Bellum

Anshul Rastogi

He awaits the chaos of the world with bated breath. The berth of stillness cradles the cosmos beneath a darkling horizon. Fleets rove amid the inky brink of space in quiet wait, watching from just beyond reach. He turns his gaze upward, into the cavernous silence, as streaks of fire carve friction trails through the rusty pall of the dusk sky. Iron Titans – war machines of death and metal – descend like angels of destruction riding upon wings of flame, hurtled from the churning stomachs of monolithic dreadnoughts in orbit. Shadowless and distant, they outrace the speed of their own sound as they rip through the atmosphere. On three spheres have they waged war and three spheres have they conquered. They come now to deliver the final outcry of The Last Solar War like infernal heralds of some unbidden judgment.

He only wonders if there will be anyone left to hear it.

A dull ache sets into his heart at the sight. Exhaustion drums his bones like an old litany so familiar that it stings to recite, yet so ingrained into the soul that one cannot bring themselves to let it go. His shoulders bore the burden of shattered empires, once. Now only the perpetual visage of empty eyes and grim deeds haunts what remains of his dreams and nightmares. He watches, quietly, as the Iron Titans follow the southbound arc of gravity’s yearning tug before glinting to silence and kissing the dusky horizon over the sea. At his feet, the coastline ebbs to the rhythm of his breath. In and out it goes, the foamy saline sloshing around tainted war boots. It is the heartbeat of his silence.

He presses his eyes closed. The taste of the Carthian ocean lingers on his tongue, reminding him of the seas of Mars before war and atomics made a scorched radioactive desert of its surface. The face of his son lingers beneath his eyelids like an unforgotten specter. I will be home, he vows. Wait for me. Your father will be home. Until then, endure.

Carthus

She is a gargantuan marble wreathed in milky white strips of cloud. Her nighttime surface swirls with aquamarine oceans and pristine green continents glittering with the neon lights of still-awake cities huddled in the darkness. Her blue star, bright and young, crests her daytime side like a flaring crescent.

She was a hostile world, once; seven centuries ago, her countenance was a weeping rictus of bitter heat and unending calderas amid boiling seas. Then Man arrived – first as a roving explorer, then as a dedicated terraformer – and brought with him the ice carved from her planetary siblings and the liquid oxygen drunk from the atmospheres of gas giants. His planet-crackers plucked from the young world twin fistfuls of rock and fashioned them into her two moons, infant children cast into their mother’s orbit to tame her all-too-fast fifteenhour spin and to slow her days. He sowed into the world the seed of life – genetically engineered flora and fauna meticulously designed to construct an exact, stable ecosystem and microbes that decomposed the vaporous sulfur and methane clouds to create ozone and breathable oxygen. Then, gradually and inevitably, came the colony ships, carrying the pioneers of this planetary system. First in the hundreds, then in the thousands, and then in the millions. She is now home to a vast sector of the human race. Her shores are cornucopias of wildlife, her lungs the belt of rainforests stretched across her equator. The long, distended supercontinent of Aldaria yawns lazily across the eastern hemisphere, tapering across her side like a birthmark until it ends in a tattered string of archipelagos. Her grasses and trees are the bountiful imitations of the life that once claimed the soils of Man’s homeworld, Old Earth. In the span of half a millennia – barely a fleeting heartbeat to her – he molded the surface to his desire, a precise perfection to suit his imperfect race. His designs are the ambitions of a species and his fingers are the instruments of cosmic change.

And now, he returns to reclaim the gifts he had once bestowed.

Fleets of warships cocoon her atmosphere from high orbit like a murmuration of iron wasps, coiling like snares as they prepare to unleash orchestral violence upon the surface. Juggernauts such as these once brought civilization to her shores, before their colony pods were traded for cannons built to crack the mantle of moons. In twenty hours, they will scorch the planet clean of sentient life. Centuries of progress will become molten rubble. She was the tenth world beyond Man’s home system to be terraformed in full. She only fears that she may be last.

The Worldkiller

It descends upon the city, at first as nothing more than a mote of fiery light streaking toward the surface from orbit. A falling star, those below will think at first. Then about a dozen of its brothers join it all across the sky with artificial, uniform spacing, riding the orchestral thunder of a hundred sonic booms, and reality will dawn.

Atomics have come to Luminor, City of A Thousand Spires, and they carry in their fuselages the vials of annihilation.

The first of the Worldkillers lands in the distance, perhaps some fifty kilometers away from the city. Light seems to stutter, then erupt as the epicenter of the explosion roars with a fiery radiance that could flash-blind the naked eye. The fireball expands from Ground Zero, a shockwave racing ahead to tear skyscrapers and rupture eardrums. It sounds like the last shout of a dying god. Edifices crumple and sink like towers of papier-mâché being crushed by some invisible, careless giant. Rubble the size of glacial boulders is flung outward. Then the fireball at the center of it all collapses downwards and sideways and Luminor disappears in a sheet of pure sun. In three seconds, the megacity becomes a molten, charred scar beneath the plume of a titanic mushroom cloud. Twelve million threads of life are clipped short in an instant. The radioactive fallout will claim millions more.

The Soldier

He sits in the deployment bay with the rest of his de- cade, awaiting the death that is the fury of the battleground.

All is silent but the arrhythmic heartbeat of the engine as their ship – The Solace of 613451 – hurtles through the Carthian atmosphere. The chemical reek of protein cubes and armor polish mixes with the lingering stink of unwashed sweat. Around them, the cramped corridors of the ship seem to press inward like the walls of some claustrophobic metal tomb. Their helms and pauldrons lie thick with spray-painted pigments, a menagerie of desaturated hues telling the tale of countless curses, dreams, and aspirations etched onto cold metal.

Home. He only wants to be home. He still remembers, if only faintly – cool breezes sweeping the grassy green hills under summer twilight. Moonpetals blooming under a brisk springtime sunrise. Watching birds flitting through the trees. His fingers pressed into the damp earth, back when they were still delicate and nimble things. Back before…all this.

It feels so distant, now, as though it happened to another soul. He remembers a family – the crystal laughter of a delighted mother, the caress of a proud father. He longs to just be that child again, cradled in the arms of safety. Of security. He wonders where his mother and father are now. Dead? Ailing? Or still standing expectantly by the door every day, waiting for a son who’d never return?

He is a soldier now, he tells himself, but beneath the fragile shell, his spirit still feels like a boy’s – lost, fragmented, and swept up into the chaotic storm of screaming metal and death. He is afraid, but he does not say it. He is not prepared to die. But then again, is anyone ever?

Worldbreaker

He lies in the abyss of darkness. Of his power armor, all faculties have failed, save the broad-line comms. It is some divine irony; only a thousand discordant moans of pain crowd the channel, eroded by the static of enemy jamming tech, the voices persisting as if to mock him. To haunt him. To accuse him. Why had he led them here?

They had given him their faith. Their dying breaths.

And now a thousand of his men lie dead in the scorched soil for all but naught.

The man-killing shell of metal encases him like some steel sarcophagus as it lies defunct, the dead oculars leaving him blind. With the respirators gone, he will suffocate to death in his helm. He almost wants to let it happen. He was made for this, wasn’t he? A genecoded weapon born in a lab to be spent in battle like a thoroughbred warhorse.

He is tired. So tired. His arms hang from his shoulders, almost torn from their sockets. He tastes blood on his lips and feels more trickling out from the spike of pain in his side. Only a promise keeps him breathing.

My son, he remembers. I will return. He forces a wavering hand upward to press the emergency release clasp. With a hiss of pressurized air, his helmet unclamps, the metal seams parting as interconnected plates fold away on slackened hinges. The brisk, blood-tainted breeze rushes in to assail his nostrils. The vault of the sky, pale and bright, gazes back down at him as he squints dimly at the blue sun above. Tears prick his eyes at the abrupt influx of light. He lies there, on his back, amid the strewn corpses of his men and the metal intestines of felled Iron Titans. Slowly, he staggers to his feet, torn sinew screaming against half a ton of brutish muscle, splintered bone, and dead armor. In the distance, a medic ship wails through the sky. Twin contrails streak after the pinprick of glinting metal. He smiles feebly. Son, he thinks. I may just see you yet.

Sensing his movement, some remnants of a mauled Iron Titan’s neuromorphic targeting system awaken behind him. A cannon strung to it by torn, strangled wire adjusts its aim, swiveling on impaired gyroscopes.

He pivots around to the sound of whirring motors, gauntleted hand reaching for his telehaptic pulsegun, and finds himself facing down the nanocomposite barrel of an Iron Titan. It shoots him in the head.

Author’s Note: This piece was completed for a short story assignment in Creative Writing 1.

Find Me

Aleah Ryan

“Let their lost beauty be painted in the broken sky to reflect our shattered hearts.”

The brilliant pastels of the aether as the sun crashes into its throne room of the sky. The deep tones as it is forced out of its position. Places such as these are often where people look to find the ones they miss the most. They take pictures of the pretty clouds as they seem to add to the painting that they believe was created oh-so-very-carefully in the name of the fallen. It's a poetic peace— to have your memories splattered overhead so that those who claim to have held you so dearly can believe you’re close to them every morning and night.

I don’t want anyone to look for me there when I’m gone. I’d much rather be left as I lived; not looked for at all. But if I had to promise a place where I could be found— it’d be in the wind.

Any wind would do, but… specifically the eerily comforting breeze in the dead of night. The breath of air that rustles the silence. Please, darling, let my cool fingers tug at the hems of your hoodie as we wander the woods together. Let me talk forever in the whispers of the leaves because only God knows I refused to shut up while I was alive. Sit and listen to my muffled wails as a night storm rages outside your window because I could never bring myself to cry before you back then. Dance with me in the fields and on the rooftops because that is the closest thing to freedom earthlybound souls such as ourselves could ever stumble upon.

And when my zephyr subsides, leave any thought of me behind with it.

For not even the wind could blow on forever.