CODA
Blake awoke three days later in the medical bay of the Revenant. Apparently, he had been hurt worse than he thought. He looked around and saw Shira and Rom playing cards nearby.
He tried to speak but could only manage a croak. Shira heard it and spun around
“Oh, thank god your awake, we thought you were a goner for a while” she reached out with a bottle and a straw and gave Blake some water.
He sucked it down and winced at the pain in his chest and throat. Once the water was down, he sucked in a breath and realized he could breathe, normally. Thank god for nanites he thought as he tried to sit up in bed.
Rom pressed him back down, the AI doc says you need at least two more days of rest before you are back to regular duty.
Blake grumped something about his mother and a donkey but didn’t fight it and laid back down. “What happened, did we win?”
he asked hopefully. Shira’s eyes saddened.
“No, but we didn’t lose exactly, turns out they had an agent get into the temple and tranq’d the initiates, they got to the server,
Kree was able to stop them, but they got away, and we are not sure what information they have. “
Shira stated gently
“Seafu is down on the planet talking to Catherine, he thinks he can get them to join us and have some of her people come back to the base to train to become rangers,” she said with forced cheer,
“He will be glad to see you up and about.”
Blake looked at her, give me the play by play XO and don’t leave anything out.
For the next hour, Shira went over the events that he had missed and filled him in on the fleet status and Seafu’s appointment to Grand Chancellor. “Damn I zone out for a couple of days, and the world goes tits up, Did Seafu give us orders yet?” he asked trying to swivel his head to see Shira and Rom at the same time but not able to succeed.
“Not yet, we were just told to get you better and then get back to base.” The Captain nodded
“don’t set a course yet, once I get up, I have an errand that needs running before we go back.” Blake said
“Boss, Seafu offered us full membership as Rangers and we get to keep the ship, he asked us, and we unanimously voted you as captain of our crew,
well except for Davi, he voted for Elvis,
but it doesn’t matter. We are going back to the base to complete our training and take our place among the other crews” she said to him.
“Good,” he said, “he knows how much of a pain in the ass we are, yet we get results,”
and on that note, Blake slipped into the darkness of sleep.
Fifteen days later a ship crept out of slip space in the sol system firing its engines and heading for earth. The captain of the vessel was a tall scaly creature named Shavok. He had been captain of the Scretrin for the last five cycles when he had inherited it from the previous captain,
as well as the location of this planet as a good source of slave stock.
He had been here once before and despised the people, but the previous captain had been correct, this species sold well as slaves and could be augmented to proliferate fast.
Shavok smiled, he would need to pick up a more significant load than usual,
the Empire was buying up all the slaves for their space docks and building yards.
Apparently, something had them in a tizzy,
but they had deep pockets, and so Shavok would sell to them. As he was dreaming about the credits he would make on this run, the alarms on the console started going off
“Full Stop” he yelled at the navigator.
He began looking over the readings, they didn’t make sense this system had no interstellar flight, yet.
“Captain, you might want to look at this,” said the navigator pointing at the main screen.
Shavok looked, and his jaw dropped as a black ship descended directly in front of them, facing their ship. Before he had time to react a message pinged on the console, Shavok accepted and sent it to the main screen. As the message began to play, he shook his head, these beings weren’t space-faring, yet there in a chair was one of them, bookended by two more.
He just stared and then the translator, an older model began to translate the message
“To the Slaver ship, I am Captain Blake Campbell of the Revenant.” The being shifted forward in his chair and smiled.
“I just wanted to give you this message
Welcome to earth Mother Fucker,
shoplifters will be killed and eaten”
and then the being extended his middle finger and the communication shut off.
“What was that?” Shavok asked of the crew.
They shrugged, and before he could regain his composure, the Black ship opened its gun ports and unleashed red death against the Scretrin blowing it out of space.
As secondary explosions finished off the ship,
Blake turned to the navigation console where Shira was.
“Alright, let's kick this pig and get out of here,
I think we are overdue at the base,
Seafu is probably having an aneurysm,”
he said smiling at the thought of it.
Rom turned his head and looked at Shira and the Captain “Fucking A” he said and smiled.
The Captain nodded and smiled back
“Good use of fuck Rom, good use indeed”
and laughed. He had healed fully but had ordered any messages sent from the base be ignored until now. “Davi, let the base know we are on our way back please and give some bullshit engine excuse or something” Davi nodded and turned to the console to relay the message while mumbling something about Elvis.
Blake got up from his chair and walked down the corridor to one of the side rooms where he found Xera and Kree sitting at a table eating.
“Hey Furby, I wonder if you could do me a solid, can you transmit this message to a particular computer on earth for me?”
Blake said holding a data disc out to him.
Kree rolled his eyes
“of course, the systems down there are ridiculously simple, I mean I have no idea how you guys got beyond sticks and stones;
honestly the computer systems are like a million switches in a box, who the hell builds things like that anyway. Kree shook his head and inserted the data disc into the chair.
“I’ll have it out before we leave the system boss,
ill bounce it to that tachyon transmitter we hid on the moon” Kree responded and began to punch buttons on his chair. As the Revenant waded into slip space, the message was sent,
and in a flash of light, the ship was gone.
CHAPTER
FORTY-TWO
FORTYTWO
Message in a Bottle
Gracie Campbell sat on her bed listening to her mother argue on the phone. They had received a call from the police a year ago saying that her father had disappeared in the woods, they mounted a search, but nearly 2 weeks later, they pronounced him lost. After three months, her mother started the process to declare him dead.
She had spent days and evenings on the phone yelling at various people trying to get his life insurance paid out. She would even argue with her new boyfriend about it. Gracie just shook her head. She missed her dad and hated what her mother had become since he disappeared.
She knew what was going on, she was fourteen after all practically an adult, but her mother still insisted on trying to keep her in the dark.
She had her father’s blonde hair and height but her mother’s nose and green eyes, she was a very striking young lady and was getting more and more popular with the boys.
She had even been asked out on two dates.
That is what she was chatting about with Heidi, her best friend, they were weighing which boy she should go out with.
Gracie snickered at a comment on the screen and then paused as the screen went blank Suddenly it filled with the picture of her father,
not one she knew, and his eyes were diff
erent, he seemed older and sadder, but it was still her dad. The picture began to speak.
Gracie held her breath tears welling in her eyes as she realized this wasn’t a picture, but a message, from daddy.
“Hey pumpkin, I know I haven’t been around and what I am about to tell you is crazy I know, if you tell anyone they will probably think either you are I are crazy, but I couldn’t go again without letting you know that I love you and the amazing things that have happened over the last year…”
Gracie listened to the message three times before putting it in her diary folder on her computer. She laid back in bed and looked out the window and smiled. Her dad was safe, and he missed her and then she thought of all the amazing things he had said. It took her hours before she could get to sleep, but for the first time that she could remember she wasn’t crying when she did.
THE END
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ABOUTTHEAUTHOR
Raymond Bayly was born in suburban Maryland, as a teenager he spent many hours reading books from the likes of Dean R. Koontz, Stephen King, J. R. R. Tolkien and Robert Ludlum, spending his early years feeding his love of horror and science fiction. At the age of 16, he moved to the Boston area and began writing short stories and playing guitar in a few local bands. He joined the army and served his tour, upon returning home to a new wife and daughter with the pressures of a new child and a new marriage he hung up his pen and for many years concentrated on raising his children and building a career in computers.
After moving to South Carolina, he took up writing again, starting with short stories and soon publishing his first full-length novel Revenant.
Today Raymond still lives in South Carolina where he enjoys spending time with his five children or working on his turn of the century Victorian home. When he is not doing that you can find him riding his Harley Davidson through the mountains of Asheville NC or answering fire calls.
His passions include writing, playing guitar, flying and embarrassing his children.
LOOK FOR BOOK 2
JAMESTOWN
COMING SOON
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http://www.raybayly.com
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