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The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/PattableGreeb on 2025-05-11 21:12:44+00:00.

General Ramona Spears had honestly not thought first contact would go like this.

A small, arboreal creature with a long neck and so many prehensile tails it looked like it was staring at Ramona through a veil of leaves clicked and chuffed at her. Its visage was currently displayed on a screen taking up most of the wall in the command center. It was maybe making demands, possibly spouting ideology, or even just having some sort of panic attack.

Is it… Rocking on something? There was some kind of metal bar above it that it was swinging back and forth slowly on.

“So they know how to instantly target and gain access to the most important communication station on Earth… But not how to talk to us.” Ramona looked around, pursing her lips.

The majority of earth’s leaders, military and political, had set up shop at Outward Station. It was the world’s largest communication relay, pointed spaceward. It hadn’t gotten a signal in its entire thirty years of operation. Not until today. Not until they were just about to head out to the stars themselves.

Then these things showed up.

A chorus of opinions and possibly xenophobic statements overtook the room like it was a mess hall at dinner. Ramona started talking to the linguists and scientists instead, with some of the less honorary world leaders cutting in to talk about the future of mankind and work through an existential crisis or two.

They didn’t get very far. The alien on-screen rocked very fast all of a sudden, then made an ear-splitting screeching noise. Ramona was pretty sure she would’ve just started bleeding from the ears if it’d been in person.

“Did it just hang up on us?”

Ramona didn’t see who spoke. She did, however, see the feed switch to a spacebound object. A massive, sleek starship was approaching Earth. It looked to be at least half as big as one of mankind’s best capital cities.

A series of long panels opened up in its sides. The vessel was shaped like a great cone. It began to glow, collecting dim energy of some kind that brightened at the tips like someone was turning up the heat far too much.

Everyone went quiet.

***

Ramona had not needed to volunteer. She was, in fact, told multiple times she could direct the mission more than adequately from the ground.

The scientists had backed her up when she’d told the leaders of the world that this mission would best be executed with key figures leading it in person. There was no telling how communications would or would not break down once they had breached the vessel. It was practically a suicide mission. The amount of energy gathering in the alien craft’s weapons systems was immense. They could very well be cooked alive just trying to get inside.

The plan had been simple. They would use the space-ready fleet they’d been about to launch, with a general for each of several divisions trained in orbital combat, to infiltrate the vessel through the far end of the weapon ports where the least energy was gathered. They’d just have to pray they could find their way to whatever hub served as leadership or critical infrastructure before the firing process was complete.

The launch took hours of nerve-wracking mundanity. Ramona had never been so tense during the prep portion of a mission before. They flew past old war-torn space stations, acting as humanity’s hope and once-in-a-lifetime true universal front.

The flight itself took days. They reached the craft without issue. They were not fired upon.

Ramona was mystified.

They began entering the vessel. Her own ship, the Future Eye Bright, navigated the massive craft’s hull with the only interruption being snatches of garbled signal and video that flashed across the bridge screen with little coherence. She saw great white rooms filled with machines, countless orderly rows of oddly-shaped beds, and the aliens themselves running around and clambering and hanging off things.

Turrets raised at several points. At least, what was assumed to be turrets. They didn’t fire a single shot. In fact, Ramona saw, a dozen different times, a turret raise, then lower, then raise. One had gone so fast doing it that something failed and it got stuck. Some piece of large debris went past as something got dislodged somehow.

None of the human ships fired. At worst, it was some obtuse trap. At best, it was a waste of ammo.

***

Ramona did her diligence. She dramatically deployed hundreds of human soldiers, internally struggling with the fact she’d be sending good men and women to die when they should’ve been off to the stars and a bright horizon. They moved through environments containing complex, esoteric alien machinery, always hearing things skittering in the background, listening to whirs and beeps and steaming for almost a full day.

The scientists and engineers who’d been dragged along saw the most action. At first, hordes of cubic tendril-flailing bots prowled towards them, seeming armed, but behaving more like anxious passersby in a village watching weird outsiders wander into their jungle who they couldn’t do anything about. Alert never dropped, but it stopped feeling so sweat and dread-inducing after the first twelve hours.

They camped in the vessel without so much as a random warning shot their way. The decision to halt was made purely from severe fatigue. There was something in the air that put lead in the limbs despite any filtration and hazard gear they’d brought.

When they finally reached the very center, the command hub, the place where the whole ordeal had truly started, the aliens finally called the machines everyone had started calling “servitors” to their side.

Everything in the room that wasn’t manmade or man-recognizable just stood and stared. After a tense few minutes, dialogue was attempted. It went nowhere.

Ramona grew frustrated. Apparently the aliens sensed that. Some started clambering all over railings, steps, bars and mini-gymnasium structures littering the expansive chamber. She watched them for a while, unsure what to do. She was about to give the order to open fire, with no other clear means of progression.

Then she saw it.

There was a cave painting style image done up in bioluminescent chalk on one of the walls. She realized just how dark it was.

She got a hunch. She hailed the head engineer of her division. “Leland.” She didn’t bother with rank and formality. “Do you think we can get some light in here?”

They’d brought heavy duty combat drones with them. Some of them broke into brightness, shining flood light beams across the room.

The paintings were everywhere. Now that it was bright and Ramona knew where to look, she saw them in every corner, every crevice, on the floor and even on some of the alien drones.

They showed a taller creature that looked a lot like the wide-eyed small ones currently crowding around the room, occasionally making noise fruitlessly in the direction of humanity’s best. The taller figures had their tails around or entwining the bodies and limbs of the smaller ones.

“Ramona?” Leland hailed over comm.

Ramona was almost too stunned to respond. “You’ve got my ears.”

“Those aren’t weapons.”

“Excuse me?”

“They’re massive heat and radiation vents. Ma’am, I’ve been organizing mapping progress results from the other teams and comparing. I’ve noticed a lot of the structures seem highly dilapidated. I don’t think anything here, anything combat-usable at least, has fully functioned for decades, if not longer.”

Ramona was silent for a while.

“Ma’am?”

Ramona ordered a blanket stand down. She watched one of the aliens rock on the bars hanging close to the ceiling. It crouched and made itself small, retreating into the only corner of darkness left in the room. It was the same one, as far as she could tell, that’d hailed them.

She remembered her kids. She remembered praying to God she’d come back to them covered in medals instead of in a casket. She pictured Carson on the monkey bars, on the merry-go-round. Thought of how he’d sometimes hang onto the metal rods like they were a safety blanket when he got anxious or upset.

“Can we reach Outward?” Ramona whispered.

“With a delay, but yes.”

***

He’d needed to stay on the Last Gentle Grasp.

Ramona watched the supply ship slowly descend towards the city of Farsight. Humanity has gotten better with shipbuilding. A careful study of the alien ship’s anatomy hadn’t brought many revelations yet. Lots of what were presumably media archives had worn out and become mostly unintelligible, even accounting for how strangely the aliens already communicated. That was to say nothing of the vast volumes of security machines, medical devices, and life support.

The supply ship let loose some of its shuttles, shedding weight and preparing to touch down. One of the shuttles came towards Ramona where she waited on a bench at a safe, shielded distance from the landing area in Earth’s first true starport.

The boxy shuttle tentatively tested the ground with its support stands before letting them collapse, admitting it’d come home. The side-facing ramp opened.

A small creature walked out. It only went up to Ramona’s chest if they stood side by side. It moved its little body over to her, clad in a bulky safety suit it obviously felt uncomfortable wearing.

It wasn’t perfect. They’d only partially restored the alien vessel’s communications hub. The best they had for now was a little walkie talkie connected to that great conical structure now hanging in orbit in Earth’s quiet blue sky...

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