Harbingers, Two of Two

by ~reido

“Eight hours,” Saul muttered, leaning back in the strangely comfortable chair.  “Eight hours since we came aboard.  Door’s still open, we’re still stationary.”

Yuri chuckled, her head resting on his shoulder.  “No one ever said it would be immediate,” she said with a yawn.  The two of them were sitting in what felt like the world’s largest waiting room—a hundred yards long and fifty yards across, lined with an assortment of odd chairs and couches, each and every one of them occupied; the seats were split down the middle by a central aisle walkway.  “I hope the air up there isn’t as nasty sour,” she said after a moment, smacking her lips.  Her hands idly fiddled with the chair’s straps, which she hadn’t felt compelled to buckle.

“I just hope it’s breathable,” her husband muttered.  “I just hope we get a damn move on.”

She laughed again.

The ship itself was an additional hundred yards long beyond the far end of the bay they had been herded into; they could see as much from outside.  What was beyond the wide dividing door, none of them had seen.  Externally, it hadn’t looked like much other than large; the vessel was rectangular, with no discernible front or back, made of dull brown metal covered in what looked like black burn marks.
There were probably a couple thousand people in the bay, which looked like it had been retrofitted to carry them—none of the chairs or couches looked like they belonged, or even belonged next to each other.  The whole thing had a very jury-rigged feel to it.

But the creatures that had come with the ship had not.  Both had worn similar uniforms, but neither had looked remotely similar to one another.  One had been built almost like a centaur, with an L-shaped torso, four legs, and two arms; the other had been tall and reedy, with long arms and legs, but no neck—its head was nestled down between its shoulders.  Since they had guided the humans to their seats, they had vanished into the body of the ship and not returned.  Occasionally the ship made odd noises, rumbles and clanks, or vibrated softly beneath their feet.  Once, and only once, something on the ship let out a high-pitched squeal that lasted a little less than a minute.

And so for eight hours, Saul, Yuri, and something like two thousand strangers had sat, awkwardly waiting for something to happen.

“I know, I know,” Yuri muttered.  “I’m sure we’ll… be… Hey,” she interrupted herself, nodded down at the interior bay doors, which had rumbled open partially—just wide enough to let one of the two alien figures through it.

“Pardon, sorry, sorry,” the reedy figure said, starting down the central aisle.  Every head turned, and every voice muttered the same basic response:  they had understood it, without knowing the language it was speaking.

Saul stood up, surprised, and watched wide-eyed as the figure made its way from one end of the bay to the other.  “Technical difficulties,” it continued, “Engine problems.  Will be underway shortly.  Need to be.  Will be.  Please remain calm.  Working on a solution.”

And then it slipped out the exterior bay door and vanished from sight.  Immediately the crowd exploded into amazed chatter and confused shouts.  It took over an hour to die down—and almost exactly at the hour mark, the centaur-like figure came sprinting out the interior doors.  It ignored the “cargo” and immediately ran out of the bay and out of view, muttering what the people understood internally to be its native profanities.

“It seemed worried,” Saul murmured, brows furrowed.

“More like panicked,” Yuri replied.

A moment later there was a loud, metallic clank, and then a second and third.  Then the floor began to vibrate, negligibly at first but soon more violently and irregularly.  “Pay no mind,” the reedy figure shouted from the exterior doors as it and its partner re-entered the ship.  “Usually smoother.  Not optimal performance.  Need to get lift now.  Have to go, have to go.”

The two of them ran down the central aisle again, ignoring the shouted questions of the volunteers.  They vanished into the main part of the ship and the exterior doors rumbled closed, and a moment later, everyone in the bay lurched as the ship shakily began to lift off.

“Shit,” Saul whispered.  “We’re really going.”  He had slipped off his chair, and Yuri helped him back into it.

“Something’s not right,” Yuri said.  “Something’s gone wrong, I think.  I’m going to find out.”

“They said to stay—”

She shrugged, muttered “Don’t care”, slipped off of her chair and started up the aisle discreetly.

“Wait—wait, damn it,” her husband hissed.  He moved to follow, and together they slipped through the still-ajar interior doors, just before they rumbled closed again.  “Close.”  No one else had made it through.

“Yes,” Yuri replied.  “Let’s go.”

~

“Do you ever sleep?” Simon asked.

Captain Nialin looked over her shoulder at him.  “You keep following me around the ship long enough, you’re going to find out.”

He had been tailing her for hours, long enough to have gone through most of the cigarettes in the pack he’d managed to acquire down in the passenger bays.  Nialin had tried to ditch him there, with the rest of the humans, but he had refused, cigarette between his lips, vehemently.

They had traveled up and down the length of the ship, one department at a time—the “elevators”, she had explained after several rides, were actually contained matter-transport stations.  They would step into one, push a button, and move instantly from one side of the ship to the other.  Simon couldn’t even feel it.  

As the ship’s captain it was Nialin’s responsibility to check in personally with the primary function departments.  She had just finished up verifying the status in what she had referred to as propulsion chamber four-three.

“It’s overwhelming,” Simon said, changing the subject.  “This whole ship.  It’s just so big.  We have nothing—nothing—on Earth this big.”

“There is very little this big anywhere in the Bulwark,” Captain Nialin replied.  “It’s half again as long as the next biggest ship in the fleet, the Ver 2-7—” There were two melodic tones from Nialin’s uniform.  “Captain Nialin,” she said, stopping in the middle of the corridor.

“Communicator Leen, Captain,” came the response.  “Patching through—it’s Fleet Central.”

“Go ahead,” Nialin responded.  The waited a beat, then identified herself again:  “This is Captain Nialin of the Raeleen, go ahead Central.”

“Captain—this is Gatekeeper Vare.  Have you been having any trouble communicating with your jumper, Gateway Hebdis?”

Nialin squinted slightly, looked at Simon.  “I haven’t been on the deck in a while.  Let me check—”

“Ask them why they’re spinning up prematurely,” the voice on the communicator continued.  “We assumed the Prime Admiral gave the order, but we haven’t been able to get in touch with them to verify—for recordkeeping.  You understand, we record all jumps.”

Captain Nialin was silent for a moment.  “Thank you.  Raeleen out.”  She immediately paged the flight deck.  “Captain Nialin for Prime Admiral Thu’din-Chot.”

“This is the Prime Admiral,” replied the rough voice.

“Sir, did you order an early spin up on the jumper?”

“No, Captain.”

There was a beat of silence.  Something passed over Nialin’s face, a dawning of realization.  “Get them on the comm.,” she said finally.  “If you can.  Central couldn’t.  I’m on my way up.”  She ended the connection.  And then she started running.

Simon stood there stupidly for a moment, and then sprinted after her.  “What’s going on?!” he called.  He could see she was headed for one of the transporters.  “Wait, wait for me,” he gasped out.  

He was amazed she waited, holding the door open for him.  “Hurry up,” she shouted.  As soon as she was in she slammed her hand against button for the flight deck.

“What’s a jumper?” Simon panted.

“Large-scale matter transporter.  The technical term is ‘jumpgate ship’.  We rode through one to get here,” she replied curtly.  The doors opened onto the flight deck, and the Captain strode out onto it, Simon in her wake.  “Anything?” she asked as she came abreast of the Prime Admiral.

“No response,” he replied, watching an image of several ships floating against a backdrop of the moon.  He was gripping the sides of the podium.

To Simon, it was pretty obvious which of the fleet ships on the far side of the moon was the jumper—it was a huge ring, topped by an oblong diamond-shape.  The ring was rotating slowly, independently of the mass at the top—the ship, Simon realized, was carrying the ring, which itself was the impetus of the jump.  They stood there, watching it for a moment.

Then Thu’din-Chot tapped several buttons on the podium, paused a moment, and ordered, “All ships, this is the Prime Admiral.  Destroy the Gateway Hebdis.  Confirmation code Caed-Chu’lo-7-7-5.  Repeat, all ships capable open fire on the Gateway Hebdis.  Go to full alert, and prepare for battle.”  Already Simon could see the fleet coming around, moving into position.

And then they opened fire, balls of light and fire racing from the ships of the fleet, tearing across the space around the Gateway Hebdis—but not landing.  The missiles and whatever else all arced away at the last second, flying off randomly into space or crashing violently into the moon, where they burst into flame, peppering the surface with new, more sinister looking craters.  It was like watching humongous, deadly fireworks.

Thu’din-Chot spat a curse.  “Pull back,” he ordered.  “Pull back and prepare for contact.”

“Battlestations!” Nialin shouted across the flight deck.

“What happened?” Simon asked the captain.

“They got their shield up, pumped all their spare power into it.”

“They?”

“The Ktho,” she said, glaring at him.  “Slow.  I hope your people are not this slow, recruit, or this trip has been a waste.”  She nodded at the image floating in front of them.

Simon turned to watch.  If he looked closely, he could see the bubble of shielding surrounding the Gateway Hebdis; he watched as the ring spun faster and faster—and then the bubble vanished, and the first ship passed through the gate and jumped into the middle of the fleet.

It was a black ship, twisted and broken like a chunk of rotten wood, and it bristled with armaments.  It wasn’t alone:  dozens more ships, each different, each clearly commandeered Bulwark ships, followed it through the gate in a matter of seconds.
There was a heartbeat.  Then, the Prime Admiral calmly said:  “Open fire.  Take out the Gateway Hebdis first.  Then pick your own targets.”

Without its shield, the Gateway Hebdis crumpled almost instantly, cutting off any more Ktho ships from jumping into Earth space; a long, thin ship had been half-way through, and when the jumper fell apart the ship was torn in half.  It buckled and spun in a slow spiral, then crashed into the moon and came to a stop.

And then, the battle began.

~

Beneath their feet the ship shuddered violently, and both Saul and Yuri lost their balance and slammed into the bulkheads.  They could hear some kind of alarm klaxon going off, and then the ship rocked as if struck, knocking them down again.  Between blares of the alarm they could hear voices shouting, arguing.  Yuri took off towards them, Saul trailing again in her wake.  A voice shouted over some kind of intercom device:  “Strap in, this isn’t going to be a smooth or easy flight.  Please remain calm and in your seats, and strapped in.  I can’t stress that last part enough.”

They suddenly found themselves on the flight deck.  Saul had been concerned that they wouldn’t be able to find anything on the transport, but it had been a straight run from the cargo bay in the rear to the flight deck in the front.  The two creatures they’d seen before were there, along with a handful of others, each working fervently at strange control panels and levers, piloting the ship.  For a while they went unnoticed.

“What are you two doing up here?” one of the crewmembers asked eventually.

“What the hell’s going on?” Yuri shot back.  The ship rocked violently around them again, but Yuri and Saul both clung to support railing—or at least, railing that looked like it was there for that purpose.

“Operating under minimal,” the reedy, neckless being replied from the front of the flight deck.  “Might break up.  Gravity bad.”

“We almost didn’t make the deadline,” a third crewmember added.  This one was a short, stout figure, basically human in shape but with huge hands and wet, frog-like skin.  “Literal dead line, if we didn’t get off the ground,” it muttered.

“What deadline?” Saul asked.

“The razing deadline,” replied the first creature.  It seemed to be in charge, and looked surprisingly human, save for the fact that its skin was transparent—and the organs visible under it were all wrong.  “Doesn’t matter now, though.”  It gestured out the front viewport, and for the first time Saul and Yuri looked past the alien crew and saw the space beyond, as the blue of Earth’s atmosphere faded away and the stars took over.

Directly between them and the monstrous flagship was the explosive battle that had erupted in Earth’s orbit.

The two humans just stood there, wide-eyed.  The crew, distracted almost immediately, ignored them.  “We have to get to the Raeleen,” the leader snapped at his subordinates.  “I’m reading negative on all of our weapons systems—not that we have many.  This pile of excretion we call a ship isn’t going to keep us alive, and it isn’t built for combat in the first place.  Set course for the flagship, evasive action.  Get us out of here before something hits us and we come apart.”

The stars and ships outside the viewport whipped around as the big-handed creature yanked on a pair of levers at his station.  They had a brief glimpse of a long, V-shaped ship buckling, then breaking in two, before the view centered on the monstrous hulk of the Bulwark flagship.  Almost directly between them was a horrifyingly twisted black shape, which was spewing an incredible amount of firepower out in all directions.

“That’s a Ktho harbinger,” the centaur-like creature whispered, and even the two humans could read the terror in his voice.  “Something weird about it, though.  Battlements are all wrong.”

“Doesn’t matter,” the leader snapped.  “Get us around it, and get us to the Raeleen.  Nothing else matters.”

And then they were in the thick of the battle, ships and explosions and munitions flying all around them.  Big-hands was piloting, but given the unwieldy nature of the ship it was clear they weren’t going to get through to the flagship scot-free.
The ship shook so violently that even the trained crew members were tossed about, and another alarm started ringing across the flight deck.  “Took one across the midsection,” someone shouted.  “Hull intact, and—there!”  One of the forward crew pointed, eyes-wide—

A small craft, a little larger than a fighter jet, hurtled towards them, and then smashed top-first into the viewport.  Again the crew, and both humans, were tossed about violently, and the lights went out completely.  There was a lot of noise, but Yuri realized most of it had been going on since they’d launched.  She had expected quiet.

“Get the lights back up!” someone shouted.  There was a sound like metal bending and tearing, and then the sound of metallic objects clattering against one another.  Something shot past Yuri’s ear, so close she could feel it move her hair.  “Breach?!” the same someone yelled.

“Negative.  Hull and viewport intact.  Barely.”  The lights came back on.  A large chunk of the flight deck had collapsed, exposing the neighboring chambers, and the deck was peppered with metal debris from the fallen and broken bulkheads.  The reedy, neckless creature was speaking: “Casualties-injuries on flight deck.  Crew operating at…”  It stopped, heaved a sigh, and winced in pain—one of its arms had been crushed by the debris and severed.  “Twenty percent.  Captain Hetchqa dead.  Myself Lieutenant Theq promoted to captain.  Crew failure imminent. Pilot Greth-ul-ul injured, but capable for time being.  Pilot Greth-ul-ul, get us to Raeleen.  Continue evasives.”

“Affirmative,” big-hands—Greth-ul-ul, apparently—grunted.  “You, human girl.  To me.”

Saul stumbled to his feet, leaned heavily on the support bar, and regarded the flight deck.  Several of the crewmembers were down, including the leader, and more than one was leaking fluid and appeared, as little as he could tell, deceased.  Only two of them were still upright.  His wife was on her feet, already making her way across to the pilot’s station.  “Yuri,” he said, his voice low.  His hands were soaking wet, and hot.

“Recruit,” Greth-ul-ul snapped when she hesitated, “You volunteered—do your duty.  Get over here and help me.”

“I don’t know how,” Yuri replied.

“Yuri!”

The pilot waved at the two levers he had been handling.  “Accelerate, decelerate—” he stumbled slightly as something heavy struck the ship, then resumed, “—drift left, drift right.  Pitch up, pitch down, roll left, roll right.  Very simple.”

“Why are you telling me?”

Greth-ul-ul looked down at itself; Yuri  looked down with it, and realized that whatever was inside the froggish creature was rapidly pouring out and pooling around its feet.  The pilot let out a noise that sounded like a laugh.  “Theq can’t pilot with one arm.  I am not dead but I am going to black out.  Soon.  Get us to the Raeleen—to the big flagship.  Get into the bay, let their crew do the rest.  Do your duty, recruit.”  It stumbled back and away from her, and then fell onto its back.

“Yuri,” Saul repeated.  He was bleeding profusely himself, and a chunk of metal was protruding from under his ribs.

“I know,” his wife replied, her voice tense but calm.  “Don’t worry.  I’ll get you somewhere where you can get help.”

She ignored the bodily fluids that had spilled out onto the control levers, took them in hand, took a deep breath, and pointed the ship at the hulking Raeleen again.  It was strangely intuitive.  They had drifted far enough off-course that the Ktho harbinger was no longer between them and the flagship.  Yuri leaned into the controls, the ship shuddered, and they were on their way again.

~

The Raeleen itself floated at the core of the battle, almost still, unloading salvo after salvo at the attacking vessels.  The flight deck was freakishly calm, to Simon’s eyes.  Nothing large enough to pose an external threat to the behemoth had made it through the Gateway Hebdis—but an internal threat was a different matter.  The errant transports and injured ships of the fleet were retreating into the Raeleen’s huge bays, and each ship had to directly communicate and be scanned before it could be let aboard.  This was a huge task, but clearly worth it: seventeen incoming ships had already been confirmed as infected—that is, members of the crew itself were compromised and were turning for the Ktho, slaved to its singular consciousness—so the remaining untainted, when possible, were told to pilot their ships beyond the edge of the battle and attempt to fight back the Ktho besieging them.  Where the crews were unable to respond, the Raeleen was forced to destroy the vessels before they could be turned against the fleet.  There was a certain cold fury to the act.

“Almost finished,” Prime Admiral Thu’din-Chot said quietly, stepping back from the central podium.

Captain Nialin took her eyes off the projected images for a moment to look at Simon, and then at the Prime Admiral.  “That harbinger is still out there,” she said.
“We’ll focus on that shortly, once we have the rest of its fleet under control.”

“Captain!” one of the communications officers shouted; “We have a non-responder, coming around now.”

Nialin stepped up to the podium and flicked her fingers across the buttons, and the projected image snapped to show what the communications officer was seeing.  The rectangular craft was wobbling oddly through the battle, off-kilter, clumsy.  It was poor piloting, even for the Ktho.  But then, just when it looked like it was going to crash into one of the two slim ships that had been orbiting the flagship, it veered around to just miss it.  Whoever was at the controls wasn’t skilled, but they weren’t incompetent either.  “That’s the faulty transport,” she muttered.  “Give me comms.  Transport Qued, this is the Raeleen, please respond.”

There was silence from the approaching ship.

“Bring armaments to bear,” the Prime Admiral said, nodding towards the gunnery stations.

Nialin repeated the same commands she had sent out to the three compromised ships:  “Transport Qued, this is the Raeleen, please respond or be fired upon.  Confirm or deny:  has your crew been compromised?  You have thirty seconds—please respond.”

Again, a moment of silence—and then, “—fucking know how to respond, damn it!”

Simon perked up immediately.  “That was in English,” he murmured.  “That was in English!” he said again, louder.

“What would one of your people be doing at the comms. station?”

“Got i—” The communication ended, then abruptly started up again.  “Got it!  Raeleen, this is… shit, I don’t know who this is.”

“What’s your name, recruit,” Nialin asked.  Her tone was soothing, calm.

“Yuri.  Yuri Daugherty.”

“Okay Yuri Daugherty.”  She looked at Simon and seemed perplexed.  “My name is Nialin, Captain Nialin of the flagship Raeleen.  Who is piloting your ship?  Why are you using the comms—what's happened to the Qued’s crew?”

“I am,” came the response.  Already the woman’s voice was sounding less strained.  “They’re all incapacitated.  A lot are dead.  There was a captain for a while but he passed out from his injuries.”

“That’s unfortunate.  You say they’re incapacitated,” Nialin continued, still speaking soothingly, “Are they compromised?”

“She won’t know what that means,” Simon muttered.

“I don’t know?” Yuri replied after a moment.

“We’ll have to park you with the compromised ships and do a sweep—”

“No,” Yuri snapped.  “Not going to happen.  Steerage is failing rapidly over here; it’s getting harder and harder to get this hulk to do what I want.”  She paused, and they could hear her talking to someone other than the captain quietly.  “The, um, computer thing is telling me that the hull is starting to compromise around the flight deck—and I’ve got injured people here who need help ASAP, not to mention a hold full of… of… Earthlings.  I need to land this piece of crap and I need to do it now.”

“Recruit, that’s just not—”

“External scans show no Ktho on the hull,” one of the techs called out.

Nialin muttered something under her breath.  Simon understood them to be curses.  “Grab them with the railers,” she snapped.  “And evacuate bay 57.  Seal it off, every entrance.”

Simon added, quietly:  “She said she had injured.”

The captain glared at him.  “And get a medical team down there, full Ktho discipline, fully armed escort,” she said.

The prime admiral cleared his throat.  “Captain,” he said, his voice low.

“Sir?”

“You will join the escort.  The human recruit, as well,” Thu’din-Chot continued.

“Yes, sir,” Nialin replied, saluting.  “The deck is yours, Prime Admiral.”

Simon saluted as well, and the two of them left the flight deck.  They stepped out of the transport pad and into a large chamber, which was fairly clearly an airlock leading out into one of the large docking bays.  “Why did he send us down here?” Simon asked.

“It’s his prerogative,” the captain replied.  “And I broke protocol.  By taking the Qued aboard we are risking compromising the flagship.  It was my choice to bring them aboard, so it is my responsibility to handle it.  Personally.”  She opened up a waist-level crate and pulled out what was obviously, even to Simon’s untrained eye, a rifle of some kind.  The first one she handed to Simon; a second one she took for herself.  Already the airlock was filling with soldiers and what looked like a medical team.

“I’m not a—”

“You’re under orders, recruit,” Nialin snapped.  Then she called out to the gathering beings in a clear, loud voice:  “Okay, people, you know the drill.  Get in, scan everyone—no exceptions.  If anyone is compromised, shoot to kill, no hesitation, no exceptions.  The majority of the people on that ship aren't going to know what is happening, so be ready for resistance.”  She slapped a lever on the side of her rifle and the weapon started to emit a soft, high-pitched whine.  “Recruit Fitzmoor, with me at point.  Let’s move.”

There was a ping, and the airlock door slid open.  Simon and Nialin strode out across the bay—which was much smaller than the vast one Simon’s ride in had landed in—and around to the rear of the bulky, smoking, crumpled ship.  Simon kept his rifle at his side, while the captain led with hers.  They stopped before the rear bay doors of the Qued, where Nialin gestured for one of the accompanying soldiers—Simon realized it was Liuetenant Thelithinosi—to move up and open the ship.

Thelithinosi pressed a keypad against the ship’s hull and tapped several keys, then stepped back quickly as the doors hissed and swung open.

“Weapon up, Simon,” Nialin muttered; then she called out, “Weapons up!”

The soldiers formed up on either side, aiming at the slowly-opening doors.

“Hold!” she shouted.  Already people were pouring out of the ship, panicked.  “Hold fast!  I said hold!”  She fired a warning shot at the top of the ship; the sound of it deafened Simon momentarily, and cowed the crowd in their tracks.  “Listen to me.  All of you.  You will move to my left and line up, single-file, so that we can scan you for Ktho influencers.  You will line up, single file, or you will be shot, no exceptions.”

The crowd hummed, bustled—but complied.  Simon hadn’t ever seen so many people in one place, all following orders well.  They were clearly scared, but they knew they were to be taken care of.  They did as they were told, though not quickly, and a few minutes later, Simon, Nialin, and Thelithinosi strode onto the ship, leading with their weapons.

“Clear!” the lieutenant called out, examining the cargo bay.  “No contacts.  They all cleared out.  Flight deck is ahead.”  The trio made their way down the bay’s central aisle, between the multitude of seats, and through the interior doors.  They traveled down a long, straight corridor that led directly through the ship, and up a short flight of stairs.  As they did so Thelithinosi held a scanner-device of some kind up at every side corridor they passed, but there were no organic readings anywhere except the flight deck ahead.

When the doors of the deck slid open and Captain Nialin entered first.  She turned left, right, leading still with the muzzle of her rifle—which then dropped to her side.  “Clear,” she whispered, awed at the sheer destruction of the flight deck.  It had collapsed in on itself from the front, and the front viewport was showing irreparable damage.  She was amazed that it hadn’t breached, that there was anyone still alive in there.

The sight of the flight deck turned Simon’s stomach.  There was multicolored blood and body parts scattered about the debris, and more than half of the small crew was very, clearly deceased.  He could hear someone speaking in a soft voice, in English, off to his left.  He turned, leading with his gun as Nialin had, and that’s when he saw them—the woman, Yuri Daugherty, wearing an American police officer’s uniform, was kneeling down over a prostrate human man, her hands pressed against his lower ribs, her arms covered in blood up to her elbows.  She looked up, hair messed and scattered around her face, and saw Simon standing there. “Help,” she croaked.  It was very clear she had been crying.  “Help.”

“Get the medical team in here,” Nialin snapped at the lieutenant.  “They’re not all dead.  Yet.  Go!”

There was a low rumble, and the ship shuddered beneath their feet.  Simon and Nialin looked at each other, puzzled—and then the realization struck them both:  “The harbinger,” they said together.  Nialin sprinted out of the transport ship and to the airlock leading back into the ship proper, Simon once more hot on her heels.

~

The calm of the flight deck had disintegrated once the Ktho harbinger had finally opened fire on the Raeleen.  “Status report!” Thu’din-Chot snapped at the flight crew as Simon and Nialin jogged back to the central podium.  “Why is he still following you around?”

“Situational training,” she replied.  “What in the universe did it hit us with?”

“We don’t know,” one of the techs replied.  “It stopped firing most of its armaments for several seconds before it let the big one loose.  We’ve got breaches along the forward-lower arrays, but they’ve sealed off.  Gunnery is dumping everything we’ve got into that thing—but it’s powering up a second shot.  Incoming, brace!”

A twisting blue fireball launched itself from what must have been the front of the harbinger.  Nialin was enraptured, watching the projected image.  

The Raeleen rocked from the impact, and shuddered more violently than before.  “Hull breaches in forward-lower arrays re-opened—it hit the same region.  Precision strike.”

“This is new,” the captain murmured.  “Never seen the like.  They sent it specifically for us—they want to bring down the flagship.”

“It appears more than capable,” Thud’in-Chot replied.  “We were too busy trying to prevent an outbreak, none of us expected that monster to be carrying anything of that magnitude.”

“Another shot like that and we’ll lose steerage and main power,” Nialin called over the chaos.  “Begin evasives—”

“Steerage is already down forty-percent, we won’t be able to move fast enough—”

“Primary power failing on multiple decks—”

“It’s charging up again, thirty seconds!”

The communications officer shouted over all of them:  “Priority message from the Kubillztat, emergency direct to the Prime Admiral.”

“Patch it through,” Thu’din-Chot said calmly.  “This is Prime Admiral Thu’din-Chot aboard the Raeleen.”

“This is Captain Kazrant of the Kubillztat,” replied a high-pitched voice.  As it spoke one of the two slim ships that had been orbiting the Raeleen moved from its side into the space between it and the harbinger, and accelerated towards the Ktho vessel.  “Prime Admiral, it has been an honor serving under you.”

“The honor is mine, Captain Kazrant, and your crew,” Thu’din-Chot replied.  The communication ended.

“What are they doing?” Simon muttered.

Nialin was quiet, her fists clenched into tight balls.  “Their duty,” she said, between clenched teeth.

“How many people are on that ship?!” the human shouted.  Captain Nialin didn’t reply.  “How many?!”

A tech shouted over him:  “Incoming!  Brace!”  All eyes turned to the projected image as the blue fireball sprayed out of the harbinger and directly into the Kubillztat.  The slim ship visually shuddered, pieces of it splintering off as it diffused the shot.  But, despite the impact, it kept racing forward.  Fragments of the blue fire splattered against the Raeleen’s hull harmlessly, most of their energy already spent on the smaller vessel.

“Seven thousand, two hundred, and ninety-two,” Thu’din-Chot said, his voice betraying no emotion, as the Kubillztat rammed full-speed into the harbinger, a slim silver spear piercing that twisted hunk of darkness.  The Bulwark vessel immediately exploded, momentarily blinding Simon; when he could again see the harbinger was in pieces, its core exposed and glowing, chunks of its black hull scattering in every direction, drifting away from them.

“Jesus,” Simon whispered.

“Sir,” one of the techs called out, “It’s caught in the Earth’s gravity well.”  Already they could see the glowing core accelerating away from them, towards the planet.

“Destroy it,” Nialin called out.

“Gunnery is out, the explosion fried what was left of their computers.  Steerage is completely gone, as well as main propulsion.  We’ve only got the ability to keep ourselves from plummeting, Captain.”

“What is that thing?” Simon asked, his brows furrowing.

Captain Nialin ignored him.  “Flag the fleet; find someone who can take it out, immediately.  We have seconds here, people.”

“Nobody else has the necessary firepower,” Thu’din-Chot replied, watching the image.  “Not to take out a harbinger’s core.”

Nialin shouted out a native vulgarity.  “Simon,” she said then, more quietly, “Don’t watch.”

The human couldn’t look away.  “What is that thing?!” he asked, his heart pounding in his chest.  “What the hell is it?!”

“Simon—”

He watched in horror as the glowing core made planetfall.  An instant later there was a flash, and all of the visual sensors went white.  A few seconds later they reconfigured themselves and, for a moment, Simon’s mind couldn’t compute what he was looking at.  It looked almost like a broken egg, chunks of shattered shell surrounding a glowing-hot liquid core that was rapidly losing its shape as the whole mass scattered out in every direction.  He heard the prime admiral order their shields up to protect from the debris, and realized that the debris he was referring to was the remains of the planet Earth.