“At this point, we don’t know. What’s happening is consistent with some sort of enemy infiltration, but we’re not seeing drive signatures, and the locations being hit are pretty random. We do still have some orbital defense platforms out there, and they’re all intact. If it’s an attack, they should be targeting our ability to strike back, but they’re not.”

The chimes sounded again, and Ecka spun his chair and pointed at Counselor Daan, who cringed back.

“Will you turn off that blasted alarm? I can’t think!”

Daan pulled himself up, standing a little straighter, and tapped a control on his datascreen. The chimes, blessedly, ceased.

Another adviser spoke up—a slim young man with red hair and extremely pale skin, Keven Tarr. The Ministry of Technology had sent him over. Ecka didn’t have much use for tech that wasn’t related to agricultural yields. In his heart, he was still a farmer—but he knew Tarr was supposed to be very smart. Probably wouldn’t be long until the boy moved on, found himself a job in some more sophisticated part of the galaxy. It was the way of things on a world like Hetzal. Not everyone stayed.

“I think I can show you what’s going on, Minister,” Tarr said.

The man had long fingers for a human, and they danced over his datapad.

“Let me give the data to the droid—it can project the information so we can all see.”

He tapped a few last commands, then unreeled a connection wire from his datapad and plugged it into the access port on the squat, hexagonal comms droid waiting in the corner of the room. It rolled forward, its single green eye lighting up as it moved.

From that eye, the machine projected an image on the large white wall in the minister’s office reserved for the purpose. Normally, presentations on the vidwall would be concerned with crop yields or pest eradication programs. Now, though, it displayed the entire Hetzal system, all its worlds and stations and satellites and platforms and vessels.

And something else.

To Minister Ecka, it looked like a field overrun with a swarm of all-consuming insects. Hundreds of tiny lights moved through his system at what had to be tremendous speed, all in the same direction: sunward. More particularly, planetward. Toward Hetzal Prime and the moons Fruited and Rooted not so far away, not to mention all those stations, satellites, platforms, vessels…many of which had people on them.

“What are they?” he asked.

“Unknown,” Tarr responded. “I got this image by linking together signals from the surviving satellites and monitoring stations, but they’re going down quickly, and we’re losing sensor capacity as they do. Whatever these anomalies are, they’re moving at near-lightspeed, and it’s very difficult to track them. And, of course, whenever they hit something, it’s…”

“Not good,” General Borta finished for him.