You a Sword of the Stars Zul player? Their Harbringer ships do exactly this. Sow confusion and destruction to a planet's populace before the rest show up.

Of course this story did not sit well with me, but still a classic retelling of Babel.

Actually, I've never heard of that game...

It wasn't until afterward that I realized that I could have placed the line, "Be not afraid" at the beginning to give it that biblical sensibility...

First thing I thought of when I saw the image was the barques exploding. The rest just wrote itself.

It is a pretty fun 4xspace game. The Zul are the more unique alien of the series (the others are all standard anthropomorphic X). Physic, extremely violent with extreme sexual dimorphism, aka females are feral and males are not, religious, have shitty technology tree and economy sort of, but capture slaves to boost it, have a hungry problem and thus eat their planets dry and their slaves. Can salvage technology from fleets they kill. but yeah they have ships called harbingers that do as they do in this story shouting confusing cryptic religious nonsense.

That line would have been good.

An image like that turning into the story is a great place for a muse.

very nicely done FC...

V.

Nice work and maybe a misunderstanding of the message...

Ooooffff that was rather dark but very well done! It reminded me a little of Oblivion, one of Tom Cruise's less popular sci-fi movies.