by Liza Probz
Chapter 1
It might not be her first time in space, but it would be the first time Brook had set foot on an alien world. Captain Jennifer Brooklyn, or "Brook" as the crew she commanded called her, wasn't sure what to expect on the trip to JL-398. She wasn’t able to anticipate and therefore, the plan made her uneasy.
And that wasn't the only thing.
Brook was being sent to JL-398 to try and locate Dr. Sylvia Cohen, the brave and perhaps foolish scientist who had agreed to take the first one-woman mission to the newly discovered planet to look for signs of life. She hadn't been heard from since her ship breached the atmosphere almost six weeks before.
There was a high possibility that she had, in fact, found signs of life, but maybe they'd been more than she'd bargained for. Perhaps NASA hadn’t prepared the headstrong scientist properly enough.
Brook pulled up the report on her display and leaned over, trying to clear her fearful thoughts. Dr. Cohen was a renowned astrobiologist who'd chaired the scientific committee charged with assisting NASA in planning the exploratory mission to JL-398. She'd convinced them that a human, and not modified scavenger robots, would be a more appropriate choice for leading the expedition. She'd headed out to JL-398 in her one-person craft with only one FIDO to guard her.
And there was no sign that she survived the crash landing that the craft apparently suffered.
NASA had debated the wisdom of sending a ship after the missing scientist. It wasn't until the government had gotten involved that a mission had been seriously discussed. Since Brook had the most experience out of their other options, she and her crew were selected as the search party.
Captain Jennifer Brooklyn had been the first woman to breach the solar system. She'd logged more hours in space than anyone except the astronauts who lived on the international space station. After faster-than-light travel had been achieved, she had been the first captain assigned to one of the new FTL ships.
While she'd never faced a possible alien threat, she had experienced plenty of tumultuous situations in her tenure as a space shuttle captain. Radiation scares. Microfractures in the hull. Decaying orbit. Life support failure.
That last one almost got me. She skimmed Dr. Cohen’s file for the tenth time, hoping to find something that might help bridge the gap in her knowledge of the events that took place.
If we hadn't managed to slingshot around Jupiter and haul ass back to base, we would have breathed our last, stuck between the giant planet and Mars.
There were plenty of things to fear in space without having to add the possibility of a hostile alien presence.
Brook had to remind herself over and over again that there was a high probability that there was no alien presence at all. Dr. Cohen could have experienced a malfunction and ended up stranded on the planet’s surface with no way to call home to Earth. NASA thought that to be the most likely cause of the communication blackout. Since they’d warned Dr. Cohen that rescue wasn’t assured, perhaps the professor had considered herself abandoned and had concentrated on other things besides communicating with Earth.
Like survival.
I’ve got a bad feeling about this. Brook frowned, exiting the display and leaning back in the chair of her cramped office. As captain, she was afforded more space than any of her crew, but the ship wasn’t large, and her room was about the size of her closet back on Earth.
She had learned to trust her instincts, and that meant being on edge for most of the mission from start to finish. They’d departed Earth almost two days before, and would be reaching JL-398 by late the next day.
In the time since their departure, Brook had been drilling her team on every eventuality she could concoct. Her lieutenant had finally persuaded her to give the crew a break. They assured her that they were prepared for every conceivable eventuality.
Brook had grudgingly let the crew have a respite, but she knew there was no way to prep for everything. Although she trusted her crew, admiring the way they functioned like a well-oiled machine, something inside her told her that this mission would change everything.
You’re overreacting. You’re going to land on JL-398, pick up the lost professor, and come home a hero.
Brook wanted to laugh at the naivety of her thoughts. None of her missions ever went as easily as she wanted, and to expect this one to was sheer folly. Still, if she went by Lieutenant Cheerful’s estimation, they’d discover an ice cream waterfall on JL-398 and spend the whole trip making friends with alien ponies and wishing on rainbows. Brook chuckled as she glanced toward her first officer.
Lieutenant Jeffrey Brunt, a.k.a. Lieutenant Cheerful, had joined her crew nearly a decade ago when NASA hadn’t yet figured out how to break the faster-than-light barrier. Her mission had been to circumnavigate Pluto, dropping probes that would use the pseudo-planet as a launching ground for exploration outside of the solar system.
At first Brunt had been quiet, reserved, interested in cementing his place as second-in-command. She hadn’t blamed him. Her crew at the time was a bit rowdy, and she’d left it up to Brunt to earn their respect and cooperation. Besides, if he couldn’t handle a little grumbling and good-natured ribbing, then he wouldn’t be a good fit to serve under her command.
Brunt had stumbled initially, but when they’d run afoul of a comet’s tail and ended up with microfractures in the shuttle’s hull, he’d stepped up and proved his mettle by donning an EV suit and heading out to fix the fractures himself. The shuttle’s engineer, Talia Bryant, had given him instructions through the comm system, and she’d reported that Brunt had sung “Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows” to himself the whole time he’d worked.
When Brunt crawled back in through the hatch afterward, Brook had asked him how it had gone. They’d barely cleared the tail, and the chance of pieces of debris dislodging him or puncturing his suit had still been very high.
“Piece of cake,” he’d said when he’d pulled off his helmet.
His performance had earned the crew’s respect and his nifty nickname. Lieutenant Cheerful seemed to think every mission would have a happy ending. He was already writing his speech for after the victory parade when they returned to Earth with Dr. Cohen.
Brook wished she had his confidence.
“Captain, we’ve picked up something on long-range sensors.” Talia’s voice over the comm system broke through her reverie.
Brook stood up and left her office, striding onto the bridge.
“Report,” she said, taking her place in the captain’s chair and motioning to Talia to bring up the view screen.
“There’s some kind of vessel out there,” Talia responded. “It’s at the very limit of our sensors, but our scans have determined that it is not a natural phenomenon.”
Brook nodded, staring at the tiny silver dot that appeared on the view screen before her. Could this be proof of alien life, like Dr. Cohen was looking for? Or was there something wrong with the sensors? It wouldn’t be the first time they’d malfunctioned.
“Stay on course,” Brook said to her pilot, Conrad Weitz, who nodded back at her. “Talia, keep tracking the object. I want an analysis of its composition and—”
“Unidentified vessel.”
The voice boomed throughout the bridge. Talia let out a yelp, pulled out her earpiece, and slammed her hands over her ears. The voice was incredibly loud, echoing through the tight confines of the small cabin.
“You will identify yourself immediately.” Brook leaned forward and tapped the dashboard, pushing down the fear that threatened to take over her sense of calm.
“It’s hijacked the comm system,” Talia stated, frantically trying to retake control. “I can’t override it.”
“This is Captain Jennifer Brooklyn of the Earth vessel Earhart. With whom do we have the pleasure of speaking?”
“Earth vessel, you will prepare for boarding.”
“What?!?” Brook rose, pointing to Talia and then running her finger across her throat in a quick gesture.
&nbs
p; Talia nodded, then hit the failsafe that took the communication unit offline.
The door to the bridge opened and Lieutenant Cheerful stumbled in. “What was that?”
“Proof of intelligent life in the universe,” Brook said, then watched as the rest of her crew crowded onto the bridge. “Where’s Smith?”
She didn’t see the payload specialist and she wanted to put eyes on everyone. Now.
“I think he was sleeping,” Diego Alvarez, security specialist and Smith’s bunkmate, replied.
“Get him up and in here immediately.” Brook needed her entire crew around her. She grabbed Lieutenant Cheerful’s arm and yanked him over to her side. Standing on her toes to speak into his ear, she whispered, “I want the FIDOs activated and any weapons we’ve got distributed.”
“Understood,” he replied and headed to a console near the cockpit. He punched a few buttons, which had to be the sequence needed to activate the FIDOs.
The ship was equipped with four FIDOs, or Firstwave Intelligent Defense Operatives, who were used in situations where the need for brawn outweighed the need for brains. Although “intelligent” was in their name, Brook thought FIDOs were dumber than the dogs they were named after.
The door to the bridge slid open again and Alvarez filed in with Smith behind him. This meant her entire crew of eight was assembled, and none too soon. The view screen showed what had appeared to be a blip only moments ago was now a very large and very fast ship, and it was headed straight toward them.
Brook took a deep breath, making sure her voice was calm before she addressed her crew. “Well, people, it seems we’ve confirmed one thing on our search and rescue mission. Intelligent life exists outside of Earth, and apparently they’re keen to guard their territory.”
The eyes of her crew were on her as they seemed to be hanging on her every word. She couldn’t blame them. Not only was this the most important discovery in the last century, hell, eon, but it was also a major threat. They were the only humans in this part of the galaxy. There was no backup.
“You heard them tell us to get ready to be boarded. It may be that they just want to check us out before letting us go on our way, but I’m not too partial to being told what to do on my own ship. So while we’ll give them a chance to explain their behavior, we also need to be ready to defend ourselves.” She glanced around, pinning each of them with her steely amber eyes.
Even as she spoke, Brook wondered what kind of defense they could put up against the clearly superior alien technology. The alien vessel, growing larger by the second, looked to be equipped with several external weapons. Her ship had a single laser bank that was used to blow up small meteorites or debris encountered in space. She doubted it was any match for the alien ship's big guns.
“We’re bringing the FIDOs online, and Lieutenant Cheerful will be passing out our limited supply of weapons. No one is to make a move without my order. Let’s not start an intergalactic incident because one of you gets an itchy trigger finger. Understood?” she barked loudly.
“Yes, Captain.” She could hear the worry in the chorus of her crew’s voices, and she couldn’t blame them one bit.
On the screen, the silver ship grew until it blotted out the stars around it.
Time to have our first encounter. I hope like hell they’re hospitable.
Chapter 2
Major Thrak’Lin Ontarii stood in front of the opaque membrane with his hands crossed behind his back. He’d had the crew haul in the little Earthling ship with the tractor beam, and the engineers had finally secured access to the smaller ship’s entry hatch. When Ontarii gave the word, the membrane would open and he could enter the ship’s hatch.
Although he’d never been on a scouting mission to Earth, he’d done coursework on all sentient life forms in the nearby systems. Once he’d heard that it was an Earthling female that took down the defense grid around his planet, he’d reviewed everything he could get his hands on about Earthling anatomy, society, and development. Funny enough, it wasn’t the Earthlings, or “humans”, as they liked to be called, that he was worried about.
The ship’s sensors had detected Hareema DNA on the human vessel. Ontarii had been closely following communications traffic on Zanthar for the past couple months, ever since the Minister of Defense had been revealed to be a Hareema infiltrator. Although no more Hareema had been found on Zanthar since, Ontarii knew that constant vigilance was required in the face of the insidious threat the enemy posed.
The Hareema were intelligent life from the outer reaches of the system. In their natural form, they were six-feet tall gelatinous rectangles with a reddish hue, but one rarely met a Hareema in its natural form.
Over the millennia Hareema had evolved the skill of shapeshifting, meaning they could take any shape, animate or inanimate. A Hareema operative could become the complete duplicate of whichever object it chose to imitate, including a Zantharian. A Hareema could hold the chosen shape for approximately six to eight hours, according to the latest scientific reports. Granted those reports were now centuries old, so Ontarii wondered what advances the Hareema might have made with their abilities in that time.
Six weeks ago, a small human vessel with only one life form aboard had somehow managed to knock out the defense shield that covered the planet Zanthar. Although the scientists on his planet had not yet been able to determine exactly how the shield was taken down, what they did know was that it was part of a complicated plot involving a conspiracy that pointed to a Hareema presence on Earth.
Although opinion on Zanthar was still divided, the Supreme Regent Xivthar Rasveen had assured everyone that he was working to get to the bottom of said conspiracy. He was doing so with the aid of his mate, the human female, Dr. Sylvia Cohen.
The thought of a Zantharian mating with a human set off a chaotic mixture of feelings in the major. He had concern over the political ramifications of such a union, discomfort regarding who could be trusted with state secrets. There was a twinge of curiosity at the nuts and bolts of their attraction to each other, and a bit of disgust at the thought of mating outside of his own species.
He knew his confusion was shared by other Zantharians, and the Supreme Regent had been having a hell of a time keeping ahead of the other political factions on Zanthar. Ontarii thought the Hareema threat hanging over their heads was the sole thing that kept Rasveen in power.
That and the fact that his brother was missing.
The Minister of Defense had been replaced by a Hareema operative who had used its power to manipulate his underlings and somehow take down the defense grid. The real Minister of Defense, known by those closest to him as Drake, had yet to be found.
Ontarii figured Drake to be dead. The Supreme Regent, however, wasn’t ready to give up hope of his brother’s recovery. He had parties searching throughout the system for him, and the ships that made up the defense perimeter around Zanthar, including the flagship that Ontarii was currently commanding, had orders to scan everything for signs of Drake’s DNA.
So far, nothing had been uncovered that might sustain the regent’s hope.
Ontarii took a deep breath, pushing away his rambling thoughts. It was time to investigate the human ship to determine if a Hareema infiltrator was on board. The ship was small and quarters were tight, which left Ontarii able to take two men with him. He was secure in his superior abilities and technology savviness, so a few extra eyes and hands were all he required. Besides, the flagship would be monitoring their movements should anything go awry.
Part of Ontarii hoped something would. The silence was killing everyone. The Hareema were masters of disguise and that meant anyone around, at any given time, could be the enemy seeking to take you out. They needed advancement on their search. He would take anything afforded him to relieve this tension of not knowing whom he could trust.
Ontarii gave the signal to open the membrane. A thin slit appeared in the center of its surface and he moved forward, nodding to his companions as they moved inside.
Scanning the surroundings, he moved forward and gestured for his men to follow.
The corridors were tight, forcing them to walk single-file, with Ontarii in the front position. He reached a doorway quickly and found the button that activated it. Ontarii waved to his men to take up positions on the left side of the door while he pressed his back to the wall on the right before hitting the button.
The doors whooshed open and Ontarii crept to the edge of the doorway to peer through it. No one greeted him on the other side. He motioned his men forward into what appeared to be the crew’s mess.
Where are the humans? Surely they aren’t ignorant enough to set up an ambush on such a small craft. Even worse, they could all be Hareema agents using human form for cover.
It was impossible to tell by the readings they’d received on their ship.
Ontarii stood in the center of the mess and debated which of the two doors that led out of the area he should try first. From their scans of the ship, he knew one led towards the crew quarters and the infirmary, while the other headed towards the bridge.
Ontarii frowned, considering his options. He could split his men up, search one option while they searched the other. But dividing his forces didn’t make sense to him. That meant he needed to choose a direction.
Ontarii relied on instinct to guide him often in military situations, but when dealing with an almost completely unfamiliar life form such as humans, he didn’t think his instinct would provide an adequate guide. He did what he thought best, and left the choice completely up to chance.
“Through there,” he said, his voice low as he motioned toward the door that would lead in the direction of the bridge.
The corridor was empty, and the ship eerily quiet. On either side of them were two doors, leading to what he assumed were small scientific stations. In front of them stood another door, this one leading to the bridge. He moved toward the final door, as he motioned to his companions to take up their positions on the left side while he went right.
