Title: The Last Flight Home
Author: Ricky Hausler
Publisher: Federal Service Books
ISBN: 979-8989612611
eBook ISBN: 979-8989612628
Genre: Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi
Availability: Paperback or eBook
Language: English
Paperback: 288 pages
Item Weight: 15.1 ounces
Dimensions:
6 x 0.65 x 9 inches
Explore Authors Mini Review:
A sole survivor of a devastating battle becomes mankind’s last hope to defeat a race of alien aggressors in this stirring Sci-Fi Adventure ★★★★★ – Explore Authors Magazine
Where to buy: eBook edition
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About the Book:
Meet Sergeant John Thomas (JT): the sole survivor of a devastating battle and mankind’s only hope for possibly defeating the Gnoracs, a race of alien aggressors, in the 4th Great Inter-Stellar War. Will JT be able to make the peace his superiors strive for a reality? Along the way, he meets a host of characters, some shadier than others. He also encounters a young part alien doctor who may hold the key to his heart. JT wants to get back home to visit his surviving family. But that goal is lofty.
With a myriad of species and alien races from across the universe, JT finds himself in a race against time. His mind conflicts with his better judgment advising him not to follow his emotional instincts. This is because he is a Federal Marine sworn to duty first. However, when his healer who is also his protector seems to care more for him than is professionally acceptable, what can he do but react humanely? After all, JT is a human first, and only after that is he a Marine. Will he survive to become the savior of the Federation and its allies? Will he find love? Will the Gnoracs be defeated saving humanity and Cybrinthian-kind? Read John Thomas and the Last Flight Home to find out.
Sneaky Reads Excerpt
Chapter 1
All Stop
Overwhelming. Bright red. Enormous. That’s all John Thomas -JT- Wayne could recall of the monstrosity that had knocked him out into space. Now he lay stricken inside an infirmary ward. He had little to think about except his buddies and the men and women still onboard the Vissad. No doubt fighting for their lives. The truth was, they were all already dead—vaporized by a spectacular bombardment of destruction no feral imagination could conceive. No funerals, no honors, no speeches, or charades to commemorate the sacrifice of the Vissad’s crew. Just a big black debris cloud and a radiation-littered quadrant, seven klicks across, expanding like a cancer—a cancer that memorialized yet mocked their existence.
But Wayne knew none of that as he lay wide-awake on his white sanitized sheets sifting helplessly through his own memories. His cloudy recollections. What he had of them. He would try to think of ways he could rejoin his brothers-in-arms, but even this was a challenge. His thoughts kept returning to that moment he experienced the tremendous and powerful force from some enemy cruiser. The giant cloud of red matter that jolted him from duty, left him unconscious and blew him into space with shock wave force; nothing he had ever experienced before, nor wanted to again.
The destruction of his vessel was an event long expected by those in the service who believed in luck, or lack thereof, curses, the occult, unexplainable forces and the like. The Vissad was named after Captain Eric Vissad, an Angolan fleet commander who met his end in the third Inter-Stellar War. Long ago this starship on which Wayne would serve earned a reputation as a cursed ship. A ship on which no sailor or Marine wanted to be. She had been christened in a ceremony that injured a port-worker and killed an engineering director. It was a freakish un-mooring accident that none could completely explain. Despite the multitude of after-the-fact investigations ordered by very high levels of fleet command, the reports all proved inconclusive.
There were many facts and fictions surrounding the ship and its lineage. A dangerous quadrant-wide meteor shower had cancelled her maiden voyage, but by the time the shower would have reached the ship’s charted course area, it had mysteriously disappeared. In fact, other ships had shortly thereafter sailed the very same space and each logged smooth journeys without a trace of debris. This was only one of the many peculiarities associated with the Vissad.
The first major battle in which she fought left her not much more than a scrap of space junk—nearly half of the crew was killed or wounded, and more than a hundred were listed missing. Fleet evaluation teams deemed her nearly irreparable. As such, she was put on the docket of junked cruisers to be stripped of classified material, usable hardware, control systems and electronics.
As luck would have it, shortly after her near-destruction, a division sized battle left all fleet power-core resources in limited supply, and the Vissad was sent to the repair docks instead. Some sailors whispered that her power-core was the reason: cursed by the very engineer who was found dead after the un-mooring. The autopsy revealed he had suffered for ten minutes from intense radiation before succumbing. This—just as emergency workers found him outside the core’s atomic pulse generator room. One medic recalled the man had whispered a single word during the resuscitation attempts,—damned, or doomed he thought. But the medic could not tell for sure as the engineer was already dead. Or at least he appeared to be. No heartbeat. No breath at all. There was; moreover, no valid reason he should have been near the atomic generator room. The generators were in good order and one would think the head engineer would have been at the engineering bridge during her initial un-mooring. More disturbing was the lack of explanation for why the room’s sealed three-inch thick, depleted uranium lined, polymer-based glass hatch should have failed. But it did.
Whatever the reason for them, the list of eerie events and mishaps aboard the Vissad went on. And so, when she finally met her end, there were some in the fleet who felt relieved that the cursed ship was now a piece of space-history. There was in truth a greater number of souls who were glad the ship was gone than those saddened by her loss. But in a way the Vissad was left to sail on, if only now in Valhalla… the warrior’s paradise… haunting her enemies… and perhaps her own crew.
Try as he might, Wayne could not recall anything following the burst of red energy. He knew that orders for ‘reverse thrusters’ were given. Then ‘prepare to embark.’ All Marines at the ready. Boarding and attack transport vessels filled. After he launched his platoon, he prepared to re-enter his transport from the tight and extremely narrow oval commander’s hatch. Then came the command, ‘all thrusters full stop.’ The Vissad slowed and before he even entered his craft- the intense short burst of red light, a long cold pelting sensation, followed by the feeling of falling, weightlessness, was that a new weapon? Then BLAM! He was suddenly and instantly transported to his current state- bandaged, drugged and immobilized. Quite a predicament for a gung-ho Marine.
Hooah was anything and everything positive; a favorite term military folks used when at a loss for words. It was generally synonymous with “yes,” “sounds good,” “affirmative,” “understood,” or “excellent.” If hooah was anything positive, then JT was stagnating in the infirmary world of anti-hooah. He was now on the fourth floor of St. Demetrius’ forward fleet hospital, somewhere several parsecs behind the front. Not exactly where a young, motivated, up and coming Federal Marine wanted to be. He was incapacitated. He should be leading his platoon in battle; that is where he was meant, wanted, and needed to be. But at the moment his desires and reality were at odds. Instead of fighting with his men he was wasting time in the infirmary – ugh. Not hooah.
His instincts kept gnawing at him to get out of bed. Depart as fast as he could. Run to the nearest port. Fly off to his ship and get back to the fight. Wherever that was. His thoughts bounced back and forth like a hologram ball between three walls: his incapacitation and how to escape the infirmary, the medicine concoction he was being fed, and the vague recollection of the mysterious red-light blast. Then, the black cloud of lost memory.
This last thought: that blast. It would not leave his mind. It kept leading him back to preceding events. Trying—trying hard—to piece them together. His logic was sound. But all the details were not. The call. The embarkation scramble. Getting his men on the shuttle and off the ship. Outside and into space. The blur.
He couldn’t help but wonder how Sergeant Johanas was doing with the men. His second-in-command was more than capable. Johanas was a leader. A career Marine. He would spend forty years soldiering and retire from the service. Of that Wayne was sure. If the young non-commissioned officer lived that long. The way this war was going, nothing was for sure. Johanas would surely get the men into action quickly. They were all well-trained. There was no doubt about that.
JT’s was the best platoon in the brigade. Maybe even the division. They were good men and they were excellent Marines. Loyal, duty-bound, motivated. They exuded what it was to be a Federal Marine. Then his thoughts shifted back to the infirmary. It was not healthy to think about that stuff: the fixations over which he had no control. His wandering mind, so it seemed, was not a bad thing: at least he couldn’t dwell on the bad for long.
The main object that kept Wayne’s mind off of his crewmates was a wonderful synthetic strawberry ice-cream soda like medicine. The doctors kept delivering it to his bedside. He could picture himself: five years old in junior school at lunchtime savoring the flavor of strawberries and ice-cream mixed together with pure carbon-water. It was delicious. This was his favorite treat as a kid, which into adolescence and then adulthood, turned into his favorite dessert. Strawberry ice-cream soda: at least that’s what it tasted like to him. Without fail every hour, or so it seemed, another one of these delicious escapes was brought inconspicuously to his bedside. Each time a straw and napkin accompanied the medicine.
Like his last memory, time was a blur. After two,—or maybe it was ten—minutes though, the drink was gone. Every one of them lapped up heartily by the young Marine sergeant. And then, he would return to his quest of trying to remember exactly what happened. What had happened aboard the strange and only battle-cruiser in the Federal Alliance to see combat in both the last two inter-stellar wars? Between his thoughts of getting back into the fray and this tasty medicine, he tried to piece together how he landed here. He had clearly been rescued from space during a deadly and intense scrap out on the edge of the Near Universe. But the rescue? No recollection at all.
Try as he might, keeping track of time in the infirmary was a futile battle. He never really fell into a truly deep sleep. Something inside his stomach would wake him every now and then to check on the status of the next strawberry medicine. The ice-cream soda dose as he liked to think. This was just as well; since his body was adapted to sleeping half-awake in short stints. It helped keep him alert and constantly aware of his surroundings. Even while resting. Sort of like a fish. But any Marine he met would agree that Wayne was more of a cunning but rouge shark. He was a puma not an alley-cat. This erratic and very alert method of snoozing by cat-nap kept him in command of the mental edge in combat. Losing the edge was one of a Federal Marines’ worst fears. He wouldn’t let that happen.
Every now and then a new doctor or doctrette (a physician’s assistant or nurse practitioner of the 21st-century era) would come by and check his vital signs. They would jot down a note or two, see if he needed more of the medicine mush he enjoyed, and move on to the next bed. He could go on like this but he didn’t want to; it was certainly a comfortable way to pass the time, but just passing time was not in his character.
JT convinced himself he was set to get out of the infirmary. He would have tried harder to leave, but while he thought he was ready, the doctors and doctrettes disagreed. And of course, he was not quite so ready that he didn’t still enjoy a visit from a cute one. The few good-looking docs who attended his ward wouldn’t make him sit up or take serious note, but he didn’t mind the attention. He wished that there were more healers of the fairer sex. More attractive ones at least.
There were more females in the medical corps than previous centuries, especially as doctors and doctrettes. But their stationings were limited this far forward. Here it was more likely to encounter the usual grumpy over-the-hill doctor-officer the Federal Marines seemed so fond of commissioning. Most doctors who came to check up on him just took his vital signs. They made notes, grunted or nodded as if to say something important to themselves then shuffled on their way.
But it was different when a young lady visited him donning a hospital coat, a hint of soft makeup, maybe a touch of lipstick, gentle eyeliner, and most noticeably: a smile. The female doctors and doctrettes had a softer touch even with the cold metallic equipment and sensors draped around their supple necks. Either they cared more, or their natural instinct was more care-giving. The female human or Cybrinthian touch was much warmer and less impersonal than a man’s.
Cybrinthians were a race of blueish human-like aliens that had come to the home solar system in search of new planets eons ago. They bred with humans and inter-mixed with them.
Yes, he thought, women make much better physicians.
He mused in fleeting reveille that it was too bad these physicians could not serve aboard forward deployed vessels. No doctors or surgeons of either sex served on forward deployed attack ships. There was a long period centuries ago when women could not in any capacity. But times had changed long before JT became a Marine and now human, Cybrinthian, male, female or neuter could serve side by side if their position warranted it. JT wished the Vissad could have had a few cute healers, but it could not. On second thought, maybe that was a good thing.
Morale was a closely linked, yet precariously perched subject as it related to maintaining the combat edge for a Marine. The state of a soldier or Marine’s mind was a basketball in play. Its fast movement went up and down no matter what the direction of travel. And the shot clock was always on.
So the healers came and went from the ward. Every once in a while, one would give him a funny glance or look twice at his name. JT had the misfortune of sharing his namesake, John T. Wayne, with the outgoing Chancellor of the Federal Alliance—not a terribly popular character at best. It was also the first and last name of a once famous but now obscure film actor from centuries ago. But few people except ancient historical cinema experts would know that. However, the commonality with the Chancellor was a good topic for small talk. A least with the pretty doctrettes and doctors who periodically came to check on his and the other patients’ conditions. To JT those visits were too infrequent.