The Silence of Zegandaria by Atanas Marinov, Atanas Marinov, Atanas Marinov, Atanas Marinov (book recommendations website txt) 📕

- That's an order, try not to be found!

The Ervanans rushed to carry out his orders, and they definitely made huge progress. Mordor Macula was a wonderful place to hide everything.

The Ervanan ships had certain features that were not to be overlooked. There was no better camouflage than theirs, but there was something in there somewhere that was definitely relevant - these ships could change shape according to what ships they had encountered before - this shape shifting was known as the chameleon effect.

These ships were built of peculiar materials as it had to be admitted that somewhere out there Earth engineers would give sweetly and dearly to take advantage of their advanced technology.

But the Ervanans destroyed their own ships for fear of falling into enemy hands.

The Ervanans were doing well enough in terms of their battle fleet, but that was not the way things stood in terms of their morale. From a human point of view, as science developed, so should morale, but this race needed more and more resources and had to get them from somewhere.

Before it had entered the solar system it had pounced on many other mouth-watering nuggets - but without much success, for the Galactic Federation guarded zealously the safety of its members.

Objectively speaking, this race had quite an advantage over the human race, which had begun its development much later.

The bodies of the Ervanans were far more resistant to cosmic radiation than that of their Earth counterparts.

We could apply a very simple example - in the past, astronauts who were sent on missions to Mars had a huge risk of developing cancer due to the doses of radiation they received.

An Ervanian wouldn't have suffered from that because his body wasn't affected by it all that much and he even had the biological ability to cleanse himself of it, albeit very slowly.

Their list of conquests was endless - they had first reached for some of the exoplanets around the Centaur constellation. There were enough interesting possible places for them to establish a possible colony.

But their resources weren't inexhaustible, frankly they needed to find a safe place where they could have a chance to catch their breath. The Earthmen were under the impression that the Ervanans were too numerous, which wasn't quite true. They had simply mobilized almost all of their available forces, which were organized and pointed in the right direction for a blitzkrieg war[1].

Not that they minded, but they were placed in a complete stalemate. There was something else to be known. The Ervanans never cooperated with other races because they felt it was beneath them. It was just genetically wired into their veins.

Om Suv Res had turned to those closest to him:

- If we perish, we should at least know that we have tried all possible options to find refuge. Do you hear me, you bastards, all of you!

Om Suv Res was not joking. He was very sick. And he knew he had to succeed.

At any cost!

They finally stopped at a small planet in the constellation Centaurus. It was Proxima B[2], which had not yet been colonized by humans. For some strange reason, the Galactic Federation hadn't colonized it either.

Om Suv Res had decided to station his main forces here, but he also launched patrol ships around just in case.

Yes, the planet was harsh - not like Earth, but it was a far better place than nothing.

The Ervanans would adjust somehow - they had inhabited harsher places in the past. The strange planet revolved around Proxima Centauri, and its surface temperature was on the order of 234 kelvin, which equated to about -39 degrees Celsius. Their chance. And they took it.

[1] Blitzkrieg - from German lightning war.

[2] Proxima B is 4.2 light years from Earth

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT: RETURN TO THE ROOTS

Every one of us dreams of returning to our roots. And that's only natural. On Zegandaria, we believed that our connection to our planet came before anything else. To us, it was the entire world that existed at all. We wanted to be there, but it just wasn't going to happen. It was an illusion to claim otherwise. A part of a former life that was irretrievably gone.

When asked "How does it feel to be away from home?", I usually reply "I don't know, simply because I've never been there." Further conversation usually became redundant.

I was always looked at as an oddball. But the people in the colony needed my skills and especially my inimitable drive to survive.

Few were able to organize a simple barter economy based on efficient production, something with which I was perfectly familiar.

Let me tell you something simple about barter trade.

We used it, not because we couldn't put the Earth Ents into circulation, or even the Zegandarian e-credits, but because many of the people were enslaved by individuals like Enbright.

I also want to interject an interesting detail - there were one or two people who had hit the jackpot in exchanging Earth currency for Zegandarian currency - you might ask what the point was. Well, as I said, with the currency in question (ours of course!) you could gamble under the now deceased Enbright and it was one of the few chances to increase your personal wealth. Since we existed virtually almost as an autarky or closed holding - it was definitely a clever trick. The problem was that very, very rarely did anyone manage to play it. And then his brutal helpers came to the rescue.

That is, we lived in a semi-slaveholding society with peculiar habits.

Those who worked in the greenhouses also received only daily rations of food - nothing more.

If they needed to experience any different pleasures - they had to get their money's worth. And there were hardly any ways to earn them legally on Charon.

I want to put some things on the table here about stress. The fact that on Zegandaria we had experienced the events of the last war for Au Kaktir and a number of other savagery could not prepare us for the wild sense of isolation and utter serenity that Charon offered in abundance.

If we think of stress as an acid flooding our system, it is easy to conclude that it had a psychic and somatic aspect. In other words, every recruit who started working in the greenhouses, who was responsible for maintaining the livorium panels for energy extraction, who was simply patrolling, or who was otherwise occupied with some other activity of maintaining the colony's buildings experienced what is called logorrhea - that is, they could talk to themselves for hours. This was actually considered normal if it did not harm the rhythm of work. I may have failed to mention the fact that we had expanded our energy fields with panels and they now took up almost two and a half scintillas, which was quite an achievement.

Actually, that wasn't a bad idea at all, come to think of it. This increase would not have been possible without the help of Rento, through whom I was able to dispose of some small valuables we had brought with us from our native Zegandaria.

For example, I was able to sell the electronic blueprints of a heomon pump that was used for deep mining of frozen ice that could easily be turned into water. The thing was, Cerberus had huge problems in that regard. If on Charon, such a thing didn't seem quite necessary, as through complex conversion procedures we could mine water and even make ice cream, which after further processing was edible. For the curious, I would add that its initial temperature was so low that it was simply unhealthy.

Incidentally, if on Zegandaria even a child could have made use of the pump drawings and easily assembled a test model, those idiots on Cerberus had great difficulty. Though they were unaware of our presence on Charon, as the above-ground floors had a special evodonium camouflage that made them look like rocks - no doors or windows (sorry synth hatches!).

One time while I was walking around the colony (apparently I'm getting infected by the use of Earth words after all we were already using some of our barter items!) I was approached by one of the simple workers:

- Excuse me sir, I've always wanted to know what it's like to manage others. But I'll soon have to go gamble with Enbright and then my life will probably be over. He never forgives us mere mortals. This card game of life is actually a diabolical creation!

Then his words made a huge impression on me. And later I would find myself in the same situation.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE: FAMILY

Charon's notions of family were also fuzzy enough. And if the crew mated in various geometric formations when they came up, on Charon this was considered strictly forbidden - not out of any special considerations, but out of sheer pragmatism. There were children to be watched, and we had no electronic cuioses - at least not yet. And the technology was not preserved on our trip up.

Someone had suggested the bold idea of using the Rento, which was still in service with us, to somehow steal one from Earth.

One of the last times I saw him at all, he told me:

- This colony is dead. Earth's quavios, even space ones, are not suited are these extreme temperatures that are on Charon. You must have noticed that even the Emonarrian hydraulics of your enhanced spacesuit can barely handle the cold, and any simpler technology like heat exchangers in the cuvios and other oddities will only complicate matters.

- "Rento, you remember my planet, tell me something, please," I looked him pleadingly in the eye.

I must have looked like some little kid begging for ice cream made of nitrogen ice at that moment - not that there were any kids here on Charon. But just the comparison made me laugh.

Rento had always avoided private conversations with me, except for that one time when we'd discussed human equality.

- "Well, my friend, there's not much to tell. It's just that the predatory model of government has destroyed it," he said sadly. "But when we abandoned her she wasn't entirely dead."

- "How so?," I asked.

- "I told you - every thing in this universe has a life of its own," he said, with a slight annoyance in his