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

But what could replace the probe? I had to find an answer to that question.

Then one suggested the simplest idea - just use a blast.

We had stocked up on a blast that worked in a very interesting way - when it was used, it fused the materials in the environment due to developing a tremendous temperature, and the shock wave over the detonation area was not too strong because it was dispersed sideways.

This blast was used by the earthlings when mining water ice, or more accurately when they needed to break it up to make better boreholes and pump water with the heomone pump technology we stole.

The full size of the craft was not clearly visible - it was probably about a hundred and fifty meters in length, maybe more. The Ervanans adored quality made battle cruisers[1], as far as we had encountered their civilization were space nomads.

I want to make an astonishing point here - the Ervanans were not defeated simply because of the military genius of GH306, but mostly because they had some problems navigating the Asteroid Belt. Their super-manned ships were deployed too densely and were a relatively easy target for the attempted clone.

I was privy to all these details from Rento himself, who shared them with me shortly before he left and subsequently ended his life.

Come to think of it, I get the feeling that this astonishing man - former ghost warrior, adventurer, sidekick detective and smuggler - wanted to wash away all the bloody stains on his conscience with a single gesture, but on the other hand I may be judging him too harshly.

The explosion was a complete success and we achieved what we wanted - the ship wasn't even scratched. But instead a hole opened up big enough for someone to squeeze through - now we had to use the torch, but before that we moved far enough away to avoid being hit by the force of the shockwave.

Lozur Bann set about putting it in, as after me he was probably the man with the most physical strength in the colony. Carefully he approached and lowered it, tied with a special zerethium thread. Then he too hid with us. We all held our breath.

Such a deep blast, as we called it in the jargon, could easily have resulted in the decompression of our spacesuits and our inglorious demise.

To activate the reondan burner, we used a very small explosive called a shigon ru, which in Zegandarian means "little mischief maker." This super strong explosive had a directional action and a small shock wave radius. It wasn't long before the fuel in the reondan burner exploded, and that was basically our little victory. We managed to hide behind one of the nearby craters before activating it.

What happened surpassed my wildest expectations - the fiery element caused by the ignited fuel danced under the icy surface and was soon followed by an explosion so loud, but somewhat muffled, that I was simply speechless.

I had feared that the ship would be affected by the shock wave, but to my amazement the super-massive neominium armour had not been affected in the slightest, but from the loss of solid surface the ship had keeled to one side and plunged deeper into the ice.

Now we had to act in an organised manner and manage to get it out the right way.

I committed myself to lifting the team's spirits and checked on our frequency that everyone was okay:

- "Group 1, 2, 3, 4, give me an answer," I repeated in a monotone over the cyclotron synthesizer, the syllables probably reminding me of the scrape of a laser cutter against metal.

No instant response followed as the various groups had split up in an orderly fashion to carry out my orders. But I repeated anyway. Same again.

For a moment I thought I was irretrievably alone. If that was true, my chances of getting back were almost nil.

[1] Cruiser - a generic name for a fictional class of battleship.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE: THE DEATH OF RIVINUS OLK

It turned out that the fall hadn't been that deep. But we decided to secure ourselves before descending into the crater. First we waited for the huge amount of heat being released to dissipate enough to use one of the team to survey the terrain. Just in case!

Rivinus Olk expressed a similar desire, for which I am grateful to this day. It turned out that somewhere in there a small chunk of nitrogen ice had formed some sort of contact with heat left over from the explosion itself, and when Rivinus Olk's foot lodged there, his corpse was torn apart like the Groandus had torn people apart in the last battle for Au Kaktir.

- "You bastard!," cried I, and a tear dropped from my eye, "you saved us all!"

To tell you the truth, Rivinus Olk could have become even a superior officer if only he had fallen under different conditions, but under the present ones that couldn't happen.

We proceeded most carefully, for we were now but a dozen men, and had to be preserved for the future. The rest had cast their eyes full of a terrible indifference - like the scots.

It was hard to manage the psyches of people gone wild with terror, but my voice grated on the cyclotron synthesizer again:

- "If anyone wants to desert, he will be shot as a traitor," I explained to them laconically.

This decision of mine perhaps sobered them and showed them what I was capable of.

We decided to act more boldly and take some risks. I gave each of them a laser cutter, as the weapons were in my and Lozur Ban's possession. Rivinus also had some, but the untimely explosion caused losses in that direction as well - he was carrying one of the Bonetier rifles.

We descended into the crater thus created and tried to find exactly where the ship's hatch was so we could get in and check for any remnants of life.

The Ervanans, as I said, were radiation resistant and this provoked me to check the radiation background around the ship - I was right, the doses were higher than normal but definitely not too much.

After more than two hours, we found traces of some possible passage that could be opened - we didn't have any explosives or other tools to solve the problem - Rivinus was carrying those as well.

When we finally succeeded, we were speechless. Inside were four corpses - all in perfect condition and dressed in the Ervanan uniform, which was reddish-blue, since according to the beliefs of their folklore these colors represented blood and sky, and every Ervanan was obliged to catch a glimpse of it at least once before they died.

I was told this again by Rento in some of the few conversations we had together. It had to be reported that he was always able to sift out the important and essential information and present it in a proper form digestible by the listener.

After all, Rento had graduated with a degree in Quantum Physics and Theoretical Astronomy from one of Zegandaria's most prestigious colleges, but few knew this fact from his biography - more accurately, only I did. Not even the late Detective Boss was aware of this fact.

- "There's no tragedy in a death," he liked to reason, "who knows if the next time the cards are dealt we'll be in the equation. We may live a very different life, or we may as well be gone. Don't you think that's logical?"

I didn't want to argue with him - he was right on every point. The morality of the universe, or what could be called the morality of the universe, was in his reasoning.

How much we enjoyed being children of our native Zegandaria!" he added, his eyes strangely cross. - Those were good years indeed!

I share this precisely because our lives are made up of many meaningful and meaningless moments, and some of them have much more significance than others. But we usually appreciate that much later.

His pale face reminded me quite a bit of the expression on my friend Jake Enroad's face, who departed ingloriously because of Enbright's men. Apparently there was retribution in this particular universe after all! At least for some of them!

To tell you the truth now I was wondering what we were going to do with the four undecomposed corpses of those aliens. We set about pulling them out carefully - it was bloody difficult and dangerous.

I could see Lozur Ban straining his huge muscles, or at least I guessed what the effort was costing him, because his spacesuit hid them to some extent. His face expressed some form of aggression, or at least I perceived it that way.

The Ervanans had left dead guards at the outpost, or perhaps those there were hoping to survive at least a while with the supplies they had left behind.

I decided to take a look at the cockpit anyway - the flying apparatus was constructed of a neon alloy we hadn't heard of.

We also tried to take a look at the communications systems, which to our surprise were working perfectly - apparently the ship had retained a small amount of its power after all.

Propulsion of such a vehicle was not a simple job and it did not use tachyon engines, but a special prototype of an engine operating on the principle of quantum teleportation. I know it sounds surprising - we also found it amazing how advanced they were!

There was the so-called Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which said that you just had to use a pair of entangled particles. Let me clarify that this is a pair of light photons organized in such a way that its total spin is zero. However, I should point out that this transfer is not corporeal - that is, it would "copy" the ship itself, but not the pilots inside it. Which was pretty clever! But what finally blew us away was that their ships also relied on another interesting technology that we had never developed let alone used - the speed of darkness.

I know it sounds absurd to you! How fast can it move? But believe me, it wasn't really - the ship was capable of generating an artificial holographic shadow that could fool enemy radars especially in areas of reduced visibility such as the Asteroid Belt and the Kuiper Belt.

However, if they had indeed used these technologies, this ship might not have been real, but merely a relocated state of it.

I wondered about the engineering thought that was capable of accomplishing such a thing for complex objects - it was amazing!

The Ervanans, besides being agile warriors, were big brains.

But then what was their plan?

Those replica ships weren't doing them any good unless...

Unless they were set up as decoys - deep-frozen waiting for the enemy ships to appear. Even in this lethargic mode, they were able to clone the parameters of the aircraft, and in this peculiar way, later be aware of the enemy's strengths and weaknesses.

This was very cleverly contrived.

But again the second question remained, namely why they needed to use these artificial hologram shadows - after