No building, no matter how well designed, could survive a supersonic wind able to lift boulders the size of a spaceship like they were specks of dust. Where Belamia touched the beaches, it left behind a shiny sandblasted bedrock, and a three-hundred-foot-high storm surge washed away the remains. The rain turned into a deluge, washing the crops into the ocean. The beaches, Antyra’s definition of paradise a mere week before, turned into an inhospitable place for life.
Millions of refugees flooded the few remaining spaceports. However, no vessel hurried to pick them up because on Antyra I, things weren’t going much better. The Antyrans were convinced they were living in the end of times, so they crowded in the sacred neighborhoods to be protected from the unbearable corruption of the “last hour.” They turned their faces to the forgotten father, their temples wet with fear and remorse, painfully aware that in the short time left at their disposal, they couldn’t turn the tides of the allotted doom. It didn’t matter that the whole world was on the brink of collapse, it didn’t matter that there were no interplanetary flights; it didn’t matter that the food supplies were dwindling and that much of the harvest was floating around Antyra II’s stratosphere, blown there by Belamia’s anger…
On top of that, Baila XXI spent most of his time perched in the highest murra tree, holding endless speeches, instead of seeking solutions to prevent the chaos and starvation.
The evening spread its deceptive veil of darkness over a torn-apart world, the eighth since Beramis abandoned them, and the first stars rose in a way that was again becoming familiar to the Antyrans. It was almost the end of the workday for Engis, one of the operators of the Mirra spaceport. His mission was to handle the interplanetary traffic in the sector, but in the last eight days, the traffic had ceased to exist. Since most Antyrans had basically moved to the temples, nobody was working anymore. No one but them.
Surprisingly, even though the deep-space radars remained silent, Engis had plenty of work on his taiclass="underline" he had to track the orbital platforms controlled by the initiates. Normally, their traffic was handled by the relay station in western Alixxor, but the base was deserted and seemingly burned to the ground.
Engis finished checking the flight parameters and saved them in his report. He was about to leave the room to meet the initiate running the spaceport when he saw a diamond-shaped formation entering his sector. There were sixteen bright-orange dots, moving at lightning speed in Antyra’s space!
Although the space radars couldn’t see much from such a distance, Engis realized at a glance that they couldn’t be Antyran. Their flight formation and tremendous speed were signs they had to be something else. Trembling in awe, he pressed a button, raising the alarm in the whole base.
The gods were returning to their children!
CHAPTER 8.
The merciless, unbearable heat was coming from the hell of fire. The star rays burned like lasers, and even the best spacesuit could only briefly protect someone insane enough to walk in broad daylight on the charred surface of Antyra III.
Although the Antyran star was a puny white dwarf, its mass barely larger than a red dwarf, from the closeness of the planet’s orbit, it shone brighter than anyone could imagine. And a year had only fifteen Antyran days.
No coincidence, Antyra III also rotated around its axis in fifteen days because it was tidally locked to the star. Therefore, a day on the starlit side lasted a bit longer than eternity. The almost nonexistent atmosphere was unable to dissipate the terrible heat from the lighted surface, bathed in red lakes of molten sulfur, to the dark side, where a billion-year-long night hid an eternal ice cap.
Even though the planet was the very definition of hell, its wealth attracted the Antyrans like a magnet. As soon as the technology allowed it, the inquisitive kyis found a way to colonize the world. The twilight ring, a penumbra between night and day, was the ideal place to start. Not far from the water source of the ice cap and bathed in the eternal light of the star-rise or star-set, several mining towns were built on two large plateaus on the eastern and western edges of the daylight side. In this shadowed area, the temperatures remained tolerable, allowing the surface settlements to grow under huge domes, silvery on the outside and transparent on the inside.
A serious problem delayed the colonization for over forty years. The farming world of Antyra II already had large, thriving communities when the Antyrans made the first clumsy attempts to plant their boots in Antyra III’s dust; the reason was that the planet had a marked oscillation, due to which the twilight ring moved all the time, causing headaches for the first foolhardy Antyrans. Viewed from the towns, the star dawned, rose, dawned again, and then rose once more from the same eastern or western horizon.
The only solution was to build two orbital belts between the settlements and the hell of fire, where they could shield the starlight as needed by the colonists.
With all this titanic effort, the real metropolis wasn’t built on the surface but deep inside the planet. The surface dome of Ropolis45 didn’t seem bigger than the others; in fact, it looked smaller and more meager than every other one. But that was just a shallow impression; from the spaceport, the visitors were brought deep underground by the spiral trains, their tracks closely following the Blue Crevice46 in which the mining city was dug. Only there did the real city reveal itself in front of the amazed eyes of the onlookers.
Seven billion years before, shortly after the formation of the Antyran star system, maybe the wind was blowing the dust on the world’s plains and plateaus; maybe the waves were rippling the surface of a primordial ocean. But the paradise didn’t last long: a weak gravity field, an orbit closer and closer to the heat inferno, and a devastating impact vaporized everything, leaving behind a burned crust and easy access to the metal-rich core—the only major source in the whole Antyran system. Five billion years before, a minor planet had tangentially collided with it. The hit must have been terrible, with Antyra III actually being broken into several large pieces, welded back together by their gravity. Because the planet was already mostly solidified by then, the impact and joining of the fragments gave rise to huge cracks and holes scattered everywhere. The one that hosted Ropolis was mapped by probes down to 150 miles below the surface, but others surely exceeded it. The legend told of an ocean gurgling furiously at the bottom of the deepest caves, hidden from the rest of the world. Of course, it was only a legend; no one saw it or smelled it, not even the countless hologuided devices sent over time on detailed mapping expeditions. But the alleged tremors of the monstrous tidal cataracts pouring back and forth through the ancient cracks were sometimes felt even on Ropolis. Many believed in the ocean’s existence, and not only the lay Antyrans: lots of scholars from the recently burned Tower of Matter thought that its tidal force, fed by the world’s slightly elliptical orbit, was the main reason of the planet’s wobbling.
***
On the second day since Engis had raised the alarm, the godly ships arrived near Antyra III. Ropolis had already reached its third star-set that day when the fleet rose in the sky in place of the star; the ships, flying in rhomboidal formation, could even be seen with the naked eye.
Their presence near the mining world was a bit puzzling, to say the least. Everyone expected them to rush straight to Alixxor, to join the fight against Arghail’s children before the hungry mist of the night could swallow its rich harvest of kyis. Instead, they wasted two days wandering aimlessly through the Antyran system. Of course, nobody dared to voice their thoughts—it would have been the greatest sacrilege to question the godly reasons. Surely they had good motives to do what they were doing.