“Humans, you will be taking flight in five minutes. We have done a systems check on the ship, and all looks normal. We have stocked your pantry with the foods we know that you like to eat. We don’t have bovine on this planet, so we have supplied you with the closest thing to it. The meat is tough, you will like it,” the Ursine in the middle said. I stared at him and then looked at my two crewmates who were also staring at the bear creature. Beside him, two hooded Ursines stood guard. They were large and carried very big plasma guns. The fur on the two big Ursines was shaven down, and each of them had what appeared to be tattoos on their skin. Tribal tattoos. These particular Ursines were worlds apart from the others we’d seen so far. They looked like warriors. They looked like barbarians.
“The king has also provided you with two guards. They don’t look like much, but you should know that just one of these special solders has been known to be able to kill thousands of enemies in no time. So you will be safe with them,” the Ursine in the middle said. I was still mesmerized by the two bigger, badder and much scarier looking creatures next to him.
“What do you mean, guards? What purpose do they have?” I asked.
“They will escort you to Earth,” the Ursine said.
I nodded.
“Ah, yes. The flight team. The ones that will be following us in your cloaked ships,” I replied, feeling a wave of relief wash over me.
“No, you misunderstand. These two will guard you on the ship. The journey will be long and boring. There will be plenty of time for you to get sick or worse. So just in case, the king has decided that these two guards will accompany you throughout your journey. That way, if you run into trouble, you will have back up.”
I closed my eyes and sighed. The gig was up. They had thought of everything. There was just no way that me or my crew could get ahead, not with two tailing ships that had orders to shoot us if we diverted off course, and now this. Two damn killer Ursines on board, for our so-called protection. But I think we all knew what was going on here. They weren’t as stupid as they looked. Turns out, they understood the human desire to fight back enough that they were making sure we didn’t do so by sticking these two behemoths on board. I could feel the collective moral of my crew deflate almost immediately.
“Thank you for your hospitality,” I said to the middle Ursine, gritting my teeth as I forced the words out.
“No problem. You will be glad to know that the guards are understanding of your native tongue. They can communicate without translators, so you won’t have to worry about any deep space anomalies destroying your ability to communicate with them, or their ability to understand you,” the Ursine said, raising his paw up and waving at us. I couldn’t believe my eyes. He was actually waving. Had we been had? Were we fully aware of what we were dealing with, or had I failed yet again as a captain and not prepared myself for the obvious might that stood in our way?
The Ursine turned around and walked off the ship, the doors locking behind him. I sat in my chair staring at the two massive, shaven and tattooed warriors in front of us. They took off their hoods and revealed their beast-like faces. One of them contorted its snout into a grin, showing a double row of sharp, pointy teeth.
“Glad to meet you,” the smiling bear said in a very gruff, yet natural voice. It extended its massive paw toward me. I stood up and shook it. Its claws retracted and it gently squeezed my hand, letting go after a few seconds. The bear looked down to the floor and pointed its paw to the line on the ground.
“Sorry if I went over the line. I know you humans have weird space travel traditions and rules. I hope me and Ern here don’t get in your way. We’re here to observe and report. You follow the rules and we’ll get on fine. You never know, you might be surprised at what you experience on this journey,” the big Ursine said. The one next to him nodded its big round head and also extended its paw out to me. I shook it, and he let go after a few seconds just like the more talkative one.
“Ern?” I said, still a little shocked that this one had a name.
“Yeah, I’m Ern and this is Borch,” the one named Ern said.
I was trying to cover up the emotions I was feeling, but I could tell that I was failing miserably.
“I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that you underestimated us as a race. You’re thinking that we’re primitive. That we don’t know how to be intellectual like you. That humans are the only real intelligent and philosophical beings in the universe. But it is not true. We are one and the same. The whole universe is full of cultures that both mimic and outperform each other. It is a world that you, humanity, are too unfamiliar with. But now you know. Now you know that there really is intelligent life out there. And unlike the other races that live in your neighboring galaxies, we, the Ursine race, are both far superior to yours, or any other, and much stronger. We are born warriors. Warriors that can rip a man in two. But we are also proficient in firearms. And many of us can speak many galactic languages. So during this trip, back to your planet, you will learn plenty about us. As we will learn plenty about you.”
Dale, Jess and I were speechless. We just stood there and stared at the two intelligent Ursines in our company. They both nodded at us and turned their big bodies around, moving toward the engine room. They then went down the ladder and did a systems check on the dials down below. I could hear them flicking switches and pushing buttons.
“Ern and Borch?” Jess said, turning to me with a half smile on her face. I guessed that the smile was emanating not from humor but complete hysteria. She, like me, couldn’t quite believe what she’d just seen. And I was in the same boat. I turned to Dale and said “You’re a big guy, you could probably take one of them on.”
Dale shook his head.
“I think I’ll pass,” he said.
We didn’t speak until they came back up. They nonchalantly walked past us and through the bridge doors, down the corridor and disappeared into some section of the ship. Seconds later the bridge doors opened once again, their swooshing sound startling the three of us, and in came the three foreigner humans. They walked up to us and stopped before the line on the floor, next to my chair. The three of us stared at the three of them. Neither of us had to say anything. I think it was pretty clear. You didn’t need to speak two languages to tell what we were all thinking.
“Looks like this is actually happening,” I said in utter dismay. “We’re actually nuking Earth. And there’s nothing we can do about it.”
Right at that second, a siren went off and a countdown appeared on one of my screens. It was time to liftoff. My new crew and old crew all took their cues and sat in their designated seats. The Spanish crew didn’t know what they were doing, which was just as well that they were seated in the passenger seats and not the control seats. I had Dale working the thrusters and Jess working the trajectory.
“T minus ten seconds,” I said, turning to my new crew, putting my thumb up and getting a sea of thumbs up in return. Everybody was ready. Everybody knew what they were doing. I turned in my seat, put my hand on the controls and breathed in deeply.
“T minus five…four…three…two….one….”
Chapter Fourteen
The power of the liftoff was something that I had never experienced before. I’d flown the Alpha Ship One for many many years, and experienced plenty of take offs, but this take off was different. Instead of slowly easing off the ground and hovering a while until the thrusters kicked in, when I pulled on the throttle, the ship jolted, rising off the ground and accelerating quickly into orbit. The shock of the liftoff nearly knocked me off my seat as I tried to tame the ship as it catapulted into the air.
“Whoa,” I heard Jess say as she held on for dear life. I turned to see the expressions on my crewmen’s’ faces. They were just as surprised as I was. Well traveled ship crew knew what to expect when a take off commenced. But I think it was safe to say that neither one of us was quite expecting this.
“Looks like the new engine is working just fine,”
Dale said as he worked his controls.
I didn’t say anything in return. Truth be told, I was bricking it. All I could really do was hold my breath and hope that the sheer force of takeoff didn’t blow the ship up. I wasn’t sure if the new speed the Alpha Ship One was capable of would obliterate it in mid air. It wasn’t unheard of for older ships to buckle under high speeds and break into a million pieces. The fact that I knew how old the ship actually was, was reason enough for my heart to be protruding out of my chest as it beat uncontrollably.
But I needn’t have worried. The liftoff went off without a hitch. And we were breaking through the Ursines home world’s atmosphere and ascending into space within a few minutes. I watched as the screens captured the violent transition from a gravity rich world to free-floating space. Flecks of orange, blue, black and red cascaded across the screens as the dense atmosphere slowly dissolved and the familiar blackness of space became apparent. Within a few more seconds, we had broken through the atmosphere and were holding our own above the Ursines planet. I shifted a few of the camera angles outside the ship to see what the planet looked like below us.
“Wow, it’s huge,” I said, panning the screen and taking in the gargantuan purple dust-colored planet below us. Its atmosphere was dense and covered up the fact that it was civilized. I couldn’t see any lights or any other signs of life on it. A passing satellite would most likely mistake the planet as barren, but I knew differently, as would everybody else soon enough.
The ship steadied itself. The vacuum of space obscured the true speed we were going at as the Alpha Ship One rose into the stars, the Ursines home planet slowly becoming a mere speck to us. But as we got higher and higher, a smudge in the distance caught my eye.
“Unidentified mass in front of us,” I said under my breath, more to myself than anybody else. We weren’t on an Earth-sanctioned mission anyway. So there was no point in reporting our surroundings. But it was a habit that was hard to get out of. I still had the urge to call in what I was seeing, but nobody was on the other end listening. And to put it bluntly, nobody would ever be on the other end listening. Not to our ship. Not anymore. We were no longer the property of Pilgrim Tech. We were on our own. Banished to the depths of space. Only our memories of freedom to keep us going. None of us knew whether we’d get out of this alive. Neither of us dared to imagine the destruction that surely awaited Earth if we were unable to get a plan of action underway. But that was the least of our problems. We had immediate problems in front of us. The smudge in the distance soon transformed into a massive idle fleet of war ships. They must have been the ships that were taking off prior to us. And by the looks of it, they were all headed in the same direction.
“It’s as if they’re waiting for us to pass,” I said, thrusting upwards so we would not collide with the ships.
Our ship passed overhead. I switched the cameras once again, this time to focus in on the battleships underneath us. They ranged in size and stature. Some were big. Others were bigger. They were also multicolored, which was something that I hadn’t really noticed back on their planet. But now, under the millions of stars that specked the dark vacuum we found ourselves in, I noticed how technologically impressive these ships were.
“I’m seeing thermonuclear capabilities,” Dale said from his seat. I swiveled in my chair and caught the collective eye of my crew as they stared back at me, their skin paler than normal. I sighed, realizing that even if we managed to get rid of the nuke on our ship, the trailing army of battle cruisers would more or less make up for it. There was no doubt about that.
“Looks like Plan B will have to be damn impressive to outsmart these guys,” I said, swiveling back in my chair and turning my attention to the screens in front of me.
The line of battle cruisers seemed to go on for ages. According to one of the outputs on the screen, we were traveling at well over twelve thousand miles an hour. The ships continued to scroll underneath us, like some prehistoric computer platformer game. After a half hour of ogling the many many ships beneath us, we finally reached the end of the seemingly never ending line of war ships. And to our horror, right in front of them, was an even bigger ship. This particular ship looked about the size of a planet. It was massive. And when I say massive, I mean MASSIVE.
The mammoth ship was lined with every sort of weapon that you could imagine. It had satellites and landing pads all over it. The thing was basically a star station. But this star station wasn’t built to sell goods, or house weary space travelers. Its sole purpose was to destroy.
“I’m picking up off the chart levels of radiation on this ship,” Dale said as he scanned the massive star ship. Luckily for us, the Ursines didn’t disable any of our ships’ instruments when they overhauled it for our unsavory mission. They’d left all our gizmos and sensors in tact. So to pass the time whilst we’d flown overhead the sea of battleships, we’d been scanning each one and seeing what capabilities they had. All of them, bar none, had nukes on board. Enough nukes to total every Earth-like planet known to man. So to say that we were at a loss for ideas would be an understatement.
“Nearly twelve thousand miles of ships,” Dale said when we finally reached the end of the parade of death that flew below us.
Just wrapping my head around the idea that there were twelve thousand miles’ worth of war ships was hard to swallow. I’d never known a race to possess so many air vehicles. Not even the Galactics had that sort of equipment. The Ursine threat was real. Very real indeed.
“Heads up,” Jess said as the doors to the bridge swooshed open and Ern and Borch, the oversized, heavily tattooed, apparently smart Ursines walked in. They were both holding three mugs of hot drink in their hands. They handed a mug to each of us.
“We thought that maybe you would be thirsty. Fear has a way of drying the mouth,” Borch said as he handed me my mug. I looked into it and saw that it was synthetic coffee from the foodomitor. The foodomitor was a device that all human ships were equipped with. Its function was to synthetically make both food and drink. It used nanotechnology to make the food and drink. The problem was that it tasted like ass. That’s why many human spaceships still stocked actual food produce in their pantries. Most of the stuff was space MRE. Space MRE was dried, salted and processed foods that didn’t spoil. They were perfect for long-haul trips. But when you spend a few years on a voyage, actual space MRE runs out. That’s when the foodomitor comes in.
“Thanks, I guess,” I said, nodding at Borch who had some sort of grin on his snout. I ignored it and swigged the mug dry, handing it back to him.
“A lot of war ships,” I said.
Borch nodded.
“You don’t need to worry about them. They’re on a training exercise preparing for the inevitable,” Borch said, his gruff voice still surprising to me.
“The inevitable?” I asked.
“When we destroy Earth, it will bring our race a lot of unwanted attention. So we are preparing for that inevitable hurdle. But believe me, the inevitable will happen. And when it does, we will be more than prepared.”
I nodded my head, trying to act unfazed. But I was crapping my pants. Everything about these things scared me. They were smart, strong and calculating. And to boot, they had more war ships than I’d ever known could exist. So I was probably right to be scared. But fear wouldn’t help me on this mission. I had to look past it. I had to be the better, bigger and smarter man here. I mean, let’s not forget the wonders humanity had accomplished. We were both feared and admired in the universe. Many races knew of our ways and a lot of them mimicked us. But the flattery was over, and now a new race challenged us.
It wasn’t the first time an alien race had tested our defenses with all their might. But this time it was different. This time Earth didn’t know it was coming.
“Prepare yourselves for ULTRABOOST,” I said, looking down at the switch in front of me. The Ursines had replaced the warp drive with their so-called ULTRABOOST drive. And in doing so, they’d hooked it up to the sam
e configuration, meaning I didn’t need to be taught how to use the new system.
“Not yet, you’re fast approaching an asteroid field,” Dale said from behind me.
At that very second I saw it. The mere sight of such a wonder blew my mind. Don’t get me wrong, I’d seen plenty of asteroid fields before. But this one was huge. And according to my sensors, it was the biggest one the ship had ever encountered.
“Get ready for one hundred thousand miles of sheer pain and utter fright,” Ern, the other Ursine said.
I slowed the ship down slightly. Suddenly a paw flopped onto my hand, and pushed the throttle up.
“Its no use going slow for this. With speed comes precision,” Borch said, letting my hand go.
I couldn’t actually believe this; I was flying into an asteroid field at over twenty-five thousand miles an hour. By my readings it would take four hours to get through it. Four hours of hair-raising, unrelenting stress.
I braced myself for what lay ahead and punched the throttle.
“Get ready for evasive maneuvers!” I screamed, blundering into the dense asteroid belt.
Chapter Fifteen
“A big one coming in hot, eighty clicks north,” Dale said as he began to walk me through the asteroid field. He was using the ship’s powerful scanners to predict the trajectories of the incoming bogies. The computer was known to be accurate. We’d never hit any flying debris during previous flights. But this time it was different of course. This time there were plenty more bogies to hit. And the more pressure that was put on both Dale and the scanner, the higher chance we had of a critical hit.
“We’re going way too fast,” I heard Jess say as she helped me navigate the belt.
“No such thing as too fast when faced with danger,” Borch said. Both he and Ern were sitting in their own seats behind us all, a little off center to the rest of us. I hadn’t noticed it before, but the Ursines had fitted the ship with two big chairs for the beasts. In all my excitement upon boarding the Alpha Ship One once again, I hadn’t seen the seats. I guess if I’d seen them, then both Borch’s and Ern’s presence wouldn’t have come as such a surprise.
Stasis (Alpha Ship One Book 1) Page 9