Tom Fleet was a bit of a misfit as the second son of a minor English noble in the 1880s. Once he finished his schooling he had little to do. His grandfathers had left him adequate finances for his needs and with his elder brother set to take the title, he gave in to his fascination with gadgets and began to tinker and invent. His goal was to create a sky craft to go to the moon. Surely if Jules Verne’s characters could go there and many other places, he could do as well.<br><br>Rowan Farrell followed in his Uncle Gordon’s footsteps, joining the UniFleet, but went a step farther and became an officer. Assigned to his first command level post, he takes a small patrol ship out to scout a region of interest to the Council and report if any signs of the enemy Angevirian Empire in the area. When one of his crew spots a strange, tiny craft, he decides to capture and study it. After all it could be an Angevirian Trojan horse. But the odd cylindrical vessel holds only one man, unconscious and suffering from hypothermia and lack of oxygen. When the man comes to, he claims to come from the earth ... five centuries in the past!

Tom Fleet’s Machine

Jost Banargee, his flight engineer, sat beside him, gaze fixed to the vidscreen. Though the ship might be small and austere, their instruments were of the latest and best quality, able to sense subtle differences in temperature, anomalous radiation and any other potential signs of life, machines or something that simply did not belong.


Jost whistled through his teeth. “Whoa, what the fuck is that?”


“Damned if I know. Something—metal, heat sources inside, moving at about a hundred-fifty knots…too slow to be as high as it is off the surface. Looks like a tin can with a pointed end and some kind of para-wings or maybe solar panels on the sides. Damnedest thing I ever saw. Intel didn’t say the Angevires had anything like that!”


Chapter 4