Red lights pulsed. Sirens howled. “Alert. Navigation failure. Proximity alert. Impact in thirty seconds.”
Captain Mara Voss shot upright in her cryo-pod, lungs gasping like a drowning swimmer. Across the chamber, the rest of the crew jerked awake, groggy and disoriented.
“What the hell?” barked Commander Juno Reyes, clutching her temple.
“Status?” Mara demanded, forcing herself to her feet. Her voice was hoarse from cryo-sleep.
Pilot Kenji checked. “We’re not near Tau Ceti. Apparently, we aren't anywhere, yet, here we are. The nav map… it’s blank—like the system we’re in doesn’t even exist.”
Myra pointed. “Then what the hell is that planet out there looming larger by the second?”
Flustered, Kenji said, “Don’t know. I’m seeing it—but our navigation…”
“Brace for landing!” interrupted the computer, blaring through the speakers. Landing rockets blasted to life. The ship lurched violently. Metal screeched.
Then silence.
Outside the viewport, a lavender sky bled into twisted orange clouds. Strange, angular trees shimmered in the breeze like wind chimes made of glass. The terrain looked like a melted Earth.
Donning space suits, the crew stepped out of the deployed airlock, lowered, and now on the surface. It appeared to be a mix of gases, including nearly sixteen percent oxygen, thin—maybe like a high mountain on Earth. Some of the other gases didn’t register but could be breathable.
“We’re not supposed to be here,” whispered Dr. Elara Nix, scanning the landscape with eyes wide. “The nearest charted planet is light-years away.”
Kenji glanced at his wristpad. “I just watched it skip two hours in five seconds. Something’s seriously wrong with the physics here.”
The group walked about a hundred meters on the barren, glossy-rocked landscape, looking at the strange drooping formations around them.
“This reminds me of that classic Dali painting—the ones with the melted clocks, but these objects sure aren’t clocks,” Myra observed. “It’s not that hot around here, either.”
Others nodded their heads.
A soft hum rose around them. They turned—where their ship had been, a crumbling, translucent-vine-covered husk stood. Rusted. Ancient.
“That was minutes ago,” Mara whispered, stunned. “It’s like… we’ve already been here years ago.”
The hum turned into a pulse beneath their feet.
Commander Reyes looked up from her portable equipment and tapped the screen with a gloved finger. “We’re not just off course. We’re in some sort of loop.”
The ground trembled, and from the trees came a voice—familiar, distorted, yet their own.
“Welcome back.”
Bio:
M.D. Smith lives in Huntsville, AL, and has written over 150 non-fiction short stories for Old Huntsville Magazine and over 300 short fiction stories in the past seven years. Nationally published in Good Old Days and Reminisce print magazines, and digitally in Frontier Times, Flash Fiction Magazine, 101words.org, Bewilderingstories.com, 10x10flash.com, 365tomorrows.com, smokingpenpress.com, brightflash1000.com, suburbanwitchcraftmagazine.