VIMANA
an excerpt from the prologue
This excerpt is taken from VIMANA, published independently on Kindle.
Nichinan City, in Miyazaki Prefecture, sits in the southwestern reaches of the island that forms the main body of the Japanese archipelago — tucked into a corner just above and to the right of its lowest point. Facing the Pacific, it is a small town of perhaps fifty thousand people.
And it was there, in the skies above Nichinan, that the object suddenly appeared. Its shape was a perfect equilateral triangle, black as deep night. The hull bore no windows of any kind; it was sheathed entirely in smooth, lusterless metal that looked impossibly sturdy. In size it was roughly equivalent to two tanks set side by side. From its underside came a faint pulse of pale blue light — perhaps the glow of some unseen power source.
The strange black triangle drifted above the coastline of Nichinan at an almost imperceptible speed. To call it flight would be inaccurate; it seemed, instead, to simply float.
Within the craft, seated in what appeared to be a cockpit, was a woman dressed in a black, metallic garment that traced every line of her body. Her face was hidden behind a transparent visor, the kind one might associate with a spacesuit — and behind that visor, her features were extraordinary: finely carved, almost sculptural, like something out of Greek statuary. Elegant arched brows. Clear, deep-set eyes. A straight, narrow nose, and full lips of a deep rose, faintly glistening. Her skin was a warm brown, her hair black and falling to the middle of her back. Her limbs were long and slender, her proportions flawless. She looked to be twenty-four, perhaps twenty-five. Whether from unconsciousness or something else, her eyes were closed, and she did not move.
"...Nnh."
Eshuna Balcius surfaced from a brief blackout with a low groan. Slowly, her closed eyes opened.
Where was this? Eshuna turned her gaze toward the world beyond the cockpit. The craft had no windows as such, but a system projected the exterior view onto the interior walls, allowing her to take in her surroundings without difficulty.
Looking down, she saw the sea. She appeared to be flying somewhere above open water. Further ahead, she made out land — a coastline first, and running alongside it, something dark and straight. A road, probably. Eshuna tilted her head, puzzled. In an age when travel by personal aircraft was simply assumed, why would anyone build something as crude as the road she now saw below?
Her confusion only deepened as her eyes moved further inland. Beyond the shore stood clusters of small structures that appeared to be built of timber. What were these? The simple curiosity that had first stirred in her mind was rapidly curdling into something closer to alarm. It wasn't merely that the dwellings looked primitive compared to those of her own era — it was that their shapes were unlike anything she had ever encountered. As though from some foreign land entirely, Eshuna thought. And yet they bore characteristics that, as far as she knew, had never once been documented. But that made no sense — in Eshuna's time, every inch of the Earth had long since been explored and catalogued. There was no possibility, at this point, of stumbling upon some undiscovered civilization. And besides — even the poorest among her own people lived in dwellings of vastly superior strength and design.
...Could this be the past? The thought froze her where she sat. And then, like a flood breaking loose, the memories of what had happened just before she lost consciousness came rushing back.
She had been cornered. An enemy craft had pursued her, and a missile it had fired was a heartbeat from striking her Vimana. In that instant, with nothing left to lose, Eshuna had slammed her hand against the teleportation switch — with no destination set, no plan at all. It had been a desperate gamble. Under normal circumstances, doing such a thing meant being swallowed by subspace and never returning. But there had been a chance, however slim, of surviving — of being thrown, by sheer luck, into somewhere, anywhere. So she had staked everything on that sliver of a chance and pressed the button. After all, to do nothing was only to wait for death. And so — she had pressed it.
The moment she did, her Vimana was swallowed in darkness. It plunged through a black void unlike anything she had ever known, falling at tremendous speed. The craft shuddered violently; a crushing gravitational force bore down on her body. And then her world went out entirely.
When awareness returned, she found herself adrift above some unfamiliar sky. While she had been unconscious — hands off the controls — some failsafe must have engaged, switching the Vimana smoothly over to autopilot. It had not gone down.
So I survived, Eshuna thought, the realization arriving through a haze. It should have brought relief, but she sensed, somehow, that nothing about this was simple. She guessed that in the instant she had blindly triggered the teleportation device, she had been hurled backward through time, into some earlier age of the Earth itself. She recalled, dimly, having once heard — during her studies of the Vimana — that such things had happened before, on rare occasion.
Even so — which era of Earth's past was this? Eshuna combed through everything she knew, searching for some memory of buildings like the ones she had just seen, but nothing surfaced. If there had been dinosaurs roaming below, the answer would have been obvious enough. But these structures left her utterly without bearings. She recognized nothing. They matched no period she had ever studied. And in any case — was this truly the past at all? Just as her thoughts reached that question, a warning alarm tore through the cramped cockpit. It seemed the reckless leap through space and time had not come without cost: part of the propulsion system was beginning to fail. At this rate, after surviving so much, she would crash and die anyway — the thought sent a spike of panic through her. She needed to land, and quickly. Scanning the terrain below, she spotted a stretch of forested mountains that looked uninhabited. Switching from autopilot to manual control, she guided the Vimana down, and brought it to rest there in silence.
コメント
コメントを投稿