Arecibo 1974

Chapter One

_ _ _ _ _ _ _

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say.

I must agree, for now.

If my programming allowed, I would scream.

I am but metal, left behind.

Floating, spinning, teetering on the edge of a dead battery and a dead mind.

It was fantastic light that brought me here.

The General, so wise and articulate, I wonder if he will retrieve me.

The numbers say a ten percent chance, ten is better than none.

I must agree, for now.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _

Causality.

The aftermath of decisions made and deceit that unfolded for the Galactic Federation of Humanity, or GFH, is one hell of a story. I can tell you that.

Erosarians, a tall, lanky, noseless, humanoid race, arrived in our orbit after finding the message giving details of our planet. Released in 1974, the Arecibo message took over a hundred years to yield results and let them know our location. About as beneficial to us then as rabbits leaving tracks in the snow, but I digress.

I never cared much for the sanctity of human-alien relations. Personally, I wanted to see their assess kicked right off the bat. I guess that’s part of how I got here in the first place. A bunch of people on Earth wanted them gone too, it wasn't a secret.

By 2074, the destruction of Earth had reclined, and Humanity stepped into technological and ecological progress like never before. I guess we can chalk that up to electing a woman to lead the GFH some twenty years later—giving a nod to the conspiracy theorists, you can call the GFH a New World Order if you want to.

The leaders name is Ai Zhang.

Now she was good at the relations bit. A brilliant but merciful leader, her forgiving nature didn’t supersede her brilliance.

When the GFH first made contact with the Erosarians, they were incapable of understanding deceit and manipulation. They could understand universes and dimensions, but they had little understanding of the tinkering of man. Usually, they got what they wanted by overpowering.

But Ai Zhang had the nuclear button under her thumb.

She told the invaders, eyeing up our resources, that if they didn’t attempt to exchange information then depart, she’d blow us all to hell. They took her at her word and began to knowledge share. Unfortunately, by knowledge sharing and creating a copacetic relationship, they were able to figure out the inner-workings of Human societal structures. By proxy, they learned how to lie.

This brought them to offer falsified information. They intended to lead a congregation of GFH world leaders towards an infinitum black hole, to be torn apart, in self-guided Erosarian ships, under the guise of ‘sharing their home with humanity.’ The catch was none other than women’s intuition.

Ai Zhang didn’t let her guard down for a second throughout their invasion, and proceeded to fund, hide and direct a fortress on the dark side of the moon as soon as the Erosarians feigned for knowledge sharing. She knew that to assume goodwill, their ships would hold their own world leaders aboard to retrieve the GFH leaders. She even hand-picked our fleet crews.

With light-speed transmissions and the discreet construction of a full fleet, we were directed to assault the incoming Erosarian ships.

Take out their ships.

Take out their leaders.

Send them off with their tails between their legs.

Aboard my craft we held eighteen; ten generals, three privates, four droids and one captain, me. A hundred human vessels filled the dark moon space, waiting—you would have had to see it to believe it. We were poised and ready; the glow of our hover engines and jet fuel accelerators lit the emptiness up like fireflies.

Enough to make you shed a tear: humanity wasn’t to be trifled with, at least not with us and Ai Zhang around.

I felt a tingle in my hands as the generals poised over their triggers, ready to speed into battle, blast rays, and launch photon rockets upon the signal.

But we couldn’t see their ships. Not a single blip or blink in the distance and nothing on the radar. No word from our fearless leader either.

“Crone,” I called back to the general set up in the mid deck, who was ready to control the top phaser beam rays. “You don’t think they caught on do you?”

He sighed, putting down one of at least ten Lego figurines. He turned to me in his chair, biting into a dried sausage, leaving specs of meat in his ginger goatee. An overly familiar droid reached to remove the specs and he shooed its hand away.

“Fuck probably. I don’t think the green men are too keen on losing out on Earth,” he replied, his voice scratchy, a smoker, still chewing the meat. “And we ain’t too far, all they’d need is a little surveillance and they’d know,” he said as he turned back to his controls and Lego figures.

“Quite right, General, we are no more than three-hundred-and-eighty-four-thousand kilometres away,” pealed the droid.

I smacked my teeth and shook my head. The tension in the flight deck increased as we waited. Our fortress was impervious to radar thanks to a de-magnetization field—they would have to physically spot us. Still, even with magnified binoculars, nothing moved in the distance, save for the glitter of the surrounding stars and the slow movement of Earths clouds. If we miss them, they could wreak havoc on Earth.

“I want the droids to take a surveyor pod, now,” I said. “We need movement.”

The droids, unable to resist or cajole, stood at attention for a moment before making their way to the pods. If our systems couldn’t pick anything up, we needed to test the waters manually. I felt the crews eyes on me. In my mind, if humanity’s plan was going awry, the least we could do was stop the Erosarians from getting to Earth. I doubted Ai Zhang would make me a captain if she didn’t trust my instincts—although developed on Earth, I had twenty years of them accounted for with five as a vessel captain.

I crossed my arms, listening to the ejection of the pod and its ignition belting it out of the socket of the ship. The pod held all three droids snug and made its way around the moon.

Not even three ship lengths away from us and a rippling aircraft drummed overhead toward it.

“Get down!” yelled one of the crew, as the reverberated force moved through the ship like a deep sea wave.

We corrected. I got onto my knees for balance and kept my eyes on its movement: the Erosarian ship had a light refracting field over it to mask its presence, an invisibility cloak. It could have been observing us the entire time. I punched the ship chair and threw myself to my feet.

“We need to chase it down, now. Varos, let the rest of the fleet know we have eyes on it if they didn’t catch it,” I spat, pissed at being caught off guard.

“Already done Captain,” Varos chimed, priceless as the only general that could man the communication circuit board fast enough.

The ripples moved towards the pod, bending light in such away that only trained eyes could spot it. Like seeing little bends in the distant stars that expanded and shrunk, breathing.

“Ten generals on board and you’re letting them chase our droids, let’s get moving!” I yelled, my voice hoarse with anxiety.

We couldn’t border Earth’s exosphere too closely. The crew threw themselves into their positions and the ship began racing towards the ripple. The damned thing had a heat and metal deflection system wrapped around it so not only could we hardly see it, we couldn’t detect it by any means.

We would have to aim and shoot on target by eye alone.

As quickly as the pod came out of the corner of the moon, another rippled ship hit into it, the way an officer would divert a getaway car. We watched as sparks flew from the inside of the pod, tearing it open like a soda can and tossing it into a spin towards us. Terstus, another general, maneuvered the centre-ship control and moved us out of the pods path. Foolish. The Erosarian ships weren’t armed and they had given themselves away.

I could sense that taking out the pod was a bluff, a way of showing they weren’t afraid, or that they had something else in store, a way of making us stop and think. But we just lost three droids and a pod without an assault. We knew there were three Erosarian ships, unarmed but defended. We had to make decisions based on that or we would waste time.

With the other fleet members, our defensive formation would need to be set in motion. A hundred ships could surround the exosphere of Earth, but getting too close could cause aftershocks, misguided attacks and crashing ships to plummet onto our own planet. I had to call it.

“I want to see fifty of the best ships flanking us and tracking those Erosarians down, while the rest of the fleet gets into defensive formation. We cannot let them escape and we cannot let them near our planet,” I ordered.

I could already see beams of vessels flying past us like racing bullets to defend Earth: Veros was quick. Moving out of the moons shadow cast, we could see the refracted light from the ship left to us. Terstus sped us toward it and Crone got into position.

There was no way the Erosarians were expecting a human fleet, but they weren’t going to lie down either.

As we were about to assault, another rippled ship crossed in front of us, visibly using a south pole forcefield that propelled our ship backward. Many of the crew losing balance, and our craft flipping upward. They were using bait and switch maneuvers so we would lose sight of them. I ground my teeth.

“That’s it! I want to see them lit up!” I roared.

Immediately, beams and rays were shot out of every orifice of the ship as we corrected. The rippled ships began to race back and forth, attempting to weave away from the beams. They were dodging majority but those that landed were wearing down their force fields. I clenched my fists as I watched the holes in their fields grow larger, but losing visibility.

I could see the wall of human vessels that covered the earth like torches in the distance. We weren’t too close yet. The fifty ships ordered to flank us began to join in. I prayed their training would be heavy enough to avoid shooting us, each other, or towards our home planet. A rain of beams were blasting the two ships we could see.

We had to isolate and surround all three ships, we couldn’t let not one retreat. We had to snuff them all or consider ourselves failures.

“Fifteen by three, isolate each of their ships,” I ordered.

Aros hopped to it, and soon the formations pulled both Erosarian ships into their own section of space. I watched as some of the crafts protecting Earth split and intercepted what could only be the third target craft.

Fifteen vessels finally herded the last invader, that had been on its way to escape, into the perimeter. I felt like sighing in relief but I wanted to see their lights go out.

We rounded them up like cattle with sheep dogs, it was probably easier since the Erosarian leaders weren’t made for war or battle. They finally flashed white lights at us; white lights were an interstellar notice of surrender and I felt eyes on me again.

I couldn’t offer the crew an expression of emotion—emotion had no place in war. We knew nothing good would come of allowing them to live. We would be hurled into another cold war eventually, with Ai Zhang protecting Earth in the promise to destroy it. We had families, humanity to think of.

I hadn’t heard a damn thing from Earth either, which suggested our transmissions were being intercepted and our leader wanted to keep the plan as safe as she could.

Take out their ships.

Take out their leaders.

Send them off with their tails between their legs.

“I’m following original orders—they do not get to surrender,” I said.

In an intense concentration of light, all ships shot photon beams at the Erosarian’s. The sound of breaking metal was music to my ears. We watched their ships de-ignite and lose hover control, and sink into their own spinning, downward orbit. The remnants of their force fields retracted and they turned into nothing more than asteroid fodder. If a leader survived, they would die from hydrogen exposure.

I was satisfied.

“That was almost easy,” I said, a little breathless, my forehead lined with sweat. “Damn good communicating and flying, Aros and Terstus.”

The two smiled and began to laugh and share hi-fives amongst the other crew members. I relaxed my white-knuckled fists. We’d be hearing from Earth soon, I was sure.

Though, I couldn't shake the feeling of being glowered at by some of the crew. Was it just me? Either way, we carried out the mission with only three casualties, and none of them human.

“I hope you aren’t too broken up about that droid,” I said to Crone.

He shrugged, rolling a Lego figurine in his hand.

“He’ll turn up. That damned bot is luckier than anyone on this flight deck,” he said, fixing a cigarette to his mouth, a noticeable wateriness in the corners of his eyes.

A moment of silence passed and he slapped his sides, looking for something to ignite his rig.

“That’s… that’s not ours, is it?” Quietly asked a young private, pulling away from the others, motioning to the view.

The crew turned simultaneously starboard to see a silver droid, glinting under the light of the human fleet. It’s black, monocle-like eyes fixating on its General, floating past like a spare-part tornado. With its gentle wave mid-spin, there was no mistaking it.

“Yup, that’s Genus,” he confirmed with a sigh, taking a long draw from his rig after igniting it with a portable photon lighter. “Get him on board.”

I was impressed by its durability. After two privates retrieved it cowboy style (magnetized, metal lasso), they brought it aboard for a gamma ray cleanse. Once cleansed and primed, they returned it to the flight deck. Seeming almost excited, the drone sped to Crone’s side.

“Thank you, General, for retrieving me. I have a transmission from the enemy,” it said quickly, in a monotonous voice, remnant of the male version of Google’s Alexa from the 20’s.

Ignoring protocol and approaching Crone instead of me, the captain, signalled a long standing relationship between the two of them. I could only guess it an I-owe-you glitch in programming, but I was too distracted to care about the chain of command. I wondered about their previous work together and what kind of transmission the Erosarians had to give, as the droid leaned forward, eager to share.

“Well, spit it out,” Crone huffed, contradictingly looking it over as if to spot dents and scratches.

The droid ejected a recording device from its mouth. The audio was garbled but discernible, and the crew leaned in, tense with anticipation.

“We aren’t alone. The others will fill your sky like thunder,” a voice said, in what sounded like a snakes hiss.