November 30, 2367
Unexplored star system
In the void of space, the Beast turned.
It had heard the scream of the dying star, had felt the spatial disturbance caused by its sudden collapse, and its equally abrupt explosion. This, in itself, was not unusual, for all stars died, eventually, but the Beast could feel that something was amiss. Something in the subspace distortion, in the cry of agony that had rippled across the cosmos. This particular star was too young. It had not died. It had been murdered.
The Beast narrowed its eyes--The Destroyers. It had to be. Only they were capable of such wanton annihilation.
The Beast peered into the star-specked darkness, although the effort was in vain. The supernova had occured several parsecs away, and light from the explosion would take many years to reach its current location. But that was unimportant. It now possessed a compass heading, a general direction in which to search--that was all that was necessary.
The Beast's maw opened, but no sound escaped. Had there been air present, the creature would have laughed.
It flew through the emptiness of space, speeding toward the deceased star that the inhabitants of that part of the galaxy called Capella. It burst through nebular clouds and skirted the atmosphere of nearby planets. Asteroids shattered into dust upon contact; the Beast shrugged them off as nothing more than pebbles.
The journey would take time, as the creature well knew, but that too was unimportant; the Beast could afford to wait. It had already waited for millennia--another decade or two meant nothing. It had hunted them for centuries, and if they managed to escape its grasp, if they fled back into the darkness of subspace, it was of no consequence. The Beast would continue to track them, until the stars themselves were nothing more than dying embers. Eventually, it would find the Destroyers once again.
When it did, it would kill every last one of them.
[Glow=red]Freespace: A r m a g e d d o n[/Glow]
The Great War ends: Christmas 2004
