5: Chapter 5 Alien Fleet Invasion

Daniel Kowalski's daily routine always began with a cup of coffee.

Sitting in his chair, he brewed a cup of instant coffee from a vending machine.

He had sat in this chair for five years and had drunk about eighteen hundred cups of this coffee.

Five years ago, when Daniel graduated from MIT with a degree in astrophysics, his mentor shook his hand and said, "Kowalski, you'll be the next Carl Sagan."

Five years later, he was sitting in an underground monitoring station deep in the New Mexico desert, his daily job consisting of staring at white dots on a screen that never moved.

This unit was called the Deep Space Observation Department. Although the name sounded prestigious, it was actually a marginal department outsourced by NASA, a "Kuiper Belt Anomaly Monitoring Project" that didn't even have an official name, only a serial number.

There were seven people in the entire department including him—seven unlucky souls who had been exiled to the desert.

His job went like this: the white dots on the screen represented known, numbered small celestial bodies near the Kuiper Belt that humans had observed ten thousand times before.

His task was to keep an eye on them, ensuring they remained what they were. If a new white dot appeared, it was either a meteorite or a comet.

All he had to do was make a note in the observation log: "On such-and-such date, at such-and-such coordinates, a suspected new celestial body was discovered and reported."

In five years, he had reported eleven times; ten were meteorites, and one was a comet that had already been discovered by the Russians.

That was the sum total of his contribution to human astronomy.

Today was no different from any other day. Daniel propped his feet up on the console, his coffee already cold by the fourth sip.

The white dots on the screen hung quietly against the black background, like a swarm of fireflies that would never wake up.

He pulled out his phone and opened a food delivery app.

Pizza or burgers for dinner?

This question troubled him more than whether the universe had boundaries.

He’d had burgers yesterday, and the day before that. At Joe's Diner, the beef patties were fried harder than shoe soles, but after two years, he had developed a sort of Stockholm Syndrome-like dependence on them.

Maybe change it up today? That new Italian pizza place had a four-star rating, and some said their pepperoni pizza was the best in New Mexico.

The edge of the screen flashed.

Daniel didn't look up, as this was likely just the system's auto-refresh triggered by a minor orbital adjustment of some known celestial body.

This happened dozens of times a month. He lifted his phone a bit higher to block the fluorescent light from the ceiling, carefully studying the pizza shop's delivery range.

The screen flashed again.

Then a third time.

Daniel finally looked up. He rubbed his eyes hard because several red dots had appeared against the black background of the screen.

In this monitoring system's color spectrum, red represented a heat source—a situation that had never occurred before.

He put down his phone, took his feet off the console, and leaned forward, manipulating the satellite to try and capture an image.

Coordinates: Approximately 47 AU from the Sun, at the outer edge of the Kuiper Belt.

Daniel blinked; the count had become twelve.

He reached for his coffee. By the time his fingers touched the paper cup, the count had reached twenty-three.

Coffee spilled onto his pants, but he didn't look down. The count was jumping up at a speed his naked eye couldn't follow.

Forty-seven. One hundred and nine. Two hundred and thirty-eight. Five hundred and twelve.

Red dots covered the entire edge of the screen like some kind of growing mold.

Every red dot represented a heat source. Every heat source represented an unknown celestial body. And they were getting brighter.

"What the hell! Is this piece of junk broken?"

Daniel's fingers tapped on the keyboard, pulling up the optical imaging.

Due to the distance, the image transmission was agonizingly slow. When the image finally loaded, Daniel Kowalski nearly forgot his own name.

Because what was in the image wasn't a swarm of meteorites, but a massive alien fleet.

There were over ten thousand large hulls. Each one was shaped differently, yet they all followed some kind of biological logic he couldn't comprehend.

The closest one had a silhouette like a hybrid of a whale and a manta ray, except its color was pitch black.

He dragged the cursor over; the system automatically measured the distance: approximately one hundred kilometers.

A ship one hundred kilometers long that looked like a living creature was suspended in the void at the outer edge of the Kuiper Belt.

Around it, there were dozens of other equally massive hulls.

They were of various shapes. Some looked like curled-up crustaceans, some like semi-unfolded petal-shaped geometries, and some had forms for which he could find no analogy in known biology.

Surrounding these massive hulls were dense, swarm-like small craft.

Optical imaging couldn't distinguish the individual outlines of the small ships because they were too small and too numerous, merging into patches of grey mist on the image.

But the heat scan penetrated that mist. Every small ship was an individual heat source, indicating they were independent combat units.

Number of small heat sources: 1,247,000

One million two hundred and forty-seven thousand independent heat sources, and the number was still increasing. This couldn't be spacecraft from any human nation; no country possessed such power.

Daniel's fingers hovered over the keyboard, motionless.

A small part of his brain was still trying to explain this using known frameworks.

Was this an instrument failure? After all, this piece of junk hadn't been maintained much in five years. Desert sand had gotten into the motherboard, the sensor arrays had short-circuited en masse, or some relay had failed, causing a data overflow.

But his brain—the one that had studied astrophysics for four years at MIT and had once been told by a mentor, "You'll be the next Carl Sagan"—was screaming at him.

Heat source curves weren't something a malfunction could create. The synchronized movement of over a million targets required computing power exceeding the sum of all supercomputers on Earth.

That wasn't human technology, nor was it any control algorithm a human could write.

Daniel's hand finally dropped onto the keyboard. He hit Enter, prompting the system to scan again.

This time, the count was even higher.

Large heat sources: 17,000.

Small heat sources: 1,830,000

His fingers began to tremble. It was a fear he hadn't felt since graduating, rising from the base of his spine.

The screen before him was displaying the most significant discovery in the history of human civilization—and possibly the last!

Daniel lifted his hand from the keyboard and reached for the red button on the right side of the console.

That button was covered by a transparent plastic shield. He had sat here for five years and had never once opened that shield.

He didn't even know if the shield needed to be pried open with force or if there was a latch to press.

He tried twice, and on the third attempt, he ripped the entire plastic shield off.

The moment he pressed the button, alarms exploded throughout the entire base.

Red warning lights dyed everyone's faces the same color. The sound of running footsteps and shouts echoed in the hallway.

The next moment, the door was burst open.