The evacuation bay tremored. The heavy platform beneath them shook with the unstoppable energy of an impossible earthquake. The air filled with the plucking, tense sound of straining metal pulled to its absolute limit. The drone swivelled back down, darting to meet the stunned crowds of people. Some froze in place, stunned at the suddenness of the assault. Others pushed others out of their way, scrambling to reach the rescue vessel first.

The lights went out. The protective field failed. A blast of air buffeted the chamber as its pressure spilt the internal atmosphere into the void. In that instant — far quicker than a human could react — the drone quickly spun up their hardlight construction tools and projected a red dome over as many people as they could reach. Firing their engines, the drone fought to hold them in place, even as the whipping wind lashed around their chassis, and the pressure under the dome fought to escape.

A low groan shuddered through the entire orbital habitat, a loud sound that tore painfully at everyone inside it.

An emergency blast door collapsed into place, sealing the evacuation bay. Emergency lights blinked to life, casting everyone inside with a dim orange hue.

The drone hesitantly retracted the hardlight dome, sensors swivelling as they looked around warily. Unable to connect with the people to speak with them, they flashed a warning.

⏩⏩⏩

Again, the crowd erupted into chaos, people desperately fighting their way towards the life vessel. The drone flashed warnings, seeing a woman pushed down, then another. A child cried out, having lost their family.

Then the Service arrived. Shunted into space through what appeared to be expanding mirror spheres, the displacement fields vanished and three tall human-types clad in biomechanical exoskeletons stood in their place. They immediately raised their arms and voices, coordinated. Standing head and shoulders above the rest of the people, they directed the crowds with hand signals, loud commands, and arrested memetic control.

One of the Service members locked eyes with the drone’s scanners. The drone felt the background EM noise fade as he countermeasured the interference using his neural lace.

“E&E Service Agent Zablawza Avia,” he introduced himself through a radio signal.

“Habitat Inspection Drone 91,100,921 KTT — pa Kaytee Desht,” the drone responded.

“Kaytee, I’m going to need your help to get this bulkhead door open again, ready for departure,” Zablawza signalled as he knelt down and helped a woman to her feet. She was injured from the trample but able to walk. Zablawza passed her to his colleague, who escorted her through the crush to receive medical aid.

Kaytee drew up the habitat’s floor plan into their internal sensory suite and looked it over. Then, they said to the foreign agent, “If the Caretaker has lost access, there’s a station for manual departure control nearby.”

“Perfect.”

“We will need to leave the bay to gain access. It is completely locked down. There will also be atmospheric pressure loss in the main living volume, if field control has been lost.”

Zablawza strode through the crowd to the main entryway, checking the manual door override. It seemed to have lost power, and he looked around with both his eyes and digital sensors.

“The quickest route to the station would be out through the bay maintanance hatch and to EVA through the habitat scaffolding,” Kaytee suggested, casting up a nearby waypoint for Zablawza to see.

Flashing the drone an appreciative smile, Zablawza unfastened his cloak and rolled his sleeves up his ebony-plated arms. He glanced back at the life vessel and raised a hand signal to his two fellow agents. They returned the gesture and began to raise the vessel’s ramps, boarding complete.

“Think you can give me a lift?” Zablawza asked as he kicked the hatch through with superhuman force, his charged exoskeleton empowering him to stamp the metal hard enough to dent it, then buckle it and collapse it through. Another bark of air, and the atmosphere whipped around them, lost to orbit as it tore through the hatch.

“Gladly,” Kaytee answered.

Zablawza hopped on top of the drone without wasting a moment, taking a firm hold of their rear aero slats for balance. Kaytee carefully took them through the hatch and then into the latticework frame of the exterior station.

Out in space, Kaytee fired directional thrusters as they rotated at just the right angle. They translated themselves — horizontally at first — swinging slowly sideways, around structural beams clad with insulating golden plastics and superconductor cabling. They could almost hear Zablawza pinging encrypted messages back and forth with the rest of his team as they moved.

Finally lining up with their destination, Kaytee fired their main engines and thrust them straight towards the hatch. Lightning fast as they crossed the expanse, Kaytee kicked themselves 180° around with another snap of their directional thrusters. Main engine blasting, they swung to a stop at their destination. Zablawza, holding on tight, gritted his teeth against the void as he used internal power to respire without an atmosphere. Unseating himself, he smashed through the hatch on the far side.

Zablawza clambered inside, fighting the blast of atmosphere, and then Kaytee followed, floating by his side. The space traffic control room was long deserted, laid out for the previously entirely hypothetical scenario that Caretaker control was lost and evacuation was still necessary. Kaytee scanned the station. It was serviceable.

“Great job,” Zablawza transmitted, taking to the station controls aglow under emergency power.

Kaytee turned to look out of the old windows, scratched from microdust impacts, and watched the bay doors swing open from their remote vantage. Apprehension filled their mind until — seconds later — the life vessel swung out and burned its engines, tearing away from the station and into orbital space. Kaytee felt a swell of happiness, of relief. They made it.

“We’ve done it,” Zablawza said over radio. “Right. What’s your mass-load? Good on propellant? I could use some help checking the living volume.”

About to answer, Kaytee turned back to Zablawza. The detonation that followed was so sudden that the drone’s sensors couldn’t register it.

One moment, they were about to speak to the Service agent. Next, they were crushed between two heavy sheets of metal and reinforced glass.

Kaytee reinitialised their systems in the dark and flashed the single light that still functioned on their chassis, sensors buzzing. All power was out in the structure around them, leaving them struggling and trapped.

Slowly, then picking up speed, both surfaces that pinned Kaytee moved in different directions, causing them to scrape and roll between them. Then, crushed and tossed around, aero-control slats torn from their lateral surfaces, the drone bounced away as the heavy wreckage parted.

Kaytee realised they had been pinned between two formerly separate sections of the habitat. The entire interior of the orbital had been torn apart and then collapsed, slammed together, around them. As far as the drone could see, swinging their light and scanning in LiDAR, the whole structure had been broken apart by some impossible cutting force, something beyond field tech as they knew it.

There was no sign of Zablawza. There was no emergency power in the structure around them. Regarding their internal warnings in their digital suites, Kaytee then tested their systems. Their location had been lost, and the EM interference had returned in full force.

Discerning that their engines might have some function, Kaytee worked their gimbals and applied a light thrust. Then, flicking their light around, the drone’s sensors made out the spires’ pulverised remains surrounding them and the wreckage of a human habitation area. They had somehow been moved at least 150 metres in an instant.

Kaytee turned their sensors to their own airframe to check for further damage and froze. They were covered in the red speckle of vapourised human. Brief panic seized Kaytee, and again, they looked around for Zablawza, filled with creeping horror, realising his fate.

Kaytee needed a moment to bring their fright under control. Only then could they push mass through their engines and crawl between exposed struts, laced together, the mangled remains of a home. The path out was blocked by the tangled steel and countless taut cables. Wary of another collapse, Kaytee knew they had to break free.

Testing their field cutter, the tool projected an arc of bright ruby light — though this time, the hardlight blade was much smaller, much weaker.

Ascertaining the blade was still nominally functional, Kaytee pressed it to the metal ruin and started cutting apart the shattered structure. Once they were sure the debris was loose enough, they fired their engines and shunted their hard shell against the wreckage. Alloyed surfaces strained, groaning, metal on metal. Then, with a crunch, they were through.

Kaytee’s light found pieces of people, their homes spilling into the void. The scale of the destruction had pulverised and dismembered them, so much so that they were not sure how many people they were looking at — two or three, or perhaps an entire family.

Numbed, Kaytee set their impulse to the lowest level and moved on, trying not to disturb their rest. They slowly progressed through an open doorway in their living quarters. Where there would have been a corridor was now empty space. This side of the building was simply gone.

It was now a hard vacuum out in the expanse of the undercity. The entire habitat shuddered. The outer portion of its superstructure was peeled apart, exposing Kaytee and everything else within to empty space. The drone turned off its light and drifted to the edge, daring to look beyond, damaged sensors adjusting and virtual antenna spinning up, switching between linear and dish, then back again.

Kaytee could still not detect the threat, sweeping a slow and deep gaze around, resolving objects in orbit against the backdrop of the stars. In the distance, the drone picked out the burning of the life vessel. Gutted, its atmosphere and contents were not content to simply drain into the hard vacuum; it had ignited. The fire bloomed like a spherical bulb in microgravity. Its edges were feathery and soft, where it choked out in the void. Kaytee had to fight to tear their sensors away.

Then, further out, Kaytee bore witness to the arrival of Caretaker Desht’s daughter craft. Coordinated and aggressive, eleven of them moved as one. They each wore the appearance of silver spheroids, featureless fields armouring them and hiding their physical makeup. At last, a sense of hope touched Kaytee’s mind. The daughter crafts were amongst the most advanced sentients ever to achieve creation, designed with technology that their simple neural mind could not even approach.

At their head was the eldest, Bhargesta Aft Teh Desht, who generated a spiralling, fractally incursive pattern from the front of her post-physical surface. The field collapsed, dragging the iron weight of space-time inwards. Bhargest fired a weapon beyond human comprehension.

Millions of kilometres rippled, and the enraged daughter’s weapon impacted somewhere distant. Monumental in force, the brightness of the blast exceeded the system’s star. Even half in the shade, Kaytee felt their exposed surfaces begin to vaporise, kicking them back. Compensating with their engines, Kaytee fought to remain stationary. Quickly, they took their sensors and field antenna offline to prevent damage. Then, adjusting for a much lower capture rate, they peered back out to watch.

Together, the daughter crafts poured so much energy into their perceived adversary that Kaytee’s field antenna detected the tell-tale signs of tearing in underlying space-time. As Bhargesta and her sister craft induced singularity, the bright light suddenly flared in circuitous and unexpected directions. So unyielding, the tremendous gravitational influence of a black hole lensed the blast that the firepower exhausted out and around the point of impact, a shell of calamity utterly beyond weapons deployed at a terrestrial level in scope and carnage.

A shadow passed over Kaytee. The sudden darkness forced them to increase their capture rate again. Sensors swivelling, they saw Caretaker Desht’s youngest daughter-craft, Avia — who must have sent Zablawza and the other Service agents — dropping and rotating adjacent to the ruins of the orbital ring.

Kaytee watched as the colossal Avia extended her stabilising fields to safeguard the collapsing orbital city. Then, the drone saw Avia expose her many bays and entryways, coordinating countless landings and rescues simultaneously. Hurried, the evacuating life vessels and shuttle craft began to break away from dying Desht’s orbital, seeking desperate refuge with her daughter.

However, that intense and distant flare burned out, even whilst the scramble of activity built up around them. Looking back out into space, Kaytee saw that it was over. There was no sign of the daughters’ counterattack left.

Kaytee froze when they resolved the exposed shapes of the daughter crafts without power. There were no field arrays; now, they resembled long cones brushed with projectors and open bays. Given the mere seconds that had elapsed, Bhargesta and her sisters were crushed and broken in impossible ways. Adrift without power, they spilt their interior mass out, gutted from fore to aft, spiralling dead and out of control.

For all their rage and hope for justice or revenge, the most advanced minds of the NILE stem systems had proven to be nothing more than apes trying to throw stones at the threat. They had been ended just as quickly.

Kaytee’s chassis rattled as Avia’s defensive fields began to split as well, fields then hardlight reinforcement breaking apart as projectors on her surface exploded outwards with showers of gas and shrapnel. Then, Avia’s colossal body began to contort, shredding. As she buckled, vast amounts of her internal atmosphere leaked out, filling the space around her with a low groan. Craft on her heading began to divert, taking evasive manoeuvres as explosions burst out of her interior volume, avoiding titanic slabs of her body in freefall.

Losing control of her orientation, Avia rotated. The tip of her continent-sized aft collided with the distant span of the orbital. Avia's final act was to produce a forcefield close to her own superstructure — a second skin. All the while, her interior rippled with concussive explosions as the reinforcements that supported her very being disintegrated. Nevertheless, that final decision contained the destruction, saving thousands of craft scrambling to escape her collapse from the spread of the explosion.

Kaytee searched their records for what to do. There was no plan for such an obscene scenario, no expected course of action for such complete devastation, for such a destructive and utterly inhumane attack on this incredible scale. Eventually, they settled on the deepest of their routines, instructions recorded more than a million years ago in the advent of the first star-faring sentient. Passed down ever since that ancient time, the simple guidance:

Humanity must survive.

Kaytee fired their damaged and exhausted engines, kicking themselves free and heading out into open space. After clearing the immense wreckage of the dead habitat, they began bleeding their orbital velocity, careful to avoid the vast clouds of debris travelling at unthinkable speeds. Calculating their course, Kaytee decided that even if this orbital was destroyed, they could fall unnoticed and help someone on the planetary surface. With the state of their engines, it would take a long time for them to overcome that much inertia and escape orbit, but they had to try.

Merlinst, a perfect world, slowly turned beneath the drone. They orbited slowly, picking out various surface habitats, small towns, and cities. They calculated the quickest route to a population centre from where they would fall, then double-checked and triple-checked just to be sure.

Daring to look back, the drone saw the habitat being torn apart. Yet, from a distance, the damage seemed to simply appear. There was no weapons fire, no projectiles, or visible field pressure. Desperate for understanding, curiosity filled them, and the temptation grew too strong.

Exposed in open space, Kaytee made the mistake of extending their virtual field array. As a result, they detected gravitational waves issuing from tremendous dark mass, shepherding the wreckage into paths that would eventually accrete into a vast moon, disrupting the planet below.

That realisation was the last thought that 91,100,921 KTT — that Kaytee Desht — ever experienced. Their virtual field antenna was detected, and without warning, the bonds between their constituent subsystems simply vanished. The hot contents of their engines exploded outwards. Their chassis spun apart, and all that remained was a mindless cloud of debris.