Final Flight SR- Expedition to Terra
Chapter 1 - Prologue
Exodus Yahren 1 – Earth Year 1979
Yes- "Yours Is No Disgrace" – The Yes Album
"Battleships confide in me and tell me where you are,
Shining, flying, purple wolf hound, show me where you are,
Lost in summer, morning, winter, travel very far,
Lost in losing circumstances, that's just where you are."
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"Long range scanner contact," the sensor/scanner operator reported.
"Report," the patrol frigate's captain, Captain Harris, ordered.
"The contact is nearly at maximum scanner range, ninety eight thousand miles, bearing off the starboard bow fifty eight by positive twelve. Its speed is one quarter star speed."
Very unusual, Harris thought. "Maintain contact and report any changes," he ordered.
"Yes, sir," the sensor/scanner operator replied.
The captain turned to address his navigator. "Plot an intercept course," he ordered.
"Yes, sir," the navigator replied while entering the scanner data into the navigation computer.
"Course plotted," he replied a moment later. Captain Harris stepped over to review the results on the navigator's computer screen. He gave nod of satisfaction to the navigator after reviewing the course.
"Feed the results to the helm," he ordered.
"Yes, sir," the navigator replied.
The captain of the patrol frigate waited patiently for several hours until they intercepted the unknown object. Finally they came within visual range.
Very unusual indeed, he thought as he reviewed the sensor/scanner and camera data. It's small, obviously just a single being craft, like an aerospace fighter. The wings are too small and oddly canted downward. The craft is appears to be armed with two forward facing beam weapons, so it's definitely some kind of fighter. The thermal emissions are nearly zero, only one area between the three obvious engines was emitting any heat, and a helium exhaust, but the engines are not thrusting. Clearly the craft is adrift in deep space.
"Bring us around so we can get a clear view of the cockpit," Harris ordered. The helmsman immediately began to maneuver the patrol frigate. A few minutes later the ship's camera was able to zoom into the unknown craft's cockpit.
It's a human being, Harris noted immediately. The frost covering the edges of the windows of the unknown craft's cockpit told him that the occupant was either frozen to death or in cryogenic sleep.
"Bring that craft onboard," Harris ordered. "Prep the medical staff for a cryogenic sleep revival."
Later in the patrol ship's small shuttle bay, Harris watched from a view port as the small fighter was slowly towed into his ship, while the gravity of the deck was set to zero, and set down. Surprisingly, landing gear automatically deployed when the gravity was slowly raised back toward normal. The craft bounced up from the deck in the low gravity while the gear deployed before setting back down before the gravity increased further.
"The craft obviously isn't dead," Harris noted out loud.
"Obviously," his medical officer quipped next to him.
"Pressurize the bay and finish bringing the gravity back to normal," Harris ordered the officer of the deck..
A little while later, after a decontamination crew had scanned the unknown ship for hazardous contaminates, they only reported the Helium exhaust was at plasma temperatures but was at a very low mass flow, the deck's environmental control systems were capable of handling the exhaust, Harris stood on the deck next to the craft. As a precaution, the decontamination crew had designated the rear of the craft as a thermal hazard.
Harris ordered a platform placed on either side of the craft level with the craft's cockpit. With a captain's prerogative, he was the first to climb up to see the craft's sole occupant. Inside the slowly defrosting cockpit windows he saw a fair skinned man with a blue uniform sleeping with his head leaning on the side of the cockpit's canopy.
"Who are you," Captain Allen Harris of the Terran Western (Nationalist) Alliance wondered out loud as the medical officer and several deckhands joined him on the platform.