The vessel shot off at the speed of light, it suddenly disappeared from their sight one moment it stood steady on the launch platform.
The next, it vanished without a trace.
They didn't know what was going to happen and how things will go but they clung to hope.
"You never really believe in time travel until the floor folds beneath your feet like paper."
02 July 1947
Upper Atmosphere – Near Roswell, New Mexico
The vessel was just a comet of glass and light falling toward an unfamiliar sky to its passengers.
Inside, alarms were going off, the gravity compensators flickered, throwing the passengers sideways. The air crackled with static and heat.
"Stabilizers are offline !" shouted Commander Lys Amari, gripping the edge of her console. "I need diagnostics now we're losing control guys"
"We're off course," said Nyro the systems engineer, his voice too calm for the chaos erupting around him.
"The whole program is pointing to one thing we're not in 3024 anymore."
"I can't believe that it really worked" muttered Dr. Keanu Venn, clutching a glowing cylinder to his chest a neural relay containing the mission's core data.
"Where's the destination lock? Did we overshoot?"
Nyro didn't answer, the onboard AI was silent. The only response came from the hull itself metal screaming against atmosphere and time.
Through the cockpit's curved viewport, a storm of clouds whipped past living the whole crew in disbelief .
Just below them , Earth waited but not the Earth they'd known no ash, no poison black skies. Just vast darkness punctuated by lights far too primitive for a world three thousand years in the future.
"Where the hell are we?" Zia whispered.
Then the vessel rocked hard.
Outside, a flash of lightning illuminated a zone in the desert.
And then
A sudden crash.
The vessel struck the ground with a loud bump, digging through rock and sand, carving a glowing trench into the Earth.
Inside, the crew was thrown violently the whole system stopped working, no lights, no contact and no idea where they landed in time ...
Then… stillness.
The mission had succeeded.
They had traveled through time.
But they still don't know the cost of it all.
Smoke curled inside the broken vessel and all around it too, thick and coppery.
A red emergency light was the only thing shining inside, casting ghostlike shadows over the twisted control panels and still forms.
Lys Amari moved first.
Her head throbbed, a sharp pain shot through her shoulders.
The belt had held barely she unclipped herself and stumbled forward, coughing.
"Nyro?" she rasped. "Keanu? Zia ?"
A groan came from the rear compartment. Nyro was slumped over a cracked monitor, blood trailing down his temple, his black eyes fluttering open.
"I'm here," he said in a whisper. "Might've broken a rib… or five."
Keanu Venn was pinned beneath a collapsed beam, one leg twisted unnaturally. Despite the pain, his grip on the neural relay was unbroken. "Well," he said, grimacing, "that was a soft landing… by ancient humans standards."
"Shut up, we didn't go that far back, I hope" Lys muttered, forcing the beam aside with her good arm. Together, she and Zia pulled him free.
The Four of them sat for a moment in silence, catching their breath, listening, waiting.
On the outside it was quiet.
No alarms, no drones, no atmospheric hum just soft wind and crickets, Actual crickets.
"Environmental scans are down,"Nyro said.
"But if we're right if the ChronoDescent got close we're in the American Southwest and Judging by the stars and temperature… probably summer."
"And the year?" Lys asked.
Zia tapped the relay's screen, it flickered, fuzzed, then displayed a shaky readout:
TEMPORAL ESTIMATE: JULY 3, 1947
SECTOR: CONTINENTAL UNITED STATES
COORDINATES: 33.394° N, 104.523° W
Keanu let out a breath. "We made it, it's Roswell."
Lys nodded "We're near the crash that started the alien myths."
Nyro coughed. "Except this time....it's not a myth. It's us."
"Does that mean that we changed nothing?" Zia muttered
A heavy silence fell.
Then, a new alert blinked across the interface:
INCOMING VEHICLE ESTIMATED ARRIVAL: 14 MINUTES
SIGNATURE: PETROL COMBUSTION ENGINE – MULTIPLE OCCUPANTS
"Locals," Nyro said. "Or the US army maybe."
"We can't be seen" Lys snapped. "Not like this. We'll contaminate the timeline"
Keanu raised an eyebrow, "You mean worse than crash-landing a spaceship in front of them?"
She glared. "Help me get the cloaking field online. We'll activate static cover and scramble our appearance. If they see anything, it'll be lights and wreckage, nothing concrete."
"And us?" Barry asked.
"We hide, we can't repeat the same mistake again" she said.
They moved fast, despite their injuries. Keanu initiated low-range mimicry protocols.
Barry and Zia patched the comm interference to loop static. Lys activated the field its shivering hum surrounding the wreck.
Then they slipped out, into the desert night, limping, bleeding.
Real air on their skin.
Real sky overhead.
For the first time in their lives… they were standing on Earth.
The real Earth.
Alive, before the fall.
And now, they had only one mission left:
Find the humans.
Warn them.
Stop the war.
Before the past swallowed them whole.
Deputy Carl Whitaker had seen storms blow cattle into barbed wire. He'd seen kids light fields on fire for a dare.
Once, he'd even seen a plane rip clean in half midair.
But he had never seen light behave like this.
"Stop the truck," he said.
Hank, the ranch hand driving, did just that. The old Ford clunked to a halt on the dirt road.
The headlights pointed straight toward the brush, but the glow beyond was too strange to be fire. Too... geometric.
"It was right here," Hank whispered. "I swear it fell like a star, like .... like it was controlled."
Carl stepped out, boots crunching against gravel. The night was hot, the wind dry, but the air around this patch didn't feel quite right to him. It was warmer, buzzing, like bees in the back of his skull.
He walked closer, no flames, no traceable prints, but it was obvious that something had landed. The brush was flattened in a perfect circle, Ash danced like silver dust in the breeze.
And then
A shadow moved, just past the hill.
Carl froze, his hand went to his holster, but whatever he'd seen… it was gone.
Behind him, Hank whispered, "Did you see that?"
"I saw something."
Another silence.
Then a crackle of static radio interference.
His shoulder unit fuzzed, then went dead.
Carl stared into the dark.
Something had come down.
Something was here.
He didn't know what he was looking for, but deep in his chest, instinct howled the answer anyway.
And it didn't feel American.
It didn't feel Russian.
It didn't feel... human.