Everything happens quickly. Maria is laughing and joking, and then there is an alarm. It is loud and Maria knows that something is wrong. Something is very wrong. The lights of the ship have dimmed and occasionally there are flashing red and blue lights.
Eakran is scared.
“It seems we are taking heavy fire,” he says loud enough to be heard over the alarm, but not in a panic. He is controlled and he leads the crew in a line to the command room.
They all sit. She looks to Darker as the sturdy chairs that are made from the metal of the floor strap him in. He is her closest friend, she loves him like a father. They could be in real danger, the alarm is making her anxious and worried that something horrible is about to happen, and she takes stock of who she has to say goodbye to. Everyone is here, everyone who would need to know. Her mother is dead now and she’d never embraced the extended family that she had, she hadn’t seen them in years.
Darker is here. She looks to Alia, the bright woman who had known the darkest times. She doesn’t deserve this, Maria thinks. Their trip was meant to be easy, Eakran had assured them that it would be, but the alarms. They are loud, piercing after so long, and they must mean something horrible is just around the corner. Alia is serene, though, eyes closed and Maria tries to do the same.
“Shut off that alarm!” she yells at Eakran.
He looks back at her and before he can speak, the ship rocks violently.
“Our shield is down!” Eakran yells. “We’re getting out of here. Ship, engage ejection!”
The ship rocks and Maria watches as the chairs rearrange themselves. Then the shaking of the ship intensifies and Maria holds on to the metal arms of the chair. Something happens, her chair moves and suddenly she is close behind Giovanni’s, who sits next to Eakran, and Alia is right behind him. They are stacked like a roller coaster train and she can only assume that Darker is behind her. There is a loud explosion, chaotic rocking, and then everything changes, they are not in the whole ship anymore and she wonders if it has blown apart and they are all trapped in the debris. But Eakran seems to be piloting and it dawns on her that they must have engaged escape pod protocols. And after a while, the chaos settles.
“My ship is done,” Maria hears Eakran say. She watches as he finishes undoing his restraints. He stands and turns. Maria is alarmed by the look on his face.
“Where is James?”
That’s Darker’s government name, Maria thinks.
“Is he not with us?”
Maria grabs at her restraints, hoping to loosen her body enough to turn, but suddenly, their escape pod begins to jerk. Not again, she thinks, and holds on tightly.
“Giovanni, engage weapons while I find better…”
Eakran is interrupted. They have just been hit by something big. The escape pod seems to roll and everyone braces themselves while Eakran struggles to hold on to his chair. When the ship settles, they all hear a communication alert and then they hear a robotic voice over the intercoms.
“Surrender, Representative. Cease evasive maneuvers or your vessel will be destroyed. Surrender. You and all passengers will become prisoners. Stand by for capture.”
A large ship emerges on the display screen, it is humble, similar in shape to a large space rock and designed to appear benign, but a portion of it opens and it swallows the escape pod easily.
– – –
The first spaceship that Maria Moreno stepped onto was a Druinte ship, like the IP vessel that Eakran would take to Earth, but much bigger. She wouldn’t have known this at the time, but after her time on Eakran’s ship, she would have recognized the malleable metal floors and walls that shifted to create furniture and even entire rooms. It was like moving through a dream. The man who guided her, brought her to a part of the ship that seemed to be a wall, until it melted back into a fully furnished room that could have been the living room from a typical home on Earth. Maria was ecstatic on the couch, eating ice cream and describing the things on the TV to the man. They were flipping through channels that Maria and her mother couldn’t afford in their humble, mountain home, but she was aware of most of the things they flipped through.
When they landed on Druont, she emerged from the ship and into a field of what felt like grass. It smelled like a spring day, but sweeter, and it reminded her of the way honey tastes. The majority of the foliage was red including the leaves on trees and the grasses that all resembled foliage on Earth, but slightly different. Many of the leaves had lightly colored veins that were noticeable, even from a distance, and Maria thought they looked like turtle shells but in red hues. The grass was softer than anything she had felt before, including the carpet in her home on Earth and the blankets that she slept under or cozied under with her mother in the mountain winter. She picked a blade of the grass that was flat and sturdy like grass she recognized, but the tip was bushy, almost like dandelion seeds but firmly part of the tip of the grass.
Maria rolled around in the grasses and she was excited by the small creatures that looked like rabbits, but were the size of large toads, with fur a similar color to the grass that helped them to camouflage. They jumped around her, mostly annoyed that she was in her way, but a few were friendly and hopped around on her body.
From the soft spot in the grass, she looked up at the burnt, yellow sky and the slow moving clouds that obscured the light of the planet’s star that hung in the sky just like the sun Maria was used to. It was all so magical.
“Do you wonder why the sky is yellow, almost red, here?” the man that had brought Maria to that wonderful place asked as he sat next to her in the grass.
“Because this is a golden place,” Maria answered wistfully.
The man chuckled. “We live on the only habitable continent of this planet, the other land masses were difficult to settle because of predators. Some on this planet decided that because we could only congregate on one land mass, we could make the rest of the planet inhospitable even to our predators by stopping the rotation of the planet. We experience night and day because of the wobble back and forth that positions us just so that our daylight shines yellow and deepens to red.”
Maria rolled around as one of the tiny rabbits hopped away.
The man smiled down at her when he realized she wasn’t listening.
“I am so glad that you like it here,” the man says. “But Maria, I need you to listen and listen very carefully.”
Maria sits cross-legged in front of him and stares into his kind eyes. There is something bouncing off of him, Maria sees it like someone is blowing bubbles behind the man, and it manifests as this incredible aura that envelopes Maria and makes her happy in a way she can’t remember ever feeling before or since.
“My name is Daecoo. Bringing you here is an experiment, and it is going very well, though some of my companions worry about the lasting effects of our chemicals on your neurochemistry. We brought you here to confirm that passing through the wormhole located here took us to the same timespace in which our planet exists. The worm hole is a secret of this planet’s government that my companions and I were recently able to exploit, and it brought us to your planet. We hope that when we take you back, you will return to the same time and location that you left, compensating for your time here on this planet. When successful, we will confirm that we exist in the same universe, in the same timeline. But none of that is important. We have discovered something on your Earth. You Earthlings are said to be primitive and far away, but neither of those things are true. We want to be with you Maria, with you and your kind. Earthlings know love and we would share in that. But we cannot leave, the winds are changing and the Lead Scientist would track us to the ends of the universe. My companions and I won’t be able to explore our curiosities freely for very much longer. But when we can, we will be back, we want to bring you back and maybe you could be the first Earthling to live on Druont. We will make it happen thanks to this trip you have made with us. We have so much data now. Thank you very much.”
Maria was asleep by the time he finished and she had a smile on her face. When she woke, she was back on Earth and she was sad to say goodbye to him, though she knew that she would see him again.
PRL Serials 