The Great Terror
1933-1943
In 1933, the residents of an outlying region of the Philippine Islands witnessed for the first time a strange, invasive ecosystem. It grew from the earth in tall, elegant stalks and branches, their fingers splitting and knotting together like undersea coral. Shades of vibrant blue and violet spread across the growths, sometimes glowing with an iridescent amber. Occasionally, bulbous lobes and still stranger shapes swelled outward from these colonies. Some were covered in porous openings that pursed like lips, or cloaked in wispy filaments that shivered and swayed against the wind. Wherever the “coral” grew thickest, sheets of mist seeped from coalescing masses that had overtaken the native soil, concealing whatever lay deeper within.
While on its boundaries, every living thing, born of planet Earth, began to die.
The first to enter what was called the “outgrowth” simply vanished in the heavy fog, their lifelines going taut and then slacking, the ends severed. Entire teams of American researchers, alerted to its presence and even armoured in equipment meant for deep-sea diving, made it only a few hundred meters inside before they too were forced back or disappeared. No effort found success for very long.
There were living things within the outgrowth. Some crawled like insects, others slithered like reptiles, a few scuttled in the twisted fashion of crabs or lobsters. But beyond these slight resemblances, the outgrowth’s depths teemed with other things beyond comparison, countless distorted forms, clawing, grasping, hooking, tearing horrors that hunted in the mist and struck at whatever moved. They mostly confined themselves to the mists. Mostly. But every day they grew bolder, striking further into the surrounding areas while the boundaries of the outgrowth swelled outward, sometimes imperceptibly, but always slightly more than they had the day before.
Scientists and researchers of the era struggled to define what was happening, disputing the outgrowth’s nature and giving rise in the general public to fearful speculations of plague, poison, or divine punishment. By 1935, entire cities in the Philippines had been evacuated, and new “outgrowths” had been reported all across the world, spreading and flourishing wherever the air was thick with heat and moisture. Some were nothing but thin strips of invasive life, easily expunged from the Earth. The largest were vast tendrils spanning miles, too massive an expanse for anything to cross, and which no chemical, bomb, or fire seemed able to contain.
The first communities to be overtaken, and the horrors inflicted upon them, finally drew the direct attention of the great powers, until then consumed by their nascent ideological rivalry. Possessing colonies, spheres of influence, or imperial ambitions, each was drawn into the crisis in its own manner. But as the danger of the outgrowths became undeniable, rival efforts emerged: some driven by a genuine desire to save lives, others by the colder calculations of realpolitik. Though motives differed, slowly but surely, a global evacuation effort began to form.
Throughout 1938, the escalating mass migrations became an all-encompassing crisis, entire nations straining under the weight of what was now called the Great Terror. The spread of the outgrowths had accelerated, expanding well beyond their original borders, cutting off avenues of escape, and enveloping whole regions within a terrifying, hostile environment. Signals of every kind struggled to pierce the boundaries of the outgrowths, and even aircraft and vehicles often faltered in their proximity. Everywhere it spread, reconnaissance reported moving shapes in the mist and, at times, pillars of light, vast beams rising into the sky, so brilliant they seared the eyes like the sun.
As the tendrils grew, tens of millions raced for a growing list of “protected ports”. Fortified airstrips or harbors where the evacuation effort was ongoing. Thousands of ships and aircraft from participant nations sustained the effort through every minute of every hour. Day and night, unthinkable partnerships sustained the effort, Axis planes flew from Allied airfields, Japanese ships docked in Australian harbors.
Yet more often than not, the destination of these scattered peoples represented a new type of horror only marginally better than the one they had sought to escape. On every continent, massive refugee and labor camps were forming, titanic in scale, yet still overwhelmed with the oncoming tide of raw humanity. At the same time, citizens of many nations began to resent the influx of foreigners as the strain of sustaining their growing population began to manifest.
As city after city was enveloped by the spreading tendrils of the outgrowths the collapse of the global order began. Nations collapsed into civil war or simply dissolved. Protected ports based in these regions were overwhelmed, ransacked by desperate masses who were fired upon by fleeing ships. Shortages and rationing escalated tensions of every nature, exploited by governments and populist movements to accelerate their own agendas, until in 1939, the most consequential actions were taken.
The German Reich, emboldened by a series of foreign policy gambles and triumphs initiated a rapid invasion of Poland, followed soon after by a parallel attack from the Soviet Union. With the European democracies consumed by evacuation efforts in their colonial empires, and the United States struggling to contain a massive tendril centered on the Mississippi River, the conquests went unchallenged.
Similar flashpoints erupted across the world, encouraged by the crumbling global order. Fascist regimes overtook many nations of Europe, annexing territory from weaker neighbors and redrawing the continent into new winners and victims. In Asia, the Imperial Japanese Army was given a free hand, its government flooded with western oil, so long as it participated in the global evacuation. What had begun as a noble humanitarian effort now devolved into a self-defeating and cynical system of coercion, with evacuees in both the democracies and autocracies alike reduced to a manpower pool sustaining the collapsing economies of their hosts.
One by one, the “protected ports” established by the international coalition fell to the spread of the outgrowths, transformed into eldritch shapes scarcely resembling what they once had been. Ships and cranes lay covered in living masses, warehouses and buildings pulsed and breathed with fleshy growths before vanishing into the mists. With every loss, the next port was established further back along the path of its advance, drawing ever closer to the planet’s most vital territories.
In 1942, Europe’s quarantine was finally breached in depth and large tendrils of outgrowth spread outward from the Mediterranean basin deep into the continent. The panic and chaos that had erupted elsewhere on the planet was repeated, as national governments faltered under the strain. Martial law, civil wars and coup d’états repeated themselves, as every nation was consumed by the impossible demands of evacuation yet presented with nowhere left to go.
Across the great plains of the United States and Canada, the interior of the Soviet Union, and vast tracts of Africa, China, and Australia, sprawling refugee and labor camps, larger than some cities, had grown out of the effort. They were equal sanctuaries and prisons, overflowing with fearful millions left without hope or agency. As the most powerful surviving governments debated whether they could sustain such immense burdens, conditions deteriorated, and countless masses were rendered too weak to work.
By the start of 1943, in the halls of power of many nations, discussions of “doomsday colonies,” until then considered only a last resort, began in earnest. They coincided with intelligence reports from what had become the world’s longest and most dangerous border, a new frontline dividing Earth’s native ecosystem from something that could only be considered alien. Everywhere the details were the same: hundreds of shining lights sent great beams into the sky, pulsing in rhythms of escalating complexity, sometimes so bright that they turned the dark of night to day.
The history of the Orion Arm will continue in Part 2: The First Scinfaxi War.
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