20 - First contact

"There they come."

Waiting in the cargo access airlock, Kate watched the fighter GCV-43 enter and dock. As the fighter powered down, Kate and her subordinates entered the hangar and started walking over to it as one of the cockpits opened up and a pilot went out in front of his craft.

"Time to get some answers, slow and steady people."

Expecting to be contacted and have a talk, Kate was somewhat perplexed when the pilot's helmet light started rapidly flashing, luckily Kate's vacuum suit was faster on the uptake and started translating the morse code signals it had been sent.

"Let's see… 'If you want to talk, this is how it is going to happen. Make sudden movements, shoot me in the head or try to arrest me and my ship goes supernova and blows this station apart.' Lieutenant, can he do that?"

Doing her best to remain calm, Kate referred to her current second in command as she remained still and the pilot in front of her continued to send light signals in her direction.

"Yeah, they properly could skipper, reactor output is rising… We should have shot out their core with our railguns before they entered the station."

"We both know that wouldn't have been an option… Let's try and find out why they're this up in arms. Lieutenant, transmit my words and act as in between please."

Clearing her throat to act as a starting signal to transmit, Kate played it civil and started with a self-introduction and a short outline of her current mission.

"Hello, my name is Kate Daniels, captain of the Solar empire destroyer Endurance. I am here to take control of this station which has recently fallen into ownership of the Solar Empire, while in the state of final preparations for departure, I got news of a massacre inside the station and am looking for witnesses. Why the whole death by reactor meltdown, we're only looking to talk."

"This is going nowhere, get ready."

Talking with the representative of the Solar Empire, Mike quickly noticed where things were going and he wasn't about to get into his life story with a random grunt.

[Ready.]

Plan B was breaking out of the station by force, and although Mike realised this was a rash and stupid decision, everything was better than returning to something like that box where Mike felt his very soul erode. With River ready to act and the Scorpion ready to move, Mike needed to somehow make it back to the Scorpion alive, but before he started worrying about that something strange happened. Out of nowhere, the multi-billion ton station shook like something equally massive had hit it. Thrown to the ground and smashing his head into the floor, Mike felt faint as he stained the inside of his helmet with blood from his nose and his ears started ringing.

"No… This is way too early!"

Still, through the pain and slight disorientation, Mike still noticed it, the easily recognizable and highly synchronised flickering of lights combined with the way stranger aurora-like light rays penetrated through the docking bay.

[Mike are you okay!? What's going on!]

As River had been strapped in and ready to leave she hadn't been thrown around, but judging by the fact that she was still freaking out meant she also could see the aurora-like light rays going straight through the Scorpion and the wall behind it meant that Mike wasn't just seeing things.

For better or worse, this was happening, and Mike had no choice but to roll with it.

"This is really fucking bad, get me in direct contact with that Captain now!"

[Wha-]

"We're getting raided, and not the kind that's likely to leave any survivors! Transmit on all emergency bands, tell civs to button up and hunker down, these things don't believe in mercy."

From the way the captain was acting, Mike figured she also had noticed there was something extremely wrong, the second he was patched into her comm system he only needed a single sentence to convince her.

"I know what's going on here, if you want you and your men to survive the next few hours listen up. If not, I'll get myself out of this some way or another."

Getting back into the Scorpion after instructing Kate to return to her destroyer, River finally found a moment to get a word in.

"So what is this exactly?"

"Extragalactic beings that are radically different from us. All forms of dialogue are impossible and they seem interested in taking humans and what we've made apart to see how it works."

Feeling a pit starting to grow in her own stomach, River realised that if things ended up going south she would be taken apart like some sort of lab animal or doll.

Launching from the station, Mike found the aurora-like lights even more brilliantly sinister with no walls obstructing them. From what he remembered from Interstellar online combined with what he was currently seeing, the exotic light show was the product of exotic matter decaying into charged photons going faster than the speed of light due to some sort of physics-defining feature. From a gameplay perspective, the light signified the start of a raid and marked off the edges of the space which would be impossible to escape within a minute after starting, now that the cage was locked and sealed there was no other choice but to fight to the end.

A few kilometres in front of the station multiple auroras seemed to converge into a single point, and that single point seemed to slowly expand as something even stranger than an aurora in the vacuum of space.

"... Is that, lightning?"

Referencing something she had never seen in person before, River seemed to believe she was having a fever dream, lightning wasn't a thing that was supposed to happen outside an atmosphere.

"It's happening now, get ready for some high G's, and tell Endurance to pull back their support craft, they're just going to die if they don't."

"R-right

As the 'space lightning' suddenly intensified, the next second what seemed to be rocks or mat grey crystals about the size of Kate's destroyer appeared as if they had just fazed in from another dimension… Which they had. Not waiting for the enemy to get the first strike, Mike slammed on the afterburner the second the crystals appeared, then after building up velocity for a few seconds he cut power to thrust, armed the railgun and used the manoeuvring thrusters to aim before squeezing the trigger the very second a crystal was in sight. Just as Mike was starting to engage, one of the crystals reacted, in an instant, its smooth-looking surface turned jagged and rough with spikes, and then those spikes and rough edges suddenly launched out in all directions with the speed of heavy artillery.

"Skipper! We need orders!"

Snapped out of her shock by the Lieutenant, Kate gritted her teeth as she lost signal with some of the fighters that had been locking down the area around where those crystals appeared.

Through her own inaction and inexperience, people under her command died again.

"The unknown contacts are hostile! Have all units engage them, but keep a proper distance! Contact the station again, if they don't get their defences up and running soon we can't keep covering for them!"

"Yes ma'am, Endurance to all sectors on this net: Open fire, watch spacing and terminate unknown contacts with extreme prejudice."

With clear orders given, the rest of the crew inside the cramped combat information centre of the Endurance got to work doing what they did best.

"Helm turning for heading 355.2, making for flank bell. Entering pattern delta."

"Weapons report automatic target lock failed, manual firing solution achieved, now prosecuting contacts, forwarding all trajectory data to target."

Coming alive in a split second, the 70-metre-long destroyer came to life like an orca who suddenly found prey. As the main thruster array lit up like a series of Christmas lights Endurance quickly lumbered up to speed as a broadside of its dual turret rail guns and large bore high energy lasers acquired their respective targets and opened fire. Not especially fast to accelerate due to its size, the destroyer Endurance and other ships near or above its weight class leveraged their tough defences above evasion while keeping hostiles at arm's length while bombarding them with heavy weapons, not even the toughest shields and armour plating could keep up with such a level of railgun and laser fire for long.

"Ma'am, no effect on targets, munitions appear combat ineffective!"

"What!?"

Other than those crystals apparently.

Although the weapon's officer couldn't auto-lock those strange crystals, it was still easy to hit the barely moving destroyer-sized targets, but instead of melting the targets in a few seconds, all the Endurance's heavy lasers appeared to be doing was making the crystals glow slightly, worse yet the armour pricing sabots fired from the railguns designed to punch through heavy armour seemed to harmlessly shatter or outright ricochet off their mat surface.

"They're fucking underestimating them… Endurance, focus one target at a time, ripple fire the railguns on a single area until its armour fails before using the lasers!"

Continuing to focus on a single target and hitting it as fast as the Scorpion's railgun could reload, Mike finally started to see limited results, if only the Solar Empire could keep up.

[That makes no sense GCV-43, lasers are the most effective against shields and kinetic weapons work best against armour.]

Being met with a less-than-enthusiastic radio operator, Mike continued dumping railgun sabots into the crystal he had been targeting since the start.

"You're currently fighting an extragalactic alien crystal that came out of a rainbow-coloured aurora in space, but sure, continue to not listen to me and let more of your people die. If you're going to be useless then at least allow me to use you as cover."

Planting the nth shoot into the same place of the crystal, Mike finally saw some progress as its shield was finally priced and countless spikes perturbed out from the opposite side of impact, making it look like a massive sea urchin as it became inert as Mike scored his first extragalactic kill.

"I can do this myself, start contributing in some way or start sitting on your hands, that's all navies are good for anyway."

Of course, that was a bald-faced lie, Mike simply didn't have the ammunition to deal with all the crystal foes, but poking at the comm officer's insecurities proved a great motivator.

"Ma'am GCV-43 has neutralised one of the hostiles, they report kinetic ammunition is most effective against their shields instead of lasers. They insist on wearing down a single shield segment at the time with ripple fire."

"Then that's what we do. Weapon's officer, focus fire and saturate their defences!"

"Yes ma'am, prosecuting single contact, saturating bandit #3"

Under the concentrated attention of countless railgun turrets, the first crystal quickly turned inert in the same way as the first, then the next as Endurance's kill count quickly caught up to then surpassed Mike's as the aurora-like light rays that started dissipating then eventually disappeared as the last crystal turned inert.

"Coordinates locked, we're fully committed for jump to hyperspace. Punch it!"

"Yes ma'am."

Not bothering to wait for the Solar Empire to capture them again, Mike and River immediately jumped to hyperspace and escaped.

"Was that really a good idea?"

Having settled into and confirmed everything was okay after entering hyperspace, River leaned back into her seat as she asked if it really was that good of an idea to run from the authorities.

"Yeah, by the time that Captain is done with her investigation, she'll have learned that we were the victims in that mass shooting acting in self-defence, not only that but we know how to counter these aliens so next time they want something from us they'll ask nicely. The pilots guild also owes us for protecting their employees so they'll do what they're supposed to and protect us."

"Right… So are you finally going to talk about those things? We just had the first contact with intelligent alien life, not only that but a hostile alien first contact and we came out on top too."

While Mike wasn't freaking out partly because he had seen them in Interstellar online and partly because suddenly found himself inside a reality that closely resembled Interstellar online was freaking him out even more. While River was born and lived in an interstellar society meeting intelligent aliens was something major, sure single-celled life was relatively common, bacteria and ammonia-based life living inside gas giants and extremophiles living in rock-like colonies on Mars-like planets existed, but this was the first contact with intelligent life.

"... Those crystals are not really what you would call 'intelligent life'. In the same way, you wouldn't call the Scorpion's mainframe intelligent life. From what I remember from Interstellar online, there's no way to communicate with them, they're some sort of a hive mind if the term 'ego' even applies to them. They appeared sometime around the year 4525, basically, stations like the one we were on started getting shacked by something unknown that left behind nothing intact while attacking seemingly at random. I think something like 35 stations was lost before people on the forums did their usual magic and figured out that the attacks were following something close to some insane algorithm and predicted the next attack, then something like 5 clans organised a 24-hour patrol pattern around the suspected stations while they were all packed with all sorts of fighters."

"... That sounds like an insane amount of effort for something like a game."

While River could imagine major powers doing something near the extreme efforts of players in Interstellar online, doing something along those lines just for a game seemed insane.

"Well, that's just the Interstellar online forum community in a nutshell. Anyway after fighting against those crystals that appeared near stations and populated worlds for a few months dedicated weaponry and counters were developed before an eventual shielding to prevent them from appearing at all was developed… The real issue is that they're not supposed to have appeared for another 3 years, for all we know a hundred stations might already have been decimated."

With undoubtedly proof that the in-game Interstellar online timeline was off, there was no way of knowing if the attack Mike and River had just survived was the first or even tenth to happen, as news spread at the speed of light it took some time to travel through the galaxy and wouldn't necessarily travel across borders.

"Okay, then what's the plan now?"

Deciding to leave all the existential questions for later, River wanted to focus on the current and concrete for now.

"We continue to make our way to the centre of the galaxy, along the way we can spread information about the crystals and how to counter them, hopefully, that information will find its way to people that know how to develop countermeasures… The current objective is to get a more capable ship. We need at least the ammunition capacity to take out a crystal raid without any assistance."