First Contact

Chapter Error and a Half - Nth Wave

"Look, mama, buggy-people dancing! Mama, look! Mama! Look! Momma, why aren't you looking!" the little girl said, hopping up and down and holding on to her mother's hand. The mother looked down at her daughter, then at where she was pointing.

A group of Treana'ad were dancing in a clear space in the park. The matrons, bigger than the males, wore as close of an approximation as their insectile bodies could get for old Pre-Glassing dresses. They were swishing their skirts and petticoats and they clacked their bladearms to clap. The males were strutting and did some weird footwork like they were sliding off to the side as the matrons came forward.

Lots of kids were laughing and clapping, the sight of the Treana'ad bringing joy to them. Treana'ad dancing in the park was a weekly thing, a community display held by the Treana'ad Classical Ballroom Dancing Club & Social Group and many people brought their children to see the costumes and the dancing and listen to the music.

"Don't point, Sammy, it's rude," the woman said.

"Yes, sweetie, Treana'ad are dancing," the woman said.

"Can we go watch them, Momma?" Sammy asked, looking up with her big blue eyes. "Please, momma, please?"

"Your father's shuttle is going to land soon. We don't have time," the woman said.

"Your father's shuttle is going to land soon, but he'll take a little while to clear customs, so of course we can," the woman said.

"Your father's shuttle is running late, this would be good thing to watch," the woman said.

"Can I have ice cream?" Sammy asked, pointing at the cart manned by a Treana'ad.

"No," the woman said, pulling Sammy away from the cart where a Rigellian saurian was selling ice cream cones.

"Sure, sweetie," the woman said, smiling down at her daughter and walking with her to where the Mantid was handing out ice cream cones. Sammy hoped she could have strawberry, it was her favorite, especially the kind of the chunks the kind with the candy the kind that was smoothly whipped and creamy.

Things shimmered and shook, leaving traceries behind, the Treana'ad slid off to the side, vanishing into the distance as the sky rezzed and flickered before slowly melting into the ground. Buildings flexed, bulged, changed color and architecture even as they flickered and vanished.

"Are you going to jump?" Mandy Newstedder asked Sammy, a challenge in her brown eyes.

Sammy looked down, off the edge of the cliff, to the sparkling water of the lake beneath her. Several of her classmates were swimming in the water, splashing around and laughing.

Sammy shook her head, backing away from the cliff.

Sammy backed up, nodding, reaching down and grabbing her courage, pushing aside the fear.

Sammy nodded, licking her lips nervously. She reached out and grabbed the rope, backing up.

She walked away to the jeers of her peers, mocking her cowardice.

She ran at the edge, holding the rope tight, balling her fists as she pumped her arms and ran. She jumped off the edge, swung on the rope out into the empty air, flew off the end, kicking her feet as she straightened her legs out to plunge into the water as she folded forward and extended her arms out to plunge headfirst into the water.

The water exploded from around her.

Sammy stood next to the table at the mall, leaning on it and smiling at her boyfriend. She opened her mouth to say something and suddenly her boyfriend had dozens of different boys appear around him as well as different versions of him appear. Different hair, different eyes, different clothing, different skin color. Her own image multiplied, appearing just as differently as the boy across from her.

Before she could ask a question a dozen different questions were asked around her.

Everything suddenly imploded, leaving Sammy standing on the sidewalk in front of the recruiter's office. She was wearing her best Tuesday dress Sunday suit Monday jumper, her hair braided shaved teased lacquered as she toyed with a lock of hair her necklace one bracelet.

"JOIN SPACE FORCE/THE FLEET/MOBILE INFANTRY/STARFLEET/THE ARMY/THE NAVY TODAY!" the hologram flashed.

She kept walking past it.

She went inside to rob the place/sign up/buy drugs/meet for some random app hookup/buy a souvenier.

She stepped back to look up at the big holosign of a spaceship and was hit by a passing taxi.

The Rigellian male showed her the different jobs she could sign up for, fluffing his feathers while he watched his wife lying on the floor watching cartoons and giggling. The Saurian Compact Kobold nodded with satisfaction as she chose the Navy and escorted her to where she could take the test. She was nervous as she went inside and the Rigellian female activated the eVR testing.

She scored in the top 3%.

She scored firmly in the top 25%.

She barely eeked by.

She failed miserably.

The eVR dissolved and took Sammy with it.

Sammy signed her name, Samantha Johnathon Kwagarkak Smith, showed her legal ID that she was an adult at 21 years of age, and then wrote in the number of the job she wanted.

And wrote in a different number.

A different number.

Pressed her chrome thumb against the datapad.

Pressed the tip of her nose on the pad.

Felt the needle flicker out of the touchpad and take a DNA sample.

Scrawled it with a paintstick.

Everything swirled around, uniforms whipping by, thousands of Terran Republic/Confederacy/Imperial/Combined Military Forces uniforms, thousands of Mantid Slave Army uniforms, hundreds of North Africa Space Defense uniforms.

She spun around, tumbled, turned inside out and backwards.

She landed face first in the mud. Weight was on her back, her arms were exhausted, her back hurt, her knees ached, her uniform was soaked as she collapsed into the puddle.

"GET YOUR FAT ASS BACK IN THE AIR, RECRUIT!" a voice bellowed.

She pushed herself with shaky arms back into the pushup position. She couldn't lift herself. She collapsed halfway up. She curled into a ball and started crying. She got up and knocked out one more pushup screaming at the top of her lungs.

She fell through the world, spinning through everything and nothing as she started grabbing for something, anything, to slow her down.

An Expert Marksmanship badge broke away and she looked at it in her hand as blood seeped out around it from the cuts in her palm.

It whirled away as thousands of her qualified with weapons on the range. Some of her fired pistols, others rifles, one of her with a face scarred from a donorcycle chain a rival banger had smashed her face in with fired a heavy machinegun, still others fired bows, and one fired a heavy grenade laucnher.

Still another of her stood on the stage, a microphone in his hand as he sang in front of thousands of adoring fans, strutting back and forth as he bellowed out the lyrics to his latest hit.

Another of her crouched in the burnt out house, staring at the pistol's ammo counter with tears running down her face. Outside she could hear something moving through the rubble filled streets. The smell of pine cleaning fluid got stronger and, still weeping, she lifted up the pistol and put the barrel in her mouth. As the tentacles burst from through the wall to grab her, she pulled the trigger.

She shattered into a thousand pieces and reformed.

She was on the bridge/gunnery station/DCC/engineering sections of a destroyer/frigate/dreadnought/battleship/galleon, locked into her seat as the point defense systems went to rapid fire. The weapons were sweeping the Mar-gite from space even as another cloud of them erupted from their jagged crystalline ship and headed for the task force.

They were swept from the sky.

They got through by the thousands and attached to the ship, their caustic saliva and grinding teeth ripping at the battlesteel of the ancient frigate.

A handful got through, making for the engine nacelles, the engines going dark and the ship floating without power as another cloud of Mar-gite puffed from the crystalline mothership.

The battelship's main guns hammered into missed shattered on the shields of the Mar-gite hiveship.

Sharp crystalline fragments broke free. The engine organs exploded. It consumed itself in fire and fury. It silent broke apart, each part converting to dozens, hundreds of bone white Mar-gite, starving and ravenous.

A Mar-gite broke through the door to the bridge. Sammy looked through the smoke, seeing only the Captain alive.

"It's time," he said.

"For the Imperium," he said.

"For the Republic," Sammy said.

"For the ducks," Sammy said.

"For the Confederacy," the Captain quacked.

Sammy flipped up the plastic cover and carefully typed out of the self destruct code, looking at the Captain and nodding.

"Prepare to turn key, midshipman," the Captain told her. "For Holy Terra."

"For Murdered Venus," she said, her green skin pale with bloodloss. She turned the key.

Everything shattered and Sammy found herself whirling inside and out, infinity coalescing into a pinprick that contained everything that could or could not be.

"Come around to two five one bearing six three," Sammy yelled out, her Captain's star on her chest gleaming in the air thick with smoke. "Target the Ring Locusts closest to the planet!"

"All guns open fire! Pound those rebellious jumped up video game NPC's into shattered code!" Holy Ship Guardian Sammy bellowed out, his hands on his hips and chin lifted.

"Go to hyperspace, we have to warn the Federation the PAWM are back!" Sammy coughed into the commo link, blood running out from between her lips. "Get out of here. All ships, go to local control, get to hyper..." her face hit the cracked plasteel of her visor as the life left her body.

Sammy held her baby, looking at its unfocused and dreamy eyes and smiling, sweat making her hair wet and sticky. The baby opened and closed its mouth, looking for comfort and sustenance. She marveled at how amazing it was and that she had made it.

"Get the civilians out!" Sammy yelled over the loudspeakers of his armor, firing his rifle at the oncoming Ring Locusts.

"We can't hold them, Gunny!" one of his men yelled.

"Then we make them buy every fucking inch!" Sammy yelled even as a launched spike snapped the tip of the dog ear off his armor. "For the Holy Order of Terra and the Pharaoh Tulketikan!"

The Ring Locusts dissolved into nothingness, leaving Sammy floating in darkness, surrounded by rings of herself expanding ever outward.

She stood on the bridge of her flagship, staring at the ships orbiting the neutron star. The largest fleet ever assembled, larger than even the Mar-gite Solution Armada, larger even then the Second Mantid War Punitive Fleet.

Tens of thousands of the most powerful ships ever produced by mankind.

The Courage in Despair was the newest, one of the most powerful, or her entire Armada.

"Fleet is ready, ma'am," she heard.

"Send the signal. All units to hyperspace," Sammy ordered, the Admiral rank on her shoulders gleaming silently in the lights of the flag bridge.

Everything rewound, her life moving backwards, until she hit a brick wall made of soft rubber and bounced.

"It's a boy."

"It's a girl."

"It's alive."

"Your spawn is ready for maternal affection and skin to skin contact."

"Cannister Contents 301834 Stable."

It all began moving forward again, stopping and starting, jerking and stuttering.

Over and over Sammy saw points of her life where she'd made decisions, or someone else made a decision, that had affected her life. In several cases she saw where someone else's decision had impacted her without any difference she could have made.

Finally it all sped up, leading to hundreds of her standing next to one another at the particular moment the blast wave rolled over the flagship.

She watched the blast wave roll over hundreds, thousands, millions of ships as an uncountable number of herself, from ones barely different to ones of entirely different species, all slapped the emergency jump button for the entire fleet.

Everything turned inside out again.

-------------

"It has been two weeks, Most High," one of his bridge crew said as the shift change went through. "Perhaps the Terrans are not coming?"

"They will be here," Cu'udchu'ar said confidently. "They do not abandon their allies."

"We stay," The Great Grand Most High of Executors stated, his voice firm. "Our own Armada has not yet completely managed to reform. Nearly a third of our vessels still are undergoing computer system repair."

"The quantum molecular circuitry took heavy damage from the energy blast wave," another tech said, turning to stare at the one who had spoken. "We're disabling weapons to use computer components for drive and shielding systems."

"The chances of the Terrans surviving is..." one of the analysts started to say.

"STATUS CHANGE!" one of the scanner techs called out.

Most High Cu'udchu'ar watched as four ships appeared on the scanners. The looked as if they were smoking, venting atmosphere, energy, and debris. Two of them were heavy, baroque looking, with skulls sporting open jaws and glowing eyes instead of the smooth prows that Cu'udchu'ar had seen before.

"Are they part of the fleet?" Cu'udchu'ar asked Cricket, who was staring at the ships through the sensors of the massive Lanaktallan super-dreadnought.

"Terran frigate weight. All four are squawking the correct transponder codes, but two are broadcasting the wrong names and are the wrong configuration," she said slowly. "ID codes, which are polyphasic algorithms, match up correctly."

"Is that alarming?" the Executor asked.

Cricket shrugged. "That was a serious energy blast, coming through a wormhole, which apparently led to a different dimension, with the leading edges of the blast moving faster than light. Who knows who we're going to get, but Confederate doctrine covers that kind of circumstance."

The Executor pointed at the two ships that were different. "These look more like the older ships you have referred to The Imperium of Wrath."

Cricket nodded. "Ship lines are the same, but I don't remember any ship profiles or classes like that."

Another three ships suddenly appeared, one of them the ultra-massive Colossus class the Terrans used. The huge one was twisted slightly, the lines off, the armor scorched, blackened, and twisted.

"That one is pink and white with what appears to be crudely drawn feline faces upon it," Cu'udchu'ar pointed out.

"The Neko-Marines, squawking the transpoder of the Let There Be Mercy hospital ship," Cricket said, shaking her head. "I think the Engrish-Emoji is the same name, but it's hard to tell."

"Incoming communication," a technician said.

"Put it on the holotank," Cu'udchu'ar said.

Cu'udchu'ar had half expected the pristine immaculate and professional dress uniform of the Terran Confederate Space Force, or maybe even the armored vac suits. Instead it was heavy plated armor, a 'smiley face' in burning warsteel on the middle of the chest. The Captain had his helmet off, revealing a face that was half warsteel cybernetics.

"This is the Mercy of the Grave, do any of the Stallions of Great Defiant Herd read me?" the figure intoned in a deep sepulchral voice.

"We read you, Mercy," Cu'udchu'ar said. "I am Great Grand Most High of the Lanaktallan Great Herd Armada."

"Your ship ID's, emissions, and transmissions are correct, but your ship profiles do not match our records. I recognize your rank and name but your appearance is unfamiliar to me," the human said. "We will wait to see if I am in your universe or you are in mine, as doctrine commands."

"Affirmative, Mercy," Cu'udchu'ar answered. "There are currently high level political situations to observe and negotiate."

"Undertood. Mercy of the Grave, out," the figure said. The wallpaper appeared for a few seconds.

TERRAN IMPERIAL REPUBLIC OF SENTIENT BEINGS was on the bottom.

"We may see more of this," the Grand High Executor said quietly. "The Terrans were likely to stay and fight, to keep the Atrekna 'pinned' (in their parlance) up until the final moment. The Terrans are not the type to let an enemy escape if they can prevent it."

Cu'udchu'ar nodded.

Three more ships, of the tens of thousands of Terran ships, arrived.

Again, their transponder ID's matched, but little else. One did not even have matching emissions or drive signatures. It was a massive ship, using the transponder of the micro-destroyer, nearly five times as long as the largest ship in the Great Herd Fleet. An artificial stellar mass the size of a small moon burned at the rear of the ship, for what purpose, Cu'udchu'ar did not know. It's name was emblazoned in burning warsteel across the hull. The Heart of Murdered Venus.

Cu'udchu'ar watched as Cricket handled the incoming data and wondered what this meant for his hopes of negotiating a peace settlement that would ensure some of his people survived.

The Executor stayed silent, keeping his own counsel, watching with red, unblinking cybereyes of warsteel and chrome, a legacy of his time as a POW in a Terran Internment Camp.

--------------

Cu'udchu'ar had to admit, he had doubted he would ever see Admiral Samantha Smith again. Her ship was the next to last group to arrive. When the Courage In Despair and its brigade mates had arrive, their hulls twisted and damaged, their crews savaged, their engines dead, the Admiral had called it there and requested a meeting with Cu'udchu'ar and the Great Grand Most High Executor.

They met on one of the rest and relaxation ships of the Lanaktallan fleet.

Cu'udchu'ar had to admit he was nervous. Eight of the ships that had arrived were pink and white, full of absolute maniacs that screamed and gibbered to the point the universal translators just gave it up. Imperium ships, Republic ships, Universal Combined Military Forces ships. Ships from a hundred different Terran governments had arrived.

While some of the crew and the captains may have had the same name, many did not. Some had different species manning the guns, manning the Captain's chair, in different positions. There was a myriad of different ranks, different ship designations.

But they had all agreed to march to Admiral Smith's banner.

The Executor was reclining in a chair, sipping at a cool drink of real, not synthetic or artificial, juice when Admiral Smith arrived with her escorts. Three heavy warborgs, one a different style then the rest, an armored Telkan Grave Marine escorting a veiled Telkan Void Captain, two Rigellian females, three Treana'ad, and five mantids. The introductions took a few minutes, but Cu'udchu'ar felt relaxed by the end of it.

There was some light chatting, plenty of curiosity over the different types of Terrans, until finally Cu'udchu'ar rapped his knuckles on the table. Everyone went silent and looked at him patiently. As the host, he was the highest ranking.

"I realize that the Unified Council is at war with the Terran Confederacy," Cu'udchu'ar said. He turned on the holotank, showing the map of Council space. There were dozens of worlds surrounded by slowly pulsing red brackets. "However, Council Space is under attack by the Atrekna. We managed to regain communication with a hypercomm six hours ago."

That got nods.

"Here is the footage I have been able to collate before the meeting," he said.

They all watched silently as news footage of world after world was being attacked. Over a third of the worlds the Atrekna were making planetary assaults with no assets in the system.

"I have considered what we know with what we are seeing," the Executor said. He had declined to give his name, apologizing that since the battle, he could no longer remember it. His only name, even close, that he could remember was Pu'ublikserva'ant.

"It has long been believed that after the terrible three way war, we Lanaktallan fled into the former Mantid systems," Great Grand Most High Executor Pu'ublikserva'ant said.

He tapped the icons. "Each of these are genesis worlds for the various species of the Unified Council," he said. "I hereby postulate, to all of you, that where we really fled was..."

The pause was so thick with tension you could practically cut it with a knife.

"Atrekna held areas," he finally said. He looked at everyone else. "They are out to seize control of their previous areas and subjugate everyone else."

There was silence a moment.

"This fleet represents the majority of the remaining naval forces of the Unified Council. Entire world's security forces were stripped. Ships that had been in storage for millions of years were even used," Cu'udchu'ar said. "Those worlds have no orbital support and with Terran military operations, the Council ability to rebuild our fleets is extremely limited."

Everyone nodded.

"The only place the Atrekna are facing significant resistance, is the Terran Military Occupation Zones," Pu'ublikserva'ant said. He looked around. "This is why Most High Cu'udchu'ar and I have come up with a solution."

"Combine our forces," the Void Captain said, her voice synthesized by the throat cybernetic visible through her fur. Her face was a suggested shadow behind her black onyx silk veil. "Protect the civilians against the Atrekna."

One of the big heavily armored Terrans leaned forward, looking at the hologram. He poked it with a finger. "Lostek," he said softly. He looked up. "The Atrekna. I would like a briefing on them once this meeting completes. My men, my guns, are at your disposal in the service of humanity, Admiral."

Admiral Smith looked at the massive square headed Terran. "Who were you fighting."

He shook his head. "I no longer remember. Only that the Terran Military Union was winning. Slowly. But we were winning, fighting with the last of Lanaktallan Martial Orders and Mantid Tech-Priests beside us."

Cu'udchu'ar nodded. "Then you will be willing to fight next to us?"

Admiral Smith looked around. "Do all of you agree that I am in charge?"

The Confederate members all nodded.

Admiral Smith looked back at Cu'udchu'ar, took a deep breath, grasped the rope, and jumped.

"Do you need assistance?"

-------

Undrat looked up as the Dread Corporal stood up. Their armor was scuffed and scraped, but the birds of prey on the shoulders and chest had begun to glow with a soft reddish hue.

"They are coming. I cannot fight within this bunker if you are to remain safe," the heavily synthesized voice was emotionless as they turned and moved toward the exit. "I will join the Glorious Half Dead Warbound outside."

Their armor wheezed and hissed as they moved to the door. They stopped and turned to look at everyone in the fighting position of the bunker.

"May the Seven Podlings of Faith and Duty watch over you, brothers and sisters," they said.

Undrat watched as they left, then turned back to his weapon.

If the Telkan Ultion Knight believed that the enemy was coming...

...then Undrat believed they were coming.

He patted the heavy creation engine strapped to the gunner's mount.

Let them come.

He and Madame Three-Eighteen had enough bullets for all of them.