Humanity Endures

Part 13 - Epilogue | Chapter 3

As Velan was taking note of the flirtatious glances being exchanged between Yelazar and Illtera — something that was surprising, as Yelazar usually moved on from people by this point; "perhaps he is finally committing to someone?" he thought — Velan was shaken from his study when a thunderous flurry of metallic clanging echoed throughout the halls of the station, being so loud that it could rival a nuclear detonation, and whose arrival was accompanied by shaking so intense that it too could rival that caused by an atomic weapon. The steely vibrations of the grating noise threatened to burst the eardrums of all within the Placeholder, and glass everywhere threatened to shatter under the shrill intensity of the enigmatic cacophony. The mostly-drunk chamber erupted into a cacophony of panicked yelling, shouting, and the shattering of glass, accompanied by the whine and creak of the station's straining hull; Velan, unprepared for the sudden movement of his ship, was flung from his own chair and slammed into the cold, liquor-covered floor a moment later. Groaning in pain, Velan listened closely for the sounds of depressurization, but could, thankfully, hear no such thing.

The deafening clanging continued, its condensed bursts rhythmically and hauntingly echoing throughout the already ravaged station, while it stirred unmitigated chaos within the Placeholder's walls; as others struggled to avoid the rain of alcohol and other miscellaneous table-bound items that now threatened those on the floor, Velan, desperate to find out what was happening to his ship, hastily linked his implants to the external cameras of his ship as he searched for a quarry. Disconcertingly, he saw nothing but the expanse of the Remnant, and fragments of scorched metal drifting away from his station, the very surface of which was being throttled and immolated by invisible projectiles. Velan's chest began to fill with panic as his mind flooded with an unnerving sense of familiarity; after he reached for a miraculously intact bottle of intoxication suppressant nearby, and as he lifted the flask to his lips, a textcomm from Falmenec slammed into Velan's partially-inebriated, shaken mind.

"This structural trauma, if the ship's sensors are correct, is caused by Remnant-oscillating hyper-energetic particles!"—Falmenec included the string of words as if it would mean something to Velan, yet though it did not, the rest of the message did—"These are the same things that shot across the galaxy a day before Light's End opened, except this time they're here in far greater quantities: if something is coming through it, whatever is coming through Light's End this time, is likely far larger. The particle barrage should stop soon, but what this entails is beyond worrying; compared to what's about to move through it, the alien fleet that attacked us over Light's End is but a grain of sand on a synthetic beach."

Velan's hairs stood on end; a horrible chill shot up his spine, and forced his entire upper body to twitch fearfully, as the noises echoing throughout his station seemed to grow more ominous and hateful by the moment. As bottles of liquor violently shattered around him and his other floor-bound crew members, lacerating many, Velan scarcely noticed them: if what Falmenec was suggesting was true, the future of humanity was more in jeopardy than he could have ever imagined. Velan wished with every ounce of his being that Falmenec, an extremely talented scientist whose hunches had an uncanny level of accuracy, was wrong this one time, though he couldn't deny that he shared Falmenec's dire suspicions.

Another moment, and the pulsing clanging finally ceased; according to a timely textcomm from Falmenec, the flow of Remnant-borne particles had stopped altogether, though the reverberating whine of the station's battered hull in the wake of the ordeal was more than merely unsettling. Those who were intimately familiar with the lead-up to the battle of Light's End, and who had identified the similarities between this event and the other fateful one often began to share their theories; as the first alien incursion through Light's End had brought the galaxy to its knees, there were few who remained optimistic about what a second interaction with the celestial object would bring. Velan's mind was awash with theories and inane ideas, each more outlandish and more terrifying than the next: could the first alien fleet to exit Light's End, a fleet that had brought the Empire to its knees, have merely been some form of scouting party? Were the aliens merely some kind of bioweapon deployed to weaken opposition before the arrival of something worse? Were these aliens running from something that now threatened to enter his galaxy through Light's End? All of his equally unscientific assumptions sounded as if they had been ripped from the gossip of fearful doomsayers — now a thriving profession in the wake of the alien invasion — though it could not be said that the insane, so long as it was terrifying and lethal, was uncommon; after all, the galaxy had been invaded by aliens emerging from a black hole.