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The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/sjanevardsson on 2024-12-25 20:31:29+00:00.

In the time before the devouring horde, humanity, thinking themselves alone, stretched out among the stars. They made barren worlds habitable, and in generations turned them into paradises. There was no part of the galaxy they considered off-limits.

When the first unmistakable, non-human, artificial signal caught their attention, humanity celebrated. They were no longer alone. While humans were still trying to work out how to respond, They showed up.

Hundreds of thousands of ships, joined together into a traveling city the size of a moon, materialized in a system where humans populated three planets and eight moons. Instead of attempts to communicate, the city broke apart into its constituent ships.

Like a swarm, the ships descended on the planets and moons. Large, rectangular processor ships hung in the sky above the descender ships.

Smaller cubic ships, a kilometer long on each side, headed to the ground and stripped everything they found. Any lifeforms they encountered stood no chance, whether plant, fungus, or animal, megafauna or bacteria. It didn’t matter to the machines that landed, burrowed down half a kilometer into the crust, then returned to the processor, leaving behind a square crater. The processor ships handled nearly a thousand descenders every second, converting more than six hundred billion kilograms of material into waste. Everything from the descenders they didn’t keep, came out the back of the processor as a fine, dry powder that circled in the upper atmosphere, blocking out the light of the local star.

That was just the first of hundreds of systems the devouring horde stripped bare. Humanity scrambled to fight back. Every ship they destroyed was replaced in a matter of days and did little to slow the advance of the horde. Knowing what sort of signals to look for, humanity found the traveling city to be the only source of the signals, which made it possible to track their movements as they moved ever closer to humanity’s cradle.

The fastest ship in all of the human fleets was the Bonny Marie, said to be able to open a warp space so rapidly, and reaching so far across the stars, as to make reality weep. A converted heavy cargo ship, most of her cargo space taken up with her massive warp engines, she wasn’t as sightly as her name would suggest. Still, she was the only ship to ever pull warp from within a mere handful of kilometers from the event horizon of a black hole. She was also the only ship ever to make it into, and back out of, the horde’s city of connected ships.

Still, even with her lightning-fast strikes, any damage the Bonny Marie did to the horde was like trying to empty an ocean with a coffee mug. That didn’t stop her crew from trying, though. With over a hundred landers and two processors confirmed destroyed, they harassed the horde from system to system. It was when the horde was closing in on Sol that the crew decided they needed to do something drastic.

Despite most of her cargo area being filled with the most overpowered engines, the Bonny Marie had more space yet to give. In humanity’s darkest hour, every available centimeter of her space was filled with multi-gigaton, three-stage hydrogen bombs. To this day, no one knows where they came from or how many there were. Some say they carried nine, others say thirteen, others say fifteen. However, all reports agree that they were all twelve gigaton yield, installed without the shielding due to space constraints, and all attached to a single trigger for concurrent detonation.

The Bonny Marie was waiting for the horde when they phased into the Sol system near Mars. They said their goodbyes to each other and warped into the structure of the devouring horde. At the center of the conglomeration was a massive pile of ore dust.

The captain gave his orders, the pilot took aim, the ship’s engines shuddered, and the Bonny Marie rammed into the pile of ore, triggering the fusion bombs. The flash of the initial fireball was visible on Earth, the fine dust ore that was not vaporized turned into radioactive shrapnel. Tens of thousands of the horde ships were destroyed in the initial blast, with tens of thousands more rendered inoperable as a result of either the EMP emitted by the blast or by heat and radiation.

It was still too little, too late for Mars, Luna, and Earth, although the weakened horde was slowed, allowing the evacuation of those bodies to continue for many months. It was only after the horde had stripped those bodies and left them in a cloud of the dust of their upper crust that the real damage the nukes had done became obvious.

The new ships they churned out from the irradiated ore failed often, some not even making their first flight from the traveling city. When the horde rejoined the city, almost back to full strength and emitting megacuries of gamma and alpha radiation, they attempted to use their phase-space propulsion to travel to the next system.

Instead, a ripple washed over the horde city at the speed of light, barely perceptible. Behind it, the ships it had passed over exploded violently. Their cores were vaporized and the remnants ranged in size from the finest dust to small pieces less than two centimeters in diameter. For the second time, a calamity of the horde was visible from Earth, or would have been if there had been anyone there to see it, and they could see through the dust that blotted out the sun.

The remaining humans, listening for the sounds of the horde transmissions, heard silence for the first time in nearly two decades. Earth was wiped bare, but humanity had survived and destroyed the horde, the remnants of which have slowly spread out into a faint ring around the planet.

All the survivors have joined together again, and now we find no other signals. It is time for humanity to build new homes, new paradises for our children’s children. Alone again, we will spread out among the stars in our new ships that use the phase drives we learned from analyzing the horde.

It is with the greatest of honor that I christen humanity’s new flagship, the Bonny Marie 2. May she lead us to the stars and our uncertain, but promising, future.

Speech by Admiral Marisol Cortez on the christening of the Bonny Marie 2, flagship of the Human Colonization Fleet.

prompt: Write a story that starts and ends in the same place.

originally posted at Reedsy