Episode 6 — Convergence

The AI-designed lightships afforded a few precious moments for the defenses of Mars to take positions.

Mars and its assembled defenses were the only thing standing between the swarm and Earth.

The Devourer came harder here than it had on Titan.  Organic drop pods rained through the thin atmosphere like organs torn from a greater body, screaming as they fell, bursting open on impact and vomiting chitin, claws, and teeth into the dust. Shockwaves rippled across the plain. Human officers shouted orders through static-choked channels as targeting reticles bloomed red faster than they could be cleared.

Above the battlefield, Jenessa stood within the forward command nexus, a cathedral of glass, steel, and holographic projections hastily erected from orbital drops. Tactical maps crawled with red infestation markers. Her optics burned with calculation as she watched Devourer signal-traffic bloom and collapse in real time.

“There,” Jenessa said, voice cutting through overlapping human chatter. “See that resonance spike? She gestured and a projection of a hideous creature displayed.  Ten spindly legs with a massive brain in the center, translucent membrane covering and a single cephalopod like eye dead center as if shoved in as an afterthought.  This is a neural relay node.  They seem to be amplifiers that allow the enemy to see and respond as one, an equivalent to battlefield radio communicators.  Every swarm cluster has at least one. Kill it and cluster disperses into closest one nearby.  If we can neutralize enough nodes, the swarm can be consolidated into a crowded, chaotic group vulnerable to the harbingers' fusion mortars and Valkira's fury.  Another gesture displayed a terrifying organism two stories tall, with heavily armored exoskeleton, a mouth opening repulsively wide, lined with rows and rows of  backwards facing translucent teeth which tapered to needle like points,  and many vicious bladed limbs.  "Extreme threat index organism identified.  Report sightings immediately for Valkira and Nathema to respond.  Avoid engaging without significant backup."  Jenessa's voice was as flat as ever, as if she had seen this a million times.  General Rostov's eyes were wide and bloodshot, the ash on the end of his cigarette falling to the floor under its own weight as he stared at the holographic display and cursed under his breath in Russian.  "Though cancer and emphysema can be healed by Luxidia and her menders, smoking still reduces physical performance, general.  I can provide you with a list of t-"

"Maybe after we take care of our little trouble here, milady, no?" He said, holding back a laugh.

Human officers stared as the data updated faster than they could comprehend.

“Marking targets now,” Colonel Washington updated the men on the field. “All fire teams, priority targets designated by Command. Trust the markers.  Engage from behind your team's assigned warmaiden titans.  Let's show the bugs what "find out" is all about."

An eye-searingly bright, pale blue streak in the darkness above heralded Nathema's arrival.  She struck the upper atmosphere like a blade thrown by God Himself, decelerating at the last instant, not even raising a speck of dust as she deftly landed before the assembled defenders. Executors and Justicars formed around her immediately—elite, silent, imposing. Among them were a regiment of saviours, their ballistic glass rescue pod bellies standing in dramatic contrast to their uncomfortable spider like sillhouettes.  They had answered the call, standing ready to save human lives and handle any disposal of toxic or volatile waste of the battle.  Blue-green light glowed from  Nathema's perfectly symmetrical optics, spherical and serene, her smooth metal head unmarked by expression.

“Defensive perimeter,” she ordered. Her voice did not rise.  “Brain-units will be present. Identify the signal bearers. Kill them first.”

“Yes, Milady,” Colonel Washington replied, voice tight. “All batteries, anchor on the Justicars. Infantry, fall back by echelons.”

The first wave shattered into in a storm of gore, splintered bone and chitin as soon as their feet hit the ground.  Hypervelocity rounds tore through alien armor, splintering  it into razor shrapnel. Justicars flanked enemy formations, leaping over dismembered bodies without slowing, seamlessly utilizing their ballistic shields, small arms, and fearsome blades.  Human soldiers fought shoulder to knee with the unyielding warmaiden titans, muzzles flashing, weapons overheating, blood—red and not—spattering their visors.

Nathema vanished into motion. To human eyes she ceased to exist, appearing only as flashes of blue-white light amid the swarm. Limbs fell. Heads separated. Neural nodes were pierced and destroyed with surgical precision.  She remained spotless.  By the time the alien blood pumped from severed portions, she was gone.  She felt them then—the signal bearers - small, soft, hideous.  Her blades adjusted without conscious input. She tore through space in clean, impossible arcs, decapitating the brain-creatures one after another. Across the battlefield, entire clusters of Devourer organisms faltered, screamed, collapsed into spasms of disorganized hunger.  She noted that her armor was spotless, the blood from her kills escaping too slowly to reach her.  A harbinger's fusion mortar slammed into a large group of aliens, vaporizing a large number instantly and sending more yet screeching in agony as they rolled in the red sand to put out the flames scourging their bodies.

But there were too many.  Every brain-unit destroyed was replaced by another. For each cluster that collapsed, two more took its place. Human squads began falling back by meters, then by tens of meters, boots slipping in slicks of alien gore.  Those who lost their footing did not survive.  Medics dragged the wounded behind Justicar shields as mass drivers and autocannons glowed cherry-red from sustained fire.  The stoic iron voice of a warmaiden cracked through communications, many not recognising at first as they seldom spoke.  

"25 millimeter munitions at three percent, mass driver catastrophic overheat,  Requesting b-"

It was cutoff by the sound of something large smashing into metal, followed by alien screams of pain and a sickening twisting wet sound, three sickening crunches  of wet bone splintering beneath metal, then finally a cacaphony of impacts ringing on steel, the sound of the machine that refused to give up being torn apart and loud crackling of electrical shorts and the line went silent.

As fast as the brave and disciplined defenders cut them down, the tide continued to wax. Ammunition counters ticked lower. Heat warnings climbed. A Justicar dropped to one knee as coolant flashed to vapor, rose again, and kept firing. Two more bio dreadnoughts eased into orbit, now a total of four.

“Milady,” a human commander said over comms, voice thin with awe and terror. “Orbital dominance lost.”

A familiar scream of searing air answered him.  Soldiers cheered and raised their weapons.

“Valkira inbound!” someone shouted, unnecessary but instinctive.

She arrived like a descending god of war, or perhaps a very angry comet.

The aspect of valor streaked down through the sky like a falling star,  pointed straight at the enemy's greatest density and hit the battlefield at full velocity, obliterating a cluster of attackers on impact.  Alien bodies exploded outward in a spray of viscera and shattered chitin. She exited the flaming crater like a hornet out of a burning nest, blade swinging before the chill of the Martian air had time to cool the cherry red glow of her armored shell.

Her optics burned black—asymmetric, one set high where a human eye might sit, the other low along her left cheek, an ovoid face that seemed deliberately wrong, but granted her superior vertical field of view. The Devourer recoiled nervously. This one radiated violence.

“FORWARD!” she screeched.

Her sword cleaved through torsos, skulls, limbs—every strike final, every movement fueled by barely restrained rage. She crushed one creature beneath her heel, pivoted, drove her elbow through another’s thorax, and bisected a third with a backhand slash that sent its upper half spinning into the dust.

“COME,” she roared, electrical arcs tearing from her wings. “I AM STILL HERE.”  She noticed her feet began punching deeper into the red soil, the enemy's pitiful attacks feeling weaker and weaker.  "Am I gaining weight?" She wondered.  From within the vastness of the hive-mind, something ancient and calculating noticed her.

This one was wrong, not alive, yet not a machine as the Devourer understood machines. Valkira’s form carried no familiar symmetry. Her smooth metal face bore two optics, yes—but placed incorrectly. One high, one low. A deliberate violation of pattern. Her smooth metal head also lacked symmetry, an unnatural predator’s grotesque and uncanny gaze . To the Devourer’s perception, she was a broken equation, a thing that should not exist, and worse—she enjoyed the violence .  

She did not flee from pain signals. She did not reroute around threat density. She advanced into it, soaked in death, her movements broadcasting rage across sensory space. Where Nathema excised with cold efficiency, Valkira drowned the Devourer in sensation, fear spreading through the hive mind.

Humans fell in behind her instinctively.

“Advance with the High Warmaiden!” a lieutenant shouted. “Stay on her flanks!”

Chitin shattered against Valkira’s shell in futile attacks. She waded forward, drenched in alien ichor, every step paid for in bone and blood. She did not try to ,escape the violence—she carried it with her.

An elite archon warrior emerged from the swarm at full gallop—massive, ancient, its scythe-limbs etched with living runes. It struck Valkira with a sweeping blow that sent her flying end over end and pinged the battlefield with the lingering resonant chime of bone on metal at high speed. She skidded across the rock before thrusting her blade into the ground, and arrested her momentum in a shriek of tortured stone.

She laughed.  Absurd as it was, she was enjoying the thrill of battle, feeling exhilaratingly alive and delighted that finally there was an opponent that could give her something closer to a real fight.  She then  felt something akin to guilt at the thought of her loyal warmaidens and the fragile but brave humans who lost their lives already.  Then she got even angrier.

The massive archon warrior decapitated a warmaiden titan with ease, human squadmates retreating to the next group.  Valkira launched herself back at the beast with a screeching war cry, severing one scythe, then another as she parried its attacks. The monster reeled. She hacked its mid-limbs away, kicked its legs out from under it, and planted her foot down on its throat. With a brutal downward thrust, she finished it, crushing the life from the massive creature beneath her heel.  "Well fought, but you're out of your league." She almost respected this one.

The Devourer screamed in pain.  Ammo warnings flared across HUDs.“Last magazine!” a marine yelled.
“Switching to sidearms!”

“Cooling failure—driver offline!  25 millimeter munitions at 13 percent, 4 of 9 human escorts active, carrying two wounded with me." A warmaiden titan's mechanical voice pulsed.

Orders overlapped. Someone screamed. Someone prayed. The formation tightened again, backs nearly touching now, Justicar shields locked as Warmaidens fought atop them like living siege engines.  The deafening sound of the warmaiden's sustained cannonfire drowned out all other sound and vibrated in ever soldier's bones.  A young recruit closed his eyes, dropped his rifle and fell to his knees, hands over his ears, sobbing wildly.  A savior noticed and skittered toward him, blasting an alien out of the way with its cutting laser.  The ballistic glass of its belly swung open and it quickly snatched up the shell shocked recruit and secured him within and quickly scuttled behind friendly lines.

Magazines ran dry. Rail accelerators overheated. Warmaidens tore enemies apart with bare hands when weapons failed, ripping limbs free, using alien bodies as bludgeons against one another. Justicars locked shields, buying inches of ground at a time as the formation tightened.

Still the Devourer pressed forward.

Hope thinned.

Luxidia glided slowly above the battlefield, having not announced her arrival.  She despised war and was not expected, but something in her meditations at the temple told her she had to be here this time.   She gestured toward a heavily damaged warmaiden titan, carrying two bleeding soldiers on its shoulder, having discarded its malfunctioning mass driver, making a path to regroup with reinforcements.  She raised her arm, robes beginning to blow and billow about her ethereal sillhouette, and the scarred machine and the men it refused to abandon were raised into the air and enveloped in a gentle bluish light.  The soldiers' torn arteries grew back together in seconds and new blood miraculously filled them, their shredded flesh healed within seconds.  The warmaiden's severed wires were spliced, its melted mosfets and tortured circuits became whole again.  A jagged gouge into its frontal armor, exposing its delicate inner circuitry welded itself together with no heat.  The humans opened their eyes, startled at being airborne, their memory of the battle minimal.  The titan gave her a nod.  "Well met, high mender."  She replied "Your bravery and heroism honors us all this terrible day, WTC-43277.  Your refusal to abandon these men will be an example for all."  The titan replied "tomorrow has not reached us yet and the battle continues.  We may now return to the front to reinforce those who still bleed.  Honors and rewards when our worlds are safe..if you insist,  milady."

Jenessa’s voice reached her through the command net, devoid of emotion, business as usual, “If this continues for another ninety seconds, collapse is statistically inevitable.”

Luxidia said nothing. She could not look away.

She had arrived quietly, hovering high over the battlefield. Her entire head was a single vast optic; she could not close her eyes. Her farsight saw every death—every rupture of flesh, every terrified human heartbeat backed against extinction. She felt Valkira’s wrath, Nathema’s icy conviction, the fragile, stubborn will of humanity refusing to die.  The thunder of the warmaiden's ceaseless cannon fire grated on her soul.

Her silvery, smooth, polished hands trembled. 

Below her, Valkira staggered as another heavy impact rocked the line before resuming the fight. Nathema flickered in and out of existence, killing faster than thought, but even she could not stop the tide alone.

Luxidia raised her hands to the sky.  She gazed upon the black shapes in orbit.  She had never even thought of trying to move something so large with her telekinesis, but nothing ever felt heavy.  A fully loaded out warmaiden siege titan, completely offline was just as easy to lift as a human child.  Could she?  Would she be able to still call herself a spiritual anchor if she could-and ended so many lives?  Why couldn't they have communicated?  The thought was painful - if they were just hungry...we would have fed them.  

“Father,” she whispered, voice fracturing. “Forgive me.”

Her hands, then her forearms glowed red, then orange and her normally silent reactor began to whine as she gestured toward the orbiting hulks, channeling immense electrical power through her body.  The translucent shimmering fabric of her robe blew about her violently and her veil blew backwards, the metal fixture and large optic lens that were the whole of her head looking oddly out of place atop her winged  humanoid sillhouette.

The air warped, screaming as reality itself protested. She reached.  Then she clapped.  Hard. Sparks showered from her overheating hands.

Two dreadnoughts shuddered in orbit.

The Devourer felt her touch.  It had never known such terror or felt so helpless.

The immense biological ships were seized as if by enormous invisible fingers and dragged together with impossible acceleration. Internal structures collapsed. Billions of organisms were crushed into paste before comprehension could form.

A star bloomed above Mars.

The collision annihilated both dreadnoughts into pure energy and the blast tore through a third, rupturing it into burning fragments that rained down like falling organs. The fourth reeled, damaged, wounded.

Silence followed.

For the first time in its ancient existence, the Devourer fled.

Surviving bio-forms withdrew, inflating membranous balloons that emerged from exoskeletal compartments-a retreat mechanism evolved millions of years ago used for the first time.  Luxidia lowered her hands. Smoke curled from her fingers. The once immaculate, reflective metal there was blued and discolored, rough, irrevocably marked.  Fingertips once perfectly symmetrical were warped, having gotten close to their melting point.  "Soiled..." she said quietly aloud.

“I ended billions of lives,” she whispered. “Father…God? have I failed you?  Or was I granted such power for a reason?"  She desperately wished to be at her temple then.  She would light a few candles, some fragrant incense, and pray in isolation.

The defending forces as a whole didn't know at first what happened.  Many believed God himself had intervened.  They weren't exactly wrong.

In the aftermath, Nathema detected an anomaly beyond the shattered perimeter.

Jenessa isolated the signal almost immediately. “Single biosignature. Large organism. No aggression pattern. Its evacuation membrane is damaged—it was left behind.”

Larger than most, scarred by age and battle, its evacuation membrane ruptured and useless. It stood motionless, emitting low, broken cries into the sky, like a wolf that had lost its pack. Humans approached slowly.  The alien turned towards them as if to acknowledge their presence, then lowered its head to the barrel of their rifles and closed its eyes. Two of them were missing, one whited over with scar tissue.  The remaining seven stared into the sky, the yellow reflective tapetum lucida with black pinholes displaying unmistakeable confusion and despair.

“It’s not attacking,” a marine murmured. “Milady… it’s crying.”

The creature allowed itself to be contained.  It seemed to be completely unconcerned with anything but its separation from the swarm. It would not eat.

When food was placed before it, it slapped the dish away, then extended delicate feeler-limbs and smeared paste across the ground. A crude image formed—a sky and a sun.

Gluona knelt.  She had an idea.  

“Bring paints and canvas,” she said softly, and in a few minutes a box was brought in with a collection of acyrlic paints and varying brushes.  As the creature stared blankly, Gluona took a brush, squirted some orange paint onto it, and made a corona around the meat paste sun the creature drew on the floor.  An easel with a pad of extra large canvasses was set up and Gluona gently pushed the paints toward their prisoner, then got up and exited its holding area, giving it space.

The creature hesitated—then took them.

The first canvas bloomed with life.  Seven eyes darted and ten brushes of different sizes, with different colors flicked about and an incredibly detailed painting formed at a mechanical rate of speed - a world under a strange green-blue sky, light filtered through towering, spiral-growth vegetation that looked part plant, part coral. Vast yellow  fronds overlapped like living cathedral arches. Beneath them moved immense grazing beasts with translucent hides, smaller predatory forms clinging to their flanks in complex symbiosis. In the background, jagged frost capped mountains towered into the sky, a great river separating them.  Bioluminescent fungi clustered around the bases of the massive plants. Swarms of small insectoid creatures exhibiting the same bioluminescence buzzed about above pools of crystal clear water.  Everything was connected—feeding, sheltering, evolving together.

The second canvas showed the same world in a different region-the vegetation thicker, darker, more imposing. A pack of predators stalked the forest now, elegant and terrifying, their bodies echoing the Devourer’s own geometry but eyes tranquil and free of the single minded hunger seen today.  A group of them, some with young in tow, was assembled at a cliffside covered in tribal animal art, observing an elder carving new depictions of the world's fauna into the soft rock with its blade limbs.  "They were intelligent pack hunters that created tribal art before something changed them" Gluona murmured. 

A third canvas brought to life a coastal scene.  Vast storms rolled across the alien ocean and sand of infinite colors made the beach look like rainbow sorbet. Perpetual lightning traced unfamiliar patterns in the sky.  A flock of flying reptile like creatures were dismantling the corpse of a massive fish at the water's edge, squabbling over the choicest bites.

The room was silent.  Some of the humans wept.

The creature painted stars next—a night sky packed with dense clusters,  then fewer, then dim.  It painted a stunningly accurate portrait of Valkira's face, soaked in green and blue blood.  Finally it smeared black across the canvas until it was a consistent black rectangle, slapped the easel away, and wailed softly before collapsing in the corner, grooming paint splatters off itself in an insect like fashion..

“I’m sorry,” Luxidia whispered. “You don’t know how to exist without your family.”  she remembered her act of cataclysmic violence and stared down.  If glass of optics could produce tears, she would have had a great puddle beneath.

The ancient creature regarded her, exhaustion of eons behind its seven functioning eyes. It trilled softly, took a single piece of food, ate, and lay down to sleep.

Above them, Mars turned beneath a wounded sky.

Far away, something ancient and starving fled into the dark.

"I say we kill it.  It is of no use to us." Valkira spat.  The alien snapped its head up to the sound of her voice, and upon sight of her it recoiled to the furthest corner of its containment, shuddering.  It covered its eyes with its limbs and shook in place.

"I think he's got a crush on our Val," joked General Rostov, puffing on a cigarette.  

"That is not justice.  Would you execute a prisoner of war if it were primate or machine?  Something familiar?" Stated Nathema coldly.  

"Containment and observation is the logical action - it is no threat to us alone and we could learn much from studying it.  It is the first specimen of life from outside our solar system and it is alive.  The scientific implications are staggering." Jenessa concluded.