Chapter 98

• “Captain’s Log, Day four thousand ninety-two. The crew grows more and more anxious by the day. They are anticipating the results of our excursion with increasing excitement, as any scientist should when faced with such a beautifully daunting task. We are still searching for the source of the energetic flares, and have narrowed our options down to a small planet in the Xenome quadrant. Planet L-24B9-6, where small bacterial organisms have been the only sign of life for the past two centuries. This is a fascinating discovery in of itself, but the fact that multiple search crews have been lost almost as soon as they got this close is evidently making my crew very uneasy. I hope we will find what we were sent here for, and remain unscathed.”
• The woman sat back in her chair as she set the recorder down, her soft brown eyes scanning the scene in front of her. Her crew moved quickly and efficiently around her like the bees she was so fond of when she lived on Earth. Her home in a small Mexican town south of Cancún seemed so far away now, and she was much happier here among the stars, on the Stormchaser 12 with the first all-female crew to open and traverse through a wormhole. The scanners projected the image of a bright pink planet in front of her, striped with magenta and red, surrounded by a few lone asteroids.
• “Captain Cruz,” one of her crewmates called from the control bridge, “the radar is picking up a dramatic change in the radiation levels emitted by the planet. Small heat signatures are popping up in clusters of half a dozen to a dozen signals. Strange, isn’t it?” A few strands of her short blonde hair fell gently into her face as she turned around to show the Captain.