“Fragments”

By RD Rivero

July 1, 2000

[Part One]

The weak radio signal could scarcely be heard over the drone of the Thunder Tank’s engines. Tygra pressed his ear up against the main speaker on the center console. His eyes were closed, his mind was immovable in exacting concentration, blissfully unaware of the course of events that unfolded around him.

Panthro was at the helm, steering his ‘baby’ along the trail that he himself had mapped in precise detail back at Cat’s Lair when the mission had officially begun. Liono was seated on a crate behind the panther, engaging in idle chatter with WileyKit and Pumyra -- mostly Pumyra. The women had awoken only a few minutes earlier and were busy sipping from steaming mugs of coffee.

Click-click-click.

Click. Click. Click.

Click-click-click.

The distress signal beat its steady rhythm repeatedly without fail.

Tygra opened his eyes and stared into the darkness of the cabin. While the bulk of the vehicle was kept to a utilitarian minimum, over time he and Panthro had added comforts and amenities. The floor, the ceiling and walls were covered in a gray upholstery. Plush chairs were bolted in place around a small, circular table. Overhead were two, long fluorescent fixtures but being so early in the morning the lights were off and everything everywhere remained in shadow.

He swiveled his chair toward the front without a word. Panthro was seated next to him on the left, he noticed he was not alone but, too, said nothing.

In the twilight hours the Thundercats were headed east past the forests and the wilderness, to the rising sun, to the great desert beyond the towering, forbidding mountains. The sky was only then starting to blue in the sharp, thin line of the distant horizon -- from there the color faded to black very quickly. It was odd, he thought to himself, that the stars would be so clearly, so brightly visible in that condition. Curious, he sat back and looked straight up -- overhead, receding behind the fast-paced vehicle, the galactic arm streaked across the heavens.

Back to reality, in the scene around the Thunder Tank for as far as the eye could see, the desert sand was light brown and rippled through the bizarre and crazed action of the steady, strong wind. He felt sand and alone in that desolate wasteland -- but no, no, that was not it. The sense came from elsewhere, the sense was not from --

“What do you think we’ll find there?”

He was dazed and spaced out and for some time he was unaware, he did not realize that Panthro had even spoken. “A ship, a crashed ship.”

“Did the sensors pick that up?”

“No. It’s a gut feeling, that’s all, the location is too faraway to get a decent image with the satellites.”

“I hope it’s not a wild-goose chase.”

“You don’t think it’s a trap, Panthro?”

“I’m not sure what to think, but I’ve got a feeling something’s wrong.”

“I feel like I’ve done this a thousand times, like a nightmare that repeats itself endlessly.”

The panther smiled having faced him for a moment. “You’re just not a morning person.”

“Something bugs me, too, but by Jagga I don’t know that it is.”

Panthro turned the vehicle violently to the left -- whatever was not bolted or secured tightly was pushed by the great acceleration to the right. He cursed and muttered to himself under his breath.

“What’s the matter?” Liono asked. He was crouched on the floor between the two, seated Thundercats.

“A large sand dune was in the way, must have been shifted there by the wind.”

The sun ascended faster than before and the three up front blinked uncomfortably in the blinding aura. Tygra pressed a button or two and a brown film ran down the surface of the windshields. It did much to deaden the glare of the strong light, “That’s better,” he said. “We should be coming up on the site at any moment.”

Panthro turned the Thunder Tank to the right once he had passed the unexpected dune and because he was more gently that, time the centripetal force went easily unnoticed.

The sky was no longer part black, part blue. It was now a bright white, a layer of dense clouds had formed in only a matter of minutes. Stars were no longer visible and the details of the galaxy, much to Tygra’s dismay, had vanished entirely. Saddened, he shivered in the cold air that circulated through the vehicle and sighed.

The landscape was unchanged, bleak and impersonal.

Liono noticed that there was something wrong, different. In the extreme distance the desert arched in a gagged ridge that was about five miles long. At the southern end an obtuse object jetted up from the surface. Even though they were still far, far away, they could see the biting, arcid sand sweep and brush against the shinning surface.

“That’s about where it ought to be,” Tygra said. He had an array of instruments on his lap. “Yes, that’s the exact location.”

He refolded the map and deposited the instruments in a side cabinet on the floor next to Liono’s leg.

“Isn’t it odd,” the young lord asked.

“What do you mean?” Tygra spoke softly, he looked down on him -- the youth sat on the floor Indian-style.

“If it’s a crash then shouldn’t the land be scarred some more?”

“True, true, the wind might have already eroded the traces of the crash, or the ridge might mark the rim of the impact crater,” Tygra answered, Liono nodded to him. “Could you hand me the earphones?”

Liono turned around and patted the lightly shaggy floor with his open palms. Panthro’s sharp turn had badly knocked small and loose things out of place -- Pumyra and WileyKit were working at putting supplies back in order. He watched them -- or more precisely at one of them -- for a brief but thoroughly distracting moment. When he located the device, he picked the thin wire earphones up from beneath a chair and handed it to Tygra -- then he went over to help the women.

Tygra and Panthro were left alone again. The tiger plugged the earphones into a small radio receiver and began to monitor the signals once more.

“Avich.”

“What?” Tygra said to himself. The signal was no longer the mere series of clicks that had been heard back at Cat’s Lair, it had transformed, metamorphosized into a voice while no one had taken notice.

“Avich. Avich.”

Yes, it was a voice but there was more, in the background he swore he could hear the suggestion of --

“Avich.”

“Is something wrong, Tygra?”

He looked at the panther. “The signal’s a little different now but it’s steadier and stronger.”

“What is it?”

“It’s a woman’s voice, but I can’t make out the word.”

“A voice? but that’s what we’ve been hearing since we discovered it at Cat’s Lair.” Tygra was too stunned to speak. “Is she still saying that ‘avich’? I thought for a moment, when I first heard it, that it was ‘ever.’ Weird.” He grunted and stopped the vehicle. “Well, we’ll find out soon enough what’s going on. We’re here,” he announced to the others.

[Part Two]

WileyKit volunteered to stay behind in the Thunder Tank to keep watch.

The others cautiously left the vehicle. The sand was incredibly loose and soft -- soft with the texture of talc and it clung to their fur in a way that was not entirely comfortable, not entirely unpleasant. Liono tried to brush it off but in vain, the rest did not bother to try.

The four, adventurous Thundercats trekked along the uninviting land. Their feet sunk into the ground a good two or three inches, their motions sent evaporating clumps of that silicate flying through the air no matter how slowly, no matter how carefully they proceeded. The wind that let up a bit but the effect was intermittent and soon the strong, stiff gale returned stronger than ever. Before, the Thunder Tank had done much to muffle the howl, but now they nakedly exposed to the mercy of the elements.

What Liono had seen, that small object he could blot entirely with his pinkie, was several yards ahead. It jetted up from the sloped earth a hundred and fifty feet. Tygra set down on the ground a small, seismic device -- the others huddled around him to keep the instrument clear of the roving, upswept dust. Soon an image formed on the green and bright-green phosphorous screen. A cylindrical tube, a hundred and fifty feet in radius -- it was a large ship that had broken in half when it crashed. The total length ‘top’ to ‘bottom’ was around the order of three miles.

The ‘upper’ half, with the nose-cone tip, was completely inaccessible, being a thousand feet below the surface. The ‘lower’ half was open before them, however and buried by a layer of sand only inches thick. The exposed object that cast them in shadow was a ‘fin’ -- a ‘fin’ that was just next to the protrusion of the main exhaust manifold of the engine.

“How can this be?” Panthro asked.

Tygra paused for a moment. “This desert was once an ocean and the ship crashed in the water. The two parts would have fallen to the bottom side-by-side. Then, through the millions of years of planetary evolution, it came to this arrangement.”

Panthro laughed. “If that’s true, then why are we here at all?”

“I agree, there shouldn’t be anyone from that original crash around alive -- but the signal,” Tygra looked up at Liono, “someone may have stumbled upon the wreck and been using it for shelter.”

“We should go on, even if just to learn what’s happened here.”

The Thundercats nodded and proceeded onward, up the rest of the slope to the fin. The exposed part of the ship was brown, oxidized by salt water and badly eroded by the air. Jagged, uneven holes had eaten through the metal through countless millennia and by the irreversibility of time, corroded to reveal fragments of skeletal, internal structures. There was no door, there was no porthole either but nevertheless they inspected the scene closely.

Pumyra pointed out to the scene opposite the boundary of the ridge, out to the land that had been covered and obscured by the hillside formed by that part of the ship buried beneath the sands. Liono, Tygra and Panthro rushed to her side and saw for themselves. Sprawled for miles distant was an oasis, complete with a large, sparkling lagoon and hanging palm trees. The soil was black and rich in fertility, there was no trace of sand what so ever and even the strong wind had ceased entirely there, in that isolated paradise.

A small, terra-cotta hut had been built along the other side of the slope.

“Promising,” Liono said, “that might be where the signal’s been coming from.”

The hut was deceptively small from the outside. It was tall and seemed to have a second or third floor but the windows up there were small, thin vertical slits that unveiled darkness and shadow. Around the lower floor was a terrace that came out horizontally over the face of the mound and that was itself another dense construction with chambers and small windows open to nothing but mystery. Part of the tiled terrace was covered by a wooden overhand -- chairs and tables were neatly arranged in one, lonely corner.

Liono and Panthro were the first to go into the hut, quickly the others joined them

Inside the large room there was nothing special, there were nothing in particular that stood out in attention. A set of stairs led to the upper floors. A side door that was partly open led to a tunnel that was brightly lit.

Tygra did notice one thing. The windows, thin though they were, revealed grand views of the oasis and, he realized, were expertly designed to keep dust and sand from blowing in. He shook his head at the thought, at the thought that he himself would have designed it so.

While it was undeniably apparent that no one lived there, still, there was no evidence of deterioration, no negligence of any kind.

“Someone’s gone through the trouble of keeping this place nice and tidy. Someone’s alive here, I can feel it,” Liono said.

“Yes and something tells me we might find who ever it is at the end of that passage,” Pumyra pointed to the door that was slightly ajar.

Liono approached it and touched it with his paws. It was metal, scavenged and welded in place. “This could only have come from the ship.”

“Should we go in?” Panthro asked hesitantly -- Tygra was still silent in his own little world but gradually began to notice what the others were going.

“We’ve come all this way, why not?”

The door creaked while it opened. The hinges had been oiled at regular intervals but the door itself had never been used in a long, long time. Tygra gave everyone a light cube from a small case he had taken from the Thunder Tank. “If there’s a power failure or an emergency of some kind in the ship,” he said.

[Part Three]

Liono entered first, Pumyra followed -- if the distress signal, or what ever it could be called, had been prompted by a medical situation then it only seemed proper. Panthro went after the two, Tygra was last.

There was something familiar about the place, there was something about the hut that made sense to Tygra but he could not put the right words together to express it. He touched the flywheel that apparently was used to lock the heavy, iron door from within -- he noticed that there were hairs on the spokes, hairs that he help up to the light of the fluorescent fixtures on the ceiling of the tubular corridor. The strands of fur were red and black -- he lost his grip, he let the fibers fall in a moment of confusion.

He looked up, forward. The others were well ahead of him. He came back to his senses and continued along with them, up-paced to catch up to them.

Panthro noticed his abrupt sprinting and snatched a glance from his shoulder. “What’s the matter?” he asked.

“We might find Thunderians here,” he said to convince himself that there were other possibilities.

“Thunderians? What makes you say that?”

Tygra nodded. “I’m not sure exactly. I wish Cheetara was here. I’m getting a whole bunch of feelings from this place.”

“You’re spooked-out.” He put a friendly hand on his arm while they walked. “I don’t like this place much, too, but I’m sure that soon we’ll get to the bottom of it.”

The tunnel was fifty feet long and terminated in a metal room that had once been an airlock -- once, for that purpose was no longer necessary. The airlock led to a pressurizing chamber and from that to a large, vast room, a pod-bay that had been converted into a lobby.

A serious attempt was made to retain an appealing, aesthetic quality. Around the place were random arrangements of furniture and of artistic fixtures. In the exact center was a deep pool of crystal-clear water. The water circulated through the action of a simple fountain. The spreading, arching streams flowed softly and silently without the action of a pump or any other internal mechanism.

“Should we split up?”

Liono thought for a moment. “This section of the ship alone is over a mile long, we would cover more area if we went off on our own.”

“I’ll try to hone in on the signal,” Tygra said, “the rest of you could look around and see.”

The leader agreed so the four Thundercats split in every direction.

Liono headed down to the level beneath. Panthro climbed to floor above. Pumyra continued to explore the rest of the middle section. Tygra put the headphones into his ears and with the radio receiver in his hands he began to roam around without direction until he spotted the signal again.

“Die libe erde,” he heard, the rest, though clear, was woefully unintelligible and obscenely guttural. It was the same female voice that he had heard in the Thunder Tank -- soft and forceful. That time he heard lucidly what had only been hinted at before, the sound of music in the background.

He walked toward the front part of the vessel, out beyond the lobby into a thin corridor that was unlit. He was not afraid. Somehow he knew, somehow he felt he knew where he was going.

[Part Four]

Liono reached the foot of the gray, metal stairs. He was in a small, well-lit chamber of a glossy, hard material. He could not identify it but it seemed to be porcelain, it was also cold to the touch. He found a door similar to the one that had been salvaged back at the hut, only that it was brighter and did not squeal when he opened it. On the other side was another one of those vast rooms -- a darkened storage compartment that stretched uninterrupted for nearly half a mile.

He entered without haste. He wanted to be silent in case he could hear someone or something calling for help.

The floor was flat and consisted of large, rectangular segments of thin metal. The sheets rang hollow while he treaded softly over them. He stopped and crouched down low, low enough that he could inspect the oddity closely. He found that he could pull up some of the floor tiles to reveal pockets and hidden compartments that were for the most part empty.

The ceiling and the walls were lined with pipes of unthinkable girth and size. He was amazed that there was such little damage -- the ship had crashed on water and split in half and still there was not one bulkhead out of place. Something was wrong but that was only the tip of the iceberg as far as Liono was concerned.

Arranged in neat and orderly rows were crates, wooden crates not badly eroded. The boxes were decorated with strange but familiar markings along with logos and colored drawings. There were too many of them to have been brought in from salvagers seeking shelter in the vessel. No. No. The crates must have been there from the beginning, from the original operators of the ship itself.

“If that’s true,” he caught himself speaking aloud, “then why wasn’t all this stuff destroyed in the crash? Why is it all still here, still in perfect condition?”

He took one crate from the top of a stack and set on the floor. He pried the lid open with the blade of the Sword of Omens. Within he found food, water and supplies, unused for millions of years and in limitless quantity from the looks of it. There was a scent of staleness in the air intermingled with the odor of a faint, perfume --

“Come to think of it, I’ve smelled that since the moment we came into the ship.”

Liono picked up one of the food bars, it was wrapped in a shinny aluminum foil that sounded and crackled in his fingers. He wondered how fresh it was, what ever it was, but he dared not try.

He explored freely and unmolested -- he was not afraid to be down in the shadows but he could not help but feel the presence of someone else, of someone else with him.

“Who’s there? Who’s there?” he asked. “I am Liono, Lord of the Thundercats.”

The presence was odd -- if it indeed was a presence at all -- definite one moment, passing, trivial the next.

Panthro found himself in a long hall. The ceiling was low and only cleared his head by a few inches. Apparently the upper and lower levels were not as tall as the middle section. Along the left-hand side of the hall the wall was featureless, along the right-hand side the wall was indented by doors none of which opened for him. He banged on them, kicked them but there was no answer. He hoped his frustration did not alert or alarm the others -- the last thing he wanted was to cause a scene.

So he calmed himself and forced himself to pay attention. He noticed that around the doors the frames had different colors or color patterns. He stopped cold, he listened -- he heard the telltale sounds of metal expanding, slight and random banging. If he had not known better he would have thought someone was up there.

He had convinced himself he was alone but somewhere deep in the back of his mind --

Panthro started to race down the hall as though there was something behind him, as though there would always be something behind him. Always, forever. He ran past an open door -- when he realized that he stopped and backtracked. He did not know why but he wanted, no, he needed to see, to look at what was inside.

Down the other part of the hall where he had just been he saw a faint mist in the shadows, a faint mist that gradually acame into a definite form and structure. He did not let the vision fully form. He sidestepped into the room and closed the door.

A light turned on within with a click.

Pumyra opened a small, square door and crawled on hands and knees into a large library. It was lit but not well-lit. The room was utterly and completely different and in someway even inappropriate. Old and ancient, there was no cold, stale metal decor, there were no dead, fluorescent fixtures. Instead she found lamps of carved bronze. She looked over one of the lampshades of thick but translucent hide and saw the incandescent bulb itself -- it had been years since she had seen anything like it. In fact, she could never actually remember seeing anything like it.

The walls were wooden and though not ornate were molded in a regular pattern enough to give the room the air of stylized texture.

The bookshelves were tall and built into the walls. The books were vastly old but did not wither into dust in her hands and, she realized, the tomes were all artistic, all geared and centered toward architecture. The architecture of earth, of Thundera, of almost every known culture and some that had been extinct since, since forever.

Pumyra walked around the leather-backed furniture, the couches, the low tables upon which magazines were spread open to reveal a wild array of exotic landscapes. She looked back -- at the opposite end of the room there was an alcove several feet above the rugged floor. A ladder led up to it, from where a warm, yellow glow emanated. She wanted to go there but she did not know why.

In her haste to reach the ladder she knocked over one of the lamps. It shattered on the floor, the bulb smashed and extinguished in a series of sparks. The room was a little darker but still manageable.

Liono sensed that there was something wrong -- not with him, not with where he was but with the others. He sensed that the rest of the Thundercats were in danger. He stopped his search and turned around. The scene everywhere was a convoluted labyrinth of stacked crates and suddenly terror seized him.

Every crate was identical and in the distance the stacks moved and shifted soundlessly -- continuously altering and changing the layout of the maze to his horror.

Panthro was in a cabin -- apparently the doors he had passed led to similar rooms.

The cabin was small but not cramped and it looked lived-in. The bed had not been made, the pillow was slanted to the side and indented though a head had been pressed upon it only very recently, the blanket was curled up in a ball and warm, still warm though the air was icy cold.

On the other side of the mattress was a desk and chair. Beside the desk were two doors. A closet stocked with women’s apparel and a bathroom, a complete bathroom. The air within was moist but the tub was not wet, the mirrors were not fogged. The toilet seat was down.

In the medicine cabinet he found small bottles of essential oils, scents, perfumes, lotions. He opened one of them and inhaled -- the odor was familiar, he had sensed it elsewhere, everywhere. He almost dropped the bottle in shock into the sink but caught himself.

Back in the main room Panthro approached a window panel. It was shut but he pulled the cover back to reveal -- nothing but sand, the sand of the desert piled up behind the thick glass. He could see his image reflected, faint and choppy on the surface.

He looked at the desk proper. In one drawer he found the a small, handmade book, pieced together from scraps of loose-leaf papers. The letters of the handwriting was a fine print, not a script and was very legible. It was a feminine hand, there was no doubt of it, complete with hearts dotting every ‘i’ and ‘j.’ The book contained transcripts of dreams and were dated but the years made no sense to him. The entries had been written before the ship had crashed and though there were comments about other crew members there was nothing juicy, seedy.

“This is beyond ancient,” he said aloud, “but --”

The lights went out. He did not panic, he remembered the light cube Tygra had given him. He turned it on and looked behind -- the mist that he had seen in the hall was now in the room, hovering around the door, inching, crawling toward the bed that had been made tidy again.

The spectral image spread and waved soft, silky linen strips in the still and calm air -- an ethereal substance that though immaterial and massless, had a definite ‘touch.’ He felt it scrape again the fur of his skin ever so slightly while it came closer and closer and closer. He wanted to run out of the cabin but he was on the floor, helpless, slunked at an angle to the wall unable to move.

He tried to scream but his voice was weakened below a whisper and more than anything he wanted to shut his eyes but he could not.

Pumyra did not know what to do except that she wanted to go up the ladder and see what was in the alcove. Something powerful and irresistible drew her to it. She walked past the shattered lamp and ascended the wooden frame.

The alcove was a study, the kind of study one would find in a manor or a mansion and, like the library before it, completely and totally out of place on a spaceship -- and yet it was.

A large globe trimmed in gold and framed in heavy, dark wood decorated one corner next to a perpetually shut and immovable door. The map was a perfect replica of third earth’s moon. She spun it around several times -- it rotated without a noise and eventually stopped while she continued to explore the upper chamber.

Upon the desk were books, medical journals and diagrams. She picked up a scribbled piece of paper. The language was horrible and she recognized it immediately for was it was -- a doctor had written it. She could translate only the last few sentences: “Yes, it can be done, but should it? I don’t want to, no, no, no, I won’t do it. Man is not a god and was not meant to be immortal.”

On the chair, when she pulled it back, was a small mound of black dust. It was dense and ashy, it was different and indeed it was the only bit of dirt she had seen in that place that was otherwise spotless. She continued to pull back the chair and discovered a tooth. Browned and chipped, it was the only part of the body that had survived the crushing blow of time immemorial.

Who ever it was -- the doctor -- had died a million or more years ago.

She did not gasp -- not yet -- she had seen worse. Convinced that there was nothing more to be discovered she decided to get out of the alcove. Down the ladder she went but before she had even reached the end she looked around.

The lamp she had shattered was back on the table, fixed and repaired, there was not even a chip, not even a dent, it was better than new. The air was scented in an unusual aroma that made her stomach tighten. She did not know why, she did not understand why for there just seemed to be no reason to fear but at once her heart raced and her breathing was uncontrollable.

She jumped down to the ground and crawled over the hardwood floor toward where she had entered the library -- a small, square door that slowly but steadily shrunk before her eyes.

[Part Five]

From the cramped passage to a winding stairwell, Tygra crawled his way toward the source of the radio signal. The headset was still around his ears but he had turned off the instrument -- he had to after it happened. He thought back to it, he kept thinking back to it perennially obsessed with the impossibility.

He had been in a room that reminded him of a kitchen, heading to the back where a set of doors opened into yet further, yet unseen parts of the ship. He had heard the voice speak “licked die fermen” and in his mind he continued the phrase “avich, avich.” In shock and horror the voice repeated him exactly. His mouth opened, his hands weakened and the radio fell to the floor. It was then that he could no longer deny the feeling he had since the beginning, he could no longer hide the fact that he had been in that place before.

The scent of oranges, faint and misty, permeated the air.

After that chilling incident he began to roam through the ship guided only by the fragments of a ‘memory’ he could not understand beyond the sense of instinct. He knew where he had to go and what he would find along the way. Confused but not dazed, he allowed himself to continue and that was how he found himself where he was.

In the midst of perpetual darkness the air was hot and stale. His ears popped and it dawned on him that he was headed to the other half of the ship, the part that was a thousand feet beneath the sands. Then the stairs, that otherwise had no perceptible end, terminated in a small chamber.

The only light came from the cube that Tygra held in his hands -- the radio itself dangled on the heavy cord of the headphones, it was smashed and broken from having hit the floor repeatedly. The room was built from a material identical to the one from the hut. The construction was shoddier having been hastily pieced together. He found a metal door, it was locked but it opened easily, he was so completely familiar with that to do it was as though he had spent a lifetime in that ship.

On the other side he discovered a dead-end, a smaller room with smooth, plastic walls. He thought for a moment but then relented, he shock his head in disbelief and then let instinct take over. He shut the door and locked it -- a light turned on inside that little, white plastic room. A button on a small panel blinked red and at once he began to descent at a terrifying velocity.

Tygra’s ears rang painfully and he fell to his knees. He peered around with his eyes somewhat shut. The walls of the tube were moving -- rather, he was on a platform that was plummeting. The elevator, if it could be called that, had no ceiling and so above the tunnel opened for many hundreds of feet only to fade black out of sight in obscurity.

The ride came to a stop and he was in the other half of the ship. It was upside-down and a mess and having the visible scars of the full force of the crash it was completely destroyed. Fixtures, pipes, bulkheads, everything everywhere that was not firmly secured had been wasted and scattered.

Tygra heard the music without the aid of the radio that was not only off but could not work anymore even if he wanted it to -- it was so badly shattered that vital and crucial parts were missing.

He strode through the remains of the state cabin. Books and papers had withered into mounds of dust. Out in the hall he saw that the structure had crushed in on itself and was held up by an exoskeleton of thick pipes and irons supports. He looked around in the silent darkness -- the sound of singing came the loudest from the lab.

The lab was well-lit, open and spacious. Instruments and devices were neatly arranged and in working order, clean and without a speck of dust. Upon one of the tables was the radio transmitter he had been looking for all along -- he studied it in his hands along with his own receiver, the one that dangled from heavy cord of his headset.

The two were identical.

The one on the table had been repaired haphazardly, converted to transmit signals. The headset, too, had been turned into a microphone and the music he had heard came from a flat device on the floor. Small and lightweight, it was a piece of technology from the ship itself. He pressed a button and the sound stopped.

A thin, shiny disk was ejected from the side. The disk fit neatly into a folding, plastic case. On a piece of paper taped to the lid were words written in his own hand and in his mind he spoke:

“Everywhere the great earth grows green anew. Everywhere skies are bright and blue, everywhere forever. Eternally --”

“Eternally,” a woman’s voice spoke aloud and on cue.

“I translated the words of the song, but --”

A woman materialized from the nothingness, she was cloaked in a white robe like a Greek goddess, curly black hair dropped down to her shoulders, a golden wreath of silk wrapped around her forehead in the shape of a crown. She looked like a Warrior Maiden only softer and her voice melted into the air in sweet, heavenly timbers. “Tygra,” she said and with that one word she had seduced him.

“Who, who are you?” his words by contrast came out choppy and broken. “You are beautiful.”

She approached and wrapped her arms around his waist. “I knew you’d come for me, I just knew it.” She stopped and relaxed her grip, she looked up to his stunned face -- he was dazed and did not know what to do in her presence. “I’m sorry, Tygra, I’ve been here alone for so long -- but I knew you wouldn’t leave me.” She was a foot shorter than he, she had her chin up against his chest. “I am Eve, I am the one who loves you.”

He wanted to say something but she anticipated his thought and pressed her finger upon his lips to silence him. It would not have mattered anyway because he had stopped himself, he let himself, he let himself willfully be taken in by her. There was just something about her eyes, her watery eyes that burned into his soul branded him to her.

“How is it that I know all this?”

“Because you’re with me now and we are bound forever,” she held his hands and walked him to another part of the lab. “We will be asleep here --”

Eve continued to speak but he had lost track of reality and of what she was saying. He saw pictures of him and her together, happy and carefree but he had no memory of it. He tried to resist:

“No, this is wrong, I’ve never met you before, I’ve never been here before.”

“But you have, you just don’t know yet.”

She waved her hand and directly before him Tygra appeared. He stopped and stepped back a foot or two. It was him, yes, it was Tygra that stood before him and there was not a thread in all his raiment, not a line in all the marked and singular lineaments of his face that was not, even in the most absolute identity his own -- except older.

“It is not an illusion, Tygra, it is you.”

“How?”

He looked in amazement while Tygra transformed from an old man, to an older man, to a young boy and then, at last -- he looked away toward Eve who herself had similarly transmutated.

She reached out to him with a small, embryonic hand and he held her. She was a woman again and spoke to him in her honey-tongued voice: “Come with me and time will have no meaning. The past, the future it won’t exist anymore. You could be a god and be with me, forever.”

Eve kissed him on the lips deeply.

“My friends? The Thundercats?”

“You can visit them when ever you want, where ever you want. With a thought you could be back on Thundera or watch your friends grow up once more and --”

“And watch them die,” he said.

“No, they don’t have to die, Tygra, nothing ever really dies,” an older Tygra said to Tygra.

“You could mend all the regrets that you’ve ever had.”

He looked down to her, he looked up, Tygra nodded and disappeared.

A wall in the room stirred and slid out of place to reveal a dark antechamber built into the earth -- it was not and had never been a part of the ship.

Eve walked him into the alcove and showed him the secret. She took from him the cube of light, he did not need it anymore. A smoky, eerie blue haze lit the scene to his weary eyes. Suspended above the floor were clear, glass cylinders and within the tubes were people, naked and in a perfect state of preservation.

“When I first found this place it was under water, it used to be up at the peak of a tall mountain but time immemorial had eroded that away, down into the foundations of the earth. There were twelve of them, some men, some women, there were no other pods.”

“Who are they?”

“The original inhabitants of the planet. I believe they are a family but they don’t like to stay on this planet anymore.”

Tygra stopped over one of the tubes, beneath the shiny glass was the figure of an old man. “Look here, see what a grace was seated on this brow, Hyperion’s curls, the front of Jove himself, an eye like Mars’ to threaten and command, a station like the herald Mercury, a combination and a form indeed where every --” he stopped in the moment of realization, the word was on the tip of his tongue, formless. He looked at her. “Eve.”

“I found the secret and I made a pod for myself.”

She pointed and he looked -- she was in a tube identical to the others. An empty chamber lay next to hers, the lid open. He ran his hands through the fabric of the mattress within -- it felt warm and was as light as the air. There was dust, though, traces of dust thick, ashy and a --

“Your tube is ready, I made it for you. You must remove your clothes, they are not necessary anymore. Oh, Tygra, we will have eternity to fall in love again and again.”

Tygra hugged her and kissed her. He complied with her wishes without protest, completely enthralled in her spell and he knew it. He knew what was going on and he let it happen. She had awoken something in him and he liked it, he wanted it.

“My friends will be safe, I’ll make sure of it,” and with those last words the door of the pod was shut and the whole of the universe went dark and oppressively silent.

[Part Six]

The three Thundercats found themselves again in the plush main lobby, each frantic and careful not to show the others their fear.

Liono began first: “The crates were moving,” he said, he looked at the bruises along his arms and legs. Pumyra noticed them too and leaned forward to examine them. “I jumped up onto the pipes that lined the ceiling,” he said with the voice of a ten year-old, she smiled a little when she looked at him, “and I sprinted toward the end where I remembered the door was. I arrived just in time because it was closing on me, I had to use the sword to pry it open some more.” He made gestures with the sword, she smiled a little more and switched arms to tend to the bruises on his shoulders with a mild ointment.

Panthro spoke next while he paced around the large, spacious room. He had forgotten how large that place was. “I won’t say what it was,” he began, “except that it blocked the door. It was a thing, an actual thing, with mass but no substance. I felt it,” he looked at his hands and then rubbed his chin though in deep thought. “I rammed it, knocked it and door down.”

Liono groaned lowly in pain while Pumyra was finishing, he indicated to her that he had more wounds on his back. “The crates opened and what ever was inside them was thrown at me.”

“I’ll need to examine us all closely back in the Thunder Tank,” she said while she put away the oil. Liono looked disappointed for a moment. “I found a strange library. It just didn’t belong here, it looked like something Tygra would have died for. I knocked over a lamp and it broke on the floor but then when I looked at it again it had been fixed and was back on the tabletop. I felt a presence,” she looked down and nodded, “I still do, but it was strong there, real strong and heavy and I just had to get out. I saw that the way out was closing in on me as strange as that sounds.”

“That’s not strange at all,” Panthro said, he was with them again, next to the small fountain that dripped sparkling clear water. “I’ve had the oddest feeling that there’s someone, alive, here.”

“In the storage rooms I thought for sure that there was someone behind me.”

“And the smell, the smell of fruit everywhere.”

A pause lasted for half a minute.

“Where’s Tygra?” Panthro asked.

The three looked around in dismay.

“He must be deep in the ship, I wonder if he’s seen anything.” Lion stood and asked the Sword of Omens to give him sight beyond sight. He gasped: “He’s on the floor somewhere, some lab somewhere. He’s not moving!”

The others readied for action and sprinted off with Liono while the sword led the way deep into the ship, deeper than they themselves had ever gone before.

He saw them making their way through the kitchen and said: “They shouldn’t come down here, Eve, or they might find the vault.”

“Do not fear, the illusion will soon be complete.”

“They must never be allowed to come here again.”

“The perfume smell is gone, Liono, the air is so hot and stale, it’s impossible to breathe.” Pumyra held the light cube over her heard arcing it in the darkness, trying to see more of the ceiling.

The room the three had stumbled into was tall and large, square-shaped and full of cabinets. The cases were made from a strong metal alloy that refused to bend or to open even to Panthro’s excursion. He gave up on it in complete frustration.

“By Jagga!” Liono said. The other Thundercats were spread around the room. He heard them run toward him. “By Jagga!” He knelt over the fallen body of his friend and turned him over face-up. One of the cabinets had collapsed on him and struck him on the head.

Pumyra hovered over the body while Liono held the broken radio receiver that hung around his neck from a heavy cord attached to the headset. She took his pulse and examined the wound around his forehead. The skull bones around his temples had been smashed in to fleshy parts of the brain. A large pool of dry, red blood had poured from the wound along with small flecks of gray matter.

“I’m sorry, Liono, he’s dead.”

Panthro was silent. Liono stood and looked at the broken instrument in his hands. He began to cry and looked away. One of their communicators sputtered to life from a hiss of static.

[Part Seven]

A young female voice broke through the cold, stillness. “WileyKit to Liono, come in.”

“This is Panthro, what is it?”

“You guys better come back, something big’s about to happen and you’re all in great danger.”

“We’ll be there in a minute,” Liono said in a moment of restrain.

“No, no, you all have to get back to the Thunder Tank right away, on the double. I’ve already got it on amphibious mode and am moving it closer to the ridge.”

“Amphibious mode?” Panthro asked under his breath, he wanted to ask more but was prevented when the ship began to shake, and rocked back and forth violently. The cabinet shelves seemed loose and ready to topple upon them, kill them like they killed Tygra. It was a hard thing to do but if their lives were in danger then there was nothing that could be done -- Tygra’s body remained where it was unmolested except for the radio and the insignia that Liono took with him.

In five minutes they had made it back to the lobby -- it was dark and disheveled, indeed, they had noticed that from the moment the ship began to tremble that it degenerated from its earlier, pristine condition to what it must have undoubtedly looked like after the crash. Floors and ceilings were broken and collapsed, pipes and bulkheads thwarted their efforts to get to the door but they got there in time nonetheless. The passage to the hut was crumpled and there was a slight bend to it -- at the end at the hut the metal door was smashed, slunked in the shadows.

“The hut’s caving in!” Panthro shouted while he directed the others to the door. The sound of the land quivering was deafening.

“Is this an earthquake?”

Outside the terrace had slipped off its foundation and slid down into the lagoon whose water shook violently. There was no wind, the air was deceptively calm.

Up on the ridge next to the exposed fin the Thunder Tank lay in wait. WileyKit waved them over. It was hard to maneuver through the sifting sand but eventually they did make it safely inside the vehicle.

[Part Eight]

“Amphibious mode?” Panthro asked again if only to keep his mind off of what had befallen his friend.

“Where’s Tygra?” the kitten asked.

No one but Liono spoke: “He’s dead. Now, what’s going on?”

“The desert’s going to flood-over any moment now.”

“What? What can do that?”

“I don’t know how, Liono, but the oceans have broken through the land and are going to flood this desert.”

Panthro looked at him: “Remember that this area is a thousand feet below sea level.”

“Look!” Pumyra screamed and pointed to the reinforced windshield.

A wall of water one hundred feet high approached from everywhere.

“Hold on!” some one yelled.

The water hit with full force that knocked the Thunder Tank to it side and with no one securely fitted the passengers were knocked about but not badly. The vehicle floated buoyantly on the violent and rippled surface of the new and turbulent body of water.

“There, you see, Tygra, there were no problems.”

“How long can this illusion last?”

“It isn’t an illusion, it is reality.”

Panthro was up front steering the vehicle once more. Treading through the water was actually faster than maneuvering through the fine, loose sand of the desert. The waves that had been choppy before, had been replaced by mere, gentle ripples of foam -- the new sea settled in nicely.

WileyKit and Pumyra were busy in the back of the Thunder Tank making sure that the food and medical supplies were in order. They had already bandaged and tended to the wounds and bruises of the others and of themselves. It also gave them something to do in the ensuing time before they reached land.

Liono was looking at the Sword of Omens and under his breath, so that the others would not know: “Sword of Omens, give me sight beyond sight, show me, Tygra --”

“Yes, Liono?” a seat upfront turned to the side to face him. “Liono?”

“Tygra?” Liono looked at him, stunned for a moment, then back into the sword -- he saw a single room, full of cabinets that had fallen on the floor. He expected to see Tygra on the floor, too, but did not and he did not know why. “I’m sorry, Tygra, I had this funny feeling that we left you in that ship.”

Tygra laughed. “No, I’m still here, Liono, I’ll always be here.”

“Who is that?” he asked while he pointed to an amulet around the tiger’s neck. It was bright and golden and held the most lifelike image of a woman in the heavy pendant.

“Her?” he looked at the picture in his hands, “I found her in the ship. She was is so beautiful, isn’t she? I couldn’t leave her.”

“Tygra, I’ve never heard you talk like that before.”

“You’re such a hopeless Romantic,” Pumyra butted in, stealing Liono’s attention once more.

“You know I can’t resist temptation,” he whispered to her picture then put the amulet down into his shirt over his heart.

Liono looked up from his seat to the front where Panthro sat alone -- “Oh, I thought he was there a moment ago.”

“Who?” Pumyra asked but he did not hear her, his eyes were fixed on the horizon, beyond the flat plane of the ocean to the bright sky open to infinity.

---

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