Endings (A Sleeping Gods Novel Book 3) by Ralph Kern

Author:Ralph Kern [Kern, Ralph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2025-02-26T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 27

“Redirecting LAT toward Earth,” Tasker announced, resignation bleeding into her tone.

It was obvious Earth would be infested, like a rotting carcass swarming with maggots, but we needed to see it, needed confirmation for our own sanity—or what was left of it.

Our trajectory was a straight line, slicing through the system at relativistic speed. Not even Jupiter, a planet with enough gravity to shape entire moons, could nudge us off course. We were an unstoppable bullet, tearing in-system at a pace so close, it might as well have been light speed.

The display shifted, the software struggling to process the raw data before rendering Earth into something coherent. I didn’t want to look. I forced myself anyway.

When Cerise had first told us about Earth’s fate, it had felt like a story—some dark sci-fi holo about an alien apocalypse. Something detached and unreal. Back then, I could pretend. Now, as the planet, or what was left of it, resolved on-screen, there was no insulation. No barrier. The truth hit me like a blow to the chest.

Earth was dead.

The vibrant blue-and-green marble I remembered—the one I’d grown up on—was gone. What remained was a little more than a cloud of rubble made of scarred, gray rocks hanging lifeless in the void. Everything I knew—the oceans, the forests, everything—had been extinguished. I stared at the debris field, now riddled with the same blight that infested the Jupiter system.

The Watcher motherships squatted amid the debris, silent and ominous. Some hung motionless in the darkness, while others had latched onto the constituent parts of our old world, chewing through them like they were a tasty morsel.

The bastards had strip-mined Earth. They’d consumed its bones and marrow, leaving nothing behind but a cloud of rock. Earth had been plundered far more brutally than Io, or Callisto, or even Mars. I tried to imagine what it must have been like—if anyone, anyone had been alive to see it. Maybe Sahota had made it, defiant to the bitter end. Frankly, I wouldn’t have wanted to live that long. I hoped—prayed—he’d taken some of the monsters with him, that someone had given them hell before the last light went out.

A sickening weight rose in my chest, a nausea that started deep in my gut and clawed its way up. It wasn’t just despair—it was grief. The raw, bottomless kind. My world, my childhood, my home, all the places I’d loved, the streets I’d walked, the trees, the rivers, the sky—everything that had once been—was gone. The cradle of life itself, the only thing the vast majority of humans who’d ever lived had known, was sterilized like it was nothing.

The only evidence humanity had ever existed—had ever dreamed, loved, fought, and died—was gone.

“God…” I whispered, barely hearing my own voice.

The LAT zoomed in, centering on one of the motherships. The grotesque leviathan hung there like a malignant tumor against the void, its massive mandibles working rocks into its mouth. And then—

The glow from within intensified.

That same sickly green light spilled from

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