Читать книгу Seeking Peace - Tiera Harding - Страница 6

Liam was standing in a field. The sun was warm above him and flowers dotted the grass around him. It was incredibly beautiful and peaceful. He spotted a house in the distance and began to walk towards it. As he drew closer he realized it was his own house. The door opened and Esther ran out onto the porch, dressed in a pink dress like the one she wore in her holographic princess game. Clara stepped out behind her. They spotted Liam and waved, smiling. As he lifted his hand to wave back he stumbled over something in the grass. He looked down with idle curiosity, then stumbled back in horror.

A man’s body lay in the grass, charred beyond recognition. He looked up again and the peaceful meadow was transformed. The grass was blackened with flame, the air thick with smoke. Instead of flowers, more corpses were scattered over the grass, charred and blackened. Liam heard a groan and whirled toward the sound. There, among the human corpses, lay Marek, unburned, but with a gash in his chest. He looked up at Liam, his eyes glazed with pain,

“The Hok-Kar,” he whispered and then the last breath of life went out of him. In the grass next to him lay Elina, her garments stained with her own blood, dead. And beside her lay a tiny baby with pale blue skin and delicate, butterfly-like wings, seemingly unwounded but wailing in fear, though Liam had not heard the wailing a moment before. He looked toward his house and there Clara and Esther stood still waving at him and beaming as though they couldn’t see the carnage around them. Liam heard the scream of a bomber overhead. He looked up and saw it directly over his house. He tried to yell a warning, but his wife and daughter just continued waving happily. Something small dropped from the aircraft and hit the roof of the house. Liam watched in horror as the house exploded in a ball of flame.

“NO!” Liam awoke, jolting up to a sitting position in bed with a strangled yell. His shout woke Clara, who bolted up next to him.

“Lights on,” she ordered. The lights came on to reveal the safe, familiar scene of their sleeping quarters on Amity. Liam realized he was shaking, his forehead soaked in sweat.

Clara turned to him, her eyes gentle as she reached up a hand to stroke his sweat-soaked hair, as she might have done to Esther, “It was a really bad one, wasn’t it?” Clara had woken with Liam and comforted him many nights, and on just as many he had held her as she cried and shook from the things she had seen in her dreams. Nightmares were common to almost everyone on the Amity. They’d all seen horrible things back home on Earth, even if it was just on the news. Even little Esther suffered from bad dreams sometimes. She would wake screaming, or silent and shaking, and creep to her parent’s room and crawl into bed with them.

Liam nodded as his heart rate began to slow. He wrapped his arms around his wife and felt her's wrap around him in response. He held her for a few minutes, eyes closed, listening to the sound of her breathing, then he let go of her and stood up.

“I’ll be right back,” he said softly. He padded barefoot into the living room area of their quarters and then into the bathroom area, where he splashed water on his face. He left the bathroom and went quietly into Esther’s room. The little girl slept peacefully, hugging a little stuffed unicorn to her chest, lit faintly by the holo-projected stars on the ceiling, an image of the Andromeda constellation. Liam stood in the doorway for a moment, then padded back towards his own room. He had just needed to see her, safe and sound in her bed where she belonged.

By the time he slipped into bed again, Clara was almost asleep, but she moved closer to him, laying her head against his chest. Liam wrapped his arms once more around his wife, listening to her breathing deepen into sleep.

The nightmares were a reminder of why they were on the Amity, of what their mission was. A reminder also of those left behind on Earth who suffered through a nightmare there was no waking from every day. Those people only made the mission more important. The crew of the Amity couldn’t help them, but they could learn from the suffering humankind had inflicted on itself. Esther, and the other precious children the ship carried, deserved a peaceful home, not a world of war and death. A home where generations could live in peace. That home was out there somewhere, and the Amity would find it.

But just before he dropped back to sleep, the image of Marek’s pain-filled face popped unbidden into Liam’s head, and he seemed to hear the Lemarian’s ragged whisper, “The Hok-Kar…”

Liam pushed the thought away. There was no reason to believe that the Amity would ever even encounter the Hok-Kar.

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Liam awoke earlier than usual the next morning. He slipped out of bed quietly, careful not to wake Clara up. As he sat alone at a table in the cafeteria, a cup of coffee in his hand, he found his mind drifting back to his life before the war.

He had been nineteen when he first met Clara. At the time he was attending Asteria University, an institution focused solely on preparing students for space related jobs, whether building space ships or traveling on them. The finest school of its kind in Britain, it was a team of students and professors from Asteria who would later create a ship known as the S. S. Amity.

Liam was beginning his second year at Asteria, brimming with hope and excitement to be working toward his dream of traveling to the stars. Clara, at seventeen years old, was just beginning as a student at another nearby university, working towards a degree in education.

One night Liam had been sitting at a small table in a coffee shop packed with university students. He was alone that night; all of his friends were off doing other things.

“Do you mind if I sit here? All of the tables are taken.” Liam looked up at the voice. The girl standing in front of him seemed barely old enough to be a university student. She held a steaming cup of coffee in one hand and her green eyes were warm and friendly in a face framed by black curls.

Liam nodded, “Sure, I don’t mind.” The girl grinned and perched on the chair across the table from him.

“I’m Clara, Clara James.”

Liam held out his hand to shake, “Liam Hawthorn, pleasure to meet you.”

“Nice to meet you too, Liam.” Clara was friendly and easy to talk to and before long the two had discovered that they shared an interest in old science fiction TV shows, movies, and books. When they had finished their coffee, Liam offered to walk her back to her campus. As they walked they looked at the stars. Before saying goodnight they exchanged phone numbers, and soon they were dating.

They were married two years later. By that time there were stories on the news of war beginning in other countries, but it all seemed far off. The happy young couple never dreamed it would affect them.

Liam vividly remembered the day Esther was born. He had been twenty-two. Just a few weeks earlier he had graduated from Asteria University, magna cum laude, near the top of his class, and thought it the proudest moment of his life. Holding that tiny baby girl in his arms he had a new proudest moment. They named her for the stars, and still the war seemed far off.

Looking back on it, the war had been building up for a long time, but for Liam, young, happy, about to start a successful career doing what he had always dreamed of, completely in love with his wife and devoted to his daughter, when the war came it shattered his world in an instant and with utterly no warning.

One day, when Esther was a year old, Liam kissed his wife and daughter goodbye and headed out the door, bursting with excitement, to embark on his first mission aboard a spaceship. He would miss his family, but it was to be a short mission, only two weeks long. His best friend, who had been his roommate all through university, would be on the mission too. Liam was in a hurry, he was running late because he hadn’t been able to find his shoes. Esther had hidden them in her toy box.

He had just turned the corner that brought the launch site into view when, with no warning, he was knocked off his feet by a massive explosion as the entire launch site went up in flames. Liam’s friend and everyone else at the launch site were killed. If he hadn’t been running late that day, Liam would have died too. The explosion was no accident and two days later the United Kingdom had declared war on those responsible, entering what was already being called World War III.

Almost four years later, Liam was approached by the leaders of the Amity project. Some of them had been his professors at university and he was their top choice for the captain of the ship they were building, if he chose to accept the job. As if he would ever have said anything but yes. It was not only a chance to fulfill his dream of traveling to the stars, but a chance for his family to live in safety, for his daughter to grow up in peace and have a happy childhood. He accepted the job and soon the family was being trained along with 409 others, people from countries their own was at war with, but in the end that didn’t matter, they were all the same, people who had been offered a new hope and a second chance.

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As the Amity entered its fourth month of space travel all seemed to be going well. The ship’s gardens thrived and there had so far been no major injuries or health problems among the 412 inhabitants of the spaceship. Perhaps they should have known that the easy going couldn’t last.

The attack came without warning. Liam had just entered the control room at the beginning of the day when the ship was hit with great force, knocking him to his knees. For a moment his mind flashed back to the explosion that had knocked him off his feet so many years ago, but he shook that thought away. He was the captain, he needed to concentrate on the present, not the past.

“Turn on the view screen,” he commanded, getting to his feet. The officer at that station, who had just regained his own seat after being knocked out of it when the ship was hit, obeyed instantly. Once again a ship filled the screen, but this ship was nothing like the one that had carried the Lemarians. The Lemarian ship had been about half the size of the Amity, silver and pretty, almost dainty. This ship was huge, dwarfing the Amity, and its color was a dull, dark grey, almost black. As Liam and the others watched a beam of dark red light shot from the ship, hitting Amity and shaking it once more. Liam braced himself against the wall and managed to keep from falling this time. He quickly punched the button on his communication device to call the security room,

“Return fire,” he ordered tersely. A moment later an orange beam hit the the ship on the viewscreen, but it seemed to have little effect. Another beam shot from the alien ship, not red this time, but a sickly, pale green, and much wider, wider than the Amity itself. When this beam touched the Amity the ship didn’t shake from impact, instead it began to be pulled towards the other ship. It was some kind of tractor beam.

“Lieutenant Han, try to break free of it!” Liam ordered Mei, who was on duty at the navigation station, “Full power!”

She punched in a string of rapid commands, “I’m trying, but I can’t; it’s too powerful!” Liam could tell she was struggling to keep her voice calm, but it was tinged with panic.

As he watched the screen a door in the side of the alien ship slid open and the tractor beam carried the Amity towards it. They were carried inside, the tractor beam cut off, and the door slid closed, leaving nothing outside the ship but total darkness.