World under the spell of the Mages (STAR-DUST 11) E-Book

Jens F. Simon

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

Seitenzahl: 86

Beschreibung

The years between 2257 and 2268 are determined by the magic construct. The tyrannical mage Sol'altoo has withdrawn the Artifact City from the Super-Earth in 2268 and thus reversed the possibility of time travel, which the construct made possible in the first place and which does not exist in the solar system due to the laws of nature in the normal space-time continuum. The whole crew of the MBF stayed behind with MAITRI in the energetic half-world of the Zetschn'cha. Sigurd wants to try to get back into the universe of the Mager via the White City of the Monkey God. However, he must be very careful not to cause a time paradox, since he will not get there in real time until 2268. When the new spiritual singularity couple Sigurd and Alethea with the common name Paurusa enter the magic city, they are imprisoned. They have little time left to free themselves, then a time paradox threatens to change the future.

Leseprobe

STAR-DUST

Under the spell of nanites

Volume 11

World under the spell of the Mages

© 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: 978-3-818751-90-6

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.

Time is your greatest enemy. You are on a narrow path in between. What exactly this means, you can only guess, but never know. Should you ever arrive at your destination, your mind will no longer understand where you are and what you wanted. The certainty that your life so far has not been meaningless will be displaced by the satisfaction of doing it all over again, should you get the chance.

The climax of your life seems to have come when you think you have achieved everything. When the rest of your life seems to be straightforward; when there seem to be no new challenges; when you think you have really arrived. Do not be so sure! Never be sure. The moment you feel good again, you are already standing with both feet in a reality behind reality and will start a new journey.

Table of content

Prologue

The search for MAITRI

The time tranquilizer

Back in 2019

Beware of time paradoxes

Amanda's choice

The penultimate battle

Back to now

Prologue

A massive debris mass consisting of thousands of pieces of rock ranging in size from three to 100,000 cubic meters formed a new asteroid ring around the planet Saturn. Amid this massive accumulation was Sigurd's body.

Aletheas and his consciousness were still switched off. The fragments of the destroyed moon Japetus and the remains of the destroyed Mernchen spaceships began to be more and more subject to the enormous gravitational pull of Saturn.

The huge planet, with an equatorial diameter of over one hundred and twenty thousand kilometers, already occupied the entire visible detection range when Sigurd slowly regained consciousness. His first perception was of a large ocher-yellow surface on which streaks of varying brightness were moving.

He had to blink hard several times to believe what he was seeing. Nevertheless, his memories returned only sparsely to the surface of his consciousness, and he could not orient himself at first.

All the muscular strands of his body rioted and ached.

Suddenly, a dark gray shadow moved into his line of sight. A very small rock the size of a single-family house moved past him at a moderate speed. It was only a few meters short, and he would have brushed against it.

Sigurd's consciousness only slowly surfaced, as if from a deep dream.

He was still dazed and did not know at first where he was, nor what had happened to him. Then he heard a very quiet voice in his head, but it became increasingly louder.

"... Not the Zetschn'cha universe. The magical time energy you used to drag MAITRI with you when you teleported was enough to transfer the entire station on one of the moons near the hemisphere of the tyrannical mage Sol'altoo, but you were thrown back. You are now in an increasingly tight orbit around the planet Saturn along with the remains of the moon Japetus."

Sigurd's active subconscious had briefly and succinctly recapitulated his current situation.

Slowly now also the memory of the events of the last hours came back.

"The moon Japetus!" His thoughts rolled over. He had indirectly conjured up its destruction when he set the space nanites from the Oort cloud on it.

But he only wanted to save MAITRI. Sigurd's field of vision wandered from the ocher-yellow surface of Saturn to the rocky gray structure of an asteroid that was leisurely passing by.

His body was still spinning around itself. He telekinetically tried to stabilize the spinning motion. Apparently, he didn't have proper control of his abilities yet because the asteroid that had just moved past him was caught by the paranormal force and accelerated toward the planet with elemental force.

In the process, it hit several other, smaller asteroids and hurled them to the side.

Sigurd cursed softly to himself and first concentrated on the surface of Saturn to get a fixed point of reference.

Immediately, the constant rotation of his body stopped, and he took a geostationary position above the planet.

Now his temporary confusion also cleared.

"Alethea, why don't you report?" Her mental presence presented itself as a blurred, small white dot in his consciousness.

"Alethea, what about you? Do you understand me?"

There was no reply. He tried a few more times, but she didn't answer.

Just in time, he noticed two smaller asteroids moving right toward him.

He had just spotted them because of their small size, they had already reached him, and it was more thanks to his instinctive behavior or subconscious that they did not hit him.

The speed of the chunks must have been immense, and the telekinetic defense came in the last second.

The unconscious and very short mental touch of the asteroids caused a tingling in his mind. He was not entirely unfamiliar with this feeling, although there had been an additional component to it in his memories.

Whenever he had encounter the space nanites, he heard a faint whisper in his mind.

Sigurd's mind reached out again. He carefully pulled himself towards the boulder, which had flown a kilometer further in the meantime, and which had almost hit him a moment ago. He had to be especially careful not to collide with other asteroids that crossed his path.

Several times he had already corrected his trajectory telekinetically, when he suddenly remembered that he could teleport.

He jumped with the next thought directly behind the small asteroid and clung telekinetically.

Saturn's surface moved faster and faster beneath him as he finally made physical contact with the chunk of rock.

Only now did Sigurd realize that this asteroid, with which he was now connected, was not colliding with any other of the thousands and thousands of debris from Saturn's former moon. It moved as if guided.

Sigurd got contact immediately.

The boulder was really composed entirely of space nanites. They were nanites from the Oort cloud, which he had ordered to attack Japetus, respectively the Mernchen spaceships located there.

They had survived the destruction of the moon, at least some of them. Sigurd spontaneously switched to macro vision and now he saw them, thousands, millions of tiny microorganisms.

The entire asteroid was made of nanites. They had now recognized him as well.

Immediately, several columns detached themselves from the rock. They drifted slowly at first, then accelerated and literally shot towards other asteroids. They sought contact with the other groups of space nanites.

It was not long before Sigurd could see more and more asteroids of all sizes orienting themselves, ceasing their flight around Saturn and realigning themselves. Their new target was clearly him.

The first cluster of nanites had already reached him, and more and more asteroids appeared as a result.

They crowded around him and slowly he became afraid that they might crush him.

"Stop!" his mental command was immediately obeyed.

All the space nanites near him literally froze in their motions.

At the same time, a million-fold echo of tense anticipation arose in his mind. They were ready and waiting for new instructions.

Sigurd literally felt their desire to finally be assigned new tasks again.

Of course he had something for them. But the question that came to his mind, he could not answer so easily himself. He wanted as fast as possible back to the earth. This was however over 1.6 billion kilometers away.

How could the space nanites help him to bridge this distance?

Then he remembered his jump from Super Earth to Japetus. Millions of nanites had followed him then. Now, in retrospect, he asked himself, how could they appear so quickly above Saturn's moon?

He had made some logical mistakes in his decision at that time. It had never occurred to him to even think about how the nanites had covered the equally great distance from the super-Earths to Saturn's moon Japetus in a relatively short time.

A direct telepathic communication to them did not exist, consequently a corresponding question was excluded from the outset.

So he had no other choice than to express his wish and wait to see what would happen.

In his current situation, he probably had no other choice.

A teleportation was ruled out for the time being because the distance was too immense and he didn't really know what would happen if he materialized in the middle of space, in the middle of nowhere.

Jumping into the blue without an exact clue was not an option for him. At least not at first.

Sigurd had just finished formulating his wish when the asteroids in the immediate vicinity, which were one hundred percent nanites, slowly moved even closer to him.

They were twenty-five chunks of nearly equal size, constantly changing their surface structure as they approached. Like a modular system, they closed more and more gaps between themselves and Sigurd. Finally, they wrapped themselves around his body like a mold.

The so from twenty-five asteroids and a human body developed structure looked like a cuboid with an edge length of 85, 90 and 120 meters.

He could no longer move, but he did not feel any external influence or any other changes in his body.

In Sigurd's mind, a kind of collective confirmation sequence appeared for a few seconds. The space nanites seemed to know exactly what he wanted and acted purposefully.

The cuboid with Sigurd in the center immediately began to accelerate toward Earth. However, he got nothing of it. After a few minutes it already reached 50,000 kilometers/second, after another ten minutes 100,000 kilometers/second.

When the nanites had reached half the speed of light, the cuboid went into transition. It skipped the enormous distance to the earth in a gigantic teleportation, so to speak.

The energies for it the nanites took from the dark energy of the cosmos. This served as a catalyst that made the transition through hyperspace possible in the first place.

After a total time of more than half an hour, the twenty-five asteroids retreated from Sigurd's body. He was surprised at first and already thought that it had probably not worked after all, when a blue shining surface pushed itself into his field of vision.

Where the ocher yellow of Saturn had just been visible, there was now a sea of blue.

Behind the planet's horizon, the sun was just rising, illuminating with immense power the steel-gray surfaces of the rocks that were moving farther and farther away from him, exposing the surface structure of the Earth to his eyes. He was actually in orbit around the Earth.

He did not yet feel the gravitational pull of the planet, which was very small in relation to Saturn.

But he would not wait that long. His goal was clearly defined. He wanted to try to get back into the universe of the Mager via the White City of the Monkey God, to search for MAITRI.