NationStates

The Locusts

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Fornax Dwarf
Kompanion-9 System
Kompanion-9 B “Eschate”
Northern Hemisphere Surface

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Jae gave a fearful glance skywards, where Fructidor’s gigantic mirrors glowed in geosynchronous orbit like four blade-shaped moons. He could hear the strange whining roar of repulsor engines growing closer, and the poppy petals were beginning to rustle in the breeze of an approaching ramjet’s intake, flitting from purple to silver in the pseudo-moonlight.

Jet-pack— dead. Blaster— also dead. His skimmer had been shot down weeks ago, his hoverbike destroyed two days before. I’m so fucked. All he had to face down an assault drone was a ball of opium, an expired emergency plasma flare—

“Pssst! Doctor!”

—and, of course, his local benefactor.

“Doctor!,” came Endu’s hiss again. “Let’s run to that house, up by the cedar tree!”

Jae turned around, sighing heavily and looking at Endu and then back up at Fructidor. “There’s no point, Endu. You run, I’ll stay. They’re almost here.”

“No, Doctor! I know these people. That house has a bow, and a basement you can hide in.”

Jae resisted the urge to roll his eyes—after all, the most advanced weapon Endu had probably seen before his blaster was a chariot. But Endu ignored his reluctance, taking him by the hand and jogging through the field towards the sizable mud-brick villa that sat by a cedar tree a few hundred meters away.

“Endu, stop—stop!” Jae batted his hand away and came up short. “All that would happen is we’ll get everyone in the house killed. Just leave me.”

Endu looked back at him and shook his head, raising his voice over the approaching rumble of the drone’s engines. “You don’t understand.” He began once again dragging Jae, his sturdy peasant’s build easily overwhelming the frail academic’s ability to resist, ignoring Jae’s protestations and pounding on the door.

“Don Kur, help! It’s Endu, Zilg of Ersta’s grandson! There’s a [NO TRANSLATION AVAILABLE - SUGGESTED: DEMON?] after this man! Please let us in!”

The door was thrown open a moment later by a woman, wrapped in a shawl and veil, her hands trembling. “Get inside, child, get inside—the bow’s above the hearth. I’ll go get Don Kur.” She helped Endu shove the reluctant but resigned Jae inside, then ran off, shouting down hallways to rouse the house.

Jae stared bemusedly at the hearth, full of embers—Endu was wrestling what appeared to be a large crossbow, with an oversized, blackened armature off a pair of pegs above it. “Endu, I tried to tell you—that won’t do any good. I should just go outside so no one in here gets hurt.”

A silver-haired, pot-bellied man suddenly burst into the room, holding a long wooden box under one arm, followed by the veiled woman. “So, you’re Zilg’s grandson, eh? How did you meet a [NO TRANSLATION AVAILABLE - SUGGESTED: FOREIGNER?], and why is there a [NO TRANSLATION AVAILABLE - SUGGESTED: DEMON?] after him?”

Jae peered at the box as he set it on the floor and the woman helped him lift the lid off. Crossbow bolts. Ha. He had started walking to the door as Kur and Endu took one of the bolts out, intending to let the drone take him and spare the building—but held up, in the faint light of a few candles and the glowing embers of the hearth, the bolt’s strange luster made Jae stop in his tracks.

That is definitely not bronze. What the fuck?

Endu slung the loaded crossbow over his back and began clambering up the rickety wooden steps—really a glorified ladder—that ran from the corner of the room to a small trapdoor in the ceiling, before sliding out onto the roof. Jae, curious, stuck his head out the room’s only window and took the plasma flare off his belt—he could see a faint red glow beginning to light up the northern horizon now, and the wind of the ramjet’s intake was kicking up dust from the hard earth and making the cedar boughs sway. Well, I hope whatever he has that bow loaded with works. Any second now…

The wind suddenly stopped, the ominous glow vanished. It was momentarily just a peaceful night in a house set amid cedar trees and poppy fields, under four artificial moons—because the drone had cut its engine to enter its terminal glide. Jae popped the cap off his plasma flare and hurled it out the window before turning his back; it landed a little ways away, hissed for a moment, and then ignited, illuminating the entire house in the surreal, harsh manner of a blue hypergiant.

A moment later, the blinding light was replaced with deafening noise—as Jae had hoped, the drone had gone for the most obvious surface target first. He was thrown on his ass by the impact, which shook dust from the walls and ceiling—he could hear, over the screams of the terrified locals in the house, the sound of mechanical legs deploying, of delicate titanium claws scrabbling at pulverized bedrock.

And then, the faint clunk-whoosh of a crossbow, and the world vanished in a firestorm.

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Fornax Dwarf
Kompanion-9 System
Kompanion-9 B “Eschate”
Geosynchronous orbit

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Ethel blinked, nonplussed. “Onby, what’s going on? Are you offloading me?”

There was no response in her earpiece, and she tapped the side of her holo-visor. “Onby, is there a connectivity issue?”

A different voice—that of the ship’s operations computer, rather than her drone’s onboard intelligence—replied. “Yes, we’ve lost connectivity—sorry, Ethel, I’m getting a confirmed KIA signal.”

She scoffed. “That’s impossible, he must just have some sort of jammer.” But a moment later, her blacked-out visual field flashed another message:



“There’s no way—do we have a picture of the site?”

“I’ll give you the best I’ve got from the external cameras,” the operations computer replied, showing her a grainy image of a dark building with a smoldering crater outside.

“This fucking sucks, it’s too low-res, I can’t see a damn thing.” Six years of my life for this filthy fucking observatory that doesn’t even have decent mid-range optics? “Do we have any lidar assets nearby?”

“After the loss of an assault drone, I would need the captain and the political officer to approve their deployment.”

“Well, ask them, I’m guessing they also would like to know what the fuck just happened.” Ethel flipped her visor up, her brow furrowed, and tapped the side of her immersion pod to crack the lid. As she stood up, half of her visor automatically flipped back down, beginning to display an analysis of the drone’s final data burst. This doesn’t make any sense, he didn’t have anything that could crack the ventral armor, it had to have started in the reactor.

The ship’s voice returned to her earpiece. “Ethel, I have the captain on audio, and a lidar model from a mesosphere soarer about 300 klicks out. Would you like me to put it on your visor?”

She nodded to the empty room, sitting back down in the pod and flipping her visor all the way down to look at the picture as the captain’s voice replaced the ship’s. “So, it blew up on landing?”

“Not quite, sir,” she replied, staring in confusion at the image on her screen. “I definitely landed—Onby made a standard millisecond diversion on landing but then realized it was a flare, and it was moving to ground configuration when we… lost contact.”

“You’re looking at the same lidar model, I’d say that’s a definite casualty, not just a lost contact,” the captain replied gruffly. “You’re relieved of duty, sergeant—we’ll need to have a conversation with intelligence about what this was, but we’re not going to be sending you down again for at least another 12 hours, I’d say.”

“Yes sir.”

All Ethel could think about on her way back to her bunk—nestled inside the cruiser awkwardly clinging to one of Fructidor’s industrial modules—was the final few frames of the lidar model: thick chemical smoke clearing to reveal what had happened to poor old Onby.

The drone was splayed on its narrow back, six bladelike legs in various stages on unfolding and two waist-mounted cannon pods still sealed shut, having been knocked to the far side of its landing crater by some terrible force. Based on the debris and the huge chunk torn from its body, something had smashed into it as it rose from the crater, shredding the ventral armor, bursting open the dorsal plating, and flinging the reactor housing clear out of the machine. A mixture of hydraulic fluid, reactor coolant, ammunition, and pulverized native vegetation had swirled together and ignited in the crater, which resembled nothing so much as the biblical lake of fire in miniature. Green and orange flames licked the faintly-twitching robot’s shattered body as arcs of electricity shot randomly from the reactor, adding bright blue-white emphases to the faint Cherenkov glow.

Ripple

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Fornax Dwarf
Interstellar space
Starship Fructidor, main cylinder

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Sam took a long drag on their cigarette, aimlessly gazing off at the gentle upward curve of Fructidor’s internal sea, admiring the curve of distant thunderheads towards the ship’s central axis in shafts of pink-orange twilight that filtered up like irregular searchlights from naked patches of ocean floor. Myna birds and crows were chattering up on the roof as they ashed the cigarette in the terracotta planter box hanging from the railing, full of dead poppies and geraniums that had long since wilted, probably even before Fructidor’s main interior lamps had gone down.

A voice called excitedly from back inside the office. “The signal’s coming back!”
Sam flicked the cigarette over the side of the balcony, not bothering to watch it fall onto the half-submerged street below, and walked back inside. Vanya was hunched over his terminal, pinched between banks of servers that had been hastily rescued from one of the ship’s internal spaces that was now below sea level and were piled up thoughtlessly all around.
“Look, look,” he said excitedly, pointing at the screen. Sam squinted, feeling their heartbeat quicken as they read the wave functions slowly cycling before them, then felt their phone buzz and took it out.

From: Karen Vashukani
To: Sam Jayeuse
Re: signal from earlier

Hey are you seeing a return of that signal we picked up a couple hours ago? the uulchi consultant suddenly won’t come out of its tank to talk to me about it for some reason but it looks to me like every instrument in Kompanion is picking it up??

Sam’s eyes widened, and they handed the phone to Vanya. “Karen’s getting the same thing back on Eschate! What the fuck has enough gravity to disrupt hyperspace like that from here to Kompanion without tearing the whole fucking ship apart?”

Vanya looked nervously out the window, then back at the screen. “I don’t see any tsunamis out there– but it looks like the origin of this is a lot more local than the big pulse we got on the way to Sculptor, doesn’t it?”
Sam nodded. “I mean, the last one fizzled the main reactor like blowing out a candle, and it was emanating all the way from the Great Attractor– email the leadership team for permission to fire up the hyperdar lens, we want to get an active scan of whatever this is. The thing an hour ago was a weird blip, but this… this is fucking nuts.”

Vanya switched windows and began typing furiously. “They’re probably just seeing a gravity anomaly on the navigation system and wondering what the hell is going on, I’m sure they’ll say yes– go get Aleida, she’s in the bathroom.”

Sam immediately hustled out of the office, down a narrow hallway filled with more rescued server banks, and began pounding on the flimsy bathroom door. “Ally! Ally!”

“I’m taking a shit, what is it?”

“Signal’s back, and fucking strong and close!”

“Why aren’t the tsunami sirens going off?”

“Oh my god, shut up and finish shitting so you can come look! It’s stronger than the pulse on the way to Sculptor!”

Aleida grunted, and Sam heard a few plops, then the hiss of a flush and the faucet turning on, before she ripped the door open, scowling. “What do you mean, it’s stronger than the pulse on the way to Sculptor? Why are we still alive, then?”

“I don’t know, Vanya’s pinging the captain to turn on the hyperdar lens,” Sam said, beckoning and beginning to walk back towards the office. Aleida jogged to follow, waving her hands.

“We can’t just turn the lens on just because Vanya’s misreading instruments again, do you know the kind of chewing out I got last time we caused a motherfucking ship-wide blackout just to find a fucking pulsar?”

Sam giggled as they both rounded the corner into the office. “Vanya’s not misreading instruments again, and that was funny– look at this email I just got from Karen,” they said, handing Aleida their phone.

Vanya turned around indignantly, switching the screen back from his email to the instrument panels. “I am not misreading instruments again, and that was a legitimately weird pulsar! Look at the graphs yourself, asshole.”

Aleida raised an eyebrow as she read the email. “So the squid is suddenly acting weird, and Karen assumes that’s got nothing necessarily to do with the weird readings? It’s not like they’ve never been known to sabotage–”

“Oh my god, just look at our readings!,” Sam exclaimed. Aleida handed them back their phone and peered at the screen, her eyes widening, while Vanya pulled out his phone, looked at it briefly, and then held it up with a grin.

“Political officer just signed off. Everyone hold onto something!”

The distant chittering of the myna birds was suddenly overwhelmed by the moan of tsunami sirens, and the lights in the room flickered and then went out. The air seemed to swim and vibrate before Sam’s eyes, as kilometers away on the ship’s prow, huge amounts of power poured into the tiny, intricate conduits of the most sophisticated active scanner the human mind could conceive, and Fructidor peered billions of parsecs ahead into the strange folds of hyperspace.

The lights slowly began glowing again as they heard the sound of rushing water and detritus clanking against the flooded first floor, and Vanya’s screen blacked out and then came back on to display a loading bar.

SCAN COMPLETE. ESTIMATED TIME REMAINING TO MODEL COMPLETION: SIX HOURS, FORTY-SEVEN MINUTES.

They all sighed, and Vanya shrugged. “Go have another cig while we wait, I guess? Someone should go wake Mo up when it’s almost done, too.”

The lights suddenly flicked back off, and the sound of rushing water below intensified. The three astronomers looked at each other, puzzled– but suddenly Vanya went rigid, his eyes bulging and fingers flexed so every tendon in his hands stood out.

“Van, are you–”

Sam felt their mind and perception skip a beat, and came to somewhere else. They weren’t touching the floor, they couldn’t hear the myna birds or the tsunami sirens– there was only blackness all around, but floating just out of reach they could see Vanya, too. They were looking at him from behind, but somehow could see his face, which bore an expression of primal terror that Sam had only seen on a few faces before in their whole long life. Not just his face, but somehow his insides, too, were visible– a fast-pulsing heart, bowels wriggling slightly as they instinctively evacuated, his brain floating serenely in the confines of his skull. But as they watched, each organ began drifting, migrating in different directions, passing through his skin and bones and even each other like brushing aside a veil. His mouth was clearly open, but Sam couldn’t hear him screaming, and a moment later they were standing exactly where they had been in the office.

Vanya was gone, and Aleida was looking at them in utter befuddlement.
“What the fuck just happened? Where did you go? Where’s Vanya?”

The lights came back on, and Fructidor abruptly dropped out of hyperspace, knocking Sam and Aleida to their knees. Sam threw up, more from shock than the immediate gravity sickness, and saw blood and black fluid.

“Sam?”

Poor Vanya. What had been doing that to him? What had they just learned?