We couldn't stop them
“What are you doing?!” The high admiral screeched at me. “Stop them!”
I shook my tentacled head as the huge torpedoes tipped with thermonuclear death sped towards the pride of the Galacc navy. My head subtly bowed as I thought back on the war and how it all had started.
We had ruled the tri-galactic cluster for eons beyond memory. Assured in our dominance by the spoils of ten-thousand years of warfare. Or at least what we called war. How little we knew of the horrors a true war would bring.
It had started simply, as all mistakes do. A new species appeared on our radar, they were young. Primitive in comparison and terribly naive. Their first ship wasn’t even armed. Their ambassador hadn’t even seen their own death coming as we cored their puny ship from a million miles away with one of our megalaser batteries.
We thought the fight would be easy, ‘Over in seconds.’ as our overconfident leadership caste used to joke. They weren't joking now, it was hard to laugh when you were sucking vacuum in the deep dark of space.
It started fast, a dozen Swarmi destructor class battleships were sent towards the puny underdeveloped system these so-called humans called dirt. They even called their homeworld the most useless name. Well, when the ships didn’t return we sent twenty more.
It took ten more years for us to figure out what had happened as the leadership caste assumed they had won and put the incident out of mind as they focused back on bigger and seemingly more important threats.
Well, the humans hadn’t forgotten. Nor had they forgiven the ones who torched their cities and flattened their mountains from orbit. They had beaten off the first wave by a bare margin, the second wave had been crushed before it even reached the human’s homeworld. Again, we would have known this if we had ever even bothered to take the threat seriously. But then it was too late.
The first we knew of humanity’s return was when an entire sector of Swarmi controlled space went silent. Not incrementally, but all at once in a massive coordinated attack spanning ten thousand light years. Still we didn’t take this threat seriously. ‘Ten thousand lightyears is nothing to the great Galacc!’ Our leadership caste has droned, and to my shame the high admirals agreed.
Oh what I would give to have been in charge, I could have stopped the tide, stemmed the flow. But that’s ancient history now. For ten additional years there was nothing more from the humans. It was as if they had claimed the Swarmi territory and then gone to sleep. We hadn’t cared, the Swarmi were not even allowed to speak in council meetings such was their unimportance to our leaders. Oh what a mistake that was.
All at once hell was unleashed, a wave of human ships of titanic scale and frightening potency. They smashed through our carefully curated defenses and into our homelands, a thousand worlds fell in the span of a single day, then a thousand more the next. They didn’t take prisoners nor did they ask for leniency, a tidal wave of fire they seemed to be.
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The leadership took the fight right back to them then, still overconfident in our technological superiority. ‘We have ten thousand years of warfare experience.
I still remember what my grand admiral had told me at the beginning. ‘They have only a few decades. We will grind them into the dust they seem to love so much.’
I would laugh bitterly now, if only I had the time. There is no time left, only remembrance.
The humans onslaught was relentless. It was as if we were not fighting living beings, but gods of bone and steel and fury. Their ships were not indestructible. Our powerful megalasers tore great bleeding gashes out of them, our hypervelocity guns smashed terrible craters in their frames, our hyper missiles tore great holes in their flanks. But still they came. Bleeding, leaking bodies and atmosphere, trails of glowing debris strewn in their wake. Then they got close enough to return fire.
Flashes, blinding flashes smote us down in a nuclear storm with the fury of a renegade star. One by one the greatest battleships of the Galacc navy were brought down by behemoths that dwarfed our greatest constructs. The tide of iron drowning our fleets in blood and chaos.
We fled, I am ashamed to admit it but to call it a retreat is to do it a grave injustice. We fled like cowards, fearful for our lives as the seemingly unstoppable hordes of humanity chased us across the tri galactic territory for a hundred years.
We fought, and even won sometimes. But the more we fought, the madder the humans got. Our leadership caste began to try communication, but all their pleas for peace fell on deaf ears. The only response they ever received was the same, a hate filled response spat from a thousand different tongues in a dozen or more separate languages. We realised the true horror as some of these languages we recognised as previous vassal civilizations.
“We offer no mercy to slavers and murderers. You will burn.” Was all the human’s ever said.
It was then that the leadership caste began to realise their true folly. So blinded had they been by their own superiority they couldn't imagine another race with more tenacity and drive then ourselves. But in our ten thousand years of war we failed to realise the truth. That while we may have adopted our warlike ways, humanity was molded by war. The constant fight for survival had crafted them into nature's more efficient killers over hundreds of thousands of years.
In reality we may understand war, but humans lived it, breathed it in and made it a part of their very being. They had become such efficient killers that they had lost their need for it, gained compassion and cultivated kindness, their murdering instincts locked deep inside their psyche.
And we had given them the key to unlocking their true potential. The more we tried to fight, the better they seemed to adapt to our strategies. We lost a hundred thousand worlds in the fist few years. Ten times that in the years following. Soon they had pushed us out of their home galaxy entirely and taken the fight to our home galaxy across the deep intergalactic void.
It was now as I stood on the bridge, the high admiral foaming at the mouth in fury and rage at my lack of response. I straightened my back and turned to face him, drawing my service pistol and pointing at his head.
“I am doing the only thing that has ever felt right to me these last few years.” I pulled the trigger, the other members of the bridge crew gasped and chittered in shock as the headless body of the high admiral slumped from the control throne and fell to the floor. I threw the gun aside as I turned once more to look death straight in the face, the human weapons nearly upon us.
I chuckled dryly as I finally answered the high admiral’s question. “Stop them? We couldn't even slow them down…”
The pride of the Galacc navy and the last real threat to the new Tri–galaxy Alliance vanished in an expanding wave of fire and ionized particles. The last of the Galacc leadership caste destroyed by one of their very own in a last great act of defiance.
End of Story