Chapter 1
31st Century.
“Thirty survivors?” asked Steven Moran. “It can’t be! There were only twenty-nine of us!”
He quickly jumped up out of his sickbay bed and grabbed the Super Homo sapiens nurse by the arm, “Can I see the list of survivors? Please, it’s important.”
The enhanced woman waved her hand and a virtual reality image illuminated the list of survivors.
The former Kansas wrestler with Midwestern rugged farm boy features and an impressive muscular physique, even for an enhanced Super Homo sapiens, viewed the list and asked, “Are all of them out of the sleeping pods?”
“Yes…” she replied, with wonder in her voice about his motives.
“That name there, Walter Sikes. He survived?”
“Yes, he’s resting comfortably on a lower deck two floors down.”
“Show me where I can find him?”
She showed him a diagram of the tremendous spacecraft traveling a great distance from Earth. “Why do you want to know about him?”
He dashed out of the ship’s sickbay room without looking back. “Because he died on the mission and shouldn’t be here.”
The nurse sounded the alarm, but Steven was already halfway down the hallway grabbing an orderly to take him on the lift system to get to the right floor and Walter Sikes’ room.
As the lift took him two floors below, a hologram of the ship’s captain, Commander Christine Carroll was projected in front of Steven. “I understand we may have a stowaway?”
“That’s right,” he responded, “I personally witnessed Walter being killed in the initial battle aboard the alien craft. He was cut down by the mysterious entity ruling the Ancient Visitors, aliens or whatever they were. I helped set every one of the survivors in the sleeping pods when we escaped the Ancient Visitors ship’s destruction. I can, without any doubt, say that Walter was not one of them. Whoever that is, it isn’t Walter Sikes.”
“Well then, we’ll need to talk to Mr. Sikes,” said Commander Christine Carroll, an old by-the-book veteran leader, as she mentally linked the conversation to her security detail. “Please apprehend Walter Sikes for questioning and use extreme caution.”
When Steven reached Walter’s sickbay room, he and the arriving security detail found a pair of unconscious nurses lying on the floor next to the recovery bed.
The leader of the security detail tapped his earpiece linked to his mind and the hologram of the ship’s captain reappeared. “The target is not here and is on the run. He is also not showing up on our sensors.”
As security personnel attended the fallen nurses, Steven looked around at the empty sickbay room. He detected the holographic screens that were used to scan patients. “How would he escape the ship?”
Without answering Steven, the Captain ordered, “All security personnel report to the transport docking bay immediately.” Images of Walter Sikes began showing in every corner of the ship.
When Steven and the security detail arrived at the docking bay, they were met by the Captain in person who ordered the door of the docking bay to be opened. When the door wouldn’t open as requested, she ran to the large window looking into the bay. Many of her personnel were scattered along the floor, at the very least, unconscious. It was then that one of the transports powered up and fled the docking bay into space. Without the interior pressure, the transport glided up and out of the docking bay into space. The various unconscious bodies began floating up and out following the transport as the docking bay’s atmosphere was sucked into the darkness of space. Seconds later the wide metal doors shut; the Captain mentally initiated the containment field.
Steven, in all the confusion going on, wondered out loud, “We shouldn’t have come back. Look what we did. We brought one back, and it may be the worst of them all.”
Hearing Steven’s words, the Captain responded, “We’ve had to deal with them in the past, our ancient ancestors had been changed by them. Then there was Bishop Terapion during the Followers of Divinity conflict. It didn’t stop there as there were others.”
Steven ran his hands over his face and through his hair then said, “There were others?”
As the Captain tracked the ship heading toward Earth on the computer in her mind, she ordered the helmsmen to set a course to intercept and then alerted her communication officer to warn Earth Command. She then looked at Steven and repeated, “Yes, there were others…”
Jim Reilly is the author of science fiction and fantasy novels, Evolution and Seaville. He is a married father of four, born and raised in Long Island. From an early age, Jim always had a fascination with science, religion, and science fiction. He now enjoys leveraging those interests to develop fascinating and unique stories.
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