Love and Aliens
From the private digital space diary of Aubrey Melroy, who was one of the volunteer military personnel on flight BEAMA to planet Selius and back:
We landed on planet Selius right on schedule. This planet was discovered in the year 2035. We finally had the technological advancement enough to get ourselves out to the farthest and oldest galaxy of XN-230.
I was six months from returning home for good, from the military base on planet SR5 when they asked for military volunteers to shoot way out to Selius. They offered us a lot of money, so five of us soldiers and Sergeant Bear accepted.
We were so excited to find another planet that was breathe ready. Usually, we had to wear heavy climate adjuster suits to venture outside the ship.
The temperature there was a perfect 70 degrees Fahrenheit, and the alien flowers released a sweet scent in the air like cotton candy. Thank God there were no insects, alien or otherwise. There have been some real doozies on the other planets. It was so nice to walk through the alien jungle in shorts and a T-shirt. Completely against protocol, of course.
James and I became really close during our six months there. We broke several rules, starting that first night after landing. We went skinny dipping in a fluorescent purple pond and made love on the sparkling green neon sand. Yes, I would say we broke a few contract rules. The other volunteers did not really notice as they were busy breaking rules, too. Joe and Cammy brought some marijuana, so I didn’t think they would tell. Prince and Joe brought a bottle of whiskey.
We were sent to check out a signal that was humming back to home base on Earth from somewhere on Selius. On the third day, we all headed out, fully geared up for anything we might find. We took the tank rover, in case we needed to blow something up. In all honesty, Sergeant Bear Easton just enjoyed standing up at the hatch and barking orders for fun. That man loved to cuss and made up his own bullshit cusswords to amuse himself.
The tracking GPS sent us North and then west. We passed through the thick forest, just barely. The strange alien trees were thin and tall with rough, round swirls in the middle, just like long fingers with calloused knuckles. We named it the finger forest. Then, we road over the green neon sand which made James wink at me, with our secret and all. That made me laugh and Sergeant Bear told me to “shut my shittin’ piehole up!” We all cracked up laughing and I winked slowly at James like I was “bringing sexy back.”
We came to a rocky hill that we could not see over at all. We all got out to look. I’ll be damned if it wasn’t an old rusty spaceship down there, in the middle of a shallow crater. It looked like some retro spaceship from Earth, from a 1970’s B-rated space movie.
Sergeant Bear got his serious look, gnawing on a toothpick as usual. No one spoke for a minute. We all just stared down the rocky slope at it, as the tracker in the tank started beeping like an alarm.
“Can anyone say retro?” Joe asked, grinning in disbelief. Sergeant motioned for Prince and James to go around to the right, to get to the leveled side of the hill. The rest of us went to the left.
Prince got there first and tried looking in a side window. He took out a rag and wiped thick algae off the window so he could see in. The Sergeant looked nervous, shuffling as fast as he could down the sandy slope. He yelled, “Wait, God freak it! Don’t put your shitsquishing hands on nothing!” Prince glanced at us, rolling his big brown eyes and shook his long, shiny black Jheri curl locks.
It was times like that when we knew why his nickname was Prince. He looked just like that short, African American entertainer that we had only seen in pictures and videos growing up. My grandmother always said he was her favorite entertainer. There he was, in front of us, on Planet Selius. When frustrated like he was, just then, he looked like he could break into a rendition of “When doves cry,” I smiled at James, and he knew what I was thinking. He made a flying dove charade with his hands.
We were able to pry the corroded metal door open. “There is no scrubfuckin’ way that this ship made it all the way to this side of the galaxy. This ship would have barely made it to the Moon and back!” Sarge yelped. He was so confused, as were we. He was right! That ship was a piece of junk and flimsy as Hell!
Sergeant Bear sent word to base on Earth and they thought it was a joke. He waited patiently for them to stop laughing. “Oh, you want to see for yourself, jokers?” Sergeant Bear cried huskily, the toothpick threatening to jump out.
So, we patched the video into all our helmets and walked through and around it. It took a while before they responded. “That’s what I thought, assholes!” Sarge mumbled.
Prince and Cammy had found a logbook written in German and we sent pictures of the pages to Earth, right there.
We were right, they said, it was an old German spaceship lost in the 1970’s. A secret mission to a close planet that no one was supposed to know about. The Germans assumed the ship had blown up on impact. But how did it get to a far-off planet like Selius?
“We got news for you, it’s in one piece but you’re missing a couple of the flight crew.” Sarge panned his camera around inside the ship at the two empty, faded, retro looking seats. Joe stuck his head into a camera lens, “They don’t make space seats like this anymore! Look at these seatbelts!” he held one of the ancient looking buckles up to the camera. Earth base was silent for long time.
Suddenly, Chief Barkley’s voice came over the radio from Earth base, “Get your asses back to the home ship now!” We all looked at each other because he sounded scared and that was not a normal emotion for him.
“You heard him! Get your pisspouts back to the tank! Let’s go!” Sergeant Bear barked, spitting a crippled toothpick on the ground. James mouthed “pisspouts?” to me and I bit my lip to keep from laughing.
We rode in the tank back to home ship in silence. Everyone looked nervous. Sergeant Bear chewed viciously through several toothpicks, pitching them in a pile on the floor of the tank. I watched him, thinking he looked like a hangry beaver on a twig diet. I wanted to joke with James who was next to me about it, but even he had a worried look on his face.
Back at our home ship, Earth base let us know that they were working on translating the rest of the logbook. It might take a while; they were waiting for the German Spacenet to get back to them. They said the Germans were still reeling about the ship. They wanted us to bring parts of the ship back, but Chief Barkley said no, as it was safety issue.
“Let them try to go out there themselves, to get the son of a bitch if they want it!” he had growled.
“We still don’t know where the hell that weird signal is coming from! It definitely is not coming from that old hunk of junk Jetson craft! Just get me some damn soil and plant samples out there,” he said with irritation.
The next morning, before any of the other crew woke up in their sleep pods, James and I snuck outside. We took the tank out for a ride and decided to check out that old ship. We knew if Sarge caught us, he would probably kill us.
We walked down to the ship and started kissing. It was romantic, with the alien sun coming up and the purple mist surrounding us. We knew we were being naughty. James yanked my sweater down off my shoulders. I giggled like a schoolgirl and ran from him. He chased me around the old clunk of a spaceship. I tripped on something and fell, scraping my knee on the rocks.
After he nursed my boo-boo with a warm kiss, we looked to see what I had fallen over. He dug it out of the sandy dirt, and we brushed it off. It looked like a fossilized egg, the size of a grapefruit. It was a marbled black and tan color. We wondered what the hell kind of alien bird it had been laid by!
James threw it down, “Nope, we can't take nothing back from here, Sarge said.”
I ran my hands seductively from his chest to his lower back. “Since when do you follow orders?” I whispered in his ear.
We ended up making love inside the ship, on one of the retro flight seats. Afterwards, without him knowing, I slipped the hard fossil egg into my sweater pocket.
The rest of the six months on Selius, no one thought much more about the old spaceship down in the crater. Nobody knew where the signal was coming from. We took more trips out in the tank but found nothing. Now it was Earths problem and we finished up what we had to do. We mined and sifted in dirt and collected some plant and rock samples.
James and I were naughty several more times. More rules were broken but it was almost treated like a vacation. It didn’t even feel like work at all.
James and I planned to move in together back on Earth. We fell in love with each other right there on planet Selius.
That was where Aubrey Melroy’s space diary ended.
Back on Earth and out of the military’s grip, her and James had settled in. One night she woke up screaming in the bed, her face illuminated by the moon light streaming in through the bedroom window. James, next to her, calmed her down and she realized she had been having a nightmare.
“I had a nightmare about the egg we found! I was staring at it, and it cracked open before my eyes. Something was wiggling its way out,” she whispered, her eyes wide. “It was a lizard looking alien, with a row of huge, shark like teeth!” she cried in horror, touching her lips. She was gripping his arm, digging in with her nails.
He pulled her down to him and hugged her tightly. “Thank God we left that damn egg there on Selius!” he said, half joking. She kept silent.
The next night, she got the egg out of her suitcase, where she had kept it hidden from James. She set it next to the bed, on the side table, under the light of the lamp. She checked her phone messages and before she could even read one, James's picture popped up, calling her.
“Hello?” she answered, staring guiltily at the egg. She knew she had to tell him about it.
“Hey, I got a top-secret email today from Sarge. About that old spaceship on Selius.”
Aubrey’s eyebrows danced, “Really?” she said.
“Yea, guess what? You are not going to believe it! The two German officers that were on that old space flight? The logbook was scribbled in by one of them. He wrote that they had both been captured by telepathic lizard looking aliens! Can you believe it? They took the two flight officers to their ship and did horrible experiments on them! Tortured them ruthlessly, he said. The whole anal probe thing, plus jabbing huge needles into them, all over their bodies, all done with no anesthetic!
The one officer wrote that they could somehow hear the aliens talking telepathically to each other. They could hear them say “these creatures who call themselves humans, are evil beings that must be destroyed. We must find their planet, before they get enough advancement in spacecraft to find ours! They will destroy us! So far, they don't have the technology, but soon they will!”
They kept asking the officer’s, telepathically, “where is your planet?” They scanned their brains with hot lasers over and over. One of the officers grabbed one of the alien's weapons and shot at them. According to the officer that wrote in the journal, they stabbed and killed that flight officer. The other one wrote how he got away and ran back to the German ship.
He wrote that he knew he had to disable the ships power, so that the aliens could not track the signals and coordinates back to Earth. The aliens were hell bent on destroying Earth and its technology, he wrote. He set the power grid to self-destruct its whole electrical circuit system in the ship. Basically, suicide for him, with no power to leave that planet or be rescued. The log writing ended there. The aliens must have drug him out of the ship and killed him, too!
So, Sarge said it was lucky that we did not bring anything back from the ship. Also, what happened, did not happen to them on planet Selius. The ship must have been dropped there and staged by the aliens. With the idea that when we finally had the technology to reach their galaxy, they could track a signal back to earth. Sarge thinks the signal we were getting, was to lure us there to Selius.
He thinks they planted a signal and a tracking system in or around the old ship. It could have been planted in anything; really. I am so glad that we did not bring that egg back with us! Holy shit! What if that damn egg was planted there and was a tracking device from the aliens?” James was whispering now, as if someone might hear him.
Aubrey was staring intently with wide eyes at the egg. It had grown a thin crack in it, just like in her nightmare. She was silent on the phone as she slowly walked over to it.
“Aub?” James said with concern. “You there, babe?”
She picked up the egg and took it to the kitchen. With a knife, she wedged the crack the rest of the way open. There was a gray, clay like substance inside of it. She reached down with her hand and kneaded the clay between her fingers, curiously.
“Babe?” James said, with a growing fear.
She felt something small, square, and metal inside the thick, gooey clay. Taking it out, she smeared the clay off the edges of it with her thumb. Suddenly, a bright red light beam started blinking, through the thinly rubbed clay.
“James?” Aubrey whispered into the phone, with a frightened gasp.
Frowning, she slowly walked to the living room window, still holding the blinking and clay covered metal square.
The bright lights of a thousand alien ships suddenly appeared out of the night sky and hovered over the landscape.
“James? I kept the egg,” she whispered.