Humanity Endures

Part 5 - War is Politics With Bloodshed | Chapter 6

Above the bloodied, corrupted, alien-infested hellscape that had once been the radiant homeworld of humanity, crowning the planet's corrupted skies and past the nuclear firestorm that was constantly fuelled by the human fleet, Xertaza, from the bridge of the battered Ruthless watched the apocalypse below with growing concern. It was in that harrowing moment that terrified sailors and civilians all across the Empire had received the crowning piece of dreadful news: the total number of deaths as a result of the recent Alien War had just exceeded one trillion. With Earth on the cusp of falling to the alien scourge in its entirety, it had become clear that this unfathomably large, incomprehensibly tragic, and undoubtedly foreboding number, would only continue to swell.

All of the Ruthless's marines who were not allocated towards the defence of the ship from boarding actions had been deployed to the planet's surface; the same went for much of the surrounding fleet, and yet despite this, the situation on the ground was a failing stalemate at best. The human ground forces were potent and capable of engaging aliens on an open field, but the alien hordes, having arrived in numbers great enough that they had become entrenched moments after their arrival, were difficult to repulse and even more difficult to dislodge. Sweeping across the planet, the aliens had the perverted the very ground they fought on, flooding the streets of Earth's cities with so-called biofluid that could heal their fallen, create new soldiers, and — according to some reports — could even create new spacecraft within minutes. Five-legged alien monstrosities, the standard size of which were dubbed "Stompers", not only stood up to human armor but served to destroy any human ship that tried to lend ground support from a close range; clouds of alien corruption choked any without a helmet and corrupted entire regions; human forces resisted their foe bravely, cutting them down in the hundreds of millions, but this meant nothing. Their foe had become the planet itself — their foe was endless.

With the aliens' ability to mimic every facet of a human, from biology to mannerisms to memories and language, the human defensive lines had been subverted on countless occasions, as aliens, following convoys of refugees, simply walked past their foe, only to transform and infect more of the planet at a later time. The surface of the Earth grew darker and less recognizable by the moment, and while the human resistance stubbornly continued above ground, those aliens that had travelled to the lower levels of the ecumenopolis easily spread their corruption in the subterranean levels of the world. Their corruption faced no difficulty as it warped the under-world of the Earth into a truly hellish form, for the cramped confines of underground, hardly being protected by the overstretched military, provided the perfect environment for the ever-infectious alien biofluid. Already, the losses of the war had been catastrophic — if Earth, the birthplace of the human race, along with many of its inhabitants and many of the galaxy's most important Tekran were to truly fall, the cost would become unimaginable. Furthermore, with tens of billions of civilians fleeing from conflict across the world, the aliens' infiltrative ability alone made them nearly impossible to contain; as many of those refugees boarded ships in preparation for planet-wide evacuation, Xertaza had reluctantly realized that if there was but a single alien aboard any of those ships, it could put other planets in jeopardy.

It was with a heavy heart that, because of the aliens' exceptional ability to infiltrate human society, and because of the advanced state of alien corruption on the surface of the planet, Xertaza had placed the entire planet under extreme quarantine — anyone who attempted to leave would be nuked out of the sky, as if the world was suffering from the devourer plague. This was but one step away from declaring the world lost, though by this point such a thing would be a formality; with the surface wavering and the underground regions of the planet having succumbed to alien attack, the homeworld of the human race had already been destroyed in a way none could have imagined. Along with the world and its people, placed in jeopardy or destroyed altogether, was the planet's vast history; as the homeworld of the human race, Earth had held more museums, historic sites, relics and monuments than any other planet in the galaxy, as well as the complex in which nearly all of the Empire's fallen imperators were interred. These imperators' grand mausoleum was but minutes away from failing, and with it, much of the Empire's proud heritage stood on the cusp of destruction at the aliens' vile hands — as the aliens consumed the surface of Earth, they consumed humanity's glorious past. The birthplace of humanity was being transformed into a nightmarish alien wasteland before Xertaza's very eyes; she was terrified, but this fear only grew more intense as she realized that this would not be the last world to meet such an undeserving fate. Not only had the aliens killed the Imperator and decapitated the government, not only had they riven humanity's heart and desecrated every facet of its heritage, but they threatened to now transform every other proud human world into a festering nightmare. Xertaza, watching the fall of humanity's longest home with sheer and utter horror, swore to herself that she would find some way to give the alien monstrosities there a taste of proper human revenge — though she did not yet know how.