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© Marie Weems, 2026
ISBN 978-5-0070-4569-8
Created with Ridero smart publishing system
Chapter 1: Strategic Initiative
The harsh, sterile light of the compartment lamps pierced eyes and made a nose itch. The faint, barely perceptible scent of processed wood drifted through the air — a dry, papery aroma of home that evoked almost no memories. It didn’t affect the crew the way it was supposed to, but nobody was planning to test that.
Marex, whose body resembled a rusty, compressed spring, was cooped up in his cabin. It was a tiny space, looking more like an abandoned warehouse than living quarters. The floor was littered with scraps of paper and wrappers, as if a portal from a Margondian garbage dump led directly here, and the walls were plastered with “trophies.” Scraps of foil, nuts, and colored glass shards — a special, almost sacred meaning was invested in each “treasure.” At least, so it seemed to Marex. He didn’t try to explain; he merely stared mysteriously into the distance.
Right now, he was nervously twitching his hand, his fingernail rhythmically tapping out an impatient tap-dance on the metal table, making even the green coins bounce in time. Of course, he could have gone to his partner and helped research the mysterious golden discs, but why study them when he could just rely on his own strength?
Either way, the closer they got to the coveted planet, the more anxiety washed over him. At the thought, everything inside twisted into a tight knot. Marex himself no longer understood what exactly he was feeling: whether it was the primitive thrill of a pioneer or a dull dread of the unknown. Muffled sounds of a working transceiver drifted from the main compartment — Dorian, as usual, had dived headfirst into studying the golden discs.
Marex began rapidly sorting through the treasures on the table, tapping each piece as if playing a piano. This music of chaos calmed him down a bit.
“Dorian!” Scooping up the greenish coins, he bolted from his seat, unable to bear his thoughts alone any longer. The cabin walls felt as though they were closing in, pushing their owner out into the common space. “Are you playing those recordings again? I can feel them drilling into my brain, you know that!”
Passing through the narrow, dark corridor and stuffing the coins into his pockets on the go, Marex burst into the main compartment. His partner sat hunched over the control console. His face wore that ultimate expression of academic pedantry that always drove the impulsive Margondian to a white heat.
Without waiting for an invitation, Marex snatched the golden platter out of the transceiver with a sharp movement. The metal burned his palm with cold and surprised him with its weight. Turning the disc over in his hands, he began examining the strange engravings, trying to discern a hidden threat in them.
“Give that back!” Dorian snapped upright, his ear locators pinning back against his head in disapproval. “This is an important assignment; we’ve barely touched the second platter.”
Dorian opened his palm demandingly, leaving no room for argument, his heavy gaze practically pinning his partner to the spot. Marex hesitated, but ultimately dropped the disc into his partner’s hand and crossly folded his arms, making a show of how bored he was.
“They’re clearly up to something,” Marex forced an intellectual look, sincerely trying to help. “Why send the exact same thing on two different platters?”
Dorian sighed heavily and, without looking at his partner, slammed the disc into the slot with a practiced motion.
“You’ve been slacking off in your kennel for the whole flight,” he still didn’t turn around, his locators frozen, greedily catching every rustle from the transceiver, “why all the fuss now?”
Marex froze for a second, staring at the near-mirror floor, but then immediately snapped his head up and jabbed a finger at his partner.
“For your information, I was monitoring the perimeter! While you were here studying everything for the tenth time!” He threw his hands up dramatically, as if surrendering at the barrel of a heavy and highly efficient Karonov. His locators spread wide in a grand gesture of peace. “But I don’t want to fight. After all, for the duration of this mission, you are my brother.”
At this admission, Dorian winced, as if static interference were being transmitted directly into his neck.
“Thankfully, the mission is peaceful and short,” he stared anxiously at the gauge, where the red line of oxygen was inexorably sliding toward the critical mark. “They could have pumped more wood into the oxygen bay.”
The Emperor was clearly stingy, flashed through Dorian’s mind. He instantly shuddered inwardly: on Margondia, such thoughts were equated with treason. He glanced sideways at his newly-minted “brother,” who was already plastered to the viewport, greedily peering into the darkness of space.
I hope we never learn to read each other’s minds.
In Marex’ head, like a malfunctioning calculator, a plan for a “strategic initiative” clicked non-stop. The thought was simple and daring: he would bring wood to Margondia first. Before the Istambian suppliers could raise their tariffs yet again. Before any of the other scouts. Quietly, in his own way.
They had been informed that there were trees on this planet. And if they were told, it meant it was true. Marex, admittedly, hadn’t studied the golden platters — he had enough with his wistful fantasies of arriving and stealing a couple of groves.
In his dreams, he was already standing on the carpet in the Benefaction, receiving the Emperor’s personal gratitude. But the image of his partner kept crashing into this idyllic picture. Dorian, righteous to the bone, wouldn’t let him steal even a dry twig if the protocol didn’t allow it.
Marex felt in advance how his grand scheme would shatter against that stone-clad loyalty. Convincing someone like that that blatant theft was a “strategic initiative” was next to impossible.
“What about the second platter?” Marex broke the lingering silence, turning sharply away from the window. “Is there anything new after all? Interesting… or dangerous?”
At the last word, his ear locators hopped amusingly, and a predatory, adventurous glint flashed in his eyes.
“Unfortunately, no differences have been found,” his partner rattled off dryly.
“Then why stud — ”
“So far,” Dorian cut him off mid-sentence. He suddenly leaned forward, staring at the control panel where a new, unfamiliar indicator pulsed among the familiar green lights. “Wait, what on earth is this?”
With that specific degree of curiosity that was hardwired into the genetic code of every Margondian and had led their species to disaster more than once, Dorian pressed the button to launch the hidden file.
A deafening, space-tearing roar of a train whistle filled the compartment. This alien, metallic shriek, slipped into the data by someone’s calculating hand, literally knocked the ground out from under their feet.
“Turn it off! Turn it off immediately!” Marex shrieked in an uncharacteristically high-pitched voice. He lunged toward his partner, frantically pressing his palms to his locators.
“I’m trying! Dammit!” Dorian feverishly battered the buttons until the hum of the train gave way to a heavy, rhythmic thumping, and soon choked into silence entirely.
“Why did you run over and just jump around next to me?!” Dorian pushed away from the console with anger, wheeling his chair back, away from his partner. “You should have just kept standing by your window, staring into the void!”
“I was trying to help!” Marex threw his chin up, still furiously rubbing his ears. “I was providing psychological support!”
“Never come near me when you’re broadcasting your fear like that!” Dorian mechanically reached for his throat, checking the lines on his neck with his fingers. “Even without contact, I caught everything you were feeling. You made me start squeaking like Azurks! Why do you even switch to ultrasound when you’re scared?”
Clearing his throat, Marex decided to leave the question without a clear answer. He sidled over to the opposite wall, re-establishing a safe distance.
“It’s a family thing, don’t sweat it. It’s not contagious.”
Dorian grimaced — he knew from firsthand experience that in their cramped kennel, absolutely everything was “contagious.”
Staring at the wall, Marex murmured barely audibly, “And by the way, they don’t squeak. Don’t speak of them.”
Dorian had already opened his mouth to deliver another sarcastic tirade, but at that moment, the golden platter, as if waiting for a dramatic pause, spat out a new recording.
“Again!” Marex instantly forgot the offense and lunged toward the screen, almost crashing into his partner’s shoulder. “Do you hear that? They are greeting each other! Fools… we know their language now! We can easily blend into the crowd, and no one will even blink.”
“Well…” Dorian drew out, casting a long, skeptical look at his partner. “We do differ biologically, don’t you think?”
He pointed a finger at Marex’ long, pale locators, which were now frozen alertly, poking cheekily out from under his tangled hair.
“I don’t think the blueprints on the platter were just for decoration. These ‘humans’ are different, Marex. Instead of proper locators, they just have two stationary pieces of cartilage on the sides of their heads. Imagine: they don’t even move them! And you, with your antennas living a life of their own, will light up in their crowd like our main building…”
“Why do you call our Benefaction just a building?” Marex froze abruptly, his locators swinging toward his partner like two searchlights. His gaze turned dangerously loaded.
“If you haven’t noticed, I called our Benefaction the Main building,” Dorian snapped to attention instantly, gripping his emotions in an iron fist. His neck twitched barely perceptibly, suppressing an involuntary tremor. “The Main one! For our Emperor is there, may his cycles be prolonged!”
“And here I thought you were speaking against…” Marex pointed a finger at the ceiling dramatically, “…Him. Well, what about the humanses?”
“The humanses?” Dorian glanced at his partner with mild disgust. “Goldon ordered us to use the terms ‘humans’ or ‘humanity.’ Be so kind as to stick to the protocol.”
Marex’ face contorted into a grimace of extreme displeasure — he clearly hated being corrected according to the regulations, especially if those regulations were drawn up by Goldon. Waving his hand as if brushing off a bothersome insect, he turned sour:
“Fine, these hu-u-mans,” Marex finally mastered his facial expressions, though his left locator was still twitching irritably. “Do you think it’s an ambush and they’re threatening us?”
Dorian didn’t answer right away. He brought up the image of that very golden platter on the central screen, where a man and a woman were engraved with raised hands.
“Look at them,” Dorian magnified the diagram. “They are sending a map of their home, their DNA structure, and the sounds of their world into space. Either they are boundlessly proud and are challenging the entire Universe to a fight, or…”
“Or they’re just stupid,” Marex interrupted, the adventurous glint flaring up in his eyes again. “They literally hung out a sign saying, ‘Welcome, please colonize us!’”
“Or it’s a trap,” Dorian cut in dryly. “Did you hear that metallic roar? Creatures capable of creating such a racket can’t be just ‘stupid.’ They surely have weapons or something of the sort…”
Marex approached the screen, unceremoniously shoving Dorian’s hand away to get to the controls himself. A sticky, cold shiver suddenly crawled up Dorian’s neck. His partner’s fear was so distinct and thick that he wanted to scrape it off his skin like dirt.
“Are you afraid?” Dorian eyed him sideways. “I can feel it. Literally on my skin.”
Marex’ eyes darted around, but he forced his locators to freeze in stillness, desperately trying to hide his panic.
“No! It’s just — » he hesitated, feverishly scrolling through the images on the screen. “It’s just that I felt so-o-o ashamed for not helping you at the start of the shift. My conscience is eating me alive, you know?”
Dorian merely raised a skeptical eyebrow, about to reply, but at that moment, the frame on the screen changed.
Marex froze. For a second, absolute silence hung in the cabin, and then a sound tore from his chest, mixing religious ecstasy with burning envy. He glued his face to the monitor, where a dense coniferous forest stretched out against a backdrop of blue sky.
“They… they have THAT much wood?!” he shouted, his locators fluttering so furiously that their edges began to blur.
Hit by such a powerful concentrate of emotions, Dorian instantly recoiled into the opposite corner of the cabin. His neck burned, and his partner’s rapture echoed in his head.
“What is wrong with you?!” he lamented, furiously rubbing his collar as if trying to shake off invisible dust. “Why are you broadcasting across the whole compartment? Why are you transmitting all this without contact?! Do you have any idea how painful it is to feel your envy mixed with greed?”
Marex lounged casually in the nearest chair, never taking his eyes off the photo from the platter. Opening his mouth, he was already preparing to lecture him on his superiority and the exclusivity of his family tree, but his partner cut him off with a sharp gesture.
“I know what you’re about to say. Don’t start.”
Dorian twitched his shoulder nervously once more, checking if any more of this emotional garbage had “stuck” to him, and his gaze fell upon the viewport.
“Perfect timing to finally study the data, I must say,” Dorian threw out dryly. “The planet is already visible to the naked eye.”
At this announcement, Marex crossed the space in two bounds. He slammed his face against the glass of the viewport, his impatience flaring up with such intensity that his body temperature spiked by several degrees. Dorian winced and pointedly stepped away, feeling that dry, feverish heat with every cell of his skin.
“Dorian, I feel we aren’t here for no reason!” Marex recoiled from the viewport sharply, his rusty curls bouncing in tandem with his words. “It’s no coincidence they paired us up for this mission! It’s a sign!”
Dorian merely twitched his eyebrows barely noticeably, trying his hardest not to drown in his partner’s emotions flooding the cabin.
“It’s just reconnaissance. A routine mission,” he reminded dryly, straightening up tensely and showing with his entire demeanor that he had no intention of sharing this enthusiasm.
“No! I feel it, and you already know that this is what I do best. We’ll make contact, take the wood, set up supply lines — and boom, done!”
Marex began slowly closing the distance, forcing Dorian to feel the feverish rapture with every cell.
“Just imagine!” Marex lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “If we return with a timber contract, we’ll be promoted to Klurs. We’ll become the elite ourselves! We’ll oust that…” Marex literally spat out the name, “…Goldon. Ugh, it makes me sick to even pronounce it. That’ll teach him to look down on us from his tall height.”
Dorian involuntarily swallowed. The title of Klur granted almost limitless power at the Emperor’s court, but the price of a mistake at that level was usually one’s life.
“You’re overreaching,” he responded coldly, though deep down, for a split second, he too pictured himself in the white robes of the highest caste, far away from rusty decks and his partner’s corrosive emotions.
“Come on, who’s going to miss a couple of trees?” Marex’ eyes flashed with a near-frantic gleam. “We’ll take the readings, and snatch one along!”
“Sounds dubious. But there’s a chance,” Dorian hesitated. “The main thing is that it doesn’t turn out to be a trap. The records say: ‘nations are rushing toward a unified Earth civilization.’ If they are developing as fast as they write…”
He cast a brief glance at the uranium decay data on the platter — their only chronometer, which now seemed mockingly imprecise.
“Do you think they’ll attack?” Marex froze abruptly, a sticky doubt hanging in the air. “Wait, wait… What if they actually attack? What if we’ve already been tracked?”
Dorian glanced at his partner with weary bafflement.
“If we’ve been tracked,” Dorian returned to the instruments, his voice becoming suspiciously level, “then we’ll find out in the next couple of minutes. More than likely, they’ll just want to talk. I just hope the translator’s linguistic database doesn’t fail us.”
Without arguing further, Marex frantically rushed back to the golden platter, hoping to fish some kind of clue out of the greeting sounds that could guarantee their survival. And outside the viewport, the boundless expanse of space was already giving way to a blue planet. Which, of course, suspected nothing.
Chapter 2: Atmospheric Pressure
Inside the compartment, everything hummed and vibrated with belated alarm. The ship had already entered the upper layers of the atmosphere, preparing for ejection, and every moment of delay threatened to make the pod miss the designated sector completely. Dorian stood by the airlock, fully equipped in his drop spacesuit. The blue plating of the suit shimmered softly, soothing his inner aura — he sincerely believed that the color of the gear helped keep his emotions in check. Through the transparent face shield, his chestnut hair was visible, along with his eyebrows knitting closely toward the bridge of his nose in sheer exasperation.
From the cabin behind him came dull thuds and muffled swearing. Marex was desperately battling his gear: one of his legs was hopelessly stuck in a narrow pant leg, turning his every movement into an awkward hop, while his arm couldn’t find its way out of the sleeve. Despite this chaos, he held the golden platter in a death grip, pressing it to his chest as tenderly as if it were not a relic, but the sole surviving creature on the ship.
“What are you doing?! Get dressed properly!” Dorian gripped the airlock frame, feeling his finely tuned aura begin to fracture at the mere sight of this mess.
“I’m coming, I’m coming!” Marex exhaled, strained, and with something akin to a whistle, forced himself into the unyielding composite. A menacing crack rang out — the fabric tightly molded around his lanky frame. It felt as though the suit was about to burst, unable to withstand the sharp, jerky pressure, but Marex merely straightened up triumphantly, thrusting his hands through the sleeves.
“You should have studied the materials before launch, not at the moment of landing,” Dorian snapped.
“I did study them!” Marex defeated the zipper and bounded into the corridor. At the last second, he tossed the platter onto the table, snatching up a small token in its place. “We did it together! I’m just… motivating myself. Reminding myself of their resources so my hands don’t shake.”
“‘Together’? You mean those five minutes?” Dorian jeered, rushing toward the descent pod. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed his partner feverishly stuffing something into his pocket. “What are you hiding there?”
“It’s for good luck! A relic from my mother!” Marex squeezed past unceremoniously, trying to be the first to dive into the pod.
Once inside, he slammed his helmet shut with a clatter. The face section instantly fogged up from his hot, ragged breathing, and strands of ginger hair stuck to his forehead. Dorian, entering right behind him, froze for a second, staring into this impenetrable fog where his partner’s face should have been.
“You don’t happen to know why they paired us up, do you?” he muttered, settling into a deep seat.
Marex shrugged and slammed into the neighboring seat. Without waiting for the restraints to lock, he slammed his palm onto the pulsing launch button with fanatical eagerness. The panel responded with a short beep, and the monotonous voice of the system sounded above them — cold and detached, it seemed the exact opposite of the wildfire raging inside Marex himself:
“Target IST-213-CRF locked. Braking systems activated. Assume brace positions. Commencing descent.”
The pod jerked sideways with such force that someone’s teeth audibly clicked. The old tin can respond to the g-force with a strained shriek — the automation was clearly hinting that its reliability limit had been left somewhere in the previous decade.
“What do you think you’re doing?! I haven’t even buckled my straps yet!” Dorian yelled, trying to shout over the rising roar. With one hand, he fought frantically with a stubborn carabiner, while his other hand gripped the vibrating control wheel. “Give me a warning at least!”
He threw a quick glance at his partner, but Marex seemed to have slipped into a trance. He heard neither the shouts nor the wailing sirens; he jolted feverishly, his entire body sinking deep into the back of the seat. His aura flitted wildly between icy terror and wild, primal ecstasy.
The pod slammed hard into the dense layers of the atmosphere. A few minutes of deceptively smooth falling ended instantly: the instruments broke into a frantic, choking scream, announcing the beginning of the end.
“What is that?! Why is everything screaming?!” Marex broke into a shriek, trying to overpower the din.
Dorian didn’t hear his partner’s yelping. His fingers flew madly across the control panel, repeatedly missing the correct keys due to the violent shaking of the pod.
“Warning. Unidentified movement detected. Maintain composure,” the system sang dispassionately, as if mocking their predicament.
Marex, completely losing his mind from the roaring din, clawed at the fastenings at his throat. He yanked them with such force that a crunch of the mounts echoed.
“Do not remove helmets,” the cold voice of the automation chimed in immediately.
“Oh, damn you!” Marex squealed, shoving his head back into the protective collar at the last second and snapping the latches shut.
Suddenly, the howling of the instruments cut off. A dreadful, muffled silence fell. Dorian exhaled, feeling the blood pulsing in his ears. He had already opened his mouth to unleash all his accumulated resentment upon his partner, but the words caught in his throat.
“What… was that?” Marex found his voice. He slowly, almost mechanically, turned his head toward the viewport and froze.
Outside the thick, multi-layered glass, in the inky blue of an alien sky, giant emerald flowers were blooming furiously. Right behind them, toxic red and golden flashes tore the darkness to shreds. Stray reflections burst into the cabin, pulsing painfully in the dilated pupils of the Margondians. The spectacle was frighteningly reminiscent of the Emperor’s succession ceremony: the old ruler fading into oblivion, the air filling with the scent of hope, and the subjects rejoicing at the new face that swore allegiance to the exact same eternal truths.
“It can’t be…” Dorian breathed out, unable to tear his eyes away from the blazing sky.
“THEY ATTACKED US?!” Marex exploded into such ultrasound that Dorian’s eardrums resonated with sharp pain. His panicked broadcasting flooded the cabin, instantly crowding out any remaining logic. “We’re almost at the ground! Level us out!”
“I’m trying! There are too many of these salvos!” Dorian gripped the wheel until his knuckles turned white, the controls tearing out of his hands like a wild beast. “You have controls too, take the lever!”