It all began with the winking out of a single star. It wasn’t an important star, or one that was even readily visible to the peoples of the Earth. The regiments of lab-coated academia with their Heaven-aimed computerised telescopes paid it little heed, merely greeting this distant apocalypse with but a shrug of the shoulders and an obscure entry in an obscure astronomical journal that was, itself, soon consigned to the annals of obscurity.
It was only in the following years, when more and more celestial bodies were brutally snuffed out by some creeping death from space, that thinking caps were put on and more and more people began to notice. The darkness, spreading like some disease of oblivion, slinked its way through Betelgeuse, silenced the burning fusion of the Plough, eventually invading even part of Alpha Centauri, our closest neighbour.
Some scientists suggested that it was all due to the meanderings of some colossal dark cosmic cloud, coming right out of the pages of a Fred Hoyle novel. Others merely maintained that it was but another of nature’s great coincidences, and since almighty science had not yet recognised any sort of precedent, either theoretical or historical, it really was not worth talking about. Then of course, there were the Armageddon peddlers, who delighted in casting about vague assertions of some sort of celestial chain reaction that was destined to send our world breaking up into a trillion pieces of space flotsam. But, of course, nobody really listened to them. With the world only just crawling out of the mire of Third Great Depression, they had better things to worry about than some mere scientific curiosity.
Then came the falling stars. At first these merely shrieked across the sky-line, throwing aside sparks of emerald and gold, suddenly exploding as they began the process of penetrating our atmosphere, little more than a novel version of the aurora borealis for those who lived in warmer climates. However, as these continued relentlessly, a few managed to survive Earth’s shield of heat. Thankfully, these tended to land in unpopulated areas: the Pacific Ocean, Antarctica, the Sahara desert. An exception to this rule was Copenhagen, which became first in a long line of capital cities to need an extensive rebuilding program. The world’s best minds, meanwhile, converged on what fragments of these asteroids that had not been vaporised upon contact with the Earth. The interstellar missiles were made of a totally unknown and almost indestructible form of metal and, what was more, there was evidence of intelligent construction. Something or somebody was apparently sending these to Earth. But was it a prelude to some sort of invasion, as both generals and Danes believed, or merely an accident- sort of like the destruction of a rabbit-warren by a clumsy digger?
The clouds of radiation that began to drift through our solar system were next. Again, though, Earth’s guardian angel stood firm, and our galactic jewel was bypassed by the spectre of radioactive death. The Mars colonies, though, were not so fortunate, dying a silent, dusty demise, the new terriforming outposts falling silent, one at a time.
It was at 9.37, Eastern Standard Time, on April 12th 2021, when the first concrete signs of an alien presence could be felt. Picked up simultaneously across the globe, what appeared to be a massive swarm of interplanetary vehicles entered our Solar System, seemingly drifting somewhere between Neptune and the Kuiper Belt. Although it was too far for details to be ascertained at such short notice, they appeared to be vast in size and many in number. Radio transmissions in every conceivable code and tongue were beamed out to the visitors but no reply was forthcoming. The public were kept unaware of this, of course, for it would only have disturbed or offended them, creating ripples in the pond governments everywhere wanted kept stagnant.
It was clear, though, that something a little less passive had to be done. Earth had to hoist up its flag in the mighty government of worlds, it had to break out and confront whatever force was responsible for the terrible onslaught that came from the skies as if thrown by Zeus himself. A ship was needed, preferably one that could be made ready to go as soon as was humanly possible.
This particular craft was found on the islands of Japan and its name was the Hirohito. Simply put, its purpose had originally been to place itself in a stable orbit around the planet Neptune, the journey being made feasible thanks to the invention of the so-called Yume Drive by the Nobel-Prize winning physicist Dr. Akihiko Tayama. This new method of propulsion effectively counteracted any and all effects of G-force by the creation of an energy field that surrounded the, otherwise perfectly normal, shuttle. Unfortunately for Dr. Tayama and his crew, however, they found themselves press-ganged into taking part in the first overture to inhabitants of a whole new world.
And so, as dawn arose on the morning of September 23rd at a site somewhere just off the north coast of the island of Hokkaido, few were awake to see the launch of the Hirohito with its crew of 8 technicians, 6 scientists and a smattering of diplomats who came along, mainly on the tender-hooks of sufferance. The journey to the strange, waiting fleet that hovered tantalisingly out the reach of the world’s electronic eyes was due to last about three months and everyone on board knew that those three months would be the most sprawling, the most endless of their lives.
-
Lt. Taro Nomura dreamt of snow as he slept on his allocated bunk in the antiseptic long dormitory that was his home this Christmas Eve. He dreamt of dark starlit nights, the air pure and frosty, waiting to be reborn in the light of the forthcoming day. He dreamt of playing with his brother in amongst with the snow-coated pines, he dreamt of a drinking a mug of cocoa beside a burning warm fire, each flicker of flame raising a barrier against the surrounding world of ice.
But then he awoke, and reality’s ugly face reared itself cruelly. Above him was the dull, grey upper bunk that belonging to Lt. Yuji Ishida- communications officer of the Hirohito. To his right, a few feet across the dull grey metal corridor, was the berth of Dr. Kenji Mifune- linguist and philologist. Both of these were currently unoccupied. To Taro’s left sat his own meagre collection of personal effects: photographs with all the viewing bled out of them, an assorted collection of unenthusiastically read books and a charm that his grandmother had given him a long time ago in a place far, far away. As he breathed in another gulp of recycled air, Nomura longed for more than memories of these places. As his eyes squinted in the space equivalent of snow-blindness, he wished he could see the sights that now lay millions upon millions of miles away.
Lt. Taro Nomura was both helmsman and navigator of the Hirohito, one of two personnel directly responsible for making sure that the ship actually got to where it had originally set out to go. He was in his early thirties, slightly smaller than average but bulky and compact as if to compensate. His hair was long but neat in a slightly foppish sort of way while his face betrayed a stubble that, while not overtly contravening the somewhat draconian dress-code of the Japanese Space Agency, was treading on the proverbial thin ice. While Nomura’s areas of expertise were mathematics and astrophysics he was also a qualified exorcist for new bio-tech computers, which was the main reason he had been chosen for the mission.
Project Bio-Tech had been a recent development in regards to the integration of neural tissue (coming mainly from the brains of deceased organ donors) with high-function computer processors. While this vastly decreased the time taken for the computers to process large chunks of information, it was still unpredictable, for occasionally remnants of the donor’s personality would suddenly break through, causing all sorts of havoc. For example, when the system was still experimental, the early computers tended to start crying with annoying frequency. It was because of such impromptu emotional outbursts that specialised technicians were required to be constantly on hand to administer both psychological therapy to the unfortunate computer while, at the same time, using electric currents to deactivate the unwanted part of the brain tissue. The first scientists to do this called themselves ‘exorcists’ and the name sort of stuck. Nomura really did not mind doing this. His father had been an undertaker and the astronaut felt that this, albeit even more macabre task, was really just a logical extension.
It was then that he noticed the unmistakably American drawl that was drifting through the room. The voices belonged to the two figures who sat in ill-fitting uniforms at a table a few bunks ahead, playing their umpteenth game of cards, looking both bored and even more depressed than the astronaut was. Their names, from what Nomura could gather, were Tyler and Chuck and they were the assistants to the diplomatic consul who had come to represent the interests of the richest nation on Earth. Never particularly confident about his English, Nomura had not endeavoured to ascertain anything further and, with there being little for them to do, the two assistant consuls rarely moved away from their deck of cards.
Totally uninterested in the pair of chitter-chattering Americans, Nomura returned to his spectral realm of random thoughts and dreams, gliding through them as he began to slumber. The thought of what awaited him and the rest of the shuttle’s occupants upon the climax of their trip came to mind. What was it to be? A colossal red herring pathetically flailing about amongst the stars? Or the dream of every lonely childhood stargazer who ever peered through a cheap telescope and wondered if there was anyone up there, in that milk-stained stellar blackness? Or where they to find only death? Cold, asphyxiating death, dealt out by some totally alien, totally incomprehensible grim-reaper- in short, a doomsday machine, waiting to strike with all the vehemence of a coiled cobra. Oddly enough, the astronaut was not that worried, for he always seemed more at home with the dead than the living.
Suddenly, the world went red while the irritating monotone of the tannoy system filtered through the air. A commanding but equally monotonous female voice followed it.
“Contact alert!” spoke the voice in fluent but accented English, “All off duty personnel report to their assigned stations.”
“Hey, Chuck?” drawled Tyler like the Texan he was, “What do we do?”
“Gee Tyler,” twanged Chuck back, “I don’t know. I suppose we ought to find the ambassador.”
By the time they finished this most decisive of conversations, Nomura had already left the living area and was already crawling through the labyrinth of access tubes that criss-crossed all the way through the Hirohito like veins and arteries in a being of flesh and blood.
-
The bridge, under the scarlet aura that oozed from the lighting system, coupled with the flickering Christmas lights of all the control consoles, looked almost festive. Most of the systems being automated, the room itself was relatively small, with instrument panels lining each of the four walls. Facing the observation window at the front of the bridge sat a centrally placed chair and, upon this was supposed to be the form of the captain. Capt. Kumiko Hasegawa, however, was presently in amongst the small group of men and women who here huddled around one of the more nondescript monitors.
“The smallest of the objects appears to be at least five kilometres in length,” spoke sensor operator Kazuo Tsuchiya, “The largest goes off my scale!”
“Do you have an exact number?” asked the captain, an impressive looking woman in her late forties.
“It seems to be in flux, constantly multiplying.”
“Multiplying?” asked Ambassador Robert V. Taylor, “Do you mean dividing?”
“No sir. It is like they are…crashing into each other, splitting each other apart. Right now, I would guess that there are well over a thousand objects in total. By the time we make visual contact, there will almost certainly be more.”
“Any sign of life?”
This came from executive officer and chief astrophysicist Dr. Eiji Kadokawa.
“No. They are simply drifting in what looks like Brownian Motion, held together by some sort of magnetic field. It might as well be a belt of asteroids. How about you, Ishida?”
The communications officer, who was busy listening intently into a set of headphones at the far side of the bridge, Dr. Mifune hovering beside him, merely nodded. He never seemed to like talking that much.
It was then that Nomura, using the low gravity to his advantage, floated up the access tube and into the bridge. His first reaction was to gaze awestruck out at the panoramic view of Neptune offered by the observation window. The celestial Aphrodite simply hung there, its atmosphere a burning bright blue, watching the approaching space-craft as impassively as if it was the goddess itself.
The astronaut’s gaze transferred itself to the various occupants of the bridge, all of whom were ignoring the cosmic spectacle in favour of what meagre joys their computers and machines offered. There was Capt. Hasegawa- enormously respected and competent and yet looking for all the world like a girl’s school headmistress, Ambassador Taylor- tall, hook-nosed and bearing more than a passing resemblance to Abraham Lincoln, yet dignified and seemingly five times the man his assistants were, and then Dr. Kadokawa, the child prodigy- young, good-looking and vastly intelligent, seemingly the one of the luckiest recipients in the lottery of life. That just left the rest of the bridge crew: bearded and bespectacled Dr. Mifune, Dr. Miki Terasawa- the resident biologist, a short, quiet woman in her forties, Tsuchiya, Ishida and then Nomura’s friend and fellow helmsman/navigator, Lt. Naomi Hiyagashima. All the crew were wearing the standard uniform of the JSA- a blue jacket coupled with black trousers, the various insignias and ranks being broadcasted on the arm. Ambassador Taylor, however, was the exception, his government having insisted that he and his staff wear the pastel-coloured outfit of their own space administration.
“Nomura!” ordered Dr. Kadokawa, rather unnecessarily, “To your post.”
The astronaut did as bidden, sitting at the console just in front of the observation window, directly beside his counterpart. Hiyagashima looked around towards him and smiled sweetly.
“This could be it, Taro-san. At last.”
Nomura acknowledged her with a cordial nod. The pair liked and admired each other greatly, having forged a strong friendship over the years. This, though, had never blossomed into anything beyond the genially platonic, mainly due to the fact that Nomura never really thought about sex that much. He considered it to be very low on the scale of life’s priorities.
Then, with an awed sigh, he took a look out into the star-scape of the heavens. Each star, each giant ball of fusion and power, twinkled with a cold, icy gleam, constantly beaming out energy into the frozen wilderness of space. In their way stood the planets: the desolate, snow-coloured forms of the Kuiper Belt objects- Eris, Pluto, Makemake and so on, Cassius- the ball of liquid, stained with an atmosphere of bloody jasper and then Uranus- glowing with a shade of green that was almost quirky. In background hung Jupiter- paternal and jolly from a distance, a furious tempest of planet-smashing storms up close, and then Saturn- dignified, quiet and yet endowed with its beautiful cloak of icy rings. Earth, meanwhile, was invisible, its tiny form shielded by the veil of incalculable distance.
Lastly, but far from least, there was Neptune. Nomura had always held Neptune in a special place in his dreams. It was not a rock like Pluto, nor was it still basking in the public fascination that Cassius still claimed. Of all the planets, of all the worlds within reach of our Sun, it was the most mysterious, an ice giant of swirling clouds of methane, hydrogen and helium wrapped around a frozen core. It shone like a brilliant, perfect sapphire, its sheer beauty screaming out evidence of an intelligent creator. Yet what lurked beneath its exterior, what mysteries, what forms of life could possibly exist in its totally alien atmosphere? Or, to use the example of the present situation, what hid behind, sheltering in its shadow, basking in perpetual night?
“How long until visual contact?” asked Capt. Hasegawa.
“The computer has engaged us in a geostationary orbit of Neptune,” replied Hiyagashima.
Nomura gave a dramatic pause before finishing his partner’s report.
“We should be in line of sight within only a few minutes.”
The captain gave a gulp and then proceeded over to the communication station.
“Ishida. Put me on inter-ship.”
He flicked the appropriate switch. Hasegawa thought for a moment before launching into what almost sounded like the sort of recruiting speech given to hapless conscripts who really had no choice in the matter.
“This is your captain speaking. We have engaged in a geostationary orbit of Neptune. This means that any time now we will come into contact with whatever force, whatever, I suppose I can say, people that have been responsible for the ‘strikes’ against our planet. It is perhaps a hopeful sign for the human race that we do not come to fight, that we do not offer the tip of the sword or the barrel of a gun, but the hand of friendship. With luck, they will understand this and perhaps, just perhaps, it will usher a new age for the human race…”
“Mommy? Are you there?”
For a short while, there was a silence, a silence punctuated only by Ishida hurriedly switching off the inter-ship communication system.
“Mommy? It’s dark. Where are you!?”
It was the voice of a young girl, probably American, drifting in and around the control room like an echo in a void. Immediately, Nomura jumped out of his seat and flicked a number of switches at the main computer terminal. Hasegawa groaned.
“Why, of all the times?!” she was heard to mutter under her breath.
“What the hell is going on?” asked the ambassador.
“It’s the computer,” explained Dr. Kadokawa, “Literally speaking, there is a ghost in the machine, courtesy of the new organic fusion technology. A young girl must have been the donor, so we hear her voice every now and then. It won’t last long. Nomura knows what to do.”
“Mommy?”
“It is all right,” spoke the resident exorcist calmly, his pitches and contortions like a lullaby itself, “You can got to sleep now. A nice long rest.”
“But you are not my mommy?”
“You will meet your mommy when you sleep. She will be there, waiting for you.”
“She will be there when I sleep?”
“Yes, that I can promise you.”
“Kadokawa? How does he do it? How can he talk to the dead like that?”
The young prodigy gave the diplomat a grim smirk.
“It’s in his blood. Take my word for it.”
“Now go to sleep,” soothed the techno-medium, “Go to sleep.”
The speakers went silent, the voice disappearing back into the inky, black depths from which it came.
Emotionlessly, Nomura returned to his control consol. To him, exorcising the ghosts of the dead was not just a secondary task that he had been selected for, but a duty. His father had done the same back home, albeit in a very different way. Death was, after all, the most solemn, the most private of experiences. Occasionally, for various reasons, a soul would lose its way to the afterlife and it was the duty of the living to help it find its true path. Nomura hated Project Bio-Tech and all it stood for but, if he could help remedy the situation it created, then it was an opportunity to be grasped with open arms.
The deathly silence, meanwhile, remained in the scarlet-soaked control room, which always happened in the aftermath of such spectral visitations. Even the usually smugly arrogant Dr. Kadokawa had no desire to be the first to speak, perhaps out of some primal fear of something both more terrible and more substantial breaking forth from beyond of the grave. It was, necessity, however, that selected the first words spoken.
“Captain!” exclaimed Tsuchiya, “Something coming up! Directly in our path!”
All eyes glared out the observation window. True enough, a huge hulking mass of metal now blotted out much of Neptune’s vista. It was like a metal moon, hanging in Triton’s shadow, its polished, mirror-like surface reflecting the cerulean glare from the heavenly mystic. It possessed no order or symmetry, its appearance resembling not much more than some bafflingly chaotic piece of modern sculpture. It was also directly in the way of the Hirohito.
“Quick! Emergency manoeuvres!” ordered Hasegawa.
A terrible fear of another sort seized her executive officer.
“But our fuel reserves are preciously low as it is!”
“We have no choice! Nomura, quickly, get us out of orbit!”
Without even a word of reply, Nomura engaged a rapid series of mathematical calculations, fed the data into the navigation system and, with a tenuous series of short, accelerated bursts, launched the shuttle away from Neptune and into the void beyond. He knew well that a random, uncoordinated frenzy of an escape would most likely condemn him and his shipmates to a lingering death as they drifted in space, all their fuel gone.
Needless to say, the Hirohito safely bypassed the floating metal moon, only for its crew to now catch sight of the hundreds of thousands of similar objects that drifted beyond it. They were not asteroids or crystals of ice that might have been, somehow, discharged from either the Kuiper Belt or the even more distant Oort Cloud. These were not the work of nature, nor were they the construction of any human hand. All the colours of the rainbow were represented, as well as some others that human eyes had never before set eyes on. Every shape that it was possible to imagine hung there, some as simple as a set of building blocks, others as dense and intricate as a diamond with a billion different faces. A few looked vaguely like what most people imagined futuristic space vehicles would look like- sleek, streamlined, the nozzles of huge guns projecting from the sides, but most challenged the imagination to conceive anything of a wilder design. One was shaped like a banana, only covered with glass domes, each the size of a small town, while another looked like the nest of a Fairy Tern- merely a few skyscraper-sized sticks tangled together in a knot. Glittering clumps of seaweed seemingly made of diamond and giant spinning tops with fins attached drifted side by side in the vacuum. Even the proverbial kitchen sink could be seen, only with mammoth sized turrets pointing out from where the taps should have been. The only uniformity in this fleet of space flotsam was the fact that each vessel was scarred, most with massive holes ripped in their sides, their metal bowels hanging out into space. A strange rippling of power even hung around a few of the ships- evidence perhaps of the effects of some sort of energy weapon.
The crew and passengers of the Hirohito watched the spectacle with the greatest of awe.
“Some sort of space fleet?” mused Ambassador Taylor, his eyes displaying the gleam of a sceptic who had just had the closed door of his mind ripped off its hinges.
“Doing what exactly?” replied Dr. Kadokawa, himself looking just as amazed, “Good God, why would they simply hang there?”
“Do you think they know we’re here?” asked Dr. Mifune.
“I hear nothing on the radio,” noted Ishida, “Just static.”
“Even if they were trying to contact us,” queried Capt. Hasegawa, “Would we know what to listen for? They might not even need words to speak. What good would our technology be then?”
“Think on it, though,” speculated Dr. Terasawa, “Would an army notice a fly? Perhaps that is all we are to them, just a small, primitive insect whose whole existence is little more than a passing irritant?”
“Their movement has not changed,” observed Tsuchiya, “They are just drifting. No sign of any sort of propulsion.”
“They seem dead, abandoned,” stated Hiyagashima.
“It is a graveyard,” whispered Nomura climatically, “A graveyard of ships, a fleet of the dead.”
All eyes turned to him, their owners at first ready to scoff before the truth of the resident exorcist’s words began to dawn.
“But what’s it doing here?” countered the ambassador, “What possible reason could there be?”
“A space battle perhaps, sir? Dr. Terasawa mentioned an army. I believe that that is what this is- the remains of some sort of great war fleet, perhaps even two or more? They destroyed each other. This was a battle without a victory, a struggle without a conqueror beyond death himself.”
“And the meteorites? The radiation surges?”
This came from Capt. Hasegawa.
“Misses, clumsy aiming, who knows? I doubt Earth or Mars were targets. More likely simple collateral damage- tiny, little, primitive worlds that simply got in the way.”
This was unacceptable to Ambassador Taylor.
“You can’t say that millions of people died just because some interstellar army was unable to shoot straight! They must have been launching some sort of spearhead against Earth, some kind of pre-emptive strike!”
“Ambassador, sir, with the greatest of respect, I think that if they, whoever they are, wanted Earth obliterated they could probably have done so within a handful of seconds. That fleet, of which we now drift through, has probably destroyed more worlds by accident than we could ever dream of. Such, sir, is the truth of war.”
Nomura’s gaze left the token American and drifted into the cemetery of stars outside.
“We have no business here. If this was the entire fleet, then there is no-one left to negotiate with. If there are others, they are probably light-years away by now. And if they do come back, what can we ever do?”
“I think there is something,” interjected the captain, “Nomura, Hiyagashima, set course for the nearest and least damaged of the objects.”
“Salvage?” asked Kadokawa.
“I believe it used to be called grave-robbing,” muttered Nomura.
Hasegawa gave him an icy glare.
“That’ll do, lieutenant. We have a duty to science, a duty to advance the technology of our race.”
The astronaut gave her no answer. He merely sighed, almost imperceptibly, before adjusting the controls with his partner. Then, silently, he began to pray, his mind whispering out all the incantations and litanies he had heard the priests and monks belt out to the wind in his childhood. Many of the monks had been his friends and so he had gotten to know all their rituals and chants quite well. Even during the bronze, autumnal years of adulthood, the memories still gave a modicum of comfort.
Silently, the Hirohito made its way through the fallen warriors at a pace exceeding the respectful. Alien ghosts watched them go, their souls in transit to whatever distant gods, heavens or hells that awaited them upon life’s end. They reached out to the invaders with dozens of sets of spectral arms, watching them malignly with clusters of eyes that varied in number from two dozen to none at all.
Eventually, the invading parasite came upon a drifting object, the technology of which looked at least partially comprehensible to the curious collection of earthlings. In appearance, it resembled some kind of metal-clad prehistoric fish, its eyes bubbles that enclosed a bridge of sorts, serpent-shaped projectiles exuding from where the fins should have been. An area at the side had been ripped apart, presumably exposing the interior to the tender mercies of a frozen vacuum.
“This will do,” stated Capt Hasegawa, standing with her arms folded, her eyes glued to the view outside the observation port, “Eiji?”
“Yes, captain?”
“Take two volunteers and get suited up. I want you to make an examination of that vessel. Film as much as you can and try, if possible, to collect samples. Remember, by the time it takes us to get another ship out here, half of this fleet will have burnt up in Neptune’s orbit. This might be our only chance.”
“Understood.”
The executive officer turned to his underlings.
“All right boys and girls, who’s coming?”
Tsuchiya put up his hand, a cocky expression on his face.
“Count me in, sir.”
“Thank you, Kazuo. Anyone else?”
“Me.”
Nomura stood up, his face stony, the air of someone with a duty hanging around him. Even Hiyagashima looked around at him in surprise. Kadokawa raised his eyebrow in a way that looked half-derogatory.
“As a scientist, Nomura, or as a ghost-buster?”
Nobody laughed, least of all the helmsman.
“Very well, then,” continued the former child prodigy, his ego deflated ever-so slightly, “Come on then.”
The threesome moved across the bridge towards the fireman’s pole that led below deck.
“Be careful,” warned the captain, for the first time betraying a hint of worry, “It is the cold, lonely unknown out there.”
-
It is said that, when an average human being is exposed to the vast infinity of space for the very first time, it is not so much the acid-burn of fear that he or she feels burning within the gut, but the terrible, yawning emptiness of the soul that accompanies the first thoughts of the insignificance of a single life in the immeasurable, incalculable, unimaginable scope of the cosmos. It was because of this that the JSA preferred most trainee spacewalkers to be of the theistic persuasion, for it was found that atheist or agnostic spacewalkers on deep space assignments tended to have the unfortunate habit of committing suicide after a disturbingly short time. At least those who believed in God had a shield against the awful loneliness that one could feel while out amongst the empty, cold burn of the stars.
Naturally, Eiji Kadokawa was an exception to the rule. A devout member of the Japanese Society of Humanists, he was the kind of person who would have gladly burnt Bibles, Torahs and Korans in one enormous bonfire just for the hell of it. Nevertheless, it was reckoned that, because of immense mental faculties, he was resistant to any and all of the pressures that afflicted most ordinary mortals. To give him due credit, however, this was largely true.
Kazuo Tsuchiya, meanwhile, was a born-again Christian, whose denomination leaned towards the highly evangelical. All this probably explained his easy-going character and zest for life. It also explained why he was one of the most experienced spacewalkers in the JSA, having logged hundreds of hours outside, each second of which put him at the mercy of the elements. If one were to ask him ‘why’ he would, most likely, give some nonchalant reply about enjoying the peace and quiet or about how it made him feel all that closer to God. In an environment where the slightest mistake would have exposed him to a quick, totally silent death, this last statement held an eerie truth to it.
As for Jiro Nomura’s religious convictions, they were as varied as the graves at a cemetery. He had seen Buddhists, Taoists, Christians, atheists, men and women of every faith and creed laid to rest in the manner of their choosing. As such, spiritually, he was a proverbial smorgasbord, always finding something of merit in each culture’s beliefs. There was something beyond the mortal coil, of that he was sure of, but as to what, well, that was another matter. His JSA record listed him as a Buddhist but, in reality, he was as sure of that as the builder of a house of sand.
All this, though, was rather academic right now, for the reason that he was just leaving the cosy, little exoskeleton of a spaceship was because, even in space, the dead were not resting easy. Even if he did not approve of the mission’s ulterior motive, he had to be there, to try and soften whatever damage was going to be done. His father had once told him a story of the thieves and grave-robbers who, after the tremendous battles of the Civil War Era, would steal and pillage from the rotting bodies of the dead, leaving them naked for the beaks of the scavenger birds. He had heard how demons would follow these men, invisibly weaving their curses around them like a spider spins its silk cocoon, until the pitch-hearted men plunged screaming into the black pit of insanity. He and the rest of the crew were already cursed for venturing this far, but if, somehow he could soften the disrespect to the dead, the spectres that hung in this part of space might show some degree of mercy and leniency.
The threesome had reached, by now, half way between the Hirohito and the nearest of the wrecked spacecraft. Enclosed within their bulky, white spacesuits, propelled forward by the thruster-packs on their backs, they looked, from a distance, almost like a trio of action-figures floating amidst a set of a child’s broken model kits. Kadokawa led the way, his eyes wide and glazed, admittedly not so much by the smashed grandeur around him, but by the looming prospect of a Nobel Prize if he played his cards right. Nomura stared at him contemptuously. Even in the vacuum of space, the stench of ego still carried. Not a sound eked into existence around them, the breath of life being totally absent from this part of God’s creation.
With a precision that was almost beyond the human, the three astronauts circumnavigated the broken space-grave, their reflections bouncing off the parts of the hull that were still as smooth as glass. Then they approached the bubbles that looked into the interior.
“Eiji?” asked Tsuchiya, a holographic recorder in his hand, “Can you see inside?”
The view, however, had been frosted over.
“No, there is something covering the interior surface, I think. It looks like milk, or frozen water.”
He cocked his head as far as was possible in the confines of the space-suit.
“Or blood? A splattering of alien haemoglobin, perhaps?”
Dramatically, his pose crafted to make sure he exuded the intense energy of a famous pioneer, Kadokawa stretched out his hand to touch it. Tsuchiya watched this concernedly.
“I wouldn’t do that, Eiji.”
The executive officer ignored him, prodding the surface of the glass dome. To his surprise, he felt no impact, none at all.
“No friction,” he muttered, “Totally smooth.”
“You should be careful. This is alien, far beyond anything and everything science knows or accepts. The people who built this, whoever they are, they might be from a world made of light, where even the air they breathe and they soil they walk on has intelligence. The ancient Greeks believed that the power of the gods was such that if a human being ever saw them in their true form, the very sight would drive them insane, or age them to death, or one of a hundred different things.”
“So?”
“These beings may be closer to God than we are. We might become like moths, getting our wings singed by flying to close to the light.”
Thankfully, Kazuo Tsuchiya was unable to see the look that Kadokawa gave him. Then, with a sigh that was both derogatory and sarcastically loud, the young wunderkind floated off, towards the hole, one hand skimming over the surface of the hull as he did so.
-
On board the Hirohito, all was quiet. Everyone who could be spared was on the bridge, watching the three tiny, white stick-figures make their way to the only open entrance port of the metal fish. All breaths were held, all beats of the heart were in a state of limbo. Since the scanner station now sat unoccupied, Capt. Hasegawa kept a watchful eye over it. It never occurred to her, however, to increase its range. If she had, she would have notice the very, very large blip that had emerged from Alpha Centauri, and was coming their way.
-
Nomura started chanting silently as Kadokawa pulled himself through the gap in the mirror-like scales. Although a stranger to all concepts of modesty, the executive officer was no fool and so took every care and caution as he made his way through the punctured alien realm. In his hand he held a scanner device that let loose invisible tendrils of energy into the space before him, acting like the feelers of a blind catfish.
“I’m detecting residual pockets of energy in the walls, possibly the remainder of some sort of battery power. Beyond that…nothing.”
“What did you expect?” noted Nomura with uncharacteristic sarcasm, “Mr. Spock?”
Tsuchiya sniggered slightly while Kadokawa remained silent, pulling himself further into the darkness. With trepidation, his two underlings followed, taking the plunge into the frozen coffin. Nomura could practically hear the spirits scream around them in unknown tongues, whispering words darker and more terrible than anything ever dreamed of in any of the myriad languages of the planet Earth. ‘Why can they not hear them?’ he asked himself, staring at the oblivious forms of his companions, ‘Why am I the only one to realise what it is that we are doing?’
For a short while they kept on drifting down through the black, obsidian atmosphere; floating, almost in utter aimlessness, like midges caught in an infinite void. Then, suddenly, little white bubbles began to rise up around them, little droplets of milk that collided and bounced off each other, coagulating only to split apart once again. Eventually, these droplets became bigger and bigger until the trio found themselves face to face with the sort of bubble that Godzilla himself could have blown. Without a word, Eiji Kadokawa once more outstretched his hand and pierced the liquid’s thin membrane, scooping up a palmful of the milky, white substance.
“This must be the sort of atmosphere that whatever beings built this ship lived in. For some reason this bubble managed to survive the vacuum.”
He gave a dramatic pause for emphasis.
“You know,” he continued, “There might still be life inside.”
“But what do you suppose we do about it?” asked Tsuchiya.
“These suits can withstand a liquid atmosphere. I say we go in. All opposed?”
Both astronauts knew well that arguing with their superior was the vainest of occupations. They would have to abandon their thruster-packs but, all three having acquired extensive underwater training in their space-suits, this would not be much of an obstacle. The same could not be said for whatever it was lurked in within the heart of the bubble, hiding its dark materials within the pool of innocent white.
Kadokawa, naturally, went first, parting the membrane like a swimmer doing the breast-stroke, disappearing quickly into the pure, milky expanse. Nomura and Tsuchiya turned to look at each other quizzically, each of their faces reflecting the uncertainty of the other, the liquid orb beaming behind them assiduously. Then, with a strong, conjoined inhalation of breath, they took the plunge out of the dark and into the white.
-
The crew were like lampreys, their slimy, limbless bodies about ten feet long, scaled with silver and black. Long tails seemingly stolen from giant birds of paradise trailed behind them, the mucous-coated feathers as bright as fire. No face could be seen, merely a gaping, round, toothed mouth that wrapped around what there was of a head. They drifted lifelessly in the most nauseating of fashions, bumping off long crystal stalactites that poked curiously out of the wall, chunks of their pink flesh ripping off each time contact was made.
The three astronauts watched these bizarre products of an alien nature with undisguised awe.
“D…do you think they’re dead, s…sir?” stammered Tsuchiya.
Even the resident prodigy was looking like a child thrust prematurely out of the womb.
“How the hell do you expect me to know?” he whispered in return.
Nomura said nothing. He merely prayed for the creatures and that their journey to whatever paradise or damnation awaited them be a smooth one. Even he, however, could not help but feel sick at the sight of the rotting corpses.
“Those…crystals,” conjectured Kadokawa, “They must be some sort of control system.”
“But…how are they operated?” replied the technician, “I see no hands or limbs?”
“Telepathy perhaps? Maybe it is something to do with those?”
He pointed to a series of ectoplasmic tendrils that criss-crossed in and amongst the crystals like a fat, white, greasy spider’s web.
“Perhaps those things act as nets, catching and absorbing the thought processes that are aimed at them. Just imagine the mental discipline involved.”
The gaze he aimed at the beings turned to one of great respect.
“If only they were alive, what all could they teach us?”
He moved a few feet further in before something caught his eye. It looked like a little, green egg, barely bigger than a clenched fist, held in the middle of the web. Power emanated from this, a light from within pulsing and beating like a newborn heart.
“Jesus,” he gaped, “What the hell is this? Kazuo, Nomura, look at this!”
The two underlings obeyed, manoeuvring past one of the floating alien corpses to do so.
“Some sort of power source?” queried Tsuchiya, “Or perhaps a beacon?”
“It is a shrine,” stated Nomura bluntly.
“Is that your professional opinion?” countered the executive officer sardonically.
“Why activate a beacon in the middle of lost or won battle? And if this is a power source, why is there no power running through the ship? No, a gut instinct tells me what this is. I can feel them in the air, all the distant voices, all the ghosts, they all congregate here. I know you have never really listened to me, Kadokawa, but I beg you to now. We have already laid our footprints in the domain of the dead. Do not make it worse by interfering with that.”
He only response he got was the tiniest of pauses.
“Kazuo?”
“Yes, sir?”
“I suppose this is a democracy. What do you think?”
The astronaut gulped as he studied the hypnotically pulsing object. In a way, he felt like it was beckoning to him.
“We have a duty. A duty to science.”
Nomura could see where this was leading.
“For God’s sake, I implore both of you! Leave it alone!”
Kadokawa simply chuckled.
“Don’t worry, Nomura. If we do open the gate of Hell, you can do another exorcism for us.”
Then he laid hands upon it.
The effect was immediate. The egg burned brightly with a blinding flash and Kadokawa screamed as the material literally started to weld into his hand. Then the web became alive. Within moments, the few threads of tendrils had divided into hundreds of flailing, whipping strands that seized hold of their human target, coiling around his every extremity. The executive officer screamed as his suit was quickly penetrated, the inrush of milky liquid turning his cries into an agonised gurgle within seconds. Then, in a single, swift movement, the web came apart, and its human captive came apart with it, all his bodily matter disappearing into the glowing and rapidly growing orb.
Gripped by panic, Nomura tried to swim back to the void, only to notice that his companion was making no attempt to join him.
“Kazuo!” he shouted, the radio receivers linking the space-suits being seized by a rapidly growing static, “Kazuo! Come on!”
Purely by chance, Tsuchiya’s spacesuit slowly began to spin around. It was then that Nomura was able to get a glimpse of what lay behind the visor. The astronaut’s eyes were the same colour as the liquid- pure white, the skin visibly turning grey and scaly. Totally unsure now of himself or anything else, Nomura grabbed hold of his compatriot and shook him, almost as if he was able to restore humanity through simple movement.
“Kazuo!? Talk to me! Please!”
A strange, harsh croak of a breath broke through the wall of static. It was pained, deep, like a modulated scream. The only clear thing about it was its total and utter lack of humanity. Broken Japanese words soon followed it, the voice resembling what had once been Tsuchiya’s.
“Warm, so warm! Burning!”
His mouth then opened wider, so wide that both cheeks were torn apart. There was no lip movement, however, as it spoke, the words echoing out of the throat like a voice emerging from a deep, deep well. Then tendrils, meanwhile, surrounded the pair, never touching, but entrapping them nonetheless.
“What is happening!?” cried out Nomura, now very conscious that his life might very well be coming to an impromptu end, “What are you!?”
“Mammal! Warm blood! Like acid! Cannot survive! Malfunction! Will be lost!”
There was fear in the words, a deep, primal, impenetrable fear.
“Are you…are you one of them!?”
He pointed to the dead bodies.
“Are you a lost soul!?”
“Lost! Yes, lost! Forever!”
“I don’t understand! You are one of those dead beings, are you not!?”
“Dead? What is dead!?”
“Death: end of mortal existence…eh…elimination of physical form.”
Somehow, Nomura had never actually had to define death before.
“Release of soul into infinity,” he continued, throwing his words out like a fisherman casting his hook into the ocean, “Journey into afterlife.”
“No death! No death!”
“You mean you can’t die? But the bodies?”
“Life ends! No death!”
Another explosion of static momentarily separated the communication link.
“But without a body…”
“Transfer!”
“Transfer? What do you mean by transf…”
Suddenly, realisation dawned. The green orb, the tendrils, Tsuchiya’s possession... Kadokawa had theorised that these beings were telepathic. Perhaps, after the culmination of their physical form, their minds escaped to be absorbed by another of their kind. If there was no other, then the crystals and the tendrils would act as nets, taking possession of the loose souls until help arrived. In this way, the sum of another’s knowledge would be added to another and then another over generations, perhaps to infinity.
“Transfer! Malfunction!”
“So when Kadokawa touched the crystal, the machines thought that help had arrived and the process began? But Kadokawa, why did they kill him?”
“Genetic sample for transfer! Did not want! The crystal!”
“But why not me!?”
“You understand!”
“You read my mind?”
“Yes! Extended all our power to save you! Not others!”
“Others? Others! You mean the Hirohito!?”
Although Nomura was in no position to physically see it, he was still able to muster a guess as to what was happening out in space. The myriad collection of personalities about the space shuttle now all thought as one, the sudden eruption of grey scales causing them to even look as one. The souls now trapped inside their bodies screamed as they writhed about in the boiling red blood. The white tendrils had, meanwhile, begun to shoot out of the alien craft, wrapping themselves around the Hirohito, gradually fusing and moulding themselves into the man-made metal framework until, eventually, the two ships would become as one, looking for all the world like some pair of cosmic Siamese twins. Still unknown to anyone, the giant spacecraft detected by the shuttle’s computer was still coming closer and closer and closer.
“For God’s sake!” spluttered Nomura, his body seized by panic, “What can I do!?”
“Help us!!!!”
“How!?”
“Let the ship join with you! Guide us back to the crystal! Let us take your mind out off its’ body!”
Before the astronaut could say but a syllable in reply, half-a-dozen huge, glowing white shards of crystal burst out from the writhing mass of white tentacles.
“But I don’t know how!” he screamed, “I can’t help you!”
“You must! Let your mind go! Let your mind go!”
The crystals hummed with a type of power that was almost ethereal and, almost immediately, Nomura felt something happen. At first it was like an overwhelming attack of vertigo, what little sense of balance he still had left spinning into the void like Ixion on his wheel of fire. Then all human sensation began to follow, every ache, every pain, every tiniest itch of feeling fading away as the bridge between the soul and the body began to unfasten itself. Nomura’s senses disappeared, only to be replaced by a new kind of awareness. He did not smell, he did not taste, he did not see or hear, but he sensed and he knew. The confines of the flesh left behind him, he experienced more in an instance than he had in all of his previous life. It was like the veil of human vision had been ripped apart, letting loose all that inhabited the once barren void of space.
Nomura tried to speak, only to realise that he had no lips to move, no vocal chords to vibrate. His voice was gone, along with the now empty prison and flesh and bone that was held in place by the squiggling and squirming sea of milky white tendrils. His eyes and ears had divorced him, leaving his mind free to experience the sight of sound, the noise of taste and the smell of vision. The living, breathing, God-made biosphere of Neptune burned with consciousness, each of the hitherto unknown ecosystems it supported- the metal insects that darted through the methane clouds, the uranium-based dust particles that swarmed in amongst their cities of storm, the flashes of colour that fed from the sea of tiny worm-holes existing in the planet’s core- let loose the unconscious song that every being with a soul casts out every moment of its life.
Then there were the hollow calls of those souls still left drifting on the battlefield, slowly making their way to the great hole in the universe where every living thing that once was is instinctively drawn to, like a salmon compulsively returning to the stream of its birth. Some of these were so alien, so different from anything Nomura had previously known as life, that no form of human imagination, no matter advanced, could ever hope to contemplate them. A few still retained spectral reminders of their physical form- beings with eyes covering their globular bodies, pink four-legged creatures with a hundred sets of wings, resembling something out of a Greek pastorale and other creatures that, in appearance, looked like flowers with spinning dodecahedrons for petals. These all milled around in the vacuum, waiting for the eruption of the instinct that would lead them to their new existence.
Other forms of life could also be seen, seemingly inhabiting this ghostly netherworld. These were like a thousand novae-worth of light, dancing about with an exuberance that was almost jovial, their souls glittering as if made of diamond. They congregated around the most lost of the consciousnesses, leading them, like shepherds bringing home misplaced sheep, to their place in eternity. Reflected in their features he could almost see the face of God.
“Are these angels?” whispered Nomura with his thoughts, “Will I be travelling with them one day?”
Suddenly, he became aware of the task he had been entrusted to perform. The Hirohito and the alien craft were well on their way in regards to becoming one. On the inside of each craft, however, a new battle was being fought, not a battle of weapons or of armies, not of swords or guns, but of souls, one against the other. Both human and alien spirits were now crammed together in the same body, their very presence together being mutually destructive. Hasegawa and the others had little idea about what they were fighting against for their humanity. As they had been standing dumbfounded, their eyes never leaving the graveyard of spacecraft, they had felt half their being torn away, something cold and alien filling its place, oozing into their souls like freezing mercury. It was not with knowledge that they fought, for that was too rooted in the dogmas of conventional science to truly understand, but with instinct- a powerful, eternal instinct that stretched back from before even human birth. Each and every one gave cries of pain and fear, but this was nothing compared to that of the involuntary souls who were being squeezed into bodies too different to be compatible.
The angels, meanwhile, kept their distance, perhaps perplexed by the aberrance of nature that took place before them, perhaps utterly terrified of that which should not be. They kept their attention on the remainder of the drifting souls, shining forth as beacons of life in the void that was tarnished by Neptune’s cerulean gleam. Attracted to these beacons like fish in the deep sea, the wandering spirits followed them.
“But what can I do?” pondered Nomura, “How can I bring these souls back? Even the Pied Piper needed a flute to let loose his magic. What do I have?”
He remembered back to the voice in the computer and how he had simply used empty promises and false belief to snare his quarry. Likewise, the monks and priests back home had used prayer to guide the restless spirits back to their eternal abodes. Here, he could not speak and, even if he could, how would they understand? Could telepathy reach over the threshold of life itself?
It was then that he noticed something. The river of souls had changed its course. The slow and dreamy procession of the dead had begun to turn away from its destination- in his direction. It was not a heady stampede, but a gentle drift, like a cloud of pollen placidly floating on a summer’s breeze. Like moths to flame, they surrounded him, always keeping a respectful distance but totally encircling him nonetheless. Much to his surprise, Nomura felt no fear, just a bewildered form of wonderment at the perfect variety of thoughts and forms that could only be the handiwork of an intelligent creator. Then an idea came to mind. Why would all these souls be attracted to him, he who glowed dimly without the beacons of the angels? What made him so different?
“I am alive,” he concluded, “The angels are not alive or dead, they just are. They don’t give out the scent of life like I do. Perhaps…”
And then he did it, thrusting his consciousness into outer space, letting himself soar through the ghostly apparitions and into the void that lay between him and the Hirohito. Gravity meant nothing to him, nor did the lack of oxygen, the cold, Sun-less light causing not a single exhalation of clouded breath, for he had not a single breath to give. Passing through the metal hull like it was a veil of cobwebs, he danced around all the screaming battlegrounds of muscle and bone, drawing out each and every escaped alien spirit, coaxing them to follow his own life-force. They came willingly, letting go of their captive hosts, leaping free of the forms of flesh that had been within their grasp, the mental shadows of their long, slithery bodies twirling and twitching in a hungry satisfaction. The taste of Nomura’s energy drove them on, after him, as he glided back to the ship of crystals and tendrils. At the same time, the organic fusion that linked the two spacecraft began to come apart, the alien vessel spitting out the Hirohito like the foreign object it was.
Once more, Nomura plunged through solid matter, the lost souls following him. He saw Tsuchiya, still possessed, and wrenched the invading spirit out from within him. Then, after doing a circle around the glowing green orb, the astronaut aimed himself at his body and became one with it once more, confident that the souls would return to their original storage area. Only they didn’t. They followed him.
-
“Nomura! Speak to me!” ordered Dr. Terasawa, the red and amber flashing lights of the medical-bay’s Christmas tree flashing in her face, “Nomura! Can you hear me?!”
“What’s wrong with him?” asked Capt. Hasegawa, standing directly beside her.
“How the Hell should I know!?”
The being that was once Taro Nomura lay down on the operating table, his skin glowing, the organs of his body shrinking and growing, screams, groans of ecstasy and whispers in a strange alien tongue pouring of what was, sometimes, his mouth. Tsuchiya stood in the doorway, his face ashen, the wounds of his cheeks miraculously healed, himself still partly dressed in his spacesuit. Neither he nor the others remembered what had taken place. They all registered what they had thought to be a few minutes of lost time but that was it. It was he who had dragged Nomura out of the space-craft and then back to the relative safety of the Hirohito. It was he who had first glimpsed the strange metamorphosis that now gripped the navigator cum exorcist. It was he who had had to respond to the bombardment of questions, the majority of which focused on the disappearance of a certain Executive Officer.
“Nomura!”
Hasegawa was about to grab his shoulders before thinking better of it.
“Nomura! Where is Kadokawa!? Is he still alive?”
“The white….the white tentacles grabbed him,” mumbled Tsuchiya, still half in shock, “They pulled at him…and then…and then…”
Nomura jerked upwards, his body, for a second, taking on all the characteristics of a giant fish.
“The cameras on the spacesuits will tell us,” stated Terasawa practically.
Hasegawa looked around uneasily with the expression of a sceptic trying to stay afloat in an ocean of fantasy.
“They’re being analysed now. But they won’t bring back the man…”
She looked at the constantly-in-flux form on the bed.
“Or men we’ve lost. God, a malfunction, an asteroid collision, a loss of atmosphere- them I could handle. But not this. How could anyone deal with this?”
Not wishing to answer any rhetorical questions, Terasawa simply looked at her dials and gauges, silently but desperately trying to find some sort of rationality behind the constantly changing heart-beats (when it, in fact, was a heart that was beating), blood pressure, blood sugars, EEG readings and so on. There was simply nothing that she could do for a man whose internal physiology was human one second and something, very, very different the next.
“Captain Hasegawa!” screamed Ishida’s voice on the intercom.
The captain passed to the other end of the crimson-lit room to answer her underling’s call.
“Yes!?”
“There is something coming!”
“What?”
“I…I think you best see for yourself, ma’am.”
“Damn it, Ishida, I’m in no mood for games!”
“It’s another craft! Coming straight for us!”
-
It was like a colossal city, floating in space, its size big enough to hold a crew of millions, or of a few thousand giants, each hundreds of feet tall. The naked, human eye could not hope to ascertain its true dimensions, for it would be like a fly managing to comprehend the height and width of New York itself. In colour, it glowed with an aggressive red, totally blanking out the mysterious blue of Neptune. The crew of the Hirohito, however, could ascertain no measurable activity, registering only the cold, omniscient glare it cast over the scene of the battle, like a boy watching the aftermath of a melee of starving flies.
The sound of stuck throats and words caught half-way in the process of being spoken hung in the bridge, deafening all those who sat staring out at the viewing port.
“Ishida!” spoke Hasegawa in a hushed whisper, “Any form of contact? Any signal? Anything?!”
“Do you think they even know we’re here?” queried Ambassador Taylor, now flanked by his two assistants.
The captain bit her lip with a sudden impulse of determination. One of her crew was, by all accounts, dead and another was the unwilling participant in some hideous metamorphosis. In each case she could do nothing. But now, with something tangible and alive ahead of her, she had a chance- a chance to make an impact.
“Well, I am going to see that they find out!”
“But how?”
“By creating our own little star, Ambassador.”
In a quick pair of steps, she moved to just behind the helm position.
“Hiyagashima, I want you to jettison all the spare fuel we have.”
The young astronaut looked around at her captain worriedly. She had always been taught that spare fuel, in the unpredictable roads and highways of space, was a contradiction in terms.
“But we don’t have that much, captain, if we want to stay within the safety margins.”
“Damn the safety margins. Can we or can we not?”
“Provided the journey back is free of incident, then yes, we can afford to, but I would not…”
“Just do it. Reaction to the gases out here should ignite it, easily.”
“But how do you expect it to burn in a vacuum?” asked Dr. Mifune.
“It won’t for long. There’ll just be bright flash that will be snuffed out within a second. But I bet that it’ll be enough to attract that thing’s attention.”
Taylor grabbed her arm, worriedly.
“But do we…we want that thing out there to see us!?”
She quickly wrenched her arm back.
“That ‘thing’ as you call it is the answer to all the mysteries that we’ve encountered: the asteroids, this graveyard of metal corpses out there, what happened to Kadokawa and Nomura. By God, ambassador, I hate mysteries. Hiyagashima, do it!”
-
Nomura stamped his feet on the ancient snows of the Taran Pass as he recalled the full flow of memories that that day on the battlefield, long ago, had brought. His children and grandchildren sat around him in a huddle, their white fur coats wrapped snugly around their frosted bodies, the warm embers of the nearby fire throwing flaming sparks into the purple sky. The ruin of the Hirohito sat as a snow-covered relic upon the cliff face above them, the ice-trees already having rooted themselves upon its corroded hull. Winter on this planet, which the late Ambassador Robert Taylor had christened as Rura Penthe, lasted six Earth years before yielding to a summer that made the once-in-a-century bloom of a desert pale into insignificance.
Of the original complement of crew and passengers on board the Hirohito, only Nomura, Ishida and one of the diplomatic staff still lived, the children of the shuttle’s men and women now inheriting the exile- the exile that had begun 45 years before and showed no sign of ending. Capt. Hasegawa’s little display had been successful, but only to an extent. The puny little Earth craft had been pulled into the maw of the flying cathedral of lights, studied, and then ejected back into space as something so primitive that it deserved nothing but revulsion. Unfortunately, in the time it took for this, the giant craft had moved what, to it, was a fraction of a distance, but, to the Hirohito, was a giant leap beyond the solar system and out into the unknown. Faced with no feasible hope of returning home, Capt. Hasegawa had ordered a landing on the nearest inhabitable planet. While this proved successful, the shuttle was so badly damaged that it would never fly again. Power still remained in the computers however, and so, every hour of every day, someone was required to man them, in case another spaceship from Earth where to appear and the emergency beacon could be activated, like a bonfire lit on top of a high mountain. Perhaps, one day, any day, a rescue ship would come. On the other hand though, perhaps they were simply too far away, or, perhaps Earth itself was no more- claimed as merely collateral damage in a war bigger than it could even understand.
Such negative thoughts, though, failed to dim the beacon of hope within Nomura. The metamorphosis had continued on for many weeks, almost killing him several times. The invading souls though, soon lost their will to fight, slinking off into that great undiscovered country beyond, leaving his body alone. Over time, the young astronaut had gotten used to his existence on the hard but beautiful planet that was now his home, even marrying Hiyagashima and sharing a happy and fruitful life with her.
Now he was an old man, his beard long and his offspring many. Yet still his memories of those spirits he had guided upon the battlefield remained. At night, in his dreams, he could hear their echoes. When he sat upon the high cliffs of Xuthros, watching the twin suns of Ankh and Lakh set beneath the glacial horizon, he could even see them, bathing in the light of Heaven. Any man who has looked into the calm, tranquil face of death cannot fail to see past even the colossal wars of mortal giants to glimpse just a fraction of the maker’s purpose beyond. Although the others tended to scoff at him, Nomura always said, and kept on saying, how each occurrence of evil, each apocalypse of mindless destruction, no matter how great, was itself but an ignorant insect when compared to the beautiful truth that Nomura had seen. One day, one moment of time in the future, the darkness would be as void, and all good would rule. This is what Nomura believed to his dying day, and perhaps beyond even that.
THE END
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