Celestial Celeste by Damir Franusic - HTML preview

Chapter 7
The eternal shine

As their vessel was closing in on the rift, time was slowing down much faster for Celeste, Vorta, and A’Meki. There came a moment when time slowed down to a point where it seemed to have come to a halt.

"This is as close as we can get!" Celeste yelled. "Start fueling up the engines A’Meki! Maximum flow! Vorta, be ready to push that throttle as far as it goes! On my mark!"

As soon as A’Meki set the particle flow to maximum, the avalanche of raw power rushed into the engines. "The drives are overflowing with scintillas, it’s now or never!" A’Meki yelled.

Celeste gazed into the eyes of her crew members one last time. She then turned to Vorta and said, "It’s time. Farewell my friends. MARK!"

Vorta pushed the engines into overdrive, stood up, and joined Celeste and A’Meki who were standing side by side, and looking directly into the rift; they were experiencing a blissful moment of pristine silence, the last ecstasy before the storm.

Soon after, the raging Scintilla drives shrieked with ferocity. The hull of the ship started to buckle, as it was no match for the immense gravitational forces of the converging universes. TSD-1 was suspended in time, but also trying to push forward through the rift. Once more, the glimmer of energized particles enveloped the entire ship and started radiating outwards.

The energy was building up, growing in both intensity and luminosity. The nebula created by the first "jump" in the Zygnian home universe was exerting attraction, while the newly forming one was causing repulsion. Those two opposing forces were locked in a celestial tug of war.

Meanwhile, the two Scintilla drives of TSD-1 had finally reached their limit, and exploded in a massive outburst of radioactive beauty. As the shock wave permeated all the universes and their galaxies, the remaining interstellar cloud shrouded the time-suspended Zygnian vessel in a veil of red and green plasma.

Although their plan was successful and prevented the convergence, the rift remained visible for the lifetime of cosmos. The two nebulas, the remnants of the Scintilla catastrophe, cancelled each other out like a pair of complementary colors. Red and green, versus cyan and magenta, the awe inspiring clouds, the beauty unseen. Restoring the multi-dimensional equilibrium, clearing the broken pieces of the shattered equipoise, the two stood as a reminder to all aspiring civilizations, a reminder that the great unknown is not an entity of exclusive benevolence.

In her final moments, Celeste sent a message. By using a simple radio transmission, she made her warning accessible to a much wider variety of species, not only the utopian or post-utopian kind. All the universes provided a glimpse through a celestial window, that ominous rift. The spectacular sight of the two nebulas could never be ignored, as the oddities of cosmos continue to amaze us.

The multi-coloured plasma clouds, the keepers of balance, provided each universe with a one sided view of their struggle. Some were presented with cyan and magenta, while others enjoyed red and green.

As the new heavenly bodies became apparent, they were given many names, most of them compliant with whichever naming convention was used by a particular civilization. The Zygnians decided to make an exception by honouring the brave captain and the crew of the TSD-1.

They named their new nebula "Celestial Celeste", the interstellar cloud radiating two different shades of cyan and magenta; "Vorta" and "A’Meki".

Without a scintilla of doubt, their memory and their message to future generations will reverberate for all of eternity.