Locusts buzzing in her ear, so loud.

Burning and buzzing and burning. Gaea was afraid.

To Black's amazement, the effort was working. The thousands of lasers firing on the thing all at once began to beat it back. It flinched and fled, disappeared into the darkness. Coward.

Black barely noticed when the front line simply evaporated. He was light-headed with the sheer unexpectedness of this victory, staring at the screen as it showed him the cloud retreating into camouflage. Then twenty cruisers were gone.

They didn't spectacularly explode, or even break apart into a pleasing shower of metal parts. They were wholly consumed. Then, as the light of the weapons array coursed and flared, he saw it.

It was a whip, thousands of kilometers long, almost perfectly black. He watched as it drew back, and lashed in a leviathan arc, down onto the center of the fleet. Everything it touched dissolved to become part of it, making it larger, more powerful.

He ordered the fleet to fire on the object.

Obediently, the ships responded. In an instant, the barrage focused on the flailing whip, illuminating it from all sides. It's stealth, at least, had been compromised. When it came down again, most of the ships in its path managed to dodge it, flaring their engines momentarily to slip past the rushing shape, and only a few were lost.

Black allowed himself a chuckle.

Lash, fight, put out the fire, put it out.

Burning, why, why, she only wanted the green, the beauty, why red red red.

Locusts swarming, rushing to kill the fire. Black was better than red. Nothing but pain.

Fire fire fire, no no, please no more. Red, red, angry red.

Angry, flaring red anger.

Put it out, put it out.

The blue cloud rushed forward again. Maybe a desperate last stand? Who knew, just keep the fire on that whip.

Suddenly, the screens and data streams flickered before him. The dim interior of Roma Shipyard flashed into the brilliance of the afternoon sun. The smell of pine trees filled the air. There was grass and loose gravel under his boots.

Black looked up from the trail and at the imposing bulk of the Alps. They were beautiful today, grey, shining things frosted with snow. The air down in the valley was warm, and there was a slight breeze ruffling his hair.

He walked with someone else, though he was unable to turn his head and look at who it was. The crunch of boots on gravel came in harmonious sets of two, accompanying the buzzing of insects and the occasional chirp of a bird. He and his partner stopped on the top of one of foothills and beheld the spread of the Swiss valley below them. Trees marched down the mountain slopes, vibrant in the setting sun. The shadow of the Alps was beginning to slide peacefully down to embrace the valley. A thin ribbon of white rapids course its tumultuous way down between the stony giants, with a few tiny settlements like pearls on a string.

Finally, he turned toward his partner. It was a woman, but her face was obscured behind a veil of lost memory. It didn't faze him; he felt his heart swell and smiled. Together they sat, bathing in the beauty of the scenery before them.

Then, out of the corner of his eye, Black spotted a streak of light burning through the crystalline sky. It was bearing down from the northeast, out of the darkening clouds. Elegantly, it dipped down and disappeared behind the jagged peaks. He wasn't sure what it was, and was soon able to forget about it.

Finally, he got up, and his companion followed him on a leisurely hike down into the valley. Soon, the sun had well and truly set, and the stars began to wake up, one by one. There was no moon that night. The forest was silent but for the couple's soft footsteps.

When Black arrived at the village, it too was silent. Eerily so, in fact. Streetlights illuminated the abandoned cobblestones. There were no lights in the windows. For a while, he and his partner wandered the village, looking for some sign of life. They came to their own hotel, but found it just as empty as the rest.

Just when they were beginning to lose hope, a car came careening around a nearby corner, the squeal of its tires startling in the absolute silence. It automatically came to a halt upon seeing them. Black was blinded by the headlights, and didn't see the man come out of his vehicle. He was yelling in chopped French, and it took a few moments for Black to make them out.

"What are you doing!?" the man shouted, "we need to get out!"

In a daze, Black followed the light and climbed into the car. He felt it accelerate and watched the Swiss villages slide past him. There was no one else on the road.

The car stopped at dawn by a barricaded bridge. The driver got out and seemed to argue with someone else for some time, before he came back, deflated. The air was clear and sweet, and the leaves of the trees looked golden in the young sun's light.

Another car came humming down the road, and stopped at the bridge. Another followed on its tail. Soon, there were dozens of idling vehicles waiting angrily and impatiently to be let through. It was late in the morning when Black finally decided to get out and try to piece together what was happening.

It was tensely calm. Everyone was waiting inside their cars, squinting at the barricade, or the other cars. Several of them wouldn't stop glancing behind them, at the open, empty stretch of highway and the quiet valley. He approached one of the vehicles, and knocked on the glass. It rolled down in response, and an unkempt man poked his head out.

"What do you want?" he asked in gruff Mandarin.

Black asked why everyone seemed so anxious, asked what was happening.

The man looked at him, his face wavering between pity and incredulousness. "It is the Russians," he said. "They have fired missiles against Europe. The world is burning down." The man seemed sincere, and after a moment of silence, he retreated into his car.

A blast reverberated through the claustrophobic tunnel of the mountains.

Time seemed to accelerate at that moment. Black saw himself returning to the car, waiting, watching as the sun arced above him. The orderly lineup turned into an angry mob, and the barricade was pushed out of the way. He watched the rest of Switzerland rush by from the back seat of a stranger's car, watched feathers of smoke rise from the valleys. He stood in the rain as the Samaritan left him and his partner on a curb in Genoa. There was a busy seaport, ships leaving full of people. Black became one of them, and was watching when the city began to burn.

Then there was chaos. Little windows of clarity opened to let him watch. Row after row of hospital beds. Smoke and rubble hanging in the air. Poppies growing in a field. A name.

Black was suddenly thrust out of his introspection, just as violently as he had been thrust into it. Once again, he was staring at the tactical screens inside Roma. He did not like what he saw.

The fleet lay in shambles. For however long he was lost in the confines of his own mind, the beast had been dismembering his forces until almost nothing remained. There was no one to stop it on its way to Earth.

With a newfound conviction, Black typed in a new command. The Equites were about to ride onto the battlefield.

Four mouths stared at the swirling, rage-filled cloud and started to burn. They burned so hot they began to melt from the inside out. Flakes of metal and paint cracked and drifted away, the blue triangle peeling and blackening as the Equites device glowed with a light that rivaled the sun.

Gaea watched, her vision blurred and reddened by anger.

She had to do something, the sparks the fire the fire someone must die no more red red.

Locusts swarmed and hissed.

Gaea saw the fires burning near her little green dot. Four of them.

Red red.

She saw them forging their own tiny suns, twisting them, crushing them, primitive replication she realized. The fire was trying to escape.

Gaea charged.

The superweapons reached the critical point simultaneously. Space bent around them, drooped and stretched and broke, uncontrollably rending the fabric of the universe. There was no finesse, no order, just brute power, consuming power, gravity and light swallowing everything.

Each weapon spat out a tiny kernel of this catastrophic power, and four infinitesimally tiny bullets went soaring into space.

They were black holes, smaller than protons, brought into existence by focusing a huge amount of energy into a heavy pellet, until it stopped being matter. As they soared toward the alien cloud, the people of Earth watched the sky catch fire underneath them.

Gaea saw them coming, but she could not stop. No no no worse than fire, worse than red.

They were bright as suns, but they were black, blacker than The black.

Confusion.

Four pinpricks of pain, before the fire burned anew.

Gaea screamed.

Black watched with anxious, cautious hope as the cloud writhed. The radiation that the MBHs produced was far too high-energy for him to see, but he knew that it was shining through everything near the cloud. Oh yes, there was collateral. He and everyone else not under the protection of Earth's atmosphere would likely fall ill with radiation poisoning in the coming weeks. Not to mention disposal of the MBHs themselves. He had no plan of getting rid of them when everything was done. He supposed they would just have to evaporate on their own, and there was no telling when that would happen.

But for now, it was a victory. Sweet, sweet victory.

Gaea lay in the darkness. Dim, nothing to see.

No. Too bright, blind. Four gnawing mouths chewing her, inhaling her.

Gaea was weak.

No No No, no death for her. Death for them. Little biting bugs who knew too much.

With a great force of will, Gaea summoned her strength.

She felt the ravenous insanity of their pull, felt herself being eaten.

Pull them back, force and fling away, throw them out.

She watched them recede into the lesser darkness of the night.

Hurry now, before the bugs try to bite again.

Black was still basking in his success when the MBHs were flung from the nebulous cloud. Most of them zipped off into space, never to be seen again as they angrily leaked mass into the ether for the next century. But one miraculously curved around the planet, caught in orbit. It arced back toward Earth. Toward him.

Black was only just able to process this fact when the MBH slammed into Roma Shipyard. He heard the shriek of metal collapsing under the enormous tidal forces as the black hole cleaved its way easily through the delicate structure. Then the habitable quarters were breached, and the power flickered as the reactor was disturbed. Black briefly felt a lethally powerful pull on his spindly body as the MBH passed beneath him, taking with it a cylindrical cutout from the space station. Pain flared in his chest and legs as the brittle, centuries-old bones snapped and the organs collapsed against each other. Then there was the rush of escaping air.

Blinking away tears, a foreign feeling. Black began to crawl toward the blurred outline of a pressure suit, hanging on a nearby wall. He forced his useless, flapping limbs into the suit and sealed it. The pain was beginning to wear on the edges of his consciousness, and he again felt the pricks of needles as they injected him with drugs.

Black pushed off from the wall and flew through the empty corridors of the Roma Shipyard. Wind rushed past him, muted by the fabric of the pressure suit. Scarlet glow of the emergency lights illuminated the star field of miscellaneous debris that drifted through the corridor. A klaxon sang pointlessly into the airless shipyard, flashing silently. There were ragged tears in the wall, through which the soft twirls of Earth's clouds bled, mixing white and red within the wrecked space station.

His mind dulled by the combination of pain and morphine, Black was still able to remember the way to the docking station. There was a shuttle. He might survive.

Painfully, Black stumbled through the twisted metal of Roma, bumping against the exposed innards of his creation, falling unconscious for a few restful moments when the pain blossomed in his mind. But this was no time for that.

He may have lost it once or twice. Time was meaningless. But there it was, a circle with the blurred letters of escape. He was saved.

The next few minutes were dark. Black woke up staring at his own morphed reflection in the bubble cockpit of a small transport craft. The stars winked at him from beyond the quartz glass.

Gaea was very tired. Work to be done, no rest, not yet.

Sluggishly, she went to the world, enveloped it in loving arms.

The locusts that shouted a brutal hunger into the remote gulfs of her mind.

Now they shrieked in ecstasy as the planet came into view.

Soon, there would be peace and growth. But first there was cleaning to do.

New York City was very loud, and it didn't stop to watch the sky grow darker. It didn't even stop when the locusts touched down a few kilometers away. The streets were littered with those drugged out of their minds, either by way of a chemical or the chip, while others welcomed the swarm with raucous celebration from skyscraper suites. The harbor was full of yachts and cruise liners, themselves crowded with those still desperate enough to attempt escape.

They were all treated to the same view of the finger of God as it came down from heaven to touch the earth. The huge black column made contact softly, and began remaking the world immediately. The people watched, silenced by the spectacle unfolding before them.

The locusts were not too different in their single-mindedness. But they had a task to complete. They saw nothing, didn't recognize trees and grass and animals for what they were. Just matter to digest and purify. Like water they flowed through the wooded valleys, tearing trees into hydrogen and carbon and oxygen before eating away at the dirt below. They glistened in the sun like black oil, rolling over the landscape and blotting it out.

When the swarm arrived in the city, most people were overwhelmed with terror, and ran from the coming swarm. They didn't get very far. The suburbs put up little fight at all. The central city was thicker and harder to eat through, but with time, the skyscrapers toppled in great clouds of glass. The streets below were alive with crowds trampling over comatose bodies, flinching as showers of rubble came from above. The screams crescendoed, then went silent.

Slowly, the city of New York grew quieter. Each block was flooded and broken down, first to rubble, then dust, then atoms. Then the swarm reached the EXN tower.

The tower proudly reached to heaven, its apex thin and skeletal where the extensions had been started but never finished. From above, it was a deep blue needle poking through the clouds, ripping a whorled hole in the clouds that rolled in from the sea. The locusts flooded around its wide base, chipping away at the glass and steel, but still the tower held. Even as the locusts began to flow into the sea, began to mold the very ground beneath the city, began to suck the clouds dry, the tower held. For a time, it stood, as perfect as an architect's drawing, without clouds to obscure its proud walls. It was five hours before the locusts managed to bring it down. First it trembled, then tipped and finally come crashing down in a hail of glittering crystal.

And so, the world died. City by city, mountain by mountain. it was calmly taken apart and smoothed over, cleared of all that once stood there. Earth took fourteen days to scrape clean.

And still the world turned.

The locusts spread further each day, resting by night. The armies of mankind did their best to beat them back, but the inescapable truth was that nothing on the surface would survive. Most nights, the great black fields of sleeping locusts were awash with nuclear fire. Then the morning came and the swarm lifted itself from the ground started its task again.

Those watching from orbit saw the black wave leave behind nothing but pink rock, dry and lifeless.

On the third day, it was determined that the locusts were susceptible to electromagnetic pulses. The discovery was hailed as salvation, and an actual strategy was imposed. Nuclear missiles were to be detonated in the upper atmosphere above the sleeping monster, where the range and effect of the generated pulse would be greater.

It didn't matter. However many the enemy lost in the night, they easily made up for in the day. Everything they consumed seemed to bolster their numbers. Hope quickly drained away.

The first major power to fall was the Mississippi Administrative District, followed closely by the Colorado AD. Absolute radio silence from the region followed soon after.

It was on the seventh day that the UDS fleet finally arrived from Jupiter, but they were now only useful as lifeboats.

The UDS itself was quickly losing stability. On the tenth day, with only the Yangtze AD untouched by the locust swarm, that the universal government collapsed. Nobody had time to shed a tear for it, because ten billion people were dead.

There was also the question of the Equites devices and what they had created. Thousands, if not millions of refugees were falling deathly sick with acute radiation poisoning, further complicating relief efforts. The minute black hole still orbiting Earth was still an open threat. It was only a matter of time until the Exonavis Corporation was forced to divulge what it had done.

Mars and Luna and all the other worlds with a human presence were suddenly without a common ruler. A hundred shards of civilization whirled around the sun, all of them on the edge of dying, and all suddenly alone in an endless gulf of cosmic sea.

The final day was the quietest one. Most of the refugees in orbit had been ferried to the surface of Luna, and only the few that were left saw the last patch of the old Earth disappear under a wave of locusts.

Black was one of them, though he watched from millions of miles away. His fleshed burned him, and his bones were a throbbing, ever present ache. His stool and vomit was bloody. His days were endless agony, and he spent them by watching the results of his failure as they came streaming in from the cameras on Lionsgate.