"What the fuck do you mean, we've lost her?!"

"The Facem isn't responding to our commands. The input is going through, but the propulsion system must be shot." said Hernandez.

The wind howled triumphantly as it ripped across the dry plains, carrying with it an army of dust particles. These created a simmering sound as they struck the west-facing side of the field tent. Caroline and the engineer were alone within; all the radio techs were waiting impatiently in the truck.

"Can you raise Shen? Get him to figure out what the problem is?"

"No dice. It looks like the comm system is down. I'm going to try troubleshooting it."

Hernandez dipped into a focused reverie, ignoring the rage of the elements around him. Caroline continued to watch him for a while, but was soon lost in the numbers and acronyms. When she looked back outside the tent, she found that the technicians and their truck were gone. Only the sand and dust remained.

Thankfully, the field tent was oriented in a way that shielded the entry flap from the worst of the wind and debris. This greatly diminished the sting of airborne gravel and dust, but the severity of the storm was mounting rapidly, and Caroline doubted they could remain in the flimsy shelter of the field tent much longer. Hernandez was entirely focused on the monitors, but even he began to worry.

The technicians, meanwhile, were making their way back to Eridu. They knew that abandoning the admiral was going to result in reprimand, but the storm was prepared to match and exceed any disciplinary action. They would take their chances.

The ride was remarkably smooth, considering the shriek of wind outside it. The armored truck was the largest vehicle in the colony, a hulking behemoth brought to the surface on its own dropship. All its electronics were sheathed in lead to protect from radiation, as was its cabin and main engine. It could survive a nuclear detonation.

The technicians only began to worry when they reached the borders of Eridu itself. Most of the building were still temporary setups, almost tents, and the majority had long since been blown into the haze. There was no doubt that the population had already been evacuated, but the loss of so much material was disheartening.

The truck soon pulled up by the base of the hill, near the dark grey shape of a concrete storm shelter. The technicians hurried to cover their mouths and noses with fabric before the door opened and let in the sand. One by one they exited the vehicle, shielding their eyes from the sting of flying dust.

The storm shelter was dark and crowded with frightened people, all of whom regarded the new arrivals with a displeasure bordering on hate. The technicians shouldered their way in and cowered with the rest, watching the dim light of the shaded sun through the windows.

"Okay, I'm starting to get skittish," yelled Caroline over the rush of storm. "Could you call that truck back?"

Hernandez looked up from his work. "Sure. I didn't know you were one to scare easily, admiral" he chuckled.

"I've got a bad feeling is all."

At first, the colonists of Eridu felt nothing but the violence of the storm. Then, the hill began to vibrate.

Many would argue about the true nature of the sound. Some called it a humming, as if a drill was digging its way through the soil nearby. Others heard a full choir, singing in a million melodious voices, singing a hymn of beauty and perfect order.

The hill sang in this manner for a few minutes, causing varying degrees of panic in the refugees. Caroline could not hear it over the shriek of the storm.

"I'm radioing Shen," said Hernandez. "It should be going through. Why isn't it?"

"You asking me?"

"How long do you think we'll have before the starship crashes?"

"I have no idea. The containment fields could be degenerating as we speak. Every time she passes over us, there's a chance we could all be dead in a flash."

Hernandez whistled. "Well how's that for incentive to work? I'll get back to it." The focused silence resumed. A few moments later, a massive shape poked through the pale of windswept dust. The armored truck drove itself to within a few meters of the field tent and stopped, impervious to the might of the storm. Its presence gave Caroline all the confidence she needed. She tried again to follow what Hernandez was doing.

The satellites were unaffected by all that happened on the world below. They were there only to observe. Some squinted against the glare of the planetary hurricane, other watched the smudge of orange that obscured the solitary human settlement underneath it. One happened to be positioned directly over the dark side of the planet, and it watched as the silent plains of ice burned with countless colors. There was no order to the motion of the light. It would take many years of analysis to find any pattern at all. Even so, a human eye might recognize the lashing tongues of flame in the mess of light.

"What the hell," said the engineer. "I just got a notification from one of the mapping sats. It's picking up unusual lights on the glaciers."

Caroline glanced at one of the monitors, on that showed the direct feed from the satellite in question. It shimmered, as if a rainbow had shattered and its shards deposited on an entire hemisphere of the planet.

Caroline was suddenly struck with a terrible sense of foreboding. "Remind me Hernandez, how are we doing in terms of military ordnance?"

The lieutenant, slightly taken aback, replied after a moment's hesitation. "Well, there are twenty UDSN officers in the colony, and all two thousand colonists could be enlisted into a militia at short notice. There are five servicemen too, but they're only good as an emergency police force. The Facem has several defensive lasers, and we have a few tons of light incendiaries down here. Can I ask why this is important?"

"That bad feeling's back."

Gaea's frozen moon was another silent observer to the mayhem raging below. Its smooth surface was largely untouched by the fires that burned across the icy plains of the Earth mother. From a vantage point in the basin of one of the few craters that blemished the otherwise perfect lunar surface one could view the total darkness of the sky with astonishing clarity. Everything was an impeccable, inky black, interrupted only by the sun and Gaea herself. The planet took the shape of a beautiful horned crescent, fringed with red and orange, a faint hint of blue. The dark side of the planet was mottled with more colors than any human can imagine, every hue that can exist, flickering by in a shower of light. The dazzle was intermittently obscured by something as black as creation itself.

The song of the hill rose in a thunderous crescendo of contrasting voices and chaos. The colonists, trapped between the storm and the hellish choir, cowered like rabbits in a den beset by wolves. All at once, the discord resolved into a single, clear note, ringing out above the whistle and hiss of the raging tempest.

The minutes passed as the storm raged outside.

"What do you think those lights are?" asked Caroline from a corner of the tent.

"No clue. Maybe some sort of volcanic activity."

"Maybe."

The engineer continued his work, leaving the anxious silence to die at the hands of the wind. The screens were now dominated by numbers, with only two camera feeds. One showed the dancing lights over the glaciers, the other a smudge of orange, presumably the view from directly above Eridu. One was constantly moving, the other almost perfectly static.

The soft keen of the hill rose above the roar of the storm, but it sounded like yet another note of wind. The tent continued to bear the force of the gale.

The Iapetus creaked on its wheels as it took the might of the storm. It was in a sorry state; most of the communication array had been wrenched out by the wind, and the flying sand had stripped away much of the white exterior, leaving only the scratched metal exoskeleton. Even so, the dust had yet to beat its way into the cabin. The volcanic column nearby whistled as the wind tore through its caves.

Dust began to billow and rush into the compromised cabin, quickly filling the polished interior and scratching the delicate computing equipment.

"Hey" said the lieutenant, "Remember that exploration rover? I've started picking them up over the comm network. Still no luck with Shen, though."

"That doesn't help us."

"Okay...The signal is getting stronger, but I can't seem to pinpoint a broadcast point."

The wind howled for a few moments before the engineer spoke again. "It's coming from everywhere. I'm pointing the antenna in every direction, it's picking up the Iapetus equally."

The hill silenced itself. The colonists had calmed down at this point, and merely hoped for the storm to end so that they could escape. The sky showed seemed to listen, parting to reveal a spot of blue. The sound of wind began to subside, and the dust began to settle on the remains of Eridu.

It was then that the buzz was first heard. It was likened to an angry hornet's nest, or perhaps the whine of propeller blades. The colonists were thoroughly desensitized to unusual sounds by now, and were content waiting for it to end. Even the shaking was ignored at first, at least until it began to tear at the foundations of the storm shelters, triggering a shower of powdered cinder block from the ceiling. This coincided almost exactly with the eruption.

Caroline hazarded a step outside the field tent when the wind began to die. The dust started to fall out of the air, clearing the view of the distant hill. The storm was still struggling along, and the wind whipped her hair into a gorgon's halo. The buzz wasn't audible over the remnants of tempest.

"I don't give a shit anymore. We need to try and get back to the colony. Try to assess the damage. Let the Facem rot in hell."

When the hill exploded, Caroline initially mistook it for a new gout of dust, made airborne by the final breaths of storm. The shockwave quickly put such foolish imaginings to rest.

The field tent was ripped from its place in the ground, and most of the equipment inside was irreversibly damaged by the barrage of gravel and sand that struck it. Caroline and Hernandez were thrown back by the mass of displaced air as a column of ash burst forth from the decapitated hill. Thunder rolled across the plain, mimicking the deafening sound of a stadium at full volume. Lightning arced between the billows of smoke, fringing the ash in white. Caroline stared dumbly at the spectacle as it unfolded.

The lieutenant shook her by the shoulder, as if to wake her. She wordlessly got to her feet and began running toward the tent.

"What the hell is that!" shouted Hernandez over the sound of the eruption.

The two began to run blindly away from the expanding cloud of ash as it engulfed the sky. They passed the armored truck as it idled, waiting.

Suddenly Caroline came to a halt and called for Hernandez to do the same, her mind clear and directed. She turned back toward the city, pointed to the truck. Hernandez understood and began to move in that direction, but Caroline grabbed his arm and shook her head/

"We have one last thing we need to do, before everything's gone."

Far above them, above even the highest aspirations of any storm, the stars twinkled. Even without the obscuring turbulence of the atmosphere they did so. Close inspection might have revealed that twinkling was perhaps not the best word for the phenomenon, Rather, the stars seemed to be intermittently hidden behind a swarm of tiny, dark objects. No one currently alive would have thought to describe it as a cloud of locusts wheeling across the sky, largely because Schistocerca gregaria and its relatives had long since been made incapable of swarm behavior. No man still remembered the terror of watching the sun disappear behind the wings of the wrath of god. Only the locusts themselves still remembered.

The swarm was slow to move. It had just put on quite the show, and needed to recuperate before proceeding. Once it was ready, it began to glow faintly in the infrared.

"I need you to try contacting the Facem. You said we could still communicate with it, right?"

"Sure, though I'm not sure all my equipment is intact..."

"It doesn't need to be. All I need is a direct radio link. Unless the dish array was damaged, I should be able to do what I need to do."

"And what's that?"

"We need to send down the terraforming machines."

The starship was awash with locusts. They had yet to learn the strange ways of these newcomers, but were doing so quickly enough. They probed and pushed and prodded, each memorizing a tiny patch of its surface until they collectively knew the entire vessel in all its vast complexity. Within the hour, they would know this machine better than those who had built it, well enough, they hoped, to fly it.

"Is it done?"

"Yes."

"Then we have about a minute until the cloud starts to settle."

Five great pillars separated from the Facem, carrying with them the genetic legacy of a planet. The columns were already working to turn the unique strands of nucleic acid into rapidly replicating life. A billion seeds were poised and ready to flow onto alien soil. Earth would live once again.

Caroline and Hernandez hurried to the shelter of the armored truck as the ash cloud began to settle over the plain. Once they were inside, both officers couldn't help but gaze out at the beginning of Armageddon.

The five bio-towers were one of the last-minute additions to the Facem. Their prohibitive weight initially earned them a place in the pile of rejected concepts, but the starship's final design allowed for much more payload mass than was originally thought. The towers were to serve a truly radical purpose in the new colony. Beyond their publicly announced function of studying the effects of interstellar travel on living beings, the bio-towers were also capable of terraforming the planet, remaking the biosphere into a mock of Earth's own. Such a prodigious undertaking was difficult to imagine, but there were ways to go about it. The process would begin with the introduction of lichens, spread by the release of spores, which could survive on almost nothing and helped to erode stone into soil. These would quickly be followed by grasses and small shrubs, then trees. Finally, when the volume of terrestrial biomass was great enough, the towers would begin cloning animals to release into the newly crafted wilderness. The project would take several centuries, as the seeds of life traversed the wide expanses of the planet, took root in the alien soil, and grew. The towers would maintain communication with orbital surveillance to keep track of their progress throughout this time, and were well equipped to continue functioning even as the eons passed them by. For millennia, they would sit, almost motionless, the metal caretakers of the world they had created. But now, they were anything but still. Slamming brutally into the sky, the towers crashed through the air with a momentous concussion, calling to the world below that its end had come.

Caroline watched as the imposing cloud of volcanic ash descended, casting an advancing shadow over the dry plain. It took some time for her to notice that it was slowing down. Eventually, the cloud came to a halt, frozen in the air. It hung impossibly still in the faint breeze of the departing storm. The cloud was painted a dirty orange by the light of the afternoon sun. Both Caroline and Hernandez stared quietly at it, confused but somehow not very surprised.

"We should probably go back and look for survivors," he said.

"Yes."

They began the long ride back to Eridu. It was about midway there that they heard the sonic boom of the biotowers tearing through the atmosphere.

Caroline stood wide-eyed as the five stars fell, emerging from behind the frozen cloud like glowing paint strokes. They trailed behind them streamers of blue and yellow fire, and cast a ghostly pale light on the red desert far below. Eventually they would slow down enough to begin aerobraking, and would drift onto the bare sands.

After some time watching the incoming spacecraft, Caroline returned her attention to the colony. Eridu's hill was now plainly visible in the shadow of the stone cloud, grey and quiet. The surrounding plains had been swept clean of their surrounding infrastructure. There was no more glinting city or farmland, only the pale dust of Gaea.

The cloud suddenly began to rise. It ascended into the ether like a blob of ink in water, twisting and flowing as if a single, viscous entity. It never slowed down as it rose, but instead accelerated, and kept its distinct, opaque shape as it did so. The cloud was soon but a pinprick in the eternal blue, quickly fading into nothing.

Caroline and Hernandez arrived at the former colony and disembarked the armored truck. There was nothing left. The storm shelters, foolishly placed at the epicenter of the blast, had been reduced to rubble. There was no point in looking for survivors.