The heat and humidity this week has been like someone smothering you in a sauna with their towel. There was a brief reprieve Wednesday morning thanks to some clouds, so I decided to walk to the store after I got home, instead of driving there after work. Almost as soon as I got going, the clouds vanished and the sweaty towel was back. I had to hang my shirt up to dry a bit before chucking it in the dirty laundry and it was still damp 7 hours later.
The surviving alien, while requesting help in being shot back into space, explains that their people had wanted to travel to the stars, but found it too difficult, given the scale and energy requirements. Until they discovered a particle in the heart of their star that let them shrink and return to normal size. So they shrank down and repurposed photons from their sun as spaceships, so they could travel at near the speed of light. And because of that relativity thing I don't understand, they would only perceive a short period of time passing while journeying to other stars.
But it costs a lot, and you can't steer, so only the people with money to afford it could go. Then it turned out their star was dying, so the rich used it as a way to escape. And that's when the alien attacks Reed because he's not finishing prepping the particle accelerator. Because it turns out the people left behind as their star died aren't too happy with the ones who bailed, especially because it was all those exotic particles they harvested that killed the star.
(What I'm taking from this is we need to convince the billionaire dumbasses to get their asses to Mars before Earth is irrevocably fucked, so we can all have a good laugh while they suffocate or suffer massive and lethal genetic mutations from radiation exposure.)
So there's an unpleasant surprise on the way, and the alien wants to get gone before it arrives. The FF kind of look like chumps against what is basically a person-sized talking squid. Granted, a fireproof (why is it fireproof?) person-sized squid, but they took out Doc Ock a lot easier than this, and he's got super-strong metal arms. I guess it serves mostly to break up all the info dumping Sue and the ones decoding the transmission trailing the escape ships are doing. Zrixa escapes, Reed manages to catch up via another accelerated particle, but it's too late.
Not for Earth. Earth's fine, or as fine as the current state of the planet allows. Reed notes (and the issue is written from his perspective, trying to be precise, describe only what can be described and verified), the rest of the team have 4 dozen ways to handle the incoming problem. But the particle ship is flying towards nothing until the proton degrades, by which time, again with the relativity, the universe will be empty.
But, as usual, the universe finds a way to keep Reed Richards from dying, so he ends up back on Earth shortly after he left. I half expected them to encounter whatever the machine intelligence they encountered earlier this tried to contact, but it's something much different. At least Reed acknowledges he has no clear memory of how or why, and thus can't properly describe what he vaguely feels, but is just grateful to be home.
3 comments:
I know what you mean about the Inhumans. The moment one of them turns up, you know we're heading into a Zero Fun Zone. But! I read the Saladin Ahmed Black Bolt series the other day and the first half, when BB is stuck in Space Prison, was pretty good!
The second half, when he gets home and the other Inhumans turn up, was not as good, as is to be expected.
Huh, I didn't even remember there was a Black Bolt series. I remembered the brief Karnark one Warren Ellis wrote, but I must have memory holed everything else.
The only thing of Ahmed's I've read was the first 8 issues of his Ms. Marvel run, which I did not enjoy. I think people liked his Exiles book, though.
It was pretty good, but I did get it from the library, so I found it to be excellent value. I don't think I would have been as impressed at full price.
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