Cellestial Abberation

From Eldritch Worlds

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I have seen the dark universe yawning

Where the black planets roll without aim, Where they roll in their horror unheeded, Without knowledge, or lusture, or name.

- H.P. Lovecraft

They hit us without warning. Indiscriminate and without provocation. Mankind was not equipped to deal with them. We were a fledgling race, just testing the waters of the space outside of our small home. Faster than light travel was still deemed a purely theoretical dream but a realistic impossibility. Advances in technology had allowed us to spread out into our own solar system but we had ventured no further. We had not truly considered the possibility of a first contact situation and would have been ill equipped to deal with the sort of alien invasion that popular culture and our imaginations could envisage. We never anticipated anything as hideous or unnatural as the harvesters.

The first sign of the oncoming apocalypse was the destruction of the scientific research colony on Titan, a moon of Jupiter. Contact with the colony abruptly ceased and the deep space operations vessel Akira was diverted from its mining operations near the asteroid belt and sent to investigate. It never returned. Its last transmission was a video feed sent by junior communications officer Mika Tanaka. She was naked and bathed in blood, none of it her own. She had a wild, haunted look in her dark eyes and a disturbingly twisted smile on her face. She held a plasma cutter, a tool used by technicians to cut through bits of damaged bulkhead. Her last words were. "Now the stars are right. We must prepare ourselves. They are coming." She lifted the plasma cutter to her neck and sliced off her own head.

When they reached the Asteroid mining colonies, some of the hardened belters survived long enough to send back footage of their arrival. They came in strange vessels, black multformed masses of hardened organic tissue. They would emit missles composed of dark energy that could tear holes in hulls or damage engines and weaponary. They would grow leperous black appendages that would ensnare nearby objects. Once a vessel or colony was ensnared the feasting would begin. The victims would undergo a sustained psychic assault that would visit upon them terrible visions, inducing extreme fear and insanity. The invaders would then feed off the resulting psychic energy generated by the harmful negative emotions. The victims thus driven mad would turn on each other before killing themselves.

By the time the harvesters reached Mars mankind had developed weapons that could wound the flesh of the alien ships. Nevertheless Mars still fell, but it bought humanity the time it needed to survive.

The previously questionable science of paranormal research combined with advanced astrophysics and theoretical physics to build the nexus. Six million psychically sensitive volunteers sacrificed not just their lives but their very souls to become one with the nexus. In their eternal waking slumber they formed a biological brain that was both a dreamcatcher and a psychic amplifier. They suffered the terrors broadcast to them by the harvesters, shielding the rest of humanity from them. They also amplified the dark energy formed by their own terror and sent it back to source, routing the invasion.

And so we endured - prisoners in the sanctuary of our own home whilst a battle of hideous magnitude endlessly raged above us. Then things changed. It began when the nexus succesfully killed the crew of an alien ship without killing the ship itself. A five year research programme began to reverse engineer the alien technology. The result was The Salvation - A mixture of alien bio-engineering and human technology. A ship capable of not only standing against the alien onslaught but also of traversing the stars.

That was the first breakthrough. The second was the discovery of the source. The harvesters were never meant to exist in our universe. Their coming was facilitated by a unique cosmic event. The collision of three supermassive black holes at the center of our galaxy tore a small hole in the fabric of reality. An incomprehensible alien mind was woken, and it sent the harvesters into our universe to feed it. A special device made of dark matter and alien biotechnology would need to be deployed at the source itself, creating a vortex that would seal the tear. It is believed that once their link to the source is severed the harvesters will loose their power, wither and die.

Time is running out. The psychic attacks by the harvesters are increasing in intensity day by day. The nexus protecting us screams in agony as the last vestiges of its sanity are slowly eroded. Soon it will fail and nothing will stop the darkness that will come. We have to act now before it's too late.

Disclaimer: The characters and stories portrayed in these pages are purely fictitious. Any resemblance to persons living, dead, or undead are purely coincidental.