The Exodus Read online

  Garry Ocean

  The Exodus

  Forbidden World. Book two

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  Copyright 2017 Garry Ocean

  Chapter 1

  It did not take them long to get ready. Most of their things were still unpacked in the cart. Nick helped Sith to harness a short thin horse with ribbed sides to the cart. The horse was snorting and biting on the bit, clearly unhappy. Nick did not know much about horses. Especially about horses born on a planet thousands of parsecs away from the inhabited Universe. But even he clearly saw that the animal was long past its peak years. Despite this, Nick was grateful to the horse because it was the same animal that his friends had used to deliver him, in a comatose state, to this faraway stand-alone house. He patted the horse’s face and gave it a piece of fruit that looked very much like an Earth’s apple. The horse at first looked at it suspiciously with one eye, smelled it several times, loudly breathing the air in, and only then took the treat into its mouth.

  At first, they were moving silently. Whisperer was half-sitting in the cart, seemingly dosing off, as usual. Sith was walking next to the horse, holding the reins in his left hand. In his right hand, he had a twig that he used from time to time to whip the horse. Nick walked in the back, thinking about the strange turns of his fate. At this point, it felt like a whole eternity passed since he had to make an emergency landing on this planet. Nick even smirked at himself, “Just tell it as it is. Be honest with yourself. Valkyrie, a cutting edge shuttle you piloted that was supposed to take cargo to our research base in Sector F-14056, was attacked by an unidentified space object at the orbit of the third planet of a star not registered in any space atlas, and was destroyed. Miraculously, you managed to save your skin and had to make an emergency landing at the planet the locals call Terrius. In the process, the rescue pod inexplicably lost its anti-gravitation engine and, I suspect, all other operational systems. Luckily, the rescue pod was equipped with an autonomous system for emergency landings at atmospheric planetoids. In other words, a parachuting catapult.”

  Nick gave himself a smirk again. He had just produced a practically ready detailed report for the Chief. That was the nickname the cadets had given to the Tau Kita-1 space base captain. The question was: when, or even if he would have an opportunity to give him this report? What happened to Nick was inconceivable. In any case, he had never heard of cases like this before and never saw anything remotely similar in any sci-fi movie. He did watch movies like this with his best pal Paul, hundreds of them, if not thousands. His teacher was right when he said that Nick had an unusual aptitude for getting himself into the most unimaginable challenges even in most ordinary situations.

  “Why the hell did I alter the course, without authorization, that Ovsyannikov had entered into the Valkyrie onboard computer? Wanted to save time. Saved it indeed!” Nick couldn’t suppress a heavy sigh. It was quite loud, too, as Sith immediately turned his disheveled head back at him as if on cue: “What saddens you, Nick? Or does your leg hurt again? Don’t play a tough guy if it does, just climb into the cart with Whisperer. Don’t fret that the horse is old because she has a lot of strength left in her. She did bring you from the City, didn’t she? She is still alive and well so she will be able to get you to the ferry.”

  Nick couldn’t suppress another sigh. The boy’s dam of a mouth broke again; it seemed Nick would have to hear the story of his, Nick’s, miraculous rescue for the millionth time. And so it went.

  “But you, Nick, of course, did a great job! To kill a collarhorn is not as easy as getting the smokesters out of the Forest. But why didn’t you jump off of it? Why? So stupid! Just tell me, Nick. You were very quick to climb up it, I was simply stunned. But why you didn’t jump off is beyond me. When the collarhorn stumbled and fell, we all thought that you were totally finished. Ron and Valu would confirm I’m telling the truth.”

  “We, of course, were scared at first. But then Ron, well, you know Ron, he just started to yell, ‘Why are you standing like this, let’s do it together!’ So we managed to pull apart his collar with our spears. Just a little bit, you know, because the collarhorn’s head is the size of a good house!” Sith thought for a second and continued, “Definitely larger than our house. Not only ours, but also the chief’s! And you know, Nick, the chief’s house is hu-u-uge!”

  “So, I climbed into that crack for you! What a stench inside, I should tell you! I was all covered in that slime, head to toe. The slime is so disgusting and potent that my skin still burns and itches as if I’d been rolled in the poisonous moss. I couldn’t breathe and I thought I wouldn’t be able to find you there. But then I felt your leg, grabbed it and started to pull as hard as I could. You are so heavy, Nick, I should tell you! I would have never been able to pull you out by myself. But then Ron and Valu grabbed me by my legs when I started to kick – that’s the signal we agreed I’d give them when I found you, and they pulled us both out.”

  “I should tell you, the fuss was great. Everyone was yelling so loud I thought my ears would pop. But, thank the Departed, Whisperer turned up. Valu grabbed you, put your lifeless body up on his shoulder and we ran for our lives. The guards wanted to block us, but then some warrior… yes, he was a warrior. Even a fool could see that. He was wearing the shining armor, and on his head, what did Whisperer call it?” Sith moved his lips in a funny way, trying to find the word. “Oh, yes, a helmet. His face was covered completely except for the eyes. So he shouted something to the guards and drew out his sword to convince them. Then they parted making way for us and stood there until we left.”

  “And after that, Whisperer found this cart and half-alive horse somewhere. Well, what can you do? Sorry if it does not meet your expectations but we were pressed for time. As Whisperer said, we could have been pursued at any moment. At the city walls, we split into two groups. Ron and Valu went straight to the ferry while we went this way here, to Whisperer’s old acquaintance’s house.”

  “You were in such a bad shape, Nick, really bad shape! It would have been all right if you moaned or screamed. But no, you were like asleep except no one could wake you up. At some point, I wanted to put some burning coal to your heels, but Whisperer would not let me.”

  A thunder rolled somewhere far away. With every next round, the thunder sounded closer and closer. Nick stopped and looked back. At the very horizon, to the side from the White Rocks, the sky was covered with black thunderclouds. Even now, in clear day, it was impressive how the dark low-hanging clouds were lit from inside with frequent lightening strikes. It was a mesmerizing sight, albeit menacing. Whisperer mumbled something in the cart. Sith, thank the Departed, finally shut up and started to whip the horse with renewed enthusiasm.

  Nick felt a lot better today. The only thing that still bothered him was a nagging pain in his ankle. I must have sprung it jumping on the collarbone’s back. That beast was indeed huge! But, as Whisperer said, it was not even the largest one of the Forest’s species. “If only a group of scientists from the Altai sanctuary knew about this, they would have had such a field trip here! They’d be jumping for joy seeing such a diversity of unknown life forms,” Nick smiled as he remembered some of his friends working with his grandmother, a famous exobiologist. “But they, of course, would burn me on the scientific stake for such a barbaric treatment of a collarhorn, an endangered representative of the local fauna.”

&nbs
p; He suddenly was overwhelmed with unexplainable anguish, “What am I going to do? How do I get to the mysterious pyramids? Or better yet, reach those who for some reason built them on this planet? Who are they? Why did they do it? When? Looking at the local civilization’s level of development, it can be concluded that this was the work of some alien, outer space sentient culture. Although, what do I know now about the history of this planet? Only several disparaging and unverifiable legends about the Old City built by the ancestors of the contemporary inhabitants of the planet and abandoned more than five hundred years ago for an unknown reason. Perhaps, we are dealing with a degradation of a previously powerful, highly technological civilization and those pyramids with their mysterious quantum resonance are just the remnants of its former power and glory.”

  “Questions, questions, and more questions… I can’t even fathom how to approach them. And don’t even ask me about the nature of the space cocoon that isolated this planet from the entire Universe. This puzzle is beyond me,” Nick thought. Deep down, he still cherished the hope that somewhere out there, beyond the extremely distorted space, there’s an Earth’s research base that is trying to break through and save him. But if he were to be realistic, Nick could not seriously count on that.

  As Nick understood, it wasn’t yesterday that the Earth researchers stumbled upon this cocoon. However, no one was able to break through it except for Nick himself. But this is a special case because even he himself could not understand how he had done it. So he could only hope that the monitoring devices or observers at the research base managed to have recorded the moment when his Valkyrie entered this part of the space. Although that is not guaranteed given that he was entering in the zero-leap mode, and using the freely estimated exit coordinates on top of that. Nick felt himself blush. He could not imagine a more stupid situation.

  “Stop,” he said to himself, “It’s not the time for self-flagellation after so many reflections and conversations. We need to find the Old City. Whisperer is hoping to find the answers to his questions there, and I – to mine. Something tells me that this will be good for both of us. Their upcoming Exodus though couldn’t be more untimely.”

  Nick heard so much about the Exodus and even personally participated in the festivities devoted to it, but he didn’t understand anything. He had a feeling that everyone and everything could not wait for it to happen and feared it at the same time. “But it’s all right, we will just wait out this calamity behind the city walls and then go straight to the Forest. And if it’s not just a beautiful legend and the Old City indeed exists, I will find it,” Nick promised himself, “If for nothing else, then just because I am out of other options. I don’t intend to live out the rest of my life in a hunters’ village simply waiting for a miraculous rescue. Such unproductive waiting will drive me crazy.”

  A strong gust of wind jolted him back to reality. First drops of rain fell onto the dusty road. An impossible silence surrounded them. No, the rocking and rolling thunder sounds had not stopped for a second since last night from when Whisperer and all the others saw the first arrows of lightening on the horizon. However, now he realized that he didn’t hear the habitual sounds of dogs barking, cows mooing, and goats bleating. Even the never-silent insects stopped chirping. At this point, Nick remembered that he had never seen any birds on this planet. The domesticated ones, similar to the earth’s turkeys and roosters, were abundant in the villages that they passed on the way, just as they were in the Great City. But there were no wild birds freely soaring the sky. Yes, he never saw them either here, or beyond the Rapid Waters. Nick stopped in his tracks.

  “You get an F for failure to observe, cadet!” Nick remembered the favorite phrase by Peter Ovsyannikov, the Chief of Courier Service where Nick started to intern a little over a year ago. Only now he realized that beyond the natural water border that the locals called the Rapid Waters, a totally different world spread out strikingly different from this one. Different flora and fauna dominated there. The grass is different, the bushes and trees are different, and the various types of animals are completely different, as if separated from the local ones by millions of years of evolution.

  Playing back in his head the events of the day when they took the ferry across the river, Nick remembered that he was surprised by the difference in the technological equipment and advancement of the residents of Near Forest and the City. Yes, exactly. He remembered how he thought that he had been transported from the Neolithic Era straight into the Middle Ages. But the sharp difference between the flora and fauna escaped him at that time for some reason. He decided he needed to talk about this with Whisperer in more detail, when a chance presented itself. He didn’t want to ask Sith about this. “He will start singing his favorite tune about me being an ignorant steppe dweller. Once he gets started, he is impossible to stop.”

  “Sith, stop!” Whisperer croaked from the cart. “Please, make this brainless beast stop already!”

  With feigned difficulty, as it always seemed to Nick, croaking and moaning, the old man got out of the cart and raised his head to the sky. The dark thunderclouds were getting closer covering the sky to the very horizon. It was already possible to see the little streams of rain, falling onto the ground in all directions. The lightening strikes did not stop, and the thunder rocked and rolled in a continuous monotonous sound.

  The old man said something inaudible, absorbed by the sound of the thunder on approach.

  “What did you say, Whisperer?” Nick had to scream over the rolling thunder.

  “I am saying that we won’t make it to the ferry! It’s getting to us too fast!” the old man waved toward the horizon. “We need to find cover right away. If my memory serves me well, a little farther over there, behind that little grove, there was a shepherds’ hut. I hope it is still there and hasn’t fallen apart.”

  Whisperer looked suspiciously at the lead-heavy clouds once again and climbed back into the cart, croaking and moaning, rapidly firing commands, “Common, Sith, why are you standing there? Whip that horse! It looks like very soon we’ll not have to walk, but to swim!”

  Sith mumbled something in response, as usual, but immediately started to whip the slow horse.

  *****

  They were sitting around an old furnace that was chipped in many places. It was built from a smoothed stone a long time ago and would have served its masters well then. Now, due to many holes in the chimney, the smoke was streaming in, collecting in the form of gray fog under the ceiling. Their eyes were already starting to water from the smoke. Nick closed his eyes forcefully several times. But under the circumstances, they couldn’t be too picky. The wall of rain finally reached them when they were about a hundred steps away from the hut. Their clothes became soaking wet in a matter of seconds and they had to go back into the pouring rain several times to bring all their things from the cart into the hut. Sith also unharnessed the horse and was the last one to run into the hut, dripping thin streams of rainwater.

  Bare-chested Nick was sitting propped against the rough clay wall and indifferently watched small streams of water running down the hot chimney, sizzling and forming a small puddle on the floor. Outside, the sky was playing an ice-bucket challenge literally.

  He suddenly remembered a weeklong trip with his classmates to the Amazon River delta during the monsoon season. To tell the truth, then they were protected from the bad weather by a transparent and completely waterproof dome. What was its name, something like a path finder? Yes, exactly, “Descobridor.”1 The dome could turn transparent or completely dark at people’s will.

  Nick smiled reflexively, remembering how they all stood there, with their faces glued to the glass made of polyplast, watching with curiosity the water wall falling down from the sky. The downpour was so dense that it was impossible to see anything within several feet. Suddenly, several wild animals jumped out from the wall of rain and rammed the transparent dome’s wall at full speed. All the girls screamed out of fear and scattered away. Nick stumbled, l
ost his balance and ended up sitting on the dusty ground.

  His classmates were later teasing him about this all the way home. Most of all, the notorious Lena Sinitsa had a lot of fun at his expense as if he was the only one who had gotten so scared.

  Poor animals – those were capybaras, large harmless rodents slightly resembling guinea pigs but bigger, about three feet from tail to head – turned around and went back into the rain, offended.

  To prevent future damage, the dome was immediately darkened so it became visible for the wild animals in the jungle.

  “Sith, stop. Don’t put more logs in there, lest we suffocate, accidentally,” Whisperer shuffled the coals in the stove with his long stick. “Let it burn a little and then we’ll add more.”

  “Whisperer, why is it raining so heavily and so suddenly? It is as if Rapid Waters itself is pouring on our heads?” the boy looked with suspicion at the dark spots of plaster swelling in the corners of the hut. “How long is it going to be like this?”

  “Be patient, it should end soon. This is what always happens before the Exodus. It’s just that last time you were too young to remember. Then, it poured down hard too. But to tell you the truth, this time the Heavenly Harbinger is particularly vicious,” the old man was clearly nervous. “It is so unusual! I was sure that we had ten days minimum, or at least five to seven. But here we go. Frice will not be able to prepare and deliver everything we agreed about.”

  Whisperer felt silent for a little while and then added quietly and hopelessly, “And the Near Forest residents will not be able to reach the Towers for cover. Many of them won’t, especially the old ones and children. I do hope that the Chieftain will understand this and will be able to put everyone into hideouts. That way some may be saved. And if they are on the road when the Exodus happens, they are doomed.”