Artemisia

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

But there are some things even space cannot contain, given enough velocity, mass…hunger. The strange ball of fire hurtled angrily on its final trajectory towards Earth. By the time it reached the atmosphere, it was positively roaring.

Thousands of miles below, the waters of Moku’ola Bay shimmered under the stars. Fisherman threw out their nets by the crest of the shore, and a pod of dolphins squealed playfully with one another. Several shooting stars arced across the night sky. A casual observer could easily catch at least four or five in any given hour. Like most cultures in the world, they were regarded as portents of good fortune—a new life born, for instance.

Fortune, this night, was about to take a twist.

The younger dolphin on the pod’s left flank saw it first. A single star suddenly grew brighter in the heavens, illuminating the waning storm clouds. Then a trail of fire broke through the cloud cover, painting the horizon in a false dawn.

The dolphin pod became restless; their squeaks changed tone and they now assumed a kind of defensive posture. The wind picked up speed, turning the calm waters into rough, choppy waves. The fishermen stood transfixed by the shore, nets still in hand. Some crossed themselves uneasily as they realized the thing was about to hit the ocean. Their ocean.

Flames whipped around the object as it penetrated further into the atmosphere. It was roughly spherical in shape, but this was no ordinary meteor. Instead of rock, it was composed of layers upon layers of organic fiber, almost like a coconut husk. Tendrils burned away rapidly, and the thing began to shrink as more of its mass was consumed by the atmospheric heat of reentry.

The fishermen, all too familiar with tidal waves, scooped up their nets most efficiently and retreated into the tree canopies. The dolphins seemed to have the same idea. The pod alpha whistled his warning to the others in the group, triggering social memory that prioritized survival above food. The dolphins dispersed down into the coral reef a few meters away, taking refuge in caves and sinkholes.

In the blink of an eye, the shore was deserted.

Flaming debris peeled off and rained down over the ocean as the object drew closer to impact. It finally struck the water at twenty times the speed of sound, churning up a boiling cauldron of brine and salt half a mile wide. Ripples several meters high spread out in every direction from the site of impact. Storm clouds were aggravated back into existence by the sudden atmospheric disturbance. Tines of lightning appeared off in the distance.

Still on fire as the water around it steamed and bubbled, the false meteorite sank towards the ocean floor. The brittle, organic carapace broke apart and fell away, revealing a glowing, red-hot oblong shape. As it cooled, the red turned a more sinister shade of green.

Eyes as black as opals rested on either side of the elongated, cucumber-shaped head, bordering a crest structure that formed a giant maw. An insectoid mandible flexed its pincers in the darkness, seemingly tasting this new, watery environment. Four appendages that could have been arms or tentacles extended out from a short, segmented thorax, grasping at everything and nothing. A long, segmented tail tapered out from the midsection.

The Queen had finally landed on Earth, and her plans for colonization could now begin. An interstellar journey spanning almost twenty years had reached its conclusion. Like so many other planets she had conquered, this strange, blue world held the key to perpetuating her kind all over the galaxy.