Stars & Empire 2: 10 More Galactic Tales (Stars & Empire Box Set Collection) Read online

  “Probably,” replied Greene, taking a moment to look around the room. “Once Lisa gets finished in the Command Center, we may have to bring her down here.”

  “Have you sent Mission Control your report about the Hocklyns?” asked Jason, knowing this had been weighing heavily on the colonel’s mind. It had been on everyone’s minds.

  “Not yet. I thought I would wait another day or two and see what other information we might be able to find. The people down on Earth will not be happy with that report.”

  “What do you think they’ll do?” asked Jason, looking at the silent bodies on the tables and wondering what this ship had been like when it was fully operational. Now its crew was dead and the ship was wrecked.

  Greene looked down at the floor, then over at Jason. “I don’t know, but exploring and learning everything about this wreck is going to become a national, if not world wide, priority.”

  “This Hocklyn threat may be hard for some to accept. Even after hearing it from the computer, it still seems so unreal.”

  “That’s why it’s important that we learn as much as we can. This ship alone should be proof enough of what the computer said.”

  Jason nodded and stood looking at the dead humans. He wondered what type of lives they had lived. Had they actually witnessed the destruction of their worlds? Jason hoped not. He couldn’t imagine anything more horrifying than to watch everything you know come to an end and being powerless to stop it.

  -

  Greg was exploring with Lisa Gordon down a long corridor with a large hatch at the end of it. Lisa had downloaded some information from the ship’s computer and was trying to find the ship’s library. The computer had told them there was a room for the crew to enjoy something called holo vids and other entertainment. One of those forms of entertainment mentioned were books.

  One of the rules they had implemented now required all exploration of the ship to be done by teams of two for everyone’s safety. It had taken them nearly forty minutes to reach this spot deep inside the center section. Greg had left a string of the small LED lights behind them. Looking back down the corridor at the dim lights, it gave him a sense of security knowing they marked the way back.

  “Do you really think we’ll find anything useful in this entertainment room?” he asked as they arrived at the large, closed hatch. This would be the third closed hatch they had come across. The first two had opened easily.

  He stopped and eyed the obstruction, hoping it would be easy to open. Almost unconsciously, he glanced back down the corridor, shining his light. He had a bad habit of doing that. There was no one there; there never was. Just several of the dim glowing LED lights he had placed on the wall. Then the moment passed, and Greg turned back toward Lisa.

  “I don’t know,” confessed Lisa, looking over at Greg. “The computer in the Command Center confuses me. It seems to be severely limited in some of its data. In some subjects, it seems to have a lot of knowledge; in others it doesn’t know anything. Sometimes I feel as if I’m talking to two different systems. It doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

  “I’m sure there’s an explanation,” Greg said. “This computer is from another world; it may not be like the ones at home.”

  “Perhaps,” responded Lisa, doubtfully. “I just feel as if we’re missing something important. The answer is there, I just have to find it.”

  Greg reached forward and turned the large metal handle on the hatch. Much to his relief, it turned easily. With a push of his hand, the hatch swung open, revealing another long corridor. The two stepped inside and began walking. Unseen by either of them, the hatch behind them swung back shut and locked.

  -

  The AI had been watching their progress. It had ordered the computer to give them the information about the ship’s entertainment center and library. Unfortunately, a power feedback from damaged systems had ordered the hatch to close and lock. The AI knew it was a result of the power it had shifted to this area so it could watch the two. Now the AI had a problem. The hatch could only be opened from one side as the circuits were damaged in the section that the two new humans were in. Someone would have to be sent to rescue them. The AI knew that it had no other choice. It would have to reveal itself to the humans still in the Command Center.

  -

  Jason and Adam Simmins were in the Command Center, cataloguing the ship’s systems and labeling what each one did. They were getting a general idea of the layout of the operating stations. They had Communications, Navigation, Environmental, Sensors, Propulsion, and Weapons so far identified and labeled. They would ask the computer a question about a console and then label the controls and readouts so as to better understand its function.

  Jason was bent over another console, studying it, when Adam spoke to him in a nervous voice. “Commander, I think you need to turn around.”

  Jason stood up, turned around, and froze at the sight in front of him. The large viewscreen on the front wall of the Command Center had come on, and a beautiful woman in her early twenties was on the screen. The view was from her waist up, and she was dressed in some type of dark blue military uniform.

  “What’s that?” asked Adam, breathlessly. “Where did she come from?”

  Jason didn’t know what they could have done to make the viewscreen come on all by itself. However, the girl on the screen was gorgeous. Her deep dark eyes and shoulder length black hair drew his undivided attention. Jason wondered if the ship’s computer had caused it. Was this one of the ship’s dead officers?

  “I am the ship’s AI,” the woman on the screen spoke with a simple smile. “I have been watching you since you came aboard the Avenger.”

  Jason was astonished and could hardly speak. “The Avenger? Is that the name of your ship?” he finally forced out, staring at the screen. He knew from his computer systems studies down on Earth what an AI was supposed to be.

  “Yes. The Avenger is a light cruiser formerly in the service of the Federation before all of its worlds were destroyed.”

  “You’re the reason the computer has been answering more of our questions,” Jason spoke in sudden understanding. He felt his heart pounding, realizing that now they might get all the rest of the answers they had been seeking. “It wasn’t the computer, it was you!”

  “Yes.”

  “What did your crew call you?”

  “I’m Ariel,” the AI responded, her dark eyes focusing on Jason.

  “Why did you choose now to make your presence known?”

  “You have two crewmembers that have managed to get themselves locked inside a section of the ship. I’m afraid it was my fault for feeding some power into that section so I could observe them. You will need to go and open the hatch manually so they can get out.”

  “Which two crewmembers?” asked Jason, suspecting it was Greg and Lisa. They had gone to check out the ship’s recreation center.

  “Greg and Lisa,” replied the AI, confirming Jason’s fear.

  -

  Greg and Lisa had found the recreation room. They were surprised to find it was more like a large recreation center. There were tables, chairs, weight equipment, a large number of viewscreens, and other items. There was a lot of other stuff that they had no idea what it was used for. The center was relatively intact as everything was anchored down securely to the floor. Instead of one room, there were several large rooms.

  Lisa was walking around opening all the cabinets on one wall of the first room to see what they contained. Opening the largest one, her eyes grew wide when she saw all the books. There were hundreds of books in the cabinet.

  “You found them!” spoke Greg excitedly, looking over Lisa’s spacesuited shoulder.

  Lisa took down a few and started turning the pages, which wasn’t easy to do with the gloves of her spacesuit. After a few minutes, she chose half a dozen that seemed to have a lot of pictures inside. She would study these when they got back to the Command Center. Perhaps it would give them some insight into the people of the Federation.
How they lived, what they did for entertainment, and maybe even what their worlds had been like.

  “Let’s go,” she said, turning to face Greg. “We can come back later and pick up some more. I want to show these to the others.”

  Greg nodded; he would also like to come back down here later and try to figure out just what some of this equipment was for. This holo vid thing sounded intriguing.

  The two turned and left the entertainment center, walking slowly back down the corridor. They came to a stop at the sealed hatch.

  “How did that close?” Lisa asked, worriedly. She could have sworn they had left it open.

  “I don’t know,” Greg responded uneasily as he tried to turn the handle. It wouldn’t budge.

  Greg tried to apply even more force, but to no avail. “This isn’t good.”

  “What do we do now?” asked Lisa, trying not to panic. Jason and Adam knew where they had gone, but it might be hours before they came looking.

  Before Greg could answer, the handle turned on its own and the hatch swung open. Jason and Adam stood on the other side.

  “I’m glad to see you two,” Greg said relieved but wondering what they were doing here. “The hatch shut by itself, and we were sealed in.”

  “We know,” responded Jason, thankful to see that Greg and Lisa were okay.

  “How could you know that?” Lisa asked, confused. Radios didn’t work inside the ship because of all the metal.

  “I’ll show you,” Jason responded with a mysterious smile. “You’re not going to believe what just happened in the Command Center. I can’t explain; you have to see it for yourself. Lisa, you’re absolutely going to love this!”

  -

  Everyone was in the Command Center staring at the large viewscreen.

  “What is it?” asked Colonel Greene, gazing at the young woman on the viewscreen. “Was this a member of the crew? How did you manage to get this image to come up on the screen?”

  “Not quite, Colonel Greene,” replied Ariel, smiling.

  Colonel Greene stepped back, his eyes refocusing sharply on the screen. He had a confused look upon his face. “Okay, what just happened?”

  “This is Ariel, the ship’s AI,” Jason answered with a grin.

  “An AI?” gasped Lisa, walking toward the screen to take a closer look. There was excitement showing in her eyes. “Just how sentient is she?”

  “Very,” Ariel replied with a slight nod of her head. “I have been observing you from the time Commander Strong and Greg first came into the Command Center after their crash landing. I was planning to reveal my presence to you shortly, but a crisis occurred which put two of your crewmembers in jeopardy.”

  “So that’s how you knew we couldn’t get back out of that section,” spoke Greg, gazing curiously at the screen. This explained the mysterious presence he had felt. It was the AI that had been watching them.

  “It was my fault the door shut,” confessed Ariel, nodding at Greg. “I was watching you and the power I was using caused the hatch to shut. I appeared in front of Commander Strong and told him what had happened.”

  “Ariel, what happened to this ship and how long has it been here?” asked Colonel Greene, realizing here was the opportunity finally to learn some valuable information. He didn’t want to waste it.

  “This is a light cruiser class ship from the Human Federation of Worlds fleet. It was part of an evacuation fleet that reached this solar system in your year 1917.”

  “An evacuation fleet,” Colonel Greene repeated, his head creasing in a frown. If this ship was part of an evacuation fleet, where were the other ships?

  “There was a secret base in our home system that the Hocklyns missed,” replied Ariel, accessing her memory. “After the Hocklyns succeeded in wiping out our fleet and destroying all the human worlds, the only survivors left in our home system were at this hidden base. A great battle was fought with the Hocklyns, and the survivors escaped in the ships still at the base with the aid of First Fleet.”

  “How many ships and how many people came here?” Greene asked.

  “There were eighteen civilian ships in the evacuation fleet carrying nearly forty thousand survivors.” A look of sadness came over the AI.

  “Forty thousand,” Colonel Greene repeated slowly. “Those must have been some big ships.”

  “They were. Several of them were colony ships. We landed survey parties on your world to find a place to settle. Before the survey was finished, a number of our people began falling ill. Soon the illness spread throughout the entire civilian population of the fleet. It was a disease that we had never encountered before. Our medical experts were helpless to stop its spread, and then our people started dying. Only the military ships remained unaffected. Their crews hadn’t been involved with the surveys and hadn’t intermingled with anyone from the civilian ships.”

  “The Spanish Flu,” Greg spoke with sudden realization, recalling his history. Now he knew what the men and women in the medical wards had died from. “The Spanish Flu spread across the world from 1918 to 1920. It reportedly caused as many as fifty million deaths.”

  “Yes, it was the flu,” confirmed Ariel, nodding her head slightly in acknowledgment. “We had no immunity against it. The civilians began dying by the hundreds. Our medical personnel were desperate to find a cure and worked night and day to find one. It was decided to leave your world and go elsewhere. It was obvious there were diseases on your world that the humans of the Federation had no immunity to.”

  “How did your ship end up on the Moon?” Jason asked. He wanted to know why the Avenger had crashed.

  “The flu broke out on the Avenger, striking down most of the crew within 24 hours. It’s not known how the flu managed to get on board. The commander thought that a supply shuttle might have carried it over just prior to the flu outbreak.”

  “So the flu was spreading throughout your crew. What caused the Avenger to crash on the Moon?” Colonel Greene asked. From a medical standpoint, he could well understand how a population with no immunity to the flu could rapidly fall victim to the deadly disease.

  “One of the engineers became delusional and set off an explosive device in main engineering next to our FTL drive. The explosion knocked out our propulsion systems and most of our power sources. We were already in orbit around your moon at the time. The orbit began to decay, and the Avenger crashed into this crater before we could get any of the secondary propulsion systems back online. Most of the crew died in the crash. The few that survived, including Commander Standel, moved the bodies to the medical center. The center section was relatively intact. It’s heavily reinforced since it contains the crew’s living quarters, the medical center, and the recreation center.”

  “Could none of your other ships send down rescue craft?” Colonel Greene asked. He couldn’t imagine leaving the survivors to die.

  “The survivors on board all had the flu and passed away within 48 hours. The Battle Cruiser StarStrike stayed in orbit and was in constant communication with the commander until he died.”

  Everyone was quiet for a moment. It was so sad to know that the desperate survivors of a defeated human civilization had come all this way to escape destruction, only to be struck down by a deadly disease.

  “Now what?” Lisa asked. She had hundreds of questions she wanted to ask the AI.

  “We get the power back up,” Ariel responded with a determined smile. “I have had nearly one hundred years to figure out what to do.”

  “Power?” Jason replied with a startled look. “What do you mean power, and what do you hope to accomplish with it?”

  “The center section is still airtight, as well as other sections around the Command Center,” Ariel replied her gaze switching to Jason. “This ship has a number of auxiliary vessels. There are two Raven class shuttles in the ship’s flight bay. If we jumpstart the main power source on one of them, we can use it to power up a small section of the ship.”

  “How do we do that?” Adam Simmins asked. />
  “Auxiliary ships,” Greg spoke his eyes growing wide. “Are these ships still flyable?”

  “Possibly,” replied Ariel, shifting her gaze over to Greg. “I would have to run a diagnostic check on their key systems. They have been in a vacuum for the past one hundred years. The shuttles are extremely durable ships.”

  -

  Early the next morning, Jason, Greg, and Adam were deep into the damaged section of the ship. Ariel had given them directions how to reach the ship’s flight bay. She thought the flight bay was still intact. The bay was located on the bottom of the ship, and Ariel didn’t believe the explosion that had taken out the ship’s drive systems had reached the flight bay. At least she hoped that it hadn’t.

  Ariel’s sensors in that area were damaged, and she couldn’t access the bay to check on its current condition. That was one of the things she wanted Adam to repair. She thought one of the sensor couplings was damaged and needed to be replaced. Adam was carrying a spare, which he was going to install.

  “I hope we can get back out of here,” Greg commented as he helped Jason and Adam move some wreckage that was blocking their path.

  The corridor they were in had obviously been damaged by either the explosion or the crash landing. In several areas, the walls of the corridor were buckled in as if hit by a huge fist. Several small metal ceiling panels, as well as support beams, had fallen across the corridor blocking their path and had to be moved to the side so they could continue.

  This section of the ship, while still intact, was dangerous to pass through. Ariel felt this was the only reasonably safe passage to the flight bay. The AI had promised that if they could power up one of the large shuttles and access its power system, then Ariel could power up the emergency environmental systems. She would then be able to make a small section of the undamaged part of the ship habitable.

  Jason stopped and put his hands on his spacesuited waist as he gazed down the corridor. “It shouldn’t be much farther. We need to go through that hatch up ahead and then down two more levels. There should be a double airlock that leads to the flight bay.”