The Forgotten Future

Chapter 1 - Firefight in the Dark

I'm just starting this story. I'll try to get a chapter out about once a week. It's a draft and welcome feedback.  :)

Thanks!

Kayla stumbled in the dim light. Her gray hazel eyes blinking rapidly to clear the tears that blinded her. Something in the air was making them burn. But it could have been the side effects from months of travel. After weeks in cold hypersleep, her mind and body were sluggish and still suffering the after-effects. Walking was challenging by itself, but the cluttered underground tunnel from the launchpad to the colony entrance, Bright Haven, her new home, was a real challenge.

She was small for her age. At sixteen, she barely made over five feet. She was rather cute with her short mousy gray hair and slightly upturned nose. But people always told her that it was her smile that was the best part. Kayla had always been on the skinny side, but now, after months of space travel, her body had lost what little weight it once had. Unlike her fat uncle, wheezing from exertion next to her.

After her family had been killed in the bombing of Wensfly, she was sent to live with her uncle Hammel. He was an engineer working space side at one of the largest stations in the system. It was an excellent job her father had gotten him, but he'd managed to screw it up, like always.

But less than a week after she'd arrived, he'd been arrested for stealing parts and selling them on the black market. He avoided jail by agreeing to work on the outer colony worlds.

Kayla wasn't smart enough to make it into one of the elite tech schools or military programs, and since he was her guardian, she was forced to leave with him.

She'd lost both her parents, an older brother, and a younger brother in the terrorist bombing, but he didn't care. He never spoke to her and spent most of his free time drinking or watching holovids porn.

Looking up and the balding, overweight man Kayla gritted her teeth. This man had ruined her chances of a real life. Banished to a backwater world to die as most colonists did from some unknown disease or something.

It was at that moment, walking in the dirty, darkened tunnel with the forty other immigrants, that Kayla realized she hated the man and wished she'd died with her family. Anything would have been better than this hell.

The sudden blood-curdling screams caused Kayla to look sharply forwards. She was just in time to see a two-meter-long multilegged insect drop on a middle-aged man from a hole in the ceiling. Its twin jaw-like mandibles latched onto his head and crushed it like pliers crushing a nut.

He wasn't the only one who'd been attacked. All around Kayla, people were screaming as more bugs dropped from overhead. Someone knocked her sideways into the tunnel wall, and she fell to her knees. Looking up, she saw the tall man struggling against two of the creepy insects. She then realized that their shells weren't black but a pretty deep blue that faded to leaf green near the edges. Her sudden fascination was broken when his blood warm splashed across her face.

Screaming, Kayla lurched to her feet and tried to run. But she was caught in the center of the chaos. With people screaming and dying all around, Kayla's mind locked up as she spun in a circle, trying to find an escape.

The sudden bright flashes of light and loud zaps from blasters blinded and stunned Kayla. The gunfire cut through both bugs and humans with little distinction or regard.

Stumbling backward, Kayla tripped and fell. This actually saved her life as blaster fire passed through the space she'd just been standing in. She could taste the burnt ozone from the crackling energy bolt as it slammed into her uncle's chest, who stood with his mouth open in horror. He hadn't moved as he stood dumbfounded at the death around him.