"It wasn't supposed to be like this!"
Hermione Anne Potter didn't know who had said that amidst the chaos on the ship's bridge but she couldn't help but agree.
The captain of the Foundation merchant vessel Star Witch had thought this run would be like any of the dozens of others she had made between Sol and Calvera. The neutron star was located some two hundred light-years from Earth and was the site of the Stellar Alliance's first and still largest mining base for natural element zero, founded nearly two centuries earlier in the first years following the discovery of eezo.
Instead, the moment humanity had feared and awaited had come. While her ship was in FTL on the two hour journey to the mining colony, real, honest-to-God aliens had turned up at the outskirts of the Calvera system. They had accelerated in slowly with their large lumbering vessel, ignoring any and all communications from the base or the prospecting boats until the base commander panicked when they got within long weapons range of the people he was paid to protect. He had fired off a warning shot with the base's kinetic weaponry. The backup weapons fired in straight lines and so they were safer than relying on the guided missiles to obey their programming and miss the alien.
The aliens had swerved wildly, obviously panicked. By Alliance standards, the aliens' drive was powerful but less effective, presumably fighting greater inertia. Then it had disappeared into FTL all without a word, leaving behind a mystery that had occupied people across human space. At the time, Hermione had been cursing her bad luck at missing such an historic encounter with actual aliens. She'd wished for them to come back.
A week later, as Hermione's cargo was being checked for the final time before she took the full load of element zero and other precious materials back to the insatiable maw of Sol's industry, a second incursion occurred. Instead of just one ship, there were a dozen, each clearly armed and of a different design from the first. Speculation was already rife that these new aliens might even be a different species!
The comm buoys in the system transmitted back a live video feed as it happened. The aliens moved in, ignoring all signals just as the first group had, and opened fire on the closest prospecting boat on their way to the mining colony. While the civilian boat's enchanted armor was designed for keeping the occupants safe in the cluttered and irradiated system, it had no chance to shrug off even one of the projectiles the aliens had fired, much less twenty of them. The pilot had already been trying to get out of their path but her efforts had been for naught. The boat and its dozen occupants were the first to die.
Shock held back the base commander for a vital thirty seconds, during which the hostile aliens got ever closer, deep into the base's weapons range. Eventually, the aliens got into their own attack range of the base and opened fire again. The base carried far thicker and more capable armor than the boat had. In addition, it was a hell of a lot larger and, though damaged, it survived.
The impact brought the defenders out of their shock and they finally returned fire. Their own kinetic weaponry was stopped by some sort of invisible barrier, reminiscent of the kind of shields that had often appeared in science fiction. The missiles, however, were far more effective. Though some of the missiles were shot down, the majority got close enough and detonated their nuclear payloads. The explosions, shaped by mass effect fields, excited the thin lasing rods into unleashing their X-rays. The invisible beams tore through the thin armor of the aliens like it wasn't even there, unlike the shots from the railguns which rammed into some type of shield short of their targets.
Two of the enemy vessels were destroyed or disabled and the rest were damaged, but their second volley silenced forever the mining base. One by one, they methodically hunted down and destroyed the rest of the prospecting boats. As they did so, Hermione ran. Unfortunately, it wasn't fast enough. Three of the enemy vessels turned to follow, their shots hammering at her rear armor as her pilot tried to dodge and evade their fire. After one of the longest minutes of her life, Hermione Potter, descendant of her famous and still gorgeous namesake, gave the order to activate their FTL despite the battle damage. She just hoped that her great-grandmother had kept the creativity that had helped take the Lily Potter Foundation to the stars. The Stellar Alliance they'd created was going to need all the help they could get.