The shuttle bug happily floated through space in a high orbit around the Freekegg homeworld.

It felt the signals from the navigation satellites, and its exterior marker lights blinked cheerfully. It was pretty much exactly where it wanted to be.

It cocked one of its bulbous eyes, focusing its powerful long-range vision on the planet’s surface below, looking for one of its favorite landmarks, The Great Ancestor, a mountain covered with the corpse of one of the great old ones.

Back in the day, huge signal ancestors like it communicated across vast distances using the planet’s natural atmospheric currents. That method had been obsolete for hundreds of thousands of years, perhaps millions. Now, the Same used electromagnetic communications using satellites or even by bouncing signals off the planet’s atmosphere.

Even the ancestors, notorious for their hidebound nature, agreed that this was an improvement. They weren’t so sure about gravitic communications, though. They claimed that it made them itch, which was quite impossible, but you know ancestors.

It didn’t really matter. Electromagnetic communications worked just fine. The bug just thought gravitic technology was nifty and wanted an excuse to have some.

The bug took a moment to ponder all of this. Space must have been very quiet and lonely back then. It loved all the noise and static coming from home, especially the music and entertainment channels. VxxLuuG and Veen in the morning were always a delight. They were so funny, and they played good music. It just loved all the fanciful characters that graced that radio show. They never failed to delight. It especially liked the deranged shuttle bug. Then again, it would.

The Great Ancestor swung into view. Hmm. Despite the satellites claiming otherwise, it seemed to be slightly off course. It wasn’t enough to really matter, but it was an excuse to throw some flame. It liked throwing flame.

Using its small spicule jets, it rotated slightly and then fired its main thrusters for roughly a second.

There. Now everything was perfect.

It took a moment to send a brief message to the surface.

This is BugKCA0A23407. The navigation beacons are a little bit off. I am submitting my observations for your review.

A few moments later, it received a reply.

This is Navigation Control. Of course, of course, YOU would notice. Thanks for the incredibly minor correction. We apologize for the infinitesimal inconvenience. :D

This is BugKCA0A23407. You SHOULD be sorry! :p

This is Navigation Control. We’ve tweaked the timing. How are things now?

This is BugKCA0A23407. That’s perfect! Thx! :*

This is Navigation Control. Hey, are you the one carrying those weird xenos?

This is BugKCA0A23407. You mean those odorless abominations? Yes! They seem nice. One of them even removed their respirator just to see if it was as bad as GuruG claimed.

This is Navigation Control. And how did that work out for them?

This is BugKCA0A23407. About how you would expect. XD Did you know their gut juice is REALLY acidic? The abomination just sprayed my tender little chamber with HCL. LOL

This is BugKCA0A23216. Really? That is so cool!

This is BugKCA0A23407. You aren’t the one with alien gut juice nibbling at your colon!

This is BugKCA0A23216. LOL! Is it bad?

This BugKCA0A23407. Nah. It just tickles a little. It was nice to get a decent whiff out of one. They gas so little it’s like I’m transporting corpses.

This is Navigation Control. Oh no! It’s an Alien Zombie Invasion! Alert the ancestors! XD

This is BugKCA0A23216. So, the zombie dumped its guts? The static is that they are xenophages. Any sameflesh in there? LOL

This is BugKCA0A23407. Worse. :D There was something that looked a LOT like parts of little bug babies, antennae and all.

This is BugKCA0A23216. Coooooool! Do they have ships like us?

This is BugKCA0A23407. I don’t think so. I think we are too advanced for them. They don’t even have rockets.

This is Navigation Control. No rockets? How the hell do they travel?

This is BugKCA0A23407. They use rock thrusters for everything.

This is BugKCA0A23216. What? That’s just stupid.

This is BugKCA0A23407. Well, they ARE others, after all. Have you seen their ships? None of them make any sense at all. At least these others are cool. Ooo! The one who just spewed is talking about their history!

This is Navigation Control. Neat! Put that on blast!

This is BugKCA0A23407. Will do!

This is BugKCA0A23216. Nice! I’ll set up a relay!

***

“It isn’t bad at all!” Grace exclaimed cheerfully as she hurriedly wiped her face with her stained tunic before quickly putting her respirator back on. “Try it!”

Both Grace and GuruG looked at Alan expectantly.

“Unless you want to admit that I am tougher…” Grace said nonchalantly.

“Fine,” Alan replied grimly and removed his respirator, and inhaled.

Gagging, coughing, and spluttering, Alan replaced his respirator.

“If you will note,” he said cooly, “I didn’t toss my cookies.”

“That proves nothing,” Grace said as she crossed her arms. “I just like puking, that’s all.”

“Sure, you do,” Alan smirked.

“Want to take the respirators off again?”

“Do you?”

Grace smiled wickedly and reached for her respirator.

Smirking, Alan did the same.

“I would prefer to deliver you both alive and conscious,” GuruG said. “I also want to hear about your history, something I likely will not be able to do if you persist in your delightful foolishness.”

“Oh, yeah,” Grace said, “I was about to do that, wasn’t I?”

She took a deep and mercifully filtered breath.

“Alright,” she said, “We originally come from a system named Sol. We never got contacted by the greater galaxy, mainly because of our location. We were too close to the Empire for anyone to come sniffing and too remote and uninteresting for the Empire. They have too many habitable worlds as it is.”

“Empire?” GuruG asked, “Which one?”

“The Juon Empire?” Grace replied. “You are familiar with them, right?”

“Only what we get from the othernet. They sound like hole nibbles.”

“They’re okay,” Alan replied, “A lot of humans are subjects of theirs. They have a pretty good deal, actually.”

“Yeah,” Grace said, “That’s where we should have gone.”

“Your gift of hindsight is truly remarkable,” Alan snarked, “Too bad you were not nearly so insistent when we stole one of my uncle’s ships.”

“You stole a starship?” GuruG laughed.

“Just a little one,” Grace replied.

“By the dusty old bones,” GuruG chortled, “Most limit their piracy to data. I see there are no half-measures among your kind.”

“All sins are equal in the eyes of the Lord,” Alan smirked, “Therefore, there is no difference between saying ‘goddammit’ and piracy…”

“…or murder,” Grace added cheerfully. “Besides, we worship…”

“What?!?” GuruG spluttered, “You guys murder each other?”

“We only do it occasionally,” Grace shrugged. “And only when they have it coming…”

“Or get in the way of our interests,” Alan added, “Or just annoys the wrong person… Like my beautiful wife, for example.”

“Oh, like you are any better,” Grace snerked. “I wasn’t the one who was ‘made’ at ten.”

“I never said that I was, dear.”

“Um…” GuruG said, not laughing this time, “Our definition of murder is when one kills one of the Same. It’s never done… well… almost never, only when something is very, very wrong with someone. Do… Do humans actually kill each other?”

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“All the fucking time,” Grace replied. “In fact, we kill more of our species than anyone else ever has. In the Sol Wars alone…”

“It’s a rather complex issue,” Alan said, cutting Grace off with a sharp look. “We are others, not the same, and do not share the same connection your species do. Instead, we form organizations of individuals, either bound by a common genetic line, a family, or by location, what we refer to as nationality, or by a common interest or goal, such as the respective ‘businesses’ from which Grace and I come. To us, our ‘same’ is members of that subgroup and that subgroup alone. Other groups of humans can be treated as ‘others’ by even our own species. You will find this common among ‘other’ species.”

“And in our defense,” Grace said, “We’ve killed a lot more xenos than we have our own species.”

“Well,” GuruG said, “that’s… reassuring… I guess…”

“Neither of us is particularly murderous without cause,” Alan replied, “The vast majority of our kills have been in self-defense against those who sought to do the same to us…”

“Or were at least trying to rob us… or rip us off… or…”

“Thank you, Grace,” Alan interjected with another look. “To those who deal with us in peace and good faith, we are peaceful, kind, and honest.”

Snerk

“Goddamit, Grace.”

“Honest?” Grace laughed, “Dude. Give GuruG here at least a little credit.”

“I said to those who deal with us in good faith, Grace. The honest have nothing to worry about, especially when we are representing the Hunzk.”

He looked over at the increasingly dubious GuruG.

“We aren’t idiots,” he said, “and we do not jeopardize good business relationships with such nonsense… Although,” he added with a smile, “the dishonest can…”

“Expect dishonesty in return,” GuruG said, “That is our way as well. Honesty gets honesty. Peace gets peace in return. Foolishness…”

GuruG released a cloud of amusement that neither Alan nor Grace could smell.

“…well… I suspect that we are much alike in what happens next.”

“You catch them on fire?” Grace grinned.

“We tend to use enzymes,” GuruG replied, “But the effect is much the same.”

“Cooooool!”

“Actually, the reaction is quite exothermic.”

“I love you guys!” Grace exclaimed.

“So, you humans do kill each other and with distressing regularity,” GuruG said, “but you don’t kill members of your Same?”

“Correct,” Alan replied, “Doing so is as unacceptable to us as it is to you. It is probably a little more likely to happen, but is it considered one of the worst things we can do. You don’t betray your own…”

“Not if you want to keep breathing,” Grace added.

GuruG dipped his protuberances in a nod and visibly relaxed.

“I apologize for making you discuss such uncomfortable concepts,” he said. “I also wish to clarify that we only consider the killing of the Same as ‘murder’. The killing of others is simply killing, not that we are planning on doing either of you a mischief. As you said, we only kill those who pose a threat… or really anger us, of course,” he added with a laugh.

“It’s not uncomfortable for us,” Grace said, “Trust me. It’s actually a good thing we covered this before I got into my little history lesson. Humans killing humans is a big part of it. We nearly extinctified ourselves.”

“You killed each other to the point that the survival of your species was in question?”

“Yeah,” Grace shrugged, “Shit happens. So, anyway, the Sol Wars…”

She stretched, adjusting her position in the sticky softness of the shuttle bug’s colon.

“Hmm…” she mused, looking upward at the glowing photophores overhead. “Where to start… Before the Yellowstone disaster…”

“That was a supervolcano that wiped out all agriculture for two years as well as causing a massive ecological disaster,” Alan added.

“Yeah, that,” Grace nodded.

“A mere supervolcanic eruption nearly eliminated your species?” GuruG asked. “Could you not simply prevent it or, at the very least, properly prepare? That should have only been an inconvenience at worst.”

“Coulda, woulda, shoulda,” Grace shrugged. “It was a lot more economical to keep most food production on Earth. Space on stations is expensive. Besides, what are the odds, right?”

“But surely you detected the event well in advance,” GuruG said, his protuberances wiggling in shocked confusion.

“Yeah,” Grace snickered, “About that. The powers that be suppressed the information and allowed the vast majority of us to be caught completely off guard. Oh, they prepared, but they left everyone else to starve.”

“Why?!?”

“They were assholes.”

“Again,” Alan said, “it was a bit more complicated than them just being assholes. Look at it from their point of view. They believed, and quite rightly so, that there was no way for the entire populace to prepare. There was quite simply not enough to go around. They believed, correctly, I might add, that their civilization was at an end. The only thing that information would have brought was panic and anarchy, preventing anyone from being prepared. They made the quite reasonable decision to gather a genetically viable population and the means to sustain them as well as securing key technology and supplies that were intended to rebuild civilization, and the human race, once the ash settled.”

He looked at GuruG.

“Your history is a long one,” he said, “have your people never encountered such a disaster, one that caused a massive depopulation event? We call these ‘bottlenecks’.”

“Several,” GuruG said. “In each case, what little resources that remained were carefully managed in order to ensure the survival of the Same with as few losses as possible.”

“Mmm, Hmm,” Grace said with a raised eyebrow, “And those ‘losses’? They were okay with it?”

“Why wouldn’t they be?” GuruG replied, mystified, “The survival of the Same as a whole was at stake. Their sacrifices were for the most noble, most honorable, of causes, the survival of the Same. Each time, there were more volunteers than there was a need for sacrifices.”

GuruG emitted a little spurt of ironic dark mirth.

“Of course, the fact their names were entered in the skeins of honor, their place among the most honored of the ancestors assured, and their spores given precedence over all others had absolutely nothing to do with it. Since we are all part of the Same, such ambition is unknown to us,” he snickered.

“Well, we don’t have ancestors and no ‘spores’ after ‘death’,” Grace smirked, “For us, dead is dead, and the dead quite often go unremembered.”

“Unverifiable metaphysics notwithstanding,” Alan said, “You just fade to black, and that’s it.”

“Well, that’s just downright unpleasant,” GuruG replied with another spurt of black humor.

“Right?” Grace laughed, “And our people were supposed to be the first of those ‘noble sacrifices’.”

“Those of us living in space, except for Jupiter, were fucked,” Alan added, “And by ‘fucked’, I mean doomed, yet another definition of that wonderfully versatile word.”

“Earth turned its back on us,” Grace smirked, “Mars did the same, even though a lot of us were Martian citizens. Luna? They only had enough for themselves, or so they thought, poor bastards. They retreated deep under the surface, sealing themselves in what was eventually called the Belly of the Shark. There, factions fought and died in the darkness over what turned out to definitely not be enough. It got nasty, even by our relaxed standards.”

She unstuck her arm where it had adhered to the bug butt with a sticky Velcro sound.

“There were the Kuipers, who were self-sufficient,” Grace continued, “They had enough, but only for themselves and weren’t about to go hungry over a bunch of ‘inners’ what they call people from the inner solar system, or what most people call the solar system. Those crazy bastards live in the comet and asteroid clouds at the edge of the system. They are about as crazy as you would think they are and twice as tough. Even we didn’t fuck with them. Hell, we couldn’t even reach most of them. No FTL, remember.”

“There was quite literally nowhere to go,” Alan replied, “so, it was either adapt or die for us.”

“And we ‘adapted’,” Grace laughed. “They didn’t care if we lived or died? Fine. That’s cool. That’s how you want to play this? We can do that.”

“As Captain Aaron Abebe, the leader of my organization, said during those days,” Alan smiled, “Someone is going to starve today, and it won’t be us. We did what we had to and only what we had to in order to ensure our survival… unlike other groups I could name,” he added as Grace stuck out her tongue at him.

“So did we… kinda,” Grace replied with a shrug. “You know what they say, more is more… ANYway,” she said, “My people were originally Martian, one of the inhabited worlds in our system, even if it isn’t exactly habitable. They had plenty of food, but they turned their backs on us, said it was ‘for the greater good’…”

She smirked.

“Funny how that ‘greater good’ had us left to die while they stuffed their faces.”

“And Earth was no better,” Alan replied. “We initially wanted to return, try to survive somehow, but anyone who tried that route didn’t fare too well at all. Your ship would be ‘commandeered’ by someone claiming to represent some government or another. No ship meant no reactor, and, of course, they would take every single thing you had. It was a death sentence.”

“Yeah,” Grace said. “At the very start of the disaster, they had the guns, and we didn’t…”

She grinned maliciously.

“That changed pretty quick. We might not have had a goddamn thing out there in the dark, but every ship, or at least every single ship that survived, had a repair shop or at least a robo-fac sitting in a corner somewhere and people who knew how to use it.”

“There isn’t a whole lot of difference between a solenoid and a coil gun,” Alan said, “or a plasma cutter and a blaster.”

“Spacesuit oxygen tanks work great in pneumatic rifles, too,” Grace said, “annnd, my people might have had… um… completely innocent and perfectly legal chemical laboratories that made… candy.”

“I assume you are not talking about confections?” GuruG asked with a humorous wiggle of his fleshy bits.

“We also might have had a few weapons already,” Grace grinned, “but it was all homebrew stuff. Getting real arms was not easy pre-Yellowstone. However, a hotwired solenoid threw a spike just fine, and a plasma thrower wasn’t that hard to build. It’s how we got our name! We’re the Dragons!”

She sighed.

“Or I was a Dragon,” she said quietly.

She fell silent.

“As Grace said,” Alan continued as he squeezed Grace’s hand, “We had a population of highly skilled people, and we had much more production capacity per capita than the livestock…”

“Livestock?”

“Sorry,” Alan replied, “The other humans, the ones all too willing to sacrifice us for that common good that Grace was talking about.”

“Ancestors…”

“Even if a group didn’t initially have the knowledge necessary to make arms,” Alan said, “Most ships had metal stock and at least a grinder. Anyone serving on a ship can grind an edge on some flat stock. We also had mobility. We could choose our targets, strike, and withdraw very quickly, faster than any government, or remanent of a government could react.”

“Yeah, we had to be careful at first,” Grace said back to her irrepressible self, “We would pick someplace remote and hit it hard, hopefully wiping them out before they could call for help. That was only at first, though. The governments didn’t last very long at all.”

She chuckled darkly.

“It turns out that even dirties aren’t cool about dying for that greater good while those at the top have full bellies. There were riots, looting… anarchy. And all of that was good for business.”

“Indeed,” Alan nodded as GuruG listened in silent horror. “And with everything falling apart, we were able to obtain a lot more than a few cans of Pasta-O’s. We were able to seize materials, parts, even capital equipment.”

“And guns!” Grace exclaimed.

“Yes,” Alan smiled. “and guns. As the governments fractured, smaller and smaller ‘governments’ took their place. At first, it was regional governments that tried to hold things together. When they couldn’t, it fractured into smaller and smaller groups. Perhaps a city or a town would try to protect its borders and pool resources. Maybe a group of people who were once police or military decided to become little dictators…”

“And with every split, they became weaker and weaker,” Grace grinned, “And we were getting hungrier and hungrier. It didn’t take long before one of us decided to try to take one of them down.”

“One ship might not be able to pull it off,” Alan said, “but two ships, four ships… a dozen? Now you have scores of increasingly experienced fighters who may very well outnumber a local strongman and his cronies three to one or more.”

“And each time you did it, you got their real guns!” Grace exclaimed. “More guns, better raiders, better raids… more guns… even better raiders… You see how this goes, right?”

“There was also wholesale piracy in space as well,” Alan said, “You either joined a faction, or you fell prey to one. Very few ships were able to go it alone, and most of them were ‘comets’.”

“Comets?”

“Yeah,” Grace said, “We didn’t have FTL, so if you accelerated fast enough, long enough, it was really hard to catch you. Some people did a long burn, built up some serious speed, and shot themselves on a long ‘cometary’ orbit where they swung way out into Kuiper space and then returned years later. Sometimes they survived. Sometimes they didn’t. There were no good options back then. It was place your bets and take your chances. Some of those comet people went really weird, though. But that’s a whole other story.”

She smiled.

“As things got worse for the dirties, it got better for us, but we were still just a bunch of thugs who fought and killed each other way more often than we took it to the ‘cattle’.”

She nudged Alan.

“And some families still hate each other to this day over it.”

“That they do,” Alan said fondly.

“What really changed things for us was the arrival of the most evil woman to have ever drawn a breath, the one, the only, bitch queen of the porkies, Jessica motherfucking Morgan!” Grace exclaimed happily. “That monster actually had the strength, and the guns, to take a bunch of murderous cannibals…”

“Not all of us were cannibals,” Alan interjected.

“Whatever,” Grace said dismissively, “She took a bunch of mostly cannibals… happy now, nerd?”

“Delighted.”

“Anyway, she took a pack of what we were and created The Confederacy of Sol, and the party really got started!”