“What happened to the ship?” asked Neva while retaking his scanner for the umpteenth times. He looked up into the spot where the ship was and then looked down on the screen in front of him. He couldn’t believe the screen or his eyes. The ship the size of a small city, carrying over a million people disappeared within a blink of an eye. Even after what they had seen, the technology to perform such a feat was still far beyond what they could imagine. Ability to transform such a large chunk of matter to energy was unthinkable. In theory, yes, but not in practice.
My heart squeezed tight at the thought of the ship. I was the captain, but I couldn’t do anything. Perhaps, I might have caused the events by approaching an unknown object, the pyramid. My goal was to land and reaffirm the safety of the planet for the main ship to land, but somehow got caught in the excitement of the events to forget the original goal. By doing so, I became the Captain without the ship. And the ship no longer had its Captain.
“Neva, can you track the current location of the ship?” I spoke first. They needed my leadership skill more than ever. I required all my trainings and experience for us to get out of the situation we were in. Staring at the sky won’t bring back the ship. We needed to first locate the ship and then bring it back. As soon as I spoke, Neva went to work. It took him a few minutes, infinity by his usual standard, before he looked up to the rest with an answer nobody was expecting.
“I can’t find it anywhere. The ship had disappeared from our universe.”