Harbinger

by Stephen Christiansen

  The boxes and crates of seeds and seedlings were smuggled aboard the Harbinger during the night shift and no one had noticed. It had taken every ounce of precaution and tons of planning, but in the end it had paid off. Earth wasn’t going to die after all. It was going to live, albeit on another planet.

  All had gone according to plan. All they had to do was get into orbit over Phoebe and the crates would be loaded onto the shuttle that he was assigned to. The shuttles would clear the atmosphere and when they landed, Peter would make sure that his crates stayed with his land rover. The hard part was over and it was smooth sailing from here.

  That was until this disaster had happened. Now that everything was torn apart he had to check up on his cargo. He simply couldn’t come all of this way and not succeed. The future of Earth was in his hands. It was his responsibility to ensure that these plants lived.

  He knew that he was told not to wander the ship since there were spaces that were now compromised with hull breaches and after what had happened to Denise and Helena he wasn’t looking forward to finding out firsthand what it would do to his system. Yet, he had to make sure that his precious cargo was still intact.

  Peter had slipped away from the rest of the scientists without them knowing. It was easy since no one really needed a botanist unless they were asking if something was edible.

  “Hey, Peter, is this edible?”

  He could still hear the laughter in the cafeteria as one of the more testosterone inclined astronauts held up a piece of his unidentifiable, poor excuse of a meal that was served back at the base.

  Peter shook his head. He needed to put the ghosts of his past to rest. After all, they weren’t going to last long on the dying planet anyway.

  Peter continued to move forward through the empty cargo bay. The flashlight that he brought didn’t help much, but it was enough to find the huge crates that were stored here. They had been bolted down so they weren’t going to move until they were unbolted. This also meant that they weren’t going move unless the ship went down and by the looks of things this was a high possibility.

  The question was, which container was he looking for? His informant had told him that his container was here, but he had failed to inform him that there were several containers. He was told the containers number, however it was so hard to read and to be honest, he hadn’t taken the time to memorize the number given to him. He simply thought that he would easily find the container and all would be fine.

  “Now was that A-42213 or A-42214?”

  Peter’s flashlight flicked between the two large containers that he was considering. Each one was easily eight feet in each direction, height, width and depth. The large metal doors that stood before him were held shut by a metal locking mechanism that couldn’t easily be jarred open, but could be manually opened by pushing on the lever. The lever would retract the bolts that pushed up and down into the container and the door would be able to swing freely open. Still, he had to figure which one to open. With a shrug, Peter opened the one on his right.

  Peter’s eyes went wide. This wasn’t the container he was looking for and now he wasn’t sure that he had wanted to see what was inside this one. This had to be a mistake, perhaps a really bad joke. This simply couldn’t be right. He just needed to close this and return to the others before...

  “You are not supposed to be here.”

  The voice sounded familiar. He had only heard it once before and he was sure that he would have pieced it all together if he had the time. Time was no longer his ally, it was no longer his friend, and it wasn’t even a companion. He had run out of time, quite literally.

  The sudden and immediate sharp pain shot between his ribs as he felt something cold and keen thrust into him. He felt his warm blood start to spill. The cold of the air around him started to rush into his body. He tried to scream in pain but the knife had cut between his ribs and into his lungs. He couldn’t breathe to get enough air to scream. Peter’s body convoluted only once before falling lifeless to the ground in a pool of his spilled blood.

  Chapter: 19

  “There, that should do it,” Bruce said. “I think I’ve got the navigation controls back online. It’s not pretty. However, we should not only be able to get out of this system, but we should be able to use our warp drive once we get there.”

  A slight cheer of enthusiasm went around the room. Tracy had thrown herself at Bruce and allowed herself to cry tears of relief. Bruce was given a pat on the back by Cleo and a firm handshake by Richard.

  Peter smiled and went to congratulate everyone for doing their part. Even though Bruce had fixed their navigations, everyone had done something.

  ‘Wait…’ Eric thought. ‘One, two, three, four, I make five, Vincent makes six (wherever he is), we’ve lost two, that makes eight but we started with nine.’

  Math wasn’t Eric’s strong feature, but paying attention to detail was, or at least when he was paying attention. He had to admit that he had to take a short walk to clear his head so he could think with better clarity, especially after what had happened to Helena and with the news of Denise. He had only assumed that everyone would be here once he got back. Assuming that Vincent was still off pouting somewhere, that still left...

  “Has anyone seen Peter?” Eric asked.

  “He’s dead,” the voice said from behind them.

  All eyes turned toward the sound of the security officer that they never thought that they would hear from or see again, and a few of them hoped that this would be the case. Now that he was here, they all had hoped that he had a dark sense of humor, a sarcastic tone that wanted to get shock value, or perhaps he was just giving a warning of what might have happened to him since he was no longer with them. They had wondered if this was Vincent’s way of stating “I hope he’s dead from wandering off on this unstable ship because that was what he would deserve.”

  However, from the look on Vincent’s face, he was neither in a sarcastic, dark humor mood nor in a condescending mood. It seemed to everyone there that Vincent was serious, dead serious.

  “What do you mean, dead?” Richard asked.

  “I mean just that doctor, the opposite of being alive. He’s dead, and I don’t mean by some accident or some unfortunate disaster. He was murdered, just as I suspect that the other two deaths were murders as well.”

  Tracy let out a gasp as she backed herself into a corner. Her eyes darted from one individual to another.

  “You can’t be serious.” Richard stated with surprise.

  “Oh, yes, I’m very serious,” Vincent snapped back. “One of us is a murderer.”

  “Vincent, you can’t just go around accusing people of murder. I’m sure he’s just...”

  “Denise and Helena are both dead. Both of these are just too convenient and coincidental if you ask me.”

  “You’re just paranoid. Peter was just right here a moment ago. I’m sure he couldn’t have gotten far. He’s probably just...”

  “He was cut open with something very sharp and was stuffed into a container, a container that he couldn’t put himself into. His blood that had spilled all over the bay told me where to find him. Was everyone here during this whole time?”

  “Yes, we were all…”

  “No, we weren’t,” Eric stated. “I took a walk myself, just to stretch my legs.”

  “We all took turns,” Bruce added. “All of us at one time or another, even I took a short break. A couple of us actually went off looking for you. Are you suggesting that none of us have an alibi? And now that you have mentioned it, Vincent, you don’t have an alibi either. You were missing from the group the whole time.”

  Vincent stepped forward with his hands clenched. “Are you accusing me of killing anyone, of being a murderer? I’ve heard enough of that accusation during my tour of duty. Do you want to find out what happened to those that had said such a thing?”

  It was Eric who stepped into the middle of the brewing argument that was steadily getting out of hand.

&
nbsp; “No one is going to accuse anyone of anything anymore. It’s counterproductive at this time. Now, we have one shot at getting out of here and who knows how long any of our repairs will last. Let’s take our shot before something else goes wrong. We all stay together. As soon as we have plotted a course back to civilization then we can start figuring out who’s a murderer or if anyone is paranoid.”

  The voice of reason seemed to calm the situation down, but Eric doubted that this would all be forgotten. Vincent didn’t look like a man that would easily forgive and Richard was a little too prideful to let anything drop.

  “Alright then,” Eric stated trying to continue to calm everyone down. “Bruce, you said you knew a little about ships. Can you get us out of the system?”

  Bruce nodded. The quicker they got out of here the better.

  The geologist looked over the laptops that Denise had set up. He had to admit that she had made it easy for them. It was all laid out in such a simple order. He checked the long range radar, punched in the coordinates through the navigation system and turned on the only engine that had been fixed.

  The engine lights flickered. At first Bruce thought that the power to the engine wasn’t fully fixed and his hopes were about to be dashed, but that was when the power light went green. The needle on the virtual dial started to creep up from the low end toward the middle as the engine started to kick in.

  A slight rumbling could be felt across the ship. It rippled through their feet and through their bodies. It could be heard running through the bulkheads. At first it felt rough, as though the engine was trying to find itself or its rhythm. The frame started to shake and for a moment it was as if it would shake itself apart. Since there were parts of the ship missing and major hull damage all over, this was a possibility. But then the vibrations settled and became the life force of the ship.

  Bruce let out a deep sigh. He was sure that they were going to blow the only engine that they had, at best or shake the ship to nothing be debris at worst. After he got his heart to stop beating so quickly, Bruce placed his fingers on the virtual throttle. This was a set of LED lights in a bar formation. The bottom two green bars, one on each side was lit up. Bruce knew that as he drug his fingers upward, the bar will fill with lights showing the energy output into the engine. This in turn would increase their speed. As long as the LED lights continued to stay green then the engine was doing alright. As it goes into the yellow or red spectrum then the stress levels of engine was being compromised. If the LED lights went into blue or purple, then the engines were cooling off.

  Bruce gave one last look at the virtual pressure gauge. This would show the amount of energy flowing through the conduits. He would have to balance the energy flow while maintaining the stress level of the engine and ensure that the navigations was working properly while keeping an eye on the long range radar.

  As Bruce’s fingers went up on the LED bar, the green lights started to fill in. One bar, then the next continued to turn green. As he did, the vibrations of the ship started to increase. There was movement on the long range radar, showing that the nearby planets were starting to move away from them. In other words, the ship was moving.

  Bruce gave a little more power, still tentative on how the engine and the ship as a whole could handle it. This was the hardest part. Once they made the jump to light speed, the warp field generated by the singularity engine, would keep them stable, that was until they came out of warped space. Then, they would be facing the same problems that they were facing now. This was why he wanted to test their integrity before making the jump.

  The engine continued to perform with expert precision. It only dropped once into the yellow when they came too close to a gravity well of one of the larger outer planets, yet despite this, they continued to build speed. More and more green lights appeared as Bruce continued to push the engine.

  The energy fluctuations moved into the cautionary zone once or twice, but they seemed to be holding as well. These weren’t the ideal situations, only running on one engine that was barely held together with half the ship missing and the other half riddled with hull breaches, but they were running as best as they could. If Denise was still alive then he would have to congratulate her on her abilities. He had to admit, she really knew her stuff. His only regret was that he would never have the opportunity to tell her.

  The last planet moved into their long range radar on their port side. It was still quite some distance away and offered no threat to their trajectory. Under any other circumstance, many pilots would find the last planet in the system and use its gravitational well as a slingshot to help give their ship an extra boost to get them into deeper space before turning on their warp drive. Bruce didn’t want to chance it. It would take a little longer to reach the system’s outskirts, but as long as the engine was holding up there was no need to take any further risks.

  Suddenly there was a flashing light, a warning on their long range radar that lit up the room and caught everyone’s attention. The dot that had been the only thing that they had to worry about, the only object left to clear in the solar system was now joined with three more.

  “What is that?” Cleo asked.

  “Is it good or bad?” Tracy asked. She had hoped that their nightmare was finally over. Now it looked as if they were having more difficulties before they were able to get out of this system.

  “Are they moving?” Vincent asked. He had a hunch of what they were, and if these weren’t some exo-planetary meteorites or even the plant’s moons, then they were in a load of trouble. It might have been better if the engines had blown and taken them down with a sudden and quick finality, if his suspicions were correct, then to face what could be coming their way. They were in bad enough trouble as it was and now they would be in a condition that would make all of that seem like child’s play.

  “There are several of them,” Richard said as he stated the obvious.

  “I don’t know what they are just yet,” Bruce mentioned as he continued to try to keep an eye on power and engines.

  He didn’t have all of their equipment up and running so their scanners weren’t online. All he could do was see them, he just couldn’t tell what they were. However, he knew how moons and meteors acted in space. They would follow a known rotational trajectory. These, however, seemed to come from the top of the planet and were coming right toward them. If he didn’t know better the he would have thought that these were ships that were using the planet’s electromagnetic shielding around its top pole to hide their presence. He had heard of raiding ships using this technique, he just didn’t want to stick around to see if he was right. It was time to get out of here despite the dangers of catching the planets gravitational well.

  “Let me put in the coordinates through our navigations and I can make the jump to warp speed,” Bruce stated as he started to punch in a few numbers while checking the star charts. “I know it’s a bit risky, but I don’t like the looks of whatever is coming our way.”

  “Agreed,” Vincent stated. “Get us out of here and fast.”

  Cleo started to shake her head “No, no, please no…” Her pleas were like a whisper that she hadn’t even realized that she had spoken aloud.

  “Can some please shut her up?” Vincent asked with bitterness and a bite in his voice. It was bad enough that Tracy was just on the verge of having a nervous breakdown; he didn’t need a second individual to have one as well.

  Cleo knew what Vincent was thinking. He was thinking that the women aboard this ship were useless. That might have been the case with Tracy, but no, that wasn’t the case with her. She knew exactly what she was doing and she was an expert in her field. She wasn’t useless. It was just that Cleo knew that this was probably going to happen, but it wasn’t supposed to happen like this. There were supposed to be more Space Marines to back them up and less of the Xenoamorphopseudopods. Her career was on the line to bring back one of the creatures, but she had been assured that she would have more protection, that there was not
hing to worry about. Now, there was everything to worry about. Her career wasn’t as important as her life and if Mister “Smith”, or whoever he really was, wanted his damn alien then he would have to come and get it himself.

  “Get us out of here! Get us out of here now!”

  “I’m trying. I’m trying...there got it!”

  Bruce hit the “enter” button and allowed the coordinates to be programmed into the navigations. The controls for the singularity engine lit up. All systems moved into the green. Power started to flow from the singularity as the engine started to warm up.

  The vibrations of the ship had a second vibration added to it. It was a slight rumble that hadn’t yet found the harmony with the initial vibrations. Once everything was attuned, the ship would fly through warped space essentially getting them to their destination faster than light would take to travel the same distance. They really weren’t going to go faster than the speed of light, they were just going to warp space and that space would take them to their destination faster.