Claimed: Unchartered Territory (3 page)

She shuddered.

This man… creature was pure fantasy. His face, although interesting, was inconsequential. Even his odd coloring didn’t give her pause. He was, after all, a figment of her imagination. All that mattered was the business he had going on underneath those fitted leather pants. She let her gaze linger on the growing bulge that was right where it was supposed to be. He made an unrecognizable sound which drew her attention away from her area of interest.

“Did you say something big fella?” And boy was he big. Like get a major crook in your neck big if he stood too close.

He uttered something else completely unintelligible to her.

“Sorry sweetie, I speak four languages and Wookie isn’t one of them. But I don’t think that should matter much since neither one of us are here to discuss the origins of the universe. God, I hope that’s not what we’re supposed to be doing.”

He made a deep throaty sound she interpreted as laughter before closing the small span of space separating them.

She was right, they didn’t need words. And Dallas had to admit she liked his style. Firm hands on her ass hoisting her up to bring them eye level.

“Now there’s something you don’t see every day,” she whispered at seeing dark lavender eyes staring back at her. So close there was no mistaking the raised flesh between his brows making him look dangerously wild.

Exciting.

This was going to be fun.

Chapter Three

Whoever thought to call an emergency drill right at the beginning of the best damned dream… ever, was definitely in for an earful.

Her weary body protested as Dallas pushed the fuzzy cloud of tiredness from her mind. She swore it felt like she’d just closed her eyes. The haze faded as she registered the internal flashing lights accompanying the high pitched warning signal.

“Ah hell,” she muttered stumbling from her quarters and down the short distance to the command deck. Her ship blazed red with warning lights. Drill or not it was definitely the boost of adrenaline she needed to come to full alertness. She slid into her seat letting fingers fly over the controls to run system checks, absently remembering to slip in her ear piece.

“Juno to mission control.”

No response.

She tried again.

Still nothing. There wasn’t a chance for a third attempt.

The ship quaked, jostling her in her seat.

“Well that wasn’t a simulation.” She flipped the switch to raise the shielding from the observation windows. Her heart raced at the thought of having been hit by space debris or worse an asteroid.

How had her sensors not detected anything? Why hadn’t her shielding deflected the object?

There was only the briefest seconds of relief at seeing unobstructed air space before the ship quaked again. Only this time the shaking didn’t stop.

The combination of rattling and warning signals merged into a noisy pandemonium.

Dallas abandoned her attempts at bringing mission control back online focusing instead on identifying what caused her ship to blaze up like the Festival of Lights on Christmas Eve. Luckily the monitors seemed to be functioning properly and began displaying one malfunction after another.

Sensors, warp propulsion, solar sails, an atmospheric leak, and a whole host of other failures sprung up on her monitors. Definitely beyond the parameters of a normal simulation. Luckily the leak was in a non-essential section of the ship and easily sealed off. She swiveled in her chair to check oxygen levels in the rest of the ship but stopped short at the sight outside the observation windows.

Jupiter, which should have loomed big as day, was gone. So were its moons… and everything else for that matter. There wasn’t one single solitary star or planet to be seen. Inky blackness surrounded her from all sides in an endless void. 

Instant fear clutched her and try as she might Dallas couldn’t help but give in to a measure of panic.

“This can’t be.”

She checked the ships system for her current coordinates. The readings came back with the last directives she’d input which should have kept her at a safe distance from the wormhole. There were no overrides uploaded from the IAC and nothing else to explain why the view outside had changed. Yet she had a growing fear that somehow her ship had found its way into the wormhole. No amount of drift could explain the distance the ship would have had to travel to reach the singularity.

But what if
- she stopped the errant thought knowing it was absurd. But it was the only thing that made sense. The wormhole wasn’t a fixed point in space. It had moved and swallowed her. Well technically it swallowed her ship but she was in it and by default it had gobbled her up too.

Dallas tried to dismiss the theory as fear.

“Stupid, stupid,” she berated herself. If only she’d thought about the possibility beforehand. It explained why her original coordinates were off.

She checked the one thing she hadn’t thought to amidst her current crisis.

Hope sank as she stared at the digital gauge that monitored the ships speed.

“That’s not possible,” she muttered at the readings projecting back at her.

The ship was traveling at a velocity far beyond its capabilities. Her mind struggled as she tried to think of ways to safely slow and reverse her course.

No matter which way she looked at it there was no way to stop the current course, not if she wanted to keep the ship from ripping apart. She was trapped. Her only hope was to make it through to the other end in one piece. She was on this space ride for the long haul.

Destination unknown.

***

Chezar, Sector Two...

“Sir, another object has come through the aperture.”

The centurion’s words caused an immediate response from his superior. 

“Another sphere?” the Watch Leader asked disbelievingly.

“No Sir, this is larger, much larger.” The centurion pulled the object up on screen for the Watch Leader to see. “The structure and shape would indicate a vessel.”

“An alien vessel?” his superior muttered.

“Open all communication frequencies,” the Watch Leader ordered.

The centurion quickly complied

“Alien vessel you are encroaching on the Chezarian home world. Reroute your flight pattern away from the planet or risk capture.” The commander’s stern threat resonated with everyone else in the tower. “Send that out on all known translations.”

“Nothing sir,” the centurion reported unnecessarily after a long silence.

“Does the craft have weapon capability?”

“None that we are able to detect.”

“Lock on it.”

The directive caused the centurion a moment’s pause before he initiated the tracking device. The next injunction was equally shocking. 

“Open up a line to the High Commander’s office, immediately.”

“Aye sir.”

An occasional sphere was one thing, but the arrival of an alien vessel was definite cause for alarm and an immediate leap in the chain of command.

***

As far as deaths went hers was a bit anti-climatic.

She expected the ship to pull apart and set off a series of explosions creating a light show of epic proportion.

It always looked so spectacular in the movies.

Hers was nothing like that.

In fact it was pretty annoying. Instead of explosions the warning signals continued to scream loudly, the incessant sound bounced around in the ship as if on a mission to torture her into insanity. She wondered at the logic of having it blare so loudly. Maybe it was meant to be a distraction. Take the person’s mind off the very real fact they might just be at the end of their life cycle. Whatever the intent was in the design it was making her head throb. It didn’t help either that she was being jostled around through the whole experience. Maybe it would have been better if she hadn’t thought to strap in at the last minute. She could be blissfully knocked unconscious and not awake to witness her impending demise. 

Death
, the word rang in her head.

Would it hurt?

Or would everything just go black?

Was there really a white light she was supposed to go into?

Dallas waited for her life to flash before her eyes as homage to her existence.

She waited… for something. Anything!

Her emancipation from the Orphanage she’d grown up in after her mother left. Her first time with Robbie McCallister, which had lasted all of one hundred and twenty seconds. Yup, she’d counted. Or what about her second time which only tacked on about sixty more seconds. Try as she might she couldn’t get the reel of film that was her life to play out in a montage of heartaches and accomplishments.

Of course it would all come to an end on a bouncy joyride through a wormhole while being yelled at by the ship she was entombed in.

This sucked.

The vibration from the craft came to an unexpected end as her ship was belched from the wormholes interior and out into open space.

Around her a constellation came into view and with it the realization that she hadn’t died.

Dallas took a deep breath and exhaled it slowly to help soothe her rattled nerves. But it would take more than a few breathing techniques to get the erratic hammering of her heart under control. She felt the first step in her recovery would be to silence the unnecessary emergency signal. There was no need in being redundant because she already knew she was in trouble, with a capital HOLY SHIT.

A diagnostic check indicated the ship had made it through intact, for the most part. But she was forced to seal off yet another area due to atmospheric leaks.

The ships sensors were intermittent at best, and the solar sails were still unresponsive. But other than that it was a successful, albeit unexpected, voyage. She was surprised to see communications back online, at least somewhat. Dejectedly she noted they only seemed capable of a one way transmission. Restoring full communication would rank high on her priority list.

But there was another problem weighing heavily on her mind. She had no way of getting back to her own galaxy. Her journey through demonstrated that the singularity flowed in one direction and unless another wormhole existed with an opposite trajectory she was going to remain thoroughly and utterly lost. Her usual self-restraint gave way to an explosion of frustration. Dallas slammed the side of her fist against the control panel in front of her. Little relief was to be had in the action but she welcomed the subsequent ache as further testament to her survival.

She activated the ships internal recorder while opening the communication link to mission control.

“Captain Dallas Mann of Juno XI, mission log.”

She swallowed the lump in her throat trying not to think about the fact she might never return to earth. The reality was even more reason to make sure the International Aeronautical Community also known as the IAC had as much information as possible, if only to prevent them sending out another vessel for research and recovery. Well at least for research anyway. She was at the end of her contract and no longer of much value to them so there was little chance of an actual recovery mission for her. Still she felt a need to document her experience. It wasn’t worth the risk to have another person end up in her predicament. She felt it was her duty as the Juno captain and a scientist to document any and all information about her journey.

“…Juno XI has made an unexpected trip through the wormhole with minor complications. My communications appear to have a one way link, if it’s transmitting or for how long I’m not sure. It’s my belief that the wormhole is not a fixed point in space but rather it moves at an undetermined speed and has only a one way flow. My recommendation is that further study of the wormhole’s patterns be studied before sending additional manned crafts to observe. At this point I can only assume I have emerged in or around the same area as the second probe. The little information received from the probe isn’t sufficient enough to make a conclusive determination at this point.”

Dallas engaged the ship’s engines which seemed to hesitate only slightly before igniting. It was another thing to be thankful for in a situation which she didn’t think could yield many positives. She rotated the ship for a better view of her surroundings, not that she would find any familiar bearings in the unchartered territory.

“I’ll have better luck playing
ini mini miny moe
,” she muttered under her breath.

Lost was lost no matter what direction she chose to travel.

For several seconds she sank into her chair and let her mind wander back to the life she left behind on earth. It might not have been much by some people’s estimations but she enjoyed it. The future she expected to have at the end of the mission was a bright one. This was to be her final trip to fulfill the Orphanages contract and now she would never return home.

Dallas shook off the thought knowing it would only give way to the panic attack hovering so close. She hadn’t felt this vulnerable since she was a child and her mother left for the lunar colony without her. It wasn’t an emotion she cared to revisit.

An object came into view from the observation window on her starboard side, interrupting her destructive thought pattern.

Her heart lurched.

A planet.

But not just any planet.

It looked familiarly like the one she’d spied from the probes transmissions. It loomed large. Imposingly alien. She could clearly make out distinct blue bodies of what she previously believed to be water along with patches of green and an abundance of orange.

If there was water and vegetation it could possibly sustain life. The thought of a forced landing was something she didn’t relish or wanted to even consider but the oxygen levels were low from the atmospheric leaks and her choices were slim. She had less than five weeks of air supply left. A month wasn’t a long time especially not to determine if she should risk landing on the planet’s surface. She could speculate about whether there was water or plant life from now until eternity but without an actual sample of the planet’s atmosphere she wouldn’t know if she could actually survive on it.

In that moment Dallas remembered the undeployed rover.

A bubble of laughter erupted from inside catching her off guard.

“See what happens when you start to give in to fear, you don’t think straight. And apparently you spend a lot of time talking to yourself too.”

She would send the rover down. It could be her salvation or a confirmation of her possible doom. She was choosing to go with the more positive thought.

Dallas resumed transmission. “Fuel levels are stable but two atmospheric leaks have reduced the oxygen levels. I don’t expect life support to last more than a few weeks barring any more complications. Deploying the rover to the planet seems the best plan of action to verify if it’s capable of sustaining human life. Ending communication.” she relayed to anyone who might be listening to the transmission.

She was beyond grateful when all systems registered positive for the rover launch and was in the process of deployment when the ship lurched harder than she experienced coming through the wormhole.

“What the hell was that?”  Dallas exclaimed after being jerked around like a rag doll in the hands of temperamental child. The lights in the control room flickered off and on before submerging the room in complete darkness. After several seconds backup lighting kicked in and caste the cabin in an eerie blue glow. The control panel was dormant. Communications were completely out, thrusters unresponsive and the steady hum of the oxygen being pumped throughout the ship came to a shuddering stop.

“Out of the frying pan and into the fire,” she said as gravity abandoned her along with all other ship’s functions.

Mentally, she did a quick estimation of potential available oxygen left inside. It didn’t look good. Hours, if she were lucky. Right now she felt the only luck she had in her favor was of the bad variety.

That kind of thinking isn’t going to help matters Dallas, so buck up and use that beautiful brain of yours to figure something out
, her inner voice encouraged sending her into action.

Her attempts to bring the ship back online were unsuccessful and she felt drained after running through every protocol several times without even a hiccup of response.

The ship jerked again but was followed by the strange sensation of movement. She confirmed the feeling to be an actual fact as she looked out the windows only to see the alien planet growing increasingly larger.

She was being pulled into the planet’s atmosphere.

“I guess I’ll know soon enough if it’s habitable or not, that’s if the ship doesn’t burn up in the atmosphere without the power to its shielding,” she muttered to the empty room as she unbuckled and floated to retrieve her space suit and helmet. Equipped with its own internal air supply the design was a far cry from the bulky suits worn over a hundred years ago. The sleek, fitted design allowed for unhampered mobility. The helmet’s snug fit attached easily to the collar of the suit with only two fasteners which provided an air tight seal. The oxygen flow started as soon as the last closure was in place. A few clicks to the arm controls had her firmly planted on the ground. Beautiful gravity.

If only the next touch down would go as easy
, she thought before going back to strap in.

***

An alien vessel breached Chezarian planetary space. It was all the information needed to move into action. Instead of waiting to be updated on what the craft held Remar chose to go with the embarking team. The ship was larger than their patrol crafts, and he wouldn’t risk sending his centurions into an unknown situation he wasn’t prepared to enter himself. The last time an actual alien ship came through the aperture it had obvious signs of battle and the two crew compliment aboard had blood in their eyes. Four centurions were lost that day before the multi-limbed aliens were put down. Remar refused to allow it to happen again.

He wanted to see these creatures face to face.

“Wake my brother and see he is fully briefed. He is to stay secured in the High Command offices until I have given the all clear. We are surely to start getting communications from the other sectors but he is only to inform that we are investigating the matter,” he instructed his advisor.

“My lord, perhaps your brother should go in your stead...” His Under Commander’s nervous comment trailed off at the hard look Remar shot him.

He wasn’t a man to be argued with especially not on a matter of importance.

***

Dallas knew something wasn’t right when instead of spiraling towards the planet’s surface her ship continued to move at a regulated speed and on a straight trajectory towards the alien world. It passed through the atmospheric barrier with the barest hint of turbulence.

For most of the journey she watched in awe as the planet’s surface began to take on more defined shapes and forms. Cloud coverage gave way to stunning red mountain tops, land, and water.

She couldn’t help but feel a bit of elation even as her steady dissent took her further into the unknown. She thought she saw the flash of something from the surface and craned from her buckled seat for a better view. It was gone too quickly to identify. But her curiosity was piqued by another spark only this time she could make out the formation of the structure it seemed to come from.

Buildings
! Her heart soared. If there were buildings then there was life and obviously intelligent life forms. She was quickly convinced that whatever species lived on the planet was responsible for her ship’s easy entry onto the planet.

“First contact. This should be documented,” she mumbled wishing everything wasn’t completely offline.

Dallas’ mind raced to conjure a potential image of the inhabitants from what she could visually glean. It didn’t help. She would just have to wait and hope that her rescuers were from a friendly species.

An object whizzed by her window, then another. Both moved too quickly for her to make out a form or determine what they might be.

As she stretched to get a better look a white foamy substance landed on the surface of the glass and began to cover it rapidly. The whole process happened in a matter of seconds making further vision impossible.