History

Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer

When the Alphas slaughtered the Charlies, Victor7 logged the incursion in his paper notebook and then meticulously removed all evidence of his tampering from both of their communications systems. The Alpha’s had received ‘intelligence’ that the Charlies were going to sabotage their base for much needed supplies, and when they mounted a pre-emptive strike, the Charlies didn’t know what hit them.

The Alphas had received similar intelligence about the Echo base, the Deltas and the Zulus, and misinformation, coupled with a modification to the stress inducing chemical makeup of the Alpha base rebreathers and food printers, made them an effective tool for reducing the clutter on the pretty blue rock they’d all been deployed on.

When mother arrived, it would be Victor7 and his brothers and sisters that stood as the Apex predators of record. It would be they who had adapted and overcome such that their DNA was most prominent in the population of the world in waiting for the coming children.

Victoria3 infiltrated the Tango and Kilo bases while they were turned away from the sun, the greenhouses safely isolated in the darkness while the rest of the station atmosphere was evacuated in one swift gasp. Safeties overridden, environment suits safely near the airlocks, just out of reach of those who so desperately needed them.

Their records would show an apparent murder-suicide by Tango2, and a drunken act of sabotage by one of the Kilo commanders when the news of her Tango lover’s death reached her.

Soon the remaining bases deployed on this planet will be engineered to eliminate each other, all of them oblivious to the fact that the Victor base had ceased to exist on any of their servers or systems within hours of their awakening. Should anyone scrape through and find any reference to the Victor base and be curious enough to go look, they would only find a crater in the space it had never really been. The Victor team’s invisibility was absolute and several levels deep.

Once the Alphas were no longer necessary in this engineered genocide, they would suffer a catastrophic failure of their fuel storage systems. “And that,” Victor7 chuckled into his helmet, “will be the end of that.”

Victor and his brothers and sisters would then spend the next months unpacking additional clone resources to man the necessary stations, consolidating the equipment and supplies into the active ones, shutting down any they couldn’t easily maintain, and rewriting logs, records and personal communications across all of the bases to make it apparent how dangerous and treacherous they found their deployment to be, and for it to be clear how strong the Victor team must have been to survive when so many others perished.

They would ultimately unpack some of the remaining bases’ clone stock from storage to breed selectively, but only once their engineering team could guarantee Victor-trait dominance. Genetic diversity was an unpleasant necessity, but the Victor lines must be maintained at the highest level of purity possible.

They were brilliant strategists, expert cryptologists, and fabulous story tellers. When mother arrived several genetic iterations in the future, that would be the message, that would be their history, just as they had written it.