We thought them some strange, insectoid creatures who had replaced their shells with metal, or perhaps covered the exposed chitin with suits at all times.
The eerie, unmoving gaze, number of limbs, the seeming lack of pain.
They spread like bugs too, infesting our stations and taking up positions wherever they could fit. Maintenance jobs with high turnover by virtue of being universally lethal, management positions of such stress that only AI could handle them, artistry, food preparation, teaching, it seemed these creatures were just as adaptive culturally as they were physiologically.
Indeed - every time they did something for a while, one or both of their upper limbs would seemingly reform to fit the task.
It was a little over three of their years after first contact that the truth came to light.
Pirates boarded one of our trading hubs. Pirates of our own kind, who knew exactly how the station worked, and where to strike to take it over without resistance - assuming it was manned by only our own kind, of course.
They didn't expect an upright-walking insectoid with skin tougher than most combat armour, a tail armored in strange synthetic crystal, and seemingly no flight instinct.
He - the males of their species universally bulkier than the females, something they shared with us - took a railgun slug to the shoulder, between the middle and upper limbs when he stood up to the boarding party. A fist-sized chunk, blown out straight out of his upper torso.
Not only blood and viscera, but metal and wiring smashed against the wall along with the deformed slug. By all expectation, it should've gone through the alien and cut through the wall well before it stopped, but it seemed their natural armour - or what we once thought it was - was far tougher than we thought.
Explains the lack of major injuries in those three years, despite the dangerous jobs they often took.
Now, I'm sure you're itching for what you came here for. The big reveal of what our neighbors really are. You already know what they are, of course.
It seems that extreme stress allows them to make full use of their freakish strength, far above anything their size would suggest. Indeed, watching a mortally wounded alien rip into an eight-foot, undoubtedly drugged up member of the warrior caste with his bare hands, laughing through the digital distortion of his enviro-suit and muttering about huge guts, it's an experience.
The rest of the boarding party surrendered their arms at the sight, thankfully, and we handed them over to the authorities without incident. Our friend, however, was much worse for wear. It was a miracle he was alive, most would've bled out in minutes from that injury.
It was rather unsettling still, seeing his iron-based blood flowing to no end from the wound and the man still walking to the autodoc and uploading an encyclopedia's worth of data onto the machine from his PDA.
It was more unsettling still, watching him climb into the machine and a half-metal, half-flesh primate getting peeled out of a combo of envirosuit and exoskeleton and pumped full of a chemical mix that, as far as our autodoc was concerned, should kill a clan elder.
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I thought him a mammal, seeing what little I did through the sanitation barrier while the autodoc peeled him out of that exosuit. A heavily modified mammal for sure, but a mammal none the less.
Now... I am not so sure. I mentioned earlier that he was half-flesh, half-metal. That was an overstatement. From the outside, the creature I so foolishly assumed to be an insectoid looks like there is barely any original left. What looked like tightly-wound, fibrous musculature covered by thin skin, turned out to be synthetic nanofiber covered in biofilm rated for stopping small arms fire, and that is the least exposed part of my crewmate.
How do I know all this? He made no effort to hide anything, once the autodoc was finished partially repairing the gaping hole in his torso.
He didn’t even delete the veritable encyclopedia he had uploaded to the machine so it could operate on him.
This single specimen, one of billions spread across our stations, was like a walking technology exhibit. He claims "this body" is on the "upper end" of "low-spec", whatever that means. I think the translator software might be failing to translate idioms.
When I asked what he meant, he simply chuckled and stated that his body was not remotely the strongest it could be, as he lacked the funds and time to arrange a stronger one before emigrating from his homeworld.
He talks about his homeworld a lot, the alien. Novahome, he calls it. He showed me a part of his encyclopedia, on this strange three-dimensional projector device embedded in his right wrist. It projected a model of our galaxy, and zoomed in until it only showed his planet, that world of fables. Below the projection, plain text stated "A new home among the stars, without the bonds of the Old World to bind its new people. Novahome."
It seemed a bit strange, from how poor he claimed to be, that he somehow obtained the funds to go on such a journey in the first place. When questioned, the human said he was part of a large emigration project by some major corporation, and explained that it was the reason why so many of his kind wore the same insectoid exosuits.
"Someone very powerful wanted to make a good first impression." he said. "Someone with a lot of power in Akaso Industries. Only one person like that on all of Novahome." he said.
I wonder what he meant by that.
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Captain's Log, 16th July, 4427
It has been three days since the attempted boarding. The human has seemingly recovered most of his functionality, his injury looks perfectly healed. Whatever self-repair systems he was modified with, they seem limited by available resources more than anything, considering he claimed the hellish concoction he made the autodoc inject him with to be "just something to refill his reserves".
We finally dislodged the railgun slug from the wall, turns out it did pretty much no actual damage to systems. We cooked up a drone to fix the deformation. Going by the caliber, it could have busted down a small building on a planet, and should have lodged itself into the power conduits if they shot someone other than the human. Hold on, I hear something... Hostile ship on boarding course?! Same markings as the pirates, much larger though! If that's who I think it is, we'll need more than the human to get through this one.
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"Human, wake up!" a panicked, hissy voice echoes through his cabin door, along with loud knocking. Isaac's synthetic heart begins whirring quietly while his Dimensional Circuit slowly permeates his cybernetics with energy, waking up the Novahuman in a matter of seconds. He springs up from his bed, willing his mind-machine interface to plug into the room's Wi-Fi and open the door. A panicked lizardman - the cook, of all people - falls through Isaac's door. He's dressed in a flash-forged armor suit, armed with a pistol he clearly has no idea how to handle. He scrambles to his feet before rushing to the still-groggy Isaac, rambling in a panic.
"It's pirates again, the same outfit, probably here to get their friends back. When they find out we handed them over to the frontier militia, we'll be lucky to get killed! They'll make mind-slaves out of us, hurry!"
Mind-slaves. Saying that pulled a string inside the Novahuman, and mentally overriding his safe bootup sequence, he flooded his systems with energy. "Give me a second to get ready." Isaac said, a tinge of anger audible in the man's voice. He was pretty sure he burned out an auxiliary actuator in his left arm, but it didn't hurt so it would be probably fine by the time he got to the fight.
Isaac steps into his exosuit, it hissing as it seals around him and purges air from its confines. A loud thunk reverberated through the room as its locking mechanism slammed into place, embedding deep into connection ports all over Isaac's body. He felt himself exhale his last breath for the next few hours, as his synthetic lungs shriveled up and his bloodborne nanites switched from carrying oxygen to functioning as glorified batteries. The Novahuman reached for his Void Shroud Projector, a defensive device in the form of an intimidating mask which projects the user's internal Void Energy into a protective field of enforced reality. His auxiliary arms reach into a compartment on the back of his suit, pulling a pair of large revolvers, while he retrieves a large, cleaver-like blade from his personal locker. Isaac turns to the cook while his Void Shroud slowly builds up, a shimmering bubble of faint red.
The lizardman almost shudders at the sight of Isaac's visage, and he chuckles to himself at the realization that of all people, the cook only saw him a few times. "Ready. Do you know where they boarded us?"
"They're cutting into the hangar in sector 7-F, come quickly."
Sector 7-F was only a few hallways down from Isaac's room, and the duo managed to reach it only moments after the pirate's plasma cutters broke through the station's armored outer layer. A ten-foot tall and half as wide chunk of mixed composites slammed to the floor, and out stepped a monstrous titan of flesh and sinew, the largest caste of lizardmen in existence.
A clan elder, the creature was covered in glowing occult tattoos and heavily enhanced with primitive but very well made cybernetics, sporting huge plates of armor over his exposed, incredibly thick hide. He wielded no visible weapons, save for a titanic gleaming gauntlet, shimmering with cosmic power. At the sight of Isaac, the elder let out of a thunderous roar. Reality bent and contorted around him, the area changing at his whim to a desolate landscape, the corridor stretching beyond the constraints of its physical space as the elder's sphere of influence spread through the station.
It reached Isaac, the crimson shroud of energy around him thundering to life and lashing out. The armor bolted onto his tail burst off, its crystalline nature revealed as it raged with extraomniversal energy, and the Novahuman's left arm slowly encased itself in vermilion crystal. Blood began running from the elder's eyes, and furious, he reared up to charge... Only to retain his self-control, and speak.
"WHAT ARE YOU, ALIEN?"
Isaac chuckles through his mask, his synthesized voice distorting further through it. A sense of indignant disrespect fills his voice, an ingrained hatred of all who warp reality coming through, the result of desolation by such creatures perpetrated against mankind so long ago.
"You could call me a monster, I suppose. I am one of an entire species that reality warpers like you nearly drove to extinction, and let me tell you, we don't forget that sort of thing."
Letting out a thunderous laugh, his field of warped reality struggling against Isaac's Void Shroud, the pirate elder responds in an equally indignant tone. "YOU ARE WEAK, THEN. I SHALL TAKE THIS STATION AND ITS CREW AS COMPENSATION FOR MY MEN, SCUM. I AM A GOD AMONG MY TRIBE, SOME PUNY ALIEN IN A SHINY SUIT WILL NOT STOP ME, EVEN IF I MUST STRIKE YOU DOWN WITH MY BARE FISTS."
The Novahuman sighs, his revolvers whirring to life, betraying their true nature as energy projectors rather than ballistic firearms. Mockery drips from his synthesized voice. "I... You actually think I'm scared of you, don't you. You actually think that just because a bunch of mentally degenerated primitives worships you, I'm just gonna bend the fuck over and let you turn my people into mind slaves... Don't you?"
The elder roars in anger, and prepares to charge, his tattoos glowing yet brighter as he forces magic through his body to enhance his already brutish strength. Isaac releases his internal limiters, overriding safeties and activating undocumented systems he technically shouldn't have. Legally, he's classified as low subsonic and capable of busting down a wall with a punch.
Realistically, the Novahuman sidesteps the brute's charge, breaking the sound barrier in the process, and fires a total of eight shots into his back, between the huge plates of armor bolted to the giant's hide. The wounds fill with red crystal, and it soon bursts outwards with a violent explosion of energy and shrapnel, ripping chunks out of his flesh and exposing bone.
The Elder turns far faster than his size would suggest, almost fast enough to keep up with Isaac, and attempts to grab the Novahuman with his right, gauntleted arm. Isaac dodges once more, sliding below the giant limb and cutting to the bone with his blade. He forces his hands into the wound, pulling it open before firing four more shots into the exposed bone and letting go.
The crystal growths cut into the elder's flesh, before bursting once more and taking his bone with them. The giant roars in pain, and swings his good arm towards Isaac, fast enough to break the sound barrier himself and cause another thunderous crack.
Isaac meets him with a punch of his own, his crystal-encased arm slamming into the titanic fist... And breaking it.
Blue blood bursts forth from the elder's tattoos, the self-entitled "God" roaring in true pain. He opens his titanic maw, lunging at Isaac to try and swallow the human, but is met with seven shots of his revolvers to the back of the throat. The Novahuman then leaps into the Elder's mouth, thrusting his sword through the roof of his mouth and into his brain. The crystalline growths resulting from his shots burst, severing the Elder's spine.
A God falls to the ground, dead.