Perry Rhodan Lemuria 1: Ark of the Stars (27 page)

Greens, nothing but greens.

He didn't give up. He connected to the surveillance cameras in the sector. Not surprisingly, he got overwhelmingly red values. Most of the cameras had broken down over the centuries, and since they weren't critical for the operation of the Ship they had not been replaced.

The Naahk began his inspection with the functioning cameras that were installed on the surface of the Outer Deck. He looked at the fields in which plants grew that were optimized for yield and resistant to the cosmic radiation and higher gravity of the deck. Nothing stood out. Or did it? Something wasn't right. His unease grew, increasing with each new camera view. Finally he realized what was bothering him: the fields were deserted. At this time of day they should been full of working metach.

What was going on? Was it mere coincidence? Or had the metach themselves noticed the decreasing amount of oxygen in the air and moved to other sectors? Such behavior would be highly unlikely. A good metach stayed in the location assigned to him until someone directed him to a new one. It would take something much worse than a temporary depletion of the oxygen supply to make him deviate from his instilled behavioral pattern.

Lemal made a note to call the responsible Tenarch and demand an explanation for the incident. But first he had to get to the bottom of the phenomenon. The Naahk checked the cameras within the Outer Deck. To his relief, he determined that the two shuttles stowed in this sector were untouched. At least his fear that a second Venron had appeared turned out to be unfounded.

He continued his search. He checked corridors and rooms that no human eye had seen since the Ship set out. In the flickering gleam of lights that came on automatically, or that of emergency lights that turned themselves on when the regular ones failed, he went through one after the other.

The work was tiring. His neck began to ache. He automatically moved his head from left to right, up and down, and while he pored over the shifting images, his deteriorating joints were subjected to stress that they were no longer capable of withstanding. Though he wasn't going to give up his search entirely, the Naahk was at the point of taking a break when he connected to a camera that watched over a long-empty storage room against the Ship's outer hull. The spare parts that had been stored there when the Ship launched had been used during the first century.

He saw a leak.

There had been other leaks in the history of the Ship. Materials aged, after all. But this leak was different from any he had seen before. Lemal zoomed the camera in close. He saw a welded seam, circular and large enough for a man to pass through. The seam was irregular, as though it had been hastily improvised—which eliminated the possibility that it had been the work of the Ship's builders. Lemal switched the view to infrared. The seam glowed crimson. It must have just been made.

He acted immediately. He did not turn to the Net: the partial blindness of the computer network was unmistakable proof that he could no longer count on it.

Launt's face appeared in an inset window on the display. The Tenarch was even paler than he had been the day when Netwar had conferred on him the hunt for the traitors.

"Naahk!" Launt exclaimed. "Have you already heard about it?"

"About the disruption in the air supply?"

Launt shook his head. "I don't anything about that. About the strangers, I mean."

"Strangers?"

"I've just learned about them. Intruders are on board in Sector XVI E! The metach are running away from them."

It was the sector bordering the one in which Lemal had stumbled on the fresh welding seam.

Someone had discovered the Ship. The day he long had feared had come.

"Naahk!" Launt pressed as Lemal said nothing. "What are your orders? What should we do?"

"The metach must leave the Outer Deck. All of them."

"I'll see to it. What else?"

"Call the Tenoy together on the Middle Deck. In full battle gear. I'll join you as soon as I can."

Lemal broke the connection. He injected a dose of painkiller and stood. From a drawer he took a supply of the medicine that was enough to last him for many weeks, then put on his body armor.

As he glided toward the Middle Deck in the elevator and the gravity pulled him more strongly toward the floor, he checked his weapons. They were functioning and loaded. He holstered them, then his fingers found the chain around his neck and clutched the medallion. He felt how it stimulated him, reminded him why he had made all this effort, what he stood for.

It took away his fear.

At least the worst of it.

Solina Tormas had always been interested in the past. As a child she had pestered her father and mother, her grandparents, her great-grandparents, and her great-great-grandparents—every member of her extended family within reach—and asked them how things used to be. While the other children spent their days with each other on the beaches and dove for glowfish to sell to the tourists, Solina had spent her time at home, preferably with her great-great-grandmother.

Mesdaq was different from all the others. She didn't shoo Solina away, never admonished her to stop with all those infernal questions about the dead past and occupy herself with something useful, like cleaning the kitchen or making some money from the tourists. Mesdaq never lacked time.

Only years later, after Solina had grown up, did she understand the source of Mesdaq's patience. Her great-great-grandmother had been an old, worn-out woman waiting for death. The life-sustaining systems in her floatchair had denied her that relief while her mind gradually decayed. Finally, she was only a shadow of the woman she had once been, now living in the past.

"Mesdaq, what was it like when you were a child?" Solina asked.

"We were poor," the ancient woman said. "Bitterly poor. The ocean was full of glowfish, but nobody wanted to buy them. All you had to do was throw a net into the sea and pull it back out again, and it was filled with them. You needed a lot of strong arms for that. There were never enough of those. Many people died before we knew which fish we could eat and which not to. There weren't many we could."

"Why didn't you buy your fish in the stores? Or have them delivered to you?" Solina didn't know anyone who ate fish directly from the sea.

"There weren't any stores. And nobody who would have given us anything."

"Why weren't there any stores?"

"We were new on this world."

"You ... you weren't from Shaghomin?"

"No."

"And there weren't any stores, not a one?"

"No."

How dumb,
the little Solina thought,
moving to a planet where there weren't any stores!

"Then why did you come here?"

"They forced us to."

"Who did?"

"The government. The Energy Command."

That's so silly! The government only does good things for us!

"Why did they do that?"

"Because they wanted us out of the way."

"Where did you come from?"

"From Drorah."

"Is everybody here from Drorah?"

"No, but many are."

"Then is Drorah where we really,
really
came from?"

Mesdaq always thought about that question for a long time. At first she answered with "yes," but once she thought about it for so long that Solina believed her great-great-grandmother had nodded off again until she whispered, "No, from Lemur."

That was the first time Solina heard the name of the world of their origin. It would never let her go.

The child grew into a teenager. She became cut off from others her age who sensed that she was different from them. Solina acted as though it didn't bother her and buried herself more deeply in her enthusiasm for the past. One day, she discovered that the computer terminal in her room was good for more than just silly games or mindless entertainment. The numerous generations that had come and gone before her lived on within it.

Before long, she had stopped spending time with Mesdaq. Despite the systems in her floatchair, her great-great-grandmother was now almost always asleep. If an antigrav field hadn't held her head up, it would have constantly fallen forward. The stories that Mesdaq told became more confused and incoherent, and Solina had already heard them anyway.

The computer, on the other hand, always had something new to tell her, and so Solina learned the history of the Lemurians, the ancestors of the Akonians and thousands of other races. They had all originated on one planet: Lemur, which was now called Terra or Earth.

Lemur was an inconspicuous world in a remote spiral arm of the galaxy. It was distinguished only by the fact that it bore life—a peculiarity that it shared with many hundreds of thousands of other planets in the Milky Way.

And yet, a long time ago, within a short (by historical standards) period of a millennium and a half, its inhabitants had risen to become the leading power in the galaxy. From the continent of Lemuria, the Lemurians sent ships of colonists to all parts of the galaxy. Soon the Great Tamanium, as they called their interstellar empire, included more planets than even the Arkonide Empire or the Terrans' Solar Imperium at their peaks. Ultimately, one hundred-eleven Tamans, or administrative districts, belonged to the realm of the Lemurians. Yet even that wasn't enough, and the Tamanium stretched its fingers out to the neighboring Andromeda galaxy.

It seemed destined to endure for all eternity.

Then the Beasts had come out of the void to attack the Lemurians, and within a few years the Great Tamanium crumbled. The continent of Lemuria, where the Lemurians' civilization had originated, sank beneath the ocean. The Tamans were wiped out. With the help of the multi-star teleporter, some of the Lemurians were able to flee to the Andromeda galaxy. Gradually they forgot their origins and became the Tefrodians. The Tamanium, from which Akon later grew, chose a different escape route, that of total isolation. The plan succeeded in that the Blue system was spared the devastation, but at a high price, as Solina learned later: the petrifaction of an entire culture.

In one last desperate effort, when the struggle had long been lost, the Lemurians dealt their enemy a decisive blow.

They did the worst thing possible to their enemy.

They made him content.

The Beasts had lived up to their name. They were giants four meters tall with four arms, three eyes, and two brains. One of the brains, called the Overbrain, was capable of performance comparable to a positronic computer. When the Beasts chose to walk on both their arms and legs, they could reach a speed of more than one hundred-twenty kilometers per hour—and keep up that speed for twenty-four hours. They could turn their bodies at will into a crystalline structure harder than any steel; their stomachs transformed even rock into usable nutrients.

The Beasts were born to kill.

The Lemurians changed them into peaceful beings of unmatched selflessness.

The Lemurians succeeded in developing a beam projector called the psychogenic-regenerator and, under its influence, the murderous Beasts mutated into sensitive philosophers. From the Beasts came the Halutians, who voluntarily limited their population to one hundred thousand members, retired to the planet Halute and from then on never again interfered in the affairs of other races. For the Great Tamanium, rescue had come too late, but it allowed many thousands of worlds settled by Lemurians to escape destruction. The Blue system of the Akonians was one of those worlds, and in all probability Lemur as well.

At first, Solina had tried to tell her great-great-grandmother the story of the origin of their people—no one else she knew would have cared to listen to even a little of it—but she had quickly given up. Mesdaq lived in one particular past, her own world, in which the Lemurians were nothing more than a catchword. Besides, the ancient woman was no longer capable of enlarging her world—with one exception that made Solina angry beyond measure.

One day, a woman tourist had emerged from the daily stream that flowed around the big round beach house of Solina's family and pressed a gift into the trembling hands of the pitiable old lady in her floatchair. It was a statue of Vhrato the Sun Herald, a messianic salvation figure who had been worshipped throughout the entire Milky Way fifteen hundred years ago in the hope that Vhrato would free the galaxy from the yoke of the Larean tyranny. The Vhrato cult derived from an old tradition of the Vincranians, Lemurian descendants who had survived the onslaught of the Beasts within the protection of a nebula. The Vhrato cult spread quickly, became a unifying symbol in the struggle against the Lares and subsumed other local cults.

After the retreat of the Lares, it had appeared at first that Vhrato would be forgotten, but the cult merely underwent a transformation. As a symbol of redemption there was always a need for him somewhere in the galaxy, and over the next millennium an entire family of redeemers grew out of the one Vhrato, whose outward physical form always resembled that of their worshippers.

The plastic Vhrato that Solina's great-great-grandmother had been given was accordingly in the image of an Akonian with velvet brown skin that was already beginning to flake off in places and long hair tied back in a ponytail, the arms widely outstretched in a gesture of bestowing grace. The family had let the old woman keep the statuette. What harm could a plastic Vhrato do? Mesdaq seemed happy to smile dreamily while running her fingers over its contours.

Some weeks later, the statuette had disappeared from the old woman's hands. Instead, Solina found it in the main corridor of the house. Someone had made an altar of driftwood, on which the plastic Vhrato now stood. And that was just the beginning: during the years leading up to Mesdaq's death, the altar grew in size, and soon there was an offering left in a bowl for Vhrato every day, usually glowfish that could have been sold to the tourists and which stank terribly.

No one would admit to knowing how the altar was growing or where the offerings came from. Everyone in the household complained about it, but no one worked up the courage to take the Vhrato away from the old woman, who floated in front of it in her chair every day, smiling blissfully and making it difficult for the rest of the family to move past her.