The Juon lounged amid a pile of coconut husks and pineapple scraps as they drank beer and pina colladas and listened to music. A few more were roasting assorted meats, fruits, and vegetables along with the Z'uush and Sheila's crew.
"Here. I made this for you," A female Z'uush handed T'sunk'al a skewer of meat, fruit, and vegetables as she giggled nervously.
"Oh… (hic), thanks," T'sunk'al replied nervously.
The female hiccuped and scuttled away.
"I don't get you, T.," Sheila said, "You ran Federation blockades in a jury-rigged ore barge, squared off against whole marine companies, made blind void jumps with no chart, and now a pair of panties has stopped you cold."
"Panties?"
"That little flap you guys wear over your naughty bits," Sheila said with a laugh.
T'sunk'al just hiccuped in reply.
"Seriously, why aren't you going for it?" Sheila asked, "I'm not an expert on such things, but she looks… cute."
"(hic) Oh, she (hic) is. Very cute. (hic) But I shouldn't..."
"Ok, T. You do you… literally," Sheila said as she swatted his carapace.
T'sunk'al gave Sheila a rude gesture to the delight of his new crew.
"There is something I was wondering," T'sunk'al said desperately trying to change the subject, "The Republic and the Empire are allies, right?"
"Yep."
"But they conquered you."
"Also true."
"And then you rebelled."
"They most certainly did." The Juon captain said as he slid another drinking dish of booze underneath him.
"And you guys had a war?" T'sunk'al asked.
"Oh hell yeah!" Jessie, a member of the crew, said emphatically. "My grandfather was killed in it."
"Neither side pulled any punches," Captain Zzuural said. "I was there. Nearly died myself."
He turned to Sheila.
"You fuckers were downright nasty," he said as he raised his drinking dish.
Sheila just smiled and raised her glass.
"Well, we tried asking nicely, but you fucking wigglies didn't take the hint," she smirked.
"Setting fire to Imperial ships and facilities is asking nicely?" The captain asked with a laugh, ripples of amusement rolling across his skin.
"And you are now on good terms?" T'sunk'al asked.
"Yep. We're tight." Sheila said as she drained her cup.
"Couldn't ask for a better ally." The captain said as he lapped up his cocktail.
"I'm sorry, but that doesn't make sense," T'sunk'al said confusedly.
"Well, it was a hundred years ago," Sheila said with a shrug.
"But… but that is less than a generation for either of your species. People alive on both sides today fought each other."
"Don't remind me." Captain Zzuural laughed as he turned his head, revealing a faint but very large scar. "Damn near got my fucking head blown off."
T'sunk'al just wiped his eyestalks in confusion.
"Ok," Sheila said as she filled her glass. "To really understand, we have to start at the beginning."
"Yeah!" Lieutenant Guzzala exclaimed with a slurred voice, her skin a wild mix of colors. "What really happened back then? I'm starting to sushpect that we don't have the whole story."
"Lieutenant, is this your first time experiencing Terran cocktails?" the captain asked with a chuckle.
"Yesh! These things are amazing! This pia colara is delicioush!"
"It's called a pina colada, and yes, they are. They are also quite dangerous. Remember, Terrans have a higher tolerance for alcohol than we do. So you might want to lay off of those a little."
"Hey, you are the one who always shays I need to relax a little," She said as she poked the captain and settled down into her drinking dish.
"Just don't say that I did not warn you. Terran cocktails are lethal." The captain said with a laugh. "You are going to be very unhappy tomorrow. But, at least you have good taste. The Empress loves pina colladas.”
"She does?" The lieutenant asked with wide eyes.
"Yep. That was all she drank when she was negotiating the truce on Hentai Island."
"Hentai Island?"
"Yeah, that was the prisoner of war camp they set up for us on Terra," the captain said with a laugh. "I had the pleasure of being a guest of the Terrans for quite a while."
"Bytheempress!" the lieutenant said with huge eyes. Most of his crew had fallen silent, listening intently. "You were captured by the Terrans? What was it like?"
"It. Was. Awesome!" The captain enthused. "They had this wonderful island in one of their oceans near the equator. Coconut trees, tide pools, beautiful sandy beaches, and the guards were incredibly nice. Hell, they would even take us out on their patrol boats so we could go fishing. We had some great housing, but the weather was so nice that most of us just slept outside. They intentionally picked a place where the climate was perfect for us. Heck, a lot of us even stopped wearing clothes."
The lieutenant gasped.
"Hey, we spent most of our time just playing in the water, and swimsuits just got in the way."
"Why were they so nice to you?"
"It makes sense if you know the Terrans. We weren't a threat anymore. I mean, we were on an island in the middle of the ocean. Where were we going to go?" The captain shrugged. "Also, I think the fact that there were so many mutineers there had something to do with it."
"MUTINEERS?!?"
"Yeah, they don't mention the Terran Mutiny in school. We are all trying to pretend that it didn't happen," the captain said with a chuckle. "It was the biggest mutiny in recorded history. Hundreds of Juon service members just... quit not counting all of the ones who were 'captured' under suspicious circumstances." He looked at the stunned expressions of his crew. "As Sheila here just said, we will have to start at the beginning to properly explain it."
After everyone got their next plate of food and a drink, Sheila stood up.
"Ok, here is how it went down," she said, taking a long drink from her glass. "You Juon showed up in our system during what was the worst time in all of human history, the Sol Wars. It was beyond fucked up."
She took a drink from her cup and continued.
"We survived three world wars, an ecological disaster of biblical proportions, a full bore nuclear exchange, and countless other things during our long, tragic, stupid, and bloody history but the Sol Wars..."
Sheila grabbed a bottle of rum and took a long drink from it.
"The Sol Wars damn near wiped us out. It was the closest we ever came in recorded history to extinction. We went from a thriving interplanetary civilization to a burning mass of rubble and dead bodies in a span of ten years."
"So what happened?" T'sunk'al asked.
"Well, we were a victim of our own success. After the big ecological collapse in the twenty-first century, we finally got our act together and developed efficient fission and later fusion reactors. Once we had those, we started expanding into the whole solar system in a big way. By the late twenty-second century, we had reactionless thrusters and a big colony on Mars as well as several on Luna. By the mid twenty-third century, we had artificial gravity and massive industrial complexes and other stations across the solar system housing millions and then later billions of people. We continued to expand happily for centuries. It was a golden age for us. We had limitless resources of every kind, and we just kept expanding. Mars became an independent sovereign state in the twenty-fifth century, and the war for their independence was the last major conflict we had for well over four hundred years."
Sheila paused as she took another drink.
"And we just kept fucking expanding, breeding like fucking hyper-roaches. The big problem that nobody saw was that almost all of those stations and colonies off-world weren't entirely self-sufficient. Oh, they could recycle water easily enough, but most of the food still came from Terra. Good ol' Terra was the breadbasket of the entire solar system. With genetically modified crops and a depressing amount of the surface area becoming a giant farm, we were easily able to support the twenty-five billion-"
"Twenty-five billion!" Captain Zzuural exclaimed. "The first census of the Sol system only recorded five hundred million humans! There were that many before it happened? I had no idea."
"Before what happened?" Lieutenant Guzzala asked.
"Fucking Yellowstone," Sheila said with a rueful smile. "On June 23, 2997, at 3:30 AM, the Yellowstone caldera decided to go boom. The supervolcanic eruption wrecked the planet. It shot an unimaginable amount of dust and ash into the atmosphere burying a lot of North America, home to some major agricultural production areas under a layer of ash and volcanic gasses fucked up the climate of the whole fucking world. Basically, it shut down agricultural production on a global scale for two years. They say we were lucky. It could have been worse."
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"Do bear in mind," Captain Zzuural said, "They never independently developed FTL. This sort of thing does happen very infrequently in the Empire, but we can always ship in food from somewhere else. The Terrans only had one world. There was nowhere else."
"Exactly," Sheila replied. "The food stopped. Shit got real, and it got real real fast. Adding to the fun was the fact that, believe it or not, there wasn't a single system-wide government that could respond with any hope of managing the disaster. Hell, there wasn't even a single government on Terra. It probably didn't really matter anyhow. Once the food was gone, society went down the shitter."
"But I don't understand," one of the Z'uush said. "A geological event on the scale you describe should have been predicted well in advance. How were you all caught off guard?"
Sheila's crew started muttering obscenities, and the word "porkie" was clearly audible once or twice.
"Well, that is a very good question," Sheila said with a smirk. "Another good question is how was it that the richest arcologies on the surface and in orbit just happened to have enough food stockpiled for exactly how long the system-wide famine was supposed to be. Another fascinating question is why did some of the richest and most powerful on the planet have private shelters similarly stocked. Another question is why some of those same people bought up obscene amounts of commodities and then had mercenaries in place to protect them. Yet another great question is how did Mars, one of the colonies that was almost self-sufficient, have blockades comprised of hastily modified freighters in place the day Yellowstone blew." Sheila said sourly. "Oh, those questions were asked by some very, very pissed off survivors who were completely unencumbered by the rule of law just a little while later, by the way. Needless to say, it didn't go well."
"Why? Why would they do that?" A Juon trooper asked in a shocked voice.
"Well, think like a porkie for a bit. They thought that civilization would come to an end and that everyone would starve to death. In addition to stockpiling food, a lot of arcologies also recruited people who were in their definition 'genetically superior'," Sheila said with a laugh. "They were going to let the system die and then repopulate it with their chosen few. It came as a bit of a shock when the truly 'genetically superior' came knocking, kicked in their doors, and took their shit. Most of the arcologies were either destroyed completely, their residents slaughtered, thrown out, or enslaved by the new management." Sheila chuckled.
"There was this one asshole who hoarded a shitload of grain and other commodities and hired a couple of mercenary companies. He was planning on starting up his own little kingdom once things went boom," Jessie, a member of Sheila's crew, piped up. "It was a great idea," she continued, "It was such a great idea that the leader of the mercenaries decided to kill the guy and take over the show. That is now the country of Hawkins, where I'm from!" she beamed. "The food was enough to support our founding fathers long enough for them to get a bunch of survivors, a few fusion reactors in place, and big ass greenhouses built. The rest is history."
"Wait. You mentioned 'porkies,' Captain Zzuural said. "Were the Federation humans involved in this?"
"Yup," Sheila said as she took another mouthful of meat from her skewer. "Federation humans are… undesirables... from the Sol wars. They are either arco-slime, shelter-babies, or people-eating raiders. You know those humans you had to keep in the outer solar system away from the rest of us? It was those assholes. Once the shooting started, they fled to the Federation. They knew what would happen to them if you wigglies left Sol," Sheila laughed as she drew a single finger across her throat."
"And thus, the porkies were born," Sheila said with a sneer. "The scum of humanity lead by the scum of humanity. Oh, they like to pretend they are all civilized and proper, but the truth of the matter is that they are either corrupt elitist shits who fucked over the rest of humanity or fucking cannibal raiders or both. There are 'pillars of the community' over there that roasted and ate their fellow man just a few decades ago. That's why we call them 'long-pork'. It's slang for human meat. Their latest stunt just fanned the flames of a fire that almost had gone out, but it isn't the only reason we despise them."
"Eeemmmppress!" Lieutenant Guzzala gasped.
"Believe it or not, by the time you guys came rolling into Sol, things were calming down."
"Things were calming down !?!" Captain Zzuural exclaimed. "The whole system was burning!"
"Ok, calming down relative to what had been happening over the last few years," Sheila shrugged. "Pretty much everyone who was going to starve had already done so, and civilization was beginning to get back on its feet."
"How did any of you not starve? One would think that survival would be impossible." One of the Juon asked.
"Oh, lotsa ways," Sheila said as she took another drink. Some were fortunate, like the founders of Hawkins or those who captured the Sunrise Arcology. Others, well... There is an old joke from ancient times is that the two last survivors of a global catastrophe would be humans and cockroaches. It wasn't far from the truth," she laughed. "We looked over at them and said 'So, it's come to this...' and grabbed a mouthful. There were countless variations on the theme but what it boiled down to is that we ate whatever we could, cockroaches, termites, snails, worms, rats, and of course… fucking algae. I hate fucking algae," Sheila said with a grimace. "We were Salties," she explained. "My grandparents were among those who retreated into a salt mine and used the fusion reactors there to culture algae and snails. Every fucking school break, my grandma would haul us down in that hole and make us grow and eat that shit," she groaned. "She insisted that it was essential we know how 'just in case'."
Laughter erupted from the humans in Sheila's crew as they all recounted similar torture at the hands of their survivalist grandparents.
"Their ability to subsist on what appeared to be nothing was a huge strategic advantage. You couldn't starve them out. You could blockade a station or have a subterranean fortification under aerial surveillance indefinitely. They were just fine in there." Captain Zzuural said, rippling with laughter. "If you were involved in such a siege, you had to be very, very careful. If you heard the word 'pulpo', you ran," The captain said as the older members of his crew laughed ruefully.
"Pulpo?"
"We um… We bear a very close resemblance to an animal that is on the human's list of edible creatures," the captain said, much to the horror of his younger troopers.
One of them gave a nearby human a sidelong glance as they inched away.
"Then again, just about anything is on the human's list of edible creatures. On Corvux," he said as he poked Sheila, "it took you guys what, three days without rations before you started grilling up the bugs?"
"Two days, and you do have to admit they are pretty tasty," Sheila replied with a grin. "As I recall, you were particularly fond of their brains... but we're getting off-topic. When you guys showed up, the fight over resources was mostly over, and we were having a polite little discussion over exactly who was going to be in control of Sol from now on. There were two groups left," she said, grabbing a mango. "We had countless smaller settlements rallying behind the banner of Tak Nakamura, founder and CEO of the Zeus Corporation, and on the other side, you had an assortment of warlords, raiders, and upper-crust arcology and shelter types commanded by Jessica Morgan, a former military officer, and politician."
She paused as she sliced into the mango.
"Things were pretty nasty," Sheila mumbled around a mouthful of fruit. "It looked pretty bad at first, but the Zeus Corp was winning by the time you guys showed up. The porkies initially had more ships and guns, but Zeus had working factories, and with those, the numbers quickly shifted in our favor."
"Ah, yes. The invisible threat, Terran industry." Captain Zzuural said to his crew. "These assholes have a reputation for being terrifying warriors, but their industrial capacity is just as fearsome if not more so. Where a lot of races wish they had a million weapons, the Terrans will be loading transports within a day."
"Yup," Sheila said. "An interesting bit of trivia is that Zeus and their factories is why the AK-47 is our weapon of choice. Before everything went to shit, we used gauss and particle beam weapons, just like many advanced civilizations. Chemical slug throwers were ancient history," she said with a smile. "Using them would have been laughable to a soldier before the Sol wars," she grinned. "As crude and primitive as they are, they do have one advantage, ease of production. Making one of those fancy gauss weapons or a blaster requires all sorts of equally fancy equipment, dedicated production facilities, and increasingly hard-to-find components or yet more dedicated production facilities to make them. A slug thrower only requires a chunk of iron, and any cheap old maintenance robo-fac can turn them out by the thousands," she said with a smile. "You can even make them by hand if you need to."
"The fact that they were so frighteningly effective was a surprise to everyone," she continued. "There were improvised chemical slug throwers in use well before Zeus started cranking them out, but the Zeus AK was the first mass-produced true assault rifle with the ammo to feed it. They changed the game," Sheila said with a grin. "They tore through anything, armor, ship hulls, barricades, you name it. With the right ammunition, they could pierce armor, start fires, explode, release any number of chemical nastiness or nanobots, anything you wanted them to do. Just change the ammo. One soldier could have a menu of options at their disposal, all from just one weapons platform. Slap a grenade launcher underneath the main barrel, and the party really starts. The porkies didn't know what hit them. One day they had the upper hand. The next, they were on the run."
Sheila grabbed a coconut and expertly popped it open.
"The same retro trend also extended to our ships as well," she said as she sipped some coconut water. "Crude chemically propelled missiles with basic electronics and a shaped charge or later an EFP warhead tipped the balance of power in space," she said. "In ancient times, they were used to good effect on the surface but in the vacuum of space-"
"Yeah, we became quite familiar with those," Captain Zzuural said with a laugh. "Those fuckers were pure evil until we started to develop ways to deal with them, and even then, they were and still are killers. Back then, they could punch a hole in just about anything we had except a dreadnought or heavy cruiser."
"You didn't use nukesh?" Lieutenant Guzzala slurred.
"Nope. We didn't have them until halfway into our war," Sheila replied, "After we had a worldwide nuclear exchange in our twenty-first century, we stopped making them and destroyed any that were left over. We damn near killed ourselves and were not going to do it again. So we had to make them from scratch. Of course, we mastered isotope separation, so it wasn't all that hard, as you guys know very well. I especially love your salted five hundred megaton babies and your ten megaton gamma-ray squirters. Those things are simply beautiful. I'm glad you didn't have those during our little dust-up."
"Well, we learned from the best." Captain Zzuural said as he filled his drinking dish. "I still remember the first time I saw one go off. There was this huge flash of light, and once my cockpit became transparent again and my sensors recovered, a destroyer had just… disappeared. We thought you guys were fielding anti-matter."
"We're drifting off topic again," Captain Zzuural said. "Like Sheila said, the Empire arrived in Sol during what we now know to be the later stages of a system-wide conflict. Humanity was exhausted, pushed to the limit by a planetary catastrophe and the wars that followed. A lot of them were happy to see us, even if they won't admit it in a thousand years," he said, nudging Sheila.
"It is said that the Empire didn't beat the Terrans. The Terrans beat the Terrans," He continued. "Tak Nakamura spoke for the system and negotiated the terms of their annexation, and that was that. The porkies were all too happy to agree because they were looking at almost certain death prior to our arrival. We unknowingly saved their asses," He said with a slurp from his dish. "Sorry. We should have let you finish up, but it was starting to look like mass murder."
"Eh, you didn't know, and it was mass murder. By that point, we were very comfortable with genocide." Sheila said with a shrug.
"As Sheila said before, one of the first things we did was separate the two forces involved relegating the porkies to Neptune and beyond. We had to," the captain said between slurps of beer. "You couldn't have them in the same room with each other back then."
"Anyway, things went amazingly well at first," Captain Zzuural said. "The Terrans suddenly found themselves part of a large interstellar civilization and enjoyed all of the benefits thereof. Any dissent was buried underneath a seemingly endless stream of transports laden with food that actually tasted nice and cheap consumer goods. Even more importantly, Sol found a bottomless demand for their minerals, isotopes, and alloys to pay for it all. Terrans can't be subdued, but they aren't above a bribe," he said with a wink.
He paused while he nibbled on a skewer of roast pineapple.
"The first lord chancellor, Lord Zuk-kal-brekal, was a fair and honest Juon. He also had an uncanny ability to relate with the Terrans, and under his leadership, integration into the Empire actually went too smoothly, as we will find out shortly. Terran industry soon became the hallmarks of productivity and quality, and Terran ran enterprises quickly became some of the most profitable in the entire Empire. As far as the individual Terran was concerned, the standard of living skyrocketed to levels that most couldn't even dream of before the wars," the captain said.
"The Terrans may be the lords of minerals, but we are the gods of bureaucracy. If there is one thing we know, it's how to run a system. We set up a system of governance in line with their values and eliminated waste and corruption. As a result, the average tax load for both individual citizens and businesses was less than before the wars, and they enjoyed better services to boot. They joked that we may be alien overlords, but we got rid of the lines at the DMV and they could do their taxes in an hour," Captain Zzuural said, scrunching his eyes into a smile. "Believe it or not, they actually liked us and didn't mind being Imperial subjects at all. In fact, many of them said that we were better than the prewar governments we replaced. It looked like they were going to be the greatest addition to the Empire in centuries."
"Sho whatsh happened?" The lieutenant slurred.
"You should drink some water, my young friend," the captain laughed. "Well, in every species, every culture, at any time in the history of the universe, there is that one asshole that ruins a good thing. In this case, the asshole was Lord Calal-Ras-Kalen. Everybody go ahead and grab seconds because this is where it starts to get good."