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

The Earth people also learned that Althorian time was different. A day had twenty-eight hours. Each hour had eighty minutes with eighty seconds. There were ten days in a week, five weeks in a month, and thirty months in a year. Althora had six seasons in a year, summer, auburn, lest, winter, plenting, and spring. Each season was five months long. There was also something very interesting about the planet and the other inhabited worlds, something unknown. The aging process was slowed. The people in the area seemed to live roughly ten to eleven times longer, and some lived up to twenty-five times longer. It also seemed that the Earth people were picking up this quality. It was unknown why, whether it was in the air, water, or food. Regardless of the cause, the end result was that the people from Earth were feeling the effect and were happier and more vibrant.

Eileen still looked out occasionally to wonder where Trance was. She quietly prayed that he was safe and some place where he was welcomed and taken care of. A silent tear slid down her cheek as she worried about him. Unknown to her, some two hundred miles away west, Trance was in peril of never waking up. His sleep chamber had come down at a steep angle and was damaged when it crashed down in a wooded area four miles outside a rural village. The timing components were locked in a loop. To make the situation worse the power system was slowly draining and would completely shut down in two hundred days.

Chapter 5

A New Home

The morning was bright, warm, and sunny with only three clouds up above, puffy cumulous clouds that resembled small piles of cotton. The farmer stood outside his farmhouse looking at the sky and smiling at the wonderful day.

“It’s going to be a good day today,” he said.

Off he strode toward the large metal barn. He pushed a button on the left side of the door and waited as it slowly opened. The barn was divided somewhat into two sections. The shop half had several shelves that were loaded down with various hand and power tools. Standing on the floor of the shop were some full sized tools for all sorts of purposes. There were saws, a drill press, a lathe, and some rather strange looking tools, all of which had signs of minor wear and tear. Overall, they were well cared for.

He walked past all these tools toward the other half of the barn. Here were what looked like animal stalls, twenty of them in all, ten on each side. He approached the fifth one from the back on the left. Curiously the sign on the stall door read, “Plow horse.” Inside the stall was a rather stout and sturdy looking horse with a very shiny silvery coat. A closer look would show that it was covered with metal, and closer inspection revealed that it wasn’t a real horse at all. It was a robot horse with a plow attachment behind it.

The farmer opened the second barn door and went back to the stall. On entering the stall he walked behind the horse, checked the plow and made sure that it was set up properly to cultivate his fields. He then sat himself on the seat on the horse, grabbed its control handles and got ready to start his day. He reached down and pressed a small green square button that started up the horse, backed out of the stall, and then turned the horse and rode it out of the barn heading toward the fields.

Two hours later, as he finished another row near the edge of his field and closest to the forest that bordered his farm, he was turning the horse around for the next row; he spotted a strange gleam in the distance. He stopped the horse and shaded his eyes to try to get a better look at what had caught his eye. Whatever it was, it was far enough in among the trees and bramble that he could not make it out. For a moment he thought about starting the horse up and continuing to plow, but his curiosity nagged at him. He wiped his brow and checked his wrist chron; some might call it a watch. His wife would be up and starting to fix breakfast by now. He would ordinarily try to plow one more row before heading back to get something to eat at this time. However, the thing in the woods seemed to call to him to check it out. Okay, he thought, it’ll only be a few minutes to find out what it is and I can head back to the house from here.

He decided he didn’t need the plow to go explore the woods, so he took a moment to disconnect the plow from the horse. Now he started off and entered the forest to head toward what lay there gleaming at him. Here under the trees it became harder to see ahead and the gleam disappeared several times before he sighted it again. He had been looking for six minutes, which had felt much longer, and he had decided that if he didn’t find whatever it was in the next three minutes he would just head back to the house on the horse, eat breakfast, and then come back for the plow and continue. A large evergreen was in his path so he turned the horse to go around the great trunk and there it was.

It resembled a mini space ship that had smashed down among a thick bramble, almost embedding in the ground at a lopsided angle. The armor shell had small wings and was designed to protect the chamber from the extreme conditions of entering a planet’s atmosphere. The farmer slowly climbed off the horse and approached the mini-craft. When he neared it he noticed the small