It began with stock footage familiar to every currently living human. Footage from twenty years ago, Aurora colony, the first Human world to be attacked.
The confused first reports appearing on the interstellar internet: ships in orbit, shooting stars in the sky, no response to transmissions.
The breathless reporters, addressing viewers at home.
The first explosions, the panic, the screams of civilians whose Emergency Packages had not at the time included combat routines.
The surveillance camera footage of an endless sky of alien drones, and of the horrible cephalopodan aliens, wielding laser weapons with the four prehensile upper limbs of their armored suits, like something out of a distorted Lovecraftian nightmare.
And all of them firing indiscriminately, destroying everything in sight, killing everything in sight, in an ostentatious, genocidal display of power that was all the more horrifying in the knowledge that they didn't have to. They could have just wiped the surface from orbit. It would have been easy too, with a brand‐new colony like Aurora.
Iconic images, all of it, gathered from chaotic transmissions and charred ruins left behind by the aliens.
A child, crying in front of her robotic teddy bear, the kind with a built‐in camera, next to the bodies of her parents, before an alien drone appeared to end her life.
The students of the local college, recording last messages for whatever relatives they had off‐world before charging to their deaths, wielding nothing but reprogrammed vehicles and drones, hastily manufactured small arms, the emptied contents of research labs, and the courage of the dead.
The moribund military ships, arriving in orbit, trying to organize an evacuation—and every single one of them blown into a thousand, orbiting fragments.
In the end, there were no survivors, not one, not even among the resident magical girls.
The second time was not too much better.
When the aliens arrived around the brand‐new colony world of Atlas, they found that the Human worlds had started to rouse their economies for war. They found orbital defense platforms, city defense systems, merchant ships sporting antimatter weapons, a small infantry garrison, and a civilian population with newly installed combat routines and synthesizers reprogrammed to produce weaponry if necessary.
All of it in only a week, possible with the miracle of modern nanoassembly and direct‐to‐cortex learning routines.
It didn't really matter.
The platforms and ships dented the arriving fleet only slightly, and while the infantry and population fought valiantly this time, it took only days to overrun the colony, and the aliens still refrained from any orbital bombardments.
This time though, they seemed to choose their targets more carefully—but their logic still defied understanding. They would expend surprising effort to eliminate an infant, then ignore the adults in the vicinity. Or they would kill three people in a group of four, and ignore the fourth even if the fourth happened to be firing in their direction. It followed no pattern anyone could discern.
