Dear Brother

Walking the roads of our youth

through the land of our childhood, our home and our truth

Be near me, guide me

always stay beside me so i can be free, free

Lets roam this place

familiar and vast

our playground of green frames, our past

We were wanderers

never lost, always home

When every place was fenceless

and time was endless

our ways were always the same

Cool my demons and walk with me brother

until our roads lead us away from each other

and if your heart’s full of sorrow, keep walking, don’t rest

and promise me from heart to chest

to never let your memories die, never

I will always be alive and by your side,

in your mind

I'm free

Eden

I sat in the white room, in a white chair, at a white table. Sitting before me, the only other object in the room: an apple.

It looked shiny, almost fake. One bite had been taken out. I was told on the way in that a final test lay before me, before I could enter the Gates.

This must be it. This has to be the Forbidden Fruit.

I stared at it a long time. I thought about the consequences of this piece of fruit. How Eve had taken a bite and had started the fall of man. How she had brought sin into the world, how she had disobeyed the only order given in the Garden.

I wasn't going to eat it. I wanted to smash it to pieces. I wanted to upend the table and curse her name.

And then I thought some more.

I thought about the stories I was told as a child. I had heard the Garden story so many times I could probably recite it verbatim. How Eve spoke to the snake, who tempted her.

What were those underlying messages? That women were easily swayed. That they weren't as strong as men. That they were the cause of evil. That they couldn't simply say no.

It taught me that women were the reason for sin. It taught me to resent women. It also taught me that women were just as bad as that snake. Eve tempted Adam, and then they both knew their shame. As I sat and thought, I got angry. So many times I had heard that story.

That story. Used as justification for institutionalized oppression.

And then I picked up the apple, and took a bite. We're all human, I thought. One holds no more value over another.

Suddenly, the door opened. An Angel stood, beckoning me.

"Come child. Welcome."

I set the apple on the table, and walked through the door.

God forgot about Earth soon after Adam & Eve, fully expecting them to die. One of the Angels just informed him they survived, and the population is over 7 billion.

“Uhh… God?”

“What?”

“Remember the rock you put all that green stuff on?”

“Green stuff?”

“The green leafy stuff.”

“Yeah, vaguely.”

“Remember that little creature you made too, out of clay? And the friend?”

“Oh yeah. They totally ate that apple. I wonder how long they lasted.”

“There are 7 billion.”

“7 billion of what?”

“Of the creatures.”

“The fuck?”

“I’m serious.”

“Is someone feeding them?”

“They feed themselves. They started planting the green shit. All over the rock.”

“Enough for 7 billion?”

“Yeah, mostly.”

“Are they unable to kill each other?”

“Some try, but the others stop them mostly.”

“Are you just fucking with me, Gabriel?”

“Dude I’m not. Look.”

“Woooah… that’s crazy.”

“You have a fan club down there too.”

“They remember me?”

“Nah… they started making shit up.”

“Weird…”

“What do we do? Smash it?”

“Leave it alone. It’s cute. They'll burn themselves up eventually, anyhow."

Of 4th Wall and Incompetent Writing

[ Disclaimer: I know nothing about quantum mechanics  XD ]

...

"...yes, but how exactly are the electrons simultaneously acting like waves and particles?"

"Well, Johnson," I replied, raising my eyebrow. "The thing you need to understand about Quantum Mechanics is that it's based on thoughts."

"Thoughts?"

"Yes, thoughts. So when you think of the electron as a wave, that's how it'll behave. When you think of it as a particle, it'll be a particle."

Johnson frowned. "What if I think of it as both?"

"Ah!" I replied. "Excellent question."

Johnson waited, but I didn't say anything. "Are you going to answer it?" he asked, after a moment.

"Yes," I replied.

He waited. "Now?"

"Give me a minute, I'm trying to come up with something."

"You can come up with something and then write it down immediately, you don't need to actually stall in the story, dude."

"Yes but I want to convey the idea that I'm trying to come up with – oh, fuck it. Ok, if you think of it as both, what will happen is something called Quantum Entanglement."

"What's that?"

"That's when electrons intertwine with themselves and become indestructible. One electron will behave as a particle, the other one as a wave, and they'll attract each other by the laws of thermo-gravitational distortion."

"Thermo-gravitational distortion…" Johnson whispered. "Nice."

"Thank you." I smiled. "That's actually how antimatter happens," I continued. "Two electrons – one behaving as a particle, one as a wave – intertwine, and they self-destruct, creating –"

"You just said they are indestructible."

"Shut up, I'm talking. They self-destruct, creating a big anti-electron, which is a particle of antimatter."

"Woah, really?"

"Yes. The anti-electron is actually visible to the naked eye."

"It is!?"

"Yes, it's a plum."

"So every plum is an antimatter particle?"

"No, of course not," I replied. "Don't be stupid, Johnson."

"I'm sorry."

"Only like thirty percent of plums are antimatter particles. The rest are plums."

Johnson nodded. Silence took over the room for a second.

"How about the Theory of Relativity?" Johnson asked, after a second.

"Well, Johnson, relativity is like drinking eight cans of beer in three minutes."

"How's that?"

"It feels wrong at first, then you feel good about it for a while, then it feels wrong again and you realize you didn't understand the part about time and space being the same thing at all."

"Kinda lost track of that analogy halfway through there, didn't we?"

"You're pissing me off, Johnson. Cut it out."

"What are you gonna do about it?" Johnson got up. "Your story sucks anyway, dude. I'm out of here."

"Shut up, Johnson."

"You're a terrible writer."

I thought of all of the electrons that compose Johnson. "Shut up. You're gonna make me do something I don't want to."

"And I bet I know how you're gonna finish it too, you hack."

I thought of the electrons as particles. "Shut up, Johnson..."

"You're turning me into a plum, aren't you?"

Then I thought of them as wave.

"You're turning me into a big fat plum because you don't know how to end this story. You're ridiculous dude. Have you no shame? Can't you –"

And then… yeah, that.

Of Fate And Circumstance

For the longest time we’d given up.

Not on the prospect of finding other life, for life was abundant. Under the ice seas of Europa, nestled around the thermal vents of Serteni IV, and even floating through the upper atmospheres of the great gas giants of Halicose Minor. Life was all around us, if we just took the time to look, but there was nothing like us.

This was not entirely unexpected. Since the early days we’ve known that the consecutive chain of miracles and happenstance that led to our birth was afforded only the most remote of chances. Everything from our development as a sapient race and the luck to escape our self destructive tendencies, to the very formation of our world.

       ***

For a long time we thought our home unique.

As we searched the night skies, in ages past, we marveled at the wonders of the universe. We found other planets around other stars; so many of them large and close, or barren and cold. We thought that if only we refined our instruments, then the other Earths would present themselves. There were many candidates, many hopeful and promising contenders, but they were too far, and we could not be certain. Slowly we expanded, filling our local system with stations, outposts, mining operations and even a few small colonies. Eventually we’d thought ourselves sure.

Three planets, all within fifty light years. All possible matches for our own biology. Great ark ships were constructed. Millions heeded the call. Cryogenic technology was still unreliable, unsafe, so the ships were built as cities and farms, taking with them vast stores of biodiversity from the homeworld. One by one they left. Communication remained feasible for a long while, but years passed, then decades. Their journies dragged on through centuries, and each nearly forgot the other.

The date of first arrival passed, remarked on by academics and enthusiasts, and the Sol system took note. Decades later, when the relevant transmissions were to be expected, the people of Earth and her colonies listened.

The world, 'Haven' it was to be called, hardly lived up to its name. It was uncomfortably warm, and with only a trio of small moons, its poles shifted erratically. There was life, the oxygen rich atmosphere attested to that, but where trace CO2 had hinted at a developed carbon cycle, the reality was a planet beset by immense tectonic activity. The colonists set down all the same. They had little choice after all. Underground cities were built, and eventually extended to the surface under great domes, much like the colonies of mars. The introduction of various terrestrial life forms began and slowly, so very slowly, the world began to change into a place that was merely unpleasant. At some point in the early years, the colonists renamed the planet Crucible, much to the dismay of idealists everywhere.

A scant decade later, the second expedition began reporting the results of their own journey. Like the first, their findings were… less than ideal. The planet Xinshijie was largely covered in oceans and, though temperate, suffered from an underdeveloped magnetosphere, which allowed high levels of radiation to reach the surface from its parent star. Further complicating matters was the discovery that the world’s oceans played host to a staggering variety of highly aggressive bacterial life. Progress was slow but steady and in time Xinshijie would thrive, though few would be convinced to immigrate to that hostile world.

A full century passed before the final group made planetfall. Surprisingly, the most unfortunate feature of that new world was its name. After the disastrous (or hilarious, depending on your view) decision to crowdsource the name, multiple rounds of voting, rewriting of rules, focus testing, committee hearings and more voting, it was decided that the third planet would be named 'Backup Earth Two: Terra Strikes Back', or 'BET' for short. Most astronomers simply stuck with the tried and true designation XB-377-Y. For all the controversy surrounding its name, BET itself was rather mundane. A little cool, and a little thick of atmosphere. More stable than Crucible and with a bland biosphere of bacteria and algae analogs that were quickly displaced by imported life. It was no Earth, not by a long shot, but in time BET would come close.

Such was the history of man’s early attempts at extrasolar colonization. The mixed results of the first wave were enough to encourage a new generation of explorers, and further expeditions were prepared. Still others chose to focus on space-born habitation, taking station architecture to new heights.

With space travel being what it was, there was no incentive to search each and every star system. We leap-frogged vast stretches of space to colonize every remotely habitable world we could find. Each new system became a self contained nation.

       ***

For a time, our dreams had died.

Millenia passed. The core worlds grew, ever prosperous, ever advancing. Science continued to advance the inexorable march of progress, but after so long, it was a slow and steady march. Advancements came in fractions of a percent. More efficient energy sources. More compact electronics. Here or there a trick would be discovered; a clever way of getting around some facet of engineering that had vexed designers for centuries. The limits, however, were known. Nanotech, while useful, was not the all powerful solution the futurists of old had thought it could be. Likewise, true sapient machines, while technically feasible, were little more than a curiosity. They found use as expert systems, automating the mundane tasks that once required legions of administrators, but they could no more bend the laws of physics than man. They could think faster, but they could not think better. The miracles of bioengineering cured many ailments, strengthened the human form and extended the human lifespan, but there was no functional immortality, no end to disease. People survived the age old spectres, only to fall to the things we still could not cure. Energy was cheap, but not limitless, not in the grand sense. And still, after all that time, we were beholden to the limits of light. The systems of humanity beamed their happenings to one another mostly out of courtesy and a sense of companionship. Occasionally, some world would make a novel discovery and announce their findings to the void. In decades or centuries it would reach the others, and they could be better for it.

And then, something remarkable happened. An expedition to a distant world had stumbled into an unexpected spacial phenomenon. In the brief time they were able to study it, everything changed. Their findings toppled a thousand theories about the nature of the cosmos, and created a precious few new ones to take their place. The theoretical implications were many, but practically, the application was one. They could not share their findings immediately, ship based communication being what it was. Once they set down and established an infrastructure, they shouted to the heavens, to any who would hear.

The message reached their nearest neighbor, twenty years after the first ship.

       ***

For a moment, everything old was new again.

The discovery of a new addition to the annals of physics led to astounding jumps in a select few fields, and renewed interest in many others. The high soon settled as researchers discovered which dead ends were still dead ends, and which areas had yet to be fully realized.

Faster than light space travel didn’t revolutionize the galaxy overnight as many had hoped. The new drive system worked on the principle of warping spacetime around the vessel, a feat that for millennia had been considered an engineering impossibility. Long distance sublight ships had been creeping closer and closer to their theoretical limits, but now, a journey that took an ark ship centuries could be completed in a few years. There were limitations of course. The technology of warp travel required the ships that used it to be massive. The first such vessels were ovoid in form and tens of kilometers in length and width. As such, they operated mostly as bulk transports, moving from system to system, ferrying goods and people as they went. Calls to form a unified government were largely ignored, and the systems of humanity went on as they had, albeit spurred by new trade and cultural exchange.

Perhaps the greatest side effect of this new technology was our newfound ability to explore our own backyard, so to speak. As previously mentioned, planets that could be called even remotely earth-like are few and far between. Our colonization efforts thus left much unexplored space between our claimed systems. Where before, sending an ark ship to a nearby system devoid of even semi-habitable planets was a non-starter, now there was a chance to have an actual return on investment that didn’t measure in decades or more.

Resource extraction enterprises led the way, often accompanied by research contingents. In an old system like Sol, very little was left unclaimed by this or that conglomerate, but these nearby systems were suddenly open for the taking, and with no regional governments in play it really was first come first serve. The commissioning of such a venture could be ruinously expensive, but they could also be unbelievably profitable.

So it was that one such enterprise made the second great discovery.

       ***

For a moment, we thought we might not be alone.

It was on a very large rocky planet that the discovery was made. A so called super-earth, wrapped in a thick dense atmosphere and sitting just far enough from its sun to not be an oven of a world. We’d never encountered such a world in one of our systems. It goes without saying that there is only so much room in the habitable zone of a star system, and such a large planet is not kind to the sort we’d be interested in. As for the planet itself, it was too massive to hope to land a ship and return, and the air was too thick to get a signal through. Machines were sent down. They explored, they studied, and when they’d found all they thought useful, they passed that knowledge to a device attached to a balloon. It floated up until a signal could be sent out, and what it showed was incredible.

There was life under the clouds. Fantastic life. Life almost like us. There were no signs of civilization, of thinking beasts, but under that dense blanket of air, amongst crushing pressure and gravity, there was complex life. Large sedentary organisms, similar to the trees of our homeworld, covered many of the plains. Creatures large and small moved slowly and deliberately through the undergrowth. There were rivers and seas, and in a way, it was the most earth-like planet we’d ever come to know.

News of this discovery set the scientific community ablaze and new expeditions were financed to explore far and wide. Many more worlds were found like the first, and a surprising number were home to complex creatures. It seems that such planets can’t help but foster life. Samples were studied and catalogued; each strange new form of life expanding our understanding of the wonders of biology. And then we found the ruins.

Nestled within the unexplored borders of our own core systems was yet another super-earth teeming with life. And on this one, we found them; our vindication that the search was not in vain. We studied the ruins relentlessly. We’d missed them by only a few tens of thousands of years, but they were there. By all accounts they were advanced, almost as advanced as us in some regards, but they never strove for the stars. We could only guess at why. It would be very hard for such a species, from such a planet to leave their cradle, but it would not be impossible.

On and on we searched, spreading farther and faster, always taking care to check those systems we passed. Decades went by, and then centuries, and a few more tombs were found.

Finally, after centuries of searching, we found one, and then another only a few decades later. Species who were intelligent, who were our contemporaries. One was industrial and warlike. Our efforts to communicate were rebuffed and so we waited, hoping that given time they would develop and seek us out. We watched them rise and we watched them fall to their own machinations of war.

The other was an old race. Like us they had advanced far and discovered much, but they were on the decline. We offered our knowledge and aid, but their mindset was captivated by a sense of fatalism. They had been declining for centuries, and saw no use in any other path. It was disheartening to say the least.

There would be more. Time and again we were forced to watch as planet-bound civilizations faltered and died. We’re still not entirely sure why, but there is something about those races and their worlds that breeds a sense of inevitability. Maybe it’s because they can’t see the stars through the sky.

       ***

For time unending, we feared we would be alone.

Our Earth really is unique, but not in the way we thought. We’ve still not found another like her. Every planet like her is one we’ve made, and none yet has been her equal.

Life, as well, is everywhere. We are not unique and yet somehow we are, for we alone have dared to travel the stars. For so long we have been resigned to our eternal solitude. Millennia are heaped upon millennia and still we spread, still we advance, still we search. For no other reason than because we can.

And then... we found you. We have seen hundreds like you, but you are unique in a way they were not. You are advanced yet hopeful, civil yet curious. We see in you ourselves, if only you could be given the chance.

So I ask you…

For the time being, will we have company among the stars?

Monolog #11

Do you know what a virtual particle is?

A virtual particle is literally that -- a particle that has only a virtual existence as a solution to and consequence of the equations describing quantum mechanics. They are modeled as pairs of particles popping into existence simultaneously, meeting, annihilating, and vanishing with no net change to the energy-state of the universe.

Virtual particles do two things: They permit black holes to evaporate through radiation, and they provide a neat answer to a question every sapient species has ever asked -- the origin of the universe. You see, if a virtual, unreal, simulated particle can still produce real tangible effects and yet accurately be said never to have truly existed at all… Then so can the universe. If the energy state of the universe will eventually decay to zero - if it is ’flat’ to use the human cosmological parlance - then it will have, in a big-picture sense, never existed at all. And any universe you happen to encounter is nothing more than a temporary local anomaly.

The point is that all of this is virtual, an emergent product of an equation that is still being worked through. Eventually, all of it will be gone and so will we, and nothing will remain. Spacetime and all its energy and matter will be gone as if they never were, exactly because they never actually were in the first place.

We live, in a mockery of a reality, one that’s infinitely less real than the worlds we build inside our minds, one with no meaning, no purpose, no fate and no hope except whatever we can create for ourselves. All of us are trapped in a cruel game that allows only defeat. 

The only endgame is to live a little longer, and the only winning move is to keep playing.

Nightwater

I remember the first time I saw a human. Fleshy, slow, and with no claws, I assumed they were weak. I was wrong.

We learned that quickly.

Growing up in an age of transition was hard. The clans were always at war. Always. Blood vs blood, cruiser vs cruiser, mandible vs mandible. The carnage was told by every seer and veteran until each and every war became a placemark in our history. We held ourselves as fierce warriors, and the crimson we spilled among ourselves was our threat to the galaxy. The galaxy took note.

Then the council came. The council was a clan, of sorts I suppose, though the tribes that made it up were other species. They came to us with ideals, with power and presence emanating from every word-speak, every footfall. They invited us, not with force, but with the promises of easier lives, of betterment for our people. We saw this as weakness, not strength.

We almost refused. But the council said they could use our help, to hammer other species into docility, and we could prove our worth at the same time. Clan Adaga was strong-hard, but had their leader pacified an entire battalion of aliens? It was a challenge any clan leader was keen to undertake. The arrangement brewed competitiveness, while leaving our own blood unspilled. The arrangement was more than to our liking.

We became their allies, and the leaders of our clans took up their places among the council, with titles too many for this one to name. They were but useless titles anyway. We were great-warriors still, but we tempered ourselves. Not peacekeepers, but a constant threat. We were being used, to be sure, but the leaders kept the politics away from the clanhome, left us to fight for more glory and honor for our respective tribes. It was quite the way to attract mates as well.

Eventually, we settled disputes, and developed a system, broken as it was. Now and then there were still mate challenges, but these were personal matters, not issues for an entire clan. The other races allied with us showed us many things, and we grew not as clans, but as a species. And indeed, growing up was hard, but if you gritted your mandibles and charged forward, great rewards followed. This was how I forged myself a shipmaster's title.

This is how I found our blood brothers.

First contact was scarce. We prowled the nightwater of space, patrolling for races who had rebuked the council's offer violently. Though, on the outskirts, we didn't think to find many Kraga, with their fat, black, horns and their horrendous appetites, much less a new species.

But my shipcrew was made up of many good warriors, many sharp-wits. We found signs of humanity long before contact. But so did they. We glanced at each other across star systems, searching for each other.

Ionic trails where there shouldn't be, broken transmissions picked out in strands, shadows and whispers reflected on Oort clouds. And then, off a green moon locked in rotation, we found each other. Looking back, their ships were so small. Nothing like now.

My shipcrew howled for warbattle. I found my own mandibles unhinging, ready to strike down Kraga or Junagi or whatever enemies tried to skirt around the council's established nightwater. But I wasn't shipmaster because I was fierce. I was shipmaster because I was smart. We had to be tempered now. Had to be better than ourselves.

But what was with this ship? Nothing was supposed to be out here. This was the outskirts. The cold was too intense, too many asteroids and not enough sunwarmth made travel impossible. Sure, if you knew where to warp there might be something, but without enough fuel to get back, you were jumping straight into a grave.

So here was a ship, gliding through the nightwater, not damaged, not with hull scratches like our ship, like it was normal. And the more I looked at the ship, the more my curiosity grew. The ship's trajectory was wrong, no race indentifiers, no kill tallies.

And then a realization came, so outlandish and cold I wanted to shove it back as far as I could. The ship's trajectory wasn't wrong.

This ship had come out of the black.

The shock ripped the thought of attacking from my mind, and I can still feel the silent, cold chill that flooded my veins, like nightwater itself was filling them. A ship, out of the black. The black was where we sent killers and thief-stealers to die. Pirates and even the Kraga didn't venture into the black.

I quieted my shipcrew, told them to hail the ship with the coordinates of a diplomacy outpost, and set a course alongside it. I got many glances and pride-jokes, but this was something new, and that meant the council would see them first.

What followed was stranger then any encounter so far experienced by my shipcrew, or my clan. The council established contact, tried to explain it's intent, and ultimately failed. Like our race, the humans did not share likeminds, telepathy, as some of the other council races did. The council would have to learn the language. My race was the first to establish contact, and so we were tasked with inducting humanity into the council. An honor, I think, that saved us.

We taught humanity many things, such as how to shape ionic forces and our techniques for sailing nightwater. In turn, they showed us many of their own technologies, such as how they used radar pings and cold-sleep to sail through the black. We tried, but ultimately it was too taxing a task. Too many shipcrews grew afraid of the cold, and missed the allure of sunwarmth. The black belonged to the humans, and we were content to let them have it.

Humanity's ship stationed in orbit around an outskirt moon, and their language and customs gradually became known to us. The first time I saw a human, I thought them infinitely strange. They had no mandibles, no manes, not even horns as the Kraga did. How did they establish leaders? Who was stronger? When I met one on a colony, I thought them even stranger. They were our size, but still not used to rock gravity. They fell over easily, but laughed and danced inside of it as well. As if they liked looking like nestlings. Infinitely strange.

What interested us most about the humans was their ability to sit and tinker with their metals and technology. They would spend days focused on tasks, picking apart, putting together, they were insects of the machine. They danced around calculations, improved on nightwater engines, and pushed us closer and closer to brotherhood. But they were relentless in their ideas and schemes, they tried sailing along the colony rocks with only themselves and a nightwater sail, they burrowed deep into asteroids to connect them to each other, they were too much to keep up with. And when they grew tired, they nested for merely hours, not even a cycle, and then they were back up and tinkering again. Our new blood brothers were magnificent, and they were infinitely as curious with us as we were with them.

But this, my friends, is when things changed. Even with over six hundred systems and limitless places to inhabit, the Kraga decided it wanted a new moon for its broodmothers. They sent patrols roaming around the system until they found a council moon, and tore into its resources. The council retreated, and my race was sent to pacify. My brothers and father's shipcrews did not succeed. The humans stayed on their ship, eager not to become involved, and we were content to show off our prowess at war.

The Kraga, eager to put an end to our boasting, made a mistake. They sent ships around the core world blockades, and ransacked the inner planets. Killing, stealing, raping, burning, the Kraga reveled in their power. They boarded the human vessel, impaling humans on their horns as battle trophies. The council mourned, but concerned with its own safety, forbade us from trying to save our blood brothers. We rebelled. We fought. We reasoned. But the council stood fast. The humans would be only a setback.

I forced myself to watch as a Kraga broodmother ate a small human girl on our transmission screen, just to see how it tasted. The girl screamed while she died.

We motioned for a a relief effort from the council, over and over. Finally they abated, with the condition the core blockades were reinforced. With the condition met, we sought out the Kraga on the moon, but sent a small battalion to aid the humans. Our warriors flew to the surface, wiping out stragglers and broodmothers, who were trying to use the human ship as a feeding ground, and an eventual orbital launch platform. Many more of the humans than we thought had survived, hiding, moving, creating illusions. We thought them dead. But they had persevered. Not won, but survived. But what was stranger still was the humans were not angry at us. Indeed, they forgave us, they understood the actions of the council.

As a relief effort, my shipcrew and I brought medical supplies to the humans. And what I saw still haunts me. A demolished ship, still thick with gore and flesh, yet the humans walked in it, they strode through warblood, scrapping, reconfiguring, adapting. Their dead lay at their feet, and yet some hummed while they cleaned, a low, solumn, eerie song that haunts my nestsleep to this cycle. Some held their own limbs as they walked through demolished bays to an aid station. Many a night I cannot shake such visions. The humans were broken, but still alive.

It was only later we learned a shocking revelation. The humans, in all our encounters with them, had not told us much of their history. They had shared their technology with us, but not their past. We knew not where their home was, their people.

It was only later we learned that the ship, in its entirety, all of them had only been a science team. The humans fled their orbit, returning into the black. Our leaders saw this as failure, and left the council. We had won back the moon at great cost, but an even greater cost was our blood brothers, and the guilt sat in our chests.

Two cycles passed.

The Kraga stilled.

And then, a report that made no sense. The Swordwalker was a fairly large spy ship, with many a great sharpwit on it. A clanmate brother of mine, the captain, even more so. So when I received a report that an entire Kraga system was dying, we prepared ourselves for a trap, or a new warbattle. As reports go, it was strange, but we jumped in, and came out battleready.

The nightwater itself filled my veins. And I tell you now little ones, never has it felt so cold.

I knew the shapes of their ships now. I knew their callsigns and language. I could read the words "UECNS Hades" on the side of the hull. But we had never known war like this.

A system. An entire system. The moons black, the planets white with ash, lines of fire crossing, snaking, entrenching the surfaces of their crusts. Ion trails, made corporeal as whips of hellfire, fell onto the planet. Oceans screamed, mountains melted, atmospheres bloomed into orange spheres. Lines of fire searched through space toward anything tangible: comets, nebulae, wisps of dust. Our species hundred year blood war didn't just pale in comparison; Our wars didn't even exist compared against this.

Humanity had returned. And they had brought their warriors.

The ship descended on the council core world. We were happy to know our blood brothers were back.

But this was no science team. Armored giants strode out amongst us, with greaves made of polymers and metal, steel plating along their chests, and face plates made of glass, wearing stone expressions. These were the warriors of humanity, ice cold in their stares, biting with their words, and deliberate in their actions.

They had come for revenge. Methodical, efficient, and uncompromising. The council said it would give them aid while they rebuilt, but we wholly pledged ourselves to our blood brothers. They accepted.

It was only later we fully understood the human concepts of hate and spite. They were not taking a colony, a nearby moon, or even a planet for colonization.

Over one thousand cycles and sixty systems later, the Kraga were decapitated. Exterminated. Eradicated. Purged.

Nightwater take me, I'm glad I'm smart.