The Fall of Orion's Dog. If you look from the galactic arm where Earth is located, in the direction of the Perseus Arm, you can notice a vast dark area at the junction of two spiral arms. This is not emptiness, there are simply far fewer stars here than against the background of the bright clusters of Perseus.
Among starship pilots, this area, a thousand light-years in diameter, bore the unofficial name "Dog's Corner." The high concentration of dark matter made interstellar jumps here extremely difficult. Moreover, the space was anomalously rich in traces of vanished civilizations that perished at a time when dinosaurs still roamed the homeland of communism, Earth. The ill repute of this area was exacerbated by the Pandora system, with its namesake inhabited planet.
The discovery of a small, solitary rocky planet near a red dwarf star... did not cause any excitement. Thirty such planets were discovered every day. This was the case until geological reconnaissance by automated stations. The system was rich in deposits of zero element and its special isotope. It was found in abundance in the planet's mountain ranges. Therefore, by decree of the Coordination Council, an outpost was first established there, and then a planetary ring of industrial specialization was deployed.
The colony developed, eventually becoming an important industrial and logistical center. One of the communities not connected to the "Collective" settled on Pandora, wishing to move to this distant corner of space. The mild climate favored agriculture and animal husbandry. Several large cities were immediately founded on the surface when the tragedy struck...
During the creation of another mine for zero element, mining workers accidentally activated a machine left by an extinct alien civilization. It emitted a powerful energy pulse that disabled almost all electronics and negatively affected intelligent beings. Moreover, due to its operation, the stability of the system's meteorite fields was disrupted, which led to the complete destruction of one of the ring segments.
By the time the fleet forces, having received the distress signal, finally arrived, it was too late. Most of the population had died, and the smaller part had gone mad and undergone a series of mutations that made them even more aggressive. The rescuers were met by hastily assembled combat ships.
Everything would have ended in an even greater tragedy if a full squadron had not arrived in time. The flotilla of madmen was defeated, but then problems began. The activation of the machine opened access to a system of catacombs that stretched for many kilometers down into the crust. Even with the army's assistance, it was not possible to catch all the madmen. Moreover, some of their ships survived and began to attempt raids on interstellar routes...
Years passed, Pandora became a kind of Wild West. The USSR maintained significant forces in this system, beginning a second wave of colonization, which no longer caused enthusiasm among shock workers, leading a protracted struggle with the first colonists who did not want to simply sit on the now semi-deserted planet.
Among the free hunters, this dusty ball was shrouded in ill repute. How many artels of adventurers had perished on its surface, tempted by the opportunity to find artifacts of ancient civilizations or raise their social rating – few knew.
The "Normandy" with its escort had been in the Dog's Corner for nine months. Using Pandora as a starting point, Shep led the cruiser on raids, delving deeper and deeper into unexplored regions of space, dropping reconnaissance probes time and time again. Left to their own devices, sensitive machines tried to find a mysterious trace in an area of a hundred light-years, mentioned in the coordinates left by Argon. So far, in vain, but with each jump, it became possible to more clearly define the boundaries of the dark matter cluster where a copy of the Citadel lurked.
The expedition team barely noticed the opening of an embassy on the currently operating Citadel, with the transfer of an entire quarter of this ancient station to the USSR's use. The scouts only gossiped a little about the clashes that had already begun between the union's government forces and the capital's criminal groups. The councilors allocated the communist state one of the sectors of the station's former slums, hoping for a scandal or that the communists would get bogged down in the fight against crime, spending resources... Only what the Red Army was best at was breaking the backbone of capitalism's hangers-on!
CERBERUS and army units did not complicate matters and, with the permission of the Citadel Council, of course, deployed three companies of Skaven, who simply instantly dissolved into the darkness of the technical tunnels. They didn't come up with anything special, but simply gave in to their predatory rat nature to the fullest, using the tactic of overwhelming impact. It's hard to do anything when the enemy can pour out in a gray wave even from the ceiling or quietly carry out sabotage anywhere. The mafiosi were not helped even by the hastily hired mercenaries and lookouts in the station's security...
By the time the news reached the people's border outpost, which happened almost instantly due to each citizen's connection to the "Collective," the expedition had no time for crime chronicles. Its commanders had their own problems.
Shep, knowing perfectly well where he would be sent, called in old favors, ensuring his ships had more than the already generously allocated supplies, but in addition to the rangers and scouts sent to him, he recruited free hunters. The latter went all out, receiving powerful army supplies.
In short, madness began, mixed with the heroism of the pioneers... one could say, the true work of pioneers without embellishment. Alas, the road between the stars was paved not with rose petals, but with rosehip thorns...
The tactical hall was illuminated by the light of holograms. A light-woven projection of the Fall slowly rotated under the hum of projectors. Real-time data updated the map, blooming with markers, overlaying scientists' reports, forming the contours of the dark matter cloud. Drumming his fingers on the "hard light" projected keyboard, Shep made minor, precise edits, while Miranda, standing motionless like a statue, quickly scanned the scrolling lines of reports.
The captain's persistence, along with the investigator's meticulousness and diligence, yielded tangible results. The skillfully organized work and data processing allowed for a very rapid survey of two-thirds of the "Dog's Corner." And it seemed like here was the trace, just step on it, but once again reality pushed the search back, as soon as the machines recalculated the cloud's configuration.
"Missed again," the captain said, leaning back in his chair, so that the furniture, reinforced for a superhuman, creaked mournfully.
The girl tore herself away from the tablet, her gaze sliding over the projection. Her brain compared the image with the previous model, and she didn't like what she saw. Shep could discern the turmoil in her soul on her unexpressive face, even without listening to the "Collective."
"We've discarded another direction," the investigator remarked dryly and by the book.
Although Miranda had become somewhat more sociable, she was still a definite misanthrope, even if she had let at least someone into her inner circle. At least the captain could call himself her friend, and he himself had stopped looking at her with hidden pain.
Risa, with her carefree nature and feline grumpiness, had managed to stir the girl, but she didn't get close to anyone else.
The rustle of the door announced that the aforementioned cat had decided to show her magnificent face to the people. Puffing out her tail proudly, Risa, with a slight jest, as only Felinids can, saluted, almost singing out of regulation:
"Hello everyone! You look a bit gloomy..." she purred the last word.
Sitting down, swaying slightly, the cat aimed and, pushing off with all four limbs, jumped onto the projector. Waving her tail, she sat on its edge. Dangling her legs, the Felinid, spreading her fingers, extended her sharp claws for a moment. A quick glance at the projection, and the proud predator discerns the main point, nodding to herself.
"Got it. Grab the soap and washcloth, start all over again?" and she reinforced her words with a mental image of this very metaphorical washcloth, where all the days of searching were hidden.
The investigator tears herself away from the reports, frowning at the cat, which is happily squinting, thus smiling. Risa looks back, twisting her head in a way impossible for a human, transmitting one mental message: "What?" In the "Collective," she shone like a bright, cheerful star, much more than she herself.
Feeling this concentrated, slightly crazy joy, the girl couldn't help but smile timidly. Even the gloomy Shep became more relaxed.
"It doesn't add up..." the mental message embedded in the words revealed all his guesses.
"We're missing something," Miranda's mental symbol, although cool, did not evoke the unpleasant feeling it used to. Moreover, the intelligent cat and the captain understood the second and third meanings embedded in it, which spoke best of their friendship. So many meanings can be read if the symbol was created by a master, or if you know the intelligent being well. The same image simply sounds different.
"As my mother used to say, everything complicated is simple," Risa said carelessly, settling in comfortably, like her wild relatives who remained simply animals.
Artem made an unreadable grimace, propping his chin with his hand. His gray uniform in the amber light of the projection seemed black, giving the operative an uncharacteristic severity. Glancing at the projection again, he frowned, trying to catch a fleeting thought by the tail.
"What if..." the captain began to say, typing a command on the keyboard without looking. The thought was so ephemeral, at the level of intuition, that it was impossible to give a silent command to the technology. Even such a scientific marvel as the "Thought" device had its limitations, otherwise all control mechanisms would have gone down in history. The wireless control device for technology merely twitched its flexible antennas on his temple powerlessly, unable to interpret what the man wanted.
"Request accepted! Please wait!" the ship's AI replied in the "Collective," not resorting to clowning, as she usually did, sensing the importance of the moment. Further scanning the captain's thoughts, filtering out the white noise and recognizing his "inner announcer," the intelligent machine corrected the command, initiating the analysis. A moment later, realizing she couldn't handle the calculations, she connected to the main computing cluster, using the communication channel formed by all the intelligent members of the expedition.
Motherland personally handled the request. Hearing her sister's plea, the personification of the entire collective mind of the USSR allocated a whole percent of its power. Engaging one hundred and fifty thousand analysts, among whom were both living and dead, she performed the necessary calculations.
The answer came via quantum communication, formed by the resonance effect of the polymer in the crew's brains, exactly one second later. Upon receiving it, the "Normandy" AI displayed the result on the projector, simultaneously sending a mental image to the captain and the investigator.
"Got it!" Shep exclaimed, seeing the augmented projection.
"Your conclusions were correct," Miranda agreed, transmitting a grateful image to Risa, who glowed, shining in the "Collective" with a message and a series: "Praise me, praise me!"
The structure of the dark matter cloud mirrored the structure typical of galaxies whose center of mass was unstable for some reason. This only happened when two galaxies collided, and their supermassive black holes merged, converging in a final dance.
"The station is not in a vacuum," the captain concluded. The mental transmission of his words conveyed a picture of a copy of the Citadel orbiting some planet.
"It might be different," Miranda remarked, transmitting a model of an outcast planet, ejected from its parent system, drifting in darkness, around which a deserted station, bound by ice, hovered.
"The area is only ten light-years. Almost negligible," Shep calculated mentally. "We should manage in about five months..."
There was no counting the invaders. All the land near the fortress, from the ancient, hastily repaired moat to the distant, full-flowing river, was drowning in plant shoots and chitin. Life alien to this world strove to engulf the last bastion of resistance.
The ancient halls, left by the underground people as a monument to their unbreakable stubbornness and greed, in this hour, when even the air had become deadly due to the ubiquitous hunger-seeds, became a refuge for the remnants of three peoples. Differences in culture, race, or beliefs were no longer important. Impending death had equalized everyone, but not broken their spirit.
A solitary mountain, far from its sisters, snarled with furious fire. The combustion products of gunpowder lay on its slopes like fog. The cannonade of colossal, old cannons drowned out the deafening rustle of hundreds of legs and tentacles, already initiated into the great Assimilator. Their tread echoed in the hearts of the defenders, making them grip their weapons tighter, and their eyes sharper to target the enemy.
The history of this distant world was being written now by battle. Ammunition was running out. Very soon, the last ink of war would run dry, and the cornered defenders would finish the end of the epic with their blood.
On the walls of the last patch of land not occupied by monsters, everyone stood. Old men, women, children. Protected from war until the last moment, they wanted to meet their end without hiding in the dark corridors of the long-abandoned underground city. Even a small child, who had only seen five winters, was tired of living in fear.
The sky of this world was covered by greenish clouds, hiding the cause of the beginning of the end from the eyes of the still-living. There, in the cold void of space, the accursed legacy revolved around their planet. No one knew what the arrogant elves had found there besides death. These almost immortal thinkers, literally grown into their deified plants, had always yearned for the stars. If the nagas and dwarves were content with little, living as their ancestors had for ages, remembering the ancient covenants, then the half-plants yearned for something higher. Their pride had brought doom upon others...
It was not for nothing that the ancients had left a strict prohibition, carved into tablets: do not leave the planet! Legends of the past world spoke of a time when all peoples walked among the stars, just as ships now plow the waves of raging oceans. They could once extinguish stars until they came, those who arranged the Harvest.
To save themselves, the survivors renounced everything, becoming like beasts, clouding their minds, hiding in the very heart of their domains, from where the enemy had come. After the end of times, the peoples living in this world saw burning skies fifteen more times, telling of the ancient enemy's new hunt, and were soon to see them for the sixteenth time, if not for their arrogance...
It all ended in three years. Only three winters had passed when the first seed of the invaders fell to the earth. The proud elves fell first. They were devoured by creatures similar to them, craving their flesh and blood. Then, an innumerable host of plants descended into the oceans of the nagas, into their depths. Only then did they turn their gaze to the underground people, raised in stone. And today, they were to devour the last sprouts...
"Fire!" A unified, deafening volley, like thunder, erupted from the battlements and swept the front wave of attackers into the abyss, their bodies covering the walls overgrown with lichen and slippery moss.
The short warriors, clad in skillfully forged steel, took already loaded muskets from the hands of the maidens of their kind. Lead smoke obscured the air, and they, igniting the fuse with a smoldering strand of their own beards, prepared another deadly volley.
To the east, where the cold and indifferent sun was just beginning to rise, the wall was already being overwhelmed by a living, writhing wall of tentacles and claws. There, the multi-armed nagas, who had once drunk the blood of their goddess, fought a desperate battle with a fury that knew no fear. Their serrated blades and axes broke through the chitinous armor with a dry crunch, severing black limbs. Powerful tails, wielding heavy clubs, swept away entire dozens of creatures. But more and more often, brave warriors and shieldmaidens took mortal blows to their chests, so that, dying, they would drag many more enemies into darkness with them.
And amidst all this hell, at the very edges of the battle, a handful of surviving elves sang their quiet, deadly song. The technological rifles of their masters, born in a bygone, wise era, were almost inaudible in the deafening din of the slaughter, but they lost none of their deadliness because of it. Each shot, precise and unhurried, found its target, and another monster froze, never to rise again...
The maiden, bracing her heel against the slippery stone, with effort pulled her stuck axe from the ripped torso of a monster that, long ago, had been her kinsman. Splashes of tree sap, warm and sticky, splattered out like a fan, and she, with renewed fury, brought the gleaming crescent of steel down on the forehead of the next enemy.
Steadily and relentlessly, like the heart of the mountain itself, the two-handed hammer struck, knocking down and crushing the chests of creatures covered in oak bark, who were alive but only longed for final death. The old dwarf, covering the maiden from the left flank, watched closely to ensure her two tight braids did not get surrounded. Though his underground throne had fallen, and his son had been killed, his word, once given, remained as strong as his own forehead. He would sooner lose his beard and his stone heart would cease to beat in his chest than break it! For these creatures to reach the maiden, they had to pass through him first.
The rear of their unbroken formation was covered by a naga. A six-armed warrior, rare even among his kind, was taller than any of his brethren. His face, resembling a dwarf's, contorted into a furious grimace. His neck hood bristled menacingly, and tiny bells, casting a melodious chime, hung from his false chin, announcing the approach of doom. His six swords whistled a single melody – the melody of death, humming in the air, slicing through him and the enemies who dared to approach.
Among them, an invisible and swift shadow, flitted an elf. His white skin, once pure, was now darkened with patches of bark growths, and his hair had turned green, like the crown of ancient trees under the summer sun. He moved like a leaf in an autumn wind, delivering precise and deadly blows where the monsters least expected to meet their demise.
"I didn't think I'd die side-by-side with an elf," the old warrior muttered, breaking a stuck arrow in his armor with a movement of his pound hammer.
"And if it's side-by-side with a friend?" the pointy-eared one asked him defiantly, and there was so much impudence in his cry that the dwarf laughed merrily, gripping his weapon more firmly...
And then, suddenly, a roar, unknown to this world since its inception, echoed over the ravaged battlefield. The celestial veil was pierced, slowly and majestically, by a colossal form. Scattering clouds like fluff, a ship descended towards the fortress, having come from the cold interstellar wastelands.
It seemed that the dim light of the local sun was drowning in its black flanks. A scarlet star gleamed ominously on its hull, and the reflection of gilded sickles and hammers portended nothing good for the distorted monsters.
Obeying an invisible and unheard command from the ground, this interstellar wanderer unleashed its wrath upon the hordes of monsters. From all its fiery maws, it spewed cleansing fire. However, a moment before this, at the foot of the solitary mountain, a hellish flower of explosion bloomed, and its incinerating tongues began to dry up and cripple the very essence of plant-based destruction...