Something was terribly wrong. There was no continuity, no sense of awakening or coming to awareness. One moment, Vash was gently drifting off to sleep in the station’s rejuvenation clinic, the next he was awake in a dimly lit and deserted room. He felt a sense of absence too wide and deep to explain, a gap where expanded senses and mentalities should have been. There was nothing around Vash except what he could see, and there wasn’t much of that.

For some reason, the rejuve capsule’s door wouldn’t open. Vash pushed at it weakly with one hand, still garbed in a smock. The transparent plate slid aside slowly and silently. With a supreme effort of will Vash tried to reactivate his expanded mentality, focussing his thoughts down to a fine point, but there was nothing to activate. His personal connection to the Utilitaria had failed like a circuit breaking. The world had lost its guardrails.

Vash dropped down on one knee and stood up, blinking hard. At least the rejuvenation itself was complete – it seemed to have scoured away all of his inserts, along with the broken collagen and aged cells. There was a basic corridor curving up ahead and all the structures were black or grey, so he was probably still on the station. Interface spots were dead or depleted and the room was otherwise empty. He wondered where all the others had gone.

A light above Vash’s head flickered and faded. That one detail, more than the rest, sent a jolt of ice running through his spine – he hadn’t seen such a thing for more than a century. In the world he’d grown into, machinery always worked with unobtrusive perfection. He realized on some level what must have happened; the Utilitaria were absent from the local environment. In Vash’s considerable experience, such a sudden interruption this deep into the heavily scrutinized zones around Earth was without precedent. It was more than unsettling.

Vash started to run; he had the body of a twenty-year-old now, but his muscles were atrophied and physical discomfort was not something he was used to. The floor shuddered. An attack, or a meteoroid collision? Paranoid fantasies of nanobe swarms or massive solar flares swam through his mind.

‘Who’s attacking us? How long until help arrives?’ he demanded. If all else failed the Utilitaria could answer queries directly. The sense of rising panic grew when there was no answer from the ether around him; he squashed it down. Vash hadn’t faced real death in centuries, but he did remember the time before the Utilitaria.

The station shuddered again. He heard the thud of something falling out of a locker but didn’t risk turning. The impulses flaring into his head were telling him not to turn back. There was something outside his understanding going on.

There was a violent shove perpendicular to what he thought of as ‘down’. He staggered as the acceleration built.

Vash heard a quiet sob as he descended the fireman’s pole that led to the ‘escape pod’ bay. Even he was shaken, his hands slipping as he descended into the dimly lit bay and fell to the floor, where four others were waiting.

He recognised them all; friends who’d synchronised their clinic visits with his, as was the custom. Calder was something big in the local demarchy; his silvered skin would usually reflect whatever local identity traits he was cultivating, but it was dulled now, as though he were an android. Eoin was the oldest aside from Vash, dressed in a skinsuit, a grim expression on his face. Elvie was a massmind – two clone bodies that shared a single personality, linked by a high capacity datalink. Both her forms were weeping, shocked at the sudden loss of the Utilitaria. She was only as old as she looked – an artificial thirty, thin and neotinic.

‘Thank eternity you made it,’ Eoin said from inside the helmet, lifting Vash to his feet. ‘They brought you up intact as quickly as possible. You look awful,’ he said.

‘I feel like I’ve been microwaved, but you don’t look much better,’ Vash replied, grinning weakly at his friend and groaning as cramps spread through his legs. ‘Do we know what’s going on?’

The lights flickered and both Elvies shuddered, as if suffering an onset of a seizure.

‘EMP, plus some other nasties. When we woke up everything was just… absent. Most inserts and implants gone, no entopics. Must be some kind of high-level viral attack,’ said Calder, by way of explanation; he was trying to control a shudder, the corners of his mouth twitching with anxiety.

‘They’ve been getting worse for the last hour. She’s not taking it well -’ He pointed to the sobbing forms of Elvie and the fibre-optic cable that snaked between her two skulls. ‘She’s switched to a hardwired cable.’

‘Did they tell you this was the end of the world? That’s what they said to me. Doesn’t seem so melodramatic now,’ Eoin said, already walking toward the capsule. The gravity was dropping and changing direction – someone was despinning the station.

‘Where did it come from?’ said Calder. ‘That’s what I don’t understand. First thing I heard was when the capsule ejected me, next thing I knew the Utilitaria was chattering like crazy, telling me there’s some kind of coordinated attack. That it was going to disappear and never return, that we were on our own.’

‘We’ve got to leave,’ said Eoin, taking charge. ‘The Utilitaria were quite clear about that before… before they dropped out. Did they tell you it was forever as well?’

Vash moved to help the nearest Elvie up. She was as light as a child, body filled with augmentations, all of which were failing. Her cold, grey limbs twitched spasmodically, like a spider in its death throes. The EMP blasts or viral strikes from whatever mysterious danger was out there were affecting her badly, but together with Calder they hauled her forms into the escape pod.

‘How do we work this thing?’ Eoin asked, once they were inside and it became clear there was no automatic launch sequence. The pod had been fabricated in a hurry and was still warm – a reflective hyperdiamond cylinder lined with a few transparencies around the top surface. Vash spotted an antique console – actual switches and throttles – and pushed himself forward, searching around the labelled buttons as he forced himself to concentrate. Calder and Eoin looked on as Vash pressed a big green switch in the centre. A moment later they all felt more than a standard Earth gravity shove them clear of the station; a brief chemical burn.

Vash lost his grip on the console and bumped into the wall beside Eoin, rebounding as the thrust abated into freefall. Flares of light filtered through the transparency, resolving into jagged shapes. The view refused to clear, as if Vash’s mind was trying to reject the reality around it. Then, he heard Elvie scream briefly and understood that he wasn’t hallucinating.

The station they’d all travelled to followed a mid-altitude orbit over the Earth’s equator, in a dense band of orbital structures. Now it looked like so much silvery confetti, the habitats shredding apart in a cascade of collisions. Vash felt the fury it propagated even through vacuum. Brilliant white threads inscribed the space above and below them, pushing forward huge spiny machines. They were spacecraft, and they weren’t any type he recognised.

Vash sensed movement in his peripheral vision and turned sharply, his head swimming. Eoin moved to face him but the other two just stared out of the front window, transfixed by the horror of it all. Something slammed into the station, ripping through the rotating wheel. Another vessel swept below them like a marine predator, orbiting lower and faster. Projectiles spewed from it as it passed, seemingly oblivious to their presence. The slugs traced oddly slow-moving curves as they slashed into debris, cascading secondary explosions.

‘Those are some slow-moving bullets. Might even be ordinary gunfire, not mass-driven,’ said Eoin, and Vash nodded emptily, his mind knocking about randomly inside his skull. ‘I remember from old newsfeeds, and I mean really old. That technology is very primitive. Who are they? Why are they doing this?’

‘Can’t be all that primitive,’ Calder interjected. His voice was dead, yet still controlled. ‘They killed the Utilitaria so totally that we don’t even seem to be fighting back. I can’t even imagine how advanced a technology that implies.’

‘They’re inhuman,’ sniffed Elvie, speaking up for the first time, both bodies chorusing together. ‘Not even those Union fanatics would dare do this. No-one would, not ever.’

A horrible suspicion was growing inside Vash, fantasies of rogue superintelligence, the return of the Utilitaria’s defeated competitors. He wondered why he felt so focussed, like this wasn’t really happening to him. Maybe someone had hacked his expanded mentality, projecting fantasy-memories into it? No; this was real. Yet there was an element of calm and rationality to his thoughts; the fact remained that in the world of the Utilitaria, human beings were not so easily broken. Vash turned in the freefall and saw one of the Elvies was curled up, while the other talked in a dead voice, her childlike face empty.

‘Have you looked down yet?’

They all looked. The Earth was aflame, bright clusters of meteors flaring as they touched atmosphere, splashes of blinding radiance imprinted on the surface as they struck. They were passing over Asia and could see the entire Indian subcontinent, a band of fire imprinted across its northern latitudes.

‘Some of the world’s largest cities are… were down there,’ said Calder in a broken voice. ‘We have to surrender. Whoever it is, wherever they are. We can’t fight this – we can’t afford the time it would take to win, even if we can win. For Eternity’s sake, there must be a hundred million people caught in that one inferno. Give them what they want.’

‘I expect we are surrendering, if there’s anyone out there still capable of doing that,’ said Vash.

‘They did say we were on our own,’ said Eoin. ‘If the Utilitaria are gone, does that mean all the virtuals are gone too? I couldn’t even put an order of mag estimate on how many deaths that implies.’

‘I just don’t understand any of it! Where did they come from?’ cried the sobbing Elvie. ‘How could anyone kill the Utilitaria that fast?’

‘Aliens,’ said Calder, his shaking hand sweeping to encompass a few of the black ships. ‘This is first contact. Don’t ask me how they got here. Maybe someone that far beyond the Utilitaria really can travel faster than light? Those warships used hyperdrives to jump right next to Earth, stabbing us right in our soft underbelly,’ he laughed weakly. ‘I have to say, we never saw that coming.’

‘No,’ sniffed the second Elvie. ‘That’s impossible. Has to be. FTL is time travel.’

‘Who’s we?’ said Vash. He turned away from the bruised Earth and glanced back at Calder.

‘The ExDef,’ Calder said. He raised his arm, palm flat, and a sigil flared briefly on the outstretched skin. It looked like a line drawing of a jagged tooth. ‘Existential Defence. That’s what we called ourselves; not much more than a few paranoid wargamers. Seems a bit silly now, but we did ask the Utilitaria if they had any plans in the event that hostile aliens came knocking.’

‘Oh, I bet you’re loving this,’ said Eoin. Calder didn’t look perturbed. He closed his palm and the sigil vanished. Vash turned back to the devastated Earth; a thin expanding ring of tsunami was just breaking across the Indonesian archipelago.

‘There were contingency plans for this outcome; a massed invasion,’ Calder said. ‘But the Utilitaria assumed if such a thing happened it would be an attack out of interstellar space, giving us months to prepare. We know there can’t be any large energy sources nearby or we would have seen them. Every hot body radiates energy.’

‘Bit late for Fermi arguments now,’ Eoin chimed in again. Calder glared back at him, as an impact flash from somewhere far below briefly illuminated their faces.

‘The only plausible motive to wage war on an interstellar scale is as part of an expansion to acquire resources, Neumman-style. But we could beat that. The plan was for our Neumanns in the asteroid belt and Kuiper to manufacture a defence fleet over a few weeks and counterattack. We’d have the home advantage, all the mass-energy of the solar system to prepare with and Dragons-teeth warseed templates to beat anything.’

‘Things never work out the way you expect,’ said Vash. He grimaced at the thought.

‘And instead, a fleet of eternity-forsaken alien spaceships just appears in low earth orbit and the Utilitaria are gone,’ Eoin replied bitterly. ‘Like a bloody Diabolus ex Machina. There won’t be any revenge fleet if there’s no warseeds, and there won’t be any warseeds if there’s no Utilitaria.’

‘We really ought to have seen them coming,’ Vash said; a part of him still wondering at their surreal calmness. ‘Remember Souvicou’s Starwhisp launch to Tau Ceti, or the expeditions to Sirius and Proxima? Those ships only massed a few hundred tonnes, and you could still spot their exhaust beams with the naked eye weeks after they left the solar system. A ten thousand tonne battleship – there’s no way you could hide it. You can’t sneak between the stars.’

‘That’s what we thought,’ said Calder. ‘Doesn’t seem to be true, does it?’

‘By the same token, we couldn’t hide any rearmament from them,’ Eoin said. Somewhere off in the middle distance, a pinprick flare briefly illuminated a dying habitat. ‘If we looked to be rearming or gathering our forces, they could just keep dropping rocks on the Earth, then flee the same way they arrived. You can’t hide weapons production on that scale.’

‘They really caught us out,’ Caulder said, face sunken. ‘This is checkmate in two moves. Doesn’t matter how many other pieces we have; they’re in all the wrong places.’

‘We are not in a game,’ Vash said, quietly.

He felt it was wrong on some deep level that they weren’t incapacitated by grief, even after witnessing the deaths of a hundred million fellow humans. The shock would reach all of them eventually, if they survived long enough.

None of them knew what to do next; right now, this empty orbital band seemed the safest place to stay. Vash tried the little capsule’s communications, but the combined EMP effects, along with the mysterious absence of Utilitaria, had silenced every spectrum.

Minutes ticked by as they all floated in silence. Vash wondered idly if any counterattack would come. It seemed unlikely, he reflected; the invaders had the Earth, still home to most of humanity, as a hostage.

The lifeboat crossed into Earth’s shadow a few minutes later and the survivors were greeted with another unwelcome surprise – out of direct sunlight, a dense constellation of new stars were visible. They shone in a bright band like a second milky way, roughly following the plane of Earth’s orbit, stretching back across the sky towards a blue glare point Vash didn’t recognise. Below, the Earth glowed a faint orange as firestorms raged.

‘Ships,’ Calder said dumbly. ‘Tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of them.’

‘Do you suppose this is it?’ Elvie said, voice cracking again. ‘The end of everything?’

Vash wanted to snap at her that he didn’t know; that nobody here knew what was going to happen next. That nothing made sense, that the world had broken and the laws of physics themselves bent to deliver an invading armada whose size was beyond estimation.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Even without the Utilitaria, this is a problem the world can solve. They’re terrorising us, not exterminating. We survived without them before, we can do it again. The rest of humanity can carry on without Earth, or the whole solar system.’

In the subsequent silent minutes, Vash fervently wished that he believed a single word of what he’d said. His attempts to operate the pod’s controls proved ineffective, and frequent sweeps up and down the radio bands revealed nothing but static. Around them, the bright pinpricks of kinetic or nuclear weapons cast fleeting shadows, the shimmer of spallation debris adding thousands of new stars. The cascade of collisions would render low Earth orbit lethal for decades to come.

Vash was facing the wrong way at the time the nuclear weapon exploded and that was the only thing that saved him. A flash of light filled his entire perception, consuming everything in heat.

He saw the others open their mouths for a moment, but there was no time for real emotion to register. The pressure hull burst with a sharp bang and then cracks were spreading and air and people were rushing out. Vash was spun, his grip on the handhold strained even as he felt the cold prickle of vacuum, throwing out a hand to one of the Elvies. Vision began to blur as Calder disappeared through the rent, screaming hoarsely as evaporating spittle puffed around his mouth. Vash halted his spin with an arm-twisting wrench, eyes spinning frantically. Eoin also had a handhold and stretched out to grab onto Elvie’s wrist, just above Vash’s outstretched hand. A moment later, her second body hurtled out of the hole and jerked both her and Eoin clear.

Vash’s strength was gone and he tasted blood in his mouth as the air pressure dropped to nothing. He kept his mouth open and let the air escape, remembering ancient vacuum exposure drills.

The hurricane of escaping air subsided and he let his white-knuckled grip relax. Something shrieked, and out of nowhere a thin plastic sheet materialised, cutting the pod in half, excluding the hole and forming an airtight seal; oxygen flooded back in but Vash had already passed out.

Vash woke with a start. He blinked away the tears and shuddered, feeling a deep tearing in his chest. Despite the pain, his lungs still inflated when he took a ragged breath. Calder and Eoin and Elvie, the closest of his friends had disappeared, gone in an eyeblink. He remembered the most potent things about them; Calder’s amusing politicking, Eoin’s gauche fascination with military history, Elvie’s ever-changing body modifications. Their deaths wouldn’t even be recorded, not today, maybe not ever. Who would remember the dead, if no-one was left alive?

Vash realised then that the screaming hadn’t stopped; he wasn’t the only one. Between crackles and hisses, a voice was emanating from the lifeboat’s short-wave radio.

‘There are no more machine minds. You will surrender unconditionally. The world is restrained.’ The message repeated a few times, then fell silent.

Vash could hardly bring himself to care what the voice was shouting about as the escape pod fell towards Earth. Deorbited by the impact or some suicidal machine instinct, he couldn’t tell.

He was entering the Earth’s atmosphere somewhere over the South Atlantic, and if re-entry didn’t get him then the bombardment the Earth was receiving certainly would. He wondered whether anyone else he knew, any of his friends, would survive today. Maybe this was the beginning of the end of the whole human race. Now, at last, he felt the darkness rise in him. This was the end of everything; if not for the world itself, then for the world as he’d known it. The world of the Utilitaria.

Vash clenched his teeth in frustration, needing and yet failing to find some outlet, some resolution. He felt overwhelmed by the sheer injustice of it all, of not knowing how or why any of this had happened, of being so impotent, of dying without ever seeing this to its conclusion. But screaming wouldn’t make any of it better, so he stayed silent and tried to brace himself against the capsule, deploying the acceleration couch and darkening the transparencies. He felt the lifeboat begin to rumble as it scraped the Earth’s mesosphere and looked out of the survival bubble at the hole made by the fragment of debris, now patched over by a black slick of extruded carbon. As the shaking began Vash started to wonder if he might survive after all.