The Crystal from Eridanus
It was right in front of him, but the Captain still could barely make out its translucent crystalline structure. Floating through the black void of space,it was hidden by the darkness, like a piece of glass sunken in the murky depths. Only the slight distortion of starlight its passage provoked allowed the Captain to make out its position. Soon it was lost again, disappearing in the space between the stars.
Suddenly, the Sun distorted, its distant, eternal light twisting and twinkling before their eyes. It gave the Captain a start, but he maintained his proverbial ‘Asian cool’. Unlike the dozen soldiers floating beside him,he managed not to gasp in shock. The Captain immediately understood;the crystal, a mere thirty feet away, had moved in front of the Sun, shining sixty million miles in the distance. In the three centuries to come, this strange vista would play frequently across his mind, and he would wonder if this had been an omen of humanity’s fate to come.
As the highest ranking officer of the United Nation’s Earth Protection Force in space, the Captain commanded the force’s interplanetary assets. It was a tiny unit, but it was equipped with the most powerful nuclear weapons humanity had ever devised. Its enemies were lifeless rocks hurtling through space: asteroids and meteorites that the early warning system had determined to be a threat to Earth. The mission of the Earth Protection Force was to redirect or to destroy these objects.
They had been on space patrol for more than two decades now, yet they had never had a chance to deploy their bombs. All rocks large enough to warrant their use seemed to avoid Earth, wilfully denying them their chance for glory.
Now, however, a sweep had discovered this crystal at a distance of two astronomical units. The crystal’s trajectory was as precipitous as it was utterly unnatural, taking it straight toward Earth.
The Captain and his unit cautiously approached, their space suits’boosters spinning a web of trails around the strange object. Just as they closed to thirty feet, a misty light flashed to life inside the crystal, clearly revealing its prismatic outline about ten feet long. As the space patrol drew nearer, they could make out the intricate, crystalline pipes of its propulsion system. The Captain was now floating directly in front of it.Stretching his gloved right hand toward the crystal, he initiated humanity’s first contact with an extra-terrestrial intelligence.