5"We read you, loud and clear," Sean replied, holding the comm. microphone to his mouth.
"Report," the voice said after a moment's pause.
Alpha Op7 had been launched a year and a half ago. Its mission to find new life, as so many others had been sent to do the same. One day, Omega Op6, the ship before Alpha Op7, had come across a bacteria. That bacteria was sentient. The more of it in one place, the smarter it was. It was ravenous and ate everything including steel and flesh. As it was doing so it gained the attributes of the flesh, of the machinery.
Omega Op6 had met its demise by this bacteria.
Many of the earlier model ships had been sent to destroy this danger and all had failed. The bacterium was greedily floating its way towards Earth, eating away at anything in its path. When the Op7 series was born, the bacterium had already consumed Pluto. The first ship, Alpha Op7 was sent to destroy the bacteria, or at least delay it. The Op7's were the only ships to date with energy weapons, as projectiles had no effect.
Alpha Op7 first engaged the bacteria one thousand miles away from Neptune.
The rotating frequency energy weapons caused a chemical reaction in the bacterium and it could not become immune to the continuously changing waves of energy that spread over it.
Eventually the threat was thought to be virtually eliminated. No one took notice of the new moon of Neptune, which had a striking similarity to what Pluto had looked like, before the attack. That brings us to our present story.
"Report," the voice said after a moment's pause.
"Everything's fine in our sector, no sign of those pirates that have been hijacking the shipments to the new Jupiter spaceport. How is the progress of the cloak equipment going for the Op7's," Sean asked in reply.
"Smoothly, you report anything you see that looks like it could be those pirates. I've heard that they look like one of the old series, like Omega Op6. Over and out."
Nothing happened for the next couple of months and the crew was getting restless. Then Alpha Op7 was assigned the Uranus sector to find the pirates as reports had indicated them going to that sector.
The ship was soon in place and decided to lock down on the newly discovered moon of Neptune, named Lambda conjunction. The ship had no sooner landed than an exploration group was deposited on the satellite. Each member of the patrol had his or her own hoverbike and took off in separate directions. When it was time to report, only two of the original seven radioed in.
Then on the second checkup, one radioed in. Before she could give her report, there was a grinding noise and then static.
"Where was she," asked Sean to his monitoring crew.
"The coordinates were 23,93."
"We need to check it out, see what happened."
"Wait," a comm. officer announced, "I'm getting a signal. The other six are coming back it looks like according to the orbiting visuals we set up."
"Good."
The patrol members were soon inside.
Sean gave out orders, "Get the ship up and over to coordinates 23,93. I want to see what happened to Ensign Sheila."
"That is not possible sir," the pilot announced, "We're stuck, the ground appears to be..Whoa!"
The ground suddenly heaved up around them and started to close in on all sides, forming an arch above the ship. The members of the away team suddenly appeared on the bridge, the door behind them melted away. They ran to the comm. officer and sucked him into them, then they turned towards the captain, Sean. You defeated us once, but we will prevail.
Sean, in desperation ordered the pilot to fire the energy ray into the moon at disrupter overload power. The last of the bacteria in known space was destroyed, but the plasma reactor core exploded from the disrupter explosion and the strain it had been under. The resounding explosion was seen from earth 12 minutes later.
Alpha Op7 was no more. All that was known of their bravery was that they had died defending, whether it be from pirates or from bacterium (They had been the same, the bacteria morphed into the Omega Op6 ship it had consumed so that it could steal its needed nutrients).
All that mattered was that they were heroes, though the people of earth never realized that only the pirates had been taken care of. The crew's sacrifice became the model for all later captains and crews. An international memorial service was held for the crew, as they had been the crew that initially defeated the bacterium.