Humanity Endures

Part 3 - Light's End | Chapter 3

In perfect unison and with impeccable accuracy, the strange vessels fired on the human force; great jets of a shimmering golden substance streaked through the void at almost imperceptible speeds, smashing into the hulls of tens of thousands of human vessels where they melted and disintegrated armor, shields, and people, as ice would melt under plasma. So ineffectual were human defences against the arcane weaponry that many of the strange projectiles penetrated through human vessels only to come out of the other end of their hapless targets; some shots went through as many as two human ships before finally stopping in the armor of a third. Millions of humans burned and died as countless thousands of ships were consumed by the golden inferno; the assault was so sudden and so vicious that the human fleet had yet to fire a single shot in reply, and those that survived only did so because they were lucky enough not to have been targeted first. Illuminated by the effulgence of gilded death, and the radiance of detonating human craft, the eldritch mass of Light's End chilled the hearts of those humans who remained, as it observed the carnage with callous apathy. The vanguard of human science ships had been the first to be purged from the face of the universe, but they were not the last. Thousands of remotely-piloted human fighters turned mindless and crashed into their squadrons as their carriers were destroyed and their pilots were slain; their wrecks drifted amidst an ever-swelling ocean of human escape pods, many of which were obliterated whenever they drifted in the way of the cruel vessels' fire. Were Velan's emotions not shielded by MECS, he would have been cast into depression at the sight of the carnage — as it was, Velan was moved to a shocked fury.

This emotion was matched by every other surviving human across the fleet, and while hundreds of thousands of ships had been destroyed, millions remained; the vengeful humans, their ships scattering in order to present less of a clustered target to the alien vessels, began to return fire at their preternatural assailants. With each human warship throwing thousands of righteous atomic warheads into the void, releasing dozens of streams of bright-blue plasma, and loosing tens of thousands of coilgun rounds, the void between the battling fleets was soon entirely occupied by the swarm of munitions. Nuclear warheads outnumbered both fleets, and the stars in the void; the alien fire did not relent, but neither did the human armada, and nuclear retribution seemed but a few seconds away. Many of the Empire's ships that were targeted were too slow to evade destruction, though some of them, when they were piloted expertly enough, could avoid the golden death entirely — Terxah, flying perfectly, earned her pay many times over in the initial exchange. Not a single spoken word, besides the occasional curse or shocked gasp, was exchanged between the captains of the navy — instead, they used textcomms to share information and tactics instantaneously, and as such acted almost as one singular entity; captains served as neurons to a collective brain, their ships as arms, and nuclear warheads as their fists, as they desperately fought to stop the unstoppable. Velan and his fellow sailors in the expeditionary fleet were the only things standing between an alien terror and the human galaxy; they fought accordingly.

Though many warheads and gauss rounds were cut down by comparatively dim flashes of destructive golden light — what could only be described as alien point-defence — the sheer scale of the human retaliation rendered many of the alien's attempts for naught. The alien ships continued firing at the human fleet, whose catastrophic losses had now breached half a million warships, yet besides the aliens' interception attempts, they appeared to otherwise remain oblivious to the swarm of ordinance threatening them, even as the first few coilgun rounds began reflecting or flattening against their elegantly engraved hulls. The alien vessels appeared as a vengeful swarm of tenebrous needles, illuminated only by the fires of their dying quarry, and the flares of their own projectiles. Once plasma began to impact the mysterious starships, and biological warfare munitions released their virulent payloads of rapidly-replicating, vessel-devouring microbial sludge, both of these proved entirely harmless to their inhuman foe; the caliginous vessels, confident of their own strength, showed no signs of evasion as they butchered humans with impunity.