By the ti Aurelian’s fleet was finally starting to take proper shape, Larkspur Haven’s situation started to turn for the worse.
It started with the teor shower.
At first, people thought it was strange, but not terrifying. The colony had seen falling debris before and had ways to deal with it.
The far rim was full of unstable lanes, dead rock, broken ice, and all kinds of junk that drifted where it shouldn’t.
But this ti, the number was wrong.
The warning stations picked up too many incoming objects at once, and worse, they had not seen them early enough.
They seed to appear almost out of nowhere, dropping into the colony’s local space in a tight spread that made no natural sense.
The alarm went out fast.
Larkspur Haven was still young by interstellar standards, but it was not helpless. Ever since contact with outside civilizations beca a real threat rather than a story, the colony had built layered defense lines around the planet.
Interceptors were launched.
Atmospheric fighters were sent up.
Ground batteries ca online.
Civil defense channels lit up across every major settlent as they all aid at the incoming projectiles.
The response was fast and almost reassuring to watch, as it showed that the best of the best were hired for these jobs.
From orbit, the defensive grid looked like it had things under control.
The first line of interceptors broke apart several of the incoming rocks before they touched the upper atmosphere.
Then the second line took over. The debris that survived was shattered further by missile screens and heavy anti-air bursts from the ground.
To the people watching the sky, it looked like everything was going the right way, and the defense lines were destroying the rocks before they entered anywhere near the planet.
The civilization had seen the threat, moved in ti, and broken it before it reached the surface, and for a brief mont, that belief held.
What none of them knew was that the teor fragnts had never been the real attack.
The mont those rocks burst apart, the real payload was released.
A tailored biological agent spread through the atmosphere in thin, invisible layers, riding ash and vapor and shattered dust.
By the ti the military recovery teams sealed off the larger fragnts and moved them into controlled storage, the infection had already begun moving through the planet’s air, quiet and unnoticed.
At first it looked like a bad seasonal outbreak.
People got fevers, small at first, but the issue gradually increased.
Then coughing fits.
Then fatigue so heavy they could barely stand.
The first reports ca from different cities at once, which should have been the first sign that this was not normal, but by then, the civilization governnt was already overloaded with impact recovery, orbital defense analysis, and debris containnt, dealing with too many problems at once.
It took too long for the pattern to be noticed and presented to the top personnel with everything in place.
By the second day, the hospitals were swamped, beds filling faster than they could be cleared.
By the third, military leadership also slowed their campaign, citing it as a natural phenonon.
Whole districts were being locked down. Public channels ordered civilians to stay indoors, seal vents, avoid contact, and wait for further instructions.
Troops were sent to isolate clusters of infection, and ergency quarantine zones were built in every major city with a large population that still had the manpower to do it.
But by then it was already too late.
The first wave of infected changed faster than anyone expected.
They did not just get sicker.
Instead, they beca sothing even more horrid.
Bodies twisted under the virus, muscles hardening, reflexes spiking, thought collapsing into hunger and aggression.
What ca out of that process no longer looked fully human. So still wore uniforms. So still had enough of their faces left to be recognized.
But the eyes were wrong, the movents were wrong, and the strength they showed when they hit police and soldiers was far beyond what normal infected civilians should have been able to do.
Panic spread with them, faster than any official order could control.
The first security lines were overrun in less than an hour. Patrols that tried to hold streets lost n too fast.
Civilian panic made movent harder. Then the newly changed started multiplying as more infections matured, and the situation inside the cities turned ugly in ways no one had prepared for.
Military units pulled back.
They had to.
Trying to hold every street was suicide. So they began evacuating survivors where they could, building fallback zones outside the worst population centers and telling the people left behind to barricade themselves in and wait, even if those instructions felt thin.
The ssages that were transmitted at first were calm and coordinated, but that changed by the day.
Across the planet, families locked doors that would not hold for long. Soldiers fired until barrels overheated.
Ergency shelters filled too fast. Whole areas stopped answering on the net, one after another, until the map of active signals started to thin.
And while all of that was happening below, the colony’s best ch force was still trapped in orbit.
The station above Larkspur Haven had lost contact with the surface days ago, not all at once, but in pieces.
At first it was signal delay. Then blackouts. Then silence. They sent down shuttles. None ca back.
They tried to raise the ground command centers again and again. Nothing steady answered.
Even automated systems began returning incomplete data, making it harder to understand what was actually happening beneath the surface.
That left the station command in a state worse than battle.
Waiting.
Arguing.
Guessing.
Inside the joint operations room, tension had already passed fear and settled into anger, the kind that ca from being unable to do anything and just waiting there with no information.
Orders were drafted and redrafted.
Options were raised and shut down.
Every decision felt too late or too uncertain.
And below them, the situation kept getting worse, with no one able to stop it.
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