Invaders

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

But I hear them still, even when I am out there, on a spacewalk or doing maintenance on a ship’s hull. I hear them every time I close my eyes, they echo around my head, and their voices protrude out from the deep abyss I repress them into. I hear the screams every single time I close my eyes, I even fear blinking.

These deafening wails I have learned, after a long, arduous time, are only useful as a motivator. To condense them into a purpose, was the only option I had. To use them as my muse to complete my self-appointed mission.

When I was young, still a naive sapling of a being, I lived with my family on a small mining ranch set up by my parents. My father and my mother, the two most loving and kindest people I had ever met had one day packed up all they owned, and with only a run-down scavenger ship and each other's love, set out to find a place to call their own. They found a nice round asteroid in a belt of many others, and claimed it as their own due to the ‘right of legitimate salvage’. It was not long until my father discovered that the asteroid was made of pure platinum. A small mine had grown in size and the sale of the platinum had provided enough money for the family to live comfortably. My father had named this asteroid after his family's name, so that generations down the line, it would represent all that had worked it.

My father and mother had, after the mine had brought in enough to build a large home, brought both sets of parents to live along with myself, and my two older brothers. We were a happy family, we needed nothing and desired nothing except for the contentedness and love that each of us provided.

Eventually, the asteroid that was once only home to platinum, had, with some hard work and inspiration become home to a family. We had built a home, farming habs with the finest of soil shipped in for our own farms and atmosphere machines. When father had saved enough money for those machines, 12 of them were placed around the asteroid to create a breathable atmosphere, that was when it truly turned into a home we loved.

The moment that my life changed forever came during a family dinner, not unusual in any way except for the fact that it was exactly the same as all the dinners before it. As I was a little over halfway through eating, a loud rumble shook the room and all our heads turned to the window. Blue thrusters had billowed platinum dust around the landing spot where this mysterious ship had decided to land, close enough to the house that when looking through the window, the entirety of the ship could not be seen.

“It’s most likely a trader who has come to buy some platinum” My father had told us, trying to calm the family. “I’ll tell them to come back tomorrow.”

Then, my father stood up, exited the building, and approached the ship that had now touched down onto the asteroid we called home. One moment, my father stood with a salesman smile on his face, and the very next, he lay limp on the ground with the right half of his head missing from a superheated slug that had been shot from the pistol held in the hand of the pilot of the ship.

My entire family panicked in that moment, both from the trauma of seeing a beloved family member’s life being ripped away from a tungsten round made solely for the purpose of bringing death to a being, and from the realisation that he would not be the only one to succumb to that fate. Their screams are not the ones I hear when I close my eyes.

My whole family panicked except for my grandfather, who just stood as still as a rock, enraged eyes staring through the window. He went to the room next to the kitchen, retrieved the family’s rifle, and took cover under the window. He aimed down the sight, ready to requite the same death to whoever had delivered it to his son. As he lined up his shot, he screamed half a word before he too lay limp in front of me, with the same outcome as father, except that the missing half of his head was the left one.

My mother, who had always been strong and stoic, who did not cry when her husband was murdered, nor her father-in-law, wept as her two eldest sons lay lifeless on the floor, once the 5 beings from the ship entered the home. Though her eyes were blinded from tears, she still had the strength to grip my hand and pull me into her bedroom, she lifted the bed and told me to lay under it and not leave until she had come to get me. She had barricaded the door and grabbed a nondescript weapon from what she could find in the room. From where I lay silent under the bed, I had a perfect view of the door, and my mother stood in front of it, breathing heavily in anticipation. The door had muffled the screams of my grandparents, those are the ones I hear in the back of my head. Those screams remain muffled, however, muffled by the loudest, most torturous scream that fills my head when there is nothing else to. The scream of my mother when the strangers had broken down the door. She had used the weapon to take down the first one that came through, but the crude weapon had broken with the final blow. The next four who came through were not kind to her, they did not provide a quick death. Her screams lasted for hours. As I watched these strange creatures, they looked nothing like any I had seen. Completely different from the family I lived with or any of the traders who had come. I remember their height, they were so much taller than any being I had seen, and they were slim, with long arms and legs; lanky. These aliens were terrifying.

When the screaming stopped, there was a period of noise that I can only explain as the aliens looting the home. Then, without announcement, they simply left. The house rumbled once more while the dust billowed as the ship left.

I did not leave from under the bed, not because I feared they would return, but because I was waiting for my mother, for her to tell me I could leave.

I waited still after all the tears had left my body.

I waited still after the pain of stillness had clawed into my muscles.

I waited still as sleep took me, only to wake the next morning and wait some more.

It was not until the next scream, the one of my stomach needing fuel, that I eventually, acquiescently crawled out from under the bed. I shook my mother, her only movement came from the force of my small, unlaboured hands. I repeated, for how long I do not remember, until something in my head told me she would not come back. I went to each body around the broken home, now stiff, and shook them hoping that one was only pretending, but they were not. The final body that I stood over was that of the stranger my mother had so valiantly taken with her.

I now had full reign to investigate this alien that had ruined my life. The head upon which its helmet sat was so large compared to ours, and it had strange-looking feet that were so unfamiliar. The black spacesuit had reflected the light through the window to gleam stunningly on the cold floor. The right palm acted as a bed for the large pistol that had taken the lives of my family, undoubtedly not the first. The chest piece had a strikingly contrasted white hand print across the middle, that symbol was burnt into my brain from that moment onwards. And the visor of dark glass reflected the image of a young, broken, confused boy who had decided at that moment that his revenge would be his solace, that his vengeance would be his silence, finally, from the screams.

That fire still burns no less intense now, 12 years later. The hatred of ‘the white hand’, the sheer dedication to track down and deliver a superheated slug of justice to the strangers that had taken everything from me. If luck is real, then all of mine had been used when only a few days after the massacre of my family, a prospective buyer had landed. I had explained what had happened and the kind soul had taken me in. The old couple was kind to me, they raised me from then on, treated me well, understanding of the chaos and horror I had experienced.

They were the ones who gave me this ship when they passed. They had cared for me when they took me in and I had cared for them in their old age. Once death had come for them, not sooner than necessary, I had enough age and ability to start my mission of revenge.

It had taken me longer than I expected to track down any information on the white hand. Every likely thread I followed led to a dead end, every informant who had information was crooked, a liar, or both. Every trail I followed turned cold, it was when I had nothing else left to follow, at the most unexpected of times that I found my first definitive lead. As I was sitting at a street vendor, eating for the first time in days, I raised my head to the large holoscreen that stretched across the building on the other side of the street. I held my finger on the aural-kinetic connection and heard the news reporter speaking in my ear.

A report on a high-ranking government minister who was assassinated during a press conference. The footage showed the last moments of the minister's speech before the attack. As they played it, something caught my eye. In the crowd of people just before the assassination, there was a man moving through the audience, and for a split second, I saw them, the assassin, wearing black armour with a white hand strewn across the chest. The news report named the planet where the assassination took place. I finally had a destination, the first step in my pilgrimage to vengeance.

At this moment, I am sitting in the cockpit of my small ship which I have called home for the past few months, in hyperspace towards the planet that is the last known location of the aliens that had murdered and massacred their way through my family.

As I approach the end of the hyperspace drift, I close my eyes as the ship returns to a normal speed. The feeling of exiting the hyperspace drift is not something that you get used to, but the sight of it is much worse, a light so intense it can blind you as the ship reduces back under lightspeed.

When I open my eyes again, I am confronted with the alien planet, it is so unlike the home of dust that I left. Where I grew up on an asteroid that could be walked fully in a day, this planet was so colossally large, the one palette of platinum grey that I knew so well was such a juxtaposition to the blue and green that this planet wore with pride. The ugly tall bipedal aliens that had murdered my family did not represent the beauty of this planet, they did not share the same shades, instead, they had dull skin to hide their evil hearts.

Where my home had been named after a noble, hard-working family, this planet, “Earth” as the aliens called it, was named after dirt. How utterly uninspired.