The order comes across comms. The bombardment begins. Ten thousand ships, ten thousand shots, ten thousand fists holding aloft our light in the dark.
As the first bombs fall, the atmosphere of Octavia begins to burn: fusion flashes burning white, orbital barrages splitting the clouds, mass-drivers shaking the foundations of the earth. It seems small at first. The planet is so big, the scope of it so immense. But even an elephant can be killed by enough ants. And most ants aren’t armed with nuclear ordnance.
The blue green burns black. The crystal-clear skies of Octavia III are growing dark, billions of tons of earth and dust thrown into the atmo as the surface is engulfed in flames and the planet shakes to its bones. The barrage is relentless, endless, the might of the combined races of the galaxy bent to a single purpose—to slay this dragon in its lair, to drown this beast while it sleeps.
And Maker’s breath, at first I didn’t dare let myself hope. But as the bombardment continues, crushing, overwhelming, as the skies of Octavia III turn black with ash and its atmo boils away into space …
“They’re doing it,” I whisper. “They’re actually—”
It’s like a whisper at first. Shapeless and toneless, lodged somewhere at the base of my skull. Building in the place where I hid all those silly fears I thought were real as a kid—the monsters under my bed and the ugly voices in my head.
I look to Fin, and he seems not to notice, big black eyes still locked on the attack, blazing skies reflected in the smooth dark arc of his contact lenses. But looking past him to Scar, I see a frown forming on her brow, her lips parted as she begins to wince.
“You hear that?” I ask.
“No.”
She meets my eyes and shakes her head.
“I feel that.”
The pressure builds, cascading along the length of my spine and pressing on the back of my eyes so hard I’m forced to shut them, hand to my sweat-slick brow.
There’s a tiny lull, as if something were drawing a single, smooth breath.
And then the whisper becomes a scream—a SCREAM so vast and hungry and hateful it reaches across the lonely wastes of space and seizes hold of my heart, squeezing so hard it almost stops.
“Oh Maker …”
Scar hisses, her nose bleeding. “What’s … h-happening?”
Fin raises one shaking hand, his whisper like ice in my belly.
“… Look.”
The fleet. The assault. The missiles, the mass-drivers, the bombardment—all have fallen quiet and still. It’s like Adams has called a cease-fire, except no such order has come through over comms. In fact, nothing is coming through over comms anymore, as if everyone in the armada is listening, enraptured or horrified or paralyzed by that awful
awful
SCREAMING.
Alarms are ringing aboard Aurora Station now—alerts for commanders to report to station, the lighting dipping toward yellow as we shift to Ready Status 2. The whole galaxy is witnessing this across the feeds, and I can imagine the uncertainty, the panic, spreading like poison as the mightiest fleet ever assembled hangs frozen and still, etched in dark silhouette against the shining cusp of that burning world.
“Admiral Adams … ,” I whisper.
The atmo of Octavia III swirls and churns, firestorms raging among walls of black cloud, hundreds of kilometers high. That scream rises in intensity, so bright and sharp I can barely see through my tears, blood gushing from my nose and spilling over my lips. Fin has hold of Scarlett’s hand, mopping at the flood of red dripping from her chin. But I force myself to watch those screens, horrified, stupefied, as the seething clouds of Octavia III tear themselves wide and the thing beneath comes flooding out.
It doesn’t look like a monster. Like a horror, or an ending. And that’s the awful thing—I’m actually awestruck at the beauty as a trillion spores of burning blue light come rushing up from the burning skin of Octavia III, flooding out into space. It rips the planet apart as it comes, shattering it to the heart, sundering mountains and molten mantle, the bleeding, liquid core splitting apart in a cataclysm beyond imagining.
Octavia III dies screaming, just like I’m screaming, just like it is screaming, yowling, howling like a hungry newborn dragged from the warmth of its mother’s womb into the cold of the world. And my heart sinks in my chest as those glittering spores tumble through the dark, latching hold of those listing ships and sinking in, tendrils questing, seed pods bursting, corruption spreading out through the mightiest fleet the races of the galaxy have ever assembled and claiming it for its own.