Kazi Depot

Kazi, Osara System, Ballas Branch

The moments after the image of whatever had crashed into the crust of Kazi had popped up on the screen were chaotic. Johns had feverishly sat down and started scrolling back and forth through the frames, searching for a sign that it wasn’t what he thought that it was. It wasn’t much help, as whatever it was had only been captured in a few frames — each blurrier than the last — but still looked decidedly like a giant squid in each.

As soon as it became clear that they couldn’t trick themselves into thinking they were seeing something else, one young brown-haired girl immediately burst into tears. Johns was happy to see that despite that they may have just discovered that a space-faring alien species had dive-bombed into the planet, that there were still several young men that were willing to console her. He was equally unsurprised to see that one of them was Rick.

“Shut down this space. No one leaves,” Johns yelled as soon as he was decently convinced of what he was seeing on the screen. A young tech a few seats down from him nodded and the Command doors closed and latched with loud thuds.

This, whatever it was, had to stay confined. For now at least. Johns was already regretting not clearing the room before he looked at the footage. He imagined that when this was all over, he’d receive a ding on his record for skirting emergency protocol, not that he cared at this point.

“Please connect me as quickly as you can to Command on Osara Prime,” Johns said when he was convinced that no one would be leaving and sending the entire station into a panic. He waited for a moment, tapping his feet while he waited to be patched through on the large screen dead-center on the far wall of Command.

“Sir, it appears that communications are down,” the tech beside him said. “Not only that, I don’t have visibility of the system at all. It’s probably the mainframe itself.” The mainframe was located at the Communications Station 30 miles East of Kazi Depot, in one of the few forest clearings on the entire planet.

Johns nodded, staring at his desk for a moment. “Officer Raimes,” he said.

“Sir,” he replied, stepping up next to him.

“I want you to make contact with security personnel at all major checkpoints in the three different sites. Tell them to start organizing a way to count the dead and injured.”

“Yes sir,” Raimes said with a head nod, and off he went to start crafting the message. Officer Raimes had been on Kazi for more than six years now. He was one of their most reliable security officers, and a likely future replacement for Johns, should Rick not want the job, which he might not. At least that seemed to be what Raimes was betting on. Otherwise, Johns had no idea why he was still here.

After a moment to consider his next move, Johns called all of the senior Kazi leadership that was present in the room into the conference room located at the back of Command. They shuffled in, and eight people sat around a long oval table with Johns standing at the head.

“We all know what everyone's thinking,” Johns said after everyone had been seated for a moment. “But let’s pump the brakes. We don’t know what this is.”

“I don’t know, looked like an alien to me, boss,” Rick said.

“Maybe it did. Still, the bottom line is that we don’t know anything. Not yet. It could be inanimate.”

The people seated around the table side-eyed each other. Before Johns could read the room and respond, a young blonde woman in a lab coat poked her head through the door.

“Sir, just wanted to let you know that we have identified collision sites for three objects,” she said.

“Show me,” Johns said, turning around toward the full-wall display behind him.

“Oh...alright...I’ll pull it up for you,” she said as she turned to leave.

“Where are you going?” Johns asked.

The young woman turned around confused, glancing nervously at the room of senior officials staring back at her.

“To my station?”

“What’s your name?”

“Sara.”

“Sara what?”

“Rutherford. Sara Rutherford.”

“Hello, Sara — and what is your position?”

“Well, I‘ve only been here a few days. I’m the new Head of Research on Kazi.”

They had expected her to arrive months ago, but the re-supply ships she had planned to hitch a ride with had kept getting postponed.

“Perfect. Please come in. That’s as senior as they come. You should have been in here already.”

Sara stared for a moment, said something inaudible to a tech outside of the conference room, then shut the door reluctantly behind her. A map of the main continent on Kazi popped up on the wall display behind Johns.

Three different circles were highlighted across the main continent on Kazi, between 30 and 60 miles away from Kazi Depot. The closest circle was placed directly over the top of a dot that read “Kazi Communications Station” below it on the map. The other two collision sites were to the Northwest and Northeast of Kazi Depot, near the northern side of the peninsula.

“It appears as if one of the objects struck the Communications Station directly,” Sara said, pointing her index finger toward the dot on the map.

Johns removed his hat and ran his fingers through his thinning hair briskly. “How many people do we have at the Communications Station?” Johns asked Officer Raimes.

“Around a thousand sir,” Raimes said, sucking the air out of the room.

“Alright. Our priority is them. We need to put a team together to go to the Communications Station and see the damage first hand,” Johns said. “We may have injured civilians there. We also need to get our communications systems back up and running as soon as we possibly can to report back to Osara Prime, as it’s likely they are unaware of the strikes at this time.”

Raimes raised his hand.

“This isn’t school. Just talk,” Johns snapped.

“Sir. We have the OSN Capela on the launchpad. She’s in the middle of repairs, not seaworthy at the moment. But she has a light beam, we can use that for off-world communications,” the young man said.

Johns snapped his fingers in Raimes’ general direction. “Yes, good thinking. Go there. Make sure it’s working. Don’t send anything yet though. We need to assess the situation first. No need to report in when there is nothing to report.”

“Yes sir,” Raimes replied.

“And the Capela - what would it take for her to be seaworthy if we needed?”

“Oh. Uhh...I’m not sure. We’ve been waiting on some parts from Osara Prime for months. I see the pilot and crew around all of the time.”

“Good. Figure out what they were waiting on. It would be nice to have a getaway ship if this whole thing goes south.”

“Hold on now,” an older man with a white beard said. “We don’t know what this is, you’re right about that. But do we really want to send a team out there without getting an understanding of what we are dealing with first? We should at least let Osara Prime know about the Communications Station.”

“We have our drone out ahead to scout,” Johns said. “That will give us an idea. We’ll send a team out, see what we can do to help the survivors. As far as what we need to tell those assholes on Osara Prime… we will in due time. Letting them know what we know now is only going to lead to assumptions...and I wouldn’t count on those assumptions to work out in our favor. We’ll go to them with something a little more concrete.”

“Even so, this could have been a hostile strike...or...I’ll say it — this could be an alien invasion. We may need to evacuate,” the old man said, clutching his fist on the top of the table.

Johns paused, thinking for a moment. “What do you think?” he asked as he nodded toward Sara, all eyes in the room training on her. She pointed at her chest to make sure that he was talking to her, which Johns affirmed with a nod.

“I don’t think that I am qualified…”

“No one here is qualified for this,” Johns said, interrupting her. “Do you believe this is an intentional strike of some kind? If someone...or something… were to attack us, it would make sense to take out our communication capabilities.”

Johns had always made a habit out of putting people on the spot. The truth was that he knew what he was going to get from the people at the table. Most of the men here were former military or high in the corporate world. They had their interests to protect. They would say that sending a team out to check things out was the right choice. He wanted a fresh perspective.

“We have no reason to believe it is intentional but we also can not rule it out,” Sara said.

“Yes, that is what he said. And how can we figure that out?” Johns asked.

“Figure out if this was an intentional strike?”

“Yes, that. Also — anything. Figure out anything.”

“Well...we have to study it. We’ll need to go to the crash site and see what happened. We need to see if there is anything left of the organism. For all we know, it was obliterated on impact. But there should be something we can take a look at. Also, this other crash site,” she said as she pointed toward the northeasternmost red circle. “Was close to the Research Lab. There may be injuries there as well. Hopefully, we haven’t lost any research.”

Johns nodded before doing a double-take. Exactly what he would expect from someone who just landed a Head of Research position. He racked his knuckles on the desk in front of him, thinking.

“Send the drone ahead of us and transport any data back to my terminal,” Johns said to Rick. “I’ll put together a small team and we’ll go assess the damage. If the strike wasn’t direct we may have hundreds of people trapped in the station injured. While we are gone, ready as many puddlejumpers as you can for evacuating civilians. Also — send more drones to the impact site near the Research Lab to have a look as well. In the meantime, send everyone available to tend to our own wounded. There were a lot of people trampled in those corridors.”

“Ummm, sir,” said Alan Greenway, Head of Kazi Logistics. “We have no way of knowing what state the landing pad is in at the Communications Station. It may even be destroyed. We may not be able to land anywhere close to the station if that is the case.”

Johns rubbed his chin. He was right. If the landing pad was gone — and judging by the map there was a very good chance of that — then they weren’t going to be able to evacuate anyone easily.

“Alright. We’ll have the drone take a look at the state of the landing pad. We’ll follow the drone with a hot drop into the area if needed. I’ll put the team together. Alan, I would like you to come and assess the damage as you’ll be responsible for coordinating shipments to the area. Raimes and Rick, you too. The rest of you make sure that we are prepared here at home to deal with this in the best way that we can.”

“And what should we tell the civilians?” Alan asked.

Johns laid both hands, palms-down, on the table in front of him and leaned forward. “The truth...but maybe leave out the alien bits. Say that the planet was struck by unidentified space debris. That the Communications Station is down, and we are currently assessing the situation. Off-world communications are down as well. Let them know that all travel on the trains is shut down too, and they will receive updates as soon as we figure out what the hell is going on.”

The man nodded. “I agree. But we are going to have to tell them eventually.”

“And we will. We’ll tell everyone everything we’ve learned after we get a chance to take a look at the impact site….Anything else?” Johns asked.

“Sir,” an old balding man with red hair said. “The Communications Station was home to our biggest farming operation, by far. They were about to harvest.”

“Oh...shit,” Johns said and he scratched the top of his head. “What are the food stores looking like?”

“Well...it’s tough to be sure without a full inventory. But to be honest, probably not great.”

“Not great, OK,” Rich piped in. “But what does that mean? How, not great? Like, we probably are going to starve, not great? Or we are just going to be below protocol, not great? These are important distinctions, Alan.”

“Well,” Alan Greenspan started, letting out a big sigh before he continued. “I don’t want to say anything official, but probably somewhere in between. We aren’t imminently going to starve or anything, we do have all of that protein meal powder that would last us months. But we probably should see if Osara will send an emergency shipment just to be on the safe side.”

“Alright, I’ll deliver that information in my message to them. Anything else?” No one spoke up. “Dismissed.”

Each hurriedly collected their items and started to make their way through the door back into the Command Center. Sara waited for the men to make their way over to the door and took up a spot at the back of the line.

“Oh,” Johns remembered before anyone managed to leave the room. “And I don’t need to say this, I know. But don’t tell a single god damn person about this until we have a better idea of what we are dealing with. We don’t need a panic. Understood?”

“Understood,” several members of the team said in unison as they made their way out of the conference room’s glass doors.

“Sara,” Johns said as she made her way out. “You’re coming with us to the Communications Station.”

She spun around.

“What? Really? Me?...Why,” she stammered, spinning around so quickly that her hair whipped her face.

“We need a researcher to help us make sense of this. And we will need to collect samples to analyze whatever hit us.” Johns said. “You are the Head of Research, right?”

Sara went rigid.

“Yes sir.”