Chapter 641: The Spoked Offensive

"The Long Night has arrived. The stars are all dead or dying. Ten thousand years of civilization has surrendered to entropy and left the universe just as empty of higher life forms as it had always been.

"There is no spark to relight the fire for there is no tinder.

"In darkness it began.

"In darkness it shall end.

"The Long Night has arrived and there will never be another dawn." - Excerpt from Oh, Milky Way, Dimension-Sixteen, author unknown.

She had been born into a universe at war. The death throes of the only intelligent life form in five galaxies. She didn't know what caused the war.

She only knew it had taken everything away.

She had been born in the latter days of the war. When faster than light ships were hoarded as nobody could make them any more. When food was scarce and sometimes she had not looked closely at the meat she was eating and ignored when she spit out a fingernail. She had grown up wearing whatever her family could provide.

More than once the back of her shirt had a hole or two in the middle of a dark brown stain.

Her planet had been dusted twice, biocracked three times, and fifty years before she was born had been smashed from orbit until the cities and farmlands were gone.

But still, she had endured. Living with her 'family' in the twisted ruins of a collapsed and burnt out hive city. She had licked moss from the inside of old nutrient tanks, had chased rats with a cramping belly, had put cheesecloth over her mouth and greedily drank the bitter rain.

A ship had landed and she had been chased by drones until they caught her. She had been loaded onto a ship, taken to orbit, and marched at gunpoint to a cryopod. She had cried, remembering how her father and her brothers had been conscripted years earlier to fight in the wars that made the stars go out.

Her civilization was beyond dying.

It was dead.

Ten thousand years of humans reaching out and finding exactly nothing in return but a few planets with insect or fungal life. Ten thousand years of finding nothing more advanced than rude animals. Ten thousand years of expansion into empty galaxies where every resource had to be hoarded and guarded.

She had slept for years aboard what had once been a massive warship. It had been stripped of weapons, stripped of offensive capability, and barely retained its defensive measures. She had been unaware of the desperate fight to keep her alive, to add more people to the cryopods that surrounded her, to add more genetic material to the paltry gene banks.

She had slept when an accident had shifted the jump-beacon to another universe, another dimension, another reality, and the flotilla had jumped on top of the beacon only to find themselves in the middle of an armada of a race that her people had mauled and maimed to get at the resources.

She was asleep, dreaming cryogenic dreams, as the commander of the armada had confronted the commander of the flotilla she was precious cargo of. Unaware that her DNA was intact, that her precious eggs were undamaged, that she was in better condition than the hundreds that fought desperately to keep her intact and alive.

She did not know that her people were only known as "The Locusts" by the people of the armada. She did not know that she, like hundreds of millions of others in cold storage, slept beneath the guns of an armada perfectly capable of wiping her out as if she had never existed.

Her short, brutal, savage life of deprivation and hardship could end in an eyeblink in the detonation of terrible weapons.

She did not know she was in need of assistance.

What she did know was that she was woken on a planet. It was lush, luxurious. It was full of life, strange, alien life. Not seeded from Lost Terra-Prime genebanks, the legacy of a planet lost lost and nearly forgotten. Life that had evolved on that world.

It had been a farming world, the people wiped out by a bioplague, but the discovery of the odd skeleton here and there did not bother her or her people.

They had left a universe of death.

This world was alive.

The sun was a warm yellow, the sky a clear blue, the air sweet and pure. The plants were all different color, beautiful and a joy to see. The little animals, many indigenous to the planet, were small and wonderful. The wind was a joy, the rain was a pleasure, and even the snow, pure and white and without the tang of heavy metals, was a thing of beauty and wonder.

The air itself was sweet.

A far cry from the air in the collapsed and ruined hive city she had spent fifteen of her twenty-two years surviving in.

Next were the wonders. Science that not even the most learned of her people had theorized was in the hands of common people. Energy to matter printers, a modern form of alchemy, made sure that nobody went hungry, unclothed, or suffered from being without.

She went to bed with a full stomach and memories of agonizing hunger. She slept in a comfortable bed, warm and safe, with memories and dreams of hiding and sleeping in cold and discomfort and danger.

She got to meet aliens. Real, live, aliens. From the tiny green mantid who helped build her little apartment, because she wasn't ready to live alone in a house, to the huge Treana'ad teacher who taught her to drive to the glittering digital person who listened to her fears and terrors.

This universe was full of wonders.

It was malevolent.

It was cruel.

It was actively hateful.

But it was still full of wonders.

A full belly. Friends who she did not have to worry about betraying her for a half-eaten rat and a thin blanket of aerogel. Aliens who she could understand the motives of.

Safety.

She had taken a trip to an orchard and even picked a basket of fruit to take home.

She had put the apple, something she had only seen in pictures, on the table and stared at it for over an hour, marveling over it.

It tasted even better than it looked. Crisp, sweet, a taste all of its own.

The glittering digital person had walked her through all of her trauma from growing up on a planet that had been repeatedly wiped out. Had listened carefully, with patience, as she had described what it was like scavenging hab warrens inside of the hive city that had been full of nothing but the dead, seeking out food, clothing, little luxuries. Had described what it was like moving through dead parks that had died with the hive city.

Then she had heard that everything she had, everything she had come to accept as real and not some fever driven dream, was under threat.

Like many others, she had volunteered to fight. To lift an upraised fist and scream her defiance.

She was shocked to discover that she was not allowed.

She was told, gently, by one of her own people, that she still had potential. She still had life within her.

She felt guilt, she felt embarrassment, she felt shame, that she was told to live her life, to life it with passion and fire.

The digital person had told her that her people had staggered to the edge of the cliff and had barely been pulled back.

Her neighbor, a quiet man, had asked her to care for his plants in his little apartment while he was gone.

She asked where he was going. He was a nice man. Quiet, kept to himself, but offered a helping hand to those who needed him.

He told her that he was going someplace horrible. A place that was not fit for a beautiful thing like her.

She asked why he had to go. He replied that he did not have to go, he needed to go. To go so that something beautiful like her did not have to.

He had told her that he would go alone to where people like him were gathering to leave.

She insisted on going with him.

She rode with him, in the vehicle, sitting silently next to him in the seat, holding his older hand in hers.

"I was there, you know," the man said.

She looked at him questioningly.

"I was awake when we came to this place," he said. "I remember. It seems like a lifetime ago."

"Then stay," she said, squeezing his hand.

"I cannot," he said. He looked up. "The stars here are still alive. Not like back where we came from, where half of the night sky was dead," his voice got soft. "At the end, all anyone cared about was hurting someone else before they died."

"Then why go now?" she asked.

He squeezed her hand gently and she was aware of the strength in those scarred hands.

"Because I must," was all he said.

So you don't have to was unsaid yet hung in the air like a ghost at a banquet.

The car came to a stop and he got out. She got out with him.

"Please, a moment," she said.

He stopped, turning toward her, smiling gently but sadly.

She took a picture of him with her dataslate. Standing there, in the warm afternoon, in his black clothing with the crimson edging. In clothing that had been tailored in a ship fighting a war nobody knew how to stop.

"Come back," she said.

"If I can," he said. He turned and moved back to her, taking her hands. "I ask of you, here, to do one thing for me."

"Anything," she said, feeling tears well up.

"Live," he said. He looked at her, seeing the tears, and said a simple sentence that made her nod.

With that he let go of her hands and moved away, vanishing into the building. She watched him leave, the tears welling up but unshed.

She took the taxi back to her own apartment. She sat there and scrolled through the options on the nanoforge in her apartment. She found what she was looking for and printed it out. It was a simple thing. A wooden frame, an LCD screen, a stand.

She uploaded the picture into it.

The man smiled back at her from the picture.

She went next door and watered his plants. She watched on the Tri-Vee as the news reported that her people were once again at war.

She learned to pray, for her neighbor. The quiet man who was always willing to help was in her prayers to the Digital Omnimessiah. She prayed for his safety. She prayed for his soul to be guarded. She prayed that the new war not take him away.

And she watered his plants while he was gone.

Who was she?

She was a Locust. One of millions just like her.

Like the others, she prayed for her neighbor, she prayed for her people, she prayed for herself, she prayed for beings and people she had never met and would never meet.

She was all of them.

She was all of us.

She was those left behind.

She was a thing of beauty to those like her quiet helpful neighbor.

And they would die in droves, had died by the millions, to protect her and those like her.

-----

The drop pod slammed into the ground, the retrothrusters burning and baking the ground into a hardened mass and the last of the compressed atmosphere vented around the pod to cool the ground. The sides slammed down on the pod, just like the hundreds of pods around it.

The Dwellerspawn screeched as they rushed forward, across where the blast wave of the three hundred drop pods had reduced their brethren to slurry, ash, and crushed gore.

From inside the pods waded out five man teams. All dressed in power armor, all carrying heavy weapons.

All firing as they left the pods.

The weapon fire was not what made the Dwellerspawn pause, was not what attracted the attention of the Atrekna leadership caste.

No, that was the invisible wave that rolled out from each power armor troop as they exited the phasic shielding generated by the pod.

The Atrekna had tasted wrath, had tasted hatred.

This, this was much worse.

It was cold, it was bleak, it carried with it the memories of exploding suns and cracked worlds. It carried with it the nihilistic emptiness of those who had looked so long into the abyss that they had become a part of it.

The Dwellerspawn quailed back in the face of the invisible cloud of empty nihilism.

Lord Captain Reshall fired a drone into the air from the backpack launcher. It arced into the sky and detonated, creating a short-lived flag of fireworks that hung in the air for long seconds.

"All platoon leaders, ensure proper fireplan interlock," Reshall ordered. The icons blinked affirmative and he knew that the junior officers would do as they had on a hundred worlds before this one. "Priority target are Atrekna leadership caste. Keep a look out from chronotron bursts or phasic interference."

Again, the icons winked.

"Minimize civilian casualties when able," he ordered as he strode forward under a purple sky.

His men followed him, firing their weapons without fear into the very face of Dwellerspawn.

He was Lord Captain Reshall and he had been born on a planet that had died in a system that had been nova-sparked, in a galactic arm that had been denuded of life, in a galaxy that was now nothing more than scattered stripped systems that had been shorn of everything they could be by the detonation of the supermassive singularity at the galaxy's heart.

His men had marched across a hundred worlds, fighting in a war they were born into, a war that nobody even knew why they fought any longer.

But this war was different.

He knew it. His men knew it.

This war was against an alien species from beyond space and time. A species that wanted nothing more than the complete possession of all of the universe.

To take possession of what they wanted, they would take away what he and his men had.

Worse, to Lord Captain Reshall, they would take away what she had.

Peace. Security. Plenty.

To Lord Captain Reshall and his men, there was no wrath, no hatred, as they marched into the face of the Dwellerspawn, as they advanced into the very teeth of horrors from beyond space and time.

There was simply a clarity of purpose.

It was done, simply, because it must be in order for those like her to live.

As Lord Captain Reshall grabbed an Atrekna and threw it to the ground, ignoring its panicked psychic attacks as the squealing of the already dead, there was no anger or hatred in what he did as he plunged his power armor wrapped fingers into its back.

There was no wrath or fury as he closed his hand around the creature's spine as the purple blood flowed and the creature shrieked in agony.

He felt nothing for the creature as he ripped its spine out in one yank.

They were the enemy.

And the enemy only existed to be destroyed.

It wasn't personal as Lord Captain Reshall ordered a sonic detonation device deployed against the glittering fantastic architecture of the Atrekna fortress and then marched his men into the cloud of sparkling crystalline dust.

There was nothing personal in it when Lord Captain Reshall jumped down into the waist deep cerebral fluid and waded through the fluid, passed through the shimmering phasic screen that parted around him, moving to the massive glob of neural tissue, leading fifteen men to the thing the Atrekna had fought the hardest to protect.

Nothing personal in it as he drew the clattering chainsword in his hand, his men following his lead.

To the Elder Brain, there was nothing but bipedal holes in space as the ice cold teeth of the chainsword began cutting into its flesh. No wrath, no fury, no joy, no love, nothing.

It was nothing personal.

It was just the enemy.

And to Lord Captain Reshall and his men, to the Locusts, the enemy only existed to be destroyed.

Because, for the first time in their lives, they had something to fight for aside from surviving just one more day.

Those they had left behind had potential to be more than the men who fought next to Lord Captain Reshall.

They had the potential to live. To be more than the men who fought.

They had no fear of death. No wrath. No rage.

Just clarity of focus as they swept aside the Dwellerspawn, rent the Atrekna, and tore apart the assault upon a planet full of small creatures who barely had the written word.

To the Atrekna, Lord Captain Reshall and his men, every man in the counter-invasion force, was nothing more than a blank spot, a hole in reality. An empty shape that did nothing more than advance and kill.

Nothing stopped their inexorable advance. Not casualties, not hopelessness, not being cut off, nothing.

The last Atrekna fell to Lord Captain Reshall, who grabbed it, threw it on the ground, and tore its spine out while it screamed.

It wasn't personal.

The Atrekna were the enemy.

And the Locust Troopers would not suffer the enemy to live.

They had no fear.

As Lord Reshall had told the girl who lived next door.

"Don't cry for me.

"I'm already dead."