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

CHAPTER ONE

The living light above her waved its glowing filaments gently; in this it was, like all things in the world, in tune with the stars, seasons, sun, and sea. She responded to the gradually increasing illumination by opening her impossibly blue eyes, blinking peacefully, slowly awake, welcoming the new day with the same tranquility with which she had welcomed slumber the evening before.

Her soft, still-drowsy gaze took in the warm pink and coral hues of her bedchamber. Light spilled down the curving staircase, and the shiny surfaces of the enormous shell’s walls and ceiling picked up the gleam and suffused the room with rosy brightness.

Her skin caught the light, too; a white that was so much more than a stark, single color. It was decorated with images that changed shape as her moods did: art of the spirit.

Pale and celestial-seeming as moonlight, her smooth, soft skin held every color of the rainbow blended into a pearlescent, ever-shifting, subtle glow.

She was Lïho-Minaa, and she was a princess.

A soft squeak beside her drew her gaze from the familiar shape of the chamber to her favorite little friend, who always snuggled beside her while she slept. Lïho-Minaa smiled as the creature snuffled at her neck happily with its long snout, offering its furry, impossibly soft belly for scratches. It was small enough to perch in her hand, but never feared being smothered by its mistress when she slept—the hard, bumpy scales on its back would wake her before any harm would be done.

Moving with the easy grace of a curling wave, she swung her legs to the smooth floor and stretched, before placing her little friend atop her shoulder. Rising, the princess padded barefoot to the giant clamshell affixed to the wall. It did double duty. The upper portion had been polished to create a reflective surface, albeit an imperfect one. Its base cupped dozens of large pearls, the one at the center as large as her own head. Above this base that served as a sink, a luminous, tendrilled creature, kin to the one suspended over the princess’s bed, provided light, but the pearls themselves also emitted a soft, pulsing glow as multicolored energy shifted within their smooth surfaces.

Lïho-Minaa smiled at herself and her small friend on her shoulder. He opened his slender muzzle for an enormous yawn, and she laughed. She dipped her long, elegant fingers into the shell’s bowl, scooping up handfuls of small pearls. As if they were water in solid form, she brought them to her face and rubbed them on her skin. Any trace of sleepiness fled from her. Her blue eyes brightened, her skin became even smoother and tauter about her fine bones. She felt restored, refreshed, and energized, and she carefully let the pearls she had cupped return to their fellows in the bowl.

Before she departed, she fastened a simple necklace about her long, slender throat. It consisted only of a chain and a single exquisite pearl. Gently, the princess touched it, and the pearl thrummed, glowing gently at the caress.

Ascending the steps, she emerged outside into the dawning day. Lïho-Minaa was seldom sorrowful. Her life, and those of the rest of her people, was filled with rhythm and calmness and beauty. But if she ever did feel melancholy, all she needed to do was look around at what her world showed her.

She felt powdery white sand between her toes, heard the soft, endless sound of the languid ocean reaching up to touch the shore, then withdrawing its watery fingers. Enormous shells of different shapes and colors dotted the beach, some even sitting in the shallow aqua-turquoise water: homes to family and friends.

She set down her little friend on his perch outside her comparatively small shell-home, patting him gently before turning to stride toward the sparkling water. The playful ocean teased Lïho-Minaa’s feet, pale as the sand, as she went to join the group of others.

Some were in the water up to their waists, gathering up filigree-fine nets laden with pearls of all sizes. They brought them to the shore, moving gracefully, their bodies pearls themselves. Children and adults clustered around the nets, eager to help remove the precious orbs and place them in large seashell-baskets that were then hoisted onto the backs of adults for carrying.

Further inland were small craters in the earth, about the size made when one extended one’s arms and made a circle, fingers touching. Smiling, their faces bathed with the milky glow, those who bore the pearl-filled shells emptied them into the waiting earth.

The very ancientness of the routine was comforting. Lïho-Minaa turned her face up toward the rising sun and closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, she beheld a bright streak across the dawn-dappled sky—a shooting star.

It was not alone. Another joined it… and then another…

Fear closed around the princess’s heart as the first chunk of something unknown—but definitely not star matter—slammed into the water. It smashed a shell house into jagged pieces. Others came too swiftly to count, sending spouts of water in the air as they struck the ocean making angry craters, wounds on the world.

Cries of terror erupted and people began to flee. But where could they run? The princess stared up at the sky, which had once contained nothing but stars and moons and sunlight, as chunks of metal ranging from the size of a fist to the size of a house rained down mercilessly upon the frightened populace.

She turned, helplessly, to gaze at another part of the sky—and then she saw it.

The scope of it was gargantuan, inconceivable, and she understood at once that it was not simply a vessel, but death.

Lïho-Minaa dwelt near the ocean, soothed by, and loving in return, its lulls and song and smell. Her family, wishing to be in the heart of the population they ruled with a gentle hand, lived in the village.

And the still-burning ship would crash directly into it.

All around her was the awful, never-before-heard cacophony of screaming.

But the princess did not scream.

She ran.

The village was a layered collection of shells, their graceful, sloping forms clustered companionably together around spiral steps and open plaza areas. The royal palace, home to Emperor Haban-Limaï and his family, was a collection of shells adorned with exquisite carvings and metalwork. It sat in a place of honor, at the highest point of the village, overlooking the shore and the ocean. In front of it was the largest plaza in the village. Once, it had been the sight of performances, both oratory and musical; it had showcased dancing and art, and had been a place for pleasant gatherings.

Now, it was crowded with frightened people, their eyes gazing skyward, round and terror-filled, as pieces of something that had once been huge and was now broken and alien and dangerous slammed down everywhere they looked.

The emperor was a calm individual, who had led his people wisely and with care. All eyes turned to him, hoping against hope that he would somehow be able to stop whatever was happening.

He turned to one of his guards as he emerged from his dwelling. The guard’s forehead and eyes were black with fear. “What’s happening?” he said in the musical tongue spoken by his people.

“There! Look!” The guard pointed beyond the elegant curves of the village at a huge plume of black smoke rising into the sky. Not everyone lived in the heart of the village. Many still lived close by.

Many lived where the ugly black tower of smoke was.

But that was not all that concerned him. He had lived a very long time, and he knew what a meteor impact was like. This was no such thing. This was much worse.

His own people would not be the only ones injured or dying.

“By all the stars!” cried the emperor. “Sound the alarm! We must contribute to the rescue effort!”

They ran, a sea of pale, pearlescent skin, foreheads dark with their distress and black, wide, worried eyes, toward the smoldering wreckage. The closer they drew, the less hope the emperor had of finding survivors.

It was massive, twisted, broken, burned black metal lying atop the pretty shards of smashed shells. There had been no war, no violence, on Mül for so long that it was the stuff of legends and folklore. The emperor had hoped that the ship had fallen from the sky because of some mechanical error, but he realized that it was a grim casualty of war, taking with it much more than the lives it had borne within its metal walls.

Closer they came, but saw no one staggering out, coughing or limping, wounded but alive. Only a single hatch was open, where a few of the ill-fated vessel’s crew members had tried with bitter futility to escape the inferno.

Nonetheless, an effort had to be made. Surely not everyone aboard such a mammoth vessel was dead…

“Search for survivors and begin salvage operations,” the emperor ordered. He took the first courageous steps himself, entering the doomed ship. He had no idea what he would find, only knew he had to see. Had to help.

The worried suspicion turned to cold certainty. Inside, they found only charred bodies that had once been living, laughing beings, who had never stood a chance. It was no longer a rescue mission, but those who had died so badly deserved more than to have their bodies forsaken.

He stepped outside, but as he began to tell the sad news, a shadow fell over them, as if something unspeakably huge was attempting to swallow the sun. Haban-Limaï looked up. His grief for the unknown aliens who had fallen to the violence of war was replaced by sick horror.

A ship about seven miles in length was falling out of the sky.

The emperor thought of the beautiful, but ultimately fragile, homes the debris from this ship had already crushed to sharp pieces. Without a doubt, their shell domiciles would never survive what was about to happen.

But perhaps this ill-fated vessel might have one final gift to offer those who had come to help its crew.

“Everybody inside!” he shouted. “Take cover! Hurry!”

There was not much time left before the end. The emperor kept one eye on the encroaching disaster and the other on his people as they rushed, carrying children, as fast as they could toward the only possible safety. Fear stabbed him when some of his guards ran up with his own family.

One of them held a terrified five-year-old Tsûuri in his arms.

Another bore the ominously still form of his wife, Aloi. Her beautiful flowing robes were torn and spattered with blood. Relief flooded him when she moaned slightly and her head rolled in his direction. She was injured—but alive.

“Get them inside! Hurry!”

The two guards hastened to obey. Fear still gripped the emperor’s heart as he seized the arm of another guard and he asked, hoping against hope, “My daughter?”

The guard’s eyes filled with sorrow as he shook his head. “I have not seen her,” he said.

The emperor thought of the chunks of debris that had fallen like pieces of stars, and his heart cracked. But he could not afford the luxury of grief, not now, when he needed to stay calm and care for as many of his people as he still could.

In the distance, the ship finally fell. The earth shivered violently, as if it was a living thing in tremendous pain. Sounds that attacked the ears with the force of a sharp spike accompanied the ghastly spectacle as the ship plowed its way through the soil even as it cracked and exploded into a roiling fireball.

His eyes glued on the ship in its death throes, the emperor waited until the last possible minute, until the final few stragglers flung themselves inside sobbing and shaking, and then he, too, darted into the safety of the first ship and pulled the massive door shut with all his strength. His muscles strained as he gripped onto the strange latch, turning it until he felt it grind forward and lock into place. He leaned against it for a moment, panting.

His eyes fell on the survivors. Shivering, in shock, they stared blankly at him as they huddled on the metal floor. His wife was being tended, and his son looked up at him, tears streaming down his small, perfect face. The emperor scooped up the boy and held him tight, pressing his face into the soft flesh of the child’s neck. Tsûuri clung tightly to his father, as if he would never let go.

There was a pounding on the hatch. The emperor went cold. He did not want to see who it was. He did not want to look into the frightened eyes of one of his beloved people who was a bitterly tragic few moments too late. Nonetheless, these were his people. He owed them what comfort he could, in this, their last moments.

He went to the porthole.

He had thought he could bear no more pain.

He had been wrong.

The frightened face of his sweet, beloved daughter stared back at him, her glorious blue eyes huge. Her face had been dark with fear, but now it receded as she gazed at her father, a soft pink suffusing her cheeks.

Was there time, even now? It would be but the work of a few seconds—

But her death, the death of the world, was approaching with vicious speed. A gargantuan fireball was on his daughter’s heels, a cruel yellow-orange wave of incineration. If he opened the hatch now—if he let her in, saved her life—he would put everyone else inside at risk if he could not get the door closed in time. The fireball would scamper greedily through the faintest crack, and then everyone on board would join the burned, motionless shapes of the vessel’s original crew.

She saw it in his eyes, and hers flew open wider. She struck the portal window with her small fists. All he could do was look with profound grief at her, his first-born, the embodiment of all the goodness he saw daily in the world.

After a few seconds, the pounding slowed, stopped. Tears poured down her face, but there was no longer terror in her expression. Only understanding, and sorrow.

Oh, my little girl…

Shaking, she pressed her forehead to the circular window.

“Lïho!” he cried, brokenly.

“Dadda!”

They wept, father and daughter, a few inches apart, a universe apart. Though a benevolent ruler, Haban-Limaï had a staggering amount of power at his disposal. There was very little he could not do.

But he could not save his precious child.

Unused to utter helplessness, the emperor pressed his hand to the porthole. The princess gulped and lifted her own hand. It was not real contact, a loving connection of flesh to flesh, but it was all he could give her. Even so, the feeble gesture seemed to calm her. She blinked back the crystal tears and swallowed hard, straightening. Haban’s heart, so battered this day, shattered into pieces at the expression of resolve on Lïho’s exquisite face.

The wave was coming, an orange, hungry beast, ready to devour anything in its path. Ready to turn her to blackened bones and charred flesh, or worse.

Lïho gave her father one last smile. Not tremulous, not fragile. It was strong, and peaceful, and certain, and he thought he had never admired anyone more in all his long years.

She turned from him, to face her death. She would make it count.

Lïho-Minaa spread her arms and tilted her head back, opening herself to the fiery embrace. Her father did not want to watch, but he could not avert his gaze. He needed to honor her courage. He needed to bear witness to what would come.

And in the instant before the flames engulfed her slender form, before they rendered her into ash and memory, a powerful blue wave emanated from Lïho-Minaa’s body.

The wave raced at staggering speed, whirling up from the beleaguered planet Mül, sweeping up into the stars, soaring across the immensity of space, luminous as the girl whose death had birthed it, rushing straight into—