Chimera

Chimera

The EF-2 Chimera jolted violently into action, thrusted into the skies by a magnetic catapult. The forested hills of the Ardennes vanished behind me in seconds. The G-force would have been enough to kill me without the protective suspension. Sure, the plane had also a smoother VTOL engine. But it was intended only for landing. When the alarm came there was no time to waste.

The squadron I was part of had been scrambled to interdict an enemy invasion force currently approaching from the Atlantic towards Europe. The High Command preferred to keep the combat as far away from population centers as possible. Thus our objective was to interdict the enemy force over the Atlantic before they could threaten civilian populations.

We were flying at blistering speed and soon enough the land under us vanished. We soared over the Atlantic Ocean which seemed to stretch on without an end. The weather was clear for once. There were no ash clouds nor hurricanes to hold us or them back. That was probably why they had chosen to send a massive invasion force now.

Soon enough our guidance systems advised us to slow down to combat speed and prepare to attack. I could almost see them at the very end of the horizon, hurtling towards us in great swarms. Soon enough the first tendrils of their swarm reached us. They were the scouts, sent forth to alert the main force. Some of the pilots almost felt it was a waste to destroy these dumb drones. They avoided direct combat and always tried to circle back to the swarm.

I sent the impulse to attack into the plane controls. A precisely time burst of plasma shot forth from the plane’s forward cannons, pulverizing a string-like formation of eight drones, their angular forms shattering into debris. Another string of drones tried to turn back but they were too slow. Another burst of plasma evaporated them. Full on combat had broken around me, the rest of the squadron mercilessly destroying as much of the advance drones as they could.

As soon as the plasma cannon’s capacitors had emptied they filled again. The zero-point reactor provided the formidable amount of energy these planes required to operate. The reactor was perhaps the greatest achievement of our reverse-engineering efforts. Nobody could explain how it worked, but it did, sucking endless amounts of energy from the very fabric of the universe. Had our civilization not been forced into a defensive war with no end in sight it would have been a true blessing. Now it was a mere necessity that kept us alive.

After the scout drones came the first wave of the proper attack forces. They were flying octahedrons the size of a car. Their deep grey surfaces crackled with energy. Occasionaly a line or two of deep red pulsed under their surface. They too came in string-like chains, tethered by an electric charge. When they had first invaded streams of these drones had descended upon our cities, slamming into skyscrapers, power plants and hospitals like strings of plasma-charged cruise missiles. But these devices were capable of more than just attacking infrastructure.

I steered my plane sharply to the left to avoid the inevitable barrage of plasma bolts. A string of eight octahedrons attempted to down me with a broadside of plasma shots, but I was faster. As they lined up for attack I shot five of the eight down and dodged the three remaining drones. And then there were eight more, then sixteen, thirty-two, sixty-four…

And we kept attacking them relentlessly, dodging them as they slithered and maneuvered around the sky. A nearby plane was hit by a bolt. A blinding blue flash erupted, the burst of the electromagnetic shield burning itself out as it dispersed the plasma bolt. Another one of those and that plane would be gone.

As we cut through the first line of invaders we were soon greeted by the second wave, then the third. It was a seemingly endless array of polyhedrons, all wrought or grown from the same deep grey material that we had been salvaging for years yet still barely understood. As I cleaned out a trio of cubes which had tried to gun me down with plasma beams I was taken by surprise by a massive tetrahedron that ambushed me from below.

I only barely escaped its attack, a swarm of triangular projectiles which glowed in red. I dove down towards the ocean, the projectiles whizzing past me as I maneuvered. As I started climbing back up for my attack I saw one of planes in our squadron explode. The battle had started to take its toll. I locked one of my missiles on the tetrahedron and once I was sure it could not escape my attack I fired. The tetrahedron tried to counterattack with another swarm but it was too late. I swerved and watched from my rear view as one of the tetrahedron’s sides exploded into fragments.

We soldiered on towards our true goal, clearing out our geometric enemies attacking with algorithmic precision and rigidity. When they had first attack humanity was unprepared for them. Not because they were aliens but because how alien they were.
Before they invaded we imagined aliens with hostile intent and the capability and willingness to completely destroy humanity. Instead we were attacked by these…things. The Moongate had opened and they came in lazily, one wave at a time. At first they took us by surprise. Millions died as they attacked Beijing, Tokyo, New Delhi and Jakarta.

But it did not take long for humans to notice the most baffling aspect of these invaders. They seemed to be as stupid and rigid as the simplest of earth computers. They would pick a target, usually a major city or military installation, and then assault it with mechanic rigidity and stubbornness regardless of their losses. And as soon as we had figured out how to hurt them they had losses, huge amounts of them. Countless swarms had been annihilated by us.

We destroyed the Moongate with nuclear bombs, but then they opened the Venus Portal. Then we nuked that planet so hard it’s athmosphere bled into space. After that they opened a portal somewhere deeper in space where we could no longer reach. And they kept on coming, slowly but steadily, despite us destroying them over and over again. How could an alien civilization develop interstellar or possibly interdimensional travel and use such rigid tactics?

We had been at war with them for 13 years and nobody still understood them. We didn’t know if these things we routinely destroyed were robots, some kind of remote drones or a form of life beyond our understanding. We could take them apart, extract useful technologies, hybridize parts of them with our bits and pieces, but we didn’t know what made them tick. Or why they attacked us and why they weren’t better at destroying us.

People speculated endlessly on their motivations. Perhaps they were to prune the humans, our planet had cried for their help as we polluted it. Maybe that explained their obsession with destroying population centers. Or perhaps this was a form of warfare originally developed against an equally alien enemy. Maybe their culture worshipped death in combat and it was their sole aim. Or they could be combat automatons sent to destroy budding civilizations by jealous forerunners, and the simplistic algorithms were they best ones, carrying no risk of them developing sentience and turning against their masters.

But the most terrifying idea was that they were nothing but simple organisms with extraordinary abilities. A form of life so alien we thought they were machines, something that had been evolving in deep space for aeons. That they were simply cosmic viruses that had infected our solar system. That the fact they went after cities was nothing but a coincidence without meaning. That they had no motivations or the capability to have motivations.

Whatever the truth was they were not talking. Their electromagnetic screams, particle bursts and flashes of light that they used apparently to communicate yielded mathematical patterns, formulas and functions but no meaning. In bunker cities scientists tried desperately to wring out some sense of all the data, but there was nothing but numbers. We did not have the keys to understand them.
In the end all I cared about was killing them. We had cleared the outer ring of attack forces and in process lost about a quarter of our squadron – an acceptable loss considering the importance of our mission.

The invasion fleet had come from what was once the United States, where they had after seven years of war managed to establish a beachhead and open a portal. And so for the past seven years the remaining combined forces of humanity had tried to keep them contained while trying to develop a weapon to turn the tide of the war. We weren’t exactly winning but neither were we winning. It had become a painfully predictable stalemate.

Perhaps this was changing as this particular attack swarm was the largest one in years. But soon enough it would be dealt with it. Our true target loomed ahead of us, a gigantic mothership which was found in the core of every swarm that had attacked us. They had come in varying sizes and shapes. This one was the largest one I had ever seen, like a crystal formation that stretched on for kilometers.

We started tearing into the second layer of the swarm that protected the mothership. Plasma and debris filled the air as we exchanged shots with our geometric enemies. Icosahedrons, toroidal polyhedrons and shard-like amalgations of forms exploded under our fire of plasma and missiles. And in turn beams of energy and swarms of flechettes tore into our ranks. But we had no choice to press on.

And I had the least of choice as I was one of the two pilots who had been given a very special task. I carried the Lance, a weapon designed to destroy motherships. It worked by tearing a rift between dimensions, or smashing quarks apart, or disrupting the superstrings, or causing a localized deletion of information from the substructure of the universe. In other words, nobody knew exactly why it did what it did. It was simply another piece of technology we had managed to develop from studying the wreckage and charred husks of our enemies.

We started to be close enough for the two of us to commence our final attack. I relayed the command to take up the attack formation and started priming my Lance. It took a while to charge up, and during the wait that felt like eternity two more of planes from the squadron were destroyed. There would not be very many of us returning. I saw a swarm of something erupting from the crystalline mothership but it was too late for them. The Lance was ready. I relayed the order to fire and a gigantic column of energy burst out from an oversized cannon in front of my plane.

Something rocked my plane and a flash of blue enveloped me. Something had hit me and my aim was thrown off. The beam did not hit the target completely. It had cut a smouldering gash on the mothership but it would not be enough destroy my target, even as residual explosions further fragmented the enemy ship. I cursed and tried to get a read on what had hit me.

And then I saw it. It was something I had never seen before, something probably nobody had seen before. It’s form was crude yet it was obvious what it was mimicking. It was the last line of defence, or perhaps the first of it’s kind. An alien conception of a warplane, it’s forward swept wings being like two triangular shards, it’s hull a collection of roughly cut polygons. It maneuvered with fluidity that all the other enemy drones had lacked. A chimera designed to kill our EF-2 Chimeras. It seemed like our enemies were learning, adapting, evolving after all. They were just slow at it. But why hurry? They probably had all the time in the universe.

The second plane armed with a Lance finished what I had failed to do, piercing straight into the thickest part of the mothership. The huge energy beam pumped a hydrogen bomb’s worth of energy into it, nearly evaporating the entire ship.

We turned around at full speed. We would not only have to deliver news of our victory, but of the new enemy we encountered. The polygonal enemy warplanes followed in pursuit, spewing out plasma bolts, hunting us with intellect we had never seen before from the enemy. I was hit and my shield had not recharged. As the flames engulfed my plane I hoped someone would survive to warn humans of what was to come.