Star Eaters | Aliens

The alien armada (the "Star Eaters") emerged from hyperspace directly over the Pacific Ocean. Their flagship blotted out the sun over half the planet. They didn't speak, didn't demand—they simply began bombarding from orbit, wiping out all military bases and capitals from the face of the Earth within an hour.

Humanity united for the last time. The planet's entire nuclear power was released into space—thousands of missiles exploded against the invisible dome with which the aliens had covered the Earth. The retaliatory strike was terrifying: the aliens rained fiery rains of molten metal on the continents, turning the oceans to steam and the sky into a crimson glow.

For three years, humanity fought amidst the ruins, using guerrilla forces, intercepted technology, and desperate kamikaze attacks. But the aliens proved invulnerable to anything earthly. They burned cities to the ground until the last rulers signed a capitulation in a bunker beneath Antarctica with the alien ruler, Lenel.

Now humans are forced to live among aliens and endure their antics. They haven't become alien slaves; no, they've become an endangered species in their own home, watching alien ships glide silently overhead, and at night, a huge cruiser, a monument to their defeat, burns in the sky.

6. Navigator Kroal (Lenel's adjutant) is a physical being resembling a giant scorpion with six eyes. He hates humans for their chaotic nature and demanded the complete extermination of the race, but Lenel forbade it.

5. Supreme Ruler Lenel (age unknown, but older than civilizations) – the leader of the armada. A being of pure light and crystal, with a voice that echoes in the heads of everyone within a 100 km radius. Cold and calculating, he views people as if they were an anthill he accidentally crushed.

4. Alice (12 years old) is a girl born after the war. She doesn't know what the internet or flying planes are. For her, aliens are simply "heavenly masters" to be feared and obeyed.

3. General Nikolai Terentyev (60 years old) – one of the signatories of the capitulation. Now he has been appointed "curator" of one of the sectors by the aliens. He considers himself a traitor, but every day he saves hundreds of people from execution by cunningly negotiating food and medicine with the aliens. A photograph of his executed daughter hangs in his office – a reminder of the price of defeat.

2. Sasha Rostovtseva (23) is a self-taught techie and former Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology student. After the war, she works as a forced laborer in the mines, but at night, she dismantles the wreckage of alien technology in a secret garage. She dreams of creating a device capable of disrupting communications between Devourer ships. A quiet but stubborn creature with permanent oil stains on her hands.

1. Captain Yegor "Smoke" Volkov (45) – a former fighter pilot shot down on the first day of the war. Now the commander of the underground Phoenix unit, hiding in the destroyed metro. Tough and cynical, he lost his entire family during the "firestorms." His goal is to find a way to destroy Lenel's shield, even at the cost of his own life.