"Only 90 seconds footage, sir."
"Is that it?"
"Yeah, but it's good stuff."
The first three seconds were an exterior hull camera tracking an object that grew larger and larger, like a baseball hurtling towards your face. Instead, itripped open something outside the camera's field of view, like some great meteorite crashing into the sea. Debris kicked up metal fluids, free of all atmosphere and structural worries.
The next camera cut to the insides of a lab or, failing that, some sort of reptile lover's den. Terrariums stacked from floor to ceiling along the walls and a big messy desk, full of data, computers and equipment. The empty and swept tiled floor crumpled and scorched under the bulk of the landing object.
Protective shells around the object that had now slowed itself and rested almost delicately upon the broken station floor fell away, revealing what appeared to be some massive, hulking, aggressive metal form.
For a few seconds, it was silent, motionless. There was no audio, but the viewer got the distinct impression of silence from the grainy footage. Then the machine lurched. Its dense shape did not expand as much as one might think it would. It reached up to one of the terrariums, and gently, delicately, with two firm manipulators, it spilled the contents of the little ecological box onto the floor. Seconds passed as grainy artifacts flicked across the screen, and then a few more before the machine, with less mechanical motion but a deadly and violent urgency, turned and barreled straight through a laboratory door as if through a wall of paper.
The next camera was in the hallway, as were the next five. Each camera only held the machine for a few seconds before passing it off to the next. So fast was the machine, so violent its urgency, that it gouged the floor with its claws and cratered the decorative panels along the hallways with its girth as it rounded corners. A singular purpose must have existed in its mind until, just in front of a door that it seemed to wish to reach, it spotted a janitor. Slowed-down footage revealed that the creature did the slightest of double takes upon seeing the janitor, but so fast was it a decision-maker that one could not identify any hesitation or even any loss of speed. Viewers were privy to a brutal assault. The machine, some 1-ton metal badger, accelerated towards the human and, gripping the human's head in its massive metal claw, bashed the skull into the door ahead, denting both. Then, with a calm and patient demeanor, it scooped both eyeballs out of the human skull and ripped the tongue out of the skull.
Grinding both eyes and tongue beneath its heel, and starting the smallest of fires to degrade the biological material, it turned to the little door it was so interested in. The door was secure, reinforced. But, with a practiced cruelty, the machine struck it only twice before it was off its hinges, metal torn and screeching under the fist of the metal demon. The footage ended.
"Jesus, Rochelle, that's our network room."
"It sure is. How did that little bugger know?"
"Little bugger? That thing belongs on the football field."
"Rolling the footage back. You can see him for about three frames and we know it's a he, or we have very good odds." "Look, look, see there, right after the terrarium is broken. You could see him on the shoulder of the machine. He is about 20 pixels large, that should be about 2 inches long. We think we did see the shape of a feather crest on his head, which indicates that he is a he. The flat spot where his horn would be if he wasn't a soldier is also a good indicator. Now, it could just be an artifact of the camera, and these are only a maximum of 26 pixels raw and three frames."
"OK, so the bugger's little. How does he know what's going on at the station? He didn't look around; he made a direct path to that location like an intentioned professional. He knew the minimum amount of time it would take to cut our video feeds."
"Well, it's rather common sense, isn't it? If you destroy the network room, you destroy any hopes of communication. He didn't necessarily know it was ours or that we would receive it; he just knew somebody would receive it and he didn't want that. You know the station's data is technically public, right? The builders had to release it for investors."
"Are you telling me this guy has a corporate sponsor?"
"I didn't say that. I said the information for this station is public, on a technicality."
"Ok, but practically, that's not a normal thing to know. You are just assuming this guy is an OSINT god?"
"Yea, I am. He's not human, and he probably doesn't work alone."
"My question still remains, how do they know?"
"OK, so he knows how to disable communications to the station. OK, he's a 2-inch long lizard. OK, he's got an 8-foot long, 10-feet tall machine of doom that can rip secure doors apart like paper. What's he doing here?"
Eyes were rolled. The question had been dodged with another question. Everyone in the room was too high-speed and low-drag to start an argument about it.
"We think he's an advanced scout. We think they're going to try and invade here." No response…
"This guy is out here collecting intelligence, probing our systems, seeing what happens when we are in crisis mode. No doubt about it."
"So what are we waiting for? Let's get the anti-material and blast him to hell!"
"Hell no, we don't! This is a once-in-a-million opportunity. We think we know who he's working for, but we don't. This could be our huge break and we need to know everything. Think about it: every second of footage we can get on this guy could save potentially thousands in the future."
The room was stone cold.
"Every second that he witnesses any system of ours, he gains the power to kill potentially millions of us. How does the trade-off work?"
Rochelle smiled. "Don't worry, we've done the math. He's going to learn less about us than we learn about him. We are almost certain of that. That little lizard might learn a lot, but he doesn't have the right data pipeline back to his masters."
"Bullshit. You just said we don't know his masters."
"But we know the machine. Copies of it have been filed for patent on our very own planets. It has no data transmission capability."
"Isn't that a huge gamble? He could just hijack, oh I don't know, the comms tower on the station where he's unopposed."
"He's not unopposed. He doesn't know that we are jamming the waves here; he thinks he is." Rochelle paused again. "Suffice it to say that everything we learn about him is going to be many times more valuable than anything he can learn about us. For this reason, it's best for us just to do nothing and see what happens. I remind you we are black operations. We can let this entire station die or blow them all up ourselves. At the moment, he can only hurt himself down there. We have no skin in the game yet, and I'd rather keep it that way." The little man grinned as the decorated elders at the table nodded approval. "Besides, the private sector needs better security anyway. They wouldn't learn if stuff like this didn't happen."
Everybody hated Rochelle. He was an asshole; it's why he was paid more than them.
"OK, I lied. We won't do nothing. Let's get drones on that station. Civilian models, stuff that we can deny. Make sure it can get off the station and we can collect them later. Preferably, we need to get hardware off the station; it has data it isn't transmitting."
Some lackey spoke up: "Remember that little lizard is a professional. He knows he has eyes on him. He's probably been trained to kill anything that looks remotely like a camera. He ripped a tongue out for a reason."
Coffee and similar cocktails were free on the "Red Solstice." Harder stuff was prescription only. Non-users were kicked off, sometimes unceremoniously and without paper trails."