38. You shot first, I'll never forget that.
Notoma had met humans before. He’d had a plan then. It was not his plan, he was just one voices among many in planning and executing it, but he was a voice that was listened to by the other young soldiers. That had been important to him at the time. It was only after he met the humans that he realized that he and those other young soldiers had been living in an ‘echo chamber’ for all of their careers. They reinforced each other’s confidence, but not necessarily their good skill or judgment.
The plan had been simple. Overwhelming numbers. Using overwhelming numbers, destroy the enemy’s resources until they were forced to react, and then battle with them using the tactical advantage of numbers to carry the day. It was a good plan, if you had the numbers to be overwhelming, and it had worked in the past.
They’d had the numbers. At first. But the Deathsworn had harried and harassed and harangued them. They had destroyed six key strategic resources to the Deathsworn fleets, shipyards and mines and reaction mass refineries. But for every blow they had struck, their numerical advantage shrank, as the Deathsworn exacted a price in green blood and scrap metal.
And then the Deathsworn had caught them with geometry and planning out in one of the oort cloud manufactories between sister-stars, and it had looked to be the end of the fleet as a fleet. They would not be destroyed, not completely. Enough would survive to limp back and wait to be called to reinforce a new fleet as it was established, but the tactical operations, the raids, the days of superior firepower through superior number, those were at an end.
The battle had not even started yet, but the outcome was inevitable. The military chorus – Notoma among them, though far from leading them – had already been singing the song of the retreat when the impossible happened.
A ship of unknown make appeared out of nowhere between the two enemy fleets. The Aurealian fleets had panicked, fearing the worst case scenario; that the Deathsworn had learned the secrets of stealth technology which had been forbidden for the exact purpose of not teaching them to the Deathsworn . And in that panic, they had fired first.
What had followed had forever changed what Notoma thought he knew about warfare.
~~~~~~~~
"Have we located their FTL communication drone?" Notoma asked once he had returned to the bridge. An actual bridge, unlike on a human ship where the most important room was simply wherever the commander happened to be at the moment.
"If you can hear this, we are not your enemy. We are peaceful explorers, just looking for a new home. We would not have taken anything from you that you did not give willingly. We were actually very happy to meet you before you started shooting at us. We regret everything that follows," a haunting song echoed in his memory. The words echoed too, but it was the song which haunted him.
"It’s a small thing, the size of a skull, about three light seconds out now. We believe it has a miniature Whisper drive, and is likely powered by antimatter," Lieutenant Lisbit said.
"Of course it’s powered by antimatter. It’s made by the humans. Everything with humans is antimatter," Notoma reminded them. "What is it doing? Is it revealing our position?"
"It’s in active camouflage, and its whisper drive is barely detectable by our scanners. By our best scanners, the ones we use to watch systems from light hours out. The only reason we know it’s here is because it still pings back when we ping it. The communication between us and the drone might be used to figure out our location, but if the Jurassians are using it for that purposes they already know where we are to the point where they’d have easier ways of targeting us than watching for faint radio scatter." Lisbit put up the numbers on the chart, and he was right. The levels were barely above the background radiation and astronomical radio sources that they routinely used to disguise such communication measures. The Jurassians never looked for such things anyway.
"You killed my kids. I listened to them as they screamed out their last breath, as the air in their room was sucked out into the void. They were so excited when it was announced we had made first contact they called to talk to me. The last sound my kids ever made was a scream, and it was because of you cat-goat motherfuckers. You shot first, I’ll never forget that. Not until the day I step out of the airlock without a vacsuit." The voice of a dead man, his sadness made song, echoed in Notoma’s heart.
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"Have you finished analyzing the data the human sent?" Notoma inquired. "Operation ‘song and dance’ as he called it?"
"According to the data, the human allied forces have shut down all of the Hrustian birthing facilities," Lieutenant Selben answered. "All of the ones we have on record for this world, sir. They claim that the zygotes have been destroyed, except for one set which is in their possession. They are offering to return it to us, or send it to a secure location of our choosing so that it does not fall back into Jurassian hands, or to destroy it for us if that is our instructions. They also claim to have sent in excess of one hundred eighty thousand kips to Neurela to seek asylum, although the human FTL method puts them out of contact until they return. If that is true, how will Neurela react? They have been isolationists for so long."
"But it was the Others who did my wife. I had to hear that too, you know? The kids, that was horrible. Hard. I’ll never forget that terrible silence. But the screams? I told her not to go, that they were already dead, but she wouldn’t believe me until she held the bodies in her arms herself, and that’s when they caught her. I don’t know what is worse, the silence or the screams. As a husband, as a father, how can I have to live with both of those? How am I supposed to decide which one is worse when they are both unfathomable?"
"The humans will find a place for them. Neurela would be fools to turn away children of a Hrustian world," Notoma declared, trying to ignore the dreadful voice of the human ghost.
Ghosts were a human superstition. But they were an infectious one. This man, and his radio broadcasts, had been haunting Notoma ever since they had been translated. This man had fundamentally changed his understanding of humans multiple times, but it wasn’t until after the man was dead that the terrible truth had been revealed.
"The question we must face is ‘What do we do now?’ The humans have accomplished one of our primary goals in destroying the birthing facilities for us," Notoma sang with confidence he did not feel. "They are also guarding the kips and young females on the planet, although they are not saying so explicitly. If they are counting them, they are taking steps to keep them safe."
"Is this our call to make?" Captain Setik inquired. "The other ships will be reaching the end of their deceleration burn soon, and exiting stasis. When we establish a chorus -"
"That is not how things are done any longer," Notoma stated firmly. "The battle chorus has been a losing strategy for centuries and it took a few hundred humans with outdated weaponry to show us why. We are abandoning our old ways and embracing the lessons we have learned from the Last Stand of the Elizabeth. Hundreds of humans died to teach us these lessons, so show them the respect that they deserve."
The toneless reply of ‘sir’ was strange coming from another Aurealian, no trace of music to it. But they had all listened to the radio broadcasts, the same as him, and they knew how the humans did things, and why those things worked, and how they could use those same strategies for themselves.
The Aurealians had spent decades studying this Last Stand, this desperate defense in the face of overwhelming odds. And they were finally prepared to demonstrate what they had learned.
But no plan survived first contact.
And no plan survived humans.
"I’m glad you cat-goat things seem to be honoring this weird little ceasefire we have going on, but I don’t think I’ll ever forgive you for killing my family. My entire family, that’s on you, because you shot first. I’m a dead man too. The others have something left to fight for, something to hold on to when it’s over. Not me. I can’t even go home, because before I left I looked the old man in the eye and I told him ‘don’t worry, I’ll keep them safe.’ And then you cat-goat motherfuckers shot first!"
Idly, Notoma wondered if Captain Nathan Sawyer had any relationship to Lieutenant Kenneth Sawyer of the Earth Space Force Military Police. He probably did, because it would suit the human’s sense of irony to send in the relative of the man who had had the most reason of any to hate the Aurealians. And the man who had been the first to profess forgiveness for their terrible, terrible mistake.
"We continue the plan, with the following exception; no direct targeting of the world of the Hrustius, or the companion world. Once we establish orbital superiority we will inquire with the humans how to achieve victory on the planets without violating their ethics. That is why they interfered, not because they disapproved, but because we had not eliminated the less destructive methods before we launched those missiles. Pass my orders to the rest of the fleet, and to the other fleet as soon as they exit stasis."
"By the time they exit stasis, it might be too late to redirect some of the weapons they are targeting towards those worlds," Lieutenant Selben pointed out.
"Then we shall hope that the human’s sense of ethical duty does not wear thin, nor his ability to make it manifest," Notoma answered.