Continued from Let Sleeping Dogs Lie: Chapter 1 - Requiem (Part 1/2)
But they didn't hear the radio chatter. It wasn't the encrypted, disciplined frequency of the EDF, it was a cacophony of rough voices, static-heavy and thick with the accents of old-world colonies.
“Red Dust to Kuroda,” a voice tore through the speakers on a hundred different frequencies, ensuring it was heard. It was a thick, gravelly Scots accent, the kind of voice that sounded like it had been birthed in a deep space forge. “You out there, you thieving bastard?”
Kuroda’s response was a sharp contrast — cold, corporate, and clipped. “Listening. I assume it is the current ‘situation’ you are addressing? Earth is under threat. No profit with no home. Truce?”
“My thoughts precisely, truce,” Red Dust replied, the word sounding like a vow. “Target the big bastard at grid seven-two. All together now.”
“Ubuntu here,” a deep Kenyan timbre joined the fray, resonant and steady. “Adding our lasers to the burn.”
“Rio Partners in,” another chimed. “We’re in range. For home.”
It wasn't a military strike; it was a coordinated riot.
Deep within the jagged shells of the mining outposts, massive boring lasers — monsters designed to crack open planetoids and melt iron cores, far too vast for any ship of the line — began to rotate. These weren't weapons; they were tools, but in the hands of men who knew them as well as they knew their own reflections, the distinction had vanished.
They locked, all focused on one massive hulk before them.
Then they fired as one.
These weren't the precise, elegant beams of the Council ships, nor were they the accurate beams of the EDF. They were brutal, raw columns of focused energy, white-hot and jagged with power. They hit the Council shields like diamond-tipped sawblades, the raw energy screaming against the alien technology. Shields that had withstood railguns for hours collapsed in seconds. The beams cut through the sophisticated hull-plating like a hot knife through wax paper.
And then they shifted target.
Two Council warships didn't just list; they melted wherever the high powered lasers struck. The raw strength of the industrial tools turned their internal decks into molten slag before the crews could even register the hit, atmosphere and bodies venting into the void long after the beams had moved on.
Then, the beams sputtered and died, the lasers overheated and ruined by a power draw they were never meant to sustain.
The rough Scots laugh of the Red Dust coordinator broke the stunned silence of the comms. “Now that’s what I’m talking about! Any of you lads got ore aimed for Earth?”
“We always have our mass drivers ready,” Kuroda responded, his corporate tone finally showing a hint of grim satisfaction.
“Loaded and ready,” Ubuntu added.
“Are you saying what I think you’re saying, Red?” Rio Partners asked, a tremor of strained humour in his voice.
“Aye,” the Scot laughed again — a wild, defiant sound. “You know where to shove ‘em.”
Three voices spoke as one, “I’m in.”
On the bridge of the Iron Fist, the Grendar’s voice rang out again, it’s cold logic cutting through the low hum of the tactical consoles.
“Losses at sixteen percent. Twenty percent. Source of attack… civilian mining operations.”
T’revak’s grip on his command chair tightened until his claws left deep gouges in the synthetic surface. His voice rose with an unfamiliar, volcanic anger. This wasn't the clean, clinical extermination he had been promised by the Council’s analysts. This was a street fight in a dark alley. One he was becoming less sure of by the moment.
“Then they just became combatants,” T’revak barked with a vitriolic rage that even his most seasoned officers started at. “Eliminate them. Burn those rocks to slag.”
Four Council ships detached from the main spearhead, their massive main guns humming as they prepared to unleash their own brand of hell. They turned their backs on the military fleet, focusing their god-like wrath on the stationary outposts.
Massive plasma balls — miniature suns contained within magnetic fields — spat into the void. They moved with a horrifyingly lazy grace, promising something far worse than a quick death. Because of the vast distances, it took seconds for the fire to reach the targets, seconds that stretched into an eternity for anyone watching.
The comms channels remained open, a chorus of defiance from men and women who knew they were already dead, or would be when the universe finally caught up with them.
“Eat this, you bastards!” the Red Dust coordinator yelled as he punched the release, launching cannisters of ore into the void. His voice was a raw, primal scream that echoed across the Sol system. Then came the strike — a ball of white fire that consumed metal, rock, and flesh in a single, silent flash.
At the Kuroda Refinery, the voice was cold, almost bored, as if the manager were merely filing a final insurance claim. “We don’t go down alone.” Plasma ripped through the station within moments, tearing the shell of the refinery apart and opening it to the vacuum. It didn't just explode, it vented its guts — shedding its lifeblood of mining equipment, ore, and the bodies of workers — into the cold, dark eternal night.
Then came the Ubuntu Habitat. The Kenyan’s deep timbre was warm, almost soothing. In the background, the unthinkable sound of children laughing drifted through the link, a sound of life that had no place in a war zone.
“I fall for my brothers,” he said softly.
The laughter ceased and static took its place, the flat, white indifference replacing the warmth of moments before.
Finally, the Rio Partners outpost. Their communication was quiet, a whisper of certainty. “For Earth, remember us, we did our part.”
The final plasma blast arrived like a vengeful star. The outpost died in a defiant spark, a tiny glint of light that was swallowed by the immense blackness of space.
For a moment, the only sound heard across five fleets and an entire planet was the hiss of static. Billions of people held their breath as the "riot" was quelled.
But the miners had left a final, radioactive gift.
In the wake of the explosions, the mass drivers — massive electromagnetic rails used to launch ore canisters, usually toward Earth — had launched their final payloads. These weren't plasma or lasers, but tons of raw, unrefined rock and metal travelling at incredible speeds.
The first canister struck a Council shield, collapsing it with the sheer, blunt-force of an asteroid strike. Three more followed, slamming into the hull plating. They didn't bounce off, they didn’t embed, they shattered, showering the interior of the Council ship with radioactive shrapnel that shredded equipment and crew alike, venting atmosphere and reducing the ship to little more than a tomb.
The sleek spearhead listed, its engines stuttering and darkening as its heart was torn out. It drifted out of formation, no longer a pride of the Council, but a dead hulk joining the debris field it had tried to create.
On the bridge of the Warspite, the air felt suddenly thinner, as if the vacuum outside had somehow crept through the hull unnoticed. Carver stood frozen, his fingers locked around the handle of his cup. The Earl Grey was stone cold, a dark, stagnant pool that mirrored the void on his screens.
He had listened to them all. He had heard the rough, vengeful bark of the Scotsman, the razor-edged corporate pragmatism of Kuroda, and the quiet, certain sacrifice of the Rio outpost. That brief brotherhood of rivals who had spent decades hating each other over mineral rights, only to find their common blood in the shadow of a grave.
But it was the laughter that haunted him.
It had been a joyous sound — the kind of sound that belonged in a park on a Sunday morning, warming the heart faster than the yellow sun it should have been under. It had drifted through the comms-link from the Ubuntu habitat, millions of miles from a home they died protecting, lasting just long enough to be heard before the Council’s Flare arrived.
Then, the static.
It wasn't just noise; it was a physical weight. A roar of white-hot indifference that drowned out the laughter, the Kenyan's warm timbre, and the lives of thousands.
Carver turned his head slowly, his neck muscles stiff, to look at Hargreaves.
She was staring at her console, her hands hovering inches above the glass, trembling so violently she couldn't strike a key. When she finally looked up to meet his gaze, her eyes weren't those of a disciplined officer. They were the eyes of a survivor watching the horizon burn.
She didn't speak. She didn't offer a status report or a tactical update. There was nothing in the academy that could prepare them for the sound of a dying playground.
Carver looked back to the main viewscreen. The Ubuntu habitat was no longer a station; it was a glowing cloud of expanding debris, a jagged smear of silver and orange against the blackness of the eternal night.
Admiral Vassily Romanov stood on the bridge of the Lenin, his similarity to Ural rock hunched almost into the appearance of a gargoyle. His fists were white-knuckled, iron anchors latched onto the edge of the tactical console in front, his head bowed. The static of the miners' sacrifice — the ghosts of Red Dust and Ubuntu, Kuroda and Rio — still hissed in his ears, a requiem of white-noise, a lament for the brave and the selfless. He knew what those ships could do now, he had seen it with his own eyes. He knew that there was no
longer a limit on acceptable losses, they would fight to the last if they must. And he knew that hell was only a few thousand kilometres away.
He raised his head, and for a moment, the bridge crew of the Lenin saw something more terrifying than the invading fleet that filled their screens. What stood at their head was no longer a man in anything but form, he was a demon with nothing left to lose, his eyes twin furnaces of controlled, hellfire fury.
“ATTACK!”
The word wasn't a command, it was a promise of war from a man who had been trained for nothing less. Seventy-two human ships, bruised and outclassed, surged forward as a single, vengeful organism, their guns blazing as they pressed on. And the distance to the enemy fleet evaporated under the heat of a desperate, final burn.
That roar of defiance rippled throughout the system. It vibrated through the bulkheads of every EDF vessel, in the bunkers beneath Geneva, and finally, it reached the bridge of the Warspite and her battlegroup. Carver’s ship was a massive silver dart screaming through the void, engines pushed so hard the deckplates rattled throughout the ship, as did the teeth of her crew.
They were almost there. Almost.
“Estimated time to weapons range?” Carver’s voice was a flatline, forced into an emotionless neutrality. He stood at the centre of the bridge, jaw set so tight the muscle pulsed. On the main viewer, the mining stations were fading embers, and the tiny blue marble of Earth was being eclipsed by the flickering strobes of a fleet in its death throes.
Hargreaves didn't look up from her console. Her brow creased with tension and concentration, her fingers flying over the keys to squeeze every ounce of thrust from the reactors. “Seventy-two minutes, sir. Earth standard. And the engines are at breaking point already.”
Carver’s fist slammed into the arm of his command chair, the frustrated violence of the motion causing heads to turn briefly and rattling the porcelain cup. The cold Earl Grey slopped over the rim, staining the leather, but he didn't notice. Seventy-two minutes. Over an hour of bearing impotent witness to something that would be decided without him. He had to watch men and women that he had shared drinks with, that he had served with for decades, be snuffed out like candles as they raced into a hurricane, and all he could do was watch the timer count down his own failure.
The silence that followed was heavy, broken only by the hum of a ship that wasn't fast enough, wasn’t close enough.
In the deep command bunkers beneath Geneva, Miri DuQuesne watched the tactical icons of her life's work — part of her life’s work, she corrected herself — flicker and die, green dots vanishing faster than they should, and red that were not disappearing fast enough. She sat perfectly still, a general who had surrendered the board to her captains, trusting the four men on her screens with the soul of a species and the billions of lives that shone with it.
A fifth window flared to life: Elias Carver. His face was sharp, the interference of the long-range comms giving him a ghostly, ethereal quality.
“Admiral, I will have firing solutions in sixty-eight minutes,” Carver said. The desperation was there, the frustration, the impotence, hidden in the cracks of his voice, the breaks in his tone, the small tic in his jaw that Miri would have missed had she not known him so well. “How is the defence holding?”
“Not well, Elias,” Miri replied, her voice soft but steady. “The Council commander is a quick study. But we have taken six of their capital ships. That is … something at least.”
“Keep the channel open,” Carver said, his eyes locking onto hers through the light-years. “Tell me where to hit when I get there.”
They didn't say goodbye. They didn't need to. The thunder of static growing on the line was the only goodbye the universe was offering. As Miri watched, Vassily’s screen dissolved into a blizzard of grey. The Lenin was gone. And the demon with it.
Carver closed his eyes, a momentary shudder of grief, but he kept his head high. One by one, the lights went out. Admiral Xi Son, fading with a calm, imperceptible nod as his face glowed half orange from the plasma flare which filled the screen of the Sun-Tsu’s bridge.
Admiral Kapoor faded next, his philosophical mask upon his face until the very end, before finally shattering into digital snow.
Then, there was only Carlos Ferreira.
The bridge of the San Martin was a mess, by all that was right and holy the ship should not exist, far from the proud dreadnought she had been, all that could be seen now was a localised sun of sparking consoles and venting gas. Ferreira sat upright, a king of the ruins, defying the void until the very last second. He looked into the screen, and that tired, familiar smile broke across his face — the look of a man who had finally found his exit.
“Remember the Alamo. Ramming speed,” he whispered. The words travelled through the system like a chill wind.
On the tactical map, the green dot of the San Martin lurched forward, an arrow aimed at the throat of a Council giant. Carlos’s voice rose, a battle cry that bypassed the ears and struck everyone still listening like a physical blow to the heart.
“REMEMBER THE EARTH!”
The two icons merged, red and green now indistinguishable, inseparable. For a heartbeat, there was a blossoming flower of pure white light on the viewer, a miniature sun that was born and died in seconds leaving only an echoing afterimage of the last of the line. And then, the screen went black.
Silence, pure and complete. Miri was alone in the dark of Earth, and Carver was alone in the light of the stars, separated, less than an hour too late, and millions of miles too far. The red dots of the Council fleet began to move again — unopposed, predatory, surrounding the planet like vultures circling a dying animal.
“Elias, record this.” Miri’s voice took on an official tone that Elias knew well, stripped of warmth, polished to the cold, hard diamond she became as the purest form of Admiral DuQuesne.
Carver signalled his comms officer. He stood as Miri spoke the words that ended one history and began another.
“Commodore Carver, Earth is lost. Retreat. Regroup. Save what you can.” She paused, the weight of a thousand years of naval tradition settling on her shoulders. “As Admiral of the Fleet.”
No ceremony. No medals. Just the passing of a torch in a hurricane.
Miri switched the feed to the planetary satellites. She watched the fifteen Krell spearheads settle into a perfect, lazy orbital ring. It was naval perfection. It was beautiful. Her lips curled into the ghost of a smile as she glanced at another, smaller screen, a screen that showed four green dots, fading out of range — a secret kept from the executioners above. She reached out and picked up the photograph on her desk.
On the bridge of the Warspite, Carver watched her. He knew that photo. He knew the two smiling children under the Parisian sun that would never shine the same way again. He saw the single tear track down Miri’s cheek, a silver line of the doomed humanity that she refused to wipe away. She kissed the glass, set it down, and looked back into the lens.
“It’s starting,” she whispered.
Carver watched the screen as the Krell fired. Thin, concentrated lances of plasma pierced the atmosphere, turning the blue sky into a bruised, bleeding orange. The fire spread like ripples in a pond, merging where the ripples met, an atmospheric conflagration that would leave nothing but ruins and ash in its wake.
“Miri,” Carver said, his voice a low, steady anchor. He snapped a crisp, sharp salute. “It has been an honour serving with you.”
“Elias, my friend, the honour has all been m —”
Static.
The screen died. The world died. The once beautiful blue marble now pulsated with a sickly orange glow, looking closer to Mars than Earth.
Carver let a single tear fall. Then, he turned. The Commodore was gone, and at this moment, so was Elias. Only the Admiral of the Fleet remained.
“Set course for rally point Charlie, full speed,” he commanded coldly, flatly. “Barnard’s Star. Comms, send the regroup transmission.”
He felt an emptiness that he would struggle to define, not violation, not even loss, just the void of shock. He stood for a moment, the silence of the bridge a physical weight upon his chest. His hand absently rested on his left shoulder. “Commander, you have the conn.”
He turned harshly and strode off the bridge, his boots heavy and rhythmic on the steel deck, each footfall feeling like a hammer strike. The sound was deafening in the vacuum of the crew’s shock, a cadence of iron against floor plating that seemed to mark a death knell for Earth, and count down toward a far darker future. The door hydraulics hissed as it closed behind him with the finality of the grave, sealing the bridge in a sepulchral and suffocating silence.
No one followed. No one dared.
Hargreaves fixed her gaze on the empty command chair. Half-full cup of Earl Grey still sat in the gimballed holder on the armrest, forgotten and stagnant. A thin film had begun to form over the surface of the liquid, a domestic relic of a world that had been sterilised in less time than it had taken for the tea to go cold.
Carver walked the corridors in a mourning daze, navigating by muscle memory rather than conscious thought. His quarters felt different as the door hissed shut — smaller, quieter, claustrophobic, as if the ship itself were lamenting. He didn't falter. He walked directly to his pride and joy, the glass-fronted case housing his collection of old militaria.
He opened the case and reached past the medals and the ancient sidearms, his fingers closing around a single item.
A lanyard. Braided cord, bone-white and stark.
Royal Artillery, an antique.
He held it out in front of him, feeling the rough texture of the cord weave. He knew the myth behind it, the old military urban legend — untrue of course, but it seemed strangely appropriate. White for cowardice like the white feather, supposedly earned when they deserted their guns without spiking in some old war.
With steady, mechanical precision, he looped it over his left epaulette, letting the cord hang for a moment before buttoning it to his breast pocket. He turned to the mirror. The man looking back was a stranger, the white cord an anaemic wound against the navy blue of his uniform.
He nodded once. "Apt and fitting."
On the bridge of the Iron Fist, Prime Predant T’revak didn't just smile as he looked at the screen, at the burning Earth, he loomed. His teeth glinted like bloody needles under the crimson battle-lighting.
“Their cradle, their homeworld ... burned to ashes,” he chuckled, the sound a low, wet rasp of satisfaction. He turned to face his bridge crew, his laughter echoing — a sound that would have chilled the blood of his subordinates had it not already been cold. “They thought their primitive boxes of metal, their fragmented tribes, could withstand the Council's decree. They were wrong … they were weak”
A junior officer, his scales still vibrant with their iridescent sheen of youth, spoke in a voice that was uncharacteristically thin. “But Predant ... ten capital ships? Lost to miners and derelict platforms, lost to inferior technology?”
T’revak’s claws dug into the arms of his throne, the screech of metal on metal punctuating his fury. “ACCEPTABLE! Does their world not lie dead beneath our keels? Do their fleets not drift as silent tombs in our wake?” He gestured dismissively toward the viewer, where the blue marble was now a charcoal sphere traced with veins of flame that would cleanse the planet, “They are broken. They are an example. A warning to any upstart race who mistakes sentimentality for strength.”
“Recalibrating,” the Grendar’s emotionless voice cut through the Predant's bravado. Its optical sensors whirred with a rhythmic, staccato mechanical cadence. “Redefining acceptable losses. Resetting threshold to forty percent ... losses now remain within parameters.”
The cyborg cocked its head, a series of clicks echoing in the expectant quiet. “Recommendation: continued monitoring. Human resistance patterns are ... anomalous. Logic dictates a total collapse, yet the telemetry from the retreating signatures shows a shift in tactical posture.”
T’revak scowled, his gaze fixed on the dying world. “Their anomaly ended in conflagration. There is nothing left for them but the long dark.”
Yet, even as he spoke, his claws remained tense. He looked at the orange glow of the planet and, for the first time in his long career, felt as though this planet was staring back at him, and not in a pleasant manner.
An hour later, the bridge doors of the Warspite hissed open.
Carver strode back onto the deck. The crew stood immediately — "Officer on deck" — but the command died in the throats of the ensigns as they saw him. They didn't look at his face. They looked at his shoulder. They looked at the bone-white lanyard, a stark, skeletal slash against the navy blue.
Hargreaves stood, a tremor in her hands displaying a rare break in professionalism. Her voice cracked, a sound of raw grief. “Sir ... no. You followed the orders. You couldn’t have made the distance. You aren't the one who —”
Carver silenced her with a single, raised hand. He didn't speak. He didn't need to.
He reclaimed his command chair with a heavy, deliberate finality, his shoulders back and his chin up as he sat, the shadow of his cap masking his eyes. He was the Admiral of a graveyard fleet now, and the white cord of cowardice was the only part of him that felt truly honest.
The crew returned to their stations in a silence that was no longer sepulchral, but focused. The gentle drone of the engines was the only heartbeat left, carrying the Warspite away from their burning former home and toward a metaphorical tent in the void, toward a destiny that as yet remained unnamed.
Carver stared out, the blackness of the void a mirror to the darkness in his heart. The tea was cold. The world was gone.
"All stations," he said, his voice a low, terrifying promise. "Status report."