Space Knights: The Arrival by Gregory Samuelson (buy e reader .TXT) 📕

was roughly the same one that Melthor’s moon had taken. The angels and the sons of God also knew a secret that the humans on the ships did not know. It was a secret that had been hidden from the people of Earth for centuries.

One day the people would find out. A prophet Jamuous gave the prophecies. His cryptic prophecies were written in a long dead language and had never been translated. Yet they were revered for their beauty and what they may foretell. The one tantalizing clue was given by a later prophet, who declared that Jamuous’ prophecies would be revealed shortly before Christ’s appearance to redeem the worlds where this portion of humanity was heading. For now they celebrated Christ’s victory on Earth and watched over the humans that were traversing the stars. Below them the ships, including the Sparrow XIV, flew silently on.

***

Eons passed in peace. Slowly the ships had separated some. They were still in formation but their spacing had been gradually increasing. Countless years passed as the passengers slept. On and on the ships flew till now they were approaching the Andromeda galaxy. The ships entered the galaxy and silently flew on as their computers and sensors scanned the surrounding stars and plotted the course toward the planet. Nobody on the ships knew that the area that they were now entering in the galaxy actually had several solar systems that had planets that could sustain life. The planet the ships were approaching was the nearest, but not by much. Some of the ships had broken formation and headed off toward some of the other worlds, but the Sparrow XIV stayed on course for the planned world.

Four days before the crew of the Sparrow XIV was to begin the wake-up process and to get the ship ready to land on the planet, another ship approached. It was not one of the escape ships. The approaching craft was large and looked very dangerous as several ports opened and were filled by very large crossbows. The powerful wenches at the ends of the bows were ready to spin and pull the cable that would launch the deadly looking bolts that were six feet long with three thin fins and incredibly sharp arrowheads that were designed to puncture a ship’s hull.

“It’s another strange ship sir,” said a knight in dark gray armor on the approaching ship. He looked very determined at his captain waiting at his station with the weapons firing controls in front of him.

“Where is it from?” asked the captain, a rather angry looking man with a scarred face from several battles in service to his king. The ship was a battleship from a planet eight solar systems away, the planet Boulthora.

“I don’t know sir. Like the others we’ve encountered it’s not responding to our hails,” the Boulthorian gunner responded and looked excited at the prospect of target practice.

“They must be friendly to the Althorians. That seems to be where they are headed,” spoke another knight on the bridge of the ship. This knight was the second in command and he looked as mean as the captain. He strode over and looked down at the viewer and sneered at the ship pictured there. “Pathetic. I wonder what kind of ship it is. You’d think they were just waiting out here to die. They don’t even look like they’re armed.”

“Could it be a decoy ship? There have been so many of them, and none of them seem to be aware that they are crossing a no-fly area,” said the captain, trying to figure out what the trick was with these strange ships.

“What are we to do?” asked the second in command. “Do we let it pass like the others, or do we put a stop to them?”

The communications officer was listening to an incoming message from their home world. He turned excitedly toward the captain and said, “I’ve got a message from King Axlor. He thinks that these ships must be either decoys or troops from another world coming to help the Althorians. He also thinks that they must be preparing to prevent us from our objective on their world. We have been given permission to attack and destroy the strange ships. If they are decoys then it’ll show that we’ve figured them out, and if they are full of troops friendly to the Althorians, it gets rid of them.”

The captain looked over at his men with an evil grin creasing his scarred face. He turned to the gunner and said savagely, “Fit the destructor arrows on the bows and destroy that ship.”

The gunner turned to his control screen and entered the commands that caused mechanical arms to extend out and remove the armor piercing arrows off the great crossbows, and then they extended out again with very deadly explosive-tipped arrows. The gunner then very carefully targeted the Sparrow XIV. On the captain’s orders he depressed the firing buttons, and the bows launched dozens of arrows at the ship.

***

Alarms went off in the Sparrow XIV as the ship’s computers recognized the threat of the approaching arrows, thinking quite correctly that they were missiles. The ship’s main computers went through the possible solutions to the danger. The one solution that came up was to immediately awaken the crew and get them to fly the ship out of danger; but it would be too late for that. The computers tried to steer the ship away, but the automatic piloting controls were very slow to respond in turning the ship. The ship managed to just dodge the incoming arrows as the computer finally found a solution: Expel the passengers, crew, and animal chambers. In a moment the deep sleep chambers emergency systems prepared to expel them from the ship.

Each chamber was equipped with its own emergency power systems and monitors. All of the chambers were also equipped with a small yet rather powerful and efficient rocket pack that could propel it quite a distance toward a livable planet. Also the chambers