As fast as we could, we got Lovely Angel off the ground and went straight up six thousand meters, and then had to wrestle her into a stable flight path. We were surrounded by United Space Force jumbo-class warships slowly floating in position over the island. Thinking that the continuing destruction of Saint Dominas Isle was probably our fault, the spaceships around us weren’t sure what to make of us. Actually, that was kinda cute. Aww…
“Hmm, something’s not right…” Yuri muttered as she stared at a screen. My ears perked up. When she talked like this, it usually meant bad news.
I dashed over to see the main screen. The first thing I saw were incredible eruptions of smoke being choked out of the island flowing ten kilometers into the air. I then saw the volcanic crater in the center of the island. The dense jungle around it was ablaze, and finally I looked beyond to see the ocean, boiling a strange brownish color. Above the frothing brown waves, the earthquake had triggered tsunamis. I couldn’t imagine a more bizarre symphony of destruction, but, at the same time, it was all equally unsettling.
“Seriously, this is really strange!” Yuri was still blabbering to herself. What, had she lost all self-control?
“Yuri!” I called to her. “You keep on chattering like a schoolgirl, but what is it that is so strange?”
“Kei, can’t you see it?” she said shocked, looking at me straight in the eyes. “Even though it’s that weird…”
Oh, really? Is that right? Weird, you say? Hmm. Is that so?
“Where are you talking about, dammit?!” I suddenly shouted out.
“Take a good look! In the ocean!” Yuri screamed back even louder, not about to concede. Ow! That hurt my ears… “The volcano is getting wider… it’s spreading out! The ocean is turning brown, right? What this means is that Saint Dominas Isle is growing, getting bigger, outward from its center. Does that make sense? Sea-level volcanoes come in series, one born after another.”
“I get it! Yeah…” I gave a cool nod.
“Aa— I have had enough!” Yuri flipped back her long black hair. I am a redhead, with kinky curly locks. Her gesture was no accident. “Normally, things wouldn’t pan out like this. Doesn’t it seem like there isn’t much activity coming from the volcano itself?”
“Aha…!”
It finally started to make sense. Oh, how could I be so dense?! Was my brain even plugged in?! That’s it! That is it! This is what is so strange!
“It’s Isabella’s deal…” I said. “When she was talking about the Super-Size Space Smasher, she flipped on switch after switch, right?”
“Oop!”
Like she was hit with a shock, Yuri sat up with a start.
“In the scope of this volcano, what is bizarre is the crust of the planet isn’t stopping its movement,” I continued, dreadfully. “Which means this isn’t going to end, which means all of Lamier is going to turn into a volcanic wasteland… right?”
“…”
“That bitch knew exactly what she was doing, huh?”
“Hm ha ha…”
I started laughing, too.
“M ha ha, hu ha ha, ha ha ha, a ha ha, he hee hee, ho ho ho…”
We both exploded into laughter.
“Hee ha ha, kya ha ha, oo ha ha, ha heh heh, bu hu hu…”
“Aah…!”
It was hard to stop once we started.
“Uu ha ha, hu ha ha…”
At some point Yuri’s laugh started to sound strange to me.
“A ha ha. A ha ha. A ha ha. A ha. A ha. A ha…”
It was a noninfectious dry monotone laugh.
Our eyes met.
Our laughing stopped.
“Arabel!” I screamed.
“First the Space Force!” Yuri screamed.
With great excitement, we contacted both Arabel and the Space Force.
This planet—Lamier, is finished. There was nothing we could do to stop what had been started. Not a damn thing. The Space Smasher triggered an unstoppable seismic reaction on Lamier, and we felt deep sympathy for the entire planet. It’s needless to say anything more than that. The collapse of a planet’s crust, rivers of magma streaming from its core. There was one thing… we could get the residents of Lamier off this planet and to someplace safe. According to Lovely Angel’s computer data, the planet needed to be evacuated within one thousand hours or we would start seeing some major death and destruction.
That is a big deal.
With the simultaneous cooperation of the United Earth Commonwealth Force and the United Space Force along with neighboring planet-state space forces, a giant evacuation was able to begin. It was an epic exodus sure to show up in history books.
There was no need to berate Mugi on the events of that day again. It was how Mugis were, with the exception of his fasting for three days…
Grr! Damn! He drives me nuts.
Seven months later, Lamier continued to be one gigantic volcanic eruption. Magma of temperatures of several thousand degrees cycled to the surface and back to the core, never cooling off, a literal sea of flame. This was no longer a volcano, or anything that simple. The planet had turned into a ball of fire. A one-hundred-thousand-kilometer-wide ball of fire. “The Gem of the Universe,” it was stated, “The Most Valuable Thing in the Galaxy,” she was called, this beautiful planet in her prime was now gone, leaving a molten mass in her place.
Thankfully, with our fast action, the escape plan was put into place quickly, and in the end, only 3,621 people died on Lamier.
However, because of this sudden disaster, 720,000,000 people don’t have a home to return to. They have become wandering nomads with hands outstretched.
Each individual planet in the remote Maleeney star cluster opened its doors to up to twenty percent of the displaced refugees…