As it turned out, the mothership was too late.
Far, far too late.
The placid, liquid starlight of the quantum waveform unceremoniously dumped them into orbit around Kharak. As it turned out, the hyperspace targeting system was completely accurate, and the mothership emerged at the exact point of its departure – however, it was facing the opposite direction, and so both the Scaffold and the planet were entirely visible to the naked eye. The LiirHra helmsman slid back from his console as though he had burned his hands on the control boards; his mouth was agape, but he managed to gasp a jumble of apologies. "I'm sorry," he breathed, as though he were responsible for what everyone saw. "I'm so sorry. I should have done something…" Tears formed in the corner of his eyes, and he slumped forward against the expanse curve of his station. Admiral Paktu was oblivious to the poor man's suffering, though. She was too absorbed in what she beheld in front of the powerful mothership.
A tangle of blackened wreckage hung suspended in space was the only sign that the orbital Scaffold had ever existed. Whereas it had been a proudly angular structure, all clean lines and protruding girders that once cradled the years of hard work that the Kharakid had poured into their journey to Hiigara, bright lights that had illuminated the skies of Tiir for decades as a reminder of their destiny…it was now gone. Enormous slabs of metal had melted and folded in on themselves, or worse yet, simply vanished into clouds of atomised particles. It was, to the bridge crew, a twisted sepulchre, a tomb to over twenty thousand engineers and command officers. No natural force could have caused such devastation. Somewhere, a datapad fell from stunned fingers to the deck.
"No-one's left…everything is gone…" Karan Sjet's voice was impassive and nearly devoid of emotion, but even her integration into the computer network of the mothership had not killed her soul. An undercurrent of torment choked her voice, and systems across the board fluctuated as her grief ricocheted the length of the ship. Kirana Paktu wanted to scream bloody outrage at the Sjet's lack of feeling for the loss of the innocent Scaffold technicians, wanted to throw herself out an airlock for arriving too late, wanted to bring them back from their icy, airless graves. None of these things could she do.
"Kharak is burning..."
In the light of the sun, the pinkish-yellow globe of Kharak, the desert world that had been her people's exilic home for so long, was under siege by a massive firestorm. The entire northern hemisphere, the sanctuary of millions of beings, was blackening and wilting like a grossly insatiable tumour, a blight that had consumed almost the entire population of the planet. It was moving so fast that she could visible see it crawling towards the southern pole of her planet, where a few kiithid had moved in defiance of the Great Daiamid. In the midst of her grief, Kirana had forgotten that the Daiamid was now gone. Spires of white gas seemed to claw out into space; the frantic fingers of her people as they burned alive. She could hear nothing, see nothing, save the plight of the world beneath. Oh, gods, it's burning! was all she could think of. The soft glimmer of stars outside were harsh, mocking their wordless pain as they had done for a thousand million years. Whispers of anguish in the silence that echoed, and echoed, and lay still. Someone on the bridge screamed long and loud as the last castle of their people burned as a funereal pyre.
Burning…burning…burning…
Kirana's mind and soul burned with her world. Burned with guilt. Burned with hurt.
Burned for revenge.
In the background, she hard someone from Intel talk about how there were no frequency contacts throughout the entire system. Kharak was being consumed by firestorm, he said. The Scaffold has been destroyed, along with all orbital facilities. Kirana wanted him to tell them something she didn't know. He sounded just like Fleet Command: no emotion and no pain, just carrying out their orders. Intel staff were chosen for their ability to continue functioning in a crisis situation, but the sheer magnitude of this disaster had overridden the training of everyone on the bridge, touching something primal and deeply ingrained, perhaps as a result of their exile from Hiigara thousands of years ago.
"Admiral, do you copy?"
It was that damned Sjet woman again, nagging Kirana for orders. She scrubbed tears out of her eyes. "What is it, dammit?"
"Admiral, I said I have a weak communications contact, on one of the maintenance frequencies. I'm analysing it now. Do you wish to be informed once…it's the cryo-tray systems. One of them is suffering a massive malfunction. Damage reports are coming in…all hands to battle stations! Three enemy frigates are firing on the cryo-trays!" Karan Sjet said, this time with a dash of emotion tainting her words. They shook Admiral Paktu back into a state of awareness, and the fiery-haired woman ripped her gaze from the dying planet of Kharak and stood up. Her knees were still shaky, but she was the admiral of the mothership. She had to appear in control and confident before her crew. "Scramble fighters, fast as you can," she said. "We need to save as many lives as we can."
* * *
