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captain nodded and his crew got to work.
    T he view of the sun vanished in a flash. A black planet now revolved slowly on the monitor.
    The captain asked, “Is this right? There’s supposed to be a civilization here.”
    The planet beneath them appeared barren and dead.
    The first m ate ordered, “Scour for communications. Find out what happened here.”
    Both of the other crew members got to work fiddling with switches and manipulating holographic displays.
    Within a few minutes one of them said, “I got something here. It’s pretty clean so I think it’s recent.”
    The captain ordered him to play it. It was an audio recording , a distress signal sent from the surface of the planet to a ship.
    The audio issued forth from the unseen speakers on their ship, for them all to hear:
    The Grays have attacked. We’re fighting back but they seem to anticipate our every move. It’s a slaughter, Commander. I fear that by the time you receive this communication, our race will be no more. Come as soon as you can. Our very survival depends on it. Please hurry.
    The transmission ended with a click and a static hiss.
    The captain muttered, “Those fucking Grays. What compels them to do this?” He spoke with sadness in his voice, but also bitterness, and something else too. The captain seemed to know more than he was saying, like maybe he knew exactly why the Grays had done it but he didn’t want Chris to know. Then again, maybe Chris was just imagining things.
    T hen the captain said to the first mate, “Find out if that communication was ever received. Get those coordinates and maybe the mission isn’t a complete loss. If we find that commander, we can take his DNA.”
    The first m ate said, “These people were classified as level two priorities. We might not need them at all if they haven’t evolved since the last time they were scouted.”
    The captain shook his head angrily. “They’ve discovered space travel. That’s significant enough to warrant their inclusion. Do your damn job.”
    The first mate turned and nodded at his subordinates and they got to work.
    Chris asked, “Did the Grays destroy the entire planet?”
    “Yeah, it’s a hobby of theirs. They find a worthy race, infiltrate them to gather intel, and then wipe them out. We have no idea why they do what they do.” Again, Chris imagined he could detect deceit in the captain’s tone when he said he didn’t know the Grays’ motives. If the captain wasn’t a monstrous robotic freak, Chris might have insisted he tell him the truth.
    Instead he said, “There have been unconfirmed reports of Grays on Earth. Does that mean they’re scouting my planet too?”
    “I don’t know. Maybe.”
    If so, there was a chance they’d wipe out all of humanity once they were done scouting. The more Chris learned, the worse he felt.
    The first mate interrupted: “We’ve got something, Captain. It’s a ship, and it’s big.”
    “Where is it?”
    “It’s approaching us at speed.”
    “Shit.”
    “Should we jump?”
    “No. Let’s see where this goes.”

Samda
     
    The first mate said, “They’re attacking us. We need to move.”
    “Just skip out of the way of whatever they throw at us and open a line of communication. This could take a while.”
    The view on the floating holographic monitor changed by the second as the ship maneuvered to avoid the attacks. The attacking ship was big, maybe even larger than theirs, though it was almost impossible for Chris to tell one way or the other. He didn’t really know how big this ship was and it was tough to tell the size of the attacking ship without a frame of reference. It was flat and circular with large blocky protrusions at the top and tiny round portholes along the edges. It was silver, probably meaning it was simply unpainted metal. It was firing from three small guns mounted on a turret on top.
    The first m ate kept saying, “They’re not responding.”
    T he captain said nothing besides, “Keep at it.