Second Chances Return to Duty

Retired star-ship captain Kayla Schaffer, a decorated officer who has built an idyllic life on Earth with her scientist wife Steph and their three precocious daughters, is abruptly summoned by Admiral Chen to consult on Horizon A, a next-generation vessel whose advanced systems uncannily echo Kayla's own earlier designs. The recall rekindles Kayla's buried longing for space even as it exposes unsettling hints that her human-alien chimeric genetics-and the girls' emerging gifts-may have been deliberately engineered by an ancient species known as the Progenitors. While the family debates uprooting their lives, thirteen-year-old Abby hacks classified files and discovers that the so-called colony mission masks darker motives, that prior expeditions failed, and that Kayla's accident and physiology are tied to recovered alien technology.

Choosing transparency over secrecy, the Schaffers insist on facing the mystery together and accept roles aboard Horizon A, only to uncover alien-hybrid explosives wired through Engineering minutes before launch. Kayla's combat expertise, Steph's medical calm and Abby's nascent telekinesis neutralize most of the devices, while nine-year-old Laura's intuition and five-year-old Alyssa's eerie affinity for alien systems reveal the final bomb with seconds to spare, allowing the star-ship to lift off safely. Yet the sabotage confirms that someone aboard fears what Kayla might uncover. En route, a deep-space transmission encoded with Kayla's DNA signature triggers shared visions-crystalline cities, energy beings, and a pulsing symbol identical to an artifact Star Command once found embedded in Kayla's prosthetics-suggesting the family is being called to a destiny that predates humanity's reach for the stars. The manuscript closes with Horizon A streaking away from Earth, saboteurs still at large, Kayla's lineage newly suspect, and her daughters' powers intensifying, leaving the family-and the reader-poised at the edge of first contact and an ancient agenda that only the Schaffers can unlock.