The Ruins of Arlandia - By William Wood Page 0,3
I’ll see you soon.”
“Thanks, Dad,” Calvin said.
His mom reached out and took his hand.
“I can’t believe it,” she said. “You’re finally going into space.” Her eyes started to tear up, so she forced herself to change the subject to something cheerier.
“Don’t forget, we’re having dinner at our house on Friday. Everyone will be there.”
“Thanks, Mom,” Calvin said. “I’ll be there.”
“You can tell us all about your mission,” Foster said. “Keep a journal. It will help you remember everything.”
“Yes, Sir,” Calvin said.
Calvin hugged his mom and shook his dad’s hand. Before leaving, his mom reached into her purse and took out a tissue. Then they left, holding hands. It was a sad moment, but it was very hard for Calvin to be sad.
“Hey, did you see all the crazy people out there?" Jax said, approaching Calvin from across the highly polished rotunda. “The Dark Terror is coming. I’m scared.”
“Yeah, they’re in space, waiting for us. Are you ready to go?”
“I’m ready,” Jax said. “Just waiting for you.” They walked down a glass-covered hallway. “Did you talk to the captain?”
“Yes,” Calvin said. “He said it would be no problem. We can share a room.”
“Excellent!” Jax said. The biggest adventure of a lifetime waited for them, at the end of the glass corridor, sitting on the landing platform—the Sorenia, a fifty-year-old ship with a dangerously underfunded maintenance budget.
Most of New Arlandia ignored the launch. They were scared and tried to pretend it wasn’t happening. There was, however, a group of ten thousand people gathered around the Space Center to watch the historic event. Thousands of cameras captured it in vivid color. They weren’t disappointed.
The Sorenia looked like an airplane, and it took off like one. Once it was high enough in the atmosphere it blasted its way into a low orbit.
The Sorenia shook violently, creaked loudly, and smelled like burning metal, but the ship made it into orbit without any alarms going off. The captain ordered Calvin to set a course that would take them around the perimeter of the New Arlandian planetary system, which Calvin did quickly. He was nervous at first, and afraid of making mistakes, but he had memorized all of the coordinates of their system, and he programmed the computer from memory. Even so, he decided to double check his work, just in case. It turned out he didn’t need to—his numbers were right.
There had been some interesting moments on the first day. The ship’s sensors showed a very large object appearing and disappearing, somewhere out ahead of them. The captain said it was a sensor malfunction, and he assigned a work crew to fix it.
The most exciting and terrifying thing happened after lunch. There was a power spike in the engine core and a frantic effort to contain an overload. Calvin was sure they were all going to die, but at the last second Jax repaired the computer and saved the ship.
At the end of the day Calvin went to bed, but he found it impossible to sleep. He couldn’t stop thinking about almost dying on his first day in space. Images of the flashing red emergency lights, the smell of smoke, and the panic on the faces of his shipmates played over and over in his mind. He was awake for a long time, wondering if the old ship could survive another four days in space. At some point during the night, he fell into a deep, restless sleep.
Chapter Three: Abandoned
Lightning streaked across the sky. Calvin stood in the middle of a smoking battleground. Hulks of burned-out battle tanks and the ruins of destroyed cities surrounded him. He couldn’t move. A massive fleet of black spaceships circled overhead with laser guns pointed at him. A small group of people stood close by. They all looked terrified. Thousands of monsters with long fangs and jagged claws appeared on the horizon. There were so many they looked like a black cloud. They moved quickly and headed directly toward Calvin and the group of survivors. The monsters screamed as if they were on fire.
Suddenly a beam of light appeared in front of Calvin. It was a beautiful, pure light in the darkest hole in the universe. An old man and woman stepped in front of the light with a young girl. The light shimmered, flashed, and shot up into space. It looked like a bridge. The people walked into the beam of light single file and vanished. The monsters got closer, and the screaming got louder.
The man and woman walked