The Omaha Slaughter

Omaha

Chapter 1: The screams

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. But the screams from the Omaha Space Station rang loud over the comm station speaker at Omaha Mission Headquarters on Indian Key. It was December 18th, 2080 at 13:44 hours.

Indian Key was an isolated, uninhabited island, part of the Florida Keys. It was converted into an advanced space launch platform and control center in 2077 shortly after the terrorist nuclear attack on Omaha, Nebraska. Over one thousand people lived and worked on Indian Key. The space station was named after the destroyed city of Omaha and a chip containing the names and images of all the known casualties of that attack was attached to a plaque inside the station. A matching plaque was affixed to the door of the command center and another at the main entrace of the Indian Key facility.

So guttural and horrifying were the screams, the cries for help, and the final grunt and gurgling exhalation of Lt. John Fitzsimmons onboard the Omaha, all over wailing of the Omaha’s emergency klaxon, that comms Lt. Ronald Schroder on Indian Key vomited during the short emergency transmission. Seconds after the first SOS from Omaha the video stream started coming through and the floor in the control center became rich with vomit.

During the emergency, Fitzsimmons must have activated the video system on the Omaha that recorded and transmitted everything happening in all common and critical areas of the station. The station was parked at the edge of the solar system so the events unfolding before the stunned and horrified duty crew on Indian Key occurred some 72 minutes before. The video was impossible for some to watch. Wrenching sounds could be heard as people ran from the room, some with their hands covering their mouths, heads down. People were being killed and butchered with speed and precision, neatly processed, by alien beings who looked canine and human, a cross between a wolf and human, tall, very thin, and quite agile.

A data analyst blurted out, “Anubis! They look like Anubis” “Anubis was the Egyptian god of death with a canine head and human body”, he explained. A computer operator put a picture of Anubis on one of the overhead screens, “Here”, he said, “Anubis”. The silence could be cut with a knife. Had the god Anubis been real these things certainly could have been his descendants. “Maybe the drawings in Egypt were real, maybe Anubis was real!”, Schroder said, while the group watched the meat of the Omaha crew piled on slabs being rolled away to the food storage area of the station. Watch Commander Dunham barked an order to Schroder, “Wake someone at U Florida! Have them find an Egyptologist and get them out of bed, I don’t care where they are in the world. I want to know everything there is to know about this Anubis god, all the legends, all the writings. Because it looks like they may have just been real and were here 5000 years ago!!” “Yes sir”, Schoder acknowledged.

The entire operation on Omaha was being carried out with factory-like efficiency! A voice from the group still in the command center was heard strained, crying, stuttering, “There’s 600 people on Omaha!”

The stream went on non-stop. Omaha Senior Mission Command Staff had been notified at 2 AM, within minutes of the first transmission. By 3 AM they were assembled around a large round table silently viewing the carnage and studying the new enemy. Mission Commander Ford sat stone-faced taking in every detail. The victims were lined up like cattle for slaughter and could plainly view what was soon to be their fate. Switching between parts of the station feed eventually brought into view many “Anubis” as they came to be called, eating the raw flesh of their butchered victims and they appeared gleeful! Unwanted parts were piled up and jettisoned into space like so much garbage. Humans were nothing more than food and this was all playing out live and in horrifyingly high resolution and color.

For weeks and months after the slaughter the feed rolled sending video of an empty station except for the occasional Anubis walking sanitized the corridors of Omaha. Anubis it turned out were clean freaks of sorts. They cleaned the entire station top to bottom. The Anubis didn’t seem to know they were being watched or if they did they certainly did not care. The dining area camera's video was recorded but not viewable without command staff clearance. The rest remained active 24/7.

Then on March 16th, 2081 at 3 AM precisely comms received an encrypted message that was not of the normal random gibberish tail that changed with every status report. Every hour a station status summary report was sent. At the end of the report a stream of several thousand bytes of encrypted gibberish was sent. The encryption was 5120 bits, thought to be totally impossible to break without the key. This was an ingenious way to get a message back to control in the event of an emergency. It was thought up by some low-level engineer during the design phase of Omaha. It was almost scrapped due to the computing power needed to do this type of thing every hour, but now it would prove invaluable! Someone was alive on Omaha, a crew member, and they were able to send messages in the encrypted tail of the status report.

By 6 AM the entire mission command staff, members of the Joint Chiefs, and a representative from the White House were on Indian Key to discuss the new developments. The crew member on Omaha was Dillon Massy, an Engineering Technician 1ST in the Life Support Division. He had been suited up for the task of repairing a malfunctioning airlock when the attack started. He said he had no idea how Anubis entered the station. He remained in the airlock for 3 days. He shut off his audio and video feeds to his suit when he saw what was happening. He had left capture on but didn’t want to watch or hear what was happening. After 3 days he turned on his feeds and scrolled through the captured data. He saw that others had survived initially, and they had killed a few Anubis. That information was nothing new, it was seen months before. Anubis was tall, strong, vicious, lightning quick, and ruthless, but easy to kill, as easy to kill as humans. Hitting one hard in the snout seemed to disable it and long enough to even have enough time to strangle it without any resistance. Eventually, according to Massy all the other humans were found and dispatched, turned into food. He was the only human left. That reference, calling his crew mates and himself “human” was troubling to at least one person at the table, General Theodore Wilkins, a 4 Star General serving on the Joint Chiefs.

Wilkins was the least vocal of the group during discussions but the most analytic. He would pose a tough question and then let the rest of the group hash it out seldom adding anything to the discussion. However, he was very vocal about his distrust for Massy. His reputation of having a mind “like a steel trap” preceded him and nothing escaped him. He’d read Massy’s service record. Massy wanted to be a comms officer. He had completed his training at the top of his class. Shortly after his assignment to the Omaha mission, while still on Earth, he got caught sending unauthorized messages on a deep space radio. When asked what he was doing he said he was trying to bounce a signal off Mars and hear its return. An investigation confirmed that was likely but he was still removed from Communications for rules violations and was forced to retrain for a job in Engineering if he still wanted to be assigned to Omaha. He accepted and did well, he finished in the top 5 of his class with a specialty in Like Support Systems.

Every hour for several days more information came from Massy. Some new, some already known from video. Massy reasoned that hitting the snout must cause a neural overload temporarily disabling the Anubis. Likely a good guess the biologists reported. The video supported this theory. Anubis would go stiff, stand tall and fall like a piece of timber. The reaction was said to be like the Tasers police used to used in the early part of the century. It was also found out from status reports that Anubis had adjusted the life support system to up the oxygen level to 26% from the normal 21%. Anubis had a language, they spoke, but deciphering it was going very slowly. Only 2 words were certain. Kill and eat. Most of their speaking was done while eating together and seeing the butchered parts of human beings eaten made it very hard for the linguists to listen and concentrate. It was ordered by the President to gather the top linguists in the world and pay them as much as they wanted and get them to Indian Key, ASAP! They and the Anubis ID Project had sole access to the dining area video without command orders. Anubis ID has identified specific Anubis traits and marks, ones that could be used to ID individuals and name them for future reference. There were old ones, mature adults, and obviously very young ones, there were males and females. There were at least 3 generations on Omaha, maybe 4. It was theorized that Anubis had been traveling for quite some time. If they traveled from the Alpha Centauri system and could only achieve escape velocity with only a small amount of extra fuel for a speed boost and course corrections they’d likely been in space for at least 80 years.

By the day after the first transmission plans were being discussed to destroy the Anubis. Massy also had a plan. He would somehow disable all safety systems that could isolate the ship sectors and then remotely open all the airlocks. He would not wear a suit, he’d die with Anubis. Command thought this plan to be excellent for the annihilation of Anubis on Omaha while keeping Omaha intact, but unlikely to succeed due to the exposure that Massy would have during the execution of his plan. Plus it could not be guaranteed that all Anubis would be on Omaha when Massy executed his plan.

Days later Massy had stated his plan would be impossible to implement because he could not gain access to the parts of Engineering that would be necessary to disable the safety systems. With those systems in place, emergency doors would close and isolate any part of the station that had an outside and inside airlock door open to space. Also, Life Support was guarded as heavily as the food supply. Again it was Wilkins who questioned, “Guarded against who? Certainly one human isn’t a major threat. Who then?” Had Massy been able to gain access it would take only a few minutes to carry out his plan. To complicate matters all maintenance shafts and corridors had been opened to space. It was likely Fitzsimmons would have done this as part of the attack protocol and he would not have reversed his decision without orders from the station commander or Omaha Mission HQ. But until Massy reported the maintenance areas open to space nothing had appeared on status reports. Massy was unable to negotiate the shafts with a suit on and changing the status of the maintenance access areas would certainly be noticed by the Anubis.

The planners had questions, hundreds of questions. Anubis, where did they come from, and did we even have the technology to destroy them? It would take months to get to Omaha. Could we get there undetected? Were there more Anubis, a planet full of them perhaps? Were they on the way to Earth? Could we survive as a species against a species that could travel the galaxy? The most troubling question though came again from Wilkins, “Why had the opening to space of the maintenance shafts and corridors not been included in the very first status report after Fitzsimmons supposedly opened them?” General Wilkins was a doubter of Massy from his very first transmission. There was something about him he didn’t trust. Wilkins stood and shouted, noticeably startling many at the table, but this time not a question, but a statement, “Those shafts and corridors were open to space before these hounds came onboard Omaha! That’s how they got in! I don’t trust this Massy!”, he barked.

There was one more status report after Wilkins outburst and then no more Massy. Days and weeks passed without a peep. Wilkins privately told Mission Commander Ford that he thought there was a mole in the Command Center, at the table! “Commander”, Wilkins said, “we got nothing from Massy after I mentioned my suspicion that the maintenance areas were open to space before Anubis arrived! This guy is a fraud and he has help, they’re on Omaha because of him, I can feel it!”

Massy had been confirmed to be real. There had been some speculation, especially from Wilkins, so Massy took a chance and showed himself on camera at a predetermined location and then did a retinal scan while on camera. 72 minutes later command knew he was really Massy but Wilkins still had reservations. Massy proved to be a brave man! He had poison from the lab onboard that he carried with him. It was a Cyanide compound used in water analysis. He thought he would ingest it and then when they ate him perhaps it would kill many of them. The doctors on Indian Key estimated it was enough to kill 200 men. He’d thought of poisoning their food but they guarded it very heavily, like it was all they had. Perhaps it was all they had, a command staff officer suggested. A look of panic fell over many around the command table! It was apparent what was running through their minds. The Chief of Communications, Major Markus Sherod said in a panicked tone, “If it’s all they have they know exactly where to find more. Earth!“

As the planning continued two plans were put together, one with Massy involved and one without him. Either way Omaha would be destroyed in a nuclear blast that would certainly kill the Anubis, destroy their ship, and destroy Omaha with Massy onboard. There would be no escape for him. Wilkins wanted nothing to do with Massy executing anything, being involved at all, or even being privy to any plan. “Just blow the god damned thing up with that son of bitch in it”, he said many times. He wanted to launch nuclear-tipped missiles with the new pulse propulsion systems. He wanted to launch waves of them seconds apart, locked on the target. Launched from space they would reach Omaha in 4 hours.

Fighting or capturing any Anubis was not an option, period! Although some in the scientific community fought hard to promote a mission to capture at least a few Anubis and get their technology, the plan was officially scrapped at the highest levels. Total annihilation was the only acceptable plan. Some had reservations however. Were there more Anubis? Does their ship do what Omaha does, send reports regularly? If we destroy it will more Anubis come looking for it?

Then 8 weeks later Massy suddenly started sending messages again. He didn’t have much more information, only that the Anubis seemed to be here to stay. They were setting equipment up in the station and had docked their ship to it. It was getting harder for Massy to move around. It was decided that the plan involving Massy was to be transmitted immediately. It involved causing the 3 reactors on Omaha to go critical. Even without an explosion the radiation would kill all on both the station and the Anubis ship. Just before the order to transmit the plan was given General Wilkins stood and yelled, “STOP!” The Commander looked at the comms officer and swiped a finger back and forth across his throat in a cutting motion. The transmission was delayed.

General Wilkins continued, “Do not transmit anything!! It’s been 8 weeks! We know all the food is heavily guarded, all of it, even the stations regular food supply. We know most of them are like a chow hound dog, they’ll keep eating until the food is gone or taken away. That’s why its guarded so closely, that’s why they eat together, and that’s why they get hustled out of the mess hall by their superiors, their alphas if you will, when they determine enough has been eaten! Massy has access to 6 suits, the rest he supposedly can’t get near. Each suit has food tubes and water that could sustain someone for a couple days, 12 days of food and water. Ration that in half and you have 24 days, into thirds and you have 36 days. I don’t trust this guy and never have! It’s been 5 months!”

He continued, “Transmit this question and only this question! Transmit, ”Massy exactly what have you been eating and drinking for the last 5 months?” “That’s all!”

The command staff on Indian Key silently looked at each other, eyes glancing wildly from one to another. It was clear there would be no discussion. The Presidents representative stood up quickly but one glace from Ford settled him back into his seat without a peep. Ford nodded to the comms officer Lt. Sherod, and said quietly, head down, in a tone akin to someone who had just been given the worst news possible, “Lieutenant, send the question and only the question.” The transmission was sent as part of the acknowledgment reply to the regular status report. A minute later Sherod replied, “Message sent sir.” Wilkins settled back into his chair to join the others as the tedious wait for the reply began. It would be at least 144 minutes.