Read Carson Mach 1: The Atlantis Ship for Free Online

deadly serious. The Atlantis ship was just a myth; everyone knew that. It was like the ghost ships of old. Tired, drunk, scared sailors would often see things in the fog and attribute it to a dread ship sailed by ghosts. The Atlantis ship was just the same thing.  
    Mach had been in deep space enough to know the human mind often saw all kinds of weird shit out there. When the CW pushed its crew hard, especially during the conflicts with the Axis, people got stressed, saw things that weren’t there.  
    The idea of this Atlantis ship just appearing and disappearing while leaving a wake of destruction behind was just the fever dreams of the scared or the insane. The myth had been around ever since humanity first settled a colony on Mars.
    “Did you hear me, Mach?”
    “Yeah, I heard you. I was just wondering what you’ve been drinking recently. Or have you taken to enjoying the benefits of stims in your old age?”
    “Dammit, Mach, I’m serious. We received a distress signal earlier just before the ship arrived and obliterated the station. We have a snippet of video too, if you don’t believe. An Ethan Bloom, one of the mechanics, managed to record a few seconds before he, along with most of the orbital, was sucked into the Atlantis ship’s closing wormhole.”
    Mach wanted to dispute it, say it was all a load of crap, but Morgan’s hologram changed to a 3D video of the recording. All Mach could see was floating debris passing over the head of Bloom’s helmet cam. When the mechanic looked up, the great looming shape of a dark ship completely filled the view. The thing looked… ancient was the only word Mach could come up with. It was of a design the likes of which he’d never seen before.  
    The ship was ginormous any way you looked at it. Before he could focus in on any detail, Bloom screamed and turned his head. For a split second, Mach saw the collapsing wormhole, a swirling ball of orange and black colors, sucking in anything close to it. The rear of the ship broke away from it and away from the field of view.  
    The recording became static as the mechanic’s scream was cut off by the radiation in the wormhole.  
    Mach stood in stunned silence.
    Morgan reappeared in the hologram above his wrist. “Well?”  
    “Well… I think that’s all kinds of madness. That was no ship of the Axis.”
    “Of course it wasn’t. It’s the Atlantis ship. You know it; I know it; that poor sod Ethan Bloom knew it. As quick as it arrived and destroyed the orbital, it was gone, vanished, like the damned stories of old. It’s real, Mach, the damned ship is real. And we want you to find it before it destroys anything else.”
    “Why me? Why not send one of your CW destroyers after it?”
    “I wish it were that simple. Dealings with the Axis have become difficult. The treaty is on the verge of collapse and they’re massing forces on three fronts: the horans to the north, vestans to the east, and lacterns to the south. All our resources are being geared up for a potential war. We cannot afford to go after this thing, and…”
    He broke away, but Mach knew what he was going to say. “I’m the only one mad enough to do something so stupid? It’s essentially a suicide mission, isn’t it?”
    “I don’t think the odds are good, let me put it that way. We want you to find the ship, board it, and disable it. It’d be a huge coup for the CW if we could capture it and reverse-engineer the tech. You’d be doing the Salus Sphere a huge favor, Mach. This is your way back into the fold. A way to clear your name.”
    “How much?” he asked, not caring about clearing his name or doing the CW any favors. He was way beyond that now.
    “What do you mean?” Morgan asked.  
    “How much will I be paid to do this? I’m only interested in cash. And seeing as your lot have forced my hand with this crazy fine, I want to make sure that I enjoy my last few months or years while I go after a myth.”
    “We’re cleared to offer