"Captain, something is showing on the radar. It looks...massive."
"Are you sure it's not just a glitch?"
"I've double and triple checked the systems, sir. There's nothing to indicate an issue."
"Hm, pull up the camera feed."
Her fingers stroked the keys, softly caressing them as she inputs the commands to power on the long-range sensor and camera arrays. They powered online, the ancient systems they used coming online. It took a grand total of five minutes before everything was in place and ready. As the transmitted video feed came back, things began to get clear and crisp on their outdated screens.
"Captain...it...it appears to be some kind of a ship."
"A ship!? What? What do you mean?"
"Just look for yourself, sir!"
"Fine, I'm coming down." The comm-link went dead, static crackling before shutting off. Within a few minutes, he found himself in the communications room, bent over a desk, and looking dumbfounded. "How...how in the fucking hell is this even possible?" His people weren't overly advanced, their systems ancient and dust-covered. Their world knew a little about space, but they didn't have the tools of the science to fully explore it. They knew of ships as rockets, upright and phallic. They knew of boosters and fuel, but this thing...this ship...looked nothing like anything they'd ever seen. Even the stories of UFOs coming out of the midwest, generally concocted by some hairbrained ninny wishing for his fifteen minutes, didn't compare to what they saw.
It was massive, a ship roughly the size of a moon. On the video feed it looked gargantuan, they couldn't even cover all of it close-up. The captain turned his attention away from the video screen for only a minute, barking the orders to bring him the direct link to the President.
"Fuhrer Trump," he began, "we...um...well, sir...we have an issue here." Silence on his end, as orders returned through the phone receiver. "Well, sir...it's a ship...yes...about four hours on the other side of our moon...yes, of course. No...no...yes, sir. Whatever you say, sir. I'll mobilize them at once."
"Franceska, mobilize the Space Force. We're being ordered to investigate and bring back anything we can find. It does appear to be still."
"Sir, yes sir." She began to input more commands, her fingernails gracefully sliding along the keys. The orders went out, and immediately the Corps began to mobilize for investigation. Their orders were simple: Eliminate any hostiles, bring back whatever information they could, and try to steer the ship away from its current course of impact with their moon.
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Three days passed since they mobilized, and they were finally within visual range of the target. Everyone was on edge, they didn't know what to expect. What they would find, but they knew they wanted to find something. They'd spent three days aboard their vessel, preparing mentally and physically for what might happen. Their weapons were primed, their hearts and minds set entirely on figuring out what this all meant, what the purpose of the ship actually was, and what it was doing here.
In a few short hours, their anchor points were determined and the advanced group moved out to recon the hull. It wasn't long before they called back, their voices crackling through the comm systems both onboard the ship, in the helmets of their comrades, and back on Earth in the viewing room, where the entire hierarchy of the New World Order watched in great anticipation.
"Entry point identified, mobilize the rest of the crew. We're going in, watch your flanks."
They dropped into the opening in the hull, clearly a broken segment. The charred, crisp edges a clear indication of weaponry far beyond what they could fathom as possible. They dropped in. Immediately things seemed odd, the hole in the hull should make it impossible for there to be atmosphere or gravity, yet they fell straight to the floor. Most of them anticipated it and landed with the softness of their boots touching the floor.
A couple of them landed on their faces, but their protective gear kept them safe from harm. They sprang immediately to their feet, one knee touching the ground. Their comms were silent, they didn't speak for fear something might hear them. Their leader motioned his hand right, and half of them took off down the corridor, while the other half went left. He remained in the center, eyes on both sets. They wouldn't go far, just enough to recon the area. Meanwhile, the second and third groups were coming through the open hull - M16s and other weapons at the ready.
When everyone was accounted for, they split off and began their search of the derelict craft.
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<Intruders detected. Activating Prime Protocol v1.38>
<The Main hull compromised, thermal shielding compromised. Oxygen systems, online. Safety protocol nets in place. Vacuum, sealed.>
<Awaken, Sigma.>
Far inside the ship's core, machines began to whir to life. For the first time in centuries, they turned on. They spun to life, booting up programs so advanced that the people on board, even with advanced computational degrees, wouldn't even begin to understand. The artificial intelligence came online, all sixteen of them, and they began to power up the defensive programs. The main one of those locked away in the containment pod, for their own protection.
He had a bad habit of getting bored, and they couldn't risk his boredom for very long. Now, though, they needed him. The containment pod cracked open in the middle and began to open. As it slid open, the decompression created a slight fog that obscured the thing inside of it. As it pulled open further, though, the mist dissipated. Inside the pod, a silver-hued thing hung suspended by wires hooked into various ports across its body.
Each of them ejected, and his body fell to the floor - hands, and legs extending instinctively to catch his fall. He coughed, spitting up goo that was implanted within his systems to protect them from time and rust. His head tilted back, and he took in his surroundings. The ship was far different than he remembered, dust and dirt covered everything. Even the floor, when he pulled his hands away, left an imprint in the grime. Clearly, the cleaning crew wasn't doing their job.
<Sigma Program active. Powering up the defense grid.>
All across the ship weapons began to come online, cameras and ionized particle cannons turning on the intruders - yet they didn't fire. They weren't there to protect the ship from the lesser lifeforms. They were there to protect the ship from its main defensive protocol - Sigma Prime.
He stood up and flexed his body, the sound of metal scraping along metal indicating his android frame was in need of some repair. He pulled open the chest cavity and peered inside.
<Fusion Core leaking, optimal power performance unavailable.>
<Switching to auxiliary power supply>
Immediately his power intensified, though not to his full capacity. Without his core being properly maintained, and the nuclear fusion that powered his systems working properly, he couldn't reach his full potential. Most of his weapons systems were maintained well, though. He could sense them properly working. His processors computed thousands of times in the space of a second, and he could tell that - other than his leaky core - everything about him was at full functionality.
<Sigma Prime Protocol Initiated. Defensive Grid, online. Proceed with extinction protocols.>
His neon green eyes glowed, and his head canted to the side as he let his sensor arrays take in every inch of the ship. Smirking, he shifted his feet - and in that same moment, his whole body disappeared. Seconds later, with bodies littering the corridors around him, he had his hand on the throat of the Seargent. His body pinned against the wall, and his feet a full four feet off the ground.
His green eyes held the other's, and his vocal processors kicked in. The sounds that came from his mouth were a garbled mess, a thousand languages melded together. The Seargent, struck by fear and defiance all at the same time, spat on his face and cursed him in his native language of English.
Sigma's head shifted to the side, and from that single utterance was capable of extrapolating the entirety of the language.
"Why have you come here with the intent to kill and steal from me?"
The man's eyes widened in shock, and he scrambled for words.
"Where are you from?" Sigma asked.
"Nowhere! I'll tell you nothing, machine!"
"You don't need to tell me anything, I'll find out for myself."
His free hand pulled a nanofilament of wire from the back of his head - and the spike on the end was larger than the wire, but it was intimidating.
"What are you doing to do with that thing, monster?"
"This..." he said, as he jammed the spiked end through the other's skull - formulating a direct link with his brain. He downloaded the information from the fleshbag, and then let his body drop to the ground. A forced lobotomy left him far worse off than his dead comrades. Sigma turned away and looked directly at the camera on the ship.
<Extinction protocol active. Requesting permission to initiated Scorched Earth.>
<Permission...Granted.>
Sigma nodded, and turned - then blinked himself to the maintenance bay. He took a spare core from the shelf and replaced his power source. The broken one, he put in the auxiliary bay - located beneath his main power cell. The radiation it leaked could kill a person in seconds, but to him, it was mundane, inert. He stepped up to the teleporter system.
<Activate teleporter Alpha-5. Coordinates set.>
<Energize.>
His body disappeared as particles split apart and the very matter that made him up was transposed from the ship to the planet. Of course, in such cases as the derelict vessel, it wasn't always accurate. His body reformed a hundred miles above the surface of the planet, looking down on a field barren and desolate. His eyes focused, and he found a single person standing in the field. It was a cliche, fighting someone in a field, but this was the first being on the planet whose power seemed worth engaging with - according to his sensor arrays anyway.
His seven foot, six-inch frame began to rapidly descend. A metric ton of weight rapidly dropping toward the planet, likely to reach terminal velocity in a matter of a second. His body slammed into the ground with enough force to topple a skyscraper, and when the dust settled and the crater that was once a field came into view again, his body sat with one knee pushed into the dirt - and his right hand closed into a fist holding his body semi-upright. His head down, he lifted his eyes.
He was just wondering if the man was capable of surviving a concussive blast so powerful that it wiped out the majority of the field, and turned all the animals and insects to dust - and blew over the potch-marked, abandoned, dilapidated houses that stood on the empty field.
