[Rukkali]

A warm bunk, metal walls, and silence greeted him as his eyes opened. He hadn't realized how vast a difference the lack of sound could make. In the room, there were no strange chirps, or howling calls. There wasn't a constant rustle of foliage overhead, and most prominent, there wasn't a pair of reflective eyes staring at him from a distance. Somehow, this was a safe place.

He had made it.

The familiar buzzing sensation of nanites was swarming through his veins as he sat up slowly, his heart beating in lethargic pulses. Instinctively reaching down to his right side, he felt the familiar weight of his sidearm. As he shifted to his left he could see his metal spear leaning against the bunk's solid frame.

That could mean a lot of things, none of which Rukkali felt he had the time to think over.

Rushing to the nutrition dispenser he put his mouth to the faucet as cool, filtered water flowed in a steady torrent. He drank until he was certain he would burst, before falling upon the ration bars on the counter. He ate six of them, and was in disbelief as he found himself tempted to reach for a seventh. That was easily half a week of rations gone in one sitting.

Falling on his back with his chest heaving, the swarming buzz of nanites slowly grew in its intensity, and his ears zoned out all but a steady blur of static.

He lay there for at least half a rotation before pushing himself to his feet.

Picking up his improvised melee weapon, he casually spun it over his hand. The crude shaft of metal had saved his life, of this he had no doubts whatsoever. When his light-rounds were barely able to pierce the skin of his assailants, the jagged metal tip of his spear had gone through their entire bodies. With one solid thrust, the prey had become the predator. He had proven this, over and over again, during that march through hell.

He felt stronger. As he whipped through some motions with the weapon, he noticed that his muscles looked different, and felt denser... if that was possible.

His thin arms and legs, as well had his chest and back, had ached horribly by the time he had stumbled into the base. They had hurt so badly that he was certain he had torn ligaments, and felt as though he couldn't so much as lift his arms to defend himself. He had fallen unconscious before help even reached him, in a fitful state between sleep and awake, just aware enough to feel the pain.

The military prided their soldiers on being in peak physical condition for their species. The rules and training were rigorous and extremely challenging, but for the lesser species. Those whose race was lacking the influence to obtain even a single seat on the senate, had very little true guidelines for training, and were forced to meet the criteria of their squads average capability. Rukkali had be placed into a squad of Rullah, and his training had not been easy.

Several other lesser species had been in the squad at its formation, but most had washed out in a matter of rotations. From the very beginning of the military conditioning he had known it would be an uphill battle. Rullah were strong, and their fierce pride often pushed them to their utmost limits in attempts to outdo one another. As the rotations stretched by, Rukkali had been forced to do the same, and he found himself slowly achieving a level of strength that few others could imitate.

Still, he had never been certain that his true limits had been pushed- even throughout all of the excessive training. With ranged weapons he had done fairly well, and proved to be above most in close range reflex scenarios. In unarmed combat he had proven himself effective, and capable of holding his own. It was only in the shock-lance training that Rukkali had ever felt himself shine.

In the first rotation of the weapon training he had found himself enamored with their simple beauty. The weapons were simply metal staffs, of a height custom made to match that of their wielder, and a particle burst function built into the ends. With the correct motions along the handle, the weapons would blast a shield stripping pulse of electrical energy. Rukkali had found himself enveloped by the things.

His weapon instructor, oddly enough, had been a Siren. Though military duty was unusual for the species, they were surprisingly agile. Many of the larger Rullah bucks had been laid flat on their sides by the instructor during demonstrations, and it wasn't long before the squad had grown frustrated with the weapon training entirely. A majority of which opted to pass their weapon proficiency and leave to revisit previous scores. Shock lances were generally inconvenient for fighting upon a naval vessel, and often were replaced by shorter, and less bulky equivalents. The weapons themselves were only kept in the arsenal and used on a regular basis by this inner systems and the Union guards, and a select few species. The weapon was certainly not held in priority by the Union fringe Naval Academy.

As such, after seven rotations, Rukkali had found himself the only member of his squad still attending the sessions set aside for the weapon. While others had repeated previous weapon trainings, or attempted to improve their scores on the reflex courses, Rukkail had attended shock-lance training for the full thirty rotations allotted to it.

He had never truly considered that this would one day save his life.

Now, as he held the metal rod, and spun it in lazily influenced pushes and pulls about himself, he understood the truth his instructor had preached on the final class.

“Perfection is sometimes reached on the first try. This primitive weapon has remained unchanged for hundreds of thousands of years, for the simple reason that there is nothing more that it needs.”

With a loud clack, Rukkali slammed the butted end of the spear against the floor. He had survived the consumption for cycles upon cycles. He had survived the void. He had survived a planet that seemed to embody every primal fear one could possess.

Despite all this, he had not yet died. Despite all of this he was stronger than he had ever been.

As he passed through the heavy sliding doors out into the unknown, he had only one thing on his mind. The oath he swore when he was commissioned to command the 33rd.

“My duty is to hold the line, and I will hold the line until the line is no more. I will defend those behind me, and destroy those before me. I am the First Commander, and my word is Law.”

...

[Yitale]

As the long period of controlled deceleration occurred, Yitale felt the pull on her body to her core. For a “full” stop like this, they had to essentially go from multiple times the speed of light (so fast it was better not to try and think about it) to a zero in relation to their docking station. To do this truly safely, the process took a decent amount of time, and this time was generally used to run diagnostics on the ship.

Yitale looked through one image feed after another as she checked the outer layers. The frustratingly ugly red stripe ran down the portion of the outer hull over her bridge.

Yitale still hated it, but her spawn had been very persistent that the mark remain. It was symbolic, or so they said. Personally, Yitale thought she had more than enough scars of her own, and her ship didn't need to share that burden... but it did add a little uniqueness to a vessel that was essentially just a large gray block.

A gray block that had been hit by something, but had then, somehow, welded itself shut as if she had hired a team of professionals.

What Di'her had reported was still bothering her.

As much as Yitale loved her ship, she wasn't about to believe that it had done this on its own.

Still, she was so absorbed in trying to check over the views on the outer hull for any unnoticed irregularities, the Shipmaster completely ignored the outward scans until a crew member shouted for confirmation. As she looked up to see a second, then a third acknowledgment, Yitale became aware of a far more obvious danger.

Their intended docking station was no more. Instead, the ship had arrived at a mass grave.

If there was once life, structure, or safety in this system, it was gone now. The sky around them, the ever empty space, was presently filled. As far as the eye or sensor could detect, there was wreckage.

Wreckage, and the dead.

What should have been an impressive military force that enveloped the entire system, seemed to only be scrap metal and small bits of organic material mixed between. The station that was supposed to be here, ripped to shreds. The military ships she was expecting, likely the same.

Somehow, the quarantine line had been partly compromised, or worse, and their ship had just droped out of FTL to land into the thick of it.

She didn't waste any further time.

Pulling up the bridge command controls, Yitale set out the alert procedure and began to take control back from the auto pilot as her crew ran to positions. Where there was once an orbital docking platform, marked as a point of drop-off on the main HUD screen before the bridge, there was now an empty shell. The corpse-like remains of the platform dangled chords of space elevator like a giant metallic jellyfish. All around the planets outer atmosphere there were bright specks of burning material as pieces fell into the planet's embrace.

In the distance, she could see that AI defensive grids were responding. Thousands of them had begun to close in over the burning cinders that remained, and beams of light that erupted from them in rapid pulses seemed to cut the sky.

A battle was beginning to rage, responding to the crisis, reforming over the breach like a thin seal over a gaping wound.

They were not quick enough, though.

A giant flash of light registered dangerously in distance from them. From the monitor, she could see there was an event registered at a distance of the second closest planetary orbit within the system.

So many beams of light began to pulse, that the entire sky seemed to be crisscrossed. As if the entire black was turning into a horrible glowing mass of brilliant cuts.

The shock-waves of whatever it intercepted rippled through directly after were enough to throw half of the crew to the floor.

"Shipmaster! That was a planet!" Somewhere from the bridge, one of her crew shouted to her. "They're losing the system! The lines are faltering!"

What were the chances? How terrible was her luck?

Yitale's six fingers gripped her seat in desperation as she cursed her fate, weathering the secondary waves which buffeted her vessel. Even from this distance, her ship seemed to scream in pain as it was battered and shifted from its course from more shockwaves, being knocked towards the wreckage of the station. Far off, scans were filling up the screens, as more beams of light tried to hold back what seemed to be a never-ending flood. She could see their impacts landing and being pushed back. Lights ending at the edge of an ever-growing circle of material they could not outpace.

A planet had exploded. The consumption had broken through and devoured it, and the lines were failing to keep the disaster which followed in check.

She felt dread running through her bones.

The resulting explosion was scattering the consumption in all directions. Including their own.

Several micro-events followed, and hundreds of smaller scale explosions ripped through in the distance measured at [1.35 – 9.74 light minutes] and then another scattering of even smaller flashes; the closest of which was at [0.27 light minutes]

Yitale screamed out orders, and she tried to get them away from the oncoming disaster.

This was how the consumption spread in the ancient cycles, before a true containment net had been cast, and the lines drawn. Back when planets were being lost by the thousand. She could only hope this was but a small breach that could be repaired quickly, as her old military training from cycles ago took over.

Shifting her weight, Yitale threw herself at the ship's controls. Already, they were starting to corkscrew into the gravitational field of the local planet they were presently in orbit of. The shipmaster fumbled to set the stabilizers to a constant auto-correct as their spin began to toss the bridge crew out of their seats. As she clutched at the panel, she waited as long as she safely could before she forced herself to make the next move. In atmosphere flight was possible, but if they were going to live, the ship had to come into this situation without an uncontrollable spiral.

When every bit of training that still resided in her brain was screaming at her, Yitale finally pulled the power.

In one forced one motion, Yitale yanked energy from the thrusters and redirected it into shields. The normally translucent barrier that hovered over the ship responded immediately, and began to glow with a sickly blue that sparked out in random arcs of excess energy. Once only capable of deflecting small quantities of inertia, the barrier was now a truly solid sphere. The shield's flare up came just in time.

The scattering of consumption had started ripping through the ever-thinning AI array.

Some of what was hitting them now, might simply be debris. Just wasted pieces of rocks and stones.

But some of it, no doubt, was the consumption.

Without those shields, it would devour her ship and crew in a mere matter of rotations.

The shield's sensors began to ping warnings as several larger bodies of material ricocheted off of its defense and back out into the void. The warning sounds quickly switched to blare an even louder signal as they began to tip into the atmosphere of the planet. The ship was slipping out of the black, and they were going to start a process which Union shock-troopers loving referred to as a “hell jump.”

Yitale was caught in a scenario that had no good options. Without their engines focused on the thrusters, they were going to have a rough landing on a foreign planet, but without their enhanced shields, there was a high chance that the breached consumption was going to break through, eat the ship, and kill them all.

It was time to roll the dice and take a gamble. Yitale currently had her bet on the hell jump.

Another impact smashed the ship's shields with a violent impact, which threw Yitale out of her post and into the wall behind her.

She felt her head land with a solid thwack, and her vision darkened.

As her body went limp, she wondered if she had made the right call.