Chris Randolph - Stars Rain Down

“Whaddyu think?” Nikitin asked in a hushed voice.

“I dunno. Collecting them for food, maybe?” Jack was a little surprised at how detached he sounded. At how detached he felt. He couldn’t figure out where all his moral outrage and disgust had run off to. He felt as if the pile of bodies should affect him more.

“Maybe. I wouldn’t treat food that way. No one’s loading them onto the ship, either.”

That was true. The creatures didn’t show any real interest in the pile of corpses. It might as well have been a pile of scrap wood on a construction site. This wasn’t for show; it was just business.

Then Jack heard plaintive cries that were all too human, which grew louder until two rhinos emerged from the thick dust dragging a young woman by the arm. She was screaming at the top of her lungs and thrashing against their grip, but it was no use.

After another moment, a third kind of creature appeared behind them, floating in mid-air, swaying back and forth gently like seaweed in high-tide. This thing looked to be made of the same material as the ship, covered from head to toe in sharp bony outcroppings. Everything about it hinted at sea-life, even the glowing blue-green eye set off-centered on its head. It was like some kind of floating prawn/human hybrid with a mermaid’s tail, and six thin, waving arms.

The two rhinos dragged their captive to the pile of bodies, and Jack pieced together what was going on. Without thinking, he pulled the flare gun out with one hand, and lifted a flare from his pocket with the other. He cracked the breach and loaded it. His hands began to shake and he was sweating all over.

Leonid Nikitin’s hand pushed the gun back down. “We can’t save her, Jack.”

The woman screamed louder when she caught sight of the bodies. The sound pierced Jack’s ears. There had to be a way to stop this. Frantically, he looked all around, trying to find some weapon, some answer, but there was nothing. They were surrounded on all sides by the hollow corpse of a village, and the sounds of a doomed woman.

For the first time he could remember, he was ready to kill. His heart was thumping like the pistons of a locomotive, and he was ready to kill them all with his bare hands if he had to.

Before Jack could climb to his feet, Nikitin pinned him back down. It was effortless. He moved his head close to Jack, and so very near a whisper, he said, “There are only two ways this plays out. Either she dies alone, or we all die together. There is no third option, hero. I know you wanna save her. It’s what you do, but that just ain’t happening this time. There are other folks out there we can still help, though… people who need you, Jack, and I’m gonna make damn sure you survive long enough to save ‘em. You understand me?”

Jack struggled under Nikitin’s arm—so slobbering mad he couldn’t form words—but he couldn’t move a centimeter. He might as well have been pinned under a school bus. There was no escape, and so he watched with unblinking eyes. A rhino lifted the thrashing girl up and dangled her above the ground, and the floating prawn-man made a motion with one of its many arms. It was a command. In response, the rhino palmed her head in its mammoth hand and snapped her neck.

The screaming stopped.

Jack’s hot breath filled the oxygen mask and he grunted in anger. Down below, the rhino tossed her limp corpse onto the pile and walked away to join its companions. Business as usual. A passage opened on the outside of the ship, and all but one of the alien creatures walked in. A lone jackrabbit waited longer than the others, all the time staring at the pile of bodies, then it shook its head, sprinted up the ramp and was gone.

The fin surrounding the cuttlefish started to wave, and the clothes washer sound started. That noise filled the air as the ship lifted into the sky and disappeared.

Nikitin released his grip on Jack the moment the ship was away, and they both lay there in stunned silence. It took ten long minutes for the lone thought in Jack’s head to stop repeating, commanding him to kill them all. When he finally returned to his senses, he said one word. “Bastards.”

“Been a real bad afternoon, Jack.”

“No shit.”

Dusk was swiftly turning to night. “But tomorrow’s another day.”

Another day like this, Jack thought. He was close to calm again, but his chest was still shaking. “That’s what they say. Let’s get the others and bring ‘em back here. There’s still plenty of shelter. We grab some shut-eye, and hunt for supplies in the morning. Something tells me there aren’t any survivors, and the bastards won’t be back any time soon.”

They waited another minute there atop the rubble pile, collected their thoughts, then climbed back down and headed off toward the stream.

The Copernicus Observatory hurtled around the Earth, completing each lap in just over an hour and a half. Phileas Fogg would have been positively green with envy. Under normal circumstances, the station’s suite of multi-wavelength active and passive scanners would be staring out away from the bright blue globe, penetrating into the depths of the darkness beyond, but this wasn’t a normal day.

Copernicus continued on at its dizzying pace, but the lights were out and the three technicians charged with babysitting it had forgotten all about the stars. Instead, they hung around in silence, together watching the fate of their planet while trying not to think too hard about their predicament.

The invasion had been carried out with frightening efficiency. Strange discs arrived from out of nowhere, jammed all frequencies, and then bashed everything in orbit apart. The only possible explanation for Copernicus’ survival was that the station was powered down during the attack. Whether the invaders thought it broken or had simply failed to notice it was up for debate. Either way, none of the three men aboard was in any hurry to flip the generators back on.

The next phase of the attack happened while Copernicus was on the other side of the world. The station came back around, streaking over Europe and then the Mideast, and as it approached Pakistan, the crew caught sight of twin mushroom clouds reaching high into the sky. Two objects had struck with unimaginable force, one in India and the other in China, leaving vast craters and dust clouds that swelled up and swallowed the entire continent.

After that, nothing could surprise the crew of Copernicus. The invaders torched the orbital launch centers which ringed the equator, removing any ability to mount an offensive in space, and then they bombarded population centers all around the globe. Their communication cut off, cities everywhere were hit completely unaware, with coastal regions receiving the brunt of the punishment. They erupted into short lived balls of blue flame that left nothing but charred ruins and the immolated bodies of the dead.

Human civilization was annihilated in three hours, before even one alien bothered to set foot on the ground. Then, with the ashes of empires still smouldering, the seven vessels made planetfall in Africa and South America.

The action was over by the eighth hour, and with the atmosphere recyclers turned off, the air inside of Copernicus Observatory was getting stale. All three crewmen were suited up but refused to don their helmets. Without radio communications, being sealed up would be too much like being alone, even though none of them had spoken in hours.

Sometime after it was over, Marco Esquivel broke the silence. “So,” he said, “are we slowly committing suicide or what?”

“What the hell?” Hopkins asked in dismay.

“I don’t know,” Jansen said, ignoring Hopkins as usual. “We can’t call for help. Doubt there’s anyone left to call if we could.”