Sagmegar - The journey to Jupiter

Tearing the skies

A fast object enters the atmosphere, almost escaping terrestrial radars, which immediately identify the foreign body and begin the EM protocol. Missiles are launched at the ship in order to disable all of its systems. The sky is torn apart by the ship, which at high speed escapes all the missiles. One by one, they are lost in the air, until one hits the other or self-detonates. The weapons were not enough. The ship sets sail towards the horizon, towards the desert that was once New York, and it is now that I enter. I wait attentively for any movement amid the dark and arid desert sky. This entire process has to be meticulously calculated, one mistake and billions of dollars would be wasted. It was finally time. Slowly, I press the trigger. In the corner of my vision I see an object similar to a bullet, I press the trigger of the Sirella launcher, the missile makes a ninety-seven degree curvature and meets the ship.

After confirming that the ship has been neutralized, I get into the truck and head to the accident site.

I have always been skeptical about supposed alien life that a large part of the population inquired about. The last recorded alien sighting, confirmed by the government, was about sixty years ago, when I was just twenty years old. Since then, I'm already halfway through my life. But now, in front of a ship torn apart by bullets and missiles, here I am, staring at the creature that had just crawled out of the remains of the ship. It looked like slime, it didn't have a concrete shape, it seemed to be writhing in pain, but not a sound came out of it. Everyone around me stared at the creature until it took its last breath. That day will forever be marked in my life. A few days after the incident I was summoned by the president of space exploration. That day I was crowned Spatium Atlas Armiger, the thirteenth highest rank for space exploration. For someone who was previously just a space general, this was a huge promotion.

Ten years have passed, I'm sitting in a truck, being driven with sixteen other crew members to the spaceship we shot down before. Through ten long years of research, the government of America managed to fully recover the spacecraft, with the earth's own materials as a small coating, as our weapons were not enough to pierce the central hull of the ship. Another thing we discovered was that this ship can withstand very high pressures. But what most motivated humanity to try to understand this alien technology was precisely the solution to our problem: the ship used gas as fuel. Whatever gas exists as a fuel, a cleaner energy than this will never exist. With this we would be able to further explore other planets in Alpha Centauri.

The ship was in front of me, but now with a more human shape, a more natural shape. Even though I knew this would be a suicide mission, I still had hope. Our mission was to invade the home planet of these aliens and try to capture at least one to understand more about their technologies, which fascinates us so much. A device similar to a tablet signaled the route we would take. We use the aliens' flare to find their "base".

As already understood at the beginning, this ship of alien origin was extremely superior to our spaceships. What stood out most about it was it's supernatural speed. Not even an hour has passed and the ship has already left Earth's orbit, and we're not even using normal speed, the only part that really took time was the takeoff. I feel nothing but fear and curiosity to know what those space creatures really are like. We will be the first men to enter Jupiter.