Always has humanity been on the front lines of war. Not with their soldiers, nor armadas. Humanity had long ago decided that they would only wage defensive wars, they would only commit troops to conflicts that were righteous in nature. They never conquered, they refused to join in expansionist wars. But on every front line, in every army, humans were always there.
It began when the human organization known as the
Red Cross met the intergalactic agency called Hands for Hearts. They were found
most often in the slums of megalopolises, the derelict space stations, serving
the poor. When Mt. Rainier on the continent of North America finally erupted,
the devastation wrecked on Sol-3 was incredible. Three billion humans died in a
matter of days. Even counting every colony and every human traveling outside of
the United Human Confederacy, humanity lost a tenth of their population. The
Red Cross, and its sister organizations the Red Crescent, Red Crystal, and Red
Lotus, could not together handle a fraction of the catastrophe.
When Hands for Hearts dropped out of FTL above the
skies of Earth, they appeared in numbers so vast the humans’ scanners glowed to
the point that one tech nearly went blind. The UHC military went to Defense
Condition Omega, nearly firing on the organization. Luckily, a human that had
been volunteering for the organization was able to get to a communications
center to ease the situation.
Then they landed.
They brought atmospheric scrubbers to prevent an
ash winter, firefighting vessels that could drop millions of gallons of water
at a time to extinguish forest fires, housing units that could be emplaced in minutes
with the capacity to hold hundreds of families, agricultural equipment that
tilled acres upon acres of land a day to reestablish sustenance production,
cloning systems to reestablish both domestic livestock and wild fauna. They
carried the capacity to essentially re-terraform an entire continent.
It all came without cost, without expectation of
recompense, without any strings attached. Millions of scientists, engineers,
technicians, and workers volunteered four Earth months of their lives for a
species that was not their own, to rebuild an ecosystem and a peoples on a
planet that was not within their realms, all funded by donations, the wages of
the labors of a hundred different species and a trillion different souls who
could have used those credits for their own luxury.
Humanity was grateful. The entire species, which
had not conducted a single major operation of any sort on an interstellar
scale, came together with a singular focus: repaying a debt that none ever
asked to be repaid.
It took three years for humanity to recover, far
less time than any human had expected when the news broke of the Rainier
eruption. By the end of the fourth year, the Io shipyard had launched the new Avia-class carrier-support ship, the UHS Hippocrates. It came armed not with
rail guns or missile pods or energy weapons but with a fleet of Vrach-class
landing ships equipped with a full medical staff and enough rooms to hold a
hundred patients as they recuperate. Within seven months, a half dozen more
were patrolling the human sector, landing in distant colonies to provide
medical assistance, improve the health of the residents, and overall healing
the colonists before taking off and flying to the next colony.
Then the war started. Two members of the Imperium,
the coalition of nearly forty percent of the many species of the Milky Way,
began a territorial dispute that quickly turned violent. Worlds were attacked,
cities razed, continents burned. As soon as the military that conducted left, a
human fleet dropped out of FTL.
At first the residents of Choktar thought the
military fleet had returned to finish the devastation. Then, they saw the
markings. The first ship, Borzuya, landed near the rubble that was one the
largest city in the planet’s western hemisphere. It was gargantuan, fully four
miles long, larger than most species’ capital ships and carriers. On her hull
showed a massive white field, centered in which was a red crescent moon. From
within came hundreds of vessels of various types: half a dozen hospital-sized
recovery wards with their own flight capabilities, dozens of air ambulances, scores of
emergency medical landing teams. The sheer scope of the one craft put most
militaries to shame, and the humans landed nearly thirty in a single day. In
fourteen hours, a quarter of the surviving population had at least spoken to a
medic or nurse or doctor. They spent days upon end reattaching lost limbs,
sewing plasma wounds shut, reconnecting torn ligaments, performing more medical
treatments than can be counted. Their doctors were more fluent in xenobiology
than most other species were in their own native bodies. When all was complete
three weeks later, the population was twice as large as would have been
expected thanks to the Interstellar Red Cross Society.
The most revealing thing about humanity happened
when the UHS Memorial landed, carrying digging teams, priests of every human
religion, and coffins. So many coffins. They immediately found religious
representatives from the planet and arranged funerary rights for every lost
soul. The humans moved mountains upon mountains of rubble, finding every body,
limb, hair, every bit of the people who had died during the attack. They had to
dig mass graves the size of canyons just to bury the dead, they numbered so
many. And they watched. They watched as High Priest To’urn sang the Song of
Mourning in front of the memorial grave marker, and they wept. They wept in a
way that no other could. They wept not from sympathy, nor empathy. They wept
from memory. They had felt the loss that the Choktari were feeling now, of the
knowledge that loved ones were gone forever, of the lonely beds and the empty
cradles. Of schools abandoned because there were no teachers to teach and no
students to learn. Of the derelict cities because there were no residents to
inhabit them.
By the time Hands for Hearts had dropped in, all
that was left was the economic rebuilding. The bodies were healed, but more
importantly, the souls were healed. Humanity left the Choktari to let Hands for
Hearts do their work. Humanity had more work to do.
The war continued for months. The humans pushed
closer and closer to the front lines, evacuating civilians, treating wounds,
anything they could do to alleviate the pains. Eventually they began receiving
the wounded soldiers from the armies, and humanity did what they do best. They
healed them. They sent teams directly to the combat units, medics and priests
with scant more than band-aids and bibles to face the horrors of war. They
healed, and sometimes, they died, caught in the crossfire of armies. Humans
appeared on every front line, healing both armies’ soldiers without question,
without complaint. They were sentients, and all sentients had a right to live.
They patched up those they could, evacuated the rest. They became a staple of
every army. To have a human medic near you was to know in your heart that you
would see your family again.
That is how humanity repaid the debt no one asked
them to. That is how the humans stopped needing any military force outside of
to police their own people and stop piracy. The humans never needed any
military, because they had everyone else’s. The sole time humanity was
attacked, a thousand ships from nearly a hundred species appeared and
obliterated the offenders. It was not out of any need to remain in the humans
favor, nor fear that the humans may recall their medical support. It was
because the humans had earned their place among the stars.
Now, there in one title that is held above all
others in the UHC. When a human walks in bearing a "Sestra" tab on
their sleeves, generals stand and salute. They are welcome in any space, given
authorization to land on any planet. They are our healers, our nurses and
doctors and combat medics and hospice caretakers. They devote their lives to
serving others.
They bleed so others don't have to.
