By The Light Of The Silvery Moon

Author : Clint Wilson, Staff Writer

The thundering blasts of the plasma cannons hammered us relentlessly like meteor-sized fists, as the Zalkanthian war ship maintained its attack position directly outside our cockpit bay windows. There was no escape. Their bizarre hive-mind intellect had outwitted us once and for all. Their battle strategies were better, their technology superior. Our batteries drained, our forward shields almost decimated, we couldn’t take another direct hit and they knew it.

There would be no mercy, there never was. We knew this. So for the next dozen seconds, before the final volley came, I mustered up everything I knew about the Zalkanthians. Truly alien creatures sharing collective consciousness yet showing immense individual ambition, they were our betters in almost every way. But as I said, they were also truly alien, and prone to a truly alien metamorphosis once subjected to the correct stimuli.

You see the one similarity between them and us was that each of our planets contained but a single large moon visible in our own respective night skies, in fact theirs was eerily close to our own Luna in mass and proximity.

And in the same way that so many earthly creatures are affected by the Terran full moon, the Zalkanthians themselves were also greatly affected by their own world’s fully illuminated satellite. And it was an extreme affliction to say the least, one that completely altered those deadly creatures for one lone night each and every month on their home world.

Like most other humans I had never actually seen the phenomenon take place, but I dearly hoped to be able to witness first hand these fierce, numerously tentacled gelatinous beings, as they suddenly collapsed harmlessly into their defenseless vegetative state. The ten or so hour interval would be more than adequate to recharge our batteries and launch a 20 megaton photon cluster into their ship’s engines while we made our jump to light speed.

Knowing full well that every one of the multifaceted telescopic eyes belonging to that enemy command crew were at that very moment monitoring us almost microscopically here on our own bridge I loosened my belt. And as I watched the tips of their plasma cannons heat up to a glowing yellow for the final onslaught, I dropped my federation issue flight pants, hoisted myself up onto the navigation console, and pressed my fat white ass cheeks against the cockpit window.