Old Glory Prologue 2

New Year’s Day, 2070, brought a miracle that defied every scientific model and expectation humanity had clung to in desperation. For over two years, the world had lived beneath the shadow of what was once called the Martinez-NAAS Planetkiller, an impossibly massive object that had entered the solar system at speeds no natural object could sustain. It had been declared a death sentence, a cosmic verdict delivered by fate. Yet on that day, across a shattered world, billions of eyes witnessed something no one had dared to hope for: the object slowed.

Its velocity dropped to a crawl, a fraction of its original speed. By then, it had already passed the outer planets and reached high orbit over Earth. Telescopes across the globe focused on its shape, now visible to the unaided eye, hanging like a dark scar across the stars. What they saw through magnified lenses chilled every scientist to the bone. The object was no asteroid. It had form. It had design. Metallic protrusions, straight lines, angles too perfect to be natural emerged from the darkness. Geometry that defied geological explanation revealed itself in impossible structures. No naturally formed rock could bear such architectural symmetry. What was once assumed to be a rogue moon or colossal piece of debris was, in truth, a vessel.

It was a ship. One unlike any human mind had ever conceived. A vessel so vast in scale that it dwarfed all known space stations and satellites by orders of magnitude. At over seven miles in length and nearly a mile in height, its shadow could have eclipsed entire cities. Speculation erupted across the remaining communication networks. Was it abandoned? Was it a generational ark? Had something within it survived the journey?

Fear, once pure and absolute, began to shift. For the first time in years, despair gave way to something else. Not hope, not exactly, but a hesitant yearning. Maybe, people whispered, the ship was here for a reason. Maybe it could be reasoned with. Maybe salvation had not been erased after all.

Then came the moment that silenced all doubt, the shift that would mark the beginning of something far worse than anyone had imagined.

As the ship entered stable high orbit, something deep within its structure failed. A blinding light tore through the sky, illuminating the upper atmosphere with incomprehensible hues. Witnesses described colors that had no name, in shades that shimmered and flickered like memories of dreams. Instruments overloaded. Eyes seared with pain as the unnatural brilliance carved across the sky. In its wake, thousands around the globe were left blinded, unable to comprehend the kaleidoscope of alien light that had flooded their vision.

The ship tore itself apart with a scream that bypassed sound entirely, vibrating instead through the deepest layers of human consciousness. Near its core, a fracture bloomed, not as a mechanical failure, but as if the very fabric of reality had been unzipped. The vessel convulsed under tensions no material should have withstood, and a storm of radiant energy burst from its interior, erupting like the death of a forgotten deity. The rupture widened into a gaping wound, splitting the immense construct in two. Each fragment drifted away from the other, glowing with internal fire, shedding trails of glimmering debris that tainted the skies above for weeks.

What followed was a silence more dreadful than any scream. It pressed down like a suffocating weight, a hush that pulsed with unnatural rhythm, saturated with a sense of something vast, wounded, and possibly aware. Humanity stood paralyzed, watching as the reality set in. The ship, whatever it was in truth, was dying, and it was doing so on the doorstep of mankind.

Global alarm networks lit up as the fractured halves of the ship began their descent. Trajectories were rapidly calculated. One jagged section angled toward the desolate Himalayas, long since rendered lifeless by radiation. The other, more intact segment, spiraled on a collision course with the central United States. The projected impact zone: just outside Kansas City.

The world watched in horror. Livestreams captured the burning wreckage as it pierced the atmosphere. News anchors wept openly. Crowds gathered in churches and temples. The impact was inevitable. But once again, the ship defied expectation.

Even in pieces, the vessel clung to control with mechanical tenacity. Systems far beyond human understanding struggled to maintain course and limit destruction. Ancient engines, scorched and deteriorated by the explosion, flared to life once more, throttling against gravity’s pull. The object did not crash as expected. Instead, it descended with a strange, deliberate grace, guided by systems that resisted Earth's pull with unimaginable precision. Its speed dropped steadily until it reached a controlled descent, its velocity moderated to the point that the eventual crash, though still devastating, would not annihilate everything in its path.

When the ship struck just outside Kansas City, the impact was still horrific. The ground erupted beneath the impact, a seismic shudder tearing through the region. Shockwaves fractured highways and rail lines for miles. Residential neighborhoods were swallowed whole by collapsing hillsides. The downtown skyline crumbled as if shaken apart by a wrathful god. Fires spread, power grids failed and emergency services were buried in a tidal wave of uncontrollable destruction.

But despite the ruin, the unimaginable scope of loss, the worst-case scenario never came to pass. The atmospheric shock did not circle the planet. The tectonic chain reactions some had feared did not manifest. The world did not split, nor did the continents shift. Somehow, it had been contained.

Within hours, the Kansas impact site began to show signs of something strange going on. At first, it was small.  Strange shimmering objects rolled across the scorched hull, something odd and writhing was spotted through a gap in the metal, and arcs of electricity crawled across the shattered shell. Then came the light. A dome of blue energy burst from the wreckage, expanding rapidly to envelop Kansas City and its surrounding suburbs. As it swept outward, everything living within its radius was unmade.

When the light finally faded, the world was left staring at a hollowed void. The grass had vanished, reduced to ash so fine it scattered at the slightest stir of air. Trees were dissolved to dust that left only faint depressions in the soil. The city stood still, frozen mid-breath. No rustle of leaves, no chirp or hum, not even the bark of a stray dog broke the suffocating silence. Insects, animals, birds, people, all had been unmade, their cells erased with surgical precision. Kansas City remained intact in structure, yet vacant of life. Televisions flickered with paused broadcasts. Doors hung ajar, mid-motion, yet nothing waited behind them. Toys sat forgotten in empty rooms. Piles of clothing floated in the wind. The bubble of sterilizing light left no living thing standing, just the echoes of what once was.

The soil beneath the city cracked and greyed, rendered incapable of supporting life. Microbial cultures gathered from the zone returned sterile. Air samples carried no spores, no pollen, no bacteria. It was as if a surgeon’s scalpel had cut a wound into the living world, a slice so clean and absolute that not even decay could take root. It was an immaculate void.

In the Himalayas, the second half struck a remote region already rendered lifeless by the aftereffects of nuclear warfare. Radiation levels had made the area a no-man’s-land, and few dared to approach. But unlike the American crash, this one behaved differently.

A violent storm erupted over the Himalayan crash site within days. What began as magnetic interference quickly grew into a regional catastrophe. Compass needles spun without direction. Radios filled with static. Then came the lightning; blinding, white-hot, and powerful enough to fuse rock and sand into molten glass. Entire cliffs were scorched smooth. The atmosphere above had turned unstable, charged with a storm of intense electromagnetic force radiating from the shattered craft buried within the mountains.

Reports filtered in slowly at first. Reconnaissance drones went silent. Patrol teams failed to return. Survivors staggered out of the storm bearing tales of horrific encounters. They spoke of grotesque creatures emerging from the heart of the radioactive zone, monstrosities that defied all known biology. Bears with armored hides that deflected rifle fire. Birds with wings of bone and fire, trailing cinders as they shrieked through the air. Quadrupeds with too many eyes and fangs, strong enough to rip apart APCs.

Chinese and Indian forces, still bitter enemies after the exchange of nuclear fire that had ravaged the region, now held tense, heavily fortified positions on their respective sides of the Himalayan perimeter. Despite their mutual loathing, both militaries found themselves locked in parallel struggle against a horror neither had anticipated. From the heart of the magnetic storm came waves of impossible creatures: nightmares forged from warped biology and alien contagion. Armored titans that shrugged off cannon fire, serpentine horrors with mirrored skin and fractal eyes, and airborne abominations that unleashed electromagnetic shrieks capable of frying equipment mid-battle.

Entire units vanished as the storm grew, leaving behind only static-laced screams. Footage recovered from lost drones showed glimpses of anatomy twisted into mockeries of life- grotesque things that stalked the fog with unnatural intelligence. Engagements devolved into routs. Both nations were forced to accept that mutual cooperation was the only choice as they poured more and more of their remaining forces into stemming the tide.. What had once been a cold and bitter frontier had become a crucible of survival against a tide of monsters spilling into the world.

In North America, the United States deployed every available resource to investigate the wreckage. Military convoys ringed the Kansas site. Scientists from every institution were pulled in. Hazmat teams in advanced suits entered the dead zone. Inside the ship, they found only silence, and the cold, empty corridors of a ship turned mausoleum.

Among the wreckage, damaged terminals and fragmented memory cores offered fragments of truth. Decoding the alien language was a monumental task. The data was corrupted. Storage systems were shattered, but advanced AI systems worked day and night, piecing together meaning from ruins.

What emerged painted a grim portrait of a tragedy made whole.

The ship was a refugee vessel, its builders fleeing the ashes of a lost war and a bioweapon that had ravaged their world and population. The pathogen was an insidious thing, meant to terrorize and horrify more than kill, though it did that all too well on its own. It rewrote its victims, awakening dormant genetic codes and reshaping them into monstrous echoes of their former selves. Their bodies twisted into weapons, driven by hunger and instinct, stripped of memory and reason. The infection spread like wildfire, through blood, bites, even the briefest contact. In the end, nothing rational remained behind their eyes.

In the end it was all for naught. The pathogen had followed them on the ship, maybe in the refugees themselves, maybe in their food, or clothing or any other hundred vectors that couldn’t be accounted for in the final moments of their species. The simple, miserable truth was that the weaponized pathogen came with them, in the worst possible way.

The crew of the ship had fought to contain the plague valiantly. Unable to cure it, knowing they were all infected and unwilling to infect anyone or anything else with the horror that had raped and ravaged their species, they made a choice. They had lost the ability to manually activate the purge function of the ship, those controls lost when the bridge fell, but they could program a contingency into the system from where they were. If the infection breached containment, the ship would activate a last-ditch sterilization wave. It would destroy all living organic matter within and around the vessel. A sacrifice to protect any world they might reach.

But time, distance, and entropy had their say. The ship aged. Its systems degraded, left to rot without anyone to maintain them. The plague endured, the ship itself a cancerous tumor filled with the missions of refugees-turned monsters. When the ship finally reached Earth, the machines that made it function were fragile indeed. All it took was something small.  A leak, a power surge, a shift from the steady thrum of propulsion to the control needed to stay in orbit, but that was all that was needed.

The defense systems, designed by hands long turned to dust, had never been meant to account for the vessel's mid-atmosphere fracture. When the ship split apart, the automated sterilization protocol was triggered far too late. The foresection, containing the command core and critical systems, activated its purge in time. Kansas City was reduced to a lifeless husk in a final, desperate act of planetary protection. But the rear section, where cargo, engines, and fuel had been stored, suffered catastrophic systems collapse. Isolated from command, its defenses failed entirely. The sterilization wave never came. In that silence, the infection survived. The last, desperate gasp of that dying race failed, and with it, humanity’s last chance to contain what had been set loose.

In the weeks that followed, Asia descended into chaos. From the Himalayas, creatures surged across borders in vast, unrelenting waves. China, India, Nepal, and the surrounding regions fell under siege. The skies above the impact site churned with magnetic fury, a dome of volatile energy growing ever wider. Aircraft strayed too close and vanished in blinding arcs of lightning. Missiles launched toward the epicenter were swatted from the air, their guidance systems scrambled and their warheads rendered inert before detonation. Chinese forces attempted multiple nuclear strikes, each one ended in failure, the devices falling silent and lifeless before ever reaching their targets.

Ground forces fared little better. While conventional weapons could bring the monsters down, sheer numbers overwhelmed defensive lines. Bullets killed, yes, but not quickly enough, and not in sufficient volume. For every beast slain, ten more emerged. Cities became battlegrounds. Outposts were overrun. Entire brigades disappeared under stampeding horrors. The enemy did not break ranks or scatter under fire. They charged with singleminded, psychotic bravery, and worse, as the fighting intensified, it became clear they the more they fought, the more they learned.

Field commanders began reporting changes in behavior. The creatures no longer attacked at random. Isolated threats had become organized packs, moving in coordinated patterns. They flanked armored columns. They baited patrols into ambushes. They struck supply convoys with eerie timing. Each engagement grew more brutal, not just in scale but in strategy. Worse still, the creatures evolved. Groups began displaying new abilities; camouflage, sonic disorientation, even limited use of esoteric energies to cause strange effects, and the more of them there were, the more they acted as if directed by some unseen will.

As the weeks turned into months, there was one thing that became apparent. Whatever was making these things, wherever they were coming from, there was something behind the mindless aggression that seemed to rule the monsters, and it was learning.