Short Story - WHALE - Part 2

A froglike treasure hunter strikes up a trade deal with a museum planet

If you missed part one, just click the button below this line.

EDITED: This author’s notes bit was for the 30th and 31st July 2022. But don’t worry, other giveaways will happen eventually, and you’ll find out first here.

I have ComicCon this weekend (going as a vendor for the first time) and will be making four Halfplanet eBooks 100% free for the weekend to celebrate (two sci-fi poetry books by myself, a collection of 52 horror writing prompts, and a Young Adult horror novella by a friend). So you will get another email about that soon. There’s no catch, they will simply be free on Amazon for 48 hours. You don’t need Kindle Unlimited or a special code or anything.

Anyway, on with the story.

WHALE - PART 2

The chair could talk to him on lazy mornings, and he could entertain the crew at night, when the fiendish Kh were wrapped around the heating pipes.

But he was getting carried away with himself. There was an order in his captain’s implant. He would orbit an ocean world close to the centre of their system.

He put the ship in position and waited. He knew that they had superior teleportation tech, not like the risky stuff used by the rest of the galaxy. Whatever it was, it happened instantaneously. No time-tubes or spatial warps or breaking down and reassembling of matter-streams. It just happened. One second you were here. The next second you were there.

But it never happened. The trader checked his instruments. They hadn’t moved at all. One of the Kh growled behind him, and he turned, wondering if their advanced senses had picked up an error. The Kh ambled into the cockpit and stood on her back legs, staring down at the trader and hissing. The trader inflated the air sacs on his cheeks, a typical apology, then checked the instruments again.

No movement.

An image of one of them flashed onto the cockpit screen. They were a mess of black and lime tentacles, writhing and pulsing with energy. The trader clicked and whistled a question, and they replied similarly, explaining in the trader’s own language that whilst teleportation was quick and easy for them, it was their belief that an object lost something of itself during the transition, so they preferred the ritual of manually moving precious objects and living beings. Here, despite the availability of teleportation, it was only used for raw inorganic materials.

The trader nodded in silent appreciation. He too avoided teleporting when he could, for there were too many strange rumours about it. He feared accidentally meeting his own teleport-pod clone, or being cast into a strange parallel world, or being trapped in the network and falling out of time and space entirely. He kept these fears to himself, and so felt reassured to have them repeated by these advanced beings.

One of the Kh hissed again, and the trader waited. The creature on the cockpit screen explained that the vessel was being scanned. Once the scan was complete, he was free to land on the planet.

The landing pad was a thin slab of meshed metal balancing above a swelling turquoise ocean that extended in all directions endlessly. The only islands were small and artificial, the steeples and towers protruding from vast underwater cities. There were other landing pads secured to this central tower, but only one was occupied. The trader looked up and cracked his neck, stretching and smiling in the humid atmosphere of this ocean world. The starship on the platform above was long and sleek, coloured a deep emerald green which shimmered in the mist thrown against the platform by the swelling oceans. The trader squinted, focusing on its shape, before turning his attention back to business.

One of them climbed out of a tunnel set into the tower. The trader smiled broadly at them, bowing. The crew offered to bring the fossil out of the ship, but the creature shook their many tentacles, bringing out four friends.

Galina’s fossil was carried by them into a glass corridor that had emerged from the ocean. Looking at it, the trader was reminded of the luxury homes of some of his clients, the glass walkways and diamond stairwells. He was invited down into the corridor with them, and despite being nervous, followed them without hesitation.

Galina was taken deep into the caverns of the planet, carried slowly and ceremoniously toward a central building, where she was propped up and secured in place. The trader was taken through a central hall. Each side was marked with weblike corridors, each branching into multiple doors and ramps and stairways. The architecture of the place would not permit bipeds to get very far, but they, being formed almost entirely of tentacles and suction cups, had no problem moving around.

The trader was stunned by the knowledge in this place. He gazed up at halls dedicated to the ancient Aevornahan, stared down into winding tunnels lined with alien artwork. It was clear that they knew far more about the galaxy’s history than any trader or treasure hunter, and privately the trader wished he had chosen this other line of work. He followed them silently. He tried to turn down one corridor marked ‘Time Machines’ and was politely but forcefully turned away by a defensive hologram composed of hot orange light. Defeated, he kept walking.

Eventually they scanned the fossil and asked him how much money he wanted. He named his price and was paid double for his silence, then escorted back to his ship. The price was so high that he had been too busy thinking of how to spend it to realise the full implications of his promise. He would now never find out what had happened to the fossil. Their museum was private, their science forbidden. All they told him was that the fossil was an astronaut.

As he turned on the ignition in his trading vessel, the trader was advised to wait by a looming Kh in the cockpit. The catlike creature placed a hooked claw on the shoulder of his jacket and waited for what felt like hours. The Kh’s intuitions were correct.

They must have seen his hesitation to leave.

They sent him another wad of money to buy his silence, and seconds later, sent him a final message.

The fossil’s name was Galina Agafonov; and she was no android.

She was a real human.