As the countdown began, I knew that I was in for the biggest adventure of my life. The gantries fell off, the rockets fired up, and before I knew it, I was in space, looking down on the world and where I had lived thirty six years of my life.
The neutrino drive kicked in only then, creating a wormhole envelope by expelling a dense stream of neutrons at either end... a little more than that and the space ship would be lost into oblivion in a proper black hole. The space ship created a space-time warp around itself, and traversed space without actually traveling through it. We were decelerating before I could regain consciousness... and saw the planet that was to be my home for the next three years, all I could see was a clear blue. Exactly like the pictures we had received.
After a hundred and fifty years of sparse funding, fake alarms, and massive relocations, the SETI project had finally paid off, when it received a seven hundred year old invitation from a technologically and culturally advanced species. Space ships had rushed to their planet, the later ones reaching there earlier than the first few that set out because of the improved technology. The astronauts on the Moby Dick were the eighteenth crew to visit the planet, and contained six individuals from different cultural backgrounds for another in-depth interaction between two species.
I was one of those astronauts. The water parted as we approached the co-ordinates that we were supposed to land at, and a platform rose to the surface. Base Ellapanadam they called it. As soon as we landed, a bubble formed around us, and we were taken to the magical place of the labqis.
The creatures that populated this planet were called the labqis... they were a pretty weird species. They were more or less like the mermaids of our myth in form β with the exception of six soft spongy tentacles instead of the tailfin. The first time I saw the labqis, I was stunned... they all were stark naked and all seemed to be of the same gender. Their faces were bright and glowing β each in a different pale color. Their faces were full of sharp features, they had the most inviting smiles on their soft lips, small, delicate pointed ears, and sharp noses. They had small, clever eyes on highly set cheekbones, that smiled more mysteriously and enticingly than their lips. They all had long flowing hair β shimmering in either white or gold, or sometimes both. Small delicate wing-like fins protruded from their shoulder blades. Their fish like lower bodies were soft and velvety instead of being scaly, and they delicately hovered on their tentacles β like the most articulate ballerinas. And their breasts β so human, with small, black nipples. And did I mention β all of them were thoroughly wet?