Travel Warnings
It was a day like any other. Well, the day was a relative term while traveling through space. There was no day or night when off planet. All they could do was do their best to replicate the twenty-four-hour day cycles that their bodies naturally clung to. You could only brush off so many millennia of evolution.
Marisa had been on duty for only a few hours now. She'd woken and taken a short shower in the limited amount of recycled water allotted to her. How she wished for an actual hot bath. She exited to pull her hair back into a regulation-style bun and slip into her uniform.
The walk to the main deck had been the brisk but unrushed stroll of someone who made the same daily trip. There was nothing new in the ten-minute walk it took to get from the cabin to the Captain's deck. And at what amounted to a 4 am wake-up call in a twenty-four-hour period, she would be the only one there for another hour or two.
When she arrived, she relieved the computer's autopilot, which told her everything was working and on track. She settled into a seat and double-checked what the computer had already confirmed. Nothing out of the ordinary. They would still reach their intended location in a few days.
Good, then Marisa had an easy shift. She leaned back in her seat and began to bring up the old book she'd been working through. The words had been scanned into the shared Earth database centuries before. It was a classic science fiction novel. They had been wrong about almost everything, but seeing what the classic writers had expected was fun.
"Anything interesting, Sergeant?" Came a voice from behind Marisa.
"Just another classic novel," Marisa said as she closed the pages and turned her chair to face Corporal Robins. "Is it already time for your shift?" she asked as she turned to check the time on the clock before her, seeing a little blinking light. "Well, it seems you had good timing. We have a message, and regulations require a witness for every message."
"Well, that's something new," Robins said as he leaned over Maria's chair to stare at the screen.
It always took a moment to load messages.
"W..w..warning." The message began. It had taken far longer than usual to load the message, and the first words came out delayed and skipped. It was the sort of sound Marisa had heard while using ancient compact discs when scratched up. A broken skipping of the same note over and over. However, that wasn't a reference she could use when she explained the issue to the corporal. Ancient sound and music were topics only some people picked up during their extracurricular activities in school.
"Is the machine broken?" Robins asked as he peered over her shoulder, checking the settings.
After adjusting, they turned their attention to the screen again.
"W? w? warning." Came the voice once more. The screen blinked to life this time, and the face of a blond woman with cracked glasses and a bruised face standing in front of what looked like a beautiful backdrop of rainforest and river looked desperately into the lens of her recording divide. "We have landed on b-b-b-b-b." The video skipped and jumped a few seconds ahead. "Beware the fl-f-f-f - " and then it cut out.
Marisa and Robins went to the start of the video, but it was useless.
Marisa sat back in her seat and considered. Finally, she spoke.
"We better inform the captain and the rest of the crew."
#
Captain Micheal Nicolas hated being woken up before his shift. He'd been driving this damned ship around for the last forty years, not counting cryogenic freezing- it was way more if you did- and had earned the right to sleep till his night shift. He always took the night shifts on long voyages, particularly these colony jumps. One could never trust some of the crew who would be off the ship and on the planet as soon as they landed. Micheal, however, would be with his ship till the day he died. That was how it worked. If you were given a ship, you stuck with it till one of you was decommissioned.
"So this is all that came in?" he asked as he looked at the video. He wanted to review the file himself to make sure Marisa and Robins had done it correctly. Still, he did not feel like spending the rest of the trip with insulted crewmates. They knew what they were doing.
"Yes, sir," Marisa answered.
She was a good sergeant. They didn't make them like this anymore. She worked hard and never let him down. It would be a pity when she got off the ship to settle down in the new colony world.
"And it's not a complication on our end?" He knew it wasn't, but he had to ensure the enlisted folks did their jobs. Of course, they said no. "So all we can do is guess it's an error on the other end. Do we know where the message originated from?"
"As far as we know, the closest location with strong enough communication networks would be Beta," Marisa confirmed.
"So we got a mysterious message with an injured person from the location we are headed." It wasn't a question. It was a statement. The Captain was troubled. He had the authority to make judgments in these situations, but no one would like either choice.
"So we need to decide if it's safe to progress or to turn around," Robins said.
Although he was young, the Captain wasn't about to reprimand him for saying things he already knew. No, he would walk them through the process.
"And say what? Hello. We know you just woke up from a good six years in cryo, but we must throw you back in and turn around. Sorry, no refunds. All your money was used on rocket fuel." Marisa cut in, and the Captain had to agree. It wasn't as nicely said as he would have put it. But that was how these trips went. A good many of these people paid their way in.
"So we go forward," Robins said uneasily.
"Forward," the Captain agreed as he looked down at the map. In three days, we will know what to expect."
#
Captain Nicolas was almost one hundred percent sure what they would find when they arrived at Beta. He had been sure since he saw the message - the destruction and desperation in the woman's voice. Yeah, he'd seen that before. She had been under attack. From what, or possibly who? He could not tell, but that had been a person in distress - a soldier in combat - a comrade in danger.
The next three days of travel had gone more hurridly than planned. While they had intended to awaken only the remaining passengers from Cyro when they arrived, the idea of possible combat had required them to begin earlier than planned.
While most of the people on the ship were simply colonists, most of the science backgrounds or farming industry, and a few wealthy people who had paid their way in, each was given a weapon and showed a simple video based on aiming and firing it. While those limited personnel with combat experience were given groups of people to shape up for the possible defense of their new home.
"Hopefully, none of you will have to use these. But at least we have them in place," the Captain told a cafeteria full of people. It was the only large room on a ship where most of the crew was supposed to be asleep at any time. So he made due. Most of the people he spoke to were still fighting cryo sickness, holding bags to their faces as they tried to watch the instructional videos on how to fire a weapon.
He really hoped he was wrong about what they would find.
#
Marisa had been tasked with getting the actual security staff on the ship ready for an unknown threat. She showed them all the video they had recieved, and many a man and woman studied it, trying to pinpoint the location and what could be attacking the people involved. But given all they saw was the one woman, there was not much to go off.
"She's clearly been surviving for a while." One sergeant had said as he looked at the blood and dirt-caked hands and face of the woman on the screen. Several times, the picture had been paused and enlarged in some places.
Marisa had thought the same thing, but given that she'd never seen actual combat herself, she could only go on what the older soldiers told her. As of right now, the only one they had access to was the Captain. Most were trained, thrown on colony ships, and sent away to train more once they reached their new home. While they were given basic information on what to do if a planet was already inhabited, it had never happened before.
"All we can really do is be prepared." She told them.
#
At the end of the third day the ship had slid in to orbit around the Beta planet. Slowly making its way around the crew did what they could to scan for life and deployed probs to see what was going on below.
"Everything matches the prob readings from the survey team," Said one of the people examining the new information compared to the old recordings. Marisa and Captain Nicolas looked over each one, but nothing was even remotely out of place - not a single thing.
"Nothing out of place," The Captain said with a sigh. "Welp. Only one option left."
#
"Are you sure you want to do this, Captain?" Robins asked as he strapped himself into the drop-pod.
"Done it a hundred times kid." The Captain said in an amused tone.
He had. He went down with every group he flew to another planet, the few times he reached home, and even when he was still a combat pilot. It had been decades since he had gone to a planet ready to fight. But now he, Marisa, Robins, and several others were on their way, strapped into the drop-pod that would soon be falling through the atmosphere to land in the water of Beta. From there, the pod would take on amphibious capabilities and float them to the nearest shore, bringing them simply miles from the town established by the survey team. And where the warning message had originated.
#
The pod hit the water and switched from a spacefaring machine to a boat. The small squad of people slowly examined the area as the craft began crawling onto dry land. Essential readings were taken, and everything matched again: the air was breathable, and there were no dangerous chemicals or radiation. So they opened the hatch.
They did not have far to travel, and it was not difficult. Beta was almost a paradise - warm sun, blue sky, green fields - almost oppresively like Earth had been before the extensive building. At least that's what they had been told. Even the Captain, with his many years of cyro, couldn't say for sure what Earth had been before the crash.
Finally, the group reached a hilltop, throwing themselves to the ground as they peered over the edge. It was a town, just as they had expected, lay below. Prefabricated buildings smoking from some kind of recent attack.
It was quiet, empty, and safe for now. Whatever had attacked the town had departed. There was still smoke, so it must have been recently. The group discussed their next plane for a minute before finally heading down the hill.
"Anyone around?" Captain yelled as he peered around the area. The others followed close behind, keeping their weapons ready to aim.
Suddenly, there was a crunch and a gasp. The woman from the video had rounded the corner, holding her right arm close to her chest as she awkwardly aimed at the group with a firearm, only to drop it as she realized she was looking at other people.
"Oh my god, someone heard me!' She said in shock. She said as tears rolled down her cheeks.
Marisa ran to meet the woman, who clapped as soon as she reached her. "She's still alive. We need to get her to medical!"
#
Once they had returned the the ship, the unknown woman was placed in medical. The group had found no other people. The medical team crowded around the unknown woman, taking every test imaginable. Finally, they returned the test results to the Captain.
"She's fine. We can't find anything wrong with her. Even her physical wounds should heal without an issue. But she won't wake up. Our only guess is she needs the rest after a severe shock." It was a curious case. "Once she's awake, we can question her properly."
#
Marisa woke up at her usual 4 am wake-up call. This time, she decided to take a side route to the medical center to check on the woman they had found. As she reached the door and placed her hand on the key code to open it, nothing happened. She flipped open the code bar and pushed in an emergency number. What she was greeted by was a ruined medical unit and the woman standing in the center covered in blood.
"What the hell?"
"I'm sorry." The unknown woman said. "I'm so hungry." And she lunged at Marisa.
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