Stasis (Alpha Ship One Book 1) Read online

  L.D.P. Samways

  STASIS

  Alpha Ship One

  Text © 2015 by Luis Samways

  All rights reserved.

  Cover Design by The Purple Book Co.

  Luis Samways has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  eBook edition first published in November 2015

  ******

  V1.4

  *Errors fixed on the 27th of November 2015

  * More errors fixed on the 27th of November 2015

  *Some more errors fixed on the 28th of November 2015

  * More errors fixed on the 29th of November 2015

  For more information on books by Luis Samways Visit:

  www.LuisSamways.com

  www.Twitter.com/LuisSamways

  © 2015 by the Purple Book Co.

  Table of Contents

  About The Author

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Sample

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  About The Author

  L.D.P. Samways is the not-so-well-thought-out pen name of Luis Samways, a best-selling thriller writer with more than 20 novels published. Samways uses the L.D.P. pen name for science fiction to not confuse his thriller reader base.

  But you can expect the same fast-paced, non-stop, breakneck action that comes with a Luis Samways novel…but now they’re in space!

  Luis continues to write in the mystery/thriller genre, and will diversify his releases according to what he likes to write!

  Thanks for taking the time to join Luis on his new journey. Hopefully this new frontier won’t be as dangerous as the journey the crewmen and women face on the Alpha Ship One…

  Chapter One

  My eyes opened wide as the sound of gushing oxygen woke me. At first, I couldn’t see all that well. After a few seconds, they focused and the the gushing sound stopped suddenly. An LED board flashed in front of my face. A heads up panel stated that the pod I was in was leaking air. Only twenty percent remained in the cabin. If I didn’t open the door to the pod soon, I’d run out of air. And once the air ran out, then I’d be a goner. But you didn’t need me to tell you that. And I didn’t need to think twice about what I did next.

  The pod was a tight fit, not leaving much wriggle room inside. After all, it was designed to house one man or woman for stasis hyper sleep. You didn’t need much room when you were away with the cosmic fairies. There was no tossing and turning in hyper sleep, so the pods weren’t designed with movement being a priority. As far as priorities go, movement was on the lowest end of the scale. That, and durability, which would make what I did next possible. I balled both my fists up, raised them over the LED board in front of me and pushed all my weight into the pod door, double punching my way out of the pod. After three attempts, I actually managed to smash my way out of the capsule, tumbling onto the floor. I landed hard on the metal grating. The diagonal slats scored uncomfortable marks on my face. As I lay there shivering and naked, I heard the sound of more pod doors being smashed open.

  I tried to see what was happening, but I just couldn’t manage to open my eyes again. After a few more seconds of hugging the metal floor, I heard a thud. I opened my eyes and saw Second Commander Jess lying on the grates next to me. She was also cold. And naked. But I guess she looked better for it. Especially given the fact that she was probably the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. But that was beside the point. I wasn’t there to look or touch. To be honest, I wasn’t sure what I was there for. I didn’t have any recollection of where I was, what I was supposed to be doing or why I’d just woken up from stasis.

  “Darn it’s cold,” I heard a voice say.

  Slowly getting up, I steadied myself against one of the hyper cylinders. The things that were supposed to supply us with oxygen whilst in Stasis. But seeing that I saw my entire crew sprawled out on the floor, naked as the day they came into existence, with their pod doors smashed open, I thought that the hyper cylinders must have failed on the journey we were taking. But where we were going or why we were going there was a mystery. It seemed as if I was suffering from some minor amnesia.

  “Darn!” I heard somebody say again. It was a familiar voice. A voice that belonged to my gunner Dale Dykstra. A big brutish man that had more muscles than I had brain cells. And I consider myself a smart person, so all in all, he’s a pretty big dude.

  “What in the stars is going on?” I heard another voice say. That voice belonged to my medic, Raj Habish. He was the resident doctor. He had more brain cells than I had…brain cells. You get the picture. Smart guy. Really smart guy.

  “I don’t know…Where are we?” Second Commander Jess asked as she got herself off the floor and stood with the rest of us. We were all naked, but none of the others seemed to notice or care. Maybe I was the only one that had noticed we were all in the buff. Maybe they were only focusing on my nakedness, but either way, I didn’t like the fact that I was naked. Don’t know if you can tell, but nakedness for me is a big no no. Probably has something to do with my small….

  “What the hell is this, Captain Flynn?” Dale Dykstra asked as he looked around in confusion. I could see that he was just as lost as I was. But being the Captain, I wasn’t about to tell my crew that I had no idea what was going on.

  “How the heck did we get here? Last thing I remember, I was sitting down at my bunk back at Sector Omega, and the next thing I’m here. Something doesn’t make sense,” Second Commander Jess said as she looked me up and down. I returned the favor. She didn’t appreciate it. But hell, if I was going to be embarrassed in front of my crew, then why the hell not spread it around?

  “Look, we all need to relax. Everything is going to be just fine,” I said, momentarily looking around at our surroundings. The hyper sleep room, or dream room as it was affectionately known to my crew, was dark and dingy. It didn’t hold much of anything other than the pods. The room was oval and the sleep chambers were built into the perimeter. They too were oval. Huge cylinders that stood at seven and a half feet tall. The pods were made out of a plastic/glass substance that was easy to smash, yet hard enough to withstand any bumpy flying conditions during hyper sleep. The dream room was more or less empty, except for the pods and the generators that stood next to each of them. The generators would feed us air, food and water during sleep. An IV drip hung inside each of the chambers and must have detached from me and my crew when we broke out of the chambers. But the question still remained, why on Earth had we broken out of stasis and why were we in it in the first place?

  “There must be some sort of explanation,” Dale Dykstra said as he started
to pace a little, from left to right. As he did so, his rather large muscles bounced a little. The sound of his flesh bobbing as he paced made me feel a little uncomfortable.

  “We need to put some clothes on,” I said, walking past my startled crew. I could tell that they were in no way enjoying themselves. And that was a bad thing. You see, the Alpha Ship One crew, as we are known, is also known for being a rag-tag group of misfits. And when you have a ship worth a billion dollars, manned by a band of misfits, bad things tend to happen. Luckily for Pilgrim Tech, the company that finances us, they usually pay us well enough that bad things are far from the hearts and minds of the Alpha Ship One crew. That being said, I couldn’t really guarantee a melt-down-free zone on the ship at that very moment in time. Not when my crew of explosive personalities had no idea how they got back on the ship, or where the hell they were or why they were no longer back at base. It was then that I realized that I had my work cut out for me.

  Big time.

  “There must be some reasonable explanation as to why we all find ourselves here,” I said, walking toward the dream room door. I was about to reach for the biometric scanner to open the door when I noticed that the scanner had a red light above it. As the captain, I knew that only meant one thing; We were locked inside. But I wasn’t going to divulge that information to my crew. Not just yet, anyway. But before I could turn around and face them head on, Jess had sidled up beside me, looking over my shoulder at the fingerprint scanner. And judging by her facial expression, I could see that she also knew what the deal was. Being my second-in-command, I would expect her to keep the fact that we were all locked in the dream room to herself, to avoid a panic. But then again, I should have known better.

  “I cannot believe this,” Jess exclaimed as she turned her back to me and faced the rest of our crew, Dale Dykstra and Raj Habish. We usually have more of a crew, but they consist of troops mainly. Well, security. And they don’t tend to sleep in the same dream room as us. The Alpha Ship One had five dream rooms. Dream room one, where we were, was reserved for top ranking crew members. Basically, the four of us. There’s room for four more, but unfortunately, we lost the other four high-ranking crewmates over the years. So only the four of us remain. As for the other dream rooms, they’re reserved for whoever tags along on our missions. We usually hire twenty to thirty expendables as we call them. Men and women who protect us on our missions. And our missions usually consist of three elements.

  Money, minerals and power.

  The three cornerstones of the Alpha Ship One mission statement. People hired us to acquire those things for them. And we hired people to fill in those roles. The only recurring crew members were standing in front of me. And they looked pissed.

  “The damn door is locked,” second-in-command Jess said.

  “It’s just a glitch. I have an override code to unlock the the door,” I said, trying to reassure the others that I knew what I was doing. But I could see that they’d more or less lost faith in me. And as the Captain, that was the end of your career. Faith and trust in a Captain was not only paramount to a ship, but it was paramount to any mission. Not that I actually knew whether or not we were on a mission, seeing that I had no recollection of previous events. The last thing I remembered was being back at Sector Omega, in bed, winding down, like the rest of my crew.

  “How the hell do we end up in hyper sleep without knowing how we got here? It just doesn’t make sense. People don’t just wake up in a dream room, now do they?” Raj, our doctor said, who looked a little green around the gills. It was normal to feel woozy after waking up from stasis, but then again, it was also normal to feel sick when you didn’t have an inkling of a clue as to what the hell was going on.

  “Don’t worry guys, there must be an explanation,” I said as I turned back around and reached out for the fingerprint scanner. I put my index finger on it and waited for the thing to recognize who I was.

  “An explanation? We have no idea where we are, or how we got here! Surely that’s cause enough for alarm?” Dykstra said, I could hear him still pacing in the background. His large frame echoing off the dream rooms walls.

  I ignored the gum flapping behind me and watched the LED screen under my finger as I waited for it to go green. But it didn’t. Instead, an alarm went of. Two buzzing sounds, followed by ACCESS DENIED from the small speakers next to the fingerprint scanner. I expected it to not recognize me anyway. The little red LED light on the top of the scanner gave that little nugget away. I feared that the ship’s computers were down and there was no way of me being able to either get control of the ship or right whatever course we were on before. At this rate, the ship could collide with a manner of things. Space, after all, isn’t as empty as people think. So I had to resort to plan B. I started pulling on the scanner, which looked a little bit like a computer tablet that was stuck to the wall. As I did so, I zoned into what the three of my crew behind me were saying.

  “It’s not the first time a crew funded by Pilgrim Tech woke up on a ship, not knowing how they got there, only to find out they were drugged, piled onto a ship and sent off on a dangerous mission,” Dale said, the sound of his feet thumping as he paced.

  “That’s horseshit. Why the hell would Pilgrim Tech send a crew out, without their consent, may I add, only for the crew to wake up and be able to regain control of the ship and turn back around?” Jess said. She was closest to me. So close in fact, I could feel her warmth radiating against my naked back.

  “It happens. Covert, black ops stuff. They send them out and once they regain control of the ship, it’s too late. They’re landing on some godforsaken planet, a message popping up on the heads up display of the ship, telling them that they were chosen for the mission and will be paid out of the ass for the completion of it.”

  I could feel Jess’s disapproval. She had the habit of shaking her head a lot when she was angry or unconvinced by something. I could feel a breeze hit my neck, so I imagined that she was in the middle of one of her violent head shakes.

  “There’s no way in hell that WE were chosen for such a mission. You do know who we are right? Alpha Ship One, the worst of the worst, fighting for scraps around the universe. Getting paid half our worth for double the work!”

  I smiled. It made a tingle of happiness run through my core. I was proud of who we were, even if my crew weren’t.

  “I’m telling you, they did it once, so there’s no reason they won’t do it again,” Dykstra sounded off as he continued to pace. The combination of him talking and walking was putting me off. I needed complete silence if I was going to be able to override the scanner. I put my hand up and turned it into a fist, signaling my crew to shut up. They did as they were told. Another smile crept across my face. A smile that was nicely concealed by the shadows. Which was a good thing, I didn’t want them to see that I enjoyed bossing them around.

  “You’ll see I’m right,” I heard Dykstra say, but before I could tell him to shut up, I heard an earth-shattering scream. I turned around, frantically looking for the source of the scream. But then I heard it again, and realized that it wasn’t coming from inside the dream room. It was coming from outside it.

  “What the hell was that?” Jess said, turning to me, her eyes wide with fear. I tried to remain calm and attempted to puff my chest out, showing my strength and authority. But what I heard next quickly deflated both myself and my crew.

  “HELP! THEY’RE EVERYWHERE!” I heard somebody shout from the other side of the big metal door. More screams could be heard, followed by banging on the dream room door. I took a few steps back, as did Jess. Our shoulders brushed against each other. Usually, I’d be transfixed by her touch, but the only thing I was fixing to do was shit myself.

  “What in the holy heck is going on out there?” Raj asked, still looking green.

  “I don’t know, but I think we have company,” I said, staring at the dream room door. The door was solid metal and had pipes crisscrossing through the middle of it. The door, just like the
room, was oval. It weighed two tons and was reinforced with titanium in the middle. It could withstand a hull breach or fire. But the sturdy structure also meant that we were entombed in the dream room with no way out. And judging by the screaming outside, the dream room was the best place to be. But that didn’t last long.

  “Good God,” I said under my breath, as I watched two massive dents appear in the big oval metal door. The dents were followed by more banging. And the banging was followed by more dents, until the door finally came off its hinges. We all ducked for cover as the big oval door came flying at us. The room was immediately filled with dust and debris, plus the sound of screaming was now louder, and nearer. I tried to see through the dust but it was nearly impossible. I called out for my team, but didn’t get a reply.

  I was just about to call for them again when I felt the steel grated floor beneath me shake. The shaking was followed by the sound of thumping footsteps. Heavy footsteps. And those footsteps were coming toward us.

  Chapter Two

  Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump.

  The footsteps were getting closer. They sounded like footsteps belonging to some sort of robot. With every step taken, the sound of it’s heavy, metallic sounding foot, not only got closer, but I grew more frightened. There was no hiding it. I was terrified. I had no idea what was going on. My crew were lost in the haze and dust that engulfed the dream room. I started to panic. My breathing became labored. I imagined what horrendous fate lay in wait for me. I attempted to close my eyes, fearing the worst, but curiosity was keeping them wide open.

  “Do not be frightened. We are here for you,” a booming voice said. The voice sounded like it was coming from some sort of speaker. As if the words were being put through a text-to-speech converter. I stood up. Feeling like I should act like a captain and less like a coward. It was hard, especially with the continuous screaming I could hear. But thankfully, none of the screams were coming from my crew in the dream room. I didn’t have a clue who else was on board the ship, or if we were even on a ship. My mind was muggy. I could have sworn that the room we were in belonged to my ship, Alpha Ship One, yet the more I looked around, the more uncertain I became.