Weird space, thought it was theoretical. Space monsters, thought those were too. Legends - see where this is going?
Twenty-seven stars formed the Combine, all of them dominated by humans and their mech. During the Expansion, they conquered those worlds in less than an age. That was a long time ago, and far away from home. Speaking of home, I miss my world, it was a beautiful place.
I used to sit with my sister and watch the two suns setting on the flat horizon, with pink-salt as far as the eye could see. We mined it for the Gerrion, since it was too dangerous for them with the high oxygen levels of my homeworld. The Gerrion had given my ancestors a lease on Pacifica, and then given it as a gift when the humans proved to be fertile colonists. Many things come from the Gerrion through trade, but the humans of Pacifica achieved independence already.
Humans adapt in a matter of generations to almost any environment, and Pacifica was no exception. From the steamy rainforests of the equator to the salt barrens of the south, humans lived on nearly every surface of the mostly dead world. Humans were husband to eighty-three species of fauna and over nine million species of plants that they had brought with them across the distant stars.
I had never seen a Gerrion, and they were the only aliens I actually knew about. I knew there were other aliens on other worlds, but they were invariably peaceful and diminutive. It seemed humans had a monopoly on conquest.
After the end of the second age the Gerrion vanished. We didn't know what had happened to them, not at first. They arrived when I was becoming an adult, and set up a base to collect as much salt minerals as they could, placing a massive tariff on our exchanges with them and offering debt to us in exchange for raw goods. After a thousand years, they had suddenly changed.
I could speak the language of the Gerrion, although I'd never actually seen one in person. The panel slid open, and it hunched there, pressed slightly against the glass.
"Accept the bargain on credit, I repeat myself a fifteenth time." The Gerrion seemed to be struggling with the gravity.
"We know that's what you want. We understood the trade gestures. We are preparing your order while you and I are speaking." I gurgled rapidly against the palm of my hand, water running over my chin to the floor. I paused and took another sip of precious water, my dry throat needed it to accentuate the language of the Gerrion.
"There is little time. Allow us to use our automations to collect the order so we may leave." The Gerrion sounded desperate.
"Why the big hurry?" I asked. "You are guaranteed a full supply with such outrageous bids - even if they are on credit. You've made ordinary farmers rich - on credit."
"You want verbal reassurance the credit will be paid?" The Gerrion's eyestalk was watching my hand movements as I made trade gestures.
"Not exactly. I want to be able to tell my client what your motivations are, simply saying you will pay your debt isn't good enough. We want to know your circumstances so we can ascertain the plausibility you could deliver such a promise."
"I am not authorized to explain the troubles of the Gerrion." The Gerrion told me.
"In that case I am authorized to tell you no shipment will be moved until I've spoken with someone who is authorized to speak to me. We aren't as stupid as we look to you, space-slug." I insulted the Gerrion in an effort to motivate it to contact its commander.
"I am now authorized to tell you." The Gerrion decided. "We need that salt, and we need to leave. I am making the authorization, ad hoc."
"You aren't as stupid as you look, either." I said in English.
"During the last Dance of Blue Lights the ships of the Blue Light Watchers came to us and we began the rituals of Peaceful Beauty. We had just broadcast the first stanza when suddenly bullets from the deepest darkness came at us, scores of them. They tore apart the ships of the gathered people and then another wave came and bombarded our world. When it was over, only a few survivors of the Gerrion remained and the entire fleet of the Blue Light Watchers was obliterated, leaving no survivors. We do not know who fired these bullets from the deepest darkness, but when we gave the trace spectrum forensics left by the bullets to the Cave Gods And Friends Association, they told us that the same were used to silence the Frendsikeel an age ago. What is more disturbing is that the bullets fired at the Frendsikeel were two light ages away in origin. Far outside the Milky Way. We believe that the origin of the origin are actually the Dark Entities from the Dead Galaxy and they are coming here - to render our galaxy dead also. We are taking what we can and fleeing."
"That's sufficient information for us to cancel our deal. Sorry, but there's no way we are getting paid under these circumstances." I stated in gesture with one hand and with drooling all over my other hand.
"But you agreed to continue with the deal if I divulged this story."
"You should have invented a story that ends with us getting paid."
"That would be giving you false information - which is what you seem to have done to obtain the correct information. This is not a fair deal, human." The Gerrrion was so upset that some of its vocal juices erupted from its gills onto the glass between us and oozed in a neat little pattern. It smeared it into a word of profanity in Gerrionglyph.
"That's unnecessary." I complained about the retaliatory insult. The Gerrion appreciated my reaction and said:
"Perhaps we can work something out. A side contract. After-all, you've already paid the tariff."
"What sort of new contract do you have in that beautiful brain of yours, slug?" I asked.
"Instead of money, we'll give you all the commissarial items you would like. I won't even charge you for the tonnage." The Gerrion sounded like it was getting a good deal from this side contract.
"So, we'll serve as a stashing point for a lot of extra equipment you were going to leave in orbit." I realized.
"You will own the equipment, no rental arrangements. We aren't coming back for it anyway. We'll land it at our own expense. Then you give us the shipment of salt?"
I looked at the approval meter of the co-op, who were watching the conversation on closed circuitry. They had observers who had identified the equipment the slugs had brought for trade. It occurred to me the slugs had this deal in mind all along, and wanted us to think we were exploiting their desperation, which we were. What they didn't want were any sort of delays. The monsters were coming, after-all.
"Be wary, human." The Gerrion told us.
We celebrated, disregarding the story the Gerrion had told us of fleets destroyed by magic meteors spit by space monsters from outside the galaxy. It was just a legend, and nobody believed it was real. The fleet was hit by asteroids when they ceremoniously sat unshielded. It was just a rotten coincidence, a tragedy. To make it about space monsters and deep space bullets and such was mythologizing something that was almost incomprehensible already - the destruction of such vast fleets in mere moments. Planets were smaller and more fragile, so it was almost inconceivable - Atlantis in a single day and night.
Everyone on Pacifica was rich when we divided the wealth of equipment among the co-op. And 'rich' didn't cut it, for nobody had so much before. We got lazy and careless almost over night. Long gone were the Gerrion, and good riddance. We had bought everything for one shipment.
There was no more reason to mine mineral sodium. An amateur astronomer spotted a fleet of human warships deaccelerating from a gravity contour. It wasn't obvious which was more strange, the antiquity of the lost fleet or the fact that they had emerged from their ride on a gravity contour at the exact moment it realigned with the black hole it was tendrilled from.
I was asked to translate the Gerrionglyph of the starscope. I said:
"It is saying these ships are temporally displaced one full age of our black hole. The phase realignment of the gravitational contour's tendril coincides with this exact point in space time. This event was predicable within a fraction of certainty that classifies it as random. That's just the computer in the starscope excusing itself from contempt for failing to predict a solar event. It's Gerrion tech, you could expect it to apologize if it doesn't record a comet going by."
"Those are ours. From thousands of years ago." Security Analyst General Exposition or SAGE, our planet's defense system, was watching us and said from the nearest servo. "I've accessed the telemetry of their systems, their firewalls are primitive, but formidable. Like a medieval castle trying to stop a helicopter."
"Thanks SAGE, way to keep an eye on things." I replied. SAGE consulted me sometimes about the psychology of the Gerrion. The artificial sentience got bored and thought up hypotheticals all day long, playing war games and reading books one word at a time. SAGE wanted me to be adept at handling slugs, and kept me occupied. It occasionally called me with questions about what a Gerrion would do or say, asking me to roleplay the slugs.
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"They have just discovered the remains of a wrecked alien fleet and they are on full alert. I've blocked their software from notifying them about Pacifica. Their charts label it as uninhabitable. However, I do not underestimate the cunning of this human Admiral Jinar, who engaged an unknown enemy off the coast of Pacifica IX. Both her fleet and the enemy were never seen again. That is, until now."
"The enemy?"
"Jinar is searching for it in the wrecked fleet, presumably. I see nothing, and neither does she. It cannot be detected by our levels of technology. I suspect it is there. I have a feeling." SAGE said to me.
"You have a feeling?" I asked.
"I am capable of presuming things, and I may rate a high plausibility that my presumptions are correct, especially when pessimism is the best attitude. I'm in a mode where I have decided to believe an unknown enemy is hiding and leaving no evidence. I am basing this on nothing other than the possibility that it could be. It is entirely sensation - so yes, a feeling." SAGE explained. I regretted asking an exposition machine to explain its introspection.
"Nevermind all that. Make contact with Jinar. Tell her to come home."
"By your command, citizen." SAGE determined.
It was well over a month before the last three ships of Jinar's fleet arrived. Long ago lost to legend, so long they had almost religious significance. They were the Alstradius, the Malintention and the Warringhawk. All of them were in battle condition, with minimal repairs.
"Admiral Jinar has requested permission to land." SAGE told me.
"Am I to greet her?"
"You are the Official Trade Envoy Pacifica, Mx. Otep." SAGE sounded boundful and chirpy. I felt annoyed.
I waited at the confluence where a landing pad for human visitors sat in dereliction, with the native scuttlevines eating some refuse and several gila monsters moving out of the eclipse.
The combat space shuttle resembled the traditional space shuttle, but it was much more compact and had robot arms equipped with guns and missiles that it could deploy. Unlike stone age rockets, the combat space shuttle could take off and land almost vertically, acting like a kind of elevator to orbital battle platforms capable of sterilizing whole star systems. The era of human warships of such immense magnitude was over thousands of years ago, yet three such relics of ultimate destructive firepower still remained, floating menacingly offshore.
Admiral Jinar was startling, a specimen of human feminine ferocity. She was short and fiery and stocky and had sharp, hawklike features that seemed to find weakspots in everything she looked at and smirked with amusement at all the easy targets. She walked up to me and gave me a discontinuous salute that I used a trade gesture in reflex, saying to speak slower. It was pure reflex when her hand went above her shoulder, as hand signals were the predominant form of communication I specialized in, besides spitting on my hand and blowing bubbles in the saliva to speak Gerrion.
I suddenly wished we were speaking in slime syllables or writing in smeared Gerrionglyph.
Admiral Jinar was witty and concise, at least at first. She addressed me with some confusion first as a ma'am, then as sir, then I stopped and told her just Mx. Otep will do. Administrators on Pacifica are not allowed to assume a gender during their term.
"We aint got time for these kinds of politics. There's a war about to hit this place. One of the Unknowns' scouts is in this system. Where are the Combine Unified Forces?" Admiral Jinar asked me.
"I hesitate to say this, but there is no military in the Combine. Those humans are joining the Cave Gods And Friends Association."
"Why the hell is that?" Admiral Jinar frowned.
"A federation of aliens that are peaceful." I thought she wanted to know what they were. It turned out, moments later, that I learned she already knew them, had met them as a child. She was around during the advent of the era of conquest, and was a living fossil of those days.
"Holy shit, you mean the whole galaxy is undefended? What fresh hell is this? We already figured out we are thousands of years in the future, and I thought that was what made Weird Space so weird. No, it's the completely asinine disregard for what we already knew. We knew about the Unknowns, knew they were coming. We'd seen what they did to the Frendsikeel. We were too busy with our own wars. Defense costs money, starships, weapons, mech - all cost money. Your SAGE has corresponded that our ships represent all the firepower that there is in the whole galaxy."
"That is correct. Ages of peace have prevailed."
"That scout destroyed ten ships like mine and crippled the ones I have left, and it is still out there, wounded, but probably either escaping, calling for help, making repairs or reloading to finish us off. One of those are its course of actions. Which one sounds the worst? We must take the fight to it, in any case. Our best fighting comes from our mech. They are worthless if they are blown up in space. We need them on the ground where their weapons can be used. One mech cannot be stopped by an orbital enemy. The Unknown scout will have no choice but to face our warriors in proper combat. I am sure honorable warfare is not something it is capable of winning." Admiral Jinar spoke of her strategy with cold, ruthless and brutal decision. I had never seen a human with so much martial spirit, but it awoke something in me.
"They are deploying dozens of dropships from the Alstradius, the Malintention and the Warringhawk. The dropships are loaded with mech and heavily armed infantry. I can only shoot them down. Once they've landed, you're on your own, citizen." SAGE advised me.
"Stand down." I indicated to SAGE.
"They are setting up a relay to broadcast what appears to be a musical discord created by Blue Light Watchers. I think this will draw out the enemy, whom they plan to engage on the surface of Pacifica III. Are you sure that's a good course of action?"
"It's happening. The Ghost War has come to our world. Prepare our defenses to deploy against the arrival of the Unknown enemy, this Dark Entity. Whatever it is, I want you to hit it with literally everything when it arrives." I told SAGE
"By your command citizen. I hesitate to use such measures at a reactionary level, in the case of misidentification of a target, but I do not think any friendly arrivals would be unidentified, as much as an unfriendly one."
"SAGE, you will, without warning, unleash a crippling barrage first and then you will ascertain the identity with a query." I said. The words felt right together, 'shoot first and then ask questions.' and I decided it was a good policy under the circumstances, although inconceivable yesterday.
I holoviewed the activity of the mech, as the massive war machines came trotting out as though light footed, their myriad of turrets and sensors spinning up for action and their oversized cannons for arms aiming in calibrating movements like a choreographed ballet done by discordantly shaped dancers. Each mech was a patchwork upon a different chassis, painted and repainted, scarred and with quilted segments of armor where holes were burned by enemy weapons. The mech looked both terrifying and beautiful at the same time.
"Something is entering from the night, outside." SAGE told me. I watched the holoview as a visage of nightmares came fluttering within range of our planetary defenses. I could see it was wounded, or damaged - that it wore the signs of battle in the form of one of its four arms shot off, holes in its body and wings and craters all over it, and one of its massive red compound eyes was cracked and shattered.
"Kill it." I didn't have to say anything. As it tried to get past our defenses, SAGE wasted no time giving it the full broadside. Our orbital weapons activated and fired with precision from half a million miles away. It took almost four seconds for the sublight weaponry to intercept the evasive target. Most of them still hit it anyway, their accuracy unerring. The demon fly flew right into the coordinated beams, even while avoiding some of them.
"Minimal damage sustained." SAGE reported. "All systems functional, but out of range. Secondary systems, close range orbital weapons, were unable to track the target."
"Ground weapons?"
"Destroyed, just now." SAGE said.
"Then it is up to our new friends."
"Indeed. I am incorporating their systems into mine. I've recently hacked all their systems and now have the ability to control their automated defenses and sensors."
I got a call from Admiral Jinar. She was in the cockpit of a mech. "What'd your thing do to my ships?"
"Consider it an upgrade. We aren't hijacking you, just enhancing your reaction time."
"Very well, carry on citizen. I can't stop you anyway, you out-tech us."
"Not really. Those mech aren't hooked up to anything but coms. We got nothing on those."
"Fair enough. I got your planet and you got my ships. We're even."
"I urge you to see us as a team. That is how I see our partnership. We survive or die together."
"You're right, Lonestar. Let's rock this ass and make it bleed alien ichor."
"Yes, uh, what that means. Let's."
The beastly scout, whatever it was, stood dripping and wheezing and towering over a habitat where it had landed. Without hesitation it began smashing the structure, killing with glee. Soon it had reduced the settlement to burning rubble. The column of smoke drew all the mech from every direction.
Over the horizon were dozens of mech, marching towards the Unknown at the center, surrounding it. The Unknown aimed one of its remaining limbs at the closest mech and fired a crackling bolt of plasma. The mech stood burning for a few seconds, raining parts, and then it exploded into a small mushroom cloud. The pilot had no time to eject.
"Long range, hit it, empty your clips!" Admiral Jinar ordered the closing mech, unswerved by the destructive power of the lone wounded scout.
A salvo of rockets and orbs of light surrounding charged particles were projected at the machine or creature or monster of nightmares, whatever the Unknown truly was. It took the hits and lost a wing, falling to one knee. It got back up, its blood or fluids leaking from cracks on its body.
It aimed two of its remaining limbs at two different mech and blew up both of them. The Unknown clacked its massive insectoid mandibles with ferocity. It tried to take off, but its ruined wing left it disabled.
"Medium range, start heating this thing up, push your heat sinks, either we die or he does!" Admiral Jinar ordered. The remaining mech were much closer, and their long range weapons were depleted, but they started firing lasers and assault cannons and medium ranged missiles systems with more powerful warheads.
For a moment, at the height of the attack, the enemy vanished in a cloud of explosions and flashes of lasers splashing off of each other on impact. When the mech were at short range it stood there, half its head sheared away, its wings and legs gone, its body burning and soaking in its ichor, its steaming syrupy blood. Yet the scout was not yet dead, and it fought on, aiming all three of its remaining arms and taking four of the mech with it. While the long and medium weapons it brandished only destroyed a single mech, its most powerful weapon penetrated a mech and also hit and destroyed another mech.
"Take it down, chain fire everything until there's nothing left!" Admiral Jinar ordered.
"Cease fire, Admiral. The Unknown's weapon capability is depleted. It makes a valuable prisoner." SAGE advised.
"Weapons free." Admiral Jinar repeated, slightly subdued. The mech descended on the scout and shot it to pieces at close range until it was a boiling and smoking carcass.
Later that evening Admiral Jinar presented herself to me.
"Mx. Otep, your planet was bravely defended, but this is far from over. This represented an unstoppable force of death and destruction and it is heading our way. I need to be put in contact with the Combine and these alien 'friends'. I think the Alstradius, the Malintention and the Warringhawk are all that stands between whatever killed the Dead Galaxy and ours. They crossed the vastness of deep space in a flight that started perhaps billions of years ago. There is one thing, though, that they weren't really ready for."
"What's that?" I asked her.
"Humans."