The rear of the landing shuttle folded open and Primary held its breath. Beings with long legs and large shoulders asserted themselves from the passenger compartment. Despite being covered from head to toe, their height and strange proportions gave the aliens away to the observers. The weak-willed fled or stepped back involuntarily. These weren't diplomats or aid workers; these were warriors. Courtesy of the popular media, every human was familiar with the capabilities and exploits of Jar’ron military units. Frequently portrayed as heroes in film and television, the Jar’ron military fostered an image apart from the glorification perpetrated by humanity’s creative minds. The Jar’ron military was pragmatic, adept and very much a subscriber to the philosophy that the ends justify those bloody means.
The seven Jar’ron commandos were merely the scaffold for something far more terrifying. Each alien was buried within armour the colour of a midnight ocean. There was only the faintest hint of blue and only when the weak light of Raysor’s star shone dully on one facet of armour or another. They carried weapons exotic but familiar. Their helmets appeared inspired by fright masks and, on closer inspection, were bespoke to each soldier. They looked at ease despite every millimetre of their considerable frame being utilised to carry the garb and tools of war. The image of these terrible creatures shot around Raysor like an electron; it was everywhere at once on the local network. The interlopers transfixed the people of Primary, who were glued to every screen and livestream.
__
Arker stepped out onto the patchy concrete of the spaceport. His nanosuit was dull grey with a hue of orange in the polluted sunlight. In front of him, his nightmarish escorts had created a semicircle at the back of the shuttle. They surveyed the landing area and the jumble of improvised suburbia beyond the spaceport like ghouls preparing to orchestrate a nightmare.
Despite their appearance, when he spoke, Marneka’s voice was even and professional when he whispered in Arker’s ear through the suit’s communicator. “The Forstella’s primary shuttle is situated thirty meters to the northeast.”
Gop dropped an icon onto Arker’s HUD, and he spied the squat shuttle hunkered down on the discoloured concrete to his left.
“Thankyou captain”, Arker replied. He felt terribly self-conscious; he hated being associated with these terrifying creatures. What were the people of Raysor thinking? Seeing a teenager in a nano suit landing with Jar’ron military on a failed colony. Arker couldn’t shake the feeling that their whole group had become trophic for targeting lasers.
Arker excused himself as he squeezed through the palisade of looming Jar’ron warriors, feeling extremely uncomfortable as he brushed past their tools of war. Gop followed him, patting the closest Jar’ron on the greave as it did so.
“I guess we just knock on the front door, Gop?”
“Yeah, sure.”
Arker sauntered towards the Forstella’s shuttle. It was quiet, whether that was because Raysor was just a place devoid of the usual thrum and bark of the modern metropolis or because their landing party had smothered normalcy into silence, he wasn’t sure. Arker almost jumped out of his suit when he glanced over his shoulder and found the seven Jar’ron commandos following him. He hadn’t heard their footsteps.
Meanwhile, Gop was rotating on the spot with his stubby arms outstretched as if feeling the wind. “Lots of… things… in the air, Arker. I think our arrival has caused quite a stir.”
“I can imagine.”
Arker stopped twenty meters from the shuttle when he remembered his manners. He probed the vehicle with his web, searching for some signal or response from the flyer. He received neither. He started sweating in his suit, and thankfully, it was whisked away from his skin faster than you could say chafing.
“I ahh, I'm not sure what to do.”
Gop shrugged as this side. “Knock on the door?”
“I'm not sure that’s a good idea…” Arker trailed off as the small robot practically skipped over to the shuttle and rapped a small white hand on its fuselage.
“It doesn’t look like any-“
The world went black.
Arker’s suit went rigid, but he felt himself stumble. There was a sensation like a strong gale was buffeting him. An uneasy few seconds later, his HUD returned and apologised for the momentary blindness. The suit notified him that an incident had occurred, and his armour had maintained integrity with a reserve coherency of seven per cent. Seven just became his first lucky number.
-Gop, what happened?
Arker’s faceplate unhardened, revealing a radically different scene from what he had seen moments before. The Shuttle no longer existed; all that remained was the charred, smouldering skeleton of its undercarriage. Nasty blue fusion fire danced across the ablating metal plating as other low-grade alloys melted as slag onto the scarred concrete of the shuttle port. The area around the disintegrating shuttle had been transformed into the canvas of a peculiar artwork. Hull plating and other bits and pieces had fused with or gouged deep into the now-blackened concrete in a large radius. More conventional red and orange flames were sprinkled across this charcoal scar, where polymers and hydrocarbons began burning. Meanwhile, Gop was extricating itself from the ruined frame of another shuttle. The explosion had thrown the small robot across the shuttle port and buried it in another flyer.
Arker found his Jar’ron companions standing or crouching behind him; some were literally on fire, and others were shrugging their massive armoured shoulders and raising their weapons. Arker spotted Marneka dousing a flaming companion with a thick white foam as blue sparks danced around the Jar’ron’s now charcoal black armour.
“Three missiles inbound. The target is our shuttle,” Marneka grated over the communicator.
Arker jumped in his suit. Already his heart was convulsing harder in his chest than he felt was humanly possible. He looked skyward, and his HUD tracked the inbound missiles as they arched over the city like comets.
“Arker, what is going on here?” the Jar’ron captain’s voice now thundered in his ear.
The Jar’ron shuttle rose on hasty bursts of blue fire as the missiles above began their final dive towards the fleeing bird. Arker stood dumbstruck as the flyer ejected its payload of countermeasures: flares and lasers pulsed as it banked away to the left. The first two missiles were diverted at the last second; one veered off, struck a building off to the right, and exploded in a shower of stone and dust. The other simply detonated above the shuttle in a thunderclap as it was fried by one of the defensive lasers. The last missile shot through the haze of electromagnetic screening and struck the escaping shuttle square in the back, knocking it to the ground in an almighty crack and a burst of blue fusion fire. Dust billowed across the landing port from the destroyed hovel, and chips of stone rained down from above.
Gop had appeared next to Arker sometime during all the excitement, and for that, he was glad because now Marneka was striding towards him, weapon in hand. He was probably pretty angry; he wouldn't kill me, would he? Arker tensed as the Captain and his nightmares marched through inky black plumes of smoke with their weapons now levelled rather than held cradled. Then they swept past him, walking toward the city.
“Ahh, where are you going, Marneka?”
“Someone on this moon has committed an act of aggression against the Jar’ron military. We are responding in kind. The missiles originated from the centre of the colony. We are headed there.”
The Jar’ron warriors, now spread out into a wedge formation, marched across the spaceport and into a busy street lined with stone hovels where the locals scattered in every direction. Watching the Jar’ron warriors deftly arming their weapons as they patrolled down the street, Arker had the premonition that something terrible was about to occur and, most importantly, that it would be partially his fault. He felt the growing sense of dread like the prodrome of a febrile illness, or the emptiness in your stomach when you realise you’ve lost something precious.
“Gop, what the fuck do we do now?”
Amid a maelstrom of dust, smoke and dancing embers, the small white robot’s casing remained dove white and untarnished despite the melange of soot and grit swirling around them. Gop shrugged his shoulders. Arker’s heart palpitated even faster.