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Monica Grey awoke to the sound of an alarm. She glanced at her clock, just to make sure that in her groggy state she wasn't mistaking the blaring of her morning alarm for the ship's danger alert. That wasn't the case, as the red light still read 3:00 AM. It was three in the morning. By earth time, anyway. In deep space, time was almost irrelevant. But on Monica's ship, the Phoenix, the crew used earth-time to know when their shift was over. Monica worked all day, for nearly thirteen hours. She was the captain, after all. For the short time she was asleep, her first mate, a man by the name of Timothy O’Malley took over the control of all operations onboard the ship. 

The Phoenix was a huge ship. The finest, largest battleship the United International Assembly had ever created. The ship had seen action, and Monica had been there for most of it. The woman had joined the military at the age of eighteen, and had spent her years climbing the ranks. She had fought on Mars when the colonies there rebelled against the UIA. She fought the first group of hostile aliens humanity had ever come into contact with, simply called “Xenos” by the solders. She was sure they had had some fancy, scientific name before, but it died when they did. Monica had always felt some remorse for wiping out a civilization that they didn’t know anything about at all. Sure, the Xenos had staged attacks on cities like New York, Hong Kong, and Paris, but she wasn’t sure if such attacks were cause for a full out war out in the Pegasus constellation. The place had hundreds if not thousands of inhabitable planets, but the Xenos no longer habited any of them. The woman had served aboard the Phoenix for it’s entire time as a battleship, but now the thing had been recommissioned as an explorer, delving deep into the solar system and in the galaxies beyond the Milky Way. Monica, who had so loyally served during the ships early days was made the captain and general commander of all personnel onboard the ship. 

The woman tied her hair chestnut hair back quickly, and walked out toward the main control bridge. She hadn’t had time to put on her armor, so she was left in the tight undersuit that all UIA soldiers wore beneath their uniform. 

Immediately she was pulled to the main panel by O'Malley. 

"What's going on, O'Malley?" The woman asked in a rather deep, smooth voice befitting of a woman in her early thirties accustomed to keeping calm for her troops even in the direst of situations. 

"Captain, the ship's radars are malfunctioning. There's supposed to be some kind of planet here, but none of our navigators can find anything on the maps," it was as soon as he had finished speaking that a violent tremor shook the entire battleship. It wasn't easy to do, the ship was built to accommodate a crew of around fifteen thousand. 

Monica immediately began ordering emergency protocols to become effective. 

"This is you captain speaking. Everyone, evacuate to the air locked life-support chambers. Prepare for impact." 

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It didn't take long for the entire crew to evacuate. The woman had instructed everyone to follow the directions in the security chamber. A suit of armor waited for each and every person; it was to protect them upon impact. Monica was beside an older man when they entered the pod. After several intense, physically jarring minutes everything went black for the captain. When she regained consciousness, the ship was grounded. Beside her, the man who had once been there was reduced to a pile of ashes in his suit. She pulled his armor apart, looking for the cause of the breech. His armor had a gaping hole. The heat from the impact had fried him from the inside out. 

Monica did her best to swallow down the nausea that was growing within her; she stepped out, suit still intact, onto a planet covered in strange colors of trees and dirt, with strange creatures flying through the air. There were two suns in the sky, Monica noted. How the hell did that happen, physically? 

The woman quickly accessed the com system in her helmet. It linked the whole crew together. 

“Anyone who’s still alive, I’m sending you my coordinates. Regroup here."