Friday Flash Fiction (Cycle 48) Falling Up

Friday Flash Fiction Prompt: Use music in a short fiction piece
Genre: Any
Limit: 750 words
Deadline: 9/14/2011 at 8:00 p.m. ET

(Author's note: The Discovery Channel show "Curiosity"recently ran a serious episode with experts in varying fields discussing the possibility of an alien invasion. I have based the story on that episode and my musical influence came from listening to the  "Linkin Park'" song "What I've Done". A video clip from that "Curiosity" episode can be found at the bottom of the story)

Looking up into the sky watching the derelict starship pass over me I realize why the young these days have no idea what the world and Humanity went through sixty years ago and how it utterly changed everything. At best, the only concern they have for the now dead alien ship is its gradually decaying orbit and the attempts by the world government to push it further away from the planet. More than likely, they only see it as some historical remnant associated with their aging grandparents and the boring stories they tell of the era before its arrival.

Humanity is on a different course now, gone are the wars over religion, ideology, and resources. Discounting the titanic efforts by the United Earth Peacekeeping Forces and the economic development teams working to stabilize the various underdeveloped regions of the planet there is simply too few of us left to even consider sliding back into our pre-first contact barbaric ways.

My grandchildren consider me insane for speaking aloud my thoughts on how we got this way, but until the day they finally lower me into the ground I believe we have the squids to thank for Humanity’s second chance. But after what I saw in the final days of the war all those years ago, I keep to myself the even crazier thoughts that it could have been so much better.

***

“The thermal image shows both the port and starboard cannons on the squid tank are dead cold along with the engine Lieutenant Stevens. We have a HEAT round loaded, you want me to light it up?” Specialist Thomas Hunter said to me over the intercom on the Abrams tank I was commanding while looking at the targeting screen. He was my gunner in the last days of the war and we were just outside the ruins of Chattanooga running cleanup operations with the rest of the Second Armored Division.

“No,” I responded, “hold your fire and order Sergeant Rivera to dismount the infantry squad in his Bradley to scout the area. I want to get a closer look at that thing.” A few seconds later, I was out of my Abrams and on the ground walking towards the alien tank.

Despite traveling untold light-years in a six-kilometer long starship the squid’s idea of an armored tank was the same as Humanity’s. It was a tracked vehicle with a rotating turret on the top.  The two visible differences were that the squids had two main cannons on either side of their turrets and that their tanks were made of a stainless steel looking alloy giving it the appearance of a maniacal work of art. In all the years I had been fighting I had never been this close to a squid tank without fearing for my life. M1A2 Abrams tanks and their crews could defeat the alien armored vehicles but it was done on sight and usually from the extreme end of effective range.

Squid tanks were fast and their two main cannons were electromagnetic rail guns that fired off kinetic energy rounds which could punch through the best human tanks like a hot knife through butter. Even with those advantages, the rail guns effective range was less than the Abrams and their armor, despite its appearance, was not all that good. To have one abandoned just a few meters away and completely intact was an opportunity I could not pass up.


Six years before that the squids had entered orbit around Earth and within the space of nine months had come damn close to wiping us out. In the first week, they destroyed every civilian electrical grid on the planet using electromagnetic pulse satellites. A week later, they caused massive tsunamis across the planet wiping out the mass of humanity living along the shore by bombing the oceans with kinetic weapons. The final attempt at genocide was engineering, then letting loose various plagues to kill us off. The result was the human race seemly broken into scattered, isolated pockets and reduced down to a little over two billion people. However, we pulled together somehow and fought back, the result being our own use of  very crude but massive kinetic weapons launched from Earth that destroyed their huge ship in orbit leaving it a crippled hulk.

By that time, the squids had setup forts and small colony towns on the surface and fought viciously to protect them. After the first squid settlements began appearing it didn’t take rocket scientists to figure out that they were guarding what amounted to nurseries for baby squids. But Humanity had lost so much but after we crippled their ship and organized our efforts at resistance on a global basis it just became a question of how long the squids could hold out.

Before their arrival I never considered myself the soldier type, in fact when I thought about it the idea of killing any living creature it turned my stomach. Now after what they had tried to do to the human race and the planet, I reveled in every squid I ran over with my tank. 

Lost in my in my own thoughts while examining the alien war vehicle I was surprised by an adult squid coming out of the destroyed remains of one of their buildings not ten feet away from me. One of its three legs was injured so it’s unusual step by human standards was made even worse. In two of its arms, it carried what was clearly a dead squid larva and it held the smaller creature with a tenderness bordering on recognizable human emotion. In the hand of its third arm it was limply carrying a large machete-like blade.

“Hold your fire!” I yelled when I heard the pounding boots of infantry troops running in my direction. In every encounter with squids, they had treated humans as if we were cockroaches but this one was looking straight at me as if I was an equal. If it had wanted to kill me, it could have long done before it came out in the open. So with a surreal calmness I stepped closer to the creature and took the blade away from it.

“It didn’t have to be this way you sorry bastard!” I yelled feeling overwhelmed as I looked it in the face. “You could have asked for help, any number of nations would have fell all over themselves to assist your people. We could have learned so much from each other!”

The squid fell to its knees, gently laying the small dead creature on the ground. The adult's feeding tentacles at the base of its head were limp, a strange behavior that I somehow attributed to despair. It then looked at me and while they had never once tried to directly communicate with humans, I knew what it wanted.

“Thank you,” I said to the thing knowing that their arrival and actions had utterly changed Humanity forever. Its eyes showed no further emotion or awareness of me but after it lowered its head, I raised the massive blade and brought it down hard across its neck.