While the Sector Fleet continued its rather ineffectual assault on the writhing mass of organic matter that surrounded Darwin Prime, the situation on the ground was equally as bleak, if not more so. The fighting on the ground had been quite fierce during the first few days of the invasion, but as time went on the citizens of Arcadia who had risked life and limb to venture out and colonize for their nation began to lose handily. By the time that five days had passed, the sapient population of the colony had dropped by more than 30 percent. By the end of the week, the population was just barely above 11 percent of what it had been merely two days ago.

That the situation was hopeless was not something that those on the ground were unaware of. Even in the event that the military managed to destroy the organic shroud that blocked out the sky and whose tendrils were gradually devouring every bit of the planet itself, the planet would be a lost cause. However, even though their every waking and sleeping moment was filled with terror and the psychic screams of the monster they were facing, they still fought on despite the odds stacked against them.

Defeat and eradication were an absolute certainty, but if they could strike a blow, not matter how small, they could at least make a scratch on the forces that their nation would be facing. And so it was that the few survivors concocted a desperate and suicidal gambit to deal a sucker punch to the monster that was their doom. They would go down in a blaze of glory and take as much of the swarm as possible down with them. All they had to do was send a single set of signals and, if successful, they would deal a potent blow to the abominable thing that was devouring their planet with themselves still on it.

As the final planet-side defense instillation yet remaining intact aimed its massive Hypervelocity Gun towards the heavens, the survivors prepared for their payload to be delivered and said their last goodbyes. It was time to drop the sky.

…

The Sector Fleet was now receiving reinforcements from the other patrols and nearby Sector Fleets, but even as they pounded away with everything that they had at the Lovecraftian monstrosity that surrounded Darwin Prime the mass of meat and chitin preying upon Arcadia’s colony simply ignored them. No matter what they unleashed, no matter the amount of shells, explosives, particle beams and other ordinance that was sent downrange, the eldritch nightmare that was the entity they were attacking simply regenerated as if nothing had happened merely minutes later. Even when focusing fire on a single part of the blob, all that would happen is that the portion under sustained fire would harden and become even more durable while whatever healing that would normally take place accelerated to an even greater pace.

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It was like they were trying to punch their way through a steel wall that was constantly having any slight scratch or dent immediately buffed out. It was almost like the planet-covering creature was mocking their desperate attempts to save their fellow citizens. But it was not like they could simply give up. No, there was too much at stake here for them to simply throw in the towel and leave the Darwin System to its terrible fate. They had to find some way of permanently damaging the creature or the fate of Darwin Prime would be the fate of all planets, moons and more throughout the galaxy.

As the final reinforcement fleet took position and began bombarding the writhing mass of organic nightmare fuel, a part of the veil covering the planet ripped open and a single shell the size of an Earth School Bus tumbled out of the hole it had torn. While the mass of grotesqueness immediately set about the process of fixing the hole in its body, the giant slug of metal had fulfilled its purpose. What had torn open the hole had been ripped apart by the sheer volume of organic matter it had to pass through, and now the device within was able to set about its work.

…

Whenever a colony was founded by Arcadia, its people had to be perfectly willing to do the normally unthinkable and potentially offer up their lives and their colony to strike a blow at any invaders. The colonies each had a device that, when the planet was deemed unable to be saved and its people unable to be rescued, would activate a protocol dubbed the ‘Doomsday Sanction’ by the masses. What the ‘Doomsday Sanction’ did was quite simple; it replicated the apocalypse that had visited the Angelus Holy Union but on the doomed colony and/or former colony.

Arcadia had no shortage of materials that it could use to build artificial asteroid bases, and thus it had no shortage of resources needed to initiate a tactic dubbed the ‘Asteroid Blitzkrieg’. When all was lost and utterly unsalvageable, hundreds of artificial asteroids that were miles in radius and that were filled to the brim with linked nuclear devices could be sent through hyperspace to utterly obliterate everything on and in an entire planet. Asteroids the size of the one that wiped out the dinosaurs and those even larger than that would, upon the sending of that signal, automatically enter hyperspace, follow the signal and then descend en masse upon the nearest celestial body that the signal was around.

Every military vehicle and station, and even every civilian version of them, all had a way of alerting their crews that a ‘Doomsday Sanction’ was in effect on the affected planet, which was the cue for them to either abandon the station or get the fuck away as fast as they possibly could. When those giant, nuke-filled rocks exited hyperspace, they would be traveling at over 12 percent of the speed of light, destroying anything and everything that got in their way as they dropped down from orbit at every possible angle.

When the planet of Darwin Prime decided to use that device, they knew exactly what it meant to do so. And so, with heavy hearts, the fleets that were up till now throwing everything they could at the monster that had swallowed the colony retreated to a safe distance and began to count down the seconds until Darwin Prime faced its terrible end. At the very least, thought the crews aboard the Sector Fleets, the end for the survivors would be quick and relatively painless, which was a luxury they had the impression that not all of the colonists had given to them by the invaders.