The Martial Unity

”We’re all dead!”

”Those creepy aliens are going to utterly annihilate us!”

”Well, it’s been a good life.”

The mood on Planet Sarantel was filled with the misery and despair that only those who knew death awaited them would have. City Stormfront was a mess, of course. Law and order degenerated at an alarming, if expected, rate. Not only did the citizenry lose all desire to adhere, but even the peacekeeper corps and law enforcement began eroding at unprecedented rates of desertion as officers, many of whom were Martial Artists, departed from the city and from the planet, trying to find a way to get out of the Arima III System.

The streets were filled with people. They were filled with the screams and sobs of the terrified and the grieving. The red skies above the city, painted by the light of two red dwarf stars, only made the world around them seem more macabre.

”Hahaha! Burn it down!” A group of young men doused a statue of the president of the planetary state before igniting it in flames.

FWOOSH!

”There we go!”

”God, I wish we could do that to the real man!”

”Hey! The malls are completely abandoned! Let’s grab some drinks! Now that we’re all gonna die, we might as well go down with some liquor in our bellies!”

Nobody cared that the restrictions on liquor were still technically in place; they chafed against every rule and regulation.

Those who had yet to accept their fates still flooded the transit ports. The elevator stations connected to the space elevators were flooded with people begging for tickets. The few remaining staff members who stuck around with a sense of duty were unable to convince the people that the station up top was already jam-packed with people who had taken it before. The pod rocket stations as well as the electric rail driver stations were similarly filled with people desperate to get off the planet.

Those who had accepted their fates were less overtly miserable, but were perhaps even more volatile. Impending deaths and rising anarchy meant that there were no consequences. Plunder was common. Food, liquor, and other products were rapidly looted from stores and shops. Violence was not uncommon, either. The most vulnerable people were especially victimized by unsavory people who yearned to do unsavory things. With nothing to stop them, they would not be stopped.

”This is humanity at its ugliest,” President Jakarthar remarked with an unusually calm tone of voice as he overlooked the city from the top of the citadel tower in City Stormfront. The man looked like he had aged a decade in just twenty-four hours. Dark bags sat underneath his eyes. His complexion was pale, like blood wasn’t pumping across his body properly.

His body language betrayed a deep sense of resigned acceptance. Like everybody else, he too had witnessed the First Battle of Arima III captured on the space telescopes and surveillance sensors.

Ten armadas from the Strategic World Bridge Force had failed to even come close to destroying the invading arakai force. The surviving fleets had simply escaped via a wormhole, returning to the Solar System.

They had left the humans in Arima III to die. The President had tried to escape, but the interdiction vessels had destroyed any wormholes his wormhole gate could generate, destroying the machine in the process. He had tried escaping via an escape pod, but there were no vessels that could take him out of Arima III.

In the end, he was ironically safer on the surface of his planet than in space. Though it didn’t make a difference, either way. He was dead. They were all dead. It was just a matter of time. The only thing he could pray for was that the arakai would make it painless and instantaneous, rather than subjecting them to unspeakable horrors. Though he was committed to taking his own life with the laser pistol at his belt if the latter were to happen.

The state he had painstakingly built was already destroyed. Now it was just a planet with people living in increasing anarchy. A planet that he had colonized and people that he had ruled over.

President Allen Jakarthar knew that he wasn’t a remarkable man. But he was proud of his accomplishments. Ruling over a whole planet may not be that big of a deal in the grand scheme of human civilization, but it was a significant achievement that many forces greater than him had ultimately failed to achieve, for one reason or another.

This was especially the case when he didn’t have massive backing or anything of the sort. Prior to the Era of Expansion, he was a man who ran a construction corporation that didn’t merely construct homes, but entire communities, primarily operating in North-West Panama, where there was immense development potential after the destruction of the Gu.

The Era of Expansion gave him an opportunity to rule over his own world, and he took it. The risks he had undertaken paid off in the form of the Jakarthar Federation. It was still brand-new for a state, barely two years old. Human civilization was constantly expanding at alarming rates, so it wasn’t even strictly the frontier anymore, but it was a state that he was proud enough of.

Now, all of it would come to ruin.

”Let us in!”

”I’m going to kill you!”

”If we’re all going to die, you’re going to die at our hands!”

A horde of people gathered around the citadel, rioting at the locked gates. They were angry citizens who were out for the president’s blood. It appeared that he could very well be killed by his own people before the aliens would.

Or so he thought.

The attack came suddenly.

One of the battle webships of the Web of War had launched an exploding prothanite shell at Planet Sarantel, with enough power to wipe out all life on the planet, but enough restraint to ensure the planet remained intact.

The people died before they knew what hit them, literally.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!