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

“That’s the chance we take. It’ll take us about eight hours to get back there at normal patrol speed. Unless they’ve developed jump technology lately, they have no idea where we went. They may even think they destroyed us.”


He turned to the communications officer, Leyla Marcos. “Any luck reaching a relay ship to get word back to Titan?”


She shook her head. “I’ll try again right away. No use while we were in jump, but now we’ll be using normal thrust, so I’ll see what I can raise.”


Rowan nodded. “Okay. Let’s head back to Harmony.” Then he turned to Tom. “I want to take another look at this machine of yours. I couldn’t make much sense of it while we were trying to get you out of it before you died from exposure.”


From Tom’s smile, which held much of the pride and affection of a new father, he saw the Englishman would be delighted to show off his invention. Leaving Jost again at the controls, they headed down to the lower bay.


Chapter 11