Ryan Taylor awakens from hibernation to a mystery that he, along with his crew, must solve in order to continue their mission. How they solve it and what they find is astounding.
The trip down to Earth was uneventful at first. We landed five kilometers away from the biosphere habitat city. Even at that distance it dominated a dismal looking landscape of ugly scrub on cracked and depleted soil.
The weather was not too bad. It was partly cloudy with a slight chill in the air. We wore the bio suits without helmets. It was a decided pleasure to breath real air for a change.
We had a lot of work to do. While I began digging the graves, the women got the body bags out of the shuttle and carried them to the gravesite. Bridget helped me do the digging, but it still required an hour of backbreaking work. The next step was to drag the body bags into the graves, but before we did that, Janet pointed at something in the distance.
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"What the hell is that?"
"I peered at the direction she was pointing and saw an object traversing the ground, trailing dust plumes. I obtained binoculars from my accessory belt bag and adjusted the digital image enhancement at 10X. "Looks like a land rover."
As it moved closer It wasn't slowing. "I don't like this."
That made my heart rate increase and the women to gather behind me.
The wheeled rover came to a sudden stop at fifty meters, and two men wearing dark uniforms got out. When I saw that they were holding weapons, I turned to the women. "Get down in the graves!"
They hesitated at first, staring at me as if I had lost my mind, but when a bullet smacked into the ground near them, they didn't waste time jumping into the newly dug graves.
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After getting prone on the ground, I powered up my laser rifle and used the scope to zero in on the guy shooting the weapon. He fired at me again, but the bullet missed my head by a few centimeters before it smacked into the ground. I shot a laser blast that hit him square in the chest, dropping him.
The other guy started shooting, but his aim was off.
