Christie Golden: Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets

Further inland were small craters in the earth, about the size made when one extended one’s arms and made a circle, fingers touching. Smiling, their faces bathed with the milky glow, those who bore the pearl-filled shells emptied them into the waiting earth.

The very ancientness of the routine was comforting. Lïho-Minaa turned her face up toward the rising sun and closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, she beheld a bright streak across the dawn-dappled sky—a shooting star.

It was not alone. Another joined it… and then another…

Fear closed around the princess’s heart as the first chunk of something unknown—but definitely not star matter—slammed into the water. It smashed a shell house into jagged pieces. Others came too swiftly to count, sending spouts of water in the air as they struck the ocean making angry craters, wounds on the world.

Cries of terror erupted and people began to flee. But where could they run? The princess stared up at the sky, which had once contained nothing but stars and moons and sunlight, as chunks of metal ranging from the size of a fist to the size of a house rained down mercilessly upon the frightened populace.

She turned, helplessly, to gaze at another part of the sky—and then she saw it.

The scope of it was gargantuan, inconceivable, and she understood at once that it was not simply a vessel, but death.

Lïho-Minaa dwelt near the ocean, soothed by, and loving in return, its lulls and song and smell. Her family, wishing to be in the heart of the population they ruled with a gentle hand, lived in the village.

And the still-burning ship would crash directly into it.

All around her was the awful, never-before-heard cacophony of screaming.

But the princess did not scream.

She ran.

The village was a layered collection of shells, their graceful, sloping forms clustered companionably together around spiral steps and open plaza areas. The royal palace, home to Emperor Haban-Limaï and his family, was a collection of shells adorned with exquisite carvings and metalwork. It sat in a place of honor, at the highest point of the village, overlooking the shore and the ocean. In front of it was the largest plaza in the village. Once, it had been the sight of performances, both oratory and musical; it had showcased dancing and art, and had been a place for pleasant gatherings.

Now, it was crowded with frightened people, their eyes gazing skyward, round and terror-filled, as pieces of something that had once been huge and was now broken and alien and dangerous slammed down everywhere they looked.

The emperor was a calm individual, who had led his people wisely and with care. All eyes turned to him, hoping against hope that he would somehow be able to stop whatever was happening.

He turned to one of his guards as he emerged from his dwelling. The guard’s forehead and eyes were black with fear. “What’s happening?” he said in the musical tongue spoken by his people.

“There! Look!” The guard pointed beyond the elegant curves of the village at a huge plume of black smoke rising into the sky. Not everyone lived in the heart of the village. Many still lived close by.

Many lived where the ugly black tower of smoke was.

But that was not all that concerned him. He had lived a very long time, and he knew what a meteor impact was like. This was no such thing. This was much worse.

His own people would not be the only ones injured or dying.

“By all the stars!” cried the emperor. “Sound the alarm! We must contribute to the rescue effort!”

They ran, a sea of pale, pearlescent skin, foreheads dark with their distress and black, wide, worried eyes, toward the smoldering wreckage. The closer they drew, the less hope the emperor had of finding survivors.

It was massive, twisted, broken, burned black metal lying atop the pretty shards of smashed shells. There had been no war, no violence, on Mül for so long that it was the stuff of legends and folklore. The emperor had hoped that the ship had fallen from the sky because of some mechanical error, but he realized that it was a grim casualty of war, taking with it much more than the lives it had borne within its metal walls.

Closer they came, but saw no one staggering out, coughing or limping, wounded but alive. Only a single hatch was open, where a few of the ill-fated vessel’s crew members had tried with bitter futility to escape the inferno.

Nonetheless, an effort had to be made. Surely not everyone aboard such a mammoth vessel was dead…

“Search for survivors and begin salvage operations,” the emperor ordered. He took the first courageous steps himself, entering the doomed ship. He had no idea what he would find, only knew he had to see. Had to help.

The worried suspicion turned to cold certainty. Inside, they found only charred bodies that had once been living, laughing beings, who had never stood a chance. It was no longer a rescue mission, but those who had died so badly deserved more than to have their bodies forsaken.

He stepped outside, but as he began to tell the sad news, a shadow fell over them, as if something unspeakably huge was attempting to swallow the sun. Haban-Limaï looked up. His grief for the unknown aliens who had fallen to the violence of war was replaced by sick horror.

A ship about seven miles in length was falling out of the sky.

The emperor thought of the beautiful, but ultimately fragile, homes the debris from this ship had already crushed to sharp pieces. Without a doubt, their shell domiciles would never survive what was about to happen.

But perhaps this ill-fated vessel might have one final gift to offer those who had come to help its crew.

“Everybody inside!” he shouted. “Take cover! Hurry!”

There was not much time left before the end. The emperor kept one eye on the encroaching disaster and the other on his people as they rushed, carrying children, as fast as they could toward the only possible safety. Fear stabbed him when some of his guards ran up with his own family.

One of them held a terrified five-year-old Tsûuri in his arms.

Another bore the ominously still form of his wife, Aloi. Her beautiful flowing robes were torn and spattered with blood. Relief flooded him when she moaned slightly and her head rolled in his direction. She was injured—but alive.

“Get them inside! Hurry!”

The two guards hastened to obey. Fear still gripped the emperor’s heart as he seized the arm of another guard and he asked, hoping against hope, “My daughter?”

The guard’s eyes filled with sorrow as he shook his head. “I have not seen her,” he said.

The emperor thought of the chunks of debris that had fallen like pieces of stars, and his heart cracked. But he could not afford the luxury of grief, not now, when he needed to stay calm and care for as many of his people as he still could.

In the distance, the ship finally fell. The earth shivered violently, as if it was a living thing in tremendous pain. Sounds that attacked the ears with the force of a sharp spike accompanied the ghastly spectacle as the ship plowed its way through the soil even as it cracked and exploded into a roiling fireball.

His eyes glued on the ship in its death throes, the emperor waited until the last possible minute, until the final few stragglers flung themselves inside sobbing and shaking, and then he, too, darted into the safety of the first ship and pulled the massive door shut with all his strength. His muscles strained as he gripped onto the strange latch, turning it until he felt it grind forward and lock into place. He leaned against it for a moment, panting.

His eyes fell on the survivors. Shivering, in shock, they stared blankly at him as they huddled on the metal floor. His wife was being tended, and his son looked up at him, tears streaming down his small, perfect face. The emperor scooped up the boy and held him tight, pressing his face into the soft flesh of the child’s neck. Tsûuri clung tightly to his father, as if he would never let go.