Moon base unknown (STAR-DUST 3) E-Book

Jens F. Simon

• Herausgeber: epubli
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 87

Beschreibung

Together with the female spaceship Paurusheya, Sigurd Westall reaches Saturn's moon Japetus. There he finds a huge lunar station embedded in the ridge at the edge of the dark hemisphere. The station is also the destination of the strangers in the small spaceship he has been tracking. Sigurd first tries to find his two abducted colleagues on his own. But when he is very quickly discovered by the aliens, he is forced to fight back. In doing so, he receives help from a side that plunges him into a personal crisis during the further plot.

Leseprobe

STAR-DUST

Under the spell of nanites

Volume 3

Moon base unknown

© 2024 Jens F. Simon

Illustration: S. Verlag JG

Publisher: S. Verlag JG, 35767 Breitscheid,

All rights reserved

Distribution: epubli a service of neopubli GmbH, Berlin

ISBN: 978-3-818715-54-0

The work, including its parts, is protected by copyright. Any exploitation without the consent of the publisher and the author is prohibited and will be prosecuted under criminal and civil law. This applies to electronic or other reproduction, translation, distribution and making available to the public.

Table of content

Japetus

The search

Attack on PAURUSHEYA

Friend or foe?

The material holograms

The path is the goal. Never be aimless, for the world is turning even if you have not yet found the path of life.

In a person's love, imagination and feelings are of great importance. If a man loves a woman, desire is a part of longing for her. However, if it turns out that love encounters limits that constrict it, feelings are put aside in the ultima ratio. What remains is the imagination to continue the path of love.

The highest reality of being lies in the innermost part of man. To reach it, a certain spiritual preparation is required. 

Japetus

Sigurd had almost reached the exit of the prism room when Alethea confronted him. Her black hair shimmered slightly bluish in the semi-darkness of the room, and her gaze irritated him somewhat.

"Ish'all, do you really want to go out there all alone? Because of the energetic shielding, I am still unable to scan the interior of the alien station. We don't know how many of them are there. Wouldn't it be better if I accompanied you?"

"How are you going to do that?"

Sigurd didn't quite understand what she meant.

"I can materially stabilize my body outside the transporter to two kilometers. I could back you up, for example."

Alethea's eyes shone from within, and she had returned to the seductive smile with which she had addressed him back in Tenerife.

"Besides, judging from the scanned exterior dimensions, the station is huge. Two people have a much better chance of finding the missing!"

"She speaks of herself as a person," it spontaneously went through Sigurd's mind.

Confused, he still looked into her bluish-shaded eyes.

"She's damn pretty. I'd give a lot to be able to be as casual again as I was that night at the Hotel Sombrairo on the island of Tenerife. But she is a mere hologram. A very advanced one, but still only an illusion. Damn, she feels very natural and physical."

Sigurd's thoughts began to turn somersaults all at once. He had grabbed Alethea, the material hologram of the independent prismatic space, which also represented the spaceship PAURUSHEYA, around the waist and pulled her a little towards him.

Her skin felt so soft and smooth. Her lips came closer and closer to his.

"What am I doing here anyway? She's not real. Fool, define real!"

A second voice seemed to intrude on Sigurd's subconscious.

"The ship is of organic origin, remember? So it is also alive. Isn't it completely unimportant in which form the life presents itself? Alethea is PAURUSHEYA and PAURUSHEYA lives. Aren't you allowed to fall in love with a living being, no matter what star it comes from?"

Sigurd still looked into her eyes while two souls began to argue inside him.

When her lips lightly touched his, his ratio snapped him back to reality.

He gently pushed Alethea's body back.

"We'll keep in touch. If I need help, I'll call for you, all right?"

Sigurd took a deep breath, carefully disengaged his arm from her waist, and attempted a smile that failed completely.

"Ish'all, I like you very much. Please be careful. I don't want to lose you again," the words of the ship PAURUSHEYA or Alethea still echoed in his mind as the material hologram dissolved before his eyes, leaving an even more disturbed person than he already was before.

With a jerk, Sigurd walked toward the exit of the transporter.

The measured data of the station atmosphere had shown a nearly one hundred percent match with Earth's atmosphere. With mixed feelings, Sigurd left the prism room and immediately found himself in a completely different world.

The room where the transporter rematerialized appeared to be some sort of storage room. Sigurd estimated its size at about twenty square meters.

The walls were made of dark gray rock, and in front of them were rows of rules going from floor to ceiling. The room brightened somewhat when Sigurd was already standing in the middle of the room.

The entire ceiling seemed to be a single source of light but gave off only a dull glow.

Sigurd's first glance was at the steel head of a stranger who was the only object in the rule row opposite him.

He had already seen him on the transporter's screen when they had just arrived here. His concentration was still distracted, however, and Alethea's likeness haunted his thoughts.

Slowly and introspectively, he walked toward the head that lay on the shelf with its face turned toward him.

The door to the transporter closed behind him, but a small part of the prism room remained visible.

In Sigurd's face, you could clearly see the question he was asking himself, "Should I touch it?"

He had already been wondering all along if the strangers' appearance was just a mask, or if their bodies were really made of metal.

Now he could see it clearly, at least on the head; it seemed to be a full-body mask that enclosed the entire head.

The mask shimmered in a light steel blue, except for the forehead area with the eyes, the cheeks, and the mouth. Here, a silver-gray was predominant. The surface of the mask seemed otherwise smooth except for these areas.

The silver-grey areas, especially at the eye sockets and the mouth area, seemed to have been worked on with hammer blows, at least one could see tiny little deformations.

On the forehead one could see strange signs that looked like dots, but clearly represented writing.

Courageously, he reached out a hand and touched the steel head. Strangely, it did not feel cold.

Without further ado, Sigurd lifted it from the regulation floor. The head was very light, he estimated its weight at no more than one or two kilograms. That was strange.

It must have been hollow inside, but there was no opening. Even at the lower end, where the connection to the base of the neck was, he could only make out a smooth surface, as if it had been cut off.

Sigurd turned the head several times in his hands but came to no further conclusions. Even the closed eyelids could not be opened by him manually, he had tried several times with his fingers.

He put the head back on the shelf from which he had taken it. He could get no further here.

Somewhat uncertainly, Sigurd went to the only recognizable door. The door frame was curved upwards, and the door surface shimmered in a gray-silvery tone that he already knew from the steel head.

After a quick glance back at the transporter, he operated the clearly visible palm pad on the side.

He pressed against the sensor several times and with increased effort, but absolutely nothing happened.

More unconsciously and due to an incipient impatience, Sigurd applied his telekinetic abilities. The door responded immediately and swung open silently.

He looked out onto a wide corridor. This led both to the right and to the left and had a width of about five meters.

On the opposite wall were illuminated panels at regular intervals. Panels that looked like framed fly screens, but emitted a bluish-tinted light from within, not unpleasant to human eyes.

Sigurd hooked the thumbs of both hands into his belt, glanced briefly at his weapon bracelet, turned right, and purposefully followed the corridor. His posture clearly expressed that he belonged here.

After all, he knew, at least since the hostile encounter with his former colleague Muehlhausen, that the alien invaders who were in the native solar system were not only made up of steelheads but were also supported by a race similar in appearance to humans.

He would not immediately be recognized as a stranger in this huge facility, or so he assumed.

Sigurd passed several doors and the corridor, after making a left turn, ended in a kind of atrium, which was separated by steel columns from the other corridors that also led here.

The interior of the atrium, which opened upward, was furnished with a wide variety of seating surfaces. Sigurd recognized larger stone benches, individual chairs and couches made of plastic or lightweight steel, or simple cushions that, it seemed, had been thrown in between them as if at random.

He was about to walk toward it when a door at the other end of the aisle opened noisily.

Sigurd ducked and quickly hid behind a support column.

Two men rushed out of the door, firing hand lasers into the room. They ran backwards and almost fell into the interior of the atrium, as it was two steps lower.

Sigurd heard curses several times in a language he didn't understand, but which didn't seem entirely foreign to him.

What immediately struck him about the two people was their clothing. They wore normal street clothes, as they were currently common on Earth, but quite dirty and partly torn, which he recognized only by looking closer.

He really flinched, however, when a loud, staccato sound came from the room from which the men had fled, with sun-bright beams as thick as his arms shooting out.

They reached the furniture in the atrium, turning it to smoke and ash in seconds.

The two fugitives, however, had already taken refuge to the left in a second, adjacent corridor.

Sigurd could no longer see them, but he could see the two steel heads standing in the open doorway, looking at each other. No sound could be heard, only at the tops of the heads communication was taking place, through a succession of cascades of light in a variety of hues.

The eyes glowed and on a part of the forehead constantly changing, unknown to him, signs appeared.

The whole haunting lasted only seconds, then they were already running after the fugitives, not caring about the damage caused by their weapons.

The pillows still smoked very strongly and in the closer environment it stank bestially of chemistry.

Should he run after them as well? The enemy of your enemy can only be your friend.

This saying came to his mind spontaneously and caused him to go in the same direction.

Ghostly flashes of light twitched through the dim illumination of the corridor through which he was now coming.

Very far ahead, it seemed to be weather lighting. Sigurd heard no sound, yet he assumed it could only be gunfire from laser weapons.

He had apparently already fallen very far behind the pursuers and had to hurry. The corridor seemed to have no end and made a slight curve every now and then.

Sigurd began to run. Finally, he did not want to lose the connection at all.

Suddenly he was standing in front of a shaft. He could see dark burn marks on the side wall.

The shaft had an antigravity field. He knew this kind of movement and the bridging of floors and decks from the ship PAURUSHEYA.

There, there was a control display on the right inner side of a shaft with which one could change the polarity in each case, so that one reached either the upper or the lower deck.