_________________________________________________

Reporting entry: No. 22426

________________________________________________

_________________________________________________

Message:

The strategic environment quickly changed. In just a couple of hours, xorx changed the shape of their main attack vector. They abandoned the encirclement of the Pharaoh base, easing their pressure on the flanks and instead quickly began to attack one position, threatening to break through the front line. I'm afraid it will not be possible to hold the western sector of defense and xorx will rush straight to the Pharaoh.

_________________________________________________

End of entries…

_________________________________________________

***

Whole bunch. There were a whole bunch of them.

Even the sun was not visible, so many xorx attacked our positions and even the reinforcements that arrived in time were powerless to cope with such a huge number of opponents. We continued to fire continuously, we tried to keep xorx away from our positions and most importantly from our engineers for as long as possible, but in the end the insectoids still got to us.

"Attention, the entire group of troops «Troy», retreat to the second line of defense! I repeat the entire group of troops «Troy»...!"

Hort Umika had already given the order to retreat, the perimeter of the all-round defense was shrinking, and the beetles themselves were already falling on us straight from the sky. There were only a few minutes left until the end of the operation, and it was in these moments that xorx managed to break through almost every position that we defended. Ammunition was already running out, there were many wounded and, unfortunately, no less dead. The shuttles have already begun to pick up fighters, mostly wounded and “empty.”

At these very moments, the most difficult part of the operation began, namely the gradual withdrawal. It is difficult to imagine how this would be possible to accomplish without the support of shuttles and actual fire from the air, because it was the “ground” that took on most of the battle, and not the “air.” If the “earth” begins to retreat, then we will simply expose our backs to the beetles.

To avoid this, we mined everything and prepared a series of counterattacks against the Xorsk to push them further away from the first and second lines of defense of the circular perimeter. My machine gun had already become unusable and I could only watch from the rear as the battle unfolded. Since I was already useless, I and my platoon returned to the shuttles and at the same time watched as the engineers worked on the explosive device.

“Why didn’t they set up the warhead while we were still in the shuttle?”

Radeper asked a fairer question, to which he received an equally fair answer from me.

"Because we've never blown up a jump drive before."

This was the biggest problem with this operation. The use of nuclear weapons threatens the spread of radiation across the entire surface of the planet. It will not be long before the surface of the planet becomes safe even if we use up all our nuclear weapons, and it is not a fact that its full use guarantees the destruction of the xorx swarm, in particular the queen of the swarm. We can say this given that before the operation, the command had already launched nuclear cruise missiles that reached the positions, but they did not cause any significant damage.

However, we had a jump engine, which we managed to remove from the cruiser at the time of evacuation. It was a relatively small device, about half the size of a shuttle, but when in operation it consumed energy extremely readily. These devices are very expensive and practically irreplaceable, losing such a thing will be unpleasant for all of us, but for the sake of survival we are ready to sacrifice our fast ticket home. Fortunately, our database contains the technological characteristics of the jump engine, and therefore sooner or later we will be able to assemble it again, but this will take quite a lot of time.

Now we sacrifice our time on this planet in order to survive. Detonation of the jump engine will create a powerful explosion, leaving behind a crater tens of kilometers away. This will instantly destroy most of the xorx and is guaranteed to kill the swarm queen. However, it is necessary to carefully configure the device before detonating it.

The command decided that the “bomb” should be set up at the landing site. Dropping a jump engine like an aerial bomb could lead to premature detonation or it might not detonate at all. This complex adjustment must be made exactly at the landing site, which is what the engineers did. Before the operation, they said that they would need a maximum of six hours, but judging by the fact that the operation has been going on longer than the allotted time, this is not so.

More than six hours had already passed, and they continued to dig inside the huge device as if they were dismantling some ancient monolith with its unexplored archaeological technologies.

"Attention, the entire group of troops «Troy», retreat to the third line of defense! I repeat...!"

Horta Umika's new order sounded and he immediately added angrily.

“Hey! Damn engineers, how long have you been there?! The guys are holding on with all their might!”

"Sorry, we're finishing up. We need to calibrate and set the timer."

"Half an hour."

"Understood."

The battle was still going on far away from us, but even here inside the perimeter it was unsafe. The equipment often changed positions and could easily run over an unwary soldier, and a dead xorx mosquito could fall from the sky, which could kill a person with its weight when falling.

At that moment something happened. The entire sky instantly turned black.

"Crap…"

One of my fighters swore, looking up.

“What else is this?”

I asked, seeing above my head the appearance of a huge monster that seemed to crawl out of a lonely mountain.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

From out of the whirlpool of sandstorm and xorx mosquitoes, a huge creature crawled out, like a Titan. He loomed over our entire group of troops as the beetles fell like a whirlpool down onto our positions. The monstrous size of the monster was difficult to describe in any way, there were too many limbs, protruding organs and even wings, but looking at it you can definitely feel within yourself the primal fear and horror that with its reach made our bodies numb, and our consciousnesses fly away into space. from this titanic size of a waking nightmare. I wanted to ask myself a question: Is she really the queen of the swarm? Was this the very creature we fought? Maybe it's... God? God... of death?

I was scared, everyone was scared and yet...

We remained human.

We remained soldiers of the Republic and most importantly...

Warriors of the "Great Army of Humanity"!

"Activate «Sky Strike»!"

"There is «Heavenly Strike»!"

By order of Hort Umika, six nuclear missiles from ground-based launchers rushed straight up and, leaving behind a long trail of smoke, exploded right at the face of this monster. Many expanding, blinding balls of fire covered the display screens on our helmets with a white shroud, and electromagnetic radiation nearly disabled our equipment. A powerful shock wave of nuclear explosions instantly pressed us to the sand and lifted a bunch of equipment, weapons, sand and people into the air.

Before I had time to react, I was already spinning and flying in an unknown direction until I crashed into the body of the shuttle, which continued to stand motionless, slightly swaying, in place, but I saw how its accelerators began to launch, heard the growing roar of the machine and people swarming around the ramp in combat gear. spacesuits.

"Argh..."

I groaned in pain after the blow while simultaneously calling my guys.

"...Damn! Lewis, Radepar, Antonio...mmm~...Armen...Finn? Someone answer!"

No one. The ether was drowned out by electromagnetic radiation caused by an extremely close nuclear strike. The suit was immobilized, disabled, I could barely do anything. More precisely, I couldn’t do anything at all.

"Fuck, Fuck, Fuck! … FUCK…"

I cursed, looking at how, through the flaming nuclear balls, the burnt face of the monster rushed straight towards us.

Oh no! Not this!

At that moment I fell from the shuttle body onto the sand. One of the flying machines was about to flee prematurely and rose up, but immediately crashed into the face of the swarm queen and began to lose altitude. There were only a few seconds left and the queen of the swarm was about to kill us all. And then for a brief moment the suit reactivated and through the radio interference I heard the gloomy voice of Commander Hort Umika, his order was nightmarish.

"Explode!"

A little more and the face of this monster will simply flatten us. You can even start counting down until a giant piece of chitin simply turns me into a cake. She’s getting closer and closer, and if I could do anything, I definitely wouldn’t have time. No one around would have time to do anything.

Why did the swarm queen decide to come out now?

I asked a premature question.

If she could have killed us so easily all this time, then why...

No... I understand.

These chaotically grown parts of bodies, their purpose was devoid of any necessity. Why would a creature commanding a horde of collective beings get out? It is unsafe, devoid of any kind of necessity. Then what is this...

This is not the queen of the swarm... this is a real xorx general!

"Oh shit…"

I croaked and everything before my eyes was filled with blackness, a matter of seconds and I...

Perhaps it was a good life.

***

Earth.

3986 year.

My name is Ted McVare. I was born in the administrative sector of North America in the city of Minneapolis into a rather dysfunctional family for our state. My parents were migrants from the distant planet Gathray. It was difficult for them to exist on the home planet of humanity, here they were weak and helpless due to slightly different harsher conditions than on Gathray and were forced to exist on one allowance. Because of this move, the parents often quarreled among themselves. They wanted their child, that is, me, to become a worthy member of the family, a strong person and have prospects in the future.

It was the father who decided to fly with the whole family to Earth, and the mother, in turn, did not want this. They didn’t just quarrel, but constantly fought over all sorts of petty squabbles, and I had to watch all of this. Soon I grew up and, not finding any worthy place in life for myself, decided at a young age to enroll in a planetary garrison, where, after serving for ten years, I was honored to join the expeditionary forces of the Revolutionary Military Forces directly into the 127th Army, then stationed on the Moon.

Having gone to the gray satellite of the Earth, I met a beautiful yellow-eyed Proximirian. Her golden eyes, contrasting with her black hair, fascinated me to the core. It sounds stupid, but if we speak literary language, then it’s probably true. In short, I fell head over heels in love with her. She was not part of the 127th Army, but was only engaged in servicing energy equipment on behalf of one corporation, and yet we often managed to meet and spend a lot of time together. In short, we often had dates. We often talked about various topics such as what halofilms we watch, the differences between the cultures of Proxima and Earth, my Gathrean origin and much more. We often avoided the topic of politics because we did not want to get into disputes whose topics were not completely familiar to us; for us it was in the order of things.

But then the 127th Army was redeployed to the planet Kanasis and I followed my comrades. This planet was unfamiliar to me, it was not part of the Republic, and the purpose of our stay here was not explained. It seemed that we had begun to carry out some kind of military intervention, but we did not conduct military operations, but simply communicated with strange humanoid aliens and were engaged in our usual service. In general, we carried out exactly the same military service; we simply exchanged the Moon for an inhabited planet with strong gravity and, after several months of stay, hastily evacuated when news reached us that the Fucult Confederation had sent its fleet here and risked sparking a large-scale interstellar conflict.

We boarded the shuttles, returned to the cruiser, and on the cruiser itself flew to the outskirts of the planetary system to then jump into subspace and fly back to the Solar System. Even then I dreamed of meeting Natiana again, to see her bewitching smile and shining golden eyes again. But the dreams were not destined to come true and something unexpected happened. We were suddenly thrown out of subspace into this system, and then something happened that we all know very well.

The fear and misunderstanding lurking inside all of us were ready to burst out at any moment, and we held on only thanks to military discipline, honed during training and service on the Moon. This planet is our unwanted stop, we risked staying here for decades, none of us wanted to hang around here for so long, and that is why we fought xorx and strictly carried out the assigned tasks given to us by our command.

We wanted to return home, but...

...the house was so far away.

The earth seemed out of reach.

Where is my home anyway? I've been on the move all my life and never stopped anywhere for long. For example, I didn’t return home for a long time so as not to find my parents arguing. I have never felt what every person could easily feel, my native place where I could return at any moment and throw off all the heavy burden accumulated throughout my life. So where is this place? Has it never existed?

Regretting that I did not know this, I slowly died.

Eusberia… test of humanity.

3998 year... my date death.

How... cold.

There was darkness all around, I could barely hear my breathing, in the distance something was burning brightly and illuminating a huge accumulation of flesh and steel scattered throughout the endless dark space, hovering in weightlessness.

More precisely, not in space, but in... subspace.

That's right, the jump engine detonated, a large-scale short-term rupture in the fabric of reality and we were thrown out of the universe.

But what kind of light?

While I was spinning in zero gravity and while my cloudy eyes were trying to see something, I activated the display with my voice and began scanning everything I could around me. The scanner confirmed that I was in subspace, outside the protected zone. Reality here was distorted, time flowed at a rapid pace, and in some areas, on the contrary, it was completely frozen. Or maybe everything is much worse and in some areas it even flowed in the opposite direction. People have never explored subspace, only traveled through it. It was always like death to linger here.

The debris collided to form asteroids and small planetoids of sorts, and others were frozen in time, but the light in the distance... what was it doing? How will he hang here? Is this the sun? I can't understand. It hardly looks like a star.

What the... oh crap...

This light turned out to be a creature that lived in subspace. It was impossible.

~ Man.

~Mortal.

~Weak.

~ Here?

~How?

~Go away.

~ Not a place.

~ Fast.

~Death.

~ Wait.

I had something to answer to this unknown choir of very different voices.

"I... I know."

She turned out to be wonderful.

Elarasia... is that you? ...Do you really exist?

~You're wrong.

~Ya.

~ We.

~Understanding.

~No.

~You.

~ Know.

~ Us.

~How.

Crazy... this can't be true.

I guessed again, filled with fear and horror.

~ We.

~ United.

~ We.

~ "Xorx".