Pluto's Curse

Earth was still recovering from the Borecats war. Humanity hadn’t been paranoid enough: we knew aliens existed, but we hadn’t built up our planetary defences enough to stop them from entering Earth. When huge ships showed up at our doorstep, we were caught off guard; we didn’t know what to do. Of course we weren’t going to surrender — we were going to fight until extinction.

Thank God the Borecats weren’t that smart. They had been in the universe far longer than humans had, but they weren’t good at strategising or fighting wars. Humans had fought complex wars with each other since the dawn of humanity. We were able to defend ourselves. Let’s say when the Borecats arrived they were a hundred; when they left they were twenty-five. We discovered they were an expansionist species and had tried to wage wars with others, but they didn’t have any asymmetric advantage over us. Even their spaceships were rudimentary. We learned from their tech, though. They didn’t have sophisticated weapons or strategies, but they did have long-haul intergalactic travel engines. Their planet had a fuel that seemed to last forever — the Pinechop, a rocky substance. When we shot down two of their spaceships, we obtained that rock.

Their only real advantage was sheer numbers. Their reproduction cycle was just a month. It was eerie how fast they grew from infant to barely fighting warrior. We bombed them to oblivion. When their forces landed on Earth, our missiles were already pointed at them. Then it began: hundreds of thousands of missiles fired all at once; they didn’t even know what hit them. But they did not stop coming even after the annihilation of their first incursion. They attempted twenty-seven landings in twenty-seven different places, and we bombed each one. Only 102 humans lost their lives, over 80,000 borecats were killed. We were also reminded of how supreme our missile tech was. But we still needed better planetary defences, they shouldn’t even have been allowed to reach the stratosphere.

After we recovered their fuel source, we started our own research to see if we could use it in our spaceships for longer journeys to the edge of the solar system. Now that we had been attacked and were recovering, we poured massive resources into building planetary defences; the work progressed at breakneck speed. We sent weapons and supplies to the nearly-empty off-Earth stations, sent people to the Moon and Mars, and installed destructive weapons and large surveillance systems. We wanted to destroy the next threat before it even entered our solar system. With the seemingly unlimited energy source from the Borecats, we iterated upon the substance and made it possible to power our own spacecraft with it.

We wanted eyes and ears everywhere. We were finally paranoid enough.

The mission I was on was a journey to set up our tent on the frozen planet, Pluto. Earth didn’t want to spend much on the Pluto mission, so I was alone on the ship. It would take me nine months to reach Pluto. Yes, space travel had become much faster. My mission was to set up an outpost on Pluto, install missile systems, deploy surveillance, and then wait for the relief team.

Earth had sent over seventeen spaceships to colonise the solar system. My outpost was the farthest one. I’d been chosen because I had done multiple Moon missions and was a soldier through and through. I was a loner, so they figured why not send me to the loneliest place in the solar system? We didn’t want to do research; we wanted to set up our defence system. My task was simple: put the system in place and then chill on the spaceship for a year. A relief team would arrive after that, and then I’d make my journey back home. The nearest space station to me was the Saturn Space Station; there were seven people on that station. I used to text them updates, they were like a relay station to Earth. It took eight hours for an update to reach Earth.

This journey had been pretty boring. Waddling through empty dark space isn’t as adventurous as it sounds. Thank God I had TV series to watch. Although these series are audited by a committee — you don’t want a human in a billion-dollar spaceship committing suicide while on a mission, eheh.