Primary memory transcription subject: Leia Kieran Irons-N, Chief Executive Officer of Irons Industries.
Date [standardized human time]: July 13, 2136
Location: I-Industries refueling station and shipyard, located in the Jovian satellite system around Jupiter, Sol system.
The II shipyard within the jovian system of Jupiter’s moons was a bit of an in-between place, far from anywhere and yet close to everything. Mining, travel, and expeditions passed through so often that while on paper it felt like a good place to wrap up one’s career, Leia Irons-N – the woman in charge of managing day-to-day affairs within the sprawling orbital complex – had soon found that it was far from the case.
It was tiring work, and as the woman caught sight of an unfamiliar ship approaching the station from her quiet perch near one of the viewports on the executive level her instincts told her that things would only get worse.
“We’ve got a ship incoming for refueling, miss Irons,” the woman’s assistant reported as he let himself into the office.
Leia turned away from the window and swung her legs down so that her feet rested normally upon the floor. The woman took a long sip from the mug of tea that she was holding, before she sighed and handed it over to the assistant in order to shug the jacket of her uniform around her shoulders. “I saw it approaching through the viewport just before you arrived,” Leia replied swiftly, her faint accent hardening the soft words ever so slightly with an over-enunciated jabbing of hard vowels towards the end of the sentence. “Do we have any idea who they are?”
“It’s a joint NASA and SETI test vessel ma’am,” the man said as he passed the mug of tea back, accompanied with a data printout. “The ship is listed as the UNS Odyssey.”
“Odyssey, huh?” Leia frowned slightly before she eventually set her mug and papers on her desk and began to pace. “Obviously meant for a long journey, perhaps it’s an extrasolar vessel? It’s too small to be a generation ship though.”
“I... believe that this is that FTL test vessel, the one that was in the news but we couldn’t watch the livestream of,” the assistant said, before hastily tacking on a small “ma’am” at the end of his sentence. “Apologies for my informality.”
“It’s fine Frank,” Leia replied. “This station is practically a backwater anyways. We’re some of the few who live here full time so I won’t hold you to formalities.”
“Still, miss Irons,” the assistant – Frank – replied. “It’s unprofessional. Both of our families are military ones and–”
“Don’t, talk about my progenitors,” Leia suddenly snapped. “I’m trying to move this operation past their involvement in the satellite war.”
“My apologies, ma’am.”
“Let’s just go get ready,” Leia said, her words clipped as she grabbed an earpiece and began to move towards the elevator, activating it and checking her connection to the virtual intelligence assistant that helped manage the logistics of the station as she did - Aegis, as usual, was fully functioning. By the time she had finished the process, the rotation of the ring station had taken the Odyssey out of view and the elevator was heading up to them. As Leia reached out towards the door, her hands hesitated for the briefest moment, before she stepped to the side and grabbed a pendant with a gold-flecked blue stone, quickly arranging it around her neck as Frank caught up to her. “A little bit of excitement probably wouldn’t hurt, so let’s see what distinguished astronauts have come to visit this lonely base.”
Frank nodded. “Very well ma’am,” he said softly as the two stepped into the elevator. “Do you want to read the personnel files for the crew on our way over?”
Leia shook her head. “No,” she said after a moment of deliberation. “That will remove the opportunity for small talk during introductions, which will allow me to feel out the situation.”
“Very well.”
Frank fell silent, and Leia found herself absently humming a tune as the elevator zipped across the station, moving in a circumnavigational path to avoid causing abrupt changes in the gravity being applied to the occupants. That had been one of the few inventions of her predecessors that were not twisted towards war. Even they had been wise enough to not contemplate building Gravy Guns.
… And now her mood had been ruined again. At least the elevator was finally nearing its destination and the airlocks of the docking bay had finished cycling. The four arrivals entered the same room at practically the same time, and Leia took stock of her surroundings on instinct.
One of the pilots appeared to be male, chocolate skinned with short-cropped hair and pleasant features that suggested he hadn't been in low-gravity for longer than a week. That, or some scientists had managed to find a fix for the gravatics to make ship-based artificial gravity a lot easier. He wore a blue uniform underneath the flight suit, the collar of the shirt poking up around the hole that the helmet’s seal section had filled, the entire set of garments loosened as he massaged the side of his neck where it met his shoulders. The other pilot had longer hair, pulled back and collected in a messy bun that became slightly more so as she shook her head roughly after she finished popping the seals on her own suit.
“Ah,” the second astronaut sighed in a relieved tone as she set her helmet aside. Her voice was eerily familiar as she turned to face Leia. “Well, I for one am glad to be out of that stuffy thing. Long time no see Leia!”
Leia blinked in surprise as she found herself staring at an old friend, Sara Rosario. Immediately she turned to stare accusingly as Frank, who only just barely managed to keep his shit-eating grin from being overtly obvious. “I did offer to let you read their files,” Frank said smugly.
Leia sighed, before turning back to look at Sara and her partner. She took a moment to compose herself, before stepping forward and sticking out her hand in greeting. “Greetings. My name is Leia Irons-N, the man behind me is chief assistant Frank Durante,” she said with a calm face and voice as she gave Sara a quick hug before turning and shaking hands with the other astronaut. “I already know miss Rosario, but I don’t know yours.”
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“Noah Williams,” The man said shortly. “Pleased to meet you.”
“The pleasure is all mine. So, what brings the two of you here to my humble shipyard?”
“Nothing quite so pleasant as one might hope,” Noah said awkwardly. “Personally, I thought that we should just head straight to Earth to make our report, but Sara convinced me to take a quick detour.”
Leia let out a sigh at the man’s words. “Alright,” she said softly. “Sara, what happened this time?”
“Hey,” Sara retorted indignantly. “That stew was entirely Lazuli’s fault, not mine! Besides, I didn’t even do anything with this, I just took notes while Noah did the talking.”
“Perhaps,” Leia replied, falling easily into old patterns of banter, “but you know full well that I couldn’t hold anything against her, so you receive blame for massacring my favorite meal.”
The two of them stared fiercely at each other for a moment, before Frank noisily cleared his throat as he gestured towards one of the smaller elevators that serviced only the docking wing of the station. “Why don’t we take this impromptu meeting upstairs,” the man said diplomatically.
Noah nodded his agreement, before following Frank as he led the way towards the elevators. Leia and Sara hung back for a moment, before Sara looped an arm around Leia’s shoulders. “You know that I don’t actually blame Lazuli,” she said softly. “That woman was the perfect friend.”
“Well, I will admit that she tended to be far too self-deprecating,” Leia admitted as they followed the two men over to the elevator. “She probably would have taken all of the blame.”
The two friends nodded, before Sara spoke up once more. “I spoke with Jade about a month ago,” She said suddenly. “Willow and Garnet are the only others remaining. They all miss you dearly.”
“I know, but…” Leia trailed off. “I just can’t right now,” she said eventually, before pushing Sara away. “Things are stable at the moment. I don’t know if I would make things better or worse. Lazzie was the first person that I truly lost.”
Sara nodded, her apologies and condolences left unspoken as they fell into silence.
The moment that the elevator doors opened on one of the crew levels, Leia was guiding her little posse to one of the conference rooms that were on the central line of the station’s docking ring. “Clear out,” she commanded the group of engineers who were using the space for some sort of tabletop game, taking advantage of the large display screen that made up most of the table. “Urgent business that needs a sealed room. Go and hold a game with the refueling crew once they’re done with the Odyssey.”
The three men seated at the table nodded, before hurriedly collecting their things and making a swift exit. Noah and Sara filed into the room, before Frank shut the door behind them all and turned the lock.
“You know we could have used an already empty room,” Noah suggested, only for Leia to shake her head.
“No, you implied that this was urgent, so I’ll treat it as such,” the raven-haired woman responded. “Now talk. What is it that I am needed for?”
Sara sighed. “You’re likely going to need to prepare for a state of war,” Leia’s old friend said softly. “We made first contact with aliens, and there’s a lot out there that we never predicted.”
Leia’s face hardened as Frank became pale. “Explain,” the woman demanded.
“It would be easier to simply show you the data as a starting point,” Sara responded as she gestured to Noah. The man took out a data fob, which he quickly tapped against a transfer port on the side of the table and caused it to light up with an expansive display of folders and image files. Leia leaned forward, letting her right hand rest against the edge as she reached towards one of the images that contained the forms of Noah and Sara, rotating it to allow for easier viewing.
The image showed the two standing within the entryway of an unusually designed building, the section of its walls that could be seen curving in at 45 degree angles with smoothed corners. The pavement that the two stood on seemed to have an almost spongy texture, perhaps designed to be shock absorbent, and standing with them were a small group of almost sheeplike looking aliens. Their eyes faced to the side on their flat faces, almost unnaturally smooth to the point that Leia couldn't make a conclusion as to whether they even had external smelling orfices or if they had to taste the air like a snake. The legs of the creatures were of a digitigrade plan, but knock-kneed and skinny. They implied weakness rather than the normal coiled strength that such physiologies usually did. Atop the heads of the creatures they had two large and expressive ears, though they seemed to express alarm and nervousness, focused on the two impromptu ambassadors. In the rear of the shot, there appeared to be a group of guards, their heads encased in helmets and their bodies ensheathed by a mettalic-looking fabric, akin to the insulation foil used in some of the construction of the very station that Leia was standing in. Her breath hitched as she made out another detail, pilot lights on the large weapons that they carried. what type of guard used flamethrowers?
“So these were our First Contact,” Leia said bluntly as she tapped the image. Noah nodded, and then Leia moved onto the next file in the line, a document simply labeled as ‘the aggressors - statistics’. Upon opening it, she was stunned to see numbers that made some of earth’s worst children look like saints in comparison. Sixty-two worlds burned to ash, many of which had been homeworlds of species. Entire civilizations wiped out and a picture painted of a galaxy that lived in fear of constant raids at the hands of the aggressors. She tapped on the next file, which showed a crocodilian-like biped, with a fierce, narrow gaze and sharpened fangs jutting out from underneath its lips.
The alien shown within the image was… monstrous, for the simplest term available. Leia pointed to the image while she gave a quick glance towards Noah and Sara. “I’m betting that these would be the ‘aggressors,’ as the previous file stated” she intoned. Sara nodded, and Leia released a heavy sigh as she pulled out a chair and sat down. “Tell me everything.”
And so the two did. They explained how there were hundreds of aliens out there, some good, some bad, some that would hate humanity as a principle, and one that Leia would eventually find to be more horrifying than what the depths of her nightmares could conjure. The Arxur.
The Arxur were a reptilian species of presumably obligate carnivores that were at war with the rest of the galactic community, a federation composed entirely of herbivores.
“This isn’t good,” was the first thing that came out of Leia’s mouth once the diets of the two parties were explained. “large herbivores are often highly aggressive towards potential predators. I suppose that that would include us?”
“And probably anything else with binocular vision,” Sara said with a slight hum. “That and Noah’s smiling caused one of the party that we had first contact with to outright faint.”
Leia grimaced. “So if they learn about us while having an all-out war with another species of predators, then they’d likely try to annihilate us without quarter.”
“Not necessarily,” Noah commented. “The venlil have become somewhat of an immediate ally, and I would assume that anyone else who might have known about our existence will assume that we wiped ourselves out.”
“How do you figure that?”
Noah shrugged. “They’ve got translators that know our languages,” he responded. “probably learning algorithims trained on the signals that we sent out, so they likely assume that we blew ourselves to bits what with the cold war nuclear tests and our horror movies.”
Leia laughed at the least thought. “I never really liked the genre,” she said after a moment of thought, “but if it saved our lives, then I might owe Willow a drink. Shall we continue with the briefing?”
“Of course,” Sara replied. “So, the venlil allied themselves with us. They initially panicked and called up a Federation battlegroup, so then they kind of sabotaged some of their old alliances to save our hides and now we’re going to put forward the idea of military aid from the UN.”
That didn’t sound good to Leia, and she quickly voiced that thought. The idea behind the modern-day UN was supposed to be of unity, with them deescalating and stopping conflicts rather than engaging in them. But Sara was quick to dissuade her of the hope that there would be a truly peaceful ending. The Arxur, as she explained, were possessed of a truly bloodthirsty mentality. The worst of humanity didn’t come close to the death tolls that they caused with over fifty worlds burned at their paws. And the worlds that had a populace that was… appealing… Those people would often suffer worse fates by the hands of the grays, as they were colloquially known.