The Last Horror

I've decided to write a short story to re-energize my creative juices. It's an idea I've been kicking around for the better part of a day, so I thought I might as well go ahead and write it out. It's flash fiction, done up in the better part of an hour, so don't go expecting fancy things like a deep, enriching universe or perfect exercise of the finer points of punctuation. So, without further ado, here's a sci-fi horror flash fiction short story I call The Last Horror.



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It's been about three galactic standard months since we set out from the shipyards at Nova Simbirsk. We were under the command of Rear Admiral Arnold Giesling, perhaps the last great military mind the League of Colonies had left. Under him were Lieutenant General Martin Hanover, Colonel-General Thomas Downes and General Vasili Kuroglev. We loaded into the Seventh Order Fleet, the pride and joy of humanity, the core of our remaining military strength; consisting of eight Marathon-class battleships, twenty-seven Agamemnon-class heavy cruisers, two Odyssey-class heavy carriers (each with an expanded twelve wings of fighters, plus or minus scores of stragglers) and a whole plethora of supply vessels, civilian support barges and outdated, patched up hulks. Anything we could bring to bear on the Hive, we gathered at Nova Simbirsk.

I was aboard the Euphrates, a refitted Perseus-class destroyer and a relic of the Harvest Crises about fifty standard years back. I don't suppose that it matters now, but I was a lieutenant-commander under Vice Captain Miles Kiljoy. I remember asking him when we were a few hours out from our objective if he thought we had any chance in hell of pulling this off - if we could finish our mission and force a peace. He grimly chewed the mouthpiece of his pipe silently before returning to duty. I think that was the prevailing mood throughout the fleet.

About five standard years into a great galactic peace, several colonies out on the Rim reported a strange prominence in background radiation out into the intergalactic abyss. No one really thought much of it until their extranet links went down, cutting the colonies out of galactic civilization. To deal with the issue, the League dispatched Marshall Kim Su-Jeoul and his Eighth Expeditionary Marines from the Songnam System with a force of about 1200 marines on two top of the line Caesar-class cruisers. A week later, a single Beluga dropship jumped into the Harvest System, the hub of commerce and trade for the outer rim, screaming distress calls across all channels and venting its drive plasma like a bloody streak across the stark black of the system.

My ship, the Euphrates was there to retrieve the small vessel, fishing out the lone survivor of our first contact with the Hive. The poor Ensign aboard told us of the abominations that had come to our galaxy, surfing on a wave of radiation that had come from the consumption of the dwarf galaxy they'd called home in some great cataclysm unknown to our science. They had given him a message: that humanity was viewed as their competition. That the Milky Way, in all of its bounty, hadn't enough resources for they and us. Hell, it barely had enough to support the League of Colonies and her client states. Nobody really blamed the Ensign when he put a round through his head the second he was left on his own.

The response was remarkably swift, given humanity's track record. The military, formerly relegated mostly to police roles and the odd insurrection here and there was substantially bolstered with new ships and reactivated hulks, manned by throngs of conscripts and patriotic volunteers. "Remember the Rim!" was the old recruitment drive, I think.

Regardless of our best efforts, though, the war went poorly for us. The Hive were expert warriors and their distinctive ebony ships, looking carved from some sort of reflective coral, rained down on the skies of a thousand doomed worlds. So effective were they at waging war that few lived to see their ships and no picture of a Hive warrior existed for they were so adept at slaying our ground troops and civilians.

Eventually, the ground war was all but abandoned with the special military government declaring that any world set upon by the Hive was to be forfeited and their terraforming engines set to overload, effectively ionizing the atmosphere and sterilizing the planet. The Suicide Order was seen as pragmatic, the ultimate convergence of scorched Earth warfare and mercy for those who would elsewise face a long and futile war of resistance.

Finally, last year, the Hive claimed Earth. Lord Gerard Montgomery of Albion Colony enacted the Minerva Protocol, recalling all League vessels to his system to put together a plan of final resistance. A grand fleet - as described earlier - was to form in the neighboring Russkaya system and all remnants of the League's navy were to comprise it. The few stragglers would remain to defend the Albion system and the last vestiges of our species which had, less than a decade ago, held so much promise.

Fleet Intelligence had estimated the Hive's home colony to be set up around Sigma Octanis XVI, about twelve parsecs out past our farthest colony. We were to jump in system and kidnap what FI led to believe must be their leadership structure. Though we had no idea what they looked like, we knew that each fleet we had seen was protecting the same ship - a four kilometer long red coral shard that formed the heart of each attack. We were to deposit the entirety of our Marine component into that ship and capture it. What we knew of Hive tactics at the time indicated that this would force a peace with the species and we could begin negotiations. Nobody had any hope for this mission, but no one knew just how badly it would go.

The battle itself was a complete and total wash. We did manage to take out one of their vessels, but the second that blazing shard slammed into their planet, the whole of their fleet came at us, their weapons bursting through our ships hulls like they'd been built out of wax. I seized the helm of the Euphrates from our helmsman, a dazed young conscript who, years ago, would have been barely qualified as a freshman in one of our academies. I plotted a blind jump with the only preset on our navcomp that the jump take us to a system with a habitable planet.

The screaming hulk of the Euphrates burned into the upper edges of a barely habitable iceball on the outskirts of a dying star system near the core, where even the nights were lit with oppressive, cold light from the millions of densely packed stars in the sector. Though our new home was cold, it was also bathed in intense radiation as a result of the tight density of stellar formation in the sector. Those who didn't die in the battle or the crash began to fade to suicide, radiation poisoning, or starvation. The ship's rations were dwindling. Of an initial 15000 crewmen, a scant 452 of us were still alive as of last week's head count. It's probably 75% of that now. It would be lower if it weren't for what happened two days ago.

You see, since we landed, we had seen increasing numbers of Hive vessels in the eternal brightness of the hellishly bright skies above us. Eventually, crewmen and women began to beg for the vessels to just end us. I'd be lying if I didn't want that a bit, myself. Well, about 48 standard hours ago, we heard a loud bang to the south of the ship's hulk where we'd encamped ourselves. Even though I'm the highest ranking survivor here, I decided to investigate it singularly, leaving the second highest ranking survivor, Gefreiter Melissa Legato in charge as I went out to see what had happened.

As it turned out, a red coral shell had landed, dropped by a Hive ship that shrank rapidly in the distance. Descending into the crater, I investigated the shell. I didn't really care if it killed me or not. Gods, I'd not eaten in days. Anything but this, I thought to myself. Anything but going on another day like this. That's when the shell opened up and... my gods, it was horrible. I still tremble, all these hours later as I recount it. It was food. The fuckers... They're... They're studying us!