Chapter Text
Time - 0430
Location - REDACTED
Date - REDACTED
Uuuuugh. You thought while staring at the ceiling, legs pushing your swivel chair to face anywhere but your work station.This God forsaken shift needs to end, you bring your hands up to your face, giving your sore eyes a soft rub before turning back to your screen. You glance at the document you’ve been working on for the last three hours while waiting for shift change to come faster. The night shifts were never easy. Even back when you were just a lower enlisted soldier, you had a love-hate relationship for them. Intel was slower than on day shifts, that much was certain. But night shifts had a knack for making you lose your sense of time. That, and no one liked trying to sleep with light seeping through the blankets hung around a bunk in a poor attempt to block out sunlight.
You, Atlas Rose, had just recently graduated Officer Candidate School after spending the first four years of your military career as a meer enlisted soldier. The transition was weird. Unlike many of the other candidates you went to school with, you were one of the few who was coming from the enlisted side– most were ROTC cadets coming out of college. Not only did you already have the needed discipline and knowledge of the Army, you were also one of the few who was occupation qualified. You had spent years working as an intelligence analyst, became an NCO, and led soldiers before becoming an officer.
These other candidates had not. They had no real idea of what the Army would ask of them. And they had no idea of the responsibilities they would soon be tasked with.
You knew going into school that you would remain as an intelligence officer– you wouldn’t have gone if you hadn’t been allowed to remain working in intel. But what you didn’t expect was being thrusted right into a deployment rotation only a month after getting to your new unit.
The good news was that this wasn’t your first deployment– your first was when you were only nineteen, just six months after getting to your unit. The bad news is that you’re the brand new Second Lieutenant on a deployment with soldiers you don’t know.
The tension between you and your new soldiers was painfully obvious– there’s a reputation around officers in the Army for a reason. Most officers aren’t specialized in a military occupation. Most are those Cadets in college who only enlisted for tuition, or just random civilians trying to be a soldier without going through the months and months of training. Your new soldiers made it clear that they didn’t fully trust you. And why would they? They didn’t know you went through basic training, they didn’t know you spent nights sleeping in foxholes, they didn’t know that you too wore those shitty issued boots and bled like they did.
This meant you spent the first weeks trying to prove to a bunch of people, not much younger than you, that it wasn’t long ago that you wore their rank. A few months prior you would’ve been here as their Sergeant. You wouldn’t need to explain your certifications or your leadership skills because the chevrons on your chest would have said enough. Now, you’re a twenty-year-old trying to explain that you aren’t stupid and did the same schooling they did.
You stare blankly at your monitor while you recount the last three months. It seemed that once you got on ground, Sergeant mode kicked in, and your new soldiers finally saw what you had been trying to show. You give your head a slight shake while reaching for the energy drink on your desk. My saving grace, you thought as you finished off the can.
“Uuuuhhh…Lieutenant Rose…You might wanna come take a look at this.”
You turn to the work station behind you. Specialist Alvarez– a young signals intelligence analyst, good kid even though he’s a bit hesitant at stating things with authority considering he’s incredible at his job– tosses a worried glance over his shoulder to you. Standing up, you crack your neck and begin to walk over to his station, “Shift change is in an hour and a half Alvarez. How bad is this going to hurt my head and day shifts head, Kid?” You ask with a slight joking tone.
“Quite a bit if I’m not going crazy and you’re seeing what I’m seeing Ma’am.” Alvarez speaks honestly. You’ve appreciated the fact that he’s grown accustomed to you over the past few months. It’s nice to have a normal conversation as if you were a Sergeant again and not an officer.
You heave a sigh knowing that he’s either overthinking and it’s nothing, or you’re going to be here a lot longer than your twelve hour shift, “Lay it on me, Kid.” You say, now standing over his shoulder trying to make sense of whatever the hell is on his screen–you weren’t a signal analyst after all and nothing on that screen made sense.
“Well, to put it simply, I picked up some weird feed coming from one of our local satellites. I looked into some other comm chatter from the other signal guys in other Divisions, tried to see if they knew what the origin was, but they had nothing. Whatever it was we were reading, it was highly encrypted and appeared to be coming from - not our planet.” He stated, trying to figure out how to word that last bit.
What the fuck did he just say? You gave a small stutter before finally saying, “Alvarez, I’m sorry. Did you just say ‘not from our planet’? What the actual shit does that mean?”
He looks back at his computer, then back at you. He takes a moment to choose his next words carefully, “Well, I thought that too when I first saw it. I didn’t believe it at first Ma’am. I sent it over to our Space Force guys, see if they would know what to do with the transmission. That is when they sent me this,”
He turns back to his computer, clicks a few things, and then the unencrypted message pops up– words moving too fast for you to read.
“It’s some kind of SOS message Ma’am, there were some bugs with the decryption process so the words are a bit scrambled. They also sent this with it.” Alvarez makes a few more clicks before a new window pops up on his screen– a photo taken from one of our space assets.
You lean in a bit closer, trying to see what the grainy photo was displaying. It doesn’t take long before you see it. A small, grey, floating pod. Just out there. Clearly not a satellite, clearly not a ship, clearly not supposed to be there.
Alvarez sees you putting the pieces together, he doesn’t feel the need to tell you it’s some sort of pod of some kind. But more importantly, he doesn’t need to tell you that it doesn’t belong to us– whatever it is, it isn’t from the US and you aren’t even sure it belongs to any nation on Earth.
“They’re about to take it all away from me,” Alvarez finally tells you.
You abruptly stand back up. You give Alvarez a confused and concerned look, “Did they tell you why? They can’t just take your system and data without some sort of security breach being the reason,” you state. You can’t imagine having this kid (even though he’s only about a year and a half younger than you) being thrown into some “matter of national security” breach, let alone being the reason it started.
He stares at you for a second, unsure of what to say, “Well, it sounds like whatever it is shouldn’t exist. Enemy tech? Unsupervised launch by some other country with space capabilities? Aliens? I honestly don’t have a clue. But whatever it is, we raised alarms when we found it, and even bigger alarms when someone on the Space Force side decoded it.” He heaves a slight sigh, running a hand over his face, “I just don’t want you to be blindsided by whatever comes next Ma’am. I don’t know what the hell I just did, or who the hell I just pissed off.”
You place a hand on his shoulder hoping to ground him. Alvarez was good at hiding his nerves, you learned that quick after you were placed as his commanding officer. You give another small sigh, almost an exhale of a breath you didn’t know you were holding, “We’ll figure this out, Kid. I’m not letting anything happen to you, not on my watch.”