The reason for the ruckus was that they had entered a planetary system. Antyra! Gill’s hearts were beating wildly at the thought that he was about to see his world before Zhan’s arrival. Maybe he’d have the chance to glimpse Baitar Raman himself!
“Mapu’s on screen,” exclaimed a Sigian, damping Gill’s excitement.
It appeared that Kirk’an had disobeyed Deko’s suggestion and picked Mapu. He wanted to hide under the tails of their enemies!
They were flying above one of the poles, which was covered by a huge ice cap. He couldn’t see the details due to a high-altitude cloud layer concealing the planet’s surface, but as far as Gill could tell, it was an ocean world.
“Is it a good idea to hide the destroyer on this world?” asked the bracelet bearer. If we meet the enemies on Antyra, we can’t fight them with the rescue modules!”
“My concern is to hide the ark,” replied Kirk’an.
“How are we going to hide the destroyer? We need a good hiding place, but easy to reach it later.”
“My plan is very simple,” Kirk’an replied. “We don’t have time to hide it ourselves. We’re going to ask the natives to do it for us!”
“Are you sure about this?” the bracelet bearer exclaimed, bewildered. “I thought the idea was to keep the place secret, not to show it to everyone!”
“Our shields can’t emulate the frequency of the water, and we don’t know a suitable cave. Their muon probes will find it in the end. We have to shield it under bedrock to gain some time.”
“So we just leave and let the primitives hide it?” asked another incredulous Sigian.
“Right! We’re going to pretend we are their gods. We’ll ask them to raise a hill over the destroyer and forget about it.”
“Deko said their spies are here already!” exclaimed the bracelet bearer. “How can we—”
“We’re going to fly in on the western continent, where the natives are still in the stone era. We’ll frighten them to keep the secret, and if we don’t make it back, they’ll forget everything in one generation.”
“If we don’t come back, that won’t matter much,” mumbled the Sigian-Gill, still convinced they were making a huge mistake by leaving their greatest weapon buried on Mapu.
The memories jumped again, this time to the known images of the Sigians lying under a canopy on top of a temple. Far from them, hidden by a thick cloud of dust, thousands of natives were carrying huge stone blocks, rolling them on logs, or pulling them with ropes made of wines, attempting to hide the golden destroyer in a hillside!
Beyond the hills, he saw two small golden ships parked on the nearest shore of a large lake. Rescue modules, waiting to fly them to Antyra to meet the Rigulian ambassadors.
Finally, after one more pause, another star rose in the center of the screen.
“Antyra!” exclaimed someone.
His world, at last! And he didn’t have to wait to make his first discovery because the firewall was missing altogether! Antyra was once part of the myriads of stars anchored in the cold darkness. Perhaps the Sacred Book was right after all, and Zhan really closed their world inside the belly of Beramis when he punished them. Maybe that happened shortly after the Sigians reached Antyra. With a bit of luck, Gill was hoping to find the evidence in the memories of the artifact.
His joy didn’t last long, though. Antyra’s star started to shiver on the main screen. Then, he realized the whole image was trembling. Are we attacked already? Gill worried. Yet the Sigians didn’t seem to notice the strange phenomenon…
To his surprise, some Sigian symbols appeared in the upper-left corner of his vision. Something was happening with the bracelet, he finally figured. A series of green fluorescent lines divided his vision into a grid, and then, without warning, a brutal twister sucked him out of the god’s memory.
The bracelet awoke him without orders! As he wondered what might have happened, he heard a discreet knocking at the door frame. Alala! The artifact somehow detected her and stopped the dream! After a while, the female knocked again, a bit more insistently this time.
“Come in,” he answered in a hoarse voice.
Alala entered the room. She had dressed in a tight purple blouse made of synthetic scales, outlining the shape of her beautiful body. Although still fighting to regain his senses, he couldn’t miss the intense scent coming from her head spikes. It was a unique aroma, skillfully crafted to tingle his nostrils and wake up his instincts numbed by the madness of the last several hours.
Then something unexpected happened: as she approached him, Alala nonchalantly opened her back pocket and let her tail free. And as if that wasn’t enough already, she wobbled it playfully from side to side, without the smallest trace of modesty.
He felt his blood running to the top of his head spikes. What did she want from him? To let the tail free was a familiar gesture that said a lot. Of course, he could always be mistaken, but after a day like this, nothing could surprise him, not even the possibility that they’d end the evening in a passionate embrace with their tails coiled together, sunk in the scented fluff of her welcoming nest…
Obviously, he wasn’t good at this. Deciding not to make a foolish mistake, he pretended he didn’t notice anything. Anyway, tradition required that the female took the first step if she was attracted by someone and desired to mate. Of course, lately, the traditions had begun to change, to the annoyance of the temples. But the old ritual demanded that she would approach the male and bow her head, offering her head spikes to be smelled. If the offer was accepted, the male woke them to life by blowing softly on them, then gently caressing them one by one with his wet lips.
What a moment she found to play like that… Ernon, her “special” friend, lay crushed to death under a huge rock, and Gill felt a huge emptiness in his kyi after living the terrible fate of the Sigians. On top of that, he lost a dear friend, and the fabric of their world was unraveling. It definitely wasn’t the happiest moment to mate…
Despite the temptation, he intended to refuse. However, an unsettling thought pinched his taiclass="underline" What if this is the last day of my life? What if the temples sniffed my tail?
The legendary Laixan said in his greatest story, “Ten Nights in Zagrada”:
Always in times of need, the Antyrans are consumed by the scents of passion. The touch of death has the gift to remind anyone how quickly their precious little life is fleeting, to push them into the arms of “here and now.” They become more alive in a day of war than in a whole age of peace.
After being almost blown into pieces twice in the same day by the Sigian bracelet, he was feeling the hunger of “being alive” growing inside him. He wanted to be alive, to feel his life flowing frantically through his veins. Maybe Alala was feeling the same way. Maybe she wanted to close the gap in her kyi, to fill it with his presence and stop looking back, at least for the moment. Maybe.
“I wanted to check how you’re doing,” she said in a warm voice. “We’re on the brink of war, and you’re staying here alone. Let’s eat something!”
The strange thing was that the green grid on his retinas didn’t disappear. He noticed that the rectangle framing the spot on which he focused his eyes always became thicker than the others. Looking at the window, he estimated that the rectangles ended at about fifty feet from him.
He wanted to pull out the bracelet, but he couldn’t do it with Alala in the room. Maybe he should give it a mental order to disconnect? Still, the artifact proved smart enough to wake him when Alala knocked on the door. He was hopeful that it wouldn’t sink him in another dream without warning. The Sigians used the green lines for something. Maybe it would be a good thing to keep it activated and find the reason. He suspected that the bracelet had a bigger purpose than recording the memories of the owner.