close one tonight!

let me know if i'm getting too self-indulgent. the last couple have been pretty dour. sorry about that!

~

. . . and his own world, in panic, had miscalculated: the asteroid cracked rather than jostled. He imagined his family bending their gazes to the sky as a hundred deaths rained down. It was this image, not the glaring indicators on his monitor or the hulking silhouettes eclipsing stars, that choked his thoughts.

First they'd been content with bombardment. Inefficient; excruciating. He remembered schools of jostling transports rocketing up through the atmosphere as pale light beat down. Cities upheaved by ripples sent through the earth like it was water. Reporters stumbling over words into cameras that seemed afraid to focus. Static.

Children toying with their food.

Fleets crashed upon their warships, their massive cloaked nothings. They had come slinking out from between the stars like they'd always been waiting there, deepnesses that rose out of that deepest ocean with suns trickling in glinting rivers off their unseen skin. Some fleets returned unharmed, their ammunition stores depleted. The rest were noticed.

He remembered the cries of victory as an asteroid was hurled into the hull of one of those nightmare shapes. Its blackness had shimmered, like an eye that had blinked—or, for an instant, shot open. Sallow light erupted from the wound in its belly. It filled television sets. An explosion of cheers as it buckled. Then the stars it had obscured were glimmering clear again and in that same moment the others vanished too, like shadows slipping back under midnight waves. It was as though they had never been.

He had been among those who'd even come to believe that. He'd believed it right up until asteroids were detected lumbering toward every world. Some had been turned away in time. Not enough. There were those who felt mocked by this particular doom: certain that our only glimpse of victory, our simian flinging of a stone, was being mimicked in that grinning way an owner might mimic a pet.

Stars like eyes watched his armada flee, sheep coralled by a shepherd, into uncharted space. He wondered where they were being led, if they were being led at all.