Chapter 3: The Encounter

The explosion rocked through the vessel, throwing everyone onto the deck. Chaos quickly ensued with multiple alarms blaring. The comm lines became saturated immediately with people asking for assistance and barking orders.

“Trigger the particle shields. Increase power output to energy barriers. Assault team, prepare for return fire. Let’s give these aliens a taste of our cannons. Wing Fleet, engage, assault pattern Foxtrot Kilo. Defend the Lady”

“Roger that Captain. Defensive combat pattern Foxtrot confirmed. Wing Squad Alpha, protect the Lady. The rest open engage and cut them down to size”

“Engage evasive maneuvers.  Let them follow us; I want them hot on our tail. Divert energy to the aft shields while our battery cannons reduce their projectiles as best as we can. The Magdalene is an iron lady, she can take the hits.”

“Master Gunnery, arm the main cannons and standby. We will show these bloody aliens what we can do.” “Slowly reduce power support to the aft shields after each hit. Let them think we are weakening. We’ll roast them soon enough”

The ship shuddered again and again being pummeled from behind. The alarms becoming increasingly shrill despite the slowly pervading air of calm after the initial direct hit. The crews are growing more focused with the intent of delivering their own blow.

“Lead those into the asteroid field ahead, once we gain some traction, turn the ship around and fire all our cannons. Main cannons on the ready.”

“There, right off the cluster ahead, turn and fire through the rocks. Our cannons will punch through it and hit them as they approach. Now”

The Magdalene groaned under the stress of turning on a dime. The gravitational gyro-controls spiraled keeping the ship level.  

“Open Fire! Let them have it!” The Lady Magdalene directed all of her forward cannons and released a barrage blasting through the asteroid field towards their assailant. There was surely no chance that their antagonist could avoid being hit.

“Contact in 2 seconds, 1 and hit”

There was blinding explosion and the entire horizon filled with light. Aftershocks reverberated through the open space, pushing away space debris.

A moment later it dawned on the Captain that their assault did not have the desired effect. Their antagonist was still there, apparently unscathed and moving in closer.

“Re-arm the cannons. Energy shields at maximum. Wing Fleet retreat beyond safe-zone”

From their vantage point in Lady Magdalene’s bridge, they could see several pinpricks of light growing in intensity ahead of the approaching ship.

“Captain, the enemy is charging some kind of energy device, everything is off the scales. We are having trouble identifying what it is.”

“Move her away, use the asteroid field as cover, and bring us as far as we can away from this beast.”

“Captain, we detect two points of energy coalescing in front of us. Engineering says it is some kind of Negative-space orb. Another two is appearing behind us as well. It seems to be boxing us in”

“Evasive maneuvers. Avoid the kill box”

                “We can’t Captain. It seems to match every action we take. We’re                          trapped!”

“Like hell we will. Return fire”

As soon as her energy cannons released their payload, it dissipated and the four pinpricks of Negative energy burst alight and formed a square. Not a blink later, a sudden flash of light appeared across the ship from bow to aft, cleanly sectioning her.

The Magdalene groaned to halt, cataclysmic damage dealt to her as she split right across spilling her contents and crew into deep space. All energy and support systems shot. All the Captain could do was gape in disbelief as his pride was violently torn away. He was about to sound abandon ship when another flash sliced through the bridge. There was no pain, no sound, just the screaming silence of his crew in the void of space.

The antagonist merely watched as their prize shuddered and died, biding their time, before harvesting the dead crew and contents of their sectioned victim.

Chapter 2 - The Beginning

The signal never changed. Never fluctuated and was broadcast consistently. A clarion call.

They Are Coming. Prepare Yourselves.

They Are Coming. Prepare Yourselves.

Overcoming the shock of affirmation, the world finally took action. Various governments and nations reactivated space research, with the express intent of communicating with the source of the signal. Intelligent minds, researchers, quantum theorists, and all manner of scientists were identified and given the burden of developing space communication and flight technologies.

A few hundred years passed, and Earth got more desperate as the amplitude of the signal became more urgent in tone. Exasperated by years of little to no real progress, Earth sent a call for help to the Originators, beseeching them guidance on needed technological development. Humans have failed to create a space worthy vessel that was capable of faster than light travel. Entire countries were ruined in the testing stages, their investment going up in smoke every time a theory was put into action. Resource was getting even more tight.

It would seem that the Originators had suddenly decided to stop communicating with Earth, their messages now nothing more than garbled mathematical improbabilities. Years we stood on tenterhooks hoping for a positive reply but nothing came. Silence for decades.

One early morning on year 2672, 0505 hours, a sudden beam of light poured out of the peak in the Himalayas, shooting straight to the heavens. A few moments later, the famed K2 was no longer there. In its wake, was an enormous vessel, organic in design, with its turrets and spires, elongated tubules and sweeping curves.

First contact occurred seconds later, simultaneously across the globe. Thousands of children of those most closely tied to Project Origin all suddenly hung in the air with their heads snapped back, eyes filled with light and screaming warnings and the invitation to come to the leveled peak. 

...

The Originators looked amazingly like humans, albeit with a more pronounced beauty and height, averaging 7 feet tall. Their skin, if inspected closely enough had the dewy translucence of a baby. Their voices command a sense of authority yet somehow placating.

Their coming to Earth had been a matter of debate amongst their kind, with most factions insisting that Earth must grow at its own pace, unaided by outside forces. A small group however were concerned about a race of plunderers known as the Eyeless, that were scouring the great expanse of the cosmos colonizing and decimating entire worlds before moving onto the next hapless world. Once a noble and proud race that co-evolved with the Originators, the Eyeless descended into madness and rejected all forms of non violence, further corrupting their potential. The race grew twisted and despised all that rejected their way of life.

The Originators still attempted to reason and succour for peace, much to their own detriment. Finally, in what was the greatest war of their age, the Originators led a planet wide battle against the Eyeless and dealt them a crushing defeat. Yet, instead of total annihilation of the vengeful race, the Originators took pity upon the remainders, perhaps brought about the realization that in the Great War, they too had turned into exactly what they were warning against. The Originators, remorseful of their fall from grace by the attempted genocide of the Eyeless, turned inward and focused on the evolution of more lofty pursuits. The Talborii faction was tasked with protecting their home-verse.

The remnants of the Eyeless were round up and sent out to the furthest reaches of space. Prisoners of their own unwillingness in a vessel. They were supposed of have died out as a race, floating in the sea of nothingness. However, what happened was something no one anticipated. In their hunger, the Eyeless turned against each other and became even more bent. Somehow, the strongest among them developed a kind of co-operative hive mind and commandeered their prison ship towards a new space facing culture. They inflicted such devastating harm onto the race of this planet and their population exploded. Seething with rage and a hunger for vengeance, they developed their own space faring ability by enslaving the remnant pockets of the peoples of their colonized world.

The Eyeless were finally capable of space travel but in a quirk of fate, retained their most basal barbaric instincts, favouring the chaos and destruction of war and the consumption of lives and resources everywhere. They were however still dangerous due to their exceedingly quick breeding. Over the countless aeons, the Eyeless have evolved into a wave of death on a galactic scale.

The wave of Eyeless shot out tendrils even wider across space and will soon find more living worlds to harvest and plunder. Only the most technologically superior cosmic races has managed to stave off their coming. Earth was next in its course and once it arrives, Earth will have no defence unless steps are taken.

The Talborii faction, charged with the policing of the Eyeless had defiantly opted to warn Earth of its impending death, before the remnant gem of the Solar system is ravaged as countless others before it.

The clock is ticking.

Chapter 1 - Contact

At first the strange repeating blips picked up by the SETI array seemed a technical fluke. Erroneous calculation coughed up by an aging machine. Funding was already ridiculously tight, with government and private sources slowing down to a trickle, direct result of years of beaming coded radio signals with no conclusive proof that any intelligent life was actually out there. Most of the space agencies had changed their focus towards military and security applications. 

Humans and wars have advanced far necessitated by the ever escalating threat of mutually assured destruction of nations. Wars were now fought with such deadly accuracy and impersonal actions, strategic penetrative assaults by covert black ops teams, death raining from miles above ground by remotely operated UAVs. The world simply compartmentalized human deaths and moved on.

Which is not to say that humanity was lost. It flourished. Peoples of the world actually were better off. The usual petty bickering put aside for mutually altruistic gains. Dissenters often simply faded from the news, disappearing from the face of the earth, or very occasionally, conveniently involved in some fatal mishap.

Focus was now geared towards the development of human technologies to harness what was left of the world's resources. The oceans and other seemingly inhospitable environments were now colonized. Enormous bio-domes housing the world's civilization. Yet, there was the undeniable fact that earth was running out of natural resources.

Then SETI caught some strange blips from far off in space. Something was transmitting back, a data package so multilayer, there was no possibility of it being anything else but intelligent life. The message, coded in all the languages of humanity was clear and simple - 

They Are Coming. Prepare Yourselves.