Dead Planet
Part 2 of the Zorpia Zorr series.
Everyone had fallen asleep. Zandar Vandar Blunt slouched in the pilot seat, his broad head folded across his pink striped belly. The Gila Monster in leather pants snored ever so slightly.
Sprawled on the chairs behind him were the green Komodo Dragon, Mox, and a Zorr/human hybrid who referred to him as Uncle. Mox was shoved into the far corner of the curved barcalounger in a position only a Varan could call comfortable. Zorpia was splayed out across both chairs with her head on the opposite armrest, one hand dangling to the floor, and both legs flailed across her uncle. A slight gleam of drool was doing its best to escape the corner of her pouty sleeping lips.
The flight deck of the Brick was utter peaceful tranquility.
A rust-covered robot called Styx manned the controls. The tubular matchstick man rotated his cylindrical head as he focused on the navigation panel. At the back of the room, the equally rusty but much larger and squarer Sentinel droid stood in its alcove. Mox’s ancient bodyguard appeared powered down, but continually scanned the room and received tactical updates from Styx.
For the last three weeks, they’d been following coordinates to an uncharted mythical planet. The instructions were hidden in the hilt of the sword of the Captain of the Dead Barge. Zorpia had inherited the sword and the title from her now-deceased boyfriend Bobby, known to most as the infamous pirate Blue Beard. His remains were destroyed along with the last ship to call itself the Dead Barge by the Klandar Authority.
Zorpia had been grieving in her own way while hiding out on her uncle’s ship. She just needed to get Bobby’s jacket and maybe a little closure.
The Brick’s sensors picked up a small rogue moon and Styx locked on the signal. Zandar opened one eye and confirmed the object matched the description. Straightening in his seat, he ran a quick system check and dropped into a holding orbit.
“Is that it?” Mox uncoiled.
Out the front window was a dark planetary object with a nitrogen-heavy atmosphere, primordial conditions, and what seemed to be unified biomass covering most of the surface.
Mox pinched one of Zorpia’s little brown toes. “Is this the place?”
She kicked him, wiped the drool off her chin, and stretched. “Great nap. How long was I out?”
Zorpia rubbed the sleep out of her eyes and looked out the window.
“Umm? Spin around to the other side.”
Blunt looked back at her.
“Trust me.”
He orbited the ship. In the murky darkness below, a colossal image of a skull and crossbones came into view. The skull had hollow dead eyes, horns on its head, and long pointed teeth. It was a large scale earthwork, probably carved from space by someone incredibly skilled with a laser cannon. Though old and fading, it still had a vicious and intimidating presence.
“This is the place. Meet the first Captain of the Barge, Old Snaggletooth himself.”
“He didn’t like trespassers much.” Mox thought about the ego of someone who would tag a planet with his own face. “But way to leave your mark.”
Zorpia stood up and leaned on the back of Blunt’s seat. “The fortress is on the south pole.”
She thought about what Bobby had told her the first time he brought her here.
“Ok, here’s the lowdown… Don’t eat the mushrooms or you’ll suffer a fate worse than death and don’t go outside the main compound unarmed because there are, well… zombies.”
Mox was intrigued. “Get a projected trajectory on the planet’s orbit. See what systems it passes through and if it repeats. We found it easily enough. Run a million-year simulation and teach the computer how to pinpoint its location at any given time frame. In case we want to come back.”
Styx began crunching numbers.
The Brick glided down close to the planet’s surface and headed south. A formidable fortress sat atop a plateau surrounded by endless fields of giant jagged bones.
“The great whale graveyard.” Blunt raised his snout. “The legends are true.”
“Well, this place certainly lives up to its reputation.” Mox also stood behind the pilots. “And there’s even a place to park.”
The Dead Fortress was made of high steel walls with spiky bones jutting off them and four towers. Three were topped with landing pads and the fourth had a multipronged battle turret to fire on ships in orbit. Two pads had docked ships and the third was empty.
“Now that’s a fast ship, I haven’t seen one like that in a while.” Mox was an old gearhead.
“I know, a Zorr Blockade Runner. That ship, alone, saved countless lives.”
Zorpia was a blockade buster and an officer in the Royal Navy, her mandatory service after primary schooling. She graduated to become a smuggler and a resistance fighter. It had been a long road that brought her to Bobby and now she was at his place again, their place.
“Not that jalopy. The Grav-shifter, the cloner ship. The perfect geometric form.”
The Grav-shifter looked like an observatory perched atop the tower. Its 12 identical pentagon sides formed a kind of rigid orb. The polygon ship was dull and lifeless with none of the color or sparkle you would expect to see if it were powered.
The flight deck door opened and in walked the tall dark specter in bright yellow short shorts and matching goggles that was Bloc Wave. He was a slender androgynous Rindo and the only other survivor of the Dead Barge’s crew. His skin and hair were pitch black and his mist-filled eyes danced when he spoke.
“A Dodecahedron Gravimetric Phase Shifter; four decks floating in a bath of gravity drive plasma, all sealed neatly in a diamond nanofiber case. The #71EEB8 deep space guild calls ’em Grav Gliders.”
Wave smiled sleepily at everyone in the room and twirled his tangled hair.
“It’s the real thing. The collective must’ve declared it unsalvageable. Took me almost a decade to get the engines running again.”
“You understand the physics of a #71 grav-drive. Are you interested in an engine room job?” Mox had respected Bobby, his ship was top of its class, Bloc Wave had built that engine, not to mention he was Rindo, which meant long lifespan and propensity for space travel. He had crew potential written all over his angelic face.
Styx chimed into action. “Glorgstum. Brick scanned. Landing code transmitted. Access granted.”
“We didn’t transmit any landing code.” Zandar Blunt began double-checking the robot’s work.
“Yeah, we did. Look.”
Everyone turned around to see Wave pointing at Zorpia’s sword, which was slung on a thick leather belt over the side of her chair. The flat curved blade led up to a hilt with three small skulls carved into it. The center skull’s eyes blinked a dull green.
Zorpia grabbed the belt and put it around her waist, then she stepped into her knee-high boots, and zipped them up. “How do you think the fortress knew not to fire on us?”
Mox smiled at his adopted niece. She was full of surprises, maybe even some to herself?
The Brick lowered down to the third tower’s empty parking space. Its rusty hull repelled the surface of the landing pad enough to cause a magnetic levitation cushion. The bay door opened and the motley crew stepped into the muggy eternal night of the Planet of the Dead.
Zandar Blunt walked to the tower’s edge and looked out into the darkness. In all directions, the fortress was surrounded by a glacier of bone. Huge rib cages jutted out of the earth, illuminated by a soft glow igniting under the countless skeletons. Blunt’s claws grabbed the platform edge and he craned his neck up letting out a prehistoric croak that echoed across the wasteland tundra. He waited and there was no return call.
He shrugged and joined everyone else in the tower elevator. “What causes the glow?”
Wave slung his turbo blaster onto his shoulder said, “The mushrooms have a bioluminescent light. The true inhabitant of the planet.”
The lift door closed and a red interior light came on. Bloc Wave pressed the talk button next to a small speaker on the control panel. It buzzed. He hit it a dozen more times before anyone answered.
A distinguished accented voice came over the speaker. “What’s this ship all about then? Did you acquire a new toy, Captain?”
Wave spoke into the box, “Blue’s gone, Clarence, and so is the Barge. It’s me and Z. The ship belongs to her Varan Uncle. Zorpia is Captain now.”
“Come down at once.”
The light in the elevator changed to white and the lift lowered to the ground floor. The iron door opened and Clarence saw only two people he knew, with them were two Varan lizardmen and a ruthless-looking rust robot with a big red lightning ball of an eye.
Clarence was Silverback gorilla from the Palavonte jungle moon. The sweetheart simian’s black and silver fur radiated evolutionary perfection. His big brown eyes swelled with thick wet tears. He opened his great upper arms and scooped up Zorpia and Wave like he was King Kong.
Zorpia hugged the gorilla back and smooshed her face into his soft shoulder fur. “How do you always smell so good?”
Clarence sniffled back, “You smell like Bobby.”
The last three members of the Dead Barge gang shared a moment of mourning. Zorpia and Bloc filled Clarence in on the death of the last Captain and the loss of the Barge. Then he gave the new guests a quick tour.
The fortress consisted of four sections connected to the base of each turret; crew quarters, the kitchen, the greenhouse, and the treasure vault. After being treated to a galactic variety of fruits and vegetables from Clarence’s lush indoor rainforest, they entered the vault.
It held as much gold and currency as you might expect, but also an exotic array of weaponry and technology. Robotic battle armor, ground vehicles, small terrestrial crafts, a stack of droids that reached the ceiling, it was the accumulation of 13 generations of pirate hoarding. In the corner next to a pile of deep space cryo units and a computer workstation was something that caught both Mox and Blunt’s eyes; another odd geometric shape about a meter around and positively the work of the #71EEB8 clones.
“A Hexagon Memorizer. Now that’s something I’d be interested in trading for.” Mox tasted the dry air of the vault with his forked tongue.
“Indeed,” agreed Zandar Vandar Blunt.
They both walked over and admired the softly glowing supercomputer module.
“I’m afraid I couldn’t part with it. I’m running the entire compound through it, not to mention the planetary atmospheric processors, the sensor array, and the defense system.” Clarence considered an idea. When a Gorilla thinks you can see it in their body language. “Toebee might have a couple laying around.”
“Toebee?” Mox lifted a scaled eyebrow.
“The mystic who lives in the north.” Clarence lowered his backside to the floor, put one hand on his knee, and scratched his round belly. “Toebee doesn’t like visitors, but I’ve been needing to tweak the atmosphere and while we did that, you could go to the mountain.”
Bloc Wave sat down at the computer interface and activated the multi-monitor display. The different sized screens danced with digital reports in multiple languages. He opened a drawer and took out a square box with a respirator on it. He pushed a button on its side, covered his mouth with the device, took a big breath, and held it.
“The nitrogen count is out of alignment. We could take a couple of hovers out and hit the terraform plant while the rest of you head up north.”
Wave exhaled pure oxygen, which both Mox and Blunt enjoyed sensing in the air. They greedily inhaled as much as they could.
That night the Varans joined Clarence for a night in his forest, Wave camped out at the computer, and Zorpia went to Bobby’s room. The door of the Captain’s quarters opened when it sensed her sword. She kicked off her boots, dove into the kingsize bed, and spent the night reliving the last year of her life through the sent of Bobby’s sheets. She dreamt he was still alive.
In the morning, she met everyone at the fortress gate. She was wearing the cobalt combat gear of Bobby’s grandfather, the original Blue Beard. The jacket was Bobby’s prized possession and it fit her perfectly. She also sported a slick platinum plated pistol at her side in addition to the Dead Sword.
“You’re looking terribly intimidating this morning.” Mox nodded in approval.
“I told you there might be zombies out there. Did you think I was kidding?”
He raised a questioning finger. “Yes?”
There were two four-seater hover cars parked at the gate. Both open-air vehicles had substantial windshields and roll bars, but only one had an assault cannon attached to it. Blunt was sitting in the driver’s seat with Clarence at his side. Wave tossed his turbo blaster in the back and climbed in. He stood up and pulled back the power lever on the cannon.
“Better safe than sorry.”
Wave pulled down his bright yellow goggles and clipped on a respirator. Blunt started up the vehicle.
Mox got in the passenger side of the other car, his Sentinel droid took up the entire back seat.
He looked over to Zorpia. “Would you mind driving? I’d like to take in the sites.”
She pulled down the night vision visor on Blue Beard’s old scratched-up helmet. The only part of her almost perfect complexion left visible was her chin. A blue scar on her cheek peeked out from under the visor. When she smiled it formed a Z.
The rarely opened meter thick doors of the fortress parted the night. The two vehicles sped out, headlights casting creepy shadows over the bone covered landscape. Even at a 500 km/hr, the whale graveyard went on forever.
Mox pulled a rectangular monocle out of his vest pocket and placed it over his right eye. It allowed him to see heat signatures and biochemical compositions. He leaned back and examined the low forest of petrified bone.
After a half hour of driving, they entered a range of rolling hills awash in the bioluminescent purple of the fungi. The sprouting plumes of mushrooms lit up the curves of the landscape. Zorpia and Mox soaked in the incredible star-filled sky of the sunless world while they glided over the softly glowing living waves.
“Beautiful isn’t it?” She elbowed at her ageless uncle.
“It certainly is.”
Ahead in the distance, a structure appeared on the horizon. Similar in style to the fortress, yet more like an industrial mosque. It had a large central domed building and four minarets around it. The towers belched atmosphere into the sky.
The serenity of Zorpia and Mox’s sublime starlight ride was broken when the lead car open fired on what was clearly three humanoids on the next ridge. The yellow-orange flash of Bloc Wave’s cannon lit up the night with a brightness that seemed louder than the crack of the blasts that immediately followed.
Both cars slowed to a stop. Three bodies lay destroyed among the mushrooms. They looked like the #71EEB8 species. They were all identical with seafoam green flight suits, yet their skin was black and red as opposed to their usual pasty silver. And it wasn’t because of the blasts they had just received.
Mox made to get out of the vehicle and Zorpia grabbed him by the shoulder.
“No, Uncle, you can’t touch them.”
“Zombies?” He sat back in his seat.
“Yeah, zombies.” She threw the car back in gear and headed down to the terraforming plant.
They waited for the others to make it safely inside, then tore off due north at full speed. Several times on the drive Mox saw movement in the distance and once the Sentinel droid ignited his great eye. The creatures were close, but moving far too slow to be a threat.
The northern section of the planet was a junkyard of crashed and abandoned ships. Their hulls stuck out of the rich dark earth intermixed with skeletal remains.
At the foot of the great northern mountain, the terrain got rocky and was covered in a light snow. The soft powder gently reflected the starlight. Zorpia slowed, downshifted, and drove straight up the mountainside. Ten minutes later they were at an entrance to a cave.
“Have you been here before?” Mox asked.
“No, but Bobby always liked to point it out as the cave of the wise old hermit. He loved that kind of thing.” She made air quotes with her hands around wise old hermit.
They parked outside and broke the silence with crunchy footsteps in the snow. Below, the valley stretched out in the darkness. Above, the arms of the Milky Way were visible even to the naked eye. There was no light pollution on the Planet of the Dead.
The entrance to the cave had snow drifting into it and didn’t show any signs of life, but after they climbed over the drift they noticed a space transceiver aimed into the stars above. It was old and homemade but in working order. They followed a line of pipe that ran along the wall. The red glow of the Sentinel’s eye lit the cave.
It was a short walk to an iron door that blocked the way. It had a large spinning wheel as if it was part of a ship. Mox looked to Zorpia and she took out her blaster. The Sentinel seemed unconcerned as its sensors already knew what was on the other side. Mox spun the wheel and pulled the heavy door open. They walked through and closed off the cold behind them.
Inside there was a wall of glass with a second far more advanced door. They were scanned with a thin green beam of light. The glass door opened and the smell of warmth, rich food, and flowers flooded the antechamber. On the other side of the glass was a room styled like Shangri-la.
The cavern was big and well lit. Bright lights lined the edges, which were also lined with trees and a sizable hydroponics garden. Handwoven Persian rugs covered the floor. Mox ran his clawed toes over the warm fibers as he stepped inside.
“Please leave your shoes and your robot at the door. You won’t need either here.”
The voice came from a side room, out of which walked an elderly woman with long curly gray hair and a big smile. She wore the seafoam green robe of a #71EEB8. She had the silvery skin and black eyes of the clones, but she was full in figure and her untethered mammalian curves showed proudly through her robes.
Zorpia pulled off her boots, put her blaster back in its holster, and took off her helmet.
“Welcome, welcome. I’ve been watching your approach. Throw your boots anywhere, sweety, mind the carpet now.” The old woman was barefoot and her little toenails sparkled on the thick rug.
“A Varan. Bet you’re proud to be the first of your kind on this planet.” She held out her hand and placed it palm open on Mox’s chest. “I speak the truth and am a friend of the Varan.”
Mox returned the Varan gesture placing his green clawed hand on the center of the woman’s chest.
“You’re female.”
“What gave me away?” She put her hands on her hips and laughed.
Mox grinned. “You resemble the #71EEB8 species. I thought they were all male, I didn’t know they reproduced in any other fashion?”
“They say nature finds a way. I suppose I’m what you might call a happy accident. Statistically, one in every 400 million clones has some kind of genetic mutation. Mine came in the form of two X chromosomes. But I suspect you didn’t come all the way out here to discuss sex with an old lady. I’m Toebee.”
“Mox.”
Toebee opened her eyes wide. “Ambassador to the Ursa Minor Corporation?”
“The same.”
“I’ve heard of you. And who might you be my dear?” Toebee placed a hand on Zorpia’s arm.
“I’m his niece, Zorpia,” she said nodding in the lizard’s direction.
“And you think it’s odd that I’m female?” Toebee said to Mox.
Turning back. “Ok, so you’re some kind of Zorr hybrid I suppose. Clearly not Varan, but your dominant species must be awfully beautiful to produce such skin tones.”
Toebee slid her silvery hand into Zorpia’s, admiring how her naturally light blue fingernails popped against her skin.
“My mother was human.”
“She must have been devastatingly handsome. I assume your eyes and blue streaks are from your father then.” She touched Zorpia’s mostly dark brown hair.
“Indeed.” She shook her hair out of the old woman’s fingers. “If you don’t mind me asking, what are you cooking?” The smell in the room was alluring, to say the least.
“Oh, yes, yes, come with me.”
Toebee led them into the kitchen, where a large iron skillet was beginning to smoke.
“For escargots, slowly saute the snails over low heat and add the shallots and garlic. Season with salt and pepper, and stir in your herbs. Then set aside and let them cool.” She dumped the bright red shelled snails into a copper dish.
“Now, I must warn you, this particular species is what they call dead snails, for the obvious reason they call everything dead around here. They pack a bit of a psychedelic punch, which seems to be a byproduct of their diet of eating the fungi. You might call them zombie snails.”
She went through the kitchen’s back door deeper into the cave and Zorpia and Mox followed. It got dark to the point of not being able to see your hand in front of your face. Zorpia had to squint. A soft purple glow began to fill the cavern. They walked toward it and the tunnel opened into a great room. There was a pond in the middle and all around it grew purple and white polka-dotted mushrooms. Their bioluminescent light sparkled on the water and reflected across the ceiling.
“This is an altered strain of the planet’s main species. Really very elegant don’t you think?”
Toebee bent over with a grunt and plucked up two red and white striped snails that looked like peppermints in her hand.
“This fungus has less toxic poison, still pathogenic to you and me, but the snails love it. In turn, they provide a mental assist to my trans-dimensional meditation, while also being a delicious source of protein. Generally, the fungi infect a host and cause addiction, the spores penetrate the body, you eat more and more until you overdose and die. Your body falls and the fungus breaks you down and consumes you, and so on lives the planet. The snails have adapted to eating it.”
Toebee led them back through the kitchen grabbing the bowl of escargots on the way, went into the main room, and over to a pile of pillows.
“So what can the mystic of the Planet of the Dead do for you?” She sat down with a fluff on a stack of embroidery.
“I’m interested in the piece of hardware that your people are famous for.” Mox flopped on the pillows in a ridiculously casual way.
Zorpia sat cross-legged next to Toebee. “One won’t hurt though.” She reached for the bowl and popped a snail into her mouth and sucked it out of its shell.
“Delicious.”
“Thank you. The hardware my species is famous for is the #EE71A7 sphere. You might call it a Dyson Sphere.”
“I’m more interested in the machines that ran it, the Hexagon,” said Mox.
Zorpia spat out the shell and he caught it in his mouth and crunched it. She hadn’t done that in 20 years.
“You are family. And I do have some, but I have no desire to part with any,” said Toebee.
Mox looked around the room at the various vines and fruit trees she lived on. It was an impressive garden.
“I’ll give you two yum-gum trees for a Hexagon Memorizer and its weight in fruit. With your setup here, you’ll be able to grow more.”
Toebee huffed out a long breath and flopped her arms at her side dropping the bowl into her lap. The copper reflected her green robe.
“Varans.” Toebee turned her head to Zorpia. “Young lady, you are traveling with one of the most resourceful species in the galaxy. #71EEB8s, myself included, wholeheartedly agree with their philosophy of the universe. I mean, he comes in here and straight away asks me for a Memorizer. And I’m looking at him and thinking, well here’s this galactic explorer traveling with this warrior babe and he’s a technology dealer with no interest in money, only the advancement of life and the pursuit of knowledge. You know the Ursa Minor thing.”
She paused and bit a snail out of its shell then tossed it to Mox, who caught it in his big mouth and crunched it.
“He simply offers something that makes me stop in my tracks and consider trading with him. It’s no wonder he has a reputation.”
“What’s so special about these hexagon things?” Zorpia popped another snail.
“Besides being probably the best computation devices around, it’s their tremendous storage and operational capacities that really make them desirable. With one, you could run a deep-space freighter, put it on auto-pilot forever, manage thousands of robotic crew, take in and store sensor data for a million years and you’d only scratch the surface of its potential. A stack of five could run a planet. They’re the quantum computer’s supercomputer if you know what I mean?”
Zorpia flipped the shell to Mox. “I’m not really into computers.”
“Of course not.” Toebee turned her attention back to Mox. “I assume you have the trees with you?”
“They’re at the fortress and I can easily have them brought to your door.”
“Well,” Toebee grunted and stood up pushing off Zorpia’s shoulder. “Let’s go pick one out for you then.”
In another side tunnel, Toebee had a small command station. Both walls of the cave were covered in stacks of Hexagon Memorizers. She had fifty in there easy. She could probably control the movement of the planet through space with the computing power she had in her cave. Mox was not often impressed, but this collection was unexpected.
“What are you up to?”
Toebee ignored his question and walked over to the command station, waved her arms around in front of a series of monitors, then closed her eyes.
Mox heard her voice in his mind. He had a neural transmitter implanted in his brain and she did too. It enabled them to speak telepathically, in a technological sense.
In his mind, he heard: “Can you see the grid? Close your eyes. I’ll connect you to the network.”
Mox closed his eyes and stood there like a statue.
Several minutes passed in silence. Zorpia spat out the snail she was eating.
“Guys, are you ok? …Uncle Mox? …Toebee?”
She watched them for minutes that seemed like hours, then at once, they both snapped out of it.
“I’m not sure I should even take one, nor do I have any inkling of which one to take if I did. The diversity is astounding. Where did you come by this knowledge?”
“If you like I could choose one that wouldn’t come with too much baggage. Let’s go back in the other room and have a sit for a while, you’ll both spend the day with me and tomorrow you’ll get your trees and I’ll give you a Memorizer.”
They returned to the pillows and ate more snails. Zorpia cut herself off, but it was already too late. They would go on an astral plane journey with the mystic of the mountain. She began by answering Mox’s question.
“The knowledge I watch over was gathered over countless millennia by the #EE71A7, the predecessor to the #71EEB8 clones. This planet was formed around a chunk of iron ejected from the original star of my species when it went supernova a full galactic rotation ago. It draws the #71EEB8 to it. They come here to die. This planet consumes life and it would have consumed me too had I not traveled here alone and initially hid in the mountains.
“I watch as my brothers are stricken with the disease of the fungus. I’ve watched them die in droves. No warnings turn them away. They feed on the planet and it feeds on them. Which is why the planet is best kept hidden from others, it will only bring harm.
“As ship after ship come here to die, I’ve collected their Hexagons. All #71EEB8 ships have one aboard to connect them to the collective.
“My species quests for immortality. When members can no longer cope with longevity, some come here.
“They leave behind lifetimes of experience. I am the archivist of their existence. You might call me a librarian of life.”
She paused for a long moment that they all sat through in silence with some minor visual events revolving around rug patterns morphing into galaxies. After Zorpia imagined she saw a whale swim through the cave, Toebee continued.
“The whales come too, as I’m sure you’ve seen. Ever wonder where the Dead Barge got its name? Old Snaggletooth, himself, started the business of ferrying galactic whales here to be euthanized. Those whales somehow know about this place or they make their way here by some deeply rooted instinct. 75% of the planet is covered in their bones. Captains of the Barge got rich being the ferryman. You don’t cross over into this world without paying a price.”
She looked at Zorpia.
“You carry the sword. Perhaps you will take up the duty?”
Zorpia thought about this for a long time.
“Now, tell me your stories and I’ll add you to my collection.”
The day and night passed under the transforming glow of Toebee’s grow lights with the telling of Zorpia’s young and action-filled life, followed by tales of Mox’s adventures. The dawn found them asleep and dreaming. In the late morning, they were sent to fetch the promised trees.
Eternal night waited outside.
Mox completed his trade with Toebee. His Hexagon Memorizer’s vast contents would be discovered in time.
With the help of Bloc Wave and Clarence, Zorpia transformed the old Zorr Consortium freighter into the new Dead Barge. When she returned to her homeworld she did so as the Captain of her own ship, wearing a badass jacket.
