Sophie, Jon and I approached the entrance to the spaceship, that huge platform I’d seen the night before stretching out before us. I glanced around nervously at the other humans who were approaching the ship as well. The afternoon was getting on, and I was growing warier by the minute. I wasn’t human, and if these humans discovered that, they’d most likely shoot me. Sophie obviously noticed how I was feeling, as she turned to me and squeezed my hand reassuringly.
“Scared?” she whispered kindly, with Jon standing on her other side.
“Yeah.” I answered with another nervous look around me.
“It’ll be okay.” Sophie squeezed my hand a second time, as we stepped onto the platform leading to the entrance doors. “Just focus on the mission.”
I nodded, and we passed through the doors.
It was an exciting experience, being inside a spaceship. I’d forgotten up until now how big it was, and stepping inside just took my breath away. There was a huge white room inside the entrance with roundels set around the walls and multiple hallways leading to other parts of the ship. I tried not to stare too much, as that would be suspicious, but I couldn’t help but stare at the highly technological set up of even just this one room. There were screens and controls at different points in the room; on the walls, in the centre, even on the ceiling for some unknown reason. I’d thought my people were advanced, but the technology these humans possessed was more incredible than anything I’d seen in my life, and this was just in one room! My eyes alighted on a wide, flat, round hologram platform in the centre of the room, with a high rail round it and sensors aimed at it from the ceiling.
“Normally, there’d be a holographic display there,” Jon explained, noticing my interest. “On our scientific projects, and to impress. On special occasions hologram messages will be shown here. But not now. No one has any need for holograms in this situation.”
“Wow.” I exhaled, impressed.
Jon led us across the room as I took in the sight, and out of the corner of my eye I saw Sophie smirking at my reaction. Evidently she’d been inside spaceships like this before. Once we’d crossed the length of the room, Jon directed us down a certain hallway and followed behind us as we walked, casually indicating which way to go. We’d decided previously that we’d establish a base in Jon’s room on the ship before going around spreading the truth about the Weraynians’ intentions or at least telling them that my people weren’t evil. I still wasn’t entirely sure what the plot of the evil Weraynians’ was, seeing as sending one human ship to Flauraan to fight didn’t affect them at all. It seemed a weak move, in my opinion. In a few days the conflict would be over and resolved, with no benefit to Werayne. A dark feeling settled over my heart as I realised what that must mean; that there was another reason behind this trouble, something more damaging. I pulled out of my thoughts and decided to focus instead on navigating these corridors per Jon’s instructions. Since the ship was huge, the corridors seemed endless and if it wasn’t for my Paladanian instincts I would probably have been lost at this point. I wondered how Sophie managed.
Eventually we found ourselves next to a door, one with a black frame, and Jon told us to stop. He pressed a few buttons on the wall and then the door slid open, revealing a small combined bedroom and workspace. There was a bed on one side of the room and a shelf holding belongings, whereas the other side of the room held a desk with a lot of mechanical stuff on it. The latter area reminded me of my dining room table earlier today, when Sophie had cluttered it with her devices. Glancing at Sophie now, I could see the barely contained glee glowing in her eyes as she stared at the technology Jon had in his room, being a mechanic and all.
Jon seemed quite awkward to have us in his room for some reason, but nevertheless he politely invited us to take a seat. Sophie plonked herself down on the edge of his bed and I sat on the chair at his desk. He surveyed the both of us before reaching past me to check a flashing device on the desk top.
“Ah.” Jon muttered before turning the device off. He turned back to Sophie and I. “Before we carry out our elaborate plan…” he began, and it felt very much like he was mocking my plan. “I have a job or so to do. It shouldn’t take more than an hour, so you guys can just hang out in here until I return.”
“Alright.” Sophie replied nonchalantly.
Jon opened his bedroom door again. “Don’t go wandering off.”
“We won’t.” I was the one who answered this time.
“Good.” Jon nodded, and then disappeared into the hallway, the door sliding shut behind him.
Barely a second after he was gone, Sophie hopped off of the bed and bounded over to the desk, grabbing up the flashing device from before and examining it.
“What are you doing?” I asked incredulously.
“Examining this device.” Came her simple reply.
“Yeah, well I can see that.” I stood up from the chair and looked at Sophie running her hand along the side of the device, as if she could detect what it did by this method. “But why exactly?”
Sophie dropped her hand from the device and stared at me. “You’re the one who said we needed to search for proof of the Weraynians’ plan!” she exclaimed.
“And that flashing device is going to help us do that?” I raised an eyebrow mockingly.
“Oh, ye of little faith.” Sophie said for some reason. She then pulled out a panel of the wall, revealing more flashy buttons and complicated wires. Within half a minute, she had the device in her hand hooked up to the wall. “See this screen?” Sophie pointed to a small screen on one side of the device. “It’s for relaying messages. If I can get it to show the code the ship has been running since its apparent run in with the Weraynians, then we might be able to find something important.”
I perked up at the idea. “Sophie, that’s brilliant.” I said in excitement. “Can you actually do that?”
“Of course I can.” She replied, pressing a button underneath the screen. “I am a top notch engineer, you know.”
I furrowed my eyebrows in confusion. “Top notch?” I asked, trying to work out what the statement meant. “You’re saying that your engineering emits the highest frequency?”
Sophie laughed. “It’s just a figure of speech, Abi. All I meant is that I’m good with machines.”
I laughed too, half-heartedly. “Yeah I know, I was just kidding.” That was quite plainly a lie, but I knew that I should have been able to work out what Sophie’s statement had meant on my own. I was Paladanian, for Staarus’ stake!
Sophie hadn’t noticed the brief, confused look on my face, as her sight was fixed on the flashing device. She pressed a button on the side and the screen displayed a pulsating pattern, and one word, ‘Loading’.
Sophie sighed. “Well, that’s going to take forever.” She turned to look at me. “While we’re waiting, you might as well explain who the Weraynians are.”
I drew in a deep breath and began. “Like I said, they’re the bad guys in the Staarus system. A long time ago, when the Halapatovians were established as the leaders of the system, the Weraynians were actually quite peaceful and nice. But eventually they became jealous of the powers of the other races, and worked hard to become smarter, faster, and better. They did dangerous experiments, built weapons and trained constantly for combat.” It was a story I knew well, that I’d been taught when I was very young. “Then one day they launched an attack on the rest of the system. War started; a war that dragged on for years until my people and the Halapatovians recognised that we weren’t going to win the battle against them. So they created a force field, like the one around this place but much stronger, and they enclosed Werayne in it. That was the end of the bloodshed for the time being, but we knew it wouldn’t hold them forever. Decades have passed since then, and now….. I guess that if the humans landed on Werayne then…. they’ve found a way to breach the force field.” I ended my speech and silence hung in the air as Sophie contemplated my words.
I watched silently as her eyebrows furrowed and she muttered to herself about war. Suddenly a beeping sound filled the room and both Sophie and I turned to face the flashing device she’d hooked up to the wall. There were now words and numbers on the screen, the information code Sophie said she was searching for before.
“Ah!” she picked up the device, and tapped the screen with her finger. She read over the information quickly and looked up at me. “That explains a lot.”
“What does?” I crossed to her side and peered at the screen.
“Well, according to the message here,” Sophie explained. “This ship came upon Werayne a week ago, intercepted a distress signal and dispatched a small ship there. The dispatch team came back with a report on the Weraynians’ and diagrams and stuff as proof that your people had trapped them there and captured a human ship a couple of months ago. There's a copy of the supposed ship manifest here. It’s a pretty good forgery actually. Even I wouldn’t have worked out it was false.”
I rolled my eyes at her ego. “So that’s why they think my people are in the wrong? Because of a couple of diagrams!?” I ran my hands through my hair in frustration and turned away. “This is ridiculous! Is there any other information on there that we should know?”
Sophie scanned her eyes over the code again. “I don’t know, the message is still coming through.”
“Can I see?” I held out my hand for the device and she handed it over. I read all the information on the screen and waited as a little pattern ran across the bottom of it, loading the next part of the code.
“Message Coder, property of the Eridanus II….” I mused, reading the etching on the side of the device.
In my peripheral vision, I saw Sophie flinch yet again at the mention of the spaceship’s name and looked up at her curiously.
“What’s wrong?” I asked her.
“Hmm, what do you mean?” she sounded distant, like her thoughts were far off.
“Sophie.” I said sharply, turning her attention to me. “What is it about the Eridanus II that freaks you out so much?”
Another flinch. “What do you mean?” she repeated, her voice an octave higher than usual. There really was a problem, then.
“You know what I mean.” I fixed a stern gaze on her.
Sophie gulped. “It doesn’t matter; the name just sounds sort of familiar to me. I think I’ve heard it before… Maybe on Saaron 3… or Dlom?” she rambled, her eyes shooting from side to side and making it plainly obvious that she was lying.
“Sophie, you can’t fool me, I’m Paladanian remember?” I told her, placing down the device I had been holding and looking her straight in the eyes. “I know that it’s something important, and I wouldn’t be asking except I’m worried about you. You seemed so scared when you first saw the ship.”
Sophie glanced at me nervously, wringing her hands. “Well, it’s a little bit complicated, and a long story.”
“I think I’ll be able to understand.” I said patiently.
She sighed, and I knew that meant she was finally going to tell me the truth. “Okay, so this spaceship is called the Eridanus II, right? Well the reason I was following it, the reason I am here by extent, is that I thought it was the Eridanus I, or just the Eridanus. It got… lost, in space and I’ve been looking for it ever since.”
“But why?” I was instantaneously intrigued by Sophie’s story.
She hesitated again. “My…. my dad… was on the Eridanus space expedition.”
I nodded slowly as I began to understand. “That’s why you were so upset when you saw this ship. You thought it was the Eridanus, and it scared you that your dad might be one of the people preparing to attack my people.”
Sophie looked down at the floor and I knew I was right. “Yeah. This ship is almost exactly the same as the original. They’re both deep space exploration crafts, of the Eridanus model, so I thought…. Just for a moment…. that I’d found him….”
We plunged into an awkward silence after that, as I pondered the things Sophie had just told me and she stood nervously. I could tell she wasn’t used to telling her story and was worried now that she had told me. Her hands went from her hair to scratch her cheek to her side where her fingers tapped out a random beat before travelling back to run through her hair. All I could think about was how brave she was. From what she’d said, I knew that she’d traversed planet after planet for years on end by herself to find hundreds of lost people on a ship that also contained her father. That was something almost unbelievable to me.
I was pulled out of my thoughts as the device in my hand beeped again, this time to alert me of the new information present on the screen. I began to read it over as the door slid open and Jon entered.
“What are you two doing?” he asked hysterically, causing Sophie and I to stare at him in surprise. At this point Sophie was sitting on the desk, fiddling with wires protruding from the wall panels, and I was leant against the bookshelf with the flashing device in my hand. Seeing as his mechanical stuff was now scattered all over the place (as always is the way with Sophie around), I could understand why Jon looked shocked and frustrated.
“I’ve been hacking the ship’s software to find out about the Werayne landing.” Sophie answered quickly, and casually.
"What?!” Jon shouted, and I shook my head in exasperation.
“Like she said,” I tried to elaborate. “She’s been hacking the mainframe; Sophie found the message report on Werayne and your trip there, and the diagrams and notes the Weraynians gave you and the device we used is just processing some information now.” I glanced down at the screen of the flashing device still in my hand.
Jon snatched it off me immediately, his eyes flashing. “Who said you could use this?” he demanded angrily, waving it in both Sophie and I’s faces.
“We shouldn’t need permission.” Sophie shrugged nonchalantly, but I could sense a bitter edge to her tone. “We were just trying to find out any information that might help us stop the oncoming battle between our two peoples.”
I noticed Jon’s shoulders relax at her words, and narrowed my eyes at him. He still hadn’t trusted us, after everything we’d done and said. He obviously thought we’d been sabotaging the software instead of just using it. Typical stupid human. No wonder the humans had been taken in so easily by Weraynian lies. They were all so suspicious of anything different, that they wanted nothing but to blow us all sky high. I hoped Sophie and I could find a way to stop them, because otherwise I couldn’t see much hope.
I’d started shaking violently with a mixture of anger and fear, and Sophie placed a hand on my shoulder to try and calm me down.
Jon glanced at the hand, and then at my face, and his expression softened.
“Sorry.” He murmured, shifting his feet.
“There’s no need to be.” I replied, having regained my composure. “This situation’s just… insane. It’s messing with all of us.”
He nodded, and Sophie took her hand off of my shoulder and pulled her scanner off of her belt.
Jon handed her the Message Coder that he’d snatched off of me and she tapped buttons until the screen displayed the diagrams and notes on Werayne. She scanned the screen quickly and clipped the scanner back to her belt before placing the other device onto Jon’s desk.
“Okay?” she asked Jon, who’d just been standing in the doorway for all of this
He sighed, stepping into the room so that the door slid shut. “So what did you find out, then?”
I exchanged a look with Sophie. “We already told you. The diagrams and notes on the Weraynians.”
“Yeah, I know.” Jon continued. “But is any of that useful in any way?”
“It could be.” Sophie said, eyes wide. “But we don’t know yet, so we still have the main task ahead of us.”
“And that is?” Jon raised an eyebrow.
“Well, to spread the word of course!” Sophie waved her hands in the air, and then placed an elbow over Jon’s shoulder. It was quite a funny sight because Sophie was quite short, and Jon was so much older than her, making it almost impossible for Sophie to stand straight with her arm over Jon’s shoulder. “We’ve got to go around the ship, try and convince them that the Weraynians lied to them, and then get them to call off their army and make peace with the Paladanians!” Sophie finished, waving her arm about, but then she lost balance and almost fell over. She tightened her grip on Jon, but once she’d steadied herself she let go, so that she could stand normally.
I stifled a laugh as Jon stared at her incredulously. It was hard to keep a straight face with Sophie around, as she didn’t seem able to stop doing silly things.
“Um let’s go, then.” She smiled sheepishly.
Jon glanced at me and we both nodded. Jon waved his hand over the door panel and it slid open. We all walked through.
The first place we went was a wide hallway, filled with people. Sophie and Jon split up, starting random conversations with different people, while I trailed along behind, looking around and listening in.
“Don’t you think it’s a bit weird, how the Weraynians knew so much about this planet, when they’re in that force field?” I heard Jon asking a small group of people on one side of the corridor.
“Well, yes but they also…”
I turned my attention to Sophie, who was talking animatedly to a man and his wife.
“Cause you see, those diagrams have a drawing base code of 163.9, so that means..”
“Who are you again?” the man asked in confusion, and I shook my head with a laugh, deciding to leave them to it.
We'd decided that at sundown we’d all meet up in the mess hall for dinner. I knew roughly where the hall was, so it meant that I could go off on my own and explore.
I traversed down another hallway, noting people with guns all walking solemnly down it. After watching a few of them enter through a door, and re-emerge without the weapons, I decided to find out what was in the room they were entering. One look at the door switch told me that you had to be human to access it, and so instead I placed my hand against the wall, leaning casually and trying to look bored whilst trying to concentrate on what was inside the room with my eyes open. It was difficult but after a couple of seconds I could see the image clearly in my mind, and repressed the urge to gasp.
The room on the other side of the wall was huge! It was positively filled with crates, full of weapons like guns, bombs, electric spears, laser swords, and any other kind of artillery imaginable. There were a few larger machines, which looked hastily assembled, but would be devastatingly powerful if the firearms attached to them were used.
Many people were milling around, moving crates around or checking the weapons or even just walking between the rows. The room was dimly lit, which made it look even more menacing than it already would.
I remembered Sophie’s comment earlier about the humans.
‘Most of my people… haven’t held a weapon in their life.’
“Oh, I beg to differ Sophie.” I said quietly as I surveyed the scene with horror.
If the humans broke the force field, then my people wouldn’t stand a chance!
About to focus my eyes on the hallway I was in again, I suddenly noticed a scurrying movement in the shadows. I frowned. The whole room seemed ominous, but why would someone be hiding, keeping out of sight? It didn’t add up. I shrugged, deciding that my mind must be playing tricks on me again. I pulled my hand off of the wall and moved away down the hallway, trying to forget the room and the weapons it held inside.
Trying to do something useful, I made an inventory of the rooms on the ship, in my mind. Apart from the weapons room, there were also bedrooms, a mess hall, an engine room, a communications deck, other various control rooms filled with differing kinds of technological systems, and general rooms for the humans to hang out in when they weren’t off trying to break through the force field and murder my people.
I felt a growing sense of apprehension at the thought of the sheer size of the human spaceship. I’d been wandering around its levels and hallways for about half an hour, yet I could tell from the structure of the ship and my Paladanian instincts that I hadn’t even crossed a third of the space inside it. It didn’t help my nerves that, whilst in another ominous looking hallway, the hairs on the back of my neck pricked up, causing me to spin wildly around, sure there was someone watching me. I found myself faced with an empty corridor and multiple locked doors. I sighed and moved on, before glancing up at a clock on the wall and discovering I had five minutes until dinner time.
As I sauntered towards the mess hall on the first level, I reflected on how surreal this whole situation felt. I mean, I was inside a stunningly huge spaceship trapped within a force field, trying to get the residents of the ship to leave my people in peace, with my only allies in the matter an eccentric space traveller who I’d only met the previous day and a mechanic on the same ship I was in. And now I was going to eat dinner with the very aliens I was fighting against. Barely twenty four hours ago I had been safely at home, about to eat dinner, completely ignorant of the events that would soon unfold, and my biggest problem being that my best friend lived on another planet. I sighed, knowing that I would never be able to go back to that simple life. Since then I’d felt the thrill of adventure as Sophie dragged me through this whole ordeal; and a part of me enjoyed it much more than anything else I’d ever done.
I came in sight of the doors to the mess hall, and saw Sophie casually standing there, eyes roaming around, evidently trying to find me. Finally catching sight of me, she waved excitedly, and I ran over.
“Hi Abi,” she linked her arm through my elbow, and we ventured inside the mess hall. “Come and see the uproar we caused.”
I wondered how on Flauraan she and Jon could possibly have created an ‘uproar’ in only forty five Earthly minutes. Then as a crowded table occupied by heavily debating humans entered my field of vision, I realised I was about to find out.