Apparently, the Aye had been observing and saved their lives. Was the Black Emperor simply being temperamental or was he planning to use them as hostages? Perhaps he hadn’t thought things through. In any case they were all safe back on the space station but confined to the one room in which the atmosphere had been changed out. They all agreed that rather than waiting to decompress, it would be better to accept the Yellow Emperor’s invitation.
They picked up new headbands and requested that the Attendants that had accompanied them to the Black Kingdom be teleported to the Yellow Emperor’s specified coordinates. They got a report back that the Attendants were engaged in a firefight with the palace guards. Two of the robots had been lost and several more were damaged. One by one, orbs were sent and collected the Attendants. The damaged ones were returned to the space station and the good ones were sent to the Yellow Emperor’s coordinates.
Jake asked Ming if they could teleport the vacikarce that remained on the surface. Ming responded that it would return on its own and that the orbs couldn’t move such a large object. Immediately after Ming’s answer, they got a report that the vacikarce’s engines had been damaged by ground fire and that it couldn’t return. Self-destruct commands were sent to it but it reported that they couldn’t be carried out. It had fallen into the hands of the Black Emperor.
They then received a report that missiles had been launched from a platform orbiting Replin. They were headed to the space station at extremely high speed. Their space station had been detected! Fortunately, orbs had already been dispatched and teleported the missiles harmlessly into the bottom of Tau Ceti F’s atmospheric ocean. Jake was amazed that the Black Emperor who had been so cordial had turned so hostile.
In the meantime, a dozen or so Attendants had been teleported down to the Yellow Emperor’s palace and reported that everything was safe. They decided to go down. After the purple flash, they were in another square courtyard like the one where they landed in the Red Kingdom. It was practically a clone: the same arrangement of trees, the same palace, and the same towering skyscrapers peering down from miles away. Only two things were different. The first was the color of the trees: they were yellow-green instead of black. That change made Jake feel like they were home, it was like fall. The second was less pleasant. The temperature was in the low 90s and the humidity was beyond unbelievable. It was like being cooked alive in a pot of hot water. Jake had forgotten it would make a difference to be at the equator instead of the South Pole.
