Before Nigekus reached the dome, a shadow flashed across the common.
But by the time he looked skyward, there was nothing to be seen. The whine and clatter of the machinery had covered the sound of the approaching dropships until very near the end, and the landing sites were downriver around the bend, safely out of view. Shaking his head, Nigekus entered the dome, ignorant of the threat already moving up the valley toward the village.
When he left the dome just a few minutes later, his inspection complete, everything had changed. Tall creatures in green and brown body armor were advancing through the village in a wide line, their weapons turning the cottages into burned and broken shells. A child’s screaming pierced the din of the machinery behind him, then ended with ominous abruptness.
Nigekus was ignored or overlooked long enough to take half a dozen uncertain steps out into the common, long enough to realize in horror that some of the blackened OBJECTS littering the ground were carcasses, long enough to feel a wild rush of indignation over the fact that he did not even know the species of the invaders.
Then he found his voice and cried out his rage, raised both fists in defiance and started across the common toward the nearest of the soldiers. A silver-barreled weapon turned his way, and Nigekus fell in agony, his last breath full of fire.
Two of the diggers at Pit 4 had seen the descending ships, making that crew the first to start back down to the village. The pall of black smoke rising over the ridgelines drew the other crews away from their work and onto the well-trod trails. Some had shouldered their tools as weapons, but most were armed only with fear for their families. They had had no enemies on New Brigia, and energy weapons were a luxury the colony could not afford.
The Yevethan troops, masked against the smoke and the stench of the vermin, waited patiently in the village for the diggers to return.
There was no need to do anything more. As Nil Spaar had predicted, the sight of the ravaged village gave the diggers the final spur to a reckless charge.
It was a methodical slaughter. Standing back to back in a circle on the common, the soldiers allowed the diggers to reach the valley floor, then cut them down.
The last few deaths were suicides in all but name.
With both the carnage and the futility before them, the remaining Brigians dropped their inadequate weapons, gave up their cover, and walked down the slopes to the village, offering themselves as targets rather than be left alive to remember.
When it was over, and the breeze falling through the valley had blown all but the last tendrils of smoke away, only the Yevethan troops, the ore sheds, and the processing dome were left standing.
It was no accident that those buildings had survived.
As the troops returned downriver to their dropships, a fat-bodied cargo transport landed on the common. Within an hour its empty belly easily swallowed both the contents of the ore sheds and the machinery from the processing dome.
Once the cargo transport was safely clear of the target zone, Star Dream completed its sterilization of the valley with a long salvo from the cruiser’s heavy batteries.
The bodies turned to vapor and vanished, and the blood was scorched from the rocks. The ground turned to black glass, and the river exploded into steam.
When the barrage was over, nothing was left of the vermin but the holes they had carved in the ground with their hands and the trails they had beaten into the hills with their footsteps.
Star Dreamreturned to N’zoth triumphant in herGlorious
victory, carrying a passage price in chromite in her hold.
In a garden city on J’t’p’tan, a world gentled by patient hands, a woman awoke from a dream to a nightmare. A falling star became a starship, the starship a warship, and the warship a fountain of death raining on the face of the world. In the dream, or the nightmare, the Current ran wild with the thrashings of murdered souls, and ran dark with the stain of blood.
“Rouse everyone, at once, ” Wialu said, shaking her
daughter. “Hurry-something terrible has begun. “
New Brigia was the smallest of the thirteen alien settlements visited by the ships of the Black Fleet in the first hour of the Great Purge. Polneye was the largest, and the only one to fight back.
Orbiting a star on the far side of the Cluster from Coruscant, Polneye was an orphan child of the Empire.
It had been established to serve as a secret military transshipment port for Farlax Sector. Cloaked in high altitude clouds whose rains rarely reached the ground, arid Polneye became home to a vast open-air armory and supply depot.
Bustling hub-and-spoke landing and holding zones sprawled across the dusky-brown flats. Eventually, even the largest vessels capable
of grounding could be accommodated, with cargoes unloaded, assembled, and transferred by small armies of droids.