Treacherous Heavens

Published by: eXtasy Books

ISBN :978-1-4874-3749-7

Page :380

Word Count :126052

Publication Date :2023-09-15

Heat Level :

Available Formats : Treacherous Heavens (epub) , Treacherous Heavens (mobi) , Treacherous Heavens (pdf) , Treacherous Heavens (prc)

Category : Romance , Science Fiction Romance

Product Code: 978-1-4874-3749-7

Qty

$4.00

0 reviews
Write a review

Waking up 105 years in the future was shocking. Finding out the world they knew was totally destroyed was devastating.

Atlantis Rey, single mom to Verruca Rey, wakes from her cryogenic sleep pod 105 years in the future to find out things have not gone to plan. Vega, the ship’s AI, explains that the vampire clean-up did not go as scheduled and that she and the 249 other passengers, are the last known living humans.

Vega appoints Atlantis as the leader of the awakees, and they all look to her for the answers to how to survive their new lives. Knowing their best chance is to return to Earth, she has to find the right place to settle them before space or malicious awakees foil her plans.

Yet amidst this chaos, Atlantis and Verruca manage to find lovers and a new family to surround themselves with.

I opened my eyes but quickly jerked my head to the side and slammed them shut against the blinding light. I tried to bring my hands to my face to wipe away the tears from my eyes, but they banged into something metallic. My heartbeat picked up a notch as I tried opening my eyes again, but this time only a sliver. I barely made out a small glass window in what looked like a sheet of metal. My breathing quickened, coming in short explosive intakes of air. I lifted my head slowly to look at this metal thing I was lying in and slammed my forehead into the top of it. My head instantly dropped back down from the pain of impact. I couldn’t really see much from where I lay because there was no room to move. A sense of claustrophobia began to set in. My mind raced in a million different directions with the dread of lying in a metal sarcophagus.

Doing my best not to completely panic, my fuzzy brain began trying to remember where I was, with just flashes of memories breaking through. I willed my arms to rise again, barely feeling them through a vibrating burn a hundred times worse than when limbs fall asleep, and I pushed on the metal with the glass window. It didn’t budge. I tried several more times with no luck. My heartbeat picked up again as I searched the edges for a button, a lever, or anything that would make it open before the panic threatening my control took over. I even tried kicking it, but that sent shocking pain through my foot.

I was breathing through the agony when the top part of the tube started making a clicking and hissing noise. Then I felt a sharp jab, like little claws were releasing their grip on my neck. My instinct was to reach for my neck, but I still couldn’t get my hands that far up. I sucked in a sharp breath from a sudden slithering sensation that zinged from my lower back all the way up my spine to where I had felt the sting in my neck. It felt like wire was being pulled from my body.

The top portion of the lid slid down over the bottom half. The whole thing lifted about two inches on some kind of metal arms, then slid down a few inches before turning toward the floor. Then the top half rose again like a shield standing at the end of my pod. The sounds of clicking and popping came from my right, and I turned my head as the side slid down out of the way.

After the metal tube quit making noise, I quickly sat up, sucking in the cool air. I leaned my forehead into my hands, taking deep breaths. I paused my freaking out when I realized the air was stale, like a house that had been shut up for a long time. Not knowing what to make of that, I took a moment to let my fuzzy brain painstakingly piece together the flashes of memory. After a few minutes of fitting pieces together like a puzzle, I began to slowly make sense of everything and opened my eyes.

Carefully and clumsily, I swung one leg at a time over the edge, letting them dangle. My legs now experienced the same burning, tingling feeling as my arms. After a few minutes, my limbs started to feel normal, and the flashes of memories began to make a little more sense.

Memories of the end of 2032 came rushing back. My daughter and I had volunteered for the first Cryogenic Sleep Program due to the volatile situation in the world. I was forty-one, and my daughter was twenty when we had been placed into our pods. We were supposed to sleep for two years. Had it been two years already?

I sat staring at my feet and shook my head slightly, needing a few more moments to clear the cobwebs cluttering my thoughts. My whole body ached from being unused for so long. I slowly rolled my head from side to side, stretching the muscles, waking them up, and felt the tightness gradually ease. After a few more deep breaths, I felt ready to look up and take in where I was.

I slowly lifted my heavy, still slightly fuzzy head and looked around. The bright lights still made me squint, but I could tell this was not a warehouse, which was where we were supposed to be stored. The walls of the room were a dark gun-metal gray and appeared metallic. Exposed octagon-shaped girders ran from floor to ceiling on one side of the room, then across and back down to the floor on the opposite wall. Three sets of girders were in the room, one at each end and one in the middle. Two rows of pods lined the walls between the girders with a wide walkway down the center of the room. The floor was covered in a very short light-gray carpet. Blue lights glowed along the edges of the ceiling, and about midway up the walls was a medium orange stripe that ran around the whole room at the same height.

They were definitely not colors I would have put together, but I didn’t have a say in the color palette.

I was positive I was on some sort of vessel. I could feel a soft vibration, like the engines of a plane or a boat. I tried to look out the large octagon-shaped window above my pod but couldn’t see much. All I could see was pitch black with white speckles and wispy, smoky-looking patches, which made no sense to my slowly working brain. My gaze dropped to the monitor mounted on the wall above my pod. It showed a picture of the moon and the stars surrounding it.