Beyond the Horizon (Beyond Saga Book 2)

Greg Spry

Book-II-Front

One-Circuitous
Auckland, Earth, May 2265 CE

 

Maya Davis’s eyelids fluttered and opened partway.

Centimeters above her nose, the bedroom clock floated in midair, twirling and doing backflips. Antique ringing exacerbated her pounding headache as the bells atop the clock vibrated. By the time her vision focused, the clock face read 08:01 Solar Standard Time.

“Time to get up and at ’em, Maya,” the clock’s cheerful voice touted. “The New Horizons launch ceremony starts in three hours, fifty-nine minutes.”

Still half-asleep, she swatted at the hologram, but her hand passed through it. “Turn off,” she mumbled while burying her head under a pillow. Curling up in the fetal position, she hugged a tattered Bio Bear, the stuffed animal her aunt had bought her when she was a kid.

Foggy thoughts of Aunt Brooke both warmed and tensed her body. Brooke had raised Maya following the death of her mother, but a recent spat hadn’t left them on the best of terms.

“Disabling alarm.” The clock blinked away into nothingness.

She drifted back to slumber.

Maya awoke to pitch blackness. Shivers of panic coursed through her limbs.

To this day, she had yet to conquer her childhood fear of the dark.

“Blinds,” she called out.

The pixels dimming the windows blinked transparent in rapid succession. Sunlight pierced the panes, warming her face and calming her nerves. The bright light forced her to squint.

“What time is it?” she mumbled.

Maya activated the displays in her i-cite. The chronometer in the bottom corner of her vision read 10:59.

“Eleven?” Gasping, she sprung upright in bed and regretted it at once. Pain stabbed her temples. She hissed when she touched her clammy forehead.

With a thought, she ran a health scan. A simulation of her body appeared in her i-cite. Animated blood coursed through a lifelike diagram of her circulatory system.

She magnified her brain. Virtual text explained the cause of her headache. Acetaldehyde penetration of nerve cell membranes? She sighed. A hangover? I must’ve forgotten to flush my system before I went to bed. With another mental command, she accessed her bioware and instructed the nanotech embedded throughout her body to break down the alcohol in her bloodstream.

“Clock, where are you?”

The hologram materialized in front of her nose.

“Why didn’t you wake me?” she asked it.

“You turned me off at eight-oh-one,” it said.

“I told you to snooze.”

“Nope.” Its face showed a vidsim of Maya retreating beneath a pillow. A moan escaped her drooling mouth. “Turn off,” it quoted her muttering.

She whipped the blankets aside and slid out of bed. Her head pounded as she stood. “That’s not what I meant.”

“I’m a clock, not a mind reader.”

“Turn off,” she snapped. “And this time I mean it.”

Projecting big eyes crying oversized tears and a frown, the clock shriveled away into nothingness.

Beyond the Horizon (Beyond Saga Book 2) Description:

Ensign Maya Davis has had her sights set on the captaincy of a starship since she launched her first toy rocket into Earth orbit at age four. But not long after she departs the solar system aboard humankind’s first interstellar vessel, New Horizons, sabotage cripples the ship, killing a third of the crew and stranding the expedition light years from home under the siege of hostile forces.

Without knowing who she can trust, Maya must risk her life to get the crew home and prevent the genocide of the very exospecies Horizons set out to contact.

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