Author : Moebius

There are six of us huddled together in the pallid, bluish light of the spacious galley. Tense, wiry and sallow. We sit together in a disjointed approximation of camaraderie. I don’t know any of the faces around me and I am afraid to make any connections. Our eyes shift nervously around the room. Not a pair makes contact with any of the others.

The baggy sleeves of my deflated dream suit drags across the scratched steel surface. Chamomile does nothing to calm my nerves. I focus involuntarily on a dent in the table top. It creases and becomes a grimaced snarl. The surface splits viciously open into cruel steel maw that leaps up at me.

She sounds like a very pleasant woman. The synthesized voice over the annunciator instructs us to return to our posts and re-commence our attack. I blink down at my thin, bony fingers on the table, covering up the dent. A face reflects back and it takes a moment to recognize the gaunt, horrified stare as my own.

After you push in and turn the umbilicus connector, the entire socket retracts and the bio-gel starts pumping into the body suit. The others are already in their skeletal frame seats. I prefer to have the serous fluid half inflate before I lock down. A spasm shakes through the woman on my right as she inhales the fluid into her lungs. The hiss of the noise cancellation device mutes all other sounds and the hexagonal room imperceptibly fades into dusk. The floatation properties of the dream suit offer only a brief sanctuary.

My eye balls dissolve into their cranial sockets from the insides of my skull, eaten away by a thousand maggots spewing acid. Flesh dries and cracks, burning puss oozes out, peeling the muscles off my blackened frame, exposing the charred hardened viscera entombed in my rib cage. A gurgling disembodied scream explodes, sending a shockwave of horror through the system.

Infinitesimal pin pricks make biochemical connections that convert the neuro-electrical signals of my nightmares into psychic images that can be broadcast down to the planet’s surface as an aggressive form of gamma waves. Our ship, Namtar, maintains a geosynchronous orbit with the dark side of their world. We have been here for almost a year.

In another year the biological agents will be released to destroy the staple crops and food supplies, and then the economic embargo will start. Only after the third year can the High Command determine if military action is a necessary recourse.

We are merely the first wave of the invasion.