by JK Stone
*****
Doran and Terrah had just entered orbit of Daregon and connected TDS 4 to the pyramids generator, and they were about to go test out the newer and much larger bed they had just created when they received a hail from the surface.
“This is High Chancellor Plaxian V’trell, I am speaking to the I-mort-um vessel in orbit. Please respond.”
Terrah looked at Doran, shrugged then opened communications. “This is commander Terrah Tones of the Imortum vessel TDS 4, how can I assist you?”
“Is there any way to get a message to your Commander Jerren Stone?” Plaxian asked beseechingly.
Terrah knew Jerren had rescued this man’s children when they crashed on Earth, and asked, “What should I tell him this is in regard to?”
“My daughters have been abducted, and I have no way of tracking them, they have been missing for almost a month now, and there is no trace of them. I am desperate, please, I need to speak with Commander Jerren Stone.”
“One moment I will attempt to contact him,” Terrah said.
Terrah muted the communications then called out, “Jerren can you hear me?”
Jerren sounded a little out of breath as he responded. “Yes Terrah, it’s nice to see you are out of the void now, Eneria and I was just wondering about you. How much longer until you’ll make it to Earth?” he asked.
“Our energy reserves are a little depleted, so we went to Daregon to recharge before heading to Earth. We have another six hours until our charge is complete. But that isn’t why I’m calling you. Once in orbit of Daregon we were contacted by a High Chancellor Plaxian V’trell, apparently his daughters were abducted and have been missing for close to a month. He’s asking for your assistance,” Terrah explained.
“One moment, I’m checking something,” Jerren said.
Terrah heard Jerren ask something about a life monitor, and then he said, “Both Viaxe, and Viaxar’s life monitors show them as still being on Daregon, with healthy vital signs. I’ll be right over—
Terrah had the feeling that she’d just interrupted Jerren and Eneria from the same thing Terrah and Doran had planned to be doing if not for the call, and not wanting to spoil everyone’s fun Terrah said, “No it’s alright. Could you just send me their life monitor tracking codes? I’ll take care of it since we’re here for the next six hours anyway.”
Jerren agreed and a moment later Terrah input the girl’s life monitor tracking codes then located their coordinates on Daregon. “There they are,” Terrah stated.
“Why are there so many life signs in such a small room?” Doran asked.
Terrah had a sneaking suspicion she knew why but launched a probe to be sure before performing the transport. A minute later Terrah’s suspicions had been confirmed when the probe entered the first room and Terrah found it had six large men gagged, and manacled to the walls. Then she repositioned her probe into the room where the girls were being held.
This room was ten feet by twelve feet and occupied by thirty women and girls who appeared to range in age from ten or twelve years old up to mid to late-twenties. Terrah knew what the signs of human trafficking were, having gone undercover in the OSI to bring down a trafficking ring, and even though these girls were not human, she felt sure they were about to be turned into slaves.
Terrah genetically locked the probe on the youngest of the daughters, then advanced her probes TD and watched as the room eventually filled with forty women before a new group of aliens arrived then incapacitated and carried the women onto a spaceship almost a month in linear time later.
“Is there any way to track all of these people without locking a probe on each of them?” Terrah asked, then she added, “We can transport the abductors that are down on the surface right now, but we don’t have time to apprehend the rest of them if we have to head to Earth after the charge is complete, and I want to put an end to this.”
Doran nodded and said, “The probes have inert nucleogenic isotopes that are encoded for our ship, and you can safely tag any biologicals and non-biologicals with them, like this.”
Doran tagged the aliens who had carried the women aboard the ship, along with the rest of the crew and what appeared to be a large number of slaves who were caged and manacled to the walls of the massive ship’s chamber while saying. “These isotopes are only found in a remote region of the universe, and each one is encoded with a unique tracer frequency just like the life monitors, so it makes tracking the isotopes easy.”
Once tagged, Terrah brought the probe back to the current time, targeted and transported the nine aliens who had imprisoned the men and women in a cell of their own aboard TDS 4 and then targeted all of the men and women in the two rooms. Terrah then located a medical facility in the center of the largest city, and she transported the men, women, and girls there before reopening communications and explaining to Plaxian where he could find his daughters and what had happened to them.
Terrah transmitted her probe’s recording as evidence to Plaxian and she said, “I have the criminals who were imprisoning them aboard my vessel, where would you like them sent?”
A few minutes later Plaxian transmitted the coordinates and said the magistrate was awaiting the prisoner’s transfers.
Plaxian had been ecstatic to hear his children had been returned once again, and he repeatedly requested that both Terrah and Doran come to the surface so he could thank them properly.
Five hours later Doran and Terrah had begged their pardon, stating they were required for a critical mission, then they transported back to their ship.
TDS 4 had just completed charging, and Terrah called out to her brother. “Jason?”
“Yes Terrah, how’s it going?” Jason asked.
“Everything’s fine here, we just completed charging and are heading straight to Earth, and we should be there in thirty-six hours unless you need us there faster?”
“Thirty-six hours should be fine. It’ll be best to have your ship fully charged when you get here. Saleria’s ship was having scanning issues, and ours were as well when we arrived at Earth, but everything appears to be working properly now. So, when you have a moment, we can all meet and finalize a plan of action,” Jason stated.
Terrah looked Doran up and down then said, “Alright, I need to get some rest, and once I’m awake I’ll call over for an archway.”
Terrah closed her communications, set course for Earth and then she said, “I do believe we have a new bed to ‘rest’ on. What do you think?”
Doran’s answer was to pull Terrah into a tight embrace, then transport the both of them directly to the bed, less their clothing of course.
Chuckling heartily Terrah said, “I really like how you think,” before kissing Doran soundly.
The End.
Excerpt from Book Five in the Imortum series:
Promethean Ark
Krysali Salinas, the high commander of the Lantin flagship Prometheus was heading to the bridge of her ship. She hadn’t heard from her brother in nearly a hundred years, but despite this meeting being of a semiofficial nature, she was still thrilled that she would see and speak to him again.
She’d just come up from the power cell room and was about to enter the bridge when her second in command’s voice rang out.
“Commander! A massive ship just entered orbit of Terra and collided with your brother’s TDS, it’s losing altitude and entering the atmosphere!” Ambrosius shouted over the communications.
Krysali rushed to the bridge and saw her brothers ship on Ambrosius’s monitor and shouted, “Status of the TDS?”
“It appears to be in an uncontrolled reentry. If he was connected to the pyramids beam when he was hit, then his power is failing, and the ship won’t recover for days!” Ambrosius replied.
Krysali’s heart thrashed as a plan came to her. “Bring the Prometheus just under the TDS! If we can support it, we may be able to get it back into orbit!” she commanded.
“On it Commander!” Ambrosius shouted his reply as the ship to
ok off for the TDS.
Krysali knew that if this worked, there would likely be hull breaches along the first level of the ship at the very least, and she was about to call out a warning to her crew when the ship was buffeted.
There was a brilliant flash from the navigation console and she shouted, “What was that?”
“We were hit by weapons fire in drive engines eight and nine,” her science officer Morgan called out.
A moment later Ambrosius said, “the Nav console is dead, were going in and I cannot restart the system!”
Krysali’s racing heart seemed to slow as did everything around her. Despite the concern for her friends and brother’s safety, she felt a calm wash over her as a plan came to mind. Looking over at her science officer she shouted, “Morgan! Perform active pings to the surface.”
Krysali knew this was going to be bad, so she called out, “All hands, make for the survival pods! THIS IS NOT A DRILL!” as she dove under the Nav console at Ambrosius’s feet.
Krysali had seen what she was about to do performed in a ‘Never do this training video’, but given the extremely low likelihood of lifeforms being in their path and their dire situation, she pulled the access panels off and began altering the configuration.
The pings were increasing in rapidity to the point where it almost sounded like a single long tone when she called out, “All hands Brace for Impact!” then she made the final connection and there was a brilliant flash as electrical discharges coursed throughout her body.
*****
Krysali awoke from the recurring nightmare and sitting bolt upright she peered around. She’d been lying in the sunlight absorbing what energy she could and realized she’d only drifted off and the events weren’t actually replaying.
It had been a very long time since she was out of stasis last and she was feeling excessively weakened from this last stint. That was the bad thing about being in stasis so long, it tended to draw a lot of enerxia from the body leaving you weak as a newborn when you came out.
On the other hand, at least in stasis she wasn’t plagued by recalling the events that got her and her crew stuck on this icy rock of a planet in her nightmares. “peering around she thought, well once icy rock at least.
After evaluating her ships power consumption, she’d realized she only had one or two more times in which to use the stasis pod before the ships last remaining functional power cell would fail completely. As it was, this time in stasis had been cut short by just over a hundred years when the pod began consuming more power than required, and once the pod detected dangerously low power levels she was brought out of stasis.
Krysali had been stranded on Terra for over thirty-five thousand years now. Over the past ten thousand years, when they would emerge from stasis the crew would set out in pairs in attempts to secure a rescue, but she was now the last crew member left on board the Prometheus, and with a heavy heart she came to the conclusion that the last of her friends must have died in their attempts.
With the anguish over the loss of her dear friends and brother rekindling, she now wished she had not overloaded the gravitational deflector, in essence cushioning their impact, and they could have all died together instead of two by two over the last ten thousand years.
Krysali’s ship had been buried over the years, and there must have been a mud and rock slide in the last four hundred years, because it took her several hours to clear the debris, and blast the extra ten feet to make it out of the tunnel that had allowed her to exit the last time she was out of stasis.
Upon exiting the tunnel, Krysali had been relieved to find that the area they had crashed in was no longer covered in ice and snow, so she stripped bare and had laid out in the only location she could find that allowed for direct sunlight.
Krysali had been hearing strange swirling noises that would only last a minute or two, but she had been unable to isolate or identify them from the thick tree cover that surrounded the clearing she was in. She was still too exhausted to investigate, and she decided to look into them once her body had rejuvenated enough. Maybe another day or two would do it, she thought to herself.
With the current weather on the planet, the emergency solar generator would power the ship faster than it had the last time, but with the power cells degraded as they were, it wouldn’t do her much good anyway.
*****
The last time Krysali had been out of stasis, she had remained out for a little over ninety days and explored the area to no avail. There were no signs that her crew had returned to the area or any indication that her people or anyone else for that matter had come to Terra.
Peering up at the blue sky, and with the weather quite warmer than she’d expected, Krysali figured that she might stay out of stasis a little longer this time and attempt to enjoy her time out as best she could.
*****
Krysali had been absorbing the sun’s rays and she could feel that something about the planet was seriously amiss since the last time she was out of stasis. The planet felt sick, and from time to time she could feel anguish building up within her, but she chalked it up to the fact that she felt more alone than she’d ever felt in her entire life, so she employed the training she’d received as a child and erected a barrier wall and blocked those feelings out.
Now that the emotional waves were blocked, she could feel the enerxia in the atmosphere, but it felt thin and diminished since her prior time out of stasis. She was pleased however, to find that the wild life had rebounded after the thaw.
The scientists on Anukan had estimated Terra would remain an ice-covered planet for a good hundred thousand more years, but by a mere thirty-five thousand years later, the ice had receded at least further north than her ship had crashed, and by the sound of the birds in the air, she knew at least some of the wildlife had come back.
Krysali had her eyes closed taking in the sounds of the song birds, and drifted back to sleep as the little critters scurried along. She had been startled awake a while later by the silence that had engulfed her, then by a shadowy creature looming near her.
The creature ended up being an adolescent Ursa, or what appeared to be an adolescent at first. The Ursa upon closer examination was actually a three or four-year-old, but she was starving. The Ursa had come upon Krysali while she was resting and must’ve thought she was going to be an easy meal, and she would have been, if not for her timely awakening.
Krysali cautiously placed a hand out touching the poor beast’s head and found that it had been unable to hibernate over the past two years due to a lack of food and changing weather cycles. Looking in the direction of her ship, Krysali figured the rations she had aboard it was of no use to her, so she focused on the starving creature, and pushed the command, Sopori into its mind, then the Ursa slowly curled into a ball and was fast asleep.
Krysali had made her way into her ship and collected pouches of every grain bar she could carry, and then she made her way to the clearing. Looking down at the poor beast she proceeded to unpack and pile everything for her to eat, then placed a hand on her head and commanded, Rousa.
The Ursa had been startled, so Krysali pushed and said Placidu. The Ursa seemed unsure as to what was going on, and she gestured toward the food and added, “Ceno, Ja Jun Ursa.”
The Ursa peered up at Krysali, then down at the piled food then plowed her snout into the pile and began eating with such vigor that she accidentally bit her own lip.
Krysali began to worry at the Ursa’s haste. She reached out and touched her again, and the Ursa let out a menacing growl. Krysali pushed, Placidu, Sedae hoc est in escam.
The Ursa must have understood that the food was all hers because she slowed her pace considerably. Smiling down at the poor beast, she considered naming it. Ursa was the species, and it didn’t feel right calling her that. Recalling a name from her childhood, Krysali said while caressing her back, “How would you like to be called Arcas?” upon saying the name, Krysali felt acceptance from the beast, and she smiled as she added, “Wel
l, Arcas, my name is Krysali.”
Krysali knew she was not up for healing the Ursa but her best anyway. While Arcas ate, she focused on healing the poor beast. She was using what little energy she’d absorbed that day from the sun, and forced Arcas’s metabolism to temporarily shut down so it could retain the food stores, as she healed its body.
Krysali did what she could, and felt seriously diminished by her effort. She looked up at the sun, there was only another hour or two left before it would be gone for the day, and in sheer exhaustion, she collapsed beside the feeding beastie.
*****
Braydon Macleod had been jostled and awakened by a sharp pain in his chest. He was finding it extremely difficult to breathe and for the briefest of moments, he thought he was back in Iraq moments after a hand grenade had been thrown in the barracks he’d been in.
Braydon received a traumatic brain injury and a severe trauma to his right lung due to that blast, but the lack of air this time somehow felt worse than that even.
He peered groggily down and forced himself to focus on his injury, what he found was that the handle of his K-Bar had been buried hilt deep into his chest, and he wondered how the hell that could have happened.
Braydon began to panic but soon realized with the spots flashing before his eyes, that he needed to calm down. Focusing on the breathing exercises he had been taught after the loss of his lung, he concentrated on slowing his heartrate and taking very slow deep and steady breaths. Once he calmed down, he tried to make sense of how he got into this condition and where he was.