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| Generated by Google Workspace Labs text-to-image Duet AI software |
It was easier for Maqsud to transport people from one planet to another
while they were floating in water. Every choosing one had their little
quirks like that. Ramses packed up their pocket dimensional home, and stuck
it in his pack. Then they hiked to the nearest waist high body of water. It
took them most of the rest of the day, but they made it in time. The Krekel
authorities were acting like them having a week to get out was some kind of
standard deadline, but it didn’t sound like the smorgasbord of punishments
for Leona’s crime was any age-old tradition. None of the others they managed
to speak to had ever heard of anything like that. No matter. They had a way
off the planet, and no need nor desire to ever return.
A weird thing happened on their way to their destination. Well, two things
ultimately. Teleportation generally implied instantaneous travel, but that
wasn’t always the case. Sufficiently rapid transportation was equally
impressive and helpful. It didn’t even have to be a superpower to be worth
it. A hypersonic jet that could get from New York to London in under two
hours was still a useful advancement to the travelers of the 21st century.
Maqsud’s globetrotting ability took time. He still had to move from point A
to point B. He just did it a hell of a lot faster than anyone else could.
Not even Team Keshida’s FTL engine could match it. He offered the passengers
sunglasses to protect their eyes from the literal blinding light of the
journey, but Ramses said that they wouldn’t need them. Their new eyes were
designed to withstand the doppler glow.
By the time they got into the water, midnight central was approaching, and
by the time they had arrived on the next planet, it had passed. While it
only felt like a few minutes to them, the trip had technically taken a whole
year. Maqsud jumped to the future with them, which didn’t seem to bother
him, as long as it wasnt a permanent thing. Leona confirmed their suspicions
about the delay with her once-father-in-law’s special watch, then they tried
to figure out where they were. Maqsud’s ability was not very precise.
Actually it was when you thought about it a little. He could always land on
a planet, even if it was billions of light years away. He just couldn’t pick
a specific point on that planet. They could have been anywhere on Earth.
Fortunately, this group had abilities of their own. They could teleport the
rest of the way. At least they might have, but this wasn’t even Earth.
“Don’t you feel that?” Olimpia asked. “The gravity. It’s...wrong.”
“She’s right,” Ramses said, bouncing on the balls of his feet. “We’re too
heavy.”
“I don’t really recognize this plantlife either,” Mateo pointed out, “though
I would not have thought much of it if Olimpia hadn’t said something. I’m
not a biologist.”
Maqsud was concerned. “I aimed for Earth. That is where we should have
gone.” He looked around. “How could we not be on Earth?”
“It’s okay,” Leona told him. “We can all breathe, including you. Everything
else, we can deal with.”
Maqsud was growing more upset by the second. “This has never happened to me
before, except that time I took you and your other friends to Mars
accidentally. But that was one planet over. Which other possibility might we
have gone to that’s anywhere close to Sol, and still looks like this?”
Leona thought about it. “The best candidate would be Thālith al Naʽāmāt
Bida. It has a higher surface gravity, a breathable atmosphere, and tons of
life.”
“I don’t think that’s it!” Marie called down to them from a hill. “This
isn’t a planet,” she said after they all jogged up to see what she was
seeing. She was right. A ringed gas giant could be seen plain as day in the
sky. They were orbiting it on a moon.
“What is that thing?” Olimpia questioned. Some kind of energy beam was
coming out of the planet, shooting outwards to the side. Or maybe it was the
other way around. Maybe the beam was coming from elsewhere, and shooting the
planet.
“Is that from a Death Star?” Mateo asked.
“No, it’s a Nicoll-Dyson beam,” Leona whispered.
“What is that?”
“It’s...it’s basically a Death Star, except it’s powered by a real star.
Someone out there is trying to kill whoever lives on this moon.”
“Why would they shoot the planet, and not the star?” Angela questioned.
“Larger target. It will eventually destroy everything.” She sighed. “I’m not
too terribly familiar with the concept, because I don’t much care for
weapons, but the way I understand it, we should be dead by now. It should
happen in a matter of minutes. For whatever reason, it’s low intensity,
resulting in a delayed—but inevitable—reaction.”
“Can we do anything to stop it?” Mateo asked her.
“If we still had a ship?” Ramses asked rhetorically. “No. Without a ship,
definitely not. The best we can do is...” He trailed off a short time to
look over at Maqsud, “...get the hell out of dodge.”
“We can’t do that yet,” Leona said, shaking her head.
“She’s right,” Mateo agreed. “We have to help these people, if we can.”
“What people?” Marie asked. “I don’t see any people. There could be billions
of them on the other side of the planet—or moon rather—for all we know.”
Ramses dropped his bag on the ground, and started sifting through it.
“Lee-Lee, I happen to have a high-speed spectrographic camera in the lab.”
“Yeah, I’ve seen it. I could try to use it to estimate the beam’s progress.”
“Yeah,” Ramses concurred as he was taking out the pocket dimension
generator. “While you’re doing that, I’ll send up a satellite to detect
human lifesigns. Let’s just hope they are human, because it’s not calibrated
for anything else.”
“We just need one cluster of humans. Hopefully they’ll be able to tell us
what’s going on here,” Leona replied. After he opened their home, she
followed him into the lab, and came out with the equipment they needed.
“How are you going to launch that?” Maqsud asked. “You have a rocket in
there too? I’ve seen some advancements in my day, but...”
Ramses smirked. “I’ll take it up there myself.” He winked, and disappeared.
“You can breathe in space,” Maqsud imagined.
“No,” Mateo answered. “But we can hold our breaths for a very long time.”
“Actually, you don’t want to hold your breath,” Leona began to try to
explain.
Mateo cut her off. “He doesn’t need the details. We wanna help, though.”
Leona handed him a bag. “Figure out how to get this tripod open. I need to
read the manual on the camera.”
As Mateo was removing the tripod from its case, he started to hear a beeping
sound in his comms device. It sounded like morse code. Everyone but Maqsud
stopped to listen. “It’s Ramses,” Angela translated. “He spotted
civilization a few thousand kilometers from here. He’s still going to launch
the sat, but he thinks one of us should check it out.”
“I’ll go,” Olimpia volunteered.
“As will I.” Mateo held onto the plastic ring on the tripod, and jerked it
downwards to make the legs pod out. “This is done.” As he was taking
Olimpia’s hand, Marie slipped her own around his other one.
Maqsud then took hers. “I need to feel useful.”
The four of them jumped to the coordinates that Ramses relayed to them. It
was a laustrine community, not particularly advanced, but not the old west
either. The place appeared to be abandoned, but rather recently. Bicycles
were left scattered on the sidewalks. A few vehicles were stopped in the
middle of the road, doors left open. Mateo climbed into one, and found a
radio. “Hello? Is anyone there? This is—”
“You’re not talking to anybody,” Marie said from the passenger side. She
adjusted the knobs for him. “All right, Try again.”
“This is Mateo Matic of the...of the Team..Matic. Can anyone read me?” He
asked the question only one more time.
“My God, it’s good to hear your voice, Mister Matic. This is the Mayor. Are
you in the town?”
“We’re in a town, at least. “It’s by a lake.”
“There’s only one,” she replied. “We’ll send someone up to get you.”
“Did you recognize her?” Marie asked.
“No, but that doesn’t mean we never met.”
As they were climbing back out of the car, they could see a little girl
running up to them from what looked like a recreational center. She didn’t
get too close before she stopped. She urgently waved them over to follow
her, so they ran to meet her halfway. She led them into the building, and
then down some stairs, which led to an elevator. They took it down several
stories. They were in a bunker of some kind. People were lining the hallway.
They looked dirty, tired, and scared, but hopeful at the team’s arrival. It
was unclear whether it was actually a good thing yet, since they no longer
had a ship, but they still didn’t know exactly what was happening.
The little girl took Maqsud’s hand and continued to lead them deeper into
the underground facility. They reached a set of double doors. A small crowd
of people were standing around a table. On it was a map. “Thank you for
coming.” It was the woman from the radio; the Mayor. “Did someone send you,
aware that we were in trouble?”
“They didn’t send us directly,” Mateo explained. “Though they may have
interfered with our transportation somehow.” He couldn’t help but let his
eyes drift towards Maqsud.
The Mayor noticed this, and looked over at The Trotter to size him up, and
his peculiar clothes. “Are you Maqsud Al-Amin?”
“I am. Honestly, I was just trying to take them from Worlon to Earth. I
don’t even know where we are.”
She nodded. “So you’re not here to rescue us. You’re just here for your
son.”
“What? My son? I don’t have a son.”
“You do,” Mateo corrected. “He’s about as famous in our circles as you.
We’ve never met him, though. I guess I would have thought you would know of
him, even while he would have only been born in your future.”
Maqsud was shocked. “You’ve known this whole time. Who is the mother?”
Mateo shrugged his shoulders. “I would have no idea. I can’t be sure if
you’ve conceived him yet, or what.”
“Do you think Senona brought us here for this?” Olimpia whispered to Mateo.
He really didn’t think so. It felt like Senona’s job was done. Someone else
was aware of Maqsud’s connection to this place, and the team was incidental
to that end. Whether that meant they were a bonus or unfortunate collateral
damage was yet to be seen. “I think it’s just the latest in a series of
people who have tried to control our lives,” he whispered back.
Maqsud redirected his attention to the Mayor, who frowned at him. “I know
who she is, and where they both are,” she said to him. “They live in another
sector.”
“First,” Marie began, “are you aware that there is some kind of laser trying
to destroy the planet that you’re orbiting?”
The Mayor sighed. “Yes. That is a little gift from the Exins.”
“The who?” Mateo asked.
“The Exins,” she repeated. “Our ancestors once belonged to them, but they
broke off, and fled to this world. The Exins didn’t like that, so they fired
a weapon at them. It’s taken hundreds of years to get here. None of the
refugees are still alive today, nor are the people who retaliated against
them. It’s kind of stupid, really. We’ve been trying to figure out whether
there’s any way to survive it, maybe by being on the opposite side of the
planet at the time. There is another bunker like this one, but it’s not
quite at the antipodes. Again, we don’t know what the severity of the
destruction will be, or when it will happen. This all may be a waste of
time.”
“How many live on this moon?” Marie asked them.
“Roughly eleven thousand,” the woman answered. “We were excited to hear that
you had arrived, but we shouldn’t have been, should we have? There’s no way
you can save us all, even if we had years to wait.”
“We’ll be right back,” Mateo said. He placed a hand on Maqsud’s shoulder,
and teleported them back up to the surface. “How many people can you take at
once?”
“All at once? On dry land, half a dozen. In water, twice that much.”
Mateo took out his handheld device, and opened the calculator. “And how many
can you do in a day, assuming they’re in water?”
“Um...one trip every few days.”
“That’s, like, four years.”
“Yeah, dude, I can’t save all of them. I doubt I could even save all the
children.”
“Mateo, can you hear me?” Leona asked through the comm disc.
“Yeah, I’m here. We found a town. They’re living in an underground bunker
right now. They’re aware of the weapon.”
“It doesn’t matter how deep they go. There’s a reason this beam is taking as
long as it is. A sudden explosion would vaporize the moon. The people who
delivered it want the residents of this world to experience prolonged
suffering. In a few days, the toxic gasses from the planet are going to rain
down and poison the atmosphere of the moon. It will become superheated, and
break apart eventually as well.”
“Ramses’ camera told you all of this? How do you know the intention behind
the weapon?”
“Because the person who ordered it is here, having evidently detected our
arrival.” Leona replied. “He calls himself Bronach Oaksent.”
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