A Distant Future

A distant Future Part 2

COLONYSHIP

On the bridge of the giant starship a group of individuals watched with relief as the tiny ship they had barely detected made no attempt to report back to Earth or to some alien race and simply made a quick run for it. "Whoever is in that ship sure as hell made it difficult to detect them." "True enough Jake, but I have a suspicion they were not expecting us or anyone else for that matter."

"Could it be a federation scout ship?" "Not likely Sarah. The few scans we got off it showed it had no beacons and was very damned small. The thing weighs almost a third of what this ship does as well and the power output on the engines is massive. That ship was designed to get someone somewhere quietly and efficiently and fast. My scanners only spotted the cannons because the ports for them opened and then they charged up real fast the moment our scanners detected them.

Look at the power readings for those guns. One hit from those guns would destroy any part of this bucket in an instant. I wish I could get abetter reading by getting closer but I'm keeping us out of range of those cannons. What the? My screens just went dead! All our sensors are being jammed! That does it, I'm slowing us down and backing off before we get attacked!

I think whoever was in that ship wanted to avoid detection and when they saw us coming in system they panicked and ran for some place where they can hide from us forever. For as much mass as that little ship packed, it sure is fast and agile. We have sensors back but they are already gone out of my sensor range. I didn't even see them until it was almost too late they were so well hidden from scans.

At any rate, we have a few more months of travel before we get to our new home and with only one engine working fully I am nursing this old heap along. Wish we could have torn those engines down and rebuilt them but too late now. I'll limp us along as best I can for a bit. I'm going to orbit the sun for a bit to recharge our batteries and get some people outside to repair the engines. We'll need them for landing.

It will be good to breathe real air for a change after three years in space running and hiding." "Sounds good to me Sara. I think after this long of a trip we are all going to be looking forward to finally getting some real air into our lungs."

ALENA

I was fairly deep into the atmosphere when I deployed the chutes finally and fired the emergency braking thrusters at the same time. A safe planet fall would have taken almost 45 minutes to do but I got down in under five minutes by using my main engines one last time and waiting until the last moment to deploy heat resistant drag chutes and then firing braking thrusters to slow down. It worked but was one hell of a bumpy ride down for the next few minutes. I aimed my ship for a small lake and was almost knocked out of my seat when thes hip impacted with the water at first.

Steam boiled off the ship and into the sky as I settled the ship into the water of the lake. I doubt that the big ship would be able to find me even with the huge steam cloud I was making. My sensors were limited once on the surface of the planet and could only see about asfar out as the first moon with any accuracy.

I used the water to cool the ship down super fast and did not come backup out of the water on gravity drive until my ship had cooled down to under 100 degrees. I made sure to land the ship a few meters inside the forest so the drag chutes could be salvaged for use by me and to make it hard for any other ship to find me.