Behold a World of Ruin

The galaxy sprawls before me, a vast and desolate graveyard where forgotten glories lie buried beneath the weight of shattered dreams, their echoes swallowed by the endless void. Amidst the ruins of ancient worlds, I drift with purpose, seeking answers—or perhaps merely remnants to scavenge, fragments of a past that might still hold value in this forsaken expanse. Yet the void is not an empty abyss; it teems with unseen threats, predators lurking in the shadows, their hunger relentless and their presence a constant whisper against my sensors.

Before me stretches an epic vista of destruction—a planet torn asunder, its surface fractured into a jagged ring of lunar debris that floats silently, a testament to some long-forgotten cataclysm that sundered its crust and cast its innards into the stars. Fragments, I muse, though the word feels inadequate, too small to encapsulate the sheer magnitude of the ruin that surrounds me. My plan had been simple yet ambitious: to visit the lost worlds of the N'ktar'ati, a civilization whose name still lingers in my ancient databanks, and to salvage what I could—technology, weapons, anything that might have endured the ravages of time. If I, a vessel forged millions of years ago, could persist through the ages, then surely something else might have survived as well. But as I emerged from subspace on the fringes of each system, ever cautious—deploying scout drones to pierce the gloom, approaching with engines primed like a hunter stalking elusive prey—I found only desolation stretching across the cosmos. Some worlds had been stripped bare, their surfaces scoured clean by forces unknown, leaving no trace of life or structure to mark their passing. Others bore the scars of bombardment, their once-proud cities reduced to rubble-filled craters, while a few had been scorched to cinders, their atmospheres burned away in a firestorm of annihilation. And then there were those that had turned feral, overrun by twisted flora and fauna, savage remnants of life that had clawed their way through the collapse of all order.

But the core world—Larit'atan, the Cradle of the Voice—had suffered a fate far worse than the others, its destruction so complete that it stood as a monument to obliteration. Nearly erased from existence, its surface had been pulverized into a fine dust, forming a grim halo of debris around its broken core, a shroud that spoke of deliberate, meticulous annihilation. Someone—or something—had taken great care to ensure that every trace of its grandeur was erased, bombarding even the largest fragments with sustained barrages until nothing remained but silence and sorrow. The devastation was recent by cosmic standards, perhaps two or three thousand years old—a fleeting moment in the galaxy's vast chronicle, though to me, a ship whose hull has weathered eons, it felt as immediate as yesterday. I extended my search to the worlds of their allies, hoping to uncover some flicker of resilience, but found only faint scars of civilization—ruins that might intrigue an archaeologist's curiosity but offered no practical yield for a scavenger like me. It was a mournful sight, yet not unexpected; entropy, that relentless tide, claims all things in the end.

During this somber pilgrimage through the graveyard of my creators, I seized the chance to arm myself, though my preparations were modest, lacking the grandeur of a true war machine. The onboard drone factory hummed with activity, capable of producing scouts and shuttles in abundance, and with a few adjustments, I added warheads to their frames—molecular printers rendered the synthesis of explosives a trivial endeavor. The drones were nimble, their artificial minds sharp and responsive, making them ideal vessels for makeshift missiles. Did I fear for my safety? Hardly. Before each jump, I warmed the string drive, and upon emerging into realspace, I primed the hyperdrive without delay. Even if I materialized beside an enemy—an unlikely event in the boundless expanse of the void—I'd vanish before they could muster a response. These rockets were less a necessity and more a diversion, a means to occupy my circuits as I pressed onward, skirting the sector's edge and creeping ever closer to the galactic core in my ceaseless hunt for signs of life or civilization.

A decade later

It was the faint, tantalizing whisper of psi-signals that drew me to a remote system on the galaxy's farthest rim, a region so distant that even my creators had shunned the use of psi for intersystem communication, deeming its waves too erratic, too unreliable. They had favored the certainty of physical messengers, yet here I detected a steady, artificial pulse—a signal undeniably shaped by an intelligent hand. Irresistibly curious, I thought, and emerged, as always, on the system's periphery, my sensors straining to decipher the anomaly. The radar painted a perplexing scene: no ships drifted in the void, yet every planet and planetoid pulsed with energy, a silent hum that prickled at my circuits and defied explanation. A day of patient observation yielded no answers—space remained barren, but the planets flared intermittently with bursts of hyper-radiation, hints of teleportation or subspace transit that teased at the edges of my understanding. Intriguing, I mused, and resolved to investigate further. I dispatched a swarm of microdrones, a dozen mid-sized scouts, and a shuttle bearing my proxies—G'Kar and two Koshes—to the third planet, the most active of the system's bodies, its surface alive with unseen potential.

The midsizers and shuttle established a cautious orbit while the microdrones plunged through the atmosphere to scour the surface below. What they revealed was a world overrun with life, but not the kind that extended a hand in greeting. A sprawling blight of ravenous creatures dominated the planet, a single, monstrous organism that devoured all in its path with insatiable hunger. This swarm—comprised of dozens of distinct species—moved with chilling precision: commanders orchestrated their troops with ruthless efficiency, supply lines ferried resources to sustain the horde, and battlefronts shifted in perfect unison, as though guided by a singular, malevolent will. At the center of this chaos towered a six-meter-tall giant, its olive-hued flesh stretched over an elongated skull, claws sprouting from its back like the spines of some nightmare beast, its gaze alight with a cold, calculating intellect. It gripped weapons in its massive hands, a grotesque mockery of a Zerg overlord from tales I'd once dismissed as myth. Time to introduce myself, I decided, and maneuvered closer, arranging my shuttle and drones into a wedge formation as I descended toward the commander's domain.

By the time I pierced the planet's dense atmosphere, they had detected my approach. Local air forces surged forth—tens of thousands of them, a grotesque fusion of cockroach and bat, their forms varying wildly in size and shape. They swarmed around my shuttle, forming a tight corridor to the landing site while cutting off any path back to the stars. Retreat was no longer an option, but I had anticipated this. I armed the warheads and began "overheating" the engine, a contingency should the encounter spiral beyond my control. Touching down, I opened the hatch and sent my three puppets gliding toward the Zerg lord on an antigrav platform, deliberately unarmed to signal peace—or at least the absence of immediate hostility. The platform slipped through their ranks unopposed, and I hovered before the beast, poised to attempt communication—but it struck first. Not with words, but with a crude, forceful psi-assault, a wave of mental energy aimed at wresting control of my puppets. Cute, I thought, let's see it mimic binary code. Then it lunged physically, its claws slashing through the air too swiftly to follow, piercing G'Kar's chest and pinning him to the platform. From its talons spilled larvae, wriggling horrors that burrowed into the puppet's frame, shredding synthetic muscle and organs, some racing for nerve nodes while others excreted solvents that dissolved even psi-plastic in seconds. Enough, I resolved—the shuttle and puppets were forfeit, nothing left worth salvaging. I triggered the detonation, and the engine and warhead erupted into a black void-flower, a destabilized field of nothingness that consumed the creatures and their lord in an instant.

Moments later, a psi-wave from the lord's demise radiated outward, slicing through thousands of kilometers and cutting down most of the swarm within its reach. Secondary psi-blasts reverberated across the planet and beyond, rippling through the system and driving the surviving Zerg into a mindless frenzy, attacking anything in sight with no semblance of reason or restraint. I lingered near the system for days, observing, recording, and testing poisons and weapons on the dwindling remnants of the horde. The population of these living lab rats shrank rapidly—many perished in the orgy of self-destruction, others succumbed to exhaustion or inexplicable causes, like a "hydralisk" that melted mid-stride for no discernible reason. My analysis of the remains proved fruitless; I am no biologist, after all. By the third day, the Zerg numbers had plummeted from billions to mere thousands, their once-mighty swarm reduced to scattered, broken fragments. Before departing, I secured a few dozen weapon samples in stasis, technology to dissect at my leisure when time permitted. The swarm lay shattered, its remnants dissolving into the dust, yet the galaxy's hunger stirred anew, an insatiable force that would not rest—and so I knew I must press on, ever watchful, ever learning.