Дмитрий Мансуров - Invasion

She passed through many corridors and soon lost count of turns and closed doors. Finally, she found herself facing a small dead-end with a single door on which the following words were engraved: “Central console.”

She found it! Maria was delighted. The door opened under her light touch. Numerous lights flashed on the strange-looking table, and sounds she’d never heard before filled her ears. After a brief hesitation, the princess went inside, approached the table, and touched one of the lights that was hidden in a matte square cube. The cube gave way and fell open to an extent. Numerous graphs and a disturbing flashing writing appeared on the vertically standing square stones. It said:

The amount of garbage is above 100%!

OVERLOAD!!!

OVERLOAD!!!

OVERLOAD!!!

Change “Cleaner” from manual to auto mode!!!

Change “Cleaner” from manual to auto mode!!!

Change “Cleaner” from manual to auto mode!!!

The “Cleaner” key began to flash, and a smaller key appeared beneath it, labeled as “Auto mode.”

Maria mentally said goodbye to her life and pressed the buttons.

Exhausted by sneezing, Kashchey angrily pounded his fists against the wall, and at the same moment, he heard a furious buzz from its depths, a buzz that kept gaining power. Kashchey quickly jumped away from the wall a decent distance — out of tactical considerations, and not at all from fear. He saw how the invisible dampers opened in the wall, and his stunned gaze fell on numerous windows. The frames swung open, too, and the wind that came from nowhere raised the dust from all over the castle. It rushed into the hall through the open doors, and from there, it jumped through the windows and slipped outside. Kashchey barely managed to cover himself with a cloak as he was enveloped in a dense gray cloud.

From the outside, it looked like the castle suddenly burst in an explosion of dust, its volume that huge. The gray pillar rose up to the skies and frightened the witnesses who were already scared of Kashchey even more. Animals and birds began to stumble in their panic, not knowing what villainy he was planning this time and whether they should escape in advance. At this point, Kashchey was trying unsuccessfully to inhale, thinking that the only death scarier than from sneezing was the one from inhaling dust. What if the princess was a member of the mythical society of witches? How could she conjure something like that? There were never any windows in the hall, and now they were like pips in a watermelon! And the wind…

Maria heard a growing noise and removed her fingers from the button, scared. It stayed pressed. The princess pulled herself together and carefully repeated the attempt. Nothing worked this time, too. Moreover, during her attempts to make the unknown force subside, she accidentally pushed some other buttons as well, and as a result, the overall noise became louder. In utter confusion, she stared at the remote until the buzzing sound from the hallway returned her to her senses. After a moment’s hesitation, she decided to go out and look. A smaller corridor was slowly moving through a bigger one. This was where the buzzing came from. As it reached the entrance, it released a steamy cloud, hit the wall, buzzed some more and drove off. The dust-free corridor turned into a work of art, something of indescribable beauty.

A small thing with suction cups and dusters popped up from the base of the Central console. It spun around the axis and cleaned the floor from the water droplets thoroughly. The princess was no longer surprised. It just wasn’t possible. Instead, she simply stared at the unknown animal in front of her. A little later, she realized that the animal was actually an ordinary magic duster. Maria tried to take it into her hands, but the duster moved aside and answered with a dissatisfied hum.

“Come-come-come,” the princess tried calling to it. The duster didn’t react and continued to sweep the floor. “Come here! I command you!”

The duster froze, rolled to the delighted Princess, and, unexpectedly for her, quickly slipped into the base of console. The metal flap behind it clanged down, almost hitting the princess’s fingers in the process. Maria didn’t like it, so she began to press all buttons in a row indignantly. She wanted the duster to come back. The remote blinked rapidly and the sirens blared from the hissing speakers, replacing the forest sounds.

Those watching Kashchey’s castle saw how misty rays flew out of the towers and spread in all directions, turning the space into tornadoes. After that, the protective forcefield appeared. It expanded, mowing down all the vegetation around the castle for a distance of two miles like a knife. The castle became crystal clear and echoing copies of it materialized here and there. Then it turned mirror-like, and the sun glares flashed throughout the forest. And when the wind blew the dust into the street, something even more unimaginable happened. The castle began to emanate the air waves that repeated its shape flawlessly, and then everything subsided at once.

Kashchey sensed that both the dust and the wind were gone, so he opened his eyes. He realized that he should probably clean his home at least once in a thousand years. For example, only now did he see that his floors were actually made not from stone but from gold! And not just the floors. Free of dust, the ceiling turned out to be covered with amazing patterns that spread around a sparkling chandelier. They were flashing with myriads of stars before falling apart in the shapes of colored comets.

The pile of gold collected by Kashchey over the centuries looked depressingly dull in comparison.

“Burum, Burum,” Kashchey murmured in complete confusion. Did this mean he now had to throw away his collection of coins and start gathering castles and palaces? But how to carry them?

The castle brightened. The ceilings flared with yellow and the air became filled with the freshness following a thunderstorm since the ozone synthesizers turned themselves on automatically. The castle turned from black and white to emerald green, with golden tips decorating the roofs of the towers and the battlements. The windows acquired a brown tinge, weakening the glow of the sun and mimicking the shadows of the evening hour.

“I thought I was dying,” Kashchey muttered thoughtfully. “Turns out I haven’t even lived yet.”

The stars under the ceiling were extinguished. Gradually, the walls began to shine, changing the color to purple, and the ceiling flawlessly mimicked the view of the night sky that stretched above the castle. Kashchey felt the need to immediately sit down. Otherwise, he would fall over from admiration. The abundance of other bright emotions and pride filled him to the brim, and it all stemmed from the knowledge that all this beauty belonged to him!

Suddenly, he was struck by the strange thought that if everything went like this, no one would have to pay him. On the contrary, he would be obliged to pay the princess an astronomical sum of money!

“That wasn’t part of the plan,” he mumbled.

The research spacecraft came under one of the beams from the castle and made an emergency landing directly at the place over which it’d been hanging. The sensors froze, as if they had been “photographed,” and the captain fell back into depression. First the shock from his encounter with the humanoids and now this! Calling the strange planet a whole bunch of colorful metaphors, he tried to improve the situation. Eventually, he discovered that the devices seemed to be working, but they were doing it in such a slow mode that the execution of the simplest command would take several hours. It was like the rays had paralyzed the equipment. Such weapons were rarely encountered even in the most highly developed worlds. They were that expensive and classified. To fall under the power of such weapons on a backward planet at the edge of the Galaxy? Impossible! There were centuries of development to go before the locals could achieve such a level!