At the frozen end of the earth, we fought an enemy from beyond the stars. "The blue beams shot from the clouds. They struck the ship and halted our pursuit of the enemy French vessel. None of the officers nor the crew had seen anything like them. No-one knew how to fight back. No-one could say what the beams were, nor who had dared to fire on a ship of war. “The year was 1803. We were far south in the Atlantic Ocean. This was my first command as captain, and it was not going well. The mission was a strange one, even for a time of war. We were ordered to pursue a French frigate and capture a mysterious sea-chest. If necessary, we were to follow the frigate to the frozen ends of the Earth. “Failure was not permitted, of course. “No-one had warned us about blue beams. None of the admirals said a word about shining black vessels in the sky. And no one mentioned that we might find a woman floating in the sea, hundreds of miles from land, nor that she would be far more dangerous than she seemed. “But nothing could have prepared us for what waited beyond the frozen latitude of fifty degrees south.".
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