“Three hours remaining until orbit”

Hearing that, I could hardly keep myself calm. Spending months careening through dead space with no communication outside of my ship’s AI drove me to the brink of insanity, even though I spent the past few years training for this. There wasn’t even a guarantee that there would be any actual life at my destination, but I would be content talking to a rock at this point.

Humanity was relying on people like me to be the pioneers of exoplanet colonization. My job was to determine the hostility of a candidate planet and take the measures necessary to quell those hostilities for the colony ship scheduled for a few years from now. In the case of sapients, I am to initially try communicating with them to establish friendly relations, but I was armed to the teeth if things didn’t go right.

There are less natural organic parts in my body then there are implants and mods. Military grade ferrous-flesh skin surrounding trauma reactive nano-piston muscles meant I could walk off a tank shell no problem. My bones, I don’t even know what they’re made of, those Jupiter big wigs keep that stuff more protected than CocaCola (yeah, still a thing), but they were stronger than any alloy you could think of and somehow repaired themselves. Most of my body did given enough time and sunlight or heat, but I’d still die if I got cut up into a million little pieces. Maybe. Hasn’t been tested much, my departure was a bit rushed in the grand scheme of things.

“Two hours remaining until orbit”

Time really flies when you have no frame of reference. I could barely see the planet out the one window in my ship. According to scans it was a bit smaller than Earth, maybe more Venus sized, and the surface was about 50% water though land and water were spread pretty evenly. The atmosphere was thin but still habitable with some machine aid, nothing I would have a problem with since my lungs have been replaced with the equivalent of air compressors.

Calling the trip here unfairly harsh would be quite the understatement. As far as the Sol System Republic of Humanity was concerned, FTL drives like the ones you read about in fictional novels online are exactly that; fiction. There’s no magic button that speeds you up to light speed in an instant without ripping you apart first. We figured out warp technology, but that required both a sender and receiver and insane precision to stop the package from turning into a fine powder. Calibration being off by even a few atoms of space was a catastrophic failure, delegating warp tech to moving goods and resources between specialized warp space stations devoid of vibrations.

The trip consisted of accelerating at full speed for half the distance and then decelerating for the other half to avoid being turned into soup. The first month was definitely the hardest; even if top of the line muffling tech could completely mute the engine, not much could be done about the vibrations that it caused. I did eventually get used to it, but I haven’t had a moment of stillness the entire flight and I was close to shattering the glass and swimming the rest of the way to the planet. I’m not actually that desperate though…

If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

“One hour until stable orbit. Sensor range has been reached.”

The first thing I noticed is the presence of an internet. I don’t know how many emotions went through me at that moment, or how many more it would have been if my brain wasn’t numbed for the trip, but I was stunned for at least a minute. Advanced sapient life. The chances of there being any life outside of germs and moss was so insanely small, the chance of sapients being pointless to mention since the numbers don’t even sound like real language. But advanced civilization with electricity and transmitted communication? And scanners just picked up a few signals on the moons of the planet?

I couldn’t contain myself. I was supposed to put the ship under cloak, wait for the AI to give me a rundown on the alien etiquette, and take things slowly for the best first impression. Instead, I had the AI enable translators and plug me into the best match for what could be considered the world leader.

I wasn’t aware that the AI interpreted my excited command as video communication, or that I had the biggest grin on my face that I’ve had in all of my space-faring deliriousness.

__________________

“Ma’am, the foreign vessel is contacting us. It’s a video communication.”

Every hair on my body stood at end. I had just been elected as the planet’s leader a couple weeks ago and now I’m in charge of the third extraterrestrial contact in history. I was part of the decision-making committee when the first two happened, but I’d never been present during the first contacts, only seen recordings and attended decisions on exo-policy. I’ve always been in favor of the friendly, open relations party, which has been the majority due to the kind nature of the other two races that made contact with us. Trade routes and exchanges of technology were always followed by an economic boom and a golden age of development. Maybe this was the opportunity to cement myself as one of the great leaders of history. I could already see the headlines “Planet Governor Destra Sind leads successful relations with new offworlder species” and the likes.

After a few seconds of psyching myself up, I gave a command that I immediately regretted with all of my being: “Patch them through.”

The only way to describe them would be demon.

Front facing eyes with circular centers that had glowing red and green rings around them. The voids in the centers of them seemed to shoot past any facade of bravery I put up and scrutinized my deepest thoughts of fear and regret. If it was just that, I wouldn’t want to curl up in a ball and forget that I had any sort of obligation to talk to this thing. One of the species that my planet had relations with also had scary eyes, but they were naturally kind and honestly didn’t pose much of a threat, even if no one said it out loud.

But no, that unfortunately couldn’t be the end of it. This thing had its teeth on full display. They didn’t look like any teeth I had seen before, even on the most ferocious predators my planet had to offer. I stared dazedly at the shiny, metallic looking tools of murder for a few seconds before my thoughts came back to me. Was it angry, did I do something wrong already? Maybe the way I was postured, leaning forward at the edge of my seat was seen as a sign of aggression or insult? Maybe I reminded it of something, like the unfortunate prey on its home planet. Us Meldren were at the bottom of the food chain for a good chunk of our evolutionary history, so I wouldn’t be surprised if I looked reminiscent of some weak species.

My heart dropped even further than I thought possible, filling me with a debilitating sense of dread as the demon opened its mouth to speak.

“Oh, you’re kinda cute.”