Chapter 77: Rout

The Adventura was climbing in altitude, fleeing a nightmare. Ada was screaming at Salman to jump into Drift, and he was screaming where, how, what, and Ada was screaming to jump into Drift as if they were two deaf people, and all of a sudden, the Endymion had appeared in high orbit, right above them. Instead of presenting its immense flank, it was facing them, its maw loaded with asteroids, and it fired them like a shotgun toward the Phoebus.

Then the octopus Xeno that was dragging around in its bathtub had screamed a psychic order at Salman who had triggered an unknown Drift. The Adventura had vanished, only to reappear in the dance of the stars.

They were all panting, eyes hallucinated, haunted.

A few hours earlier, the terrifying Endymion had released a creature, a biological weapon, not far from the ship. When it rose up on its legs and sent a psychic message to Ada and Salman, saying very clearly in their language and their words: “you are going to die,” they knew it was a weapon.

They had fired with a blaster and a Transient rifle, but even though the latter had pierced the thing straight through, it had leapt onto the ship. Salman, quick-witted, had fired the reactors at full power when the creature crawled on top: it had melted a little, and had been ejected a few hundred meters away. But with great bounds, it came back. It healed. That bastard was unkillable.

Salman had pushed the ship into the sky as it leapt, as if it had a grappling hook, toward it. He had told everyone to hold on while the thing grabbed the underside hull and tried to smash it apart: his plan was to crush it between the ship and the ground.

The impact was terrible, and Ada, Alpha, and the bathtub had lifted a few centimeters just before falling back to the floor-but that was not all.

The ground cracked. The Adventura suddenly fell through, as if it were a dry biscuit.

The fall lasted another three hundred meters, striking and breaking through several layers, until it hit a soft ground. A disgusting spongy noise-the thing being crushed.

They counted their wounds-Ada, breathless, her vagus nerve affected-some bruises, and Salman had switched on the floodlights that covered the whole Adventura, normally used when diving into sublime waters to impress wealthy tourists. No water here, but a spectacle as unique as it was unexpected.

Todolo, the planet with the random name, was a world with an unsuspected ecosystem. Vast hills of violet and blue moss, tall slender mushrooms, and everywhere, cathedrals of earth and plants that launched graceful ogives for hundreds of meters to support the cracked soil above, which let the sunlight filter through, drawing an infinite design on the ground. There was a whole world, of undulating slugs, butterflies and aerial plankton, living beneath the surface.