Perry Rhodan NEO: Volume 12 [Complete] by Alexander Huiskes Wim Vandemaan

Author:Alexander Huiskes, Wim Vandemaan
Language: eng
Format: epub

2.

Carfesch

“Carfesch! Wanderer is up ahead!”

The ship pulled the scout out of his reverie. Carfesch hadn’t slept—for so long now that he couldn’t have said how sleep felt anymore.

“Thank you,” he said. The syllables came only slowly from his lipless mouth. His state of reverie left him far away from things. Maybe that was why he preferred it to sleep. In sleep, he dreamed of Inkadye. He held her in his arms, ever so tightly. Clutched her to himself. But as hard as he struggled, she slipped away from him.

“Everything okay?” the ship asked. “Your vital signs—”

“Are my business, and mine alone!” His attention abruptly returned. “You’re overstepping your authority.”

“I am merely following my conscience. I—”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about, ship!” he said, cutting off the computer. “Show me the Planet of Eternal Life!”

Instantly, the walls of the small, sparely furnished cabin disappeared. Carfesch was surrounded by space again. It was as if he were floating out there, without a protective suit, completely on his own. Stars hung in the blackness. Tiny beacons, uniform and yet inviting. He spun on his axis and made out one point of light, bigger than the others.

Wanderer.

Carfesch thought back to Ambur. To the elderly Thort whose last moments he had shared. “The pattern of the stars is frozen music,” the three-eyed Ferron had said to him.

The stars were the last thing the Vega system’s ruler had seen. That system was one of the most magnificent and yet most wretched places Carfesch had ever become aware of. Magnificent because the enormous bluish white sun had gathered a flock of forty-three planets with hundreds of moons around them. Life flourished on at least half a dozen of those worlds in such variety that it seemed to Carfesch like a symbol of the variety of life.

Wretched because the Ferrons hadn’t appreciated this gift the universe had given them. Instead of delighting in their home’s magnificence, they’d blanketed each other with war, had brought themselves, and life itself, to the brink of extinction. The war that the Ferrons called the Dark Age was now at an end thanks to the Thort, and thanks to Carfesch’s actions. Only...

“You’re sad,” the ship determined.

“No, pensive.”

“The Thort?”

“I don’t want to...” he began, but then thought better of it. The ship would see through him anyway. “Yes, the Thort,” he admitted.

“I’m not an organic being,” the ship said, “but it seems to me that a better, more fulfilling life than Thort Guall lived is hardly possible. He was once a simple lad, a cripple, destined to meet an early, violent end in the Ferrons’ war. Instead, he rose to be the ruler of all Ferrons, bringing the Dark Age to an end. His third eye allowed him to see things and gain insights that would normally remain closed off to organic life-forms.” The ship stayed silent for a few seconds, as if it needed that time to think. Which it didn’t, of course. It had just learned the effectiveness of rhetorical pauses from Carfesch.

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