Marathon

Word had it that space was the final frontier – a boundary to push ourselves beyond our capabilities to achieve things beyond our imagination. What the word didn’t say was we might cower and crumble under the sheer speechless horror when facing the unimaginable.

He opened his eyes and gasped when the capsule shook uncontrollably. It has been two hundreds years since he was put in the stasis, and his awakening could only spell one thing: the total destruction of Starfleet Endeavour. The battle at Aegean System must have failed, and he needed to carry the message back to the Earth.

He was one of the ten Mercury agents, a special crew trained for superluminal travel to carry messages between two predestined points. The discovery of such technological breakthrough happened in 3,257 AD at Planet Ionian, a planet at the outer rim of Aegean. Humanity elated at its potential: hyperspace travel, information transmission and other dreams once forbidden by ordinary physical laws.

And they came. Cold and calculated, as if they had been waiting for this precise moment to happen. They belonged to a species called Perxian, according to an intercepted signal. Not much intel was extracted, only one painful fact: they consumed light, creeping endlessly in the dark space.

He tried to recall what happened before his pod was ejected: Endeavour warped to Marathon space in Aegean to stop the spreading of the mad Perxian mass, and arrived only to be swallowed by the swirling void. Mercury agents were deployed when the hull cracked, to warn the Earth: RUN.

Fumbling the console in front of him, he saw a tiny screen with a reflection of his eyes. Haggard and bloodshot. He pressed a key and a message flashed on the screen.

” νενικήκαμεν?”

 

via Daily Prompt: Marathon