Evan led them to the elevators and called one. After ushering them inside, he stepped in behind them and as the doors were closing Jeffrey, a large black man that had lost his left leg and part of his left arm to an IED, asked where they were headed. “We’re going to the hangar.” He replied, not realizing at first why he was asking. When he saw Jeffrey looking through the buttons for one that might mean hangar he shook his head. “Ah, sorry, you won’t find it there. Not a place we want just anyone showing up in, you see. Lisa, hangar please.”

There was an extended pause that made him frown, then Lisa’s voice rang out in the elevator. “Yes! Sorry! Kinzie’s new project is consuming a great deal of my processing power, so everything else is taking a bit longer.”

“Ah, no worries then, I was just concerned, how is it going?”

Another pause. “It’s going really well so far! I’m told I still can’t see the programming, and have trouble focusing on certain parts that are too similar to myself, but we’re making progress!”

Evan smiled. “That’s great Lisa, but enough for now, mixed company and all.” The elevator dinged and the doors opened to reveal an open space somewhere around three stories tall and clear of any obstructions clear to the external wall in nearly every direction. All there was to see at the moment was a Scarab parked not too far away, and the mid-sized office that Jason had set up there. It had full-sized walls, but Evan couldn’t help but point out that it looked like a really tiny cubicle just sitting in all that empty space by itself.

Gasps of shock erupted from his guests when they saw the Scarab sitting there, and he grimaced dramatically. “I know, absolutely hideous aren’t they? I keep telling Jason he needs to come up with something more appealing, but when it comes to his design work he gets pretty stubborn.”

“Is that an alien ship?”

“He just said his friend Jason designed it, how could it be alien?”

“Maybe they are the aliens!”

Evan chuckled at the round of fierce whispers. “You know, you would be surprised at just how well sound carries in here, and no, that isn’t an alien ship, nor are we aliens. There actually is an alien ship, but you might not believe me if I tell you where just yet, this way please.” Followed by his group of thoroughly shocked and confused veterans, he led the way into Jason’s office. Jason looked up from whatever he was working on with bloodshot eyes. “You need to get some sleep, man. Oh, Kinzie told me about some of the problems she was having and I thought of an idea that might function as a sort of workaround-slash-shortcut. Lisa said they’re actually making progress now, so you might want to get with them and see how much it changes what you gotta do. I’ll be back to help once I’m done with these guys. Could you activate the displays?”

Jason nodded, seemingly too burned out at the moment to bother reacting or replying to Evan’s news, and flipped a largish switch on the wall by his desk. Neat rows of holographic displays lit up across one side of the hangar, each projecting an image of one of the ships Jason had worked to design in order to flesh out their future fleet. He had insisted that the projectors in the hangar be connected to a physical on-off switch in order to prevent accidents from happening once they had more than a couple automated Scarabs. “Thanks, this shouldn’t take too long.”

He led his group to the first display, grimaced, and went to the second one since the first one was of the Scarab. “So, getting right to the chase, what you see here is something Jason was working on for fun since before I even met him. Recently I discovered something really huge, and he has been working on refining them since.” Evan ‘touched’ the hologram and started manipulating it. “He calls this one a Shredder, and it’s a relatively small ship, built to be quick and agile with lots of firepower, and, at least in theory, best used in groups to flank and harass.”

Kevin leaned closer. “Your friend designs stuff like this for fun? It has toilets. He designed a spaceship down to the plumbing for fun? Or did that come during the refining part you were talking about?”

Evan chuckled. “Nope, he did that part ages ago, the refining part is something else entirely. Go ahead and look around at them all for a bit, everything here will also be used in our new game once we get around to fleshing it out, think of this as a bonus sneak peek before I give you the scary secret.”

None of them moved. “Secret first.” Jeffrey demanded firmly. “You’ve been teasing at it for a while now, and after that,” he jabbed a finger at the Scarab, “I’m done waiting.”

“Pretty sure we all are.” Another man said, his name was Franklin and he was thirty-two years old, but very fit in spite of losing a leg. “Specially after seeing all this and that giant bug thing. Tell us what you need us for, ain’t like you haven’t already decided to tell us if you’re showing us all this.”

Evan sighed. “You’re right, and I’ve been putting it off because I’m worried about how you will react, despite the half-dozen different assessments each that claim you will take it the best out of everyone we scouted. Lisa, since you’re busy can you pull up the Doomsday files on the Ripper’s display and set it to manual browsing? I can take it from there.”

The others all looked at each other nervously when they heard Doomsday, but didn’t say anything in fear he might change his mind about telling them. The display changed to an array of little folders, and Evan walked up to them and started to open the files, explaining as he did so. “Essentially this all started a year before the launch of Shard. In a way, it started before that, but for us, for humanity, it started a year before Shard went live. Believe it or not, I actually fell into a hole nobody could see and landed on an alien spaceship. Something went wrong and the device she was using to cover the hole and prevent anyone from finding her failed for a moment as I was on top of it.

“I should have died, but she fixed me up after a fashion, and despite wanting nothing more than to get out of there as fast as I could, I took the chance to as for a way to stay in contact with her. She gave me a communicator, and I went and talked to my friends, introduced her to them, and then she dropped a bombshell on us. She was ordered to deliberately come to our planet and make her arrival look like an accident, hence the hole I fell into. Once here, we were supposed to discover her and use her capabilities as an automated factory ship to build a ship capable of interstellar flight, and the moment such a ship leaves our system, we will be approached and convinced to join the Confederation of Worlds. Which wouldn’t actually be a bad thing normally, the little she had in her database on other interstellar powers was pretty horrifying, except they did this for a reason.

“Our people, and I suspect a number of other races, are needed to help them in their war against a highly aggressive species they call the Gnarlath. Only their problem isn’t fighting them in space as best we can tell from the data we found, their problem is that once the Gnarlath land on a planet they are unable to remove them from that planet without it costing countless lives. In space, they are more or less evenly matched. Which makes the conclusion we came to pretty obvious.”

“They want us to fight on the ground for them,” Sarah said grimly, the joints in her artificial hand creaking slightly as she made an angry fist, “but why the crazy scheme to give us the tech we need to get out of the solar system?”

Evan nodded. “We thought that was silly at first too, until we read this.” He pulled open a file and a wall of text appeared. “Horrible to look at really, takes bureaucracy to an entirely new and painful level, but this document is what has been protecting us from invasions, abductions, enslavement, anything you can think of really. It’s a portion of the founding document of the Confederacy, similar to our own Constitution, that was created by the combined efforts of six or seven races that banded together to put an end to what they refer to as the Reaping. Basically their people were abducted en masse to fight the enemies of whoever abducted them, who would also use abductees to fight.

“Worlds were stripped bare of sentient life, honestly their history files are pretty messed up. Anyway, they got a chance to fight back and won, then created this document, placing the protection of primitive species at the core of their civilization. After that, they got the other major powers around them to sign treaties swearing to protect primitives in their sectors. Even the Gnarlath eventually agreed after they simply glassed a few planets and promised to do more if they didn’t capitulate.

“To finally answer your question, we currently fall under the protection of their laws as a primitive species, and violating those laws openly is not an option after they fought so hard to get everyone else to agree to do the same. The moment we open a slipstream though, we’re fair game. They can come in, bribe all the world’s crooked politicians with advanced tech and promises of high positions in their government, get them to sign a bunch of treaties, contracts, and concessions, then start shipping off the portions of society and civilizations that were earmarked as undesirable to the frontlines. Tribes occupying land someone wants? Gone. The poor, the homeless, people on welfare or other government support systems? Gone.”

They all just stared for a bit, glancing at the document floating in the air. “It might not go down that way.” Someone in the back said tentatively. Evan just gave the group one of those looks people give when they know you know you’re wrong. “Yeah, nevermind, it would probably go down exactly like that. Sounds like we’re screwed though.”

Evan’s stern look turned into a fierce smile. “That is where we need your help. We will be recruiting more people in your former positions, and I hope you all can help bring them to our side. Archangel wasn’t a name chosen because it sounds cool to gamers, or any of the other reasons people have come up with on the internet. We chose Archangel because we intend to protect our world from those that would attempt to defile it.” He waved his arm at the rows of projections, each displaying a design for a spaceship. “We will use this gift they have given us to build a fleet, already we have begun adapting their advanced technology to suit our needs, and once we really get started, once we have a full organization helping with research and development, we will set forth into the galaxy in ships built for war and may whatever deity you pray to have pity on the souls of those who would try to use us as tools.

“If, and that is a fairly big if, we decide to join the Confederation, it will be as equals, not cannon fodder. That comes later though. Right this moment, we have very little. My friends and I are nerds. We’re gamers, and our greatest dream was to create video games that would bring wonder and joy to new generations. We can handle the tech stuff for the most part, and Rebekkah can handle the business side of things. Where we need your help is the military side. We intend to build ships of war in order to defend our planet, but all we know about war, about military tactics and requirements is the work of fiction. Books, games, and movies.

“We need your help to build up an entirely new force, recruited from all over the globe, with one singular purpose. Defending the planet as a whole. We can’t devote ourselves to a single nation, our men and women cannot be divided by nationality. Not with the world at stake. There are legends, stories, and fairy tales, of someone having an angel watching over them protecting them from harm. Archangel’s purpose shall be to watch over the world."