Page 26 of Becoming Super

“That’s called work, Maria.”

She laughed. “I suppose it is.”

“We should do something fun.” Visions of a picnic and volleyball game bounced into my head.

Axel shook his head. “We are here for a reason, Sarah. Zeronian’s don’t need fun, they have discipline and courage. That is better than fun.”

I was about to argue with him when an alarm started sounding. I knew that meant we needed to get into our seats and connect the seatbelts.

“There is a rogue ship coming out of Neman’s asteroid belt that isn’t responding to our communications, Captain.”

Heath was suddenly all business as he gave the coordinates and statistics of the unknown vessel traveling toward us.

Zack instructed one of the crew to zoom in on the belt; for a while all that we could see were large rocks. And then toward the center, the shape of a foreign ship came into view. I gulped, realizing perhaps a moment too late that this was real, and these aliens probably wouldn’t like us.

“Fuck,” Zack ran a hand through his dirty blonde hair. “We are going to need to outrun them. If we engage in battle now we are breaking The Intergalactic Space rules, but I have a feeling that this Seran ship isn’t the only one.”

I looked at Axel, who was punching in a bunch of things into the mainframe computer.

Maria called out, “Ready when you are, Captain!”

“Engage.”

If it wasn’t so entirely scary I would have been sure to make a Star Wars comment or ask if they knew any Klingons. But somehow, I didn’t suppose these people would be up to date on their Star Trek humor.

The one ship multiplied into three and then seven.

“Fuck!” Axel yelled as the first blast shook the force field of our vessel. “Can we go any faster, Maria?”

She was typing away at a furious pace into some kind of smart tablet and referring back to the lines of code in the monitor in front of her.

“We can’t outrun them, but there is a chance that we could lose them.”

Zack threw her an incredulous look, “You can’t be suggesting.”

For a blue woman, Maria was mighty fierce. “It is my job to come up with solutions, sir. It is one viable option.”

Another blast hit the ship. My stomach lurched as we shook, lights blinking.

“Just do it,” Axel yelled at Zack. “You know what you have aboard this ship. It’s better that we go down fighting than get caught.”

That seemed to decide things for Zack. He nodded briskly at Maria and then instructed Heath to take power from the forcefield and allocate that to the boosters.

I wanted to ask where we were going and why Scotty couldn’t just beam us up. But the terror and panic that was clawing at my throat prevented me from doing a damn thing.

If they shot us again with the force fields down, could we withstand such a blow? Was I willing to find out?

“Ready,” Heath called out, and a split-second later Zack commanded Maria to alter our course.

Suddenly I was upside down and falling fast. We were headed to a swirling ring of nothingness.

Please don’t be a black hole.

Please don’t be a black hole.

Darkness encroached on the ship and I forgot about puking and started worrying about living.

There was screaming, and things went flying everywhere, but we continued to fly upside-down into the greatest gravitational force known to man. Did they not watch cartoons as children? Nobody willingly goes into a black hole.

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