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

Jessica and I would have made a great team. She tried to connect the generator the right way, as she thought the anti-gravity generator could be useful to us for other purposes. After a while we were both floating freely through the air, but our grav boots quickly pinned us to the floor. Jessica gave me a hand and gently pulled me up until I felt solid ground beneath my feet.

Now all we had to do was break the ice above us. There was over three hundred thousand cubic feet of ice -and that was a hell of a lot.

We had to come up with a solution to this serious problem and do it as soon as possible. But one thing really gave me no peace. Namely the feeling of annoying and deceptive calm! Something was perhaps not right.

I shared my feelings of impending danger with Jessica. At first she reacted seriously enough, but then she laughed a little and said she doubted anything bad would happen. And for the moment, she turned out to be right. But I kept my eyes on the co-pilot's corpse, getting the feeling that he was going to stand up and grab us by our arms.

The appearance of the Ervanans was quite interesting and worthy of some description - for instance, they were about six feet tall, rather thin, and with very pale skin, which seemed to me to be much thicker than ours, but nevertheless by no means coarse. Their heads, too, had proportionate proportions to ours, but were just a little narrower.

Cryogenic sleep looked like hibernation, but in practice it lasted for years. The special chambers in the cockpit in which their bodies stood were adapted for just that purpose.

- "I think we've succeeded," Jessica finally said, the only one besides the late Averia Downs who had attended school on Zegandaria, and subsequently graduated in quantum physics and particle mechanics from the Nal Rhys Moon Academy.

Jessica settled herself confidently into the pilot's seat, what we called the herodania, which the aliens used for seating.

The ship could have slid through the nitrogen ice and caused an unprecedented explosion that could have cost us our lives. So, Jessica decided to use the quantum teleportation engine.

- "We just need to set the coordinates very carefully," she told me very seriously, 'otherwise it could get really bad.

The problem stemmed from the following important detail - no living matter could be moved in space. So we decided to teleport the ship with the parameters set to vaporize the nitrogen ice above us. This was not such a simple task. The perfect duplicate of this aircraft would have to perform other tasks that were to be of prime necessity in the realization of our further plan.

Jessica sweated quite a bit while she tackled this serious problem, but in the end everything was done right.

The ship was also fitted with an emosan "periscope" through which very interesting things could be observed. We knew that the phenomenon of quantum teleportation was realized with extremely high accuracy, but we still had to check, because we hardly had the luxury of making a mistake.

Jessica's calculations turned out to be completely correct, and overall the ship was "duplicated" right above us. Then, using the parameters Jessica had set, the ship began to cut out and very carefully vaporize small enough doses of ice that would not cause too loud an explosion in case of some mistake.

After a few hours we were free. Believe it if you want, but if I wasn't wearing a spacesuit I would have kissed Jessica and thanked her from the bottom of my heart for a job well done, but she was also a graduate of the Military Branch of the Nal Rhys Moon Academy and didn't tolerate any displays of intimacy. Still, she encouraged me with her light and pleasant smile - as if she wanted to say "I told you I would succeed." There was a special magnetism in the look of this woman who was determined to succeed at any cost to survive. I thanked the Almighty whether it was the god Erduk or some wild and ruthless cosmic deity that she was working on our side and fighting tooth and nail.

- 'The ship must be properly erected,' she interrupted my thoughts, 'otherwise the first successful part may be a fleeting triumph before a spectacular fiasco.

Jessica set about activating the antimatter engine with a precision that could truly earn the highest praise. For those who wondered where exactly we were going to go, now that we had freed the ship from the enormous ice burden that had encumbered it until recently - well, in all honesty, the concept of antimatter propulsion involved what was called specific energy, which was billions of times greater than that given off by chemical fuels. Not that earthlings used chemical rockets. They were prehistoric, but here we had to consider that the collision between hydrogen and antihydrogen[1] could generate thrust, and that was the thing we needed. This shower of pions[2] and muons[3] could generate directed motion strong enough to take us to anywhere in the solar system with ease, and even much farther.

When we lifted off, we turned off the secondary vertical stabilizers. I was amazed at the foresight of the Ervanans and their desire to build such a perfect battleship, which could have been a true specimen of the highest order in its own right.

Then I clearly heard Jessica's voice:

- "Now, my dear Jervond, comes the most difficult and specific part, and you are really expected to help me," she looked at me with feverish anticipation.

- "What exactly do you expect me to do?," I asked her frankly, 'I believe I could run this ship and overrule you if necessary.

- "That's not necessary for now," she replied through a laugh, "just keep an eye on that pilot. Who knows, maybe the cryogenic chamber he's in will open and he'll attack us out of nowhere. I know it's highly unlikely, but still."

- "You're right," I shared my concerns with her, "We have to be really careful or we might fall victim like all the other people on Enbright."

Gradually the ship made altitude and the antimatter thrusters were activated. Then Jessica asked me a rather interesting question:

- Are we ever going back to Semrik Sin? We might be ambushed there, leading to a brutal clash with Earth Federation forces. Your decision could prove fateful, so think it over. We can of course try to rescue the others, but I'm not aware of the ship's combat capabilities, particularly the geovenium cannons, which possessed astonishing power.

Jessica's idea was to launch a small spy probe to test her theory of Earth Federation subterfuge.

- "Haven't you ever dreamed of going to a real place where you could feel truly free?," she asked openly.

I didn't know what to answer her. This impressive woman was charged with a special magnetism. Don't get me wrong, there was an inexplicable fatality about her and a slightly gloomy air. Jessica always tended to look on the worst side of things, and was beginning to convince me to believe her that somewhere out there we really were facing a serious threat.

When I looked at her, I saw her as she was, confident, with blonde hair that looked almost white against the ebony lighting of the ship, with some hint of tragicism and a post-apocalyptic feel. She was wearing the same spacesuit that every member of the team wore, a special enzanium composite alloy mixed with nanopolymer and covered with Kevlarite tiles, but there was something special about her - she kept telling me something extra special, that I had come to Charon on a mission and that I was destined to go all the way, for better or worse. She was so young - she was hardly more than thirty in fact - but there was a strange sense of doom in her smile.

- "Some would say you're something of a guardian angel to me," I smiled sourly.

- "Worse I am your mentor on the path of the Light," she answered me gravely.

- "Are you one of the Light creatures?," I looked at her in disbelief and a frank dose of doubt.

I had a feeling I was going to start completely unplugging.

- And you can't change it in any way, but you can accept it with philosophical humility and dignity, which is, I think, the wisest possible decision.I stood spellbound at her strange words, but she had saved my life and could say whatever she wanted!

[1] Antihydrogen - the antimatter analogue of hydrogen.

[2] Pion - collective name of three types of elementary particles.

[3]  Muon - a type of elementary particle.

CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE: THE SINS OF GERVOND

I, Gervond Om San, am ready to confess to all my sins committed in the name of preserving my own life, as well as the life of Jessica Edwater herself. Her suggestion that we wait a while for the hidden spy nanoprobe to bring us the appropriate signals proved correct - the Semrik Sin colony had indeed been wantonly destroyed. It was with difficulty that I held back my tears when I saw what atrocities the Earthlings, who liked to tout their culture as "civilized" and consider the Ervanans "space nomads" and "savages," were capable of. I don't think I particularly need to remind you that everything that happened on their ship was caused primarily by the very natural course of events, namely the built-in self-defense system had activated and we barely managed to survive under these brutal conditions.

The remnants of the Semrik Sin colony were not just destroyed, but flattened to the surface of Charon, and from the holographic projection that was before our eyes, it was clear to us that this work was most likely motivated by people like Hermonal Bivors and his nonsensical theory of debugging. This brilliantly mad scientist was definitely surrounded by a dark aura. We even heard one of the clone troopers recite a little passage from his harebrained idea, which went something like this - "An annoying mistake, but also a dangerous one, where will it get us - apparently it wasn't enough to just deal with the problems at the level of genetics and improving our clones, but to raise our sights to the Universal level as well!"

To carry out their audacious scheme, the Earthlings had atomic bombs which they had aimed in the right direction - it seemed primitive, but what they had caused was sickening. It wasn't clear from the spy probe records whether they had taken anyone with them before carrying out their intrusion. But one could expect absolutely anything from Hermonal Bivors and company!

In fact, after some interruption, we noticed that Eberald Eziner was on one of the ships, and he was supposed to be torturing the surviving Zegandarians as only he knew how!

No matter how much I knew Jessica, or knew her, I knew I could trust her. She was serving a cause or had a