Accidental Nightmares
Science fiction short
Vu’n watched the aliens, and could not decide whether to be afraid or not.
They had expanded to a second world in their solar system, and were busy terraforming it - crudely - with ice meteors and atomics, stirring up the thin atmosphere over the poles and soaking the khaki sands in countless storms. They reminded Vu’n of the insect hives on Home World, when you touched them the wrong way or released the wrong pheromones at the entrance. Boiling, writhing masses of the tiny insects would spread out, mandibles raised, aggressively seeking for the Something that had disturbed them.
The Council Primix had tried to make contact via the Dream realm first, touching the tiny alien minds where they drifted alone in the scattered darkness of the system’s asteroid belt. Prospectors and scouts, small ships with only a handful of glowing minds aboard.
The aliens went mad, attacked each other, and blew up their own ships.
They did not understand the Dream at first, it seemed. Vu’n and the others had taken the news with grace, and also a touch of disappointment. The Dream was everything, to them.
The Council Primix tried again, this time reaching out to the minds in orbit around the second, red planet. The Dream was open, pleasant, inviting.
The aliens went mad again, and started a civil war on the red planet. Terraforming atomics landed on bubble cities instead of the poles, and glowing, glass-fused sand replaced the settlements they had spread across the world. The endless horde of ships moving between the two worlds slowed, then sped up. The battle intensified, and eventually the one faction was triumphant - or so it seemed, for the atomics stopped falling, and the ships in orbit no longer bore the sigils of the defeated faction. Their blue homeworld was spared the same conflagration, for some reason.
The Council Primix fretted, and considered their options. Clearly the Dream was not as universal as they had though, for the alien minds could not comprehend it. Would they have to reach out and approach them physically?
The glowing atomic scars on the red world suggested that caution would be best.
A plan was devised, and a scout ship was sent to the asteroid belt, where the drifting hulks of the first Dream outreach still spun. Vu’n had watched with naked curiosity as the first tumbling wreck was towed into their scout. The alien technology was crude, metallic and primitive, but the ancient archives were consulted, and the Wise Ones were called forth in the Dream, and in time a single alien ship was restored. It had communication equipment that operated on the frequency of light - an ancient oddity that Vu’n had never even heard of until the Wise Ones crooned forth the history of their own times - which could be used to send messages to other alien ships. Phase two of the plan could be set in motion now.
The Council Primix prepared their message, and recorded it on the restored alien ship. Vu’n stood by and watched as the chosen Primix stood in front of the lenses, and spoke words in both tongues - at least inasmuch as they had been able to decipher the alien one. The dead aliens recovered during the restoration process showed a remarkable physiognomy - bipedal, a near-identical arrangement of limbs and sensory organs, an endo-skeleton of calciums - and aside from their pale, stunted statures they could almost have been considered offspring of the Home World. Vu’n had worked on one of the bodies, gently peeling epithelial membranes and endocrine systems apart, and had marveled at the fact that something so small, with a synapse organ so tiny, could work together in sufficient harmony to build space-faring craft - and even atomics.
The message, recorded on audio and visual channels, was sent in the direction of the orbiting fleet that ringed the second world. There was some initial confusion about how long it would take to arrive - light-based communication was slow, and crude, and prone to an infinite number of interruptions and interceptions - and when the aliens did not respond, concerns were raised.
Had the recordings been done correctly?
Had the alien vessel been restored correctly?
What could be the matter?
Vu’n and the others in the scout ship fretted some more, a rare feeling for them.
The aliens responded by launching a river of atomic missiles at the position where the restored alien craft had been transmitting from. Clusters of ships surged forth from orbit around the red world, and moved to encircle the position. Kinetic and chemical warheads pounded the asteroid field, turning every rock larger than a fist into dust. Their fury was unbridled, and seemingly without end. The light flares of their attack were visible to the naked eye on our research ships, in orbit around the largest gas giant that tumbled slowly through the same system.
Not only was the Dream not reaching them, the attempts at communicating in their own style were also failing - for reasons we could not understand.
We moved the restored alien craft back from the asteroid belt, using our own scout ship to shield it, but something went wrong. Our null fields did not work on the alien craft, and something - some scent, some link, some digital pheromone we did not yet comprehend - remained trailing behind it.
The alien fleet, having pounded the asteroids to dust, gave chase.
At the gas giant, the Council Primix agreed to a change of tactics. Our largest research vessel dropped its null fields, revealing itself in all of its glory. It had been grown in orbit around Home World a few hundred solar cycles before, and had a Dreaming mind of its own. It spoke to us, guided us as we wended through its internal labyrinths, and mumbled sweet nothings whenever we went through the no-light gates that took us from system to system. It was a kind spirit, gentle and wise to the ways of the stars, and we had learned much from it - and it from us - over the years of our beautiful symbiotic relationship.
Her name was Vu’luhu’nu.
May her memory live on with the Wise Ones now.
The alien fleet did not stop their pursuit when she revealed herself. Our attempts to talk to them received garbled responses, first on their own primitive technology, and then again when we tried the Dream one last time. The aliens had something in them now, something new, which kept the Dream from reaching them the way it had done before. They had become blunt, some on the Council Primix reasoned, or hardened like shells around a mollusc, others theorised, and were no longer reaching the Dream.
They brought with them a Nightmare instead.
Atomic fires engulfed Vu’luhu’nu, and she surrounded herself with anti-pockets and static fields and even the Council-sanctioned no-time bubbles from our forbidden past - and yet onwards came the aliens. Black metal hulls vomited forth kinetics, atomics, amplified light, radiation bombs - and for every handful we stopped, twice that number took their place. They were a relentless, frantic, angry hive.
Vu’luhu’nu succumbed, and fell into the gas giant, and sang her songs in the Waking Dream no more. Sadness filled the Dream as we watched and listened to her descent into gravity, and she left us a final note before fading away.
Do not judge them, for they do not understand.
Vu’n watched the sensor screens long after the last notes of Vu’luhu’nu had faded from its mind. They had abandoned the restored alien craft in orbit around the same gas giant, moving away from it to be clear of its strange pheromones, and their own null-fields kept them securely hidden now. The alien fleet was swarming into orbit too, picking over the hulks of their own damaged craft and eagerly recovering the patches of coraluminum that had broken free from Vu’luhu’nu during the assault. What they would learn from the organo-metallic compound, which needed special Dreamers and pheromones to grow correctly, only time would tell.
Why were they like this?
Vu’n watched its own reflection in the sensor screen, seeing black eyes and an up-turned mouth gazing back at him, and had no answers. Its concern was a blue mottling under the grey skin of its head, while the anxiety radiating from its chest painted faint red and orange starbursts across its torso skin.
Vu’n idly wondered if the aliens could also see in the infrared, or if they would be blind to the emotions of the Home World dwellers much like they had been deaf to the Dream. Their eyes were small, and he had seen no infrared receptors when he dissected them, but you never knew with these things. Biology could always deliver surprises.
It would only be a matter of time now before the aliens found the no-light gate hidden in orbit on the other side of the gas giant.
Only a matter of time before they understood it.
Only a matter of time before they used it.
Outside the scout ship, the aliens spotted the restored alien craft, and descended upon it. Vu’n watched the lettering on its side - a name, partially burnt off by the attack that had killed it the first time - and wondered what it had been called. Only three letters remained now, scrawled in dark reds across the once-white hull.
XIN
What would they do when they discovered the alien bodies that had been left aboard, and the dissection labs, and the sample tanks which Vu’n and the others had filled with organs and tissue samples as they studied and tried to understand these curious, violent little bipeds?
Vu’n realised that it was, indeed, afraid.
This is probably going to be my top pick for DREAD 3