The Girl in the Tank: Galactic Consortium, Season 1

Episode One: Attack! Part One

Cheyenne was jolted awake by the ship's sirens. "All hands to stations, I repeat, all hands to stations," the intercom blared. Flashing red lights lit her quarters. Her kid's faces were illuminated in each flash. James Junior was a scrawny boy of nine with big eyes and dark hair, like his mother. Mackenzie, next to him in the photo, was eleven. She, too, was scrawny and had her mother's hair, but it was her father's eyes and wrinkled brow that looked out at Cheyenne. The timid smile was simply Mackenzie.

She had taped the photo there so they would be the first thing she saw when she awoke. Usually, it brought a smile to her face. Not today, the blaring of the sirens and the way the photo appeared and faded with each flash set Cheyenne's nerves on end.

She threw herself out of the bunk and turned on the light. It took her only a minute to climb into her uniform jumper and maybe twice that to shove her feet into her boots and lace them. Just long enough to wonder what was going on. The U.S.S. Cambridge was two days out to sea from Taiwan. It was too soon to see action, way too late to be running drills.

The ship lurched as the engines were cut. Cheyenne pushed herself up, wondering what that meant. They had been moving at full power towards the tiny island state since last night.

She pulled her dark shoulder-length hair back into a ponytail. She preferred to braid it, but there was no time now. Turning to her door she saw another picture of her kids. It was an old one, the kids were two years younger and James Senior was in the picture. She'd have bent the picture to eliminate him, but he was in the middle. She paused one second to look at it. Mackenzie had a suspicious look on her face, like she knew her parent's marriage was on the skids.

Cheyenne held two fingers to her lips and kissed them. She pressed it against the girl's cheek. "One more deployment, Honey. I promise," she said. Then she stabbed her finger at James Senior, hard enough to hurt. "Fuck you," she snarled, opened the door and dashed out into the hall.

Chief Petty Officer Cheyenne Walker shoved the thought of her family out of her mind as she barreled down the final staircase towards the main missile command. "What's the sit rep?" she barked as she grabbed her com rig.

Petty Officer Dan Oleson, her second in command, gave her a worried look. "We spotted a sub on sonar, ma'am," he said. "Chinese, nuclear."

"They are coming up hot," Jensen howled from his console station. "T minus five til they break surface, armed to fire."

"Talk to me, Kleppie," Cheyenne yelled across the command center.

"Aegis is online, ma'am," Seaman Karl Leipeweitz replied, his voice terse. "We have guidance systems but the firing array keeps locking up and shutting down." There was a groan around the room.

"So we can aim but not shoot, great," Dan joked.

Cheyenne exchanged a look with her second in command.

"Can the Others do anything?" he asked.

The Others. He meant the aliens, the ones that had shown up in earth's skies not five months ago. The aliens that called themselves the Consortium and were not aliens at all, but humans like us. Or mostly humans, Simian they said, from the same genetic line as humans. They had others, variations of human evolution that had died out on earth or never evolved here, Neanderthals and the Hanuman, an ape-like humanoid.

They claimed earth was theirs. They had terraformed this planet thousands of years ago, sent settlers, us, presumably, to settle in the name of their consortium. Earth was to be the base for their exploration into this galaxy, and forty some thousand years later, they were back to begin that exploration. What had happened to the Earth in those last forty thousand years, why we had no recollection of any of this, remained a mystery.