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The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/ColossalRenders on 2024-11-01 02:44:04+00:00.

Alternative Title: Active Sonar

I'm working on another story in the same universe as We Are Here, but decided I wanted a short break and took an afternoon to write this instead. This has no relation whatsoever to my other stories.

You can picture the aliens however you want. I don’t even know what they look like. 

Numbers: sonar can get as loud as 235 dB. You get permanent hearing damage at 150dB. You can die at 185 dB. Sound attenuates much, much less in water than in air.

“Director! Director, enemy craft detected entering the upper atmosphere over the Pacific!” 

The situation room at the headquarters of the Earth Mutual Defense Organization erupted into a series of exclamations before the Executive Director managed to bring it back to silence. The messenger looked around somewhat abashed, realizing he had interrupted a meeting of the top executives in the EMDO. 

“And I assume by your haste that they have somehow devised a way to avoid all of our anti-orbital defenses?” The Director inquired calmly. 

“Yes, sir! They are using powered descent to stay within the Pacific Blind Zone, where our defenses are the thinnest.” 

“How many?” 

“Ground based observatories report a minimal force of only three ships. Analysis suggests that they are targeting the Pacific anti-orbit laser platforms and missile silos, likely to open the way for a larger force. The details are being sent out over the intranet right this moment.” 

“Very well. You are dismissed. Well, everyone, it seems like this meeting is adjourned. Someone get the Strategic department on the line; meanwhile I’ve got a new situation to attend to.” 

\*\*\* 

Scales-Flash-In-Moonlight felt the dropship tremble. He looked out through the viewport showing the view of a sensor mounted on the outer hull. Plasma lapped at the edge of the view, while in the distance two small but bright specks of light marked the two other ships. 

The comms crackled to life with the voice of the ship’s pilot, Dives-Off-Cliffs. “We’ve been spotted. Prepare for evasive maneuvers.” A klaxon blared throughout the interior of the ship. 

“Our most expensive maneuver yet,” Scales muttered. And it was true. The near-impenetrable defenses of the humans—the very defenses they were tasked with destroying—made landing unwelcome on the planet nearly impossible. In order to stay within the gaps in the human’s planetary defense grid, they had to drop over a 300-km diameter region in the middle of the largest ocean on the planet, which was extremely hard when your ship was moving at 7.8 kilometers per second. It meant burning through an ungodly amount of fuel and propellant, having a small crew, and having the entire cabin be submerged to counteract the acceleration forces, leading to more mass and more fuel and more propellant…

Scales’ people were an amphibian species, meaning he could stay in the oxygenated water for hours on end. It also put him at a significant advantage over the humans by landing in the ocean. 

At that moment multiple points lit up on the dark horizon. Scales felt gravity abruptly change direction as Cliffs threw the ship into a hard bank. He heard a curse muttered by Hides-In-Shadows, their platoon leader. In-water operations were her specialty, not orbit to ground insertion. Even submerged the acceleration was quite uncomfortable for all of them. 

The night sky outside turned into day as a great beam of light cut through the atmosphere, passing just over their ship. That was the humans’ anti-orbital lasers. Luckily, at this range the lasers were firing almost horizontally through kilometers of turbulent atmosphere, making them largely ineffective. Still, it was a terrifying sight, and barely a fraction of a second later a great boom shook the ship as the superheated atmosphere exploded along the path of the laser. 

Noticing another flare along the horizon, Scales zoomed in on the viewport. Barely a second later Cliffs’ voice spoke over the comms again. “Enemy launching interceptor missiles, 15 seconds out!” 

“Fifteen seconds?” Quickly Scales changed to a different feed, provided by telescopes in orbit. On it a small, cone-shaped pointy missile quite literally exploded out of its silo. It was visible for barely a few frames before a white hot plume shot out of its rear and in less than a second the missile had turned in midair, leaving an arching contrail and shooting off into the distance at—”five hundred Gees!” Scales cursed. 

“Preparing countermeasures. We’re not going to make it before the missile gets to us.” 

It has barely been three seconds and Scales was watching as the first stage of the missile extinguished and was detached, instantly disintegrating in the mach 39 winds. The upper stage was glowing white hot, moving towards them faster than the escape velocity of the planet. 

“Deploying decoys for both thermal and radio!” 

The missile sailed closer. The lasers roared like a continuous thunderclap. 

“Seven seconds!” 

The laser swung and intersected one of the other ships. It exploded in a blinding flash into an expanding fireball. 

“Ship down! Ship down!” 

The missile’s second stage thrusters blazed to life. 

“Decoys ineffective! Point defense, Point defense!” 

Point defense railguns began firing a red-glowing continuous line projectiles towards the small dot that was the approaching missile. 

One of the projectiles struck true, disabling the warhead in the missile. The onboard AI detected this and decided to change tactics. 

The missile leveraged its near-infinite delta-v to reorient itself to the closest reentering ship and turned itself into a kinetic impactor. Scales watched as the missile shot clean through the second ship, ending both in a spectacular fireball. 

Cliffs cursed over the comms. 

The laser beam swung again, hitting nothing but air, then blinked out of existence. The thunderclap ended, leaving a ringing sound in Scale’s auditory sensing organs. 

“All clear,” Cliffs reported. Their ship, the last one remaining out of the formerly three-strong force, splashed down on the human’s homeworld. 

Scales just looked out the viewport, now showing a blurry underwater view. 

“Alright, squad, let’s move out. Our target list has just tripled in size,” Shadows commanded. 

\*\*\*

“Everyone!” the submarine captain called out to his gathered crew. “HQ has reported a detected enemy splashdown somewhere in the Pacific Blind Zone, and we have been ordered to locate and destroy them! All crew to stations, let’s go!” 

One of the crewmen sheepishly raised their hand. 

“What do you want, sailor? We are not in school!” The captain said. 

“How are we going to find a single enemy squad in the middle of the pacific?” 

“Why, with the help of the patrol ships, of course! Now let’s get going!” 

\*\*\* 

Scales emerged from their ship into the eerily silent waters. All the wildlife had swam away when they splashed down. He was more than used to it, though, being a veteran just like the rest of the squad. 

“Hey, you scared?” Cliffs teased. “I got us through that shitstorm and I ain’t even scared. A bit of alien water ain’t nothin, and besides, we’re in our element! Those humans stand no chance. Did you know that they use metal shells floating on the *surface* to crawl across the ocean? Pathetic!” 

“Cliffs, shut up and move,” Shadows chided. She then offhandedly commented, “he’s right however, this is the easy part. We just have to sneak up to their laser platforms undetected.” 

“Yes, miss you-can’t-see-me, we know you’re good at sneaking up on people,” Cliffs said. 

“I’m being serious. Now move.” 

“Yeah, let’s go,” Scales muttered. 

The group headed off in the direction of their first target, a laser platform some five hundred kilometers away. 

Over the next six hours, the group traveled silently, occasionally surfacing for air. Along the way, they had several run-ins with the local wildlife, including a school of sharks and a few whales. Scales was at first awed by the size of some of the organisms. The geologically-recent mass extinction event on his homeworld had wiped out most of the marine megafauna. Cliffs had commented that they posed far more of a threat than the humans; that was, “almost none.” 

They were traversing through a nondescript region of water when Shadows motioned for them to stop. 

“We’re 150 kilometers out. Proceed with a low sound profile. They’ll never see us if we are careful,” she spoke in a low voice. 

“They’ll never see us, period. We’re unrivaled in the water. You can’t see nothing, after all.” Cliffs commented. 

Shadows neglected to reply and simply headed on, taking care to minimize the sound from her movements. Scales and Cliffs followed suit. 

For the next hour or so the group proceeded in a tense silence. Scales became increasingly tense as time dragged on. One would-be ordinary encounter with those colossal whales left him quite shaken. He blamed it on the alien waters messing with his biochemistry. 

Shadows suddenly froze. 

*“Enemy ahead. Approximately 100 kilometers. It’s one of their ‘ships.’ I don’t like how close it is to us. Proceed in absolute silence.”* 

\*\*\* 

“Captain, we’ve lost the enemy.” 

“What changed? We’ve been tracking them just fine for the past hour or so.” 

“Dunno, maybe they realized that we’re following them. Or more likely, they saw our surface ship and decided not to take any chances. What do we do now?” 

“Well, what will we do when the enemy turns off the lights? We turn on ...
***
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