It was hot. Blisteringly hot, in fact. The tiny gunmetal-hued room practically radiated heat; turning the tiny space into what felt like to Iapeth to be an oven. He wiped his forehead and blinked.
He had already been listening to transmission traffic for seven hours in the comms hut, maybe more; the heat, beyond making his mind slow to a crawl, had also stopped several key systems in the dank, electronics-infested hole; namely, the clock, but, perhaps most pressingly, the cooling systems for the banks of computers, turning what was once a mildly-bearable desiccating heat into the little slice of hell he was currently enjoying. And for what? He mused. There had been nothing coming in on the board for days now; nothing but static and an eerie popping sound, which according to the eggheads in the facility, had been caused by the bloated apocalyptic red star that scorched the tiny world he sat upon.
Nothing. No status updates, no commercial traffic chatter, not even military correspondence. Not a soul.
Despite the oppressive heat, he shivered. It was damn spooky. I need to get out of here. He thought, startling himself with the sudden violence of it. He sat up out of the sweat-soaked chair and began shutting off the unnecessary electronics, almost savouring the thought of each one's quiescence bringing the temperature down, even for a moment. After each and every shutdown checklist had been followed and the forces of bureaucracy given their votive offering, he stumbled over to the door, pulling his heavy protective gear on with the lumbering clumsiness of a parched elephant.
One of the unfortunate side-effects of the planet's star being a geriatric was that it's light, once life-giving and benign (Even the paleontologists could tell that much; fossils of crab-like sea dwellers the size of shuttlecraft, embedded in a planet that hadn't seen liquid oceans in millions of years was compelling) had become hardened and angry; having jumped up the spectrum to high-energy ionizing ultraviolet. Direct skin exposure to the light outside led to horrible peeling and sore sunburns in half an hour, tops; an hour or more meant that your skin started flaking off entirely.
With one final heave, Iapeth threw on the last layer of his beige desert gear, and, with a sigh that could move mountains, opened the door to the outside world. The basin in which the tiny comms Quonset hut, in fact, the entire base, sat in, shimmered in the noontime sun. The geologists had described it as a 'near-extinct caldera', but all Iapeth knew was that it was fucking huge. The mountainous rims of the caldera were visible only as brownish-beige smears on the encircling horizon, framing a perfect, white salt-encrusted plain, stretching on into the oppressive heat until it blurred away into the beyond. Thankfully, Iapeth's target was much closer; only a dozen metres ahead of him, a surprisingly nondescript, hexagonal grey bunker sat in the glare, impervious to the world's hostility. He stumbled, still slightly dazed from the heat of the tin hell he had came from, until he reached the door to the bunker; a grey metal slab with a small holographic keypad that fluttered into life at his approach.
With growing anxiety he keyed his passcode into the device, and, with a soft, melodious chime, the door eased open, revealing a cramped airlock that led further into the structure. As he stepped inside, the door to the frying hellscape irised closed, and, with a gentle whirring sound, the glorious embrace of cold air began to flow through the station's dedicated cooling system, nearly knocking him off of his feet with the sheer relief of it. Finally, with a pronounced ping, the inner door slid open, the waiting elevator's clean brushed-steel surfaces and comfortable, modern-styled seating calling him as if it were a dream. He slumped into the chair, falling asleep nearly instantly, ready for a long nap on the slow ride down into the cool depths of Veritas.
...
"What do you mean, nothing? There had to have been something, Lieutenant." The frustrated voice echoed through the chamber. It belonged to Chlorus, the base's de facto military commander, and simply by his tone Iapeth could tell that he was at his wit's end; the lizard-like Poruscans never showed true emotion until it was nearly boiling over inside them. He would have to tread lightly.
He straightened his back, standing to an even more apt attention than before. "I told you, sir. There's nothing but static on the entirety of the Dominion subspace comms spectrum." He resisted the urge to throw his hand up in the air to add weight to his words. "I've run dozens of diagnostics on our equipment, gone through every nut and bolt and solder in that hut and there's nothing wrong on our end. I can't explain it."
The Poruscan's face flushed with blood, and the small crest on the ridge of his skull slowly began to inflate, gorging on the blood that, under normal circumstances, would have flowed away from his face for water conservation, but now pulsed with anger.
"Try again, Lieutenant. This is more important than you could possibly know."
Something twitched in Iapeth's leg. Of course I fucking know, you overgrown lizard. Who do you think I am, anyways? He thought, feeling his own blood rising to the surface. It had been an extraordinarily long and stressful day; he didn't expect to get the full-spittle treatment from the Commander, let alone in front of the assembled crew of the station's command centre.
When he spoke, he had to wring the anger out of every syllable; "The only thing, sir, that could explain what's happening at this point is a complete collapse of the subspace network. Now, whether that be due to some new AI that an idiot scientist unleashed into the extranet by a fluke or something more dire, I don't know." He sighed. "There's no way to know, at this point. We're sitting here twiddling our thumbs, and, if you'll pardon the colloquialism, sir, sticking our asses out in the breeze until whatever brought the network down in the first place is fixed."
The Poruscan took a deep breath, evidently about to unload a new barrange upon Iapeth, when another voice chimed in. "Absyrtus, if I may."
The Commander's face drained of colour, slightly, as he turned towards the shimmering image of his own commanding officer, stationed high above the base aboard the largest of the facility's guardian vessels, the ironically-named cruiser Untouched Snowfall. Unlike his humanoid companions, Admiral Eurylochus was a cetacean, a member of the Theline species; at almost 14 metres long, he most resembled the humpback whale of the Earth of old, but was depicted in the tiny command post underground in a nigh caricatured manner; the hologram that depicted him was less than a metre long, and the voice of the computer that translated for him was tinny and flat.
Absyrtus bowed slightly, a gesture of deference amongst the Poruscans. "Of course, sir."
Eurylochus rotated slightly, evidently basking in the subtropical sunlight of his oceanic habitat in orbit. "Now, Lieutenant, is there any way to be able to determine the malfunction from here? Some sort of system-wide diagnostic?"
Iapeth relaxed slightly, now that he wasn't about to be devoured by the Commander. "Not from here, unfortunately. This base, as I'm sure you're aware, was built to be hidden from the galaxy at large, as part of a secret military research programme. Unfortunately, to make the base hidden, we couldn't be directly connected via the extranet to Phorcys; there is a chance, however remote, that someone could backtrack and gain access to our systems through it and cause all sorts of internal mayhem, both here on the base and within the general public if word ever got out about our existence here. So, Command devised an alternative; our extranet/subspace array would be tuned only to transmit to the military base on Melisande."
"That's just under two light-years away; almost negligible to subspace communications."
Iapeth smiled. "Exactly. Though the subspace signal from here needs to be routed back out through the array on Melisande to reach, say, Command on Phorcys, the actual delay is practically non-existant, thanks to the sophisticated computers employed there to shuffle and filter data going back and forth."
Eurylochus chimed in, performing a slow-motion barrel-roll in his tank. "Ah, I see. So, if I could make a guess; in order to be able to run a system-wide diagnostic, we need to find the array on Melisande and find out what's wrong with it; from there, we can determine the status of all of the other arrays and, eventually, Command itself."
The Poruscan commander, however, stepped in; "But in order to do that, we'd have to send a ship, or two, or even three to Melisande; are we sure that it's worth the risk? We still don't know what caused all of the network to crash in the first place."
Iapeth snorted quietly under his breath, hopefully low enough to hide from the cadre of superior officers around them. "I'm sorry sir, but do you think we're being attacked?"
Absyrtus shot back, cold as the void itself; "This isn't some B-grade 'flick' on the extranet, Lieutenant; communications networks planning hundreds of worlds across thousands of lightyears do not simply crash with no warning."
The lieutenant deflated slightly, and was about to retort when Eurylochus interjected; "Very well Commander. We will have to take extra precautions; I will take the Untouched to Melisande with a strike-team of servitors and the Lieutenant here."
Iapeth's face drained of colour. Even through the dim feed of his hologram, Eurylochus saw the human's trepidation, and, mustering all of the emotion he could force through the tightbeam, comforted the lieutenant. "Have no fear, Lieutenant. You will be escorted by combat servitors at all times and will have near-constant communication and fire support from the cruiser in orbit."
"If that doesn't keep you safe, nothing will."
...
The silence of Melisande was crushing, suffocating, enveloping; even as Iapeth picked his away across the street, he could hear no sound beyond the rasping of his own ventilator.
"Fuuck... What happened here?" A voice to his left swore softly, bleeding into Iapeth's thoughtspace over the radio. What did happen here? Iapeth thought. They were wandering through the streets of one of the semi-major cities of Melisande; Pelleas, previously home to over five hundred thousand souls.
And the entire city was empty. No people, no animals, no nothing; storefronts remained open, garbage lay where it fell, fluttering in the guttering breeze of a summer day, electric cars still whirring softly, waiting for their owners to close their gaping doors and return them to blissful slumber. It was as if the entire population had simply dropped what they were doing and left, in an instant.
Nothing had been disturbed, nothing was out of place, but for the grey ash drifting in sheets from the iron sky. Iapeth stuck out his hand, letting it fill with the cloying dust. Some of it was still burning; smoking char dotted and smoldered in his palm, threatening to burn through the thick plastic polymers of his environmental suit. He let the ash fall to the ground, joining its companion particles in the ever-growing drifts, and activated his handset, connecting him directly to Eurylochus in orbit.
"Admiral, there's no-one here. Not a soul. I... I just can't... explain it. Have you gotten anywhere with these clouds? The ashfall is getting strong enough to impede our progress."
A pause, a momentary lag as the signal struggled through the thick clouds to the orbiting Untouched, before Eurylochus' computerized voice filled his head once more. "We've pinpointed the source of the ash clouds to be a crater in the primary equatorial continent, about ten thousand kilometres from you. Ladar and radar scans indicate that an asteroid, approximately in the 3 km-range, hit the coastline just inland of Melisande's capital, Maeterlinck, at a speed which we've calculated to be around a half-percent of the speed of light."
Iapeth's jaw dropped. "A half-percent?! There's no way that an asteroid could possibly go that fast naturally..."
"Or be able to hit Melisande's capital with an uncanny amount of accuracy. Hence why we believe that we are, as the Commander suggested, dealing with an invasive threat. I've brought the cruiser and her systems up to action stations as a precaution."
"Gods. Has there been any sign of whoever... or whatever did this?"
"None that we can detect from here. It is most likely that they have already left for another target of opportunity."
Iapeth sighed, allowing relief to edge back into his voice. "Well, at least we're alone h..."
"Or, it could be that they are simply waiting farther out into the system, that we cannot see them for any number of reasons, and that they are simply watching and waiting."
Iapeth deflated like a ruptured blimp. 'Y'know, Admiral, you're really good at making people feel better..."
"Glad to be of service, Lieutenant. Orbital Command out."
Iapeth chuckled slightly under his breath, lamenting the cetacean's inability to detect sarcasm, when the voice to his left spoke once more.
"Sir, I think we're here." The voice, which belonged to an average-sized human named Pholoe, pointed towards the end of the street, other hand clenched onto his rifle like a soother.
The street ended in a t-intersection, with storefronts and houses lining either side of the street, stretching off into the slate-coloured gloom. Their target, however, was just in front of them, at the very crux of the intersection. A small lot, fenced off with barbed wire and a high fence, contained a small, nondescript grey bunker, caked with the swiftly falling ash. The front gate, once locked securely and watched by security cameras and combat servitors, was ajar and deserted, creaking ever-so-softly in the unnatural stillness. Iapeth gestured for a cautious advance, and the combat servitors, previously padding quietly behind them, picked up the pace, the dim light barely reflecting off of gunmetal-hued carapaces.
The two servitors scanned the lot in infrared, sniffed the air in ultrasound and felt in gravitic waves, before motioning for the two creatures of flesh and blood to move forward, covering their passage to the bunker's thick metal bulkhead door. Iapeth peered through the gloom of disturbed ash at the door's holographic keypad, which, despite the infiltrating ashfall and the destruction around it, faithfully jumped to life at his and Pholoe's presence. A quick entering of the override sequence, and the door groaned open, revealing the cavernous and pitch-black interior. With a click, their helmet-mounted flashlights were activated, and both of them stepped into the murky dark, servitors following slowly behind.
The subspace array bunker was nothing too spectacular, nor was it very large; it was merely a modular version of Veritas' Quonset hut-like structure, built into a reinforced concrete-and-synthetic steel composite shell to be both resistant to potential damage and liftable into orbit via heavy transports if necessary. As such, Iapeth immediately got to work. He walked over to the corner of the bunker closest to the door, and, with a flourish, flicked a large switch. "This should do it..." He said to no-one in particular, and, with a whirring sound and a series of harsh coughs, he was proven correct; slowly, but surely, the fluorescent lights in the ceiling flickered into life, backup generators grinding to life in the background. One by one, chunk by chunk, the banks of computers lining both sides of the wall began to start up as well, running diagnostics and chirping away to one another.
Finally, the only thing left to start was the massive supercomputer and terminal that was the primary subspace array's public face, which coughed slowly into life, its massive fan-and-duct system roaring to life like a primitive jet engine, before, with a chorus of harsh error chirps and alarms, collapsed down into death once more.
"Huh." Iapeth strode over to the device, draping a trail of accumulated dust and ash. He applied the ancient technician's fix-all of 'ctl-alt-del', but, predictably, it did nothing. "Hang on." He said, again, addressing no-one in the group in particular. "Must be something in the power supply..."
He stepped over to a large panel built into an outcropping of metal-sided hardware casing and pulled it aside, placing it on the terminal nonchalantly. "Shit. Shitshitshitshit shit." He swore, focusing his helmet-mounted light into the dusty interior of the computer.
Pholoe, now completely riled by the situation, yelled; "What? What the hell now?"
Iapeth, not removing his head from the cavity, turned on his radio and responded. "Ach, I don't know. Looks like some sort of vermin got into the power supply conduits; whole damn thing is chewed up half to hell. Cables are wrecked, control chips scratched..." He pulled out of the space and shook his head. "There's no way we can bring this online here."
Pholoe's face drained of colour. "W..ww...what other options do we have?"
Iapeth rubbed his helmeted head. "We could bring it up to orbit, assuming the Untouched has a heavy transport in its hangar, but.."
He was interrupted by a flickering of the lights and a cacophonous groan from the machine-filled interior of the bunker. Both of them looked up to the ceiling, watching dust, formerly lodged in the light housings, drift slowly to the ground. "That really doesn't sound good..." Pholoe mumbled. Iapeth opened his mouth to reassure him, but was interrupted, again, by an urgent-sounding chirp from his handset. Almost with trepidation, he touched his helmet to bring it online, allowing Eurylochus' voice to fill the room.
"Lieutenant, I hate to disturb you at such a sensitive point in the recovery effort, but orbital sensors have detected several power-sources coming online within the city. Aerial drones also have revealed that there is a large mass of infrared signatures heading towards the bunker site, many over half-a-metre long."
Pholoe merely glanced towards the robotic servitors and they leapt into motion, nearly flying up the short staircase into the ash-covered lot. Iapeth immediately snapped into motion as well, running over to the secondary control terminal, tucked neatly into the far corner of the room. His fingers rapidly entered commands into the waiting holographic terminal, which responded with a series of terminally-cheerful chirps and beeps. "Pholoe, I'm going to try to seal the security shutters in the inner entrance here. Guard the entrance; whatever happens, make sure nothing gets in here." Breathlessly, he switched channels to Eurylochus aboard the orbiting cruiser. "Admiral, respectfully requesting immediate evac from the site; the subspace array is currently non-functioning, and we'll need a heavy transport to get it out of here." He glanced out the door, where the staccato pop of the servitors' gunfire could already be heard. "And some air support would be nice as well."
An eternally-long second passed as the comms lag held up the signal. "Understood, Lieutenant. I'll have the heavy transport and two Peregrine-class gunship escorts in-atmosphere momentarily. We have a slight... complication up here as well. Telescopics have discovered a large vessel, potentially 1-2 kilometres long, on a steep and fast burn towards us along the ecliptic. We are unsure of composition or countenance, but if I had to guess, I'd say it belongs to the combatants on the surface."
Iapeth nodded. "Whoever they are. Thank you, sir; I'm attempting to close the security shutter in the bunker; hopefully it'll buy us enough time to get out of here." He sighed for a moment, weighed his options. "Requesting radio silence for all non-essential information at this point; we don't know if they're monitoring radio, and I don't want to give them an undue advantage."
Suddenly, the chorus of gunfire outside fell quiet, filling the bunker complex with silence once more. Iapeth glanced up from his station, turning to Pholoe once more. "Remember what I told you; don't hesitate, and don't miss. The shutters should be closed in just a moment."
Pholoe nodded tersely, tightly clutching his rifle. An eerie clicking sound resounded down the corridor, becoming more and more numerous with every passing second, sounding disturbingly like the sounds of thousands of crawling insects. With a final keystroke, however, Iapeth exclaimed "Got it! Doors should be sealing.... Now!"
With a grinding start, the heavy metal doors began easing closed, ash-clogged mechanisms struggling to muscle past the force of friction. The chittering grew louder and louder, until, with a horrifying screech, a veritable horde of insect-like aliens began flowing through the opening; most were the size of small rodents, wingless and the colour of dried blood, while a small few were the size of rabbits and, along with large grasshopper-like legs, had bright red spots on their stubby thoraxes. Pholoe, true to his orders, immediately opened fire with his repeating coilgun, evaporating the first wave of bugs in a spray of viscera and chitin before backing slowly further into the room, reloading a new cartridge of rice grain-sized bullets and turned to Iapeth, motioning for cover-fire.
Iapeth leapt forward to his own discarded rifle and opened up on the insects, evaporating another wave with a hail of neon-blue c-frac bullets, before the metal door finally closed, the pop-hiss of a magnetic seal closing off their tiny haven from the horde pursuing them.
Iapeth and Pholoe were left panting in the darkened bunker, the skittering sound of the insects faint and tinny. With a pained movement, Iapeth swatted his earpiece and opened a channel to Eurylochus.
"Sitrep, sir? We could really use some help down here..."
Almost as if on cue, a tremendous thunk echoed through the bunker, and slowly but surely they began raising out of the ground.
"Heavy transport is in position and is preparing for liftoff, Lieutenant. The gunships are currently under heavy fire; the insects have been able to put together a crude anti-aircraft battery." Eurylochus' signal faded to static for a moment, as he continued. "The other ship we detected has opened fire on us with KEWs and nuclear missiles; so far, point defenses, shields and maneuvering thrusters have kept up, but the enemy is adapting quickly; we cannot stay here for long, or we risk irreparable damage."
Iapeth coughed. "So what do you need us to do, sir?"
Eurylochus responded quickly, almost at the exact moment they could feel the transport lifting off of the ground, attempting to filter compassion through his computerized hindrance. "Nothing for now; you've done an excellent job, Lieutenant; just strap in, it's going to be a bumpy ride."
...
The shuttle and its two companion ships rocketed upwards, exiting the dreary world's crippled atmosphere in a nigh-vertical trajectory, the fiery rounds of anti-aircraft missiles exploding around them, until they reached the exosphere, where they lined up in a formation for a very delicate maneuver.
The Untouched Snow, with all the precision of a ballet dancer, opened its hangar, and, matching the speed of the tiny craft perfectly, swallowed them up inside and sealed the bay doors, making a hard climb out of the planet's gravity well. The insectoid enemy, for some unknown reason, had ceased firing at the cruiser, allowing it, as well as its tiny charges, to escape; jumping to hyperspace before their assailants had time to change their minds.
They would soon realize just why they were allowed to escape, but by then it was far too late.
...
The glaring of klaxons jarred Iapeth out of his slumber, nearly causing him to slam his head on the roof of his bunk. Even in his half-awake state he could tell something was wrong. Very wrong. The emergency lights flickered softly in the gloom of the wardroom, which, even more worryingly, was slowly filling with a caustic-smelling smoke. He shook himself, desperately trying to remove the cobwebs from his head.
He was still dressed only in the non-descript one-piece lower layer to an environmental suit, which he hazily remembered he had neglected to fully change out of. At just that moment, the light parted the clouds in his mind and a flood of memories came back; he and Pholoe had been debriefed on the successful mission and allowed to get some rest; Admiral Eurylochus had decided it would have been more prudent to allow a fresh set of technicians a look at the mangled subspace array. And at that point, he had no intention of arguing with that, and had retired.
Stumbling towards the intercom at the bulkhead door to the outside corridor, he quickly entered the code for the CIC and groggily queried; "Admiral? This is Lieutenant Iapeth down in C-Deck. What the hell's going on?" An abnormally high amount of static met him, then Eurylochus' voice filtered back.
"Lieutenant?! You were supposed to have been evacuated with the first wave of shuttles. Where are you? What is your status?"
His head swam again. "Wait, evacuation? What evacuation?"
"The insects, Lieutenant. Somehow they boarded both the bunker and the heavy transport and began breeding, multiplying and consuming the interiors of both. By the time we were aware that they were even there, they had overwhelmed the hangar deck and engineering; we lost over twenty crewmen in the first five minutes alone. The servitors have the insects contained to D-Deck, but just barely; we had a couple of very close calls in the shuttle bay. And by all accounts, they're getting smarter. A couple of crewmen from D-Deck swore they saw some almost human-sized insects manipulating the controls at one of the terminals." A pause. "We may not have much time left."
Iapeth began snapping into full awareness, military training kicking laziness into a bloody pulp. "So what do I need to do?"
"Cross C-Deck to the auxiliary fire control room; there should be a set of one-or-two escape pods. Once you're there and strapped in, I can pilot you to the surface, where you can be picked up by ground recovery agents."
Confusion crept back into Iapeth's mind. "Wait, surface? I thought we were still in hyperspace..."
"No. We exited above Veritas about an hour ago; Commander Absyrtus is fully aware of our situation and is already preparing teams for search-and-rescue ops." The lights flickered ominously, and the hull creaked deeply. "Please, hurry, Lieutenant; the insects have begun tunneling into the primary operating system. I cannot guarantee that the network's firewalls can hold them back for long."
Iapeth deactivated the link and ran over to the wardroom's weapons locker and pulled out a small repeating pistol. Not much, but it'll have to do. he thought glumly, and strode over to the hatch to the outside corridor, and, with all the delicacy he could muster, sidled it slowly open and peered outside.
The corridor, as Eurylochus had expected, was empty; the crew had long been evacuated, and the servitors were most likely up to their necks in insects in the lower levels. It should be as easy as making the sprint a couple-dozen of metres to the other side of the vessel, and he'd be home free.
But a clatter behind him shattered that illusion. He froze, halfway out the door to the corridor. It sounded like the grate on the air duct, tucked away in the back corner of the wardroom. And what accompanied it chilled him to his very bones. A soft chitter, combined with a series of high-pitched clicks, resonated through the room. And, almost compelled by a morbid curiousity, he pivoted on his foot, turning back into the room.
An insect, easily the biggest one he had ever seen, sat on the precipice of the grate, feelers in the air and mandibles clicking hungrily. It was, he decided, similar to a bee of some sort, but unlike any bee he had ever seen, at over half-a-metre long; it seemed more primitive, almost ant-like, and was alien enough to forgo a local origin. But by far the most disturbing part of it was the cybernetics that seemed to infest every orifice of it; they oozed and pussed, a black tar-like substance that could only have been blood mixing with foamy white mechanical lubricants and cooling agents, almost as if the implants had been surgically implanted only moments before.
Oddly, he didn't freeze at the sight, his revulsion overtaking his fear. It hasn't seen me yet. Iapeth thought to himself, and slowly, delicately slid out of the door into the hallway, and, with the speed that surprised even him, he tore full-tilt down the hallway, uttering a prayer to any gods that would listen that the horrible insect wouldn't be following him.
A fast scuttling and the slam of the bulkhead door behind him signalled the fact that his impious prayers had not been answered, and he picked up the pace, ducking through the now-dim series of corridors, until his target peered out of the gloom at him; the 'AUXILIARY CONTROL ROOM - EMG ESC' printed on the bulkhead door glowing like a lighthouse in front of him. He urged his burning legs to carry him the last two metres, and, with a slide that would have won him a sports award back home, dove into the room, landing in a not-so-perfect heap on the hard metal deck. He bit down the pain for one last moment as he struggled upwards and slammed the door's keypad with his fist, signalling to the door's primitive computer that it needed to seal the hatch at once. The door slammed closed, faster than most humans could blink, leaving the insectoid monstrosity hot on his heels scratching at the three-inch-thick steel composite.
He collapsed to the floor just as Eurylochus spoke over the room's intercom, voice nearly consumed with static.
"Lieutenant, you need to get into the pod now. I'm rapidly losing control of the ship's systems; the insects have overrun our perimeter on D-Deck and are swarming all over the ship. I am going to seal off the ship's secondary reactor and rig it for a self-destruct sequence so as to prevent that from happening."
Iapeth, mustering all of his remaining strength, pulled himself upwards, limping past the dusty unused terminals over to the escape pods, one of which glowed invitingly at him like an open coffin. "What about you?" He coughed, as he lowered himself gently into the pod's padded interior.
Eurylochus' computerized voice took on a level of sadness Iapeth didn't think possible. "It is necessary for me to stay behind and detonate the reactor manually. We cannot allow these insects to take command of the Untouched. It was both an honour and a priviledge to serve with you, Lieutenant. May the Goddess smile upon all you do."
Iapeth attempted to sit up, and exclaimed "Wait, there has to be some way..." but it was too late; the pod sealed itself with a hiss, and began to load itself into the launch tube, a sheet of solid steel covering what little windows there were. Iapeth sat back, stunned, for a long moment, before the ground fell out from under him; accelerating far beyond what was possible for un-reinforced meat to handle. Even in his secured position, his mind began to fade away, just before a final reckoning; as he sped towards the dead world below, a passage came to his mind, from an ancient Earthly religion;
For out of the ground we were taken for the dust we are, and to the dust we shall return.
The irony, he thought, was palpable, as his mind finally faded away into unconsciousness, and the first licks of the atmosphere's tender embrace began to hold the pod.