Gill couldn’t understand how the Sigians followed their way under fire; he only saw a maddening carousel of stripes, fluorescent lines, and colorful sparks running in all directions. The sphere handler stretched the jelly from inside out, as if he was swimming in a whirling river. A bright-yellow, highly irregular shape appeared in the center of the display wall.
“The engine’s right ahead! Launch the charges?” asked a soldier from a transparent floor cockpit.
“Get a little closer,” replied Kirk’an, grinning broadly.
“This is madness,” exclaimed the soldier, more to himself, gazing worriedly at the sensors.
Dozens of alarms started to scream, a sure sign that the radiations coming from the giant engine were more than a match for their protections.
“The shields are about to fail!” shouted the soldier.
“Fire!” Kirk’an finally gave the order.
A salvo of fluorescent orange stripes gushed from the destroyer’s belly, spearing the fiery furnace. The planetoid had no chance of avoiding them. The sphere handler frantically pushed the space, and the ship jumped backward. Despite this, the blast shock wave hit them so violently that the god of the bracelet landed on the floor with a loud thud, followed by two other soldiers who didn’t take the elementary measure of locking their cockpit doors. The commander didn’t budge a bit, his automagnetic suit holding his feet firmly anchored to the floor.
Shortly after that, the unbelievable violence of the engine explosion caught them. A sea of fire surrounded their ship, and for a brief moment, it seemed that the whole planetoid was blowing away. The blast tore off huge chunks from the longer arm, spreading them it all directions. Ice and gases flared out of the craters while the monster quickly spun out of control.
The golden ships pressed on with their attack, deciding to finish it off. Soon, they reached the top of the dorsal armor and launched a wave of bombs through its holes. The huge blasts of the Sigian bombs were followed by strings of internal explosions.
Kirk’an gave another order, and the destroyer left the battlefield. Some grays followed them in a desperate attempt to block their escape, but the Sigians nearby attacked with such ferocity that they had to abandon the hopeless idea. Anyway, as long as the grays were unable to fold a very large distortion front, they had no chance of keeping pace with the destroyer.
Behind them, the battle raged with renewed fury. The grays, despite their overwhelming numbers, started to crumble under the vicious assault. For a while, it seemed that the Sigians were about to win, but every moment, more and more grays reached the battlefield, opening fire as they arrived.
The destroyer was running away from the battle at full speed when a huge explosion ripped the sky. The dying giant had just ended its active service in the enemy fleet, throwing millions of fragments—some as large as a warship—in all directions.
Around the wreckage, the survivors were playing their deadly game. The grays launched wave after wave of tightly packed nukes, trying to guess where the yellow stripes would materialize. Sometimes, well-aimed Sigian charges found their marks, smashing the gray vessels into bits.
It wasn’t a battle anymore: the Sigians were all doomed, and they knew it. Despite this, none of them tried to break off but fought valiantly to take as many enemies with them as possible.
The closest of the two planetoids arrived at the battle. This was the ship Gill saw when he first connected to the bracelet. The scattered charges launched at it ended up vaporized by the formidable defenses; meanwhile, its lenses fired green rays of huge intensity at the golden fleet. Almost every successful hit blasted a Sigian vessel into oblivion.
Despite the grays’ overwhelming power, for each ship they destroyed, they lost at least five. The battlefield filled with fragments of armor, ship frames, splinters, and colorful ice fragments sucked out of the broken tanks.
Next, the grays tried to disable the largest Sigian vessel—a color stripe much brighter than the others but just as agile—the fleet node. An old Sigian surrounded by troops appeared on the screens: the fleet commander.
“My brave soldiers,” the commander shouted, “we fought many battles together, but now the time has come to say good-bye. Whoever wants to surrender, feel free to do it. As for the rest of us, let’s show our enemies how the Sigians face their ending! Let’s charge once more, for the night’s coming!”
The Sigians on Gill’s destroyer pressed their right fists over their mouths and blew guttural choeee sounds in his direction, after which the transmission ended. The node stopped jumping and turned toward the closest planetoid, even though the latter focused all available lenses on its bow. The impact depolarized both ships, and the Sigian node broke in half, its aft section drifting apart to join the smoldering wrecks floating around. Other Sigians jumped on their commander’s footsteps.
The slaughter was quickly over. Thousands and thousands of survivors escaped from the twisted carcasses, flying toward the desert planet to join the fighting on the ground. The battle scene became a huge graveyard, stuffed with myriads of fragments, some still burning violently, fed by the oxygen that escaped from the broken tanks. From time to time, a wreck exploded, blasting a shock wave of gases and metal shards through the surrounding debris.
The young cadet of the fleet command appeared on the screen.
“Your way is free,” he exclaimed, half relieved, half terrified for the irreparable loss of their small fleet. “We’ve made it!”
“How’s the situation there?” asked Kirk’an.
“Bad,” the cadet answered bitterly, “and soon, it’s going to be all over.”
“Can we have some images?”
A large city appeared on a display wall. It was none other than Sigia, the Sigian capital, spread between two large mountain plateaus in the middle of the desert. Some high-altitude clouds rolled on the dark sky.
To everyone’s horror, they could see that the battle for the city had already begun. Thousands of lenses mounted on the buildings and in the canyons fired relentlessly at the sky, hitting the clouds with green beams.
And then they saw the huge bombers descending from the dense mist. Their sphere-shaped bows spilled hundreds of bright-orange hologuided bombs, able to smell their prey with deadly accuracy. The bombs plowed the canyons and the city itself, silencing the orbital defenses.
The general chaos deepened when hundreds of thousands of flying vessels took off to avoid the bombing. They ran—but to where? No friendly city awaited them anymore. The blackness of space swallowed them one by one. In the distance, far from the city’s batteries, rows of fat transport ships descended from the clouds to unload the enemy troops. The horizon became red from the heavy fighting carried out across the planet.
The Sigians on the destroyer’s bridge stood speechless. They were witnessing the moment they most feared, the end of their civilization. The Sigian-Gill caught his head in his hands, a useless attempt to fight the pain.
“Close the contact, we saw enough!” Kirk’an told them abruptly. “We have to carry on with our mission!”
The transmission ended. An orange dot, which held everyone’s gaze, was all that was left on the display.
They were alone. For the first time, they were truly alone, the kind of loneliness that only the last members of a vanished world may experience. Their civilization was no more, and they had to rebirth it from the ashes of its defeat.
“Change the course,” the commander ordered, pointing at the holographic map of the quadrant. “If they triangulated us, they’ll send a whole fleet this way.”
The bracelet made another jump. The next memories seemed to be a prelude of another battle. A commotion started on the ship’s bridge, hurried soldiers dressing in their fight suits and activating their bracelets, even though there were no enemy ships in sight.