Monsterpocalypse Monday: Captain’s Log – First Sight

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Captain’s Log—First Sight

  • Crew:  Captain Jeffrey F. “Bingo” Griffith, USN
  • Shuttle Location:  Low Earth Orbit
  • Earth Date: 25 January
  • Earth Time (GMT):  23:04

I retired to my quarters at 21:30 after initial docking with the Russian cargo ship we had been assigned to deliver to way station 004. I’d left Roscosmos Flight Engineer Smirnov to hunt for his care package from home.

Lunar Delivery Intercept 106 had gone well. Until tonight. It began when Mission Specialist Ito of JAXA woke me and told me Smirnov had sent him to get me. I thought it was still about his care package and asked Ito to kindly ask Smirnov to be a good doctor and have patience, it would be in there somewhere, but two things happened: the pun didn’t land (I keep forgetting I’m the only one of the four of us on Shuttle Foresight who speaks English as a native tongue), and Ito said Smirnov was waiting for me at the viewing bridge.

The newest specialist, Inga Weinbach from Hamburg, was already on the bridge when Ito and I arrived. Smirnov was floating at a view port above us—all of the shutters of the viewing bridge were open, so we had slightly more than one-hundred-eighty-degrees of view of Earth and the empty space all around us as we moved in orbit in preparation for our mission to the moon . When Smirnov looked down and beckoned the rest of the crew to join him, I knew by the sick look on his face that the pelmeni dumplings he was hoping were in his gifts from his grandmother no longer mattered to him. He looked like a man who wasn’t sure he would live to enjoy them.

I drifted up to him, Ito and Weinbach right behind me, as Smirnov turned his attention back to his pentagon-shaped window. He said something in Russian, and though I only a fraction of it, his tone made it clear: we are in serious trouble.

I did not know what the metallic, segmented, snake-like nightmare approaching us at an exceptional speed was, but you don’t have to possess a high IQ to know when you are in danger—a survival instinct will suffice. It twisted and gyrated to move, much like a serpent. Its yellow eyes seemed lifeless, yet I easily imagined I could read fury in them. As it passed between us and Earth, we could see its green plated armor set against a backdrop of ocean blue and white clouds. It was an elegant form of death racing toward us.

“We need to engage the thrusters,” Weinbach said under her breath.

I said, “There’s no time. And it wouldn’t matter. We don’t have the speed to outpace that.”

“We cannot sit and wait for it to kill us.”

“NASA didn’t build shuttles for combat,” I said, “or racing.”

“Get us out of its path at the least. Maybe it—”

Ito cried out in surprise behind me, and I turned with the intent to calm him—it was my role as captain, though I was certain I didn’t have the vocabulary to even come close—only to discover him pointing out another portal, the one opposite the Earth view. We all looked. There, among the blazing pantheon of stars that will never be as bright from home far below us, was a shape drifting toward us. One we knew, called the same name in all four of our respective languages.

Ares.

The Mothership was accompanied by a small wave of Vanguard ships, the claw-shaped smaller fighters that maneuvered like houseflies as they closed in on both Shuttle Foresight and the snake-like monster approaching us from Earthside. Radios all over our shuttle were quickly coming alive, even from mission control centers who had no one on board at the time—Beijing, Toulouse, even Sriharikota all began to broadcast warning messages. India was the first center to include the space serpent’s name—Gausamal—and Houston was the one who told us she was part of the Draken Armada. She was a friendly, a Texan drawl assured us.

“A friendly what?” Weinbach asked, but we were barely communicating with Earth. We were watching the war begin above the skies below.

The Vanguard ships passed our shuttle with less than a hundred meters between us; it was close enough that we risked being knocked out of orbit. As Ares descended closer to the exosphere, two rays emitted from it as if to scan our station, but whatever the intent of those rays was, Ares was interrupted when the first of her Vanguards was met by Gausamal’s fury. She wound herself like a python around one of the smaller ships, and before it could accelerate free, she crushed it into an unidentifiable wreckage of metal. The move was so fast, I blinked, and it was over.

I turned to Smirnov. “Did you—?”

Our Russian flight engineer was gone.

I knew instantly what had happened. I had read about the Mothership using her rays to abduct civilians, and though I had never heard of her being capable of capturing someone within a structure with those rays, nothing was beyond possibility in this impossible war. We had been scanned, and for whatever reason, Ares had stolen one of our crew members. Oddly, my first moment of panic was a microscopic worry that predated the apocalypse of the monsters: what would the Russian mission control center in Korolyov say when they found out we’d lost one of their cosmonauts?

I know—the enemy of my enemy is my friend now. But still. I was the captain of Lunar Delivery Intercept 106. As far as I knew, no one in the other rotations had ever lost a team member. I had no desire to be the first.

“Look,” Weinbach said to me, reaching out to tap my shoulder.

Gausamal—our “friendly”—had obliterated a second Vanguard ship and was moving on a third. At times I thought she had momentarily vanished, but when I pulled myself over to another viewport, I could see her again. I half-expected to see a small human body tumbling through space as Ares stole Smirnov from us with some kind of invisible tractor beam, but the rapid destruction of her Vanguard ships seemed to have given her motivation to attack. She blasted away, halting Gausamal in her proverbial tracks, allowing Ares to close far more quickly than Gausamal might have expected. Her sudden participation in the battle between the Draken Armada monster and her own Vanguard ships gave those ships greater motivation to open fire but then slip away rapidly before Gausamal could get ahold of them. And her very presence seemed to refocus them on attacking Gausamal’s weaknesses—if there were any. I couldn’t tell. Another blast from Ares sent Gausamal coiling toward Earth, but she recovered and re-launched her own assault.

She engaged the last two Vanguards, and in the blink of an eye, one of them was spinning away as if shoved by a gigantic invisible hand. Gausamal took that opportunity to coil around the last one, and that apparently convinced Ares there would be a better time and place for this confrontation. She began to flee for the Earth’s horizon, carrying her over most of Europe in a matter of moments. Ito cheered, albeit only long enough to grow embarrassed. I understood the feeling, now that I knew she was on our side—she was a beauty to behold as she took down the enemy. I would have cheered, too, if not for the pain in my chest for having lost Smirnov to the Mothership. Gausamal crushed another Vanguard as Ares reached the very edge of the glow that surrounded Earth and began to descend out of view.

“Here. Take this.”

I turned toward him as Smirnov handed me a small dumpling from a plastic container. He had already put one in his mouth and was shoveling a second in, chewing and scanning the skies beyond the viewing bridge. There, Gausamal had abandoned her fight with the Vanguard ships and was swimming through space in pursuit of the retreating Ares Mothership.

Pelmeni,” Smirnov said when he noticed my wide-eyed stare of disbelief. “My babushka, she makes the best. So…what did I miss?”

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