The deltari hordes were on us before we even knew they were on the planet.
Our Kuiper belt scanners picked them up first, weeks ago. Bulging bio-asteroids, tumbling into our system from the gods only know where. Reactive membranes spread for kilometres around them, soaking up the dim red light of Lauvi, with jellyfish tendrils behind them that stretched even further. The footage from Cordel II and Muaxton, weeks before, had been terrifying: the bio-asteroids becoming giant biological space elevators, tumbling into position above the planets and linking up, long chains of straining xeno-muscle and ichor that reached down from the L1 Lagrange points all the way to the surfaces. Skittering, leaping, endless hordes of the deltari, rushing down from sacs and cysts scattered along the lengths of the elevator, an endless Biblical flood of retribution and wrath wrought down on those worlds.
Saint Godfrey and the Seraphim Host fought them, and lost. The Host was scattered, ships wrecked and leaking plasma as the deltari unleashed hell on them, and Godfrey was last seen on the bastions of Hyperion Station as the creatures engulfed it. Hyperion fell into darkness soon thereafter, and so too did the updates from the SolNet and the courier ships. The trumpets of Deus Praxis had fallen silent.
We waited, and hoped, and continued our work.
What choice did we have?
A refugee ship arrived from the Technostates, pleading for mercy. They broadcasted footage of the Mercator Palace around Technaron Ultima on fire, deltari clinging to its gleaming surface in boils and scales of corruption. Fire and bile filled the worlds of the Technostates now. We did not want to believe them, for they had been the enemies of everything we stood for and believed in for decades - but we had watched as Cordel II and Mauxton went through the same fires and brimstone, and our hearts knew the truth even as we turned them away. They fled back into the darkness, and were lost to the stars. Our ancient enemies, finally routed - and yet there were no celebrations in our midst.
We waited.
The bio-asteroids passed our Kuiper belt, slingshotted past the gas giant Hephaestus and its blue rings with the many moons, and then it was on its way to us. There were talks of evacuations, but there were no ships - and where would we flee? A pulse-wave drone arrived from the Olympian system, carrying warnings from the Greeks there. The deltari had arrived there too, and the Greeks had fought them with every bullet, ship and blade they could muster. When the enemy did not yield, the Myrmidons lured the creatures to their sun, and detonated a gravity tunneler on the roiling plasma surfaces there. The resultant solar flare sterilized the entire system, and the pulse-wave drone repeated two lines from an ancient Greek poem before melting its Turing circuits into slag. Its fight was over, its masters extinct.
What profit to live or die
When light itself has fled?
We began to barricade the facility, and the orbital sensors gave no warning. Flesh reached down from orbit, touched our world, began to spread its violence and hatred. The creatures were on us as the day’s light faded, Lauvi sinking below the western horizon one last time. Black, many-legged, glittering spider eyes that watched eight or ten things at once - they moved like static, jittering through the vegetation outside, and breached the perimeter fence without even noticing it. Captain Gilliam and his men fought, and disappeared into the maws and pincers of the liquid, manifested violence that boiled out of the night.
I helped to haul furniture and barricades into place deep underground, in the tunnels that separated us and our work from the surface. Panicked civilians, staunch soldiers, fumbling scientists - we all did our part to try and fortify the facility which had kept us safe for so long.
The barricades fell, one by one, and the tunnels disappeared into darkness.
Our last stand was a storage hall, with a single entrance in. Solid stone above and below us, and steel walls that could withstand the sun. It held the women and children, and the weak and ill, and we handful of last resisting survivors.
Claws against the stone, trilling and vibrating the naked rock as something gnawed and bored at it with mindless persistence and patience.
Claws against the door, scratching and scratching.
Scratching, scratching at the walls.
It is all we hear now.
It is all we are now.
The lights are out.
We are alone.
Scratching.
Crack…
What a way to begin a Sunday!
In these far off days, would it really still have been 'women and children first'? I'd have thought everybody would be mustered into weapons training. I know I'd rather face what was going to eat me, with a weapon, rather than cower, just waiting. Feminist rant over.
I want to collaborate with you. You're an amazing writer and your style seems so much like my own.