My entry to 24 hour short story contest

Naveen woke up by the sound of birds chirping and looked at his table clock; it was showing 5:55 AM. He looked out the window sitting still in his bed, the sun was red and it was coloring the nearby trees in its red tint, the pleasantly cold breeze of air was touching his face, birds were chirping for no reason understandable to humans, Naveen thought in his mind that they were singing some song.

Naveen was brought to real world by his alarm going off, he looked at the clock it was showing 6:30AM, He was surprised that he was sitting for half an hour like that, the morning felt different today, everything seemed more beautiful than it did usually, it was the most important day of his life, a day he had work so hard for.

Today was a new beginning of his life; Naveen was an engineer and an officer in Indian navy. This was the first time after his training he was going to serve on a ship, he has been selected for newly commissioned spying ship of Indian navy, this was the most advanced ship in its category ever operated by the country and he felt a certain proud in his heart for being chosen to be serving on its first journey.

Naveen reached for reporting where he met his training mate Aneesh, who was also going to be part of the journey, they greeted each other and boarded the ship together after required checks.

Some times after the ship started its journey, Naveen looked at the port which was slowly diminishing from his sight and the journey of his life from being a boy in a village to being a navy officer got replayed in his mind, his gaze was broken by the sound of Aneesh, he looked back and went to him, they together entered the control room and sat on their stations looking at signals on large screens for any abnormality in ship parameters.

The ship was specially designed for spying operations outside Indian waters so it carried a new system to make it invisible from sight, radar and had no possibility of being discovered by enemy.

Ship was nearing to enter Chinese waters and the order to start the cloak was issued by the captain, Cloak was also operating in its first deployment onboard a ship just like naveen, it was a top secret project and developed indigenously by India so other countries had no info about existence of such a thing.

Naveen issued the command to start the cloak and he felt a sudden crumble in his stomach, it was like the worst nausea he ever felt, he fell down from his chair and hurt his head, after some time he gathered himself and looked around, all officers in the room were in the same situation, naveen tried to gather his voice but the voice didn’t come out of his mouth.

His eyes met with his commanding officer who was on the other side of room, commanding officer wanted to speak but he couldn’t , gathering himself he pointed towards the emergency stop push button for cloak which was above Naveen’s feet, He gathered himself and kicked the button, in a flash everything came back to normal.

Naveen looked around and saw that some officers have been buried inside the metal body of ship, this looked like he has been into some kind of nightmare, and he couldn’t believe the scene was real. His head was hurting he examined it and got relieved that there was just a bruise.

All officers hurried to their stations to check the operation parameters, naveen looked towards the console, all parameters were normal only the location coordinates looked different, Soon he and everybody else realized that the ship was deep inside china waters, 3 days journey from there last location, nobody had any idea how the ship reached there, the ship was vulnerable here without the cloak on.

As he was still absorbing the situation, a radio message was broadcast that the ship has been discovered by enemy radars and was going to be shot down or they need to surrender, enemy aircrafts were only minutes away in reaching the ship, his commanding officer was still talking to the captain about the possible decision.

The captain announced that there will be no surrender, the captain was right, the ship was designed in such way that it had no Indian colors and could not be linked to India if destroyed but if they surrendered India was going to face a big international embarrassment.

As the time elapsed the ships radar detected multiple incoming missiles towards it interceptors flew off in all directions but there were not enough interceptors or any other security which could save the ship from here, Captain ordered that there is only one option left, to start the cloak again even if there will be some losses, he said if the cloak transported us here it can transport us once more out of here, everybody agreed that this was the only chance and should be taken.

Naveen restarted the cloak without any second thoughts after he got the orders; he again felt the nausea as earlier but the intensity was much higher; a flash of blue light blinded everybody in the room and all were pulled in air toward the roof.

Suddenly he heard the sound of alarm and opened his eyes, he found himself in his bed at the academy,
Naveen jumped out of the bed, looked at the calendar, it was showing date back 6 months from the events he was earlier into,

He still felt the nausea and headache but was happy that it was all just a nightmare. He went into the Washroom and stood in front of the mirror,

The bruise was still there on his forehead.

Contest Post: https://steemit.com/twentyfourhourshortstory/@mctiller/twenty-four-hour-short-story-contest-topic-1