Seeds and Ash
Copyright© 2026 by G Younger
Chapter 22: Fire in the Sky
The shuttle clawed its way through Oblivion’s thin atmosphere, every rivet screaming.
Lynk peered through the viewport as the Falcon’s fractured hull shrank beneath them. Emergency lights pulsed in a dying rhythm across the ship’s superstructure, illuminating the ice field in stuttering red.
Movement caught his eye.
The Griss came like a tide breaking against stone.
They poured from fissures that had split the permafrost, thousands of them, their predatory bodies moving in synchronization. Their bioluminescent markings traced green constellations across the darkness as they swarmed toward the dying colony ship.
Lynk’s chest tightened as the first wave hit the Falcon’s lower decks thirty seconds after the shuttle cleared the launch tube.
Claws found purchase on damaged hull plating, and bodies scaled the ship’s flanks with insectile precision, flowing upward like black water defying gravity. They moved as a single organism, coordinated by whatever intelligence governed the swarm, each individual a cell in something vast and ancient.
The Falcon’s automated turrets opened fire.
Plasma discharge lit the ice field in brilliant blue-white bursts, and Griss’ bodies vaporized, but more climbed over the fallen. The turrets tracked, recalibrated, and fired again.
It made no difference.
“Lynk?”
Inaya’s voice pulled him back. Her weight had become heavier against his chest as consciousness slipped away.
“We’re clear,” he said.
Not entirely true; the shuttle’s trajectory arc carried them through the upper atmosphere at angles that made the hull groan, but they’d escaped the immediate kill radius. Whether they’d survive atmospheric exit was a calculation he’d already done and filed under insufficient data.
Through the viewport, the Falcon disappeared beneath the Griss swarm.
Breaches opened as the creatures found every weakness, every stress fracture, every compromise in the hull’s integrity. They widened gaps with ease, pouring inside through wounds that would have taken human engineers hours to cut.
Lynk watched the cargo bay hatch, where Rex had died holding the line, collapse inward.
Darkness swallowed the interior as power grids failed. Emergency batteries kicked in, casting the ship’s skeleton in ghostly phosphorescence. In the failing light, Lynk tracked movement inside the corridors he’d walked for weeks.
The mess hall where they’d shared tense meals; engineering, where he’d learned the difference between function and care. The bridge where Inaya had told him he was trying to be good. All of it was gone to shadows and teeth.
Inaya’s breath rattled.
“If we’d waited one more minute...”
“We didn’t.”
Not just at the Falcon’s landing site, but across the landscape, ice fields cracked open, and thousands of thermal signatures bloomed across the scanner display. The eggs weren’t hatching randomly; they were following an emergence protocol that had waited centuries for the right trigger.
’Quinn’s transmission,’ Lynk thought.
The Falcon became unrecognizable. Its silhouette, once proud despite its damage, collapsed into organic chaos as the Griss claimed every corridor, every deck, every piece of technology humanity had brought to this frozen grave.
One minute, forty-three seconds until core breach.
Inaya’s hand found his again, squeezing with fading strength.
Lynk held her tighter as he watched their ship die and counted down the seconds until fire answered darkness.
The core breached, and light devoured the horizon.
Not fire, purer than that. The fusion reaction tore through containment and became a miniature star born on ice, expanding outward in its wrath. Lynk’s eyes slammed shut against the intensity, polarization maxing out, but still the brilliance bled through.
The Falcon ceased to exist.
Where the colony ship once stood, only white remained, a sphere of annihilation that swallowed wreckage and ice and Griss bodies with equal appetite. The shockwave rippled outward, visible as a distortion in the frozen air, racing across the permafrost faster than sound.
Snow didn’t melt; it vaporized into steam that rose in billowing walls, backlit by nuclear radiance.
The ground split.
Fissures spider-webbed from ground zero, and ice sheets the size of city blocks tilted, collapsed, and tumbled into crevasses that yawned open like wounds. Through his viewport, Lynk saw terrain he’d mapped disintegrate.
The Griss swarm vanished.
Thousands of thermal signatures on his scanner blinked out simultaneously as their bodies incinerated mid-stride. Those inside the Falcon’s hull died without knowing, reduced to carbon shadow and ash in the microsecond between ignition and obliteration.
Then the nest collapsed.
The blast wave hit subsurface structures Lynk had only glimpsed through sensor readings: cathedral chambers where eggs had rested in patient dormancy; arterial tunnels connecting them; everything built into Oblivion’s crust.
The explosion didn’t stop at the surface.
It traveled down.
Through the ship’s scanner, Lynk watched thermal readings cascade through the underground network. The organic infrastructure that Quinn wanted to harvest—the bioluminescent veins that pulsed beneath the permafrost—conducted the detonation like neural pathways conducting electricity.
Fire raced through frozen arteries.
Each egg chamber became a secondary explosion as fusion heat reached hibernating biomass; proteins designed to survive millennia couldn’t survive this. The Griss embryos cooked inside their shells, organic material flash-combusting in a chain reaction that fed itself, spreading faster than Lynk could track.
Tens of thousands died.
The scanner display lit up like constellations being born and dying in accelerated time.
But it went deeper still.
Below the egg chambers, below the cathedral spaces, something else burned.
Lynk had seen the vault, the structure Quinn believed held the planet’s secrets. Now he watched thermal readings descend through those depths, following infrastructure that wasn’t just a nest but a mechanism. The Griss hadn’t simply colonized Oblivion; they’d been grown there, engineered into the planet’s depths, part of the machinery designed for purposes Chyna’s research only guessed at.
The Architects’ work.
All of it fed the fire now.
Explosions blossomed along ley lines traced through Oblivion’s mantle. Whatever power source had kept this frozen world habitable, that maintained the perfect equatorial band despite impossible orbital mechanics, overloaded; the artificial equilibrium was shattered.
Lynk watched the aurora die.
The crimson spiral that writhed overhead from the time the eggs began waking collapsed inward, color draining from the sky. Every Griss system that made this planet something other than ice and vacuum stopped.
The shuttle bucked against atmospheric turbulence born from catastrophic temperature shifts below.
Inaya stirred against him, consciousness swimming up through pain.
“What’s happening?”
“The Falcon’s core breached. It worked,” Lynk said.
Her head turned, eyes finding the viewport. The white sphere had contracted now, cooled from stellar brilliance to merely thermonuclear. But its work continued: across the horizon, ice fields collapsed into sinkholes as subterranean chambers imploded; steam geysers erupted where heat met permafrost, and vapor columns climbed kilometers into thinning air.
The planet was dying.
Not slowly, not the gradual entropy they’d witnessed since landing—this was murder.
Oblivion was a gun pointed at the stars, but they’d spiked it.
“How many?” Inaya asked, her voice barely carrying over the shuttle’s rattling frame.
Lynk checked his scanner. The thermal signatures that had bloomed across every ice field were gone now; the organic network that connected them showed as dead tissue, cooling in the frozen ground. Whatever intelligence had coordinated the swarm, whatever consciousness had stirred in those depths, was now severed from its distributed body.
“All of them. Everything within eight hundred kilometers of the blast site,” he said.
But his scanner showed more. Beyond the immediate kill radius, beyond where fusion fire could reach directly, the chain reaction continued. The planet’s infrastructure was interconnected in one vast organism stretched across Oblivion’s habitable band. Damage to one node propagated through the entire system.
It was like killing a brain by destroying its stem.
Thermal readings flickered and died in cascading waves, spreading outward from ground zero at the speed of failing biology. Egg chambers that might have survived the blast itself went dark as their life support failed. Embryos died in their shells, never waking.
The Griss extinction, interrupted centuries ago, completed itself in minutes.
Lynk felt nothing, then felt something, then couldn’t name what he felt.
Relief? Horror? Both seemed inadequate.
He’d just seen genocide rendered in thermal gradients and scanner data.
Rex had died, buying them time to trigger this.
Geo had been a hero.
Xavia and Issis had held the line.
Chyna’s research had given them the knowledge.
Quinn’s arrogance had given them the necessity.
And Inaya, thankfully, was still with him.
Her breathing had become shallow again as blood continued to seep through makeshift bandages.
They were clear of the blast radius, but the shuttle’s fuel reserves blinked critical warnings. Atmospheric exit remained theoretical.
Below them, Oblivion burned.
The shockwave hit like a fist through the shuttle’s spine.
Warning klaxons died mid-scream as the blast wave slammed into them, pure kinetic force transmitted through atmospheric compression. The shuttle’s nose pitched violently upward, and gravity inverted. Lynk’s harness locked tight against his chest as the world outside the viewport became a spinning blur of ice and stars and burning horizon.
Inaya screamed.
Her harness failed; a torn mounting bolt sheared under g-forces that the aging shuttle frame was never rated to survive. Her body lifted from her seat, weightless for one impossible second, before momentum threw her against the bulkhead.
Lynk’s hand shot out, caught her wrist, and held onto her.
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