SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

Jude had studied all of that in school, but it just didn’t mean all that much to him. The scientists also said that the next planet from the sun, which they called Earth-eal, also bore life. Shockingly, their days were only 24 hours long with half of it in sun and half in the day, and their orbit around the sun was 365 of those 24 hour periods. Jude thought that was unimaginable.

He remembered something about how there were humanoids on the planet, but they were not civilized, living in a much colder world, where the snow that touched the highest mountains on this planet covered large expanses of the ground, there. The humanoids huddled in caves around primitive fires that could barely support their existence.

Jude thought it sounded horrible and never wanted to travel there. But the stars—that was different.

The Dragons promised to take them to the stars.

Jude wasn’t a scholar. Really, he didn’t care where they all came from as long as they traveled to other places.

While she waited for Jude to answer, Yalta-ba-oath yawned, her huge mouth filled with the sharpest, longest, whitest teeth Jude had ever seen. It was early, and Jude had awoken her in his impatience to learn more about the Dragons’ ships. She opened her wings, stretching them. They were sleek, spanning almost thirty feet across and half that in width. She usually kept them drawn against her body, but Jude knew that, in the right conditions with the atmosphere and wind speed just so, she could fly.

She was a red Dragon, her face ringed with pointy tips Jude thought of as her beard. He heard, in his head, her amusement at that label. She didn’t seem to mind, even though his mother would have been insulted. High pointed ridges, three on each side of her face, gathered in a sort of crown at the top of her triangle-shaped head. Her throat was covered in cream scales, some as small as his fingertip, some as large across as a grown man’s hand spread wide. The same cream color could be seen under her wings when she chose to spread them, the strong, muscled arms red and the softer wing leather underneath. Her tail was as long as her body and ended in several spikes.

In spite of this fiercely strong appearance, she still seemed gentle, to Jude. Perhaps this was because as his teacher, he could hear her presence in his head and it never seemed cruel, even when he did the dumbest things like he had yesterday in his training session on navigating Black Holes. A mistake Yalta-ba-oath told him could cost them all their lives if made in the real world and not a simulated dream.

Sleek, black, and large, the ships could travel immense distances. The Dragons were vague on where the ships came from, vague, in fact, on details about themselves in general, but as far back as anyone on Kiel-e-ken, the second planet from the sun, could remember, they had simply been there. The Dragons would travel often, and the launches of the ships were attended with great revelry by the people of Jude’s home-city of Halom.

But it was new that the Dragons had offered to take people with them. And Jude was one of the first travelers, one of the first to study the ships and the navigational systems the ships contained.

Jude finally answered:

“Does it matter where the ships come from, where we come from? Isn’t it true that what matters is where we go next?”

Yalta-ba-oath chuckled. The emotion was strong in Jude’s head, but you could also hear the huffing sound through her mouth and nostrils if you had been standing nearby. Dragons only projected their thoughts to those they chose to project to—if they didn’t want you to be in on the conversation, it was private. Jude could almost hear her thoughts now. He felt he was just days away from truly hearing her through their connection, and then, the ship would be next.

“I can see I chose well in you, Jude.” Jude could hear the smile, even though it was hard to tell when a Dragon smiled from looking at their face. “You ask the important questions, but then you find the answers you need for yourself.”

Jude squirmed under the attention; the Dragon probing his mind always kind of tickled.

“Shall we get to today’s astro navigational maps?”

To: The Congress of Elders, the Judges

Halls of Government

Aredvi Sura Parallel

Esteemed Elders,

I write to you today to urge immediate action. The beginning of dangerous events is clearly upon us. There is no way that we can continue this dialogue unless both sides agree to discuss the issues at hand. I urge you to include all groups immediately and not negotiate without their explicit attendance at your meetings. Secret meetings of the Government must cease immediately so that the groups in question are not antagonized further.

The “doomsday device” that has been stolen by factions that disagree with our plan to travel to other planets, who believe that we should preserve our way of life at all costs because of the superstitions of an ancient religion, must be taken seriously by all the Wise and Learned among us. This device, while dismissed by some as a simple bomb, could change the entire nature of this planet.

What you have heard is correct: the device will, if detonated in the right part of the planet’s day/night cycle, possibly lead to an escalating Greenhouse effect that could burn off all of our planet’s Oceans. The winds will become a veritable vortex, rotating on our planet at something like 60 times the speed of our normal rotation. All animal and human life will die in the lightning storms that immediately follow said detonation. The escalating heat caused by the clouds of CO, Nitrogen, and Sulfuric Acid that will erupt from this device will then make the planet completely unrecoverable for any form of life as we know it.

I also urge you to consider the implications of all I have written here.

Those who say that it’s a simple nuclear bomb that will only destroy a radius of 8 miles do not understand the science at hand.

I have seen with my own eyes the danger that these people represent when the leader of the Faction killed dozens of his supporters in order to acquire my energy making machine. I know that I have been dismissed as a doomsday prophet, someone who stands aside and predicts scientific disasters that will never come to pass. The government must listen to its scientists if we are to preserve any semblance of life on this planet. Those who say “But they would never dare to use this device” do not know the levels of hatred these people have for anyone who disagrees with them. The fact that they stole the technology for the device from our labs does not go unnoticed by me, and I regret the experiments that lead to its discovery.

Those who say “But the space-travel will save us” do not realize that the Dragons can only carry a fraction of our planet’s life with them. And they do not seem to ask the questions of where we will go? The only other potentially inhabitable planet in this system, Earth-eal, is in the midst of its Ice Age—a time when human life is barely supported on most of its continental land masses. The primitive state of life on that planet, where there are no man-made structures and very barbaric humanoid creatures that live like animals, is not to be under estimated. Any of our planet’s survivors who managed to land on the planet would suffer a horrible fate.

Esteemed Elders: I, John of Tycho, believe that this device could end this planet forever, and the Dragons are not just the saviors of our kind that some would paint them to be. The origins of their species, as well as the nature of their benevolence to us, is unknown. Their minds are of an alien intelligence, and we cannot be certain of their intent.