Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets: The Official Movie Novelization

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

There had, surprisingly and fortunately, been no casualties among the extraterrestrials gathered in the security hall. It seemed that the commander’s soldiers had been good enough shots to avoid collateral damage, and the weapons the Pearls had used only incapacitated. The converter had been completely unharmed, and a quick check revealed that it had slept through the whole ordeal. Within a few moments, Laureline and General Okto-Bar were back in the control room. Both of them placed their hands on the ID screen.

“Status on Major Valerian. Level Five. Emergency,” Laureline stated, keeping her voice calm and cool.

“Accepted,” answered Okto-Bar.

Laureline called up a map of the space station on the screen and typed in the code. A red light appeared on the map. It looked like Valerian was deep in the heart of the technological section of the station. He was right in the middle of a major intersection.

“Valerian? I’ve got you on visual,” she said.

“Okay, but I’ve lost track of them. Try to locate the commander!”

Laureline typed in the message, but instead of the location of the missing Filitt, the face of the minister of defense appeared on-screen.

“Agent Laureline here,” Laureline said. “I need to access the genetic code of Commander Arun Filitt.”

But the minister was shaking his head. “Those codes are strictly confidential, Agent Laureline,” the minister chided. “You know very well I—”

Laureline had no time for this. She placed her hand over a scanner that glowed red when she touched it. “The commander has been abducted,” she stated. “If we don’t get a lock on him in the next minute, we’ll lose him.”

The scanner turned green.

Okto-Bar read the result aloud. “Lie detection result: negative, sir. And I can confirm that the commander’s been taken.”

The official hesitated. Then he nodded. “Very well. Access granted.”

Laureline entered the code as soon as the minister of defense sent it through, and another red dot appeared on the virtual map. She exhaled in relief.

“Thank you, sir. Okay, Valerian, I’ve got a fix on him. He’s near the docking bay. The intruders must be headed for their vessel.”

“Okay! What’s the shortest way there?” asked Valerian.

“North-northeast,” Laureline replied. “One hundred thirteen degrees.”

Valerian spun around, following the digital compass on his wrist. He lifted his head and blinked.

“North… East… Laureline, that leads me straight into a wall!”

“You said you wanted the shortest way!”

Valerian sighed. He had said the shortest way, hadn’t he? He hit a button on his sleeve. With a series of snapping sounds, his combat suit morphed into a solid shell. He took a moment to steel himself for the experience, then he started running.

He’d done this before, so he knew it didn’t physically affect him in any way. Even so, he found his stomach tightened every time he ran into a wall full tilt.

But that very normal human reaction didn’t slow him one bit. Valerian sped up and crashed through the black metal wall, and the chase was on. He was in the west part of the station—the humanoid area. He continued his straight, shortest path, crashing through corridor halls, into private domiciles, and charging through public recreation and shopping areas.

He was so focused on what was ahead of him that at one point he almost didn’t see what was underneath his feet—or, rather, what wasn’t underneath his feet; he exploded through a wall and into open space. Various small spacecrafts went about their business as Valerian plunged downward, the surrounding buildings black monoliths sprinkled with lights here and there. Streams of magenta and blue lighting marked walkway tubes that connected the buildings. His suit’s default setting was to operate at all times as if he were in normal gravity unless specifically reprogramed. He was therefore hurtling downward directly at one of the walkway tubes right now, and he frantically tapped in the key that changed his suit from one that smashed right through solid matter to one that didn’t.

He had to get the timing just right—

Valerian crashed through the clear top of the tube and, just in time, his suit transformed so that he landed safely on the corridor’s floor instead of continuing right through it, albeit on his hands and knees.

There were several other humans in the corridor, understandably startled by his appearance. They cringed back as they ducked the falling chunks of clear debris, but no one looked hurt. They’d be fine; already the breach Valerian and his suit had made had sealed with a protective force field.

“Alex,” he yelled, “give me the surfacer setting!”

“Right away,” Alex replied promptly. “Reconfigured,” she said an instant later.

Valerian took off again. “This may be the shortest way, but it’s sure not the easiest one,” Valerian said to Laureline, panting. The suit protected him from physical damage and gave him added strength, but any speed was still his own.

“Keep going,” encouraged Laureline’s voice. “You’re losing them!”

“I said, I’m doing my best!”

“Do it faster!”

Valerian bit back a retort. Right now, he needed his breath to keep running. He sprinted down the enclosed translucent passage as long as it took him where he wanted to go. It opened up onto a building of small apartments, continuing straight as the hallway turned left. He was vaguely aware that one wall of an Arysum-Kormn family’s home was of a translucent material as he raced through it, but he didn’t realize that it was actually a window until he’d shattered it into a few hundred shards and found that he was, once again, hurtling downward.

This time, though, he was prepared. Alex had reconfigured his weapon to produce a deceptively thin, glowing plasma disk with a diameter of about four feet. Valerian struck it with his right foot and launched off, firing ahead of himself before every leap.

He sprang forward from the last plasma disk into the Azin Mö nuclei cluster field. He winced as he did so. The station’s doctor race crafted orbs of various genetic materials for emergencies, and there was no way Valerian wasn’t going to step on quite a lot of them. Well, that was Arun Filitt’s problem as the commander of Alpha and the one being rescued, not his, Valerian thought as he stormed through the cluster field shouting “Sorry!” and smashed his way out the other end. It was some consolation to him that the Azin Mö tended hundreds of cluster fields, and this one looked to have tens of thousands of soft, radiant orbs.

The nuclei field was the demarcation between the humanoid section of the west and the gaseous environmental part of the station. Valerian continued onward. His “shortest” path took him directly through an enormous, glowing, golden wall of intricate computer technology that was currently being upgraded by a group of Omelites, bio-metallic species with large, bulbous heads, several spindly appendages, and laser eyes. The destruction this particular move caused bothered Valerian more than the damage he’d done to the nuclei fields. He hoped he hadn’t done anything irreparable. The Omelites had developed the ability to communicate telepathically, and the messages being fed into his brain quite vividly conveyed their displeasure. He didn’t think they’d hurt him, but he was glad to get out of range of those laser eyes.

“Hurry,” came Laureline’s voice. “Looks like they’re making for a docking station and you’re nearly there!”

“I’m doing my best!” Valerian snapped. He smashed through the other side of the giant computer banks into a freefall, firing plasma disks to step on as he made his way through a sea of translucent floating creatures that looked like jellyfish of the air.

“Hang on,” Laureline said. “They’ve boarded. Ship has no tags, a totally unknown model. Change of plan. One hundred forty degrees east! Just keep going straight and look for a door marked eighty-one. Alex will pick you up!”

Valerian didn’t break stride as he glanced at his wrist and made the correction. Each section, no matter the inhabitants who had settled there, had a docking area that could accommodate a variety of vessels and environments. He was heading toward one of those now. It hadn’t seen much use in the last several years. Doubtless the Pearls had chosen this one so as not to attract unwanted attention.

He reached it now, running on metallic flooring instead of the softer plasma disks. Valerian smashed through another wall, and found himself in a ventilation shaft. He kept going.

“Alex?” came Laureline’s voice in Valerian’s ear. “Sending you the coordinates. Pick him up.”

Valerian was starting to tire, but he couldn’t afford to. Not now, not when he was so close.

“Intruder in position,” came Alex’s voice.

“That’s good news!” said Valerian, panting. Seldom had words been more sincerely meant. He sprinted straight for an iron door with the numbers eighty-one prominently displayed on it.

“That’s it!” said Laureline. “Keep going!”

Head down, Valerian charged through a steel wall and found himself in space.

Unfortunately, the Intruder wasn’t there to catch him, and he started to plunge downward past levels of empty docks.

“Hey, Alex! Where the heck are you?” he shouted as he fell.

Puzzled, Laureline glanced at her map. She turned the dial. The map spun. She gasped, horrified, as she realized that eighty-one became eighteen.

“Alex? You are on eighty-one?”

“Affirmative, Sergeant.”

“Sorry, my mistake,” said Laureline. “It’s number eighteen!”

“Great!” came Valerian’s voice. “See? I trust you more than I trust myself, and look where it gets me!”

Laureline felt her cheeks grow hot. “Alex? Pick him up! On eighteen!”

She waited, biting her bottom lip. It felt like hours, but it was only about ten seconds before she heard a breathless, irritated Valerian gasp, “Thanks, Alex! Bring on the beach!”

Laureline allowed herself a relieved smile.

Valerian switched his suit to normal mode and clambered into the cockpit. Energy returned to him in the form of adrenaline as the ship filled his screen and he realized that this was definitely the right place. The vessel docked in bay eighteen-not-eighty-one looked exactly like the sort of ships the pale, beautiful Pearls would build. It was huge, and its three sides came together in a shape like a star. The engines at its base were dozens of perfect white spheres, and its prominent surface wasn’t any one single, bold color, but a soft, muted combination of delicate shades that seemed to undulate and shift.

Pretty though it was, it was gearing up to flee, and it had Commander Filitt on board. “I don’t know where you come from,” he muttered as he locked onto his target, “but I know where I’m going to send you.”

The XB982 opened fire on the ship. It swerved away and accelerated, with Valerian hot on its tail. It was fast, and it was smooth, and it led him on a merry chase. The two vessels sped in and out of the queue of tanker ships alongside the docking station, and Valerian was reluctantly impressed at the speed with which the much larger ship could maneuver. Even so, he managed to get a solid lock on the back of the vessel.

“I’m going to shoot out the engines,” he announced to Laureline and Okto-Bar.

“Their protective shields are very sophisticated. You won’t go through,” Laureline warned him.

“Then let’s try something bigger.”

As he was about to fire, the unthinkable happened. Dozens of what looked like fissures appeared along the shell-hued sides of the vessel. For a second, Valerian thought it was going to explode. But instead, the “cracks” became deeper, and Valerian realized that the single enormous ship was splintering into several smaller, identical-looking ones that now peeled away in all directions.

“Shit! Laureline? The ship’s just broken up into a bunch of little ones. Which one has the commander on board?” Valerian shouted.

“Nine o’clock! South!” Laureline answered.

“Nine o’clock?” Valerian repeated, furious and irritated. “You sure? Not six o’clock?”

“Nine o’clock!” Laureline snapped. “Hurry up!”

The vessels were flying above, ahead, behind, and below him now, and he spotted the vessel Laureline had pinpointed zipping along beneath him at, indeed, nine o’clock. The Intruder switched course to chase after the smaller spacecraft, which hurtled into the maze of the station’s innards.

Valerian loved piloting the Intruder. He was very fond of Alex. But after he almost slammed into another vessel and Laureline had yelled, “Watch out!” in his ear, he reached a decision:

“I’m too big to follow them,” he told her and Okto-Bar. “I’ll take the Sky Jet!”