The Volans Incursion
an excerpt

(Author's Note: This is the end of the Prologue and takes place 10 months before the main story. The Martian Queen is an Earth-bound luxury cruise ship that has picked up a distress signal from a small private ship)

Two and a half hours later, the Martian Queen had located the source of the distress signal and was slowing down as it prepared for intercept. No radio contact had been made with the vessel; the continuing weak signal from the emergency beacon was the only sign the vessel existed.

Commander Bryanna Gentry, Executive Officer of the Queen stood at the Comm Station, looking over the shoulder of the Lieutenant at that position. "Are we getting any signals at all from them, besides the beacon?"

"No ma'am, I've done a full spectrum check and I'm not reading anything other than the beacon. Which is odd, because I should be getting something over there, heat from the engines, or the running lights, or even just radiated heat off the hull. It's almost like the ship doesn't exist except for the beacon." The Lt. rubbed his face, and adjusted one of his sensors. "And I'm still not getting any response from the Guard, plus I think . . . well, I think our telemetry back to home isn't working right either."

"What running lights? That thing is black as pitch out there," Commander Gentry rebutted as she glanced over her shoulder at the giant viewscreen centered in front of the bridge. A barely visible outline of a small ship could be seen on the screen. With the vessel between them and the sun, the ship was in shadow but any running lights should've been clearly visible along the darkened hull.

The Lt.'s comment about the telemetry caught the captain's attention. Swinging his chair in the center of the bridge to face Communications, he spoke out. "What do you mean by that? HOW is it not working?" Once an hour, the cruise ship sent an automated data burst back to Triple Diamond's home office on Mars. The data packet was composed of all log entries made since the last packet, along with the ship's current location and a data dump concerning the ship's engines and other systems.

The Lt. audibly gulped when he realized he was the focus of the captain's attention, and stammered out a response. "Th-the data seems to have been sent, but I don't see the usual auto-response from home indicating they received it." He swallowed once more. "In fact, I don't see a response entry for the previous packet either."

"Lt. Morton was supposed to do a diagnostic on the transmitter when we first didn't hear from the Space Guard. Do you see a record of that?" Captain Hasten stood up and approached the Comm Station.

"Y-yes, sir. It looks like he ran three of them. Two low level tests, and one high level test on the entire Comm Suite. No errors detected." A bead of sweat broke out on the Lieutenant's forehead. It was his first trip onboard the Queen, and he was still very nervous whenever the captain was around.

"ALERT ALERT ALERT. COLLISION COURSE. COLLISION COURSE. ALL HANDS BRACE FOR IMPACT."

The automated alarm sounded from loudspeaker throughout the ship, causing an instant panic among the passengers and great confusion from the crew who knew of the distress signal and the supposed size of the disabled vehicle.

"What the . . . ?" Captain Hasten spun around and almost leaped to the Nav Station. "What's going on, Ensign? We were on a parallel course, not direct intercept! Bring us about . . ." His glance at the viewscreen caused the words to die on lips. The darkened ship was still onscreen, but clearly not in direct line of the cruise ship. However, just past the ship and definitely in the way was a new ship that hadn't been there previously. Approximately one-fourth the size of the Martian Queen, the ship had a strange coppery hull and unusual lines. It wasn't of any design that the good captain had ever seen.

The Queen was already turning to starboard to avoid the strange vessel, and Captain Hasten quickly recovered his composure and opened his mouth to issue a command when a loud "pop" sounded from all the consoles on the bridge and everything went dark.