Supernova: Part 5 (1)

Part 5

Through Tvorgh's carelessness, a catastrophe could have occurred. Well, fine! The time machine and some of the Ectomorphs were gone, but not all of them; they would return. To prevent that, humanity would have to be prepared.

Delar Nor emerged angrily from the bunker and grabbed Tvorgh right by the collar:

"What was that supposed to be? This plan could just as easily have gone wrong—would you have been able to take responsibility for that? We will talk about this once we finally have a functional city. Furthermore, since you seem to be irresponsible, I must also relieve you of command over MAGNETIC STAR 2, and that is far from everything—your court hearing will take place in a few days."

Tvorgh was somewhat shocked, but it was clear to him that Delar had to act this way; in his place, he would have done the exact same thing.

Suddenly, an enormous shock ran through the entire Jovian moon. The ice crust ruptured, releasing megatons of water from the still-liquid ocean, which fortunately froze immediately without reaching the Zer city. No one could stay on their feet, yet these tremors were no earthquake; the moon's interior was indeed made of liquid water and other comet remnants, but even so, no geological instability could have been triggered by that, and it wouldn't stop. Tvorgh held onto a pillar while most of the other Lords of Zer lay on the ground, trying to regain an upright position. Everyone felt dizzy; only Xana was still completely in her senses. An effect that only negatively affected Genomorphs had apparently been triggered. Tvorgh felt like throwing up, but he managed to control himself and increased his metabolism to more quickly consume the food that was still in his stomachs.

The tremors stopped just as abruptly as they had begun. Delar stood up, brushed the dust off his suit, then turned to security monitoring and asked:

"What happened?"

"Sire, the star constellations—they have changed," answered one of the scientists from the monitoring room via Tekome. Tvorgh looked up through the glass dome; indeed, all the constellations had changed, though not very drastically.

Delar called into the Tekome, alarmed:

"Did the entire moon just fly through a wormhole!?! Determine our new position."

"No, Delar, I'm afraid we're in bigger trouble. I fear we have made a time jump," said Ween, who was examining the precise star chart and overlaying the old one.

Delar stepped behind Ween and looked at it as well, and when Ween projected it onto the large 3D screen, all doubts vanished. The positions of the stars had not shifted parallel to one another; instead, they had moved in different directions.

Delar asked Ween:

"Future or past, and how many years? And then, please, the cause," glaring reproachfully at Tvorgh as he spoke.

Ween began running the calculations on his computer. Compared to Earth's current top-tier machines, the 486s, this machine was roughly as fast as a snail compared to a Concorde—and it wasn't even the top model. After a few seconds, the result appeared: 4,793 years and 3 months into the future. The cause was an artificial manipulation of time from the outside, with the same influence spectrum emitted by Arthur Benedict's time machine.

Delar had already expected this exact result regarding the cause and summoned the security officers:

"Arrest Tvorgh. He will have to answer for treason."

Tvorgh didn't like that; he fell to his knees and pleaded with Delar:

"Please, let me fix this before you make a mistake. I know I can do it, I will retrieve the time machine."

Delar considered it for a few minutes and then said:

"All right. I can drop the charges if you retrieve the time machine and neutralize Shadow Nemesis. The Ectomorphs have become a serious threat; therefore, I want you to neutralize them as well."

"I'll do anything. I just need a living Ectomorph to fully copy its brain."

"If we catch one, yes. When you find their homeworld, you will fly there with MAGNETIC STAR II and carry out your mission. Xana and Tero will accompany you."

Tvorgh protested:

"Xana is in danger near Ectomorphs, and Tero is my sister—I don't want to put her in danger. Who knows what the Ectos are capable of."

"We need all qualified personnel to repair the damage here, and you can't fly the ship alone—which you are getting back provisionally. Besides, you probably don't want to spend a very long time in the cryo chamber, do you?"

Tvorgh had no other choice; he had to agree.

"And how do you plan to lure the Ectomorphs here?" Tero asked her husband.

Ween turned around in his chair toward them and crossed his arms. After a brief thought, he asked Tvorgh:

"Do you remember that winged spider back then? How you caught it?"

"Yes, I baited that five-equad (2-meter) beast back then. I built a trap, transformed into a Ga-ua bird, and the spider couldn't resist such a delicacy. It flew straight into the trap. Without that trick, I would have starved during survival training. Man, back then I had no idea how delicious those beasts are."

Now it became clear to Tvorgh what Ween meant: a trap! The only difficulty was making an Ectomorph believe that a being with a soul was standing before it.

Tvorgh combined the DNA of Xana and Dr. Benedict and began to morph, while eating something to produce enough fresh cells for the transformation. In doing so, he took care to look genuine, even limiting his morphing ability by doing so, and copied the genes for a soul into his other cells. He didn't feel comfortable with this, because none of the Genomorphs could say for sure what a soul was, what it did, or whether it might be harmful to a Genomorph. The only clear thing was that he would be the first Genomorph with a soul if the experiment succeeded. Unfortunately, it could not succeed, because not the slightest trace of a soul would form, no matter how hard Tvorgh tried.

Finally, Ween said:

"Forget it, Tvorgh. I'll build a generator that will give you an aura as if you had twenty souls. That's certainly better than your pathetic attempts."

Exhausted, Tvorgh could no longer stay on his feet. He crept into his room and threw himself onto the bed. Then he fell asleep immediately, like someone who hadn't slept for days.

"Tvorgh, get up already!" echoed through the room. Tvorgh jumped up and saw an unfamiliar woman standing next to Xana.

"It's me, Tero!" she said. Tvorgh had to admit that she had transformed magnificently. No one would be able to distinguish her from an Earth dweller anymore.

Xana sat down at the table and said:

"Doctor Arthur told me a lot about Earth's history, so I know more about it than you do. I know that some Ectomorphs will be seen in Sumeria in a few days."

Tvorgh got up and went to the refrigerator to replenish his energy. Unfortunately, the Genomorphs who built his room had messed up, as he couldn't find anything edible that suited his taste—strictly plant-based food. Gritting his teeth, he had to shove a plant into his mouth. With a full mouth, he shouted:

"Damn it, am I supposed to starve? You can't cover my energy needs with this—I need meat!"

Xana asked Tero, half-seriously and half-jokingly:

"Can he eat humans too, or does he not do that sort of thing?"

Tero merely shrugged and pulled a chicken out of a plastic bag, saying:

"That's what they breed down on Earth. Eat this. On Earth, we will pose as a married couple, and Xana will be our daughter. Your name will be Shanur, and my name there will be Stella. Your trade is weaponsmith."

Tvorgh buried his face in his hands. Shanur the weaponsmith—he didn't quite like that, but he had no other choice.

"While you were sleeping, our best scientists networked their brains in parallel and developed several devices that will be very useful to us. Here they are."

Tero took several smaller packages out of the plastic bag and handed them to Tvorgh. He opened them, took out the devices, and began studying the user manuals.

So there was the soul simulator, with which Tvorgh could deceive any Ectomorph into thinking he possessed a powerfully radiating soul that none of them could resist—a fiendish trap.

The other device was a proto-beam forcefield generator (abbreviated PSKFG), which could isolate an Ectomorph and render it immobile. With these two devices, catching and studying an Ectomorph would be child's play.

MAGNETIC STAR II landed in an inaccessible valley near a river. Tvorgh, Tero, and Xana jumped out, and Tero cloaked the ship using a remote control.

"Where did our people buy the house for us?" Tvorgh asked his sister.

"It's a few mequads from here, in Sumer. We'll be there on foot in four hours if we hurry," Tero answered. She began marching toward Sumer to reach their new home as quickly as possible.

The march took four hours. The sun rose slowly, and a new day began.

The city of Sumer appeared in gleaming light like a modern Zer city. The light reflected from golden statues dazzled Tvorgh; never before had he seen such bright light, as his homeworld lay under a cold red sun. The heat of the rays from Helios warmed his black suit very quickly, so that Tvorgh began to dehydrate. Not a particular problem, since both humans and Genomorphs consist of 95 percent water, but in Genomorphs, the percentage can drop down to 50 percent without any danger, whereas humans at 80 percent already

...are long dead. Well, Genomorphs really are extremely adaptable due to their variable genetic structure." Tvorgh did not sweat, which allowed him to retain enough water; his metabolism dropped to an extremely low rate. Unlike Xana—she could barely walk any further, so Tero had to carry her. Ween caught up after stabilizing the ship's cloaking field and took the girl from Tero. When all four entered the city, Tero cast a discreet glance at her wrist computer, which was cleverly hidden beneath a long sleeve, and checked the city map for the location of their house. Fortunately, it wasn't far, and in the shaded, narrow alleys, making progress was much easier, even though they were congested with beggars. Most of them were war heroes missing one limb or another.

Tvorgh was the first to spot the house. Compared to the luxury he was accustomed to on Zer, one might have thought it was a building slated for demolition. The humans certainly understood a great deal about architecture, but they applied that knowledge exclusively to the King's palace, which stood only a kilometer away. When Tero was about to use the key, an older man opened the door and said quietly:

"- Aha, there you are: Tvorgh, Ween, Tero, and Xana. We improved the inside of your home a little; you'll like it. I must return to Zer II now."

Tero handed him the remote control for the cloaking device and said:

"- Argoz, you don't look all that convincing as a human, you need more practice. The MAGNETIC STAR II is parked in a valley near the city, have fun with it."

Tvorgh picked up Xana and carried her to the upper floor, which offered every comfort he was used to from Zer; by contrast, the ground floor was downright primitive, just in case anyone ever invited themselves over.

The upper floor also housed one of Zer's supercomputers to detect Ectomorph spaceships in good time, but there was no communication system in sight. When Ween came upstairs, Tvorgh asked him:

"- And how am I supposed to contact Zer if there's anything to report?"

Ween smiled at him as if he were a total idiot and countered with a question:

"- Have you ever heard of biowaves?"

"- Yes, of course. A form of communication that was still in the experimental stage back then. It's supposedly possible to communicate faster than light using that method," Tvorgh answered without hesitation, since his own girlfriend, with whom he had lived platonically, worked at the Institute for Bioenergy Research, where such experiments were being conducted.

Ween pulled a small box from a shelf and connected several wires to the flower sitting on the table in the middle of the room. Now Tvorgh understood: the plant served as a kind of antenna. What won't people invent when multiple brains are wired in parallel?

The Lords of Zer logo appeared on the 3D screen, and the connection was established. Surprisingly, there was no interference whatsoever, unlike with standard radio transmissions.

Delar appeared on the screen and asked about the status of the mission, and Ween replied that everything had gone according to plan so far and that they had moved into the house. When the conversation ended, Tvorgh sat down at the computer and began rewriting the software slightly. Just like in our present day, software for powerful computers back then wasn't particularly crash-proof, even though there were no viruses—on Zer, any virus programmer was sentenced to death, a penalty not even imposed for murder. The death penalty had only ever been carried out twice on Zer: on a psychopathic mass murderer, and on a virus programmer whose fault it was that a passenger plane crashed. All this simply because Zer used only a single type of computer across various performance tiers for all applications.

Tvorgh improved the scanner resolution through interpolation and stripped all unnecessary routines from the program to increase speed. Indeed, in a test run, the computer needed only two minutes instead of four to scan the solar system. A necessary performance boost, since Tvorgh knew that Ectomorph ships could travel at twice the speed of light by projecting a space-distortion wave ahead of their bow and immersing their ship in a field-stabilizing force field. A technology that was extremely advanced and clearly not of their own making. It had probably been developed by some human civilization that had fallen victim to the Ectomorphs—and the devil only knows what technologies they had stolen or "inherited" in the meantime.

The solar system was clear; only the MAGNETIC STAR II on its way to Zer II, the Jovian moon, could be seen. Tvorgh switched the computer to automated surveillance and prepared to leave the house.

"- Where do you think you're going?" asked Tero.

"- I want to check out the city, little sister," replied Tvorgh, pinning on a beeper meant to signal an approaching Ectomorph ship. Then he dashed downstairs and vanished through the door.

He didn't do this without good reason, for his personal wrist computer had shown him something deeply alarming. Satellite imagery revealed that an army was advancing on the city, and the commanders were unmistakably identifiable as Ectomorphs—specifically, a breed of Ectomorph Tvorgh had never encountered before. Tvorgh didn't want to put his friends and Tero in danger, intending to capture the Ectomorphs himself; however, that was impossible without the help of the humans.

The government district was lavishly appointed. Golden or gilded statues stood on every corner. The buildings, too, were far superior and bore witness to a certain wealth. But the best of the best was the King's palace. Behind a wall, guards stood watching Tvorgh suspiciously; his shabby clothing made it abundantly clear that he did not belong in this district. Finally, one of the guards stepped forward and asked him:

"- What are you looking for here, beggar?"

"- I am no beggar, and I want to speak to the King," said Tvorgh, somewhat offended.

The guards laughed and were about to grab Tvorgh, but Xana, who had secretly followed him, used her telepathic abilities and put both of them into a trance from a distance.

END