its big crater, I noticed that you guys didn’t get all the saltwater, some of it was left in the bottom of the hole…,” he paused, making a rustling sound.
As the Elders opened their eyes, they saw him rummaging through his hip-pack and yanking out the contents. Shortly, he pulled out a sketchpad and a tiny holo-viewer, holding them up in triumph. “Ta-daah! Proof!”
Duron regained his tongue. “What-what is that small object, please?”
He smiled brightly. “A 3D camera!”
“You took pictures?”
“Lots of them! And I made some sketches, too! We brought back quarantine jars from the Obelisk Planet … oops, I mean Zeran. The jars are real, guys: you can pull out the contents and examine them anytime. Hey, wait a sec! I’ll back up this little gizmo a bit….” He excitedly pressed a few buttons. “There, take a look!”
As he passed the viewer and sketchpad around, their expressions changed from astonishment to wonder and then to fear. Duron shuddered. “Yes, those are definitely shell fragments from the monsters and your drawings are remarkable, but-but the question remains: how could it be? Zeran must be light-years away from us by now!” He pondered a moment, and then sat up straight in his chair. “Well, in view of all this indisputable evidence, I, for one, believe you. It must be so!” As he crossed his arms firmly, the Elders bobbed their heads.
His grandfather had been listening, conjecturing and putting his own thoughts together. “Adam,” he interrupted quietly, laying his hand on his arm. “Believe it or not, I think I might have a way to help you figure out these mysteries.”
“Huh?”
“Right before I put myself to sleep in the pod, I’d finally finished work on a huge project. I’ve retrieved the, ah, star of the show…,” he paused, rethinking his wording. “I’ve got a tiny, pointy gizmo back in my lab. It should clear up this whole long, complicated sequence of events. We gotta be careful with it, though; it’s very delicate and, ah, quite radical.”
“Radical?” Adam’s eyes glowed eagerly. “Let’s go!”
He chuckled, pulling him back down onto his chair. “Whoa, slow down, boy!”
“Why?” He blinked. “You said….”
He stared at Adam pointedly. “First, pick a few people to come along as witnesses. We gotta fly in your new Phantom Cruiser,” he added cryptically. “It’s an integral part, and the only way to get where we’re going.”
Chapter 33: WARPING TIME
“Just a sec, almost got it…. There!!”
Maneuvering precisely with his thrusters, Adam lined the Phantom Cruiser up directly over his grandfather’s surface dwelling. As he patched the dome’s amazing gold-washed electric-blue image down to the crew’s monitors, a gasp of astonishment erupted out of the surround sound.
“W-what?” Duron sputtered. “What instrument does that, Adam?”
He paused, thinking. “Actually, it’s a group effort, kind of an AI-generated….”
“But Adam,” he interrupted, “it took decades for us to construct this first working prototype. Hundreds of our brightest Bandor specialists were involved in the long, difficult task and they were working from extremely detailed technical drawings. That-that feature was nowhere in their plans!
“You’re right,” Adam agreed, “it wasn’t. But somehow, when I crank all the external sensors up high, the Cruiser’s built-in AI weaves the schematics together into some kind of synergy, and then…. Oh, we’ll talk more about it later.” He parked the Cruiser in a rock-steady hover, and then popped open several landing platforms.
“Hey, Grandpa, you ready down there?”
There was an answering chuckle. “You bet, boy! Hey, come to think of it, I’ve been waiting for this moment for hundreds of years!”
Adam thought a moment. “Oh. Right, gotcha,” he said, grinning. “So, let’s skedaddle downstairs to your lab. I wanna take a look at your mysterious gizmo.”
As the SpeedSled parted the last of the vine-covered branches, the old man’s eyes widened. He stood up, lifting his dark glasses a moment to look around. “Good grief, Adam, you were right: the tree’s enormous! That settles it. Before we go any further, the first thing we’ve got do is to pull that monster off my roof! My force field’s strong, but not that strong!”
Adam looked up and raised his hands. “Wait guys, wait!” Above his head, the long chain of SpeedSleds sleds wobbled and then paused in their slow descent. “Here, Grandpa, take the controls for a minute. I just remembered that I’ve got three, ah, helpers in one of the cargo holds. I gotta call ‘em out…” As he closed his eyes in deep concentration, the puzzled group landed, slid off their SpeedSleds, and began to walk slowly toward the damaged structure.
There was a sudden whoosh of thruster jets above them. The crew looked up to see three massive utility barges shoving their way through the tangled canopy. As the featureless rectangles descended and hovered next to the fallen tree, they could finally make out the cargo on top: two heavy-duty robots and a large laser cutter. They glanced back and forth and then at Adam, their eyes questioning.
“Hey,” he motioned with his thumb. “Those badass dudes got the chops! They’re itchin’ to go to work!”
The mighty machines revved up. Locking their mechanical feet into matching brackets on their barges, the bots lined up on either side of the trunk. As the laser cutter adjusted its cutting length and shot out a blaze of light in the middle, they worked their way downward, slicing and flipping away huge sections of logs like matchsticks.
His grandfather could only shake his head. “You’re kidding me, boy! Tell me you’re not directing all this with your … with your….”
Adam grinned, tapping on his forehead. “Yup! Just usin’ the old noodle!”
As the last sections of logs flew away, the big, rubbery dome popped back up into shape as if it had never been damaged. Gathering strength, the force field returned in a crackling aura of light, haphazardly whipping off branches, forest litter, and brightly lit lizards. They ducked and flinched through the onslaught, holding their hands protectively over their heads. In a few minutes the big dome settled, alive and brimming with energy.
“Well, I’ll be…,” the old man breathed excitedly. “Home, sweet home.”
Adam could contain himself no longer. “C’mon, c’mon, let’s go take a look!”
His grandfather grabbed his arm. “Cool your jets, boy! That force field could fry you this time around! I gotta beam out my entry code!” As he waved his wrist programmer, the shimmering gold particles parted like a curtain. With his long robe fluttering behind him, the old man entered and walked briskly toward the far wall. He slid a tall bookcase aside smoothly to reveal another thin, twisting passageway winding through the jungle.
Kron peered over his shoulder. “Ah, another pod room, sir?”
The old man paused, thinking. “You’re close. Let’s just say there’s a different form of suspended animation in there; more like the stuff dreams are made out of.”
The long, twisting passageway ended in a large, brightly lit dome. The group filed in and stopped short, their feet squeaking on the rubbery floor. A large, mysterious object was sitting under a flimsy covering in the middle of the room. With no other entrances, how could something that big have gotten in? Their eyes turned to the old man.
“Okay, okay,” he said, grinning. “This dome was my first sample, an actual, working prototype of my AnchorPlank system. It turned out so well that I lived in here while I expanded the rest of my complex.”
Their eyes kept darting back to the mysterious object.
“Oh,” he teased, “you wanna know what this is?” Ever so slowly, he reached for the edge of the covering, his fingers twitching tantalizingly.
Adam threw up his arms in exasperation. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, lemme help you!”
As the group broke into laughter, they all grabbed the edge together. Yes, that was their Adam, back in the fast lane. They counted to three and gave a collective yank. The flimsy cloth disintegrated into a cloud of threads, drifting to the floor. Silence fell. The bare skeleton of a hollowed-out spacecraft sat propped up on triangular metal supports. Was this some kind of an experiment in progress? All around the perimeter, cluttered workbenches brimmed over with jumbled parts in various stages of disassembly.
The old man swept his arm in a big circle. “Well? Any guesses, boy?”
Adam grimaced. “No, Grandpa, you couldn’t have! You didn’t!”
“Yup,” he shrugged. “This empty shell used to be my speedy little TimeWarper.”
“But-but….”
“But what? How else could I have uncovered all its hidden secrets? And believe me, boy, there were a lot of ‘em! Without this huge, long-term reverse-engineering project, I wouldn’t have been able to dream up any CAD drawings for your…”
“No!” Adam interrupted. “You designed my amazing Phantom Cruiser!”
Nodding enthusiastically, Duron and the elders caught Adam’s eye. The rest of the group could only stand there with their mouths hanging open, studying the old man in a new light.
“Hey,” the old man shrugged, reached up under his hood, and tapped on his forehead. “Just usin’ the old noodle!”
There was a long pause. “Wow,” Adam whispered. “That’s really usin’ the old noodle! But not that I had any suspicions”; he winked, “the Cruiser has your name stamped all over it!” He paused again, searching for the right words. “But, um, I think I’ve got to dig deeper between the lines here, Grandpa. There’s something else submerged under all this tech stuff: something huge, something way more important!”
“Oh? And that is…?”
“It’s-it’s kinda hard to explain.”
“Go ahead, take a stab. I think I know where you’re heading.”
“Okay, here goes.” He took a deep breath. “Is there a chance, a remote possibility that you knew the Elders would end up giving me the Phantom Cruiser, and once I got it you knew I’d be able to weave your enhanced AI sensors together to produce those new, hi-res color schematics?” He stood on his toes, leaning right up into to his face. “And here’s the Big One: you knew I’d use those incredible graphics to find you sleeping here in your pod?”
He winced, grinning sheepishly. “Ya got me there, boy.”
“But … how?”
“It wasn’t hard. I had the missing piece.”
“Huh?”
The old man pondered a moment and then answered Adam with a question. “You’re familiar with an object’s X, Y, and Z axes in space, right?”
“Ah, right. So…?”
“So I left a small gap in the command center’s circuitry. It’s hidden behind the main monitor in the flying bridge.” He turned around and stared pointedly at Duron, looking over his glasses. “It’s supposed to fit the, ah, missing piece…,” he prompted.
The Elder reacted with a start. “W-why yes, you are correct! There was a strangely-shaped opening!” Duron stuttered. “Our engineers could not explain why it was left there, but they followed your plan to the most precise units of measure. What is it?”
The old man held up a finger. “Wait a sec.” He walked over to a bench, rolled back the long sleeves of his robe, and slipped on a pair of heavily insulated gloves. Slowly, carefully, he slid a small object out of its protective box and held it high over his head for all to see. “This little gizmo,” he explained, “is the missing piece. It generates something totally radical, a new force. I call it the ‘W’ axis.”
“What?” Adam started. “There is a fourth axis?”
The old man nodded. “Yup. I pulled this tiny assembly directly out of the saucer, with no changes. It’s the main ingredient, the ah, shall we say, star of the show. In honor of my little saucer, I’m calling it the ‘Warper’: it totally alters the perception of everything we know, changing the finite to infinite.”
Tola’s eyes popped. “Whooee! So now we’ve got four axes? W… XYZ? All those science fiction writers I debated when I was an editor weren’t just guessing?”
“Nope. This is a large-scale Quantum Field Generator. It distorts both time and space.” The old man turned the glowing object over in his gloved hand, contemplating. “So let’s go plug this little sucker into the Cruiser and give it a spin, whaddaya say?”
The saucer rose swiftly through the atmosphere and pulled away from Aurona. Up in the flying bridge, Adam watched his grandfather punch a code on the main monitor’s glassy surface to release a few hidden latches. As the huge, curved, floor-to-ceiling screen slid silently aside on hidden rollers, he took a short breath and stepped behind it. In moments he clicked on a small pin light and let out a loud whoop.
