“Majhena? Is that you? What are you doing here in the dark? You should be in bed, young lady.”
“I’m not sleepy,” she replied. She was sitting in a fetal position in a corner of the room. Her arms wrapped around her legs, resting her chin on her knees, she was looking at him with a grumpy expression on her face, slowly rocking herself back and forth.
“You should still go back to your room. This is not a place for a young girl at night, alone.”
“I’m fine here!” she made a very faint grunt.
“Majhena? Are you OK?” He could sense she was not.
“I’m fine. I just want to be alone,” she replied telepathically.
And then, she started sobbing. Soon, her large purple eyes were crying. Her body, as with any Kahnu who was crying, tuned to a dark gray color. Majhena was now an orphan. Her parents had stayed on Kahnu. She was the only one of her family who had escaped the tragedy, purely by luck, after a set of circumstances had given him no choice but to take her with them, when they had found her hiding in the ship, the night of their departure.
Jorh approached the girl and sat right next to her on the floor. He reached over for her hand and said, “It’s OK to be sad. It’s normal to feel pain. You just lost your family, your home, and everyone you ever knew. It’s OK to cry Majhena, I know I want to. Cry my child, you’ll feel better.” Putting his arms around her, he pulled her to him and caressed her head, while she abandoned herself in her sorrow.
Thirty-six hours later, a blueish streak was scraping the top layer of the thin orange hued atmosphere of Kesra. The long line of light emblazed the cloudy haze over several kilometers, as the ship made its final descent. Entering the lower atmosphere at over 25,000 kilometers an hour, the ship would have been a spectacular scene to watch, had any life form been present on the ground below. But Kesra was, for the most part, a dead world already. Only a few species remained in crevices and underground water holes. But none of them possessed anymore intelligence than that of a starfish on Earth. And within the next few million years, most of them would also disappear. Water on Kesra, evaporating in the thin atmosphere, was slowly killing all life on the planet. Eventually, the once fertile planet would become a global desert, a desolate world, known to man as Mars.
Mahhzee reduced the vessel’s speed to 1200 kilometers an hour within seconds. The resulting G-force felt by the crew members was negligible, thanks to the ship’s Zarfha controlled artificial gravity field. It was capable of automatically compensating for any change in gravitational force almost instantaneously, allowing it to keep the gravity onboard relatively constant, no matter what the forces exerted on the outside were. This amazing technology was the creation of Jorh. His years spent on Zarfha gravitation engines had made him one of the most celebrated scientists in his field. They were now flying over a region of Kesra man would later call Valles Marineris, an unmistakable planetary feature the Kahnu people had visited many times before. The giant geological trench, over 4000 kilometers in length, and several kilometers deep in some areas, dwarfed most geological features on any world around the sun. The view was majestic. Giant red cliffs to their left were towering over the ship. Their colossal size was an amazing sight. Occasional coves and recesses seemed to invite the intruders to explore them. A desert of dried out river beds, rocky boulders, and flat, vegetationless terrains, made up most of the landscape below. Rocks littered the ground everywhere. Far in the distance, to the right, another cliff could be seen, just as gigantic in size, but hundreds of kilometers away, and stretching far beyond the horizon, where it faded away behind the hazy atmosphere. In the gigantic facade nearest them, smaller canyons branched out from time to time, but the travelers continued forward towards the center of the monumental decor. After a few hundred kilometers, they had come much closer to the cliff, and the speed of the ship was now barely eighty kilometers an hour. They had relied mostly on the Zarfha to bring them to the correct coordinates, but now everyone was paying attention to Mahhzee, who had once again taken over the ship’s controls. They were searching the cliffs for the cavern entrance in the rock face, artificially carved by their people many years earlier.
“I think we’re getting close,” said Donjeh. He was the only passenger who had actually been to the red planet before.
Steering with hands gestures, to face the vertical cliffs, she brought the ship down a few hundred meters above the floor of the canyon, waving commands to the spherical artificial brain of the Aruk. She slowed down the vessel, while pulling back on the nose to level up. Slowly descending vertically while maintaining the ship horizontally, Mahhzee was sweeping the face of the cliff in front of them.
“There! On the right!” Donjeh said telepathically, pointing in the direction of a small bulge on the rocky wall.
“I see it!” she replied.
Quickly moving the ship to face the location showed by Donjeh, Mahhzee turned the white vessel to face the dome shaped formation. Encased in the cliff’s face, the spherical marker meant the entrance was nearby. After hovering around a tall chimney-like rock formation on the right of the marker, a large fissure revealed itself. At first seemingly too narrow to fit, Mahhzee slowly engaged the ship in the tight passage. It was an impressive canyon in its own right. The ship was now getting lower and had slowed down to a crawl. After a few minutes, they were hovering in front of a large gap in the cliff, about sixty meters above ground. It appeared to continue on into a cave-like passage, maybe only twice the girth of the ship. Slowly moving forward, Mahhzee maneuvered the Aruk toward the narrow mouth of the opening, and they entered the dark cavern. The glowing shell of the hovering transport was now illuminating the walls of the tunnel all around them. To everyone’s surprise, like stars in the night sky, millions of quartz stones started sparkling, reflecting some of their light back to them. The corridor walls were surprisingly smooth and symmetrical, and many different tunnels branched out here and there, also quite even in their proportions, as if artificially made. In fact, some of them were.
Although the cave was natural in formation, the Kahnus had carved more tunnels into it, like a colony of termites would a beam of wood. Many years ago, when they had first visited the red planet, the council of Elders had agreed to allow a permanent station to be built on Kesra. After almost forty years, it now covered more than five times its original size in length, expanding through the belly of the cliff. Even after Kahnus had visited all the planets and moons of our solar system, and eventually moved on to other type of research, the laboratories and habitats on Kesra had stayed in use for many more years before they were abandoned. Many discoveries were made during those years. Coval salt was one of them; a white powdery substance that had become an important ingredient in their biogenetic Time-Frost hibernation technology. Many leaps were made thanks to research performed in those caverns, especially in the field of biology. The closing of the station, soon after the discovery of Varih-Aru, had been very difficult to accept for some. No one had been allowed back on Kesra since.
None of the passengers on this ship had ever been to the red planet, except for Serm’s uncle, Donjeh. He was also the most renown researcher in Time-Frost technology, and one of the few who had fought to keep the laboratories on Kesra operational.
Kesra, the red world