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

The inconspicuous unexpectedly visited us and then took their first victim. It was Bendo. He passed away in his sleep. I cried a lot, but could do nothing. Then I saw the scars on his neck - they were as if someone had very carefully tried to strangle him. He had been trying long enough because the bruises could still be seen in his carotid artery area. It was disgusting. What kind of freak had allowed himself to do this to my best friend?

I don't remember what happened next. It's all a blur to me.

But the mood of the others soured further once they realized what was going to happen to them after his death. First, Bendo was in charge of the colony in my absence, when I was trying to find some raw materials that were being bought around the Asteroid Belt in that part of the system.

Because of that, we had to shoot several people who were not in their places to protect his life. This has gone on for far too long now. Bendo wasn't much liked for the simple reason that he couldn't help but hurt someone with the power he had.

Bendo had imposed a pattern of behavior that did not appeal to many. He demanded that the greenhouses be ready in the early morning and that the plants be given more fertilizer and phosphate, which would help them grow faster. I did not want to inconvenience anyone, so I took the situation with all seriousness. It was time something was done.

We had lost too many people, and we could too easily lose the rest.

McDougle Enbright might have been doing all the talking, but it was my own head on the chopping block, and that was highly unpleasant.

That bastard son of an Enbright was harbouring serious intentions to displace me even now, but justice prevailed - on one of the visits of the Invisibles, he was the victim. Enbright has always been utterly antipathetic to me and I have not had a good opinion of his entourage either. They were all shady types.

Enbright was into smuggling and all sorts of nasty stuff like racketeering, dealing in alchocol in western bottles and so on. Yes, there were no charging regimes in place here, but it was still proper for him to share at least a small portion of his illicit gains with the colony's general coffers. The city of Semrik Sin was, after all, a city of free men. Or at least that was the idea at first. Later, things changed.

And by now I feel really strongly that this man was incapable of normal emotions, let alone anything more in this life. He was going from blow to blow, and I think it's a blessing that his life path ended just like that.

Somewhere around this time, the Unsullied also kidnapped Zerilia Cox, who was one of the relatively few women in the colony. She was a beautiful and stylish lady who was in charge of some specific food issues. She was a truly courageous woman, full of life and a real desire to succeed. But the Invisibles did not pass her by. She fell a second victim after Enbright. That bastard! He was a real bastard and a scoundrel! Just a rare disgusting character!

Anyway the others were no less intimidated, but I had to give them some confidence and help them out. I felt it was my responsibility.

Somewhere in there I could sense all too clearly and realistically that something was not right at all. I just knew it. And then came the big trouble.

CHAPTER NINE: THE EXILE

Von Blask had gone to a rather unusual place, and it was one of Charon's companions, Cerberus. There was a small mining settlement there, and that was where the old warrior had decided to stop for a while before he really disappeared without a trace. Later the guard there reported to me and gave me the following coded electronic ciphergram.

%$670549863hgf45^78-475^&(*%$)#

Translated, all these characters meant "Von Blask was here. What should we do?"

I didn't pass over their message lightly because I knew what was going to happen. An old veteran like Von Blask wasn't going to lick his wounds, he was going to take concrete action. What was interesting, though, was what his real plan was. I didn't want to waste time guessing because I considered it pointless.

However, few had the intellect to guess his next move. I was one of them. But more on that later. Naturally, I didn't get the valuable information right away. And that decided the course of the story. Over time, I learned to judge people and evaluate their actions.

Another problem was the solar wind. This phenomenon consisted mainly of high-energy electrons and protons having the ability to overcome the stellar gravitational field and gain tremendous energy. But we still knew little about this process. This solar wind was interfering with our livorie panels for solar energy extraction and there was the need to clean them from time to time.

Electricity was needed not only for some of our basic needs, but also for the operation of some of the facilities. Yes, the irradiation lamps provided us with endless light, but we also needed certain specific probes that we used to dredge the ice in our desire to get water. That was one of our main priorities. And we terribly wanted everything to be right!

You see, in outer space, things can't be easy when they can be really hard. As for the help that was given by some other members of the colony towards my humble persona - that's another story.

Many wanted to be leaders in a place like that - something that was practically impossible. To be a leader required a host of specific qualities that almost no one really had.

However, it should not be assumed that leaders are infallible - this is a gross misconception.

The first huge mistake I made had to do with some interesting points. First, let it be known that the governance of the colony was done with a governor and his deputy. Pretty simple and effective means of imposing control.

There were some who tried to profit from the dead souls by recording them in a special electronic register. There was also a specific resale of Narenzian identification chips. We had kept this quirk from the previous colony.

But then Rento came along. We didn't know who he was - he was old and grey. Von Blask was long gone. Rento arrived at the Semrik Sin colony in a battered old speeder, which gave me serious suspicions that something terrible had happened.

I later learned that there had been a violent fight between Rento and Von Blask himself. The two men had locked lips - figuratively speaking - because they were wearing spacesuits, and Rento had barely managed to prevail in this unequal fight. Von Blask was renowned for his impressive physique. After killing the old veteran, he was hunted down and left Cerberus. Now the intergalactic police were hunting him down under tree and stone. I didn't know two points of the story, the first of which was where Rento had been before, and the second and perhaps far more significant what the serious reason for their altercation had been.

The Rento my eyes saw had hardly anything in common with the real Rento of old - his face was now quite brutal and he had a rather nervous demeanour. Maybe he was hiding something, but I never figured out exactly what. He came with the status of a political refugee, which in practice he was not, and asked for help.

I didn't mind responding and acting human, but Rento's personality remained a huge mystery. He was so strange and peculiar. Something in there somewhere had changed him. There was no trace left of the once bold man with a boisterous temper. He was a bit of a macho type, and a sort of type exuding a strange magnetism. But now he was just a different person.

- "I've seen the afterlife," he murmured, "everything we've left on Zegandaria will now come back to haunt us in full force. This is what I can say."

- "You don't sound very hopeful," I told him, "Well, I might as well know that, it's not something I haven't thought about. After all, the intergalactic police are a creation of this part of the universe. And it is responsible for preventing crime..."

- "I'm not talking about that," he cut me off. "I'm talking about the Invisibles. Why do they roam among you? Why do they kidnap you in your dreams and try to take your life? Why don't you have answers to all these questions yet?"

Then my attention suddenly sharpened. Significantly more rose to my eyes after the confession I had just made.

- "You don't know because the children you abandoned on Zegandaria were your own!," almost crescendoed Rento.

- "You're talking nonsense," I snapped at him, "This is nonsense and utter nonsense. What children the devil took him?"

- "I know perfectly well what I'm talking about," Rento foamed, "Von Blask was one of those who believed that, and that's why he was on the companion Cerberus."

- I beg your pardon? - I was about to jump up and slap him on the helmet of his spacesuit, What's all this simplicity? What was the cause of your quarrel? Do you feel better having taken his life?

Rento and I were communicating in a backwater place where the so-called Riandan terraflyers wouldn't record our conversation. Not that we had them here on Charon, but the survival of the last remnants of the Zegandarian population depended on this conversation.

"Von Blask was actually fighting his inner demons," Rento began cautiously, "He knew the truth about his son Hans Ausländer. But few would doubt that they were communicating from beyond the grave."

- "That's about as nutty as the simple fact that the intergalactic police haven't fried your ass," I snapped scathingly, "You're even lucky that I'm listening to you right now, and for some reason I still feel the urge to help you."

The landscape around us was so harsh that one's balls would simply freeze if one even glanced at the infinite dead scrapes on the satellite's surface. Pale stars twinkled lazily in the distance. They were most likely quite a distance away - it was the Oort Cloud, which was on the order of a thousand orbital radii away from Pluto. According to solar system scientists, it was responsible for almost all comets entering the inner solar system. Incidentally, this cloud was also a remnant of the primordial nebula that had once formed our entire universe.

Yes the hazy layers in its atmosphere were ubiquitous, but these few layers were created by photochemical reactions that resembled those in Titan's atmosphere. On the other hand, one had to take into account the so-called gravitational dance of Pluto and Charon, which had been studied by many prominent astronomers in that part of the universe.

But not to bore you with unnecessary