Good Samaritans
Good Samaritans
By Patrick S. Barnes
©2025 Patrick S. Barnes. All Rights Reserved.
Chapter 1: AGROHERDERS
“You know they might be bad guys, right?”
I knew he would go there, but not this soon.
"We don't know that. You've been watching too many bad science fiction movies." I responded.
“Ok, if they’re not bad guys why are they here?”
Steve and I were having a late dinner and beers at a local bar near the telescope and discussing our new visitors. I thought about his question for a moment and responded.
"I think it's too early to say. They haven't done anything aggressive. Why should we assume the worst?"
"Well, we now know they’ve been out there for at least a week, and they haven’t even said hello.” He responded.
"That doesn't prove anything."
The reports of spaceships began that morning and came in from observatories around the world. Dozens of alien spacecraft were at the edge of our solar system. They were exceptionally large and in many shapes. Spotted a few days ago and thought to be a group of comets it was now clear that we did indeed have visitors in our solar system.
Our observatory, which had been looking deep into another galaxy was adjusted and took its turn viewing them. They had stopped and sat unmoving, just beyond the orbit of Pluto. There were no messages or transmissions from them.
Steve did not stop with his theory, "There's a lot of ships.”
"That doesn't mean anything either. They could be some type of benevolent agroherders."
"Agroherders? Is that even a word?" He laughed.
It was my turn to ask a question.
“Let me ask you this, why does everyone have to think the first aliens we see are a bunch of crazy world eaters?”
He responded with a deadpan look.
“It's human nature.”
I scowled at him.
Steve wasn’t alone in his thoughts. News outlets and social media were awash with thoughts of doom. “Are these visitors the prototypical evil doers from science fiction movies?”
Then he came at me from a different angle.
“OK, consider this. If you were building a new house, would you notice any of the ant hills that you knock over when you are building the house?”
“No, of course not.”
“The ants and their ant hills are insignificant in relation?”
“Sure, I guess so,” I replied quietly fuming.
“Okay, now let's assume you're an advanced alien race and you can travel thousands of light-years with ease. You want resources, food, and places to build your home. Are you going to look out for the ant hills in your way?”
“That’s different,” I replied.
“How is it different?” he asked.
"We're not a bunch of ant hills! We’re an entire planet!" I said exasperated and far too loud which got me a questioning look from the customers at the next table.
“Maybe not to them.” He said looking at me sideways knowing I was getting upset.
We changed the subject.
Chapter 2: INTENTIONS
The alien ships had been moving toward Earth for several days and did so with great speed.
There had been great anticipation building. The aliens were the only conversation taking place in homes, schools, and on social media. “Who are they?” “What do they look like?” “Are they friendly?” The TV ran wild with analysis and theories.
Websites around the world held continuous live streams of the aliens’ approach. Moving maps, star charts, and nonstop footage of space.
I was watching one of these feeds on the day the spaceships passed Mars and every satellite around the planet started exploding.
Military satellites were the first to explode. They were quickly followed by hundreds more every minute. It lasted for hours. There were no signs of weapons use but it was clear who had done this.
I walked to Steve’s office and leaned against his door frame looking in. He was watching the same news reports that the entire building was watching.
"Well, I guess you're right," I said.
He turned away from his monitor, looked at me woefully said, “I wish I had been wrong. Benevolent agroherders would have been just fine.”
Chapter 3: PRELUDE
In the days that followed the destruction of the satellites it was worldwide pandemonium.
Military forces went from standby to active in every country. Marshall law was declared to manage panic across the globe. Humans are at our ugliest when we are scared, and this event took us there on an express bus.
Violence, looting, and mayhem gripped every community. It started quickly. Fear of what was coming drove unstoppable masses to grocery stores which were rampaged, then food distribution warehouses and any stores that were left. Empty shelves and fear then turned neighbor against neighbor and people were shot in the street for boxes of cereal and loaves of bread. When the food was gone general looting and violence were all that was left to the mobs. Many cities and suburbs burned out of control and thousands died.
If the people of the planet had known what was coming, they probably would have treated each other better and prepared for the real threat.
---
When the aliens arrived eight large vessels took positions around the planet while the remainder of the spaceships, several dozen at least, remained at a distance not far from the moon.
Now that they were in orbit, we could see the details of their ships. They were strangely shaped; long tubes held together in a mass. The tubes varied widely in width and length, but many were miles long. Made of yellow and green metal these tube ships, vertically oriented with the tubes facing up and down, made an imposing site.
Myself, Steve and several telescope staff looked at the photographs of the alien spaceships that were being shared.
“They remind me of the pipes of a church organ,” I had said. Several others agreed.
The entire world tried to communicate with them. They never responded.
Before things got worse, I spent a lot of time thinking about Steve's ant hill analogy.
Would I worry about the ant hills populating the ground of my new house? They're just ants, I thought. Insignificant life forms compared to me. Would I really care? No, I wouldn't and that scared me.
Chapter 4: INVISIBLE DEATH
The first attack was on the city of Tianjin, China. Two of the tube ships came out of orbit together. They dropped out of space at high speed, falling as if they were out of control. Then the ships stopped in an instant five thousand feet over Tianjin and simply hovered there.
Underneath them, every living thing in the huge sprawling city died almost immediately. The live video coverage only lasted a few minutes, but it was horrific. No one knew it was a radiation weapon at the time. There was no visible attack that could be seen, but it was there, projected from the bottom of the ships onto the city below. Higher levels than had ever been measured and deadly in moments.
The Chinese attacked them almost immediately with jets, missiles, and nuclear weapons all of them failing to do any damage. Fighter jets fell out of the sky before they could get close enough and the nuclear weapons that were able to detonate near the ships did not damage them.
From Tianjin, the ships moved Northwest sweeping over Beijing and the Chinese countryside before returning to space.
Every living thing the two ships came near died immediately and horrifically from radiation. Those who were able to get to underground shelters were not safe either and quickly succumbed hours later. Over thirty million people died in China that day.
Steve and I sat in stunned silence with others in the telescope’s auditorium as we watched the news coverage. Many cried.
I stared blankly at the television and wondered what I should do. My only family were my parents who lived on a farm in rural South Dakota far from the cities which comforted me somewhat.
Steve, who had no family, turned to me while we sat in the auditorium and whispered.
"Mike, we need to get everyone out of the cities, out of the population centers." He was very serious, unlike his normal relaxed demeanor. Before I could reply he was on his feet and talking to the executive director of the observatory who was nodding quickly as Steve talked to him.
Within moments an announcement was made that everyone was welcome to bring their families to the observatory so they could get out of the city. We were encouraged to bring food and belongings for many days. Our observatory was in the desert eighty miles from Phoenix. We figured any location away from the city was safer at that point. We were half right.
Chapter 5: EVERY FOURTEEN HOURS
Fourteen hours after the first attack in China there was another in New York City. Then fourteen hours after that Mexico City. Every fourteen hours another city, military base, or population center. The gut punches of death poured in and never stopped. Every fourteen hours millions of us were dying.
Everyone at the telescope watched the continued news coverage and were numb after several days. The tears were gone; burned dry by the death totals that didn’t seem real, but they were. We casually listened to the numbers like we were watching a movie.
Each attack took place in the same way. An alien ship would leave orbit, arrive over its target, and then everything below it would die. I won’t go into details on how death from extreme radiation poisoning occurs other than to say it's fast, incredibly painful, and ugly.
Nothing the world's militaries tried affected their ships. Several countries tried placing nuclear weapons in the population centers and remotely detonating them after everyone was dead. Even this was ineffective. The aliens were too far ahead, and their ships were just too tough for 21st-century tech to penetrate.
We tried to surrender. Radio transmissions from every country pleaded for mercy. We offered them anything they wanted if they would just stop. All of it was ignored.
They just kept killing us.
I remembered thinking darkly to myself at the time, “Why should they respond? We’re just a bunch of ants.”
Chapter 6: SCAPEGOATS
It was a weird and desperate time as we watched cities fall waiting to see if we were next. What do you do when the end of everything is coming and there’s no way to stop it?
Human-caused violence across the globe continued unabated and every 14 hours after each attack the world became more unhinged. Several countries fell into total lawlessness and went completely dark with no communication coming from them.
Driven by desperation millions of people looked for "the purpose" of this. It sounds ridiculous now years after. Why would rational people think there had to be a purpose for such an event? The problem during those dark days was that rational thought was in very short supply.
A growing dialogue of hatred focused on scientists. Nothing makes a compelling cause as much as a scapegoat. To the many chaotic and frightened masses, we became the procuring cause of these attacks.
To some, it was our explorations of the universe, space probes, and messages beamed into space that were to blame. To others, it was our unrelenting pursuit of technology. False idols language from the Ten Commandments was used frequently. It didn't matter if it made sense or not, only if it sounded good to the millions of scared people.
Fueled by opportunistic fear mongers, huge groups of people proclaimed the aliens were the end of the world foretold by multiple religions and was due to our technology and avarice.
It was a recipe for destruction.
Chapter 7: SACRIFICE
Most of us were eating dinner on the terrible day that religious fanatics attacked our telescope facility in the desert.
One minute Steve and I were drinking coffee, and watching TV, and the next moment we heard gunshots in the hallway and screaming. Then the cafeteria doors burst open and dozens of them came pouring in, attacking everyone. It was madness.
There were 50 or 60 of them, dressed in black with painted faces. A few were armed with guns, the rest had knives, axes, iron pipes, and all manner of homemade weaponry. They attacked like savages, screaming about killing the bringers of doom.
We tried to defend ourselves with anything we could, mostly cafeteria chairs. I fought using a chair and then my fists until I was knocked down by a crazed man with an iron pipe. My arm was shattered, and he was about to kill me when Steve saved my life.
I had lost track of him during the fight, but when I was on the ground facing my last moments alive, he came out of nowhere. He took the iron pipe from the fanatic and beat him relentlessly. Then he dragged me out of the melee to the side of the room with some others and told us all to run and not stop.
As we ran from the cafeteria, I looked back to see Steve swinging that pipe like a mythical berserker with a sword. He was incredible, bashing one out of action then another, and another. His efforts to fight back had drawn the fanatical mob towards him allowing us to escape the building. It was the last time I saw him alive.
It was pitch black outside when our group made it into the desert and scattered in all directions. Several fanatics saw our escape and chased us into the darkness. I survived by burying myself in sand up to my head and trying not to shiver in the cold while they hunted us.
Hiding in the sand I shook with fear and hypothermia as the buildings burned, and the screams of my co-workers and their families filled the night.
By morning, the state police and national guard had arrived. They were fresh from the anarchy of Phoenix where many more were lost. Our telescope was not the only target. Fanatics around the world were attacking scientists and any scientific institutions in the hopes that the aliens would see this and stop their destruction of our world.
Myself and others who were injured were loaded into ambulances and taken to an army field hospital that had been set up nearby.
Only twelve of us survived the night and most of us owed our lives to my friend Steve Price.
I stayed in the Army field hospital for several days. It was filled with dozens of injured people from the cities where humanity had lost its mind.
My arm was shattered from the attack at the observatory and needed total reconstruction. The military waited a few days until the city of Phoenix was safe enough that I could be transported there for surgery.
The morning they loaded me into an army ambulance for the trip to Phoenix the aliens fell out of the sky over Arizona. I had been in the ambulance only a few minutes when the call came over the radio to get clear of the city. I was heavily medicated with painkillers and strapped onto a gurney in the ambulance but remember the frantic journey driven at top speed to get us away from the attack. We drove south deep into the desert as fast as the military ambulance could go.
It was close. We were clear of Phoenix and the attack area by ninety miles when it occurred, but still received the equivalent of a lifetime dose of X-rays according to experts. We were just happy to be alive.
Phoenix was not as fortunate.
We ended up at another army field hospital in the Mexican desert. There was nowhere I could go since Phoenix was gone and many of the major medical centers in the remaining cities had been evacuated.
I was well taken care of, but my arm developed a terrible infection. By the time I could be seen at an appropriate facility, the only thing left to do was to amputate my gangrenous arm at the shoulder.
Chapter 8: INVADERS REVEALED
Soon after Phoenix all eight of the enormous alien ships left orbit at the same time. Each of the behemoths landed in a different destroyed city. In this case Tianjin, New York, Tokyo, Berlin, Osaka, Montreal, Istanbul, and Mumbai.
They landed without opposition initially. Every living thing in those cities was dead, and the areas were so irradiated that nothing on Earth could approach without dying.
Once on the ground, the mammoth tubular ships unfolded into hinged segments. These openings allowed them to collect the remains of the destroyed cities and resources for their use.
When the aliens emerged, we could see that they resembled their ships. They were brown, elephant-sized tube creatures that shuffled across the ground. They had no faces or limbs that we could see from the few operational cameras.
Slow and lumbering they consumed all manner of debris inside the cities. Metals, wood, plastics, and also the fallen. It was one more crime on top of many.
Eventually, the broken armies of Earth approached as close as they could with heavy radiation shielding and attacked with anything they had left, and it did nothing. Military forces were burned from the sky or cooked in their tanks. It wasn’t even close.
Chapter 9: LIGHTS IN THE SKY
On the fifth day after landing the aliens stopped suddenly, abandoned everything, and boarded their ships in haste. It took hours to close them up and reform them into their original configurations. They were leaving.
Their ships had barely lifted off when the skies lit up from everywhere at once. The source of the light came from space. In several landing areas, night turned into day with so many flashes coming from the sky. Cameras worldwide, cell phone videos from those hiding outside the cities, still functioning CCTV cameras and drones, recorded the next incredible moments.
The aliens, now back in their ships and trying to lift off, answered the light from the sky with orange energy beams fired upward at something.
The huge ships moved slowly, clearly not made for rapid takeoff. Like lumbering beasts stuck in the mud, they clawed their way skyward. Several thousand feet up, just as they looked like they were picking up speed, all the ships were hit with streaks of light from the sky. Each ship was ripped apart and exploded into a ball of fire resembling a small sun. Much later we learned these streaks of light were missiles traveling at half the speed of light.
There was nothing left of the invasion ships except scattered pieces strewn across hundreds of miles of each landing zone adding to the previous devastation.
The dozens of other alien ships in space were another matter.
There was a battle going on out there, near the Moon where the rest of the enemy had parked. Every night for eleven days telescopes and cameras all over the Earth watched as an epic space battle took place. After several days, a clear picture emerged. Our defender was one ship. Just one.
The spacecraft was a simple gray sphere about one mile in diameter. It was small compared to the complex shapes and sizes of the invaders’ fleet. However, this one ship was taking the fight to them every time. Always destroying a few more enemy vessels during each encounter and returning every few hours to hammer them once more. The battle raged and our heroes were relentless.
On the eleventh day, the remaining invaders made a run for it. Their star drives blazed brightly in their quest to escape, but it was too late. Our defender wiped them out and the battle was over.
Chapter 10: HEROES
The friendly alien ship sat in space near the last battle for several hours before finally coming toward Earth. It landed quietly in the Atlantic Ocean just off the coast of Maryland in two hundred feet of water and never moved again.
No one came out of it. No communication. Nothing.
Groups worked for days to get into it without success. Just a giant, grey impervious sphere. Then the color began to fade. The grey becoming more translucent over several days. It finally revealed a spherical ship of green metal underneath. The grey was some type of shielding. Robbed of energy to support it, the shield slowly faded away.
The spacecraft was accessed in due course, and our heroes were revealed. They were not unpleasant-looking aquatic creatures bathed in seawater from wherever they came from. We tried to help and communicate with them for several hours before they died, but tragically, the battle to save Earth had taken all they had. We learned many years later that the ship inside was damaged. Many systems including life support had overloaded to support weapons and shielding. The battle to save us was costly and they paid the ultimate price. We think they had planned to get into the ocean but had nothing left.
As an out-of-work astrophysicist, I was asked to join the teams that worked to understand the alien ship. A friend in the community had heard that I survived the attack at the telescope and her telephone call was the lifeline I had needed.
Our teams worked relentlessly to understand the ship. It was a frightful task trying to make sense of technology we could barely comprehend, but we persevered and got lucky. Four years after the battle we brought the alien ship online and communicated with its artificial intelligence.
Chapter 11: ONE FINAL INSTRUCTION
That was 23 years ago.
Technological advances on Earth have been blindingly fast since then. The ship’s artificial intelligence, a benevolent, friendly being unto itself, runs most of Earth’s functions now. Energy, manufacturing, infrastructure, and even defense.
Our benefactors who we now know are called the Ramm gave the AI one final instruction before they died “Help this planet in any way possible” and it has.
The incredible technology shared by the Ramm’s AI has been beyond our wildest dreams. It allowed us to quickly rebuild our destroyed cities and remove the horrendous amounts of radiation that had poisoned the planet. Most diseases have been cured, and the average human lifespan has gone through the roof. As for me, I have a new biomechanical arm that looks and feels like a real arm. Amazing indeed.
The Ramm’s impact has been not just technological. Their sacrifice has made humanity a little better, I think. Earth lost a lot during the invasion. Perhaps the absolute cruelty of the enemy and the sacrifice of the Ramm have removed our hard edges. There is still evil, cruelty, and strife in the world and the AI is always there lending a helping hand when needed.
The Ramm ship remains off the coast of Maryland to this day. We have restored the gray shielding so that it can be seen in all its power as it was during those eleven days. To honor and commemorate our defenders Earth has made the largest monument ever constructed. It’s a small, beautiful city in the ocean called Ramm and it surrounds the ship. No expense was spared in its construction. The monument city documents the entire event. Its purpose is to teach, educate, and most of all remember that another race, aliens who didn’t know us at all, gave everything to protect our small world. The generosity of the Ramm in their last moments is remembered by all. Ramm Day is a worldwide celebration and remembrance day on Earth.
Today I am in my cabin on the first Earth starship Eleven Days. It is named after the heroic battle that saved our planet. Our small, but powerful ship has its own artificial intelligence built by Earth’s AI. It is our navigator and the second officer of the ship.
While I have many duties on this ship as an astronomer, I am also the record-keeping officer. So, I am documenting this journey with a retelling of the event and the journey our new vessel is on.
Remembering all these past events has been difficult for me. So much loss suffered by all. I still miss my friend Steve Price who would go absolutely bonkers over the spaceship I am riding in. I keep his photo on my desk and chat with him occasionally. His photo sits next to a large desktop ant farm to remind me of that day. I will not forget, Steve.
So where are we going? Over the next few months, we will be going very far, about 520,000 light years. We have contacted the Ramm home world, and they are awaiting our arrival. In the cargo hold of our ship, guarded by an honor guard, are the sacred remains of our fallen comrades who will, after a long and courageous journey, be reunited with their ocean home.
THE END
---
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Patrick S. Barnes lives in Farmville, Virginia where he works as a digital marketing and branding professional. He writes sci-fi short stories and novels in his spare time. Formerly the brand manager for the science fiction network Comet TV, he’s a dedicated sci-fi reader and film buff who believes UFOs are real. He plays right wing on a local ice hockey team and lives with his wife and a roaming band of feral cats.
By Patrick S. Barnes
©2025 Patrick S. Barnes. All Rights Reserved.
Chapter 1: AGROHERDERS
“You know they might be bad guys, right?”
I knew he would go there, but not this soon.
"We don't know that. You've been watching too many bad science fiction movies." I responded.
“Ok, if they’re not bad guys why are they here?”
Steve and I were having a late dinner and beers at a local bar near the telescope and discussing our new visitors. I thought about his question for a moment and responded.
"I think it's too early to say. They haven't done anything aggressive. Why should we assume the worst?"
"Well, we now know they’ve been out there for at least a week, and they haven’t even said hello.” He responded.
"That doesn't prove anything."
The reports of spaceships began that morning and came in from observatories around the world. Dozens of alien spacecraft were at the edge of our solar system. They were exceptionally large and in many shapes. Spotted a few days ago and thought to be a group of comets it was now clear that we did indeed have visitors in our solar system.
Our observatory, which had been looking deep into another galaxy was adjusted and took its turn viewing them. They had stopped and sat unmoving, just beyond the orbit of Pluto. There were no messages or transmissions from them.
Steve did not stop with his theory, "There's a lot of ships.”
"That doesn't mean anything either. They could be some type of benevolent agroherders."
"Agroherders? Is that even a word?" He laughed.
It was my turn to ask a question.
“Let me ask you this, why does everyone have to think the first aliens we see are a bunch of crazy world eaters?”
He responded with a deadpan look.
“It's human nature.”
I scowled at him.
Steve wasn’t alone in his thoughts. News outlets and social media were awash with thoughts of doom. “Are these visitors the prototypical evil doers from science fiction movies?”
Then he came at me from a different angle.
“OK, consider this. If you were building a new house, would you notice any of the ant hills that you knock over when you are building the house?”
“No, of course not.”
“The ants and their ant hills are insignificant in relation?”
“Sure, I guess so,” I replied quietly fuming.
“Okay, now let's assume you're an advanced alien race and you can travel thousands of light-years with ease. You want resources, food, and places to build your home. Are you going to look out for the ant hills in your way?”
“That’s different,” I replied.
“How is it different?” he asked.
"We're not a bunch of ant hills! We’re an entire planet!" I said exasperated and far too loud which got me a questioning look from the customers at the next table.
“Maybe not to them.” He said looking at me sideways knowing I was getting upset.
We changed the subject.
Chapter 2: INTENTIONS
The alien ships had been moving toward Earth for several days and did so with great speed.
There had been great anticipation building. The aliens were the only conversation taking place in homes, schools, and on social media. “Who are they?” “What do they look like?” “Are they friendly?” The TV ran wild with analysis and theories.
Websites around the world held continuous live streams of the aliens’ approach. Moving maps, star charts, and nonstop footage of space.
I was watching one of these feeds on the day the spaceships passed Mars and every satellite around the planet started exploding.
Military satellites were the first to explode. They were quickly followed by hundreds more every minute. It lasted for hours. There were no signs of weapons use but it was clear who had done this.
I walked to Steve’s office and leaned against his door frame looking in. He was watching the same news reports that the entire building was watching.
"Well, I guess you're right," I said.
He turned away from his monitor, looked at me woefully said, “I wish I had been wrong. Benevolent agroherders would have been just fine.”
Chapter 3: PRELUDE
In the days that followed the destruction of the satellites it was worldwide pandemonium.
Military forces went from standby to active in every country. Marshall law was declared to manage panic across the globe. Humans are at our ugliest when we are scared, and this event took us there on an express bus.
Violence, looting, and mayhem gripped every community. It started quickly. Fear of what was coming drove unstoppable masses to grocery stores which were rampaged, then food distribution warehouses and any stores that were left. Empty shelves and fear then turned neighbor against neighbor and people were shot in the street for boxes of cereal and loaves of bread. When the food was gone general looting and violence were all that was left to the mobs. Many cities and suburbs burned out of control and thousands died.
If the people of the planet had known what was coming, they probably would have treated each other better and prepared for the real threat.
---
When the aliens arrived eight large vessels took positions around the planet while the remainder of the spaceships, several dozen at least, remained at a distance not far from the moon.
Now that they were in orbit, we could see the details of their ships. They were strangely shaped; long tubes held together in a mass. The tubes varied widely in width and length, but many were miles long. Made of yellow and green metal these tube ships, vertically oriented with the tubes facing up and down, made an imposing site.
Myself, Steve and several telescope staff looked at the photographs of the alien spaceships that were being shared.
“They remind me of the pipes of a church organ,” I had said. Several others agreed.
The entire world tried to communicate with them. They never responded.
Before things got worse, I spent a lot of time thinking about Steve's ant hill analogy.
Would I worry about the ant hills populating the ground of my new house? They're just ants, I thought. Insignificant life forms compared to me. Would I really care? No, I wouldn't and that scared me.
Chapter 4: INVISIBLE DEATH
The first attack was on the city of Tianjin, China. Two of the tube ships came out of orbit together. They dropped out of space at high speed, falling as if they were out of control. Then the ships stopped in an instant five thousand feet over Tianjin and simply hovered there.
Underneath them, every living thing in the huge sprawling city died almost immediately. The live video coverage only lasted a few minutes, but it was horrific. No one knew it was a radiation weapon at the time. There was no visible attack that could be seen, but it was there, projected from the bottom of the ships onto the city below. Higher levels than had ever been measured and deadly in moments.
The Chinese attacked them almost immediately with jets, missiles, and nuclear weapons all of them failing to do any damage. Fighter jets fell out of the sky before they could get close enough and the nuclear weapons that were able to detonate near the ships did not damage them.
From Tianjin, the ships moved Northwest sweeping over Beijing and the Chinese countryside before returning to space.
Every living thing the two ships came near died immediately and horrifically from radiation. Those who were able to get to underground shelters were not safe either and quickly succumbed hours later. Over thirty million people died in China that day.
Steve and I sat in stunned silence with others in the telescope’s auditorium as we watched the news coverage. Many cried.
I stared blankly at the television and wondered what I should do. My only family were my parents who lived on a farm in rural South Dakota far from the cities which comforted me somewhat.
Steve, who had no family, turned to me while we sat in the auditorium and whispered.
"Mike, we need to get everyone out of the cities, out of the population centers." He was very serious, unlike his normal relaxed demeanor. Before I could reply he was on his feet and talking to the executive director of the observatory who was nodding quickly as Steve talked to him.
Within moments an announcement was made that everyone was welcome to bring their families to the observatory so they could get out of the city. We were encouraged to bring food and belongings for many days. Our observatory was in the desert eighty miles from Phoenix. We figured any location away from the city was safer at that point. We were half right.
Chapter 5: EVERY FOURTEEN HOURS
Fourteen hours after the first attack in China there was another in New York City. Then fourteen hours after that Mexico City. Every fourteen hours another city, military base, or population center. The gut punches of death poured in and never stopped. Every fourteen hours millions of us were dying.
Everyone at the telescope watched the continued news coverage and were numb after several days. The tears were gone; burned dry by the death totals that didn’t seem real, but they were. We casually listened to the numbers like we were watching a movie.
Each attack took place in the same way. An alien ship would leave orbit, arrive over its target, and then everything below it would die. I won’t go into details on how death from extreme radiation poisoning occurs other than to say it's fast, incredibly painful, and ugly.
Nothing the world's militaries tried affected their ships. Several countries tried placing nuclear weapons in the population centers and remotely detonating them after everyone was dead. Even this was ineffective. The aliens were too far ahead, and their ships were just too tough for 21st-century tech to penetrate.
We tried to surrender. Radio transmissions from every country pleaded for mercy. We offered them anything they wanted if they would just stop. All of it was ignored.
They just kept killing us.
I remembered thinking darkly to myself at the time, “Why should they respond? We’re just a bunch of ants.”
Chapter 6: SCAPEGOATS
It was a weird and desperate time as we watched cities fall waiting to see if we were next. What do you do when the end of everything is coming and there’s no way to stop it?
Human-caused violence across the globe continued unabated and every 14 hours after each attack the world became more unhinged. Several countries fell into total lawlessness and went completely dark with no communication coming from them.
Driven by desperation millions of people looked for "the purpose" of this. It sounds ridiculous now years after. Why would rational people think there had to be a purpose for such an event? The problem during those dark days was that rational thought was in very short supply.
A growing dialogue of hatred focused on scientists. Nothing makes a compelling cause as much as a scapegoat. To the many chaotic and frightened masses, we became the procuring cause of these attacks.
To some, it was our explorations of the universe, space probes, and messages beamed into space that were to blame. To others, it was our unrelenting pursuit of technology. False idols language from the Ten Commandments was used frequently. It didn't matter if it made sense or not, only if it sounded good to the millions of scared people.
Fueled by opportunistic fear mongers, huge groups of people proclaimed the aliens were the end of the world foretold by multiple religions and was due to our technology and avarice.
It was a recipe for destruction.
Chapter 7: SACRIFICE
Most of us were eating dinner on the terrible day that religious fanatics attacked our telescope facility in the desert.
One minute Steve and I were drinking coffee, and watching TV, and the next moment we heard gunshots in the hallway and screaming. Then the cafeteria doors burst open and dozens of them came pouring in, attacking everyone. It was madness.
There were 50 or 60 of them, dressed in black with painted faces. A few were armed with guns, the rest had knives, axes, iron pipes, and all manner of homemade weaponry. They attacked like savages, screaming about killing the bringers of doom.
We tried to defend ourselves with anything we could, mostly cafeteria chairs. I fought using a chair and then my fists until I was knocked down by a crazed man with an iron pipe. My arm was shattered, and he was about to kill me when Steve saved my life.
I had lost track of him during the fight, but when I was on the ground facing my last moments alive, he came out of nowhere. He took the iron pipe from the fanatic and beat him relentlessly. Then he dragged me out of the melee to the side of the room with some others and told us all to run and not stop.
As we ran from the cafeteria, I looked back to see Steve swinging that pipe like a mythical berserker with a sword. He was incredible, bashing one out of action then another, and another. His efforts to fight back had drawn the fanatical mob towards him allowing us to escape the building. It was the last time I saw him alive.
It was pitch black outside when our group made it into the desert and scattered in all directions. Several fanatics saw our escape and chased us into the darkness. I survived by burying myself in sand up to my head and trying not to shiver in the cold while they hunted us.
Hiding in the sand I shook with fear and hypothermia as the buildings burned, and the screams of my co-workers and their families filled the night.
By morning, the state police and national guard had arrived. They were fresh from the anarchy of Phoenix where many more were lost. Our telescope was not the only target. Fanatics around the world were attacking scientists and any scientific institutions in the hopes that the aliens would see this and stop their destruction of our world.
Myself and others who were injured were loaded into ambulances and taken to an army field hospital that had been set up nearby.
Only twelve of us survived the night and most of us owed our lives to my friend Steve Price.
I stayed in the Army field hospital for several days. It was filled with dozens of injured people from the cities where humanity had lost its mind.
My arm was shattered from the attack at the observatory and needed total reconstruction. The military waited a few days until the city of Phoenix was safe enough that I could be transported there for surgery.
The morning they loaded me into an army ambulance for the trip to Phoenix the aliens fell out of the sky over Arizona. I had been in the ambulance only a few minutes when the call came over the radio to get clear of the city. I was heavily medicated with painkillers and strapped onto a gurney in the ambulance but remember the frantic journey driven at top speed to get us away from the attack. We drove south deep into the desert as fast as the military ambulance could go.
It was close. We were clear of Phoenix and the attack area by ninety miles when it occurred, but still received the equivalent of a lifetime dose of X-rays according to experts. We were just happy to be alive.
Phoenix was not as fortunate.
We ended up at another army field hospital in the Mexican desert. There was nowhere I could go since Phoenix was gone and many of the major medical centers in the remaining cities had been evacuated.
I was well taken care of, but my arm developed a terrible infection. By the time I could be seen at an appropriate facility, the only thing left to do was to amputate my gangrenous arm at the shoulder.
Chapter 8: INVADERS REVEALED
Soon after Phoenix all eight of the enormous alien ships left orbit at the same time. Each of the behemoths landed in a different destroyed city. In this case Tianjin, New York, Tokyo, Berlin, Osaka, Montreal, Istanbul, and Mumbai.
They landed without opposition initially. Every living thing in those cities was dead, and the areas were so irradiated that nothing on Earth could approach without dying.
Once on the ground, the mammoth tubular ships unfolded into hinged segments. These openings allowed them to collect the remains of the destroyed cities and resources for their use.
When the aliens emerged, we could see that they resembled their ships. They were brown, elephant-sized tube creatures that shuffled across the ground. They had no faces or limbs that we could see from the few operational cameras.
Slow and lumbering they consumed all manner of debris inside the cities. Metals, wood, plastics, and also the fallen. It was one more crime on top of many.
Eventually, the broken armies of Earth approached as close as they could with heavy radiation shielding and attacked with anything they had left, and it did nothing. Military forces were burned from the sky or cooked in their tanks. It wasn’t even close.
Chapter 9: LIGHTS IN THE SKY
On the fifth day after landing the aliens stopped suddenly, abandoned everything, and boarded their ships in haste. It took hours to close them up and reform them into their original configurations. They were leaving.
Their ships had barely lifted off when the skies lit up from everywhere at once. The source of the light came from space. In several landing areas, night turned into day with so many flashes coming from the sky. Cameras worldwide, cell phone videos from those hiding outside the cities, still functioning CCTV cameras and drones, recorded the next incredible moments.
The aliens, now back in their ships and trying to lift off, answered the light from the sky with orange energy beams fired upward at something.
The huge ships moved slowly, clearly not made for rapid takeoff. Like lumbering beasts stuck in the mud, they clawed their way skyward. Several thousand feet up, just as they looked like they were picking up speed, all the ships were hit with streaks of light from the sky. Each ship was ripped apart and exploded into a ball of fire resembling a small sun. Much later we learned these streaks of light were missiles traveling at half the speed of light.
There was nothing left of the invasion ships except scattered pieces strewn across hundreds of miles of each landing zone adding to the previous devastation.
The dozens of other alien ships in space were another matter.
There was a battle going on out there, near the Moon where the rest of the enemy had parked. Every night for eleven days telescopes and cameras all over the Earth watched as an epic space battle took place. After several days, a clear picture emerged. Our defender was one ship. Just one.
The spacecraft was a simple gray sphere about one mile in diameter. It was small compared to the complex shapes and sizes of the invaders’ fleet. However, this one ship was taking the fight to them every time. Always destroying a few more enemy vessels during each encounter and returning every few hours to hammer them once more. The battle raged and our heroes were relentless.
On the eleventh day, the remaining invaders made a run for it. Their star drives blazed brightly in their quest to escape, but it was too late. Our defender wiped them out and the battle was over.
Chapter 10: HEROES
The friendly alien ship sat in space near the last battle for several hours before finally coming toward Earth. It landed quietly in the Atlantic Ocean just off the coast of Maryland in two hundred feet of water and never moved again.
No one came out of it. No communication. Nothing.
Groups worked for days to get into it without success. Just a giant, grey impervious sphere. Then the color began to fade. The grey becoming more translucent over several days. It finally revealed a spherical ship of green metal underneath. The grey was some type of shielding. Robbed of energy to support it, the shield slowly faded away.
The spacecraft was accessed in due course, and our heroes were revealed. They were not unpleasant-looking aquatic creatures bathed in seawater from wherever they came from. We tried to help and communicate with them for several hours before they died, but tragically, the battle to save Earth had taken all they had. We learned many years later that the ship inside was damaged. Many systems including life support had overloaded to support weapons and shielding. The battle to save us was costly and they paid the ultimate price. We think they had planned to get into the ocean but had nothing left.
As an out-of-work astrophysicist, I was asked to join the teams that worked to understand the alien ship. A friend in the community had heard that I survived the attack at the telescope and her telephone call was the lifeline I had needed.
Our teams worked relentlessly to understand the ship. It was a frightful task trying to make sense of technology we could barely comprehend, but we persevered and got lucky. Four years after the battle we brought the alien ship online and communicated with its artificial intelligence.
Chapter 11: ONE FINAL INSTRUCTION
That was 23 years ago.
Technological advances on Earth have been blindingly fast since then. The ship’s artificial intelligence, a benevolent, friendly being unto itself, runs most of Earth’s functions now. Energy, manufacturing, infrastructure, and even defense.
Our benefactors who we now know are called the Ramm gave the AI one final instruction before they died “Help this planet in any way possible” and it has.
The incredible technology shared by the Ramm’s AI has been beyond our wildest dreams. It allowed us to quickly rebuild our destroyed cities and remove the horrendous amounts of radiation that had poisoned the planet. Most diseases have been cured, and the average human lifespan has gone through the roof. As for me, I have a new biomechanical arm that looks and feels like a real arm. Amazing indeed.
The Ramm’s impact has been not just technological. Their sacrifice has made humanity a little better, I think. Earth lost a lot during the invasion. Perhaps the absolute cruelty of the enemy and the sacrifice of the Ramm have removed our hard edges. There is still evil, cruelty, and strife in the world and the AI is always there lending a helping hand when needed.
The Ramm ship remains off the coast of Maryland to this day. We have restored the gray shielding so that it can be seen in all its power as it was during those eleven days. To honor and commemorate our defenders Earth has made the largest monument ever constructed. It’s a small, beautiful city in the ocean called Ramm and it surrounds the ship. No expense was spared in its construction. The monument city documents the entire event. Its purpose is to teach, educate, and most of all remember that another race, aliens who didn’t know us at all, gave everything to protect our small world. The generosity of the Ramm in their last moments is remembered by all. Ramm Day is a worldwide celebration and remembrance day on Earth.
Today I am in my cabin on the first Earth starship Eleven Days. It is named after the heroic battle that saved our planet. Our small, but powerful ship has its own artificial intelligence built by Earth’s AI. It is our navigator and the second officer of the ship.
While I have many duties on this ship as an astronomer, I am also the record-keeping officer. So, I am documenting this journey with a retelling of the event and the journey our new vessel is on.
Remembering all these past events has been difficult for me. So much loss suffered by all. I still miss my friend Steve Price who would go absolutely bonkers over the spaceship I am riding in. I keep his photo on my desk and chat with him occasionally. His photo sits next to a large desktop ant farm to remind me of that day. I will not forget, Steve.
So where are we going? Over the next few months, we will be going very far, about 520,000 light years. We have contacted the Ramm home world, and they are awaiting our arrival. In the cargo hold of our ship, guarded by an honor guard, are the sacred remains of our fallen comrades who will, after a long and courageous journey, be reunited with their ocean home.
THE END
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Patrick S. Barnes lives in Farmville, Virginia where he works as a digital marketing and branding professional. He writes sci-fi short stories and novels in his spare time. Formerly the brand manager for the science fiction network Comet TV, he’s a dedicated sci-fi reader and film buff who believes UFOs are real. He plays right wing on a local ice hockey team and lives with his wife and a roaming band of feral cats.