Across the system, with each passing second, the bloodshed grew, and the Stygian void seemed to be made radiant by the flames of destruction; tens of thousands of alien ships were consumed by the tempestuous nuclear inferno forged and fuelled by the human armada, while tens of thousands more were damaged to the extent that they had to teleport away from the fight. Retaliatory alien fire mercilessly cut through millions of human warships after a mere twenty minutes; millions more human vessels, having believed the initial alien deception, endlessly breached into the system with each passing second, intent on joining a battle that, until a short while ago, hadn't even existed.
As the battle persisted, each and every second became more and more costly for both sides; the extensive network of hundreds of thousands of long-range space stations which defended Earth proved its worth, its heavy gauss cannons being capable of splitting an alien ship in two — provided the alien ship stayed still. Though the aliens never did such a thing, the stations were still numerous enough to fill much of space with their metallic death, and this steel storm eviscerated tens of thousands more alien ships where human vessels were ineffective. The stations' presence made the aliens' position far more unfavorable than it would be otherwise, and as the battle continued to rage, it gave the beleaguered human force a true chance at decisive victory, for though it was outmatched technologically, it was numerically overwhelming. Xertaza's heart filled with hope, and the bridge filled with the excited cheers of the overly optimistic, the overly eager, and the overly drugged, even as the hearts of those cheering were torn by the billions of deaths that sustained this glimmer of hope.
With Xertaza and the rest of the human force continually being reinforced and the rapidly-growing human armada bathing their surrounding space in nuclear fire, the alien fleet was confronted with a quandary — they couldn't attack the human ships at close range, for they would get melted or cracked open by the radioactive inferno that raged there, yet they couldn't attack from long range because they would be gradually destroyed by Earth's defensive stations, which still had enough nuclear armament to deter a few attackers even with the aliens' improved point-defence.
A few minutes of continuous human triumph later, and this fleeting human success came to an end as the aliens deployed their next powerful tactic — many of them began teleporting inside the human formation. These alien ships would lay waste to everything around them using their close-range weaponry, throwing boarding parties, borne on spherical, TDP-like craft at those human ships that survived, before teleporting away to avoid destruction, provided they hadn't been destroyed in the chaotic sixteen seconds since their arrival in the middle of the human fleet. However, as alien teleportation was a seemingly crude instrument, the ability of these alien ships to infiltrate the human formation was limited, and many of the alien craft instead opted to teleport across the system in massive groups; their sole goal — one they often succeeded at — was to surround and destroy defensive stations, teleporting between their targets as they wreaked vicious death across the system. As Earth's defensive stations were heavily armed, and as the human navy was loosely spaced enough that it could still use nuclear weapons against their alien assailants without fear of annihilating itself, the new alien tactic quickly became a bloody one for both sides, but the aliens didn't seem to care. The tenebrous hulls of the aliens' monstrous vessels were illuminated only by the distant light of Earth's star, the flares from their own murderous weaponry, and the fires of detonating human warships. With superior weaponry, superior ships, and superior coordination, the aliens were able to inflict catastrophic losses on the human navy, whilst Earth's defenders had only destroyed just over three hundred thousand of their alien counterparts. The bridge of the Ruthless was filled with the patriotic exclamations of uproarious bridge crew, though Xertaza, more focused on winning the battle than hollering empty threats at a foe that couldn't hear them, neither contributed to the chorus nor paid it any heed as she ordered the Ruthless and its battlegroup to descend on a nearby mass of alien ships. Another moment, and this mass of aliens teleported away, reappearing to destroy a few thousand human craft on the other side of the battlefield.
So brutal, so vengeful, and so widespread was the carnage in Earth's system that the wrecks of vessels, mostly human, yet still with a significant number of alien craft amongst them, quickly became as an asteroid field, proving a great physical barrier to any vessels attempting to move conventionally. Those human wrecks with survivors still inside were, in such circumstances, inevitably forced to battle the survivors from wrecked alien vessels, and something of a land war erupted across this grim, secondary battleground between the fallen. The aliens soon began to win this one as well.
Despite this, despite the billions of dead from the fighting already, and despite no clear victor emerging on either side, the fact that not a single human vessel had fled the battle from fear alone was a testament to both the bravery of the crews involved, and their desperation. Earth, the oldest and one of the largest planet-wide cities, was home to hundreds of billions, the imperator of all humans and Tekran, along with all valid claimants to the throne — if it were to fall, humanity would be left with a gaping hole in its heart, in its government, and in its war-machine. The planet could not fall — its loss would surely break the will of humanity to prosecute its war for survival, and if this will to fight were to fail, the war would be all but lost. Not only would it deal a vicious blow to the Empire's fighting ability, but even more worryingly, without a clear successor to the office of imperator, the planet's loss could even lead to a civil conflict. The war against the alien had thus far been brutal, merciless, and apocalyptic; if Earth were to fall, it would become hopeless.
Cursed with the knowledge of this, as Xertaza fought, despite the focusing influence of MECS coursing throughout her veins, she, and many on her ship were already growing defeatist. Patriotic exclamations or vulgar insults directed at the aliens only increased in number, but rather than being a symptom of overwhelming confidence, they were used to try and create such confidence. Their intent was flawed, their message became diluted, and indeed, the hollow cheering often served only to demoralize those who heard it.
Xertaza, her ship, and its accompanying fleet, being in the thick of the merciless fighting yet unable to pursue a foe that could teleport, merely contributed its vast firepower to the battle while also blasting out of the void alien SDP-like objects that contained their equivalent of boarding parties. Thousands of human craft had already fallen to the alien monstrosities, and those that had not been promptly purged from the galaxy after the fact were now fighting their former fleets. The human forces could counter the aliens' boarding tactics by dispersing, but this would only make them more vulnerable to external alien assault: they would be less capable of concentrating their firepower in the way that had kept them relatively safe from mobile groups of alien ships. The simplest way for Xertaza to aid the human formations under attack from teleporting alien vessels was to hold in the midst of a human formation, and nuke anything alien that appeared — as it was, Tehkria-class were constructed for this type of role, and Xertaza, as a person, was almost as specifically purpose-built. While chants of "Humanity endures" echoed throughout the Ruthless, and throughout countless other ships, these vessels shook with the force of massed nuclear volleys being loosed, which only elicited further cheers from their MECS-addled crews. Enthralled by chemical confidence, and their superior numbers, the humans were blind to the massacre occurring around them.
Xertaza, who had a natural talent for military tactics, recognized that with their current, maneuver-focused tactic, the alien force couldn't effectively concentrate their fire on single targets, and with obscene amounts of modern armor, the Tehkria-class amongst the human armada were, for the most part, safe. Human losses continued to mount, and the dead had long since reached into the billions, but despite this, with eager, vengeful reinforcements breaching in from the Remnant with each passing moment, and with the aliens taking similarly brutal losses, a human victory appeared inevitable. The aliens had lost just over half their ships by that point, and were poised to lose many more.
Aware of this reality as much as the humans were, the alien fleet, in a single instant and without warning, quit the battle entirely, though they did not quit their attempts to invade Earth. Teleporting behind the human navy en masse, they began suicidally rushing towards the Earth, many of them teleporting so that they just skirted the upper atmosphere, before moving to deploy their shrieking, inhuman hordes to the planet's surface without a moment's hesitation. Within a few seconds, alien ships had surrounded the relatively undefended planet, eradicating any nearby stations, including the titanic complex that was the Empire-wide Communications Center, within seconds of their arrival. The destruction of this critical edifice left the first of the identical backup stations — the one over Tehkria — in control of most galactic communication. If Tehkria's were to fall, the second backup was over Nahmatiix; if this were to fall, another backup lay in orbit around Ihndrastar; there were more after this, such was the political benefit of having such a station, though not all were up to modern standards. The main battle had been occurring some distance from the Earth, and the human navy had grown so desperate that it had expended all of its meaningful reserves — as the alien armada descended upon the faltering Earth, the hastily pursuing human navy was still minutes away. Those hundreds of thousands of defensive stations near the world did their duty exceptionally well, destroying tens of thousands of alien warships as the vessels fell upon the homeworld of humanity and the capital world of the Empire, but in the face of such concentrated, durable numbers, even this wasn't enough. Shortly after they had appeared, hundreds of thousands of alien warships had crashed down upon the surface of Earth, deploying their crews to the surface of the world in the process as they sought to overrun the planet's defenders rapidly. Earth's surface was being desecrated by alien horrors, and the human race could only watch, helpless, for they fought a seemingly omnipotent enemy. Though the many soldiers and militia on humanity's homeworld were determined, skillful, and plentiful, so too was their adversary, and their adversary had the additional benefit of being technologically superior hordes of hell-spawned fiends. Even Xertaza was wary of how long the human army would be able to survive against the alien onslaught assailing them, let alone maintain any semblance of containment, especially when the aliens' infiltrators could impersonate normal people with perfect accuracy.
Somehow, however, the worst facet of the situation did not lie in the invasion of Earth's surface by millions of alien monstrosities, but instead, it lay in Earth's upper atmosphere, directly above the most important building in the galaxy, the Capital Complex. Here, where most of the remaining alien fleet gathered, was the beginning of what Xertaza had feared from the outset — a decapitating strike. The attack on Earth wasn't intended solely to destroy humanity's fleets or to capture its homeworld: it was intended to annihilate the Empire's government by killing the Imperator Kesaldax.
The Ruthless's engines, mirroring Xertaza's own emotions, burned as intensely as they could manage, flaming brightly in defiance of the aliens' strategy and safety regulations alike, while a fleet of millions of human warships surged forwards behind them. Xertaza desperately ordered her ship and any nearby to fire everything they could at the dense cloud of suicidal alien vessels gathering above the Capital Complex in an attempt to destroy them before they accomplished their mission, but in that moment, the alien formation then began its final descent towards the Imperator's quarters. Their inhuman weapons blazing so as to immolate everything surrounding their target, the alien ships utterly destroyed the hyperspheres that were Kesaldax's last hope at escape, besides his loyal fleet. As the humans' tidal wave of nuclear ordinance surged forth through the bleak void, the alien ships evidently exceeded their own engines' safety limits; as the hateful aliens descended, the fires from their ships' engines burned so brightly that their luminosity rivalled that of a star, and the heat produced by them was so intense that the engines began to melt the hulls of the suicidal vessels they were attached to. This sudden burst of speed allowed them to outpace Xertaza's ordinance and plummet straight into Earth's atmosphere — all Xertaza could do now was trust in the strength of the Capital Complex and the Imperator's below-surface bunker. The location of Kesaldax's shelter was obviously not public knowledge, but as the aliens had appropriated the information of multiple senior military officials who had accompanied Terilan's fleet, they knew exactly where to strike.
Watching the assault through the telescopic cameras of the Ruthless with abject horror, Xertaza witnessed the dense column of alien ships dive down towards the Capital Complex, their weapons ablaze with inhuman fury and arcane power as the alien ships threw themselves into the building below, firing all the way. The seemingly endless alien fleet, a great pillar of black hulls reaching past the sky, continued to pummel the Capital Complex with stunning violence as they sought to kill the most important man in all the galaxy. The targeted section of the mighty building resisted the first few waves of suicidal ships, until its superstructure simply collapsed under the sheer force of the devastating impacts; anyone who remained within the meeting hall, or anywhere a hundred kilometers around it on the surface, was crushed. The formation of alien ships continued its suicidal dive in the not-so-vain hope of reaching and destroying the Imperator's bunker, which lay a mere three kilometers below the surface; the Capital Complex had failed to so much as survive the first wave. The entire bridge of the Ruthless, and those of every ship in the human galaxy, were deathly silent, save the shocked gaps and panicked breathing of these spectators to the vicious assault on humanity. This was made somehow worse when Xertaza was alerted to yet another horrible truth: each alien vessel was deploying entire vast swarms of ground forces to the surface of Earth just before they crashed into the surface of the planet they were invading, ensuring that even if the efforts of those vessels that had borne them were to fail, they would still be able to execute their objective — "execute" being quite literal — in person. Horrifyingly, it did not seem as if it would ever come to that; the Imperator's bunker was beneath three kilometers of armor, but even three kilometers of the most advanced armor was nothing against the combined might of the remaining alien ships.
The alien warships continued to surge into the surface of Earth, the impacts of their hulls tearing apart the weakened armor below like massive baleful bullets; as the alien ships fired everything they had into the surface of Earth, even the most fortified location in the galaxy found itself no match for the malignant mass of monstrous machines above. Many on Earth thought that they were witnessing the final days of humanity's ancient homeworld, while countless others felt that the Imperator was as good as dead; no matter what anyone thought, there was little optimism among these thoughts. Another minute, and this lack of hope was vindicated: Kesaldax, most of his senior staff, and all within the Imperator's bunker, were utterly annihilated when the structure they were hiding in was erased from the surface of the planet. Not even a ruin remained. The rain of alien warships refused to abate, even once the Imperator was dead, as it viscously pummelled the surface of the Earth, ensuring that it would leave only a smouldering crater where the leader of humanity had once stood. The multiple-kilometer deep wound in the Earth was teeming with millions of alien monsters, and the scattered human forces surrounding the crater were struggling to contain the innumerable alien hordes within, but little of this was on the mind of Xertaza, or any other humans watching events unfold — their imperator had died, and their spirits perished with him.
It had been just two days — though the third galactic day was already nearing its end — since the aliens were first sighted above Light's End, and already the Capital Complex was gone, along with humanity's head of state; the enlightened role-model, leader, and devoted father-figure of the entire species since the beginning of his rule over a century ago, had been brutally and senselessly killed by the genocidal alien scourge. The galaxy's capital of Earth seemed likely to follow. More than half of the Ruthless's bridge crew, despite the MECS coursing through their veins, broke down into grief-filled wails as they realized what had transpired. The sound of coil-pistols discharging echoed throughout the halls of the Ruthless, those of countless other vessels, the surfaces of planets and even the blood-soaked battlefields of the Empire, as grieving people, to many of whom the Imperator was more of a treasure than their own beloved sons and daughters, sought solace from the nightmare of reality in oblivion. Despite the interference of combat drugs, many soldiers who had heard of the Imperator's death, yet whose immense grief was frozen by the drug, were overcome with a sorrowful, near-catatonic lethargy that even MECS was powerless to stop. As the terrible news spread, this crippling trend was perpetuated throughout the galaxy, and though Xertaza was of too strong a will to fall to such a fate, she was still reduced to a crying wreck, not out of blind loyalty, but out of a loyalty and platonic love born from knowing Kesaldax personally: out of all the people in the galaxy, he had been of a hundred or so who knew her condition, but he had been one of the only ones who treated her as a person despite it. Kesaldax had had that singular trait which was rare, sometimes detrimental, and yet always appreciated in a ruler: he had been kind. His loss was almost as great as that of Earth would be, if the homeworld were indeed destined to fall into the corruptive grasp of the alien hordes.
It was another eight minutes until Xertaza had regained a semblance of her usual composure, in part thanks to MECS, and in part thanks to her own tenacious nature; she then realized that despite the Imperator's death, it was still possible to prevent the fall of Earth. This was only achievable if she were to act quickly, and rallied the shattered defences of the planet, because at present these defences were even more grief-stricken than Xertaza was. She was Prime Constable, the galaxy's order was disintegrating, and the Empire's imperator was dead — if there was ever a time Xertaza was needed, it was then.
Undoing her harness and standing from her chair so as to draw the attention of the mourning masses, Xertaza, patching herself into the entire ship's speaker network and disregarding textcomms for they lacked tone, bellowed a command, "Prepare all deployment pods, ready nuclear warheads, and stand-by to initiate ground support operations on Earth's surface. Distribute a command throughout the fleet instructing them to do the same — they took our imperator, but I do not intend to stand by and watch while they take our homeworld!"
As soon as Xertaza uttered her last syllable, she ordered all of her crew members to dose themselves with an even higher quantity of MECS, in the hopes that this would make them attentive; this worked, though not brilliantly. All of the decks on Xertaza's ship responded to the order, and began making preparations to carry it out, but their actions were sluggish and inaccurate, being woefully insufficient for the task of defending humanity's capital and birthplace. To break them out of the emotional prison that her crew had fallen into, Xertaza had but one option left — to orate, and to preach vengeance, for hate was an emotion stronger than grief, and it was one easily tapped.
Inhaling deeply, briefly compiling some notes, and audibly clearing her throat so as to seize the hazy attentions of the fleet that she now headed, Xertaza connected herself to the communications of this fleet, and began.
"I won't pretend that Kesaldax's death means nothing, I won't pretend that you should be able to perform your best after his death, but I will not pretend that mourning or self-pity is an excuse to let our homeworld die along with him."
Xertaza's words shamed some into action, but not many; the harsh truth only made some sink further into melancholy.
"Just a few thousand kilometers below us, alien horrors are parading through our streets, corrupting our proudest ecumenopolis, our homeworld, while they butcher our people like animals — they do all of this, whilst we waste our time soaking the armor of our warships with tears. I began this speech by saying 'I won't pretend that you should be able to perform your best' but now, for the sake of the people on Earth, and for the sake of the Empire that Kesaldax fought so hard to protect, I also won't pretend that you don't have to do your best in order to save our species! You are the only thing that stands between trillions, and extinction — you must prove yourselves worthy of those ships whose air you breathe, and prove yourself worthy of Kesaldax's legacy, for if we idle today, we won't just be mourning our imperator tomorrow, but we'll be standing by for the funeral of the Empire, and of humanity!
"Now, do your duty, follow my orders, and cover the streets of Earth with alien blood! Humanity endures!"
Xertaza's powerful speech succeeded in awakening the fires of vengeance within the battered hearts of her crew, and much of the fleet at large. Her bridge sprang to life, and soon, as the vengeful fleet abided by her instructions, tens of thousands of SDPs began soaring down to the gilded, blood-soaked streets of the besieged planet below, eager to butcher the alien butchers and save the birthplace of the human race. Even as her left arm began to twitch against her will, Xertaza herself was not concerned — utilizing textcomms, she began to direct the efforts of what had essentially become her fleet, as it worked in conjunction with the planet's ground forces, in a desperate attempt to preserve humanity's homeworld.
Slaughter; corruption; apocalypse; a battered, imperator-less fleet and a shaken army of soldiers and marines were the only things standing between the chaos and carnage that had so characterized the aliens' arrival, and Earth. Only with time, sweat, and blood, would the value, or pointlessness, of their efforts be realized, but whatever the result was, it had already become clear that the aliens were more than a match for the galaxy they had attacked. Without a leader, the human race stood defenceless against the crisis that was now on the verge of eradicating it; with treason stirring in the hearts of many, and with emotions being more turbulent than they had ever been before, it seemed as if only greater disaster would follow.
***
"Fuck."
— Kesaldax Tekran, imperator during the Alien War, last words.