SECTOR 10 (The CLOUD 2)

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 1

In their native language, the Yhemlen commander directs the Class-A starship. "Bring the harvest to me," he says with a high-pitched shrill.

It is dawn, and at the base of a Martian mountaintop, blueberries settle beneath layers of sediment where the scorched surface leaves remnants from the impact of a rogue planet long ago. The blueberries are iron oxide pebbles from mineral deposits of eroded stone, hidden within splintered craters where magma still pours through. Amidst the dunes, there is a dry rain that evaporates almost immediately from violent chemical reactions. The pebbles are a treasure, waiting to be uncovered in the rubble.

The commander perches himself at an interior balcony, observing the crew whose faces remain shielded in gas masks. Railing above the starship's atrium is dimmed by low light as he watches the reptilian creatures prepare a metal hamper for the collection to be deposited.

Brutal rainstorms are no challenge for the Yhemlen starship flanked just above the Martian surface. With the warmth of bubbling liquid steaming below, light peeks over the purple horizon. This reptilian crew, Yhemlen, discovered these radioactive remnants haphazardly while doing reconnaissance. One accident of cosmic radiation to their cells metamorphosizes them into powerful giants.

It wouldn't be long until the lush, rolling prairies of their home on Earth—Pangaea—became their breeding ground. This starship squadron and their commander pronounced themselves Overseers over the constellations of the zodiac when they returned to Earth and finally learned how to control their radioactive, shapeshifting power. Many attempts were made to penetrate Pangaea's electromagnetically vibrant biosphere, and on initial contact, The Concord Alliance's stealthy attacks failed. Quantum computers alerted The Concord Empyrean Armada to retreat. Reptilian giants with a civilization that rivaled their own couldn't just be destroyed, but rather systematically occupied. Automated probes were not enough to complete the task. Not long after The Concord discovered the blunder they had made. Leftover power stones, blueberries, buried underneath layers of soil on Mars allowed them to revel in the same cosmic radioactive power of the Yhemlen.

What the Yhemlen should have done was thank the group that destroyed planet Mars millennia before. This was never supposed to happen. The Concord's sterilization project was a plan to annihilate all life in solar systems detected in parallel universes, and they ruptured the space-time continuum after a venture back to the early formation of planets. Microbial life on Mars may have been exterminated after the collision with an off-orbit dwarf planet, but the ricochet in debris to Earth led to sprawling new cultures that The Concord hadn't planned for.

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"Wir brauchen eine andere Waffe. We'll need another weapon," Grandmaster Frost says to Nemesis Captain, Gereon. Their starship waits in a docking station near the moon's landing base. "We've identified the coordinates, and the civilization is more advanced than before."

Gereon Heinemann is the patriarch of a decorated Grey lineage. In a secluded room of their landing base where the starship is docked close, they make their sinister plan. The Grey Order is an elite force within The Concord, gene-edited in artificial wombs, or surgically, for purity.

"If we're to return, this weapon will need to make the Yhemlen tremble in fear. A new planet destroyer will be created. I promise," Gereon finishes, glued to an image spectrometer's coordinate map. Gereon and Grandmaster Frost's diminutive bodies wrapped in black synthetic fibers remain still while they peer up at the ominous omen of an intelligent civilization rising.

In a race for supremacy, Yhemlen are endangering alternate universes as a contest for survival grows more imminent. The struggle for Earth is reaching a turning point. A desire to wield mastery over the cosmic web, the structure of the universe, is tempting The Concord to hurl planet-sized behemoths at foes. Like colliding particles, the cataclysm of planet-killers will lead The Concord and Yhemlen to make Earth a wasteland across parallel universes, but it is humans who are threatening to change that.