Area 51: The Legend Read Online Free PDF

going and the mission they had been assigned was not amenable to having a child along. Once they deployed from the mothership, there was no room in the smaller spacecraft for a third person. It had been their choice to have a child, knowing their ultimate fate, and Enanhad declared they must accept the consequences of that choice.
    The cargo door slowly began to close, cutting off their view of the distant crowd held at bay by the soldiers. Tears streamed down Donnchadh’s face. She knew no matter what her destiny, she would never see her child again.
    She had had many discussions with her husband about the future of both the mission and their planet. He had been blunt and honest, as was his nature, hiding any emotions with a focus on preparing for the upcoming mission and the practical matters that had to be dealt with in doing so. But she noted his chest moving rapidly as the cargo door shut and their world disappeared from sight. He kept his face averted from hers as he reached out and put his arm around her shoulders. All on board had left loved ones behind; they were merely an island of misery amid a sea of pain. Large as the ship was, the five thousand chosen were tightly packed on board along with their supplies. Although only thirty would be deployed in teams of two on the fifteen spacecraft, the rest were put on board to populate any unoccupied planet amenable to human life that the craft found on its journey. In this way the line of their people could go on. If such a planet could be found quickly, perhaps the ship could be sent back to get more.
    At the appointed moment, the ship lifted out of its cradle without a sound. It moved upward, accelerating through the planet’s polluted atmosphere until it was in the vacuum of space and out of sight of the millions of eyes on the planet’s surface who watched it with mixed emotions. It continued to accelerate conventionally away from the planet and the system star’s gravitational field.
    After two years of travel, the star’s field was negligible and the mothership was moving at three-quarters of the speed of light. It was also far enough away that those on board hopedany sign of its passage would not be linked back to their home world and bring the Swarm.
    At that point the mothership’s interstellar drive was engaged. With a massive surge of power as great as that of a brief supernova, the ship shifted into faster-than-light travel and snapped into warp speed.

III

    12,362 B.C. EARTH CALENDAR: CENTAURUS SPIRAL ARM , MILKY WAY GALAXY
    The scientists had been wrong in one respect. Human life still existed on Donnchadh and Gwalcmai’s home planet sixty years after the mothership departed. Not much life, granted, and the existence was miserable, but man still walked the face of the planet. The people left behind had adapted as best they could, tilling the land by hand after the last of the machines had broken down and could not be repaired. They ate plants and animals their ancestors would not have even considered as food. It was the human way to cling to life and the survivors were the hardiest of the race.
    Unfortunately, the scientists had been right about something else. The mothership’s warp shift had been picked up by a Swarm scout ship on patrol over twenty light-years away from the star system. While the scout ship had immediately turned in the direction of the shift, it also sent out an alert to the nearest Swarm Battle Core.
    It took the Swarm some time to find the planet the mothership had come from and for the Battle Core to arrive, but the Swarm were a patient race, who had little concept of time except as an operational variable. On the planet’s surface, there were few still alive who had witnessed the mothership’s departure. Their descendants cared more about gathering their meager crops than stories of spaceships andaliens. There were fewer than twenty million humans left, down from the peak of over five billion prior to the Revolution. They