Post by Thrif on Feb 13, 2008 8:10:45 GMT 7
There was a new light in the heavens.
In the vacuum of space, a few belated broken asteroids swirled and merged with the great whole, smashing against each other in silent collision as the enormous birth entered its final stages. The titanic round mass was raw and seamed, crisscrossed with crimson lines like blood or lava, and continents were simultaneously born and died as massive tectonic plates shifted and broke. The surface of the young planet roiled and broiled with the turmoil, wracked with forces that would seem to destroy it in the very process of bringing it into being.
It was an impossible thing to hope for, what was happening.
But the work of a team of brilliant and dedicated minds held. The great engine of the planet, bore forth the new orb. Perhaps even this would not have been enough if it weren’t for the watchers: the strength of their desire, the fervency of their hope, the anguish of their potential despair. Perhaps the power of their dreams was what finally brought closure. The young planet found stability, and the turbulent clouds boiled back, revealing the slow, beatifying calm of New Earth.
Of course it took far longer than might seem from a moment’s description. And over time the number of watchers would grow, as human colonies the universe over drew nigh the new Mecca.
But it began with five.
“Oh my god!” a short, blonde guy with a sleeping infant in his arms broke the awed silence that had befallen the crew as they passed the Earth-like planet.
Korso laughed, his long blnde hair falling back. “Yeah, Zeb, I guess that just about sums it up,” he said, putting his hand on Zeb’s back. He glanced sidelong at Jeni and was startled to see a long tear sliding down her cheek. It was an unusual sight to see on the face of the tough young fighter pilot. “Jeni, what’s wrong?”
She just leaned further forward, staring at the sight of the planet before them. Her blonde dangling forelocks obstructed his view of her eyes, which were, in any case, bright and brimming with tears.Stith, a very large, mantrin creature standing on the other side of her looked at her and then to the captain. “What do you think is wrong with her? She’s happy, idiot.”
Stith’s eyes softened as she looked back at her friend, and put an arm across Jeni’s shoulders and squeezed gently.
Jeni made an odd sniffling noise and laughed as she hugged Stith in response, then turned back to Zeb. “Zeb - just look at it. It’s so beautiful.” she said, pushing her long blonde hair out of her face.
“Yeah. It is, isn’t it?” he nodded his head emphatically. “They do good work, those God’s. Put work into that baby like I could never do.”
“Maybe, but you’re still the best, Zeb.” Korso remarked. Causing a grin to spread onto Zeb’s thin features out of surprised pleasure.
“How’s our reading?” Korso asked, staring out at the planet, a stunned witness to this beautiful display.
“O2 is present here.” Zeb smiled, his eyes shone excitedly as he stood in front of the control panel. “H2O, and animal life.”
It looked perfect, from up there in their space craft. Just like the photographs of the old Earth, although the continents were closer spaced together and shaped differently.
“Jeni, I want you at your station, so we can land on the planet. We have to check this out.” Korso added hurriedly, he was obviously having a hard time containing his anticipation.
Jeni simply nodded as she went to her station and made the descent onto the planet. They landed on an unmarked rock face and in a large, excited group, they piled out of the space craft, with Korso taking up the rear. He was the captain of the Valkyrie, this magnificent space vessel. He looked around. The sun crept slowly into the sky of this planet. It crawled over the land, staining the sky red and driving out the shadow of the night. The whole land shadowed with fear and suspicion. The birds shuttered in their trees and the grass swayed, passing on the world. He sat watching the sunrise, the grass shivering around him. The breeze whispered in his ears and ruffled his lengthy blonde hair. He felt earth tremble under his feet as he squinted at the horizon.
“Before we go anywhere, please remember the buddy system. Jeni, you, Stith and Zeb all scope out the area. Zeb, I can take care of Marley until you get back but I need to report this finding to EarthWatch.” He looked at the infant in the scientists arms, before looking at each of them again.
Once the baby was settled, back in his crib in the ships quarters, they all paired up, and moved off to search the area.
“So what exactly are we looking for?” Stith asked, looking around in awe at the sight of the new planet, as they ventured further and further from the ship. She shuffled her feed into some dirt as she walked.
“Anything.” Jeni said, looking around with her deep brown eyes. “Signs of life... vegetation... anything,”
“Something like this...” Zeb called out, seeing a large steel door frame built into what appeared to be a mountain face with over grown shrubs all around it. They all approached the door frame and looked up at it with open mouths.
“Wiked...” was all Stith managed to say.
“We’re going inside aren’t we?”Zebne squeaked uncertainly. He seldom, to never ventured far from the ship. For his own reasons mainly, he never spoke about it to anyone at any rate.
“If we can figure out how to-.” Jeni commented after a few moments of looking at it, and not seeing a visible way to open it.
“-looks near impenetrable.” Zeb added, he was looking around him nurvously, playing with the sleeves on his shirt, as he looked up at in in awe.
“Well hurry up. I want to explore some more.” Stith said, leaning against the side of one of the rocks that surrounded it. She cried out as one of them slid back and with a creak, the door opened, standing slightly ajar. “Hey look what I found.” she grinned walking inside. They all followed after her, and looked around at the cavernous room before them.
“What is this place?” Zeb asked, looking around with wide eyes.
“A forgotten research facility by the looks of things.” Jeni said, tracing over the floor with her flashlight.
“Where do we look first?” Stith asked.
“No where, we tell the captain.” Zeb said with a frown, he reached for the walky talky on his belt but Stith interrupted him first.
“There isn’t any harm in looking around. Don’t be a party pooper -” she complained.
“- This place isn’t going anywhere.” Jeni added
“Look here.” Stith’s said as she shone a torch over billions of little test tubes. Zeb was the first over there and was taking a few of them out of their place, looking at the little labels on them. “It’s written in English,” he noted happily, and then read out the label “DNA Coding: The Bottle Nose Dolphin.” he put it back and took out another. “Whale, squirrel...These are animals...Or at least they will be.”
They all jumped suddenly as there was a loud “bzzz” as the lights flickered on and off for a moment, before brightening the entire room all all floors.
Looking around they realised that they were on a second floor, with several other stair cases leading upwards, and another leading downwards.
It was bigger than we had thought.
“Guys, do you realize what kind of discovery this is? We’ve discovered the second Earth.” Jeni said, causing the two others to grin. None of them had ever smiled so much in since they had met.
“We discovered the second Earth,” Zeb repeated her, looking around.
A dying supernova burned behind his eyelids as he lay there.
“...These are animals, or at least they will be.”
“Guy’s, do you realize what kind of discovery this is? We’ve discovered the second Earth.”
There were voices. They were humanoids, they weren’t dead. What was more, he wasn’t dead. Unless this was the Afterlife’s strange idea of Hell. As an annoying voice joined in, he decided maybe that theory wasn’t so far off. The pain that wracked his twisted form was mind-boggling. Air escaped his body in a wheeze, as he lay there, face down, too low to be heard by the others.
“...We discovered the second Earth.” the shrill, annoying voice said.
There was a hiss. A faint gurgle. He heard the sounds his own neck was making as he tried to breathe: soft sickening sounds as loud in his ear as his own heartbeat. He wanted to die, it hurt so bad.
He heard a deeper yet quite feminine voice and he listened carefully...he recognized the voice, it was Stith!
There was the sound of the Mantrin’s heavy tread on the rail, the creak and scrape of her toenails as she, and another creature went down to the railing that connected to the stairs.
“Hey. What’s this?” there was another step, step. Then brief silence, followed by an enormous slam that sent powerful vibrations through the floor. The dying creature laying on the floor gasped as the violent tremors jarred him.
It was typical of Stith. She rarely used the stairs when she could jump.
“What?” Zeb hurried after her down the railing of the stairs.
“How’d he get here?” Stith asked. Step. Step. Then brief silence, followed by an enormous slam that sent powerful vibrations through the floor. He gasped and squeezed his eyes shut tightly as the violent tremors jarred him. Typical of Stith. She rarely used the stairs when she could jump.
A rough hand on his arm. And then abruptly he was jerked up and flung across a hard shoulder. His head hung loose, awkwardly smacking against the small of Stith’s back, and he wanted to howl with the pain, but all that came out was an odd sigh, like the mew of a kitten. Something wet dribbled out of his mouth and nose.
“Stith! Stith, wait! Hear that? He’s alive.” Zeb cried hurriedly.
“What?!”
“Preed is alive! Put him down.”
“You’re crazy, Zeb. His head’s doing a one-eighty, for goodness sake.” Nonetheless, accustomed by habit to the reliability of Zeb’s assumptions, Stith set her load down. She did so none too gently, stepping back to give Zeb room.
Small thin fingers suddenly pushed at the loose skin of Preed’s neck, feeling, searching. Needle stabs, hot hard pinpricks, and he was gasping, sounds that Zeb didn’t miss. “See?”
“Son of a ...” breathed Stith overhead. Through watery, hazy vision the dying creature could dimly perceive her hovering over the humanoid Zeb, shaking her head in amazed disbelief.
“I told you I was right!”
“Ya sure are, Z-man. Now let’s kill him.”
A shudder went through his body, one of anticipation rather than fear. Of course the logical part of his brain was rationalizing as usual, working this through, trying to figure a way out: a scheme, a scam…ultimately, merely an intellectual exercise. Because there was no way out. He was Mantrin chow. Hell, maybe death would be a good thing. It would mean a release from this agony. What did he have to live for, anyway? There was nowhere to go, no one who cared. Only the memories of life on the run, fighting and stealing and hustling and hard living—a handful of space stations that all smelled the same and a dirty little nowhere slum on P’lochda….His benefactors, were down the tube, he had sold out his fellow crew members, he had betrayed his partner and the closest thing to a friend he had...and what for? Nothing.
Maybe it’s not so long before I see you again after all, Captain. He thought to himself, as he was lost in his fading thoughts, he didn’t hear the argument that was breaking out over his head as he slipped into unconsciousness.
Zeb gasped. “No! We are not killing Preed!”
“Yeah right. He tried to blow us up, Zeb! He betrayed us. And I’m gonna bash his stinking smirking face in like an overripe Jumolla melon.” She made a step towards the unconscious body.
“Eeyew!” Underletted by her threatening approach, Zeb stood blocking her path, making a disgusted face. She tried to move by him on one side, then the other, but he kept sidling to prevent her from passing. Finally, growling in annoyance, she simply picked up the little inventor and deposited him easily to her right. “Jeni!” he cried, realizing that there was nothing he could physically do to stop the Mantrin from attacking Preed.
Jeni had run to the railing and was staring down at the scene below. “He really is alive,” she said in disbelief, seeing the blood that was actually bubbling out of the Akrennian’s nostrils. She hurried down to get a closer look. “Nothing can ever just be simple, can it?” she muttered.
Zeb looked at her pleadingly. “We have to do something! I mean, we can’t just stand here and—
But he was interrupted. “Stith, don’t do it! Put him down!” It was the captain.
Stith had hauled up Preed by the front of his dirty tank top, his head hanging in a sickening way on his shoulder. As she brought her other fist back behind her for a heavy blow, she paused. The composition of the two figures became a tableau of frozen violence. Stith broke the mood of the piece, swinging her head around and glaring up at Korso. “What?” she growled.
His jaw worked, and he finally jerked his head from side to side. “This isn’t right! This just isn’t right!”
“Oh, it doesn’t get much more right than this,” she almost whispered, as her eyes shifted again to the unconscious Akrennian.
“Stith!” This time, the voice was neither Korso nor Zeb’s, but Jeni’s. “Stith. Don’t.” Her voice was quiet but not to be denied.
Stith considered momentarily. Although she had come to develop a certain respect for the captain, she was still more prepared to listen to her best friend of several years than to the tow-headed monkey boy. She lowered her fist. “Yeah?” she said slowly.
“If you want a good reason why you shouldn’t kill him this moment—well, I can’t give you one. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t one. And maybe I’ll think of just what it is while I’m working on him.” Jeni’s eyes flicked to Korso briefly, then back to Stith. “There has to be a—an infirmary, or at least a lab somewhere on this oversized time capsule, if not more than one. We’re going to go look for it.”
In the vacuum of space, a few belated broken asteroids swirled and merged with the great whole, smashing against each other in silent collision as the enormous birth entered its final stages. The titanic round mass was raw and seamed, crisscrossed with crimson lines like blood or lava, and continents were simultaneously born and died as massive tectonic plates shifted and broke. The surface of the young planet roiled and broiled with the turmoil, wracked with forces that would seem to destroy it in the very process of bringing it into being.
It was an impossible thing to hope for, what was happening.
But the work of a team of brilliant and dedicated minds held. The great engine of the planet, bore forth the new orb. Perhaps even this would not have been enough if it weren’t for the watchers: the strength of their desire, the fervency of their hope, the anguish of their potential despair. Perhaps the power of their dreams was what finally brought closure. The young planet found stability, and the turbulent clouds boiled back, revealing the slow, beatifying calm of New Earth.
Of course it took far longer than might seem from a moment’s description. And over time the number of watchers would grow, as human colonies the universe over drew nigh the new Mecca.
But it began with five.
*
“Oh my god!” a short, blonde guy with a sleeping infant in his arms broke the awed silence that had befallen the crew as they passed the Earth-like planet.
Korso laughed, his long blnde hair falling back. “Yeah, Zeb, I guess that just about sums it up,” he said, putting his hand on Zeb’s back. He glanced sidelong at Jeni and was startled to see a long tear sliding down her cheek. It was an unusual sight to see on the face of the tough young fighter pilot. “Jeni, what’s wrong?”
She just leaned further forward, staring at the sight of the planet before them. Her blonde dangling forelocks obstructed his view of her eyes, which were, in any case, bright and brimming with tears.Stith, a very large, mantrin creature standing on the other side of her looked at her and then to the captain. “What do you think is wrong with her? She’s happy, idiot.”
Stith’s eyes softened as she looked back at her friend, and put an arm across Jeni’s shoulders and squeezed gently.
Jeni made an odd sniffling noise and laughed as she hugged Stith in response, then turned back to Zeb. “Zeb - just look at it. It’s so beautiful.” she said, pushing her long blonde hair out of her face.
“Yeah. It is, isn’t it?” he nodded his head emphatically. “They do good work, those God’s. Put work into that baby like I could never do.”
“Maybe, but you’re still the best, Zeb.” Korso remarked. Causing a grin to spread onto Zeb’s thin features out of surprised pleasure.
“How’s our reading?” Korso asked, staring out at the planet, a stunned witness to this beautiful display.
“O2 is present here.” Zeb smiled, his eyes shone excitedly as he stood in front of the control panel. “H2O, and animal life.”
It looked perfect, from up there in their space craft. Just like the photographs of the old Earth, although the continents were closer spaced together and shaped differently.
“Jeni, I want you at your station, so we can land on the planet. We have to check this out.” Korso added hurriedly, he was obviously having a hard time containing his anticipation.
Jeni simply nodded as she went to her station and made the descent onto the planet. They landed on an unmarked rock face and in a large, excited group, they piled out of the space craft, with Korso taking up the rear. He was the captain of the Valkyrie, this magnificent space vessel. He looked around. The sun crept slowly into the sky of this planet. It crawled over the land, staining the sky red and driving out the shadow of the night. The whole land shadowed with fear and suspicion. The birds shuttered in their trees and the grass swayed, passing on the world. He sat watching the sunrise, the grass shivering around him. The breeze whispered in his ears and ruffled his lengthy blonde hair. He felt earth tremble under his feet as he squinted at the horizon.
“Before we go anywhere, please remember the buddy system. Jeni, you, Stith and Zeb all scope out the area. Zeb, I can take care of Marley until you get back but I need to report this finding to EarthWatch.” He looked at the infant in the scientists arms, before looking at each of them again.
Once the baby was settled, back in his crib in the ships quarters, they all paired up, and moved off to search the area.
“So what exactly are we looking for?” Stith asked, looking around in awe at the sight of the new planet, as they ventured further and further from the ship. She shuffled her feed into some dirt as she walked.
“Anything.” Jeni said, looking around with her deep brown eyes. “Signs of life... vegetation... anything,”
“Something like this...” Zeb called out, seeing a large steel door frame built into what appeared to be a mountain face with over grown shrubs all around it. They all approached the door frame and looked up at it with open mouths.
“Wiked...” was all Stith managed to say.
“We’re going inside aren’t we?”Zebne squeaked uncertainly. He seldom, to never ventured far from the ship. For his own reasons mainly, he never spoke about it to anyone at any rate.
“If we can figure out how to-.” Jeni commented after a few moments of looking at it, and not seeing a visible way to open it.
“-looks near impenetrable.” Zeb added, he was looking around him nurvously, playing with the sleeves on his shirt, as he looked up at in in awe.
“Well hurry up. I want to explore some more.” Stith said, leaning against the side of one of the rocks that surrounded it. She cried out as one of them slid back and with a creak, the door opened, standing slightly ajar. “Hey look what I found.” she grinned walking inside. They all followed after her, and looked around at the cavernous room before them.
“What is this place?” Zeb asked, looking around with wide eyes.
“A forgotten research facility by the looks of things.” Jeni said, tracing over the floor with her flashlight.
“Where do we look first?” Stith asked.
“No where, we tell the captain.” Zeb said with a frown, he reached for the walky talky on his belt but Stith interrupted him first.
“There isn’t any harm in looking around. Don’t be a party pooper -” she complained.
“- This place isn’t going anywhere.” Jeni added
“Look here.” Stith’s said as she shone a torch over billions of little test tubes. Zeb was the first over there and was taking a few of them out of their place, looking at the little labels on them. “It’s written in English,” he noted happily, and then read out the label “DNA Coding: The Bottle Nose Dolphin.” he put it back and took out another. “Whale, squirrel...These are animals...Or at least they will be.”
They all jumped suddenly as there was a loud “bzzz” as the lights flickered on and off for a moment, before brightening the entire room all all floors.
Looking around they realised that they were on a second floor, with several other stair cases leading upwards, and another leading downwards.
It was bigger than we had thought.
“Guys, do you realize what kind of discovery this is? We’ve discovered the second Earth.” Jeni said, causing the two others to grin. None of them had ever smiled so much in since they had met.
“We discovered the second Earth,” Zeb repeated her, looking around.
*
A dying supernova burned behind his eyelids as he lay there.
“...These are animals, or at least they will be.”
“Guy’s, do you realize what kind of discovery this is? We’ve discovered the second Earth.”
There were voices. They were humanoids, they weren’t dead. What was more, he wasn’t dead. Unless this was the Afterlife’s strange idea of Hell. As an annoying voice joined in, he decided maybe that theory wasn’t so far off. The pain that wracked his twisted form was mind-boggling. Air escaped his body in a wheeze, as he lay there, face down, too low to be heard by the others.
“...We discovered the second Earth.” the shrill, annoying voice said.
There was a hiss. A faint gurgle. He heard the sounds his own neck was making as he tried to breathe: soft sickening sounds as loud in his ear as his own heartbeat. He wanted to die, it hurt so bad.
He heard a deeper yet quite feminine voice and he listened carefully...he recognized the voice, it was Stith!
There was the sound of the Mantrin’s heavy tread on the rail, the creak and scrape of her toenails as she, and another creature went down to the railing that connected to the stairs.
“Hey. What’s this?” there was another step, step. Then brief silence, followed by an enormous slam that sent powerful vibrations through the floor. The dying creature laying on the floor gasped as the violent tremors jarred him.
It was typical of Stith. She rarely used the stairs when she could jump.
“What?” Zeb hurried after her down the railing of the stairs.
“How’d he get here?” Stith asked. Step. Step. Then brief silence, followed by an enormous slam that sent powerful vibrations through the floor. He gasped and squeezed his eyes shut tightly as the violent tremors jarred him. Typical of Stith. She rarely used the stairs when she could jump.
A rough hand on his arm. And then abruptly he was jerked up and flung across a hard shoulder. His head hung loose, awkwardly smacking against the small of Stith’s back, and he wanted to howl with the pain, but all that came out was an odd sigh, like the mew of a kitten. Something wet dribbled out of his mouth and nose.
“Stith! Stith, wait! Hear that? He’s alive.” Zeb cried hurriedly.
“What?!”
“Preed is alive! Put him down.”
“You’re crazy, Zeb. His head’s doing a one-eighty, for goodness sake.” Nonetheless, accustomed by habit to the reliability of Zeb’s assumptions, Stith set her load down. She did so none too gently, stepping back to give Zeb room.
Small thin fingers suddenly pushed at the loose skin of Preed’s neck, feeling, searching. Needle stabs, hot hard pinpricks, and he was gasping, sounds that Zeb didn’t miss. “See?”
“Son of a ...” breathed Stith overhead. Through watery, hazy vision the dying creature could dimly perceive her hovering over the humanoid Zeb, shaking her head in amazed disbelief.
“I told you I was right!”
“Ya sure are, Z-man. Now let’s kill him.”
A shudder went through his body, one of anticipation rather than fear. Of course the logical part of his brain was rationalizing as usual, working this through, trying to figure a way out: a scheme, a scam…ultimately, merely an intellectual exercise. Because there was no way out. He was Mantrin chow. Hell, maybe death would be a good thing. It would mean a release from this agony. What did he have to live for, anyway? There was nowhere to go, no one who cared. Only the memories of life on the run, fighting and stealing and hustling and hard living—a handful of space stations that all smelled the same and a dirty little nowhere slum on P’lochda….His benefactors, were down the tube, he had sold out his fellow crew members, he had betrayed his partner and the closest thing to a friend he had...and what for? Nothing.
Maybe it’s not so long before I see you again after all, Captain. He thought to himself, as he was lost in his fading thoughts, he didn’t hear the argument that was breaking out over his head as he slipped into unconsciousness.
Zeb gasped. “No! We are not killing Preed!”
“Yeah right. He tried to blow us up, Zeb! He betrayed us. And I’m gonna bash his stinking smirking face in like an overripe Jumolla melon.” She made a step towards the unconscious body.
“Eeyew!” Underletted by her threatening approach, Zeb stood blocking her path, making a disgusted face. She tried to move by him on one side, then the other, but he kept sidling to prevent her from passing. Finally, growling in annoyance, she simply picked up the little inventor and deposited him easily to her right. “Jeni!” he cried, realizing that there was nothing he could physically do to stop the Mantrin from attacking Preed.
Jeni had run to the railing and was staring down at the scene below. “He really is alive,” she said in disbelief, seeing the blood that was actually bubbling out of the Akrennian’s nostrils. She hurried down to get a closer look. “Nothing can ever just be simple, can it?” she muttered.
Zeb looked at her pleadingly. “We have to do something! I mean, we can’t just stand here and—
But he was interrupted. “Stith, don’t do it! Put him down!” It was the captain.
Stith had hauled up Preed by the front of his dirty tank top, his head hanging in a sickening way on his shoulder. As she brought her other fist back behind her for a heavy blow, she paused. The composition of the two figures became a tableau of frozen violence. Stith broke the mood of the piece, swinging her head around and glaring up at Korso. “What?” she growled.
His jaw worked, and he finally jerked his head from side to side. “This isn’t right! This just isn’t right!”
“Oh, it doesn’t get much more right than this,” she almost whispered, as her eyes shifted again to the unconscious Akrennian.
“Stith!” This time, the voice was neither Korso nor Zeb’s, but Jeni’s. “Stith. Don’t.” Her voice was quiet but not to be denied.
Stith considered momentarily. Although she had come to develop a certain respect for the captain, she was still more prepared to listen to her best friend of several years than to the tow-headed monkey boy. She lowered her fist. “Yeah?” she said slowly.
“If you want a good reason why you shouldn’t kill him this moment—well, I can’t give you one. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t one. And maybe I’ll think of just what it is while I’m working on him.” Jeni’s eyes flicked to Korso briefly, then back to Stith. “There has to be a—an infirmary, or at least a lab somewhere on this oversized time capsule, if not more than one. We’re going to go look for it.”
