[HFY] If We Had Known

If only we had taken our time. If we had studied them, learned about them, learned about their history we might have taken a different course and the galaxy might be different. But what were they to us who walked amongst the stars? They were so far beneath us as to be mere beasts in comparison. How could we know what was to come from our actions, hundreds of times over we had done the same and hundreds of times before there had always been a singular result. Not this time, this one time was different and for that in the annals of all history we will be remembered as monsters, tyrants, slavers and destroyers when we had done nothing different than any of the others. Worse though, we would be remembered as fools, a thousand worlds and trillions of living beings all united under our banners and our biggest marks would be as foolish creatures of evil who let loose an even larger evil on the galaxy.

I do not have long, I write this manuscript in haste, my claws trembling in fear for the first time in a hundred planetary cycles. Not since my first battles as a youth have I felt the trembling touch of that feeling. Unlike that time though, this fear holds no excitement, no anticipation, only dread and a reluctant resignation to the fate that we have brought upon ourselves for our deeds. The deeds for which my people will be irrevocably removed from the galactic stage, and of which I write in my haste only a few more partial day cycles left before their arrival. I aim to be brief, and hopefully if all of the factors of fate are with me this manuscript might be sent before their arrival, and if not even more of a hope against all others, that it might survive what they do to my body and my home.

My name, irrelevant as it might be to the grand story is Mirxal Tsloka and I am a Wiarna. We are a proud race, our ancestors were the apex predators of our world and we used that heritage in all facets of our lives. It was the driving force that led us to our expansion and subjugation on a dozen other space faring species, but that subjugation was not harsh. We aided those we had beaten if they showed their mettle. We respected strength, skill and ferocity above all other traits and those species that showed theirs were raised to be almost as brothers but still with us at the helm of the Imperium. Other races, those of the cowardly herds or any pre-space species were treated as chattel. They were not our equals; they could never even be the equals of our second tier species. They were as beasts and we chose to treat them as such and use them.

The Imperium was vast and strong, nearly a thousand words and several dozen races stood at its top, with a few hundred more holding its base. A pyramid of power, built around the ideology of an apex predator’s mindset. It is why we were blinded, lost in our view of the way things should be. There was no alternative, for nearly four of our millennia things had progressed that way. Nor amongst any of the other vast territories controlled by other species or collectives was there any other way, the strong ruled and the weak, meek or simple did as they were bid.

I had spent my first decades learning for learning’s sake. I was a queer Wiarna and still am, sitting and writing in my last day rather than preparing the defense of my home. Few others amongst my kind think or believe as I do, that every species functions in a different way. Sometimes the differences are small, almost unnoticeable but they are there. It was my drive to study those differences, why do the herd animals not resist not that they have been beaten, why are some predators predisposed to simply give way before a stronger rather than fighting to assert their dominance? These were the things I sought answers to and apparently asked too many times.

My reward was being stationed on one of the survey flotillas, a dismal and boring station. We travelled the stars looking for anything of use. Resource deposits were catalogued, worlds life bearing and barren marked and taken account of, hazards mapped out. We spent what seemed like an eternity at the task. Only the habited worlds broke the monotony, but even there was a kind of sadness for one such as me.

Those were the worlds we would spend the most time near, watching and studying the denizens of the newly discovered planet. Non-sentient races were quickly marked, categorized and moved on from, but the sentients required study. Only three times during my stay as a survey officer did I ever see a new sentient species. Two are negligible, early space faring and easy to subdue, they might make good slaves or if they proved themselves enough they might even become low level foot soldiers, cannon fodder, for the Imperium.

It was the last race that was the most interesting. We found them in a little system, out of the way and along one of the more useless spiral arms in our territory. Habitable and useful worlds were far and few between in this stretch of the galaxy, which made even this species interesting, and even more so their habits as we observed them.

They had only achieved space flight a short time before as the evidence of their probes, satellites and the general space debris surrounding their world indicated. Unlike any other species though, these creatures seemed to have stopped their advancement. No other race we’d encountered had ever reached space and stopped, had not pushed on farther and faster in a bid to reach the stars. These creatures had explored some of their system and then apparently given up on the idea of reaching much beyond their immediate orbit.

It was baffling and if I had been given more time to study them we might have been able to prevent all of this….

That was the sensor alarm. They have entered the system periphery, less than a planetary rotation remains. There was still so much to see, so much to learn…

If I had more time, it always comes down to time does it not? We spent most of a planetary stellar orbit observing these creatures. They would be easy to subjugate, they had not even formed a unified planetary system, and even stranger they were not like any other race we had encountered. Their fractious nature more than likely stems from their not being a herd based race, nor an apex predator race. They appear to be some kind of pursuit predator with omnivorous diets. They are an anomaly, possibly due to their galactic position but something that required further study and understanding, something which was not granted.

We watched in that short time, and learned what we could of them. Hundreds of separate clans lived on their world, with nearly as many different tongues spoken. If anything would be a problem for their subjugation it would be the need of a force to visit every clan and a program to translate every language. Their population was a mere speck, tiny in comparison to the Imperium and the might we could bring to bear and eventually did.

Two of their planetary orbits later I returned with the conquest fleet, our admiral a noble and pompous example of our species had requested me for my firsthand observations. He did not care about their unique nature or what might be gained from their study, he only wished for the honor of enslaving yet another species for the Imperium. Admiral Tsiuma stood by as we bombarded some of their densest population centers. We did not wish to destroy their population, it was needed if they were to be a labor race, but to send a lesson some of them would have to be wiped away.

Even as we did so our data experts were rapidly invading their networks, copying and stealing everything they could find, and everything we would later learn we had needed to study. It is not often that we look back on our mistakes, nor even admit to their happening, but here we had failed to properly understand our prey and what they would do as a response to these action. It was a response we had never even thought of, never believed possible having been united long before we ever reached space.

Only a few heartbeats after our strikes destroyed their cities great pillars of flame spat into the sky and these creatures roared their defiance at us. It was almost laughable that they fired missiles at us, what warhead could damage a starship’s shields? It was pitiful, and we watched as those missiles slowly rose, clawing their way on chemical fuel out of their dense gravity well, and we swatted them away by the hundreds, contemptuously.

Again, had we understood the nature of our prey things might be different. But who had ever thought of such a thing, no species needed to make such weapons as the ones we encountered. All known species had left their gravity wells united, a single solid front as they reached into their heavens and spread amongst the stars. Even then what use were the weapons we found, the expense of creating them, especially for a divided race such as this must have been astronomical. There were more efficient ways of bombarding a planet, cleaner ways. A rock from space will impact with even more speed, cause even more destruction and leave only a crater as its evidence.

This race had done something different, something insane. They had harnessed nuclear power and put that onto a missile. A missile that they had never intended to use against another race, a missile intended fully for the use within their own atmosphere on their own people. It was insane, but they had done it, and only a short period of time to look would have told us so. Instead we swatted aside their missiles with contempt, secure in our arrogance that nothing these primitives had could harm us. And as the first of our ships were struck and their shields flashed and flickered away we were stunned, surely some accident had happened. Then it happened again, and again, and again and we watched from our command carrier as almost the entire invasion fleet was wiped away, a disaster that could not be repaired on our admiral’s honor.

We had no reaction for this, no contingency. This didn’t happen. Except there we were, standing on the bridge of our carrier watching as dozens and then hundreds of warheads blotted away our ships in blinding boils of light. These crazy creatures had harnessed the power of the sun for their weapons, at insane costs, for an insane reason and we now learned about this at our great cost. Admiral Tsiuma ended his life before the planetary rotation was over, before even the last of the missiles had detonated, taking with it nearly the entirely of our fleet leaving all of the rest bleeding wrecks only a few capable of travel. The admiral’s successor had no more direction, no clue on how to react and so we ran, fleeing from that world’s insanity lest another storm of missiles reach up to blot us away, taking away the Imperium’s only source of warning.

That was what we told ourselves but it was fear, pure abject horror that drove us. When a predator faces something that it knows cannot be true, that it knows it cannot face and survive, then it runs and waits and comes back another day when it is stronger or more plentiful. We were no different than our ancestors and so we ran, straight back to our emperor with the hope that he might have direction for us. But that running was more of a crawl, our surviving ships heavily damaged, and we took nearly a dozen standard planetary cycles to even reach our frontier.

What that trip gave to me was time. The time I had asked for, begged for, and that we had unknowingly needed, to understand these creatures. Our databanks survived the strikes of their weapons, and great swaths of information that we had gleaned from their networks sat translated before me. Day after day I sat, pouring over their history, their words and ideals. I learned what they called themselves, and even the names of their great clans, these Humans and I shuddered at what I saw.

We had interrupted what I can only look back on as fate’s galactic intervention. Our meddling had distracted one of the most violent fast breeding species from keeping itself in check. The entire history of the Imperium is filled with short wars, unification, conquest, subjugation but nothing like the wars I found listed in Humanity’s history. They fought wars over the smallest of things; they would fight over rocks, dirt, ideals, and words. Give them even the smallest excuse and based on what I could tell from their history humanity would fight over it. Their species had fought so many wars, kept itself so divided as to be only in its infancy in terms of space flight when they should have already been colonizing their neighboring stars.

That division was something that had kept us safe. The more I read about them the more worried I became and if only I had known what they were doing that fear would have shifted into abject terror. They fought each other but their stories and histories were filled with tales of enemies uniting to fight a terrible enemy that was unlike them. Even humans that they considered to have stepped beyond the boundaries were united against, like this Hitler person. But now we had justified every worry they had ever had, every fear about what existed in the great night sky, a thousand stories about other races come to conquer, butcher or enslave them and we had done exactly that.

The planetary alarms are going off…They’re here. I have no more time, my story ends here but if by some miracle this transmission reaches one of the other empires or confederations out there, heed my words. We have woken something, they are not interested in platitudes or terms. We are their bogeyman and they aim to destroy their fears. Run if you can, hide if you cannot. If you stand, say your farewells to your loved ones and prepare to meet your gods, for surely they will not stop.

Mirxal Tsloka, Last intellectual of the Wiarna.

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By /u/Scribblerofwords on /r/HFY