I could hear the ping of alarms in the background as Russ spoke into my communicator. "Captain", he said, "You need to get up here. Something strange is happening down on the surface."
"Be right there." Venus has never been much for surprises in the two years I've been in command of this station, the Venusian Extended Research Array, or VERA for short. The surface was a hellhole of rock and volcanism, with an atmosphere of superheated carbon dioxide and sulfuric acid, combining to make one of the most inhospitable places in the entire Solar System. I don't know what could be going on that would raise an alarm *and* get me out of bed.
The command pod was chaos as I stepped through the door. "Sir, the surface temperature has went down 150 degrees in the last two hours. At first we thought it was a computer issue, so we went to backup and rebooted. Since then we've checked three times, it's definitely falling. And not just locally, it's falling everywhere we've measured. Also, every active volcano that we could get on our scopes have all went dormant. The entire surface just went quiet."
"How is that even possible? Planets don't just suddenly stop."
"We can't figure it out, sir. We've scanned everything in range through every array we have and nothing but low frequency seismic activity. We can't tell how it's being cooled. We can't even detect heat from within the volcanic craters."
I checked the data coming from our sensors and various probes down on the surface. Sure enough, a steady decline in temperature coinciding with a complete shutdown of all volcanic activity. I quickly tightbeamed a priority message back to Earth with all of our data and requested instructions. "Observe and report every fifteen minutes.", the message directed to my optical implant.
Two hours went by, same steady drop in temperatures. Two more, four more, nothing changing but the Kelvin readings. Then as suddenly as it began, the temperature stopped falling. "Sir, we've got something," said Russ, "39 north by 59 east, the ground is caving in. Putting in on the overhead."
I could see the computer's recreation of the surface, the cascade of scans and sensors making a visual image of a surface we can't actually see from orbit. I could see stone and sand, rocks and dirt, falling into a crevice. And the crevice seemed to be getting wider. I quickly realized what is actually was. "That ground isn't collapsing, it's opening! I want everything we have, X-rays, infrared, gravity, everything looking into that hole, right now!"
I overrode our computer's recording function and set up a live stream of all the data we were getting back to Earth. I also requested instructions on how to proceed. I looked back to the scans of a now 100km wide opening in the surface of Venus and stared dumbfounded as what can only be described as an alien ship coming from within. It was massive, many times larger than our mightiest ships back on Earth. As it cleared the atmosphere, it turned towards our station and began to accelerate. As our telescopes focused in, I could see the smooth, reflective black hull gleaming sunlight off its stern.
Just as two small points of green light appeared and brightened on the front of the ship, my implant brought up the reply from Earth. The last thing I saw before myself and the station were vaporized was their message:
THEY HAVE AWOKEN. GODSPEED VERA.