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‘Your bad. You didn’t take up the free PT I offered you a few months ago.’
‘Excuse me?! First of all, you’re a sadist when it comes to PT. Second of all, I’m army reserve. I’ve done my fair share of reps and runs. I’m fit enough to do this. It’s just everything happened so fast - and father -.’
Rina sensed the mood shift, and her expression softened. ‘Hey, together with the Security Council members still loyal to you, we’ll come up with a plan and a way out. First, we need to get to the Enclave.’
‘I know -’
‘And to get there, we need to move fast, Sel,’ Rina said, looking up to the darkening skies and swaying cyclopean trees. ‘The storm is worsening. It feels like a super typhoon is raging above the canopy. It could trigger flooding, maybe even landslides in a few hours.’
What of the landslide in her heart?
Selene grit her teeth, composing herself against the tide of grief that threatened to overwhelm her. She pulled back her generous wet curls, tying them back from her rainswept face, and took a deep breath.
She could do this. She only let herself avenge her father and grieve his loss when they’d prevailed.
‘First one to Zulu One gets first dibs at hot water and a hammock,’ she called out.
With that, she sprinted off between the fronds of two colossal ferns.
‘Challenge accepted,’ Rina retorted and tore after her friend.
With each step, the pair penetrated deeper and higher into the supercontinent’s vast forest, into lush glades teeming with abundant plant growth and life usually powered by ample sunlight.
Tree trunks lashed by the storm swung from side to side, whipped by icy water from the heavens above. Cutting winds tore at leaves, branches and roots. Altiphyte trees loomed overhead like monumental phoenixes, their external roots forming wide island-sized bases on the ground. Yet, the rain somehow penetrated their coverage, lashing under the vast canopies and slamming in between the massive roots and knee-high moss that made up most of the forest floor.
Here, leviathan-sized megachids, dromapods and nognathans commonly roamed, grazing on the trailing masses of moss and plants growing on the forest floor. Red-crested terodonts and butterflies the size of birds would set down on climbing fruit phytes hanging from the immense canopy above. During the night, trees along Dunia’s rivers lit up at night with tens of thousands of fireflies flashing in sync, creating sparkling routes along the banks.
On warm, dry days, supersized passifloras fanned out their deep funnel-shaped petals for the sword-billed hummingbird to dip into its bowl of nectar using its elongated, thin beak.
One had to be careful to avoid blooms of carrion rafflesia flowers that mimicked rotting meat to attract carnivorous flies and beetles and duck away from opalescent snakes flashing with rapidly changing colour patterns that help them to blend in with the bright blues and greens of the forest, letting them stay hidden until prey came within range.
However, the vortex had driven most hunters and hunted to their lairs and nests. Yet despite its ferocious reputation and the continual lashing of the storm above, the forests of Dunia were a sheltered refuge for those who cherished it.
The planet nurtured its charges and protected them from harm, as it had done for hundreds of millions of years. So even as screeching gales and gusts bombarded the canopy, the vines far below parted, and paths appeared mysteriously, creating safe passage for the two women running through its moisture-laden clades towards Enclave Zulu One.
Onboard an unidentified ship, above Dunia
The Proxima Technocracy would have prevailed if it hadn’t been for their vast underestimation of Dunia’s sentient powers.
Especially of its unwavering guardianship over its precious ecology and inhabitants.
One day, the twin suns above the magnificent planet shone, and the air teemed with optimism and possibility.
The next day, torrential rain, howling storms and waves of relentless hurricanes were pummelling the ground, especially on the southern continent where the interlopers had first landed, for what they thought was a sure-fire invasion.
Large plate-sized salvos of hail flung horizontally from drenched skies slammed into every obstacle in its way. With such great force, it obliterated power suits, sheering off armour and turning the ground beneath into a never-ending boggy swamp.
The storm reduced visibility to zero; radio comms turned to static and bionic musculature to mush. The Technocracy’s invincible interceptors and rattlers became weak as gnats against the prevailing winds and devastating lightning, crashing into prismatic mountainsides in large explosions that lit up the nightmare scenes.
Even the far north desert tundra fell victim to the high winds that whipped sand into sheets of devastation. Wisely, the few creatures that made up the arid biosphere retreated into caves and holes carved into the ancient rock.
Despite their firepower and metal might, the invaders’ soldiers, also known as the crats, fell in the thousands.
Then inexplicably, the interceptors retreated from the planet and docked back with the armada.
In the stratospheric space above Dunia, The Technocracy’s armada streaked away one by one into FTL flight. They vanished with a wink as they raced back to the Omega IAZL System and their gleaming silver-plated habitat that hovered around the vibrating exoplanet HD 638974 b.
However, not all of The Technocracy ships left the system. Three capital cruisers remained, hovering in orbit.
