"16-hour day, huh?"
"We'll get time off soon, don't worry."
"They are letting the others sleep; must be something big."
"Not our problem, kid. Just start the good stuff."
The two clicked around on the screen as they began the hour of violence. This is station security… a list of helmet cams; it's about twenty minutes.
"Who recovered them?"
"I dunno… um, it's tagged in the video info."
"What's that say?"
"Are you sure you want me to check?"
"Yes, yes… don't stress. It's gonna be a long 12 hours if you start."
The young analyst clicked around and pulled up the video info.
The old man yapped, "Captain Owningsburg picked up this info from a corpse… yikes."
Five corpses, three helmets in this group.
"What happened to the last two helmets?"
"Not for us to know, I guess."
"Figures."
"You ready?" The youth didn't wait for the old man to be ready; they started the footage. They had expected it to be barely visible from the radioactive snow that scattered itself across the data. But the first-pass viewer must have had a nice repair software and access to high-definition video.
"This is highdef fo.. Oooooo…."
The video started, and only seconds later they watched a depressing 'guns round a corner' error. Neither of them were CQB jocks, but the term might have been 'flagging' or 'encroachment.' One man with a gun had knelt in the hallway; the other had stood. If they were toy soldiers, it might have worked. Unfortunately, it hadn't; they saw the bullet pass clean through the back of the suit and rupture the atmospheric protection helmet. They paused the video. The kneeler was mid-fall; neither of the other two humans in frame had even reacted yet.
"I guess we gotta flag this as an accident video." The old man was matter-of-fact.
The youth was a little more surprised. "In the ten seconds of film, too… have you ever seen that before? Gosh, glad I never enrolled in any military."
"Yeah, last time I saw something like that I was your age, though. A friend who liked guns was showing me a safety video; never seen it in the wild."
"Some safety video… I'll continue if you got your marks down."
The video continued; the humans in frame were angry and moved to huddle behind the corner. The third living human, who wore the camera, wobbled nervously. Then it vibrated; a flash of light and flame spread across the floor instantly.
"Pause!"
The camera frame jolted unnaturally, panning to the wall on the left all the living clung to. The camera was lifted up and backwards as if the human wearing it was practicing some archaic and exotic yoga stretch.
The camera now fully faced the polished station wall; the video was paused.
"Can you see any reflection?"
"Not really. We can check later, I'll timestamp this…"
"I missed the spot you wanted to pause."
"There was some explosion… but it's within the second. If we timestamp it, it's gonna be the same time."
"Breach, assault, explosion, reflection—all the same timestamp?"
"Guess so."
The video resumed. Another jolt as the camera bashed into the wall. It was clear the operator of the camera was no longer in control of their body. The camera panned backwards, down the hall the doomed humanity must have arrived through. The video paused again.
"Wow…"
"Darn still-life right there."
There was no floor in the station hallway; the camera focused on the buttocks of a soldier previously unseen as they fell backwards through the air… but was there even any air? The station floor panel was occupying the wrong section of the camera; at the top right, where the ceiling was, a poorly viewed void that clearly revealed exterior station architecture showed that the atmosphere must have been fading from the hallway. This helmet was in the middle of the stack of armed humanity; the two comrades behind them were in unfortunate scenarios.
One was bleeding heavily, their atmospheric protection shredded at the neck. Their head lolled sideways and a massive clean gash—as if placed there by some cartoon with a sword—spread across their torso.
"What do we timestamp here?" the youth spoke.
There was a brief silence as the two thought.
"Confirmed breach," the old man eventually said. "We confirmed there was a successful breach, also severe injury of… do we have that guy's name?"
"No, ummm, he's number four; we are watching the camera of number three."
"Typical… the guy falling is number five?"
"Uhh, yeah."
"I guess start the video."
The camera darkened as number five hit the still-existing station floor. He bounced, and within a second the two analysts spotted flame.
"Energy emission as a weapon, oh my goodness," the youth gushed. The old man was silent.
The video resumed. In seconds number five had combusted almost entirely, their durable plastic atmospheric protection melting over their bones. The video didn't pause as the flames began to die and the shreds of atmosphere dissipated rapidly. The camera brightened again.
"That's a rough start, and no raw monster in the camera."
"You think it knows?"
"I'm not normally one to say this, but if it's all gonna be like this, let's skip around a little bit. I want to prepare myself."
They skipped around the videos. Only a few helmet cameras had actually seen the monster. All the knights had seen the monster; the station captain and five marines had spotted the station monster at various points. Only six station security grunts had seen the monster.
"Still though, that's 16 people who got eyes on it? Not bad."
"Probably about how many people died."
"Try to stay positive."
"I don't know how young folks do it. I used to be like that; I miss being happy and young."
"Don't get depressed on me now old man. It's just some video."
"I wasn't always like this."
They saved images over the next few hours.
The first one was from a dead man in the initial video, Station Security #4, as the documentation named him. His camera got a good look at the top half of the monster firing its laser—its laser, an odd little protrusion from its wide head, a "nose" or "rhino horn" where its face would have been if it was an animal. The monster's head was surprisingly flat, almost looking like a bull's where it might bash its skull into an enemy. No horns, though.
The second one was a clear view of the monster's left forearm as it was only a split second away from plunging through another one of the Turlington Station volunteer first responders the way a needle plunges through thread. The forearm was about the size of a fat lady's thigh, though it wasn't quite a forearm.
"It's got like two elbows."
"Not three shoulders?"
They couldn't tell from the image, and the video degraded as the station security team member who wore the helmet was pushed forcefully through the opposite side of the station. Their footage spun briefly before it became apparent the wearer was still alive. The guy spun slowly into space and, with an impressive coolness, checked his vitals and his atmospheric connections—or so it appeared from the footage. Concluding they were safe, their head searched for and briefly tracked the monster as if they were aware the camera was the only effective weapon they possessed. The monster disappeared down one of the deserted hallways in a motion not dissimilar to a beetle racing up a computer cord.
Image three was from Marine Four, who got a good still of the entire body of the machine as it chucked one of his fellow armored men behind its own body. Its head focused ahead down the station hallway away from the storage deck; visual distortions from heat filled the image, making otherwise good detail hazy. It stood in an odd pose, some cross between that of a sprinter on an advertisement. It had just thrown a quarter-ton armored man; the momentum was in the image, but it was hard to see when the image was still. They focused on the proportions of the arms. The two analysts considered a variety of animals. Clearly, its arms were longer than the legs in this shot; it looked like a chimpanzee bowling right here. Its legs and arms were deceptive in some shots; the next few frames showed it explode forward quick enough to damage the station, its leg elongating as if it was a frog, its left arm at the very least recoiling like a turtle folding its flippers back into its shell. But the monster clearly didn't have the leg length of a frog.
"Some sort of quadrupedal monkey."
"Feels good being naturally gifted in war, doesn't it?"
"We are bipeds."
"You seen the species estimation? It's contrived; it's a robot to make it more like us. It doesn't have thumbs naturally; it can't stand on two legs naturally. I would think their idea of a mech suit would be a giant torpedo or fighter jet, not a big gorilla monster."
"Wouldn't it make sense if it wanted to infiltrate human society?"
"You call that infiltration?"
"Maybe its mission went wrong? Maybe it was never supposed to fight."
"Maybe gorillas are just nature's perfection. That's what it looks like, right? Like a giant horned lizard and a gorilla had a metal baby? Maybe with a little turtle or rabbit in there for good measure."
"You don't see a giant spider-cricket with a centipede shell?"
"Those things are creepy…"
"Aliens are creepy. I bet if you take one of those little lizards and shine a flashlight at it at night, his eyes glow like a cat."
"I got cataract surgery before this mission; my eyes do that now."
Work resumed eventually. But the images were all like this: conversation pieces for someone with more money and time. The analysts tried to save those final consumers a bit of time by writing notes and removing unimportant data, as some had done before they began.
Security One got a good look as they were almost crushed by the back of the machine—more spine and armor. It looked like the back of a giant angry centipede from the angle of Security One. Or, as a better identifier, the guy who flagged and shot his comrade. Also the only one of the initial six to live, they had a record that the man was in intensive care from an extreme radiation dose.
The old man had commented on the universe being just. But that was an unprofessional and jaded old man.
Knights One and Two had good close-up looks at the machine. Knight One had almost punched it, the daredevil. Knight One got a good look at the central torso, revealing some sort of ribcage that protected a variety of dark but bulbous forms. Undoubtedly the internal machinery of the robotic menace. But the analysts could not know that for sure. Instead, they took note of a particularly gnarly-looking gash in one of the bulbs.
Sure enough, video from the other two knights, the spacewalkers, confirmed the likely reason. One of the knights congratulated the other on a hit. Careful review of both videos revealed a likely impact at the location of the visible metallic gash.
Marine Three and Four's video confirmed this. Marine Three being dead, their camera placidly recorded the floaty tail of the metal beast as their suit stabilized itself after their death. Rendered in other videos, the unnerving two-step jig of the digital system looked like a sad clown. Marine Three's neck must have broken.
This was chronologically after Knight One, the most inspiring footage by far. The start of their video was almost unusable because they had apparently been staring at a station aperture being cooked to a white-hot radiance, the camera tried it's best to suppress the intense energy it would have been forced to accept. The knight had gotten ready to take the laser directly to the face and, it seemed, got into a bizarre game of chicken with the monster as both blasted away at a door in between them with their respective ranged weapons. Each somehow spiritually aware of the other hidden behind the poor and broken portal that eventually was beaten down by Knight One's angry fist. Only then did the knight foolishly look away for an instant before looking back and coming into hand-to-hand combat with the alien. The jump scare would have fit a horror movie, except the cut didn't reveal a scary face but the plain metal of the alien's shoulder. This armor blotted out the camera and was mere millimeters away from crushing it before the camera ducked below the critter's arm, revealing that the knight had knelt and swung with his clawed arm at the underside of the beast. The fist never connected, their arm failing to grasp the beast as the non-human cast Knight One away as a garbage man flinging trash into his truck.
Knight Two's video was less inspiring: a somewhat better view of how the machine had moved, as well as the notable, (but action free) "video of a screen" that rendered the signatures of the monster on one of those vibratory "listener" sensors used for spacecraft security. This knight's video ended as the monster's tail shattered his camera in that fateful hallway, he was diving for a gun and got to witness the bullets cook off for his trouble.
"This is two events; the monster killed the station security about six hours before the marines and knights fought it…"
"Well, there are a couple of other events. These are just the only good close-ups."
Station security had seen another couple blurs of the monster; one had gotten a good look at it crawling out of the station like a moth crawls from clothing. Most marines saw the monster flee this encounter because only a minute later they were attacked in the same way, the monster breaching the tubelike station hallways through the outside and attempting to rip structure and man alike apart.
Marine Five had the dizzying experience of flipping rapidly into the void away from the station before slowing themselves and eventually being saved by Knight Three. Though this salvation was not part of the "good stuff" footage. This section of footage included marine five being thrown away from the station, a sickening lurch occurred as the tail of the beast filled the camera and the monster kicked him into the void, using the marine as a form of physical propellant to return to the station after what must have been a sort of "tackle" that launched both into the zero G void.
Knight Four had fired the first shot at the beast. The beast seemed to do an odd little alien dance, as if to taunt everyone watching.
"What is that?"
"Looks like a weird automated routine, IDK, but it just looks robotic to me."
"Wait, why does Security Number Ten's footage end?"
"Check Knight One; they put him in Marine Three's armor after Knight Two's camera died."
"But Marine Three died."
"Yeah, but we have video of him walking into the shuttle."
"What?"
"His armor at least. Marine Three, the human, is confirmed dead—we can track his bodybag, in video no less. Security Ten walks the suit onto the escape shuttle."
"The knights bypassed the biometric security?"
"I don't know, but they just did, it looks like. By the way, that biometric stuff gets disabled by the user all the time."
"How do you know?"
"I just do."
"IJD"
"You making fun of me?"
"I don't know to be honest"
"idk tbh?"
"Yea..."
The two finally got to Marines One, Two, and Six, as well as Knights Three and Four—the five posted themselves outside the station, each with angles on the hallway and storage deck. Footage of Knight Three and Four was uninteresting here; the marines saw all the action.
Six made a call out. They were watching a bizarre construction float in space below them: two large tanks of gas, bound together with bent rebar. It floated with purpose towards a station hallway.
"A makeshift bomb?"
The marine captain gave an order, and Marine Six shot, and the two tanks exploded.
"I guess so…"
"Tag that. Nobody else but Marine Six saw that."
Marine One and Two had the most cinematic tragedy. They stood above the hallway the monster was ravaging, unable to see into it. Neither fired, presumably for fear of hitting their own, until Marine One ordered the gunship shuttle to shoot the hallway.
"Wait, why didn't Two shoot as well then?"
"That's not for us to judge."
The gunship raked the hallway with fire, and with a blazing fury, the monster erupted from the station, leaping at the gunship—the gunship that had flown as close as possible to the station to minimize the spread of its prodigious cannons. The gun still chattered as Marine One and Two both bore witness to the collision of the robot and their gunship.
The robot was clearly denser; the two rigid bodies were mated, revolving around the monster. Bullets from the still-firing gun walked up the station in an instant. Marine One saw Marine Two get hit with not just one, but three bullets. Marine One looked for cover, and hauntingly, so did Marine Two. Neither reacted until a full half-second after the first bullet would have pulverized a leg.
The marine shuttle, only visible to these two, began to accelerate away, the scream of the pilot audible in every video so far. Marine One realized they needed to shoot back and, discarding their weapon, they grabbed the anti-materiel rifle from Marine Two, whose body was failing severely, having been penetrated first by three high-caliber rounds from the gunship and now by the void of space, to say nothing of the radiological disaster that was prickling the footage. Marine One aimed but struggled to fire the weapon, forgetting to initialize or disable some setting. By the time they set it, the camera was not good enough to render the shuttle, somewhere off in the void.
"What a terrible omen…"
"Yeah… we should eat, I think we forgot."
"I dare you to send it to Bollywood. You could be rich…" The old man wanted a laugh after all the stress.
"They wouldn't take it. Too unrealistic."