“So, you’re sure about the—”

“So help me I will yeet you out the window if you don’t—”

The animated discussion beneath my bed was almost immediately drowned out by the windows exploding, showering my apartment with glass.

“Ahh! Ahh! My eyes! My eeeyyyeeesss!”

The scream, apparently from an apartment above, grew momentarily louder before growing rapidly quieter. It was even more rapidly silenced. I winced.

“You can thank me later,” I said, pulling myself out from under the bed once the rumbling had died away. I hissed, pulling some glass out of some sensitive areas before tip-toeing across the room to fetch a dustpan and brush.

Bob also pulled himself out from under the bed, carefully avoiding the shattered glass and what was left of my television. “Is that going to happen every time somebody decides to nuke us?” he asked, peering out what used to be my window.

“Yeah, it would, but thankfully…”

“Oh… then shit. Get back in the rape dungeon!” Bob shouted, stepping back with alarm. “Quickly!”

Far above, silence reigned on the bridge of The Five Paths.

“|But… but… what happened?|” the Matriarch asked, her last few feathers falling to the deck.

“|The… the effectors, the cannons… they were, we were recharging! I thought… I thought the others...|” replied the local EM Lord, voice hollow. “|But they didn’t fire either, they left it to others. Not… not all of them, b-but… what we had left after the first volley, it was too late!|”

“|Eng… engineering reports our systems were overtaxed,|” whispered the Station Lady. “|We weren’t expecting tens of thousands of nuclear warheads! Nobody was! Nobody could! We did our best! We stopped… we stopped almost… almost…|” Tk’rirt started sniffling, then outright collapsed at her console, tears falling down her muzzle.

“|Geo-Lord, tell me they had point defenses! Tell me… tell me what slipped through were stopped before they landed!|”

The Geo-Lord looked up from his station. “|Most were stopped. Most. They airburst, but a few… maybe a dozen, two, warheads hit. A dozen… it sounds so few… First Mother protect them! It’s a disaster!|”

The Matriarch stood up straighter, trembling. “|We do what we can. We have to make this go—er, better, er...|”

Her voice faded away as the High Lord Inquisitor-Commander interrupted all transmissions with his message of rescue. When it was over, the Matriarch had a renewed in her eyes.

“|You heard him! Send everything. Send everything we have!|”

The bridge exploded once more in panic.

“It’s not a—” My protestations were drowned out moments later. There was another flash, this time brighter than before, if anything, and the roaring assault from the demonic winds didn’t just blow in my window, they blew open the wall. I’m pretty sure I passed out for a bit, as when I came to I was bleeding and my ears were ringing. My room seemed to be missing, and my blood was on a lot of the rest of it — namely the floor. Okay, clean up all the glass quicker next time.

“Did… did the space raptors just nuke us?” I asked, blinking my eyes slowly until they both opened and closed at the same time.

“Don’t think so Dean,” Bob replied. “Pretty sure we did it. Again.”

I huffed air out my mouth, dusting my hair to get the bits of wall out of it as I took stock of the situation. “So, you know how they tell you to put plastic on the windows so you suffocate rather than die of radiation sickness?”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t think I have enough plastic.”

In a daze, we cleaned ourselves up. We’d got off amazingly lightly, whether through sheer luck or quick thinking I wasn’t sure. Cuts, bruises, a sprained ankle and a hip that would smart for days, but nothing serious. The real victim was my room. With pipes leaking from above, the walls missing and there being not much of a ceiling, it was useless as shelter even if I hadn’t been worried about the whole damned building coming down. We gathered what we could of my life — wallet, check. Keys, check. Cellphone, check. Prisoner, check. — and stumbled out the door to my apartment. I went through the door and locked it. Bob stood on the other side, having clambered through the hole in the wall.

“Uh… what now?” Bob asked.

“I don’t… I don’t know,” I replied weakly. “I’ve never been nuked before.”

“Me either. It’ll be a learning experience.”

I gazed in mild concussion at the haze-ridden sky as flocks and flocks of birds descended upon the city. It took me several long minutes to realize that they weren’t actually birds; they were more like floating bricks, full of space and raptors. And, as far as I knew, vengeance.

You have to understand it wasn’t that I knew what I was doing. In actual fact, I was more or less operating on instinct. Once your apartment’s got less walls than most people have hands, there’s not really much point staying put. I don’t know where I thought I was going, but I would be going there. The rest of the building’s power was out. The plumbing was decidedly outdoor, so… to the streets we went. Like everyone else with nothing to do at the end of the world.

This wasn’t initially a good idea. The general public was doing what the general public does best during times of high stress, which was rioting. The police were doing what they generally did best at these times too, which was watching from the sidelines in between bouts of random brutality, and the army, well… they were nominally battling invaders from beyond the stars. One correction, here: It may have been their aim, but quite frankly the reality was a little lower on the scale.

I ducked as a rifle went flying over my head. The soldier throwing it had done so because he’d unsuccessfully emptied it — well, he’d successfully emptied it, but it hadn’t done much good — at one of the gigantic space raptors.

Said space raptor was screech-singing something, pushing its hands — let’s go with hands — forwards as if it were trying to implore the soldier to stop firing. This didn’t make much sense. It didn’t stop me from running and shrieking though, with Bob following doing much the same.

With bullets whizzing overhead and great, hulking clawed alien beasts trying to rip out my guts, I was having a very interesting evening. The darkened sky full of dust, rubble and burning trash in the streets, the melodic retort of gunfire, the screams and explosions… unforgettable. Then there was the scenery. Piles of whimpering civilians, looming space-beasts and screaming soldiers… I curled up in a mostly complete corner, hyperventilating, trying to shut out the world as Bob did his best to become a scarf.

I’m not ashamed to say I might have chipped a tooth trying to bite the arm-wings off a space-raptor before being booped on the nose and squawked at in some form of alien tutting. It was then that I realized none of the people sprawled on the floor bleeding out had been injured by the space raptors. Not directly, at least. I knew this because they were still in one piece, as was I. Anything the size of these creatures — that were decidedly not using guns, not a single one — that wanted to hurt people would’ve left a trail of devastation inches of red deep.

Of course, I might have taken a bit more persuading if I’d seen what had happened to Hank, but I didn’t even know he existed at that point.

“Bob?” I asked, almost whispering, as the creature that had held me in its grip gently put me down again.

“Yeah, Dean?” Bob asked, finding himself separated from me by another space raptor, but also in one piece.

“I don’t think this is an invasion.”

Bob looked at me like I was mad.

“I’ll kill you! I’ll bite your legs off! I’ll rip out your feathers!”

“Trill tweet tweet roar growl! Growl roar tweet tweet! Tweet chirp chirp! Chirp cheep!”

“Have at you! Take this! Die, scum!”

“Tweet trill chirp cheep cheep! Chirp cheep!”

“I mean… it is, but… it isn’t.”

The pair of us were situated near the ruins of my apartment block as a squad of three space raptors tried to herd a group of soldiers together. One raptor was standing quite still, quivering, as three soldiers hung off of him, or her… I wasn’t quite sure which. One burly human was trying his best to unscrew the faceplate, another one was biting the raptor’s tail, and a third was trying his best to put the creature into a submission hold. Our mad dash for safety — okay, our mad dash for nowhere in particular — hadn’t taken us very far. Unsurprising, really. The two space raptors who had grabbed us had dumped us next to several more cowering figures, then stepped back.

The raptor behind the two flanking us civilians chirp-tweet-growled apologetically at another of the ‘flock’ and dumped the first two it was dealing with into a rowdy pile of soldiers. The third they very gently extracted from the tail, patted said soldier on the head and put him gently down with the others.

The soldiers in the pile had their hands up, at least long enough for the raptors to turn away, at which point the whole ruckus would start up again and the space raptors would have to herd them all again. Eventually the soldiers near us were properly subdued, gathered into a circle and then… herded towards a waiting ship. They were taking prisoners?

“Where do you think they’re taking them?” I murmured. Then I turned my head to look at Bob, who was just about to open his mouth. “And I swear, if you say one word about dungeons, I am going to slap the silly right off your face.”

“Not sure you’re going to get a chance…” Bob stepped backwards. “Clever girl’s coming back over here.”

“Chirp cheep!” The space raptor who’d grabbed me said.

“Umm… hi? Uh, I d-don’t taste very good, I’m afraid,” I said, trying to appear as un-tasty as possible. “Stringy, no exercise, too much fat…” I pinched my arm and gestured to my body.

“Cheep cheep growl roar chirp cheep!”

“No, really, you don’t want to— eep!”

The creature leaned closer, then huff-growled something at me, before whining and trilling. Then, ever so slowly, it put out a hand and… patted my head.

“Ah, thank you?” I may have marinated what was left of my clothing. Slightly. Shut up.

“Growl growl growl… growl roar rrr? Churrrr… chirrup churrr…”

“I quite agree. Bobwhatisitdoing?” wild eyed, I glanced in his direction.

“Shutupshutup,” Bob said back, grinning like an idiot. “When a space raptor wants to pat your head, you let it!”

“|Chirp.|” “[Greeting.]”

I blinked. “Uh… hello?”

“[Hello. Hello! Hello!]”

“Ye-es… umm, hello? Nice to, uh, meet you?”

“[Nice hello! Hello you! Meet hello!]”

Something was happening. Something I didn’t quite understand. The bird-dinosaur was chirruping and roaring and growling still, but alongside that it was… projecting some sort of voice that was pidgining very, very basic English.

“Hi, yes, um… please don’t eat me?”

“[Meet eat come.]” “|trill squawk chirrup growl growl|” “[Me come you come!]”

“Uhh… are you saying you have food for me if I come with you?”

The space raptor chirruped again, looking at its… flock? Squad mates? ...and then reached out once more, making that same low, soft growling noise as it put its hand on my head, stroking softly.

“[Soft soft,]” it said, then clapped a hand over its faceplate. It stood up taller. “[Fierce tall. Demand come.]”

“Uh huh.” I stepped forwards, legs made of jelly and underwear braced. The space raptor stepped back. “See, you almost had me,” I added, somewhere beyond the mountains of madness and into the valley of the absurd.

“[Big fierce strong!]”

“Look just… what is all this?” I ventured, heart trying its best to enter the stratosphere.

“|Chirrup tweet chirp growl roar [come] rrrr [now] chirrr [hello]!|”

“Uh huh, uh huh, I was with you right up until you opened your beak. Muzzle. Mouth. Whatever.”

The creature was growing more and more agitated, especially as something on its wrist started flashing from green to amber, then quickly turned to red.

“|Chirr cheep [come]!|”

Ranger Chr'ter threw her head back and almost screamed at the skies, casting an ancient oath to the First Mother. “|What is it going to take to get you silly little doofuses to come with me to safety!|”

She had just finished gently herding the last of the bitey ones into the craft, where they were hopefully permanently — and safely — restrained, but it was all taking so long! So, so long! It would all be so much easier if she could just grab the cute little galaxy-glittering small cuddlies and carry them in her fluff like the hatchlings they so strongly resembled — the thought of having one, two, or five or so, safely ensconced under her feathers made her tremble with happiness and warm feelings — but the thought of… of that happening to them made it impossible. News of The Incident had spread far and wide, and nobody wanted a repeat performance.

“|Sister,|” interjected Trk’nr’wa, “|be calm. They are frightened, lost, and in need of our aid. You’re doing well with that one… try something else! Anything, but be calm!|”

Chr'ter took a deep breath. “|You are correct, sister.|” She turned to the strange, mop-headed creature in front of her. Maybe she would try talking to it. Slowly, and clearly, like she would a hatchling. “|Please! You need to come with me! A radioactive storm is headed this way, and you’ll all die if we don’t get you to safety! We have food and shelter for you! Just come, please!|”

Her words didn’t seem to scare this one the same way the other ones were. Maybe this one was a female? She had heard that females tended to be smaller with this species. It was hard to tell, they all looked so similar! And so cute! She couldn’t help herself!

“|You’re so cute though! So very, very cute! Yes you are! All of you! With your little teeth and claws!|”

Very gently, she extended an arm and patted the creature in front of her on the head. It peeped something back at her, the noise so very like a hatchling it made her spleen ache for her own brood back home.

“|You’re a cutie, aren’t you? Yes you are… yes you are! Such a cutie! Do you want to come home with me? You could have all the brothers and sisters you ever wanted, and I’d be your new Mommy and...|”

It peeped something back at its friend — a mate? Were they a bonded pair? Maybe she could adopt both and have little peeping babies? — and then peep-cheeped something back at her. It was trying to communicate! Success!

“|Okay, honey… hello?|”

“[Greeting.]”

“|Hello! Hello! Hello!|”

“[Friend hello greeting happy!]”

Chr'ter’s spirit soared. “|Oh I’m so glad! We’ll be so happy if you’re mine! Come with me, okay?|”

“[Greeting happy food no eat self greeting!]”

“|Oh, sweetie, we don’t want to eat you! We want to give you a little house and a place to sleep and some food and to keep you warm, won’t you come with me?|”

She kept cajoling and coaxing the little creature a few more tries, becoming a bit bolder. However, translating that she found it soft and cute seemed to have emboldened it, and after that even trying to be more forceful didn’t work. It was about that time that her radioactive storm warning went from ‘likely’ to ‘counting down’.

“|Oh… feathers and ash! Okay, I’m going to try… what is this? [Memetic Channish]? Whatever... Information dense, simple to confer meaning… might as well give it a try.|”

“[BIG OOF]”

I blinked. The creature had gone… silent, kind of, but instead was showing words and pictures from some sort of holo projector.

“You’re sorry?”

“[OOF OOF [NUCLEAR EXPLOSION] [kermit drinking tea]]”

“Uhh… okay, let me see… you’re sorry about the… whole nuclear explosion thing? But that it’s not your fault?”

“[A cat playing bongos] [earth-chan and moon-chan kissing]”

“I… I see.” I kind of did. I was obviously mad.

“[Some guy making jello] [some guy putting pineapple in jello] [house on fire] [this is fine]”

“Yeah… you could say that.”

The raptor pointed to their spaceship — which had been joined by so many more ships that I couldn’t count them, the growing crowd of raptors almost outnumbering the humans in the area — then displayed a picture of… the weather? A really, really bad storm?

“Okay… I’ll go slow… I’ll get everyone I can, to the ship, yes?” I mimed walking around, knocking on doors, sending people towards the raptors. “There’s a bad, bad storm coming that will…”

“[Spooky scary skeletons]”

“Yeah, that. Gotcha. Hey Bob, I think we have a mission.”

Throughout this whole exchange, Bob had been watching the pair of us conversing in alien and pidgin — which was which depending on whether you had a tail or not — and was slowly shaking his head. “You want to go around collecting up humans to deliver them to the mechanized alien space raptor invaders? I’m pretty sure that’s, like, treason or something.”

“There’s a storm coming. If I understood it right, we’re all going to die if we stay there.”

“Out of the fire into the frying pan, that’s what I always say. Right, you lot, move!” Bob turned to the crowd behind us, some of whom were watching the strange scene unfold in front of them, others gauging whether they could kick somebody else in the shins hard enough to get away, after all you don’t have to outrun the bear if you’re just faster than the other guy.

“I ain’t going nowhere, arsehole!”

“Yeah, fuck you! Who died and made you—”

“GET IN THE FUCKING SPACE SHIP SHINJI!” Bob shouted.

“Bob, Bob, hey, I got this,” I said, a hand on his arm.

“Okay, fine, you have a go.” Bob crossed his arms after making a ‘keeping my eyes on you’ motion.

I nodded, then turned to Clever Girl, holding up my arms. It didn’t take much persuasion to get her to lift me up. It did take quite a bit of persuasion to stop squeezing me, but eventually she got the message and I clambered up on top of the space raptor.

“Okay, listen up arseholes!” I shouted from atop my precarious perch. “We have to move. Now.”

“And why the hell should we listen to you?” asked one of the collected crowd. I saw murmurs of agreement.

“Because I’m the one standing on top of the fucking space alien! Now shut the fuck up and open your lugholes! You all saw the news, I guess, or at least know what went down before the power did. Nuclear freakin’ weapons! So you know what’s coming next? Pro tip, it isn’t rainbows and kittens!”

“So you want to go with the man-eating space aliens?” scoffed smart-arse.

“You really think they’d eat somebody as ugly as you?”

“Hey!”

“Exactly. So shut up. Look, the way I see it,” I continued, glaring around at my audience, who was now mostly listening to me, “you can all stay here and let your insides leak out your arse when the radiation spikes up, dying painfully over a number of days as your hair and teeth fall out, or… you can take a chance with Big Bird here. And I for one like my insides inside and not leaking out my arse. So, who’s with me?”

“Well I’m gonna stay right… what are you… what are you doing?”

“Bob? What are you… Bob!”

“I’m helping!” he said to me, with a manic shit-eating grin that he then turned on his target. Bob then started looming closer and closer to the wise guy. He slowly raised his arms in a T-pose and then…

“CA-CAW!”

“Wh-wha—”

“CA-CAW! CAW!”

“...Er… help? Help! Keep him away from me!”

“CA-CAW!”

“You’d better do as he says,” I urged. “I’ve seen him like this before. Went through five people before they stopped him. At least I think it was five, they never did manage to match all the dental records.”

“You’re… you’re crazy! Fine! I’m going! I’m going!”

I nodded. “Come on everybody!” I shouted to the crowd, with Bob exuding the power of the T-pose. Wise-arse got up and scrambled away from the manic show of dominance as quickly as possible, bringing more people with him. “Time to go!”

Bob changed tack as people started moving. “Get in da choppa!” he uttered, exchanging straight T-poses for linesman type positions.

More of the people understood we were serious, and more to the point it was working. The infection spread as civilians started moving, backing away in fear and confusion.

I climbed down from my perch, it taking a suspiciously long time for Clever Girl to let me go again once she had me in her powerful grasp. When she did, she trilled something at me, then handed over a small disk on some sort of pin. I looked at her curiously, so she just patted me on the head again.

“[Soft soft.]”

“Whatever you say, lady,” I replied, mystified, putting the disk in my pocket. “Lead the way!”

Looming presences, repeated phrases and T-posing humans slowly but surely overcame what remained of the resistance, and the whole tribe were herded out from the burning ruins of society, to join the flow headed in a ramshackle mass towards the waiting ships.

This was all just in time, it seemed, as the weather was getting worse. The winds were growing, the dust was becoming blinding, lightning was crackling, and now the human river was a torrent. Ships were exploding skywards even as ever more of them dropped from the skies to take more and more humans.

The torrent became a flood as people understood. I don’t mean to imply it was me that made this happen, because it wasn’t. I was just one of many raptor-riding nutjobs that realized the light at the end of the metaphorical tunnel was a nuclear freight train coming the other way. Earth was finished, at least our Earth, and despite these space raptors seemingly being the catalyst for it, they too were the solution. Everything was either gone, in flames, or busy going up, and a swift exit was the only real recourse.

“Come on! Get in! Get in! The storm’s really coming now!” called one of the self-appointed guard-humans as he stood outside a shiny metal bird.

For some reason I’d stayed behind as long as I could, trying to get more people away. My legs were shaking, lights were flashing in my eyes and my vision was going, but I could feel the heat now, and smell the burning scenery. I felt ill, shaky. I wiped a hand across my mouth and spat. This was it. Time to go. As lightning struck nearby, I stepped out of the wind. The aliens now moved frantically trying to set up shelters and protect the still-sizeable stream of refugees from the radioactive onslaught, though by far the most common actual shelter were in spaceships that fell like rain from the skies.

“Come on, Dean,” called Bob softly, “it really is time.”

I stumbled further onto a craft, supported by my erstwhile prisoner. There were more people coming of course, there would be for… days, at least, but I was done. I was finished. I fumbled my way further into the bay and collapsed in a heap. My last view of Earth was roiling black clouds, dust, and burning ruins before the bay doors closed and we were left in silence.

The High Lord Inquisitor-Commander of the Eternal Holy Karnakian Crusade And Its Infinite Legions bowed his head for a moment. Then he came to a decision he’d been putting off for some time.

“|Spin them up. We can’t handle this alone and we’re in no danger from them. Quite the opposite, in fact.|”

Around him danced a ballet of exquisite complexity. Every single atmosphere-capable ship — and a few that weren’t, but could in a pinch — was in constant motion, either landing on or taking off from the burning planet below.

Tens of millions of precious lights had already died, hundreds of millions more would perish before they could be helped. Maybe a billion would die even with the advanced aid and technology that the Karnakians could supply. A billion would ordinarily be a tragedy in galactic proportions, but this… these creatures were so fragile that it was as if tens, maybe hundreds of trillions of any of the other three known races of the galaxy had perished.

They had to be saved. Of a certainty, the planet could be restored. Dealing with the fallout? Not ‘easy’ per se, but doable. To let these wonderful, glorious, crazy little galaxies of light ever possibly do something like this again? Unthinkable.

More probes to connect with the Galactic Community at large were sent, ordinarily a great breach of protocol, but in this case, protocol had gone out the window when the first wave of nuclear warheads had targeted the planet. They’d destroyed the first load in case the world they’d encountered had been hostile, canny and otherwise dangerous to the homeworlds lightyears out. The truth was decidedly different.

“|Your holiness, we have a connection. Ansible effectors are online.|”

Three faces appeared on screen. To a human, one would have appeared wolven, another decided snake-like, and the third instantly recognizable as another space-raptor, though the bearing was ‘haughty’. Dorarizin, Jornissian and Karnakian, respectively.

“|Speak. You are interrupting the three most busy people in the galaxy. Hubris does not become me,|” The karnakian fluffed herself out on screen, “|so I assume you have good cause, High Lord Inquisitor-Commander.|”

“[Sotek’s coils bind us to answer,]” stated the jornissian, eyes unblinkingly fixated on the bridge of the ship far across the galaxy, “[but as his coils encircle the world, know they encircle you, too. Make this worth our time.]”

“[Patience, my friends. Listen to the voice of the pack, ignore it at your peril.]”

The High Lord Inquisitor-Commander sunk his forelimbs to the floor, bowing his head. “|I need all the ships you can spare, my Lords.|”

“|All? Do you seek to crack this… outpost you have found like an egg?|”

There was a strangled cry from the inquisitor, and he looked up, tearing more feathers from his body. “|Their homeworld is burning, my lords. Their only homeworld is burning, and we need to save them. I ask not for warships, but for ambulances, medical frigates, freighters, habitation rings, colony cylinders… everything! Anything! They’re dying, and it is our fault! It is my fault!|” His eyes were wet with tears. “|With your leave, I will not submit myself to further regeneration after this, I will—|”

“|You will do no such thing, High Lord Inquisitor-Commander!|” the distant karnakian snapped, tail whipping angrily. “|This is your pile of cracked shells, you’ll be dealing with it until the stars burn out if need be! But… you will have your ships. Everything the Holy Karnakian Dynasty has to offer will be sent.|”

“[Jornissia, too, sends her aid.]”

The dorarizin was silent for a moment, staring at the moulting karnakian before her. “[You have made a grave mistake, but I feel it is not one that can wholly be placed at your talons. Ultimately it is ours, as pack leaders for all pack leaders. As Speakers for The Senate, and the galaxy at large, this is our crime as much as it is yours. Dorarizia will send everything it can, the Pack of Packs is yours for as long as you require.]”

The High Lord Inquisitor-Commander was silent for a few heart beats as the screens returned to their display of the organized chaos outside the vessel. Then he gently went and collapsed into his throne, weeping. “|We have the ships, my friends. We will save them. Go, go… do what you can, save them. Please.|”

I didn’t know what was worse; seeing and hearing the end of my world, or the relative peace and quiet once those bay doors closed.

The running lights were low. The only sensation was a strange, sticky feeling all across my body. The only sounds were a soft, low thrumming of distant engines, prevalent under the sobbing and sniffling of the other passengers, and the low murmurs of talk. When the lights shut off, there was screaming, briefly, before the large bay doors opened again and we were ushered out into a larger bay that held hundreds if not thousands of ships.

It was brightly lit, with floating spaceships soaring like majestic bricks through the upper echelons of the hangar, and behind me… I gasped. An empty hole seemingly as large as a small town gave me a view of a blue and green, and somewhat red and glowing, orb hanging in the blackness of space.

For a moment it felt like I was falling forever as my brain tried to make sense of the view. My knees were weak, my stomach was doing somersaults and my breakfast was trying to exit out of any orifice it could find.

I turned away before it got worse. Breathing heavily, I looked around. Space raptors were everywhere, as were people. We were herded in a loose formation towards an area that at one time had been a plain old maintenance bay, but right now looked more like a zoo.

“|Chirp cheep!|” “[Come me!]”

“Come on Bob,” I said, sighing heavily and limping towards the space raptor, “in for a penny, in for a pounding.”

“Is that…” Bob put his hands to his face, and a wide smile broke his features, “is that a space raptor dungeon joke?”

“I guess it is, buddy, I guess it is.”