Under the Spell of Magic (STAR-DUST 8) E-Book

Jens F. Simon

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

Seitenzahl: 94

Beschreibung

Two hundred and fifty years from today, the solar system and humanity are an integral part of a union consisting of five planetary systems. Saturn's moon Japetus and the station MAITRI were destroyed in the attack of a non-human race about 120 years ago. Since the disappearance of Sigurd, the TRISHARANA along with the Xxiin settlement has hidden under a camouflage field. Mankind has never heard of them, although Venus has been subjected to terraforming with the help of alien technology and over ten million people and members of the four Union peoples now live there. Mysterious occurrences are shaking the native civilization. It seems that sorcerous powers and magic are at play. Several assassinations attempt on Sigurd, which he survives only because of his special abilities, convince him that he must join forces with the new MBF organization to solve the riddles. His top priority, however, is to find the organic ship PAURUSHEYA, which also mysteriously disappeared 250 years ago.

Leseprobe

STAR-DUST

Under the spell of nanites

Volume 8

Under the Spell of Magic

© 2024 Jens F. Simon

Illustration: S. Verlag JG

Publisher: S. Verlag JG, 35767 Breitscheid,

All rights reserved

Distributed by: epubli a service of neopubli GmbH, Berlin

ISBN: 978-3-818740-03-0

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

The Mellran Calgulla

New conflicts

The magic space-time construct

„ With supernatural abilities "

The Mellrack Council

The new PAURUSHEYA

The search begins

The 5th race

When the world is no longer the one you thought you knew, when you lose your footing, when your body fails you, when everything you held sacred breaks, then, my friend, you embark on a tremendous adventure that breaks the boundaries of the traditional, even the boundaries of the universe.

Be of good courage and open heart, then you will find what no one has ever found before, immortality. 

The Mellran Calgulla

"No, that's really too absurd. In the old MBF documents, we kept coming across a Venus station that must have already existed in the 21st century. But we didn't know anything real to do with it, because after 2148, when Earth's first contact with us spacefaring peoples occurred, and the planet Venus was transformed for settlement, we found absolutely nothing there."

Calgulla's eyes rolled in a strange way as his facial skin changed to take on the background color of space. A visible sign of his excitement and a typical reaction of his people.

"That I came across you, Sigurd, and to me, so that Venus Station TRISHARANA was revealed, is like death, an inevitable fatality, a fate of the absurd life, which thereby exposes itself to the absurd. We are a part of the nature that surrounds us all-embracingly, and thus it is also absurd to want to flee from the absurd."

Calgulla looked from Sigurd to Queen Yiilyix, who was also present in the room.

She was the head of the Xxiin, who had found a new home on Venus 250 years ago through Sigurd.

The Xxiin were non-intelligent beings with a body size in the nano range and only when at least 10,000 individual beings came together did they develop an intellect. For the necessary gathering they used a so-called full-body exoskeleton. Queen Yiilyix was the intellect of more than 50,000 Xxiin and thus also possessed the ability of metamorphosis, that is, she could assume any appearance and was thus relatively independent of the otherwise necessary artificial assistance of an exoskeleton.

Since the first contact with Sigurd, her preferred appearance was an oriental princess, dressed in a long velvet dress in dark purple decorated with golden sequins and ornamental borders.

The belly area was embroidered with shiny gold applications. The dress was very short in the front and almost floor-length in the back. From the upper arms, the wide sleeves were open and lined with shiny satin fabric, with small golden bows adorning the upper arms.

She wore long blonde hair that fell forward to the height of her chest on the left side of her head.

A maiden's wreath made of velvet with golden decorative ribbons and with an attached veil cloth made of soft tulle emphasized her otherworldly appearance. In addition, glittering make-up and long eyelashes with rhinestones made her look extra mysterious.

After Calgulla revealed himself as the head of the present secret MBF organization, Sigurd learned more and more details about its activities during the last 120 years.

Curiously, Calgulla kept talking about the founding of the MBF having taken place in 2080.

He had never heard of a Sir Arthur Newcraft, a George Foulend, nor Mark Merlin and Selin Wiegand.

When Sigurd mentioned the name Amanda Lerch in passing, he listened, but that was it. The MBF headquarters on Saturn's moon Japetus had been destroyed along with the moon in 2148.

The history of the MBF only reached back to the year 2080 and this year was also called the founding year.

This fact Sigurd could not understand, but now also not explain, he could accept it first simply.

Sigurd stayed with Calgulla and Queen Yiilyix in the central dome of the TRISHARANA.

Calgulla had been wide-eyed when out of nowhere, using form energy, comfortable chairs were created in which they now sat and looked out through the transparent dome to the surface of Venus, which was still natural within a radius of over one hundred square kilometers, only the atmosphere had changed massively and now corresponded to terra norm.

Sigurd looked pensively at the huge spaceship, next to which was a second, smaller one.

Further in the distance he could see the typical basket buildings of the Xxiin.

Some of them rose to 50 meters, which was very high for this type of construction. The large ship was the space island XAAL, which had brought him to the Super-Earths.

It was still fully functional, but it had not left its berth for 250 years.

After the disappearance of Sigurd, the TRISHARANA and the Xxiin settlement under construction had hidden under a dimensional field.

The then Queen Yiilyix had herself been surprised by this action of Venus Station.

TRISHARANA's only comment had been that the time of gathering must be preserved in order to serve Paurusa fairly and perfectly.

Queen Yiilyix of that time was, of course, not the same as of today.

Xxiin as individuals did live to be 250 years old, but during that time span many of those who made up the Queen's intellect had died and newborn Xxiin had joined them.

She had had to bow to the dictates of the TRISHARANA of necessity, because the Xxiin were dependent on him.

They never again left the planet or the dimensional field, which functioned similarly to the prismatic space that served as a transport medium for the organic spaceship PAURUSHEYA.

Sigurd recapitulated again and again all the information he had received in abundance during the last days.

His main interest, of course, was in his PAURUSHEYA, as he called her again.

"Princess Xyaala sends her regards, Paurusa. She, too, has grown older, but remembers well your last mission together against the Mernchen. She is especially fond of telling of the flowering meadows on Earth."

Sigurd understood. Princess in this case also did not mean daughter but was merely a title of office.

What activities related to this office; he did not really know. Only briefly he thought back to the infiltration of mankind by the alien Mernchen.

Together with Princess Xyaala and Amanda, a former colleague, he had freed Sir Arthur and Mark Merlin from captivity, whereby the spaceship PAURUSHEYA had briefly fallen into the hands of the Mernchen.

At that very moment, when Sigurd intervened and freed his PAURUSHEYA, the nanites took over his body and thus saved his life.

But at the same time they banished a part of his humanity. He was only a soul in an alien body, which consisted of trillions of artificial and organic nanobots.

They had submitted to his will, but nevertheless they remained alien to him for the time being.

Sigurd's thoughts drifted even further. He remembered that he had also brought several million space nanites from the Xxiin planetary system and settled them in the home solar system. Their new home was to be the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

There Helmsman Xaa, the captain of the space island XAAL had set them down in any case.

Sigurd had originally wanted to use her to protect Japetus Station. Unfortunately, he had not been present when the station had been destroyed in an unexplained way.

It was absurd because that was exactly what he had wanted to prevent. Sigurd had to smile.

Normally Calgulla, with his philosophy of absurdity, was responsible for such trains of thought.

"Sigurd...!" Calgulla had asked him a question he had not actually noticed.

He was still too deeply absorbed in his own thoughts. Only slowly did he reemerge from there.

"Yes, sorry Calgulla. I wasn't listening to you just now. My memories got the better of me for a moment!"

"The inescapable fatality of the absurd has taken you very far beyond the existing. I think I can understand what you're going through right now, my friend!"

He looked at Sigurd somewhat pityingly.

"Nevertheless, new riddles continue to arise. Not that we are already exposed to enough problems by the threatening situation of sorcery and magic in the solar system, mysterious occurrences seem to have already taken place in the past as well. Sigurd, you claim that a certain Sir Arthur Newcraft founded the MBF organization as early as 2019, and I tell you that it first appears in the historical records in 2080, and a person called Paurusa was mentioned as the founder!"

Now the bomb had dropped. Sigurd jumped up from his seat when he heard the name.

"There's no such thing, it just can't be!"

"Yes, how surprised do you think I was when I heard that very name Queen Yiilyix first addressed you by after we were pulled under the dimensional field."

"Are you really sure you got that name right?"

Calgulla's eyes where the only thing Sigurd could make out of his head, the rest had blended in almost perfectly with the background, so aroused was he. "Yes, absolutely. As sure as I'm the head of the MBF organization, which now spans four planetary systems."

Things had changed, in the 250 years I had skipped just like that. Calgulla, a Mellran, was the current head of an organization originally founded by Sir Arthur to control and monitor alien activity in the home solar system.

It was truly absurd that an alien was now the head of this organization that should normally have been monitoring him.

Slowly I began to understand the philosophy of the Mellrans better and better.

Any attempt to make sense of this world inevitably leads to the absurd. I shook my head unconsciously.

Nevertheless, there still had to be a certain logic behind all this. The MBF organization had extended its field of activity to the planetary systems of the Sremsen, Mellrans and Siierins.

The MBF was more and more concerned with extraordinary extraterrestrial phenomena.

Calgulla, its leader, was not only the owner of a small fleet of tourist ships, but also a member of the governing council of Mellrack, his home system.

"I was actively involved in the MBF in my time, but that was in 2019, not 2080, so I should know that! Besides, I would never have lived to be that old."

Of course, I hadn't told him that I had become relatively immortal by transforming my body.

I was not yet really convinced of it myself, but that had transmitted to me at least so my active subconscious.

"But you are the only one to whom this name can be clearly assigned!"

I had sat down again, and we looked at each other more than irritated.

"The whole thing makes absolutely no sense at all, unless we are really dealing with sorcery and magic!"

There they were again, our current problems. I changed the subject; we weren't getting anywhere here now anyway.

"Calgulla, surely you can tell me how you were able to track me down on Venus. How did you learn of my acquaintance with Milk'ee?"

Calgulla tried to put on a smile but failed thoroughly. First, he wasn't human, and secondly, in doing so, his scalp began to change color constantly again, as if it didn't really know whether the Mellran was excited now or not.

"You look like a traffic light that can't make up its mind!"

Calgulla immediately stopped trying to smile. "I must confess, it was no accident that we met on Super Earth. The MBF had received information from a science team only a few hours earlier that the radiation levels in the artifact city had increased almost tenfold. The level of this type of radiation from self-reflecting black matter, or SSM, or super radiation, had become so alarmingly high that I went there in person. I knew as soon as I saw you that something was wrong with you, so I tried to further develop the contact once it had been established. When I left you later for urgent business, I of course made sure we didn't lose track of you. MBF- Agent Adrian Lerch continued to shadow you on the liner, and of course picked up on your contact with the well-known publisher Milk'ee."