Contact Alpha, A story of sci fi fantasy

The Descent

Uncertainty, excitement and a slight hint of panic.

They flow around my brain and its implants.

To me, it is indeed strange.

We are one of the best, the top-of-the-line, the elites among elites. Trained and modified to be absolutely stoic at any possible scenarios. Gone through untold amount of deployments, through countless conflicts and missions. With decades of experience under my belt. Yet here I am. Experiencing panic. Even though just slightly, a tiny bit of panic. It is still strange.

It's hard to believe that just several minutes ago, everything were still going smoothly. With just several standard hailing and docking procedures, and maybe some official greeting on both parties. Everyone thought it was going to be another simple escort mission: follow our VIP, put up a barrier around him all the way until he returns to the Sol system, simple enough. We even questioned the decision to pull us out of the front line and shove us into this whole thing. Why bring such an elite force to some random VIP escort mission? Our target is not even someone important. From what I can gather in the mission brief, he is just a governor-in-training. Somehow the higher ups decided to take away such an important asset, us, only to follow some guy visiting a space station.

We all though it would be easy, simply a temporary trip away from the fronts. We thought that we will be back in no time. I have no idea why they would do this. The frontline is practically on the opposite end of the space humanity currently control. I do understand that only a few SF, Delta Six included, are qualified for anything alien related however, so that's one reason for choosing us. But still it's not like we were actually going to land on this planet anytime soon. They said we will only observe from orbit and that is unlikely to change for a while, probably never.

But now I can see why our expertise is needed. How very convenient indeed. None of us would really expect something like this to happen. Just look at us now. Sitting inside an escape pod, entering the atmosphere of an unexplored planet.

Exactly 7 minutes and 39 seconds ago, while we were taking a break in the cafeteria, the station's alarm suddenly goes off. And moments later, the whole thing start to list to one side. Then some loud collision noises were heard, nobody had any idea what was happening. Worse, an evacuation order was set in place, that meant the station was beyond saving at that point. And the next thing we know, the entire orbital platform started descending. After helping the station's personnel evacuate, we tried to look for our VIP. But we couldn't find him, plus the situation was extremely severe so we entered one of the few remaining pods and dropped down as well. And right now we are descending onto a planet. Not just any planets, but a planet with smart aliens on it, of all thing. Every other habitable planets human came across before only had alien animals, not actual sentient intelligent beings. Which means all six of us will be some of the first human to come into contact with sentient alien. I don't know whether to be excited or to be afraid of that fact.

A slight vibration rocks the entire pod, waking me up from my thoughts. I look out of the small circular air tight hole. My eyes can clearly see the dancing yellow flames shifting about on the other side of the reinforced carbon glass. A clear indication that we are indeed, descending down onto the planet's atmosphere from orbit like a meteor. The cold blackness of space is slowly retreating, giving way to a more vibrant, clear cyan-ish blue as it slowly creeps up from below the view of the porthole. It is rather dark in here. With the only light source being the window, our personal lights and the screen in the middle of the pod. Which did not help to ease the feeling of uncertainty.

"Chief, seems like we hit something on the way down. Two directional thrusters are offline." the voice was coming from the man in front of me. He is Talon 4, the Engineer Sergeant of Talon squad, Staff sergeant Shirogane 'Deman' Keiki. Specialization: engineering and demolition. He has a rather obsessive relationship with anything explosive related. Hence the nickname "Deman", short for demolition man. And from his name, you can clearly tell he's from Japan. He is currently interacting with the escape pod's control system via a portable UI pad he always carries with him. A standard issued piece of equipment for soldiers, but combat engineers receive specially modified ones.