Stars Gods Wolves by Dan Kirshtein (good books for 8th graders .TXT) 📗

and hypotheticals for anything the former two things couldn’t answer. It was like law; most things were already established and well recorded. But biology, the doctor had discovered, always had a way of sneaking up on you. It didn’t happen often—probably two or three times within Martin’s lifetime—but biology would, every so often, throw a curveball.

Interjection:

The second war that was mentioned in Gally’s report was the war between the Heruleans and the Humans. The Heruleans, at the time, were a very densely packed people. They hadn’t colonized many planets, but their home planet (Sabile) is about as large as Jupiter (of the Milky Way galaxy, not the other one), and it was packed to the gills with them.

Humans, at the time, had done the opposite and spent as many resources as possible trying to colonize as many planets as possible, with marginal success.

The Heruleans saw this as sacrilege. Planets were sacred to them, their resources precious. They viewed Humanity as a plague, going from planet to planet, and influencing one ecosystem after another, with no end in sight. So, the Herulean fleet made its way across several solar systems, eradicating as many Human settlements as they could find along the way.

The Human colonies fought to the last man to whittle down the massive fleet as much as they could, but a good chunk of it was still hurtling toward Earth. The Heruleans seemed hell-bent on wiping Humanity from existence. It was all they talked about.

Truth be told, they got rather close to doing it. A few Humans had decided that there was no reasoning with these creatures, and they concluded that biological warfare was the only way to stop them.

Well, a Human couldn’t exactly walk onto the planet and open a can of planet-be-gone. The can would have to be placed on something and then delivered to the planet somehow.

Sabile’s proximity station had been sabotaged. The station was made to look as if it was knocked off course; in fact, it had been driven directly into a collision course with Sabile. On this particular proximity station was the Carbonic Mutator, developed by Doctor Martin Collier, before he had the thousand-yard stare: a device that was capable of identifying a planet’s climate, ozone, and weather patterns. It would then turn all of those things upside down.

Starting with the crash site, and eventually swallowing the entire planet, Sabile’s usual warm, rocky, beach-like atmosphere suddenly turned volatile. Despite their proximity to Earth, and their imminent victory, the Herulean fleet was called back to help relief efforts during what they thought, at the time, to be the worst natural disaster in recorded history.

The few Heruleans left alive colonized a nearby rocky dwarf planet and named it Heru. Leaving their homeworld, however, was an affront to their religion. They were devastated, both in numbers and in honor. It was during this mass transit that they discovered their recent apocalypse had not been an accident. So, while they were working out the terms of their surrender to the Human colonies, they plucked Doctor Collier from his colony on Maxia and sentenced him to the worst punishment they could imagine.

Sabile:Survival Bunker: ten feet below the capital city of Ba’na

Ula Nethos was a girl of ten years. Her blue, woven hair, her mother would tell her, was the longest of any girl’s on the planet. She played with the end of one of her many braids as she read her favorite book. She could hear her mother shuffling around in the kitchen. The smell of doing the best one can with preserved vegetables permeated the cozy bunker.

The hard floors were covered in a fine carpet, the walls covered with family drawings and photos. Ula would never realize it, but Herulean life had grown quite parallel to Human life. Even the decor was similar, probably because their bodies were built so similarly. Her mother, Jae, had done her best to make the most of what was essentially a small apartment with no windows. It had shown that she wanted her daughter to grow up and hardly ever realize that the world had, in fact, ended.

Sure, she’d known sunny days, though she could hardly remember them. And, yes, she knew just how wretched outdoor life had become, but her parents always seemed to distract her from the hard truth of it. Not that she was easy to distract; they were just very practiced at it. But books always held her interest, so her father would always come back with one.

He’d spend his days with her brother, out in the wilderness scavenging the city’s remains. They’d come back with all sorts of things. Mostly food, clothes, and survival stuff; but every day, they’d bring her back something special. Today, they were late.

Jae looked at the clock again, cutting a sigh short as she tried not to arouse suspicion from her daughter, but it was enough to make her daughter look up from her book. She looked back at her daughter with a comforting smile that didn’t fully reach her eyes. Without provocation, she insisted, “Know what I think?”

Ula loved those kinds of questions; they inspired curiosity and wonder within her. She scrunched forward, dropping her book onto her chest. “What?”

“I think,” Jae jutted out a hip and put on her inquisitive face for her daughter. She knew that if she was animated enough, she would not only capture the girl’s attention, but also steer her mind away from darker thoughts. “They found something special and are taking so long because it’s a surprise,” she lied.

“Surprises don’t take this long.”

It took a moment, but Jae finally thought of a response. “Heavy surprises do.”

Ula huffed and looked at the door. Just then, she heard a familiar clang. The door was about to be opened. The two rushed to it in anticipation. But Jae heard her husband’s voice behind the door, groaning. After the many years, she knew that groan: her husband was in pain. She’d never heard