Chapter No.19. Escape.

After going through the disinfection process, we entered the shuttle proper, but what we saw was horrifying. The main window was literally covered with the vampire bats, and they were gyrating and slithering around in a concerted attempt to enter the shuttle.

The women remained still while I sat down at the pilot's chair and powered up the shuttle. I punched a few buttons to activate the deflection system. A strong magnetic field enveloped the shuttle, followed by a powerful blast of hot plasma. That killed some of the bat creatures, allowing me to see where I was going.

I started the engines and began a rapid ascent. That got rid of more of the creatures, which prompted the women to get buckled in. As the shuttle sped up to reach orbital velocity, the remainder of the creatures were lost in the slip stream.

"I thought those damn things were going to get in," Natale said.

"I've never been this frightened," Bridget said.

"I didn't think they were going to get in," I said. "I needed to get them off of the window so I could see where I was going."

"How in the hell did those things evolve?" Janet asked. "Wouldn't the aliens have realized that they were dangerous?"

"They probably didn't realize how dangerous they were until it was too late," I said.

"I guess they weren't any smarter than humans," Sharon said.

"That's the truth," I said.

As the shuttle caught up with our ship, I approached the hanger but stayed out at a distance.

"What's wrong?" Janet asked.

"I'm going to have COMA give us some particle blasts before we enter the hanger. I don't want anything alien to get in our vessel."

No one complained. COMA blasted us with gamma rays to kill off anything alive that had persisted on the outside of our vessel.

By the time we got back to the crew wheel deck, we were emotionally and physically exhausted. But I was not happy about remaining around the planet we were orbiting.

"You may as well start searching for a new candidate planet," I said. "I don't want to hang around here anymore than I have to."

"Do you want to stay in this galaxy?" Janet asked.

"I don't care. Just find something." I walked back to my bunk and laid down to relax my nerves. I realized that we had just escaped a really bad situation. Only by sheer luck and my ability to sense ugly situations were we able to escape a horrible end.

When we gathered at the food station for supper, I was in a better frame of mind.

"We owe you our lives," Bridget said. "If you hadn't reacted so quickly to that situation, we would have been . . . turned into zombies."

"I was only doing my job. I was in combat during the African campaign. I learned to make swift situations in dangerous situations."

"What we're doing isn't supposed to be combat."

"I realize that, but the next time we go down on a planet, all of you will be armed and I'll carry a laser rifle."

"Hopefully, the next planet won't be a scene from a horror movie," she said.

We all agreed with that wish.

The next day, Janet and Sharon found another planet, but it wasn't in the present galaxy.

"We couldn't find anything that we liked in this galaxy," Janet said. "There's a spiral galaxy fifty-five million light years away in the direction back to Earth. We think it has several good candidate systems."

"We should be able to get there in a couple of weeks," I said. "The sooner we get started the better I'll feel."

"We should be able to start now," she said.

We buckled into our G-chairs and braced for the engine burn that would abuse our bodies. The good news is that we were getting used to it.

After we were in hyperspace and the wheels were started up, we unbuckled and went to the command station.

"The readings indicate that we were at the proper acceleration when the antimatter production commenced to send us into hyperspace," I said.

They didn't react to my statement. They got up and went back to the mess hall. I stayed back at the command station.

The women settled into their usual routines during the trip through hyperspace, allowing me to continue my inspection of the engines and the antimatter production equipment to make sure they were still operating within proper safety parameters.

Routine had a way of calming us and keeping us more civil. Most days ended up with us eating breakfast and then going off to our usual tasks of trying to understand what the hell was going on with this hyperspace business. Unfortunately, we were not able to discern any new theories.

When we dropped out of hyperspace, we were in the new galaxy.

"We in an outer arm of this spiral galaxy," Janet said. "I'll start trying to locate habitable systems."

"Hopefully, they'll be less threatening," Bridget said.

I chuckled. "Yeah, the last two places have been rather insane."

"Interesting," Janet said.

"What is?" I asked.

"We're in a direct course to a habitable Earth-like system. A short hyperspace trip should put us near to it."

"Is it just a coincidence or a part of our dystopic fate?"

She laughed.

We got into our G-chairs to enter hyperspace for a short one-day trip that would put us close to the habitable planet. When we did come out of hyperspace, we were only two days out from obtaining orbit around an Earth-like exo-planet.

"This planet is the closest to being like Earth so far," Sharon said. "It has most of the parameters of Earth."

"That means that it probably has life," I said.

"It's a high probability."

"Any chance it has intelligent life?"

"I'm not detecting any radio signals," Sharon said. "There are no visible light sources on the night side, but we may be too far away to pick up smaller lights like a campfire."

"If we do find a truly Earth-like planet, are we going to settle on it?" Natale asked.

"The only way I see that happening is if we can do a thorough bio scan of the planet, and I don't think we're equipped to do that, at least not on the level we would need to guarantee we won't end up dying from some alien bug."

"I'm beginning to see what you mean," Sharon said. "If life does evolve on an Earth-like planet, it would definitely be different from what happened on Earth, and we know that bacteria and viruses are the first kind of life to evolve."

"Yes, and there's no way we would be immune to them."

"If that's the case, why the hell did they send us out to find a habitable planet?" Bridget asked. "If we were not supposed to return to Earth we would have to settle on the planet."

I held up my index finger. "Or, we would have waited on the ship until they came there to do a proper bio scan."

"That would mean that we would have been at least forty years older when they did get there."

"Unless they came up with a faster way to travel in hyperspace," I retorted.

"So, you think they actually knew about how to travel through hyperspace when they launched our mission," Janet said.

I smiled. "Yes. I think it's quite obvious, but they screwed up by attempting to enhance the process using electromagnetic antimatter storage bottles, and it resulted in at least one crew's destruction."

That ended the discussion, but what we found on the planet changed our mission plans.