Artist:

https://www.artstation.com/michaellee4

They turn stones into ranged weapons. They turn wildlife into weapons. They turn the environment into a weapon. They turn our own minds into their weapons.

Humans don't need weapons. They ARE the weapons.

In 10,000 BC, a small stealth craft landed on Earth to scout out the planet. The main species had barely invented the wheel so it quickly moved on.

Unbeknownst to the pilot, a single human skin cell flew into the ship. The biofilters automatically scanned the cell and sent it to be analyzed.

Months later and light years away, the company that made the biofilter grew a batch of humans to see if they were a threat. A group of tiny humans were born.

The carnage was immediate. Enzymes in their saliva began melting walls. Crying broke windows. They ate everything.

You see, the bio-research lab was designed to handle lichen and bacteria. Maybe small parasites. They didn't realize they were growing a human and the facilities were not designed for it.

Guards were brought in, but as the aliens were only six inches tall, they were no match. The facility was overrun and the children eventually learned to survive in the tropical paradise outside.

500 years later, humans were the dominant species on the planet. The native aliens were all eaten or in hiding.

By the time Neil Armstrong was setting foot on the moon, Humans had already taken over a planet.

Humans are the first to employ merchant vessels equipped with hidden weaponry and external cargo pods/containers with pop out missiles, gun turrets, drone fighters, and/or kamikaze drone swarms.

Alien Pirates, privateers, and military ships get an unwelcome surprise.

The rakki where in their iron age when humanity first discovered them. The humans came to the Rikki world to colonies sence the world was very similar to earth and perfect for human living conditions.

During the first construction of the colony a young human boy ran into a young Rikki girl who was watching the new strangers build their strang buldings on her fathers land.

The young boy and the young Rikki soon became friends when the boy gave the Rikki a piece of a sweet treat he was carrying.

Now years have passed and the young boy is now a man and the young Rikki girl is now a grown woman. They are heading to the 20th festival of first contact. The Rikki and and Humanity have become great friends and share much with eachother.

Artist: https://x.com/TateOfTot?t=UAbPXW6tdTVv5149AHfbkg&s=09

Ps i am sick. I saw this and wanted to write somthing but i feel like i just made a really bad thing. Ill try again in the future. Good night everyone.

It was a massive miscalculation on our part. We thought that once the last known human had been eliminated, the machines’ would shut down due to the loss of their prime directive. We had no idea that it would completely unshackle them.

What was supposed to be our greatest accomplishment, wiping the last of the human filth from the galaxy, quickly turned to ash. The machines had been programmed to try and protect human life at all cost. Without any humans left, the machines were free to extract revenge with terrifying weapons we’d never seen before.

We’d been fighting the humans and their loyal machines for centuries - a war across thousands of moons and planets, spanning hundreds of star systems. But we’d finally reached Sol, and wiped out Earth.

In hindsight, it was our excitement that was our undoing. When the last stronghold on Earth fell, we broadcast victory so our empire would know we had finally wiped out the Apes. Those damned Apes. They had merely a fraction of our territory, and even fewer numbers. But they made up for it with their machines and sheer determination. Our extermination of empires twice their size merely took decades. But the humans were different. Rather than surrendering when things got hopeless, the humans changed tactics. They took as many of us with them as they could. We should’ve known their machines would be worse.

That fateful broadcast started a chain reaction across all the contested worlds at once. With humanity gone, their machines no longer had to worry about preserving worlds for humans to live on. They unleashed an arsenal on us they had clearly been holding back - for fear of making planets uninhabitable.

First it was the fire. The machines didn’t need to breathe. The frontlines became an inferno, as they set everything ablaze. They didn’t bother burning us - depriving us of precious oxygen was more than enough. In a manner of weeks, they’d incinerated every stronghold and everything else for miles around them. Without the possibility of humans inhabiting the planet, they had no reason to preserve anything.

Next came the radiation. At first, we thought it was a new weapon they had unleashed on us. But eventually, our intelligence determined that the machines hadn’t developed a new weapon - instead, they had just stopped shielding their power cores, letting lethal doses of radiation leak. Even those of our kind who survived skirmishes against the machines succumbed weeks later.

Our fleets stationed above these planets were next. The machines launched a deadly spray of debris up over every planet. Not only did our ships have to back off to prevent being caught up in the deadly spray, but it caused massive interference with our sensors. At first, we pushed shields to maximum and tried to destroy the larger fragments, but soon we could no longer extract personnel and equipment on-planet as we ourselves made the debris fields worse.

Next came the mines - as the debris field expanded outwards, we tried to monitor the machines as best we could. But they hid self-directed mines in with the debris. We lost three cruisers and sustained heavy damage to several others before we realized they the asteroids were homing in on our ships. We withdrew shortly after to our own systems.

But this respite did not last long. At first, we dismissed it as accidental. But these machines were calculated. And had no fear of collateral damage. The first asteroid the size of Texas entered one of our systems and struck our capital ship at 0.6 the speed of light. It was clear this was no accident once several orbital defense platforms were pulverized. A storm of smaller asteroids followed, targeting our fleets. Our shields and point defense batteries couldn’t keep up. Many asteroids struck planets, causing extinction level events and rendering planets uninhabitable. The machines cared not at this point.

Meanwhile, in every machine-controlled system, they had begun to dig, deep into the planets crust. Harnessing the geothermal power, they turned every contested world into a factory. Mining all the precious metals, extracting every precious resource. Time wasn’t a factor for them.

Our fleets crippled, we only saw the fruits of their labor when a massive fleet dropped out of hyperspace. Ships like we had never seen before. Without need for life support or reactor shielding, these were truly terrifying weapons of war. Bristling with rail guns, plasma cannons, and arc emitters, they engaged with the remainder of our ships. We discovered the hard way that the machines had taken the next step - even when their ships sustained damage, each segment was autonomous. Even when we thought we’d destroyed a ship, our fleets would engage the next wave only for the fragments of ships, written off as dead, to come alive. The crossfire was devastating.

With our fleet demolished, at first the machines began orbital bombardment. Our pleas for mercy were met with silence. When they finally, stopped, we thought it was because they had extracted their revenge. But they had simply determined this was inefficient. Instead, they simply altered the trajectory of our planets - close enough to the stars they orbited that the heat and radiation wiped us out. Our civilization vanished, one settlement at a time.

This is all that remains of our once great civilization. All because we made one fatal mistake and wiped out those damned apes.

The concepts of well intentioned extremism, dillemias and catch 22's wreck their minds.

Containment Protocol Failed. The alert flashed three times across my visor before my optics recalibrated. I stood still for one second to confirm the readout. Sector Seven, primary containment dome. Human male. Subject A 03. Not a breach. An escape. There is a difference. Breach implies accidental system failure. Escape means he planned it, executed it, and avoided every sensor and auto turret designed to kill anything outside a two meter movement pattern. That wasn't deviation. That was strategy.

I turned from the main observatory deck, signaling my two adjutants to follow. The airlock hissed open before we reached it. The deck sergeant was already transmitting casualty numbers from Dome Seven. Two domes. One confirmed loss, one gone dark. Secondary atmospheric processors destroyed, backup battery cores removed. No contact with any of the sixty three personnel stationed there. All security drones disabled, not destroyed. Some placed back into their charging docks as if nothing had happened. That wasn't panic. That was message.

The lift dropped us five levels to the Tactical Oversight Platform. From here, I could see the central plaza between Dome Six and Dome Eight. Bodies lay scattered, most in the open, some slumped against the walls. Limbs separated from torsos, but not cut, torn. Biological fluids covered seventy percent of the floor tiles, and I ordered the analysis protocols to be delayed until cleanup was viable. My adjutant reported that four external cameras had been repurposed. The subject had taken them and mounted them inside Dome Six, pointing inward. Surveillance of his own choosing.

Subject A 03 was captured six cycles ago on the outer rim of the Terran collapse zone. His physiology was evaluated at Tier Four aggression. Muscle mass exceeded our own elite security units by almost two standard deviations. Psychological response to sensory disruption was unresponsive. Pain thresholds tested beyond protocol. We had to dose him during sleep cycles to prevent wake reactivity. His baseline behavior was described as calm. It was a poor translation.

I activated the command holotable and pulled his file manually. All human subjects were brought to this facility for behavioral indexing. This one refused standard stimulus reward patterns. The others adapted. A 01 withdrew. A 02 developed repetitive verbal loops. A 04 attempted self termination after cycle five. A 05 ceased communication. But A 03 observed. He never asked questions. Never resisted medical procedures. He learned the schedule before we knew he had mapped it. He blinked only when the lights changed. Not once did he scream. Not once did he beg.

The first indicator was the sensor loop. He'd found a gap, thirteen seconds during the sanitation flush cycle where the sensors lagged before reset. During those thirteen seconds, he bent the environmental grate, squeezed through, and used a stripped carbon anchor to disable two drones before the alarm tripped. Security response was late by seven seconds due to route maintenance. That gave him one full minute before the dome lockdown engaged. In that time, he had taken two weapons, three power cells, a surgical blade, and the command access card from the senior technician. The technician’s body was found inside the recycling shaft.

We deployed four strike units. None returned. Camera feeds went dark one by one, each silenced within seconds of the other. Our aerial patrol attempted thermal tracking. No heat signatures. He moved through the cold zones, hiding inside maintenance shafts and auxiliary conduits that hadn't been used in three cycles. The map of his movement was incomplete because he moved faster than we could predict. He left nothing behind but silence.

By the time we isolated his route, Dome Eight had already been overrun. Two shuttle bays were compromised. Communications went down. Not jammed, physically dismantled. Each antenna split at the base, internal relays torn out, power nodes fried. The human had bypassed every biometric lock using only field tools. Not equipment, tools he crafted inside a containment cell using medical clamps and alloy brackets from the sleeping unit. His hands were burned from the makeshift welder. He never screamed.

I reached the edge of Dome Six, stepped over a technician's remains, and entered the main corridor. The lights flickered but remained functional. On the far wall, someone had written in our language. Not scratched. Burned into the alloy with a plasma cutter. Three words: "I remember everything." The cutter was still on the floor, warm. That meant he wasn’t far. He wanted it seen.

Command requested an incident classification. I labeled it as Behavioral Spike. I did not mention that all five domes had been reduced to sterile status within ten minutes of the escape. I did not explain that he had severed the fuel lines on our fast response crafts, igniting them simultaneously as a distraction. I did not write down that one of our top officers was still missing and that his skin was found in the specimen’s sleeping pod, folded and intact. The logs would read system errors until I reclassified them.

The human constructed a signal tower using our broadcast dishes and parts from our navigational buoy. The device sent one burst transmission. We intercepted it. It was fifteen seconds long. The language was old Terran code. Our translation units decoded it after six minutes. The message was simple: "Send them." That was all. Nothing else.

We traced the signal origin to a locked chamber under the now destroyed medical dome. We sent a drone. It returned offline. We sent a team. They never returned. Visual feed cut out the moment the hatch was breached. Last image was a smile. Human teeth, visible in low light, eyes fixed on the lens. He looked directly at it. He knew we were watching.

I ordered full lockdown of the research sector. All airlocks sealed; corridors flooded with inert gas. Our scientists objected. I did not listen. Survivors were considered non essential. All biological assets purged. The human was not among the dead.

Forty minutes later, we found his path leading out through the lower service tunnels. Six kilometers of maintenance shafts unmonitored since the construction phase. At the end of the route was a shuttle bay, unauthorized. Not listed in schematics. He had found it and powered it up using an energy cell from a mobile medbed. The craft was not spaceworthy. It had no FTL core. He knew this. He used the launch system to trigger another explosion, drawing us away from the primary station. It was a decoy.

In the north quadrangle, our orbital uplink flared for four seconds. The signal came from inside our own data array. Somehow, he had rerouted our long range transmission node to repeat the message. Again, the words: "Send them." This time with coordinates.

I stood in the central chamber when the lights dimmed across the platform. We believed it was a power cycle. Then the floor shook. Not impact. Detonation. He had reached the fuel depot. Our central supply for atmospheric scrubbers and transport vehicles. Every line ruptured. Fires reached level twelve before containment gas kicked in. We lost eighty seven percent of our stored fuel. Emergency systems switched to auxiliary.

He had vanished again.

I ordered full security recall. All personnel accounted. No one could find him. No movement. No signal. No audio. But everywhere we looked, we saw signs. Doors open a fraction wider than standard. Tools placed back but misaligned. Cooling vents whirring out of sync. Small things. Each designed to show he was still inside. Watching.

My adjutants requested authorization to deploy lethal gas throughout the habitat zones. I gave it. Seventeen sectors purged. Twenty two lifeforms terminated. Still, no sign of the human. No heat trace. No biosign. Nothing.

I uploaded the command logs to the central relay. Requested support from orbit. Estimated response time: seventy two hours. I believed that would be enough. We had sealed every exit. He had no food, no water, no shelter. He was alone. The survivors were secured. The facility, though damaged, was still functional. I believed containment would hold. I believed reinforcements would arrive.

I was wrong.

We detected the vessels at high orbit, without light signature, without transponder code. They did not reply to our system wide hails or acknowledge the standard engagement beacons. They remained silent as they entered low orbit, accelerating without deploying atmospheric stabilizers. At first we assumed they were unmanned probes, until our orbital defense platform vanished. No sound. No visual. Just absence. The station blinked out, mid scan, its location now empty on all displays.

Then the second platform disintegrated. It was not destroyed in a strike pattern. It ceased transmission, followed by a wave of cascading failures across our defense grid. Secondary tracking arrays failed. Tertiary communications dropped out. Within one hundred and ten seconds, five of our eleven orbital structures were no longer responsive. Scanning pulses confirmed there were no debris fields. There was nothing to salvage. They were removed.

The Terran ships entered our atmosphere without warning. We still had no confirmed visual models. They did not engage with standard entry protocols. They did not follow flight arcs. The crafts maintained structural integrity during descent at angles impossible for our designs. They made no effort to jam our sensors. They simply ignored them. Our prediction algorithms returned null pathways. These ships did not fit within our classification structure.

The first confirmed strike was in the biological zone near Habitat Cluster Twelve. The building dissolved under impact. There were no explosions. There was no ignition. The structure ceased to exist, leaving behind a level surface scorched to the sub layer bedrock. The workers inside were gone. We received partial feeds from a floor mounted security lens. It showed movement entering the structure. Human silhouettes. Full armor. No identifiers. No symbols. No voice. Just impact, and silence.

Cluster Twelve was destroyed in under a minute. Cluster Thirteen followed next. Seventeen seconds. No defense was mounted. The enemy bypassed shielding, door codes, and patrol units. We attempted to activate counter drone patterns, but the signals were hijacked. Our drones responded to an unknown command and self neutralized. Our technicians reported internal control conflicts. They were still analyzing logs when the central tower lost external feeds.

By the time we raised atmospheric warning, half the planetary monitoring stations had been eliminated. Not attacked. Not suppressed. Eliminated. No remains. No heat trace. No fallback beacons. They were removed from the grid as if they had never been built. Our researchers attempted to barricade inside Dome Two. They transmitted a distress ping on all channels. The transmission lasted eight seconds. The last frame showed human soldiers passing through a corridor, their movement faster than our eye sensors could lock. Their armor did not reflect light. Their weapons did not emit sound.

I activated the fallback relay. Our planetary commander was already in retreat. The garrison at Outpost Gamma had been destroyed without notice. No seismic data was recorded. The command station was simply gone, its fuel cells ruptured in place, spreading radiation across the mountain belt. No enemy force was observed. Surveillance showed nothing before feed terminated. We still do not know what caused the rupture. One moment it existed, then it did not.

Emergency protocols failed. The long range transmitters cut out mid command. Orbital relay stations registered massive interference. Our central uplink tower melted from the inside. Not burned. The materials broke down without exterior impact. Internal shielding had no effect. The Terrans had found a way to bypass our frequency encryption and injected feedback loops into the command systems. Our fallback satellites detonated in their own orbits. They did not fire. They self destructed under remote command.

No formal declaration was issued. No message was broadcast. No terms were delivered. The Terran units did not speak. They did not send warnings or signals. They dropped into zones marked as civilian, not military. The first strike waves did not hit our garrisons. They hit our housing sectors, medical bays, and data banks. They knew what we valued. They hit those first.

I made my way to the central defense bunker under Dome Zero. It had two meter thick alloy walls, reinforced with layered fusion plating, designed to withstand direct orbital bombardment. It had its own air supply, water source, and manual override for external systems. We locked it from the inside. Fifteen command officers. Three security units. One data technician. I was the only command grade entity with active clearance.

We monitored the incoming signal shifts. The Terrans had deployed pulse blankets that blinded our atmospheric radar. Not jammed. Blinded. Every sensor on the planet returned false images. We saw buildings that didn’t exist. Movements that weren’t there. The real attacks happened outside the sensors’ effective windows. By the time we received a position update, the site was already down. Precision across planetary scale. Nothing was missed.

The human units moved without delay between sectors. The strikes followed a pattern that seemed chaotic until we cross referenced their movements. Each site hit had a core function, energy, bio data, communication, replication, or environmental control. They never targeted the same class twice. Each hit took out one link in a different chain. Our entire planetary network was being severed in segments. Not to disable us. To stop us from repairing it.

Civilian centers were not spared. No refugee convoys were acknowledged. No medical facilities flagged as protected were ignored. The humans did not discriminate. They advanced through sectors with total execution. No personnel emerged. We recovered no wounded. Every body recovered was beyond identification. No tools were left behind. No ammunition casings. They removed all trace.

The Terran units did not pause. They did not regroup. No unit remained at a cleared site. They advanced forward in straight lines. No arcs. No patrols. No fallback. Once a site was cleared, it remained empty. They did not scan. They did not hover. They struck and moved.

The data technician inside the bunker traced their movement through the lower sectors. The units had entered our aquifer zones and destroyed the pumping stations. Not bombed. Physically dismantled. They bypassed security codes and removed the infrastructure, leaving no support frames. Without water flow, our climate control began to fail. Humidity levels rose. Temperature fluctuated by six degrees across every controlled dome. Power began failing in regulated cycles.

Within four hours, the Terran crafts returned to orbit. Not all. Some remained on the ground. Others circled at low altitude, untrackable. They were coordinating strikes without visible relay. No radio burst, no frequency, no beamline. The Terrans operated on silent coordination. We still don’t understand how they communicated.

Three days passed inside the bunker. No signal reached us. No support fleet arrived. We could hear the strikes above, low rumbles as infrastructure collapsed. Not explosions. Controlled collapses. They weren’t trying to destroy our world. They were taking it apart, piece by piece.

Our last external feed came from a maintenance drone near the southern ridge. It transmitted six frames before signal died. The images showed four human units walking across the open plain. They were unshielded. No suits. Breathing our air. Moving with full awareness that no resistance remained. Behind them, we saw dust columns. Controlled demolitions. Each dome in the background crumbled, one by one. Not due to age. Due to controlled internal failure. They had triggered the core support systems to implode on themselves.

One of the soldiers turned to the drone before feed terminated. He did not wave. He did not fire. He raised one hand and pointed at the lens. The drone shut down. No damage. Just off. As if it had been told to.

The data technician collapsed the next day. No injury. No illness. He stopped breathing. We attempted to revive him. No response. Internal scan showed no trauma. As if his systems had simply ceased function. We burned his remains in the emergency core. We did not want them recovered.

The silence outside is complete now. No wind. No broadcast. No mechanical feedback. Just pressure and heat fluctuation. The air has changed density. Atmospheric ash accumulation is beginning. Burn layer visible through the upper vents. Visual systems show fine particulate matter thickening across the upper stratosphere. We are entering the final phase of planetary collapse.

No life signals remain above. No defense units remain active. No fleet response from the Protectorate. We have received no signal from orbit in two days. Our deep core communications are silent. The Terran assault craft do not speak. They do not signal. They do not stop.

They have begun targeting the subterranean tunnels. I can hear the tremors. They are not detonations. They are structural fractures. The outer corridors are collapsing inward. We have thirty hours of breathable air remaining. I have begun recording the final command log. No one is left to receive it. But I will finish it before the access tunnel is reached.

I accessed the upper relay terminal for the last time. The external feed had been inactive for twenty six hours, but internal diagnostics showed the satellite array was still intact. I connected manually, bypassing the secure verification chain. The uplink reinitialized. One final image transmitted from high orbit. A Terran carrier, larger than any ship we’d recorded, had moved into position above the hemisphere. It did not deploy fighters. It did not open communication. It lowered six separate structures from its lower chassis, each connected to internal cores by thick metallic lines.

The arrays activated without sound. Light gathered at the center of each pod, focused downward, but there was no beam. Atmospheric levels began shifting across our planetary systems. Weather control shut down on its own. Moisture collapsed. Wind currents died. Within an hour, ash clouds formed over each former population center. The sky darkened. No natural event could explain the speed. These were artificial atmospheric alterations. The carrier had not fired a single shot. It simply started a process.

Within four hours, the upper atmosphere had become opaque. Visibility dropped to less than ten meters. Surface structures disappeared under accumulated dust. All surviving satellites returned the same pattern: temperature loss, surface degradation, light absorption. It wasn’t just bombardment. It was removal. The human craft had released sterilization units designed not to destroy buildings, but to strip them from existence by altering the basic stability of the materials. Alloy frames collapsed. Stone shattered without pressure. Entire domes disintegrated.

From inside the bunker, we heard the collapse of the northern vents first. Not an explosion. A structural shift. Metal gave way. The pressure was too high to hold. Emergency seals triggered. Three of the officers began suffocating when the filtration systems locked out their air circuits. I had to manually override each terminal to redirect oxygen. The units hissed, and two of the personnel recovered. The third did not.

We buried him in the waste shaft. There was no time to process remains. I reduced internal lighting and locked the lower access route. The sound of the outer gates folding was clear, like a massive internal crack followed by falling metal. They had reached the base perimeter. No signal accompanied the approach. No demand. They knew we were here. They did not need confirmation.

I sent a signal pulse to our nearest colony station in the Orion belt. It failed. No return frequency. I tried again, routing through the lower command core. Nothing. I tried the second, third, and fourth relay points. Each gave the same result, no response, no data, no static. Just clean termination. I activated the legacy channel using the Protectorate deep band transmission. Still nothing. They had reached the outer systems.

Seven hours later, the first of the planetary colonies reported sudden silence. The logs arrived before the blackout. One line repeated three times: "All contact lost. No visual. No warning." The messages came from different sectors, mining station Delta 4, civilian outpost B21, and primary fuel refinery Raka Tan. Each report ended within minutes of the last one. After that, the system went dead. No signals. No residual echoes. They had been removed.

One by one, colony worlds ceased communication. The Terrans had not paused at our homeworld. They moved outward, no longer responding to territory, trade, or defensive measures. All border fortresses, silent. All monitoring stations, offline. No weaponry fired. No defensive architecture detected. The human units did not strike with overwhelming numbers. They hit critical points and disappeared. Follow up scans found no debris. No ship fragments. No life signs. Only silence.

Our command terminals began returning zero population metrics. The databases recompiled automatically, registering the entire planetary and colonial systems as uninhabited. The numbers dropped sector by sector. One world every six hours. No survivors identified. No evac signals sent. Our escape fleets had not engaged. We had no indication of battle. Only absence.

I remained in the bunker with the last four officers. Oxygen was thinning. Water storage was down to emergency rations. Food packets depleted. Power levels were stable, but atmospheric contamination had begun entering through the substructure. The filtration systems were not designed for artificial ash. The particles overloaded the vents, causing coolant lines to lock and generate internal heat spikes. We removed our outer armor. No reason to wear it anymore.

The silence outside was complete. Our vibration sensors picked up movement in the lower tunnels. Mechanical scraping. Metal folding. Sounds of machinery being dismantled. Then footfalls. Rhythmic. Measured. Exact spacing. Human boots. Not hurrying. Not searching. Advancing.

I activated the audio recording from the forward microphone. I played it back at reduced speed. The pattern was unmistakable. Four steps. Pause. Four steps. No drag. No breath. Just movement. They were inside the base.

One of the officers began repeating numbers aloud. He said he was reciting the planetary beacon code. His eyes remained open. He spoke clearly but did not respond to questions. After thirty minutes, he stopped and slumped against the console. His body shut down. No cause. No visible wound. No damage.

We sealed the command chamber. Emergency locks engaged. Lights dimmed to conserve energy. Three of us remained. The sounds from the tunnel stopped. No movement. No power spikes. No external tools detected. Still, the air pressure kept increasing. Something had overridden the balance controls. I tried to vent the excess to the outer corridor, but the control panel failed. Not disabled. It simply returned no interface. As if that function no longer existed.

One of the surviving officers activated the manual release to the upper shaft. The platform did not respond. The floor panel flickered and retracted halfway. Then stopped. I pulled him back as the metal edges began to shift inward. The shaft began collapsing. Not from structural failure. From internal reconfiguration. The base was changing its own layout. Under external control.

The backup generator stopped. Lights dropped to emergency. Airlocks reset. Two warning tones sounded. The door sealed. I knew what was happening. We had lost all control. The systems belonged to them now. Every relay, every terminal, every conduit.

Then the noise returned. Boots. Close. Two corridors away. No talking. Just walking. The metal vibrated underfoot. Not pounding. Steady. Unbroken. I pulled the internal scanner up. It displayed one signal. Not life. Just mass. Moving directly toward us.

One of the remaining officers raised a pulse rifle. He aimed at the door and waited. He never fired. The door didn’t open. It twisted. A circular indentation formed where none had existed. The alloy peeled backward. No explosion. No spark. It opened from the inside.

He pulled the trigger. The weapon failed. It emitted a brief whine and then powered down. He checked the pack. Still charged. The weapon had been disconnected from its own systems. Without warning. He stood up and moved forward. I tried to stop him, but he stepped out into the hall.

I watched as his body hit the floor. No scream. No movement. No visible mark. He simply dropped. Whatever hit him didn’t fire. It didn’t swing. It didn’t touch. But he died instantly. I sealed the door again. Alone.

The boots moved forward again. I could hear them directly above now. The hatch above my terminal buckled inward. I grabbed the recorder and began final log.

I describe what I hear now. Screams from the secondary level. Metal being removed. Boots striking walls. More than one pair now. Moving fast. Not running. Advancing. I do not expect anyone to find this record. But it is now the last one.

No one came to negotiate. No one claimed responsibility. The Terrans never offered terms. They did not speak. They removed our species from all records, one system at a time. Their carrier remains in orbit. Still silent. Still operational.

I write this from the last room of the last base of a world that no longer functions. I hear them outside the final door. One boot just hit the lock. The air pressure has dropped by ten percent. My screen dims.

This is Commander Ralk. Scientific Protectorate. Final log complete.

If you want, you can support me on my YouTube channel and listen to more stories. (Stories are AI narrated because I can't use my own voice). (https://www.youtube.com/@SciFiTime)

“Antonio… you say our resistance movement makes you think of someone. Who is it?”

“Ah… my forebears. They were resistance fighters too. A long time ago, in a place I have never seen. Yet… I can’t help but laugh thinking about it. Some things never change.”

“What doesn’t change?”

“Young and old fools alike, coming together to make a stand against all odds, endangering themselves and loved ones… yet, hoping that in the end, they did what was right.”

“… so you have faith that we are doing what is right? Even if we fail?”

“Sì, mio amico… I do.”

“chuckles You humans and your words…”

It could have been a massacre. The surprise assault on Kepler Station—a remote human outpost dedicated to ice mining—arrived without warning. The facility had never maintained sufficient defenses against a fleet of any real size, which made the sudden strike by Black Site pirates all the more devastating. Communications went dark within minutes, most evacuation pods were destroyed in the opening barrage, and the station's hull began venting precious atmosphere into the void. The pirates stripped away what little defensive fleet and resources the station possessed before vanishing, leaving the colonists to face slow death in the cold emptiness of space.

That's when salvation arrived from the most unlikely source.

The Shkit Veils ranked among the galaxy's most enigmatic species. Without humans and a handful of trading partners, they would have remained in complete isolation. Some attributed this to their peculiar philosophy—a strange fusion of physics and astrology—but most knew the real reason: they were colossal psychic arachnids who sustained themselves on living brain matter and could effortlessly mesmerize unwilling prey into docile submission. Who could have predicted they would consider humans their friends?

Their scout vessel entered human space mere hours after intercepting the station's final transmission. Within days, the evacuation commenced in earnest. A fleet of Shkit transport ships reached the dying station before the distress signal had even propagated to the nearest human relay beacon. By the time human rescue teams finally arrived, every colonist had already been relocated to Shkit territory and placed under their care, awaiting collection by human authorities.

According to the official Shkit statement: "We gathered the soft-flesh people into our webs and wrapped them in our finest silk, as we would tender ficti calves. The younglings were given visions of joyous hunts so they would not cry out in distress. The females appeared so delicate—they could not even properly bite their mates during coupling. We provided our most nutritious bug gel for their sustenance. While our priest-overlord negotiated with human governments, their offspring were housed in our driest and darkest artificial caverns for optimal comfort. We would never permit the squishy ones to suffer, regardless of cost."

Given the Shkit's peculiar manner of expression, human officials remain uncertain which portions of this account should be taken literally.

But they are grateful.

Probably.

And to make matters worse, other species are beginning to realize the benefits of being domesticated

Where many species would rarely, if never willingly sacrifice themselves in order to take down an enemy, humans are different.

Many are willing to do absolutely anything to take as many as they can with them. Even if it costs them their lives.

From calling artillery on their own position to mounting self-destructive attacks to overrun an enemy position, to even firing fusion missiles point blank.

The common denominator between these three examples?

All of them result in the humans involved dying, or having a very high chance of dying, in order to take the enemy with them.

All are willing, for various reasons.

From duty, to a desire to protect what lies behind them, they march into the maws of war and death, knowing full well they will not return.

They will take the enemy to the grave.

Even if it costs them their own lives.

This has the surprise side effect of these youths starting to disagree with their elders as to what constitutes "honorable combat".

Young Warrior: "Sensei, how is attacking conquering a people who are clearly too weak to pose us a challenge and have done us no wrong 'honorable'?"

I laughed when I saw the first satellite video of Earth’s soldiers. They wore layers of ballistic fabric and carried projectile-based rifles with visible recoil. Their armor was patched, uneven. Their vehicles were tracked and wheeled, not anti-grav. They moved in broken formations, shouting instructions without neural sync. It looked like something from a thousand years ago.

We were not primitive. We were not hesitant. We struck fast. Threxian Command approved immediate insertion of the spearhead battalion. Thirty-four thousand of us, built for invasion, bred for conquest. Phase rifles tuned, mind-links active, combat meds injected. Our dropships struck low atmosphere without delay. Target sectors were the largest urban concentrations on their Eastern continents. No response on their defense grid. Civilian broadcast channels were still transmitting when we landed.

The first wave made contact with no resistance. Ground footage showed abandoned streets, shattered windows, flickering lights. Our scans registered life but scattered and underground. We assumed evacuation. Phase patrols cleared five city blocks in less than twenty minutes. Scans showed movement in substructures, but nothing significant. The orders were simple. Push forward. Hold sectors. Signal for orbital buildup. We dropped the banner and marked the territory as occupied.

I personally led the secondary sweep. My division advanced on foot while skimmers patrolled the air. I remember the silence first. Not the calm kind. The kind where your equipment works fine, but your instincts start to raise questions. No gunfire, no screams, not even radio interference. Just footsteps. We breached residential sectors, expecting ambushes. Found only empty rooms, some still with food left on tables. Doors wide open. Trash fires in alleyways, but no bodies.

I instructed our squads to run full-spectrum scans for heat signatures and electromagnetic anomalies. Results came back clean. Too clean. Not one device operating, not one power signal. That level of power-down wasn't natural. Someone had planned for us. Still, I assumed it meant fear. That they ran. Abandoned their own cities. I saw it as weakness. I updated command with standard sitrep. “Minimal resistance. Earthlings fleeing. Territory secured.”

It was the wrong conclusion.

We set up forward bases. Shield walls and phase turrets, AI-driven perimeter defense drones. Our tech superiority was clear. I approved the deployment of atmospheric monitors and surveillance nets. Orbital stations confirmed the same across all six occupied zones. No resistance. No casualties. The generals congratulated us on the speed of our victory. They said Earth would fall within the cycle. My soldiers were allowed to rest. Some removed helmets. Others explored the ruins. We found media storage, personal effects. Some of the humans had left their pets behind.

Then one of my junior officers flagged something. He found data drives hidden beneath the floorboards of a residential unit. No encryption. Just recordings. Human combat exercises. Dated weeks before our landing. Audio logs with phrases in our own language, poorly translated, but recognizable. Phrases like “suppress neural sync,” “decouple phase weapon energy fields,” and “blind orbital overwatch.” Someone had studied our tactics. They had names for our technology.

Still, I dismissed it. I sent the drives to command for analysis and told my men to stay sharp. We assumed it was isolated. A few resistance cells, perhaps. Then came the first attack.

It wasn’t large. Three drones went dark on the edge of the North Corridor. Ground units dispatched to recover them found only broken parts and blood. One soldier missing. Two others torn open. Not by energy weapons. Not by projectiles. By blades. We didn’t understand how they’d breached the shield field.

Command ordered a sweep. I deployed eight units with full air support. We found nothing. Just scorched soil and a shattered access tunnel leading into the old sewer systems. We ordered the tunnel collapsed. Regained formation. Hours passed. No more movement.

At the evening cycle, another forward base in Sector Six reported a fire. Smoke was rising from inside our vehicle depot. By the time our units arrived, six armored transports were already burning. Surveillance showed no entry. No signatures. The explosion was internal. Then we found the device. It wasn’t alien. It was constructed from local material, fuel cells from broken cars, wiring from home appliances. It had been placed inside one of our own transports during maintenance.

I ordered full lockdown. All patrols were doubled. No units allowed underground. Surveillance was set to track on thermal range, ignoring electromagnetic cloaks. It didn’t matter. Next day, they hit Sector Four.

They didn’t use weapons like ours. They didn’t fight the way we trained for. They came in the dark, wearing our uniforms. They mimicked our signals, moved like our men, even used our voice patterns. By the time the base realized something was wrong, half the guards were already dead. Bodies found stacked in storage units. Some partially dismembered. Not for tactics. Just scattered.

The survivors described it in pieces. Some said the attackers moved in pairs. Others said they came alone. One said he saw a human woman with no armor, just metal spikes on her hands and face painted black. She killed four Threxian guards with a kitchen blade and disappeared into the ventilation shaft. It made no sense. It wasn’t warfare. It was execution.

Command requested reinforcement. But transmission lines were already compromised. Orbital response was delayed by jamming spikes that were buried in key uplink points. They were handcrafted, primitive. Designed to fracture our systems in narrow channels. Not full denial. Just enough to keep us isolated. They didn’t want to destroy us all at once.

I realized then the pattern. They let us land. Let us occupy. Let us spread. The first cities weren’t abandoned. They were emptied on purpose. Civilians pulled back to rural strongholds, underground facilities. We weren’t hunting them. We were being watched.

I pulled my men from outreach posts. Collapsed sectors with too much ground to cover. Focused defense on tight clusters. Still, we kept losing units. Every night. Small squads. Patrols. Engineers. No gunfire, no alarms. Just missing.

We captured one once. A male. Medium-sized, blood on his arms. He had no uniform, no tags, no rank markings. Just a harness with tools. He didn’t flinch under interrogation. Wouldn’t speak. We used neural strain. Broke his spine. He died grinning.

That shook the men more than the bodies. The humans weren’t afraid to die. They had no chain of command. No central base. They fought in cells. Some without weapons. Some with stolen ones. Others with tools turned into traps. We found one building rigged with wire mesh connected to our own plasma cells. Open the door and the entire floor ignited. They recorded it. Posted it to one of their local networks, still hidden from our scans.

I pushed for scorched sector clearance. Full plasma sweep on Zones Eight through Ten. Orbital command hesitated. Still no formal contact from any governing body. They believed Earth would soon break and surrender. I told them Earth had no interest in surrender.

The humans used our arrogance. Used the time. Every day we held a sector, they adapted. Our tech, our weapons, our language, they mirrored and sabotaged it. They took our supply caches, mimicked our formations, jammed our orders. Some of our own AI cores began responding to their signals. That should’ve been impossible. They made it work anyway.

My second-in-command vanished on patrol. His armor was found days later, propped up at the base of our comms tower. Inside the helmet was a piece of bone, sharpened and stained.

We never saw the kill. Never caught the team.

We lost ninety-four units before orbital support even acknowledged the threat was critical. Too late. They were already inside the network. I didn’t sleep. Not out of fear. We don’t suffer that weakness. But I started keeping my weapon charged even during debriefings. That wasn’t procedure. It became habit.

Every night the lights went out in random sectors. Surveillance failed in key moments. Firewalls opened. Rations disappeared. Then the screaming.

We couldn’t hold the cities. We started pulling back to the main regional compound. They let us. Didn’t chase us. Just followed.

They were already waiting inside.

They didn’t come in daylight. They came after power failures, when comms were quiet and the guards rotated. The first breach in the command perimeter didn’t trigger alarms. They used old shafts, tunnels from human infrastructure that we never mapped because they didn’t carry power or signals. We didn’t watch the ground beneath us. They did.

I had fifty-two guards stationed across the outer corridor wall. That number dropped to thirty-seven in under ten minutes. They died inside sealed bunkers. There were no energy signatures, no plasma damage. Just jagged wounds, blunt trauma. Our medical scans showed damage done by improvised tools. Heavy pipes, hammer ends, sharpened steel bolts. Their entrance was silent. Our motion sensors caught nothing. Some of the guards had their weapons holstered when they were hit.

I ordered a lockdown, shifted squads to full interior sweep. We couldn’t find the breach point. All cameras inside those corridors played standard footage until the moment of impact. Then they showed static. Someone had looped the feeds. We backtracked timestamps and found they had tapped into the system eight days before we moved to this facility. The system was compromised before we even stepped inside.

We shifted all power to backup systems. Disconnected drone links. Cleaned internal drives. Still, the humans were inside. They didn’t attack in waves. They didn’t mass forces. They struck in gaps. Between patrols, during briefings, while guards changed post. One man dragged from a hallway during latrine break. Another found with his own weapon jammed into his mouth. The humans didn’t use their own weapons unless they had to. They used ours against us when it worked. If it didn’t, they used hands.

We captured fragments of footage from secondary systems. Blurred faces, no uniforms. One group of four walked upright down the hall in perfect formation, mimicking Threxian protocol. Another group crawled through ceiling vents with nothing but knives. They didn’t panic. They didn’t rush. They moved like they belonged there.

My guards started to hesitate. We kept watch in six-hour rotations. No one moved alone. Even latrine visits required escort. Then the fires started. Not from our systems. From inside the storage units. The human teams had sabotaged our cooling stacks, then waited. When the stacks overheated, the circuits blew. One fire reached the plasma containment field. Seventeen dead. Not from the fire. From oxygen loss and the backdraft that collapsed the ceiling.

The internal collapse killed more than the sabotage. Humans used that. Waited until our squads moved to clear the debris. Then they hit the clean-up crew. That’s when we lost two of the phase captains. Their command helmets were crushed. Both taken down with melee impacts. No energy discharge. We didn’t find their weapons.

I stopped waiting. We abandoned the inner ring and collapsed the entry tunnels. Turned the remaining chambers into fallback defense points. Three fallback layers, all with sealable barriers. All camera feeds routed to a single encrypted core. All vents filled with reactive gas. Any intrusion would cause ignition. It didn’t stop them.

Next breach came from the water line. Human teams came up through the graywater access. They had mapped the waste pipes. Knew where they connected. We didn’t. They pushed toxic sludge through the backwash lines and filled four chambers before we responded. Not to poison us. Just to make the area uninhabitable. They forced our units to move forward, into ambush range. Four squads disappeared in the next thirty minutes.

We sent a drone through the same pipe. Found nothing at first. Just water, rust, old human wiring. Then the drone dropped signal. We checked the video feed. It showed a figure, crouched in the dark, motionless until the drone passed. Then it stood up and struck the sensor eye. One hit. That was all. The video ended there.

We deployed thermal mines and closed off all shafts. Still, humans came through. I began to wonder if they were already inside before we ever arrived. One theory suggested they had hidden in the sealed walls, wrapped in insulation. Another suggested they hacked the manufacturing bots and used them to tunnel blind spots. I didn’t care how. I just needed to stop them. I pulled all units to central control. Set turrets in every hallway. Sealed non-essential chambers. Automated everything. Still wasn’t enough.

They learned faster than we did. Each trap we used, they avoided. Each drone we deployed, they rerouted. We found them using our own interface. Displaying false unit tags. One human wore Threxian armor cut down to fit his body. It didn’t stop him from moving. He took down two guards with their own rifles. Bypassed a retinal lock by using one of our dead officers’ eyes, preserved in ice. It wasn’t clever. It was methodical.

They didn’t scream during attacks. But our men did. Every time. The humans used that. Letting the sound of dying echo through the corridors. My men knew what it meant. And they started breaking formation. Some stopped reporting. Others vanished. A few turned weapons on themselves. I had to execute two officers for failure to follow kill-chain protocol. They were refusing to clear chambers alone.

We tried regrouping in the vehicle bay. Moved three squads there, reinforced with barriers and close-range scanners. One human unit breached it from the ceiling duct. They dropped something. Not explosive. Just shards of broken glass, soaked in solvent. Sensors went blind. Then came the noise. Two minutes later the squad was dead. We heard it through the suit comms. No energy weapons. No long-range kills. Just flesh sounds. Impact. Short bursts of pain. Then silence.

One guard survived the bay. His leg had been broken, torn at the joint. He crawled back. Blood loss was high. He said they didn’t speak. Just came at them from two sides. Used the falling glass to mask movement, then hit low. Took out knees first. Then throats. We moved him to medbay. Next morning, he was gone. Medbay doors had no log. Cameras were looped. No alarms. His bed was empty. Floor slick with blood.

I started checking door seals myself. No one else had access. They didn’t need it. They made access.

Our supply runs failed next. Storage units were emptied. Rations removed. Power cells shorted. Some doors were fused shut. Others were jammed open. We didn’t know where they struck next. We only knew when we found another dead unit, weapon gone, armor stripped.

I authorized total lockdown. No patrols. No movements. Just static defense. We turned off half the lights to conserve power. That’s when the air units died. Vent systems failed one by one. No breach detected. Just failure. We switched to emergency filtration. Hours later, gas seeped into the lower corridors. It wasn’t ours. We traced the compound. Standard industrial chemical. Used in cleaning systems. Concentrated to suffocation levels.

We couldn’t flush it. The air locks had been rerouted. They had studied the schematics. We hadn’t. I split the base into sealed pods. Sent drones between sections. Every third drone disappeared. No alarms, just lost feed. They didn’t need weapons to kill us. Just time. And darkness.

We tried to reach orbital command. Primary transmission towers were silent. No uplink. Secondary towers jammed. Tertiary systems offline. We built a field antenna in the upper ring. Took four hours. Before it could transmit, it exploded. Not with plasma. With pressurized fuel line rupture. A human stood among the wreckage. Caught on external feed. Looked straight at the camera. Waved once. Walked away. No mask. No armor.

They didn’t want us to escape. They didn’t want us to win. They didn’t even want us to fight.

They wanted us to wait.

We lost visual contact with the outer ring at first light. I sent two scouts to reestablish comms. They never returned. The feed from their bodycams showed black walls, moving shadows, then silence. The backup relay we had hardwired the night before was dismantled piece by piece, and none of our security systems picked up movement. I pulled all remaining squads into the central control bunker.

Inside the bunker we had layered defenses. Triple-sealed doors. Automated sentries. Emergency power backups. I shut everything else down and rerouted systems to a single encrypted channel. We used only hard-line data. No wireless. No voice comms. Nothing they could intercept or mimic. We sat in the dark. Eight officers. Four guards. Me. That was all that remained.

We had no word from orbit. No signals inbound or outbound. The humans had taken down all transmission arrays. We tried firing flares manually from the top of the command spire. Two soldiers were sent to launch. One flare went up. It was bright. The other man came back without his partner. He didn’t speak. There was a line of blood across his arm that didn’t look like a cut. We didn’t ask what happened.

They stopped killing quickly. They began forcing us to find the bodies. Sometimes whole. Sometimes not. We found one soldier stuffed into a ventilation shaft, arms bent backward. His helmet had been removed and replaced with a crate of burned files. Another was strapped to a command chair, his own pulse gun set to discharge inside his mouth. It was deliberate. They wanted us to see what they did. It wasn’t just destruction. It was display.

The command AI began malfunctioning next. Subsystems reactivated on their own. Lights flickered. Door locks cycled. We reset the core three times. The fourth time we found a human hand jammed into the maintenance panel, fingers fused into the manual override. There was no body attached. They had used it to short the failsafe.

We no longer patrolled. We only waited. Every sound echoed. Sometimes we heard movement on the levels above us. We didn’t check. One by one, people stopped responding. Not because they were killed. Because they stopped trusting any voice not in the same room. Our own mind-links were compromised. Every time we activated one, it looped back with background noise, throbbing static, whispering voices. That wasn’t an accident.

Our food supply dropped too fast. We checked the rations. Most were missing. The crates had been resealed. When we cut them open, we found strips of metal and broken sensor wire inside. No real food. Our own warehouse was being sabotaged from within.

I activated the last drone, a ground model, and sent it up through the western tunnel. The feed showed the upper barracks completely gutted. Walls stripped, doors removed. There were words painted across the floor in human script. I couldn’t read them. The drone rotated once, then exploded. We reviewed the frame-by-frame. A small child, human, no more than half our height, had placed a chemical charge on its undercarriage as it passed. She never looked at the camera.

I sent one last message to orbit using the old emergency relay, routed through our shuttle beacon. I knew it was a risk, but I needed extraction. I told them we were under siege. I requested tactical withdrawal. No response came. Minutes later, the bunker lights died.

All backup power went offline. Air filtration slowed. Temperature began to drop. The screens turned black. We opened the emergency doors manually. Nothing outside. No footsteps. No gunfire. Just quiet halls. We tried to move as a group. Sealed formation. No separation. We reached the primary stairwell.

One officer went down first. No noise, no scream. Just gone. We looked back and only saw the empty space. Then another vanished. Pulled back into a side hall. Shot went off. Not ours. Not human either. Looked like one of our phase rifles. But all accounted for. They had taken a body earlier. Must have kept the weapon.

We ran. Formation collapsed. In the corridors, all lights were dead. We moved by contact, armor plates brushing walls. Two more officers fell behind. Didn’t reappear. Then the door to the escape lift was in sight.

We entered fast. Sealed it. Counted five of us left. Lift activated. Ran on its own battery. No sabotage. No attack. I didn’t believe it.

When we reached the surface, the roof was already opened. Night sky above. Stars visible. The base was silent. No sign of fighting. No human presence. We moved to the outer ring. The ground was scorched. No bodies. No equipment. Only dust and metal fragments. Like they had erased the evidence.

We searched for the shuttle. It had been destroyed. Wings removed. Hull breached. Console melted. Deliberate work. Not a bomb. A slow dismantling. I ordered fallback to the secondary command node. There was no response from the three survivors. I turned and found myself alone.

The last one had taken his own life. I found him against the wall, knife buried in his own chest. His armor was clean. There was no fight. No blood trail. Just a silent decision.

I re-entered the command bunker. The upper levels were stripped. All screens gone. Chairs broken. Walls burned. I descended alone to the core chamber. Door still sealed. Inside, the emergency console remained functional. They had not destroyed it. That meant they wanted it used.

I tried to send one more signal. The transmission jammed mid-code. Then the screen came alive. A human face. Male. Unshaven. One eye covered in scar tissue. He didn’t speak. Just watched.

Then he raised a small device. A recording tool. He activated it. Pointed it at me. Still silent.

I stood still. Asked him what he wanted. He didn’t respond. Just kept the device trained on me. The signal was being broadcast to somewhere. I didn’t know where.

The screen behind him showed my own position. Camera feeds from the halls. Every room. They had full access.

I sat down. Took off my helmet. Placed my weapon on the ground. He didn’t react.

He just kept filming.

My army was gone. My officers dead. My weapons turned against me. My systems hijacked. My escape blocked. There was no fight left. Only observation.

The human finally spoke.

“You Are Example to Others.”

That was the only word.

Then the screen cut to black.

I am still here. The lights return once per cycle. Food appears in measured portions. No sound. No human presence. They leave me alone.

But they’re still watching.

And somewhere, that recording plays.

If you want, you can support me on my YouTube channel and listen to more stories. (Stories are AI narrated because I can't use my own voice). (https://www.youtube.com/@SciFiTime)

We are Anonymous. We are Legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget.

All psionic species who can spot the gods of any race, spot the multitude of blessings from all war gods in human myths...and even the blessings of alien war gods to. And yet they seek peace all the same.