The Anomaly Volume Three: Into The UnknowableChapter 17: Intrepid - 3756 C.E. free porn video
The Intrepid's computer system had been tampered with. Sheila Nkomo knew this for sure. She could use most of the system, but she had no access at all to any part of it that could tell her what was happening on the space ship.
Ever since Captain Kerensky and the military officers had arrested and detained her in the villa, she had been as much blind as she was naked. She had no access to the Intrepid's information systems. She couldn't monitor the bridge. She had no means of communicating with any of the crew and passengers. Beyond the daily reports from the uncharacteristically upbeat captain and the scientific bulletins, she had no direct information at all about the current operations of the space ship of which she had until recently been the Second Officer.
There must have been meetings and discussions to decide whether the Intrepid should take the highly irregular and unauthorised action of plunging into the Anomaly, but beyond a few sketchy second-hand accounts Sheila knew very little about them. There was clearly an active policy of censorship which was itself in direct contravention of every conceivable policy maintained by the Interplanetary Union. It was as if Captain Kerensky had hijacked the ship simply to take everyone on board towards their doom, but in her daily briefings she spoke about it as if she was merely following orders from Mission Control. In fact, so insistent was the captain of this that Sheila began to doubt her own memory of the mission's original purpose. This became even more disconcerting when Sheila accessed the Intrepid's Mission Statement which was subtly different from how the Second Officer remembered it.
Had she gone mad? Had she stumbled into an alternative reality? She'd never have agreed to participate on a mission that would sacrifice the lives of thousands of people for a dubious and unverifiable scientific adventure whose results couldn't even be relayed back to Mission Control. And here was a Mission Statement that quite clearly stated that this was precisely what the mission would do, even though it was phrased in terms like 'exploratory ingress' and 'practical research'.
Sheila's opinion of her captain had always been mixed. She was respectful of the Saturnian's rank and her professional attitude towards her rank and position. Her conversations with her senior officer had been relatively relaxed though not as much so as those with the Chief Science Officer. Then again, Sheila had always felt uneasy about the captain's quite obvious sexual attraction towards her. It was one thing for a man to show, however discreetly, that he found the Second Officer attractive. It was quite another for a woman to do so. Sheila had never had even the slightest inclination towards a romantic or sexual relationship with another woman.
Perhaps it was because the captain was piqued by Sheila's rejection of her advances that she'd placed the Second Officer in detention. Whatever it was, it couldn't have been for insubordination or dereliction of duty. And why was she given no explanation? Beyond a cursory account of the conditions of her detention, Sheila Nkomo had been given no reason for this extraordinary action.
She vividly remembered the moment several weeks earlier when she awoke, naked and dazed, in the villa. As she adjusted her eyes to the unfamiliar room and the bed on whose sheets she lay without blankets or sheets, she gradually became conscious that she was in the company of Captain Kerensky and two military officers who she didn't recognise. They were standing just by the bedroom door as if they'd been expecting her to awake at just that moment.
"You are at liberty to wander about the villa as you please," Captain Kerensky informed her. "You have almost complete access to the Intrepid's facilities. But you will not be able to leave the villa and you will not be able to communicate with anyone."
"What's there to stop me from leaving, captain?" Second Officer Nkomo asked when she saw that the doors were not locked.
"You'll soon find out, Ms Nkomo," said the captain.
"Can you at least tell me why I've been put in detention, captain?" Sheila pleaded.
"That's classified information."
"What have I done to deserve this?"
"As I say: that's information I'm not at liberty to disclose."
Sheila watched Captain Kerensky and the military officers depart with the captain walking ahead of the two soldiers. None of them glanced back at Sheila as she stood dazed, confused and humiliated on the lawn of the villa in what she'd been informed was the outermost level. This was normally considered the most privileged level for the Intrepid's passengers, though after the attack by the Holy Coalition and the later bombardment by the maniac trillionaire it was now mostly empty with brand new villas and freshly planted trees.
Sheila's question remained unanswered. What did stop her from leaving the villa? There was no prison wall and Captain Kerensky and the military officers didn't pause at all as they marched off.
However, Sheila soon discovered the nature of an invisible force field through which she could throw stones but which she couldn't walk through. The Second Officer was no expert in invisible force fields, but this one was quite unlike any she'd ever encountered before. This was a weapon the Interplanetary Union had kept secret until this moment.
From that time on, Sheila became angrier and angrier. She was angry at the injustice of her captivity. She was angry at Captain Kerensky for having singled her out for detention. She was angry when she discovered that, contrary to her original understanding of the mission's parameters, the Interplanetary Union had chosen to plunge the Intrepid into the Anomaly on a suicide mission. And her anger motivated her to study in detail that information to which she had access of the space ship's progress through the Anomaly's peculiarly empty space. It also stirred her several times of every day to run full pelt in many different directions towards the invisible border that confined her in the hope of identifying a weakness she could take advantage of. She had no clear idea of what she would do if she managed to escape. It wasn't as if there was anywhere she could hide from the Intrepid's extensive surveillance system. And she was sure that by escaping she would just compound the original unspecified offence for which she was being punished.
Sheila became not only angry but also somewhat anxious. She was alarmed by her first sight of one of the peculiar Apparitions associated with the Anomaly. She thought she'd know what to expect, but the sight of three mediaeval knights marching towards the villa in full regalia was both astonishing and terrifying. The fact that they vanished after fewer than twenty seconds didn't diminish at all the strangeness of the sight. Then there were more and more of these Apparitions. She mostly only saw them from a distance, but she was especially surprised when a bizarre feathered animal more than two metres high wandered noisily through the villa and stood in her kitchen for very nearly five minutes before it vanished. Unlike the knights, this visitation directly interacted with the villa and had gulped down almost all the soup that Sheila had been looking forward to eating.
Her daily offensive on the invisible boundary was never better than futile. Sheila detected no sign of weakness in it whatsoever. Then again, the exercise did allow her to vent some of her rage and frustration and perhaps by doing so she might alert the attention of a passer-by. This seemed unlikely, however. In the whole time Sheila was detained the only person who'd directly addressed her was Captain Kerensky and the only person she saw passing by, and this from quite a distance, was a woman in a strangely diaphanous dress who looked very much like Beatrice, the wife of the Godwinian Paul Morris. This was peculiar because Paul's villa was in the next outermost level and there was no good reason that Sheila could think of for the bimbo from Ecstasy to be wandering about on this level.
And then one day, when Sheila had more or less abandoned all hope of success, when she ran directly at the invisible boundary on this occasion it offered no resistance whatsoever. She'd run a full twenty metres further than she'd normally have done. It was as if there'd been no boundary at all.
When Sheila realised this, she continued running in a kind of ecstasy of release. She kept running and running until she'd covered well over two hundred metres from where she'd previously been stopped and nothing hindered her in any way.
She was free!
She stopped running and stood upright at a point well outside the villa's grounds. She was panting heavily not so much from exhaustion, as she'd always been very fit, but from disbelief that after so long in captivity she'd managed to escape so easily.
And now what should she do?
She decided against returning to the villa. She wasn't going to fall for that trap. If she was going to be imprisoned anywhere it would be somewhere else. She wandered instead into a nearby villa she'd watched for so long from a distance and had never seen anyone either enter or leave. Not surprisingly there was no one inside. It was as brand new and pristine as the villa in which she'd been detained.
After so many weeks with nobody with whom to communicate, Sheila desperately wanted to talk to someone. There were so many unanswered questions. Why had she been imprisoned? Why had the Interplanetary Union consigned the Intrepid to the Anomaly? What was going on?
Sheila wandered from villa to villa. The outermost level's artificial six hour night approached, but Sheila ignored the demands of her diurnal cycle in her hunt for other people.
There was the same uncluttered emptiness in every villa she visited. None of them had evidence that anyone had ever stayed there. Was Sheila the only resident on the outermost level?
It was several hours later and after exploring many more villas that Sheila at last found proof that she wasn't alone. It was still dark but even before Sheila entered the villa it was evident that someone was living there. There was the distinct imprint of a body on the lounger in the lawn. There were traces of damp footprints from the swimming pool to the veranda. The door to the villa was slightly ajar. Not open. Not closed. Just carelessly left ajar. As Sheila pushed the door fully open she was anxious that this might be a trap and she'd be confronted by military officers who'd handcuff and arrest her once more.
Instead she discovered the slumbering naked body of the one person on the space ship she believed she could trust. How fortunate could she be?
"Petal!" she cried, ignoring all conventions of decorum as she shook awake her closest friend. "Wake up, Petal. It's me. Sheila."
Jayla
- 05.05.2021
- 14
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