With a deep, tired sigh, the Engineer set aside the empty cup of coffee on his table and touched a few icons on his computer as Christine and Steve pulled up chairs beside him.

“All right, so like I said, the glyphs we saw on the ship? It all looks alien, right?” he began.

“Very much,” replied Christine “I know Steve has a different opinion...”

“Actually, Steve is right.”

Steve triumphantly wagged a finger in the air with a satisfied grimace and stuck his tongue out at Christine.

“Dammit Steve, how old are you?” snarled Christine.

“I was right all along and you kept making alien probing jokes, so that’s what you get now,” cackled Steve.

The Engineer rolled his eyes and cleared his throat.

“So, it’s not alien writing at all, just a stylized Pigpen cipher,” he continued. “We thought it couldn’t be right at first because the letters wouldn’t add up, but then we ran it through the translator anyway and it was obvious we were looking at shorthand that omits vowels.”

He opened a few documents showing the angular text side by side with plain English translations.

“We think it probably started as a way to save bandwidth when they’re broadcasting and then turned into a full-blown language with rules that took common abbreviations, contractions, and keeping letters to a minimum, using only the vowels they need to make the word obvious. It’s efficient to a fault.”

“Where did you find so many samples of their writing?” asked Steve.

“From their computers. They’re a lot like ours, but very heavily encrypted. There was some plain text in memory though and that let us find a bunch of really weird terms like ERCON, EXCOM, and SAGCARTER. But then we saw a few much more familiar ones like SIGINT and ORCON, which are, duh, Signals Intelligence and Originator Controlled information.”

“So, these are military acronyms and designations,” Christine nodded along. “Do you know what those other acronyms mean?”

“From the context, we have some educated guesses. EXCOM sounds like the command to which they answer. SAGCARTER probably stands for Sagittarius-Carina, which is the closest arm of the galaxy.”

“But that’s all you know?”

“Military jargon can be very dense and branch-specific. Unless they tell us, we’re more or less just guessing. And I have no idea if they’d tell us. Are they awake?”

“Not yet. I need to speak to medical. Keep plugging away at anything you think might be even remotely interesting.”

So, they were human, well, sort of, she thought as she made her way to the med lab. Cyborgs are human, just enhanced. And these are just extra enhanced humans. Her heart started to flutter once again. This is exactly what she hoped would happen. Humans who could finally answer why Earth fell silent were now on their little planet. Maybe Naenia figured out more, like how to read their identifying marks, or where they’re from based on their genomes.

Unfortunately, the doctor had come up empty. She shrugged with upturned, open palms at Christine’s questions before opening a screen filled with colorful splotches.

“I analyzed the ‘blood’ I took off the bodies,” she said. “It did contain DNA from them. The male had XY chromosomes, the females had XX, your standard fare. But the Y was even more shriveled than it should’ve been, almost as if it was damaged by whatever process was used to make them. And when I tried reading the genes...”

“What did you find?”

“I don’t know. It’s like all the normal human genes should be there, but nothing lines up. I had the biologists crunch the sample data the way we do with alien life. They told me these cyborgs have four codons. Pretty much every living thing on Earth has three, including us. Until we landed here, only one other creature we knew of had a four codon genetic signal, and only for making one amino acid.”

“Why would they need four codons if they’re human? Or were?”

“We think it’s to make more amino acids and proteins to protect themselves from mutations caused by radiation and constantly generate new stem cells. It’s like their bodies never stop developing and start actually aging. We’re not sure how long they live, but from what we’re seeing here, it’s probably a very, very long time. Maybe thousands of years.”

“Did you find anything else?”

“Well, we also tried to bombard their cells with radiation. They created a weird, glass-like structure inside them that’s immune to alpha and beta decay. That’s not totally unheard of either. Tardigrades, the little extremophiles, do that. But not humans. We tried to do that with genetic engineering but it only sort of worked. They perfected it.”

Christine rubbed her eyes with a tired grunt.

“In your current opinion, based on everything you know, who and what are they?” she asked. “Can we say anything about why they came here or where they came from?”

“They’re extensively genetically engineered cyborgs created for deep space exploration. They’re almost immune to radiation that would melt a human, and based on an analysis of their muscles and joints, they have superhuman strength. They would be a lot faster too, but speed is limited by joint length so they’d max out at 45 kilometers per hour. Theoretically.”

“And considering that they’re obviously soldiers, could they be even stronger and faster than you think?”

“Absolutely. These were low-end estimates. With training, they could be much stronger and more dangerous. They couldn’t kill a human with one punch, but it wouldn’t take them much more than that if that’s where you’re going with this. If they couldn’t get the job done then, the fangs we saw in their mouths would.”

“You’re shitting me. On top of all that, they’re poisonous?”

“Venomous, to be accurate. And you don’t wanna know what they inject into their victims. We haven’t quite pinned down what it is, but it pretty much dissolves living things from the inside out.”

“Oh my God, oh my God, what did we do?” Christine muttered while burying her face in her hands. “What if they turn hostile when they wake up? This is a fucking disaster.”

Christine rushed out of the medical lab as the grimly amused Naenia returned to her work. Should’ve thought of that before you had Ingrid agree to bring them into the city, she thought while looking at the new batch of results.

...

A spaceship resembling a large shard covered in small, flexible scales warped into above a gas giant orbiting so close to its sun that the star’s corona erupted in massive, spiraling protuberances of plasma triggered by the gravity of the planet.

As it followed the planet’s curve, it caught a good glimpse of its hellish day side which looked as if an enormous, invisible blowtorch was aimed directly at it, sending out massive waves of turbulence across its atmosphere.

Something inside the vessel selected a star on its navigational screen. The star expanded to a model of a solar system with six worlds. The third world was selected as several other ships began to warp into similar orbits and follow the curve of the planet below.

The alien spaceships assembled into formation, accelerated, and warped out towards the selected destination: an Earth-sized world with blue skies, jagged mountains, red and beige deserts, and a city just large enough to spot from orbit.

...

In the city’s control room, the technicians calmly worked on their daily tasks behind their desks. After an initial day of excitement, they once again settled into the daily routine. Sure, the mysterious cyborgs in the sick bay were interesting, but the city didn’t run itself. There was daily maintenance to oversee, critical tasks to schedule, and systems to test and debug.

The Chiefs and scientists always got to have all the fun as the technicians saw to the day-to-day grind, thought Katja as she returned to her terminal with a fresh cup of coffee from a nook right off the control room. She unlocked her computer to check the output on the array of terminal windows always running in the background of her dashboards.

“That’s weird...” she thought aloud.

“What’s going on?” asked her colleague Edwin.

“What’s this process called x0hff0a trying to talk to SATCOM?”

“Did the system flag it?”

“Yah. Let me try and kill it and see what happens.”

As her fingers hovered over the keyboard, suddenly, all the monitors and screens took on lives of their own. Tsunamis of scrolling text and commands exploded across every terminal.

“What happened?!” asked Edwin, his face pale.

“I didn’t touch anything!” swore Katja. “I didn’t even have time!”

“Guys, did we just lose control over everything all of a sudden?” asked Christine peering over the balcony at the scurrying technicians below.

“We’re infected with a virus! It’s hijacking every system across the base!” replied a technician named Sandra, who was fruitlessly tapping on her keyboard to restore command.

“I’ll be right down!” said Christine, grabbing her tablet out of nothing more than habit, realizing full well that it was effectively useless until their computers were once again compliant.

...

The security guard sent to check on the cyborgs in the small, private recovery rooms approached with a sense of dread. A lot of rumors about claws and poisonous fangs have been circulating around the guard station, and while it was interesting to see what humanity has come up with in its quest to cope with the rigors of living among the stars, these cyborgs seemed... a bit excessive for lack of a better term.

Still, it must have been nice not to need the various serums, elixirs, and infusions to maintain their immune systems and clean up tissue damage every week, or risk an early death from a whole host of autoimmune ailments and cancers. With a heavy sigh, he peeked into the room. The cyborg seemed unresponsive, her eyes closed.

He exhaled with relief, took note of her vitals projected on a screen above her, and confirmed that the readouts were correct on his tablet. It was his first time seeing the humanoid up close and personal, and the more he looked, the more strange things he noticed, at least to a human. There was no sound of breathing and her chest didn’t move, unlike with every other patient he’s seen before.

He reflexively leaned down to double-check just in case. As he examined her, he remembered that she didn’t have lungs in a conventional sense, and so it would’ve been impossible for her to breathe like a flesh and blood human. Instead, she had a bladder-like air sac the doctors thought was used to speak.

Before the thought managed to fully sink in, the cyborg’s arm shot upward, slamming her palm into his chin with enough force to slightly lift him right off his feet. He painfully fell to the floor, but as he tried to get up, her shin caught his temple and sent him sliding away.

In a panic, he reached for his standard-issue gun and tried to raise it to fire at the cyborg, but she effortlessly tore the gun from his hands in the blink of an eye. He watched in horror as the naked humanoid easily crushed the gun into a twisted clump of metal and bounced it off a wall while attacking in one fluid motion. A knee to his sternum sent him flying backward into the wall headfirst. His world went dark from the blow.

The cyborg froze and shook her head. Her red, complex pupils stabilized as she finished coming to her senses. She stepped out into the quiet hallway and tried to assess the situation, but was rudely interrupted by another guard being violently thrown out of the room next to her. He slammed into the wall and tried to get up, but collapsed into a groaning heap.

The male cyborg walked out into the hallway. He stopped and clenched his eyes shut for a moment. His pupils stabilized as he also finished recovering. With an embarrassed grimace, he looked away from his fellow humanoid.

“Commander,” he respectfully intoned.

Before she could respond, there was yet another groan and thud, and the second female cyborg swiveled towards them with the guard’s gun in her hand. She was fully awake and recovered as well, and lowered her weapon immediately.

“Commander, major, where are we?” she asked.

“Meiko, Jake,” the Commander acknowledged as she looked around the bay. “This looks a lot like a Terra Firma outpost.”

“Oh... I recognize this from the manual,” agreed Jake.

“Let’s find our uniforms, give the crew members first aid, and assess the situation,” ordered the Commander.

“Yes Commander!” responded the cyborgs, jumping to attention.

...

In the control room, Christine and her technicians were still scrambling to regain control of the base, the agitated din of their frenetic work filling the large space. A live feed from one of the satellites dominated the primary screen, which in ordinary circumstances would’ve been perfectly fine, except that this feed was brought up by a virus currently rampaging through their computers with disturbing ease.

“The virus is now connected to the satellites,” heavily and angrily sighed Kepa to Christine, who was looking over her shoulder at her terminal outputs. “It’s not doing anything right now, but it’s definitely reading live data as it’s coming back.”

Suddenly, the image on the main screen began to move.

“Hold on,” said Kepa. “It started adjusting SAT 5 to a new set of coordinates.”

“Why?” asked Christine.

Her answer came in the form of a group of shard-shaped alien ships warping into orbit around the planet to leisurely assume a tight formation directly over the city. As they appeared on the main screen, a hush fell over the technicians.

“That can’t be the rescue mission for those cyborgs,” said Edwin, chewing on his lower lip.

“Well, the virus is now trying to figure out how to take full command of our weapons systems, pinging anything even remotely defense-related, so I’m going to agree with you,” chimed in Sandra as Steve briskly walked in behind Christine and the technicians.

“Hey everyone, so what’s going on we... uh...” he started right before he noticed what was happening on the primary screen, his train of thought coming to a screeching halt. “Oh. Oh shit...”

“It’s not them, it’s the cyborgs,” said Christine before pointing at the screen, “But they’re not helping things either!”

Steve peered at Sandra’s screen and let out a hiss.

“Let me dive into the computers some more,” he said. “Maybe we can stop this thing.”

The technicians’ screens, hijacked by commands from the virus, started displaying critical alerts. Seconds later, an alarm rang out across the entire building.

“Oh no...” gasped Katja. “It has command of our nukes and it’s locking on to the ships in orbit.

“What?!” Christine’s jaw dropped in shock.

“It’s almost like this thing was written by someone who knew exactly how our computers, base layout, and defenses work,” Edwin shook his head. “It’s not just trying random stuff and hoping to find what it wants, it’s following a step-by-step plan.”

“They’re not just human,” mumbled Steve, frozen in place by the realization. “They’re definitely from Earth.”

“How did you... ?” started Christine.

“The cyborgs, I think they have to Earthlings,” he explained. “Who else knows how to hijack Terra Firma bases that thoroughly and override our defenses, especially since they’re supposed to be unique to each outpost? They have bodies more advanced than anything we’ve ever come up with, their ship design looks like no other Terra Firma vessel. They have to be from Earth. The odds of other outposts managing all those advances over the last three thousand years are a billion to one, and if they were even remotely close, there’d be rumors we’d hear at least in passing.”

Christine weighed his words. Given what they knew about tech trees, his idea made sense. Maybe they weren’t from Earth but certainly, from the vicinity of the Sol system. But if that’s true and they came to this world after 700 years of silence, fighting with someone or something, what did that say about the current state of humanity’s homeworld? Before she could respond, the primary screen exploded with target indicators overlaid on the alien ships in orbit.

“Well, whoever they are, they’re going to fire a nuclear volley if the aliens drop below low orbit,” said Katja. “And I don’t think we can do anything to stop them because I’m completely locked out.”

Christine and Steve’s phones pinged. Steve read the message and exhaled through his nose. Christine also read the message, closed her eyes while muttering assorted expletives under her breath.

“Fuck,” she finally chose to summarize.

“Fuck indeed,” agreed Steve.

“What’s going on?” asked Sandra.

“Now the cyborgs are missing too,” replied Christine.

The team stared blankly at the target overlays and alien ships, overwhelmed and unsure of what to do next. In the hangar under their feet, the cyborg pod hooked up to numerous thick cables and machines was hard at work. The glyphs across its surface glowed and pulsed as it screamed into the void of space for a helping hand and calculated its odds of using a Terra Firma city’s weapons to successfully protect its crew and the humans who would now be in the crossfire. The odds, as they stood now, were suboptimal.