6. Cursed Treasure of Holed
Jassia tapped against the cave entrance. Tibre told her to go away. His voice was weak, his body protesting against the lack of food.
When Jassia entered anyway and looked white as a ghost, he already felt what she was about to say.
“Zandir has died,” she said softly. Then louder: “And Piponre, your son, has been abducted!”
You see? Nature was against him. Everything always went wrong, everyone died too soon, what did all of it matter? And now his son was gone because of a mysterious visitor. He would search for him for days now, find nothing, and, probably, return to hear his other children have also been kidnapped.
“Hello? Are you hearing me?” Jassia shook Tibre. She pushed his large, bulky body off the stone bed. Even hitting the ground face first did not make him react.
“Piponre made it very clear that he doesn’t care about his family anymore,” mumbled Tibre.
“Maybe you don’t care about anything. But I do care about him, a lot!”
“When … when did you two become friends? Thought you hated each other.”
Her cheeks turned red. “Erm, all the Dwellers, of course. We all care.”
“Well, then you can all search.”
Jassia kicked a rock through the cave. “Every second of delay is wasted time. You are the oldest and the strongest now, Tibre. I am not going to search for Piponre in the dark, nor with the aid of a few toddlers. I need you.”
“We all need things—”
Jassia crouched and put her shoulders underneath Tibre’s armpits. Then she straightened her back, grunting and puffing, until she could carry his heavy body. He let it happen, at first, but his feet scraping against the floor hurt too much, so he decided to walk. Excruciatingly slowly, but at least he walked.
When they reached her cave, Tibre seemed completely woken up. A good thing too. Jassia hadn’t eaten nearly enough for such exercise. She stumbled into her husband’s arms, who gave her a worried stare.
“Dear, dear, let Tibre and me do this. Or Borrick and me. Please, rest.”
He leaned forward for a kiss; she turned away.
“Gather everything that could be a weapon,” she said. Her bear quickly took all the collected pieces of wreckage off the shelves.
Jassia instantly noticed they were all different.
How had she missed that? It was dark, sure, she was in a panic, she hadn’t had time to properly study it. But one piece, which they found where the spaceship landed, had completely different colors, material, symbols, and wires. The other pieces seemed more primitive, as if someone had imitated a spaceship with lesser materials.
Had multiple spaceships crashed? Whenever they saw a dot in the distance, they now assumed it was another lightbulb. But what if that wasn’t the case?
She hit her Echobelt against the pieces and listened intently. Yes, the imitation pieces also sounded far more hollow than the others. They’d fall apart more quickly if she were to apply her hammer. Could these objects be weapons too? How did they make those flashes?
Tibre’s children ran into the cave.
“Dad! Did you stop giving up?” his youngest daughter asked.
“So … giving down?” his other son said with a frown.
He took them both in his muscular arms and kissed their cheeks. He couldn’t deny that these simple actions still gave him some joy and purpose, even though his mind didn’t want to hear it anymore.
Piponre remained his son. Family was everything. Helping his children and seeing them grow old … leaving behind a strong and kind being when you die … wasn’t that a useful purpose? He repeated it to himself until he found some energy. Some tension and excitement, and the desire to run to Piponre and save him.
“Hey, hey, puckles,” he told his children. “Go to the cave and stay inside until it’s safe. We’re going to save your brother.”
“Safe!? What is—”
“When you see flashes of light, hide,” said Jassia. She turned to her husband. “He’ll look after you, won’t you dear?”
Her husband sighed. “Yes, sure, whatever you want.”
They left the cave. They followed the path that Jassia had run yesterday, but in reverse.
The lightbulb hadn’t moved. It had been turned off long enough now to play the memory inside. They both stood still and watched.
The drawings showed a large room filled with lights. And more squares that seemed to play memories too! These memories, though, were interactive: the humans could push buttons, or say things, and the memories in the squares would change.
“We found the reason,” said a female face, which was displayed on the largest of the flat squares. “We’re beaten in every space battle because our opponents can travel with the speed of light.”
“Impossible!” exclaimed multiple scientists. They nearly dropped the books, papers and measurement devices they were carrying through the room.
“It’s possible. The calculations work out. Eye witnesses all confirm it. There is some particle or device, that much is unclear, that makes their spaceships fly a hundred times faster than ours. We’ll never defeat that.”
A man in a tight, shiny uniform paced through the room. “What do you propose?”
“Give up, commander,” said the woman curtly.
The man pulled a button off of his uniform. “Did I hear that right? No, I must have misheard. Nobody would betray their own army like that. What did you say?”
The woman rolled her eyes and left. The square shut itself down; only a dark grey emptiness stared back at them.
The man turned to the others in the room. They awaited his decision with baited breath.
“We will discover the reason behind their speed. And we’ll steal it for ourselves! We do not give up! CAJARA does not give up!”
The memory sped forward, to the next conversation between this commander and the sullen woman. Apparently, she was allowed to keep her job, though that did not make her happy.
“We found the source,” she said.
Her face only covered a part of the rectangle now. The other parts were filled with rotating, detailed drawings of an entire planet.
“The power to travel with the speed of light has its origin on this planet: Holed. The army is ready, commander,” she said reluctantly. “At your command, we attack Holed and conquer it.”
“We must be merciless,” he grunted. “If they have the secret to interstellar travel, they must have more advanced weapons. Everyone is deployed. Everyone fights a 120%.”
“We have traded and bartered for this information, commander,” said the woman. “With another intergalactic species. They might attack too, soon. What am I saying, we might be walking into a space battle with ten enemies if we’re not—”
“Fine,” said the commander without hesitation. “Humans have never lost a space battle before.”
The memory advanced a final time. The space battle was on its way and looked similar to the battle they saw in an earlier memory. But it wasn’t the same. The planets that formed the stage for this battle were different. Tibre didn’t understand: the Great Map in their cave proved that a galaxy stayed the same over time.
And then Holed was turned into a black wilderness.
The planet wasn’t that large to begin with. Now the fight had taken large bites out of the surface, and burned or crushed the other parts. If beings lived on Holed before, they had surely perished now. If the planet indeed contained the “secret” they wanted, somebody had stolen it now.
Until a voice over a radio spoke the feared message: “We couldn’t discover the secret power. As far as we can tell, nobody else found it, because all ships in this fight flew at normal speed. I conclude: it was not a power of the planet, but of the beings that lived here.”
The commander’s face darkened, as he smashed his control panel to pieces. “The same beings who are all dead now?”
“No. Some fled. We don’t know where, because they fly much faster than our radars can track.”
The memory stopped. Tibre and Jassia both trawled through their memories.
“No,” said Jassia. “Holed was not on the Great Map in our cave. Whoever drew that map called our own planet Marmir. And we aren’t even close to any of this!”
Great. Another memory that was useless to them. Things just got better and better, Tibre thought cynically.
Then they noticed two fresh footprints. One of them curved away from the lightbulb, with large steps and a consistent pace—the intruder. The other trail was one deep line in the dirt—Piponre who was dragged along.
Her bear had noticed this long ago. He seemed completely uninterested in the magical memories, never stopping to watch them.
Her pet already followed Piponre’s trail. They ran after him.