Killer Aliens
Or how a first contact nearly became a last contact.
Estelle Jimenez, defense contractor for the USSF, fired up her console for the beginning of her shift. Life on Moonbase Alpha had been abuzz for the last year. She had anticipated her two-year stint to be just like her last one, largely boring and a good way to sock away money for retirement. Then she had been the one to discover 2I/2032 or as she had dubbed it, “Quetzalcoatl”.
It had many of the same qualities that “Oumuamua” or 1I/2017 had when it was discovered in 2017. Little did anyone know that the “first visitor”, as the Hawaiian word translated, would be prophetic. The only difference was, 2I/2032 was at least ten times larger. It was difficult to tell at this distance. The object was barely inside their solar system as such things were measured.
She’d named it after the feathered serpent to honor her heritage and because of its unusual “feathered” tail. It spread out in a way different from comets, broader and more diffuse. There were also some anomalies in the spectrophotography. They wouldn’t get better results until it was closer.
It was now a year later and she called up all of the records from over the past three hundred days or so. As she paged through them, she felt a presence over her shoulder. “Hello, Senior Airman Dickens.” Her tone was cool, but polite.
“Okay, I’m sorry I missed our date last night. How long am I going to be in the doghouse for?” The young Senior Airman was taller than she was by a good six inches and she loved how big his hands were.
“If you keep trying to read over my shoulder or interrupt my work, the length of time doubles. Go get me a coffee.” She didn’t hold rank as a contractor, but she was five years his senior and had a PhD, though she never made anyone call her doctor.
The curious thing about I2/2032 was that it appeared to be slowing down, not speeding up as it approached the sun’s gravity well. It also appeared to be changing course. She read about how some people on Earth were throwing fits. There were minor riots and a few splinter religious groups went into hiding.
She pulled up the data from the Venera D, Russian’s Venusian Orbiter, as well as from NEO, the Near Earth Object satellite telescope. Over the last couple of months all signs pointed to the new plumes coming from its “front” as being the source of the deceleration. New calculations said it would stop well before it got here, but it would be close.
She got a few pings from RANGR 3, the satellite telescope/early warning system in L3. From opposite Earth on the other side of the sun, it had a good perspective on things approaching the planet. She switched over and saw some meteor activity. It shouldn’t get to them for at least another week to ten days and would miss the earth by quite a bit. The moon would catch a few of them on the dark side, but that was nothing new. They were near the terminator line, so they’d be safe.
She drank her coffee and chatted with Dickens, letting him know he would be out of the doghouse soon, when the klaxons went off. Automated systems put shields up and sent off warning messages to all Moonbases as well as the orbital platforms, space tugs, and shuttles. The plethora of vehicles were available because of the Space Force’s gearing up for the next Mars mission.
The first wave was made up of smaller asteroids. She guessed they picked them up from the Kuiper belt. They didn’t get hit but she still felt massive tremors from the dark side impacts. Thanks to the automated warning system, Earth had a few minutes heads up.
Some of the space-based weapons platforms were able to take out the larger objects. A few more minutes of warning would have made a big difference. As it was, thanks to the news and real-time satellite monitoring, she saw the collisions mostly affecting the world’s oceans and large open spaces where they hit land.
The few impacts where there were people were utter disasters, of course. But humanity’s tendency to cluster helped a little, as did their movement away from the coast over the previous two decades. Tidal waves from ocean impacts still caused devastation along populated coastlines. Baja Island off of the California coast was completely underwater.
The next wave wasn’t far behind. Dickens, Jimenez, other contractors, members of the US Space Force, and the United Nation’s Space Force were ready for them. Laser platforms targeted the larger ones, waiting for them to be in the effective range. They were able to bring mass driver canons online. Their primary intention was to launch spacecraft but they could also work as a sort of shotgun when loaded with moon rocks and other debris.
What no one was ready for were the evasive maneuvers. Weapons systems were largely stationary. At the last instant, those “meteors” began moving left and right and firing particle beams of some kind back at them. From her vantage point, she watched as some local space traffic was taken out one by one. Then these… Fighters? Hit the atmosphere.
Again, she watched helplessly as the combined Air Force and Space Force along with some Marine and Navy pilots, not to mention UN fighter aircraft and spacecraft took on the new threat. It was an uneven fight. Human made armor was no match for their weapons. But it seemed their craft wasn’t well suited for Earth’s atmosphere. They moved sluggishly compared to our world’s planes.
She turned her attention back to the monitors as did dozens if not hundreds of others, wondering what was next. Larger ships, seemingly carved out of asteroids, hit the Moon and the Earth, dispatching ground-based forces. The aliens either wore metallic suits or had a shiny exoskeletons. Their ground-based ships had the same kind of beam weapons on a larger scale and the soldiers had wands which doubled as beam and hand-to-hand weapons.
The Moonbases all had additional emergency shielding which was activated after pulling in as many people as possible. It stood up well against the alien beams and they were able to turn mining equipment and other hardware into makeshift weapons. The next forty-eight hours would go down in history books. Many would survive. She would get a battlefield commission and promotion, the first woman in her family in generations to become a soldier. Dickens would lose an arm and a foot, but would be promoted as well. They would have a long battle ahead of them. I2/2032 had yet to make planetfall. When it does, they’ll find humanity knows how to do one thing very well. They may suck at taking the inevitable seriously, but they’re mighty good at killing.
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Very good.