Chapter 4

SS Cherry Barb Ares Station

“Captain Frazer, all systems green, all sections report they are ready. We are green across the board and ready to depart on your orders.”

If Captain Frazer heard his 1st officer, he gave no indication of it. Instead he continued to read a message that he had just received on his tablet. Lieutenant Commander Bannon knew when his friend was rattled and judging by the expression on the Commanders face this message must have been dire. After a few more moments of reading the Commander looked up and said, “Excellent work everyone, Lieutenant Green give me ship wide.” With that he picked up the receiver from its cradle and began speaking as soon as the Lieutenant Green indicated he was live.

“Ladies and Gentlemen of the Cherry Barb. We had been given a mission of the utmost importance. We were to investigate a group of visitors to our Solar System. To be amongst the first humans to ever approach Alien life and attempt to learn as much as we could about it in order to better help understand them so that when the time came, we could approach them with a message of peace. This is no longer our mission. Moments ago, I received a message that the United Nations space station above Europa has been completely destroyed. As the Leviathan ships approached the station, the crew onboard made every attempt at a peaceful first contact, they were ignored. The space station was destroyed and all crew on the station is presumed dead.

We have now been given a new mission. We are to approach the Leviathans in order to learn as much about them as we can, so that when the rest of the task force arrives, they will be better prepared to blow these bastards straight to hell.

Ladies and Gentlemen make no mistake this has always been the single most important mission we would ever receive in our lifetimes. But now that we know the Leviathans are hostile it is even more imperative that we learn as much about our enemy and their capabilities as possible. The coming months will be difficult, not because of the difficulties of serving on a stealth ship, we are all experts in our craft. No, this mission will be difficult because we will have the entire weight of Humanity on our shoulders. The future performance of our bothers and sisters in the rest of the fleet hinges on us.

Along with the news of the attack I received footage and other data from the attack itself. This footage will be made available to the you all shortly. I am not going to lie it is disturbing.”

With that the Captain placed the receiver back in its cradle. Taking a moment to compose himself he turned to the Lieutenant Green. “Contact Ares station and get final approval to cast off. Helm as soon as final clearance has been confirmed I want us underway. Navigation confirm our flight path out of Mars orbit with Ares station, make certain they are keeping our lanes clear. As soon as news of the attack on Europa spreads it will be chaos out there and I don’t want some idiot in an ore tug running into us.”

The Captain barely heard their confirmations. After a moment the Cherry Barb received its final permission to depart, cast off her tethers and accelerated out of Ares orbit. Usually a stealth ship would need to hide their exact departure route from enemy telescopes lest they be tracked as soon as they leave their berth. However, with all the major powers now working together it was deemed an unnecessary delay and they could simply begin accelerating towards their vector to slingshot around Mars, and then on to Jupiter.

“Lieutenant Brown you have the bridge, Pounds in my office please.” The two of them left the bridge and made the short walk to the Captains room and office.

The Commanders bunk was only slightly larger than any other crew members and that was mostly because it doubled as his office. There was a small desk immediately upon entering with a small chair one either side with his terminal and a few drawers for storage. Behind the desk the bunk was built into the wall same as any other room, but instead of there being three beds there was extra storage for anything the Commander felt he might need. Commander Frazer kept a few bottles of alcohol, one of which he was opening now.

“I want you to take a look at this first.” Commander Frazer said as soon as they were settled in the surprisingly comfortable chairs each with a drink.

“Isn’t it a bit early in the mission for this?” Pounds asked

Frazer just gave his friend a look, turned the monitor so they could both see it and started the video.

As the video started, they saw an external view from a camera that had been mounted on the outside of the station. Normally used to survey damage to the station from any stray meteor impacts it was currently showing a massive form heading to the camera. As it approached slowly getting larger in the screen stars behind it kept getting blotted out. Before long a truly massive form took up the entirety of the screen, but rather than collide with the station it kept getting closer and closer and the image clearer and clearer.

“What in Gods name….” Bernard said.

When Bernard was certain that it should be colliding with the station any moment it just continued to come closer and closer. It’s face if it could be called that was a dark red, with dirty splotches of brown and orange. He thought he could see the flesh pulsing just underneath its surface but dismissed that as a trick of the light, the tentacles protruding from its front looked almost like they were wet, an impossibility in the void of space. Close and closer and larger and larger it came until finally an orifice opened in its face. It was a crooked maw filled with a mass of writhing of tentacles, pulsing organs and what might have even been teeth. Far quicker than Pounds would have thought possible the tentacles exited the orifice and approached and enveloped the camera completely before it cut off and the screen only showed static.

“Is there another angle?” Bernard asked after a moment.

Without saying anything Commander Frazer pushed a few buttons on the screen and another video started.

This time the camera was a great distance away and showed the entirety of the Leviathan. Slowly the creature was drifting forwards small tendrils in the front of the creature were waving in front of it wildly. It was hard to judge the size of the tendrils, but they were probably over a hundred meters in length and must have been a dozen meters thick. Pounds looked towards the front of the creature and could see as it slowly moved towards the station. From the other angle it was hard to see how quickly it had been moving but now he could tell that it was in terms of space travel it was almost a crawl.

Something on the front of the creature seemed to shift and with a start he realized he was seeing the orifice opening. The camera zoomed in as its face continued to open wider and wider. As the camera zoomed in Pounds could make out some individual tentacles moving inside the things mouth just before it crashed into the station. Despite how slowly the thing was moving it still must have been a few hundred meters a second.

The front of the station caved in where the Leviathan hit it, but the station remained surprisingly intact. Dura-steel beams shattered and were thrown clear, glass and crystalized water vapour floated away, and Pounds even thought he saw a body floating away crystalized blood trailing behind it before a small tendril quickly grabbed it and the body disappeared in the front of the creature.

“How the hell is it moving? There’s nothing like an engine on it.”

“We still have no idea, there’s one more video.” Frazer said pushing a few more buttons on the screen.

Pounds watched as another video started. This one from inside the stations control room.

There were over a dozen people in the room all clustered together in front of a terminal in the middle of the room. With the people so far from the camera it was impossible to make out what they were saying. As he watched they started to get more and more agitated with some people backing away from the terminal and their voices being raised. The group began shouting at each other as one young woman turned and ran through a door and out of the room. Suddenly the camera shook there was an incredibly loud bang and tearing sound as every person flew several feet to the right. One person landed headfirst onto a wall with a sickening thud and stopped moving.

The lights flickered but the station had been designed for redundancy and every part of it had backup batteries in the event of catastrophic damage so after a moment half of the lights turned off and the remaining lights lowered themselves. An automatic reaction to preserve the batteries as long as possible. The new shadows being created from the emergency lighting made it a little hard to make out the details, but slowly people started pulling themselves to their feet getting organised and helping those who were more injured.

Before people could make it more than a few steps away there was a second squeal of bending steal loud enough to make Pounds wince as on the camera something was forcing open the wall on the right-hand side.

In from the newly created holes large tendrils entered the room and the atmosphere of the station began exiting. People screamed their hair and clothes being pulled towards the hole as the tentacles waved around for a few moments. Pounds looked closely and he could almost swear he saw hundreds of small eyes dotting the tentacles as they all opened one after another. Suddenly one of the tentacles plunged straight down into the body of the man who had died when he hit the wall, spearing the man it lifted him into the air before several smaller tendrils entered the room and began tearing bits of the man off and pulling them back through the whole.

The horrified onlookers reacted as soon as the body of their friend was lifted into the air, peoples mouths opened as they screamed, but nothing could be heard on the video as the atmosphere was exiting the room. People tried to hold onto whatever they could in order to avoid being sucked towards the new hole in the hull a few people even tried to run towards the closest doors, but before people could make it more than a few steps; dozens of more tentacles burst into the room. The tentacles writhed as they darted forwards impaling people through their bodies holding them still for other tendrils to enter the room and begin to pull people apart. There did not seem to be any rhyme or reason to how people were being treated by the tentacles. One man was ripped into a half a dozen pieces and removed from the room, another was torn into fist sized chunks by dozens of smaller tendrils, a woman with long blonde hair was speared by a dozen tendrils and pounds watched as they burrowed underneath the skin before the tentacles exited her body in several places and she was pulled in one piece towards the hole still screaming.

Watching it was almost enough to make Pounds lose his lunch as he held his drink in a white-knuckle grip. One lucky woman managed to make it out of the room, the door closing behind her as she left the cameras field of view. A larger tendril moved along the left-hand wall before plunging straight through as if the wall was made of tissue paper. A moment later it came back through the hole it had made holding the woman who had almost managed to escape, her body being broken and torn apart as she was forced through an opening far smaller than her body. Smaller tendrils were already going through the hole to gather the small parts of her that were torn off when she was forced through the small hole.

All in all, the chaos had lasted only 47 seconds.

When the last human had been carried from the room screaming tendrils started pulling the room apart, quickly after that a tendril whipped towards the camera and the video stopped.

“A few other videos were sent out as well, even a few more from nearby satellites, but they mostly just show the station being pulled apart. The station has been completely destroyed, and from what we can tell eaten by the creature. The other creatures appear to be examining Europa itself and a few of Jupiter’s moons. Almost all of the satellites that were in orbit around Jupiter and her moons have also gone dark.”

“Jesus Christ James, are you sure you want the crew to see all of this?” Pounds said drinking the alcohol his friend had poured him.

“The crew needs to know what they are going up against, and they are all prepared for the dangers of space travel.”

“Up until now the dangers of space travel only involved, freezing to death, being cooked to death, asphyxiation, and decompression, being eaten by monsters is a new one.”

Commander Frazer considered this as he peered into his drink. “I’ll hold off on making the last video available to them for now, but if it makes its way public it could be worse for the crew.”

“What the hell are we up against here? What are these things? It looked like they were eating them, but why would a creature that size eat a person. There is no way they actually needed to.”

“It doesn’t really matter why they did that, all that matters is that they attacked and destroyed the station. After this the fleet is no longer going to try and make a peaceful first contact. We are going in on an extermination mission.”