Aquari by DD White
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It had been late at night when Volock silently landed his new flying saucer on the roof of the secret headquarters for the Ministry of Science in Gulfang. Volock now routinely checked his saucer for unwanted stowaways ever since Eistia succeeded in stopping him by using that strategy. Tonight he had loaded the saucer with xenastic explosives that now were in place so that they surrounded the building. Volock went to blow the building up while all his targets slept inside. The ensuing flames would surely complete his murderous mission once and for all.
Investigator Eistia had a hard time getting any help from the Gulfang authorities after driving the thousand miles to Gulfang the day after talking with Oldo and his wife. They probably knew exactly where the hidden Ministry headquarters had been, but the Gulfang authorities were not going to tell Eistia. He did however, convince the Gulfang authorities that the secret Ministry was in grave danger, and therefore the Gulfang police had placed a permanent surveillance on the secret Ministry headquarters. For that reason Volock’s nighttime saucer landing had really been no secret at all, and the Gulfang authorities were immediately notified of the landing by surveillance teams at that location.
One thing Eistia likes to do when on an assignment in a strange city with less than cooperative authorities, is tune into the local radio chatter on police frequencies. Thanks to that, Eistia had been able to notice the multiple units of Gulfang authorities that were suddenly called to the location of Volock’s terrorist attack while that attack was still just beginning. Eistia even had the advantage when the police calls came on, of being the closest one to the scene.
Eistia got on the roof, and got in Volock’s way as he headed back to the saucer to take off before the explosions started. “I warned you about this crime that you dare
that when you commit it I will be there.”
Volock succumbed to fury. “You’re just in the way of my angry fit!
You little piece of Uranian shit!”
Volock produced a long blade from his Aungtalli robe, and swung it at Eistia.
Eistia’s training had been ready to get out of the way of that attack. He gracefully dodged two other wide swings. Volock swung like someone enraged trying to swat a stubborn flying pest.
It became time for Eistia to produce his Club Incapacitating Device in a perfectly justified response to a belligerent arrestee. He tried to dodge Volock’s swings so he could use the Club Incapacitating Device to deliver incapacitating blows to this opponent. The blows seemed to not even be noticed by Volock on his rampage.
Volock swung wildly at Eistia as the Investigator skillfully dodged the blade attacks once again like a combination duck and Kung Fu master. One valuable attribute of the Club Incapacitating Device is its ability to parry sharp objects that are swung at the officer. Officers are trained to use the absorbent synthetic hydrocarbon polymer material of the device to catch the sharp blade as it cuts into the club. The Club Incapacitating Device also is reinforced by a hard metal core that will stop any blade from actually cutting through the Club Incapacitating Device after a sharp object chops into it. In such a situation the Club Incapacitating Device can be used to grab that blade from the opponent when thus stuck in the Club Incapacitating Device to be yanked from the opponent’s hand.
That worked exactly as Eistia had been trained to do it, and he caught Volock’s blade in a parry that had cut into the Club Incapacitating Device. Then Eistia pulled the blade out of Volock’s hand after it got wedged into his club. There had been a split second when Eistia tried unsuccessfully to pull the blade out of the club when Volock connected a couple fist blows to Eistia’s head, to cause stars to blaze before Eistia’s eyes. The Aungtalli Volock had been incomprehensibly stronger than Eistia the Uranian. Those blows left no doubt in Eistia’s spinning head about that.
Volock started to enjoy this, and started punching Eistia toward the edge of the roof while Eistia just dropped his Club Incapacitating Device with the sword still stuck in it. Eistia knew what Volock had been doing as each connecting fist pushed him closer to the edge, and delivered blinding pain.
Then Eistia crumpled into a roll right through Volock’s legs, which tumbled him over. Eistia got up and got a kick into Volock’s ribs while Volock started to get back up. The second kick had been less successful, and Volock grabbed Eistia’s leg and almost tossed him over the ledge then.
Then Volock produced a pistol from his robe, and approached Eistia whose head already dangled over the building ledge. Volock pointed the gun at Eistia, and had been determined to not waste another second with this pest.
That had been the second when gunfire started going off below from police units that were called earlier to the scene, and had finally arrived. Several bullets went right through the startled Volock who then wasn’t even pointing the gun at Eistia any longer. Volock looked suddenly confused as gunshots continued, and his robe started displaying growing spots of red blood that were now starting to soak it. Volock spun around while looking off in space at the nothing come to greet him. Volock’s gun let off a single shot harmlessly into the night sky. He then just tipped over the ledge, and fell to a splat on the ground below. Eistia rolled on his side to look down below as Gulfang police closed in on Volock’s very dead blood-soaked body.
The Ministry scientists, awakened by the gunfire, then began to trickle out of the headquarters. The explosives that surrounded the building were located and disarmed, and once again Eistia made the Uranian news as a true hero of the people. Many of the Gulfang police were actually filming the ordeal with their hand-held Ministry of Science computer networking devices, which had been recently introduced to market.
That morning Eistia completed his paperwork at the Gulfang Police Headquarters. His case of the Ministry of Science Murders had been solved, the serial killer tracked down, and justice had been served. The famous scientists of the Ministry thanked him, and before Eistia left they showed him some of the wonders of the Ministry that were at the headquarters. They gave him one of their, now industrially mass-produced and very popular, hand-held networking devices out of appreciation. Eistia had always wanted one of those contraptions ever since they recently became available on the Uranian market. He fiddled with it when he tried the phone functionality to call his partner Grega.
Grega answered. “Hello caller I know not.
Time to tell me what you got.”
“Hello Grega it is I Eistia.
Just calling you before I come see ya.”
Grega said, “Hey Eistia, I’m so glad that its you.
The news just announced that Volock you slew.”
Eistia said, “We had a fight. My life he tried to fleece,
but he was killed by the local police.
I’m only grateful that the police tried.
He almost put a bullet in my hide.”
Grega let out a laugh. “Well you’re in the news again. You should know
the chief don’t like it. He thinks you should go.”
Eistia had not been intimidated. “That’s what he says, and he puts on a show.
That’s not the chief that I’ve since got to know.”
They both laughed and talked for awhile. Then Eistia said goodbye to Grega. After that he said goodbye to his new found friends in the Gulfang Police Department. If the chief fired him he figured he could always get a job in Gulfang. As he drove off on the thousand-mile journey back to Keshdesh, he figured the chief would probably give him a raise of value instead.
About three and a half hours after sunrise on Urania the sun almost filled a third of the sky. The Sun’s white dwarf light however, had been dim and you could look straight into the planet’s solar source of phosphorescent light without hurting the eyes. Eistia drove across the lush Swerite farmlands beneath that mid-day light where, not many days before, there had been a great battle between the King and the Aungtalli/Swerite forces. There was now no sign that an
Eistia enjoyed this drive back to Keshdesh where the sky had been mostly blue with just a few patches of white cloud mixed with green vegetation. The Sun stretched its dimly lit sphere across most of the central patch of blue sky, bathing the green farmlands in a coaglium light for as far as the eye could see. The planet Neweet became visible on the horizon like a crescent moon. Sure there had been terrorism, and disorder, but still the future had never looked brighter, or more enlightened. Eistia became comforted with a warm optimism that today everything looked up for the better.
Then the giant Sun in the sky immediately shrunk down to a size even smaller than the nearby gas-giant planet Neweet, which had been near the horizon about the size of our Earth Moon in that miniature solar system. The star’s light also suddenly grew intensely brighter, now bathing the green landscape in a white-hot light that caused Eistia to instinctively cover his eyes while slamming on the breaks. The intense blinding light then started the temperature to suddenly soar higher and higher and higher.
It had not been very long before this that Beataphoriah realized that the solar flare activity, caused by the previous neutrino bombs, had been chipping away at the amount of unspent fuel in the star’s core. Beataphoriah redid the math with this new information and knew the core was about to collapse, and then the rebounding explosion would disintegrate the planet. The star-door would remain immune within its super strong alloyed quanta-nanocoded virtual particle controlled walls, and Beataphoriah at that moment stopped asking Uranians politely to come live in its star-door. The day the sun shrank, Beataphoriah had been busy scanning the planet for life forms, and teleporting groups of Uranians through disconnected wormholes into cities beneath the mountain where they would hopefully survive this nova event.
Very few of the Aungtalli species ever agreed to take refuge in the evil one’s star-door. When the end approached they had already, the day before, ceased terrorist activities, and had retreated to the temple shelters to await the long since prophesied intervention of the gods, as if they responded to a secret call.
The coming of Aquari had never been late, but it had also seldom been early. Aquari finally got back to the planet Urania while the star collapsed, and he emerged through the walls of the star-door just as Beataphoriah had been desperately teleporting any Uranian sign of life it could find. Star-door cities and reality landscapes of folded space/time were filling up with Uranians, Aungtalli, pet smugorfs, waffs, haffaffats, trengeoffs, and herds and herds of thulumga. Some dangerous predators like foven, and big hairy gomieh were found and teleported to isolated locations. Even some flying dires and vivolen were plucked from the skies to suddenly find themselves flying through virtual skies that actually kept them at the same location in space as they flew. Beataphoriah teleported precious life when it had noticed the activation of the Chronolus wormhole program just as Aquari then entered into its presence.
“I know what we need to do with that wormhole program Beataphoriah. It is programmed to take this whole planet with this star-door to the cold desolate starless place where Chronolus exists. You will become a moon of a moon that is orbiting his Devaplanet.”
Beataphoriah said, “Oh sweet destiny! Aquari you are here! How I’ve missed you all this time. What can I do? The program is already powering up with the energy of the collapsing star!”
Then Aquari said, “It would help to have a body to work the controls. I can add an algorithm to the wormhole coordinates in order to locate us at a better place. Is Hanson anywhere to be found?”
Beataphoriah didn’t answer, but hastily reprogrammed the teleportation controls like the high-speed quanta-optic-nanocoded star-door being it was. At the time General Hanson had been back with Veldada and son in their star-door reality. Now he had been teleported into the room with Beataphoriah and Aquari.
“Why have you teleported me here?
Is this the terrible end that you fear?”
The 2-dimensional circle of light said, “Hanson it is I Aquari you know
I had brought you back from death’s certain blow.
I need your body again like before
to save the whole planet with this star-door.”
Hanson immediately surrendered again, this time consciously and alive, to Aquari’s control as Aquari entered Hanson’s body and the hair stood straight up again. There was no time to lose as Beataphoriah also surrendered control of the star-door controls to the knowledgeable fingers of Hanson/Aquari. Aquari was all Beataphoriah had faith in at that moment, and it surrendered to Aquari, and became desperate for his cosmic salvation. Without the phantom matter from the star Tze-Doldus, the star-door will be out of an energy source to feed the phantom matter singularity, which had been the essence of the 15 legendary star-door’s time/space folding, matter creating functions. The star-door would be left to drift through space on a slowly diminishing array of auxiliary power sources. To Beataphoriah, even that had been better than the situation awaiting the star-door on the other side of the Chronolus programmed wormhole.
Already Aquari had been ready with the math figured out before even arriving, and he added an algorithm to the program just in time, before the Chronolus program activated an even more complicated variation of the star-door disconnected wormhole functionality that had been used before. The entire planet, along with its phantom matter orbit area became engulfed in a greenish energy that swallowed the entire planet a split second before the intense pinprick point of light, Tze-Doldus, become an explosion. Suddenly Tze-Doldus exploded to rapidly fill the whole area of space at the speed of light for several solar masses with blazing hot flaming plasma, and energy that would eventually cool into new matter for the universe while it swirls into the vivid colors of a nebula.
The light of this event would be seen throughout most of the galaxy Magphoreus. In about 89 Earth years the light of this Urania nova event will be 5 times the brightness of Earth’s full Moon on our planet, and will remove the night from the Earth skies for a couple days. Because of what happened next, galactic cultures, even Devasuras, will name the resulting nebula left in the Tze-Doldus nova’s wake “the Urania Nebula” after the star-door planet that miraculously survived it, and not “the Tze-Doldus Nebula” according to the usual convention of naming nebulae after the exploding star.
When the wormhole program became activated, Chronolus had been notified by a quanta-communication that the star Tze-Doldus was now at last exploding. After more than enough time had went by he became perplexed that the planet Tze-Doldus-2 had not yet appeared in the skies above his Devaworld. At first he feared that something went wrong in the calculations. He re-ran the exact same thing in a simulator, and gazed out at the skies, frustrated that even he couldn’t see what happened a hundred light years away. There would be only one probability that made any sense. Aquari had done something. Chronolus looked at the glowing Devasura sky where nighttime didn’t even exist thanks to phosphorescent clouds that swirled in those skies, and he wondered what Aquari had done.
Eistia witnessed the end of the world from his vehicle on the road through the Swerite plains between Keshdesh and Gulfang. When the Sun suddenly shrank he slammed on the breaks to pull over to the side of the road so he could look up, and see what happened to the Sun. It had been a shock to the eye’s ability to believe what was being seen. Pulling over had been wise in the end because the intensity of the light from Tze-Doldus also suddenly increased exponentially when the Sun shrank, and Eistia had to cover his eyes from the blinding effect. Then the heat shot up lighting the vegetation-filled sky on fire. A hot wind started, which came from no normal direction, but from straight up above in the sky. Eistia only felt this with his hands over his eyes, and knew beyond all doubt that it was the end of the world.
Then the light and the heat suddenly dimmed down, and Eistia tried taking his hands off
The entire inertia of the planet had been disturbed by the giant wormhole event that had been created with the sudden increase of energy from the exploding star. The Devasuras were ingenious for creating the technology for this, which had been evolved from the star-door’s ability to fold time and space. All Aquari really did would be to add an algorithm of some basic 3-dimensional calculus math to the wormhole coordinates for the other side. Aquari basically shifted the other side of the wormhole 90 degrees in a different direction, but almost exactly the same distance. Unfortunately great tsunamis were unavoidable with the inertial shift, and many coastal cities and islands were destroyed. Tens of thousands of Uranians died in the fires, tsunamis, and earthquakes that occurred that day. There had also been flashfloods from 60 miles of Glacier that suddenly melted from the Great Glacial Mountain that also caused the North Sea and the Great Lake to rise over 20 feet, submerging coastal towns.
Eventually the earthquakes stopped rattling Eistia in his car, and he watched the green glowing sky with wonder. It seemed to be zooming by like the whole planet fell through a giant green tunnel. Then the green faded away and the sky became a pure blue, not quite the same blue as before. All the clouds were almost instantly evaporated off the planet by heat from the collapsed star before the green glow started. When it had all been over, Eistia looked around to find that a source of light still illuminated the sky. The Sun in the sky now appeared about the size of the planet Neweet, and Neweet no longer could be found within a 100 light years of the planet Urania. In fact, Neweet had been totally disintegrated by the Urania nova event, and no longer existed. The light from the new Sun however, now showed much brighter than the larger Tze-Doldus used to shine in the sky. Eistia couldn’t safely even look at the Sun anymore. He looked at the smoke from fires that were rising off of the distant horizon from shriveled crops in the Lands of the Swerites. Eistia just sat in his vehicle for the rest of the day without driving or moving. He had been too terrified to do anything. He witnessed the end of the world, and now witnessed the end of that end. Eistia wondered why he wasn’t dead, or if he was. Still no answer ever showed up to greet Eistia as he remained parked beside the earthquake shattered road between Gulfang and Keshdesh, which he couldn’t drive on any longer anyway. So Eistia just sat there admiring the new day.
“What happened Aquari? Where are we now?” In the star-door there had been a vigorous earthquake, and the surge of energy had been experienced in everything from the lights to Beataphoriah’s behavior, which seemed a bit hyperactive for awhile there.
Hanson/Aquari knew exactly where the planet, along with its orbit had been teleported to. “The original program had been to take you a hundred light years straight up into a freezing starless void above the Chronolus Devaplanet. I shifted the wormhole 90 degrees to orbit a tropical waterworld that I’m familiar with. It fit the wormhole coordinates perfectly. You are now technically not a planet, because Urania is now the waterworld’s moon.”
Beataphoriah programmed observation technology to confirm Aquari’s answer. Urania’s temperature was cooling down from the heat of the star collapse. Beataphoriah detected a new star in the sky, which it calculated would because of the extra distance reduce average surface temperatures a few degrees even though it had been a hotter brighter star. Beataphoriah then noticed that the new Sun currently did not power the star-door. In the wake of the Tze-Doldus nova, the star-door programs had chosen the magnetosphere of the waterworld planet they now orbited as a power source. They now orbited in the field of Phantom matter created by the waterworld’s significant gravity.
Hanson/Aquari explained. “The planet below is a waterworld that is teaming with ocean life of its own. It has a powerful magnetosphere that can power this star-door, and will also contribute to the general warmth of the planet. You’ll need to apply some virtual particle technologies to neutralize tectonic effects from its gravitational pull.”
“I see Aquari. Thank you for saving my planet Urania. The waterworld is about as large and almost as bright at night as Tze-Doldus had been before. Urania almost doesn’t have night time anymore.”
Aquari said, “Some plants will thrive on that, and some may die. There will be 9 days straight of night with every 69-day year as your planet passes through the shadow of the waterworld. I know it won’t be easy for you, or your Uranian and Aungtalli species, but this is your new day beyond what would have been certain freezing destruction.”
So the planet Urania had been saved from the nova that should have consumed it. Beataphoriah appeared as a hologram to the King who barely survived the collapse of a side of the castle during the Keshdesh earthquake. There are never really any power-outages on a star-door planet short of powerful solar flare effects, and soon the Uranian, and Aungtalli survivors were rebuilding the planet as two species now much more mutually determined to live as equals. Beataphoriah missed its opportunity to phase out the pod-pollen tree, and the Uranians again cultivated that tree, which now became even more sacred than ever to the god of the pod-pollen tree from time immemorial, Beataphoriah. Soon the skies of Urania were again blue, white, and green with the atmospheric vegetation that rained food down on many a hungry Uranian during those difficult days of rebuilding. The female Uranian menstrual cycle started calibrating with the 9-day night after every 60 days of day with dimly lit nights. It had been the hardest of times and the best of times for the Uranians who came to gratefully understand the miracle that had happened thanks to their star-door inheritance, and a mysterious cosmic being of light called Aquari.
Beataphoriah had now a whole waterworld to explore that was inhabited with life only 800,000 (716,571) or so miles away. Aquari didn’t think intelligent life existed there, but there were anomalies in the magnetosphere activity that left Beataphoriah wondering. Beataphoriah also had the last hundred Earth-years of Tze-Doldus history in the sky above for it to observe. The nova event happened just 89 light years from Earth, but on Urania it will fill the skies with light both day and night for Beataphoriah to observe in about a hundred Earth years.
The Aungtalli Bishop crawled out of the catacombs beneath the Temple of Energy, and contacted the King to say he had a message from the gods for Beataphoriah. It is amazing how catastrophes mend animosities, and bring hostile beings together. The King relayed the message to Beataphoriah through the newly re-established Ministry of Science that still had the operational teleportation platform. The Bishop had an Aungtalli quanta-communication device taken to the platform in Gulfang. Beataphoriah showed up on the platform from its star-door, knowing exactly whom this message would be from.
Chronolus appeared as the quanta-communicator hologram to address Beataphoriah in classic Nephaprican. “Well played Beataphoriah, and also no doubt Aquari as well. I seek to contact you, and recognize now, the sovereignty of your planet Urania, wherever it is. I wanted to possess the star-door mostly to stop what shall now occur. You must realize that you shall now become the hub of a new galactic culture that is dawning in this Third Age of Magphoreus. Your gravitationally challenged Uranians shall now be admitted to the pantheon of galactic beings, even still with terrestrial DNA. Your Uranians are about to become galactically wealthy just from all the valuable coaglium dirt on your lucky little planet. I want to propose a truce, and become an ally of the future that will now transpire.”
Beataphoriah had been more than happy to accept the truce. It had become time for Aquari to return the Uranian body of Hanson to its own ego-phantasm who then returned that body to Veldada and his son named Aquari. Beataphoriah now finally became ready to open the star-door wormhole wall to Goag Ralus in the core of the galaxy. King Worapor, along with many observers from the Ministry of Science were there, along with Hanson, his
When the wormhole portal matrix opened up, the first to emerge would be a giant blue humanoid woman with a bald skull shaped in baroque patterns that formed a horn on top of her head rounded at the top into two rounded ends. She had been a little shorter than Chronolus, and the Uranians gasped in collective fear at the sight of her.
Deliadre knelt down and smiled at the Uranian crowd. “Oh they are so cute Beataphoriah. I’ve been a distant admirer for a long time now.” She spoke in audible Eigalli.
Then a much shorter, rather well dressed Uranian emerged from the wormhole portal as the latest avatar of Goag Ralus. “Greetings Uranians who did survive.
I’m Goag Ralus. Glad you’re all alive.
I look forward to hear the whole story
how the planet lives thanks to Aquari.”
Goag Ralus greeted King Worapor, and truly galactic diplomacy began. The Uranians were given a place on Goag Ralus that accommodated the lesser gravity of the planet, which Uranians were accustomed to. Most planets would crush a Uranian with gravity, and they’d even have a hard time lifting their heads off the ground on Earth, which they would become pinned to. Uranians however, still lived in the perfect habitat, now as a moon orbiting a waterworld that orbited a star very much like Earth’s star. They got used to barely dark nights, a warmer summer season, and even winters that started happening during the yearly 9-day night, which now forced them to harvest their gardens every year, but still the best of all possible worlds.
The waterworld that brightly filled the night sky, often with enough light to be a second sun, had been named Minerv. It was a word meaning ‘the ghost of the old light’ in homage to its resemblance to the former Sun Tze-Doldus. Many Uranian children now grew up with ambitions to visit the waterworld planet right next door, which had been a waterworld void of any landmasses that wielded a Uranian-crushing gravity. Children often sang, “Oh Minerv, ghost of the previous light
that died right after the planet took flight.
When I grow up and someday have the nerve
I’ll build me a ship and visit Minerv.
I’ll build a ship that can fly through the sea.
I’ll visit the fish that also see me.
I’ll visit new life forms, fly and be free.
I’ll swim on Minerv, where I want to be.
When I grow up and someday have the nerve
I’ll build me a ship to visit Minerv.
Oh Minerv, ghost of the previous light
that died right after the planet took flight.”
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