Northern territory, Australia, September 2035

  It took Georgia Brown about twenty minutes to drive from the gate entrance all the way to outer ring of the rail gun complex. The four massive rail guns, the size of skyscrapers are mounted atop rotating platforms. Each the cost of an Nimitz class aircraft carrier, this asteroid interception facility is one of twelve around the world. I feel my legs shake as the towering railgun above me moves around during its weekly test of the rotating platform.

  "About 3 meters of diameters, ten meters long. reinforced composite shells to handle the electromagnetic acceleration without breaking apart. About the price of a house each.". She says.

  "Why was it not up in time for the second landings?" I ask.

  "It was already a miracle we got them built in time for the third landings. Two years from blueprint to completion. No wonder the UN designated them the eighth wonder of the world. Designed specially to make their meteors break up to soon and crash into thousands of pieces like broken glass. And the second landing was back in September. ICBMs did the trick, but they brought their own set of problems."

  I ask, "Any idea why they didn’t all land at the same time?"

  "The first wave carried most of their warfighting capability—tripods, crabs, tools, and the biomatter needed for the hatcheries. Everything required for a beachhead on Earth. The few meteors from the second landing that survived? They carried terraforming equipment and what we’d call 'non-combatants.' In other words, their wives and kids."

  "But I thought crabs came from hatcheries?"

  She shakes her head. "Best we can tell, their species follows a caste system. The red ones—shock troopers and tripods—are the warrior elite. We don’t know how they’re chosen, but those that hatch without the 'red' designation? They're cannon fodder. The ones that arrived with the second wave were a different breed entirely—not soldiers, but engineers and terraformers. The few meteors that slipped past the ICBMs had crabs setting up massive towers in the Baltic and Black Sea to extract water. Safe to say, the Air Force wasn’t about to let them establish a foothold.

  "We called them 'the little grey ones.' Enginers. Not meant for combat, except when operating tripods."

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  She picks up a beetle, watches it crawl over her fingers, then sets it back down.

  "We had nearly every satellite, radar dish, and backyard astronomer watching the sky the moment the first landing happened. There was no missing the second wave.

  "The UN spent six hours talking after the first reports came in. Most were ready to fire, shouting 'bombs away!' But we knew—those strikes would bring their own set of problems. It was a miracle we even hit 16 of the 23 mother ships, country sized asteroids designed to break as it entered the asmophere before splitting out in multiple parts."

  "How did they design those?" I ask.

  "Who knows?" She shakes her head. "They weren’t master builders, that’s for sure. You’ve seen the materials they used. No sleek silver ships. No brainwave communication. No anti-gravity tech. Just crude, jagged machines thrown together with whatever they had left. Their homeworld must have been a dying rock—maybe a desert moon. They probably drilled through its crust, scraping together the last scraps of energy they had."

  She pauses, eyes narrowing as she glances at the rail guns overhead. "And frm the meteor fragments we’ve analyzed, it looks like they blew themselves off of it. It was an exodus—one fueled by desperation."

  I frown. "Why? What forced them of-world?"

  She exhales. "If I had to guess? They were losing. Maybe it was war. Maybe their world was collapsing. Doesn’t really matter. They arrived the way desperate civilizations always do—violently. First, they hit us hard. You saw how we had no time to react . Their opening move was classic shock and awe—wipe out defenses, disrupt communications, and make damn sure we were too terrified to fight back. That’s step one of a violent colonization: overwhelm the locals before they know what hit them."

  I nod slowly. "And step two?"

  "Establish a beachhed. They dug in. Their fuel depots and hatcheries spread like a disease, popping up at every inch they took. The first meteors carried their war machines, their weapons, their tools of conquest. The second wave? That was different. Like I said, the few meteors that survived the ICBM strikes carried something else—terraforming equipment."

  I shudder. "Like settlers."

  "Exactly." She kicks a rock aside. "Step three: population control. They didn’t just conquer—they replaced. Unlike us here on earth, they didn't even bother to enslave. Damn right murdered anyone they came across. POW's, the injured, civilians, kids. All the same to them. Kill and compost for hatcheries.. That’s how these things go. And when they had enough of a hold, they would’ve moved on to step four: long-term extraction. Our oceans, our atmosphere, our land—all of it would’ve been stripped bare to sustain them."

  I glance back up at the towering rail guns.

  "Not enough ICBM's to stop them if we hadn't those built in time for the second and third meteor shower. Besides. Should have known it would have caused all that trouble. Hundreds of meteors lost, the EMP's that stretched countries. All the garbage that put into our atmosphere, it's a miracle we can send even one rocket up without having it blow up in the outer atmosphere because of the garbage that's flying around. They’re our only insurance policy against whatever kicked them out of their last home."