Benji watched the towers of flame on the horizon.
There were three of them. A pale, yellowish one to the left, and then two close together to the right, twin columns of grey and black rising into the green-tinged sky above. His visor flashed radiation signs whenever he looked at them, but the range indicators said it was over the horizon, so the fallout chances were low here.
Mushroom clouds capped them, spreading higher and higher. The sky was almost black above the rising domes, night setting in in the distance, and the twinkle of the orbiting fleet was a scattering of bright lights far, far above. The fireworks and flame in orbit had stopped hours ago, shortly after they made planetfall. He had watched from the dropship window, and cheered as the orbital platforms went down one by one.
“Private Henderson! Is there a problem?”
“No sergeant,” Benji yelled back, instinctively, and tore his eyes down to the ground. “No problem at all, sergeant.”
The ground was covered in a torn-up lawn of something that looked like blue grass - and dead Xin.
Their bodies lay scattered in heaps and piles amidst the burning debris of the airstrikes, and everywhere Benji looked, he was met with the sight of those unnaturally long, smooth grey limbs of theirs. That, and the oozing purple blood that seeped out of them from the onslaught of the Seventh Corps. At his feet, one of them lay spread out, legs missing in a ragged purple wound that had stained the grass into a gummy mess. Thin purple lines drooled from the Xin’s upwards-slanting mouth, and one of its marble-black eyes had burst, trailing more ichor and jelly down its face. Benji gave it a kick as he passed, for good measure, but it was long dead.
Ahead, there was a commotion as the lead elements tore open a building and started firing. Xin architecture was strangely organic, all whorls and bulges and curves, and seemed utterly allergic to straight lines. Everything looked grown, like something from a coral reef or mushroom farm. Benji’s rifle, and those clutched by the survivors of the Seventh, were probably the only straight lines on this entire planet.
There was an explosion from the fighting ahead, men in black and grey armour staggering back from the hole they had breached moments earlier, and Benji picked up the pace. If there were live Xin inside, he wanted a piece of that action. He wanted to watch them mewling and scampering away as the hyper-spikes from his rifle chased them down, he wanted to see them twitching and hissing as the spikes tore into them and pinned them to the ground, he wanted…
There was a final explosion from up ahead, and the upper part of the structure glowed white-hot before collapsing in on itself. Brown snail-shell shards clattered down around it in a twinkling wave. An all-clear pulsed over the tactical net, and the troops that had been rushing in slowed down. Benji slowed down too, cursing, and kicked at the nearest Xin corpse.
Why was there no fight left in them?
On the horizon, behind the cluster of buildings that was the only section of this village they had not yet cleared, there was a bright flash that reached from the ground up into space. A new dome suddenly grew up into the open space to the west of the yellow tower of flame that still loomed in the distance
“Tac strike! Polarise and cover, polarise and cover!” The sergeant’s roar came a moment later, and Benji dove for the ground while slapping at the side of his helmet. Filters doused his view in midnight, light becoming murk, and darkness reigned for a moment.
There was a rumble from the distance, felt more than heard, and Benji felt the trampled grass underneath him shiver and recoil. The seismic wave raced past them in an instant, followed a few seconds later by the atmospheric wave. Debris and clutter went flying, and the flames around them roared wildly for a long moment before settling down again.
Silence reigned for a drawn-out, crystal moment.
“All clear, all clear! All squads, up and advance!”
Benji hauled himself up, scanned around for movement, but saw nothing except the Seventh as they recovered their feet. Someone swore over the tactical net as they all watched the distant dome climb up and transform into a fourth pillar of flame.
“Pay-back’s a bitch, ain’t it?”
There was a ragged cheer over the net, interspersed with whoops of laughter. Not even their sergeant tried to keep order at that point.
The village they were in was on the south side of a line of hills, and to the north of that line was the Xin capital.
The same place where those pillars were rising.
In orbit, the generals watched the tactical maps as they glittered and updated, and counted the strobing markers where megatonnes had landed. The Xin capital was surrounded by water on three sides, and their attempts to flee there had been cut off by the jets from Fourth and Eighth Corps. The south was the only land approach, and the infantry divisions were pushing up there. Purple markers showed Xin formations falling back, scattering and fading away under the assault of red triangles that pushed relentlessly north.
On one of the wall monitors, a screen scrolled an old video on a loop. Unwatched, it repeated information they had received just after they had arrived in the Xin home system. It was several weeks old at this point.
It showed Earth, from orbit. The moon was visible in the back somewhere, cracked in half and raining a million million pieces of lunar rock into the atmosphere below it. Molten fires glowed sullenly in the depths of the moon, while livid lines of red danced on the planet itself where things burned.
Tectonic plates, held in place by internal forces and external pull from the moon, had shifted and buckled when the moon came apart, and what was left had been covered in floods and the ash of countless fires. Borders had disappeared. Landmarks had disappeared. The topography of the very planet had melted and run like wax as the moon pounded it from above with a million fists.
“The capital is gone, Commander,” one of the officers reported, leaning back from a wall console. “The fourth strike has hit their last energy bunker. There are signs of cascade effects on their energy grid, we expect total collapse within the next four to eight hours.”
People shifted, stayed quiet. The commander had a line of stubble down his cheeks, dark rings under his eyes, and a white-knuckled grip on the map table that had not shifted in almost 48 hours. On his chest, a thin line of medals winked. The bloody red of his Martian Campaign Medal was a gunshot wound on his chest that leaked something vital - not to his heart, but to his heart.
“Tell the infantry to advance to the edge of the fallout zones, and hold. No prisoners. Send a victory confirmation four hours from now.” His voice was low, strained. “Let them have the night. Tomorrow we tell them the rest of the news.”
The infantry generals nodded, sent orders. Their troops had not seen the video from Earth before they had landed. They had heard rumours of a strike against Earth, but the details of the Xin attack had been kept from them.
It was for the best, the commanders had decided.
In the opposite corner, the logistics officers looked at each other, then looked away again. Fingers fidgeted at comm pads, pulled at sleeves.
They knew there was no Earth to go back to.
They also knew that the ships here were empty.
No fuel. No terraforming equipment. No quantum gates left to jump out of this system. Very little food remaining.
Whatever plan there was to survive, was down below, on the Xin lands.
On what was left of the Xin lands.
On the surface of the world, four pillars rose into the heavens, and paid a tribute of ash and alien blood to these new, violent gods that had bled themselves dry for vengeance.
Excellent! In regional conflict on a stellar level, this is what it would like.
Awesome story. Incredible writing and description. Held my attention the entire way. Can't wait to read more!