Espial Space Station, Mission Day 11
Mila dragged herself into her quarters, slumping on the edge of her bed. The constant tension in her neck and between her shoulders was evidence of her stressful day. Today felt like the longest day of the mission, which said a lot about the god-forsaken hand-me-down station that she was 'graciously' captaining.
She pressed her fingers to her temples, feeling her headache beat under her skin. Silas had approached her, yet again, begging for her forgiveness. She agreed with herself that she would stay angry at him for terminating their relationship just prior to their mission for the sake of his career. With each plea and sappy love note left on her captain's chair, Mila would rebuff Silas over and over again. Her actions spoke louder than his, telling him that he had made his bed and that he could lay in it, alone.
She sighed, running her hands through her hair. They had been so happy together, and their future looked so promising. If it weren't for this mission, she could imagine them settling down and starting a family. Yet when push came to shove he showed his true colors. And that was that.
A sudden beep interrupted her lamentations. From the second floor of her 'surprisingly' luxurious bedroom, her computer terminal beeped, indicating that she had gotten an email. Heaving herself upright off her bed, she headed up to the loft. Her terminal showed a message from Elias, the Espial's contact with command. The subject line simply read "Further Instructions."
Attached was a file detailing what was to happen next in their mission. Mila nearly let her jaw drop when she read it, barely believing what she saw. Command was asking her crew to do something so outrageous, breaching nearly every ethical code and protocol. The shock forced Mila to sit down to steady her pulse.
She emailed Elias back immediately, telling him that this was much too sudden. She insisted that her crew had nowhere near enough data on the planet to even consider collecting a sample specimen, to which Elias replied that she had no choice in the matter. He played 'the future of their species had to be safeguarded' card and that interplanetary kidnapping was the only way to protect their kind.
Their message chain ended and Mila's concerns were silenced. She sat back in her desk chair, entwining her fingers together, pressing her thumbs together. The science wing had multiple stasis pods for preserving many of the large organisms native to Psi Prime as specimens. Never in a thousand years would Mila have thought that the planet's only genuinely sapient species would become an inhabitant of said pods.
Even if the aliens were unnaturally violent and warlike, she still had a moral and ethical dilemma that she would now be forced to come to terms with. She would have to ignore the specimen's sentience just because of its observed barbaric tendencies.
Mila let out another sigh, feeling like it was becoming her new breathing. She took the steps down from her loft, going back into her bedroom. She stepped up to her wardrobe, rubbing her fingers over the fabric of her captain's outfit. It was coarse and stiff. Everything she had to be in order to operate as a good captain. She changed into the crisp uniform, practically marching out of her quarters.
She was NOT looking forward to the meeting she was about to call.
Rural Iceland, Planet Earth, 2275
It had been a tiresome day.
Such a phrase was once ordinarily reserved for rare occasions by which an individual had a day in which they were particularly unfortunate in their endeavors. But for Marco, tiresome could describe any day since he was forced to flee his home in the central CanAmeriCo to Iceland, of all places.
Of course, in a world spotted with hundred-mile wide craters from bomb blasts or leveled plains from the subsequent shockwaves, one could only count their blessings if they lived in one of the few places not ravaged by war.
As such, Marco didn't complain as he swung his axe down into a log that refused to split evenly down the middle. His next chop sent splinters throughout the air, all just barely missing his face. He exhaled heavily in defeat, his breath puffing out into a white cloud in front of him. He picked whatever useful wood he could carry and headed back into his cabin, located deep in one of the few remaining forests on the planet.
His cabin was a single-story, its size barely totaling a thousand square feet. Marco stacked his firewood with the rest by the fireplace, keeping a few tucked under his arm. He shook the wood splinters from his brown hair as he moved into the kitchen area of the cabin. He placed the three logs into his wood stove, cooking himself a meal of hard-earned ptarmigan. As he mindlessly stirred the stew pot containing his Arctic bird and some root vegetables, the ridiculousness of his situation caught up with him.
He muttered to himself, shaking his head. "I'm living in the twenty-third century and cooking with a wood stove in a cabin in the woods… I couldn't even DRINK half a year ago… Legally…" He pulled back into his thoughts. 'Perhaps such consequences of such devastating global warfare, the regression of society to a primitive state, were destined to be a feature of humankind till the day they ceased to be-'
A noise sliced through the rural silence.
"Huh? The fuck was that…?" Marco mumbled under his breath as he went to the window of his cabin. From the depths of the late evening woods came a sound that crossed between mechanical whirring and low whistling.
And it was getting louder, coming closer.
Marco wasn't particularly academic. He was acceptably intelligent, with good grades in high school and a good amount of common sense. The latter told him that whatever he was hearing could only lead to very bad things if he left the safety of his cabin. He extinguished any desire to go outside and investigate the noise, instead dimming any lights he had on, locking his door, and hiding in a corner where he wouldn't be seen.
His wise plan was soon vanquished when the cabin door was broken down, splintering just like the stubborn logs from earlier. His eyes widened when he saw a figure wearing a suit of exo-armor he'd never seen before. It aimed a light throughout the cabin, no doubt searching for him. Marco drew back further into the corner when he realized his intruder was armed, holding a weapon he could only hope was a tranquilizer gun.
When the figure saw him they didn't hesitate when they fired their weapon straight into his left shoulder. As Marco's vision blurred and darkened at the edges, he could see the figure approaching him with a chillingly collected walk that was wholly alien to him.