Ship’s Notes: The Aliens

With our current sensor suite, traveling towards a planet allows us to watch the last dozen years of its history.  Telivoni was a fairly boring planet, with nothing to distinguish itself above a hundred other Linked Systems worlds.  Tien Terra was a more interesting watch: Three habitable planets, fairly late to build a Gateway, but with highly developed interplanetary infrastructure and ship-building know-how that led to it immediately becoming a common port and trade hub of the Linked Systems.

Of course, with a little math and star-reading, my Navigator and Communications Officer were able to give me an accurate reading of the date of what I could see, far better than simply estimating from what I could see.  With that in mind, I came to a halt relative to the planet, just in time to watch the aliens arrive without interference.

They arrived much as we would, with the ship appearing near Telivoni, and a ghost image of themselves appearing to shoot backwards, as light from earlier portions of their journey reached us.  A particularly pronounced effect, as we were viewing them arrive from a 45 degree angle, rather than head-on.

The ship was much as I remembered it, a giant spiraling conch shell, looking like nothing much more than a shellfish pulled from a well-terraformed sea.  It continued towards the planet, activating anti-asteroid defenses that fired upon the ship, blowing giant holes in the shell and causing heavy outgassing for a short while.  Then the holes stopped venting smoke, and instead the internal structure could be seen through a glittering, translucent membrane.  The damage was much less than one might expect from such weapons, particularly on a decent hit.

The defenses stopped firing, and instead drones and a heavy interdiction patrol ship moved to intercept the alien craft.  I could see the drones hovering over the membranes, taking the first known images of alien life, images that I myself have seen with the eyes I used to have.  The patrol ship backed off, and, as I understood it, readied its payload of a single nuclear device, ready to destroy the massive ship before it impacted the planet at high velocity.

But instead the ship slowed, despite no visible means of propulsion, and gently fell down through the atmosphere, impacting in the ocean at only a few hundred meters per second, rather than the original relative velocity of thousands of meters per second.  The Telivonians would quarantine the area, and then call the Linked Systems leadership, which would respond before providing any warning, sending an entire planetary suppression force through the L1 and L2 Gateways.

They would secure the system, fake a medical quarantine, and eventually tow the alien craft to shore, where the old me would eventually see it.  Meanwhile they would discover that most of the aliens within were sick and dying, and forcibly evacuate all of them into separate medical isolation wards.  All of the sick aliens would die, but the remainder survived, probably due to the quarantine efforts, and went on to deal with the humans, to tell their stories, and, eventually to swear not to use their magic to help the humans until the Linked Systems council was able to decide how to fairly take advantage of the alien magic.

We have returned to approaching at a few times light speed.  In a few kiloseconds, I should be able to observe me fleeing from the Telivonian Interdiction patrol, activating the drive to accelerate beyond the speed of light, and reaching the L2 gate before the message to invalidate my access permission code.  It will be strange seeing myself.