Chapter 44

August 2220

It was no accident that they looked insect-like to human beings. Though their internal organs were now much more complex and specialized than any insects, and they had evolved an internal skeleton and shed most of the exoskeleton, their physical structure still echoed their ancestors, who could easily have been very much like Earth's ants.

"But don't be fooled by that," said Graff. "It's just as meaningful to say that our ancestors could easily have been very much like squirrels."

—Ender's Game

Day Four

"Don't let up! Don't let up!" Roared a deep voice over a static-filled radio, and the sounds of intense gunfire, death cries, and angry bellows from Hegemony and saltorian alike. "Get more combat drones moving down the main road!" The voice called out, before it was drowned out by a loud, whistling round tearing through the air and slamming into the ground at the feet of the multiple dozen batarian soldiers defending their slice of land in an alien city.

"They're pressing on the left side! We need some fire support!" A new, lighter voice called out, as the commander in charge of everyone's rapidly waning lives was sent flying by an explosion.

"The wall's going down! Watch out!" A third voice called out, as the heavily armored commander hit the ground and slid several feet. His eyes snapped open and he saw a shower of debris from a collapsing, rapidly disintegrating stone wall begin to cascade down upon him.

The commander rolled to his side and scrambled to his feet, his gravity suit having suffered heavy damage from fighting earlier on in the week, and though he didn't have to struggle against the full gravitational pull of this cursed planet, the suit was still barely able to alleviate three G's. His dark red armor stained by dust and caked with grime, he got to his feet and dived into a small corner created by two piles of debris as several saltorian rounds and a laser blast soared over him, giving him deep and lasting flesh wounds. He pulled his pistol off of his hip and was kneeling over his cover and pouring rounds downrange as rapidly as he could.

In front of him was a horde of saltorians, some in thick kevlar armor and forest-camouflage uniforms, some wearing casual clothing, but all armed with their particularly devastating brands of weaponry. The apartment building the batarians had taken was being slowly melted and blasted apart, piece by piece, with a large chunk having been blown out of its upper floors and the corner of its roof, the debris of which was what many batarians currently cowered behind. It was only through sheer volume of gunfire that the batarians were able to survive, with many firing blindly over their protective cover, and some even going so far as to take up the weapons of the fallen and firing them, akimbo style, sacrificing any semblance of accuracy for raw firepower.

"Keep firing!" Coughed the Commander, as he ducked back behind cover and dodged a few rounds, which hit the ground and debris around him almost like high-speed sledgehammers. Cover was less of a place to cower behind and more of a brief respite in a sea of ever-increasing lethality, and the more the saltorians blasted apart, the more batarians died. "Air support should be on its way!"

"I switched out the ammo-block for the HAP! Laying down fire!" And a moment later a loud, thunderous staccato echoed out from the upper floors, as the Heavy Armor Piercing machine gun entered the game again and forced any advancing saltorians to retreat to safety, or get shredded by the deadlier rounds.

The commander peered over his cover and looked down the street, past their offensive line, and he didn't like what he saw. The city was practically crawling with the lizardfolk, and was filled with the constant roar of gunfire, be it the explosive rat-a-tats of the saltorian ballistics, or the metallic, thunderous clangs of the barely effective batarian eezo guns. It was all the commander could do just to keep his own building situated and fortified, but whatever he was doing, it seemed - despite all evidence to the contrary - to be working! Unless his eyes were deceiving him, the saltorians were beginning to employ a staggered retreat. First the plain-clothed combatants began retreating, with the armored laser-rifleman providing covering fire. At the distant end of the street he looked down, he even saw some of the previously abandoned vehicles roar to life and start tearing across the street, filling the air with the sound of squealing tires and the smell of distant burning rubber.

"Keep up the pressure! They're retreating! This is our chance!" The commander ducked down behind his pile and opened up his omni-tool, "tafr squadron, how far out are you? They're falling back, if you hit them now while they're exposed, you can do heavy damage!"

"Commander Zah, we're still five minutes out. Be advised, orbital scans show large amounts of heavy troop-transport vessels heading to your position. They seemed to be equipped with heavy counter-measures against anti-aircraft fire. They will be on your position in seven minutes and we will not be able to slow them down."

It was a problem, but Zah felt it was one he could deal with. "We've got unguided rockets and machine guns, we'll be alright until you get here. Just get here fast." He switched to the short-wave, "alright, everyone, on my mark! One more push and we'll send these reptiles running!" He leaned over his wall of debris and fired wildly downrange, his minuscule slugs soaring through the air at thousands of meters per second.

It took time, but the saltorians were retreating as if the ground was on fire, some full-on sprinting away. By the time five minutes had passed, the air was deathly silent save for the distant echoes of gunfire, and the rapidly retreating sounds of boots hitting the ground. It was eerie, going from full-on warfare to dead silence in the same amount of time it took to switch out an ammo block. Zah found himself not wanting to step out from cover, he was so paranoid it was some sort of trap. What he discovered, however, after listening to the radio, was that it had to be anything but.

"What the hell, did we win?"

"Where did they all go?"

"Sitrep, the enemy just retreated."

Zah took a deep breath and stood up, walking to his building's threshold and, with one hand on a slightly sturdier-looking wall, he leaned outside, scanning the area around him, searching for some of sign that would explain the saltorians' speedy retreat. It couldn't have been for pragmatic reasons, despite the fact that they survived, the batarians weren't winning this by a long shot. It was literally only a matter of time until they had made the one needed breech in the batarian defensive line, and then the city would have once again been good as theirs. So if they weren't retreating out of fear, or because of a need to withdraw and rethink strategy, then why were they evacuating?

"Are there any snipers taking aim?" Zah questioned, as he surveyed the surroundings, taking in the shattered city, toppled buildings, and dust-filled air.

"Negative, else we'd be getting casualty reports. Their snipers like those laser guns." Someone spoke up, quickly, as a great many batarians started following Zah's lead, slowly streaming out of their buildings with an air of consternation.

Zah turned his head to the sky, Saltor's twin suns were behind the city, casting it in the deep orange glow of the late afternoon. In the distance, and approaching at what looked like a crawl, was a fleet of dozens of enormous bomber planes, with massive cylinders hanging from their bottoms, like oversized bombs having bypassed bomb-bay doors entirely. They approached with a menacing slowness, and the droning roar of the engines filled the air with a great amount of tension, as Zah swallowed thickly through his drying throat. He knew they weren't nukes, but what terrified him was that he knew whatever these bombers were hauling weren't nukes, and whatever they were, had so thoroughly terrified the green krogan that they had evacuated the city in less than ten minutes, practically ceding victory to the Hegemony in the process.

Or so I would think… "Tend to the wounded and set your perimeters, I want as many guns ready as possible. Whatever's coming… It is not good." And as he spoke, the first plane got within range, and the claw-like clamps holding its steel cylinder opened up, allowing the enormous tube to tumble to the ground like a stone, the sound of shaking metal and whistling air slowly reaching the Hegemony forces' ears, as they all scrambled to set up their defensive lines, and pray they could fend off whatever was coming.

Unfortunately for them, they could have had years to prepare for what was coming, and they still would not have been able to win this battle, for what was coming was ancient, what was coming was frenzied, and what was tumbling through the air in gigantic metal tubes, was very, very hungry.

His hands were covered in the blood of the alien invaders, dripping onto the ground with a near constant sound of thick splashing. His handcannon was glowing red hot, its thick barrel scorched from the flashes of gunfire and billowing translucent smoke. His head was humming with the euphoric feelings of survival through bloodshed, and his body throbbed with each heavy beat of his hearts. He stood, his dense frame towering over a small pile of corpses, with even more littering the ground behind him, inside the clutches of his shadow, cast across the ground by the setting twin suns. His eyes were so wide that, were anyone in the room aside from him even alive in the first place, they could have seen the whites of them, and the thin, bloodshot veins coiling close to his snake-slit pupils.

It was only now, as his heart rate began to descend and the world, previously in an intensely sharp focus, began to dull, that he realized that the only sounds filling the air were that of his deep, throaty breathing. There were no gunshots, no sounds of men dying or screaming, or even retreating, just the sound of him breathing, and the loud, droning sound of powerful engines carrying themselves through the air. The saltorian about-faced and stared down the street, closing his slacked jaw and forcing himself to breathe through his nose. His eyes narrowed in confusion and he saw that the previously raging battle had ended, there were even some batarians brazenly strolling out of their fox-holes and surveying their surroundings, trying to find out where their enemies had gone.

The saltorian clenched his jaw and growled, not thinking past himself and the blood lust he was allowed to indulge in Holy War. He took several heavy steps forward, but came to a halt when he saw, high in the sky, cresting over the horizon, a flying fortress. The one was soon joined by another, and the two by two more, multiplying until the distant sky was filled with hundreds of massive airplanes. The sight alone wasn't enough to scare the saltorian, no, it was what was hooked to their stomachs, that terrified him to the core. The loud, droning roar of the engines deafened him to everything in his vicinity, and the sight of the pill shaped containers fastened to their stomachs blinded him to everything else.

The saltorian once remembered when, when he was in his early fifties, he left Sithresi to hunt, and had run afoul of a pack of zestor, creatures the size of trash haulers and even more powerful. Before the advent of gunpowder and large weapons, they were avoided by anything smaller than them, because even modern melee weapons and lance-form Energy Lances had incredible difficulty penetrating their hide; zestor were nearly impossible to kill, their hides several inches thick and as tough to penetrate as a bolder. They were so powerful that even the threat of one moving its hunting grounds close to a nearby city was enough to clear the local Tyyrahn for tank acquisition and a few gunships. With anything less, the death toll of just one zestor wandering into a city for food could be just as enormous as a major battle, or a coordinated insurrection attack, and while they were not nearly the largest thing on Saltor, they were close to the top of the list, and were terrifying in their own right. In his youth, the saltorian had run into a pack of them, six in total, and the only reason he still yet lived was because the local Tyyrahn had sent word to Innsua, requesting BattleVectors to either coax them away, or kill them outright.

Standing in the middle of the road, the saltorian felt the kind of crippling terror that even his run in with the zestor couldn't even compare to. He had heard stories of these things, of what was approaching, he had read the books of the flying fortresses, seen the pictures, and it all leant to a terror that made him feel small and weak. It felt as if his skeleton had shrunk and grown brittle, that his muscles had grown stiff, and his organs were quivering. His weapon felt heavy in his hand and the blood in his veins and covering his body suddenly went ice cold, as his eyes went wider than they had ever been.

I won't make it out… He thought, with a shaking, slacked jaw. I… I need to hide. I need to bunker down. I need to find some place I can hide until the BattleVectors come and clean the city! His breath caught in his throat as the thought occurred to him that, instead of cleaning the city, they would cleanse the city.

The saltorian turned and ran, his feet beating against the ground and digging it up, sending gravel, dust, dirt, debris, partially dried blood, and anything else he stomped on flying into the air. He moved with the sort of terror-stricken, adrenaline-rushed speed that he had fled down a street in less than ten seconds. He found the first building that looked like it would have stores of food, and was destroyed enough such that he could use the rubble to fortify himself. He stormed to the building and scaled a pile of debris, managing to climb to the second floor and kick his way through a window just as the ground started shaking, and the thunderous sounds of metal striking earth filled his ears.

The saltorian turned around and looked into the sky, just in time to see another flying fortress drop its pill-shaped tube. It tumbled through the air for several seconds, growing in size and lightly whistling as the air reverberated off of the metal. The tube smashed into one of the still standing skyscrapers, digging into it like a knife, and jutting out of it like an arrow, looking as if someone had taken a tunnel-sized pipe and shoved it through the building. It was only a few seconds after impact, as thousands of pounds of glass, stone, and metal showered down to the ground and slammed into it with the booming noise of stone and concrete smashing apart and glass shattering, that the ends of the tube opened up. The saltorian didn't watch as whatever was inside began to literally spill out, and he tried to ignore the starved howls, incessant hisses, and hauntingly low melodic wails that filled the air as more and more of the containers slammed into the ground and unleashed their hordes. He barreled inside and buried himself in the building, finding the first sturdy looking office, locking, and barricading the door as heavily as he could, slamming everything that looked even remotely heavy against the door, filling the room with the reverberating crashes of metal and wood, as one thought repeated over, and over in his mind.

The Dregs were here.

Hunger was a terrifying thing. There were many kinds of hunger, but what the one who knew itself to be Sotef felt was the all consuming, gnawing, biting, and endless hunger that came from being kept in a state of near starvation for his entire life. One would think one would get used to such a hunger, but one would be, almost appropriately, dead wrong, the Green Ones had perfected their starvation over millennia of trial and error. When the Green Ones came, they fed Sotef only enough that he could survive to the next feeding, and that was if Sotef's brothers and sisters didn't get to it first. Sotef had never in his life eaten his full, because those that filled their stomachs were sought out by the Green Ones, who sang horrible songs of burning blades and projectiles that destroyed their thick carapaces. Sotef could never get used to the intense and endless hunger that ate at his stomach, because every day for a precious few moments he ate and his stomach simply demanded more, and when he could not provide more, it punished him. Even the songs of his queen, so far away and quiet, could not quiet his mind and soothe his stomach. Sotef needed food, but his brothers and sisters were too powerful, too strong to attempt to kill for it, and he knew from the songs of those that failed that anyone who attempted to consume the Green Ones were met with a quick but painful death. Such a death could not be worse than Sotef's painful life, but Sotef felt he couldn't stand the silence of death - the only thing that made life worth living were those few precious seconds each day and night, when he could convince himself he heard the songs of his queen, when he could just barely ignore the gnawing at his stomach.

Sotef's dark red carapace felt stiff, and his limbs and tentacles creaked and groaned with every movement, and with the lack of sustenance in his stomach, he moved very little, only to get food or to press against the wall, as if doing so would allow him to hear the daysongs clearer. Were he any other species, Sotef's muscles would atrophy, but he was granted no such convenience, as each night his pitch black, cavernous home was filled with a dark mist that he felt slip between the cracks of his carapace and seep into his muscles, keeping them from shrinking and keeping him from losing his killer edge. Sotef's head hung limp, as he pointed each of his hundred eyes at the ground, any sort of light within them having dulled long ago when the songs had grown their dullest. All Sotef could do, day in and day out, was sit in his cavern and wait for food, or wait for the daysongs. Eat, sleep when exhaustion set in, wake up to the sorrowful wails of his distant, tortured queen as she was force-bred, eat again, rinse, lather, repeat.

However, today was different. He could just barely hear songs of fear pervading the very atmosphere, penetrating deep into the mountain in which he rotted without decay. He heard songs of battle, of death, of terror and of disappointment. All of the songs formed a dull roar that rattled around in Sotef's head until he finally deigned to ignore them all and continue to stare unflinchingly at the ground, sometimes drifting off to a light, unfulfilling sleep. But, many hours later, he saw something completely foreign, something he had rarely ever saw in his life, and didn't recognize it until he heard the songs of his brothers and sisters fill the air: Light. A massive, curved door swung open and bathed the cavern, Sotef, and the thousands and thousands of his brothers and sisters in bright rays of blue-white light.

Transfixed, Sotef slowly pushed himself to his feet and retracted his limp tentacles, clenching tight his limbs and slowly crawling towards the light, his multiple legs skittering across the floor. He was soon joined by all of his brothers and sisters, who made for the light if only because it was new, and perhaps it brought food. It certainly didn't feel, but it had to be good, nothing so brilliant could be evil.

Sotef, his head raised and blankly staring upwards at the light, felt like he had walked for hours before he finally noticed the Green Ones flanking him on both sides. There were scant more than two dozen of them, yet them and the sight of their wooden weapons and the memories of their songs of burning light were enough to keep Sotef from attacking. Some of his brothers, who had been separated from the daysongs for too long, or had never been exposed in the first place, simply attacked on sight, but the Green Ones were swift in their vengeance, striking down the angered singers and corralling everyone who stayed silent into an enormous, tube-shaped cavern with a metal floor and a ramp leading upwards into its dark depths. Sotef's eyes hurt from the sudden exposure to light, but they adapted with a remarkable swiftness, and Sotef was able to see clearly for those few seconds he had until he entered the massive metal tube and was engulfed once again in darkness.

It was much darker in this tube than in the cavern, Sotef couldn't even see the wall he was pressed against; and the dull drone of distant, mechanical songs filled the air and subtly vibrated the walls, ceiling and floor. It was much smaller and more cramped in the tube than in the cavern, to the point that there was no sitting room and Sotef and his brothers and sisters were all packed in tightly together. Some even were stood or sat upon, leading to layers and layers of them all, spilling over each other, with some of the smaller workers even being crushed by the sheer weight of thousands and thousands of their brothers and sisters pressing in against them from all directions. Sotef was lucky to only be pressed against the tube's far wall, as that meant he had not to deal with anyone standing upon him or writhing beneath him, though given his size and girth, Sotef wondered if any difference would be made in any other situation.

Sotef felt the metal floor lurch beneath him, and his stomachs press against the bottom of his carapace as the enormous tube was hauled into the air. It shuddered heavily, coinciding with the thunderous sound of metal linking with metal, before their trip began in earnest. Sotef was left inside the tightly packed, population-dense tube for hours as it was carried across the lands he had never seen except in the daysongs. After the seventh hour of his trip, just when he had settled in to pressing his head against the wall and the pain in his stomach, heretofore ignored thanks to the excitement, once again began to become unbearable, Sotef felt his feet leave the ground. He raised his thick head and sang a low, brief song of confusion, as he turned his eyes in all directions, realizing that gravity had been switched off for everyone: All had left the ground and were now floating. It was an odd experience, usually the planet felt as if it were making every possible attempt to drag them down and crush them under their own weight, but now it felt as if it had given up its fight, and the excitement almost made Sotef forget about the hunger in his stomach.

The hunger and excitement was very quickly replaced by sheer terror when gravity caught up with them and they all slammed into the ground with an enormous, deafening thunderclap and the sound of rearing, bending metal. The ceiling above them and the ground beneath then bent and twisted as the tube settled down, and Sotef, with terror settling into his gnawing stomach, searched around for an explanation, but was only met with songs of fear, terror, confusion and… Apathy?

Sotef tilted his head, and turned it to the wall he had been facing, which began grinding with a loud shriek, almost sounding as if the metal was tearing itself apart. Slowly, everyone was bathed in bright rays of light again, and when the enormous bay door opened once again, they were greeted by an enormous jungle made of concrete, steel and glass. Dust hung thickly in the air and the light bounced off of all of the suspended particles, blinding anyone with less powerful eyes. Sotef's eyes, and the eyes of the brothers and sisters like him, penetrated this fog, and were greeted by thousands of small creatures, barely as tall as half of a tentacle. They smelled of fear, and disgusting bodily functions, and all held odd, box-shaped weapons pointed at Sotef and his brothers and sisters, but what Sotef realized, the very second his eyes laid upon these creatures, was not their size, or their weapons, or even their fear: It was their fragility. They were small and fleshy, their bodies groaned under the strain of supporting themselves against the fight of the planet's intense and heavy gravitational pull, and the smell of their blood hung as thickly in the air as the dust that permeated it. They were so weak and fragile that they entombed themselves in metal carapaces and had wiry exoskeletons hooked onto their limbs.

Sotef felt acid begin bubbling in his sac, and leak from his mouth. These flesh creatures were not Green Ones, they were not strong enough. That left only one, possible answer: They were food. As Sotef hissed and charged forward, followed by a horde of similarly ravenously hungry brothers and sisters, it heard one terror-filled song cut above the noise of a thousand thousand snarls and hunger-filled hisses, a two-note song that each of the flesh-creatures repeated with deep and penetrating, but ultimately ignored notes of terror that were drowned out both by the shrieking, howling and crying tunes of the hungry horde, and the clanging, thunderous rat-a-tat of the boxes they held in their arms.

"RACHNI!"

More than two thousand years ago, before the turians policed the galaxy, before the humans blew up everything in sight, before the quarians ruined eons of peace because of their hurt feelings, there were but two races inhabiting the cosmos: The asari, and the salarians. These two species had what was becoming an increasing rarity, in modern times: Peaceful first contact. They met, they used the Citadel as a means of neutral territory, and soon entered a mutually beneficial alliance, exploring the galaxy and colonizing it with a furious intensity, similar to modern humans. It all ended when they discovered, and were promptly fired upon by, an insectoid race known simply as the rachni. A hive mind, explosive population growth, and such a propensity to survive in even the most harsh and unforgiving environments, the rachni took one look at the burgeoning Council's contact fleets, and tore them apart without a thing to stop them.

The rachni war was fought for centuries, with ground being lost to them at every turn. The Citadel was down to its two respective member-species most core colonies and the station itself, and all hope seemed lost, until first contact was made with the krogan, and the salarians, in a moment of desperation, uplifted them to act as shock troopers. To fight fire with fire. The rachni soon were rendered extinct by the superior weapons, durability, and tactics of the krogan, but they left a mark on history that even now hadn't been forgotten. In the contemporary era, exploration had slown to a halt due to the rachni, simply for fear that there was something else out there, as bad as, or worse than, them. The entire galaxy feared the rachni, and there were volumes upon volumes of text from survivors of the rachni war, hundreds of hours of video footage from the battlefields, and even one or two particularly old krogan or asari that still yet lived and could tell the tales of their fading memory. Everyone knew the images, everyone saw the footage, everyone knew the history, but everyone took comfort in that that horror was gone, forever. The rachni were the one and only species that had been well, truly, and purposefully, rendered extinct.

So, when Commander Zah saw them literally spill out of the enormous tubes dropped by the saltorian bombers, and in less than ten seconds begin literally consuming the unfortunate soldiers who had gone to investigate, he froze dead in his armor. He literally could not believe what he was seeing, as the ceaseless hordes spilled out from their iron cage and sought out the nearest food sources. He watched as terrified batarians fled, very few even trying to run and gun, most of them just dropping their weapons and fighting Saltor's gravity as they beat against its grounds with their feet, desperately trying to create as much distance between them and the ravenous insectoids. Zah's jaw was hanging slack as he watched some soldiers get their legs turned to puddles of red mush by the rachni acid, and others get consumed whole, their skeletons not even slowing the creatures down. He shook his head heavily, snapping himself out of his stupor as he inhaled as deeply as he could.

"RETREAT!" He bellowed, as loudly as his sore throat and aching lungs would allow, his deep baritone voice briefly overwhelming the rapidly approaching hisses and wails of the rachni horde, and even deafening himself and others who heard it through the radio. "Get inside! Get inside a building, run, take cover!" His ears were now ringing from the force of his own voice reverberating inside his helmet, deafening him to the world around him.

Zah pivoted on his right foot and bolted forward, his feet slamming into the ground and carrying him across it as fast as he could, only briefly stumbling as his damaged suit failed initially to fight Saltor's intense gravity. He was quickly flanked and followed by dozens of batarians, whose mouths were wide open in unheard screams, and whose eyes were wide, radiating fear and terror. The Commander heard nothing as the adrenaline started pumping through his blood and the ringing in his ears intensified, allowing him to, in tandem with his damaged gravity frame, move as if Saltor weren't 5G's, but a manageable 1G. The red-armored Commander climbed the pile of rubble that led into the small building he and his soldiers had been fighting in, and though he just hurtled further inwards, some soldiers paused briefly to try and take up heavier arms. Very few would slow down to try and help these doomed soldiers, those that did were overtaken and left behind by the others who had the sense to retreat, soon leaving them alone in an obliterated section of the building, exposed to the street in front of them, and the hordes of insectoid creatures almost literally flooding the city.

Through his ringing ears, Zah didn't hear the soldiers they had left behind get assaulted and literally torn apart and consumed when the rachni converged upon them. He found the first sturdy looking apartment, the walls of which were made of the same stone that the building was built upon, and the door of which looked to be of a dense wood capable of standing in this kind of gravity. He crashed into the door and fought with the doorknob, before he fell inside and was nearly trampled by the other batarians retreating in.

Zah turned over to his back and saw, streaming through the dark, dusty, cramped hallways of the apartment building, hundreds of rachni. The terrifying creatures were trampling over eachother in their mad bloodlust, as they charged straight for the apartment the batarians had taken refuge in. Zah scrambled backwards, barely able to push himself off of the ground and upwards in his desperate attempts to simultaneously fight gravity, and retreat from the ancient enemy. His soldiers, fortunately, had more sense, and two of them slammed the door shut and used their bodies to keep it pressed shut. The sound of the door slamming home almost instantly cleared the ringing from Zah's ears, allowing him to hear the despair in his men's voices.

"What do we do?!"

"They'll break through!"

"Find something to barricade the door! Hurry!"

Zah shook his head, and hauled himself to his feet. He quickly surveyed his surroundings, the apartment was small and spartan, with little but a bar-like counter separating the kitchen and the living room, and a small hallway leading to the bedrooms. Zah swallowed thickly and his eyes locked onto the kitchen, where he saw the current object of his desires: An alien refrigeration unit.

"The fridge!" Zah called out, pointing into the kitchen as he ambled over the countertop and slid inside. "Help me!" The words had no sooner left his mouth than did four other batarians come to his side. They all grunted and roared with effort, desperately grabbing at the fridge and trying to pull it from the wall.

"They're breaking through! Hurry!" One of the soldiers holding the door shouted, as the heavy drumbeat of bodies slamming into the wooden entrance joined the equally cacophonous sounds of panicking batarians, and metal scraping across the ground as the fridge was slid out from its position against the wall.

Zah let loose a primal roar from the pit of his stomach as he felt the refrigerator finally tip over. He hopped to the side as the entire thing came crashing down, leaving multiple deep cracks and a small indentation in the ground beneath it, as all of the glass, metal, ice, and whatever else was inside was thrown about, shattering, breaking and contributing to the air of chaos. Zah and his soldiers all assembled on one side of the fridge and pushed with all of their might, scraping it across the cold concrete ground and pushing it towards the door, which now had four batarians stacked against it, being pushed back with every impact on the outside. The fridge was pushed out of the blessedly small kitchen and in front of the door, where the four soldiers and the commander immediately took up positions around it and hauled it back upright, with even more effort and shouts than before. The batarians holding the door leapt out of the way as the fridge was slammed up against it, and pressed tight. The apartment went silent as the sounds of bodily impacts against the door continued, but now the door didn't budge at all with the fridge weighing it down.

For now, at least, they were safe.

Gasping for breath, Zah stumbled backwards and leaned up against a wall, the dark apartment staying silent save for the muffled hisses and starved wails of the insectoids outside. Zah tried to calm his heart, control his breathing, to try and come up with some kind of plan to -

BANG!

The silence was shattered with the deafening sound of a gunshot, and Zah, and multiple soldiers, jumped into the air, or fell to the ground as they were startled. Zah's head whipped to the direction of the gunshot, just in time to see a batarian fall backwards, his pistol smoking and blood leaking out from a hole in his jaw. Zah almost couldn't even comprehend what he'd just witnessed, and before he could even react, he actually saw it happen again. It all went down in slow motion, his gaze lifting up just as another soldier pressed the barrel of his pistol against his temple, muttered an oath with his last shaky breath, and pulled the trigger, splattering the alien walls with his blood. It was now, as he watched the second body fall to the shadowy ground, that he realized that his men were screaming, and the clamor of all of the raised voices came crashing down on him.

"Rachni! Where in the void did they get rachni!? Where did they COME FROM?!" One angrily roared, throwing his arms out in wide, wild gestures.

"I don't want to fight this war anymore!" Another cried out, as he rocked back and forth in a corner as far from the door as he could be. "I want to go home! I want to go home! No more humans, no more bullet-proof green demons, and where the rachni are dead!" He actually started indiscriminately screaming, trying to drown out the sounds of everything around him as he clenched his eyes and pressed his arms against the sides of his head, still rocking back and forth as he did so.

"No!" Another was yelling out, shaking his head and clenching his rifle as hard as he could, "no, no, no, no! They're dead, this isn't happening! They aren't the war-pets of green super krogan, they're dead!"

"I read that these things eat you if you're lucky! Otherwise they keep you alive, they lay eggs in your stomach and your lungs and you get turned into a rachni hive!" Another soldier shook his head, "I'm not fighting these things! I won't!" He upended his own rifle and, before Zah's very eyes, took his own life in another deafening bang.

Zah's gaze turned to the door as he realized that the impacts against it only grew in intensity every time a gunshot rang out. With every gunshot, the rachni knew that another meal had just presented itself, and their desperation to get inside grew all the more. His eyes grew wide behind his helmet as he realized that there were brief pauses between impacts, before louder, more heavy thuds landed, the impacts forceful enough to fill the air with the sound of wood splintering, and even force the fridge to shudder.

Zah swallowed thickly, knowing that the rachni would break in - it was just a matter of time. He turned to his terrified men, most of whom were pacing back and forth, resting against the wall or on the ground with blank looks in their eyes. All of these people were terrified, none of them would even put up a fight if and when the rachni broke in, they would just die, afraid and in pain.

Zah clenched his fists, and pushed off of the wall. He stooped down and snatched up one of the suicide soldiers' rifles off of the ground, and stalked forward to another, to grab it as well. He attracted a few eyes as he did so, and the terrified, nonsensical cries began to die down. The air was filled with a sense of scared trepidation, as those who still had some semblance of sanity even dared to hope that their commander had words of pride for them. What they didn't expect, however, was the commander to raise both rifles and pull the triggers, slowly, methodically blasting apart the surviving soldiers as he traced the bucking and barking rifles across the room. He shattered shields, perforated bodies, and ended lives with a numb, blank look behind his helmet.

His men deserved better than a coward's suicide, and deserved far more than to be eaten alive by the encroaching horde, but they could not get it. So, the Commander instead deigned to give them the best he could: A quick and painless death. Some seemed to realize what he was doing, others, too terrified to even register the action, may not have; and whether it was simply allowed, or his men didn't have the strength or the will to fight anymore, it did not matter: the mercy killings were over in seconds. The Commander's rifles grew silent, smoke pouring out of their glowing barrels. The sound of splintering wood and the fridge rocking back and forth grew over the wails and hisses of the insects outside, but the Commander simply stared at his handiwork. All of his soldiers were now dead, they no longer had to feel the pain of war, experience the endless hubris of the Hegemony, or weather the terror of the rachni. As the fridge was pushed back from the doorway, giving the rachni just enough space to shove their limbs and tentacles inside, almost giving it the appearance of being alive, an abomination writhing in hunger and anger, Zah sighed deeply. Did he want to go out swinging? Or did he want to take the fast way out? Did it even matter?

He turned his gaze to the door, as it was slowly wrenched further and further open. His terror so complete and all-consuming that his body had simply settled to a dull, neutral stance, his face blank and his breathing tranquil as he shut down, his heart beating and fibrillating so fast that it may very well have just been thrashing around in his chest.

It won't matter… It really, really won't matter. Thought the Commander, as he dropped one rifle, and lifted the hand to his helmet, which he pulled off roughly, not even caring for his own comfort. He dropped the helmet, revealing his taut skin, yellow face, and four black eyes to the dark apartment around him. The helmet hit the ground with a dull clunk, as he hefted his rifle in his hands, and pressed the barrel to the soft, fleshy underside of his jaw.

As the rachni finally broke through, sending the fridge toppling down onto the ground, the room was once again filled with a brief flash of light, and a deafening bang. The insectoid creatures streamed inside, filling the room to its absolute maximum physical occupancy, hundreds and hundreds of them pressed into the small tight space, crowding around the corpses and tearing them to ribbons. The wet, tearing sounds of flesh being rent asunder filled the air, soon followed by the pleasured, musical chimes and chirps of the rachni as they swallowed pieces of the batarians whole, and dove back in - sometimes literally - for more.

In less than ten minutes, the bodies had been torn apart and ingested, the starving rachni not even leaving bones behind in their mad quest to satiate their hunger. When the bodies were gone, the rachni briefly turned on eachother, spitting eachother with acid, beating eachother with their powerful limbs, choking eachother with their dexterous tentacles, until the distant songs of more gunfire filled their ears, and froze them all to the spot, even making them silence their songs. This silence continued for a few moments, before songs of desperation and hunger replaced it, and the rachni skittered out of the room, tearing their way through the apartment building and back outside, listening intently for the songs of war, of battle.

Of food.

"You're still in the city?"

"Please help me." Drawled the deep, hissing saltorian, as he cowered at the back of his room, squeezing against the wall, as far away from the door as he could physically make himself.

The voice on the end of the phone only served to tighten its grip on the saltorian's hearts, furtherly crushing them in fear. "We unleashed the Dregs for a reason. You should have listened for -"

"I'm not even Tyyrahn! What call should I have -" The saltorian's deep, booming voice petered out in a comically deep squeak, as the office he had barricaded in seemed to grow darker, and the world outside grew deathly silent.

"It is already too late for you. What is your name?"

The saltorian felt its jaw quiver, as the sound of skittering limbs and hissing, starved wails filled the air, and grew louder and louder with every passing moment. "Sedo…" He whispered, tightening his grip on his blood-splattered hand cannon, "Sedo Sal'Hogh."

"Take solace in that your name shall be remembered, not as a fool who gave into his bloodlust… But as a hero." The voice bluntly spoke, as Sedo, his jaw slacked and his eyes wide, dropped the phone from his previously flattened ear. "Amen." The call ended, the man had other things to do than comfort a dead man walking.

Sedo swallowed deeply through his dry throat, as he waited for the inevitable. There were a few moments of silence, until the barricade shuddered with a mighty crash, dozens of bodies slamming into it from the other side. The teetering tower of detritus shook, and partially collapsed as it was again impacted from the other side. For a moment, Sedo wondered if it may stand firm, but then he heard muffled skittering sounds from his left and right, and even a few above him; they caused him to blanch, his pupils dilating in fear. Above him, the insectoid dregs tore at the ground, spitting at it with their acidic saliva, while to his sides and front they slammed into the plaster and wood walls with all of their strength and numbers. He was surrounded on all sides save his rear, and it felt as if the entire building was shaking down around him.

The first breech came from his front, he attempted to combat the exponentially growing din of hisses and hauntingly melodic wails with a roar of his own, leading to a thunderous white-noise of hundreds of voices all fading together in an indecipherable cacophony. The tumult was only briefly overpowered by Sedo's handcannon, as it bucked and barked with ear-shakingly loud explosions, its slugs tearing multiple dregs apart with each shot. He barely even managed to stem the tide as the dregs spilled in and filled the room in a manner similar to that of a tidal wave. The dregs collided with him, slamming him into the wall at the back of the office, distending it before it pushed them back.

Sedo screamed as the acid-covered tentacles wrapped around his limbs and slowly started corroding his scales and eating into his flesh. With little room to maneuver, Sedo was reduced to merely thrashing about, trying to tear the insectoids' limbs off and free himself, but growing under the intense gravity had hardened these creatures, and their constant exposure to non-atrophying treatments meant that they were always ready to fight for a meal, the result being that nothing he did - from yanking his arm away with all his strength, to punching and kicking the softest portions of their carapaces - did any lasting damage or had any desirable effect. The same, however, was also true in reverse: Having evolved in this environment, the saltorian was naturally far hardier than the insects trying to eat him alive, and as such they were completely unable to tear him apart and eat him as they had done with the batarians outside. The result was the dregs constantly yanking and tearing away at him, trying to rip his bones out of their sockets and shred his muscles and skin apart, and they needed to try, and try, and try before they got any desirable result. Sedo felt everything.

This struggle went on for less than a minute before the ceiling caved in, and like a leaking pipe finally bursting, a shower of dregs poured in from above, with debris crushing and slamming into the unluckier ones. Sedo quickly found the light from the remaining functional fixtures was blocked out entirely by the horde of dregs, blinding him in a literally crushing darkness. With the lack of light, he was now forced to feel his death solely through the deafening noise storm of hisses and wails, and through the horrific pain of his skin and scales being dissolved, his bones painfully being wrenched and jerked this way and that. It took four minutes of intense, painful, ceaseless struggle before the first limb was ripped off of him, and with the scent of blood flooding the air, the dregs fell into an even worse frenzy, and began tearing into the exposed meat and bones with ravenous hunger. After six minutes, Sedo had been completely torn apart, his last feeling before his brain ceased function was that of his throat being physically ripped from his chest, and razor sharp teeth closing around his forehead as his spine strained to stay attached to itself, before finally breaking off with an unheard 'pop'. After fifteen minutes, the only remnants of Sedo's existence laid in the stomachs of the starving dregs, and splattered on the floor of an abandoned office building. The dregs quickly fled the building to search for other, hopefully easier, meals to consume.

"Captain, they've unleashed rachni!" Came the panicked, nearly nonsensical cries of the marines and soldiers over the comm network.

Aboard the HSV Vengeance, the Captain overseeing the invasion felt every bit of his meager control over the situation evaporate, as he watched the terrifying, shaky video footage streaming from the planet below. This was the thing two-bit horror novelists and conspiracy theorists dreamed of, the kind of cliche that had been so played out that even those that took it seriously didn't take it seriously. If there was anything the krogan had been good for, it had been wiping these creatures out, but it seems that there had been a holdout, just one faction that had split off from the rest. This faction had picked a fight with the green, reptilian krogan of planet Saltor, and the indigenous, without any interstellar help whatsoever, had not only defeated them, but curtailed them to the point that they could weaponize and field them for combat deployments.

The sheer levels of ridiculous terror generated by that statement alone was only comparable to someone saying 'A krogan, a SIGMA, and a turian Infiltrator get into a fight'. No one knew the specifics of what came after, only that there would be a lot of bodies, and in this instance, one could add rachni to the equation, and multiply the number of bodies by multiple dozen exponents.

"Captain Heyl, we need orders! These things are eating our men!" A new voice screamed, as footage of a bright red rachni showed it lifting a batarian into the air with its two massive tentacles and, with a vicious twist and an angry yank, ripping the batarian in twain and shoving both halves of the body into its acid-spewing gullet.

Heyl gulped, and turned to the nearest communications officer, "get me comms to the fleet." He ordered, before hailing the soldiers on the ground. "Full retreat, don't even try fighting them. Get to the shuttles, you have five minutes before we obliterate that city." He said clearly and calmly, his deep voice seeming to ooze confidence, when in fact he was filled with everything but. He had seen the footage as it was streamed, one tube had contained tens of thousands of creatures straight from nightmares, and he had seen dozens of these tubes fall from the various ground feeds.

No one will survive that city, it is lost. He had to force himself to not think that the planet would be lost too, as if that were the case, the saltorians wouldn't be there, so long after a rachni infestation. What concerned the Captain the most, however, was how there was a terrifyingly large population of rachni situated less than one hundred light years from Earth. If there was an outbreak, could the humans contain it? They were tough, but they were most definitely not krogan, and their supplies of SIGMAs were not inexhaustible. We need to change our strategy, and we need to do so immediately.

He cleared his throats, "get me situations reports from all conquered cities, I want to know how many rachni outbreaks there are and I want evacuation orders in all of those cities. I don't care if they need to build conventional rockets to do it, we are not fighting the rachni!" He said, "then get me troop counts and engineers and slaves working around the clock for rearmament. The only way we can scavenge victory is if we force them to surrender." He knew what had to be done, the saltorians lived and breathed their religion, the only way to force them to surrender was to hold a gun to their holy city and threaten its destruction. The saltorians wouldn't deploy rachni, not in their 'Innsua', so that meant it would be a ground game, and so long as he re-armed his forces and parked a few ships in-atmo to provide air dominance, they would win the ground game.

Break their spirits, and their bodies will follow. He prayed he was correct.

Out of the corner of his eye, Heyl saw a scanner-tech suddenly lean close to his console and press a hand against his auditory canal. Heyl turned to face the tech, who immediately turned to report to the Captain, his four eyes wide.

"Sir, I just felt a radar pulse!"

"Nobody… Breathe." Gutturally whispered the Captain of the SSV Kakaroto, as he slowly placed his hand on the arm-rest of his chair, situated dead-center in his Destroyer. After having awoken from stasis for the regularly scheduled check in on Saltor, the Captain had made the incredibly intelligent decision to send out a ping to locate and sync up with the nearby DS/C Satellite and 'wake up' their AI. The result had been discovering upwards of six thousand unknown contacts blanketing the saltorian system, turning the previously dead and boring Saltorian Deployment, deservent of brief month-long stays in cryo, into anything but.

"Dan… Can you keep us hidden and get comms running?" The Captain whispered, barely any force or volume behind his voice.

The holographic artificial intelligence appeared above its projection mount, the microscopic nanites lighting the air in a pale blue glow as the form of a male military officer in an airman's uniform came into being. The AI shook its head, softly speaking, "no sir. It would -" It flickered briefly, before its holographic eyes widened. "Scratch that. We're being hailed. They noticed."

The Captain swallowed deeply, and nodded once. "Sound General Quarters across the battle group… Wake everyone up who hasn't already, and open the comm-link. We're about to get into a fight." He leaned forward and interlaced his fingers, covering his mouth as he stared dead ahead, the hologram that had previously displayed the saltorian solar system washing away before reforming into a video display.