Flash Fic: From The Past

We were pushed back to our home system. Once, my people spanned a volume over 122 million cubic light-years. Now, just the volume of our original sun, seven worlds (five developed as intrasystem colonies), two good sized asteroid belts, and two trillion souls stuffed into every container big enough to hold atmosphere.

For all the good it would do.

The Void simply didn't care. They could speak. They clearly could reason. But we were less than nothing to them. In fact, any species, sapient or not, wasn't worth any sort of energy other than what was needed to exterminate them. Entire worlds scoured of life, right down to the last prion. And always the same broadcasts, always the same two words, rendered in a thousand different languages across the entire galaxy: "We hunger." As if that explained everything.

So we retreated, saving as many of our people as we could and never as many as we wanted, falling back here. To where it all began for us. The Rhegpreka had dared to leave our cradle forty thousandof our years ago. Now, we had returned home to die.

I wasn't a soldier, really. Wasn't much of a fighter. I simply manned a stealthed communication array near the edge of the heliopause, passing along the word to High Command that another world had died, another species exterminated. We all had suicide packs loaded in our environment suit pharmacopes for when the end came. Occasionally, I picked up strange signals, encryption schemes we'd never seen before, and which certainly weren't employed by the Void. Safal joked that maybe it was humans. None of us thought it was funny.

The successors of the old Orion Concordiat and Perseus Alliance, those species who'd fought against and alongside the humans of Terra before their mysterious disappearance fifty thousand years before we launched our first crude test rockets, had died believing the humans would return. That a threat like the Void was something only humans had the will and the ingenuity and the sheer bloody-mindedness needed to defeat them. We pitied those species for their blind faith in a people who'd disappeared long before the Void ever came around.

The Void came into our home system from a polar approach. They announced themselves and our doom with their characteristic brevity, then settled over the home system like a quilted plague. Orbital facilities fell into gravity wells or simply disappeared, consumed by the inexplicable energies that the Void used. The Symbioarchy Fleet, the last Rhegpreka vessels which would ever be built, burned as Void ships engaged them with their bizarre weapons. I despaired as I saw the Void's ground forces sweeping through the grand towers of my people and knew our end was at hand.

Then, we picked up the disturbance. One moment, empty space as far as the eye (or sensor suite) could see. The next, ships of unfamiliar design and titanic proportions appearing without any sort of transluminal signature. Thousands, tens of thousands, and all them bristling with more firepower than our sensors could calculate. Still fewer than the Void, but more than even we'd been able to gather for our last stand. A message came in the clear, spoken in slightly accented Galactic Standard, that lingua franca which humans had bequeathed to all the sentient species who came after them: "General signal to all ships. Death or Glory!" 

I'm not sure I slept for the entire time the humans engaged the Void. I must have at some point, but it seems so inconsequential compared to what I witnessed. The human fleet (armada? super-armada?!) swept from the outer system and straight into the teeth of Void ship weapons. Watching the Void attack targets, it was like watching weaponized oblivion, the inherent nothingness between galaxies forged into instruments of annihilation. But the humans, Ancients beyond memory, their weapons were the apotheosis of fire. They didn't simply strike the Void ships, they burned them out of existence. The fires of genius and madness, of comfort and rage, of the distant warmth of a sun bringing life to a world and the terrible energies of that star when seen too closely. They channeled it, harnessed it, and focused it to a level beyond the merely mundane laws of physics. And then they unleashed it on the Void.

They took damage, of course. And they lost ships, naturally. But each human ship which died took dozens of Void vessels with them beforehand. Human drop pods punched out and shrieked through atmosphere and vacuum alike, falling on Void ground troops like a rain of fire. Knots of human troops came out of their pods, gathering like the clouds of a storm. And like a storm, nothing was untouched. It was clear they were trying to minimize civilian casualties and destruction of civilian structures. But even the best efforts sometimes fell short, particularly with the Void complicating the tactical situation. For their part, the humans really did keep the civilian death toll down, and none of us were tempted to give them any grief over the collateral damage. From what a few of my colleagues said later, the humans punished themselves pretty severely over it.

When it was over, the commander of the human forces sat down with what survived of our government and told them an incredible tale.

Our saviors were the 23rd Apocalypse Fleet, one of forty-two such fleets which had assembled in secret over the course of millennia. Fifty thousand years earlier, humans had discovered the Void entirely by accident. An ambitious private expedition trying to reach the Andromeda Galaxy (before its inevitable collision with the Milky Way in a few billion years) had run into the Void. Their destruction was sent back to the control center for the mission, and the telemetry was analyzed quite thoroughly.

"The problem," Admiral Mitroi explained in her calm contralto, "was that there were a multitude of possible methods available to us, and none of us could agree on one course to chart. So, we decided to make a virtue from our vices. We figured the Void would make their way here sooner or later, and we wanted to make sure that we could take them out for good. So, we split up, dug ourselves into a series of holes, and pulled the holes in after us.

"We can appreciate that some will blame us for the Void coming to the Milky Way. It was our people who first encountered them. And in fairness, we did share the telemetry with our allies and even some of our adversaries, trying to convince them of the threat. But they didn't believe us. They genuinely thought we were making up an insane and completely fictional threat as some sort of deep plot to cement human hegemony across the galaxy." Every surviving Rhegpreka saw the pain and regret in her eyes as she told us. A decision made before her own birth, ten thousand years before we first tried to leave the gravity well, and the way it had warped the history of the galaxy seemed almost impossible to truly comprehend. It was just too big.

"Yes, we hid. But it was not a seclusion of cowardice. It was the seclusion of preparation. Of training, construction, research, and experimentation. We kept in touch with the other fleets, of course. But we've spent fifty millennia getting ready for this. We cannot get that time back. But we can damn well buy the galaxy another tomorrow. On my honor, and the honor of all the Apocalypse Fleets, we will not stop fighting the Void. There are only two choices for us. Death or Glory. And that," she said with a smile that both heartened and terrified us at the same time, "is the simplest choice in the Universe to make." 

(This piece originally appeared on r/humansarespaceorcs)