Humanity Endures

Part 6 - The Cesspit | Chapter 3

The dry-dock his ship was docking at had been ripped in half, and visible in the near-distance was the gilded trail of an alien projectile, one far quicker than any Velan had seen before; scorched shards of structural steel, accompanied by clouds of debris where the station's core once stood, were all that remained of Velan's destination. The remaining halves, having lost power, drifted apart, firing escape pods off in all directions as they, gripped in the iron fist of gravity, began to fall towards the Cesspit below — similar sights could be seen wherever Velan looked, all around the Cesspit, as the alien world exacted its retribution for the nuclear assault earlier. The Nemesis's rear had been entirely torn off by the alien projectile, one that was of a scale he had never seen nor imagined possible, and with it, hundreds of Velan's crew members had perished; the force of the detonation had sent anyone not strapped into a chair flying, turning many into gore and breaking the bones of countless others. The damage to his ship was immense, but the damage to Velan's people threatened to become even greater. The following instant, the Nemesis's artificial gravity suddenly failed, sending many flying from the floor and forcing them to spin helplessly, while the power-loss spread to the ship's maneuvering thrusters, and left the Nemesis itself in a terrible position. The alien projectile's detonation a few seconds later changed this lack of motion, evaporating dozens of closer ships, melting through already-launched escape pods with ease, and sending the half-destroyed Nemesis tumbling towards the Cesspit below; around his ship, as hundreds of thousands of Kalithiharian vessels flamed, burned, and broke apart, it became clear that Velan was not the only one suffering terrible, tragic losses. Nearly a third of his crew members who had survived Light's End had already been killed over Kalithihar, and unless a miracle were to occur, it seemed as the remaining two thirds would follow.

With no control over the ship's powerless thrusters, Terxah had no hope of preventing the Nemesis's rapid and unwanted descent, though this was not the most worrying thing about Velan's situation: a mere glance at the Cesspit showed that the aliens' destruction had touched everything nearby, and that much of the Kalithiharian force above the Cesspit had been utterly annihilated. The fires of these ships' igniting hulls illuminated the void of space and the Cesspit below, leaving whatever scraps remained unable to suppress the growth of an alien-corrupted skypiercer, let alone an entire damn tainted planet. As many of these destroyed ships hurtled down towards the now-unchecked, corrupted surface of the Cesspit, Velan was nearly blinded by the awful truth: if he stayed on his beloved Nemesis, he and his crew would die — if they evacuated the ship, they would likely all die shortly afterwards. A death in space was preferable to succumbing to the aliens in person...

The screaming of his crew members filling his ears, Velan, an overwhelming desire to keep himself and his crew alive, resolved to choose evacuation; whatever the odds may have been, he would not give up on life so easily when so many had died to get him there. Flames lapping at his gloved hand, Velan deployed his armored pressure shell around him, and ordered all of his crew to abandon the ship. With the space behind his shredded ship being filled with debris and the lingering influence of alien weapons fire, both of which would destroy any escape pod within seconds of its departure, Velan saw but one option available to him: land his crew on the Cesspit itself. How to do this was relatively clear, even if what he was supposed to do after he landed was not.

Realizing that he would need to get off the mostly-alien surface quickly once he landed, Velan had the Nemesis's remaining scanners search the Cesspit for intact space elevators and hangars, located within, or close to, uncorrupted territory. A few moments later, and he found the most promising candidate — a military garrison building, once home to an infantry division, which stood roughly ten kilometers from a mostly uninfected part of the Cesspit. As it was, the edifice was surrounded by alien taint. Above this structure, suspended relatively low in the burning, tainted skies by an intact space elevator, lay a small shipyard — an ideal place to look for a ship with which he could escape, Velan reckoned, honestly surprised that the station was still there. Though the orbital installation was small enough that trying to smash directly into it would likely damage it, could even send it crashing down into the planet below, and would likely force its automated defences to start shooting Velan's pod-bound crew out of the sky, everything was fine — Velan did not have to land on it when he could simply land near it. Locking the programmable destination of his ship's escape pods to an automatically generated spot nearly ten kilometers behind the border between corrupted and uncorrupted land, Velan realized that he had been swearing vigorously without even noticing it, lamenting the situation that he had found himself in as his ship came apart around him. The ten-kilometer distance between the landing zone and the aliens' domain was done so that when some of Velan's crew members inevitably landed away from their intended destination, they did not land within the realm of the alien corruption, nor did they pass through the clouds of alien taint which dominated the aliens' infernal realm: Velan did not know what these clouds would do to a mere escape pod or its occupant, nor did he want to find out personally.